Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Regina Cohen - April 18, 1982

Would you say you were a religious family?

Well, we were, we were considered Orthodox, okay. But not Hasidic. A religious Jewish family. We were uh, keep everything. It's not as, as the American call Orthodox. It's...

How is it different? Did you...

Well...

...did she shave her hair?

She had, when she got married. After that she grew, mm, sort of the length, you know, the short length hair. Um, modern Jewi...Judaism. It, it was um, my father didn't wear no beard.

Mm-hm.

Didn't uh, always wear a hat, um. Where, where we lived in that community was, it was quite mixed in um, Jews and Gentiles. It was a very good mixture. We got along nice in the first--beginning of the few years. But as I was getting--from the age, I think, of five I remember being called a dirty Jew by the neighbor's children. So things were kind of happening all along. Uh, but you know you grow with that, you kind of get used to it and you don't uh, you don't let it bother you. And you just sort of walk away from it as if you don't even hear it. After awhile you just don't hear it, really. And uh, what else can I tell you?

Would you describe yourself as middle class, upper class?

Uh, a good middle class family. We had our own home and uh, land. Uh...

Were there many synagogues in Chust?

In Chust there were two main uh, main, large synagogues. Uh, there was another small, on the outside skirts of the city. But there were--one was uh, uh, central of the city. And the other one was further down towards uh, out towards the outskirt of the city.

What about your extended family? Did you have aunts and uncles that lived in town?

Yes, I had my grandparents, my father's parents lived in the same city with uh, my father's sister lived in the same city. They had seven children. Um, those were the only close relatives from both my father--my mother's side of the family lived in another--a smaller town, but it was a few miles away. And we would see them occasionally when they'd come during summer vacations, school time.