Hannah Fisk - January 24, 1983
Life Before the War II
Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Um, can you remember the name of the synagogue that your father belonged to?
Um, it calls the old, the old synagogue. That's the way it called. But it was beautiful. You should see the sculptures, you should see the painting there. You can't imagine. It's even prettier than the Radio City and my cousin happen to paint the Radio City--he lives in New York. But it was prettier. But, it's unbelievable, the sculptures, what those people could do it. I don't know where they--they didn't have the tools, they didn't have the, the ability like now, but something gorgeous. When you came in in this shul, you thought you were someplace in a--like in a museum. So beautiful. It was the biggest shul in Częstochowa. And they honored my father very much. They grab a broom--my God--in the street when he was going, they, they even have respect for him. If they need a few dollars or something, somebody would--every Shabbos we used to have a guy that came in, you know, that my father brought back from shul to eat with us. Even if we didn't have maybe too much but was still enough that he knows that that guy's hungry, he brought him in. Every Shabbos.
Can you describe your house for me, what it looked like?
Our house? We had one--we had a living room, we had a kitchen, and we had a little bit a bedroom, and then we had another little like a porch. That's where most our children were sleeping. I slept with my sister. We, we didn't have like here everybody has a bedroom, but we were happy. Was not too comfortable, but, you know, we didn't have uh, that tough that we have to go outside. And then we didn't have um, you know, like here, everything--the convenience. But we survived. We weren't going around dirty, believe me. My moth...my stepmother happens to be a remarkable woman--a remarkable clean woman.
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