Lanka Ilkow - October 12, 1991
Religious Life
So your family was ko...kept kosher.
Oh very, very kosher.
Was it a religious family?
Very religious. Shabbos the Gentile people worked for us, you know.
Where did you go to shul on Shabbos?
We, we just had--in the next village, the villages was so close that we walked to the next village to shul. Or they had minyan and uh, there was a Kalstein family and they had a big house. So and they had a, like a bar, they called it Korcsma. So they was there davening all the time.
Like a shtieble.
In a shtieble, yeah. It was always minyan. But, uh.
What was a Friday night like in your house?
Oh, Friday night we liked it because Friday night we had always chicken soup, you know. And, we had our own chickens, but if they killed our own chickens the children didn't want to eat, you know. So they bought always a chicken. Or they fooled us or so, we just saw later there's missing one. Because we had chickens, geese and everything we had. So uh, uh, so we had always chicken you know, for Friday night and the same thing farfeel carrots and all these things mother made. But we liked the most was like uh, she make beans, they--you know, I can't find here this kind beans. Very sweet, those beans, big beans. And she used to make it. They called it galarit you know, with uh, uh, bay leaves in it. And sweet and sour she made it. Oh, we loved that, the children, everybody. So like--and Saturday we had always two kugels in our potato, and they made from a cornmeal like kugel my mother. Oh, she made a cherry kugel. We had a lot of fruits. We dried the top. If you went on our attic we had nuts and fruits and ap...all kinda apples. And then they make sauerkraut and they put apples in that sauerkraut. So we always went sticking our hand that we should catch an apple you know, during the winter. So uh, one thing when--before that year when they took us away, so my father was taken to a labor camp.
What year? 1939?
Uh, no in, in, uh...
'41?
Forty--'42. And my brother, and my brother run back for some reason and they didn't bother him. So my father was taken to labor. But they brought him came back home. Let, they let him go home. He worked on the fields by the Hungarian rich people. They give him uh, even a lotta uh, uh, wheat to take home, which we make flour out it. But it wasn't--during the war it wasn't allowed to make white flour, only black you know, dark. You couldn't bleach it. But on the black market, my father did it. So we always had challahs, white challahs. But uh, but it wasn't allowed to have uh, to make the flour white.
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