Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Mrs. Roemerfeld - 1982?

Social Status of Family

How would you consider your family? What--at what economic level?

At the medium level. Because uh, I cannot recall as a little girl knowing any Jews that were at really uh, at what you call here rich. Uh, my teacher was uh, Mr. Ben Gurion's, the prime minister's niece. And uh, uh, she was living a little bit outside of the area of the Jewish you know, population. And uh, that's all she had was two rooms. And they had a maid. But her husband was a teacher, she was a teacher. And they lived in, you know, uh, not accelerating rate, what I would call rich. It just, you know, getting by.

A higher class, would you consider them a higher class?

Well, they were uh, in my estimation they were better educated and uh, uh, there were some doctors, Jewish doctors. But they went to the same place, to flea market shopping. There was no such thing as, you know, "I'm better than you," because the--most of them were on the same level. And there were, was a lot of poverty. I remember, a m...a woman used to come to the store and wash the floor in my mother's store and she got a half a pound of flour for it. So...

She was a non-Jew.

No, Jewish. And uh, like I said in the beginning of the interview, that there was a lot of poverty. You know, like people were carrying water for other people's houses, because we did not have canalization. We had uh, uh, water in a pump in the middle of the street.

Before the war.

Oh naturally, oh yes.


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