Under the communist regime, my father didn’t have any pension. My sister and I supported him. He lived with my sister. She paid for the utilities – firewood, electricity, gas, all these things –, and I paid for the food. There was no assistance system back then – or it was only at its beginnings. But he died in 1972, before things had got organized.
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Mira Tudor
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It was only in 1945 that a law was passed while Lucretiu Patrascanu [7] was still a minister in the government. According to this law, Jews could move back to their houses if they offered those who had seized them an apartment to their liking. Luckily for us, col. Paraschivescu had died on the front, and his wife lived alone in our house on Labirint St., which had many rooms and an enormous garden. So she had to accept to move on Panduri Dr., where we had lived after we had been kicked out.
Between 1940 and 1944, the Jews were deprived not only of their stores, factories etc., but also of their houses – the beautiful ones, of course. Ours was seized by a colonel, Paraschivescu by his name. He kicked us out of it in a few hours, with all our things. My father went to find another place and came across an apartment on Panduri Dr. It was twice as small. This is how most of our things got scattered.
The Jews from Ramnicu Valcea left [the country]. They all left between 1950 and 1960 [6]. It’s true, there weren’t many of them. Ten families at the most – maybe twelve, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
My father worked during the entire war.
Did you know that those who were able to submit papers proving they did forced labor – the boys, for instance, had forced labor written in their soldier’s record instead of military service – got a compensation for it? There aren’t many of them still alive, but I personally know two people who got this money.
My sister did forced labor at the Statistics Institute.
But at least we didn’t wear the star [5].
During the war, my father did forced labor in an economat [Ed. note: (outdated) store within an enterprise or institution whose purpose was to secure basic commodities for the employees and their families], in a ministry. A neighbor of ours got him that position, knowing he had been a tradesman. Back then, all the ministries had economate, small internal stores which supplied the clerks. I don’t know where they got the merchandise from, who delivered it and how they paid for it. My father didn’t get paid for this job – it was forced labor. All the Jews went through this.
Someone in Ramnicu Valcea must have been very kind, because my father even received a compensation for the lost store – I don’t know who did that. I heard this is not the way things happened everywhere.
So we moved to Bucharest in 1940. We had our own house, but it was relatively small and had a big shortcoming: the rooms were in a row. The good part is that it had a garden of 1.000 square meters. When my father bought it, he saw that courtyard with fruit trees, the garden, and the roses, and he lost his head. He always remained a country boy. He came to us and told us: ‘I bought a house on Labirint St., and it’s got roses, and apple trees, and quince trees, and…’ But my mother asked: ‘What about the house, Maere? We’re not going to live in the quince trees, you know!’ – ‘Oh, the house is beautiful.’ – ‘How is it?’ The women were disappointed. In order to get to the kitchen, they had to cross the entire place. The ground floor had three rooms, a hallway, and a vestibule, and there were three more rooms in the attic. This was it. When I got married, I lived in one of the rooms upstairs. Apart from that, the house had a bathroom, and terracotta stoves, and all the comfort.
My father had connections with rich tradesmen in Bucharest. They were Jewish, of course. He came here and told them what had happened to him, how he had lost everything. And they told him ‘Come to Bucharest and we’ll find some work for you’. He came back to Ramnicu Valcea and packed everything. Would you believe that we even took our cats with us? We were afraid they would poison them. We filled two or three freight cars with our things. We took everything there was to take, or most of it, anyway. The station master in Ramnicu Valcea was a man named Nitescu. His daughter was my classmate. [The Legionaries came to the station.] ‘These cars don’t belong to Maer Simovici anymore’, Nitescu told them. ‘They are the property of the CFR [The National Railroad Transport Company]. If one single chair is missing, I’ll have to pay for it.’ The poor man spent a day and a night sitting on a chair in front of the cars, guarding us against the rage of the Legionaries. Then, as soon as he could, he routed them to Bucharest. They waited for us there, until my father found the house on Labirint St., and we moved in.
