Tag #138621 - Interview #99202 (Ruzena Deutschova)

In Dombo, we heated our house with wood, and lit with [mineral spirit] lamps - one by my father’s sewing machine, and one hung by the table. We didn’t have electricity. We lived in a house with a garden, whatever we needed, grew there. We had a lot of apples, we raised poultry, geese for ourselves. The furnishings were humble. There were two beds in the bedroom, with two standing chests of drawers. Below, in the drawers, we usually kept fresh-baked biscuits, crescent rolls. Nobody helped with the household chores, we never had a maid, anyway, we never had the money for one. We were very poor in Dombo.

In Dombo, we only had Jewish neighbors, as little children we played together with them. Dad would sew rag dolls, make little tables of wood. He even sewed clothes for us, while we were small. We went to a river, I don’t know the name anymore, to swim. Dombo was in a mountainous area, full of forests. We drove the geese up to the top of the mountain to mind them, and we played a lot then. The ground was clay, I remember, we made all kinds of biscuits out of it. We decorated them with little flowers, that’s how we played. Sometimes the geese would swim out on the water, straight to the nearby watermill wheel, from where they couldn’t get back, we lost them that way. We cried, that’s for sure. I don’t know which river it was, but it was a big river. They floated rafts of cut trees down the river to the sawmill.