Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Henry Konstam - October 25, 1991

So you went to Jewish school, rather than...

Well, it was a day school. It was a day school. We also had the uh, the secular as well as, uh... We had uh, so many hours of secular, you know, studies. And it was under the supervision of, of the uh, school uh, school system.

Public school.

Public school system.

So you went to both schools then.

Yeah.

So what would the day be, when you were ten years old, what would a typical day be?

We, we had uh, I uh, we went in the morning to school about seven o'clock and uh, we had about uh, three hours of secular teaching in the morning. And uh, my day ended about 8:30 in the evening.

So you finished...

Yeah.

public school at what time?

No, public school, it was from, I would say it was from eight to eleven.

And then what would you do?

And then it was the uh, religious studies, you know, Talmud and, and so on. Uh, or when I was younger it was Chumash. But it all uh, the rest of the day was all uh, religious learning, teaching, learning.

So did all of you wear payes and tefillin.

Yeah, yeah.

And you wore tzitzit.

Yeah.

When you went to public school...

Yeah.

did non-Jewish children ever...

I didn't go to public school. In our uh, in our school, the private school, we had a teacher from the public school that came in...

Oh, I see.

and uh, teach us. There are teachers that hired by our school, just like day schools here.

I see. So you, did you have much contact with non-Jewish children?

Well not uh, uh, later. Not when I was very young, no. But uh, later on I had a lot of contacts yeah. Because really were a few people that worked for us, maybe some other people. We had contacts, yeah.