Emilia Leibel with her grandson Ryszard Bronislaw Jasicki
This is me and my grandson Ryszard Bronislaw on a trip to Warsaw. We are standing in front of the Palace of Culture and Science there. I can’t remember who took this picture. When he was young I used to take him on lots of trips and vacations.
In the early 1950s I had plans to move to Warsaw, I had the chance of a good job, but my daughter Halinka didn't want to go; I had all sorts of problems. I took her to Warsaw, and she came back. So then I said: either you go to work, or you go to school. She was 18. She went out to work in her final year at school, took her school-leaving exams while she was working. Well, what did I have to live on? She worked 3-4 years in Huta [the Lenin Steelworks, built 1954, the largest industrial plant in the Cracow region, now the T. Sendzimir Steelworks]. Then she worked in Cracow as a Russian translator - after all, she'd been at school in Russia for several years. Then she did a part-time university degree, in Russian.
After we had to leave the children's home, Halinka lived with me at first. I found a tiny room at 48 Karmelicka Street. Then, while she was doing her degree she got married and I lived with her and her son [Ryszard Bronislaw, b. 1959], and her husband, a medical student, lived with his parents. Oh, it was all kinds of fun. The owner of the apartment was a very pleasant Mrs. Jenerowa, an Italian woman who'd married a Pole who worked in Cracow in the days when it was Galicia [i.e. before World War I]. So to the time we knew her, she didn't speak Polish perfectly. A very genteel, immensely pleasant, good person. It was a 3-room apartment. She lived in one room with her maid, in the second room was a Mrs. Tatarowa, who'd been married to a Jew, but her husband had perished in the occupation, and in the third room us, together with my grandson.
When a room came free in my friend's apartment on Slowackiego Avenue, I moved in with her, and at least they could live together. Shortly afterwards Halinka divorced him. He moved out. His parents wouldn't let him back in their apartment. In the meantime, Ryszard was with me more than he was at home with Halinka, because Halinka was working. I worked too, but we managed somehow. He was sick a lot, had high fevers, so he didn't go to school, but stayed with me. I was constantly taking him on vacation or on trips. When Halinka was in Russia, he lived with me. She was there for 7 or 9 years, working as a translator. In Smolensk somewhere, then in the Crimea - various, in different places.