So I had a regular trajectory, as most children would: primary school, high school, faculty. I started attending primary school after the war, at a rather too early age, yet it wasn’t my parents’ fault but my own, for, seeing that my older brothers have books and that there are all sorts of pictures in them, I thought that one goes to school in order to look at pictures. And I wanted books as well, I wanted to have my own books, to look at pictures, for they [my brothers] didn’t really let me browse through their books, as the age gap was rather big, too. So I started attending school in 1945, as soon as we returned from Transnistria [3]. We returned in spring-summer 1945, and I started going to school in autumn, it was a state school. And I received physical punishments for speaking a very broken Romanian, a medley of words.
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Simon Glasberg
There is a large Jewish cemetery in Radauti – it is one of the large cemeteries. These cities: Botosani, Radauti, Siret, Suceava, Dorohoi – even more than other cities –, have had large communities. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard someone say, in a conversation about ethnicity attended by the mayor himself, that at a certain point before World War II almost 60% of the population of Botosani was of Jewish or mixed descent – which is to say, Jewish women married to Romanians and men belonging to other ethnic groups. After the war, it had dropped to approximately 40%, and then people emigrated en masse; now there are 50-60 of us left – museum items.
Romania
After he went bankrupt, my father worked in a bakery as a worker – as a baker’s help, for he wasn’t really a baker – bread seller, then worker again, and he retired due to poor health, as he was suffering from a serious cardiac condition he contracted in the concentration camp during the war.
In the Jewish tradition, for instance, fowls are not slaughtered in the fashion Romanians do it, by chopping the head completely. The head wasn’t severed, only the veins in the front, and the blood was drained – a certain ritual. I, for one, couldn’t find anyone to slaughter the fowls for me, and I slaughtered the birds as Romanians do. For there’s nothing you can do, you have to get by. Where would I go? There has been no fowl shochet in Botosani lately – for the last 20 years, if not more. You could only buy ritual beef that was brought from a slaughterhouse once every few months, usually around holidays. But there was someone who came from Bucharest for this purpose [to take care of the ritual slaughter]. They performed the slaughter in Botosani for several cities, for Radauti, Dorohoi, and they would deliver the meat. But nowadays, this has become ever more rare lately, as the Community itself is growing smaller – not by the day, but surely by the year. For there are many elderly people, many ailing people.
The shochet – also a religious title – was the person who performed the kosher slaughters for the believers. People traveled to Radauti in order to go to the shochet. I remember that my mother would have wanted to take the fowl to the shochet, but she didn’t always manage to do so because we lived far from the downtown area. There was one kilometer and a quarter from our house to the synagogue where we attended the religious service. We had to walk at least one kilometer and a half in order to reach the temple. Another 500-600 meters and you were out of the city. There was only one shochet in Radauti, also in the dowtown area, close to the Jewish bathhouse, that’s where people went and where the shochet performed the ritual slaughter. It was a place specially fitted for this purpose, in a blind alley, similar to a courtyard, but still a public place, where there was someone who cleaned, erased any left-over traces, if there were feathers or… [other remains]. I used to go the shochet sometimes, I accompanied my mother. But she wasn’t able to go there very often. She would ask one of the neighbors to do it. She didn’t have the strength, the heart to do it, and she had some good neighbors who used to say: ‘Give it here, Mrs. Glasberg, for I’ll chop its head in no time.’ In the Jewish tradition, for instance, fowls are not slaughtered in the fashion Romanians do it, by chopping the head completely. The head wasn’t severed, only the veins in the front, and the blood was drained – a certain ritual.
In addition to the temple, there was a Jewish school, this so-called chedder. They only taught Ivrit there, Hebrew, starting with the alef-beys, and including reading. I started to go to the chedder rather late, I believe I must have been in the 6th grade by then, so I was around 12. I attended the chedder for only 2-3 years. I could read well by then. Nowadays, I read the prayer book with punctuation, it’s rather hard for me to read without punctuation. That’s how it is. We were taught by a melamed, a teacher. He was an elderly man, I believe he was around 60 at that time, who didn’t have any special didactic methods, for, after all, he gave us texts to copy. For instance, he would say: ‘alef,’ he had a small board on which he scratched this – for he didn’t even have decent chalk, if I remember correctly, for there was a shortage of chalk –, and we all had a little notebook, and wrote down what he wrote.
