I was born in Łódź, in 1932, into a Hasidic family. Our family,
the extended family numbered between 150 and 200 people that I knew personally, because we used to
get together, you know we all lived in Łódź, and I had uncles and aunts and great uncles and and
grandfathers and on my mother's side on my father's side and I would say that the immediate
family was anything between 150 and 200 people. Well, we lived a very religious life. My mother's
parents were farmers, which is unusual for Jews in Poland because Jews weren't allowed to farm, but
somehow or other, not quite sure how they managed to do that. But they owned farms near the German
border so, I don't know whether it was a leftover from the Austro-Hungarian empire but whatever.
And they also were Ger Hasidim, so they were ultra-orthodox Jews,
and our life was very uneventful before the war. We worked, I went to cheder. When I was five years
old, I already finished the Five Gooks of Moses, and I started studying the Talmud.
I went to school when I was two and a half years old. My grandfather took me with a bag of sweets,
and distributed to all the children and that's how I started my schooling.
I don't know if that's of any importance but we were very close to the Ger Rebbe, and
a lot of my life was spent in the entourage, like summer vacations
were spent in dasha in a place called Wisniowa Góra, where my parents, well my mother and
the immediate family were there the whole week my father used to come for weekends on Friday
and spend the you know and used to go back to town on Sunday,
and we used to go and pray in the woods. I mean the real Hasidic way of of of living.
I spent a lot of time with my mother. My mother was more, not more secular,
but more secular educated. She went to the gymnasium which is unusual for Hasidic
wife, and that's where I learned perfect Polish before the war, which was also unusual for a
Hasidic little boy. You only learn Polish much later. My father did not speak good Polish.
Life wasn't a bed of roses from a point of view antisemitism before the war wasn't a
bed of roses either. I mean, I remember quite clearly walking in
Łódź with my mother, and because I was wearing Hasidic garb, which was you know a little hat with
peyos. I often had to walk across, my mother would take me across the other side,
because there would be unruly type of individual, hooligans or was the way she could call them in
Yiddish a hooligan, who would come and pull my peyos or kick me or something like that,
which was you know quite frightening in its own way.