Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Eugene Feldman - July 15, 1991

Let me take you back, tell me a little about life in uh, in Glinka before the war started.

Glinka. That was an interesting life. It was really a village. Everybody had a little plot of land, a garden, for yourself, not big enough to sell anything, just for yourself. We used to grow cucumber. It was fun. For a kid it was fun, go in the garden and pick your own cucumbers uh, tomatoes. But you got, you had to have it to survive. I mean, there's, there was no stores in my little t...village where to buy so obviously you had to grow it. You had to bake your own bread. I mean, there was no stores. So what--my--how we survived, my dad, once in awhile he used to go buy a co...a cow or whatever and sell it. My mom would bake challahs or bread, I think ca...something, maybe cakes too, sponge cake and sell it to the farmers. They would come to the house, I remember, and just sit there and eat. You talking, oh, you talking about petty stuff. But it was just enough, and the garden.

What did your father do, what was his...

That's it. He was a uh, he had a little garden, farm, to take care of it. That's before the war, before, that--we're talking about Russia--I mean Poland. That's before 1939, that was still Poland. So, he--we lived in that little, from little garden. And it was like I say he would sell once in awhile a cow and make a couple dollars on it. We had our own cows for ourselves. So we had milk. We had a horse or two sometimes that would work that little farm, whatever. It was a very rough life. He would get me a pair of pants, I would get for Pesach a pair of pants and a pair of shoes and that was it. And I was happy with it. I used to walk around barefooted. It didn't bother me, of course. Everybody was walking barefooted; I was no different.