We all came to Bucharest because of the Legionaries, just like King Ferdinand in 1492, were after our fortune. They had no business with us: ‘Go to hell!’ They took over the store with all the merchandise and a safe as large as a bookshelf, only thicker and deeper, where my father kept the money and the papers. So they took everything. Fortunately, my father had saved some money somewhere else, and this is what kept us going during the war.
Our house had belonged to a nobleman named Bratasanu. He was a widower and agreed to sell us the house if we agreed to look after him. The place had about seven rooms. Three of them or so measured about 36 [square] meters each, and the others measured about 24 [square] meters each. We had a bathroom, which was quite an extraordinary thing at that time. The toilets were inside the house, not at the back of the courtyard. We had plumbing, electricity, and terracotta stoves. Peasants would come and pile firewood in our large courtyard. Then some woodchoppers would spend about two months with us. They would saw the wood and stack it in the basement. We also had a shed, and some of the wood was kept in the courtyard. We burnt enormous amounts of wood and I can’t remember to have ever suffered from cold. Opposite from us lived the daughter of a captain, Ciofaca. The man had three daughters. Two of them were not good at school, but the third became a doctor. She was very clever and determined, and her name was Victoria. We called her Vintu, Vintu Ciofaca. And the captain built this house, which was very beautiful, but didn’t have a bathroom; and the toilet was outside. I don’t know what he was thinking. But the house itself was beautiful. And all the furniture had been made by local carpenters.
Then there were the theater tours. A great actor of the National Theater [in Bucharest] Ion Iancovescu was from Ramnicu Valcea. [Ed. note: Ion Iancovescu (1889-1966), actor who became famous in the interwar period, a time when a new conception on art was formed, and when tradition and modernism were combined.]. He came from a noble family who had renounced him because he had become an actor. Much later, when he came on tour with the theater in Ramnicu Valcea, they invited him to dinner, because they had partially forgiven him. Fintesteanu came too [Ed. note: Ion Fintesteanu (1899-1984), actor who became famous in the interwar period.]. We weren’t allowed to go to the theater – this would have got us expelled. If we had been caught at the cinema, we would have got expelled too or banned for a week. But if my father took me, it was okay. We weren’t allowed to go there by ourselves. There was the officers’ ball, and all the youth was there. But we didn’t go, because we weren’t old enough at the time.
I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema. I shed bitter tears and begged my father to take me, but he was always tired after having spent the entire day at the store. He only came home to eat. He worked hard and he liked to keep the place clean. If the boys didn’t sweep the floors well, he did it himself, so that the customers would be pleased. On Sunday, he was dead beat and felt like sleeping. And I cried: ‘Let’s go to the cinema, father!’ I remember this film called ‘In Old Chicago’ [1937], starring Alice Faye. I bought the ‘Cinema’ magazine and had read about it. Ramnicu Valcea had one of the first cinemas in the country. It was build by an Italian, in 1920 or maybe even earlier. As far as I’m concerned, it had been there for as long as I could remember. It had a hall, a row of ground-floor boxes, and a row of boxes at the upper floor. My father would take me by the hand and we would enter a box. He would hide in a corner and doze. And he even snored sometimes. ‘Father, you are embarrassing me! Stop snoring!’ – ‘I’ll never come here with you again if I’m not even allowed to snore!’ So I let him snore, hoping we would come again.
Ramnicu Valcea had one of the first cinemas in the country. It was build by an Italian, in 1920 or maybe even earlier. As far as I’m concerned, it had been there for as long as I could remember. It had a hall, a row of ground-floor boxes, and a row of boxes at the upper floor.
From time to time, my mother went to visit other ladies – but she did it quite seldom. She also had them come over. They were both Romanian and Jewish.
One of our neighbors was a Turkish landowner, Romulu. There’s a hill in Ramnicu Valcea, Capela, which stretches down to the very center of the town. It’s covered with fir trees and it’s magnificent! Romulu owned a part of this forest, so our house felt like a park. Our courtyard was beautiful – with flowers and trees.
