Chapter Two

MY EARLIEST MEMORY of my mother is walking with her in the street, in summer, munching a piece of bread. I was probably four years old. Mother met some of her friends and stopped. As they engaged in a conversation, I suddenly began to choke on a piece of crust. I tried to attract mother’s attention by pulling her hand and pulling her skirt — all to no avail. She kept on talking to the ladies. In desperation, I kicked her in the leg. Only then did she realise my predicament. She gave me a few solid slaps on the back, and I was saved.

My sister Malke is four years younger than me. When she was nearly one, she contracted meningitis and was critically ill. During her illness, my older sister, Ruchl, and I stayed with our two aunties, who lived together in a large but run-down apartment, about one kilometre away.

One day, our aunties came with us to visit our parents. We were not allowed to enter our one-room apartment, and instead talked to our parents through a small opening in the door. There was practically no furniture in the room — only a bed, on which my little sister lay, a table, and one chair.

Both my parents were crying, and asked us to leave, which we did in a great hurry. Much later, I learned that we had come on the day of crisis for my sister. She was only one breath away from death, but by some miracle pulled through and survived, with no apparent damage. When I was older, I understood that all the furniture had had to be sold to pay for the doctors and medicines.

As soon as I reached the age of five, mother, who came from a religious home, enrolled me in a cheder. One day — it must have been in the summer — a group of us were sitting around the table, prayer books in front of us. It was late afternoon, and I felt very hot in the small, stuffy room. Suddenly, I saw my father through the window, beckoning me to come out. I excused myself and went out to him. He embraced me, told me the weather was too hot to stay inside and study, then bought me an ice-cream in a nearby shop. We sat there for a while, then went home together. When we were in the courtyard, father winked at me and said: ‘We will tell mother that you were sent home earlier today, because of the heat, and I met you on the street.’ I loved him for that little conspiracy.

In September 1928, at the age of six, I went to school for the first time. It was a secular Yiddish primary school, where my sister Ruchl was already in the second grade.

The winter of 1928–1929 was one of the coldest on record. Transportation was at a standstill, coal was impossible to get, and people were freezing. Schools were closed, and we stayed home, dressed in the warmest clothes mother could find.

One morning, our father left early, telling us that he had been promised a cart-load of coal if he could pick it up personally at the railway yard. It must have had something to do with him being an invalid. The three of us, and mother, stood at the window waiting for father. Then he appeared at the entrance gate of the court, walking beside a horse-drawn cart full of coal.

When he entered the courtyard, the cart was suddenly encircled by a great number of people, the tenants of the building. They were desperate. Normally peaceful and friendly neighbours, each of them grabbed as much coal from the cart as they could. Father’s pleading and shouting did not help much. He was left with very little of the precious coal.

Father was very angry for a while. Then he sat silently for some time, got up, and told us that he was not mad at our neighbours anymore; they were simply desperate, and needed the coal, just as we did.

One Friday, early in the spring of 1929, the principal of our school called me out of the classroom and asked me to fetch mother right away. We lived about 500 metres from the school. Excited, I ran all the way home and conveyed to my mother the message from the principal. Intrigued by the urgency, she followed me to the school and went to see him. What he wanted was my mother’s permission to promote me to the second grade for the remainder of the school year.

Apparently I was scholastically advanced, well above the level of the other kids in grade one, and the teachers had recommended that I should jump a grade in mid-year. On the following Monday, I was presented to the children of grade two by my teacher. I was only six years old. At the end of the school year, at the age of seven, I was promoted to grade three. Most of the other students were already nine years old. For the remainder of my school years, adolescence, and even later, I would always associate with people who were a couple of years older than myself.

Our school belonged to the CJSZO (Central Yiddish School Organisation), founded in 1921, under the influence of the Jewish Socialist Party, the Bund, and it adopted the standardised Yiddish spelling of the YIVO, the Jewish Institute for Scientific Research. The CJSZO schools were the only ones in Poland where all subjects, except Polish language and literature, were taught in our mother-tongue, Yiddish.

The majority of our teachers were young, idealistic, radical people, who set themselves the goal of bringing modern, secular education to Jewish children. They were particularly zealous in their love for Yiddish, and considered the upgrading of its status and tuition methods as their sacred duty. Despite being poorly paid and overworked, our teachers infected us with their enthusiasm and love of education. They encouraged our quest for learning and knowledge, and gave each student individual attention. At a time when corporal punishment was the norm in most schools, it was unknown in ours.

