Bernard Hirsch - June 29, 1982
Religious Life
Can you describe what your household was like, your family life?
Uh, family life? Middle...middle-class, middle-class. We were very good off. My father was very good off. Uh, we had everything--not luxury, I mean, cars and this. In the house, in the house was everything in the house.
Uh, can you describe how many synagogues there were in town?
In mine town wasn't synagogue. We had to go to a synagogue three miles. The name of the town was Hanuŝovce. There was uh, about forty, fifty families of Jews, they were laying there, they had--lately they didn't have the synagogue because in '39, when the German came in they burned down the synagogue. So they just had the rooms where we were praying uh, we're having Saturdays and uh, no other services.
And you said there was what, sixty-five Jews in your town?
No...
Sixty...
...Gentiles.
Sixty-five Gentiles in your town?
Town and one Jew.
Oh and one Jew? Oh, you were the Jew.
One family Jewish.
You were the Jewish family. Um, okay, how did you keep a Sabbath? Can you describe a Friday night?
Friday night we kept modern, like uh, religious modern. Saturday ni...Friday night when my mother uh, light candles, it could burn everything around the house, nobody did nothing. It was a Saturday. And this was 'til uh, next day 'til uh, the sun, or the time came when you could do something. My father was a very religious person. Every Saturday we were going three miles to the shul. Not the mother uh, the three boys with the father. We were going each Saturday except something happened, rainy or what, so then we didn't go out. Otherwise, every Saturday. That was our uh, life made this way. My father was a very religious person.
What were your family's political affiliations?
Democrat, always. You, you meant, uh...
Not here, I'm talking there.
At home. Always democrat.
Can you describe what you mean?
Czecho...Czechoslovakia was a democrat country.
Oh.
Except after the--when the German came in then uh, didn't mean nothing what the Jew was, that he was a democrat or whatever. They were all the same.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn