Travel

Isroel Lempertas
Vilnius
Lithuania
Interviewer: Zhanna Litinskaya
Date of interview: February 2005

I met Isroel Lempertas in the Lithuanian community where he agreed to give me an interview at once. He was very busy, so he could not pay me enough attention. I suggested interviewing him in his apartment, but he refused saying that his wife was sick and made an appointment with me at the community office at his earliest convenience. Isroel is an athletic man of short height, with a mop of grey hair. He is very modest. He looks serious, refined and intellectual. I can feel that the conversation is not easy for him. Isroel takes hard every reminiscence of his childhood, parents and brother, who perished in the lines. That is why he does not say much about his kin and I did not want to hurt his feeling with extra questions.

My family history 
Growing up 
During the War 
After the War 
GLOSSARY

My family history

I was born in a Lithuanian frontier town Mazeikiai, located 250 km from to the North-West from Vilnius, not far from the border with Latvia. The population of Mazeikiai was about 5-7 thousand people. Jews were about 700- 800 people. There is hardly anything I know about my ancestors. Like most adolescents, when I was young, I was not interested in my past as I had to think of my education, work and family. Now, I would like to get the information on my lineage, but there is nobody I can ask about it. As far as I know my maternal kin was born in Mazeikiai. I remember my maternal grandfather Faivush Levinson. I reckon he was born in 1860s. Grandfather was melamed in cheder. As I was later told by his students he was a very advanced person and a teacher. He gave not only traditional knowledge in cheder, but he also tried to tell more about nature, birds and flowers, read unreligious books of modern authors. As far as I know, grandfather Faivush Levinson was not truly religious man. I do not recall him in kippah or with a hat on. Judging from the pictures, his head never was covered.

I do not know anything about my maternal grandmother. She died long before I was born. I do not remember any tales about her. I do not even know her name. When the World War One was unleashed, Jews from frontier territories, namely Kaunas province, including Mazeikiai which was part of that province during Tsarist times, were exiled to the remote districts of Russia. Anti- Semitistic tsarist military authorities deemed that propinquity of Yiddish and German and vast difference of Jewish appearance and mode of life from the rest of peoples, inhabiting that territory, would incline Jews to the espionage. Many Jewish families from Baltic countries turned out be exiled. My mother's family was exiled to Berdyansk, warm Ukrainian town on the coast of the Sea of Azov [1000 km to the south from Kiev]. When Lithuania gained independence 1 almost all Jews came back to the motherland. The family of Faivush Levinson also returned. I cannot say whether my grandmother was alive. As far as I remember grandfather Faivush lived in the house of one of my aunts. He died in 1933. He was buried in Mazeikiai Jewish cemetery in accordance with the Jewish rite. I was not present at the funeral. It was not customary for Jews to take children to the funerals of the relatives.

Faivush had many children. My mother's brothers left for America in early 1920s. All I know is their names - Louis and Beniamin and that they had wives and children. I do not know what happened to them. There were 5 daughters, including my mother born in 1897. The eldest sister, who was couple of years older than my mother, had a double name Rosa and Shifra. She was called Shifra in our family. Her husband Aba Mets did not have a permanent job. He got by odd jobs. Shifra and Aba had two sons- Rafael, 4 years older than me and Nahman, who was my age. When the Great Patriotic War 2 was unleashed, we fled with the family of aunt Shifra. Her husband Aba was in the labor front first 3. He worked at some military plant in Siberia. Then he was drafted in the army and served in Lithuanian division #16 [the battalion is called Lithuanian because it was formed mostly from the former Lithuanian citizens, who were volunteers, evacuated or serving in the labor front]formed in 1943. Aba was killed in action in 1943 shortly after he had been drafted. He was not a young man at that time. Shifra and the boy came back to Lithuania and settled in Vilnius. About 20 years ago, she and her children left for Israel. Shifra had lived a long life and died in early 1990s. Her sons are doing well in Israel now.

Two of my mother's sisters lived in the USSR. Elder sister Liya, who was one or two years older than my mother, left for Baku, Azerbaijan, where her husband lived. I do not know how they met. They loved each other passionately. Liya's husband was Russian and it was one of the reasons why she left Lithuania. But at that time marriages between people of different nationalities were not acceptable. When Liya got married her name was Zimnikova. She was a housewife and her husband, whose name I do not remember, was assigned to different positions in the government of Azerbaijan. They had an only daughter Victoria. After moving to the USSR, Liya stopped corresponding with the kin in Lithuania, as it was considered dangerous and was persecuted in the USSR [Keep in touch with relatives abroad] 4. Moreover, Liya's husband was in the government. I do not remember where Liya and her daughter Victoria were during WW2. After war Victoria was married to my friend. They moved to Vilnius. When Liya and her husband got old, they moved to their daughter Victoria in Vilnius and lived there till the end of their days. Aunt Liya died in late 1970s.

Before departure for Russia, my mother's second sister Anna (it was the name she was called during the soviet times, and her original Jewish name is unknown), who was 2 years younger, worked as a child-minder in the Jewish kindergarten in Mazeikiai. In early 1920s Anna illegitimately ran away from Moscow, USSR with her Jewish husband Kabo. Before Lithuania was annexed to USSR in 1940 5 mother did not keep in touch with the sisters. Then she began corresponding with them. In autumn 1941, when fascist troops approached Moscow, Anna and her daughter Rina decided to get evacuated and came to us in Kirov oblast. After war Anna and Rina came back to Moscow. Anna died in the 1980s and Rina lives in Moscow now.

The fate of my mother's youngest sister, born in 1910, can be called tragic. Rahil married a pampered loitering Jew Jacob Rier from Riga. When WW2 began, Rahil's daughter Rosa turned 3. Rahil, Jacob and their daughter fled Mazeikiai on the second day of war. When our family got to Riga, Jacob insisted that his family should go to his relatives in the town of Salaspils 'to take a rest' in his words. We moved on, but Rahil's family was in occupation. In accordance with archival data, which I found after war, Rahil's family died in one of the most dreadful extermination camps in Salaspils. 6.

My mother Luba Levinson was educated at home. I do not remember her saying that she went to lyceum. Grandfather Faivush taught his children himself. Yiddish was my mother's native language. Born in Tsarist Russia and having spent her adolescence there, she was well up in Russian, both written and oral. As for Lithuanian, she spoke with a heavy accent like most of Jews. Like many Jewish ladies, mother did not work when she was young. She lived in her parental house and helped grandmother with chores. I do not know how my parents met. Maybe it was a pre-arranged Jewish wedding. They got married in early 1920s.

I know hardly anything about my father's family. I remember grandfather David Lempert lived in Latvia, in the town Daugavpils, but I do not know if he was born there. In my father's words David was born in the middle of 19th century. Father said that grandfather David dealt with timber trade and was a rather well-off. Judging by the portrait hanging in our house, where David is with beard, with a kippah on his head and from the scares tales of my father I can say that grandfather was a religious Jew. During World War One, father's family was also exiled. In my father's words grandfather refused to live in Kharkov [Ukraine, 440 km from Kiev], where he worked in some offices of the Soviet Army. When the war was over, the family returned to Lithuania. I cannot say when grandfather David died. I think it happened before the family came back to the Baltic country. Maternal grandmother, petite lean woman, with her head always covered, lived with us. I do not remember even her name. Her health was very poor and she mostly stayed in her room in bed. We just called her grandmother. I remember her lighting candles on the Sabbath eve. She read her thick shabby prayer book while she was able to see. When I was five, i.e. in 1930, grandmother died. She was buried in accordance with the Jewish tradition in the Mazeikiai Jewish cemetery. I do not know anything about father's siblings. I think he was an only son. At least I do not remember any talks about siblings.

My father Itshok Lempert was born in 1887. I do not know where he was born. Father was a very educated man. He finished lyceum and most likely some other education. Apart from mother tongue Yiddish, he was fluent in Russian. I cannot say how good was his Lithuanian, but it was definitely better than mother's. Father was exempt from the service in the tsarist army as he had myopia alta. Father was much respected in Mazeikiai. He worked as a chief accountant at the Jewish bank in Mazeikiai. He was a highly skilled accountant. He even had students. They came home to my father and he gave them private lessons in book-keeping. Apart from book- keeping and teaching, father was also involved in some social work.

My parents got married in Mazeikiai. I do not know if their wedding was Jewish as both of them, especially father, were unreligious. They might be married under chuppah out of mere respect for the relatives in order to observe the tradition. In 1923 my elder brother was born. He had a double name Mikhl-Duvid. He was named Duvid after grandfather, but I do not know the reason for his second name Mikhl. At home brother was called Duvid. I was born on the 17th of November 1925. I was named Isroel after one of my great grandfather, I do not know paternal or maternal. The surname of my father and grandfather was Lempert. I was born in independent Lithuania, so a Lithuanian version of my Jewish name was written in my birth certificate, namely Lempertas [Lithuanianization of names] 7 I still carry that name.

Growing up

Our family did not own any property and our parents always rented an apartment. I do not remember the peculiarities of our apartments. Usually these were 3-room apartments with a kitchen, without conveniences (there was an outhouse). Father was busy with his work and social activity and could not spend a lot of time with his children. Mother mostly took care of us. The air in our house, and conversations of our guests, mostly Yiddishists, affected our upbringing. Mother was a housewife, but she just ran the house,while others did all the chores. We always had a maid- a Lithuanian tacit and hard-working woman. As per order of my mother she cooked dinner, cleaned the apartment and did the laundry. My parents were not religious. They tried to observe Jewish traditions while grandmother, who lived with us, and grandfather Faivush, were alive. At least most kashrut rules were observed during cooking. There were separate dishes for milk and for meat in the house- from the set of china up to pots, pans and cutting boards. Meat was bought in a special Jewish store, where only kosher meat was on offer. One of the apartments where we stayed for a long time, belonged to the owners of the kosher store. There were three owners of the store - two brothers Glik and their widowed sister Mendelevich. Poultry was purchased in the store and taken to shochet. In my early childhood mother took me to shochet. I remembered his small house with a shed in the yard. There was always a line of Jewish ladies with cackling fowl. There was no pork in our house when grandmother was alive. On Friday she or mother lit Sabbath candles. That was it, there was no other preparation for Sabbath- no cooking of tasty things, baking challahs. There were no things in our house as compared to other Jews. On Sabbath father did not work. Jewish bank like other Jewish educations was closed on Saturday. Father kept late hours at his desk reading and writing and I think he was violating Sabbath traditions.

We did not mark Jewish holidays. Grandfather Faivush came over to us and carried out Paschal seder. Grandfather reclined at the head of the table clad in festive apparel and kippah. A piece of matzah -afikoman' was hidden under his pillow. I was to look for it. Usually Duvid was the one who asked grandfather traditional four questions about the origin of the holidays. [Editor's note: It is always the youngest son that is supposed to ask the questions, so according to the tradition it should have been Isroel.] I also remembered Chanukkah. Potato fritters were usually cooked in our house. The children usually played with a whipping top. Grandfather Faivush gave us Chanukkah money. I do not recall celebration of other holidays. When grandfather Faivush died, we stopped marking even those holidays. It was not because we were lazy. It was because of my father's atheistic principles. Because of that neither I nor my brother? Duvid went through bar mitzvah.

Neither father nor mother went to the synagogue. A big two-storied synagogue was not far from our apartment. Rabbi Mamjoffe was a very respectable man. He got along with father and he called on us. Father and rabbi had long conversations over a cup of tea. I do not know the subject of their conversations. I assume those were theological and philosophic topics. The surname of Mamjoffe was written on my birth certificate and I remembered his ornate signature very well. Rabbi Mamjoffe was atrociously slaughtered by Hitler's soldiers during the first days of occupation. When I worked with the historic archives after war, I came across that signature once again and I was concussed by my reminiscences from childhood. I knew a lot of people who were murdered- my classmates from lyceum and pals of my parents. But these were casual acquaintances and I was not touched to the quick. The preserved signatory of Mamjoffe really touched my soul. When I remember that man, tears come to my eyes.

Apart from the synagogue there were couple of more Jewish institutions. There was a mikveh not far from the synagogue, but our family did not go there. There were charitable organizations, such as Jewish kindergarten, canteen for the indigent. Our family was middle class, it was not rich. Books, papers, father was subscribed for, were the priority in our house. Since childhood we used to read them. We had radio in the 1930s. It was rather rare and expensive back in that time. My brother and I were given a bike. There were few Jewish children who had a bike and it was a kind of luxury. In summer we went to dacha [summer house], which parents rented in a small Lithuanian hamlet. Mother made us take a stroll in the forest for a long time, but brother and I were homesick and wanted to see our friends. We felt tedious in a hamlet. The living wage of our family was pretty decent. The majority of Jews were much poorer. There were a lot of rich people among Jews. Usually these were businessmen, owners of the stores, Jewish doctors and lawyers. I do not remember their names. All I know that the stores in the downtown mostly belonged to the Jews.

One of the local Jews Tulia, owned a house. The first apartment we rented was in his house. Tulia had large egg storage. He dealt with wholesale of eggs and even exported them to England. I did not enter the lyceum because of one of his daughters. My elder brother Duvid went to Ivrit lyceum. Gradually the number of students was cut and it was in the wane. Brother did not finish that lyceum and lately studied in the working school of the labor organization in Kaunas. There was an elementary Jewish school in Mazeikiai. I had studied there for couple of months and got ill. I was taught by my father and crammed for the lyceum by a tutor who came to us. I entered the 3rd grade of Lithuanian elementary school. Having finished it, I took entrance exams to the state Lithuanian lyceum. One of the entrance exams was Bible study. I practically flunked it, having got a satisfactory mark. The teacher, who took the exam on Bible, was the daughter of rabbi Mamjoffe. When I was not in the list of the admitted, Mamjoffe's daughter ran to my mother, repenting and blaming herself. She thought I was not admitted because she gave me a low mark. Two of Tulia's daughters were in the list of the admitted to the lyceum. They did not have brilliant knowledge and given satisfactory marks for the entrance exams. Tulia just bribed the director of the lyceum having arranged parties in his honor. I had studied in the 4th grade of Lithuanian elementary school and the year after I succeeded to enter the second grade of the lyceum. Thus I turned out to be in the same grade with Tulia's daughters. They were good girls. I made friends with them and helped them with homework. In general, mostly Jews, my classmates, were my friends, I remember Borya Mendelevich, son of the owner of butcher store, Jacob Gusev, Meishke Mitskievich. All of them perished during occupation.

There were Lithuanian guys in the class up till 1938. We got along with them. In general, there were very few anti-Semitists in Lithuania. I think, Lithuania was one of those countries, there anti-Semitism was rather weak as compared to the other countries, especially by the middle 1930s. Before 1924 there was a 'golden age' for Jews in Lithuania. Jews were not oppressed in any way. There were Jews in parliament 8, when in 1926 there was a coup d'etat in Lithuania 9 Tautininki came to power, there was an end to democracy. Communist party, 60% consisting of Jews, was banned. Jews were driven out from parliament and from leading positions in the state. But, that was not it. Dictator Smetona 10, came to power and he thought that Lithuanians should be leaders and the rest should keep quiet and help Lithuanians make a happy state. Though, Smetona treated Jews pretty well and we practically felt no anti-Semitism. Of course, in every day life anti- Semitism was displayed in different ways. I remember that once Lithuanian guys in elementary school tried to put some pigs fat on the lips of Jewish guys. But it was childish unmalicious prank. It was as if guys did not understand what they were doing. I came across with a real anti-Semitism in late 1930s. By that time I did not have any particular political interests. I paid attention to the conversations of my father and friends and later on I understood that father belonged to any party- neither communist, nor any other. He had his own views, 'left' views. There were Zionist organizations in the town, including Betar 11 and Maccabi 12. I did not go deep in the politics I joined «Maccabi», where I played ping-pong and communicated with people of my age.

In 1938-39 pro-Nazi public opinion was streamlined in Lithuania. The teacher of arts, a Lithuanian, called upon fascism among youth. I do not know who of them did it, but each morning there were anti-Semitist posters in the lobby of lyceum, namely a Jew with a 'snoot', plaits, distorted appearance and clothes, with a humped back. Those posters were removed, but next morning they appeared again. I know for sure that two guys from that circle shot Jews, including their classmates in 1941 during one of Hitler's actions. There was a very beautiful girl in our class, the daughter of the director of Jewish bank, Kock Glikman. Many guys wooed her, including one of those guys. She did not want to go with him and he shot her with his own hands during one of the actions in 1941. Many people, at least our family, understood, that fascism would bring calamity to our country and many people looked up to USSR. I am not sure if my father knew about political processes and repressions carried out by Stalin in USSR [Great Terror] 13. He had never talked to me about it.

During the War

When soviet soldiers came in our town in June 1940 many people welcomed them hoping for a better life. [Editor's note: In reality probably it was rather few people who welcomed the occupying Red Army in Lithuania. This is more than 50 years of Soviet propaganda, that regarded the occupation of the Baltic states as 'Liberation', that makes itself felt at this episode.] There was a train with soviet militaries and couple of tanks. I remember I and other boys rushed there, encircled the soldiers and tried to speak Russian to them, though we hardly knew anything in Russian. Many guys boasted on stars from the fore-and-aft caps the soldiers gave them. First there was a state of all-in-all euphoria. During the first day there was a meeting on the central square. My father took the floor. He welcomed soviet soldiers in his mother tongue-Yiddish. For the first time within many years Yiddish was heard from tribune in Mazeikiai. Then meetings were held almost every week and almost the whole town got together to listen to the speakers. Euphoria gave way to disillusionment. Many products vanished from the stores. Only one sort of bread remained and it was low-grade. There were hardly any manufacture goods, including soap and napkins. Nationalization was commenced. The bank where father was employed, was nationalized, but father kept on working there. People who owned any type of property or hired workers, were arrested and exiled to Siberia [Deportations from the Baltics] 14. Tulia and his family were exiled and many other. Tulia died in Siberian camp. His wife died in exile, but his daughters managed to come back to their native town in middle 1970s at an adult age. They did not stay in Lithuania long and left for Israel.

Our lyceum was declared a secondary school and the 7th grade of lyceum was the 9th grade at school. Other than that things were the same. I entered Komsomol organization 15. I was rather active- conducted meetings, called upon people to support soviet regime, drew wall posters. One year with the Soviets went by very quickly. On the 21st of June 1941 we had school- leavers party at school. I came home late and did not stay in bed for a long time. Early in the morning we heard the roaring of the planes. The town was bombed. The Great Patriotic War was unleashed. People were panicking, trying to escape, abandoning their houses. Some Jews thought that Germans would do them no harm and decided to stay. Our family did not have a dilemma- to stay or not to stay. By the evening of the Sunday, 22nd of June we left the town on foot. There were four of us - the families of aunt Shifra and mother's younger sister Rahil. People were fleeing. There were crowds of fugitives on the road with suitcases, rucksacks and bales. The road was bombed and I saw death for the first time. Not all people got up after the bombing was over. Retreating units of the Soviet Army walked along with us. We had walked for couple of days until we reached Latvian border and stayed for couple of days at some train station in Latvia waiting for a train. We had a problem with food. We did not take much with us and we ran out of food pretty soon. Father and uncle Aba Metz exchanged our things with products and our family managed to get by couple of days. Then we managed to get on the train heading to Riga. Upon our arrival we were placed at some school, where evacuation point was organized. We slept in a large hall on the floor. In the afternoon all evacuees were given some soup or porridge and bread. The situation was rather unusual mildly to say. By 1940 we had lived in bourgeois Lithuania and were used to relative comfort. We decided to stick together as it was easier to overcome trouble with the support of kin, which was really precious under those circumstances. In a day or two Jacob Rier, husband of aunt Rahil insisted that we should stop by in Sauspils and take a rest in the place of his relatives and wait for the stir to end. He was not used to the complications and aunt Rahil obeyed her husband. We said goodbye to her and their little Rozochka. At that time we did not know that we would never see them again.

We moved on in about ten days. We took a train, which was supposed to evacuate some plant. Couple of empty platforms were attached to the trains so that the fugitives could get on them. There was barely any room. The train started. We had been on the road for no less than 3 weeks. Before we got on the train, father got some [food] products in exchange for some things. At the evacuation point we were given dry ration- rusks. At first, we did not starve. When the products were over, we felt famished. During stops father and elder brother got off to look for food. Sometimes we got some food from the local people by exchanging them with what they had and at times they managed to get a pot of soup given to the evacuees at the stations. The road was being constantly bombed and the train made frequent stops. Then evacuees scattered in different directions hiding in some natural shelters. I saw a lot of deaths, but it was impossible to get used to it.

We arrived in the town of Kirov [850 km to the east from Moscow]. First we settled at the evacuation point. We were kept there for couple of days. The so-called 'buyers' - the chairman of kolkhoz 16 and construction supervisors came there. As a rule they selected young people. In a while we and the family aunt Shifra were sent to some kolkhoz in Kirov oblast. First I was involved in agricultural works and then in carpentry. Father was confined to bed because of illnesses and hunger and died in late 1941. At that time aunt Anna and Rina came from Moscow. She also went to work at kolkhoz. All of us lived in one room in the house of the local kolkhoz people. They treated us really well, but the food was catastrophically scarce though I got trudodni 17 and ration and mother received tiny dependent's ration. I dreamt of studies in spite of the war. I still thought of entering the institute. When Moscow Teachers' Training Institute was evacuated in Kirov, I was enrolled for the first course of Physics and Mathematics department. I was not exactly what I was dreaming about- to become a historian or a philosopher, but I was not to choose. I lived in the hostel of the institute in Kirov. Mother really suffered when father died. She often was unwell. I managed to make arrangements for my mother to have a room in my hospital. She was hired as a cleaner in the hostel and was given a room there. She also was on duty in the hostel. My student life went by very fast. It was easy for me to study and I did well. We lived in a cold hostel like one family, we shared everything we had. Everyday with bated breath we listened to the round-ups from the lines. Guys of all kinds of nationalities studied with me, but our friendship was cemented because of our common grief. There were no discords. I had studied only for a year and a half. At the beginning of 1943 my brother and I were drafted in the front-line forces. My brother worked at some military plant all the time and he came to the military enlistment office on numerous occasions, but he was not drafted, and now was the time.

We were sent to the newly-formed Lithuanian division # 16, 18 positioned in the town of Balakhna, Nizhniy Novgorod. Mother stayed in Kirov and we agreed that she would stay by the institute all the time so it would be easier for us to find her after war. By that time the situation in the lines was considerably different - after defeat of the fascists in the vicinity of Stalingrad [Stalingrad Battle] 19, nobody questioned the victory of the Soviet Army. My brother and I were in the different places. I had spent couple of months training and was sent to the front shortly afterwards. Unfortunately, my brother was not in the lines for a long time. He was killed in action shortly after he was drafted in the front-lines.

In the summer of 1943 I turned out to be on the leading edge. I was a private in the infantry. It was the hardest and most dangerous military profession. We always were the first to confront the enemy face -to-face. Our division was the part of the First Baltic front 20. We swiftly moved along the territory of Russia, then Ukraine and further to the West. We were fed well in the army. It was the first time during the war times when I was full with the food. Of course, living conditions were much to be deplored. We slept in the dugs-out. Sometimes we settled in the houses of the liberated hamlets so that we could sleep in a warm place and take a bath. But it happened on very rare occasions. I was not a coward. I was one of the first who rushed in the attack. Before one of the fiercest battles I joined the Communist party. I did it consciously and deliberately. In the lines all those who wished were admitted in the party, without any bureaucratic routines. So I was admitted in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I remember that often we darted in assault with the Stalin's name and we did it willingly. We thought he was the one who encouraged us and assured us in the victory. It was the way we were brought up. During one of the most serious battles I was ahead of everybody. I jumped in the enemy's trench and killed the fascists who were there. As it turned out my deed turned out to be decisive in liberation of the village we were attacking. I do not remember its name now, but it was somewhere on the border of Russian and Belarus. After that battle my commander included me in the list of the awardees. I felt strange. I was a modest guy and I did not think my action to be extraordinary. Soon there was a resolution and I was conferred with the Order of Fame 21. Soon I was elected a Komsomol organizer of the squad and became the aide of the political officer 22. I was to follow the rounds-up of the fronts, estimate political situation. By the way, news- paper were delivered daily and had political classes with the soldiers when they were not in the battles. The war was about to end and the front was advancing to the Western borders of the USSR.

In the summer of 1944 my motherland Lithuania was liberated. I always corresponded with mother. As we agreed, she kept on working in the hostel of the Teachers' Training School. She was evacuated in Moscow with that institute. Mother asked me to be cautious not to be hit by the bullet, but I was never a coward. Strange as it may be the most difficult for me at the front was the lack of the conveniences, the chance to wash my face, take a bath and put clean clothes on, not fascist bullets and the fear of being killed at any moment. Marshes, filth, gnats and not getting enough sleep desponded me the most. My character did not fit the military service, though I was quite good in the battles being a brave soldier. At the end of 1944 the invitation for the officers' courses was sent to our regiment. It was suggested that I should go there. I did not want to be a career soldier as I did not like military service. I wanted to continue my studies at the institute. I understood that the war was winding up and it would be difficult for me to be demobilized at the rank of an officer. But still, I agreed. I even do not know why. Probably, because I was highly responsible. I left for the courses, which were to last for 3 months. These were officers' courses of the First Baltic Front. It happened right after Lithuania had been liberated. We settled in Riga. The war was about to end and the courses were constantly prolonged to save as much officers as possible. When the war moved to Eastern Prussia, we were sent to the former German Kaliningrad region 23, having been liberated by soviet troops. We met victory here. We were exulting. We were so happy to know that the war was over and now it was the time to think of our future.

After the War

We had been already conferred the officers' rank and I became a junior lieutenant. Shortly after our victory we were allocated to different military units. I was sent Vilnius and assigned Komsomol organizer of regiment # 249, where I used to serve. First I lived in the barracks with everybody. Our regiment was in Severny Gorodok, it was the name of one of the outskirts of Vilnius. Mother stayed in Moscow for a while. She was supposed to have a permit to come to Vilnius. When I managed to get a permit for her, I went to Moscow to take mother in Vilnius. In Moscow I saw aunt Anna and cousin Rina. By that time they came back from Kirov oblast, where they stayed during war. First mother and I rented our lodging in Vilnius. It was a small room without conveniences. In 1946 many people left Vilnius for Poland and many apartments were empty. [In 1946 soviet authorities permitted to leave the territory of the USSR to all people, who were born on the territories annexed to the USSR in the period of 1939- 40s.] I was given a small two-room apartment with a kitchen, but without conveniences. Finally, we had our own house and we settled there with mother. I had been writing the requests on demobilization, but they were returned to me unsigned.

I was demobilized only in 1947. I was happy. The only thing for me to do was to find a job and go to the institute. The real hardship in my life started. At that time in Lithuania, as well as in the rest of the USSR, anti- Semitism [Campaign against 'cosmopolitans'] 24 was thriving. I came across it when I was seeking a job at the institute. I finished one year and a half in the period of time when most people did not even manage to finish 10 classes. It was enough to find a job. Besides, I was born in Lithuania, a front line soldier with the awards, the member of Communist Party, which was rare. I wanted to be a lector. I had that experience in the regiment and got along with people. Nothing happened. First, I addressed the "educational agency" Znaniye [Znaniye all-Union society, a public educational agency supporting spread of political and scientific knowledge.]. I was offered a job as an accountant. I had not experience in that. Then, the second secretary of the Central Komsomol Committee of the Republic, the fellow soldier, recommended me for a position of the aide of the first secretary of the Central Komsomol Committee. Of course, I did not succeed. I addressed other organizations. First I was welcomed as I did not look like a typical Jew, but when it was the time to see my last name during processing of my documents, the head of HR department found any reason to refuse me. Of course, they never said that the true reason was my Jewish origin. Finally one good fellow soldier helped me get a job as a literary worker at the paper 'Sovietskaya Litva'. [Russian language Lithuanian newspaper. Between 1944 and 1990 it came out six time a week in 70,000 copies daily (1975)]

The same year- 1947 - I submitted the documents to the Vilnius university, Physics and Mathematics Department. The pro-rector, responsible for academic studies, an inveterate anti-Semitist, told me: «you studied at the Teachers' Training Institute. Take another attempt». But I was helped by the party organizer of the university, who was from Mazeikiai. He knew my father very well and insisted that I should be admitted to the second course as I was the member of the party and a front-line soldier. Students of those years did not look like modern students. At that time we were adults having gone through war. I was also responsible for my mother. She could not work, so I was the only bread-winner. When I was in the third year I was employed by Chair of Marxism and Leninism as teachers' assistant. There was a lack of teachers in social studies Lithuania, who were fluent in Lithuanian and Russian languages. On the third course I was appointed as an assistant to the teacher in Marxism and Leninism. There were 3 students-teachers in the entire university, including me. Upon graduation I successfully defended my diploma and I was not to worry of the mandatory job assignment 25. They even did not ask what I would like to do. I remained teaching at the university.

I did not associate state anti-Semitism, commenced with the assassination of the great Jewish actor Mikhoels 26, extermination of Jewish Anti- fascist Committee 27 and ended with the preposterous so-called 'doctors' plot» 28 with Stalin's name. I thought there were the willingness of the local state activists to outdo others in front of all-union dignitaries. I should say that I personally was not touched by anti-Semitistic campaigns. I kept on teaching successfully. Judging by the way tutors and students treated me, I can say I was respected. I took hard Stalin's death in 1953. Gradually I came to understanding his true role and the resolutions adopted at divulging the  Party Congress 29 were taken by me as logical and necessary. The truth was revealed. Only now, after perestroika 30 we came to know almost everything about transgressions of the soviet régime and gangster leader Stalin.

I had worked in the university by 1989, before the outbreak of perestroika. I had defended candidate theses [Soviet/Russian doctorate degrees] 31. When the independence of Lithuania was restored 32 I confirmed my title. Now I am the doctor of History. I should say I did not accept perestroika at once. It was hard for me to object all those ideas I was sincerely devoted to- the ideas of socialism and communism. Being the nee of Lithuania I understood very well that Moscow was alien in our country. Now I completely agree with the term 'soviet occupation, when it goes about soviet regime. I support the independence of my country, its membership in European Union. I hope that Lithuania will overcome temporary obstacles and become a flourishing European country.

I am happy in my private life. I met a wonderful Jewish girl at the university. Polina Aibinder was the student of the medical department. We had a lot in common. Both of us were born in small Lithuanian towns. She was born in Kupiskis in 1930. Her father Zelik Aibinder was a tailor and mother was a housewife. Polina had a sister Rosa Aibinder. In 1941 she did not manage to get evacuated and had to go through all the horror of Vilnius ghetto 33. Rosa survived. Shortly after war was over she left for Israel. She is still living there. In 1941 Polina and her parents left the town and were evacuated in Chuvashia. Upon return Polina's family settled in Vilnius. Polina and I started seeing each other. In 1951 we got married. We had a very modest wedding. We registered our marriage in a regional marriage registration office and had a small party with closest people in my aunt's apartment as there was no room in our apartment. We moved in my mother's place. In 1952 our elder son came into the world. We named him David after my brother. Our second son Ilia was born in 1957.

Our family lived the way all common families lived by the soviet regime- from check to check. We did not have any riches, but our life was pretty decent. My wife worked as a doctor. Children, like others, went to the kindergarten, then to school. Mother helped us the best way she could. In early 1960s she was getting more and more unwell. She took to her bed and in died in 1965. She was buried in the Jewish sector of the cemetery 34, but without any Jewish rites being observed. We went on vacation every year, sometimes with children. Like most people from Vilnius we went to the spas [Recreation ?enters in the the USSR] 35 in Palanga [popular resort in Lithuania on the coast of the Baltic Sea]. We got trade-union travel vouchers and had to pay only 30% of the trip, so we could afford to take a vacation every year. Children went pioneer camps on the territory of Lithuania. In early 1970s I bought a car and we took an interest to travel around Lithuania. We went to Crimea and the Carpathians [Ukraine]. In couple of years I got a land plot for my orchard. At that time there collective horticulture was developed and workers were given land plots of 600m2. The land plot was small and the cottage built could not exceed 30 square meters. We enjoyed taking care of our garden, orchard and flowerbeds. All could fit in our house- we, our children and grandchildren. When the restrictions as for the size of cottages were cancelled, I expanded my cottage. Now we have a pretty decent heated dacha [summer house].

David graduated from the Mathematics Department of Vilnius University. He was an excellent student, but still he had problems with a job. He was given a mandatory job assignment teach mathematics at the elementary school, though he ranked the 2nd of the 3rd best student and was dreaming of scientific work. Finally I managed to find a place for him - to perform research at the University, but David was dissatisfied: the salary was skimpy, there was no way for the growth and he could not work on his own. He had a family - his wife Liza, a Jew, who worked as an accountant and two daughters, Elena and Anna born in a row in 1982 and 1983 respectively. In early 1990s David and his family left for Israel. There he does well. He is a mathematician/programmer. His wife is working as an accountant. My favorite granddaughters served a full term in Israel army. Now both of them study at Haifa University. My son's family lives in Petakh Tikvah. I visited him for couple of times. I am happy he managed to achieve what he sought.

My younger son Ilia also finished Vilnius university. He is a historian. His wife Larissa is a Ukrainian Jew. During soviet regime she came to Vilnius to enter the institute like many Jewish young people as it was much easier in Lithuania as compared to other republics. [There was rerlatively less discrimination against Jews upon entering higher education in Lithuania than elswhere in the Soviet Union.] Larisa finished university, Russian philology department, defended candidate theses. She is the candidate of science now. Larisa is currently dealing with Judaic. Ilia has two children- the elder Olga, born in 1986, entered Moscow university, Judaic department. She studies Jewish philology. My only grandson Alexander, whom I call Sachenka - I call all my grandchildren tender names: Lenochka, Anechka, Olenka - [Russian diminutives for Elena, Anna and Olga] born in 1989 is finish Vilnius Jewish school this year. By the way, Jewish school in Vilnius is not private, but state.

Another, probably the most important thing for the Jews is the revival of Jewish life, which became possible with perestroika and independence of Lithuania. Now I came back to the life I used to have so many years ago. In the period of time when the state of Israel was founded, when it was at war - six-day war 36, Yom-Kippur war 37 etc., I, like many other people could not help, but admire Israel. Many people displayed solidarity with Israelies. I kept silent at the party meetings, when my peoples was stigmatized. Now I am proud of Israel and I am happy that my son lives there. I do not think of immigration. I cannot split myself for each of my sons and for each of my motherlands. Let things remain the way they are. Besides, my Polina is very sick. Couple of years ago to had to retire because of her poor health. Now, she rarely leaves the apartment.

When I resigned from the university I was employed at psychological laboratory by the university dealing with research of educational issues. At the same time I was offered to teach Jewish history at the Jewish school, which was recently open. It turned out, that I was learning together with my students, being one class ahead of them. In my childhood and adolescence I did not study Jewish history and now I opened that wonderful history world for me. I had worked by 2004 and now I am taking a rest for a year. Though, I cannot call it a rest. Earlier, when my younger son took a keen interest in Holocaust, I started collecting materials on that horrible page in the Jewish history and understood that Jewish life and community appealed to me. Probably it was an inner need to do possible and impossible for the Jewry to be revived. Now I am a member of the Board of the Community of Lithuanian Jews. Now I have the chance to do my best for the community. I did not become religious; my family marks Jewish holidays and mandatory fasts on Yom Kippur to commemorate my ancestors and millions of those who perished.

I dote on Lithuania. Now I like things, which I could not accept at once- crushed communistic regime was like a breath of fresh air, something which was necessary for our country to exist, but there are things in Lithuanian politics, which I disapprove, i.e. getting away with everything, connected with the USSR. I do not think it is the right thing to do. I do not like a negative attitude toward the victory over fascism. Here many people think that we should have fought with Hitler against USSR. I am strongly against it! Hitler captured half of Europe, enslaved and exterminated millions of people. I was in the lines and I know: because of our combined efforts we gained a victory over fascism and we should always keep it in mind. I hope that my country would get over the difficulties with growth.

GLOSSARY:

Fira Shwartz
Kiev
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ella Levitskaya
Date of interview: October 2002

Fira lives in a big comfortable apartment in Troyeschina - a new neighborhood in Kiev. One can tell that the family cares for one another and keeps the home in good order. Fira is a very sociable lady, although interviewing her is a bit tough: she only talks about what she wants to talk about and avoids any subjects that may bring back heart-rending memories.

I have no information about the family of my father Israel Shwartz. He perished when I was a small child. I've never met anybody from his family. I don't even know where my father was born. We only have a death certificate stating that he died at the front near Leningrad in 1942 at the age of 41. Therefore, he must have been born in 1901.

I know more about my mother's family. My grandfather on my mother's side, Itzyk Borodianskiy, was born in Gornostaypol, a small town near Chernobyl, in the 1860s. He came from a poor family with many children. His parents were religious and observed all Jewish traditions. My grandfather studied at cheder and at 10 he became an apprentice to a glasscutter. He worked as a glasscutter in Gornostaypol for his whole life. He owned a small shop where he received and carried out orders.

My grandfather was married twice. He had two sons from his first marriage: Samuel, born in 1892 and Yankel, born in 1897. My grandfather's first wife died shortly after Yankel was born. About a year after his wife's death my grandfather remarried. His second wife, Esther, was ten years younger than my grandfather. Her family lived in Chernobyl. She came from a poor family, was the younger daughter and had no dowry. Esther was a housewife and a very nice woman. My mother, Rosa Borodianskaya, was born in 1905. My grandmother died in 1932 during the famine in Ukraine 1. She died before I was born, and all I know about her is what my mother told me. We also kept a photograph of her.

They lived in a small wooden house in Gornostaypol with three small rooms and a kitchen. My mother took me there once when I was 5 years old. I have some dim memories of my grandparents' house. There were earthen floors with quilted rugs on them. It was dark in the rooms because the windows were very small, and there were trees around the house. There were two stoves in the house: one in the kitchen, which was used for cooking and heating one room, and one to heat the two other rooms. The stoves were stoked with wood because charcoal was too expensive at the time. The ceilings were low and whitewashed. I remember a big nickel-plate bed, in which my mother and I were sleeping during our visit. The letter 'E' was embroidered on the sheets, and my mother told me that my grandmother Esther did the embroidery. There were also woolen carpets on the walls embroidered by my grandmother. They had a garden and a kitchen garden near the house.

My mother's older brothers studied at cheder. They also completed seven years of the Jewish lower secondary school in Gornostaypol. My mother studied at secondary school for eight years.

My mother's parents were religious. Her father read religious books after work. He prayed in the mornings and in the evenings. I don't know for sure whether there was a synagogue in Gornostaypol, but I believe there must have been one. Uncle Samuel told me that there were quite a few Jewish families living in Gornostaypol. My mother's family celebrated Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. I know this from my mother's brother Samuel, who later replaced my parents.

Gornostaypol was a small and quiet town. All stormy events shattering the country at that time - Jewish pogroms, the Revolution of 1917 2 and the Civil War 3 - didn't affect the town. I know that the Revolution didn't change anything in the life of my mother's family: They had been poor before and they remained poor afterwards.

My grandparents' children left the house when they grew up. Samuel became a tailor in Gornostaypol and moved to Kiev when he was 17. He got a job at a military tailor's shop where they made uniforms for soldiers and officers. He was an apprentice there at first, but he was very good at sewing and soon became one of the best tailors of the shop. He married a Jewish girl called Rosa. She came from Kiev. They had two children: a son called Semyon, born in 1922 and a daughter, Bella, born in 1928.

Yankel moved to Baku, Azerbaijan [2,000 km from Gornostaypol]. He went with his former classmate whose brother had moved to Baku two years before. I know very little about Yankel's life in Baku. He worked at a plant. He married a Jewish girl from Baku named Diphia, and they had two children: a daughter called Beba and a son called Naum.

After finishing school in the 1920s my mother moved to Kiev. Uncle Samuel convinced her that there were more opportunities in a big town. I know very little about my mother's life before I was born. She told me that she worked as a nurse in a kindergarten. I don't know how she met my father. He was a forwarding agent at the railway post office. My parents got married soon after they met. My mother was 24; my father was four years older. They had a civil ceremony at the registry office. Weddings were considered to be a bourgeois vestige, so they had no wedding party.

