Rose Green - May 21, 2008
Life Before the War
Tell me a little about what you remember of life in Michalovce before the war.
It was very good. My husband was a well to do man. We had a, we had a good home life. I was not married very long. I was married four, four years uh, when they took me. We didn't want children because we know how bad times are, you know, so we were saving it for later. Just in the worst time we had a baby. I was two weeks pregnant when it looked like the Americans are coming.
I see. What about your childhood?
Beautiful.
How large was your family?
My family uh, my pa...my father was a dentist and we had a very good life. We--it wasn't a rich because my father was in first war, war in the army and he was uh, wounded and for about a year he couldn't work. He didn't work at all. My grandfather supported us. And uh, but later when he started to work we are very good. And we were three sisters and a brother, and uh, I was the oldest. We, we had it very, very good.
Was it a religious family?
My grandparents were very religious, but my parents were not religious. But we kept a kosher home because my grandfather came to visit and my mother kept a very, very meticulously kosher home.
So did you go to synagogue on...
Oh yes.
...Shabbat? Not so much...
On the big holidays.
On the holidays.
Yeah. My, my father went to the synagogue. There was a big respect for my grandparents and my father wouldn't, wouldn't want--his father was scared that he didn't go to synagogue. He was an adult and a professional man, and he was so respectful, he loved his father very much. He was a very good man and father.
Did anybody in your family speak Yiddish?
I speak Yiddish.
You spoke Yiddish at home?
Uh, not at home, but at grandparents'...
Ah.
...house. My grandparents wanted me to know Yiddish and he said, "If they won't speak to us, nobody will." And when we were with them, we spoke Yiddish. And everybody--we had a maid who spoke Yiddish fluently because she, she was with Jews all the time.
She wasn't Jewish.
No, no, she was a Christian girl.
So you spoke Hungarian at home.
At home, yeah, Hungarian. And in school--we went to Slovak school, so we spoke Hungarian, we spoke German, Yiddish, and Slovak.
So you spoke Slovak in school?
Yeah, Slovak. We had Slovak schools, yeah.
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