Tag #120444 - Interview #87387 (Rifca Segal)

It was nice in Sulita. We led a good life there. I miss it even now, as we led a very good life there. We had a house with several rooms, a cellar, an attic, a courtyard, and a barn in the courtyard. It was a brick house, like they built them in small towns, one next to another, adjoining. If, God forbid, a fire had broken out, all of them would have burned to the ground. In front, in the same building, there was the store, which was large enough, and then there was a kitchen to one side followed by three rooms, in the back. Small town kitchens had a fireplace with a cooking stove and an oven. It was made either from terracotta or from bricks. And when my parents renovated the house, they modernized it, they built a terracotta fireplace in the room in the middle. They left the one made of bricks in the bedroom as it was. Besides, it was very nicely built, with pillars. It was a house with an attic, a cellar. We dried laundry in the attic, and stored the food in the cellar – for we didn’t have refrigerators back then, we didn’t even have electricity in Sulita. We used lamps and lamp oil for lighting purposes. But we had a nice lamp, with silk. And of course, the toilet was in the courtyard. We didn’t have a bathroom in the house. Even though my grandparents from my mother’s side had a fountain in the courtyard, and they drew water from it using a water pump, and they built a bathroom inside their house. They had a bathtub, and they had a cauldron in which they drew water from the fountain through pipes, it reached the cauldron, the lower part of the cauldron – like in a terracotta or zinc stove –, had a compartment where you placed firewood, you lit the firewood, and the water was being heated. And it was very good, I used to go there myself to take a bath. For at home, my mother bathed me in a small tub. That’s how it was in Sulita. But she added Chypre cologne from Paris to the water. But she bathed me in a small tub. That’s how it was, and it was fine. Our life was so good! Had they not evacuated us, it would have been very well.