LEVINE:

This is Janet Levine for the National Park Service, and I'm here today in Margate, Florida, and I'm with formerly the Liberman sisters who came through Ellis Island in 1921 from Poland. There's Lillian Liberman Levine, who was eleven when she came from Poland through Ellis Island, and Shirley Liberman Rofman, who was thirteen years old. Today is May 10, 1992, and we'll begin here. I'm very happy to be here, and maybe we can begin by each of you telling me your birth date.

LILLIAN:

Very good. Well, I am not sure about that. However, you're welcome here, we want to tell you that. And we came here, as I say, in 1921, and at that time I believe I was eleven years old. And we came here, did you want us to . . .

LEVINE:

Do you remember your birth date?

LILLIAN:

Well, I am not, let's say it's February 12, 1910.

LEVINE:

Okay.

LILLIAN:

Right. I think that's about right. And . . .

LEVINE:

And how about you, Shirley? What was your birth date?

SHIRLEY:

Well, I, my birth day I now celebrate on December 10th. I was born in 1907, and I was thirteen years old when I came through Ellis Island. But, however, in later years when I needed a passport and I had to request my Polish birth certificate from Ostrow, where we were born, the month of my birth date is altogether different than December 10th, but I use December 10th on all my papers, my school records, and everywhere else I feel that December 10th is my birthday because I've been using it all my years that I've been in this country.

LEVINE:

I see. So you really don't have the, you didn't have the exact record.

SHIRLEY:

We never, we never celebrated birthdays when we were children, so we didn't know we even had a birthday. But when I needed official records, I requested the birth certificates for myself and all my other sisters, and I have one in Polish. But I'm not sure of the month, because I don't, I don't remember them, the names of the month, the Polish months, any more, but it is not December. But I use December 10th as my birthday.

LEVINE:

I see. Was that something usual that people didn't celebrate birthdays, or didn't they?

LILLIAN:

At that time, no, we did not, because we had nothing to celebrate it with. We were very poor. My father was in this country, and we were, we were in Poland, and my mother struggled very hard to make a living, and surely we didn't have any reason to have big celebrations at that time.

LEVINE:

Uh-huh. Now, what was the name of the town where you were living?

LILLIAN:

We lived in Ostrow. It's O-S-T-R-O-W. It's also called Ostrow Mazwiecek. I don't know if you need to spell that one. That's a hard one. M-A-Z-W-I-E-C-E-K, Mazwiecek. That was the whole name of the town.

LEVINE:

Now, how, did you live in the same town from the time you were born until you left for the United States?

LILLIAN:

Yes.

SHIRLEY:

May I just say that Mazwiecek is the county. Ostrow is the name of the town. County of Mazwiecek, Lunga Gubernia, which means like the state or something like that.

LEVINE:

Okay. Was it, was the town you lived in a small town, or was it a city?

LILLIAN:

I think it had about the population of ten thousand, which is not a very small town considering at that time when populations all over the world were smaller. So it really was not a small town, but we were sort of confined to one little area where we, we were children, and so we didn't get around very far. We stayed mostly within the Rinnick Number 10 where we lived. It was a very large courtyard, and we sort of stayed confined in that little courtyard except when we went to school. I went to school for about three years, and I think you went to school for a little longer, Shirley.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah, maybe. I don't know how long I went to school, but I did go to school.

LEVINE:

Do you remember anything about school, then?

SHIRLEY:

Yes.

LILLIAN:

You want to talk?

SHIRLEY:

All right. I'll tell you. I went to school, I must have been, I don't know, ten, eleven years old, but I do remember that there were girls in my class who might have been sixteen. They were already fully developed, and they always used to whisper about little things that I didn't understand and I was not aware of, and it might have been about menstruation or boys or anything like that, but I was much younger than they. But there was no compulsory education there. You didn't have to go to school. So whenever the parents or the pupil was ready, then they came to school. So there were children of all ages in one class. But I remember studying, of course, we spoke Polish very well, just as we do English here. And during the occupation of Germany we were taught German. I was in a higher class than my sister, of course. And it was very nice. Of course, there were some winter months that we couldn't go to school because the snow was hip-high, but otherwise we went to school.

