Tag #153009 - Interview #78263 (Michael Kotliar)

We didn't have a place to live. More than half of the houses in the town were ruined. We were accommodated in a small room in a barrack near a military unit. My father couldn't get a job in 1945 and decided that we need to move to Chernovtsy. People said there were many vacant apartments there, and the town was almost intact. We rented a horse-driven cab and reached Chernovtsy within a few hours. We liked the town. It was big and beautiful and Yiddish could be heard all around. There was a synagogue and the majority of the population was Jewish. At the beginning we rented a room in the basement of a house in an old Jewish neighborhood. This was the area of the former Jewish ghetto and the owner of the house lived there during the war. This old lady spoke Yiddish and Romanian. It was a cold and damp room with no running water, heating or toilet. My mother cooked on a primus stove. She stayed at home. My father found a job in a garment shop. The money he earned was just enough to live on bread and water. We were always hungry, but we had known worse times during the war and didn't pay much attention to the hardships of postwar life.