These are my parents: my mother Irina Sadlik (nee Bogner) and my father Karl Sadlik. This photo was taken shortly after their wedding in Liptovski Mikulas in 1925. This photo was miraculously saved in our house. My cousin Altrey gave it to me when I visited him for the first time in 1970.
I don’t know how my parents met. My mother never told me about it. I think my parents had a traditional Jewish wedding. This had to be so at the time. At least, I know that all of my cousins had traditional Jewish weddings with a chuppah and klezmer music. My parents got married in 1925. I was born in 1928 and named Kurt. My Jewish name is Itzhak.
After the wedding my parents settled down in the house of my mother’s parents. It was a one-storied brick house divided into two sections: my mother’s sister Adelina lived in one and our family and Grandmother Othelia lived in the other part. There were two big rooms in each section and a big common kitchen in the central part. There were separate entranceways to the house. We lived in the center of the town and didn’t have a garden or livestock. There was a small flower garden near the house and a woodshed in the backyard.
My father drove the only bus in the town that commuted from the railway station to the hotel and then to the Tatry Mountain. There were big caves near our town. There were ancient idols, an ice cave and grottos with stalactites and stalagmites there. It was a place of interest where my father took tourists.
A bus driver was a popular person at that time since cars were rare. Only rich people had cars. There were two or three in our town. The main means of transport were wagons and carts. When I was five or six my father took me with him and all other boys envied me a lot.
My mother was a hairdresser. Before Sabbath and Jewish holidays she did the hair of rich women in their homes. The rest of the time my mother did sewing at home. She sewed bed sheets, nightgowns and fixed clothes. She had a Singer sewing machine at home.
My father wore common clothes. He didn’t have a beard or payes. He didn’t cover his head. My mother didn’t cover her head either. Only orthodox Jewish women wore wigs and dark clothes. My mother had long and very thick dark hair that she wore in a knot. My parents covered their heads only when they went to the synagogue. My grandmother and my mother’s sisters had their hair done in the same fashion. They also wore common clothes in the fashion of this time.
Our family and my mother’s relatives were religious. We had faith in God and prayed. We observed traditions, but we didn’t always observe the kashrut in everyday life at home.