LILLIAN:

I remember that I was never permitted, I couldn't get registered into school. They wouldn't take me in. I was too young. They considered me too young when I was five, of course. Six, until I got in, must have been, by the time I got in I must have been, I must have been seven years old, and they wouldn't let me into school because there's no compulsory education. And, of course, there are children who are much older than me, and they had priority to get into the classes. But I received tutoring, because I was very anxious to learn, and I had my wonderful cousin Rose who taught me how to read and write and, of course, talk Polish, and we did very well together, just great. I do remember, however, there was one incident at school when it was very, very cold and clothing was at a minimal. We had very little clothing. And I went to school, even though it was so cold, and I was just wearing a little shawl or stole over my shoulders. And when I got to school the school was closed because the weather was so bad. And I came home, and I was all numb. My fingers were frostbitten, and I was in such pain. But that was one incident that I cannot forget, going to school on a terribly cold day.

LEVINE:

What was your attitude toward going to school?

LILLIAN:

Oh, attitude? I was, I know I was extremely anxious to go to school. Shirley, how about you?

SHIRLEY:

Oh, I was, it was like a compulsion, really. You, we wanted to learn. Besides going to school and learning, I was not good at arithmetic. I remember I always had a lot of trouble with arithmetic. But the languages I was very good at, and luckily we had wonderful cousins who lived very close to us, and my, one of my cousins, David, he even taught me Hebrew. So besides learning in school, I guess my mother was responsible for all this. She wanted us to learn. I knew Hebrew and, of course, I went to school and learned a lot of things about history and arithmetic and whatever else was available to me.

LEVINE:

It was highly valued, to be able to go.

SHIRLEY:

Yes.

LILLIAN:

But there is one, we must say this, that the education programs in Europe, the curriculum is much more difficult. Shirley said she was not good at arithmetic. She's fantastic in arithmetic now. And so the same applied to me. It's more difficult in Europe, much more so. We came here, it was a breeze. True. They just, it's much easier learning here. I guess the way the curriculum is, much easier. So she's a wizard, she's a wizard at arithmetic. I am very good at it, too. My husband is also. ( microphone malfunctions )

SHIRLEY:

I have to say that education in Europe at that time, I don't know how it is now, was on a much higher level. When you went to the gymnasium, which is equivalent, which is like high school here, you were really, I think you were getting an education very close to college. ( microphone malfunctions ) So when you were young, and you were not able to learn certain things ( microphone malfunctions ) [long gap]

LILLIAN:

Kwiatek.

LEVINE:

Maybe you could spell it.

LILLIAN:

K-W-I-A-T-E-K. That is her maiden name. She married my father. Of course, his name is Max Liberman.

SHIRLEY:

Mendel.

LILLIAN:

Mendel is his Jewish name. My sister is right. And the children, Shirley came first. Her name is Sheyna Men . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) Sheyna Mendel. Mine is Laitch--, Laya, called Laitcha, then there is Esther, Estherke, Sima, Simale. We had aunts living in the same, one aunt, I believe, whose name was also Sheyndel. Grandparents lived in the same courtyard with whom we were very close. Especially during the war, the First World War. My grandfather was extremely kind. He used to come in in the mornings when we didn't have anything to eat and bring in a couple of rolls.

SHIRLEY:

Pletzel. (chewy, half-roll)

LILLIAN:

Some kind of rolls. They were sort of made with very dark flour. During the war everything was ersatz, and the bread was horrible but we managed to get through anyhow. My mother worked very hard to provide with the food. And those were, ( microphone malfunctions ) important to us when we were living over there. And, of course, we had some cousins that Shirley mentioned. David was a very important one to us, and Sylvia . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) And my Aunt Esther, who we were very close to them all throughout our lives. Even when we came to this country we lived very close together, one house apart, one tenement apart. ( microphone malfunctions )

LEVINE:

Were your mother and father both from that town?

SHIRLEY:

No. My mother was from Ostrow, but my father was from a different town. I think he was from Kosowa. That was the name. And if you want me to spell it, I'll try. I really, I'm not quite sure of the spelling, but it's K-O-S-O-W-A, I would say. And ( microphone malfunctions ) she was introduced to him, you know, as a, he did not court her very much because that was not allowed during those years when they were young, so it was what was called a Shadkhen (marriage broker) brought a Shiddukh (engagement), and that's how she met him and she married him. My father and mother, I don't know, I guess they were happy when they were together, but he wasn't home very much because he was a carpenter and he could not find work in the town where we lived, so he always had to be away, and came home just periodically. And every time he came home, my mother had a, became pregnant.