My father lived in a communal apartment 4. There were two other families living in this apartment. My father's room was small and dark. Its only window faced an entry corridor of the building. There was a wardrobe, my parent's bed, my bed, a table and a few chairs in the room. There was a big common kitchen where each family had its own Primus stove. There was a strong smell of kerosene in the kitchen due to kerosene containers that were kept there. My mother worked for some time after she got married, but she quit her job before I was born and stayed at home afterwards.

I was born in Kiev in April 1936. My mother called me Fira. Actually, this is affectionate for Esphir, but Fira was the name my mother gave me and the name written on my birth certificate.

I remember very little of my childhood before the war. I didn't go to kindergarten. My father often went on business trips, and I recall how happy I was when he returned from his trips. He took me out and bought me ice cream. I don't think my parents were religious. At least, I don't remember any celebrations of Jewish holidays or Sabbath at home. At that time religion was viewed as a thing of the past. Many young people rejected religious traditions and rituals as something outdated and unnecessary. We spoke Russian and celebrated Soviet holidays when my father was home. My mother cooked and we had my father's colleagues over as guests.

Grandfather Itzyk visited us quite often. He was living alone in Gornostaypol at the time. I remember him praying every morning and every evening. He put on his tefillin before saying his prayers. He explained to me what it was. My grandfather also had a tallit. that was like a big white scarf with black stripes and frange on edges. My mother cooked Jewish food when my grandfather visited us: she made gefilte fish, chicken broth with dumplings and baked strudels. My mother told me that she learned how to cook Jewish food from her mother. My grandfather wore a black velvet kippah at home and a black cap to go out. He wore a long black jacket and striped black trousers. He had a small gray beard. My grandfather was short and very vivid. My mother and father spoke Yiddish with him, but he spoke Russian with me. He liked me a lot and called me ketsele [kitty]. My grandfather was an old man, and our neighbors treated him with respect.

I was 5 years old when the war began. I remember that my father and I were planning to go for a walk on the slopes of the Dnepr River that Sunday, but in the morning he told me that it was cancelled. I burst into tears, because I was so unhappy about it. My mother cried, too, and I thought that she was disappointed by not going to the park. Only later did I understand that she was crying because of the war.

My father was released from service in the army because he was a railroad employee. He also received a railroad carriage at his disposal for the evacuation of his family. We all went to evacuation in this carriage at the beginning of July 1941: my mother's brother Samuel, his wife and daughter Bella, my father's fellow worker, his wife and two children, and our family. Uncle Samuel was not subject to recruitment due to his age. Samuel's son, Semyon, was recruited to the army during the first days of the war even though he should have been released from the army because he had one shorter leg and walked with a limp. He perished at the front in the battle for Moscow in 1941. My mother's other brother, Yankel, lived in Baku throughout the war. He was ill and released from service in the army.

We had very little luggage with us. We only took the most necessary clothing, my toys and children's books, my bed linen and a few casseroles. My father told us that we would return home soon. I don't know how it happened that Grandfather Itzyk stayed behind in Gornostaypol. When the town was occupied by the Germans in September 1941 my grandfather went to Kiev on foot. He walked about 100 kilometers. Kiev was already occupied by the Germans. My grandfather didn't find us and was ordered to go to Babi Yar 5 along with many other Jews on 29th September 1941. Wwe heard about this after we returned to Kiev in the fall of 1944.

We didn't know where we were going. I remember the first bombing near Kharkov. The train stopped and we jumped off the train to hide. I saw a German plane flying very low and I thought that the German pilot also saw me. After the bombing we returned to the train. We saw another train at the station. It had been destroyed by the bombing and many dead bodies were lying around it.

Uncle Samuel and his family got off the train at Buzuluk station - his acquaintances were living there. We moved on. The train stopped at Magnitogorsk, Cheliabinsk region [2,500 km from Kiev]. We got off there. All evacuated people settled down in the barracks there. There were two families in each room. The so-called 'rooms' were separated by sheets that served as 'partials'. We lived with my father's co-worker, his wife and children. My father worked at the railway station in Magnitogorsk. At the beginning of 1942 he was recruited to the front. He wrote us a single letter from there. A few months later we received the notification of his death. It said that he perished close to the village of Malyie Krestsy, near Leningrad. Regretfully, I have never been to the place where he was buried.

My mother and I were starving and freezing because we didn't have any winter clothes with us. I stayed inside the room for the whole winter. My mother had to go out to get some food in exchange for ration cards. She had to stand in long lines for hours and hours. I remember her buying a small fur tree on 31st December 1942. Then she went to the store. She came back with a face white as chalk and put a bag of food on the table. She went to bed saying that she was going to stay there and get warm. She never left the bed again. A week later she died of pneumonia.

I was staying with our co-tenants. They took me to the morgue to say farewell to my mother. My mother was lying on a steel table and there was a layer of ice on her face. I could never forget this image. Even after finishing school, when I would have been admitted to Medical College without exams, I recalled my mother's face under ice and realized that I couldn't study there. I wasn't allowed to attend my mother's funeral. She was buried in a common grave. There was not even a sign with the names of those that were buried there.

My mother had asked our co-tenant to write to her brothers. At the beginning of January 1943 Uncle Samuel came to pick me up and take me to Buzuluk. His family became mine. I started school in Buzuluk in 1943. I have no memories about that school. I only remember that I wanted to sing in the choir, but I wasn't admitted because I was too short.

In September 1944 we returned to Kiev. My uncle's apartment was occupied by a 'politzai' [expression used for former fascist menials]. We stayed with one of his acquaintances. My uncle returned to his former job at the tailor shop. He soon managed to get back his apartment, and we moved in there. It was a two-bedroom apartment in a two-storied wooden building in the center of Kiev. It used to be a communal apartment, but later it was refurbished into a two-bedroom apartment. There was gas heating and running cold water. We had a kitchen that had served as a corridor before; it was long and narrow. I lived in this apartment until the house was pulled down a few years ago.

In Kiev I studied in the 2nd grade of a Russian secondary school. I became a Young Octobrist 6 and later a pioneer. I loved dancing and begged my uncle to send me to a ballet school, but one had to pay for it, and he didn't have money to pay for my studies. My uncle didn't adopt me. He was my guardian so I received monthly allowances for my father, who had perished at the front. . My uncle treated me very kindly and supported me with everything I needed.

I was a sociable girl and made friends with almost all my classmates. The teachers and pupils were sympathetic to me. There were quite a few schoolchildren that had lost one parent to the war, but there weren't many that had lost both parents. I had free meals at the school canteen and received clothing and stationery every now and then. Half the pupils in my class were Jewish. There were also Jews among our teachers. I never really faced anti-Semitism in my whole life. Only once did some boys shout 'zhydovka' [kike] at me on my way home from school. I was taken aback but pretended that I hadn't heard them.

My uncle and his wife Rosa celebrated Sabbath and other Jewish traditions. I don't think they managed to follow the kashrut at that time. There was no place to buy kosher products. They never kept meat and dairy products in the same spot though, and there was no pork in our house. I became familiar with Jewish traditions through them. My uncle's wife always wore a shawl or a kerchief, even at home. At Chanukkah children were always given some money, although the family was poor. Every Friday Rosa cooked enough food to last for two days. She always managed to get some fish at the market. She made gefilte fish and baked challah in the oven. We prayed on Friday evenings, then Rosa lit the candles, and we sat down at the table for a festive dinner. My uncle had a tallit and he always wore his little cap and Rosa always wore a shawl.

Saturday wasn't a day off at that time. My uncle went to work in the morning whereas Rosa stayed at home and tried not to do any work. She used to say that her husband had to go to work, but that she had an opportunity to follow God's covenants.

At Pesach my uncle bought matzah at the only operating synagogue in Podol 7. Matzah was expensive; besides, it was rather difficult to get it at Pesach, because there were so many people that wanted matzah for this holiday. There was no bread at home at Pesach. Besides matzah we ate corn porridge on this holiday. Rosa cooked gefilte fish, boiled chicken and chicken broth with corn dumplings. She also made sponge cakes. My uncle conducted the seder, said the prayers and read the Haggadah.

At Purim Rosa always made hamantashen. Uncle Samuel and Aunt Rosa went to the synagogue at Pesach, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. They also prayed at home and they fasted at Yom Kippur. My cousin and I didn't fast. We thought religious holidays to be a thing of the past, but we loved and enjoyed delicious food on holidays and always looked forward to such holidays. My aunt and uncle observed traditions but kept it a secret from their neighbors and acquaintances and told us to remain silent about it. They explained to us that my uncle might have problems at work if they found out about his religious conduct.

At school we celebrated Soviet holidays and the New Year. 1On 1st May and 7th November [October Revolution Day] 8 everyone at school went to the parades and afterwards we gave concerts at school. My uncle and his family didn't celebrate Soviet holidays, but they enjoyed being off work. My cousin and I celebrated Soviet holidays with our friends.

After finishing lower secondary school I had to learn some profession and earn money for my living. I entered the Library Faculty at the College of Culture and Education. There were only girls in my group. Many of them came from villages. Only two of us were Jewish: I and another girl called Tverskaya. She was nice and we became friends. I knew from my uncle that she was Jewish. There was no anti-Semitism as far as I noticed. I got along well with my co-students and had many friends. I studied in college for three years and finished it in 1954.

I became a Komsomol 9 member in college. I was eager to become a Komsomol member. I liked to go to the movies and all the pretty and successful girls in these movies were Komsomol members. I believed that being a Komsomol member would change my life for the better.

I was 17 when Stalin died. I was never interested in politics and felt quite indifferent about his death. Besides, I had an appendicitis surgery at the time that took all my attention.

After finishing college I got a job assignment in the village of Vysokoye, Zhitomir region [200 km from Kiev]. Graduates usually got assignments in distant locations. I became a librarian there, but I had a very small salary - 400 rubles. My mandatory job assignment was to last three years. [This was a standard requirement that was to be followed by all graduates from higher educational institutions]. I rented a room from an old woman and had hardly enough money to make a living. Every now and then my uncle and his wife sent me food parcels. I had to stay in this village for another half year until they found a replacement for me.

I returned to Kiev in 1957, but I couldn't find a job as a librarian there. I couldn't live at my uncle's expenses and thus went to work in a shoe factory. At first I was a laborer at the storage facility, and later I became a laborer at the shop of the factory. I liked my job. The majority of the employees at the factory were Jewish. The director and chief engineer of the factory were also Jews. Of course, there was no anti- Semitism at the factory.

I met my future husband, a Jew by the name of David Kargorodskiy when I returned to Kiev. David was born in Kiev in 1936. Aunt Rosa and David's mother were close friends. David finished the Communication Faculty of the Mining College and got a job assignment in the Ural where he stayed for three years. His mother wanted David to meet a Jewish girl. She met me during one of her visits to Rosa. She liked me and when her son came to Kiev on vacation she introduced us to one another. We began to see each other.

David's mother, Haya Kargorodskaya, was a pensioner when we met. She had worked as a secretary at a plant before. Her husband, Leib Kargorodskiy, worked at the same plant. David's father was a very religious man. He always read the Talmud and the Torah at home, even after the war. He went to the synagogue on holidays. David's mother wasn't quite so religious. They always celebrated Sabbath: David's mother cooked a festive dinner, and they lit candles at home. David's parents celebrated all traditional Jewish holidays: Pesach, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. They often talked in Yiddish, but David was far from being religious.

We got married in 1959. We had a civil wedding and a wedding party afterwards. There were many guests at the wedding. My Uncle Samuel, who was my guardian, received my monthly allowances for my father. He had been putting the money into my bank account, and my wedding was arranged from that money.

After our wedding David had to go back to the Ural where he was working. I quit my job and followed him. David was a communications supervisor. We got a room at the family hostel. I stayed there for a year after which I had to return to Kiev. I had to make sure that I kept my residence permit 10 in Kiev. A few times a year militia authorities sent their representatives to check whether tenants where residing in the apartments they were assigned to. My uncle sent me a telegram notifying me that I had to come back to Kiev in order to keep my permit to live in the apartment. Every member of the family living in one apartment had a stamp in his passport - parents had stamps in their passports for their children - and those stamps served as a residential permit. The authorities strictly checked that people were registered and resided where they were assigned to. So I went back to Kiev and my husband joined me after about a year's time, in 1960.

David's parents lived in one room in a communal apartment with many tenants. My husband and I moved in with my uncle. My cousin Bella was married by that time and lived with her husband. My husband and I were living in the room where my cousin and I had lived before. We got along well with my uncle and aunt. We were a family. Although we were atheists we celebrated both Soviet and Jewish holidays with them because we respected my uncle's religiosity.

My husband got a job at the Giprosviaz Communications Design Institute. More than half of the staff of the institute was Jewish. David had no problems getting this job. I worked at the library. My husband and I didn't feel Jewish. We spoke Russian. I didn't know Yiddish at all, and David could only remember a few words from his childhood. We were an ordinary Soviet family and we felt like Soviet people. We raised our children that way, too. Our daughter, Margarita, was born in 1961 and our son, Igor, followed in 1968. My mother-in-law was helping me to look after Margarita, but as soon as a kindergarten opened near our home I took her there. Igor also went to nursery school and to kindergarten, and I went to work soon after he was born.

My uncle Samuel died in 1962. He was the only member of our family that was buried according to Jewish tradition. Such was his will and we fulfilled it. We buried my uncle at the Jewish cemetery in Berkovtsy [a neighborhood in the outskirts of Kiev]. The former rabbi of the Podol synagogue conducted the funeral. He was also buried in this cemetery when he died. Rosa, who died 6 years after her husband, and David's parents were buried without any rituals.

My mother's brother Yankel visited us in Kiev several times after the war. We corresponded but later he stopped writing. I have no information about him or his wife and only a bit about their children. Yankel's son Naum lived in Kiev after the war. He died before he turned 50. Yankel's daughter Beba got married. She had two children: a daughter called Galina and a son called Edik. After Beba's husband died in 1991 she moved to Germany with her daughter's family. They live there now.

In the early 1970s many Jews were moving to Israel. I wanted to move, too, but my husband was strictly against it. He said he grew up here and wouldn't be able to adjust to life in a capitalist country. I believed that our children would gain a lot by living in Israel and mostly wanted to go for their sake. I tried to convince him but he stood his ground. So we stayed in the USSR.

Neither my husband nor I were members of the Communist Party. In 1973 my husband insisted that I got a job at the Giprosviaz Institute where he was working. I got a job as an assistant secretary there. I made copies, did the typing, purchased new books for the institute and performed other small errands.

Our daughter Margarita finished lower secondary school and entered a medical college. After finishing this college she got a job as a masseur at a clinic. She Margaret got married in 1987. Her husband was a Russian. David and I weren't against their marriage. We had nothing against her Russian husband. We wanted my daughter to be happy. My granddaughter Karina was born in 1991. Unfortunately, Margarita got divorced. Her ex-husband supports her and Karina a lot though. We live with my daughter and granddaughter now. I retired after my granddaughter was born. My husband also retired after working in the institute for 43 years.

My son Igor studied at trade school after finishing secondary school. He became a mechanic and got a job at a vehicle maintenance yard. He was recruited to the army from there in 1987 and returned in 1989 after his service was over. It was difficult for him to find a job when he returned. This was already during the perestroika and unemployment was high. My son married a Ukrainian girl when he returned from the army. Their daughter Natalia was born in 1991. My son had to support his family. He got a job as a laborer. I feel very sorry for him, but this was the only job that he could get. In 1995 Igor's son Sergey was born. My son lives with his wife's family. They have a nice three-bedroom apartment in a new neighborhood in Kiev.

In recent years, after Ukraine gained independence, the life of Jews has changed a lot. There are many Jewish organizations. We get much assistance from Hesed. My husband and I receive food packages. We appreciate this support a lot, especially when considering that we receive such small pensions. We also receive medication from Hesed and other medical services. We often attend lectures or other cultural activities. This is a great opportunity for us to communicate and socialize with others.

I have come closer to the Jewish identity of my family. I study the history of the Jewish people and take much interest in it. My Ukrainian friend took me to her church a few years ago. I've attended the Jewish messianic congregation for several years [the Jews for Jesus congregation]. Jews in our church are converted into Christians. Hesed doesn't acknowledge this community. We are viewed as renegades there.

It has become my road to God though. We don't study the Talmud there, we study the Bible instead. We have a very good pastor. There are over 1,000 people in this community. We often have visiting priests from abroad. I enjoy attending this community. We have services twice a week and I try to attend them all. There's a choir and a dance group. This group is called Glorification. We sing religious Christian and Jewish folk songs. Regretfully, my husband doesn't believe in God. I feel so sorry about it. But I accept and respect his views. Different opinions must not separate people in the family or in this world. I wish politicians would understand that. I start each day with the quotation of a song that we sing in the community: 'God has given us this day to rejoice!'

Glossary

Laszlo Spiegler
Budapest
Hungary
Interviewer: Dora Sardi and Eszter Andor
Date of interview: May 2002

I don't know the maiden name of my grandmother on my mother's side, only that she was Mrs. Markus. She died long before the war. I remember when I was a child, she was ill all the time. She was always in bed. My mother had ten brothers and sisters; my mother is the eleventh child. They weren't born here in Ujpest but somewhere in the provinces, but they came to Budapest. It was a Neolog 1 family, but quite religious. I had an aunt, the wife of Uncle Herman, my mother's brother, who had been Christian; she converted to Judaism and she knew how to pray in Hebrew better than any Jew. She lived with my grandma. Uncle Herman never came back [from the war] and I don't know what happened to him. Miska Markus, another of my mother's brothers, was a victim of World War I; he got a disease, something to do with the brain, because a bomb had exploded near him and the pressure wave did him great harm; he later died - around the end of the 1920s. He was a merchant. Not in Ujpest, they lived somewhere in the Castle District [in Budapest]. His wife was Auntie Vilma.

My grandparents on my father's side came from Vagujhely, Trencsen county. My uncle lived in Puho. I must have been three or four years old when we were there. I remember Puho. My uncle, my father's brother, had a pub. No one was left. I don't know what my grandpa on my father's side did for a living because the poor soul died. I didn't know either of my grandfathers. My grandmother, my father's mother, could only speak Yiddish, because she was from the Felvidek 1. I couldn't tell you her name, I don't remember that, but I loved my grandma and she loved me. She was very religious, very kosher. She didn't have a wig, but her head was covered with a shawl. I was the only Spiegler boy and she had six granddaughters. I had three sisters, and my uncle had three daughters as well. I was the only one whom, when it was my birthday or Christmas, she took everywhere to buy candies I loved. This was your due for being a boy!

My father is Gyula Jakab Spiegler. His Jewish name was Itzchok. My mother was called Lenke Markus. Her Jewish name was Leye. My father barely spoke Hungarian. At the engagement he kissed my mother, who smacked his face. He said - because he couldn't speak Hungarian properly - 'I wish I had never got this smackering'. My parents spoke Hungarian with us, children, but they spoke Yiddish to one another, moreover, they corresponded in it as well. My mum's mother tongue was Hungarian, but she spoke Yiddish. In those days Jews used to speak mostly Yiddish. So they spoke this distortion of German, [that is Yiddish] moreover, they corresponded in it, too.

My father was an ironmonger, but he was also a wood- and coal dealer; I know that because it was written in my birth certificate. And when my father was taken to World War I, we already had a crockery shop. My mother ran it well during the war, while my father was on the battlefield. She bought a load of vessels and she only had to pay the advance, she even paid the tip because one couldn't find merchandise at that time. And then we said that I would take care of it - I was a little child, about four years old. My father was on the battlefield for four years, in World War I, he was on the Russian battlefield in Siberia. He deserted from there and suddenly he was at home. We lived in the same house, but in a bigger apartment because we had grown up. I was happy, as my father took me here and there, to markets and all. My father looked after the shop when he came home, and then the family grew financially, and we became quite well off, too. My parents were tired people because they ran a shop; they went to work at 7am and worked until the evening, 6pm. Later, in 1927-28, my father opened an enameling factory in order that his daughters should have dowries. At that time there was deflation as well, the crisis of overproduction, and my father wasn't a cartel member. And then the enameling factory ruined my father because the cartel ruined him. They had a contract with a big company; it was called Hutter and Stran, where they made the enamel in stoves. And they cancelled the order and there was no work, but the day and night workers had to be paid regardless. At that time the factory had been running for about six years, but it went broke. It cost us the crockery shop. It cost us our house. They auctioned off everything we had.

I was born in 1910. My Jewish name is Leben. And I know my wife's Jewish name as well; she was called Pesl. My elder sister was born in 1908. She was called Anna. Her Jewish name was Miriam. She died in 1939. Her heart took her from us. My other sister, Marta, was born in 1909, but I don't know her Jewish name. My sister Tace was the youngest; she was born in 1912. Manci was her Hungarian name, and Tace was her Jewish name. After Anna's death three of us were left. I inherited something from my mother as well as my sister. My mother was very ill, with heart problems.

There was no Jewish elementary school in Ujpest at that time. My wife attended the Jewish school already; her father was a teacher there. I finished four years of middle school, then I went to commercial school. I finished three years, but didn't want to work in a bank. Then I went to help my father anyway, and I became an ironmonger. Well, I was a boy and wanted to do what my father did. I became an apprentice ironmonger, and I had to carry 100-kilo bundles. I could carry them, but I told myself I wouldn't do it. Then I just simply didn't go to work any more. They said that I had to learn something, 'Don't be a merchant, please, learn some sort of technical trade'. And then it was announced here in Ujpest at the Nasszer brothers, that they wanted apprentices. They had a watchmaker's shop, a house of their own. I learned the watch-making trade there. I spent five years there. Sometimes they gave me jobs like taking out jewels, and once I took out to consignment a pearl necklace such that one could have bought a house with it. They trusted me!

I have worked since I was ten years old. I had no time to go and play on the plot. I came home from school, studied for a while, and then if I had any free time, I went to the shop. There were the three girls; they went to the swimming pool, while I was in the shop. I had to keep things in order. I bought dishes by the thousands, and sold things in the shop. When I was ten years old I was already selling jars. The cucumber and paprika wasn't pickled as it is nowadays, but they bought the jar and pickled them themselves. We sold them [the jars]. They weren't brought into the shop because there were too many, and I slept outside in a lean-to with my sister. When I was already fourteen years old we had been buying dishes by the thousands. I used to go shopping by myself. They put me into the shop as soon as they could because my mother was sickly, and when she was ill I had to stand in for her. My sisters had their circle of friends, and I didn't really like to bother with girls, I would rather work; I got so used to work. I loved working so much.

I never went anywhere for the summer holidays as a child. I was 18 years old when I saw Lake Balaton for the first time. There were cheap trains to Siofok; that was when I first saw Balaton. My sisters used to go to Puho; they spent their summer holidays at relatives.

My father always said that when he was young they worked very hard and had fun for a few coins. We had fun, too. Later, when we didn't have the shop anymore, we went to have a good time on the banks of the Danube, I would drink a glass of beer and dance. We went to Margaret Island, and danced there as well.

Before the war there was cultural life for the youth in Ujpest, they gathered every Tuesday. There was a cultural center that was full every Tuesday. The oldest of us must have been about 25. There were only young people. There was culture there, Hungarian, Hebrew... They sang and recited poetry. There was no food. It happened, back when the Jewish school still existed, that we popped in there to get a slice of bread and butter. This was before the war in 1936, 1937, and 1938. There was always good company. They went in for sports there. In the old times [before WWII], for example, the cultural center used to have a choral union, a Jewish choral union. They won prizes too. They used to sing Hungarian songs as well.

We observed every Jewish holiday very strictly, the fasting, too. My father went to the synagogue in the morning and didn't come out until the evening. There used to be a synagogue in Bocskai Street - it was ruined during the war - and we used to go and pray there. And I also went to the Orthodox synagogue. I don't know how to pray very well, but my friends, the Lichtensteins, were Orthodox too, they lived here in the neighboring house. I was always ahead with the prayers; I can still follow the cantor.

My father prayed wonderfully, I wish I knew a tenth of it. We had such a seder that it's hard to describe. My father lit the chanukkiyah. We had a huge one, which we put in the window. At that time we used to live a proper Jewish life. I used to light it for a while as well, but now I don't do so anymore. We celebrated Purim as well. As for the sukkah, we didn't have one; the Neologs usually didn't observe Sukkot. There was an Orthodox Jew in our house, he had a sukkah, but he never invited us. Still the Orthodox kept their distance. They went to the synagogue in Virag Street, which had a mikvah as well; and there was an Orthodox house in Virag Street just for them. They had payes.

Every Friday evening at home we lit the the candle very rigorously. We used to go to synagogue every Sabbath. It was obligatory at school. My parents' shop was open until 7pm on Saturdays. And they had to stay open all the time everywhere. But if there was a holiday and a Jew didn't close he was denigrated. Shops were scarcely open on Jewish holidays. Moreover, 75% of the shops were closed in Ujpest; there were so many Jewish shops. They did everything properly for the holidays; my father said a blessing over each child on Yom Kippur. We took the rules very seriously at that time. Once we went to a football match during Pesach. And I was thirsty and drank a glass of water. I felt such remorse after that because on Pesach you can't just drink something somewhere, everything has its rules.

One couldn't sit down in the synagogue on Friday evening; it was full. During holidays they rented shops in order to pray there. They got a Torah. The grocers had a house, and they prayed there as well. In Klauzal Street, where there's a grocery now, we used to pray there in the shop, too, because there was room there. We couldn't get into the big synagogues. This was before the war. My father used to go to Bocskai Street. That synagogue was old. It had a balcony, and there were tiny windows so one couldn't see the women from below. Men and women weren't together. Everyone from my family went to the synagogue.

The wealthy Jews used to go to the big synagogue; we were the middle-class. Many Jewish tycoons got into the big synagogue. But later my father got in there too. My uncle made seats for the synagogue and got a seat un return on the side, near the Torah; that's where he used to sit, and the seat is still there today.

As a child my head was always covered, I wore a cap all the time. We wore the cap at home, but later in school we didn't any more. My father for example, wouldn't eat without a cap. It happened that they went to one of his brother's and they offered him meat fried in breadcrumbs, but he didn't know it was rabbit, which isn't kosher. He put on his cap and we all ate wearing our caps. We prayed before and after eating and then it turned out that what we had eaten wasn't kosher.

When I had my bar mitzvah, a tight family circle of 75 people gathered. It was a dinner of fish dishes; the business went so well that my parents couldn't get away from the shop. It was at the house of my auntie, my mother's elder sister, because she had a big room, they were furniture- dealers, and there were tables in a circle and they sat around them. And there was singing, the 'Szol a kakas mar', the cantor couldn't leave that one out. [Szol a kakas mar is a Hungarian folk song, which was adopted by the Hasidic rebbe of Nagykallo, Hungary.] They shnorred money [collected donations] for various people. I got lots of presents. Books, jewelry, rings and watches. A wristwatch was quite a thing at that time. And then I got a lot of rings, none of which I wore, but the girls did. The whole community was there: the shochet, the cantor, his assistant, the main cantor and the rabbi. This was in 1923.

We ran a kosher household. We used to have a servant. The kashrut was something she was charged with very seriously. There was a sink for utensils used for milk products and a separate one for utensils used for meat. She couldn't ever get them mixed up. And there was also a separate cupboard for utensils for milk products and for meat. It would never occur to us to mix the milk products and meat. We kept the Pesach utensils separately, and every year they were made kosher and after that we couldn't eat bread in the house any more. They took the utensils out and put them away. I even remember that at the first dinner after Pesach there was bread with Liptauer [spiced ewe cheese mixed with butter]. There used to be a kosher slaughterhouse, there was 'Orthodox kosher', 'Neolog kosher', and there was a shochet. We went to the Neolog one because we were Neolog. Keeping the kashrut lasted until I stepped out into life.

Before the war I worked at Egyesult Izzo and then I was drafted into the army. [Egyesult Izzo was a world-famous Hungarian light bulbs factory.] I was in the army in 1936, 1938, 1939, in 1940 I was in forced labor service, in 1941 I was at home, and in 1942 I was in, the whole year.

When I was demobilized - after the end of the usual service, they held me back. They wanted to promote me but I wouldn't accept it, I wanted to come home. I became unemployed. I had a very good friend, whose uncle was the manager of the dispatch department at the Egyesult Izzo, he was also Jewish. He took me into Egyesult Izzo, and I was there until the end. I had a very good salary. I did everything, from 7am until 10pm. Manual work, administration in the evening, I did everything. I lived at my parents' house. At that time they yielded from their severity. We didn't eat pork, we didn't mix milk products with meat, but it was no longer as it had been in my childhood; for example it was no problem if I didn't go to the synagogue on Friday evening. Despite this, I rarely missed it.

I went to Egyesult Izzo and took home a heap of watches to repair. And that was my pocket money. I gave my salary to my parents because they needed it. And when I went out with my wife she didn't let me pay for her. Then we got engaged, and from that time on I paid for everything for her, from my evening watch repairing.

Then I had to join the army in 1932-33. We went to Balassagyarmat for training. From there we went to Oroszi. And when the holidays came, we were in Balassagyarmat, and then the Jews of Balassagyarmat sent us lots of food: meat, milk loaf, and challah. Moreover, it was just then that we got off duty.. At that time there was no Jewish platoon. When we joined up it was a very kind company, including both the company commander and the training officer. The training officer called out the Jews, 'Look, boys, I called you because if you do this much it will mean that much, so keep that in mind.' We could understand that. It meant that if we made any little mistakes he would make big trouble for them, so we had to keep it in mind. Later they posted me away. I went to the Castle District. The fall holidays found me there, and going off duty, we went to the synagogue; as we came down from the Castle - I had never worn foot-cloth on my feet before - and so my feet swelled up because of it. I became lame, and then I ended up at the battalion command. I had a good life there. I was a switchboard operator and courier. I went to the governorship. I had one case; they called me saying that the Ministry of Defense was looking for me. God almighty, they're looking for Laszlo Spiegler. I could tap every phone call. It turned out that I had to go somewhere in Zuglo to repair watches. The ADC ensign, the Battalion's second-in-command, told me, 'Listen, be very careful because this watch is the promotion officer's, so do a good job!' I did a good job and they were very satisfied with me. I worked and repaired watches as well. And I helped at the office, too, I went to the governorship if I had to, and to the Ministry of Defense, moreover I was on sentry duty. They liked me very much at the battalion as well. And I got good food there, though it wasn't kosher.

In 1936 I was at a large army exercise. Then I got a boot that was patched from the inside, and the foot-cloth blistered my feet in such a way that the flesh was exposed. I couldn't walk, so I presented myself to the chief medical officer, 'I respectfully report that I can't walk, my leg aches.' He examined it. 'What's your name?' he asked, and I told him. 'You are a Jew.' 'Yes, sir,' I replied. 'Then you can bear that,' he said. I didn't deny it, even in that situation. I still don't remember how my leg got better.

Then I had hardly gotten home in 1938, when they called me back to the Felvidek. There I was part of the first Jewish platoon in the country. Neither the rank nor anything mattered, only that we were Jews. At that time there used to be uniforms, and there were dumdum bullets as well because we had to guard the wagons. We were in the first line. This means that their own people were in the rear and the Czechs were in the front. And they said, 'Well, we are going to send somebody for reconnaissance from the Jewish company; who wants to go?' We went. And we did a good job. Then there was another event. The Jewish platoon was already in existence, and there were bunkers between the Czech and the Hungarian border. They were underground bunkers, impossible to blow up. And we had to attack them, 'Who volunteers to do it?' The whole platoon stepped forward. But there were also Jews who were bad. They sent one to arrange accommodation, and he went to buy leather instead. He was bound hand and foot. Another one was punished because when he was on sentry duty and wasn't relieved, he fired into the air. We had a sadistic battalion commander, it was terrible. We, Jews, couldn't get parcels, couldn't go on furlough.

Then I came home again for a short time, until I was called in again. I joined up in Szentendre; from there we went to a camp at Esztergom, we constructed a shooting-range for tanks. Then they brought us to the Ministry of Defense in Budapest, and we did unskilled work at a construction site. I did everything, but I didn't know how to put up a wall. We didn't have a bad time of it, especially me, because I worked hard.

When I was demobilized in 1938, I learned to dance and we used to go dancing. At that time there was a café right here at the corner, it was called Pannonia café, and there I met my wife. She was called Erzsebet Reich. She had three siblings. This house where I live at the moment belonged to my wife's family; her grandmother lived here. She was born in this room - there were no maternity houses in those times. Her aunt lived downstairs, and there were two tenants and a caretaker. And her grandmother had a glass and porcelain wholesale store as well. She sold it off, and my mother bought it. But at that time they didn't know we would be relatives. They were very religious; they observed everything.

Then I started to go dancing with her, and after a while I told her that I was going to betroth her as my fiancé. I pulled the ring off my finger and put it on hers. This was in 1939. After that we went out for five years, when finally my wife said, 'Well, we've been going out for five years, so I want to marry you properly.' My poor father-in-law was sitting out here, there was a big vestibule, and a worktable. He sat there, and I asked for his daughter's hand in marriage. Thereupon they went to my parents and asked them for my hand. This was in 1942. And immediately after our engagement they called me up again. It was only for two months. Then they demobilized me, and then called me up again. I was released from service again, and then they called me up in July 1942, and I was there until the end of the war. The wedding was held because they said in March 1944 that they would take away the girls but not the women. Then I came home - I was in forced labor service at Kassa - and we got married. It was a civil marriage. And when we came home we had our religious marriage in the synagogue of Ujpest. I had lived in Istvan Square before the war - I joined up from there -with my wife. But she was deported in May. Her brother was deported, too.

When we were in forced labor service we were in Keleti Karoly Street [in Budapest] and everybody was buzzing that they would convert to Catholicism because then they wouldn't be deported. It never occurred to me. It was then that they started to learn Catholic religion and cross themselves. It made me feel sick. 196 people out of 200 presented themselves, and all of them died. What I got was that I survived, and my wife, too, but my family was taken away. No one was left, they killed everybody.

I don't even remember when the Germans came in. I was in Buda, and the lorries were going up [to the Castle District], full of German soldiers. And then the sirens started to howl. The Germans were bombing. I didn't have anywhere to go. And this is when the deportations started. [Editor's note: Laszlo means the entry of the Germany army to Hungary in March 1944 after which the ghettoization and deportation of Hungarian Jews was launched.] They deported me to Mauthausen; I found out there what Auschwitz was, from the people who came from Auschwitz, because we were gathered in Mauthausen, and they sent us to Gunskirchen from there. I was liberated in Gunskirchen.

In Gunskirchen there was no drinking water, there was no water for washing, and we were sentenced to death. Peopled starved to death there. There was no crematory. There was nothing else but wood. Our guards were very evil. What the SS soldiers did with children was that they threw the bread down, sat in a circle, and the children snatched it from the ground. That place was for gathering us in order to be executed. We were to starve to death, and those who didn't would be burnt along with the entire forest. It was a Friday when we were liberated. Friday evening I didn't go anywhere, but on Saturday I started off towards Wels. An American woman came; she had been imprisoned as well, and she took us in to some house. My first wish was for paprika potatoes. A Black American man gave me a parcel. He said they were in the same situation as us [that is, the black people in America]. He said they weren't allowed to walk on the sidewalks either.

So then they gathered the Jews, because we were full of lice. I didn't have the strength to get in the car, we were so weak. Nothing but skin and bone, we had neither butts nor thighs. And they took us to Horsching; it was an airport. I got typhoid fever. I was in hospital because of that, for a month. I saw how they carried away the dead; they had a wooden ticket on their big toe, and there was wrapping paper around their body. They just took them away in lorries, all piled up topsy-turvy. The food was very poor. While in hospital, I ran away and begged for food. I didn't accept money. After the typhoid fever I ate 10-12 lunches. When I got out of hospital I thought, 'Well, now I should get home somehow.'

My friend had a bottle of oil, with which we would cook if we found something on our way. We left and the Americans took us as far as Wiener Neustadt, where they passed us to the Russians. We had cigarettes and they told us that a train was leaving at midnight for Hungary, for Sopron. And on the way we always had to give something to the Russians in order to drive the train further. We arrived in Sopron. I went to the Red Cross and they gave me some financial support. I went to the town hall; they gave me some financial support, too. In Sopron the train became full in a flash. How could I get to Budapest? On the top of the train; that's how I came home in 1945. We arrived at Kelenfold. I didn't have the patience to wait at Kelenfold, I walked across the Manci Bridge - this was its name, it was a pontoon bridge - I entered Nyugati station and slept there until morning. In the morning three women came. One told me, 'Your wife is at home.' I found out then. She had come home a month earlier. It was absolute bliss for me. But we had suffered very much. We didn't have children because we didn't want to. My wife said, 'Daddy, haven't we suffered enough? Should our child suffer as well?' She was in Worlitz. She got there from Auschwitz; she got into the workers group and escaped the gas chambers. The poor soul had been beaten so many times, she couldn't stand the factory, and they made her work at night; they made shell cases, and she fell asleep and they struck her down.

My elder cousin was a doctor and left for America in 1939. He survived. And he didn't want to let anybody know he was Jewish. He had a daughter and a son. His son started putting Jews down at university. Thereupon a boy who knew him said, 'But you are a Jew, too!' Thereupon he went home to his father, asking, 'Is this true, dad?' The answer was, 'It is, son." And then he told him what had happened to his parents. My cousin's last wish was to be buried in Jerusalem. And he is buried there. He turned back to Jewishness in his death, one cannot deny being Jewish.

They deported my parents, my family, to Auschwitz and killed them there. They killed one of my sisters, Marta, together with her two children; she had a twelve-year old son and a one-year old daughter. Once the Arrow Cross 3 men caught her and she begged them to let her off, because she had two children. They let her off. They let her go home, then they took away all of them from there. Her husband was called Ede Viskovicz. He was a merchant.

When we arrived back home, we saw that we'd been looted, the house didn't have anything, not even a glass. Only the walls remained of the house where my wife had lived with her parents before the terror. When she came back, she couldn't enter her own house. She had to lodge an appeal against it, and then she got back one room. Those who lived upstairs were Arrow Cross people, and they moved downstairs. As soon as they moved downstairs the owner of the neighboring house claimed that it was his furniture. And so we got this apartment completely empty. We had no furniture at all, not a single chair or couch. We didn't have kitchen furniture or anything. Only one trashy ice-box. We found the pictures in the cellar. My wife was lying ill with a fever of 41 degrees [106 degrees Fahrenheit], and we had only one bed and a pillow. She had vitamin deficiency, was full of abscesses and they mistreated her. I put a cold compress on her night and day. I managed to save her. We didn't eat meat when we came back, only around September; her sister brought us chicken. Until then we just ate split peas and paprika potatoes. Then, when I could buy them, I bought a goose and cheap goose-fat. I also bought a sack of flour.

When I came home my wife wore gym shoes and checked clothes from the Lager [concentration camp], and she used them at home. She didn't have anything, not underwear, nothing. Then I started to work. This was quite an episode of my life too, that I came home one day and the next day I went to Egyesult Izzo because I used to work there and they reported my departure when they deported the Jews from Ujpest. When I came back I applied for work. They said they couldn't re-engage me; the factory was closed. They gave me financial aid, but that was it.

My younger sister was the only one in the family who survived except me. She got married after the war; she had a son, Pista. My poor sister was ill. She died about six years ago. Pista got married to a gentile, and he didn't have the brit because my sister was worried about him. My sister was in Auschwitz as well, and in Ravensbruck, and I don't know where else, and she was liberated weighing just 25 kilos. And she gave birth to her child, and it's been a delightful experience since he came to this world. I always loved him very much, I still do; I gave him everything. He has two daughters but they wear the Star of David. The elder converted to Judaism in the meantime, she was in Israel as well. The younger, Eszter, also considers herself a Jew. She attends university in Italy. Pista also has the heart of a Jew. When they built an organ in the synagogue here many years ago, he donated 200,000 forints.

When I came back, at first one could only buy things and peddle them. Well, I did everything to get ourselves together. I was a very busy man, because a watchmaker was always needed. I had a shop of my own here in Kemeny Street for four and a half years. Then they [the authorities] started to pick at me in 1952. If somebody entered the shop, they asked me what they sold, what they bought. There was a revenue officer and I asked him what it was all for. He said I had to join the co-operative; they hassled me about it. Then I joined the co-operative in July 1952. I left the shop. I had bought it for 300 grams of gold and I had to leave it. There was no one to buy it. And then I worked in the co-operative. My wife learned to be a typist and shorthand secretary. She worked at a company. But I told her, 'Mum, don't go to work, I earn our living, and you don't have to.' But she wanted to go anyway. I retired in 1971. Since then I help with the correspondence and everything at my old workplace.

