"It was a real busy shop," recalled Srulek. "Six days a week."

"[Mr. Margulies] gave out work to contractors for pants, jackets, vests. Forty-five zlotys for a suit just for the labor, plus the cost of the fabric, plus lining. It cost sixty zlotys for an overcoat. They were very expensive."

"Everything was as a 'French system.' It was good. We made about fifteen suits a week. It was a lot," said Srulek.

On top of our armoire we kept large bottles of homemade wine. Mama and Papa filled three- and five-gallon bottles with grapes, then poured sugar on top and let the mixture stand at room temperature to ferment for several months until it was ready to drink. My parents as well as my grandfather would prepare the wine after the fall grape harvest so it would be ready by spring for Passover.

One evening in 1937 Mama and Papa went out to the movies. Itzhak Hun, an employee who liked to joke and fool around, wanted to taste the wine that stared so invitingly at him from above the armoire. As Itzhak grabbed a bottle, it slipped from his hands and crashed to the floor, spilling all over. He and the other workers quickly wiped up the spilled wine. But when Mama and Papa returned home the fragrance of wine whiffed throughout the house. It did not take them long to discover from whence the smell originated. Though the employees wouldn't reveal the culprit, my parents deduced anyway that Itzhak Hun was responsible for the transgression because he was apt to play jokes and be mischievous. This incident was a subject of great amusement for our employees and was narrated often to the hilarity of all.

The atmosphere was often lighthearted in Uncle Jozef's shop as well where there was much camaraderie among the workers.

"I used to love to be in the workshop," said Fryda. "His assistants would joke and sing and do fun stuff especially when I was around."

In 1935, when I was two years old, Papa's sister Aunt Pesa died. Her fifteen-year-old, eldest daughter, Hanka Lew, came to live in our house to care for me and learn tailoring in Papa's workshop. Three years later, Hanka's younger sister, thirteen-year-old Rutka, joined our household as well. At that point Hanka was working in Papa's tailor shop so Rutka helped watch Romek and me.

In der Gas or Iber der Brik

There were two main sections of Tomaszow: in der gas and iber der brik, as they were called in Yiddish, "in the street" and "over the bridge."

Living "in the street" didn't imply "homeless," as it might seem. To the contrary, living in der gas meant "in town," where we resided, which was generally more prestigious than iber der brik (though no doubt some iber der brik Tomaszowers would argue otherwise).

Tomaszow-Mazowiecki is in the Mazowsze region of central Poland, seventy miles southwest of Warsaw and about thirty miles southeast of Lodz. Believe it or not, there is another Tomaszow in Poland, the far smaller Tomaszow-Lubelski of the Lublin region.

According to the 1931 census, the last one taken before World War II, Tomaszow-Mazowiecki was home to 11,310 Jews—or Tomaszowers, as we call ourselves—thirty percent of the municipality's population. But during the war, as Jews from smaller surrounding communities were forced to our town, the Jewish population swelled to over 14,000, comprising nearly one-third of Tomaszow’s 45,000 residents.