LEVINE:

There were four girls, right? Four sisters? ( microphone malfunctions ) [long gap]

LILLIAN:

As I said before, my grandfather, I have very fond memories of my grandfather. I don't have similar memories of my grandmother. She was more of a retiring type and didn't participate as much as my grandfather. We went to my grandfather for everything, for problems. And . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) We left in the middle of the night, and he spoke to me personally, because I was supposed to be asleep in his house. Because our apartment at that time was in such disarray with going away, with the packages, and since we were leaving in the middle of the night I guess my mother wanted me to get some sleep before we left. I didn't get too much sleep, but my grandfather ( microphone malfunctions ) My grandfather said to me, " Farges nisht den alten Zayde ", "Don't forget your old grandfather." ( microphone malfunctions ) Shirley, do you remember anything?

SHIRLEY:

Yes, I do. ( she is moved ) I think it was the saddest day of my life, which I shall never forget. We were, like my sister said, we were leaving in the mid-winter. It probably was December. And it was so cold. The snow was glistening, and we all had to get into an open wagon because there was no other way, in order to get to the train to go to Warsaw. So it was so cold, and I remember it was a beautiful night because the moon was out and the stars, and we all got into the wagon, and we, as the wagon took off my grandfather ran after us and he cried and he cried. And I will never forget that scene. It was one of the saddest times of my life.

LILLIAN:

Grandma did not come out because I think she was too upset, and I don't think she wanted to see all her children leaving, all the children. It was the four children and my mother, and also she knew that, my cousins were leaving at the same time. We had, those very cousins I mentioned before, with their mother. We traveled together to America. And so she knew that she was losing, they had five children. Nine children were going, and her daughter, and daughter-in-law. And she, I guess, could not take it. And she stayed within the house, but Grandfather did run after the carriage, this little, this open carriage. He ran, it was so cold, and he ran after it and was saying goodbye to all of us.

LEVINE:

So your father went to America first?

LILLIAN:

Yes, he did.

LEVINE:

And what, how was it decided that he would go, do you know?

LILLIAN:

Well, he went to America, I believe, no one had really mentioned it, but I believe he went to America to escape from the draft. So he went away, he, among other people, there were other people in the family who left about the same time, and when the war broke out there were no, there was no communication at all from America. We got nothing, no letters, no money of any kind. So things were pretty bad at that time.

LEVINE:

Do you, how did your mother get along, then, after your father left and you didn't hear anything, or receive money?

LILLIAN:

Well, there were lots, in many ways she tried to make a living. She used to, she used to buy . . .

SHIRLEY:

She had a little business of her own, a dry goods business. She didn't have a store, but she had a stand like they have now in the thrift shops.

LILLIAN:

The flea market.

SHIRLEY:

The flea market. She had, we had a flea market, let's say, once a month, and also flea markets close, in other towns close by. So she would have a stand where she'd sell children's clothes, scarves, little shawls, little hats and things. And my sister Lillian and I had to help, because we were the two oldest ones, and we had to help her set up and watch that nobody stole, and keep an eye on the stand. And she was selling, that was one of the ways that she made some money so that she can support us. But later on there was a different way that she was making money, uh . . .

LILLIAN:

Smuggling.

SHIRLEY:

When the Germans occupied our town there was no more fairs or anything like that. So she used to smuggle flour or sugar or something and sell it to people on the black market, and that's how she made a living.

LILLIAN:

When, she used to set up that stand, which is equivalent to what you see here in the flea markets. We would, I would stand on the table to see that everything is going smoothly, and Shirley would help with the selling, and there was one time when we had a tremendous storm, and it was pouring, raining hard. And I, this was a canvas thing that covered the whole thing. I don't know whether they use canvas in here at all. I don't think so. But this was a canvas stand and all fours, on the three sides, and the one side was open for customers. And I stood up on the table when it was raining so hard to keep the top from collapsing, and I felt the lightening pass through my hands. But I wasn't that hurt or anything, but I do remember the incident. And I also remember the incident where my grandfather, when he, the rain was over, it was really a very bad storm, he came out to see what, if we were all right, and to try to help get things together again, but it was a really bad storm. And then, of course, Shirley used to go along with my mother out of town to set up the same type of scene, the same type of stand, and she would go with her and help her and, at that time, I was not yet old enough to go, so I stayed home. But it was, that's the way we made a living.

