Selected text
So they, my best friends from work, they reported on me, saying that my son was beating up the poor Arabs in Israel, that I was a Zionist, that they didn’t want a Jew – a Zionist to be working with them. I later found out who wrote this. And they didn’t have the right to fire me. I never served time [in jail], I had an excellent opinion, I was a veteran. In order for them to lay me off, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs would have needed to issue permission. And it would have needed to be some major offence for him [the minister] to do so. And yet, they fired me. And they didn’t explain this decision. They fired me without notice. I wrote to Warsaw that I wanted to know what the reason was. They didn’t write back to me to tell me what the reason was. So I wrote them that the reason was that I was Jewish. The chairman of my housing cooperative asked me why I wasn’t going to Israel. I said I’d go when I wanted to go. They chased me away: ‘No, go now, because you won’t be eating Polish bread here anymore.’ And I answered: ‘Not bread, but rolls, chocolate. I’ll drink vodka and champagne!’ I had some ambition. I showed them I’d leave when I wanted to, not when someone wanted me to.
Period
Interview
Jakub Bromberg