When I worked at the co-operative I went to the synagogue during holidays. The personnel director and the party secretary came because of a worker. I came out of the synagogue and asked, 'Are you looking for me?' 'No', they said, 'but we were.' They asked me where I had been. 'In the synagogue,' I replied. This was around 1953. I didn't deny it. And I wasn't a party member either. I hated the whole thing.

I starved a lot, and I said then that I wouldn't starve anymore; I would eat what I could. My kosher regime was interrupted before I was deported, as I said, I was a soldier then; they took me to the camp, and of course they didn't give me kosher food there. And there was no question of eating with a cap on my head. I almost went crazy when I was told to parade in front of the cross. I never liked that. I never denied my religion.

Before the war I didn't have a single Christian friend. That's just the way I wanted it. I had a Christian friend who had a Jewish wife, but this was after the war.

Both my wife and I paid taxes to the Jewish community. I go to the synagogue every week, I only miss it when I'm sick. I feel very much Jewish. If I could pray according to my feelings it would be nice. I like Jewish holidays. I like going to the synagogue; I'm always there. And I like our rabbi, too. I go to Obuda, to the Jewish cemetery, to visit my wife every week.

My wife was excellent at making Jewish dishes. She cooked very well; I had such a good wife! She was clean and thorough. I have been going to the Jewish old age home since my wife died. Before that, for three months, I used to eat at my cousin's house and at my sister's for one month. But she couldn't cook for me that way, and I only eat Jewish food. I still don't eat pork, though I'm not so kosher anymore. If I go to a restaurant, I eat turkey, which isn't kosher, but I still don't eat pork.

We've never been abroad because we didn't know any languages. And my wife was scared of traveling; after all she went through, it doesn't surprise me. We never went to Germany either. She was scared. Very scared indeed. I was in Israel on a package tour in 1988. Not with Jews, but they loved me. They knew I was a Jew. I went there because I'm a Jew. I wanted to see everything. I didn't want to see the birth of Jesus but what a Jew is like there. I was very, very happy to be there. I felt that it was my home. I felt very good in Jerusalem. I didn't go to the wall because I would have had to walk for three hours, and I'm a cardiac patient. It hurts that I couldn't go there. During the wars in Israel [the Six-Day-War 4 and the Yom Kippur War 5] we followed the news and were very proud of the Jews, and that we are Jews. And I'm still very proud.

Glossary

Naum Balan
Odessa
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ludmila Grinshpoon
Date of interview: May 2003

Naum Balan is a tall gray-haired man with a sincere and friendly face. He and his wife Lidia Lieberman live in a two-bedroom apartment. In the living room the furniture is of 1970s style. There are a few landscape paintings on the walls painted by Naum's brother Michael, an artist, and his daughter. Naum is very proud of his brother. Naum had a file of his family that he had made himself displayed on a big table. He has a beautiful sheet with his family tree with over one hundred names in it. Naum became interested in the history of his family in the 1980s. He corresponded with his elderly relatives to get more details, but he didn't get answers to all his questions since many details were gone along with the ones that knew them.

Family background
Growing up
During the war
Post-war
Glossary

Family background

My paternal ancestors came from Mostovoye, Ananiev district, Kherson province. [Editor's note: at the end of the 19th century it was called Liakhovo, Privolnoye.] There were 1,607 residents in Mostovoye and 862 of them were Jews. There was a synagogue, an elementary school, a district hospital and a steam mill in the town. There were a few markets where Jews had their shops. My great-grandfather Naftul Balan was born in 1844. He lived in Mostovoye all his life. He was a cattle dealer. Around 1864 Naftul married Sosia, a Jewish girl, born in 1845. Nobody remembers Sosia's maiden name. My great-grandfather Naftul perished during the Civil War 1, in 1919 when a gang 2 attacked Mostovoye. Bandits broke into the house and one of them cut off my great-grandfather's head when he was praying. My great-grandmother Sosia died in 1924. They had five children: three daughters - Chona, Shyfra and Esther - and two sons - Mosha and Michael. All of them were born in Mostovoye.

My grandfather Michael Balan was born in 1865. He was the first child in the family. He spent his youth in Mostovoye. Michael began to help his father when he was very young. In the late 1880s he married Reiza Bashuk, a Jewish girl from his village. My grandfather was a very business-oriented man. He often went on business to Odessa where he had acquaintances. In the late 1920s my grandfather sold his house in Mostovoye and moved to Beryozovka with my grandmother. They lived with their daughter Lisa. Grandfather often visited my parents in Odessa and Tiraspol. I remember his visits to Tiraspol. He wore traditional dark clothes, a long jacket and boots. He had streaks of gray hair, a beard and a moustache. He always wore a cap with a hard peak. My grandfather was religious. My father said he studied in cheder. I think he had food made specifically for him in our house since we kept a cow and pigs and he wouldn't have eaten pork. I don't remember whether my grandfather went to the synagogue in Tiraspol, but he always prayed at home. I liked to watch my grandfather preparing for praying covering his head with tallit and putting on a small box [the tefillin, on his forehead and hand]. Grandfather Michael died in 1939. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Beryozovka. I don't know whether he had a traditional funeral.

My grandmother Reiza's father, Solomon Bashuk, was born in Mostovoye in the 1840s and died in this town in 1902. That's all I know about him. His wife, my great-grandmother Etl, lived a long life. After her husband died she lived in the family of her daughter Golda Gorokhovskaya in Odessa. She died in 1941. Besides Golda, Reiza had two other sisters: Charna and Eidia.

My grandmother Reiza was born in 1863. She was of average height and was neither slim nor fat. I remember her wearing a kerchief, long skirts and long-sleeved blouses. I believe my grandmother was religious and observed all Jewish traditions, but I never took any interest in it and don't know any details. My grandparents spoke Yiddish. Grandmother Reiza died in Beryozovka on 3rd February 1937. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery. Michael and Reiza Balan had eight children: four boys and four girls. All of them were born in Mostovoye. They studied in a Russian school. My father's brother Abram died in infancy in 1902 and another brother Semyon died at the age of 14 in 1914. Betia, one of my father's sisters, lived in Kaluga where she died in 1978. That's all I know about her.

My father's brother Minia was born in 1897. He lived with his family in Beryozovka before the Great Patriotic War 3. His wife's name was Sonia. They had three children. I don't remember their names. Minia worked in a kolkhoz 4. I don't know what he did. I only remember that he always brought watermelons when he visited us. In July 1941 when the Great Patriotic War began and our family was ready to evacuate from Tiraspol, my father went to Beryzovka to take his brother Minia's family with us. His mother-in-law said, 'Why do we have to leave our home - did we do the Germans any harm? We don't have to leave'. They stayed.

When the Germans came my uncle's family was taken to the camp in Domanevka 5. He saw his wife and children being shot by the Germans. He buried them himself. He would have been shot, too, but Manya, a Jewish medical nurse helped him to escape. They kept wandering in the steppe for a long while and they lived with a Ukrainian family for some time. Uncle Minia knew German and pretended he was a German. When the Germans were retreating somebody reported to them that Minia was a Jew. They arrested and beat him so hard that his leg got fractured. It didn't knit properly and Uncle Minia was lame for the rest of his life. The Germans were in a hurry. This saved his life. After the war Uncle Minia and Manya got married. They lived in Beryozovka. My uncle continued his work in a kolkhoz. They had two sons: Senia and Alik. When their sons grew up they moved to Odessa were they worked as meat cutters at Privoz market. Uncle Minia died in Odessa, where he lived with his older son, in 1962. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery. Both sons and their families moved to Germany in the early 1990s. Senia has already passed away; Alik lives in Berlin.

Lisa, my father's sister, was born in Mostovoye in 1902. She married Moisey Rosenblatt, a local Jew. They had three children: Gedaliye, Emma and Anna. Before the war they lived in Beryozovka. When the Great Patriotic War began Uncle Moisey and Gedaliye went to the army and Aunt Lisa and her daughters were in evacuation with us. After the war they returned to Tiraspol with us. Gedaliye perished and Uncle Moisey returned home after the war. He had many awards. He worked as an accountant after the war. He died in the 1970s. Emma graduated from a pedagogical college. She was very sickly. She has already passed away. Anna, the younger sister, graduated from a technical college and worked at the wine and cognac factory in Kishinev. She doesn't work any more now. She lives in Kishinev with her husband, and their only daughter lives in Canada with her husband. Aunt Lisa died in Tiraspol in 1993.

As for my father's other sisters, Polia and Esther, all I know about them is that Polia was born in 1904, lived in Mostovoye, was married, had children and perished along with her children during an air raid in 1941. Esther was born in 1906 and lived with her husband and children in Odessa. They all perished in 1941.

My father Mark Balan, the oldest of the siblings, was born in 1890. I don't know whether my father was raised religiously, but from what I recall, he observed no Jewish tradition. After finishing a four-year elementary school, at the age of 12 my father began to work to help his father support the family since the situation was hard. They worked for their landlord Engelgardt purchasing cattle for him. Every now and then they got into trouble. Once some bandits attacked them, took away the cattle and locked them in a hut in the woods. They managed to escape from there.

When World War I began in 1914 my father was recruited to the army. He was almost 24 years old. He served in the rear in Simferopol first. He told me that one of his duties was to stand on sentinel stock-still for two hours. If his sergeant major noticed him stir, he started his countdown anew. Later my father went to the front. He was in the army of General Brusilov. [Editor's note: ?. ?. Brusilov (1853-1926): well-known Russian and Soviet commander. During WWI he was the commander of the Southwestern front. In 1916 he was in command of a successful attack of the Russian army known as Brusilov breakthrough. From May-July 1917 he was a Supreme Commander-in- Chief and between 1920-1924 he served in the Red army.] Once his regiment had to lie in hiding under the enemy's fire. My father and his fellow comrade were ordered to fetch some water. On their way back his companion was killed and my father was wounded in the neck. He was sent to a hospital in Kiev. This happened in 1916. After he recovered he returned to Mostovoye. My father never told me what he did for a living there.

My maternal great-grandfather Avrum-Itzhak Korsunski was born into a very poor family in the town of Novoukrainka, Elisavetgrad district, Kherson region, in 1818. My great-grandfather was raised in his aunt's family who also had twelve children of their own. When he turned 20 he decided to leave the family and live on his own. He had to work hard to make his living. When the Crimean War [1853-1856] began he was recruited to the army. His regiment was in Sevastopol. After the war Avrum-Itzhak purchased a small grocery store in Novoukrainka and married Getia, a local Jewish girl. I don't know my great-grandmother's maiden name. My mother didn't know the date of her death either.

My mother often talked about her paternal grandfather Avrum-Itzhak. He was a strong man with big hands and a large nose. My mother used to say, 'Azoy vi a kartoshke' [it looked like a potato in Yiddish]. My great-grandfather Avrum-Itzhak liked drinking and his nose was always of purple color. He lived in Novoukrainka separately from his children. When my mother brought him borsch or other food, when she was a girl, he always heated it on his Primus stove: he liked his borsch or tea very hot. He loved my mother and always had a small gift for her when she came to see him. My great- grandfather was tall and big; he had an upright posture and walked a lot. He rarely took his stick with him. Even in his old age, he had strong teeth and a clear sight. When somebody complained of a toothache, he used to comment that it was hard to imagine that a bone could ache. He read without glasses. He was a self-educated man. He read Russian newspapers and was interested in politics. My great-grandfather died in 1921: he was sitting in an armchair when they found him dead in the morning. He died at the age of 103. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Novoukrainka. My great- grandfather had only one son named Gersh.

My grandfather Gersh Korsunski's date of birth is unknown. Most likely, he was born in Novoukrainka in the early 1860s. He studied in cheder. He helped his father in the grocery store and later went to work at the mill owned by Varshavski, a local Jew. Later my grandfather bought a mill in Novoukrainka. In 1887 he married Leya Lev who came from the town of Bobrinets, Elisavetgrad district, Kherson region. My grandmother's father Tonchen Lev was born in 1822. I guess he was born in Bobrinets, too. He died there in 1912. My grandmother's mother's name was Pesia. I don't know the dates of her birth or death. My grandmother had one brother, Shlomo, and six sisters: Tsetl, Zlata, Mariam, Basheiva, Shyfra and another sister whose name nobody remembers. They were born in Bobrinets. My grandmother was born in 1870.

After they got married my grandparents lived in their own house in Novoukrainka. I don't remember this house. My parents and I went to Novoukrainka, but I was too small to remember any details. My mother told me that my grandparents were very religious. They strictly followed the kashrut and had their poultry slaughtered by a shochet. Their four children were raised religiously. They observed the Jewish traditions and rituals. They spoke Yiddish in the family. They were wealthy. My mother's brother and sisters studied in a grammar school. My mother told me that in 1919, during the Civil War, a gang came to Novoukrainka and broke into their house. Bandits demanded horses from my grandfather. Horses were of great value for villagers and my grandfather refused to give them any. One of the bandits grabbed his sable, but my grandmother began to scream and they didn't do my grandfather any harm. In 1922, after the Civil War, Soviet authorities arrested my grandfather for some reason. Grandfather Gersh never returned home and we don't know how he died. The authorities didn't offer any explanation of what had happened.

After my grandfather was arrested and gone, my grandmother Leya lived in Novoukrainka alone as all her children had left their parents' home by then. In 1934 the older children, Godia and Sonia, convinced her to move to Australia where they lived. She lived in her son Godia's house. In 1936 my grandmother died accidentally: she drowned in the bathroom. She probably felt ill, but there was nobody around and she drowned. This happened when she was visiting her daughter Sonia. Grandmother Leya was buried in Perth, Australia. For many years Uncle Godia couldn't forgive his sister Sonia that their mother died in her house. They made it up only two years before Sonia died.

Godia, the oldest in the family, was born in 1888. In 1908 he moved to Nikolaev from Novoukrainka and became a shop assistant. My uncle was a caring son and brother; he often wrote letters and sent gifts to his family. The owner of the store valued him highly and put all his trust in him. The owner offered him his support if he wanted to open a store of his own, but my uncle decided to move to Australia in 1913. He had a hard life in Australia: he was a laborer and worked in stores, but gradually he came to standing firmly on the ground. He owned a hotel and purchased a shell- rock mine. He married a Jewish girl, but she died when she was young. They didn't have any children.

Uncle Godia often traveled to Israel for charity purposes: he built a school and supported children's institutions. He wanted to visit us, but my father was summoned to the KGB 6 office where they told him to write his brother that he couldn't receive him on any plausible excuse: refurbishment in the apartment or something like that. My mother missed her brother a lot. She said she would recognize him among a thousand people. Finally, Uncle Godia arrived in Odessa in 1963. He stayed in Londonski hotel on Primorski Boulevard. My parents and I went to see him in Odessa since he wasn't allowed to travel to Tiraspol where we lived. Uncle Godia wanted our family to move to Australia, but my father didn't agree to this. After my father died Uncle Godia invited my mother to visit him in Australia, but she didn't dare to travel that far. Uncle Godia died in Perth in 1971. His nephews in Australia inherited his money. My cousin Rachel contributed some money to charity in Israel in the memory of my uncle.

Rachel's mother was my mother's older sister Sonia, born in 1897. As a child Sonia was smart and had an inquiring mind. She studied well, but was a naughty girl. My mother told me a story: during the Civil War some bandits were staying in my grandfather's home. There was a redhead among them who had a remarkable appetite. When their senior ordered Grandmother Leya to make vareniki [dumplings with filling] Sonia made a big varenik filling it with wheat wastes and put it on top of others on a dish hoping that the redhead would grab it. He did and got very angry when he found out that there was something wrong with the filling. Grandmother Leya was horrified, but Sonia just burst into laughter. All of a sudden other bandits began laughing, too, and the redhead laughed with them.

Sonia got married in the early 1920s. I think her husband's surname was Katel. Sonia's son Abram was born in 1923, and in 1924 Sonia moved to her older brother Godia in Australia. I don't know what happened to her first husband.

In Australia Sonia married Yakov Roshanski, a Jewish man who came from Bessarabia 7. They had two sons: Harry and Tony, and two daughters: Rachel and Liya. Liya was named after her grandmother. I saw my aunt Sonia in 1976 for the first time when she came to Kishinev on a visit with her husband. Sonia was a slim woman who looked young for her age. She died in Perth in 1989. Her son Abram visited the USSR in 1990. He wanted to find his father. We met and spoke Yiddish. I correspond with Liya. I don't know whether my relatives in Australia observe Jewish traditions, but Liya always sends me greetings on all Jewish holidays.

My mother had another sister, Rosa, born in 1895. She told me that Rosa attended a Marxist club. She died of twisted bowels in Nikolaev in 1914. Grandmother Leya also adopted a boy that had problems in his own family. His name was Veniamin. He took my grandfather's last name. He went to the front during World War I and never came back to my grandmother's home. Somebody saw him in Odessa after the war. In the 1960s our relatives mentioned to us that there was a Veniamin Korsunski who lived in Leningrad. I visited him when I went to Leningrad on business. They received me well, but that man told me that he wasn't the one I was looking for. My mother believed that he didn't want to acknowledge that he was a Jew since he hadn't told his wife that he was one. He was Russian, he said. I didn't find him looking like a Jew, anyway.

My mother Fira Korsunskaya was born in Novoukrainka in 1902. My mother enjoyed recalling her childhood. She was a healthy and cheerful girl. She was the favorite in her family and of their neighbors. She was her older brother's pet; Godia always gave her gifts. My mother told me that she always fought with street boys who teased her calling her names. They called her: 'zhydovochka - a Jewish girl [abusive] - Rukhlia died on a stove bench and other zhydy [kikes] came to her funeral...' I don't remember the rest of it. Those boys always threw stones into a bucket of water when she was carrying one. She ran after them to beat the obnoxious boys. She could always stand for herself. Her sense of humor never failed her and she was always cheerful.

My mother finished seven years of grammar school in Voznesensk. She studied well in grammar school, had an inquiring mind and was hardworking. My mother was fond of literature: she remembered poems that she learned in grammar school and often recited them to us. We liked listening to her. My mother was good at mathematics. When my brother Michael had problems doing his homework my mother helped him. She knew the Bible well and told us stories from the Bible. She wanted to become a doctor when she was a child. To enter a medical college women had to finish a school for medical nurses. My mother entered a school for medical nurses in Voznesensk in 1916. After finishing this school in 1918 she was sent to work in a hospital in Mostovoye where she met my father. My mother told me that my father made up any excuse to come to see her in the hospital: his leg hurt or he bruised his finger or something the like.

Growing up

My parents got married in Mostovoye in 1919. I don't know what kind of wedding they had, but knowing my grandfather Michael's religiosity, I would think they had a traditional Jewish wedding. After the wedding the newly- weds spent some time with my mother's parents in Novoukrainka. Grandmother Leya made my mother a very valuable wedding gift: a feather mattress that my mother kept until she died. After a few months, in 1920, the newly-weds moved to Odessa. At first they lived on Chicherin Street in the center of the town, but it turned out to be very cold and they moved to another apartment in Nezhynskaya Street in the same part of the town. My mother told me that my father and another Jewish man named Reznik kept a few cows in the stables in a beautiful building in the backyard of Gaevski pharmacy in Odessa. There was no pasture since the stables were in the center of the town, but it was a profitable business. They supplied fresh milk to residents of the town. In the late 1920s they closed this business. Perhaps, it was due to the end of the NEP 8.

Their son Adam was born in Odessa in 1920. He only lived a few months. The next was my brother Nathan, born in 1922. He was named after our great- grandfather Naftul. My brother Abram was born in 1925 and I followed in 1928. I looked like a girl so much that my mother called me 'meydele' [little girl in Yiddish]. In 1929 my parents moved to Tiraspol where life was not so expensive. My brother Aron was born there in 1930. He died of scarlet fever when he was one and a half years old. The doctors couldn't determine the right diagnosis.

In Tiraspol our parents rented a wing of a house at first. Their landlord's name was Bogaty [rich in Russian]. It was a small house with a kitchen and two small rooms - 50 square meters altogether. The living room was a little dark. There was a long old table covered with a tablecloth - my mother liked tablecloths - and five chairs. There were two wardrobes and a couch that served as a bed for Nathan and me. There was another bed for Abram. The other room was our parents' bedroom. There were two beds and a sideboard between them in the room. The rooms were heated with a stove. There was a table and a stove in the kitchen. My paternal grandfather Michael liked to pray in the kitchen - nobody knows why - when he and Grandmother Reiza were visiting us. We were the only Jewish family of many families living in the neighboring house, but we got along well with all other tenants and never had any problems.

There was a long basement that once connected a house and the shop of the landlord of the house. We, the boys used to go to this basement. There was old furniture, children's prams and other junk there. I found an old gun that was dropped there during the Civil War. My mother was a monitor of the yard. We had skittles, chess, checkers and other games in a sideboard in the hallway and all children in the yard could take them to play, but then they had to return the games where they belonged.

Around 1935, when they sold the house in Novoukrainka that my mother had inherited from Grandmother Leya, my parents managed to buy a house in Tiraspol. My mother always dreamed of a house of her own. There were three rooms, a hallway and a kitchen in the house. There was a small orchard in the backyard: there were apple trees, a cherry tree, an apricot and a plum tree that is still there. Branches of our neighbor's walnut tree hanged over the fence into our garden. I was responsible for our kitchen garden. I grew radish, onions and other vegetables on a small plot between the house and the fence. I designed and made a system of irrigation and planted bushes and flowers. There was a shed and a deep cellar in the yard. During the war we found shelter in this cellar. We kept a cow and two pigs in the shed. Although my grandfather Michael was very religious I don't remember him mentioning anything about pigs to my parents. There was also a chicken- coop in the yard where we kept chickens and ducks. We also stored wood and coal in the shed. There was a small pergola in the yard.

My father was a worker at the wood cutting factory in Tiraspol, and later he worked as a meat cutter at a market. My mother worked as a nurse in the town hospital for a short while, but then quit since she had a lot of work to do about the house and with the livestock. My mother put all her time and effort into the house and the children and my father worked to provide for the family. We spoke Yiddish in the family. My father wasn't religious. I don't remember him ever going to the synagogue while my mother always knew when there was a holiday. She told us the history of each holiday and cooked special food. I regret that I didn't listen to her as I should have and took little interest in all this. But I remember that we always had matzah for Pesach. My mother cooked fish, chicken broth and other delicacies. Before Pesach she took chickens to the shochet to have them slaughtered.

My older brother Nathan was good at drawing and liked photography. He attended a club of photographers at the town's Palace of Pioneers. I sometimes joined him to go there. Nathan and I had much in common and were very much alike. We were both dark-haired and dark-eyed while our middle brother Abram had red hair. He didn't have any hobbies, but he studied well. When I grew older I began to attend a drawing club in the Palace of Pioneers where I learned to play the mandolin and balalaika. I also attended an aviation-modeling club. Nathan went to a Jewish elementary school, but he didn't like it there and left it for a Russian school, which was the best school in town. Nathan studied well and was a Komsomol 9 activist.

In 1935 I went to the elementary school located not far from where we lived. It was a one-storied cobble-stone building. My first teacher, Sophia Yakovlevna, was a Jew. I studied well, but due to my misconduct Sophia Yakovlevna sometimes told me to leave the classroom. Once I made her so angry that she grabbed me by my collar and pulled me to the door along with my desk. My bag fell on the floor and my apple and slice of bread with butter and jam, which my mother had given me, rolled onto the floor. Sophia Yakovlevna kept pulling me telling me to send my mother to school. My mother had to go to school to talk with the teacher. However, I finished elementary school and always kept good relationships with Sophia Yakovlevna. I was very happy that she survived the occupation during the war. She failed to evacuate and stayed in Tiraspol.

When I went to secondary school I became a pioneer. I had all excellent marks at school. After finishing the 5th grade my schoolmates and I went on tour to Odessa. We walked in the town and went to museums. I also remember spending vacations in a pioneer camp at the seashore.

Tiraspol was a small town. There was a musical and drama theater in the town. My mother liked going to the theater. She often took me there. She liked Natalka-Poltavka [an opera by a famous Ukrainian composer Nikolai Lysenko] 10 and Zaporozhets za Dunaem [Dnieper Cossack Beyond the Danube - an opera by famous Ukrainian 19th century composer Semyon Gulak- Artemovski]. My parents often visited their relatives in Kirovograd, Bobrinets and Novoukrainka. I remember a trip to Kirovograd when we went to pay a visit to some of my mother's relatives. We went there by train and attended a birthday party of the son of one of our relative's. I remember that the food was delicious.

When Bessarabia became a part of the USSR in 1939 a special border patrol unit was organized at my brother's Nathan school. Senior pupils were to patrol the bank of the river with frontier men to prevent spies from crossing the border. We, boys, were also on guard. Once we saw a suspicious man, and we asked him to show his documents. He couldn't run away since there were people around. Some pedestrians joined us. This man didn't have any documents and we took him to a militia office. There were many such incidents.

During the war

I remember 22nd June 1941 - the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. My father was an early riser. He was the first to hear explosions: a bridge across the Dnestr River between Tiraspol and Bendery was bombed. My father woke us up and we went to hide in the cellar. The front was nearby and we prepared to go into evacuation. My father obtained documents for our departure and got horses. He went somewhere with Abram at night, probably to an office, to make final arrangements. For us to get packed my mother put a kerosene lamp on the floor. The light came through between the front door and the threshold, and two patrol soldiers saw it from the outside and came into the house. One of them said that my mother was signaling to the Germans and that she should be shot. Another soldier argued in response saying that she didn't do it on purpose. The first soldier wanted to take my mother with them. We were scared. Nathan and I got up and began to scream. My father came home soon and we managed to protect my mother.

We evacuated on horse-drawn carts. We picked up my father's sister Lisa and her children in Beryozovka. The family of my father's brother Minia refused to join us. We stopped in various towns. Once near Nikolaev I was wounded in my leg during an air raid. We reached the village of Nizhne-Chirskaya in Stalingrad region and stayed to spend a winter there. My father worked in the kolkhoz named after Stalin. He was a cattle breeder and we worked in the field. My older brother Nathan was recruited to the army in December 1941. In his letters he wrote about how they marched to Stalingrad - they had to cover a distance of about 100 kilometers - and how they stayed in a school building. Later he wrote from the front. Nathan disappeared in 1943. We don't know where or how it happened. In February 1942 my younger brother Michael was born in Nizhne-Terskaya.

When the Germans began their offensive near Rostov in summer 1942, we - I, my mother, my three brothers, Aunt Lisa and her two daughters - moved on with the kolkhoz cattle. We traveled on horse-drawn carts. Germans often bombed and fired at our group. I saw carts blowing up and people dying. German pilots pursued every person. I don't know how we survived. At the crossing on the Volga - I guess it was called Krasny Yar - there were military men crowding waiting for their turn to cross the river. The Germans bombed this crossing a lot. Soldiers found shelter in shell holes. We also looked for any hiding place we could find. We didn't unharness our horses since we didn't know when we might get a chance to get across the Volga on a pontoon.

My brother Michael was only six months old. My mother and he were hiding under the cart and my mother shielded him with her body to protect him from bullets. At night the Germans fired with tracer bullets that shone in the dark. In the daytime the sky was dark from avalanches of German planes that made a specific howling sound. There was a small church not far from the crossing where a military unit stayed. Many bombshells hit this church killing many military. I watched these bombshells falling down: there was hardly any fear left since we got used to firing. My father helped with fixing the crossing. They made a small landing stage and then the crossing began. Our cart was about to board the pontoon, but something delayed us and another cart boarded before we did. The pontoon moved, but we stayed back. We couldn't move backward since there were other carts jamming. When this pontoon was in the middle of the river it bumped into a mine. It exploded and sank and we stood there looking. We crossed the river on another pontoon. When we got to the opposite side another bombing began. The first cart turned over when trying to get on the bank. It took some time to get the horses onto the bank so that we could move on. We hid in a forest and watched the bombing from there. We saw big splashes of water created by the explosions.

We finally got to Palasovka, a railway station on the border with Kazakhstan, where we got on a freight train. Somebody stole some of our luggage at the station and we had little left. We were given bread on the train and a hot meal at the stops. I remember millet soup, however thin, but hot and tasty. We arrived in Karaganda [2,000 km from Odessa]. There were one and two-storied buildings with stone foundations and wooden structures in the town. There were barracks for workers from other locations near the railway station. There were lots of robberies and murders in Karaganda during the war.

In evacuation, people were supposed to find accommodation by themselves. We stayed in an earth house for two years. There was so much snow in winter that it was rather warm in the earth house. There were frequent snowstorms. Once there was so much snow that my father could hardly manage to get outside to shovel snow. After two years we moved to an apartment in a private house. Another family lived there. We stayed in this apartment until August 1945.

My father went to work at the meat factory. He was the head of a cattle supply department. Our life wasn't too bad. My father brought home some leftovers from the factory. We went to buy bread in Kustanai region where it was less expensive. My mother did the housework and looked after Michael. I went to the 7th grade at school. The school was big and there were wooden floors. There were children of various nationalities. I studied well. I became a Komsomol member in this school. Several times some boys called me 'zhyd' [kike] in the streets, but I fought back. Once, a boy hit me with his skates. This happened during a snowstorm in winter and I was caught unawares. There were two of them that came unexpectedly out of the blizzard saying, 'Ah, zhyd!' Well, there was some fighting, but when injured I had to run home. My mother got so worried when she saw blood dripping from the wound. I told her that I had had a fight. Basically, besides some minor episodes of this childish fighting I wasn't suppressed or persecuted in all those years.

My brother Abram finished secondary school in Karaganda and went to the army in 1943. When he received a subpoena to the military registry office he got an offer to go to work at a military plant where employees were released from service in the army, but Abram said he wanted to beat fascists like his older brother Nathan did. He went to the front. First he was sent to the town of Kushka [Turkmenistan] in the very south of the former USSR. My brother took a six-month training there: they trained horses to transport ordinance at the front. After he finished his training he went to the front. In 1944 my father received a notification that his son perished in Sumskaya region in January, but this happened to be false information. Abram was severely wounded in his face and got to a hospital in Leningrad. He was in the department of facial surgery. He recovered and went back to the front. He perished in the village of Parichi near Svetlogorsk in Gomel region at the end of 1944.

In February 1945 my father was ordered to go to the Ministry of Meat and Dairy Industry in Moscow. He received an assignment to join a military unit in Berlin. This was how he came to Berlin with Soviet troops. He was the supervisor of the cattle supply base of the Berlin meat factory for over a month. In summer 1945 he was released from his assignment due to his health condition. He was 54 years old.

On 9th May 1945 [Victory Day] 11 when we heard an announcement about the victory on the radio all residents of Karaganda rejoiced. There were so many people and enterprises in evacuation. We all dreamed of going back home. We waited until my father came to pick us up in late August. We went to Tiraspol from Karaganda via Moscow. This was my first time in Moscow. In the square in front of Kievskiy railway station [a railway from where trains to Ukraine and Moldova depart] where we were to board a train, I saw a staircase going down, and many people were going downstairs. I wondered where they were going and followed them. It turned out to be the metro. At that moment boarding on our train was announced and my father began looking for me. He was very scared when he didn't see me around, and he gave me quite a 'what the dickens' when I got back. I kept looking at Moscow from the train window. It was very interesting.

Post-war

We came to Tiraspol and found out that three other families lived in our house. During the war Romanian soldiers kept horses in our house. They bit on the barks of our fruit trees in the yard. There was a mess in the house: there were partials installed, plaster damaged and floors scratched. Our neighbors took our belongings. It took us a while to have these families move out; the town council helped us. After the war my father worked at the market. He was a foreman of the meat department. I went to the 10th grade at school. I also continued photography. I took my younger brother Michael to his teacher of music. He learned to play the violin. He was five years old then.

After finishing school in 1946 I entered the Electrotechnical Faculty of Odessa Communications College. I lived in a hostel and received a stipend, but this wasn't enough for a living and my parents supported me. Students also worked as loaders in the harbor to earn some money for a living. 1946- 47 were hard years. We tried to get up late in the morning so that we could have lunch at 12, because we usually didn't have any breakfast. We were given food coupons for a hot lunch at the canteen. After classes we bought a half-liter jar of corn flour at the market to make mamaliga [corn flour pudding] with shmaltz [melted pork fat] in the evening. We lived on the second floor and there were dancing parties on the first floor in the evening. We managed to drop by there to dance a little while mamaliga was being cooked. We didn't care about nationality at that time. There were no conflicts or anti-Semitism whatsoever in the college. I had friends in college and also visited my father's acquaintance and companion Reznik. His daughter Rita introduced me to Lidia Lieberman, a student of medical school, who was to become my wife many years later.

I finished Odessa Communications College in 1951. I studied well and got a [mandatory] job assignment 12 at a design institute in Kiev. But I liked practical work and chose to go to Kustanai in Kazakhstan [2,500 km from Odessa], where I was appointed as chief communications engineer. My parents gave me a pillow, a blanket and a box to store my clothing. I sent my luggage to Kustanai and went to the town via Moscow where I got an invitation to the Ministry of Communications. The deputy minister had a meeting with me. He said that I was to become the director of the communications office in Kustanai since my predecessor had been fired. Later I got to know that he had lost his job for criticizing comments regarding the Soviet regime in a discussion with friends. One of those friends sent a letter with this information to the KGB.

I even received a house when I arrived as my management thought that I was bringing my family with me. It was an old one-storied house where a cleaning woman and her daughter lived. I occupied only one room there and this woman was very grateful to me for this. I met Alexandr Lazerson at work. He came from Leningrad and worked there at the telephone station. His wife Maria worked there as telephone operator. In 1937 [during the Great Terror] 13 Alexandr's brother was arrested and disappeared. There was no court hearing or investigation. Alexandr and his family were allowed 24 hours to pack and leave the town. Alexandr was sent into exile to Kustanai and his wife and daughter were sent to another town. It took them a few years to get a permit to live together. They were very decent and friendly people. We were friends. Maria offered me to come to lunch every day and I took them to the theater and cinema to return the favor. There was a nice drama theater in Kustanai and a wonderful actor whose name I don't remember. He was admired in the town and we went to see performances where he took part with great pleasure.

When Stalin died in 1953 we were given red-and-black armbands. People looked preoccupied. Many cried. There were no loud discussions or laughter heard. People were asking each other how we were going to live without Stalin. Shortly after Stalin died Alexandr Lazerson was rehabilitated [Rehabilitation in the Soviet Union] 14, but his family stayed in Kustanai. Alexandr was like a father to me. In 1982 I went to see Alexandr Lazerson in Kustanai. He was dying. We talked and he said he had been waiting for me and now that he had seen me he could 'leave'. I still keep in touch with his daughter Galia.

In the early 1950s I went to work as a chief engineer at the telephone station and received a room in a two-bedroom apartment in the center of the town. My neighbor tenant had tuberculosis and I believe I contracted it from her. It was diagnosed in 1953. The doctors told me that I had to go to hospital; my lungs were affected and it was a disseminating process. I underwent treatment: pneumothorax and medications. They sent me to Borovoye recreation center in Kokchetav region, and I went there for the second time in 1954. I met Elena Mazdorova, a Russian woman there. She also had tuberculosis and was getting treatment in that same recreation center.

Elena was born in the town of Mamonovo in Altay in 1931. When we got well we got married in 1956. Elena moved to Kustanai. My parents had no objections against my marriage since I just informed them de facto. When Elena and I went to see them they liked her. Elena finished Kustanai Pedagogical College. She was a teacher of Russian literature and language in a school in Kustanai. After I got married I got the second room in the apartment. Thus, Elena and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment by ourselves. There was running water in the apartment but no other comforts. Later I promoted the installation of bathtubs in apartments. In 1959 I bought my first TV, brand of Record, as I worked in the communications field. TV sets were rare at that time and our neighbors came to watch TV with us. There were first refrigerators sold in Kustanai, but they were very expensive. An acquaintance of mine helped me to get a Soviet refrigerator ZIL-Moscow.

Our son was born in Kustanai in 1963. We named him Igor. My wife and I agreed that for our son to avoid any problems in the future he would have her last name and his nationality would be Russian. I didn't face any anti- Semitism personally, but after the Doctors' Plot' 15 in the 1950s state anti-Semitism was very strong.

My parents lived in Tiraspol. My brother Michael studied at school. He was the only child who stayed with our parents and they spoiled him a lot. Michael was fond of drawing and collecting postage stamps since he was five. I sent him his first stamps from Kustanai. When he grew up he became a member of the philatelic society of the USSR. He had a big collection of stamps. In 1962 Michael finished school and went to the army.

I was a success at my workplace in Kustanai. I became a recognized person in the town. I was offered a responsible job in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, but my parents were getting older and my mother wrote me that I had abandoned them. I finally made a decision, and in 1963 I moved to Tiraspol with my wife and son. We lived with my parents. My wife stayed at home looking after Igor. I couldn't find a job for quite a while. The Ministry of Communications of Moldova promised me a job, but they couldn't give me an apartment. I worked as a technician in a construction trust and then in the laboratory of the tinned food factory. In 1965 we moved to Kishinev where I got a job as an electrical engineer at Kishinev University. My wife worked at school. We lived in a room in a hostel until I received a nice two-bedroom apartment in a new district of Kishinev in 1968. We completed repairs: whitewashed the walls and painted the kitchen with oil paint. We bought a Moldavian set of furniture: a cupboard, a sofa, a dinner-table, chairs and a low table. Moldavian furniture was of good quality. We bought Romanian beds with good mattresses for our bedroom.

My father died at the age of almost 75 in 1965. He worked as a meat cutter at the market and got up early in the morning. On that day he got up as usual. My mother said goodbye as usual. When leaving he said 'good day' to her as usual and she replied, 'Gey in gezinterheit' [have a nice trip in Yiddish]. It was an early morning in April. There was ice on the road. My father fell and hit his head, but he stayed to wait for the bus to get to work. He worked all day, but when he came home he complained that he had a headache. My mother called an ambulance and sent me a telegram. I came immediately. The doctors couldn't help him. He died. We buried him in accordance with the Jewish tradition: I remember him lying on the floor wrapped in a shroud. We buried him in a coffin in the Jewish cemetery in Tiraspol.

My brother Michael got married in 1966. His wife Marina had a Jewish father and a Ukrainian mother. Michael and his wife had two daughters: Ludmila and Tatiana. My brother and his family lived in our parents' house. My mother didn't get along with my brother's wife and my brother felt sandwiched between them sometimes. Michael was a design artist in Tiraspol: he designed the interior for exhibitions, painted pictures and portraits. He worked in his shop. My brother became a well-known artist in Moldova. He took part in many art exhibitions and became a member of the Union of Artists of Moldova. His daughter Tatiana followed into his footsteps and finished the Art Graphic Faculty of Tiraspol Pedagogical College of Moldova. His daughter Ludmila finished construction college. They are both married.

After my father died, my mother's brother Godia from Australia continuously asked my mother to move to Australia. He said that he would send a medical nurse to accompany her since she wasn't feeling well. He invited her to come and look around and then my brother and I would follow her. However, I was a patriot of my motherland and I had no doubts about my decision: of course, I wasn't going to leave my country. After my father died my mother felt ill all the time. She lived a hard life: she lost two children, my brothers, and two sons that perished during the Great Patriotic War. But she never gave up: she cooked and even went shopping to the market a month before she fell so ill that she had to stay in bed. My mother died in 1976. She was buried near my father in the cemetery.

My family life wasn't perfect. In 1972 I left my family and moved to the town of Soroki where I worked at the construction of the water supply pipeline Soroki-Beltsy. I was senior engineer in a construction company and later I became head of the industrial technical department. I received a room with electrical heating, electricity and running water. In 1975 my wife and I divorced officially. I received a one-bedroom apartment with all comforts in Soroki. I left our apartment in Kishinev to my ex-wife and son. There was a drama theater and a cinema theater in Soroki so I didn't get bored. In 1981 my acquaintances reminded me about Lidia Lieberman that used to be a friend of mine in Odessa. By that time she had also divorced her husband. Lidia lived in Odessa and worked as a lab assistant in the pathologoanatomic department of the regional hospital. I wrote her a letter and then went to see her. We resumed our relationships. Lidia came to see me in Soroki and I often visited her in Odessa.

