Tag #123407 - Interview #90376 (Lazar Abuaf)

Approximately a year after the Wealth Tax, my father was able to reopen the bar but not the hardware store (page 4).  Everything was in shortage in our country during this period.  The government stamped the backs of our identification cards with ration cards and in this way tried to prevent stocking up on food items and ensure equal distribution of basic necessities.  We could buy anything you could think of by showing this ration card.  Normally ¼ of a loaf of bread was given to each person, flour, oil, sugar was all distributed like this at a minimum. I was studying to become an ironworker in the Art School at the time (I could produce anything from iron using an iron file), because the products we manufactured in school were sold in the market, we were treated as laborers.  I had a “hardworking laborer” ration card.  The laborers had a right to ½ loaf of bread a day.  Our family was large, my father was close friends with the baker who was our neighbor, and he liked and respected my father a lot,  bless him, the baker would one way or another give my father extra breads.

One day there was a large bonito [a kind of fish] surge on to the beach, I gathered 6 of them that had beached themselves on the shore because of the winds and immediately brought them to my mother, we made fabulous lakerda [bonito preserved in salt] with these and ate them at every opportunity.  We all developed scabies due to this salty fish and also because of the shortage of sugar at the time.  Following this we had louse, and I contracted typhus on top of all of this.  We overcame these days even if it was difficult.  My family struggled to observe the Sabbath, the holidays as much as we could when everything was so hard, we tried to follow our religious obligations with the foods we prepared whether it was a little or a lot.

The Tax Assessors who read the sign outside my father’s older brother, my uncle Izak’s store that was in Sisane, as “Izak Abuaf Shirts” instead of “Izak Abuaf Pottery” [in Turkish the words for shirts and pottery are spelled the same way except for one different consonant, gomlek and comlek], came up with an impossibly high debt for my uncle who was a manufacturer of trunks.  Because my uncle could not pay off this debt, he was deported to Ashkale along with the other nonMuslims who were not able to pay.  People usually were made to work in building roads there, my uncle who was handy with everything and who was streetsmart told the official there that he could cook very well and became the cook for the camp.  In this way he handled this period without being as challenged as the others.  When he returned from Ashkale, he continued his work where he left off.