Tag #134618 - Interview #77952 (Ruth Greif)

I believe life got better after 1989. You have access to everything now, you don't have to stand in queues for everything. But we weren't doing too badly during communism either: we had good wages, I did night shifts for 30 years and those were well paid, and we could save a lot because there wasn't anything you could spend it on, except trips. After the revolution we had 700.000 lei saved, which was a huge amount of money back then. Immediately, my husband started to worry about how to invest it. He knew from his own experience in Cernauti that the money would devaluate, and that in the end we would only be able to buy a bag of onions with that money. So we started buying: we bought gold - the Russians were coming with gold jewelries - we bought hand-made carpets, which are extremely hard, if not impossible to find now, we bought a four-bedroom apartment for my daughter, furs and so on, And, we still had money left.