Tag #106673 - Interview #88491 (Emanuel Elbinger)

No-one worked on Saturday, of course. The Jewish shops were closed and it was all festive. Everyone would play chess or checkers on the street – but that was the men. The women gossiped, met up. Everybody put tables and chairs outside their houses and sat around like that. And in the Square there were a few Jewish food stores that as well as the shop, out the back had a little room, like a cake shop, as it were. And on Saturdays the men used to go there and drink colored water, or fizzy drinks, eat cookies and talk. You weren’t allowed to pay on Saturdays, of course, so I suppose they paid on Monday. Father never went there – I just saw it, because it was in the neighborhood, and I would wonder that they could afford it. The proprietor there was called Kopel. We went for walks on Saturdays, along the Vistula, and then towards Smilowice [approx. 5 km east of Nowe Brzesko]; there’s a manor there [a neo-Classical house dating from ca. 1805 and a park, now ruined]. You took a big scarf to have something to sit on, and food. And then we’d sit in a meadow somewhere and eat. Life was… well, back then it seemed normal and good to me.