I loved the school and its teachers, and was very happy there. I had good friends, and enjoyed the camaraderie of students and teachers. Learning came easily to me. In consequence, I was good at most subjects, especially maths. The principal, who was our maths teacher, proudly called me her ‘little mathematician’. I was also a voracious reader. Soon the school library was inadequate for me. On the suggestion of the teachers, I began to borrow books from the large Grosser Library, which was situated at least three kilometres away from where we lived. But I did not mind. As a matter of fact, I enjoyed my visits to the library very much.

The atmosphere of our school was like that of an extended family. It was our second home. The students were close to each other during their school years, and remained very good friends after graduation. The classmates kept in close contact even after the terrible years of the Holocaust. The survivors, spread over different countries and continents, have retained to this day their warm, fraternal feelings. We have written to each other over the years and met whenever possible. Such meetings have always been very joyous occasions. The close bonds, cemented at our school, were to last forever.

When I was eight, in 1930, I became seriously ill with scarlet fever. At that time, it was a much-dreaded, highly infectious children’s disease. A doctor was called, and he gave me an injection in the lower left abdomen. To this day, I can still remember how painful it was. However, it must have been very effective. I started to get better quickly, but no one, especially children, were allowed to visit me.

Every afternoon, after school, my classmates assembled in the courtyard, below our second-storey apartment, and yelled out in turn, to share with me the day’s happenings at school. I appreciated very much their thoughtful expressions of friendship, and recovered quickly to join them at school.

In 1931, my parents decided that our apartment at 17 Młynarska Street, where they had lived since getting married, was too cramped for the family of five. They found a much larger vacant apartment about 160 metres away, at 14 Berek Joselewicz Street (so named after a famous Jewish participant in a Polish uprising against Russia). We moved to the new place, which was on the ground floor, in the far corner of a huge courtyard, on the opposite side of which were stables for horses and the equipment of some teamsters who lived in our building.

One particular summer evening, our whole family came home from some sort of celebration. Father, who had had a few drinks, was in a very good mood. We sat outside our apartment enjoying the lovely evening. Then we heard the coughing of our upstairs neighbour, a young woman in her early twenties, who was suffering from consumption. Father’s mood changed immediately, as he told us tearfully: ‘That poor girl will not last much longer — what a pity, what a waste.’

His prophecy proved to be correct. She died a few weeks later.

We did not stay very long in the new apartment. There was dampness on most of the walls, and my parents were very concerned that this could affect the health of their children, especially my sister Ruchl, who was more delicate than the other two. In 1933, after an absence of less than two years, we moved back to Młynarska Street — though to the other side, to number twenty.

That was a nice brick building. However, it had only a small courtyard. Our apartment was on the first floor facing the street and had a balcony, which my mother soon filled with flower boxes and plants. She loved gardening, and was very good at it, too. All our relatives and visitors had to inspect her balcony as she proudly showed them each flower or plant. Mother had what is called ‘green fingers’, and she always had larger and prettier flowers than anybody else.

From the first day, our family was happy in that apartment. It was always full of young people — our schoolmates and, later, after leaving school, my and my sisters’ friends. Both our parents were on very friendly terms with the young people. They never complained of the noise we probably made on many occasions. They were happy to see us in the company of so many youngsters: arguing, singing, dancing, or just being in the company of friends.

In that apartment, I met my Faygele (Fela) for the first time. It was probably in 1934, when she came to see my sister Ruchl, with whom she became friendly. In that apartment, our family lived through the terrible years of the Nazi occupation in the Lodz ghetto until the bitter end, the liquidation of the ghetto.

As I have mentioned before, our school was under the influence of the Jewish Socialist Party, the Bund. As soon as we got a little older, we were actively encouraged by the teachers to join Skif, their children’s organisation. I, in company with most of my classmates, became a member of Skif when I was about ten. That was the beginning of a new and very interesting period in my life. The organisation was divided into groups of about twenty. Each group had a leader, an adult — in most cases, a teacher from our school — and sent one of its members as a representative to the council, which ran the whole organisation. The group leader or a guest speaker held weekly talks about current social and political events. We also had outings, summer camps, and participated in all Bundist festivities.

