Samuel Offen - December 27, 1981
Family
Other members of your family--you had, what, two brothers and a sister...
Yes.
...and your, your parents lived, all in...
Six of us.
Uh, was there extended family in, in the same area?
Uh, yes. There was, yeah uh, my mother's family, my mother had three sisters and a brother. And they all lived within the same--within a block or two of each other. In fact uh, some of them lived in the same house. My grandmother lived in the same apartment house as we, as we lived. And at that time out--I reme...I still remember all my mother's sisters and brother were single, because, as I say, I was the oldest one in the family. I remember when they were single. And little by little, one by one they were becoming married and moved away within a block or two. So we had a big extended family. My father, as I mentioned before, was born outside of Krakow. And he did not have any family in Krakow. Although occasionally they would come and visit us, but I did not know his family very well at all.
How large do you think the family was in Krakow by 1939?
The extended family had to consist of uh, with the children oh, between fifty and seventy people. Because uh, by extended family I mean my, my grandmother's sisters and brothers and her children. It might have even been more. And it was everybody--they had a lot of children. Everybody had four, five, six children. Some they were even married and they had little children. So it had to be sixty-- seventy people maybe.
Do you...
And we were close. There was close, we used to get together and uh, on certain holidays.
Do you have any idea of um, approximately how many of those people were lost during the war?
Oh, as far as we know, all of them. As far as we know there're, there're no survivors, except my brother Bernie, who lives here and I have another brother, Nat, who lives in New Jersey. We are the only three survivors of the whole family that we could--were able to...
Cousins too, included?
Cousins, uncles, aunts, of course my grandparents. Even distant cousins. We tried to find out and there are just--are no survivors.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn