In 1958 I returned to Kiev and lived with my parents in the apartment in the old shabby wooden building that my father received after the war. I started looking for a job but couldn't find any. The moment human resource managers opened my passport and saw that I was a Jew they were telling me that there were no vacancies left. My mother, who was a high party official, had already asked her boss to call the director of the Radiopribor factory and pull strings for me. Although I held a diploma in electronic technology, I was offered the position of a packer at the storage facility. My career started when the production manager came to the storage facility and noticed me because of my smart answer to one of his questions. He offered me a job in his production-planning department.
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Displaying 9571 - 9600 of 50826 results
Mina Gomberg
In 1962 I entered the Faculty of Wire and Wireless Communications at the Odessa Communications Institute, where I studied correspondence. I had tried to enter it twice before, and I was successful the third time. After I got my diploma I was appointed manager of the planning-dispatcher bureau of the shop and later became a senior forewoman at the Radiopribor factory. This was the highest position I was promoted to. I suffered much from anti- Semitism. I didn't feel it when I was among common employees, but it was so evident when I had to deal with the management. They gave me polite hints that my career would have been different if it hadn't been for my nationality.
In 1959 I married Arnold Gomberg, a Jewish man. I met him at my friend's wedding in one of the Kiev restaurants. We had a civil ceremony and invited our guests to a dinner my mother had prepared. We had about 15 guests: my husband's and my friends and some relatives.
My husband finished lower secondary school in 1951, went to work and attended an evening school to complete his secondary education. He didn't get along with his stepmother (his father remarried shortly after his wife died). She was mean and greedy. Her only merit was that she could cook well.
In 1953 my husband was recruited to the army; he was in the Air Force. His service term lasted two years. After he demobilized, he finished a car repair school and worked as a driver and a car mechanic at a car maintenance facility until retirement.
In 1953 my husband was recruited to the army; he was in the Air Force. His service term lasted two years. After he demobilized, he finished a car repair school and worked as a driver and a car mechanic at a car maintenance facility until retirement.
My husband's father was the manager of a vegetable storage facility. In 1951, at the height of the anti-Jewish campaign, he was summoned to a KGB office. He was asked about his work and colleagues. A few days later he was arrested. He was accused of theft from the storage facilities where he worked and was sentenced to 15 years in camp. Several of his colleagues were also arrested. His wife divorced him immediately after he was arrested.
Our children were not raised Jewish, but we didn't let them forget that they were Jews either. In 1960 my father's mother Reizl died. We continued to get together on Jewish holidays. We didn't know any prayers, but we always cooked a delicious dinner: beetroot soup, chicken and gefilte fish. We always had matzah at Pesach. We bought matzah at the synagogue in Podol. We went there in the dark, because we didn't want to be seen there. We were afraid of having problems if somebody reported us to the KGB office. People were persecuted at that time for demonstrating their religious convictions. We ate plain matzah or made small pancakes, fried eggs with matzah and cakes. We didn't follow the kashrut, and we didn't have religious books at home, but we never forgot about our Jewish identity.
In the 1970s many of our friends and relatives were moving to Israel and the US. We were also discussing to move to one of these countries, but my parents would have never accepted it. They were dedicated to their communist ideas and regarded departure as a betrayal of the Communist Party and its ideas. So we never advanced farther than discussing it.
danuta mniewska
My sister and brother-in-law applied for emigration and in 1954 or 1955 left for Israel. They lived in Ramat Gan. My brother-in-law's sister, Sonia, helped them a lot. She had no children of her own, an unsuccessful marriage, so they were virtually all she had. It was thanks to her they bought an apartment, then they swapped it for a larger one. Hadn't it been for her, it would have been very hard for them, they'd have had nothing to live on.
,
After WW2
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My mother's eldest sister, Cela Grajman, emigrated with her family in the early 1930s to Palestine. Her four kids had been born in Poland: Rachel, Szmuel, Bracha - my age - and the youngest one, Salomon; they called him Salek. Uncle went first. Later, when Aunt joined him with the kids, it was very hard for them, as they had nothing to live on. Their kids, in their teens, joined the Haganah [11].
Around 1937 my grandparents with their youngest son, Szolek, joined them in Palestine. It was very hard for them there - Grandfather suffered from anemia. Szolek dreamed of staying and begged his parents, cried like a child, for them to let him stay, that he would settle down somehow. Grandfather didn't want to agree - Szolek was supposed to take over the management of his business in Lodz. And so my grandparents returned with their son in 1938, returned to Poland...
