Tag #153842 - Interview #94293 (Nikolai Mesko Salamonovic)

I do already remember what sort of house we moved into in Mukachevo. It was in a street named Toltes. Our three-room house was very modestly furnished. It consisted of only a bed and wardrobe. We didn’t have a tile floor nor even a wooden one. It was an earthen floor. Each and every week, before the Sabbath, we evened and smoothed out the floor. The house also had a courtyard and a very nice garden. In the courtyard we had stables for horses. The stables were made of earth. Our house wasn’t made of bricks either, but of earth. The courtyard wasn’t large, but for that all the more beautiful. It was planted mainly with fruit trees, but my mother and sisters planted potatoes, cucumbers and other vegetables. That’s what we lived on. Like I said, we were a poor family. My father, as a coachman, didn’t make very much, because with a hay-wagon you couldn’t make very much. The town had a stand for coachmen, where they stood with their wagons and waited until someone needed something moved somewhere. When, say, a rail car of flour arrived, because in those days there weren’t haulage trucks, businessmen would come and ask the coachmen to transport it somewhere. Often it happened that he made nothing.