After the war, he was hired by the prestigious Orchestra of the Radio Broadcasting Company.
- Traditions 11756
- Language spoken 3019
- Identity 7808
- Description of town 2440
- Education, school 8506
- Economics 8772
- Work 11672
- Love & romance 4929
- Leisure/Social life 4159
- Antisemitism 4822
-
Major events (political and historical)
4256
- Armenian genocide 2
- Doctor's Plot (1953) 178
- Soviet invasion of Poland 31
- Siege of Leningrad 86
- The Six Day War 4
- Yom Kippur War 2
- Ataturk's death 5
- Balkan Wars (1912-1913) 35
- First Soviet-Finnish War 37
- Occupation of Czechoslovakia 1938 83
- Invasion of France 9
- Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 65
- Varlik Vergisi (Wealth Tax) 36
- First World War (1914-1918) 216
- Spanish flu (1918-1920) 14
- Latvian War of Independence (1918-1920) 4
- The Great Depression (1929-1933) 20
- Hitler comes to power (1933) 127
- 151 Hospital 1
- Fire of Thessaloniki (1917) 9
- Greek Civil War (1946-49) 12
- Thessaloniki International Trade Fair 5
- Annexation of Bukovina to Romania (1918) 7
- Annexation of Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union (1940) 19
- The German invasion of Poland (1939) 94
- Kishinev Pogrom (1903) 7
- Romanian Annexation of Bessarabia (1918) 25
- Returning of the Hungarian rule in Transylvania (1940-1944) 43
- Soviet Occupation of Bessarabia (1940) 59
- Second Vienna Dictate 27
- Estonian war of independence 3
- Warsaw Uprising 2
- Soviet occupation of the Balitc states (1940) 147
- Austrian Civil War (1934) 9
- Anschluss (1938) 71
- Collapse of Habsburg empire 3
- Dollfuß Regime 3
- Emigration to Vienna before WWII 36
- Kolkhoz 131
- KuK - Königlich und Kaiserlich 40
- Mineriade 1
- Post War Allied occupation 7
- Waldheim affair 5
- Trianon Peace Treaty 12
- NEP 56
- Russian Revolution 351
- Ukrainian Famine 199
- The Great Terror 283
- Perestroika 233
- 22nd June 1941 468
- Molotov's radio speech 115
- Victory Day 147
- Stalin's death 365
- Khrushchev's speech at 20th Congress 148
- KGB 62
- NKVD 153
- German occupation of Hungary (18-19 March 1944) 45
- Józef Pilsudski (until 1935) 33
- 1956 revolution 84
- Prague Spring (1968) 73
- 1989 change of regime 174
- Gomulka campaign (1968) 81
-
Holocaust
9685
- Holocaust (in general) 2789
- Concentration camp / Work camp 1235
- Mass shooting operations 337
- Ghetto 1183
- Death / extermination camp 647
- Deportation 1063
- Forced labor 791
- Flight 1410
- Hiding 594
- Resistance 121
- 1941 evacuations 866
- Novemberpogrom / Kristallnacht 34
- Eleftherias Square 10
- Kasztner group 1
- Pogrom in Iasi and the Death Train 21
- Sammelwohnungen 9
- Strohmann system 11
- Struma ship 17
- Life under occupation 803
- Yellow star house 72
- Protected house 15
- Arrow Cross ("nyilasok") 42
- Danube bank shots 6
- Kindertransport 26
- Schutzpass / false papers 95
- Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) 24
- Warsaw Uprising (1944) 23
- Helpers 521
- Righteous Gentiles 269
- Returning home 1090
- Holocaust compensation 112
- Restitution 109
- Property (loss of property) 595
- Loss of loved ones 1724
- Trauma 1029
- Talking about what happened 1807
- Liberation 558
- Military 3322
- Politics 2640
-
Communism
4468
- Life in the Soviet Union/under Communism (in general) 2592
- Anti-communist resistance in general 63
- Nationalization under Communism 221
- Illegal communist movements 98
- Systematic demolitions under communism 45
- Communist holidays 311
- Sentiments about the communist rule 930
- Collectivization 94
- Experiences with state police 349
- Prison/Forced labor under communist/socialist rule 449
- Lack or violation of human and citizen rights 483
- Life after the change of the regime (1989) 493
- Israel / Palestine 2190
- Zionism 847
- Jewish Organizations 1200
Displaying 17371 - 17400 of 50826 results
Ticu Goldstein
But in 1941, he was kicked out of the theater, like all the Jews for that matter. During the war he was able to play at the Jewish Baraseum Theater, in the Capital.