Around 1937 my grandparents with their youngest son, Szolek, joined them in Palestine. It was very hard for them there - Grandfather suffered from anemia. Szolek dreamed of staying and begged his parents, cried like a child, for them to let him stay, that he would settle down somehow. Grandfather didn't want to agree - Szolek was supposed to take over the management of his business in Lodz. And so my grandparents returned with their son in 1938, returned to Poland...
,
Before WW2
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What was happening in Poland in the 1930s [8] hurt us terribly. I remember in Lodz, in the house where we lived, also on the first floor, there lived a young married couple - very nice people. His name was Saul Jerozolimski. He had a wife and a little baby girl. I liked them very much, and they liked me too, so it was a mutual affinity. And they emigrated to Palestine. It may have been 1935. I don't know what happened to them. They exchanged letters with someone from our house, perhaps with my parents too, and once they wrote it was being hard for them. My parents never thought about going to Palestine, they had no money for that. You had to have some foothold there - a job, a house. I don't think they would have gone to a kibbutz - my father would have agreed, but my mother would certainly have not.
,
Before WW2
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I visited Israel for the first time in 1960, I think.
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After WW2
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It was a beautiful story, their marriage, I learned about it years later and I was moved. My grandmother was an orphan and when she was just ten years old, and my grandfather was eleven or twelve, they got engaged. Afterwards, when they were about to marry, people started telling my grandfather, 'Come on, drop it, you don't have to. You promised, but you don't have to. She's a poor girl, she has nothing.' And he said, 'What?! Not only is she an orphan but I'm to do such harm to her, humiliate her by abandoning her this way?' And he married her.
,
Before WW2
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It was in Grabow my father met his future wife, my mother. I have no idea what their wedding was like. His parents were strongly opposed to the marriage, but my father was terribly in love with my mother. She was a poor girl and my grandmother didn't want her beloved son to marry a girl without dowry - she wanted a princess for him. And the ladies disliked each other, disliked each other terribly.
,
Before WW2
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A servant who lived with us slept in the kitchen. She was Polish, her name was Regina Kus, a young girl; she may have been eighteen or nineteen. She came from the countryside and stayed with us for a couple of years.
,
Before WW2
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My parents had two rooms with a kitchen on the first floor. There was electricity, coal-fired tiled stoves, a toilet.
,
Before WW2
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When the very good period had ended, Piotrek started thinking about getting rid of the farm. His film friends visited him often in the countryside and he felt the attraction again, started missing his chosen profession. He moved to Warsaw, found a job at the public TV, worked as a producer. And slowly he moved up the ladder. Today he still works for the public TV; he has been one of the directors of the TVP1 channel for two years now. His wife is a Theater School graduate, who works at the TVP too. Currently she is the second director of the 'Sensations of the 20th Century' series [semi- feature historical documentary].
,
After WW2
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But it turned out it wasn't so bad after all - he really is a very intelligent boy. He played the lead role in the 'Hospital of the Transfiguration' based on Lem's novel [33] and won a debuting artist award in Brussels [in a 1978 Edward Zebrowski film]. He played quite a lot in movies, I didn't see him in theater, I didn't want to - I was afraid to.
,
After WW2
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I studied and worked. There was a gynecologist whom I knew from the period when I had been with my husband. He made procedures and he offered me the job of his assistant. I applied anesthesia, made intravenous injections, reportedly with great skill. Then I went to a knitting cooperative and got a job - I brought home huge bags of unfinished gloves and sewed up the fingers. I was officially registered as a knitter, had a labor union ID. I sat until two, three in the morning, but it was still good, I felt so happy.
I also gave people injections. Once a dentist I knew called me and said he had a penicillin patient for me - those days you administered penicillin every three hours, so if I had a patient, I had to move in with them. And I was allotted a very nice room on Gdanska with a Jewish family, the Feldons. Those were very wealthy people, they quickly made big money after the war. They had four grown-up sons and one of them fell ill. I moved in with them and they were greatly impressed: such a young, pretty girl and working so hard. They offered to pay me a scholarship so that I wouldn't have to work so hard. They very much wanted to ensnare me, but that was the gilded youth of Lodz, I wasn't interested in that.