On Chanukkah we used to go to the shil, and light candles at home. Usually, it was the children who lit the candles. But we, the children, left home one by one. At a certain point, I was the only child who was still living at home, and I would light the candles. We had candles at home and a special candelabrum for Chanukkah, with several brass branches, it was beautiful, it resembled gold, because it wasn’t made from gold, far from it. You can usually find it in the home of every more or less religious Jew. We used to place it on the table, not by the window, we didn’t expose ourselves, we didn’t boast about this. I don’t remember receiving toys on Chanukkah. Perhaps they gave us an improvised spinning top during my entire childhood. We didn’t really have toys, only very few.
We didn’t wear masks on Purim – I don’t quite remember doing that. They recited one of the books of the Torah at the synagogue, in which are recounted the events that took place then, with Ester, Haman, and people would make noise whenever the name of Haman was mentioned. My father used to read at home as well, we had prayer books for every occasion. The Machzor, for instance, was the prayer book we used on Friday evening, on Saturday, on all days, as it were. [Editor’s notes: The Machzor is a specialized form of the Siddur. It is used on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. It does not include the daily prayers and blessings that one should recite on week days and Sabbath, which are found in the Siddur. http://www.judaica-guide.com/machzor/ ] We observed the holiday with modest capabilities. People baked cookies and gave them to relatives, friends. We usually gave cookies to our neighbors, because we had good neighbors, not all of them were Jewish. Some of them were Jewish, in the house right across the street lived a certain Mehler, who was a Jewish carter – he earned his living hauling things.
On Passover we used the clean dishes we kept for holidays – my mother had special dishes for Passover, which were kept separate from the regular dishes. We bought matzah. But it was only later that we bought matzah through the Community; in the beginning, during the post-war period, my mother would bake bread that resembled matzah. For matzah is baked using a special technology, it is really made only from water and flour and is specially prepared, pressed, thin – you can’t actually bake it like that at home. But she baked something similar. Father would organize a seder evening at home. It was shorter, I don’t remember if he observed the entire seder, but we were raised in this tradition. We usually recited mah nishtanah. Being the youngest child, I didn’t understand much of it.
As for holidays, of course we could always hardly wait for the holidays to arrive as we ate better, special food. Not to mention that we performed a major cleaning of the house before the holiday, everything shined in the house.
We had silvered candlesticks, I remember that my mother used to light two candlesticks on Friday evening. She didn’t bake coilici very often. [Editor’s note: Coilici is a variant for challah, similar to the word „kajlics“ used by some Hungarian-speaking Jews in Romania. Both words have the origin in the Hungarian word „kalacs“.] She baked them when she could and when she had the necessary ingredients, but not very often. I remember that she covered it, she placed a clean kitchen towel over it, and recited the Friday evening broche.
There were several synagogues in Radauti. The temple still exists to this day, it is one of the most beautiful temples – at least in the north of Moldavia, in Bukovina. On major holidays – Passover, the New Year [Rosh Hashanah] – we attended the religious ceremonies at the Temple, and I would regularly attend the prayers on Saturday together with my father; we used to go to a small synagogue in our neighborhood, which could house 25-30 people at the most, and where the service was performed by one of the citizens, the most knowledgeable one. I’ve been there countless times. Admittedly, my father wasn’t a very religious person, but he tried as much as possible to attend the religious service at least on Saturday or Friday evening, in other words, to go to the synagogue once during the weekend. It was also a way for him to break with everyday life, to meet with people he knew, exchange an opinion, for, of course, people would sit and discuss worldly matters before or after the religious service was performed. And during the prayer people would usually meditate. At least that’s how it was in Radauti, there was no talking during the religious service, people would pray to God for “Shalom veLehem”, so for peace and bread. These were the two prayers. I never heard big words, happiness, anything else. But if there was peace and if there was bread, to ensure as tranquil an existence as possible…
He didn’t go to the synagogue during the week, I don’t remember him going to the synagogue in the evening. Other people used to do so, those who were well off or weren’t working at that hour. He used to attend the synagogue at the end of the week, whenever he could, not on Fridays, but usually on Saturdays. But he couldn’t go to the synagogue during the rest of the week, he was struggling and striving to make ends meet.