After finishing the elementary school, my mother went to a private school for four years, and she spoke some French. Her brother from France helped her with her studies as much as he could. But she stopped after they moved to Ramnicu Valcea. At that time, studying was practically impossible for a girl.
My father had only attended two years of elementary school, so what could he have possibly read? He could barely write.
On vacations we didn’t go to the seaside like, for instance, Dr. Zeana, our neighbor. Zeana was arrested by the Legionaries and died in prison. My father would rent a carriage and take us to Calimanesti, or Olanesti, or Ocnele Mari. We left in the morning and came back in the evening. He took the carriage from a cabman’s post, drove it home and took us wherever we wanted. We took the train to Calimanesti, because it was farther away, at about 18 kilometers. There was no station in Calimanesti. We crossed the river on a small ferry. It was very beautiful! My father also sent Grandma, who had rheumatism, to Ocnele Mari for 2-3 weeks every summer. A carriage came and took her there, then brought her back. She took baths there. It was primitive – some wooden cabins with wooden tubs. Grandma took me with her a couple of times.
Zeana was arrested by the Legionaries and died in prison.
Our father also hired a French teacher and a German one – ‘pope’ Mangesius, the protestant minister of Ramnicu Valcea. My sister speaks German beautifully. As for me, they had to catch me first before making me take those lessons. So my German is rather poor. But I speak French well. Then I learnt Russian, because I went to Leningrad. I also learnt English by myself and I can read it – it almost has no grammar and the phrase structure is easy, unlike German, with the subject at the top of the page and the predicate on the following page.
We took piano lessons from a Russian refugee, Madame Verbinskaia. Her husband had been a colonel. She fled when the Russians came and she ended up in Ramnicu Valcea with her son, while her husband died. She never left our town again. I wasn’t talented and I wasn’t diligent either.
There was a vocational school for boys. But the girls who were older than 15-16 stayed at home. I remember this family… God, what was their name? Not Adler, but Taubman! Lazar Taubman. My father worked as a shop boy for his father-in-law, Marcu Adler. Then they both became tradesmen. Taubman had two daughters. The elder didn’t even go to high school; she stayed at home with her mother and helped her around the house. They got her married at 17-18. The same thing with the younger. She went to a ‘housekeeping school’; this is how it was called – not apprentices’ school, not vocational school. It was a ‘housekeeping school’ where they taught girls to sew and cook.
There aren’t any Jews left in Ramnicu Valcea today, of course.
My sister is 6 years older than me. The two of us were the only Jewish girls in our high school. After my sister left, I was the only one. She got the school’s first prize for eight years in a row. I only got the second or third prize in my class, never the first. I got the highest average at the admission exam, 9.66, and I graduated in the spring of 1940, with the highest average again, 8.80 – only a classmate of mine, Olguta Popescu, and I had it. [Ed. note: In the Romanian grades system, the maximum grade is 10, while the minimum grade for succeeding at an exam is 5.] The other children didn’t study well, they weren’t good at it. They all went through elementary school, but stumbled over high school. There’s one exception though, Rozeta Saraga, who finished high school and went to college – the Faculty of Geography, I think. She now lives in Israel.
On Sukkot we built a tent. Ramnicu Valcea is an area rich in fruit. Grapes were wreathed in the walls of the huts. I can’t remember what we ate in those huts. I think Sukkot lasted for 8 days.
On major holidays – New Year’s Eve (Rosh Hashanah), Yom Kippur, Pesach, Sukkot (when the tents with fruit are built) –, our entire family would go to the shul. The children would play in the courtyard. This was about all the religious life we had. I became familiar with some of the Jewish rituals. We had a rabbi who tried hard to preserve the Jewish way of life; otherwise, we would have dissolved among all those Romanians. For instance, I remember when they gave us wine and the prayer we had to say. ‘Melech’ means ‘king’, ‘Adonai’ means ‘God’, so it’s God, the king of the universe. I can’t say it by heart though. We all went to the synagogue for the large holidays.