I enjoyed the camaraderie of my fellow Skifists, and became very interested in the theoretical teachings of the founders of socialism. At the age of twelve, I read the works of Marx, Engels, Bebel, and others. I was voted to represent my group, and became a member of the council. I even managed to write an essay under the title ‘Socialism and Women’, based on the writings of August Bebel, and I read it at a special function of Skif. Within a short time, I was convinced that socialism would solve all the problems and ills of the Jewish people and of the entire world. I considered myself a fully fledged participant in the struggle for socialism.

Religion was not taught at our school. The seeds of anti-religiousness were firmly planted in our minds. At Skif, religion and religious practices were treated with contempt and disdain. It went so far that on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, we would be busy helping to make a success of the party’s special press-day. We ran around the Jewish quarter selling the daily newspaper of the Bund, the Naye Folkstsaytung, completely unaware that we were badly hurting the feelings of tens of thousands of people who were walking to or from the synagogues.

Before Passover 1934, the principal of our school, Mrs Liza Holtzman, had a talk with me and three other boys in our class. Since that was our final year at the school, she proposed that for the last three months of the school year we should attend a government Jewish primary school, the principal of which was a lifelong friend of hers.* Her idea was that we would get a graduation certificate from that school in order to increase the chances for any one of us who wanted to continue his education to receive a bursary to a government high school. She feared that the authorities were biased against our school because the subjects, except Polish and Polish literature, were taught in Yiddish. She then asked each of us to call a parent to see her immediately, to get their approval.

[* Under the provisions of a treaty agreed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the newly restored Polish state was obliged to fund public elementary schooling for its national minorities, and to protect minority religious freedoms. The treaty was always controversial in Poland, which renounced it in 1934. A treaty provision requiring teaching at minority public schools to be in minority languages (such as Yiddish for Jews) was never implemented.]

It was again on a Friday, as it had been five years before, when I told my mother that the principal wanted to see her. This time, though, I was able to explain the reason. Mother was very excited and happy. She knew that I was doing well at school, but had not expected such a development. She went to school with me and gave her approval without consulting father. That same afternoon, Mrs Holtzman accompanied the four of us to meet our new principal and to enrol us in the new school.

Naturally, we were nervous. But the principal, Mr Shelubsky, welcomed us cordially and quickly put us at ease. He seemed to be very friendly with our Mrs Holtzman. Like her, he was an old revolutionary, an intellectual, a gifted and hard-working educator, who had come to Poland from Russia after the October Revolution.

Mr Shelubsky was right. We had nothing to fear. Our educational standard was higher than that of our new classmates. Although only two of us, my friend Avrum (Alan) Wolf and myself, had been top students in our previous school, even the other two, considered average, did very well in the new school. We all graduated with high marks in June 1934. I was only twelve.

Some time later, a decision had to be made about my future because the government had rejected my application for a bursary. We held a family conference, and I was told by my parents that, if I wanted to continue my education, they would be prepared to pay the necessary private high-school fees. My answer was that I could not place such a heavy financial burden on the whole family, especially in those times of economic hardship. I told them that I would wait until I could begin an apprenticeship in a trade, when I turned fourteen. In the meantime I could become a tutor for slow-learning children in our school. In fact, I had already made inquiries and had been promised a few tutorials. My parents reluctantly accepted my decision.

I began tutoring as soon as the school year started. The pay was pitifully low, but I enjoyed it. I gave my mother all the money that I earned, and I was the proudest person in the world when, some time later, father went with me to buy cloth for a new suit. Then he found a tailor, who made up a suit for me. It was the first time in my life that I had paid for something myself, with the fruit of my own labour.

It was a tradition in our family to prepare our own Passover wine. Usually this was done immediately after Chanukah, in December. Mother and father went to the market and brought home a box of grapes, usually a little damaged and therefore cheaper. Then mother would wash them, allow us to help to press out the juice, add some sugar, and put it away to ferment in a very large glass bottle. The filtration of the fermented juice was a job that mother did not entrust to anybody — she considered herself an expert in that field.

It was a tedious and time-consuming job. A special grey cardboard funnel was made and filled with charcoal, and put in the throat of another, similar bottle. The liquid had to pass through it very slowly, drop by drop. Father rigged up a special stand for the top bottle to keep it nearly horizontal. Mother kept on saying that the secret of good wine was slow filtration, repeated as many times as possible.

That winter, when I was twelve and had already finished school, father woke me up one night, gave me a sign to be silent, and asked me very quietly: ‘Would you like to taste the wine — just to see how it is coming along?’ That was the first of many tastings. From that year onwards, mother would wonder why she lost so much wine in the distillation process. However, when Passover came there was usually plenty of wine left.