In the early 1990s I began to attend the Jewish community in Soroki. The community regained a building of the former synagogue. There weren't many Jews in the community, but we had beautiful celebrations of holidays there.

I often traveled to Kishinev where I met with my son Igor. Igor also came to see me in Soroki. Igor went to the army after finishing school. He returned from the army and got a job at a scientific research institute. He was a locksmith in the laboratory. He had 'hands of gold'. Igor married a girl from a Ukrainian and Moldavian family in 1986. Her name was Tania. I didn't have any objections; love is what matters. They have twin girls: Alina and Oksana. Igor's wife was a painter. They received a nice three- bedroom apartment in the suburb of Kishinev. My granddaughters went to work after finishing nine years of secondary school.

When perestroika 16 began I believed in Mikhail Gorbachev 17. I thought life was improving, but it wasn't quite so. In 1991 the USSR fell apart. I happened to be living in one country and Lidia in another. Perestroika developed a problem with the Russian language: even Moldavians that had spoken Russian before began to communicate in Moldavian. Russian speaking residents were looked at as if they were foreigners. Many people left Moldova for Ukraine or Russia.

Lidia and I decided to live together in 1995. I moved to Odessa. I had to have my documents changed. Moldavian officials were helpful and so were officials in Odessa, especially when I told them that I came from Odessa. Lidia lived in a communal apartment 18 in the center of the town. After her aunt died she inherited a one-bedroom apartment in Cheryomushki [a new district in Odessa]. We exchanged these two apartments and settled down in a new two-bedroom apartment with a balcony and all comforts in a new district of the town. Our apartment is on the second floor. It's very convenient for us since there is no elevator in the house and we are in no condition to walk higher upstairs. My son Igor often comes to see us here in Odessa. We support him. In my time, children supported their parents, but now things are different.

In the late 1990s my brother Michael, his daughters and their families moved to Germany. They live in the very picturesque area of Turingia: a distric in Darmstadt. Michael and his daughter Tania draw a lot. Michael has been exhibiting his works in Jewish communities in many towns.

I go to the main synagogue in Odessa on holidays when my health condition allows it. I don't pray since I don't know any prayers.

I identify myself as a Jew and wish all Jews to have a good life. I'm interested in everything about Jews and Israel. I knew about the establishment of Israel in 1948, but we didn't get any information about the country at that time. Israel is the life and the capital of all Jews in the world. In 1948 Israel won the war for independence, and I was glad they could stand for themselves since I heard people say more than once that Jews were no soldiers whatsoever. All my relatives, all our men were at the front during the Great Patriotic War and two of my brothers perished during the war.

The Gmilus Hesed Jewish Charity Center, established in 1992, provides assistance to Lidia and me. There is an aid visiting us. She brings us food and cleans our apartment. We receive food packages and medications. Whenever I can I attend events at Gmilus Hesed.

Glossary

Meyer Tulchinskiy
Kiev
Ukraine
Interviewer: Oksana Kuntsevskaya
Date of interview: July 2002

I was born in Kiev on 4 February 1924My mother, Tsypa Tulchinskaya [nee Luchanskaya], was born in Tarashcha. Tarashcha was a small distant town. Jews constituted half of its population; the rest were Ukrainians. People lived in peace and friendship and helped each other. They were mostly craftsmen and farmers. There was a synagogue and a Christian church in Tarashcha. Most of the Jewish population perished during the war. The survivors didn't want to return to the ashes of their old homes and scattered all around the world.

My mother's mother was named Mariam Luchanskaya, and her father's name was Isaak Luchanskiy. I don't know how and when my grandfather and grandmother got married. I don't remember my grandfather either. I believe he died in 1935. My mother's parents had their own small business. They bought cattle skin from farmers, made boots out of it and sold them.

My mother said that my grandmother Mariam gave birth to 18 children. Only 9 of them survived. From what my mother told me I know that few of her brothers emigrated to the US during the Civil war of 1917 - 1920 and the period of outburst of pogroms1I have some information about six children. Her oldest son Gitsia (born in 1889) was shell-shocked during WWI and had mental problems. He lived all his life with my grandmother. The next was my mother Tsypa Tulchinskaya (1892), Rosa (1893), Fania (1895), Riva (1900) and Liza (1904). My grandmother was very religious like all other inhabitants of the town. She celebrated all Jewish holidays and followed the kashrut. She went to the synagogue regularly and never left home without putting on her shawl. They weren't a rich family. I remember their small lopsided house, rooted in the soil. There were at least 8 children in a common family in Tarashcha, no matter if Jewish or Ukrainian. People tried to find ways to provide for their families and worked hard to make their living. It's hard to imagine how people lived at that time. They didn't have TV, libraries or movies. The only entertainment was a fair twice a year. The fair was a big thing with fun shows and clowns. The level of culture was very low; people didn't read any books, and the majority of them couldn't even write their own name. They gossiped and made fun of each other. I remember my mother mimicking her neighbors. That way they entertained themselves. It was ... provincial life. You know where a Jew starts? He starts with a funny joke with a double meaning.

There were many young people in Tarashcha in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of them were Komsomol 1 members. They believed that the communist revolution would improve the situation of the Jews, give them more freedom and the possibility to study and live outside the Pale of Settlement 2. I remember a sad incident: A Komsomol activist, a Jew, publicly rejected his father, who was a shochet, because his father slaughtered chickens and was religious. This wasn't quite in line with the revolutionary ideas and communist principles of the son. The Jewish youth spoke Yiddish to one another, but Ukrainian was the language of communication in town. There was one Ukrainian secondary school in Tarashcha, and all Jews finished this school and undoubtedly knew Ukrainian.

My mother said that my grandmother gave birth to 18 children. Only nine of them survived. From what my mother told me I know that a few of her brothers emigrated to the US during the Civil War 3 and the period of pogroms 4. I have some information about six children. My grandmother's oldest son, Gitsia, was born in 1889. He was shell-shocked during World War I and had mental problems. He lived with my grandmother all his life. The next child was my mother, born in 1892, then came Rosa, born in 1893, Fania, born in 1895, Riva, born in 1900, and Liza, born in 1904. My grandparents couldn't afford to give education to all their children. However, all of my mother's sisters and brothers I knew got primary education. In the 1920s the children moved to various towns looking for a job or a place to study. My grandmother stayed in Tarashcha. Her children supported her by sending money and parcels. She didn't receive any pension. She was a housewife and never went to work. My grandmother and her older son, Gitsia, perished in Tarashcha in 1941. Her children were too late to make arrangements for their evacuation. My grandmother and grandfather couldn't afford to give education to all of their children. However, all of my mother's sisters and brothers that I know got primary education. In 1920s the children moved to various towns looking for a job or a place to study. My grandmother stayed in Tarascha. Her children supported her sending her money and parcels. She didn't receive any pension. She was a housewife and she never went to work. My grandmother and her older son Gitsia perished in Tarascha in 1941. Her children were too late to make arrangements for their evacuation.

Rosa was the only one to finish grammar school. After the October Revolution [the Revolution of 1917] 5 she became a party member and an active supporter of revolutionary ideas. She participated in the underground movement in Odessa. Her name, Rosa Luchinskaya, was mentioned in some memoirs of revolutionary figures. I believe she moved to Kiev in 1918. Later her younger sister, Riva, moved to her from Tarashcha. In Kiev Rosa met and married Lavrentiy Kartvelishvili, a Georgian and a Soviet party and government official. He worked in Kiev for many years. During his studies at the Commercial Institute from 1910-1916 he was involved in underground party activities. In 1917 he became a member of the Kiev Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and in 1918, one of the leaders of the underground Bolshevik organization, a member of the all-Ukrainian Provisional Committee. From 1921-1924 he was First Secretary of the Kiev Province Committee of the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party.

It goes without saying that any religious traditions were out of the question for this communist family. Rosa and her husband lived in Kiev for some time. In the 1930s they moved to Moscow. Rosa had a job at the Council of Ministries, but I don't know what kind of position she had there. Her husband was also in the management. In 1937 he was arrested and sentenced [during the so-called Great Terror] 6. It turned out later that he was executed in 1938. Some time before Rosa entered the industrial academy for the training of higher party officials. This saved her life. If it hadn't been for the Academy she would have been arrested, too. She became a party official. During the war she was in Moscow. After the war she continued to have positions as a party official. She died in 1970.

Rosa's son Yury was born in 1920. He finished a Russian secondary school in Moscow and entered the Industrial Institute in Moscow. He lives in Tbilisi now. He graduated as a Doctor of Technical Sciences and became a professor. He was a lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute in Tbilisi. Now he's retired. He married Dodoli, a Georgian woman. She had a difficult life. In the 1930s her father was Deputy Minister of Education in Georgia. He was arrested in 1938. He was suspected of being involved in anti-revolutionary activities. Her mother had died some time before, so Dodoli lost her parents when she was 14 years old. After her father was arrested policemen took her out of the apartment, locked the door and said, 'And you, girl, go away!' Dodoli had to seek shelter at her distant relatives'. They were very concerned about having to give shelter to the daughter of an 'enemy of the people'. Dodoli had a strong will, which helped her to fight all hardships. She finished a secondary school in Tbilisi and entered the Vocal Department at the Conservatory in Tbilisi. Later she became a teacher at this Conservatory. She fiercely hated the Soviet regime. When her father was rehabilitated 8 posthumously in the 1950s, she made every effort to have all their property, which had been confiscated in 1938, returned.

My mother's sister Fania moved to Tbilisi from Tarashcha 5-6 years after the October Revolution and stayed there. I don't know what brought her to Tbilisi. She married a Polish man named Kalnitskiy. He was an irrigation engineer. Fania was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to five years of imprisonment for her contacts with an 'enemy of the people', Rosa's husband, who often visited his relatives in Tbilisi. Besides she was accused of not returning books by forbidden Soviet writers to the library. She had the right to write to her relatives and informed them what she was charged of. Fania was in a camp in Perm region until 1939. Rosa, who was studying at the Industrial Academy went to the authorities and said, 'Why did you arrest her? In that case you should arrest me for my contacts with an 'enemy of the people', too'. However strange it may sound, they released and rehabilitated Fania and even suggested that she entered the Communist Party, but Fania refused. Some time later she was appointed director of a Russian school in Tbilisi. After I returned to Tbilisi from the front, Fania and I visited her former students in Tbilisi, and I witnessed the respect they treated her with. She died in 1966. She had two children. Her son, Alexei, became a Candidate of Technical Sciences. He settled down in Moscow when he was an adult. Her daughter, Medeya, married a Georgian man and divorced him later. She lives in Tbilisi now.

My mother's sister Riva finished an elementary school in Tarashcha and helped her parents with their leather business. Rosa was a big influence on Riva and her other sisters. Riva got involved in revolutionary activities. Although she didn't like to study she finished a Russian secondary school in Kiev after she moved there. She remained undereducated though. She was a typical Komsomol activist of the 1920s: indefatigable, energetic and uneducated. My mother used to say about her that she had a strong personality. Riva tried to study at the textile institute but gave it up. She wasn't an industrious student. She changed jobs every year. Before evacuation she worked at the Franko Theater in Kiev. Riva was an assistant trade union leader. A well-known actor called Shumskiy was the trade union unit leader. This was the period of 'red directors'. Riva fit into this role well: she was a party member and was responsible and energetic.

Riva lived in a small room near the Franko Theater and was very poor. She lived in Kiev for over 20 years. I remember that she didn't have any clothes to have her picture for the passport taken, so she borrowed a blouse from the dressing room in the theater. Riva was a straightforward and honest woman. She lived with a Ukrainian man; they didn't register their marriage. They didn't have any children. During the war she was in evacuation in Tbilisi. She kept changing jobs there, too. During the war she worked as a tutor at a labor penitentiary institution near Tbilisi. After the war she was a receptionist in the governmental room of the railway station in Tbilisi. This was a privileged position: only deputies and high officials were allowed into this room. Riva visited Kiev several times. During one of her visits I went to the theater with her, and I was struck by the praises Riva got from the leading actors. They admired her trade union leadership activities. Riva was a very pure and transparent person. She died in Tbilisi in 1974.

My mother's sister Liza didn't have any education or profession. She followed her sisters to Kiev, got married and became a housewife. Her husband was a carpenter. He had a Jewish education. He finished cheder and could read the Torah. His name was Meyer Rabinovich. Thank God the disasters of 1937 didn't affect them. Liza and her husband often visited my parents, and I entertained my cousins. Liza had three daughters. Meyer liked to discuss political and general issues with my father. They were the only religious family among our relatives, they observed traditions and celebrated holidays. I believe, they celebrated Pesach and Yom Kippur. They had quiet celebrations, and I heard about it incidentally, so I don't have any details.

When the war began their family evacuated separately from ours. Liza's husband was working at an enterprise that evacuated their employees and families. They crossed Siberia by train. At one station they had a discussion with the director of an enterprise. When he heard that Meyer was a carpenter he offered him a job. They stayed there. Meyer made boxes for ammunition, and Zina, his older daughter, worked at the same military plant. She received 600 grams of white bread. She was 14 years old at the time. Their youngest daughter died on the way to evacuation. After the war Liza and her family returned to Kiev. They didn't have any problems with getting an apartment. Meyer got his job back, the same as he had before the war, and received an apartment. Aunt Liza never went to work. She died in 1978. Liza's daughters Zina and Sima live in Kiev. They are married and have children and grandchildren.

My mother was the oldest of the girls in the family. (Photo 1). I don't know what kind of education she had. She could write in Hebrew and Yiddish, which was rare for a woman. She liked reading and read classic literature in Yiddish and Russian. She could also write well in Russian. She had many friends and corresponded with them all her life. She was helping her parents with the shoemaking business before she got married. My mother told me little about the years of her youth. I don't know when and how she met my father. I only know that my parents had their wedding in Tarashcha during the Civil War. They were hiding from gangs 8 in Tarashcha and I don't think they had a real wedding party. The situation wasn't good for celebrations. There were Denikin 9, Polish and Petliura 10 units in town. The power in town changed from one to the other, but they all persecuted Jews, of course.

My father, Lev Tulchinskiy, was born in Zhivotov, near Tarashcha, in 1891. I don't know anything about his family. My parents told me very little about themselves. I only picked up bits and pieces of conversations. It was my understanding that my father didn't have pleasant memories about his childhood. I remember one little anecdote that my father told me. He recalled how his parents were hiding freshly made bread from the children. There were many children in the family, and they ate too much freshly baked bread whenever they could get it.

My father studied in cheder and later entered the yeshivah in Vilnius to study to become a rabbi. He was probably religious when he was young. He probably observed Jewish traditions, which was common in all Jewish families back then. He never finished his studies because he got disappointed with religion. It was the time of chaos. My father took to another extreme: he participated in the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War. I believe he was wounded in 1919 and had to stay in hospital. This created some distance between him and his relatives. His family ended up in Winnipeg, Canada, in their effort to escape from pogroms. They settled down there and had a good life. During the famine in Ukraine 11 my father's relatives sent him parcels. They changed their last name from Tulchinskiy to Tulman to make it sound more English. We haven't been in touch with them for quite a long while.

After he was wounded my father still led an active life, but he didn't become a member of the Bolshevik Party. He wasn't really happy about the regime in his country, even though he had been fighting for it. He got disappointed with the idea of communism. My father called people in power 'these smooth-talkers'.

My father and mother moved to Kiev from Tarashcha in the 1920s. They rented an apartment in the center of the city. I was born there in 1924. (Photo 2). My father worked as an accounting clerk at the Kievfuel Trust. This trust supplied coal, wood, kerosene, gasoline and lubricants to enterprises in Kiev. My father was very fond of self-education. He showed an interest in political economy and politics. He wasn't interested in fiction. He liked to read newspapers and sent me to buy Pravda and Izvestiya [communist newspapers.] He enjoyed discussing political issues with his daughters-in- law, Rosa and Riva. Meyer joined them sometimes. Political education was mandatory at that time, and all employees had to take exams at their offices. I remember Riva, my father and somebody else getting prepared for these exams.

Basically my parents were in favor of the Soviet power. If you ask me whether there was anything positive about the Soviet power my answer would be, 'Yes'. This refers to education first of all. When I went to school we had several textbooks in mathematics written by different authors. After some period of probation the education authorities decided to switch to the pre-revolutionary textbook written by Professor Kisilyov from Voronezh. The Soviet authorities favored him and awarded him the order of the Red Flag. I remember his words: 'The country where almost all people study needs good textbooks!' He didn't exaggerate. Even the poorest could get free education. Young people studied in all kinds of educational institutions including military, engineering, accounting, law and philosophy colleges.

My parents spoke Yiddish with each-other. Sometimes they communicated in Russian, when they also wanted me to get involved in the conversation, or if someone else was in the house and didn't speak Yiddish. I'm surprised that my parents didn't even try to teach me Yiddish. Regretfully, my parents didn't celebrate any Jewish or religious holidays or observe any traditions. I rarely visited my mother's mother in Tarashcha. My relatives spoke Ukrainian to me, and I don't remember celebration of any religious holidays. My relatives got together on Soviet holidays at our place. I was the only child in the family. My mother had babies several times, but they all died.

I studied at a Russian secondary school in Kiev. It was located near the Ukrainian Drama Theater and school children participated in the performances. We often went to the theater. I remember the terrible famine of 1933 well, although the situation in Kiev wasn't as tense as elsewhere. I remember long lines of people waiting to get bread. There were supervisors to watch the order. After the government moved to Kiev from Kharkov in 1934 life improved a lot. Kiev, as the capital of Ukraine, had better supplies of food products.

We lived in the main street of Kiev, Kreschatik. We had a huge room and seven other families were our neighbors in the same apartment. My parents separated my part of the room with a screen, which they bought from the sales. It was a heavy mahogany screen, upholstered in a beautiful manner. My parents and I had iron beds. We had a sofa with a high back, a carved cupboard, a floor mirror and a table in this room. We also had a radio.

My mother was a very difficult woman, a family despot. She always interfered with my life. But I'm grateful that she taught me how to read. She died with a book in her hands. She preferred fiction. My mother didn't work because she was constantly ill. Besides, there weren't enough jobs for everybody at that time. She was a very good cook. Her stuffed fish and jellied meat were delicious.

I remember 1937 when a large number of people were arrested [during the Great Terror]. I was studying at the governmental school [school for the children of high officials] located in the vicinity of Lipki, an elite neighborhood of Kiev. There were children of high Soviet officials and military in my class. The children's parents were arrested as 'enemies of the people' and often physically maltreated, executed or sent to camps with extremely hard living conditions,0 and the children were sent to children's homes or shelters. They were arresting higher officials and common people. There were two Polish girls in my class whose parents were clerks. They were arrested, and the girls were sent to a children's home. I never saw them again.

My father was an accounting clerk, and this campaign didn't affect him. His nationality was of no significance at that stage. Aunt Fania, who lived in Tbilisi, had her nationality written as Russian when she obtained her passport. She mentioned that she wasn't Russian, but she was told that all citizens were Russian. Many people liked the fact that all were equal and that there were no first or second-class people any more. However, this didn't last long. In 1939 the Department of Judaism at the Institute of Linguistics in Kiev was closed. It moved to Birobidzhan 12. The authorities closed Jewish schools pretending they were responding to the request of the children's parents.

I heard about the war at 12 o'clock on 22nd June 1941. We had a radio. At that time that was even more prestigious than having a car nowadays. We had the reputation of being rich because we had a radio. We turned the radio on and opened the door so our neighbors could hear the announcement about the war.

After a week the military office sent us to excavate trenches near Goloseyevskiy forest in the vicinity of Kiev. We spent a week there. After we returned to Kiev we were sent to Donets. We were too young to be recruited to the army, but we were to come of age, and it was the right step of the government to send us to a remote area as a reserve for the Red Army. My parents evacuated. My mother's sister Riva helped them. She worked at a bank and they were the first to evacuate. Riva was allowed to take my parents into evacuation. They came to Donets to pick me up. The Germans were approaching Donets and the military office didn't keep young people any longer.

It took us a long while to get to Middle Asia. We stayed at a collective farm 13 in Uzbekistan. We worked in the cotton fields and lived in a kibitka [clay hut] with a very small window offering a view of the kishlak [an Uzbek village]. We spent about half a year in Uzbekistan. People were dying like flies. They were dying from eating mulberries and fruit after starvation and drinking water from the river. They died from dysentery and bloody flux. A lot of children were dying. There was even a separate cemetery for children.

Riva, who was living in Tbilisi, came to our rescue again. There was a labor camp for children somewhere in the Caucasus and a factory in it, and Riva was employed as a tutor there. She managed to send us the necessary forms to come and work at this camp for youngsters. We traveled to the Caucasus from Middle Asia across the Caspian Sea. My father had a weak heart after working in the cotton fields. He died on the way at Ursakievskoye station in Middle Asia. He was buried quietly there. We reached Tbilisi, and I entered the Communications College where I studied for several months. I lived in the hostel, and my mother rented a room. In 1942 the Germans came close to Zakavkazye and total mobilization was announced in Tbilisi. 300,000 recruits went to the front, and I was among them. Every third one of them perished.

My mother got a job as a medical nurse at the navy hospital in Tbilisi. The Georgians treated my mother very well. As soon as I went to the front she was registered at the military office as a member of the family of a front line soldier, and she moved to an apartment where she lived until the end of the war. This hospital gave treatment to wounded military of the southern front. I was at the 3rd Ukrainian front. My mother was always looking for me among the wounded soldiers who were being brought to the hospital. I wrote to her but now I think I could have written more letters to her.

I was a private at the infantry, at the Zakavkazie, North Caucasian front, from where we moved to the South Ukrainian front. I was wounded by a stray bullet on a battlefield in Hungary in April 1945. I remember this incident as if it happened yesterday. I was sent to a field hospital and then to Odessa. Later I moved to Sochi where all recreation centers were turned into hospitals. After Sochi I was sent to Yenakiyevo in Central Russia to complete my course of treatment. (Photo 3).

My mother found out that I was in Yenakiyevo and wanted to come and visit me, but she wasn't allowed to leave her work. Then she got a chance by accident. Two majors, who had lost their legs, needed an escort to return to Russia. My hospital was near where they lived in Russia. It was a difficult mission with lots of arrangements to be made on the way, and nobody wanted to take it. The director of the hospital suggested that my mother went. She agreed, but her condition was to have a statement reading, 'Visiting Yenakiyevo to meet her wounded son', written in her route document. The director of the hospital didn't agree with it but she insisted that he did what she was asking for. She escorted both majors home - they were miserable people. She came to Yenakiyevo, and I was released from hospital.

We went to Tbilisi, but I didn't feel at home there. We decided to go to Kiev. We weren't awaited by anyone. Our place had been destroyed, and we didn't have a place to live. It was a good thing that I kept my passport during my mobilization to the army. It was a hectic moment at the military office. There were many recruits, and they all submitted their passports to have them replaced with military identity cards. The clerk sitting at his table had heaps of passports scattered on the floor around him. He probably thought that these soldiers wouldn't need their passports later on. I put my passport into my pocket when he wasn't looking and thus managed to keep it. It wasn't a good idea to have one's passport during the war. If the Germans had ever captured me and seen that I was a Jew they would have shot me immediately. I was hoping to be able to throw it away if necessary. After we arrived in Kiev I went to the social support office to be registered there. The chairman asked me whether I could prove that I had lived in Kiev, and I showed him my passport. He saw my address and gave me a 200-ruble allowance to rent a room.

After the war I had an aversion to everything that I had seen or lived through during the war. I'm reluctant to answer questions related to the war. I had finished 9 years at school before the war. After the war I told my mother that I wanted to get higher secondary education. I need to give credit to my mother because she supported this idea of mine in spite of all misery we were living in. My mother respected educated people. She said that an uneducated person could hurt other people's feelings, however unintentionally, and she avoided such people. I started to study at an evening secondary school in 1945 and finished it with a silver medal in 1946.

I submitted my documents to the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. There were many applicants for the Radio-Engineering Faculty, but I was admitted because I was a medal winner and a war invalid. I lived in the hostel, and my mother rented rooms. Later I received a small room in Podol 14. After graduating I worked at the Communications Department of the Hydro-Meteorological Center. Later I had several jobs. I didn't have any acquaintances and couldn't get a really good job. I didn't mind because I liked my work. Another reason for my not being able to get a better job was that this was all during the period of the campaign against cosmopolitans 15.

As for the Doctors' Plot 16 I would like to say that there has always been anti-Semitism in USSR. I remember that parents at that time didn't allow their schoolchildren to accept medication from a school doctor if they found out that the doctor was a Jew. I think, the basis of anti- Semitism is people's ignorance and stupidity. Stalin's death in 1953 put an end to this period. Erenburg 17 has an interesting description of this period. The Evening Kiev newspaper published anti-Semitic articles and notes. There were always Jewish names mentioned if something indecent happened. One might have imagined that all existing jerks at that time were Jews.

I worked as head of the communications office at the Zhuliany airport in Kiev at the time. We had meetings where people were pointing at the 'enemies', accusing them of embezzlement, espionage in favor of other countries, negligence, carelessness and dishonest attitudes. We were bound to get involved in the persecution of innocent people, as well as in their dismissal from work. Of course, I sympathized with them and understood that they were innocent, but there was nothing I could do. It wasn't wise to fight against the Soviet regime. The situation was very bad, of course. However, I didn't face any anti-Semitism myself. People always treated me with respect. I was head of the medical equipment design office for a few years before I retired in 1989.

My mother worked as a janitor and later, after the war, as a telegram deliverer. She received tips from the people who received good news about their loved ones from the front. Mistakes were made, and families were notified of their relatives' death when in reality they were captives or wounded in hospitals and just weren't able to let their families know that they were alive. Therefore, after the war, many people got news from their loved ones. Once my mother delivered a telegram to an old couple. They had received notification before that their son had perished at the front. The one that my mother brought them was from their son saying that he was fine and heading for Kiev.

My mother had a poor heart and she often felt very ill. Perhaps, it was for this reason that she liked to be visited by doctors. She was very concerned about me not getting married. She didn't care about the nationality of my future wife. One of my mother's sisters married a Georgian, another one married a Polish man. My mother married a Jew and so did her sister, Liza. Riva's lover was a Ukrainian man. So, if we hadn't been continuously reminded that we were Jews, we would have probably forgotten about it once and forever. My mother died in 1963.

I met my future wife, Alexandra Aizman, a Jew, in 1967. She came from a Jewish family with many children. Her father, Naum Aizman, was born in the town of Gusyatin, on the western border of Ukraine, in 1899, I think. Her father had an elementary education. He probably studied at cheder. Before the war my wife's father was chairman of a shop in Gusyatin. My wife's mother, Sarah, was born in 1915. She finished a Ukrainian elementary school. She didn't have any profession. She married Naum Aizman in 1935 and became a housewife. They had 3 children. My wife's parents didn't celebrate any Jewish holidays or observe any traditions. After the beginning of the war their family evacuated to Middle Asia. My in-laws' children died from dysentery and pneumonia. The food and water were very poor and the conditions of living very hard in the place where they lived. Many children died of infections and lack of food.

After the war my father-in-law went to Shargorod, located close to his hometown. There's a synagogue, a church and a cathedral in Shargorod. This town had Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian inhabitants and people lived in peace with each other. They spoke Yiddish and Ukrainian in Shargorod. During the war there was a big ghetto there. The majority of Jews were exterminated, and the ones that survived left for other places after the war. There are hardly any Jews left in Shargorod today.

They had three children born after the war: Dmitriy, in 1945, my wife Alexandra in 1946, and Dora in 1947. My father-in-law became a soda water and lemonade expert in Shargorod after the war. He created his own recipes and made syrups. The local authorities allowed him to open a store in Shargorod. Although it was a state-owned store he had his own customers and could provide well for his family. His products were in big demand and he earned well.

My wife's older brother, Dmitriy Aizman, finished the Road Transport College and was a driving teacher at a technical school in Shargorod. Dmitriy married a local girl named Anna. They had a big wedding party, but I don't remember whether theytraditional Jewish wedding. He was a member of the Communist Party. They had two children. They led a quiet life, didn't have any hobbies, didn't celebrate any Jewish holidays or observe traditions. In the 1980s they went through hard times when the Soviet regime was collapsing. Dmitriy found a profitable business. He took a course and learned how to make smoked fish. He opened a smoking shed and became a fish supplier. He died when he was 54. His older son, Alexandr, his wife and her parents emigrated to Germany in 1996. Anna also moved there after Dmitriy died. Anna's younger son, Igor, became very religious. He grew a beard.... Nothing of this kind had ever happened in our family before. In 1999 he was in a camp in Israel. He received a student's visa to the USA and went there to study to become a rabbi. I don't know whether he finished his studies or not, but he stayed in the USA. His religiosity came to him somehow even though his mother Anna had never been serious about religious issues.

My wife's younger sister, Dora, was born deaf and dumb. She studied at the boarding school for deaf and dumb children and became a tailor. She worked at a tailor's in Shargorod. Dora married a deaf and dumb man from a neighboring town in 1970. Her husband was a good carpenter, cabinetmaker and welder. He worked at a construction company for some time. They didn't observe any traditions or celebrate holidays in Dora's family. I think the reason was that none of our families ever had any celebrations. Dora's eyesight got so bad that she became almost blind. In the 1990s perestroika began, and her husband lost his job. Dora couldn't earn anything, they had five children and were literally starving. Their family moved to Israel in 1996. They still live there now, but we aren't in touch with them.

My wife was born in 1946. She was 22 years younger than me. She finished a Ukrainian secondary school and a pharmaceutics school in Shargorod and came to Kiev to enter Medical College. She rented an apartment from my Aunt Liza. My cousin, Zina, decided to introduce us to each other. We had a civil wedding ceremony in 1966. Her father came to Kiev at least once a month. Her mother didn't come because she was rather sickly. She didn't even attend the wedding. We often went to Shargorod. My father-in-law died in 1968 and my mother-in-law in 1979. My wife's parents were sociable and had many friends in Shargorod. (Photo 4). They spoke Yiddish in my wife's family. However, Alexandra and all the other members of her family spoke Russian or Ukrainian to me.

After our wedding we lived in the communal apartment 18 in Podol. Some time later we purchased an apartment in Obolon. My wife was a nurse in a hospital in Kiev. She was a highly qualified medical nurse. She did her job very well, and sometimes she even corrected doctors if they were wrong. She had many acquaintances she consulted on medical issues. My wife was so highly valued at work that she was offered to be admitted to the Medical Institute without exams. Alexandra was planning to study at the Institute, but she died from cancer in 1988. We lived a short but happy life together. I feel so sorry that she spent so much time doing additional work to earn a little more money: she gave people injections, looked after sick people, and so on. Alexandra was a very easy-going person, and we had great family and friend gatherings on Soviet holidays. She shared my fondness of classical music, and we often went to the Philharmonic and theaters. We didn't celebrate any Jewish religious holidays - it simply wasn't a tradition in our family.

Our daughter, Tsessana, was born in 1969. (Photo 5). She finished a Ukrainian secondary school in Kiev and entered the Pharmacological Institute in Leningrad in 1986. She studied there for two years. She married Oleg Impriss, a Jewish man, in 1988. He worked as a locksmith at a plant in Kiev. They emigrated to Germany in 1989. My granddaughter, Alexandra, was born there. My daughter tells me to join them, but I don't want to go. I don't even like the thought of Germany or the language. It probably has to do with my associations from the war times. Besides, all these long process of getting the required documents is a problem for me. I haven't even visited them, although I love my daughter and granddaughter, and I'm very attached to my son-in-law.

It's difficult for me to say what I think about emigration in general. It all depends on how adjustable an individual is. Some cats and dogs could return home covering the distance of over 1,000 kilometers. Scientists call it the 'sense for home'. If animals have this feeling for home, some people must also have it. I think it's alright to go to work at some place and return home afterwards. When it comes to looking for personal happiness it's a different matter. Basically, Israel is supposed to be our historical Motherland. But the situation isn't simple there. I like to listen to the Israeli radio station, read newspapers and books about this country. I would like to visit Israel, but again, it's a problem to stand in lines to obtain documents. Besides, it's expensive for a pensioner to go on this trip. Also, I'm concerned about the latest events in this area: all this shooting and terrorism.

I live alone. I read a lot and meet up with my friends, relatives and neighbors. I feel okay. It's a pity I can't see my daughter and granddaughter more often. I know that there are many Jewish organizations in Kiev. I don't go there. I'm not interested, and I don't need to go there.

Glossary

Ivan Pasternak
Bratislava
Slovakia

My name is Ivan Pasternak, I'm from Bratislava, and I was born during the
Holocaust. My mother and me survived; my father died in Dachau. I was
hiding with my mother with the help of the Habel family from Devinska Nova
Ves near Bratislava. Grandmother Fanus Habel, Ludvicek, Ilonka, Jozinko and
children from Devinska Nova Ves helped us. The grandmother always knew in
advance about the fascist roundups. When it was announced for Devinska Nova
Ves, we had to move to Lamac to her relatives. And when the roundup was
expected in Lamac, we moved back to Devinska Nova Ves. The roundups
happened very often. They were looking for Jews. I wonder if it was due to
my mother's upbringing or if it was God's will, but I never cried on such
dangerous occasions. After the Holocaust we visited this family for the
first and unfortunately last time in 1947. The grandmother got ill; the
children moved to various places. We are still in correspondence with them.

Family background">Family background

My parents come from Presov. My mother's maiden name was Preisova. My
grandmother was Helena Preisova, nee Rotmanova. My grandfather was called
Eliezer Preis. We have a menorah at home with the engraving Eliezer Preis.
Their three daughters Katarina, Nely and my mother Marta attended school on
Konstantinova Street in Presov. My mother was born in August 1916. My
grandparents lived in a house with a nice verandah on Sabinovska Street.
The eldest daughter, Katarina, liked to sit there in a wicker-chair reading
novels. My mother used to tell her: Don't read so much, your eyes will get
bad. Now, that she is 80, she is partially blind.

The head teacher of my mother and her sisters was Ms. Bednarova, who was a
nun and a good friend of our family. The nuns were prosecuted later, in the
communist era, and they were forced to move from Presov to Bacs near
Dunajska Streda. I saw Ms. Bednarova when she was over 70 on the occasion
of the visit of my aunt Nely, who lived in Nairobi, Kenya. My uncle Sani
Gellert and Aunt Nely lived in Nairobi during World War II. They could save
their lives thanks to businessman Bata 1. He could see that the situation
in Central Europe wasn't good for Jews so he decided to send them to his
branch in Nairobi. My aunt and her daughter were cooking for the workers in
the Bata factory and this way earned money to survive the war. My uncle
Sani fought in the Czechoslovak Army in Egypt. All the family survived and
after the war a son, Andrew, was born, my cousin, who lives in London.

Our family has always been keen on sports. I have photos of both my
mother's sisters at a Presov swimming pool near the Torysa river. The
Jewish youth, members of the Maccabi 2 association, used to meet there.
Both sisters and their husbands liked to go for long walks. Both husbands
graduated from Charles University in Prague and then became doctors in
Zlin. They used to play tennis in Zlin.

During the war

Sad memories are connected with the early 1940s. The eldest sister,
Katarina, who lived in Kosino, which was part of Hungary then, came to
visit her parents. They didn't know that this was to be their last
encounter. My grandparents died in the Holocaust. They were deported in
1942 and perished in Auschwitz in 1945.

My father's family was called Pasternak. They were forwarding agents but
they were very keen on giving their children the best education possible.
My father's best friend was an English teacher. My grandmother was Rozalia
Pasternakova, nee Grossmanova; she died in 1944. My grandfather was called
Emanuel Pasternak. In June 1941 the whole family was still in Presov. They
lived on 14, Kovacska Street. I have a picture of the whole family in the
backyard of the house. My parents are sitting on the bench. My father's
younger brother Vojtech Pasternak is there with his wife Etela. At that
time he was a soldier with the Czechoslovak Army in Ruthenia [see
Subcarpathia] 3. I didn't know his brother Zoli; he died in the
Holocaust. William Pasternak, my father's other brother, was a high
military officer. He was a representative of the Jewish community in Presov
and a deputy of the Presov council. He had a son, Tomas, my cousin, who
died along with his father and my father in Dachau in 1945. Members of the
family, who escaped deportation for a certain while, had a special
exemption for 'economically important Jews'.

Presov was the first town where Jews had to be specially marked. They had
to wear white strips even before the rule about wearing yellow star came
into effect. I have a photo of my father that was taken for the
registration in police archives.

My parents Teodor Pasternak and Marta Pasternakova, nee Preisova, got
married on 1st January 1940. The wedding was held in a Neolog 4 synagogue
on Konstantinova Street in Presov. Their friends Edita and Pali Fraenkl got
married on 26th January 1941. The Fraenkl family survived the Holocaust by
escaping to Hungary. Once they were hiding in Gzongzos, when Horthy 5
groups were doing a roundup searching for Jews. The Fraenkls were hiding in
the loft and when the soldiers came to the fifth floor the whistles ordered
the soldiers to leave. More than 50 Jews were arrested and deported from
that house only. The Fraenkls had two children: Jancsi, who was born in
December 1945 and Elzi, who followed five years later. Their son Jancsi is
still a member of the Presov Jewish community.

My parents were very sociable people. The Jewish social life in Presov was
quite rich. The Jewish youth used to meet at a place where a swimming pool
was built later. They established a Jewish association called Fortuna. They
organized trips, social events and religious ceremonies in Presov.

The Maccabi association organized trips on the river Torysa, to the High
Tatras and also abroad. My father used to plan the trips. Already in 1926
Maccabi had over 50 members interested in tourism. They were mostly men,
but also about ten women. Most of my parents' friends, for example the
Gellert family, didn't survive the Holocaust.

My father was an eager football player. He played for Maccabi Presov. This
was a strong team; on 31st May 1924 the Maccabi football club won 2:1 over
Torokves in Presov. Torokves played in the National Football League,
whereas the Maccabi players were all amateurs. The football team was based
in a working class district nicknamed Mexico Platz [Mexico Square].

Post-war">Post-war

My mother and me survived and came back to Presov after the war. Our return
was a bit delayed because the trains only started running in June or July
twice a week from Bratislava to Zilina. In Zilina we had to wait for a day
for a train from Zilina to Kosice and from there we continued on a horse
carriage to Presov.

I graduated from university and stayed in Bratislava. I'm a teacher. My
mother lived here too; she died a while ago. I'm married, my wife's name is
Zuzka. She is a doctor and she is Jewish. We have two sons, Teodor and
Peter, who are both single.

Glossary">Glossary

Matilda Hrabovecka
Bratislava
Slovakia

My family background
Growing up
During the war
Surviving Auschwitz
My return to Slovakia
Married life
Glossary

My family background

I was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, which had several rabbis, in
Presov region. My mother Dorota Friedmannova, nee Weil, was born in 1886
and came from Poland. My father Jozef Friedmann came from Stropkov and was
quite well off. He was born in 1884.

My maternal grandfather's surname was Weil. I don't know his first name. He
was born in Jaslo, Poland, and died before World War II, in the 1930s.

I would say our family was rather bohemian, although the men grew beards
and were religious. My father was also religious; he graduated from a
yeshivah, but I remember seeing him, when he thought nobody could, turn on
the radio on Saturday, although this was considered work.

Growing up

My parents had eight children, me being the youngest. My two older sisters
were Lujza and Anna or Anusa. Both worked and supported the family. Lujza
was the oldest. She was born in Presov in 1910. Before World War II she
finished an accounting course. She was deported to Auschwitz with the last
transport in 1942, along with her husband, Bela Wohlwert, and in December,
during the last selection, she was sent to the gas chambers. She spent
three months in the concentration camp. Her husband was also killed in
Auschwitz in 1942.

Anusa was born in 1912, also in Presov. She was good at music and played
the violin. She married Sandor Abrahamovic in 1937. He was born in Presov
in 1905. Before the war he worked as a shop-keeper. She was killed in
Lublin ghetto in 1942 at the age of 30. Anusa and Sandor had a son,
Herbert, who was born in Presov in 1938. He was deported to Treblinka,
where he died at the age of four. My youngest sister, Alzbeta, was born in
Presov in 1926. She was killed in Treblinka in 1942, only 18 years old.

