Tag #127935 - Interview #78031 (Arnold Leinweber)

In the first day of school I went to the Malbim School [Ed. note: This school founded in 1898, next to the Malbim Synagogue, was named Talmud Torah Malbim and consisted of four elementary grades. It was located in the Dudesti quarter, a poor area inhabited predominantly by Jews.], where our social assistance center is based today. Headmaster Koritzer came outside and told the first-graders to line up holding hands two by two and to enter the classroom. I held the hand of a fair-haired boy with glasses and his mother said: ‘Adolf, have you any idea who you’re walking next to? Your cousin!’ I turned to her and said: ‘This is not my cousin. I only have two cousins, from Aunt Lisa [Lisa Gherman, sister of Mr. Leinweber’s mother]. ‘He is your cousin’, she insisted. ‘Your father and his father were brothers! Your father shot himself!’ Well now, remember your own first day of school and the excitement of that moment. Can you imagine how it’s like for a seven-year-old to learn such things on his first day of school?! This happened in 1927. My first day of school was the day I found out that I was an orphan and the man I was living with was not my actual father. I don’t remember how that day went, but I know that, when I got home, I couldn’t eat. And I bore inside me this psychological burden throughout my entire childhood and adolescence.