My parents weren’t particularly religious. But certain customs were observed – from the lighting of the candles on Friday evening to the prayer for peace and minimum welfare, to have bread on the table. We observed the Yom Kippur fast, when the isker [yizkor] was recited, the prayer for the dead, for the parents, the relatives, the oppressed. So it was somewhere in-between – observing tradition neither too strictly, nor too loosely. What I mean to say is that I have often seen my father wearing that tallit, even at home. When he couldn’t go to the synagogue, he would wear it at home, take out the prayer book and intoned a few broche prayers as follows: starting with Sema Israel and those regarding thanksgiving or the respective holiday. These are my childhood memories.
Romania
Also, times were extremely hard after the war, what with that drought. Children were actually starving to death. Since an international aid was probably offered in those days, children up to the 7th grade were given polenta to eat at school during the break, which was, of course, already cold by the time we got it, one slice of cold polenta and govidla – that means jam made from plums – and a cup of milk which was indeed warm or even hot. It was a delicacy for us. Even for me, the son of a shopkeeper. When I told my children what special cake I used to eat during the 10 or 11 o’clock break when they distributed it, they almost couldn’t believe it. I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade – but I remember as if it were yesterday, to such an extent it made an impression on me, as it was very welcome.
Times were very hard after the war. Although my father had a store – he started to rebuild his store at the outskirts of Radauti, where we lived, on Putnei Street no. 162 –, even though my mother managed to get her sewing machine working again, we struggled to get by, but times were very, very modest. Which is why at a certain point my father recovered his former horse from before the war and bought a cart so that he could do the supplying of the store himself. Among his customers were even people of different ethnic origins – Romanians, gypsies, even some Czechs or what have you. There was one in particular, and I remember him to this day, because he wore a beard, he said his name was Cerny, with a ‘y’ at the end. He was from Czechoslovakia – Slovak or Czech, I don’t know for sure. But there were others who came to borrow. Times were very hard, poverty was widespread, there was also a severe drought back then – at least in Moldavia –, and people came to borrow on credit.
As long as he lived – only 59 years - and inasmuch as I knew him, my father was a man of rare good nature. He was almost too kind, too good-natured. As a dressmaker, my mother, who was more pragmatic, more calculated by nature, would tell him: "Husband, pay attention to whom and how much you give, for you won’t have enough money to pay the wholesaler for the merchandise." My father couldn’t follow her advice, out of pity for people, and he would record the debts in a notebook – he had a very calligraphic handwriting – but this didn’t mean that everybody paid him the money. On the contrary, many of them couldn’t pay their debts and, after a very short period, 3-4 years after the war, my father went bankrupt, because he literally couldn’t pay for the merchandise he received, and it was only with the help of one of his brothers in Bucharest, Fritz, that he managed to escape legal punishment.
As long as he lived – only 59 years - and inasmuch as I knew him, my father was a man of rare good nature. He was almost too kind, too good-natured. As a dressmaker, my mother, who was more pragmatic, more calculated by nature, would tell him: "Husband, pay attention to whom and how much you give, for you won’t have enough money to pay the wholesaler for the merchandise." My father couldn’t follow her advice, out of pity for people, and he would record the debts in a notebook – he had a very calligraphic handwriting – but this didn’t mean that everybody paid him the money. On the contrary, many of them couldn’t pay their debts and, after a very short period, 3-4 years after the war, my father went bankrupt, because he literally couldn’t pay for the merchandise he received, and it was only with the help of one of his brothers in Bucharest, Fritz, that he managed to escape legal punishment.
Certainly, we found the house devastated, there was no piece of furniture left. Our parents were able to scrape together the bare necessities for inhabiting it from whatever they managed to give some honest neighbors for safe-keeping [before the deportation]; some of them returned what we had left with them, others didn’t want to admit, they said they didn’t take anything, were never given anything. I don’t know who had lived in our house during our absence, probably somebody from the German military who was quartered there, or somebody connected with the German military, because we found a collection of German war magazines, published in Romanian, called ‘Signal.’ I don’t know if it was distributed throughout the whole of Romania, perhaps only in Bukovina [7], but such a magazine was indeed issued, it was an entire collection. And I read many of them, as a child I gathered much information about the war – of course, from the point of view of the German propaganda – from those magazines. Like any child, naturally, I enjoyed browsing through them, for there were many battle scenes, all sorts of stories. But it was very well printed for those times, the graphic quality was very good. To be sure, the content was as expected, it couldn’t be otherwise, that of the Nazi propaganda.
