Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Cyla Wiener - July 13, 1992

That's where the Jewish section was? Podgorska?

Yeah. It was Jewish, and Jewish mixed, you know. Mostly the Jewish section was called, Kazimierz, you know, where may parents lived, you know. Krakówska, Brzozowa, Warszauera, the main district where, the Alta Shul, you know, ???, ???. I have to tell you the streets, you know, Jozefa, you know, Meiselsa, you know. This was the Jewish section, you know. [Deklawska?]

Podgorska was like a warehouse district, was it? Where they had businesses and things like that.

Business, Jewish had businesses in ???, you know. But a lot of Jewish had business in...in...in, like downtown here you call it, you know. Has businesses too. ??? and ???, they had businesses. And good businesses, not a very, you know the Jewish life in Kraków was very nice, I think and very...

Lot of stories.

Very, very, and the ??? very, education and everything on the high platz and there was, we had no Rabbi, we didn't have a Rabbi in Kraków, you know. For a long, long time, they didn't have a...you know, like a Tsadík. You know, a Rabbi, the main Rabbi. We had a lot of Rabbis', you know.

Was there more than one Shul?

Shul? There was.

Shteblach?

Yeah.

Did your family go to a shtebl?

My father, everybody belongs to a group of Hasideans. My father's Rabbi was the Muler, Muler, you know. Muler Rebbe, and he was a very nice man. Then we have a Leventov Rabbi, we have a Scardino Rabbi, a Podrgersehen Rabbi, you know, but this was Rabbi, estate, you know, Kraków, special. They, his name was Kordmitska, very, very, intelligent, very nice. He married me and my husband, you know. Very intelligent. They brought him over from Hungary, you know. Very educated man. Six languages. Somebody very special.

Before the war, did anybody talk about going to Palestine?

Oh, a lot of people went. I had a friend who went to Israel, to Palestine.

In your family, was anybody...

In my family, no. This was the, the, the mistake from all of us that we didn't go. My mother was so...she didn't want her children to go away. She wanted them all close. She didn't want them...they have opportunities sometimes, but my brother's friends went to America, you know. They left Poland, went there 1922, '23, they went to America, you know. A lot of them went to America, you know. In what is there, what I can first, in 1949, 1950, I was looking for my brother's friends and I found some of them. Really, really.

Nobody joined as a Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa’ir?

No. No. But I had friends who did and they went to Israel, you know. A lot to Palestine, they went, a lot went to Israel. But we were so close, my mother was afraid of it, this was, this was such a mistake, you can imagine you...you, some of my brothers would go to Israel or would go to America.

Break the family up?

Terrible, that's right, just terrible, really terrible. But how she could know? How we could know, right? Okay, that this is important, you know. Impossible.