Regina Cohen - April 18, 1982
Surviving at Home
How was your mother able to support herself with her husband being gone and...
Okay.
...all those children to...
Well, okay, uh...
...feed and clothe?
...like I said, there was uh, my two older brothers had worked. Another one that was taken away, the, the two above me, in my father's business. And where they had um, empl...employed quite a crew of people to do um, home modernization, painting and all that. And this crew, a big portion of the crew were Gentile. Being that we had the business, they did the work. And so the older of the boys uh, Bernard, Bertse, he uh, was very fast and he learned quickly. My mother was quite a business lady. I mean, she knew what was going on. So we didn't lack uh, if my memory serves me right, being able to find money to buy things. The money was there. It's the material things that you buy with money that we couldn't get. Uh, you would find foods on farms. Uh, my mother came from a family that had big, big uh, uh, farm and land area, so they grew their own uh, just about everything for uh, for sale rather than for, just for...
Mm-hm.
...family. So we'd get certain supplies, black market. So it wasn't a question, so obviously--you know, children don't, don't always know what material value their, their parents have. But I know there was money--enough, because we all were healthy children. None of us were uh, impaired in any way. We all went to school, we were all dressed well. So what you call a very good middle class family. My mother didn't uh, uh, for me uh, business just carried on. It deteriorated to nothing at the middle of '43 is when it was a total nothing. 'Cause uh, by then Christians didn't want to work for Jews. They would rather take the business away. And little by little you wind up with nothing. It's just what you might have put away. There was probably some monetary uh, uh, things that you trade. You trade. You trade away everything you've got. Your silver they take. You have nothing. Even, including a bicycle is what they took away from Jews. You had no radio, no silver, and no bicycles, no furs, no art.
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