This photograph was taken during my visit to my paternal grandmother Maria Sadlik on my summer vacations. I, Kurt Sadlik, am sitting in the middle. My grandmother Maria is standing behind, on the right. The rest of the people are my grandmother's Polish neighbors. This photo was taken in Tuszyn (Poland) in 1938. This photo was miraculously saved in our house. My cousin Altrey gave it to me when I visited him in Liptovski Mikulas for the first time in 1970.
My paternal grandmother, Maria Sadlik, is the only one of my father’s family whom I knew. I don’t know her place or date of birth though. All I know is that in the 1880s my father’s family lived somewhere in Austria-Hungary and that was where my father was born.
At the time when I remember my grandmother she was living with her mother in the town of Tuszyn in Poland. I don’t remember my great-grandmother. She was an elderly woman. When I went to school in 1935 I spent all my summer vacations with my grandmother in Tuszyn. Grandmother had a small stone house in Tuszyn. Here were three or four rooms in the house. Grandmother spoke Polish with her neighbors and Yiddish and Slovak to me. She only spoke Yiddish with her mother.
My grandmother was a short fatty woman with a round smiling face. She was very quiet and kind. She had long black hair with streaks of gray that she wore in a knot. She didn’t cover her head. She wore common clothes like all other women in smaller towns at that time. She wore light dresses and shoes with heels.
My grandmother lived in a Polish neighborhood. I cannot say for sure, but I don’t think Jews had their own Jewish district in Tuszyn. I played with Polish children. I remember that grandmother took me to her friends or relatives whose house was also in a Polish neighborhood.
My grandmother wasn’t fanatically religious. She didn’t wear a wig. She went to the synagogue on Jewish holidays and observed Sabbath and Jewish holidays at home. As far as I remember, Grandmother didn’t observe the kashrut. We never heard about my grandmother again after Poland was occupied in 1939. I think she perished during the German occupation.
