When we came back, my father had to work as a tailor, because he wasn't allowed to be a clerk.
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Displaying 2551 - 2580 of 50826 results
Rudi Katz
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My father was now rather sick; in 1943, he was taken away to Buck [Bug], to build a bridge, and he came back sick.
I came home in 1944, with my father.
Obodovca, a little town, was 15 to 20 kilometers away from Tibulovca; there was no forced labor there, but no one looked after you there.
I could have come home sooner, in 1943, because there was an order that children could go, but I got to Obodovca [11] late, and missed the train I should have taken and so I had to go back to Tibulovca and wait.
We only got in touch with my father's sisters from Bucharest once, in 1943, when we had permission to write; they sent us some things, but nothing much, they were rather poor.
Tibulovca was a village, like all concentration camps in Transnistria. It was a relatively small and isolated place. We were taken just outside the village, into a huge building that used to be a collective farm. The first winter there was terrible: no one could go into the village, because it was guarded. But there was no barbed wire like in the German concentration camps had, and there was no camp administration. Hunger and typhoid fever were everywhere. 1,700 Jews were taken to Tibulovca, and after the first winter only 200 had survived. There were no executions in Tibulovca; if it happened, they were only isolated cases.
The deportation was an intense shock; we had no time to get used to what was going on. My grandfather died on the way, in Marculesti, because he couldn't walk. My uncle Iosef's wife, Frida, and her mother died in Tibulovca. My mother died soon after we got there, in two or three months. They all died because of typhoid fever.
He had to take up tailoring again, so that he could support the family.
But we were affected by the anti-Jewish laws, even before we were deported; my father was forbidden to work and I couldn't go to school anymore.
The strongest impressions I have about the ongoing political events are from one night, after the war with Poland, when the Polish refugees came. [Rudi refers to the beginning of World War II when Germany occupied Poland without a declaration of war [10].] There was a big noise one night, and everybody came out of their houses into the main street, to see what it was. It was a huge stream of people, of all ages, with cars, carts, or on foot. There were Jews among them. The Dachners, our neighbors, took in some refugees. I remember one of them married one of their daughters later.
Until I was deported with my family to the Tibulovca [7] concentration camp in Transnistria [8] in 1941, I wasn't directly confronted with anti- Semitism, but I had heard of it. Newspapers talked about the events in Germany, and there was news of the Iron Guard movement at the universities, where Jews were beaten and thrown out. I made friends with a boy who had come from Austria right after the Anschluss [9], in 1938; he probably had relatives here. There was some tension in our house; I think my parents became aware of the fact that the danger could come our way.
During the holidays I stayed at home with my parents, I never went to a youth camp or something like that; sometimes I went to my grandfather in Paraul Negru.
I had a lot of friends. I liked Feder, an acquaintance of my father; he was a carpenter and I loved spending time with him in his workshop, where it always smelled like wood. I liked his family and kids, too, they were a happy family. A Christian family rented the other apartment, and I made friends with their daughter, Viorica. We were the same age, eight or nine years old. There was another boy who lived in the neighborhood, Nathan Kurz; we were friends. Across the street was another Jewish family, Dachner, who had girls. One of them, Sulamita, was my age and we got along really well; everybody called her Slima. I had Christian friends as well, two German boys: Rudi, who left for Germany in 1940, and Fiebich. I remember Fiebich drew beautifully.
We had a library in the house; my mother read good novels in German, and my father was fond of history books. We also had religious books, like the Mazor. I loved reading, and my father was sometimes annoyed because I read too much or I read things I wasn't supposed to read. He once burnt some of my books - I liked to read books from a series called 'Famous Women': it was about famous women throughout history, like Anne Boleyn, the mistress [second wife] of King Henry VIII of England, and that kind of reading was prohibited - and so my father smacked me. He got very upset when a neighbor gave me a Magazine of Science and Travel because he thought it distracted me from studying. [This is a magazine with scientific articles and feature articles on different countries.] He never thought that kind of reading was useful for a child's evolution. He believed I should read only books for school, and that I should be obedient and polite. My mother usually took my side when it came to reading. I didn't go to a library, because there wasn't one nearby, but my father had a friend, a high school teacher, to whom he advised me to go. I borrowed from him Romanian literature, like Creanga or Sadoveanu [Ion Creanga (1837-1889) and Mihail Sadoveanu (1880- 1961), famous Romanian writers]. But back then I was crazy about Karl May, adventure books, the Magazine of Science and Travel.
