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1.

Earliest Memories

I WAS BORN IN JULY 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. My parents were Eastern European Jews who had come several years earlier from Poland. Unlike the Jews who had lived in Germany for generations, they knew little or nothing about its culture – for example, about Goethe and Schiller. Most German Jews were wealthier and better educated. They were also patriotic; they considered themselves part of the country’s middle-class society. But we did not feel so much at home.

At the time of my birth, my brother Leo was already eleven and my sister Lena ten. So for a year and a half, I was the baby in the family. Even after my younger sister, Judith, was born, I received a lot of attention, because I was often sick. My parents had established a fairly comfortable living by then, so I was pretty spoiled as a child. We shared a house with several relatives from my mother’s family, and I used to play with my cousins.

My parents had a kind of warehouse together with my uncle, Chaim Simcha. In Germany at that time, young Jewish women often used the income from their first job for an Aussteuer – a set of sheets, pillows and blankets, and maybe even a featherbed – for the day when they would marry. My father and uncle sold such sets of linens to be paid off in monthly installments. The business went well, and our extended family acquired several properties in Frankfurt. So we were fortunate that we had the means to escape Germany when the Nazis came to power.

My memories of Frankfurt are varied and scattered: an exciting visit to the zoo, dreadful throat examinations in kindergarten, and a fantastic candy shop around the corner from our house.

My first encounter with anti-Semitism was my mother’s horror when I came home and used, in front of her, the expression Dreckjude – “dirty Jew.” As a three-year-old, I must have picked it up from playmates without understanding what it meant. A short time later, we watched from the windows of our house as the Hitler’s S.A. (Sturm Abteilung, or “Storm Troops”) marched through the street singing, “When Jewish blood spurts from our knives…” More than my own fear, I remember the look of terror in my parents’ eyes.

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, my parents were convinced that we needed to leave Germany. In April, Father went to Palestine to find a home for us there. We waited anxiously for news; eight months we waited. But in the end he could not secure permission from the British authorities for us to enter Palestine. He sent word that we should meet him in Poland, because he felt it was unsafe for him to return to Germany. After a joyful reunion at the train station in Rzeshov, we made our way to my mother’s hometown of Rozwadów, where we were to spend the next six years.