He came back at the end of the 1930s and gave up the violin for the drums. He was hired by the most important variety theater in the country, the Carabus-Savoy in Bucharest. He went on tours across the entire world with them.
I only remember one of them, named Ionel Tapu, one of her cousins. He was an artist in the proper sense of the word. He played the violin and was very talented, so the family sent him to study in Paris and supported him with great financial efforts. But he was a Bohemian and the only thing he acquired in Paris was a new violin.
Some cousins of hers from Piatra Neamt named Pescaru (my grandfather’s nephews) owned some restaurants in that Moldavian town.
Both my grandfather and my grandmother were religious, traditionalist people; they used Yiddish at home, but they spoke Romanian pretty well too.
Grandfather Tobias was a tailor and taught my mother this trade.
Frieda Portnaya
Iosif was missing in action during the Second World War, and Lyova was in the evacuation in Zelenodolsk, in the Tatarskaya Soviet Socialist Republic. He was evacuated with the “Lenin’s Smithy” plant where he was working at the time.
He came from a very poor family. His father died during an accident at the plant, leaving my grandmother alone with five children.
My father was captured when he was in the Polish Army fighting against the Red Army. He stayed in Russia and got to Kiev somehow.
He got a job as a sailor at the Dnipro Fleet in Kiev and met my mother there.
By this time my mother and her brothers sold the house in Makarov and moved to Kiev. Those were very difficult years. My mother worked very hard. She traveled around to villages and sewed in exchange for food and food products. She was actually the provider for her brothers. They were renting a room in a private house in Demeyevka, on the outskirts of Kiev. During pogroms in Kiev they would hide in basements.
During pogroms in Kiev they would hide in basements. My mother and father met often and loved each other very much. My father didn’t look like a Jew, and he was able to go out into the town to bring them some food.
My parents got married in 1921. They didn’t have a real wedding. They just registered their marriage and started their life together. They bought an apartment in a house in Podol.
My mother continued to work as a dressmaker and also taught my father to sew. He became a very good tailor – he learned to make trousers. He worked at a tailor shop, but he worked at home and took the finished items to the shop.
I knew the words “financial inspector” from my early childhood. We were very much afraid of these people in our house. The reason was that my father had just learned to make leather coats, which were in fashion. But he didn’t have a license to make them, so this business of his was illegal. The license was very expensive. He was only allowed to keep items that were registered in the shop at home. And we kids always knew that we were not supposed to talk either at school or in the courtyard about what was going on at home. Financial inspectors came to our home often and searched the house, but my father always managed to hide the items on time and everything went well.
We had two small rooms in an apartment that we shared with other people. There were Primus stoves in the kitchen and each family had its own table. My father earned good money [on the side], but we couldn’t afford good clothes or food, as our neighbors could report to the police that we were spending more than we were supposed to. Now I understand that they did report on us every now and then, which is why the financial inspectors used to come.
We had two small rooms in an apartment that we shared with other people. There were Primus stoves in the kitchen and each family had its own table. My father earned good money [on the side], but we couldn’t afford good clothes or food, as our neighbors could report to the police that we were spending more than we were supposed to. Now I understand that they did report on us every now and then, which is why the financial inspectors used to come.
My mother was religious. She always tried to celebrate the Jewish holidays and cooked all the traditional food. There was matzo at home for Pesach. But as my father wasn’t religious these celebrations were quite modest. My mother’s brothers Lyova and Iosif used to visit us, and her older stepbrothers and stepsister also often visited us at the holidays. They came with their families and at those times we had a big Jewish family, or as we say in Yiddish, a “mishpocha”.
At home we also always celebrated the Soviet holidays – May 1 and the Anniversary of the October Revolution. My father loved these holidays. He loved it when my mother’s relatives came to visit.
His own relatives had stayed in Poland, where they had a very difficult life. My father used to send parcels there while it was allowed. In the middle of ‘30s it became rather unsafe to have any relationships with foreigners – one could be arrested and put in prison for this – so my father broke all contact with his family.
My father’s brother Wolf was involved in the evacuation of factories. He insisted that we be evacuated and promised my father to evacuate us from Kiev. By that time we knew that Hitler was exterminating the Jewish people. Wolf sent us away in September, along with my uncle Iosif’s wife and her neighbor. This woman’s husband was an officer, and we all were put on the train as an officer’s family. Our trip was long, and there were bombardments along the way.
We finally arrived at the Northern Caucasus and were all accommodated in the court building in Piatigorsk. There were many families, and we all slept on the floor.
