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[In Lwow] we lived in a former prison, the party found us a job and the place to stay. Me and two other friends got a job at the Aida factory: tubes, filters, and paper [a cigarette factory]. Every week we received an allowance of tubes, the kind of empty cigarettes, and there was a machine for stuffing them with tobacco. I didn’t need those tubes because we didn’t smoke, but I gave it to my brother who sold the stuff on the market. In fact, he had no job, so that was a kind of support. And the man he had worked for in Bielsko found himself in Lwow too and paid [my brother] five zlotys a week as a means of support, for nothing. He obviously had money.
Then we rented a room. The landlord [gave us] a single spring bed, but there was no mattress so we slept on the bare springs. The landlord lived in the same house, in a different part of it, and he knew we slept like that. He is surely dead by now, but if he’s alive, perhaps it pricks his conscience that he was so mean to us. Then my husband got sick, he had stomach ulcers, and people at my work helped secure a place for him in a sanatorium on Kurkowa Street, in Lwow, and he spent like two weeks there, but he was still sick, an ulcer doesn’t go away easily.
Then we rented a room. The landlord [gave us] a single spring bed, but there was no mattress so we slept on the bare springs. The landlord lived in the same house, in a different part of it, and he knew we slept like that. He is surely dead by now, but if he’s alive, perhaps it pricks his conscience that he was so mean to us. Then my husband got sick, he had stomach ulcers, and people at my work helped secure a place for him in a sanatorium on Kurkowa Street, in Lwow, and he spent like two weeks there, but he was still sick, an ulcer doesn’t go away easily.
Period
Location
Poland
Interview
Rozalia Unger