My father didn't study religion with me, but he sent me to cheder two or three times a week, from the age of six until I was around ten years old. He didn't want to send me to do further studies in a yeshivah, but it was tradition, and I think my mother wanted me to have some basic knowledge about Judaism. We studied with bocherim from Maramures, who knew Hebrew, in a room in the synagogue we usually went to. It wasn't really a classroom, with a blackboard, and we didn't use notebooks. We just had to have a Hummash or Siddur, the teacher read first and then we had to read after him. He would go around and hear us read, and if we made mistakes, he would slap us.
We studied with both bocherim and melamedim. I studied with a melamed, Margulis. He had a cheder in his home, but he also came to our home to teach me; we did translations from the Hummash, and reading exercises, and learned the right punctuation. I remember he had a lot of books, but he didn't speak Hebrew as well as the young bocherim, who studied in a yeshivah. I remember I had a friend whose melamed was teaching him Hebrew, and it was a sensation, because Jewish kids usually learnt that in yeshivah, not in cheder. I wasn't very hardworking, during the class I never read the entire paragraph I was supposed to, because I used to go drink water three times, then ask permission to go to the toilet three times. When I took it up again, after I retired, I barely knew the letters! But it eventually came back to me.
We studied with both bocherim and melamedim. I studied with a melamed, Margulis. He had a cheder in his home, but he also came to our home to teach me; we did translations from the Hummash, and reading exercises, and learned the right punctuation. I remember he had a lot of books, but he didn't speak Hebrew as well as the young bocherim, who studied in a yeshivah. I remember I had a friend whose melamed was teaching him Hebrew, and it was a sensation, because Jewish kids usually learnt that in yeshivah, not in cheder. I wasn't very hardworking, during the class I never read the entire paragraph I was supposed to, because I used to go drink water three times, then ask permission to go to the toilet three times. When I took it up again, after I retired, I barely knew the letters! But it eventually came back to me.
I also played a bit of football, near our house there was a football field; it was the town's football field, called Maccabi [6]. We had a really good football team. Sports, in general, were very popular among the Jewish organizations.
I got along well with all my classmates, it didn't matter that I was a Jew. I made friends easily, and we often went hiking or swimming - there was a lake nearby.
Then I went to kindergarten, and then I went to the normal state school in Cernauti from 1934 to 1939. I especially liked mathematics and physics. I had good teachers, who made sure that at least a few students understood what they taught: they asked questions, and were more involved in the teaching process than I think they are nowadays. I don't remember one of them in particular.
There weren't typical occupations for Jews. A Jew could be anything, from a butcher to a lawyer, especially since there were no Anti-Jewish laws [5] then [in the 1930s]. Jews could go to school, college, own houses or stores. Near our street there was an oxygen factory and the owner was a Jew. But making a living was hard for a lot of people; I remember the chazzan in the synagogue where we went was a tinsmith, but at the same time he was also a chacham, a shammash, and from time to time he was called up to the Torah to read from it as well, during the service.
Very popular among Jews were the Jewish theaters, which preserved a certain way of thinking and feeling: I still remember an actress, Sidi Tal, who was very famous then.
And almost every Jewish house raised money for Keren Kayemet.
The Jews in Cernauti had a lot of cultural organizations, where they sang Jewish songs or recited poems; they made trips around Cernauti, but I was too young to join them.
Cernauti had a rich religious life, there were five or six synagogues in the town, and also a beautiful temple, which was later set on fire. We went to the one closest to us. It was a small synagogue, with simple people: they weren't intellectuals, doctors, or professors. For these simple people the notion of reformism didn't have much meaning; they were neither Orthodox [4] nor reformed. There was only a shammash, but no rabbi there. I don't know about other synagogues, but the Jews at the big temple were different, they were intellectuals, so they were reformed. But in those years this separation into different streams of religion wasn't that visible.
The Jewish community was big, and well structured: over 30 to 40 percent of the town's population. Most of the Jews were well situated, except maybe those who lived in the crowded Jewish neighborhood. We had a relative there we visited from time to time, but I don't remember what kind of relative he was.
Cernauti was a modern town, which inherited a lot from the Austro-Hungarian culture. It had beautiful buildings, paved roads, and friendly people. Education was compulsory, the commerce was booming. We lived on the outskirts, a bit far from the center. We had Jewish, German, and Ukrainian neighbors.
They got along well with their neighbors, Jewish or not, and they visited each other.
My parents weren't politically involved; I remember my father came home once with the book 'Capitalul' [Karl Marx's 'The Capital,' forbidden by the Iron Guard [3]] - a friend from work asked him to hide it for him for a while. My mother burned it immediately.
I didn't have a bar mitzvah, because I was on the road when I should have had it. Later, in 1949, I was sick, then busy making a living; and under the communist regime I couldn't go to the synagogue.
I also remember the chazzan, dressed in white after being in the mikveh, and blowing the shofar on Yom Kippur. That image still lights up my memory. There was a song about the martyrdom of Jews; women cried when they sang that.