Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982

What were your plans for the future before the war?

Before the war, plans for the future? I had no plans. Who planned? Who planned something? Parents planned for you. Probably to get married and become a mother.

Is that what your parents had planned for you?

I believe so. Because I know one thing. And uh, uh, in Poland to marry off a daughter, you have to have a dowry--what is it a dowry? The, the...

Dowry.

Dowry. My oldest sister uh, was given cash. My younger sister there was already an amount of money which stay sitting right here--some of it they had in a basement buried in a jar. I remember my father buried it and showed us all uh, where it is. Thought, you know, we'll be back. A--for a bro...uh, boy didn't need it. Somebody else had to worry for him. And then I came along. So the, the store was supposed to be--no, the house, the building, was supposed to be for me. For the youngest one the store. And then the parents stay with the youngest one in the store, you know, until God takes them away. But Hitler came and destroyed all this. And, and the plans have never been fulfilled.