One night somebody knocked on the door, and when I went to the window to see who it was, I saw Misha standing there! It turned out that when the Germans approached Donbass all the mobilized young people were dismissed. Misha knew where we were from a letter and managed to reached us. I was so excited that I jumped from that window, on the first floor, into his arms and my mother ran to him with tears.
At that time we had no information about my father. But we all knew that our army was surrounded near Lubny, and in fact they all died. My mother had lost any hope of seeing my father alive again.
When the Germans approached the Northern Caucasus, we had to flee. We boarded horse-driven wagons and moved along the mountainous roads to Nevinnomyssk. My brother and two girl neighbors were hiding under our clothes, as they could be mobilized for trench excavation. My mother said she wasn’t going to let my brother go. In Makhachkala we didn’t manage to get on the train because there were too many people. My mother was crying and begging the soldiers to take us with them, but they didn’t do so. It turned out for better, though - this train was destroyed by bombs. We reached Makhachkala on the next train. From there we went to Astrakhan by boat. In Astrakhan we sat on the pier for a long time. It was cold as it is in December. There were many Jews from Bessarabia there. They had been on the pier for a long time as they were afraid to leave their luggage. It was here, on this pier in Astrakhan, that for the first time in my life I saw people dying from cold and hunger. In a few days they announced that they would be evacuating the families of soldiers. We were on the lists as the family of an officer. They put us on a train going to Central Asia. It was a long trip. We hardly had any clothes that could be bartered for food. Sonia, the wife of my mother’s brother Iosif, was with us. She had a baby girl named Fiera, after my mother’s sister who had died. Sonia didn’t have any milk. We were starving. At one point, when the train stopped my brother ran to the fields to get some snow and melted it on our little stove. We gave this drink to the baby, but Firochka, the baby, died. Sonia held her, afraid that somebody would take her baby away. Our neighbor who was traveling with us asked her “Why is Fiera so silent? Why isn’t she crying?” and Sonia said “I don’t know. She may be asleep.” The neighbor looked at the baby – Dear Lord! She was dead! And she began to cry saying that Fiera had died. Soldiers came immediately and said they had to take the dead baby to a special car of the train -- many people were dying on the train, and their bodies were taken to a special car. It took my brother some effort to take the dead girl from Sonia. He took her to that car. At one point, the train stooped and all the dead people were buried in a common grave. And our Fierochka stayed there too, in a common grave somewhere, we don’t even know where it is.
Eventually, we arrived in Semipalatinsk, a town not far from Alma-Ata. We got accommodation with a Russian family. The hostess was a pig-tender at the collective farm. She brought intestines from where she worked and my mother made sausage from them. She taught us to make this sausage and our life became easier.
My brother was conscripted into the Army in 1942, from Semipalatinsk. He took part in the defense of Stalingrad and it was a miracle that he survived. Afterwards his unit was sent for R and R in Kazan, and later he was sent to the First Ukrainian Front. He wrote us that he was in an anti-tank gun service unit. After reading this letter my mother said that she would never see her son again. This was true. Misha sent his last letter from somewhere near Kiev. He wrote, “I will be in my native town soon” and we understood where he was. Later we received a letter from the commanding officer of the unit, informing us that Misha had been severely wounded on September 2 and died on the way to the hospital. This was a terrible blow to my mother.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
Her brother Lyova arrived to help us cope with this grief. He took us to Zelenodolsk, in the Tatarskaya SSR. I finished seventh grade there and went to work at a factory. It was very hard work. I carried heavy cast iron blanks. I felt very sleepy, especially during night shifts. Once I fell asleep on a box during the night shift. The chief of the shift woke me up and told me to go on working. A woman said to him “Let her have a nap, she’s just a child.” But he answered, “If she wants to receive her bread card, she must work.” I was entitled to 500 grams of bread with my card. My mother worked at the cattle and vegetable yard of this plant, but after her legs started swelling she couldn’t go to work any more.
Victory Day, May 9, 1945, found us still in Zelenodolsk. I remember people coming into the streets, kissing and rejoicing. Soldiers were shooting off their weapons. It was a happy day, but it was also filled with sorrow for the lost ones. This was true for our family, too.
We returned to Kiev in 1946 with the “Lenin’s smithy” plant.
Somebody told us that our neighbors had seen our father in 1941 near Lubny. He told them that he was going back to Kiev to find out what happened to us. Then somebody told us another story. They said that when uncle Pinia and his family were being sent to Babi Yar, they were accompanied by a blond man. All her life my mother believed that this was my father. We were notified by the recruitment office that my father was missing. We still don’t know for sure what happened to him.