Did you hear about the chimney sweeps?
You know what they did. They brought in food through the chimneys.
So my mother was very brave. She opened up a little store.
She used to buy the food from the chimney sweeps, sell it in the ghetto.
We had some food, and the chimney sweeps had places where they did it.
And this way, there was a little money.
It was, again, it was turning. If we had some, as I said before,
There were some valuables like dollars. There were some gold coins.
I don't know how much, because when I left the Ghetto for good, I didn't have a cent to my name.
I didn't have a penny. It was sudden.
There were days when they would take you right next to the "Torwache"
- there was a room, a store - and tell you to undress.
But there were days when you could just go in.
And people smuggled in anything under the sun.
Anything they could lay their hands on.
We lived in the apartment. Where we existed actually, it was 5 men to about 16 people in the apartment
that had to be fed. And those were all children or women, actually.
So, if we wouldn't risk that to bring it in, it wouldn't be there.
And I was fortunate: two men out of those five did get caught smuggling in, and they got shot.
They never returned.
- What would be a typical day for you as a young kid?
- In the Ghetto, yeah. Probably going to school, going to this trade school, for lack of a better term,
to learn with working, and things like that. With some other subjects that were fairly mundane,
but nothing very elaborate.
But again, I was 12-13 years old, so that whatever a 12-year-old should be familiar with.
But, other than that, I would get together with my friends. We would play cards, play chess.
There was a theater - I mean, a live theater.
Find a place, like a few families together in one small apartment.
Everybody, the same thing they find. They were with other families in the same place.
We didn't have where to sleep. One was sleeping on the table. We were sleeping, I remember, in one bed.
We were sleeping - I, my sister, my mother and father - like herring in a barrel.
And my father started to work.
When he was working, what was the work? He had to go out of the Ghetto,
to a place that was called "gendarmeria".
There, he was working as a shoemaker.
I, my sister, and my mother, my other aunts and uncles - we were in the Ghetto.
And the uncles also went out to work, because the women didn't work at that time.
Crowded, hard, although the Ghetto had a life. There was passive resistance.
We had theater, we had schools, we had one of the largest libraries in town.
It was a Jewish library, "Strashun Bibliotek".
Where was that, do you remember?
This was called "Strashun Bibliotek", and it was on the same street we lived on. This was its original place.
The Ghetto area also had a secular high school.
It was called the "Real Gymnasia".
So we had schools, we had a hospital.
The schools were forbidden, but we still had schools.
We had active theaters.
- So you went to school there?
- I went to school there for a short time, in between...
- Which school did you go to there?
- There was no "which". There were little enclaves with instruction.
There were teachers. They would take a group of kids to teach them.