We returned home by means of a cart that we hired there [in Djurin]. I don’t remember exactly how long it took us to get home, for anyway, it’s a long distance to travel, but I remember this image, that in the spring of 1945, when we returned, the snow was thawing and there were many puddles to cross. And the horses weren’t very tall and didn’t look that good, but they were very good for pulling. They managed to take us – five persons, well, six if you count the carter –, we traveled by cart day and night, and we managed to reach our home in Radauti.
Only 5 of us returned home, my father’s cousin perished – she too fell ill, and they couldn’t save her. I believe that she died approximately 3 years after we arrived there [around 1944], she was young, I think she was around 20.
After liberation, we remained in Djurin for a few years, because my father managed to find some jobs, earn some money. There was a sugar factory in the neighborhood – I don’t know for sure whether it was in Moghilev [6] or in a closer locality –, and I know that my father, as he had a very legible and calligraphic handwriting, succeeded in getting hired there – temporarily, of course. Our wish was to return home immediately. We had our house in Radauti and it was meaningless to stay there and barely build a house; besides, these were different places, our acquaintances were here, our dead were buried in the cemeteries here.
With the liberation and the advancing of the Russian troops, my father returned from the concentration camp, and he came to Djurin, where he knew we were. So the Germans took my father, he was taken to a Nazi camp of the SS troops, a forced labor camp. I know a few episodes that happened there – in any case, its purpose was extermination as well. Through forced labor and also through the abuses that have been and are still committed throughout the world when some human beings that have weapons and power face another human being who is powerless and their prisoner, they believe to be superhuman. Let me recount a single episode my father told me, and I believed him, for he wasn’t the kind of person to fabricate stories. They were eating – meaning they were sitting cross-legged around a so-called square, of course, there was a barbed wire fence behind them and they sat around that square with some sort of used military mess kettles and a spoon, and they ate first, second and third course consisting of a single dish, a very thin soup made from potatoes, vegetable marrow, beet, and so on – I’ve heard stories of soups that in any case do not belong to regular human cuisine, rather to that for animals. My father was sitting next to a good friend of his from Radauti, a tailor – he was a professional tailor in Radauti –, and while they were eating an SS sergeant appeared, and the rule was that they should stand up – as a sign of respect for the respective officer. The man sitting next to my father simply wasn’t wearing his glasses, didn’t notice him; they were generally starving, and when that food was brought they would rush to sip it, and he wasn’t paying attention, and in the instant when that man had the spoon to his mouth the sergeant drew his pistol, and instead of swallowing the soup, the man was shot in the mouth by the sergeant; of course he died instantly. This is one of the episodes my father told me about the Bug concentration camp. But there were countless such episodes. Human beings didn’t count for the Nazis. Even among them, there were some who, in turn, thought themselves to be elite citizens at home – and, like everywhere, the war, the weapons, the conceptions inoculated in people’s consciences can turn even educated human beings, as many of the German officers and sub-officers were, into beasts.
They mainly worked at building roads, because this entire region: the south of Ukraine, Ukraine itself, Russia in general, the Russian steppes had very poor infrastructure – these were muddy roads; they carried stone, laid it, dug ditches, built bridges, and so on. They worked shifts of 12-14 hours a day, so tiresome that many would collapse on the way back from work – the elderly or the sick. God willed that father, who was a more robust individual, raised in the countryside, as I said, at Straja, and accustomed to hard work ever since he was only a child, should survive the efforts there, but with consequences, nevertheless. Meaning that he managed to return home, but he suffered all his life from angina pectoris, an ailment that he contracted there, and that’s also what caused his early demise – he died at home at 59, in Radauti.
They mainly worked at building roads, because this entire region: the south of Ukraine, Ukraine itself, Russia in general, the Russian steppes had very poor infrastructure – these were muddy roads; they carried stone, laid it, dug ditches, built bridges, and so on. They worked shifts of 12-14 hours a day, so tiresome that many would collapse on the way back from work – the elderly or the sick. God willed that father, who was a more robust individual, raised in the countryside, as I said, at Straja, and accustomed to hard work ever since he was only a child, should survive the efforts there, but with consequences, nevertheless. Meaning that he managed to return home, but he suffered all his life from angina pectoris, an ailment that he contracted there, and that’s also what caused his early demise – he died at home at 59, in Radauti.
