Tag #121274 - Interview #101947 (Saul Rotariu)

Afterwards, we returned to Saveni in 1946. We still had no house there – the grandparents’ house was destroyed, there was only an empty plot of land. My father rented a room somewhere that you entered and exited through the window. Someone else lived there, a single, elderly lady. It was one of those houses that have two entrances, one in the front and one in the back, and the rooms are placed like in a train carriage, without separate entrances.

We were given the room in the back, the last one, which had no separate door, and we had to walk across her room to enter ours. From the room in the back you entered the one in the middle, the middle room opened onto a hallway leading into the courtyard on one side and into the street on the other. And we had no choice but to walk across that lady’s room if we wanted to go out either through the front or through the back.

We, the children, ran about the place all day long: out of the house – into the house, outside the house. You can’t keep children inside the house all day long; we went out from time to time. And this was a very, very old lady. In the end, the problem was solved by building two or three steps in front of the window, and that’s how we went out of the room: through the window. We lived there for a while.