My mother was the one who took care of the family, not only by keeping the
household, but also by trying to help financially, which wasn't really
common at that time. Our family wasn't very well-off because my father got
involved in a rather dubious business with gas stations and went bankrupt,
although one could argue that his bankruptcy was mainly the consequence of
his gambling habit; he liked to play cards. Despite their poverty my
parents tried really hard to provide education for all of us.

My oldest brother, Bernardt, left for France to stay with his uncle. My
younger brother, Henrich, became a locksmith, and the rest of us, girls,
attended a Neolog 1 school and later on a gymnasium. All the siblings
worked hard to support the family.

The Presov Neolog school was mainly attended by students from more well-to-
do families, thus I experienced the meaning of social differences in my
early years, which motivated me to join the Hashomer Hatzair 2 and later
the Communist Youth Organization.

Hashomer Hatzair was very important to everyone in our group of youngsters.
My youngest sister Alzbeta would go there with me, and the Kamenski
brothers, Pali and Lori, also came. Lori was really smart and quite
talented in school. He didn't survive the camps. Except for Rosenberg
Imrich, who was in Theresienstadt 3 during World War II, all the others
from our Hashomer Hatzair group were killed during the Holocaust.

I really loved going to school, mainly because we had wonderful teachers.
The headmaster's name was Svarc; we all loved him and referred to him as
,Svarc bacsi' [Uncle Svarc]. Then there was Mr. Reich, who was teaching
religion and Hebrew and then our class-teacher Mrs. Kleinova. She was the
mother of Professor Fischer, who taught in the physics department. It's a
sad thing to mention that from all the people I went to school with, only
about eleven survived. The others were killed during the Holocaust.

In 1939, when the first anti-Jewish legislation [see Anti-Jewish laws in
Hungary] 4 started to be introduced, I was learning to become a tailor.
Unfortunately, I never learned very much since they used to have me do all
sorts of odd jobs instead.

My sister Malvina, or Manci, was born in Presov in 1920. She graduated from
a high school, then we stopped going to school because of the anti-Jewish
measures. I went to work for a wood seller, who was Jewish and for whom my
sister was also supposed to work. But my father sent me without her and
Manci stayed home. He was always worried about her, since she was so
beautiful.

During the war

In 1942 they drafted me as the first member of my family and I was deported
in the first wave. One of my cousins fled to the Soviet Union. Later we
found out that he died in one of the Gulag 5 camps, so his escape from
the fascists didn't help him.

We left Presov for Poprad by train. It was my first trip on a train, and I
thought of the irony of life, whether this train trip was also to be my
last one. The people in Presov were horrified by what was happening to us,
Jews, but already in Poprad the atmosphere changed completely: Slovak
guards were beating us like crazy. They loaded us onto cattle cars and
transported us to Auschwitz.

My sister Manci went to the gas chamber along with my parents. It makes me
cry when I remember what a cute little thing she was, with those blue eyes
and dark hair. I really loved her. Sometimes I think of her, even today,
when I see her friend Katka Hexnerova, who lives in Kosice now.

Surviving Auschwitz

I spent three years in Auschwitz, full of suffering, selections and finally
a death march out of the camp. While I was in Auschwitz, I found out that
my friend from Hashomer Hatzair, Halmos Nusi, was there. Halmos came from a
rather wealthy family. Her parents had divorced years ago; she was an only
child, and, I would say, she was spoiled. She was sick as soon as she
arrived in this hell, and was taken to see a doctor because she was
complaining about a sore throat. Poor Halmos was dead even before they took
the rest of her group to Birkenau, but I don't know exactly what happened.

I could say that because of the horrors I witnessed, I developed my own
philosophy for staying alive in such a hell. To be frank, I find it painful
to say what that philosophy is today. The things I went through in
Auschwitz influenced my whole life: I always avoided standing in the back
of any group, or on the side. And I would never stand in the front, either,
so that I would never be seen as not being part of the crowd. And in
Auschwitz I survived, in fact, to the detriment of those who happened to be
standing on the sides. To put it bluntly, that means every survivor lives
on the grave of someone else, and I still find this hard to deal with.

From my entire family, my parents and sisters were all murdered along with
a number of relatives-even my four-year-old nephew Herbert. I survived
along with my sister Blanka and brother Bernardt. After I returned to
Slovakia, I realized at once how much my way of thinking and my values had
changed after three years spent in hell.

My return to Slovakia

It took me some time to come back. I took the last repatriation bus and
arrived in Neustvelica, near Neubrandenburg. I came back to Prague, but was
scared of the disappointments I knew were waiting for me at home. I didn't
know what to expect from those people and what freedom meant.

On the way, several Yugoslav women were trying to convince me to go home
with them, but I decided to go to Presov first and see if anybody had
survived. My sister was working as a clerk, and amazingly, she had somehow
managed to escape the concentration camp. I didn't blame her for that, but
she was nothing but a huge disappointment after keeping me waiting until
her lunch break! I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive her for failing
to understand what I had gone through.

I had too many ideals about the Slovak National Uprising 6 and everybody
who took part in it; everything seemed to be perfect to me. Suddenly, I
idealized the whole society and the situation that we were living in,
although I was worried about the future.

Then I enrolled in high school. I crammed four years into one year and
graduated in Kosice. But, it wasn't all so nice and easy. I was really
poor. I didn't even go to my own sister's wedding because I had nothing
nice, or even decent, to wear.

And, anti-Semitism wasn't exactly dead. Once I lined up for lunch tickets
at work. The line was long, and when people saw the number on my arm, they
said, 'Look at this Jewish woman. Hitler didn't manage to kill them all;
more of them came back than there were before!' I was horribly upset and
ran to the police to report it, hoping that this would be a solitary
incident. Evidently, my view of life was very distorted then, I'm sorry to
say.

Married life

I continued with my education and studied in Prague later on, where I met
and married a Jewish man from Presov, Mikulas Hrabovecky, who survived the
Holocaust in Slovakia. I married a Jewish man because I wanted to avoid
being called stinking kike when I became an old woman. If your spouse isn't
Jewish, you can never be sure that he won't call you names during some
crisis.

After school, my husband Mikulas and I moved to Bratislava, where I joined
the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia 7 and became a civil servant. My
status changed for the worse during the personality cult in the fifties,
when my brother, a convinced communist and party member, ended up being
imprisoned.

Nowadays, after my retirement, I take care of my granddaughters. I have two
wonderful daughters Katka and Viera, and they, along with their children
Zuzka, Nina, Jozef and Daniel, are the joy of my life. I'm also involved in
the Documentation Center of the Holocaust, which I helped establish. I
wrote a book of memoirs on my time in Auschwitz.

Glossary

Rahela Perisic
Bosnia
Interviewer: Klara Azulaj

My name is Rahela Perisic (nee Albahari) and I was born in 1922 in Sanski Most. My father, David Albahari, was born in 1889 in Tesanj (Bosnia) and my mother, Luna Albahari (nee Levi), was born in 1899 in Kladanj (Bosnia).

We lived in Sanski Most in a one-story garden house. Upstairs in this house we had a three room apartment and on the ground floor my father and his brother had a dry goods store. Next door to us lived my father's brother Jakob. They also had a garden house but their garden was much nicer than ours. Jakob's wife, Rena, grew beautiful flowers and had an orchard. My sisters, brother and I liked to stay at their house and play with their children. My father and his brother Jakob, two brothers, married two sisters, my mother and her sister Rena. Thus we lived liked one family.

A great number of Jews lived in Sanski Most. They had many professions among them: merchants, craftspeople, pharmacists, lawyers, etc. All in all it was a beautiful Jewish community, one that knew how to get along and was always ready to jump in and help someone when it was needed. There was a temple. It was an old modest building where all the Jews of Sanski Most gathered and marked their holidays.

My father and uncle's business did not go well and they decided to leave Sanski Most. My family went 12 kilometers away from Sanski Most to a place called Lusci Palanka. My uncle and his family went to Sarajevo.

We were the only Jewish family in Lusci Palanka. My father, who was a very sociable man, made a lot of friends quickly. Soon after our arrival he also established the first library and reading room and a group of mandolin players. My mother was well received by the other women and she was always willing to help the other women especially when it came to advise about running a household and taking care of children.

In Lusci Palanka my sisters and I went to elementary school. Since Lusci Palanka did not have a temple we went to Sanski Most for Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot and sometimes for Pesach. While there we stayed with our relative Avram Atijas and his wife Mazalta. For us children Chanukah was the best. I loved to light the candles. I remember before Pesach my mother would take all the dishes to the garden where she cleaned each plate. She also had a special trunk with dishes only for Pesach. Regardless of the fact that there was no temple in Luka Palanka my family always washed before the Shabbat and wore nice clothes. My father wore a dress suit as if he had come back from temple. Then he would read a prayer and after dinner we would go for a walk.

We did not stay in Luka Palanka for long. My father had to move because his business was not going well. This was not an industrialized environment in fact it was exclusively an agricultural region. In 1930 we moved to Drvar. Drvar was an industrialized town rich in wood. There was a cellulose factory and a big sawmill. The Grmec mountain was exploited by the sawmill and many people were employed in this industry. Unfortunately, we found that we were once again the only Jewish family. My father found a very good space for our future shop and very quickly the seeds of his and my mother's work began to appear. As very social people, they quickly had a steady clientele and my father was able to buy many shares and we had a solid savings.

When we finished elementary school my sisters, Flora, Judita and I continued our schooling in Banja Luka because there was no secondary school in Drvar. We lived with our aunt Rena and her husband Jakob who had relocated from Sarajevo to Banja Luka. My uncle's business did not go well and his family lived very modestly. My father helped him a lot.

My sisters and I joined the Jewish youth group in Banja Luka. There was a big temple and next to it a space for Jewish youth activities called Ken. In Ken we learned Hebrew, songs and Jewish games and we organized trips out of Banja Luka. Older girls and boys always went with we younger ones and they paid strict attention to our behavior. When we passed through the town everyone knew that we were Jews because we were dressed in clean clothes, not luxuriously, but very neat, and we were always well behaved.

My mother's brother, Haim Levi, also lived in Banja Luka. He had a big hairdresser salon. Frequently, he told me stories about his parents, Haim and Flora Levi. Since they died before I was born I listened to his stories with great interest. The story of my great-grandfather, Salomon, my grandmother Flora Levi's father, was especially moving and interesting. My great-grandfather was a banker of sorts. He had a currency exchange. He would take foreign currency and go from Banja Luka to Prijedor to change the money from Turkish currency to Austro-Hungarian. (Editor's note: we assume she is speaking of pre-1878, when Banja Luka was still in Turkish hands). He traveled a lot for this work. Once, while he was in Prijedor, someone noticed that he had a big bag from which he took out foreign money and changed it. Thieves waited for and killed my great-grandfather and took the money. His horse and dog returned home by themselves. My great- grandmother Bikina organized a search party and with help from the horse and dog she found the place where the crime occurred. The killer was quickly found and taken to prison.

My grandfather Haim and his wife Flora had a small shop. They sold mostly leather good including: saddles, horse harnesses, leather bags and other household goods. They lived modestly and observed all the holidays and customs because they were very religious. When their daughter Rena married she had to go to the ritual bath. For this ritual bath all the girls discreetly accompanied her to a place on the Vrbas River and helped her with the bath. Her hair was very long and they put some fragrant grass in her hair and on the way they sang. My mother told me about how wonderful these songs were. After the bath the bride was decorated and adorned until the morning. My grandmother Flora knew how to make the nicest tukada. A tukada is a hat which is placed on the bride and made from pearls and brocade. These were real pieces of art work. The young couple married under a traditional Jewish canopy and it was an event which all the young people of Banja Luka took part in. Six children were born from this marriage: Rena, Haim, Sarina, Luna, Leon and Matilda. Unfortunately, Matilda died very young. My mother's brother, Leon, was seriously injured during WWI. He never recovered from the injuries and died in 1923. His wife, Sida, died very quickly after him and the care of their three children: Zlata, Flora and Haim, was taken over by the remaining family members.

My paternal grandmother, Rahela Albahari (nee Atijas), was born in 1855 in Travnik.

She lived in a big family and had a lot of brothers and sisters. She was born while Bosnia and Hercegovina was under Turkish control. In Travnik there were a lot of Jewish families, more Sephards than Ashkenazis. There were rich and poor families. My great-grandfather was a small merchant and lived very modestly with his family. The male children learned a trade and female children did not go to school. My grandmother Rahela was very adroit, hardworking and curious about everything. She and her brothers learned Hebrew script and read religious books. Since the prayer books had Ladino (a medieval Spanish dialect written with Hebrew characters; Ladino, or Judeo-Espanol, was to Spanish what Yiddish was to German), she was able to use the Ladino to learn Hebrew. She spoke Ladino, Turkish, Hebrew and Serbian. She went to temple regularly, which was rare for female children at the time. She married Moshe Albahari when she was 17 years old. My grandfather Moshe's family lived in Travnik, and later moved to Tesanj, a small place in Bosnia. Moshe and Rahela lived in Tesanj and had a small shop. Rahela gave birth to 7 children: Salamon-Buhor, Jakob, Sabetaj, Leon, Gedalja, Ester and David. The children all left the house early; they learned a trade with friends or relatives in Travnik, Zenica and Sarajevo. When they finished their schooling, they got married, started their own families and lived in different places in Bosnia and Hercegovnia. Grandfather Moshe was sickly and he died of pneumonia around 1910. Since the children had moved away and she was left alone, Rahela decided to fulfill her longstanding wish to move to Israel and to die in the Holy Land. Her son Gedalja accompanied her to the ship, which sailed from Split.

When she arrived in Israel she educated Jewish children since she new Jewish history and how to read and write Hebrew quite well. She was in Israel when WWI broke out. Nostalgia and sadness overcame her. She was worried about her children. Unfortunately, she only managed to return to Bosnia in 1918. She died in Sarajevo in 1930. Before her death my father, my mother and my two sisters and I went to visit her. That is the first and last time I saw her. My father, David, was her youngest son and she was very close to him. I remember when we kissed her hand, first my father, then my mother and then the children and she kept repeating: "David, my sweet child."

Sometime around 1934, one could feel that bad times were coming. Fascism could already be felt in the air. After the unification of the Third Reich in 1938 (editor's note: this is how the respondent refers to the German takeover of Austria), many Jews arrived in Banja Luka from Austria. My uncle Salomon Levi took in one of these families. They left all of their property behind in Vienna. I was still too young to fully understand their situation. But, unfortunately, the hard times soon befell me too. For the 1940-41 school year I was enrolled in Prijedor. During this school year I started to have problems because my history professor was a fascist sympathizer and he always humiliated and insulted me in front of the whole grade. I cried after almost every class with him. My three school friends: Sveta Popovic, Joca Stefanovic and Milan Markovic were a great consolation to me. They would tell me: "Don't give in to him, hold your head up high, proudly, high, you are not going to let one fascist make you suffer." I listened to them. Numerus Klausus, a law which restricted the number of Jewish children who were able to go to school, had already been enacted. They carried this out especially rigorously with those boys and girls who were supposed to enroll in the higher grades of the gymnasium. At the teacher's meeting the director of my school insisted that I be thrown out, but I was lucky and my physics, geography and literature professors lobbied for me to stay. Their argument was that it would be better to dismiss a younger student who had time to transfer to some trade school rather than me. In the end they did not throw me out. I learned about this incident during the war when I met one my professors.

War broke out in 1941 and a German unit entered Drvar. Not much time passed before my father, mother and younger sister Judita, and my younger brother Moric, who was eleven, were taken to what was called a reception camp in Bosanski Petrovac by the Ustashe [Before and during WWII Ustashe were an extreme right wing political and military organization of Croatian nationalists on the German's side. They ruled Croatia from 1941-1945]. When this happened I was at my aunt's house. The Ustashe told her that she must send me to the camp but I did not go and I ran away instead. I hid in surrounding villages, however in the end I fell into the hands of the Ustashe and I suffered terribly when they took me to prison. But something happened to save me. Serbs, who were also mistreated by the Ustashe, attacked Drvar. I was liberated at that time. I immediately registered to help at the Drvar hospital. Salomon Levi, who I knew from before, worked there as a doctor. I contacted him and told him that I wanted to help in the hospital since before the war I had learned first aid in school. From that day I became a fighter against fascism. From then until 1945 I held a variety of different responsibilities and positions. Once the enemy attacked liberated territory and the people began to flee. Many mothers fled with weak children. Many children ran around like mad, fell in flames and disappeared. At the time I was in the 10th Krajiski brigade. I gathered these children, saved them from a sure death and took them back to a safe place. They were put up in a children's dormitory in Lika, which was established during the war. In honor of my effort to save as many children as possible, I was decorated with a medal of courage.

In the meantime, my parents along with Judita and Moric were supposed to be transferred from the reception camp to Jasenovac. However, my father was clever and while they were in the cattle cars waiting for the train tracks at the Prijedor station to be fixed he told my brother and sister to ask to the officers if they could use the toilet. Since there was not a normal toilet, they went a little behind the wagon and they managed to cross over the narrow-gauge railroad tracks. Shortly afterwards my parents managed to escape unnoticed and caught up with them. All four of them got on a train for Sanski Most. In Sanski Most they hid for some time; they wanted to reach Drvar because the Italians were there and they did not practice the same abuse the Germans did. With a lot of hardship they finally reached Drvar. I was ordered to stay in Drvar from the time the Italians took over to do illegal work. My father and mother spent the entire war running from place to place as liberated territories changed. My sister and brother were in the partisans.

In 1944 I caught pneumonia. The war efforts, hunger, walking, exhausted me terribly. My unit decided to transfer me to liberated territory from the medical facility. As soon as I got a little better I began to work in the youth organization in the liberated territory. This was in Bosanski Petrovac in Grahovo, in Jajce and in Travnik. At that time I was selected to be part of the top leadership for Bosnia and Hercegovina in the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Youth. My work was a great help to our army. I organized youth to help carry the wounded, to plow, dig, sow since all the food was sent to the front lines. We started a literacy course, we taught the youth many useful things and skills. For this work I was also awarded. I received a lot of recognition. I received awards for serving Bosnia and Hercegovina, for contributing to the fight, and after the war for my work with children. I was in Bugojno until 1945 when I heard that Belgrade was liberated. Naturally we were overjoyed, however all of Yugoslavia was still not liberated. Fortunately that too happened.

The members of my family and I were reunited in Sarajevo in 1945. We all came to the family house. My father was very happy that all of his children had survived and said: "Children, do not worry as long as your head is on your shoulders, we will start over and there will be everything."

After the war we children continued our schooling, we went to so-called courses for one year and finished two grades. We all finished gymnasium. School was hard, there was no paper to be used and we were all greatly impoverished, but we were all ecstatic to be liberated. The Jewish community in Sarajevo received aid from different organizations like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, so that we Jews had clothing and we received eggs, powdered milk, rice, etc. My father was very active in the Jewish community. Later he got work as the head of a shop and while at this job he found himself. He worked with such enthusiasm in this store. Frequently he told me how he wanted to teach young people that commerce could be an honest trade. Not to steal and lie. My mother Luna devoted herself to the house. She met each of us and picked each of us up. In this time of poverty and lack of food she managed to make all sort of things out of nothing. Everyone loved her. In our family house in Sarajevo she waited for each of our surviving relatives. They slept on the floors until they found something. She had to clean, do laundry and cook and she never complained, she was so happy to have her children around her.

My parents were proud of each of their children because they all finished some form of higher education. My sister Judita finished agronomy and lived in Sarajevo. She married and had a daughter Tanja. My brother Moric finished forestry faculty and at the same time went to pilot school. He married a Jewish woman named Rahela Maestro. My father was very happy that there would be at least one heir. Rahela and Moric had a son who they named after our father. My sister Flora finished a commercial academy.

In 1946, I participated in the building of the Brcko-Banovici railroad line. After finishing the work I met a wonderful young man, my current husband, Ilija Perisic. He was active in aviation. Very soon after we met we married, in 1950.My two sisters and myself all married Serbs. My father wanted Jewish son-in-laws, but nonetheless he respected our choices. My father died in 1973.

My husband went to an advanced military school and finished a degree in political science. He is very responsible; he worked hard in the air force war division. He retired as a general lieutenant colonel.

My mother was in Sarajevo during the summers because we, her children, came there on our holidays. Those were wonderful days when the family gathered together. During the winters my mother would visit the three of us in Belgrade. She died in 1993.

My husband was a pilot, an officer in the Yugoslav national army and was transferred from Sarajevo to Belgrade. In the meantime, I managed to enroll in a two year teachers' college and right when I graduated my husband was transferred to Nis. My first teaching position was in Nis. We lived in Nis seven years and at one time I worked in the Museum of National Liberation Battles.

In the meantime we had three children. While the children were small they went to stay with my parents in Sarajevo for the school holidays. My parents celebrated all the Jewish holidays, so that from a young age my children knew everything about the holidays. Since Jewish holidays in essence mark historical events of the Jewish nation, their grandfather and grandmother explained to them the importance of all the holidays. My husband and I are atheists and in our house we celebrated neither Jewish nor Serbian holidays. My children are from a mixed marriage and feel like both Jews and Serbs. My eldest son Simo, finished the construction faculty and currently works for Energoprojekt as a deputy director. He is married and his wife works as an editor at the daily newspaper Politika. They have three children: Ana, a university student studying political science, Maya a fourth grader in middle school and Djordje a high school student in the II grade. My middle son, Predrag, finished the technological faculty and has a master's degree. He is married and has two sons Nenad and Mladen both of whom are students. My youngest son, Miljenko, finished the construction faculty and works. He has a daughter, Darja, who is in the V grade of elementary school. All of my sons and their families are members of the Jewish community. Sometimes my grandchildren go with the rest of the Jewish children to the (Joint Distribution Committee/Lauder Foundation) summer camp in Hungary.

We were once again transferred to Belgrade in 1959. I became employed at the Institute for History of the Workers' Movement. I worked there processing documents from the National liberation battles until my retirement in 1969.

I get much satisfaction and joy from grandchildren. They are my greatest treasure.  

Vladimir Rabinovich
Riga
Latvia
Interviewer: Svetlana Kovalchuk
Date of interview: March 2002

In 1976, my father, Isaak Moiseevich Rabinovich, made a sketch of his paternal family tree. His family took root in Kraslava [(265 km from Riga]), in east Latvia. The family settled there at the end of the 18th century or the beginning of the 19th century, when Zalman Rabinovich was invited to become the local rabbi. According to some family legends, he had been living in Odessa [(today in Ukraine)] before that.

By the middle of the 19th century, two sons of Zalman Rabinovich lived in Kraslava - Abram-Tuvia [(Tobias]) and Samuil. That was the time of the progressive Jewish movement known as Haskalah. Both sons were extremely devoted to education, knowledge and the study of secular sciences. They no longer adhered to traditional Jewish religion. However, they observed all community norms and rules to a certain extent. Samuil was the more- educated of the brothers. He vigorously studied the Russian language, civil rules and legal standards, especially property issues. There is no information confirming that he studied in any special educational institutions. He seems to have passed examinations and become a private attorney, and in at the end of the 1870s or the beginning of the 1880s, he became a representative of a private financial establishment in Kraslava called the Russian Insurance Company. He represented that company on all kinds of insurance activityissues. He was extremely proud of his position. And for his honest, zealous service in that company, he was awarded honorary diplomas and service badges. One badge marked his 20th anniversary in service, and another, the 25th. The badges say he began working for the company in 1887.

All these family relics were kept by my father's cousin in Leningrad, who was very devoted to family traditions. In our uneasy century, she managed to keep them, and gave them to me.

Kraslava was Count Plater's family estate. The Platers attracted Jews to the area, both for trade and for crafts. They treated Jews very well and were very liberal. It seems that Zalman Rabinovich received the invitation to come to Kraslava from the Platers. Samuil was on rather good terms with Count Plater in his insurance and legal business and used to carry out various assignments for him. Count Plater gave Samuil a signet ring, which I have now, for his service in the Russian Insurance Company.

Samuil and Tobias were successful, and the local Jewish community wanted large payments from them to help support the community. There were a lot of needy people in Kraslava who wanted their financial support. But the brothers considered it burdensome. With the help of friends, their family left the Kraslava Jewish religious community and formed their own religious community, as was typical and widespread in those times. It was a small community, which entered Kraslava history under this very name. Within the family, they were focused on knowledge, education - all progressive and advanced tendencies in the European and Russian science.

Samuil Rabinovich is my great-grandfather on my mother's side. The marriage of my grandfather and my grandmother was a marriage between family members. Both brothers - Tobias and Samuil - are my great-grandfathers. Tobias's son, my grandfather, Moisei Rabinovich, married his cousin Masha Rabinovich, Samuil's daughter. Tobias, as far as I know, had various trade enterprises in Kraslava. Owing to the family's immersion in Russian culture, Russian was the language of everyday communication, although, of course, Yiddish was known, and was kept up by the wives.

Tobias married Blyuma Berkovich from Shlok [(today Sloka in Jurmala, 35 km west of Riga]). A traditional Jewish community settled in Shlok after all sorts of restrictions had been placed on Jews in Riga 1. Blyuma was famous in the family chronicle as a vigorous and striking woman. Some stories of a comic nature survived to this day. Once, shopping at the Kraslava market place, Blyuma noticed someone selling a high-quality sour cream at a very reasonable price. She didn't have suitable vessels with her. But she wanted to buy that sour cream, and potters were selling some vessels that resembled chamber-pots. She bought some of those pots, rinsed them right there, and bought the sour cream. When she brought the cream home, her family bluntly refused to eat from those pots.

Is this the same as Yurmala or a different place? Just thought I'd rather ask because you brought up the spelling of Latvian places the other day.

Tobias and Blyuma had five children, four sons and a daughter. One son was my grandfather Moisei, who became mayor of Kraslava. Before the tragic events of 1941, his sister Shterna, to whom he was very close, also lived in Kraslava. Solomon, the eldest of the sons, was a dentist and had a successful practice in Riga. In the 1920s, he was elected chairman of Riga's Jewish Dental Surgery Society. I read his obituary. He was rather well known in Riga because of his medical and public activity. One son, Isaak, had died early. In At the beginning of the century, when inflammation was a serious disease and surgical intervention was considered risky, he died of appendicitis in St. Petersburg. I have no information about Tobias's son Meyer.

Samuil also had four daughters and two sons. Samuil was married to a girl from the Grodzensky family named Zelda, from a Lithuanian borough called Kalvaria. She was from a rather intellectual environment. Samuil's daughters were particularly intelligent. All of them married and gave birth to outstanding children. Masha married her cousin, Tobias's son, Moisei. They are my grandparents.

Her sister Shifra, common name Serafima 2, married Moisei Botvinnik, who was not from Kraslava, but from the same region [(Latgale in eastern Latvia]). They had two sons. One of them, Mikhail, became the chess champion of the world. They lived in Petrograd most of the time, and it is there that the chess genius of Michael Botvinnik developed. In the 1920s and 1930s, Grandfather was closest to his relatives who had settled in Petrograd even before the World War I. The correspondence between Grandmother Masha and Serafima was regular. Mikhail Botvinnik was then studying to become an electrical engineer. Among his teachers was a professor of geometry, from a family of Armenian descent, who had a rather attractive daughter, Ganna [(Gayane Davidovna]), a student at the Vaganov ballet school. Mikhail fell in love with her.

The repressions of the 1930s 3 did n'ot touch my Leningrad relatives. The daughter of the great chess player, Olga, lives in Moscow now. She was born in the summer of 1941. They managed to leave Leningrad on what was literally the last train before the blockade 4 started. She graduated from the Moscow Power Institute, specializing in computer science and computer devices. She married a good Russian man named Fioshkin, an engineer, and they have two children, Yura and Lena. And these children also have children. I used to visit them, and they came to Riga several times. Now our contacts are less frequent. I know Olga very well, but I don't have direct contacts with her children any more.

I added the entries for Great Terror and Blockade of Leningrad here.

Another one of Samuil's daughters, Bella, married Solomon Konnikov. Their daughter Ida became the main archivist of our family and, thanks to her, plenty of relics survived: photos, family silver, Samuil's memorabilia. Sofia, another of Samuil's daughters, was the grandmother of one of our prominent public figures - Alexander Bergman, the lawyer. Samuil's son Alexander married a girl from the Adelberg family, which owned a large bookshop in Dvinsk [(today Daugavpils, 230 km south east of Riga]). Their daughter, Lia Alexandrovna, married a man named Gromov and left for the United States. We write to each other constantly. She has two sons - Vladimir and Mikhail. Mikhail Gromov, the son of Lia Alexandrovna, is a mathematician, a member of the French Academy, and lives in Paris.

My grandfather on my father's side was Moisei Rabinovich, Tobias's son. He was born in 1883. He received a double name Moisei-Abram Rabinovich. But he is known as Moisei. Father's parents, Moisei and Masha, got married under a chuppah, I think. They lived in Kraslava. Father, the first son, was born in 1911. He was named in honor of grandfather's brother. In 1923, their second son Samuil-Alexander was born. At that time, educated people didn't want to emphasize their Jewish roots, so he was named Alexander.

Moisei was known for his commitment to education and patriotism and love for his native city. In their house they had a large collection of Russian educational literature, in particular the Pavlenkov Library, all sorts of enlightening editions, which Moisei digested and studied in the most steadfast way. He tried to obtain knowledge in both natural sciences and humanities. Because of his desire to help his compatriots, he chose the pharmaceutical business as his profession. It was a popular field of business for many natives of the Lithuanian and Vitebsk territories, to which Kraslava belonged at the time. The position of pharmacist required a higher education, a diploma of a medical faculty. It was possible to become an assistant pharmacist if you prepared for examinations independently. This is what Moisei Rabinovich did. I suppose he passed the exam in the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg.

Thanks to Count Plater, a power station was built in Kraslava in the 1910s to illuminate the streets. Moisei Rabinovich was one of the managers of that municipal power station. He possessed enough knowledge of natural sciences and sufficient experience to manage it.

During the World War I, when population was evacuated to central Russia, Grandfather Samuil moved to his family, in Petrograd [Leningrad in Ssoviet times, now and earlier St. Petersburg], together with the family relics. In 1917-1918, they again moved to Kraslava. At that time, industrial equipment had been transported deep into Russian territory, lest it be seized by the Germans. Moisei followed the power station to Oryol region of Russia. You see, Kraslava stood on the route of the famous Riga-Oryol railway, which was an important economic line.

In 1990, I started to study the files of the Kraslava city administration in the Latvian historical archive. That is how I learned what happened to Grandfather Moisei, from approximately 1920. My father's family returned from Oryol to Kraslava in May or June 1921. They immediately found that the city was dominated by members of the Polish community, who were partly supported by Count Plater. Although the Plater family acknowledged its Polish origins, the family believed they wereas rather indirect. In 1921, it appeared that Moisei Rabinovich was the most authoritative representative, by any historical standards, of the Jewish community in Kraslava, a powerful and important public figure in the eyes of the numerous national groups. So he was put forward for municipal activity from the moment he returned to Kraslava, when local self-management was being restored. Kraslava didn't have the status of a city, but the uncertain status of a borough.

Moisei was elected a member of municipal administration and started to handle all the complex issues of municipal economy. From the summer of 1921 until the autumn fall of 1932, he was a member of Kraslava's municipal administration. He first was vice-mayor; later, he was the mayor. For eleven years, his life was wholly and completely connected with municipal self-management. The year 1932, if I can say so, was an anticipation of the state coup of 1934 53, which took place in Kraslava. In autumn fall of 1932, the elected city council decided that Moisei did n'ot have the proper influence with the central authorities in Riga, and thus generous financing didn't materialize, and it was necessary to select another head of the city. So he was discharged.

Until the Soviet times 64, Moisei led a private life. He returned to the pharmaceutical business in the Soviet times. He was appointed the manager of a drugstore in thea small town of Ezernieki, near Kraslava, where he met his death. Moisei, Masha and their son Samuil Alexander were killed in 1941 75.

What were the brightest moments in the activity of Moisei Rabinovich in his public post? Immediately after assuming office in 1921, he was designated, as a man known for his honesty and skill in financial affairs, a supervisor of all municipal finance. Moisei put forward the initiative for Kraslava to obtain the status of a city. And he had submitted that initiative to the authorities in the first days of 1922. He wrote a report for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with his proposal that Kraslava get the status of a city. That hand-written report is in the state archive. His initiative was supported by the then prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, Zigfrid Meyerovits, who gave the green light to the initiative. One of the first decrees of President Janis Chakste [(first President of independent Latvia]) 86 in 1923 was to confirm Kraslava's status as a city. Grandfather is said to have put forward the idea of the creation of the Kraslava city emblem - a boat with five oars, symbolizing the five main ethnic groups of Kraslava: Jews, Poles, Russians, Latvians and Belarusians. Moisei was a proponent of electrification and put his greatest efforts toward two things - the Kraslava power station and the work of public schools under the supervision of municipal government. He entered into discussion of problems of the Jewish school, when Janis Rainis, the famous Latvian poet, became the minister of education of Latvia. The two men had certain differences of opinion, but they also reached agreements.

My grandfather was an educated man; therefore he didn't find it appropriate to go to the synagogue or observe the fast. He had moved rather far from the traditional Jewish religious principles. I have no such information, but, maybe, his wife adhered to some Jewish traditions. They were honest people and therefore lived with difficulties and sometimes even poorly. And that poor life prevented them from strict following of Jewish traditions.

My father, Isaak Moiseevich Rabinovich, finished the Kraslava grammar school in 1927. He was under a very strong psychological influence of his father, but they had certain problems in their relationships. In 1927, Father entered the Mechanics faculty of the Latvian University in Riga. And under the influence of his father, he chose the profession of practical engineering. But he graduated not from the Mechanics one, but from the Physics and Mathematics faculty and as late as 1945!

My father took part in public activities, like Grandfather. From the beginning of the 1930s he worked in the Bund 9 in Riga. He did n'ot join leftist radicals or the underground Komsomol [107] groups, but was oriented toward the social-democratic movement, Bund. He was an active member of the Bund students' social-democratic union 'Zukunft.'. He was an active worker for hospital mutual aid funds, was a bookkeeper and auditor. Father was the coordinator of a successful strike of retail trade workers in 1933, which is known as the 'Yakhnin conflict.'. That strike succeeded because of the workers' solidarity. They forced the shop owners to increase workers' wages. Father was punished for his activity.

I put the entry we have for Bund here.

During the revolution in Latvia in May 1934, he was among the people who were subjected to security arrest. Along with many social-democratic workers, he was jailed in the Central Prison for about three months. He was released on condition that he sign a statement obliging him to quit public activity. My father signed. When his imprisonment ended, he put aside his student's exemption and served his term in the Latvian army. His studies at the university advanced very slowly. AtIn the end of 1937, he left the army and became a private teacher of Mathematics. The demand for private tutors was probably connected to the decisions of the Karlis Ulmanis [118] government, which required that students pass examinations in the Latvian language to obtain a secondary school certificate. Father knew Russian and Latvian. He became a highly demanded teacher of Mathematics. He earned good money from 1937 through 1939 by preparing students for examinations in the Latvian language. Father told me that in that period they met in a narrow circle to study Marxist literature and, in particular, the works of Plekhanov [129].

I changed the two entries that were here originally to the ones from our current list.

When he studied at the Ffaculty of Physics and Mathematics at the university, he made many friends. He became acquainted with Vladimir Feigman, the son of the auditor of the Ministry of Finance. The man was from a Russian-Lithuanian-Latvian family. My mother, Dora [(Dvoira)] Alperovich, and my father met because they were in Feigman's circle. It is a romantic story! Vladimir Feigman took a great interest in photography, and his friends helped him develop snapshots. My mother and father became acquainted in a dark room, printing photos, in the autumn fall of 1939. Mother had been on a short trip to Paris to visit some friends. The trip was suddenly interrupted by the beginning of World War II. It was only with the help of the Latvian Consulate in Paris that she managed to escape from France in the autumn fall of 1939. It was a happy turn of events, good luck for her.

Mother was born in 1912 in a small Belarusian town, Postavy. She studied Economics by herself. When she was older, she used to reproach herself saying that she didn't have the persistence to acquire a diploma. By character, she was more of a family woman, a housewife.

My parents got married rather quickly - on the eve of the New Year of 1940. Their marriage was officially registered by the Latvian state. Mother sometimes recalled that her family, especially my grandfather Ber Alperovich, was quite religious. In his youth, he received an advanced Jewish religious education, and he zealously adhered to traditions. To please her parents, Father agreed to undergo some kind of a procedure that corresponds to the Jewish religious marriage. He was skeptical of any and all religious traditions, including Jewish ones. But after the events of summer 1940 [130], his professional business underwent changes, and Father became more or less tolerant of all that. He was about to graduate, was in his last year in the university, and simultaneously he got a job teaching the preparatory courses at the university.

I know nothing about my grandfather and grandmother on Mother's side. Mother's family language was Yiddish. There were three sisters and three brothers. It was a famous family here in Riga. Ber Alperovich, Mother's father, was known by his Russian name - Boris Alperovich. Grandmother Tsipe Alperovich [nee Tager] was from Jakobstadt [(today called Jekabpils, 143 km east of Riga]). The family legend says that when Grandfather Ber was traveling as a salesman in the region of Kurlandia [( today Kurzeme, western Latvia)], Kovensky province, he once came to Jakobstadt and saw a very healthy, plump girl with bright pink cheeks. He thought, 'This girl is exactly what I want for my wife.' And she became his wife. In the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, Grandmother suffered from diabetes and was sent once a year for a one-month treatment in Bikur Holim [141] in Riga.

Their family was very large. During World War II Grandmother was evacuated with all her family and died in Uni Kirov (today Vyatka in Russia), Kirov region, where I was born. She died one month after my birth. My grandfather returned from evacuation and is buried at the Jewish cemetery in Smerli, Riga.

I changed this according to the info given in the tree.

The whole Alperovich family had its roots in thea Polish-Belarusian town of Postavy. The older brother, Ovsei Alperovich, settled in Riga atin the beginning of the 20th century. In the early 1920s, during an economic upsurge, three Alperovich brothers had settled in Riga - Ovsei, Ber and Natan. They decided to organize a joint venture - a small wholesale company to supply flour and other necessities to bakeries. Small private bakeries were a rather widespread phenomenon in all of Latvia. And that firm was called Obonat, the abbreviation from the names of the three brothers - Ovsei, Boris, Natan.

Most members of Ovsei and Natan's family became victims of Fascism. Natan's entire family perished. Ovsei's daughter, Tatiana Ovseievna Mikelson, managed to evacuate. Mother was especially close with that family. Tatiana was ten years older thaen Mother. A native of Riga, she guided Mother through Riga's life, Riga's customs.

Mother's name was Dvoira, but under the German-Russian influence, she was registered as Dora in the official documents. Mother was the eldest sister of her family. She received a secondary education in a grammar school in Riga where the language of instruction was Yiddish. The director of that school was Isaak Bers, a rather active figure of the social-democratic movement, loyal to the Latvian republic. Such liberal spirit was characteristic of that grammar school, where the representatives of democratic Jewish circles of Riga studied. The school was in Gertrudes Street. Mother and her sister Lia had numerous acquaintances from that school. Mother finished grammar school in at the beginning of the 1930s. Mother worked in Obonat as a shop assistant and kept business documents. In that practical way, she became a qualified bookkeeper.

Lia graduated from the Latvian conservatory at the time of the first Latvian republic, in the 1930s. Her first husband's family name was Vulfson; her second spouse's name was Churilin. From the first marriage, she had a daughter named Kira; from the second, a daughter daughter named Alla. In the Soviet period, Lia was a very good concertmaster, but she lost her hearing and retired early. She now lives in Israel. The third sister was Reisen [(common name Rose]). She died in Israel. Naum, Mother's older brother, died in the war in 1943.

This sister isn't mentioned in the tree, I added her there.

