This is me and my cousin Gusta from Debica. She is the blond one. I do not remember when this picture was taken but I think she was already a student.
Aunt Ida, my mother’s eldest sister, was widowed and left alone with 6 daughters in Debica. I hardly remember her husband. After his death her sisters wanted to help her, so one of her daughters, Gusta, who went to the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, came to live with us in Podgorze. When my brother died I had the room to myself for some time. There were 3 rooms in our apartment on Czarneckiego Street and she moved in with me in my room. She was older than me, maybe 3 years. She was a beautiful girl, blond. We liked each other a lot, and were like best friends. At that time the system was that if you studied, say, history, as she did, then your minor was German.
To practice her German, in the summer vacation she went to stay with her elder sister Syna, who'd married a Polish Jew living in Berlin. And there some relative of Syna's husband fell in love with her and married her, so she didn't finish her studies, only went back to Berlin. Her married name was Ulman. And she had maybe a 2-year-old boy when the Polish Jews were kicked out of Germany. They walked. Gusta's husband arrived without any shoes, on foot. He turned up in Cracow, and first off Anka, Gusta's sister, took care of him. She was a nurse in the Jewish hospital [8 Skawinska Street, now part of the University Hospital]. She bought him some shoes and he went on to Debica, because I think he came from there too. But Gusta was such a beautiful blonde that the Germans took a fancy to her, and so she managed to wangle her furniture and apartment back. She brought the child and the furniture back to Poland, to Debica, where her mother was. And then the Germans murdered them all.
