Halina Leszczynska's family

This picture was taken in my son Wlodzimierz's home, in Warsaw, in 2003. There's my mom, Gustawa Birencwajg, my son, Wlodimierz Leszczynski, my granddaughter, Zofia Leszczynska and me, Halina Leszczynska.

I live with my mother. I don't have a good old-age pension, a teacher's pension, I didn't work overtime, but I did manage to write several handbooks for studying Russian. I started off with cartoons, later adaptations of classic books, later, as a co-author, we wrote some handbooks and then I did that on my own. But the school system reform has just begun, so all my textbooks are useless now, nobody's learning from them.

For some time after I retired I kept working. At first I worked part-time at the Institute, at my old workplace, because I was a senior lecturer there. I later worked in a private college, an economics-computers college. I worked there for a few years, but I gave that up, because I only had a few hours a week there, it wasn't worth the trouble of going back and forth. I also did private tutoring at home then. Now I don't have school, tutoring, nothing. 'Vsyo' [Russian for 'everything'] is over. I don't even have the fees for the textbooks.

Now I am 76 years of age. Whether one likes it or not, well, I like it the least. I didn't remarry. No one suggested it to me. Perhaps I would have considered it. I have a good son, but he's got his family, his own problems. I have a sister here, nearby, she lives 5 minutes away from me. She's also got a daughter. But her daughter has her own family, two grown daughters. One of them is starting high school this year, the other one next year.

My sister is also married to a Pole. We degenerated, that is, got married to non-Jews perhaps because there was no other solution. My friends in Israel ask me, 'Why did your son marry a Pole?' Well, was he supposed to be a bachelor all his life? He met her during some sailing trip, organized by Doctor Andrzej Jaczewski, now a well known sexologist. They're a very good couple, they've been together for almost 30 years.