Many people were eager to help me, but I was doing great myself. And at the end of my freshman year at the academy I was given a role - a Film School team visited us and they hired me for a movie they were making. It was a group of young filmmakers who were shooting a production with the assistance of their professors. They came to the Theater School in search of nice girls. And they chose me. The movie was a terrible bore, called 'The Two Brigades', really nothing to talk about [a 1950 production shot by the students of the directing faculty of the State Film Art College under the artistic leadership of Eugeniusz Cekalski]. Well, but what did I care - I had something to do, I could earn some money, and the very fact that from among all those girls they had chosen me meant a lot in itself. So I no longer had money problems.
I also gave people injections. Once a dentist I knew called me and said he had a penicillin patient for me - those days you administered penicillin every three hours, so if I had a patient, I had to move in with them. And I was allotted a very nice room on Gdanska with a Jewish family, the Feldons. Those were very wealthy people, they quickly made big money after the war. They had four grown-up sons and one of them fell ill. I moved in with them and they were greatly impressed: such a young, pretty girl and working so hard. They offered to pay me a scholarship so that I wouldn't have to work so hard. They very much wanted to ensnare me, but that was the gilded youth of Lodz, I wasn't interested in that.
Many people were eager to help me, but I was doing great myself. And at the end of my freshman year at the academy I was given a role - a Film School team visited us and they hired me for a movie they were making. It was a group of young filmmakers who were shooting a production with the assistance of their professors. They came to the Theater School in search of nice girls. And they chose me. The movie was a terrible bore, called 'The Two Brigades', really nothing to talk about [a 1950 production shot by the students of the directing faculty of the State Film Art College under the artistic leadership of Eugeniusz Cekalski]. Well, but what did I care - I had something to do, I could earn some money, and the very fact that from among all those girls they had chosen me meant a lot in itself. So I no longer had money problems.
,
After WW2
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I told my parents I'd go to the hospital to apprentice as a nurse. The provisional hospital was in a two-story building on Przemyslowa, and it was the only hospital in the ghetto. I know from other people's accounts that before the war the Jewish hospital was in a completely different place, in Zawodzie, I guess - a large, wealthy, very good hospital financed by the Jewish Community [today's L. Rydygier Hospital at Mirowska Street in the Zawodzie neighborhood, built in 1908]. But during the war I knew only the one at Przemyslowa. And indeed - I went there, gave people injections, washed the patients. Then I worked in the operating room, pouring the rubbing alcohol, tying up the aprons.
,
During WW2
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She ran a colonial store, a grocery. It was a single room, on the first floor, in the same house on 1 Maja Street where we lived.
,
Before WW2
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He was a very intelligent and wise man, but he had no specific profession. In those days, Jews took up whatever occupation they could. I know there was a period when my father had a halva factory in partnership with one Mr. Liberman. I remember both: the name and the guy - a small, plump individual. I visited the factory once - I don't remember where it was - a large factory room. I guess they operated for some two years, but then went bust. Mr. Liberman went to Argentina and my father was left with the debts to pay.
,
Before WW2
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We speak German, she doesn't know Polish.
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After WW2
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My sister speaks Polish, of course, but she also speaks fluent Hebrew, after living there for so many years.
,
Before WW2
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Our aunts and uncles spoke Polish to us and their children, though of course they knew Yiddish, and to my grandparents they spoke Yiddish.
,
Before WW2
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I spoke Polish to my auntie and uncle, they spoke Polish well. And with the girls I spoke German because, as a gymnasium student, I had already developed a basic knowledge of it.
,
Before WW2
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I understood Yiddish but I spoke Polish to them.
,
Before WW2
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We spoke Polish at home. But when talking to my grandparents, my parents switched to Yiddish. My maternal grandparents called her Chawcia [Polish diminutive for Chave]. They spoke poor Polish, understood everything, but speaking was a problem.
,
Before WW2
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He spoke Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and fluently German; he was familiar with German literature.
,
Before WW2
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We weren't allowed to go to school. But there was a lady, Ms. Skapska, who had been displaced from Poznan, and she taught me and my sister English. I loved her because she was a great teacher. She was able to keep your attention, and I was making such great progress - my orthography was excellent, my pronunciation was excellent. She was enchanted with me, I was enchanted with her. But one day she came to us and said, 'Listen, I'm scared. I need the money, of course. So please, don't be angry with me, but I'm scared.' And that was the end... Then came some other teacher - but it wasn't the same, I no longer felt like learning English.
,
During WW2
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There was also Hebrew and religion, unnecessarily, because we tormented the teacher so hard I actually pitied him. His name was Hurwicz. He had to earn his living and here no one wanted to even think about Hebrew and religion, we teased him terribly. It was complete mockery, really.
,
Before WW2
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