Baruch Spergel - February 4, 2008
Introduction
...names please and where you were born.
ZF: You're the big...
BS: Hmm? I, I was born in Poland in a place called Leżajsk, Leżajsk.
And what's your name?
BS: Hmm?
Tell me your name.
BS: My name is Baruch Spergel.
And what is Alon?
BS: Hmm?
What is Alon?
BS: Alon is uh, it's a tree.
But was that...
BS: It's in Hebrew.
Was that your name as well?
BS: It, it was oak, I think, Alon.
Was that your name...
BS: Oak tree.
Your name as well was Alon?
BS: Huh? No. It's Baruch Alon, yes.
I see. And where...
ZF: He changed his name when he came here.
And where was the town?
BS: Hmm?
Where was the town you were from in Poland?
BS: Where I was born?
Yes.
BS: That was in the-in what's it's name? In uh, Galicia in Poland uh, yes. I was-but we left a place when I one-year-old and uh, when, when my parents went to, to live in the Sudetengebiet in Czech...Czechia...Czechoslovakia-what was then Czechoslovakia.
So this was the western German part of Czecho...
BS: Hmm?
This was the German part of Czecho...
BS: That was the German part
Of the Sudetenland.
BS: ...of the Sudetengebiet. Germans, was eighty percent Germans or approximately 80 percent. I went to a German school. My, my mother tongue is German.
So you spoke German at home?
BS: Yes, German or Yiddish. My parents were Yiddish sometimes but German generally.
And what about you?
ZF: Well I was born in Czechoslovakia. I was born in 1933 and I was born there in Czechoslovakia. Actually my mother always said when she had me in, in, in the hospital there in Reichenberg, which is now called Liberec in Sudetengebiet um, Hitler came to power. He entered 1933-he came to the-and she said the world-that's what she told me, this is not what I remember, that this is the time the world is going to change now and uh, this I tell you where I was born, okay?
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