Her second brother, Vulf Alperovich [(1904-1976]), studied at the Latvian University, then the Faculty of Law, from which he graduated in 1935. Vulf Alperovich got married in 1949 to his close friend from pre-war times, Eida Isaevna [(nee Berkovich]). She has her own story. She was married to Iosif Peretsman, one of our Riga acquaintances, a famous Jewish Komsomol leader, who in at the beginning of the 1930s set off to build the city of Birobidzhan [1512] with a group of Jewish Komsomol members. He was the editor of a Komsomol newspaper there, but in 1937, at the time of the Stalinist persecutions, 13 he was arrested and perished. His wife seized their son and fled from Birobidzhan, through all of Siberia, and reached her brother in Leningrad. In 1945, when her former husband disappeared, she turned up in Riga and met Vulf Borisovich. She was a really beautiful and elegant woman. They got married.

I took out the glossary entry for Great Terror here because I already put it earlier in the story.

Mother's younger brother, Grisha, or Grigory [(Jewish name Girsh]), received an education in textiles industries engineering. He went especially for that purpose to Brno, Slovakia, and with that specialization he got a very good position in Riga. Oriented toward a secular environment, Grisha wanted the family to live in a prestigious apartment. His sisters were grown girls by that time, and he was convinced that a prestigious apartment would attract the young people and facilitate the girls' chances for successful marriages. He filed lots of requests with the manager of one fashionable house at 40 Brivibas Street, convincing him to lease a rather large and convenient apartment to the family. Around 1935, the family moved to that apartment, which had five rooms and a room for maids, near the kitchen. They had a maid the whole time Mother's family lived atin 40 Brivibas Street. Both Vulf and Grigory Borisovich were still single then.

Then the war began. Our family was lucky to evacuate to Russia on 27th June 1941, to the city of Kirov, where a lot of trains with refugees from Latvia were going. Mother was pregnant with me then. We were assigned to the village of Uni, far from the railway line. I was born there in November 1941. Father was given a position of Mathematics teacher in the local school. In August, Latvian military regiments were being formed [164]. All men were sent to those Gorohovetski camps, where Latvian rifle battalions were formed. Father was in artillery, was given thea rank of senior sergeant and assigned the tasks of a military topographer. He participated in all the battles in which the Latvian division took part, including the famous Narofominsk fights. In the spring of 1942 he found himself in Staraya Russa, where conditions were very harsh and the soldiers didn't have enough food.

On one mission, Father was wounded and sent to hospital, in the town of Ostashkovo on Lake Seliger. Once, while he was recovering and reading a book on Physics, Kolbanovsky, a front-line doctor, approached Father and asked if he could maintain X-ray and other equipment. There were very few experts capable of maintaining that sort of equipment. Father immediately agreed. It was not difficult to transfer him from the ranks of the Latvian rifle division to the appropriate military-medical unit, where he quickly became an expert technician. Around the autumn fallof 1942, Father obtained the rank of lieutenant-engineer. His further service was connected with military-medical units. He was dismissed from service in the rank of senior lieutenant.

My father was with the Steppe Front in 1943, and later with the Second Ukrainian Front. When Father was at the Second Ukrainian Front, he was appointed assistant to the chief surgeon of that front, a Soviet medical doctor named Elansky. He went with this unit through Moldova and Hungary. In May 1945, he was somewhere in the Protectorate of Bohemia. During the entire period of his military service, Father did n'ot get a leave. Right after his demobilization in August 1945, Father passed his graduation exams at the Latvian University, which had been interrupted in June 1941.

In the post-war years, my father was completely absorbed in official pedagogical work. He was a professor of Mathematics, worked in the higher education system by correspondence and in evening courses. We had a huge scientific library at home. Father taught Mathematics, but later he became a scientific researcher at the Astrophysics laboratory of the Academy of Sciences. Father was an outstanding popularizer of Mathematics and Astronomy for wide circles of population. He is the author of a great number of publications - 186 written works. Detailed information about his scientific career was published in the book 'From the History of Natural Sciences and Engineering in the Baltic States'.

In Uni, while we were in evacuation, Grandfather worked as a weigher. But the main means by which we subsisted was my father's officer's certificate. The men who served in the acting army got certain allowances for their families.

How happy we were to hear the news of the liberation of Riga on radio when we were in Uni! And after that message, the whole family started to anticipate going back to Riga. Vulf, who was an administrator of industry in the government of the Latvian Soviet republic, was released from the army. He was ordered to return to the liberated Riga along with other industrial managers. He arrived in Riga in October 1944. We returned to Riga in January 1945.

Vulf set off to 40 Brivibas Street, from which the whole family left for evacuation in June 1941. As soon as he stepped in the courtyard, he was met by the caretaker of the house, carrying the keys of the apartment. Everything indicated that an important official of the German administration had been staying in the apartment, probably the chief of the German security service. The apartment was very well equipped, with a lot of beautiful furniture - not the furniture our family left. There were solid stoves and tile furnaces that had n'ot been there before. An ordinary family could have hardly afforded such substantial heating. There were many magnificent, multivolume publications in the apartment: encyclopedias, books on art, atlases. All publications were of a German nationalistic character, but you couldn't say that those books were Nazi propaganda. There also were numerous sets of Fascist newsreels in the apartment. The children who returned to the apartment started to play with those bobbins of films. However, the men realized that these chronicles could be of interest to the Peoples' Commissariat of Internal Affairs. All these films were given to the appropriate authorities without much fuss. Some of that literature was burned in furnaces.

My father had strict Soviet-type views on labor and family life: Everyone in the family should work, and a child should receive a public Soviet education. Right after returning to Riga, Mother mobilized all her knowledge of accounting. With the assistance of Vulf, who was a lawyer with the Ministry of Light Industry, Mother got a job in that ministry. When I was nine, I was ill with a lung disease. To nurse me through that illness, Mother left work, and for a year or a year and a half, she was occupied only with the household. When my health recovered, she was close to pension age and started to work as a bookkeeper. We had no nannies. I used to go to Pioneer camps [175]. We had a summer cottage in the period when I was sick, when I needed to get rid of that lung disease. Now I feel nostalgic each time when I think of those beautiful places in Jurmala, not far from Riga.

See my question regarding spelling before

I was an only child. I had comfortable conditions at home. Father sharply criticized me quite often for my various mistakes and lack of self-control, but Mother was softer. In general, there was a favorable family atmosphere that enhanced my success. I finished a standard Soviet school - a Riga secondary school. I entered the mathematical branch of the faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Latvian University. After graduation, I started to work as a programmer in the computer center of the Latvian University, and I quickly was assigned to this center [186]. I served in the army for one year, in the Leningrad military district. After the army [197], I continued to work in the university's computer center. Then I was transferred to the computer center at the State Committee on Supplies. It coincided with my idea of getting married. I began to get a higher salary and, with that salary, I could present myself in a more favorable light as a groom. But I was not satisfied with my marriage.

I was dismissed from my job in 1980, but not because of my nationality. I didn't feel any open pressure because I was a Jew [2018]. All that was hidden, latent. After I was dismissed, I didn't work. I was n'ot looking for any job. I was a moderate dissident. My non-conformity manifested itself in responding to newspaper publications, writing political articles to some newspapers. I had an especially active correspondence in 1982 with the Moscow newspaper 'The Soviet Culture.'. With my public activity from the beginning of 1980, I was very close to the public opinion that resulted in the so-called perestroika [2119] reforms in the late 1980s.

I am a rank and file member of the Latvian Association of the Jewish Culture [220] and I regularly pay the fees. I was n'ot among the founders of the association. I joined the organization in 1990, and all my work is now connected with this society.

In the Soviet times Mother used to call the office of the Riga religious community and ask when Pesach and Rosh Hashanah would fall, according to the official religious calendar. And we had some traditional Jewish meals on these days. But she didn't go to the synagogue. She died in 1985. Mother and Father are buried at the Jewish cemetery in Riga.

Since I grew up under the strong influence of my Father, I do not go to the synagogue, I am completely secular. I remember my grandfather Ber a little bit. He regularly visited the synagogue together with his friends - the believing Jews. He stayed in the same track all his life and didn't swerve from it. None of his children really inherited his religious zeal. Out of respect for their parents, they observed certain traditions, but no more than that. Mother's brother Grigory, who was inclined to humor and comic behavior, sometimes pretended that he adhered to traditions. In the 1960s and 1970s, he used to go to the synagogue, but his sisters made fun of him.

A funny but not very pleasant political story happened to Vulf Borisovich when de-Stalinization began [231]. In 1940, he joined the Communist Party and, in general, he was a very pro-Soviet man. Mother always remembered his exclamation: 'What a remarkable country we live in!' His pro-Soviet views ripened as early as the 1930s in Riga, with the so-called 'Acadsoyuz' - a Jewish Communist students union. It was founded in 1930-34, and was a more or less underground organization before the Ulmanis revolution on 15th May 1934. In 1957, Vulf and his friends decided that all Stalinist restrictions passed into history. They resolved to invite their pre-war 'Acadsoyuz' friend from the 1930s, who was then living in Paris, to reminisce about their Komsomol youth. But it turned out that the KGB [242] was permanently spying on their friend, who had just arrived. In 1958, the whole company was charged with a severe accusation - failing to inform the appropriate Party bodies of their plan to meet a Western representative. That meeting took place at Vulf's apartment. Mother was at that meeting but, as she was n'ot a member of the Party, she was n'ot accused. Vulf was expelled from the Party and dismissed from the Bar of Lawyers. In the 1960s, he filed petitions with several congresses of the Communist Party, asking them to restore him, but all the petitions were rejected. Otherwise, his reputation was irreproachable. He had good relations with the executives of the ministerial administrations, and he became a lawyer with some industrial enterprise.

This whole story affected his daughter Ira in such a way that she grew up with a completely different orientation - not a dissident, but definitely a bourgeois. In 1979, she left for America. She is an entirely material woman. She decided that, being a good engineer, she would go to America and earn a lot of money. She has a son, Michael. Seeing that Michael could n'ot arrange his personal life, they went to China and found a Chinese girl to be his wife. This is what I call the American way! The meeting of civilizations!

Glossary

Yakov Driz
Kiev
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ella Levitskaya

My family background
Growing up
School years
During the war
Post-war
Anti-Semitism
Married life
Glossary

My family background

I was born in the town of Tomashpol, in the Vinnitsa region of
Ukraine, on 3 July 1937. I was given the name Shloima-Yankel, in honor of
both my grandfathers. The origin of our family name Driz is as follows: In
the 1700s my great grandfather was to enlist in a 25-year term of service
in the tsarist army. Such military service was very difficult, and so to
spare him this hardship, his family decided to hide him somewhere far away
from Tomashpol. Since he had no education and could barely write out
Gaisinskiy, his last name, they decided to give him a new last name. They
just made one up, and all his descendants were called by this new family
name - Driz.

Shloima Driz, my father's father, was born in 1860. All I know about
him is what my parents told me, as he died before I was born. My
grandfather was an educated man for his time. He could play the violin, he
loved music, and he read a lot. He owned a store that sold all kinds of
merchandise - from food products to fabrics and shoes. My father worked as
a clerk in my grandfather's store. From time to time my grandfather took
business trips abroad. He usually traveled to Poland, where he purchased
fabrics. In 1920 the Soviet power expropriated my grandfather's store. My
grandfather couldn't overcome this shock. He contracted tuberculosis and
died in 1921.

My grandmother Eheived (this was her real name, and she was also
called Eva), born Averbuch, was a modest, religious woman. The family lived
in Tomashpol, one of many Jewish towns in the Vinnitsa region. My
grandmother was born the same year as my grandfather. My grandmother
Eheived starved to death in 1933 during the famine in the Ukraine1. Like
my grandfather, she was buried at the Jewish cemetery in accordance with
all Jewish traditions. She gave birth to ten children, eight of which
survived. My father, Abram Driz, born in 1884, was the oldest. The youngest
was Boris (Borukh) Driz, born in 1904. The difference between their ages
was 20 years. I can't remember all of my father's brothers and sisters, but
I can tell briefly about those I knew. One of his brothers, Nuhim, was an
active revolutionary and a Komsomol activist2. In 1919 he was killed in
Kiev while trying to escape from prison. He may have been killed by a
Denikin gang3. Another brother, Shmul or Samuel, was a poet. He and two
sisters who were dentists moved to the United States of America in 1919 or
1920. My father was not able to move to America with his brother and his
sisters, because as the oldest of the children, he had to support his
family by working, and did not have the opportunity to continue his
education. My father had only a primary school religious education. There
were two other brothers - I can't remember their names. One of the brothers
lived in Odessa. I don't know what he did to earn a living. In 1941 he and
his family - his wife Rieva and his daughter Tsylia perished in the Odessa
ghetto. His second brother - I don't remember his name - lived in
Privokzalnaya Street in Vinnitsa. Like my father, he was uneducated, and
worked as loader and carrier at the market to support his wife and two
children. They were killed by the Germans in 1941. Boris, my father's
younger brother, served in the Soviet army and then resumed his
agricultural studies, graduating from Moscow's Academy of Agriculture. He
enjoyed farming. Later, he became director of the first vehicle and tractor
maintenance facility in the Ukraine, located in the Odessa region. When the
war began he went to the front. In 1945 he served in the Soviet army in
Eastern Prussia. From there he was transferred to the Japanese front.
Later, the Ministry of Agriculture requested his return, as he was an
experienced specialist. He became director of the selection facility for
grain crops. He became Chief Agriculture Specialist in the Ulianovsk
region. Boris spent his last years in Ulianovsk, where he died in the
1960s.

Yiddish was spoken in my father's family, which was religious. They
always celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays and strictly observed all
Jewish traditions. My grandmother, Eheived, followed the kashruth and often
went to the synagogue. My father told me that they had beautiful Pesach
dishes in the house.

My parents married in 1917. My mother's name was Tsypa; her family
name was Zeltser. She was born in the Jewish town of Miastkovka - now
Gorodovka - not far from Vinnitsa, in 1893. The only thing I know about my
mother's parents is that her father's name was Yankel. After their wedding
my parents moved to Tomashpol. My mother's parents died before I was born.
My mother often told me that she was a granddaughter of the Miastkovka
rabbi, even at that time when it was dangerous to mention such facts. They
had three daughters in the family. My mother was the youngest. Their oldest
daughter, Haika, born in 1890 moved to the village of Velikays Kostnitsa
near Bessarabia, in the Vinnitsa region, on the Dnestr River. My aunt's
husband worked at the local mill. They had no children. At the beginning of
the war Aunt Haika's husband went to the front. There, he fell in love
with a nurse and never returned to my aunt after the war. She moved to
Tomashpol and lived there with my parents until she died. The second sister
was born in 1892. I don't remember her name. She and her husband David
Krivoviaz died during some epidemic. They had a daughter named Manya. My
parents took Manya to live with us, and she stayed until she got married.
We spoke Yiddish in our family. The daughters were educated at home, and
didn't go to school, but had private teachers teach them to read and write,
as well as the rules of conduct in society, good manners and foreign
languages - German, French.

My mother was very well educated for her time, she could read, write,
and even knew Latin. She worked at the drugstore before she got married.
She had beautiful handwriting. My mother learned to play the guitar before
she got married. When I was small Mama liked to sing a certain song in
Yiddish, accompanying herself on her guitar. This song was played at her
wedding. I remember some rhymes from this song in Yiddish: "Der shnei ist
geyongen drai Teig der Hanond", which means "It snowed 3 days in a row...",
etc. Later this guitar lay broken in our attic, but my mother couldn't
bring herself to throw it away. My mother didn't have a perfect voice, but
she was very musical.

My parents met in a very typical manner for their time. My mother was
living in Miastkovka and my father lived in Tomashpol. At that time, there
were people called "shathen" in Yiddish, who were engaged in matching
couples. They told my father's parents about a girl from a good family who
was of age to get married. My parents were introduced to each other and
soon married. They had a traditional Jewish wedding with a huppah. My
father was a shy, hard-working man. My mother told me that she liked him at
once. After the wedding, my father worked at grandfather's store for some
time. Later, after the store was expropriated, he went to work as a laborer
at the Tomashpol sugar factory. My parents had no children for almost ten
years. I was born on 3 July 1927 when my father was 43. In two years' time,
on 25 June 1929, my sister Polia was born.

Growing up

I remember my town, Tomashpol, since about 1933, when I was six. My
grandmother died at this time and this was during the period of famine in
the Ukraine. I remember seeing in the streets people swollen from
starvation. Some were still alive, but couldn't get up, and others were
already dead. All corpses were put on a horse-driven cart and taken away.
We were very poor. I remember my mother going to the market on
Sundays. She used to buy one glass of sour cream. We spread it on slices of
bread in very thin layers. But that sour cream didn't last long, and too
quickly, my sister and I found ourselves looking forward to the next
Sunday. My father continued working at the sugar factory. I knew the way to
the factory, so almost every day, mother sent me out to bring lunch to my
father. With spades, father and the other laborers packaged sugar in bags,
sealed them and loaded them on racks. At night, to earn some extra money,
my father worked as a night watchman.

In 1932, to save the family from starving to death, my parents had to
move to a village in the Kryzhopol district. There they got a job at the
mill. Father was paid with grain and this saved our family from starvation.
My sister and I stayed behind with grandmother and grandfather in
Tomashpol. My grandfather left us a house. There were three rooms and a
cellar where we kept food products and wood. It was a solid, warm wooden
house. My grandfather also left us some furniture. I remember a huge
cupboard with bunches of grapes carved on the doors. There was a shed in
the yard. During the occupation, when we were moved to the ghetto, our
houses remained empty, and people from neighboring villages removed windows
and doors and everything that was left in the houses. Later, the remains of
our house were removed to serve as firewood for heating the German and
Rumanian commandant's offices. It turned out that they sent people from the
ghetto to do this work, and I was among those who were sent to remove our
house. We were to take the wood to the gendarmerie. Chopping this wood was
a very difficult job. The house was made of hard oak beams and we had only
blunt saws with which to chop the beams into firewood.

My parents were religious. They went to the synagogue once a week, on
Friday. I remember there were two synagogues in Tomashpol. The big one was
called "Bes midrash". When I was five or six years old the authorities
closed and then removed this synagogue. But people kept coming to this
place like to the Wailing Wall to pray. The other synagogue was smaller
and was near our house. It was a long, one-story building with a basement.
On holidays they took the Torah out of this basement. Children carried the
Torah on holidays. My father had a thales and a tefillin at home. When I
reached the age of thirteen, my parents arranged a Bar Mitzwvahu for me,
and the rabbi conducted the ritual. We had many people at home on this day
- many friends and relatives came to the party. My mother lit candles every
Friday to pray. My father also prayed.
We also had ceders, everything that a traditional Jewish family would
have. I asked my father four traditional questions. I remember them until
now.
We observed all Jewish holidays at home. I especially remember Pesach
and Hanukkah. Pesach was a very festive holiday. When we were small they
took special dishes from the attic for Pesah festivities and we always
looked forward to these days. We got used to our dishes in the course of
the year and it was so exciting to view patterns on our Pesah dishes. A few
days before Pesach my parents and I went to buy flour - one and a half
pounds (one pound - 16 kg). We took this flour to the house where they
baked Matzoh. Jewish women worked there. They made dough and baked Matzoh
in big ovens. We always looked forward to eating Matzoh. We took a big bag
of Matzoh from the bakery home. During Pesach we helped our mother to make
flourt from this Matzoh. Later, Mama made delicious biscuits, cookies, and
pancakes that were called latkes from this flour. My mother cooked
traditional Pesach dishes: stuffed fish, clear chicken soup with dumplings
made from Matzoh and eggs, chicken neck stuffed with liver, and strudels
with nuts and raisins. We also had seder dinners at Pesach, everything that
a traditional Jewish family would have. I asked my father the four
traditional questions4. I remember them even now.

I also remember Hanukkah - my sister and I got some change from our
relatives on this day. We could buy some ice cream or toys with this money.
We always looked forward to Hanukkah, because, as I said, we were poor. And
some small change to buy an ice cream or a ticket to the cinema was a quite
an amount for us.

About 80% of the population in Tomashpol was Jewish. There were
Ukrainian villages near Tomashpol: Tomashpilka and Beloye. We children
went to one and the same school. Many Ukrainian children from the
neighboring families and my classmates knew Yiddish. They often came to
our house and we talked in Yiddish. There were no Jews left in Tomashpol
after the Great Patriotic War. Many of them were killed, the rest of them
left, but many people living there still speak fluent Yiddish and remember
Yiddish songs. We cared not about the nationality in those years. I mean,
we were aware that we were Jews and they were Ukrainian Christians and
there were gypsies nearby, but we never focused on it.

School years

In 1934, when I was seven, I went to the Jewish school. Children were
supposed to start school at eight, but I was eager to study. My cousin
Manya decided to help me. Manya was older than I and she studied at school.
She took me to the director and said that my mother had typhoid and had
asked her to accept me into the first grade Of course, this was a lie but
Manya told me to keep silent about it. Manya said that I was eight years
old already, but that we couldn't bring my birth certificate as it was
under my mother's pillow. The director didn't want to see my birth
certificate after she heard that my mother had typhoid. So I went to
school. I was the youngest in my class, but I did well in all subjects. All
subjects were taught in Yiddish. We even read the books of Russian writers
translated into Yiddish. However, we didn't have any subjects related to
Jewish tradition or history. We studied all the typical subjects taught at
any other Soviet school. Our school was the best in the neighborhood.
Teachers paid much attention to our involvement in after-class activities.
We had three orchestras, a choir that had Jewish and Ukrainian songs in its
repertoire, and a theatrical studio. We had a club where we had concerts
and performances. There were two Ukrainian schools in Tomashpol - secondary
and primary. Schoolchildren from these schools often came to our club.
There was no national segregation.

I studied for four years in the Jewish school. Unfortunately, in 1937
my parents transferred me to the Ukrainian school. The majority of children
from our school went there, too. There were no schools where we could
continue our education in Yiddish. After finishing Jewish school one had to
enter a Ukrainian or Russian institution for higher education. At that time
we didn't quite realize that it was the policy of our state to destroy
nationalistic priorities. I was successful at my Ukrainian school as well.
All pupils from the Jewish school spoke fluent Yiddish and Ukrainian. We
had a benevolent reception at our new Ukrainian school. Half of the
schoolchildren in our class were Jewish and the rest of them were
Ukrainian, from Tomashpol and the surrounding villages. I had both Jewish
and Ukrainian boys as friends. I still have a Ukrainian friend from my
childhood - Tolya Pokynchereda, who now lives in Chernigov.

I was eager to become a Pioneer. I didn't become a Pioneer while
attending the Jewish school, but when I went to the Ukrainian school I put
on a red necktie and from then on I acted like a Pioneer.

My mother was a rabbi's granddaughter and she wanted me to become a
rabbi's pupil, to study Hebrew and prayers. Rabbi Yankl came to our house
two days at week to teach me. I knew Yiddish and there is some resemblance
between Yiddish and Hebrew. I learned to read and then the rabbi began to
teach me to translate. I was learning some prayers by heart. I still
remember them. It lasted until I bumped into an astronomy textbook for
senior students, where I learned more about the world, and where what I
learned didn't quite agree with what the rabbi was telling me. I believed
that God created the world in six days but I also knew that there were
other planets besides the Earth, and other galaxies. The rabbi wasn't
always happy with what I was learning, but he continued to visit us until
he grew too old. Thus, we terminated our classes in 1936.

In 1936 disaster came to our family. I mentioned already that we were
very poor. Once Mama said that they would be selling the cheapest black
cotton in our store. We were standing in line the whole night taking turns.
A few hours after the store opened my mother came home, bringing 10 meters
of this cotton, with which she intended to make some clothing for us. In a
month's time someone suggested that my mother should sell this cotton for
20 kopecks more per meter than she had bought it. We needed money, and so
she sold the cotton. But someone informed the local authorities, and my
mother was arrested and taken to court. It was an open court, to show
others what punishment people would be subject to. For selling 10 meters of
cotton, my mother was sentenced to five years at the camp in Kem in the
Kolskiy peninsula in the North of the Soviet Union. I was in the second
grade then. My sister Polya didn't go to school yet. Aunt Haika, my
mother's older sister, took Polya into her family. I stayed with my father
and my cousin Manya. Then a new judge was appointed. His name was Fedyuk.
Manya arranged an appointment with him and told him that my mother had been
sentenced for nothing, actually, and that my father was left alone to take
care of two children. My father could hardly earn enough money to feed us.
The judge came to our home to see how we lived. He asked me whether I could
write. I told him that I was in the second grade and could write. Then the
judge said that we should write a letter to Stalin. He dictated the letter,
and I wrote "Dear Mr. Stalin ...." I wrote that my mother was sentenced to
five years in prison for selling some fabric, and that our father was
raising two children, and told him how poor we were, etc. At the end of
this letter I was asking Stalin to release my mother. A few months passed
and my mother returned home. She had spent about nine months in the camp.
She was very thin and took to smoking. We were happy to have our mother
back. However, my sister was living with her Aunt, and liked it there, and
stayed. Until 1940 there were four of us: my father, my mother, Manya and
I. In 1940 Manya married a young Jewish man from Tomashpol and moved in
with him. Then before the war my sister Polya joined us at home.

We heard on the radio and read in newspapers that Hitler had come to
power in 1933. The Jewish population of Tomashpol, especially the
intellectuals -people who remembered pre-Revolutionary Germany - were
continuously saying that they didn't believe that Germans could kill people
and that they were cultured people. We leaned about what was happening in
Germany from radio programs and newspapers. Later we watched movies. I
remember "The Swamp Soldiers" and "Professor Mumlock". These movies
described Hitler coming to power, the attitude towards Jews in Germany, and
the pogroms. The radio mentioned the "Crystal night" in Germany and the
massive riots against Jews.

The year 1937 is known for the arrests and obliteration of the best
representatives of the intellectuals5. Some of our acquaintances were
repressed, too. Judge Fedyuk, the judge who helped me to write the letter
to Stalin was arrested. He was a very nice and kind person, and he helped
many people. I was in the 6th grade then, and I remember my classmates
crying at school in the morning because their fathers had been arrested the
previous night. We believed that their parents were enemies of the people
- that was what we were told to believe - so we didn't sympathize with our
classmates.

At school, I was fond of painting. I liked to paint portraits. I made
portraits of great physicists: Galileo, Ohm, Volt and others. I made
drawings because my parents couldn't afford to buy paints. Once in 1940 I
was awarded a prize for my drawings. My mother wanted me to study music but
we couldn't afford it as we were poor.

During the war

In 1939 the war with Finland began. I saw people who returned from the
war to our town Tomashpol. There were many Jews among them. Among them were
victims of frostbite, others that had been wounded, and some who had lost
legs or arms. I remember this war. I also remember our army "liberating"
the Western Ukraine and Byelorusse. Of course, the official version was
that we were liberating our land in Western Ukraine and Western Byelorusse.
The population was enthusiastic about it. There were posters everywhere
with our Soviet soldier in hardhat embracing a Western Ukrainian peasant.
When Germans occupied Poland, we had a feeling of the inevitability of war.
We felt it, but we couldn't quite imagine the upcoming war. We watched such
Soviet movies as "If there is a war tomorrow..." and others, and all of
them stated that if the enemy attacked us we would put an end to him
promptly and on his territory. We were convinced that we were strong and
that nobody could defeat us. I remember a song from this period "If there
is a war tomorrow and if we have to leave tomorrow - you must be prepared
today!" Then they executed a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany6.
Ribbentrop, Germany's Minister of Foreign Affairs, visited our country and
we read about it in the newspapers. We were all happy that there would be
no war and Germans would not advance further than Poland.

On 20 June 1941 I passed my last exam at school. I finished the 7th
grade and was 14 years old. 22 June7 was Sunday. Our house was near the
market and many people passed by our house. One of the passersby said, "Did
you hear on the radio the announcement about the war? The Germans bombed
Kiev and attacked the Soviet Union". It came as a complete surprise to us.
Then Molotov8 spoke on the radio at noon. However, nothing changed in
Tomashpol in the first days. Then we heard that they were going to evacuate
the sugar factory. The Party and administrative authorities were gradually
leaving town. However, in Tomashpol common and religious Jews were the
majority. We were waiting until our turn came to evacuate. The Germans were
advancing rapidly. After all the officials had left Tomashpol, we got horse-
driven carts and prepared to leave on them. Several families were supposed
to leave on each cart, so we couldn't take a lot luggage with us. This was
the middle of July. All these carts headed to the east in the direction of
Vinnitsa. We were about 15 km away when the bombing began. The planes
dropped two bombs. Nobody was injured. We moved on. We met a group of
military motorcyclists. They stopped and asked us where we were going.
Someone in the head cart replied that we were evacuating in the direction
of Vinnitsa. Then the man who had asked this question told him that
Vinnitsa was already occupied by the Germans. So we had to return to
Tomashpol. On 20 July 1941 Germans quietly entered Tomashpol. We saw their
troops on motorcycles, horses, cars and bicycles. They were the front
troops and they didn't touch the population. A German soldier came to our
house and asked my mother to give him some water. She did. He drank the
water and said to my mother that he wanted to give her a present. He took
his wallet out of his pocket and showed my mother a picture of a young
woman standing beside a rose bush. The German soldier told my mother that
this woman was his wife. Then he took out a dried rose wrapped in paper and
said that his wife gave him this rose for good luck and that he wanted to
give it to my mother. He also wrote down his address and invited us to
visit him after the war. His name was Alfred Klemmer. After he left, my
mother said that those people that warned that Germans would do us no harm
were probably right.

In 3 days Paraska Shpileiko, our Ukrainian acquaintance living in the
neighboring village came to see us. Her family were friends of my parent's.
She told us to hide because Germans were killing the Jews. It turned out
that the front troops were followed by other military troops that were
grabbing Jews in the streets and from their houses. They got over 120
people and chased them to the Jewish cemetery in the outskirts of
Tomashpol. They forced them to dig up a grave and shot them all. My
classmate Fira Shwartz, Tomashpol Shoihet and many others perished there.
In the 1980s a monument was installed at this location. There is an
engraving on the obelisk on the common grave, which reads, "To the citizens
of Tomashpol, brutally shot by fascist occupants on 4 August 1941". We
escaped, firstly, because our house was in the outskirts of town, and
secondly, because Paraska let us know in advance. We hid in the cellar,
locked up our house and stayed in our shelter for two days. The Germans
left in two days, and they appointed my classmate's father, Slobodianyuk,
to be a village warden.

At the end of July this warden came for my father. My father told us
later that he and several other men were sent to bury the corpses of the
Jews that were shot. The corpses decomposed during all this time so that
they were unrecognizable. My father smelled so much of putrefaction that it
was hard to wash that smell out.

The shops and the market were closed. We were able to get some food
from local peasants in exchange for some clothing. At the beginning of
August people elected the Jewish council that was responsible for sending
Jews to do work at the direction of the village warden. It consisted of
older people. Young people all went to the front.
After the Germans, the Rumanians came to the town. There were two
Germans left to give orders to the Rumanians. The Jews were ordered to wear
bands with David's hexagonal star. In two weeks they cancelled this order,
because the policemen also wore white armbands and it was unclear from some
distance whether one was a policeman or a Jew. With one day's notice, we
were then ordered to sew a yellow hexagonal star on the black background on
our clothes. We had some black fabric at home, but no yellow cloth. Our
neighbors had a yellow undershirt and they tore it to pieces and shared
them with all neighbors. Two weeks passed and we were ordered to move to
the ghetto. They fenced one street and all Jews from Tomashpol and the
surrounding villages were moving there. There were several families living
in each house. Our family got accommodation in the basement of a wooden
house. This basement was formerly used to store coal and wood. We moved
beds from our house and took apart wardrobes for wooden planks to install
on the ground floor. My parents, my sister Polia, a distant relative from
Yampol, Manya and I lived in this basement. There were over one thousand
people in the ghetto. Half of them starved to death or died from diseases.
On 19 May 1941 Manya gave birth to two twin girls: Polia and Dora. Manya's
husband and his two brothers went to the war where they perished. Manya and
her children lived in this ghetto for two years and eight months. We lived
behind the barbed wire fencing with no money or food. It was so hard to
raise these baby girls. Manya died in 2001 and her girls are still living.
Of course, the years they spent in the ghetto had an effect on them; they
are sickly, but they are still alive.

Before the war, I learned from our neighbor, a tinsmith, how to make
buckets and other tin goods. This helped us to survive in the ghetto. Every
day we went to work chopping wood or carrying water to the commandant's
office. In the evenings I made buckets and my mother and sister gave them
to peasants in exchange for food. Once a week they opened a gate to the
ghetto. Rumanians with guns and dogs and policemen were posted at the gate
to the ghetto. The inmates of the ghetto were allowed to go out to the
nearby market for one hour. We had only this one hour to buy or exchange
something and come back. We didn't need to be watched. We had yellow stars
on our clothing and couldn't run away. There was no place to run. We
thought of the ghetto as our last shelter. We tried to be back on time. If
somebody was late Rumanian gendarmes beat him or her with whips, as they
were not trusted enough to be given guns, at least, at that time. On our
way back we tried to get a potato or a beet, or to pick an apple to put in
our pocket. This supplemented our food supply. Tomashpol's Ukrainian
population sympathized with us. When the policemen turned away, the
Ukrainians tried to give us food. Paraska, the woman who told us to hide
when the Germans were approaching, came to the ghetto on Sunday and waited
for Mama and my sister to give them some food.

We did all kinds of work. We shoveled snow in winter. When Germans
occupied our town they ordered me to take off my boots. I was 14 years old
then. After I finished the 7th grade my mother had bought me new boots.
This was quite an occasion in our family. But that German ordered me to
take them off, so I did. I didn't have any shoes until our liberation in
March 1944. In summer I walked barefoot and in winter I wrapped my feet in
rags tying them with a rope or even with wire. I came back from work
starving and frozen. We didn't get any food while we were at work. I still
have rheumatic pains in my feet at night. I also got abscesses on my legs.
We had no medications to treat them. No iodine or bandages, and no medical
facility in the ghetto. However, there were doctors and nurses among the
inmates of the ghetto. We tried to hide our ailments from the
administration of the ghetto, especially when the diseases were infectious.
My former schoolmate Tolia Pokynchereda sent some iodine to me in the
ghetto.
I collected tin to make buckets near the houses. The tin was old and
rusted and this rust seeped into my sores when I was busy making the
buckets. Soon I couldn't walk at all. At that period they stopped sending
me to work. However, previously I was sent to work almost every day and we
had to work promptly. If somebody fell the supervisors beat him or her with
a whip. Often, my mother could not go to work. She was not young and often
felt ill. Women did all kinds of work: they peeled potatoes, washed the
floors, cleaned up, and carried wood. When I couldn't walk any more my
father replaced me at work. Rumanians rarely came to the ghetto. The
policemen and the Jewish council were in charge there. The Rumanians were
afraid to enter the ghetto due to the terrible sanitary conditions. They
were afraid of catching infection. Many people in the ghetto got ill and
died.

The policemen raped girls, but the girls' parents tried to hide this.
And every day somebody would say that he knew for sure that the next day we
would be all shot. So we were living with the fear that every day was to be
our last day. Members of the Jewish council often came to pick up some
valuables to bribe the Rumanian gendarmes.

We didn't hear any news from the outside world. Later, Boria
Slobodianyuk, my former schoolmate and the son of the Tomashpol warden
started sending me newspapers, and we could read about the war, but this
was towards the end of 1943.

There was a rabbi in the ghetto. Religious people got together in
secret to pray. My father also went to some house of prayers to pray. They
got together a minian9 of at least 10 people.

Young people were falling in love. Life was going on even under such
difficult conditions. We celebrated Pesach, although we couldn't have any
Matzoh.

In the fall of 1942 we learned that the administration was planning to
get all Jews between 16 and 55 yeas old. I was 15 and my father was 59, so
we were relatively calm about it. I was not on the list, but just in case,
I decided to hide in the attic of an empty house. My sister Polia knew
where I was hiding. The Jewish officials announced that people had to take
enough food to last for three days, and some warm clothes, although it was
still warm outside. On this day, policemen came to our basement to enquire
about my whereabouts. My parents said they didn't know where I was, and the
policemen beat them up with their whips. They threatened to shoot them if
they didn't inform them where I was. Polia ran to find me to tell me the
whole story and I went home. As soon as I entered, the policemen whipped me
so hard that I fainted. My mother got me some food to take with me: a few
apples, some bread, cereal and a bar of soap. And she gave me my jacket and
a hat to take along with me. My father gave me his old boots. They were
sewn up with wooden pegs that hurt when I put on the boots. Nobody knew
where we were heading from the ghetto. I was waiting for our departure when
all of a sudden a Rumanian soldier called me to the exit door. My father
was there and he took my bag from me and went in. I went home. The soldiers
put all the people onto a truck and drove away. At home they told me that
my parents asked some Jews from Bukovina who spoke Rumanian to talk to the
Rumanian soldiers about replacing me with my father. My parents were afraid
of what was awaiting me. Besides, I could make buckets and provide for the
family, but my father couldn't earn anything.
Half a year passed, and we didn't know where my father was, or whether
he was still alive. Then we heard a rumor that those that couldn't work any
more were coming back. And they did. They were in terrible condition.
Previously healthy men looked like old people, so exhausted were they. They
told us that they had been working in the Nikolaev region. Germans were
building a strategic bridge across the Bug and the construction itself was
performed by Jews and captives. The Jews lived on the bank of the Bug. They
dug holes in the ground and put in some hay to sleep on it. By the way, the
father of my sister Polia's future husband was also there with my father.
He died there because fleas ate away his eyes. My father told us later that
the hay was stirred up by fleas. My father said that they got potatoes that
were boiled, unwashed and dirty for meals. Many people were dying but my
father survived. Later a commission arrived to inspect the progress of the
construction. German engineers were in no hurry to complete the
construction. They felt more comfortable in the rear. When the commission
asked what the reason for the delays was, the engineers blamed the Jews,
saying that they were lazy and didn't want to work. The commission then
gave the order to hang ten people from each crew. All Jews were lined up
outside, and asked which of them wanted to go home. A few people stepped
forward. Soldiers took them away, and the following day carpenters
installed gallows in the square. Ten people were brought back in front of
the line of Jews. Jews from the crowd were to put nooses around the necks
of the sentenced and push the boxes they stood on out from under their
feet. If somebody refused he was hanged as well. If somebody approached the
barbed wire fencing, the Germans shot them, too, and their corpses were
hung on the wire for several days.

My father was also supposed to return home with the first group of
people, but he was not among them. We thought he must have died on the way.
But my father had gotten off the train to go to the toilet and fainted
there from exhaustion. Only on the following day did the cleaning women
find him. My father was sent to prison in the Balta Odessa region. He
shared a cell with a communist who was later hung. He gave my father his
leather belt and my father brought it home to me. He was getting some food
in prison and his condition improved. When he was released from prison, he
went home. He got on the train that headed for Yampol instead of Tomashpol.
The Rumanian commandant sent my father to the "Pechora" camp 2 km from
Tomashpol. This was a horrific death camp. About 10,000 people starved to
death there. This was already 1944. Kiev had been liberated, but we were
still under the occupation. The security guard in the camp was loosened and
people could go out at night to get something to eat in the surrounding
villages. In this way, my father survived.

I remember our army coming to the village. The Germans and Rumanians
were running away in retreat. We saw two tanks with young men sitting on
top of them. They asked us where the Germans and Rumanians were and
suggested that I go with them to show them the way. I grabbed a German
rifle - there were weapons all around - and charged it. I was showing them
the way. It was on 16 March 1944. The regular Soviet army was at the
Vapniarka station then. These tanks were an investigation group. They shot
at the retreating Germans. I also took a few shots. Later, our army and
partisans entered Tomashpol. One of the partisans was a young Jewish girl
riding a horse. I asked her, "Have you and the Soviet army come here
forever?" and she answered, "Yes". I felt sad because my father wasn't with
us and we thought that he had perished in the camp.

One particularly horrible event occurred during the liberation of
Tomashpol. A young man, one year older than I, a blacksmith's son and a
blacksmith himself, fell in love with a very pretty girl in the ghetto. She
loved him, too. When all of us came out to meet our armies, this young
couple was also out there. A cavalryman saw them together and cried out
"What?! You are strolling around when we are going to war?!" and he shot
the young man, who had survived all the horrors of the ghetto and
occupation, only to be killed by a Soviet soldier. I don't know what
happened to the young girl afterwards.

