This is a picture of me, taken in my father’s office in our house in Katowice. It was taken in the late 1930s.
In Katowice, Father was a real estate manager. Private owners would ask him to manage their tenement houses.
Probably at first Father was only managing one or two houses, for example the building at 10 Slowackiego Street, which belonged to father's brothers Tobiasz and Chaim.
Later the owners started trusting him more and all in all he had 14 buildings in his care.
We had an apartment in one of these buildings. Father's office was in our apartment. There were 5 rooms there, Father had one room for himself, but it was also the dining room. There was a telephone in Father's office, number 990.
There was also a Keren Kayemet can. You'd put money in there, from time to time young people would go around collecting the money. With this money Jews used to buy land from the Arabs in Palestine. A portrait of Uryshkin, this Zionist, was on the wall.
Father was a member of the General Zionist Organization. He was the treasurer there. My parents wanted to move to Palestine, but they never had enough money for the tickets, to go with the entire family.
So we never left. Zionist views were popular among Father's brothers. Uncle Tobiasz and Uncle Chaim bought some land in Palestine, but somehow they didn't manage to leave on time, because if they had, they would have probably survived the Holocaust.