I also want to mention in relation with this episode that, even though I respect the Romanian people in the general context, for it is the people in the midst of which I live and have lived for so many years, my heart shrinks when it comes to this particular aspect, that such events were possible in which completely innocent people – such as my family and countless other families that I met afterwards, after they returned from Transnistria – could be punished in such manner, for absolutely no reason other than being Jewish. So, only based on ethnic origin, they could be deported in such conditions – the respective conditions being nothing else than more or less slow extermination. I say this because I shudder even at present, I am dumbfounded by certain voices trying to rehabilitate Marshal Antonescu [4]. I admit, and I know he was head of his class at the Military Academy, I’ve read and heard say that he was a good strategist, a patriot in his way, but this aspect, that he could ally himself with the beast whose name was Adolf Hitler, and that he could share the same ideas with regard to the Jewish minority, that debases him in my eyes… the other qualities have no value as long as he could embrace such a conception, such a way of thinking as to send hundreds of thousands of people to extermination solely on ethnic grounds. My conception and my conviction is that a human being who is capable of doing such things, regardless of his name, regardless of what people he belongs to, even the Jewish people itself, can no longer be called a human being. He is subhuman. An Untermensch. With this, I’d like to close the chapter of Transnistria.
And mother improvised a sort of chair on which to place the sewing machine, and my older brothers – I couldn’t really do it, I was too little, only 2-3 years old – would take turns spinning the sewing machine’s wheel with the help of a small stick; she sewed as much as she could for the diverse population there – especially Ukrainian, Russian and Moldovan women, those who spoke Romanian, that is, to a smaller degree. As payment for her sewing we would get a handful of flour or cornmeal, or they would bring us the smaller potatoes that couldn’t be peeled – we would boil them as they were, whole –, and on many occasions my mother would ask them to bring us the potato peels as well. That was the reality of our life. I remember that. For it was because of this precarious food, and that’s what we ate most of the time, that I have always been sickly as a child. It was there that I heard for the first time the word ‘cir,’ it was there that I learned the word ‘prici,’ which aren’t Romanian words, but probably Ukrainian. Cir is a very light polenta, cornmeal with water, to which potatoes were usually added – it was the poor man’s way of thinning the polenta, of combining –, small potatoes, rejects, as they say, which are kept neither for eating, nor for planting – these potatoes are too small. But we also added potato peels. Prici is a large bed – so-called bed, it doesn’t come close to what we call bed nowadays – made of straw covered with sackcloth on top, and that was the bed people slept on using blankets as improvised pillows – as long as the blankets brought from home lasted –, and this is how we spent approximately three, if not four years in Transnistria.
At a certain point, my mother contracted exanthematic typhus, and was taken to the hospital in Moghilev, and we had no clear idea whether or not she would survive. And we, the three children and my father’s cousin – she was slightly older – practically lived from the alms the people there gave us out of pity, they would bring us something to eat now and then. From what I recall and from what my parents told me, there is quite a long distance from Djurin to Moghilev, around 15-20 km, I believe. So it was too much for children to walk it on foot. I know that we went there only once, by cart, with one of our neighbors, and we talked with mother at the hospital’s window. Even I remember that, although I was only a little child – by 1943-1944 I was 4 years old going on 5 –, but it remained stamped in my mind. Also stamped in my memory is the fact that when the front was being pushed back, the Russian armies advanced and bombed the area, as there were some resistance lines of the German army there, and my older brothers ran into the garden, hid themselves somewhere among whatever vegetation there was, and my mother took me, placed me on the ground and covered me with her body. For it was dangerous, bombs were dropping in the area of the Djurin village, too. To conclude, it was an utterly precarious episode, at the limit of existence, very hard to bear even by children, by a child less aware of what was going, like myself. But I remember that even in the latter period there I used to wear only a little shirt and walk completely barefoot – from spring till fall, this was my entire outfit. During winter, my mother improvised something for us to wear on our back, out of shreds of sackcloth or blankets. That was Transnistria.