We temporarily settled down in an empty house. My mother asked the
military to sell her a pair of boots, as I had nothing to protect my feet.
And they gave me yellow American boots as a present. We were living all
together: my parents, my sister Polia, Manya and her twin daughters. A
little later my mother's sister Haika also moved in with us. In 1944 I went
to the army. Later my parents rented a room. They never had their own
apartment and lived a very poor life. They didn't have any furniture, just
some boxes they used as furniture.

My father returned home before I went into the army. Our neighbor's
daughter came to tell me that my father was coming home. I didn't believe
her, but went out anyway, and saw an old, old man, exhausted, in some gray
clothing, barefoot, though there was still snow on the ground, and carrying
a stick. It's difficult to express what I felt when I knew that the man was
my father. As I said his clothing looked gray, but it was gray from the
fleas that it was covered with. This was horrible. We took off all his
clothes and burnt them. My father was ill for a long time afterwards.

After Tomashpol was liberated, the mobilization of young people over
17 to the front began. Young people under 17 were mobilized to the so-
called fighter battalion. We had trophy rifles and bullets and were helping
the military to guard the captives or transport them. Once we even were
ordered to look for parachute forces in the woods.

I also went to school and studied in the 8th grade before I was
recruited to the army. We went to the military registration office in
Vinnitsa, from where I was sent to the Far East. This was in the winter of
1944. We traveled across Siberia for 43 days. In the Far East I was sent to
the Pacific Ocean Navy. I participated in the war with Japan.10 After the
war we stayed in Port Arthur in China. We were liberating China, Korea and
Manchuria from the Japanese. We stayed to serve there after the war. My
service lasted six years. Later, this Pacific Ocean fleet separated into
two fleets - number 5 and number 7. My service was in fleet number 5, which
spread from Vladivostok to Port Arthur. . Photo # 7 I had friends there and
still meet with them annually. They are Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars
and members of many other nationalities. Ivan Khometsky, a Ukrainian, was
my closest friend then. We spent time together talking about our plans for
the future and about our lives.

Post-war

Those were difficult years. I remember the famine of 1947. I was in
the service then and I didn't suffer hunger - we were getting our meals and
life was not as bad as it was for civilians. But I knew that my parents
were suffering a lot. My father's body swelled from starvation.
Fortunately, his younger brother Boris took him to Ulianovsk. My mother and
sister survived this famine of 1947. In 1948 I came home on vacation. As a
gift, I brought my parents half a pound of rice (8 kg) - this was all I
could get.

My father and mother were still religious after the war. But there was
no synagogue and minians got together in private prayer houses. My father
always went to pray. The rabbi died in the ghetto. One man who knew the
prayers well led the minians for many years. Old people got together in
this way and the authorities didn't persecute them.

The struggle against cosmopolites that started in 1948 had an impact
on our family. Ovsey Driz, the son of my father's cousin and a famous
Jewish poet, wrote his poems in Yiddish. They were translated into Russian
by the famous Russian poets Mikhalkov and Marshak. In the early 1930s when
Ovsey Driz was beginning to write, a very famous Jewish poet, Lev Kvitko,
was helping him. Many of Ovsey's books were published before the war. After
the war no books in Yiddish were published. Ovsey's Russian was excellent
but when I asked him why he didn't write his poems in Russian he said that
he could, but then they wouldn't be his poems. When the struggle against
the cosmopolites began Ovsey couldn't provide for his family. His books
were not published and he was about to be expelled from the Association of
Writers of the USSR. Ovsey turned to the Soviet poet Marshak for help, but
he couldn't do anything for him. When I went to Moscow I often stayed at
Ovsey's home and was the first to hear his poems. Ovsey died in 1971 .

By that time, my sister had married our neighbor Abram Gedrich, a Jew.
She studied for seven years at school and then took a course in accounting.
She worked as an accountant in the Tomashpol hospital until her departure
to Ber-Sheva in Israel in the early 1990s. In 1962 Elena, the daughter of
Polia and Abram, was born. Lena and Polia live in Israel now. Lena
graduated from a music school in Vinnitsa. She has a daughter Asia, born in
1984.

I demobilized from the army at the end of December 1950. They wanted
me to stay for an additional term and offered me an apartment in Port
Arthur. But I couldn't stay, as I knew that my parents were living in
poverty. In 1951 I passed my exams for ten years of secondary school. At
that time I worked as a lab assistant at the physics laboratory, as I just
had to be earning money. In 1951 I entered Kiev's mining college. I chose
this educational institution because, as a participant in the war, I could
enter this school without having to take entrance exams. They also paid the
stipend that enabled me to study and live. I also had 2-3 months training
sessions in Donbass, which enabled me to support my parents as well. I
worked as a miner and was paid well. In 1955 I finished my studies in the
electromechanical department of this college. At first I couldn't find a
job. My eyesight was poor as a result of my experiences in the ghetto, and
to get a job as a miner I had to go through a medical examination. The
medical commission didn't issue me a work permit. I had problems finding a
job.

Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism at that time was both on the state and everyday level. I
obtained my diploma without a mandatory for that time job assignment, and
returned to Kiev. I went through job announcements and found one for a
foreman in the electric shop at a certain plant. I arranged an interview
with the manager of the human resources department. We discussed the
vacancy and then he asked me to show him my documents. He took my passport
and saw that my nationality was a Jew. He immediately told me to call back
in 2-3 days. I came back in two days and he said they had no vacancy for
the position of foreman, only for an electrician in that same shop. He
didn't expect me to agree to take this job. But I thought it would only do
me good to go through all levels, from beginning to end, to gain
experience.

In 1957 I got a job as a foreman at a military plant. Later, I was
promoted to Deputy Manager of the electromechanical shop. In few years I
became Chief Engineer at the plant. I worked there for 24 years and had
excellent performance records. I received a two-room apartment. But still I
felt some discrimination towards me, especially during the last year. In
particular, when the manager of the maintenance shop went on an extended
business trip for two years and I was offered the chance to replace him.
But I also had to keep my job responsibilities. I agreed. After some time,
the assistant accountant asked me about my salary rate, which I didn't
know. But I hoped that it would at least be equal to that of the former
manager of the shop. I asked the director, and it turned out that besides
not being paid for doing two jobs, I had a lower salary than my
predecessor. The director had realized that I would have to accept and was
taking advantage of my situation. If I quit this job, it would be difficult
for me to find another due to my Jewish nationality. And I had to stay at
this plant. In 1978 I got a job offer from another plant and agreed to take
it at once. I was appointed manager of the electromechanical shop at this
plant and from there I retired in 1987. But I decided to continue working
and got a job as a communications specialist. I quit finally in 1999.

Stalin's death in 1953 was a shock for me. I didn't believe the
country could live without him. People were crying. I think, these were
sincere tears. Later we recovered and life went on. Our thinking was
changing gradually and denunciation of the cult of Stalin and the speech at
the Party Congress11 was kind of expected event.

Married life

I got married in 1956. My wife Tamara Batenko is Ukrainian. Tamara was
born in 1934 in the Fastov Kiev region. At the time we met, Tamara was a
student in the Economics Department of Kiev University. We met at a party
and fell in love. Contrary to my expectations, my parents had nothing
against my marrying a Ukrainian girl. They must have changed their attitude
to such mixed marriages, regardless of their religiosity. They liked Tamara
very much. My mother always called Tamara her little daughter. Tamara got a
job at the Institute of Public Economy after graduating from the
University. Later, she obtained a job at the Academy of Sciences. But,
unfortunately, she was very sickly and had to retire because of poor
health. In the fall of 2002 we shall celebrate the 46th anniversary of our
wedding. On 20 July 1957 our son Alexander was born. He was born into a
mixed family and got no religious education. He is an atheist and a
cosmopolite - a man of the world. He obtained his education at the Kiev
Communications College. He is a colonel now and works at the army
headquarters. as chief editor of military TV broadcasting. His wife
Tatiana, a Ukrainian, is a housewife. We have two granddaughters: Katyusha,
born in 1984, and baby Mashenka, born in 2002. Katia is finishing school
and is going to continue her studies. My son's family live separately, but
every single day they call us or drop by for a chat.

In 1963 my mother died. She was in poor health after the years she
spent in the camp and in the ghetto. My mother was buried in Tomashpol in
accordance with Jewish traditions. My wife and I decided to take my father
to Kiev. By that time he was almost blind - he had cataracts in both eyes.
He lived with us for almost 15 years. After two surgeries, he could see
again. My father admired everything that we had: the tap with running
water, the TV and telephone. My father put on his thales and prayed twice a
day: in the morning and in the evening. Only in the last years of his life
he couldn't do it: he was too old to remember the prayers. My father died
in 1979 at the age of 95. He was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Kiev.
There was no rabbi at his funeral and I said Kaddish, which I remembered
from childhood.
My sister Polia moved to Israel. Unfortunately, I didn't dare to go.
My wife isn't a Jew and I was afraid that she would go through prejudiced
attitudes in Israel similar to the ones I experienced in the Soviet Union.
I have been to Israel twice and I now realize that I was wrong. But we are
old people now and it is too late to change our life so dramatically. I
liked Israel, our country. I admired the blooming Israel - the country
where ancient history and modern life have entwined so organically. It's
hard to imagine all the hard effort involved in turning the desert into a
blooming oasis. I respect and feel grateful to the people of Israel. I
visited my sister Polia in Ber-Sheva. She and her family enjoy living in
their new Motherland.

Many things changed after Ukraine gained its independence. Of course,
it will take some time before life improves, but I can see big changes.
There is no or almost no anti-Semitism in the new Ukraine. There is none on
the state level, and if there is some remnant of it, it comes from older
people. Young people have different outlooks. Jewish people hold management
positions and nobody has anything to say against it. I am not a religious
person, and do not visit the synagogue. A Jewish way of life is also
restoring. We have Jewish newspapers and magazines in Yiddish and in
Russian. I receive "Jewish news" and it is free for me. There are Jewish
performances and concerts. Hesed does a lot to support us physically and
spiritually. I attend very interesting lectures about the history of the
Jewish religion and celebrations of Jewish holidays. This is just
wonderful.

I don't want you to think that the life of our generation is a chain
of calamities. We lived through a lot of terrible things: famines,
repression, war, struggle against cosmopolitism and suppression of the
Jews. Many members of our family perished. At that most difficult time we
used to say that if we survived - although we didn't believe we would - we
would only talk about what we had to go through for the rest of our life.
But the years went by and I came to understand that people forget the bad
things and remember the good ones for a long time. I would like to address
all those who are going to read my story to try and do everything we can to
prevent any repetition of the past.

Glossary

Dagmar Lieblova
Prague
Czech Republic
Interviewer: Pavla Neuner
Date of the interview: January, 2004

Dagmar Lieblova lives with her husband in a wonderful apartment in a new housing development in Prague.

he interview took place in her large cozy living room which is full of old pieces of family furniture and books.

Mrs. Lieblova is a very pleasant person, as is her husband.

She is also a very well-respected and elegant lady whose many activities and great energy are worthy of admiration..

• Family background
• Growing up
• During the war
• Post war
• Glossaries

• Family background

I can't remember my grandmother or grandfather on my father's side too well, as I never spent much time with them, even though we used to visit them twice a year in Cimelice, which is a small town near Pisek. My grandfather on my father's side was called Vilem Fantl and was born in Lubenec in 1858. He lived in Cimelice, south Bohemia, where he had a farm with land under crop and horses that he was very proud of. He also had a store there, which is still standing, although it now sells Dutch furniture.

My grandmother on my father's side was called Jindriska (nee Hechtova) and was born in 1859. She came from Suchomasty, Beroun. The Hecht family must have lived there for a long time, for we came across a grave in the local old Jewish cemetery on which was written the name 'Filip Hecht aus Suchomast' [German, Filip Hecht from Suchomast] - he was my grandmother's grandfather.

This forefather of mine was a glassmaker, which I know from a document written during the war by my father in which he mentions that "Filip is an unusual name for a Jew, as is the occupation." He did this so as not to be subject to discriminatory regulations, but it was still of no use.

My grandparents were both religious. They had separate sets of dishes, ate kosher food and probably had a Jewish wedding, but my grandfather didn't wear a yarmulka. Their devoutness was not, I think, passed on to any of their children.

At the beginning of the 1930s my grandparents sold their house and farm in Cimelice and moved to Beroun, where they built a little house with rooms and a kitchen downstairs and an attic upstairs. Unlike Beroun, I can't remember Cimelice. We always went to Beroun on the first of May, and my parents always wanted us to leave before all the ceremonial processions in Prague started up. We went there from Kutna Hora via Prague.

My grandmother used to cook excellent flour dumplings; mom would always ask her how she does it and she would say - "Don't you know how to do flour dumplings?" We always had dumplings and Polish sauce or goose. Polish sauce is sweet and has plums and raisins in it.

There was always good soup, too. I can remember that grandfather would go a bit of the way with us in the car to see us off on our way home. And he always blessed us when we parted I do not remember what he was whispering, but he always put his hand on my forehead. Both my grandparents died before the deportations began - grandmother in January 1940, grandfather six weeks later.

My grandparents had seven children. Ota, who died in infancy, Rudolf, Emil, Ruzena, Marenka, my dad Julius and another son, Ota. Rudolf was born 1883. He married a Jewish woman, Rezi, who was my mother-in-law's sister. They lived all their lives in Ceske Budejovice. Rudolf inherited a distillery from his father-in-law.

When he died in 1922, the business was run by his wife, who did not survive the Holocaust. They had two daughters together, Marie and Lilly, who were my cousins. Lilly married a non-Jewish man; living in a mixed marriage, she managed to survive the Holocaust. She gave birth to a daughter in 1944, shortly before being incarcerated, and had another four children after the war.

Marie also married a non-Jew, by the name of Antonin Rozanek. Marie was sent to the Small Fortress 1 and then transported to Auschwitz. She was in the Frauenlager [German for women's camp] in Birkenau and, according to her sister Lilly, perished in Bergen-Belsen. Her husband survived the persecution, as did their daughter Helenka, who married Josef Moravek, a chemist, with whom she emigrated to America, where they live to this day. Antonin remained in Bohemia. He went to visit her a few times, but he died in Bohemia.

Emil was born in 1886. He married Josefa Franklova, a Jewish widow with a son called Ludvik who was born in 1913. They had a grocery store on the square in Hyskov, which is a village near Beroun. They also sold fabrics and farming implements.

They had another son, Rene, in 1922. Both of their sons were fine boys. When we went to visit our grandparents, we would go for a snack in Hyskov after lunch. We were there on vacation sometime in 1939. I was very fond of Ludvik and Rene - they were older than me and it was fun to be with them.

Their parents also used to sell paints in the store; the boys would take water from the pump in the yard and add paint to it. Rene taught me the crawl stroke in the river Berounka. Ludvik studied law and was just about to graduate when the universities were closed down. Rene had already graduated and was wanting to study chemistry, but it was too late for that. [Exclusion of the Jews from schools in the Protectorate] 2 He was dragged off to a labor camp in Lipa.

We saw a lot of Ludvik and his parents in Terezin. 3 Ludvik was the stoker at the baths in the Vrchlabske Barracks, and sometimes, on Saturdays when nobody was around, he would let us take a bath there in secret. Rene was transported from Lipa to Terezin in the summer of 1943.

Emil was put on the September 1943 transport to Birkenau, together with his wife and Rene; Ludvik volunteered to go with them. I saw the boys again in Birkenau. Once, I met them as they were carrying some dead bodies and they looked terrible. They ended up in the gas chamber.

Marie died at a young age. I think it was tuberculosis. She was single.

Ruzena was born in 1890. She married Ota Beran, who, I think, was a coffee importer. They were well-off financially, but their only son, who I never met, was killed in a bike crash long before the war. Ruzena lived with her husband in Prague and later built a villa in Strancice, where we once came to visit.

I was really impressed by the place at the time, for there was a room with a door that led straight onto the garden via a staircase. Ruzena and Ota were both transported to Terezin in September 1942 and straight on to Maly Trostinec, where they perished.

Ota was born in 1894, remained single and lived in Prague, at Koubkova Street 3. He had been to high school and I think he worked for a firm involved in foreign trade. He wrote short stories and had a literary talent. Ota was a really nice gentleman and a very witty person. He used to go to Kutna Hora to visit us.

On my dad's birthday he would always arrange for a cake to be sent to him from Mysak's. In Prague there were two famous candy stores, Mysak and Berger, both in Vodickova Street. When I was born, I received some silver cutlery from Ota. He was transported to Terezin and straight on to Treblinka, where he perished in 1942.

My grandmother on my mother's side was called Augusta Reitmanova (nee Hermanova) and was born in 1870 in the Bohemian-Moravian highlands in a village called Pokrikov. Her dad apparently had a tavern or a little store. My grandmother had several brothers and sisters. Karel and Zikmund lived in Brno, where they made confectionary.

Another brother, Emil, lived with his wife, Petronila, and two daughters in Hermanuv Mestec. He lived in a mixed marriage, which saved him from deportation, but he hanged himself during the war. My grandmother also had a sister, Matylda, who was single and lived at home in Malin.

She died sometime in 1933 and is buried at the Jewish cemetery in Kolin. Later, grandmother had another little brother, Jindrich, but he died in childhood. I bumped into Karel's granddaughter, quite by accident at a congress for children who had survived the Holocaust, which was held in Prague in 1999.

Eva lives in Israel. She moved there with her parents soon after the war, got married and had four children. I knew that Eva was still alive, but she didn't know about me at all. She asked someone at the congress if they could remember her mom, so that was how we met.

When, later on, I was at her place with her daughter in Israel, she showed me a letter I had sent to my dad after the war, which she had kept. It was a long letter and was signed Danka, but she didn't know who it was.

My grandfather on my mother's side was called Maxmilian Reitman and was born in Trhova Kamenice near Chrudim in 1870. He lived with my grandmother a short distance from Kutna Hora in the village of Malin, where they had a little house with a little grocery store inside.

Malin was about 7 km from Kutna Hora and is now part of the town. A very old community, silver was mined there sometime back in the tenth century. Behind the store was a kitchen and, further on, two rooms and a courtyard. I think that they didn't have running water and the toilet was in the yard. It was a rustic building. I remember it must have been a very low structure because my dad, who was relatively small, could touch the ceiling.

My grandparents had a dog called Haryk, who could always sense well in advance when I was coming with my parents for a visit. He would then start barking. My grandparents were rather poor. They had store and an assistant in it but my grandmother was mostly at the counter.

Various ideas used to come to my grandfather, so one day he would sell vegetables, another day something different, so my grandmother was the mainstay of the store. My grandparents sold the house and store in 1934 or 1935 and moved in with us in our house in Kutna Hora.

Housemaid of my grandparents once told me that my grandfather Maxmilian's dad was in the army with my grandmother's dad Josef Herman. According to my calculations, this must have been in 1866. They are said to have made friends at the time and to have arranged to get married once they had children, which is what happened later. Allegedly, my grandmother was originally with someone else, but her parents didn't approve as he wasn't a Jew, so she married the suitor of their choice.

In his youth, my grandfather had a fine figure and a beard that he was very particular about. He had a restless nature and I think that it can't have been an easy life with him. I heard at home that they were living in Bosnia and Herzegovina a few years before World War I, sometime around 1908.

I don't know why or how they got there, but I suspect grandfather went there to sell things. They stayed in Mostar and Novi Sad, which were the first foreign cities I heard about as a child. [Before WWI both, the Herzegovinan Mostar and the Hungarian Ujvidek (that was renamed as Novi Sad after the war) were parts of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy just like the Czech lands.] Then they returned to Bohemia and spent at least part of World War I in Prague. My grandmother would always recount having to wait in line for bread. Later, they returned to Malin, where they remained.

Both of my grandparents came from a Czech-speaking family. I don't think either of them had any higher education. My grandfather was religious and went to the synagogue regularly, not only on the main holidays, and he would take me with him. Near Malin there was a synagogue but no-one went there any more, so my grandfather, who was an ardent Sokol 4 member, somehow arranged for the Jewish community to sell it to Sokol.

The building was knocked down at least twenty years ago. My grandmother was also religious. She didn't go to the synagogue, but she did try to observe the Sabbath. She prayed with mom at home and they both fasted on Yom Kippur. My grandmother had varicose veins and ulcers, so, as far as I can remember, she wasn't very steady on her feet.

As she couldn't get about, she sat and knitted for days at a time. Not on the Sabbath, though. She tried to observe the rule about not working on the Sabbath. When she was living with my grandfather at our place in Kutna Hora and dad wanted us to do the housework on Saturday with my sister, grandmother would say that it could wait until Sunday. Grandfather died in 1941, he had Jewish burial, grandmother did not survive concentration camp.

My mom's elder brother, Ervin, was born in 1895 in Malin. He lived in Dejvice, Prague, in what is now Ckalova Street, and worked as a bank clerk. At the end of the 1920s he married Helena Schillerova, a Jewish woman. Her father had married twice, so she had two step-sisters who lived in Kolkovna Street in Prague. During the Protectorate 5, when Jews had to move out of the better quarters, Ervin and Helena later moved in with him.

Ervin and Helena had a son, Tomas, who was born in 1936. I don't know how religious they were, but I think that Uncle Ervin wasn't devout. They all later perished in concentration camps. Uncle Ervin and Aunt Helena went to Terezin relatively late, in 1943, and were sent to Birkenau on one of the September transports in the very same year.

When my mom and I arrived in Birkenau in December 1943, we met people who had been on the September transports. We were standing in line, waiting to be given a number tattooed on our arm, when an acquaintance of my mom's appeared and told her: "You know that Helena Reitmanova is a widow?" She knew that my mom knew Mrs. Reitmanova, but not that she was her sister-in-law and that the person who had died was mom's brother. Aunt Helena was sent with Tomas to the gas chamber in March of the following year.

My dad was called Julius Fantl and was born in 1892 in Cimelice. He was a blue-eyed blond. While studying medicine, he become involved in student activity against Austria and was sentenced to six months at the age of twenty-two.

He was only in prison for three years though, because there was an amnesty in 1917 when Emperor Franz Joseph died [November 21st 1916] and a new emperor came along. Dad was condemned and permanently expelled from all the universities in Austria-Hungary.

My grandfather Vilem wrote a letter to a prison in Arad, Romania [Arad was attached to Romania only after the Great War, as late as 1920. Julius Fantl was imprisoned in the Austro-Hungarian city.], asking if his son Julius was there and if he was alive and well. He received the letter back with the following note written on it in German: "We can inform you that your son Julius is here and is well."

A lawyer later explained to me that this made sense because if they had replied on different paper, they would have had to archive it and to send an official reply. After my father had received an amnesty, he later served in the army in a Czech regiment in Hungary, and in 1918 resumed his studies once again.

He would often relate what happened when he went to put his name down for the degree ceremony: a clerk at the rector's office looked in his documents and pointed out that he had been permanently expelled from all universities in Austria-Hungary. In response, dad said that Austria-Hungary is no longer in existence. He was a general practitioner all his life.

My mom was called Irena Fantlova (nee Reitmanova) and was born in Malin in 1901. After completing her basic education, she did a cookery and sewing course. She lived in Malin and helped out in the store and with the household. Mom was a beautiful woman.

When she became sick one day, a neighbor supposedly said to her: "Young lady, why don't you go to Kutna Hora, there's a new doctor there, it's a Jew but he is a really nice person." Dad had been given a position in Kutna Hora as a doctor at the Masaryk Institute for Social Work, as well as setting up his own practice.

This is apparently how they met, according to the family. But in fact, they actually met, I think, through a joint friend of Mr. Ohrenstein, the father of the poet Orten. [Orten Jiri: maiden name Jiri Ohrenstein, Czech poet, 1919 - 1941] They got married in 1926 in Prague, but it wasn't a Jewish wedding.

Dad bought a house in Kutna Hora in 1932. Before that, we had been renting a place from Mrs. Roubickova. Dad bought it from Mrs. Taborska, who was butcher and originally had a store in the house. As Kutna Hora had been undermined and the ground was falling through, a big cellar was formed in the house when it was being built in 1904 or 1905.

The butcher used this as an ice cellar. My father turned her store into a consulting room. Our house stood on the corner of the streets Ceska and Hradebni. It was a one-story building with a garden. We had running water, electricity and gas. Our house was relatively large, with about five apartments - two upstairs and two downstairs, along with a consulting room.

We had a four-room apartment on the ground floor. The house had a turret with a bay window, and there was a corner room that was hard to heat as there were seven windows. There was furniture that a carpenter in Kutna Hora had made to commission - a cupboard, glass cabinet, table, chairs, desk, two small armchairs and a collapsible leather couch. It was a large room and, like the other ones, had parquet flooring.

Only the entrance hall and bathroom were tiled. In the apartment was a hallway, dining room, guest room, bedroom and living room where I lived at first with my sister. When we were a bit bigger they put me and Rita in the guest room. That was only for a while, though, because after our grandparents had moved in, they lived in the guest room and me and my sister were back in the living room, where there was an American stove.

Our grandparent's maid, Fanynka, slept in the kitchen. It was a cold apartment; the kitchen was north- facing and had fashionable terrazzo flooring with really cold stone tiles. The rooms were over four meters high, which made them difficult to heat. There was a coal stove and a gas-fired two-ring cooker in the kitchen.

Mom always had socks and a sweater on when she was there. The American stove in the living room couldn't heat everything, so we later used a Musgrave stove which heated both the living room and the bedroom.

Mom was a housewife. She was religious like my grandmother, as she also fasted on Yom Kippur and on the Sabbath, I think, she only did what was necessary, but she didn't go anywhere. She prayed but she did not light the candles or cook cosher. Dad didn't observe fasts at all. We didn't celebrate Jewish holidays at home. Me and my sister were not brought up in a very Jewish way. We went to the synagogue only on the New Year and Yom Kippur. We celebrated Czech holidays and had a tree and presents at Christmas. I knew about Jewish holidays, however, because we learnt about them in religion lessons. On the Pesach we used to order eleven kilos of matzot from the Bernard Schutz Firm in Pardubice. Mom would break matzot into pieces and put them in white coffee and we also gave them out to our friends. But we also ate bread. Our relatives came over to see us around Pesach at Easter, as they did at Christmas. We celebrated Easter rather than Pesach; we would paint eggs [Easter tradition] and go to the fair and buy Turkish honey [traditional sweet, sold typically on markets throughout the ex- Habsburg lands].

Although he came from a religious family, dad ate everything, probably because he always knew how things were in jail. I listened to him, but it wasn't until much later that I understood. He said that prisoners watched each other so that nobody would eat more potato peelings. I understood this later when I ate them myself. But I know there was food he didn't like, even though we didn't cook or eat kosher. Roast sirloin with cream, for example. I think the reason was that they didn't cook it at their house. We always did dill sauce with beef instead of cream.

I think that dad was a good doctor. There are still people around who can remember him. He employed nurse at the Masaryk Institute for Social Work, but he did everything for himself at home. Mom came in the evening to clean his instruments and to boil the syringes.

He was the only Jewish doctor in Kutna Hora. Because he was a Jew, he was allowed to work as a general practitioner only until 1939, after which time he could treat only Jewish patients. Dad was a member of a number of professional associations, but I don't think he held any posts in them. He was a retired officer and saw himself as a Czechoslovak patriot.

His political sympathies were with the Social Democrats. At home we read 'Pravo lidu' [The People's Rights], which was a Czech-language daily paper read by the majority of Social Democrats.

• Growing up

My younger sister was called Rita Fantlova and was born in Kutna Hora in 1932. We were together a lot of the time and had a normal sibling relationship. I was an irate child and she would sometimes tease me a bit, so I would be shaking with rage. Our parents always told me that I should be more sensible, as I was the oldest.

It annoyed me whenever they said that. In the summer and winter, when the school term was over and we had no homework to do, we used to play in the garden in front of the house. Our parents saw to it that they didn't leave us outside.

We had friends who would come round to see us, but when I was older and wanted to go out, I had to bring Rita everywhere with me, which I wasn't too keen on. But then again, Rita wasn't too pleased about having to wear my cast-offs.

Dad wouldn't get home until the evening, for he was always busy. Mom would sometimes ask him to tell her things after he had got back, but he would say he had been speaking all day. When they had a day off, my parents used to go the cinema.

There were two cinemas in Kutna Hora at the time and they went to every film that was on. Mom always joked about dad falling asleep there. They also went to amateur theatres, concerts and whatever cultural events were on in Kutna Hora. Other than that, we would always go somewhere in summer, and if it was warm, we would head for Vidlak Pond, which is about 15 km away.

We even went there on workdays, after dad finished work. On the weekends we would go swimming, often in the River Sazava. We also went to Caslav, which is about 15 km away. That is where my mom's cousin on my grandfather's side, Vera Mullerova (nee Reitmanova) lived. She was also married to a doctor, Lev Muller, and they had two sons, Jirka and Zdenek, who were a year older than me and Rita.

We often went on trips with them. We also went to places on vacation, twice in the Tatra mountains in Slovakia. When I was very small, we spent a few holidays in Stare Splavy near Machovo Lake, where we stayed in a hotel. Each year we would spend from two to three weeks in some place or other. I can remember going to the swimming pool in Luhacovice when I was five or six. Steps led up to the big pool from a children's paddling pool where we were supposed to stay.

One day I tried the first one, then the second one, which was already under water, and then the third step, by which time I was under water and had started to drown. A young lady pulled me out and I got a smack on the bottom from my parents, but then they put me in for swimming lessons.

I also remember being at Velichovky Spa in 1938, where the locomotive organs were treated, as they still are. The spa is in the border regions and I can remember walking on the ramparts. Aunt Helena was a furtive smoker and I can recall her handing cigarettes to soldiers from her car. In winter we used to go skating; mom even bought some skates and boots and went along with us. Kutna Hora is all very hilly, so there were also lots of opportunities for sledging.

Kutna Hora is a nice town, but I didn't realize this until later. I took the area for granted as a child. When we were in Terezin later on, I didn't like the fact that everything was flat and square there. I had been used to winding streets and to there being hills everywhere. Wherever you go in Kutna Hora, there is always a uphill to go up. The land become flat on the way to Kolin, but remains hilly with forests on the way to Sazava.

My parents had a number of Jewish friends, of course, but in general they didn't care too much about their friends' origin. We mostly met with other family members, particularly with our relatives in Caslav. We saw each other nearly every week, and if not, mom would at least speak to my aunt on the phone. A doctor was required to have a telephone and ours had the number 17.

In those days you had to turn a handle and then wait for the exchange to put through your call. We were a middle class family. We had a car - a Tatra. In Kutna Hora there was only one gas station, and that was owned by Mr. Kubin. The first car my dad bought, when I was born, was dark green. He bought a new one sometime in 1936. Our first ride in the new car was to Ceske Budejovice, for dad's twenty-fifth school reunion.

Dad was always the one behind the wheel, because mom couldn't drive and also had a bad sense of direction. Once we were supposed to go to the Krkonose Mountains for Easter, when Rita was probably about four years old. We were already half way there when Rita said she had a soar throat and headache, so our parents turned round and went back.

They put her to bed, took her temperature to see if she had a fever, which she didn't, and dad looked at her throat and saw there was nothing wrong with it. After she had recovered, they asked her what had happened and she said she was scared of Krakonos the Giant. [Mythic giant who is believed to protect the Krkonose Mountains, between the Czech Republic and Poland] Our parents used to go on hiking trips before we were born, and me and my sister soon became used to hiking from an early age. We liked to go to the forest and dad always went mushroom picking when we were away somewhere on vacation.

At home we had a maid, called Anicka, who came to our place sometime in 1932. She was with us until it was prohibited. Later on, Jews were not allowed to have a maid under the age of fifty, so she had to leave us. We didn't have another maid after that. Fanynka, the maid of my grandparents who had moved in with us, was older, so she could stay at my grandmother's place. That was a stroke of luck because she really helped us out during the war.

There were several schools in Kutna Hora, and children went to the one nearest their home. Me and my sister went to the elementary girls' school. A bit further on there was another elementary school which was coeducational. There was also a school where students from the nearby teaching institute used to train.

There wasn't a Jewish school in the area. I didn't have any problems at school, in fact I enjoyed it on the whole. As far as I can remember, I didn't have any particular favorite subject. There was only one other Jewish girl in my class, and she was called Hanicka.

I attended religion classes with her, but I didn't really make friends with her in the first grades. But she became my only friend when we were not allowed to go to school from 1940/41 and we had lessons at home instead. My other schoolmates somehow disappeared. Rita started school in 1938, so she only finished the second grade. I finished the fifth.

Both my parents knew German; dad could speak English as well, as he had learnt it at evening lessons with Mr. Strakosch, who was from one of the local Jewish families. My parents spoke German in front of me when they didn't want me to understand what they were saying.

So I planned to learn German so I could understand them and then to learn English if they switched language. I started going to German lessons in the third grade and then English at the age of eleven. On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons we went to Sokol Hall where we trained on the rings, beams and vaulting-horses.

There wasn't a very big Jewish community in Kutna Hora. Most of the local Jews were dad's patients, so they were on friendly terms with him. There was a synagogue and for a while we had our own cantor. Afterwards, Doctor Feder of Kolin used to come over; he was later to become chief rabbi of Czechoslovakia. He also gave us religion classes.

We didn't have a yeshivah or a mikveh there. At the time, there were about thirteen or fourteen thousand inhabitants in Kutna Hora, of which there were probably about two hundred Jews. The Strakosch family had a shoe factory and produced for exported. Another wealthy Jewish family, the Reiningers, had a clothing factory called Respo. There were also Jewish lawyers. On the whole, the local Jews were middle class businessmen. They lived a normal Czech life, and only a few of them went to the synagogue.

• During the war

The 'Arijsky boj' [Aryan Struggle] tabloid started coming out after the occupation, but I think that Jews made fun of it at the time. It was not local, it was edited by fascist organization called Vlajka. In each issue of this paper - I think it was a weekly - there was always gossip about what this or that Jewish woman was talking about. It also mentioned my parents.

No-one took it too seriously. Once, when I was no longer allowed to go to school, I met a former classmate who spat in front of me. That was the only specific case of anti-Semitism I can remember coming across. But I didn't take it seriously, in fact I thought it was quite funny. I don't know if my parents were afraid of Hitler, but dad probably thought nothing could happen to him as he was a Czechoslovak citizen.

My parents were certainly not Zionists. They were typical Czech Jews. Dad probably thought that Jews would be left in peace if they assimilated. I think that my parents didn't make any attempt to emigrate. Firstly, they certainly couldn't imagine how far things would end up, and secondly, it wasn't easy to leave with their family in 1938, when I was ten and my sister was six, especially as they didn't have any relatives abroad or any extra resources. I know that they once mentioned someone who was sending children to England, and that dad said I was too young for that.

However, my parents must have known something because émigrés from Germany were coming to Bohemia. Mr. Abraham was a German Jew who came to Kutna Hora with his wife sometime in 1936 or 1937. He spoke Czech badly, and his wife couldn't speak it at all. He was active as a cantor and also taught German to local Jewish children.

I can remember that he had a completely incompressible teaching method, so I could not understand what he was saying. Mr. Abraham also wrote a book about his experience in Germany and published it at his own expense. I don't know what happened to him because he simply disappeared before the occupation.

My parents read his book, so they must have had some idea about what was going on. People were somehow informed, nobody could say they weren't, but they didn't come to the right conclusions.

Having had to hand in his car, my father then received permission to use a bicycle. I went on his bike sometimes, but that was the only bike we had. In those days it was common for wealthier people to have bicycles or skis. We had to wear the Jewish star and there was only one store where Jews could do their shopping.

All the anti-Jewish regulations of the Protectorate were in force in Kutna Hora. My parents were no longer allowed to go to the theater or cinema. Traveling was forbidden. Dad received permission to leave the city limits because he had patients in the surrounding villages, so he could travel to see them on his bike.

We lived in Kutna Hora until we were deported to Terezin in the summer of 1942. At first, we had to go to the assembly point in Kolin, and then to Terezin. My father stayed in the Sudeten Barracks, while me and my mom, sister and grandmother were in the Hamburg Barracks. My sister then lived in the Kinderheim [children's home] and I was in house L- 410. Mom initially worked as a cleaner in the Kinderheim and then she got a job with the Menagedienst [food distribution service] in the kitchen of the Sappers Barracks.

My father was employed as a doctor in the Jägerkaserne [Gamekeeper's Barracks], which was where the deportees from Germany were sent. The living conditions were fairly good, in comparison with the way things turned out. There were about 24 girls of the same age in the children's home.

At first we were under the care of Magda Weissova, then of Laura Simkova. We worked in the garden during the day and sang and recited in the evening. I gained a deeper feeling for music, poetry and literature in general. Some of us performed in the children's chorus that appeared in the opera Brundibar, which was a big event for us. [Brundibar was written by Prague Jewish composer Hans Krasa in 1938 and sang by children from Terezin more than 50 times. Krasa was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.]

I sang in the choir. We sang a lot under the encouragement of Magda, who was originally in the Schachter Choir [the most famous choir in Terezin, lead by conductor Rafael Schachter] in the Prodana nevesta [opera written by Bedrich Smetana] and in other operas. In house L-410 there was a cellar room with a harmonium which we sometimes borrowed. Karel Berman dropped by once and, sitting at the harmonium, rehearsed the whole of Rusalka [opera written by Antonin Dvorak] with us.

We stayed in Terezin until December 1943. They took us away in closed cattle cars. We didn't know where we were going, but on the way we realized it was to the east. We arrived at night in Auschwitz. They took us straight away to a block inhabited by those who had come in September.

Transports from September and December 1943 and May 1944 went to Family camp in Auschwitz without selection. They began tattooing numbers on our arms. That is when mom found out that her brother was no longer alive, which was our first shock. Then we left for the baths and I can remember someone saying: "Just come back safely."

At the time, none of us understood what that was supposed to mean. After our bath we were given clothes, which were nothing but thin rags, hardly enough for us to keep warm in the December cold. I lived with my mom and sister in the same block. One day we saw dad at roll- call, but we could hardly recognize him, for he had become terribly run- down in just a few days.

Mom did what she could to help us, so she found work carrying out huge barrels of soup. The advantage was that those who distributed the soup could scrape what was left from the bottom of the barrel. But it was difficult work for mom, so she then stood guard over the toilet in the block which was for those who hadn't the strength to get to the outside latrine.

My father was a doctor in Terezin and when we arrived in Birkenau, he was told to see the chief physician who asked him if he had studied at a Czech or German university. My father was very patriotic, so naturally he said he had been to a Czech one.

He was asked another two times but kept saying he had been to a Czech university. If he had said he had been to a German university, he could have been a doctor there as well, but he would never have said that. Instead, he had to go around checking the inmates to see if they had flees. In one way this was good for us because he could go to the women's blocks, so we could see him. Afterwards, I went to the children's block where I later looked after ten-year-old boys.

In 1944 we somehow suspected that there was little remaining time for us. I had a strange kind of feeling. I was fifteen and couldn't imagine that we would get out of it or, on the other hand, that it would all come to an end now. I can remember saying that I would never see trees or forests again, or go anywhere by train.

We became alarmed when we saw two other transports arrive from Terezin. Then came news that all those fit to work would be sent off to work. Those fit to work meant women from sixteen to forty and men from sixteen to fifty. I was fifteen, my sister was twelve, dad was fifty-two and mom was forty- three.

None of us fell into that group. But then the block leader came and read out the numbers of those who were to go through the selection process. My number was called out - 70788. I said it was a mistake, but it was on the records, so I had to go, which was lucky for me. I don't know who made the mistake, but it was a mistake that saved my life.

Fifteen-year-olds could later volunteer to go, but I wouldn't have left my mom and sister. So I went to through the selection, which I passed because I was quite big and not too thin yet. We didn't know if there had been some kind of trick, if we were really going to be sent away to work.

First of all, we were sent to the Frauenlager [German, female camp], where we stayed for a few days in terrible conditions. We were put in little cubicles, twelve people in each, where we sat, and the only food we got was soup from a single pot and without spoons. A few days later we were given our prison clothes and shoes and after a few selections they took away the last of us and loaded us onto trucks. It was a strange feeling, finally to be leaving Auschwitz.

A few days later, we arrived in Hamburg, at the Dessauer side of the port. It was a July Thursday. We were given fantastic accommodation with two-level bunk beds and a wash room, as well as tables to sit at. We didn't go anywhere the next day and after all those long months we were given something other than soup to eat - potatoes and pickled herring.

