Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Hannah Fisk - January 24, 1983

Family Life

Can you tell me about you family? How large was your family?

Oh, we had a huge family. I had six brothers and four sisters. My mother passed away, I was two years old. I never remember my mother. My father remarried. I had a stepmother. But, we were not too bad--getting by.

What did your father do for a living?

My father had a place where you sell coals for the winter. People come to buy winter and summer. And he also was a glass repair. He know how to repair glass, you know, cars and windows. Like I say, I wasn't too rich, but we made a comfortable living.

Did your stepmother work also?

No, no. She never worked. She had uh, her children, too, before my father got married, she had from the previous marriage. So, actually we were only about four in the house because none of my sisters and brothers wanted to stay with the stepmother so they all flew the coop. Everybody was scattered around someplace else. I had an aunt in, in uh, Sosnowiec, I had an aunt in uh, Łódź, one of my sisters was working there. You know. I was the only one because I was the youngest.

Mm-hm. Okay. Um, how many aunts and uncles lived in Częstochowa? How many, how many of your family members lived there in Częstochowa?

My aunts and uncles?

Yeah, your...

None of them.

None?

No. Not that I remember. They were, they were all the way in Poland, one in ???, one in Łódź. Uh, one was living in uh, Radomsko, you know, none here.

Did you see them very often? Did you visit them?

Yeah. Yeah. They used to come to us, too, and we used to go there. Every summer practically I went to my aunt. She had a bakery. That was my father's brother. And she was rich, too. And she always supplies all the clothes and everything we needed because she never had any children. So we were like her adopted children.

Husband: ??? children like father and mother.

[interruption in interview]


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