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[Then we settled with my stepmother] on Leona Sapiehy Street, an apartment I remember very vividly. It was a very large apartment, on the main street, opposite the technical university. And there occurred a clash because they assigned one large room for me and Anka [stepmother’s daughter] together, the furniture was all new, everything painted blue, and there was a wardrobe where she had the lower part and I the upper one.
Besides that there were beds with those white-and-blue kind of curtains, there were writing desks, a table, and those blue armchairs. And I rebelled, because I was already at the age when my friends from school visited me, I was in gymnasium and high school, and the chit told her mother what we talked about, and we had all kinds of secrets.
Always when I told her to leave us alone, there was an argument, because she’d open the wardrobe and sit there, in her [part], on the pretence that she needed some stuff from there. Because she had their crayons there, and her toys. With my stepmother I lived like a cat with a dog, but my father arranged it somehow and she started sleeping elsewhere, not in my room, but her wardrobe was still there and she always came, especially when Staszek visited me.
Because there was a large bathroom, my father, to spare me the effort of going through their rooms, knocked out a new door and now I had direct access from my room to the bathroom, even though that door wasn’t standard size but lower and narrower. There was a huge kitchen, and the servant’s room by it, a servant always lived there, and I remember the stove, in an alcove, fired with coal and wood.
Besides that there were beds with those white-and-blue kind of curtains, there were writing desks, a table, and those blue armchairs. And I rebelled, because I was already at the age when my friends from school visited me, I was in gymnasium and high school, and the chit told her mother what we talked about, and we had all kinds of secrets.
Always when I told her to leave us alone, there was an argument, because she’d open the wardrobe and sit there, in her [part], on the pretence that she needed some stuff from there. Because she had their crayons there, and her toys. With my stepmother I lived like a cat with a dog, but my father arranged it somehow and she started sleeping elsewhere, not in my room, but her wardrobe was still there and she always came, especially when Staszek visited me.
Because there was a large bathroom, my father, to spare me the effort of going through their rooms, knocked out a new door and now I had direct access from my room to the bathroom, even though that door wasn’t standard size but lower and narrower. There was a huge kitchen, and the servant’s room by it, a servant always lived there, and I remember the stove, in an alcove, fired with coal and wood.
Period
Location
Poland
Interview
Matylda Wyszynska