At a certain point, my mother contracted exanthematic typhus, and was taken to the hospital in Moghilev, and we had no clear idea whether or not she would survive. And we, the three children and my father’s cousin – she was slightly older – practically lived from the alms the people there gave us out of pity, they would bring us something to eat now and then. From what I recall and from what my parents told me, there is quite a long distance from Djurin to Moghilev, around 15-20 km, I believe. So it was too much for children to walk it on foot. I know that we went there only once, by cart, with one of our neighbors, and we talked with mother at the hospital’s window. Even I remember that, although I was only a little child – by 1943-1944 I was 4 years old going on 5 –, but it remained stamped in my mind. Also stamped in my memory is the fact that when the front was being pushed back, the Russian armies advanced and bombed the area, as there were some resistance lines of the German army there, and my older brothers ran into the garden, hid themselves somewhere among whatever vegetation there was, and my mother took me, placed me on the ground and covered me with her body. For it was dangerous, bombs were dropping in the area of the Djurin village, too. To conclude, it was an utterly precarious episode, at the limit of existence, very hard to bear even by children, by a child less aware of what was going, like myself. But I remember that even in the latter period there I used to wear only a little shirt and walk completely barefoot – from spring till fall, this was my entire outfit. During winter, my mother improvised something for us to wear on our back, out of shreds of sackcloth or blankets. That was Transnistria.
Shortly after we arrived there, my father was caught by the Germans, by the SS troops, and was arrested while simply walking in the street, taken to the concentration camp in Bug, the forced labor camp.
We were six all in all, the five of us – three sons and our parents – and there was also a first-degree cousin of my father’s – I can’t offer any details about her, as she died when I was very little. I know her name, but I forget it right now. She was much younger than my father and was closer to our age, which is to say closer to my eldest brother’s age, who was 12 years older than me. And the six of us received ‘accommodation’ – let us say, between inverted commas – in a single room in a semi-basement, it was more like a cellar, with a tiny vestibule in the front and some stairs that led directly from the street in that vestibule, and where we spent the 4 and a half years in Transnistria. We arrived there during the fall of 1941, and we returned home in 1945.
The living conditions there were extremely difficult.
The living conditions there were extremely difficult.
Let me recount the period of the departure. We know that we took very few things with us to Transnistria. An order had been issued that people should leave in a very short while with only the bare necessities: clothes and some suitcases, bundles, whatever they could carry. My mother wrapped the head of the sewing machine in a blanket, lest they should see it, because we weren’t allowed to take such things with us – which is to say, a means of survival, basically, that’s what it was. And that’s what kept us alive in Transnistria. We traveled through Moghilev [6], and were taken to Djurin [nowadays Dzhurin, in the Vinnytsya region in Ukraine] in Transnistria.
I believe 99% of the Jewish population in Radauti was deported to Transnistria. Maybe they spared a doctor or specialists that they needed. But the rest of the population: craftsmen, shopkeepers, petty merchants – anyone belonging to the population that presented no interest to them and wasn’t a necessity, such as medical assistance or any other field of special interest – the majority of the population was taken to Transnistria.
We spoke German at home. I spoke German fluently. I’m still pretty good at it even now but, naturally, I have forgotten some words, and other words I pronounce with an accent; not quite a Moldavian accent, but still, a Romanian one.
Just like my father, my mother’s education consisted only of primary school, too. They lacked the material means to go to high school. My mother, at least, would have been prone to study. She greatly enjoyed reading, she was self-taught. She recited Heine [Editor’s note: Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856), German poet] and Goethe [Editor’s note: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832), German poet, playwright, novelist, and scientist.] in a very literary German.
My grandfather was a religious person. He wasn’t officially a rabbi, but he performed religious services, they often invited him to the … [Torah], people knew him even in Radauti. I know this from my mother, for she told us that he recited the prayers with a very pleasant intonation. And this was proof of exercise and knowledge, for those who read it for the first time do so jerkily, heavily.
Their name was Licvornic – probably a name of both German and Polish origin. For we came from the south of Poland; we came to Romania through Galicia. At least that’s what my parents told me about their grandparents and great-grandparents.
Their name was Licvornic – probably a name of both German and Polish origin. For we came from the south of Poland; we came to Romania through Galicia. At least that’s what my parents told me about their grandparents and great-grandparents.