[6] in a [. . .] happy that the place is [. . .] fed me and I was happy [. . .] when
I was a year old and my mother [. . .] to eat mush, but when I was three, I was
already eating by myself. Mummy placed a little plate with potatoes and a glass
of red borsht in front of me, but I could not eat. I spilled it on my bib, but it
didn’t matter. In a short time, I became used to feeding myself. When I was
five, my father brought me to heder. In heder I learned the Chumesh¹¹² and reading
Hebrew, and later Rashi.¹¹³ Afterwards, he brought me to another heder
where from 9 in the morning until noon we learned Chumesh and Rashi, and
at 12 o’clock a teacher came and taught us Polish, counting, reading and writing,
¹¹⁴ until 2 in the afternoon. Then I came home for lunch. At 4 o’clock we
went back to heder, where we said minche-mayrev.¹¹⁵ That lasted until 6 and
then we went home.
Yankl Fraynd
[7] when I [. . .] a performance, but the performance was already [. . .] it was not
cheerful like before the war [. . .] sadness reigned. We sang, we [. . .], but there
wasn’t as much freedom as there had been when I was in the sanatorium two
years previously. That doesn’t matter, however. Uninvited guests came there.
And then we remembered how our parents are tormented at home. Every day
we hear more news. However, children mustn’t worry about that. A time will
come when the world will be free, when people will not be tormented and we
won’t have to suffer so much.
Tzirl Tzimerman
[8] then [. . .] small. We were all in one room [. . .] we came to eat. We finished
eating soup [. . .] and went home. We had no school to [. . .] No attention paid
112 (From Hebrew, five) Pentateuch, Five Books of Moses, Torah in its basic meaning.
113 Acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (1040–1105), from Troyes, France, one of the most prominent Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages. Rashi’s teachings constituted higher stage of teaching in heder. His commentary on the Bible and the Talmud is still of fundamental importance today.
114 It was probably one of the boys’ schools run by “Horev” (Hebrew name of Mount Sinai), a school organisation affiliated with the religious Orthodox party Agudat Israel. In those schools, besides religious subjects, general subjects were taught. The language of instruction was Yiddish.
115 In Ashkenazic pronunciation, from Hebrew: mincha – afternoon prayer, maariv – evening prayer.