However, an error seemed to have been made, so we were given soup again. We had to go to work on Saturday. We got up while it was still dark, went to the port and went on boats to the bombarded factories where we cleared away the wreckage and dug out the rails. It was bad there as there was at least one air-raid every night.

In September they sent us to Neugraben, which is a district on the outskirts of Hamburg. At first we were guarded by members of the Wehrmacht, who were later replaced by the SS, but they weren't too bad. They were then sent to the front and the next guards we had were old customs officers, some of whom were decent, others were not.

Emergency accommodation was being built in Neugraben for those whose houses had been bombed out. We dug the foundations for these houses, as well as ditches for the water and electricity connections. We did this even when it was freezing and the ground was covered in ice.

Once we were working in a place where a lady with a twelve-year-old son was living. Her son always said a few words to us and his mom asked our guard if we could carry pieces of turf into her garden. She later invited us in and gave us black coffee and some bread and cheese.

Before Christmas the boy brought us a large sack, saying that Weinachtsmann (Santa Claus) had brought it. Inside was a yellow turnip, cabbage and a few potatoes. For him it was nothing special, but for us it was a princely gift. We were then sent to clear away the snow in Harburg, where we dug out bricks from piles of debris.

We then went to dig an anti-tank ditch around Hamburg. We were working alongside prisoners of war. In February we had to move again, this time to a quarter called Tiefstack, which was at the other end of town. I couldn't move, though, because I had a badly lacerated leg, so they took me, along with the other sick people, in a truck, so we didn't have to walk.

We didn't have the customs officials as guards here. Instead we had SS-women who were worse. Once again we had to dig out bricks and clear the area for further use. One day we returned from work and our camp had been bombed out.

Some time later we were sent away from Hamburg. First of all we went to the railway station and then we went by train to Celle. That was at the end of March 1945. Several people managed to escape on the way. From the station in Celle we then went to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It is hard to describe what it was like at that time.

In the barracks that we went to, there was a bare floor where we had to sit as we were so crammed. The hygienic conditions were shocking, as there was no water or anything. Piles of dead bodies were lain everywhere between the blocks. A few days later the SS-men escaped because at that time you could hear cannon fire everywhere. There wasn't any food left at all.

Me and my friend Dasa found a carrot in a pit and took it. Then, when it was impossible to endure much more, along came the British army on April 15. I didn't even have the strength to stand up to see what was happening. They brought some food, but me and Dasa only took a can and smeared the carrot with grease.

There were people there who ate a lot of food very quickly and that was their end. There was an inconceivable amount of lice and flees. Makeshift bathrooms were put up to give us showers and to disinfect us. I later caught a high fever and had to stay in hospital until July 1945.

• Post war

As soon as the war was over, I wrote home to Fanynka, at whose place we had hidden things before the war and who had send us packages throughout the war. People from Bergen-Belsen were supposed to go to Sweden for recovery, and I was to go there too. But just before setting off, I received news from a person who Fanynka had been with during the war. It was one of my father's friends and he wrote that they were awaiting my return.

The first train from this area was dispatched to Czechoslovakia in July 1945. We traveled by train through conquered Germany for almost a week and then arrived in Pilsen, where we had to get off as it was supposed to be the end of the American zone. They then put us in open coal trains and we went on to Prague.

My dad's friend, the professor, found me in Prague and took me to Kutna Hora where our Fanynka also was. The next day they took me to see the doctor and it turned out that I had a very nasty affection of the lungs. The doctor arranged for me to stay in a sanatorium in Zamberk, where, as I later found out, the only reason they accepted me was to give a doctor's daughter a decent place to die. I stayed in the sanatorium for two and a half years, until February 1948. I was then given an apartment in our old house and returned home.

After returning home, I decided that I should study because I hadn't even finished my elementary school education. First of all I went to English lessons and then I resumed my piano lessons. During the next year I started to prepare for entrance exams for high school, so I would have a proper education.

The professor friend of my father's became my guardian and gave me support. But he wasn't too keen when said that I wanted to continue with my studies. I was quite stubborn, though, so I managed to complete my high school education after many difficulties and got a place at the Arts Faculty of Charles University in Prague, where I studied German and Czech. I was given a full disability pension at the time.

It was during my studies that I met my future husband, Petr Liebl. He was born in Ceske Budejovice in 1935 and his parents were a mixed couple. Towards the end of the war his mom was incarcerated in Hagibor 6 and Terezin and his dad was sent to the Postoloprty labor camp. 7 Petr spent this time at his grandmother's on his father's side in Ceske Budejovice.

At the end of the war, Petr's father, together with another man who had also been at Postoloprty camp and also had a wife and daughter in Terezin, took a horse and cart and went to Terezin, where they dropped off their wives and left the day before the houses in the camp were quarantined.

Petr's mother was expecting a baby boy who was born immediately after the war. I knew Petr from what was said by our cousin Lilly, who I went to see after the war. Before I met him, I heard that he was interested in math and that he weighed little balls, which seemed odd to me. Then one day in summer someone rung the bell and Lilly said - hey, it's Petr Liebl here, shall I tell him to come up? So I said - yes, if you want to. I wasn't curious about him at all. Then he came and was completely different from what I had imagined.

We got married in October 1955. We lived in Prague - he was in a hall of residence while I was subletting. On Sundays we would go to Kutna Hora to see Fanynka, who we then called aunt.

I gave birth to my daughter Rita in my fifth year of studies at the faculty. I then stayed at home and wrote my dissertation. We had little to live on, for all we had was our grant. When my grant finished, which was before my finals, I started looking for a job. I finally found a place at a high school in Caslav, where I taught German from 1956.

In the meantime, Petr finished his studies and got a job at the Mathematics Institute in Prague. I then had a second daughter, Zuzana, in 1959 and we tried to get an apartment in Prague. In the end, we joined a cooperative and bought a housing society apartment, which we moved into in 1961. In those days I thought that we would never be able to pay for it.

A year before that, Petr was offered a job in Dubna near Moscow, so we went there with our children. In the meantime, I got a place at a language school and promised that I would be back at the beginning of the school year. So I returned with my children in August 1961 and Petr came back for Christmas.

In 1965 we went to Ghana, as the Mathematics Institute offered Petr a job teaching mathematics at the university there. We stayed for three beautiful years in Africa. I taught German there and, for a while, Russian. Our children did not go to school for the first year, as I taught them at home.

Zuzana went to the first grade, Rita to the fourth. We then moved to the university campus, and then they went to a school that was for university staff. We returned to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. I was pregnant at the time. For the most part, I experienced the events of 1968 [Prague Spring] 8 in the maternity ward, giving birth to my son, Martin, in September.

We were a bit confused by the situation because we had been completely out of it in Ghana during that time, even though we had read Czech newspapers. We didn't really understand much of what was going on, and, thanks to Martin, I was mostly absorbed in my family.

In 1972 I moved to the 17th of November University, which was a college for foreign students, also with a translation and interpreting department for Czechoslovak students. The university was soon closed down, however, the department moving to the Arts Faculty.

During the holidays, we always went with our children to stay with Petr's parents in Ceske Budejovice. We never actually considered emigrating. We toyed with the idea of going to New Zealand, we had got this offer while teaching in Ghana, but in the end we returned home. I had an acquaintance in Israel, since a lot of people had emigrated there, but we didn't keep in touch.

My first trip to Israel was in 1993 with my husband, and I was back again in 2000 with my daughter. Rita got married and moved to Canada in 1987. Zuzana and Martin live in the Czech Republic.

The regime change in 1989 9 was actually to be expected. Although I hadn't been persecuted by the regime, I'm glad that it happened, if only because we are at least free to travel abroad. I didn't come up against any specific case of anti-Semitism towards me after the war.

At present I am the chairperson of the Terezin Initiative. 10 As a Holocaust survivor, I go to various meetings that I am invited to. Recently, for example, I was in Hamburg, which was hosting a new exhibition on subsidiary camps, so I found myself in places that I had been during the war. I often attend talks in Terezin with students from the Czech Republic and Germany.

I also travel to Germany a lot, because the Friends of Terezin Association is based in Lower Saxony. For many years I also worked at the local branch of the Association of Freedom Fighters. I was also chairperson of the Commission of the Swiss Fund for Needy Holocaust Victims and am now on the Appeals Commission for slave and forced laborers within the framework of the Czech-German Future Fund.

I have never forgotten that I am Jewish. My children, too, have always known. It has always been taken for granted in our family. My children were not brought up in a Jewish way, because I myself had not actually had such an upbringing, but they are very interested in Jewishness.

• Glossaries:

Mojsze Sznejser is an 84-year-old cobbler, who still works in his own workshop in Legnica. He comes from a small town called Lukow. Before World War II he lived and worked in Warsaw, and after surviving the Holocaust in the USSR he moved to Legnica, a town in south-western Poland, where he is a member of the local Jewish community. During our four meetings in his workshop and his apartment, he shared with me his memories of his large family, and sketched a picture of Jewish life in pre-war Lukow and post-war Legnica. His narrative style is very laconic, that is why his story appears short, but in his frank, simple words there's a certain hidden logic and coherence. These short paragraphs say more about his life than a long essay might do. Mr. Sznejser also sings very well in Yiddish, which made the interview even more interesting.

My name is Mojsze Sznejser. I was born on 5th March 1920 in Lukow. My father was called Dawid Josef Sznejser. He was a cobbler. My mother's name was Szajndla Sznejser, her maiden name was Sosnowiec. I had two brothers and one sister. My brother was called Abram and my sister was called Chana. I was the oldest. Then came my brother and sister; the age difference was two years. My other brother died young, in the 1930s, as a child - Icek, his name was. We lived in Lukow, on Pilsudskiego Street, near the cinema, and in the apartment there Dad had a cobbler's workshop.

Ma's family came from Radzyn Podlaski. That's in Lublin province [a region in eastern Poland]. I remember my great-grandfather was called Awrejnu, and my great-grandmother Suwe Gitl. My grandfather was Bejro Lajb Sosnowiec, and my grandmother Rywke Laje. I don't know her maiden name. Granddad worked for a miller. He had a beard, like my great-grandfather, but not a long one, it was average. I used to go there, and I would sleep at Granddad's. I remember Granddad's house in Radzyn. After the war I came back to Poland and went to visit that place, Radzyn Podlaski. I remember, half the house was finished, and the other half was still unfinished up to the war. I came back in 1946, and other people were living there, a Polish family. I said to them, 'I haven't come to take it back, just to see what it looks like. I went back a second time, the same year, and it had all gone. Somebody had taken it down.

I didn't go to the synagogue with Granddad, because I went with Dad back home in Lukow, and Granddad went there, in Radzyn. I remember I went there once on a Saturday by bike, from Lukow to Radzyn, and that was a sin, so when Granddad asked me: 'Where were you?' I answered: 'I was here, sleeping at a friends' place.' I couldn't have told the truth, he'd have leathered me.

On Dad's side the family was from Lukow. Granddad, I remember, was called Szymen Sznejser, and his wife Pesech. I don't know her maiden name. Granddad was a cobbler too. They lived near the Polish elementary school, where they rented an apartment off this one Jew. It was this one room and a corridor. Granddad would sit working in the room where the beds were too, and there was a bit of a kitchen taken off that room. They weren't rich.

Dad had one brother and two sisters. His brother was called Sahje and he was a cobbler too. His wife was called Ruhla, her maiden name was Sobelman. They had three children, but I only remember the name of one son - Herszel. They lived in Lukow. One sister was called Gitla. She stayed with my grandparents; I don't know if she got married.

Dad's other sister was Zlata. She married Aaron Konski, a tailor. They had a lot of children: Mojsze, Szlojme, Szyje, Herszel, Chaim, Josel, Abrejmale and Chana. Eight children. At first they lived in Lukow, where one son - Szyje - was religious, wore sidelocks and went to the yeshivah. And then they moved to Warsaw, where my uncle got a job as a tailor for the army, and Szyje stopped being religious and started to work. In Warsaw they lived at 20 Twarda Street, I remember to this day. I had one more cousin, more distant family, related to Grandma on Dad's side, Mojsze Zilberman was his name. He was very big, tall. He worked as a tailor, was earning. When he came over when I was small, he would give me a zloty. 'Here you are, have a zloty,' he'd say - I remember that. They lived in Warsaw, at 50 Dzielna Street.

Ma had three sisters and four brothers. She was the oldest. Her sisters' names were Toba, Frajda and Liba, and her brothers, in order, Symche, Mendel, Chaim and Mojsze. And that uncle Symche, I've got a photo of him from before the war, well, he had a son. I remember that son - back before the war I slept in the same room as him in Radzyn. That son, Dawid - in Polish Tadek Sosnowiec [he didn't change his name, that was just what they called him if they used a Polish name] - after the war, he went to Warsaw, got married there and settled down. He died a few years ago, now only the young generation lives there. And Ma's youngest brother, Mojsze, well he's still alive, in America. He went to Israel after the war, changed his mind there and went to America. He had his own apartment, and left it. I didn't ask why.

Ma's sister Toba lived in Siedlce with her husband - Shulke Wyszkowski. I went to their place once; I was going home for Easter [Pesach] from Warsaw. I went in to him and said: 'I'm going home.' And he said: 'Wait!' He nipped out and bought something - 'Now off you go home.' He bought something so that I'd have something for the holidays at home. Ma's second sister, Frajda, lived in Siedlce too. Her husband, Mendl Zonszajn, was a painter. He painted stations as well. When he came to Lukow to paint the station, he lived with us on Pilsudskiego Street. That was when my father was already dead. He worked a while and then went back home.

There was Ma's more distant family too; they lived in Radzyn, not far from my grandparents. He was Ma's cousin, Icek Kopciak. He was a carter, he transported all types of goods, flour, grain, whatever people gave him, and he'd carry it all from Radzyn to Lukow and back. I knew his father and mother. The Kopciaks lived on the same square as my Ma's parents. It was this big square, not cobbled, on the edge of town. In the center of town there was a church and a rank for cars and out there on the edge a lot of Jews lived. And there was a prayer house there, on the same square.

My Ma was very pretty; I remember that she wore a sheitl - a wig. And she taught poor girls to dance. I don't know, I didn't see it, but people told me that she taught dancing. She didn't make anything from it, she taught her poor friends. That was back when I didn't exist yet. She was still a girl. After that she couldn't teach, because she had a family. And she helped Dad with his work: he taught her to repair galoshes and do heels. He had bad turns with his heart because of the stinking glue, so she repaired the shoes herself. Apart from that she kept house. She cooked well, ooh! Very well. She did everything just as it should be. Dad got his portion first of all, he had to. Yes, she could cook and bake. Everything was kosher.

On Thursdays everyone went to the mikveh, first women, and then men. There was a very big synagogue and special prayer houses. And the women went into the synagogue by a separate entrance and stood where the young people studied during the week. It was connected to the synagogue, and there were these special little open window holes, so that the women could hear the prayers and repeat them. There were other prayer houses too, smaller ones, and the Hasidim 1 had their own prayer house. There was a yeshivah as well, and a bes medresh. I remember the rabbi, too, he lived down by the river, in an upstairs apartment; I never went there. But I remember that people didn't like him. He made himself out to be the cleverest, you see, he wanted to prove that he was somebody, to rule everybody. That's why they didn't like him.

On Saturdays nobody worked. You weren't allowed to do anything, not even heat up water. If your candles burnt out, you didn't light them again. If people had electric lights, somebody else [a shabesgoy] came to switch them on. We had a kerosene lamp, and again, once it had burnt out, nobody lit it again until later on Saturday. Everything for Sabbath on Saturday was prepared on Friday. Ma made the cholent and took it down to the bakers', because their oven was hot all Friday. They put all the pots in it and then on Saturday they opened up the oven and it was all hot. They brought the cholent home and everyone ate. And when Father died it was hard; at Easter [Pesach] Ma would go out to make matzah to earn enough to keep us. And of course she was given matzah.

My father died when I was coming up 12, at the age of 42. I remember that he didn't have a beard, and on his head he had a hat, like the ones in the Russian army. He served in one of those armies, back when it was still the Tsar's army [see Partitions of Poland] 2. He was a good cobbler, all his customers were Poles. The workshop was through the courtyard at first, and later at the front, onto the street. Dad wasn't very religious, but Sabbath was observed. And when Dad went to the synagogue, he took me with him. I remember we always sat on the left.

I remember that before he died, Father went to the hospital; he had heart problems. And my mother dreamed that she was burying him. At the same time a friend had come to see my father and given him a bit of vodka to drink, and Father died in the hospital. And then that same friend came to our house; I remember we had this closed-off corridor, and well, he opened the door and took Father's sheepskin.

I hardly remember my sister Chana. I just have a photograph of her, nothing else. I remember that she learned to count and sew, because that was what she had to do. She had her friends, but I don't remember her having any toys, just these dolls made out of twisted rags. And after that I don't remember anything at all, the war was a different life, and that other life just went, was lost. My sister was still young. And when me and my brother escaped into the woods [early in the occupation], she stayed with Ma. And when we came back they weren't there any more.

I remember the holidays, Chanukkah and Purim. Once I dressed my brother up at Purim, and he had a saber, a real saber, and we went to our uncle's, Dad's brother, who we seldom went to see. It must have been after Dad died, because before that, when we were small, I don't remember us dressing up. And at Pesach Ma did everything herself at home, baked challot, cooked noodles. There were separate plates and mugs for Pesach, and if there weren't enough, then they had to be cleaned. I still have separate plates, like we did back then at home.

At home we spoke Yiddish. But I could speak Polish as well. I went to elementary school, but only until my dad died, then that was the end of it. I couldn't go to school any more because I had to go out to work. And after that I only attended evening classes. But I remember the teacher at the elementary school, Miss Cetnarska: she taught Polish, sums, everything. And there was another elementary school, where only Jews went, but the teachers were Polish. I went there for religious studies. Once a week they had Jewish religious studies there. I went to cheder as well, and then to talmud torah. Our lessons were in Hebrew. We learnt to pray and translate into Hebrew. We were taught by Josel the baker, and then by Awrum Zyto, who came from Israel [Palestine at that time], and taught us Hebrew. The cheder was private, I remember, at old Nissenbaum's home, who taught us. The talmud torah was in a big room connected to the synagogue. You had to pay for it all; Dad was poor, but we had to pay anyway.

Lukow was a very pretty town. There were two churches, two grammar schools, the 22nd Riflemen's Regiment [a unit of the army of the Second Polish Republic]. It was a lovely life! And Lukow was bigger than Radzyn. In Radzyn you had to walk nine kilometers to the [train] station, but in Lukow there were two stations, one for Lublin and one for Warsaw. I often went to Radzyn by bus to visit my grandparents. Ma would go to the driver and tell him to throw me off in Radzyn by the church.

There were different youth organizations in Lukow: Shomers [see Hashomer Hatzair in Poland] 3, halutzim, Shomeradats [Hashomer Hadati], Zionists, but no one in my family was interested in that. They had their own work. I sometimes went to Zionist meetings, but we didn't get out much, because there wasn't time. We had to work.

There were a lot of Jews in Lukow before the war. They had bakeries, and there was a Jewish slaughterhouse. The Jewish slaughterhouse was in this big building near the river. There were two slaughterhouses in the building: the Polish one and the Jewish one. The Polish part was closer to the river. But the slaughterhouses were separate: separate entrances and exits. If they did something wrong with the meat in the Jewish part and it wasn't kosher, they would give it to the Poles. And then they settled up with money. But normally everything had to be kosher. And on the right side the Poles slaughtered pigs and other [non kosher] animals. And all the blood flowed down into the river.

In Lukow, before the war, there were different sorts of Jews, like in every nation. I remember one Jew was killed by some other Jews. Why did they kill him? Because he split on some others. He was called Jojne Bocian, he was a party bloke - a communist. And once, the Polish police caught a few communists and put them inside, and Bocian was among them [during the Second Polish Republic, in the 1930s, the activities of communist parties and organizations were illegal]. Well, one of the policemen went to a tailor to have something done, and the tailor was Bocian's brother-in-law, Sliwka, his name was. This tailor asked him why they'd arrested Bocian, and if they could let him out. The policeman said that they could let him out, but on one condition: he wanted him to denounce the others. Bocian agreed and they let him out.

Bocian went to the [communist] organization and said that they had to have a meeting. He wanted the police to catch them. But the other people weren't stupid. They were surprised that he had been let out, while the others were still inside, and they worked it all out. They arranged a meeting somewhere in a field and sent someone to watch the site. And one of them was there and saw the police come but that Bocian wasn't there and the others weren't there either. And then when Bocian asked why they hadn't had the meeting, they said that they were going to have it another time. And Bocian told the police again. When he was sitting with his parents and his brother-in-law at dinner on a Friday evening, this guy from the party came to him and told him he had to go to Siedlce to do something. Bocian went by train. In Siedlce there was this guy standing in a doorway, and he told him to come up to him for instructions. Bocian went into the entranceway, and the other guy killed him. The next day his mother screamed: 'Help! They've killed my son!'

There were rich Jews too. Gasman, for instance, who was a cobbler, had a large firm, other cobblers working for him, and who built a big house. I didn't work for him, because the firm wasn't around any more in my day, but people used to talk about it. I just saw the house, this very big house. There were other rich Jews, mostly bakers. I remember there was one who lived near the bridge; he had a very big apartment. And when the kids were walking to school, whoever they were, Polish or Jewish, and stood in front of the window looking in, the baker would call them and give them a roll. 'I haven't got any money,' the child would say, but he just said: 'Eat up, eat up, your Ma will pay.' And whether or not she paid, he would give out the rolls either way. And his brother, Josel the baker, he was a teacher, and taught us Hebrew.

Life with the Poles was harmonious enough. We lived with them like brothers. They'd come to us, so we'd go to them, you had to. When my father died, the neighbors would come round to my mother and say: 'Neighbor, why don't you come round for some potatoes?' I still remember those neighbors' names: Chajkowski, Golaszewski. And when a Polish funeral was passing the Jews paid their respects too, and took off their caps. We didn't wear kippot on the street, you see, but caps or hats. But later on, when I was working and just going to evening classes, there were times when youths were out to beat us up, throw stones at us [in the late 1930s anti-Semitic feeling in the Second Polish Republic intensified]. The teachers didn't let us out then, so that they wouldn't throw stones at us.

It was only Poles that came to us with work - farmers, teachers. And when Dad made some shoes for this one Pole and Ma took them round, she took me with her, and when I got there I had to kiss his hand out of respect. And I'll tell you what else I heard, what they used to say: that back in the time of the Tsar there was this old Pole with a beard, Kaminski, who had 18 children. Well, when the Ukrainians wanted to throw the rabbi out of the window, he wouldn't let them throw him off the balcony. Well, I heard that when he died all the Jews went to the funeral.

The Kaminskis owned the cinema and the library, they were very rich. We rented our apartment off Kaminski's son. That son, Mietek, his name was, he had a bit of a limp. He was into stuffing birds and other animals. He wanted to take me hunting, but my mother told me not to go, because if I ran around I could get killed by a stray bullet. That Mietek rented apartments to lots of Jews, and if anyone couldn't pay, he didn't throw them out, he would just tell them to sweep the street a bit. Mietek's wife was the daughter of a chimney sweep, and very nice. They had two children. I used to go round to their house every day. Sometimes they'd send me out for something. Their children were younger than me, but I got on with them. Those were very good people.

I remember one other thing that happened, that was on Pilsudskiego Street too, the cinema was there and the club was there. This Jew, a dancer, was walking by the club, it was a Saturday, and he was going to the club, not to the synagogue. And another Jew, with a beard, was going to the synagogue, and two Polish army officers grabbed him. One grabbed the Jew by his beard and pulled it. And the dancer, oh he could fight, I saw what he did - when he head butted the one of them, the other officer ran away.

I remember that where we played there weren't any Polish children. We played ball [football] mostly. We played in a field, and the farmer would come and chase us away. Because he had sowed it and we were getting in the way and wrecking the field. There were a lot of children in Lukow. There was this one Jewish kid in Lukow, who went to the grammar school, an only child, the son of a rich painter. Well, he had those wheels on shoes [roller-skates]. The only one in Lukow! And I remember I used to go to the cinema, because my brother helped out at the cinema. One guy would let us in, and we'd sit there quiet as mice. Good films and all sorts there were. They'd screen banned ones, but I went anyway.

My grandparents and parents didn't go on vacation, but I remember that rich Jews did. Poles would let out their homes, sometimes even moving into the barn, because they were paid. There were places like that in the woods, three kilometers or so from the town. I didn't go away anywhere, just to family in Warsaw, Siedlce and Radzyn Podlaski.

After my father died I had to work. First I worked for this one master [cobbler]. I wanted him to give me another zloty, he wouldn't, so I moved on. To Mojsze Onikman. I worked there and my brother did too. I've got a photograph of us working together, with one other guy - Lajbele Bomstein. That Lajbele was denounced to the Germans by his own father! Lajbele met a girl somewhere; she was escaping and hiding from the Germans. Lajbele found a Pole and hid the girl with him, threatening to kill him if anything happened to the girl. Later on he hid there too, and some other people as well. His father found out where he was and split on them all. They killed the whole family and all the people hiding there. A father split on his own son!

After that - this must have been in 1936 - I came to Warsaw, to my uncle [Aaron Konski]. I remember he said: 'There's so many hungry mouths around here there'll be enough for another one!' And off he went. Went off there and then, and found me a job. I stayed there until the war. Ma, my sister and my brother knew where I was, because I'd left home to earn some money. I lived with my uncle, at 20 Twarda Street. We lads all slept in one big room, my uncle and aunt and their daughter in the other. There was this bed, big enough for five people. And in the workshop was the kitchen and my aunt made dinner there and she'd argue with me for not coming in for dinner. My uncle was a tailor for the army and once, I remember, Edziu the neighbor came round, a Pole, and wanted to learn to be a tailor. And my uncle asked his mother: 'Do you agree? Edziu wants to be a tailor.' And she says: 'Yes.' 'Well then, so be it,' said my uncle, and from then on Edziu got dinner. And later on, that Edziu came to my cousin's funeral; I was there too.

When I lived in Warsaw I didn't have any contact with the Jewish community, I didn't go to the synagogue, just straight home from work. We didn't work on Saturdays, so I would go to these unofficial beaches to swim [on the bank of the Vistula], and the police would chase us. That was in Praga [a district of Warsaw]: young people, students used to meet up there, on Zamenhofa Street. I worked first of all on Panska Street - my uncle got me the job - then at 49 Mila Street, and then at 12 Zamenhofa Street, by the passage - there was this passage there to the other side [of the street]. And the youths used to meet at 26 Zamenhofa, all our youths [Jews]. There was this spot there, where people would meet, talk about this and that, just young people. That was a to-do, it was great.

I went back home right before the war. In 1939, in September or October, I and my brother Abram escaped into the woods. It wasn't easy, you had to hunt for food, and keep your wits about you, and you had to be careful with other people in the woods too. After that we slipped over to Brest [see Annexation of Eastern Poland] 4. In Brest it was a bit different. In Brest they did a round-up and shipped me off to Belarus, to Gomel, and there I worked in a factory, Selmasz. It had belonged to a Jew, that factory. I did whatever work they gave me to do there: I worked the thresher, the chaff. I lived with this family in a Jewish woman's house. I asked the foreman to give us some coal to burn. They gave us fuel, but she burnt it for herself and not for us in our apartment, so I got out of there right then.

By then the Germans were rounding people up [in June 1941 Germany attacked the USSR], and I escaped by train to Kurgan, out there it was Russian. There I worked as a cobbler. I wasn't in uniform back then. Later on the Russkis [Russians] were scouting for the army and they sent me to Chelyabinsk, to an aluminum factory. That was when I got separated from my brother, who got sent elsewhere. In Chelyabinsk I worked on a building site. And I said to the foreman: 'I'm a cobbler.' So he said: 'Go and get your tools, you can repair shoes.' But I didn't understand Russki [the Russian language], didn't understand that you had to get a permit to leave, so I got on a train to Kurgan and off I went. I don't remember where they caught me, it might have been Alma Ata or somewhere else, but they hauled me off the train and they were telling me I had escaped from the army. And after that they ferried me around, I can't remember where the court was, somewhere in Russia. I didn't understand anything, they were all speaking Russian. I got the death penalty, that's all I understood. But just afterwards they kept me in prison - I don't remember where or how long. Later they changed my sentence to ten years' labor - I'd learnt a bit of Russian, so I understood that.

When they'd changed my sentence they shipped me out to Nizhniy Tagil, to a camp, and turned me out into the middle of nowhere. Starved as a dog I was. Frozen hands. I even slept in my clothes, had nowhere to lay my head. After that they built barracks and we slept in our clothes there too, as they didn't heat them. One camp commandant came out from Moscow and gave an order that they were to hand out mattresses. Once I started working there, this naradchik [Russian term for an official in a labor camp] came along and said: 'You're going to Moscow. You're going to work and from there you can get home.' He was a Jew, he was in the camps too, but he was a naradchik.

And I went to Moscow. In Moscow I worked in a camp, as a cobbler. They brought work down from the Kremlin and then sent it off to the front. We were mending shoes. About 30, 40 people worked there. I was strong then, always got what I wanted. Once, it was a Sunday, I remember, we went to the kitchen to eat. I sat down, and opposite me Ivan Gadzhuk [another prisoner] wanted to sit. He could have sat down, there was space, but he wanted to sit where somebody else from the gang was already sitting, an older guy. And he [Gadzhuk] was a strapping guy. And Gadzhuk tells the old man to get up and make room for him. The old guy, like old people do, got up slowly, Gadzhuk pulled the bench out, and the old guy didn't make it, and he fell over. So I say to Gadzhuk, 'Ivan, happy now? Do you have any honor?' And he starts insulting me. Then he grabbed the bench, pulled a leg off it and threw it at me. I picked the leg up, went over to Ivan, and gave it to him on the head, grounded him and kicked him all I could. He had his boys, but none of them came over because they knew I was right.

That night I was afraid to sleep, because Gadzhuk could have come. So I put a cupboard up [against the door] and I had this big knife. I slept all night and in the morning we went to work. The women working in the office went to the director and told him everything, that Mishka, that's me, had a brawl with Gadzhuk. The director came to me then and asked whether I couldn't have sorted it so that Gadzhuk wouldn't come to work any more at all. That's what the director said!

All of us in that plant had to make quotas [quantity of work performed in relation to the average per employee according to a plan imposed from above]. And I made the biggest quotas and that saved me. 400 percent, 450 percent I could do, day in, day out, and I had a good reputation. They set store by those quotas. That reputation saved me. There was an amnesty for the Russians, and I got counted as one of them. They'd read in my papers that my town was Lukow, see, and out there near Moscow was Wielkie Luki, and I came home as a Russian. That was in 1946.

Practically all my family was killed in the war. I don't even know which year my Ma and my sister died. My brother Abram survived: he was in Russia too, and then in Romania. There he met his future wife, a Romanian Jewess. Straight after the war they went back to Russia together. From Uncle Konski's family everyone was killed, only one was left - my cousin Szlojme, or Stanislaw Konski. They died in Warsaw; I don't know how he came to survive. He'd have told me, but I didn't ask. Back in Brest [in 1939], I met that other cousin of mine, Zilberman. He said: 'I've got to go back to Ma, because I left her behind.' He went back to his mother and he died too; they died together. Her name was Sonia. From Ma's family they all died except Uncle Mojsze Sosnowiec. He lived the war out in Russia as well.

When I went back to Lukow I remember that some people came round asking if I wanted to help take ours [the corpses of Jews] out of the Catholic cemetery. I went to the grave, opened it up, and we dug out three men and two women, and took them to our cemetery. And this Pole, Mr. Cholocki, when he met me, he gave me a photograph of the Germans finishing off Jews wearing prayer shawls. He'd hidden to take the photograph, sat up in a tree. He gave it to me, didn't want anything for it. I gave it to some other Jews who were emigrating. 'Here you go,' I said, 'this'll come in handy abroad.' I met the church organist in Lukow too, Schiller. He said to me: 'Give us a hug! Come here, I'll tell you everything. The Germans came round to his father during the occupation and said: 'You're coming to work with us.' And he shook his head: 'No!' So they killed him on the spot - him, a German himself. He would always grab me by the ear. There are all sorts of people in every nation. I can't forget that Schiller, he knew me, see.

When I got back to Lukow I started working straight off. They gave me somewhere to live; I had a place to lay my head. And I'd still be there, in Lukow, to this day if it weren't for this one Jew, who took me in. Borrowed a few coins off me and said: 'Come on, we'll go West.' And off he went, first of all to Warsaw. I chucked everything and went after him, first to Warsaw, and then he says: 'How can I go anywhere - the wife ill, the kids ill.' I could have stayed there at his place, but I didn't want to, he'd already had me once. And I went off to Dzierzoniow. And that rogue came to Dzierzoniow from Warsaw to sell things. He brought some chocolate. And I took my money back then. You see, he asks me if I want to buy some chocolate, so I say yes, that he should leave it, and I'll pay him when he comes back. And that's what he did, left some chocolate and went off. Then he came back and wanted his money. So I said to him, 'You only took me in once, I'm not being had again!' Because he had borrowed some money off me and not given it back to me. He thought I'd forgotten. But I outwitted him.

I went to Dzierzoniow with my wife, Chaja, nee Sznajser. I'm Sznejser and she's Sznajser -that was a laugh. We came back from Russia to Lukow together, and then went to Dzierzoniow, where our first son, Dawid Berek, was born on 10th February 1947. Well, I worked in a co-operative there, as a cobbler, and Uncle Mojsze came to see me, my mother's youngest brother. During the war he'd been in Russia too, and then he lived with his wife and children in Legnica. And he took me to Legnica. There, in Legnica, Chaja and I got married, got all the papers. We just put our names down in the municipal council. We went, we and our witnesses, and that was all. We didn't have a wedding in the community before the rabbi; at the time no one went to the community. I saw weddings like that before the war, under the chuppah, and with all the family. My uncle Mojsze Sosnowiec had a wedding like that, only I can't remember where.

I worked for that uncle of mine, he was a cobbler too. My uncle gave us somewhere to sleep, a tiny place, just me and the wife there, and the oldest boy, he was just a baby then, in a pram, a few months old, see. And then I found an apartment and it was all right. After we had two more kids: my son Szama was born in 1950, and my daughter Syma in 1952.

After the war my brother Abram came to stay with us in Legnica, with his wife. At first they lived with us, I gave him a separate room, and later he found another room and went to live there. Two years he was here and then he went to Israel. I never thought of going there. I wanted to stay here. This is my country.

After the war there were a lot of Jews here in Legnica. The synagogue was on Chojnowska Street. I used to go to the synagogue on the holidays. I didn't go on Sabbath. There were lots of people, see, and sometimes I was at work. Now on Saturdays I go to the synagogue, well, got to help keep the ten up [the minyan]. I know how to pray: I've got my prayer shawl here too, and I put it on, but not all of it, because I've forgotten it now. Back then there were lots of people. There was a synagogue and a SCSPJ club [see Social and Cultural Society of Polish Jews] 5. I went to both. I always went to the SCSPJ on an evening: we'd come, play dominoes, and there was a buffet bar. Life was different - lively; we'd go to the club, to the park, once in a while to the cinema. The club was on Nowy Swiat Street. You could go every day of the week. They'd have an act come in and play; there was a Jewish theatre. The theatre was on Nowy Swiat Street as well. They'd come from Warsaw, from Wroclaw; the shows were in Yiddish. There were Poles that sang in Yiddish there too. One time they came up from Wroclaw, and I said: 'Listen up, I'll sing you a song, but without the piano, so everyone can hear.' And I sang for them, and they clapped.

On the holidays they would organize something in the synagogue, but it was the same folk who came here to the club. And there were Jews who didn't go to either, didn't want to let on that they were Jews. But I went to the club from the beginning; I never thought of letting it go. You can't change what you are. A man who changes is a good-for-nothing. Because he'll change all the time. But I will always be who I am, what's the point of going round lying? I can't, that's my nature. My kids are the same. My oldest son was called Dawid Berek, after my father and my granddad from Radzyn, and my second son Szama, after my other granddad - Szymen, and my daughter Syma too.

Here in Legnica everyone always knew, and still does, that I'm a Jew. I've never really had any problems. On Kartuska Street, where my workshop is, everyone knows me well. I tell them, 'That's who I am, and I'm not going to change.' People who know me call out to me from a long way off. There's this one Pole who's been going mushrooming in the woods with me for 40 years. 40 years, and he won't go with anyone else, only me! It was he who taught me to pick mushrooms. Like a brother, he is; once I needed him to go for my daughter to Swinoujscie [a Polish Baltic port], because she was coming back from Denmark, so I ask him if he'll go, and all he asks is when. I told him 'today', so he got straight in [his car] and went. He's known me so many years and to this day he comes into my shop every day. He came to have his shoes mended once and we got talking. And it's 40 years now.

I belonged to the party [the Polish United Workers' Party] 6, but I never sold anyone. My boss said: 'You have to inform.' But I said no. He didn't really want me to, see, he just wanted to know what kind of a guy he was dealing with.

Later on I worked in a Jewish co-operative, it was called Dobrobyt [Prosperity], my uncle worked there too. It was a Jewish co-operative but there were Poles working there as well: cobblers and boot-makers, they made bags there too. Then they changed the name to 'Kilinskiego'. I worked there until 1960, until Gomulka closed it down. My uncle handed in his notice and went abroad: first to Israel, and from there to America. But in 1960 I opened my own place and I sat and made shoes.

In 1968 I remember that it wasn't much fun when all that fuss reached us in Legnica. It was just Gomulka's work [see Gomulka Campaign] 7. Well, not his on his own, but the organization [the Polish communist party, PZPR], but he made the most noise: 'All the Moszkes [Moses] to their dayyan!' And I sent my children away. I said to them, 'What can you do? Go.' I thought that they would have a new place there, that perhaps they'd make a place for us. My son Szama went to Israel and my daughter Syma to Denmark. I thought that one day the wife and I would go to live with one of them.

In Israel Szama went straight into the army. Almost straight away he was injured and went to stay with family, my mother's cousin, Icek Kopciak. (The Kopciaks had left for Israel earlier, and before they left they had lived in Legnica too. Icek worked in a co-operative, Model, where they made hats). But there in Israel Szama didn't want to stay with them. One day Kopciak's wife put some food out and he ate a lot. Szama was very ill, but he didn't say anything to her. And she went to her husband, who was in the garden, and told him that Szama had eaten a lot. And the window was open and he heard. And right away he wrote to me, 'Dad, I'm not going there again.' And after that I didn't have any more news from him. I just found out in a letter that he had died, and that he had left a few zloty. Well, I could at least have written back and told them to put up a headstone in the cemetery, but I didn't think, and I didn't do anything.

Syma got married in Denmark and her married name was Gertner. She was in contact with the Jewish community there. She lived with her husband and her mother-in-law. I went to stay with them. The mother-in-law was a Russian Jewess, not a very nice woman. When my daughter put food in front of me she looked kind of oddly. And then in 1993 my daughter died too. She's buried in Denmark in a Jewish cemetery.

I stayed in Legnica with Dawid, my eldest son. He didn't want to leave, because he didn't want to leave me. My wife died in 1986, right after the disaster in Russia [the April 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine]. She went out early in the morning, breathed in the air and that was it, at once. She died shortly afterwards. My son married here in Legnica. But then he threw his wife out. Because she told me that when she's in the kitchen she didn't want to see me. In my house! So Dawid threw her out. And they had a child, a son, Mariusz is his name. She taught him to be against his father. When Dawid wanted to talk to his son, he would run away. Then, when he got married, he didn't invite his father, and when they had a baby they didn't invite him either. It's only now that I'm in touch with him: he comes round from time to time, at last, after 35 years I'm a grandfather to him! All that was hard for Dawid. And he paid child support money for 18 years. In the end he died too, in 2002. I prayed for him for a whole year, recited the Kaddish. I've given my grandson a lot of things his father left, because Dawid was always buying things for him, even though he couldn't talk to him.

I carried on working. And I still work to this day, you have to live a normal life, see. And I miss Lukow, my town, life was good there. Not long ago this guy came in with a pair of shoes to repair. And he asks me whether I'm not from Lukow. Someone had recommended me, someone from those parts. He gave me the work. Other than that there's no work, but you want to chat. Sit and wait to die? You have to keep going.

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