LEVINE:

And then would you go just for the day, or would you go for longer periods of time?

SHIRLEY:

Just for the day. We'd go early in the morning and come back at night, and the, of course, the traveling was horrible, because it was an open wagon, and there were no roads. We had to go through, through paths in the woods, and it would trundle and shake. And I was a young child, and I remember I had to go to the bathroom and I had such cramps, and there was no place to go. And besides which we had to put up, we had to go through back roads because anti-Semitism was rampant in Poland, and they would see Jewish people, they would attack us. So we had to go through roads where we wouldn't be seen. And it was a, it was really such a hard, for a young child to have to experience, and I'm sure my mother felt the same, and we traveled, not alone, we'd go maybe two or three wagons would travel together for protection, for safety.

LEVINE:

Now, would your mother be driving the wagon?

SHIRLEY:

No. There was a driver. She had to hire the wagon to take her wherever she wanted to go and pay. But that was one of the ways that she could make some money, you know. So I had to go, I went with her. I had to go with her. She couldn't go alone and set up and do all the work herself.

LEVINE:

Were you a religious family in Poland?

SHIRLEY:

Yes. We were very observant. I don't know whether Mama went to shul (synagogue) very much, but my grandfather and grandmother used to go to shul . And we were kosher. We had, you know, a very kosher home. My grandfather was an elder of the synagogue. He used to, on holidays he was, he used to be at the, he used to pray for the congregation. He was an elder.

LILLIAN:

He officiated at some of the services, and my grandma used to go every single Saturday morning that I can remember. And since Jewish people who go to synagogue are not supposed to carry anything, so the Side r (prayer book) that she had, I would carry the Side r for her into the shul , and then I guess somebody must have carried it back. I don't remember carrying it back. Somebody else must have done that. But that's what we did. And Grandfather, somehow, was able to, he must have left his Sider in the schul because he went every day, so that was not a problem. But my grandmother, somebody had to bring the Sider for her, and I was elected. I did not really care to do it, but I had to do it.

LEVINE:

Why didn't you want to?

LILLIAN:

It was, I had to get up early in the morning on a Saturday, and I just didn't like the idea that I had to go every single Saturday, but I did it anyhow, like it or not. ( she laughs )

SHIRLEY:

I just want to comment about my grandmother, on holidays especially, when she went to synagogue she had a dress that I will never forget. She, I don't know, she was slim. She had a black faille dress with a tight bodice with maybe a, God, three dozen buttons down the front, and a very full, long skirt. And she always, she used to wear that. That was her holiday dress. And she had a very fancy headdress which was called a chipik. (cap or bonnet) I don't know if you ever heard that word.

LEVINE:

No. Could do you spell it?

SHIRLEY:

I really don't know how to spell it.

LILLIAN:

A chipik I guess would be, it's a Jewish word, but trying to spell it for us here in English I think it would be C-I-P-I-C.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

It had feathers, beautiful plumes, irridescent plumes, beautiful, with beads . . .

SHIRLEY:

And flowers. And she was beautiful when she got dressed that way. And she must have been young, because when they got married in those years I'm sure not any older than eighteen. So she was young, even though she was a grandmother, and she had a lovely figure. She wore the tight bodice, and she was like a portrait when she went to her synagogue.

LILLIAN:

But the reason she wore that chipik was because her head was shaved. And during the week I don't recall . . .

SHIRLEY:

She wore the chipik .

LILLIAN:

All the time?

SHIRLEY:

Yeah, but not a dressy one.

LILLIAN:

I see. She did not wear a wig, but she wore these little chipiks and, during the week, as Shirley said, they were not as fancy. But on Saturday they were gorgeous, instead of the wig. I guess this must have been . . .

SHIRLEY:

She did not wear a shaytel .(ritual wig}

LILLIAN:

No.

SHIRLEY:

Never.

LEVINE:

Did other women in the town?

SHIRLEY:

Wore shaytels , oh, yes. If you were religious, I mean, the younger people, of course, it was already advancing, it was changing. Because I remember my aunt, she was not wearing a shaytel when she got married, and she was not as religious as my grandfather. And there were a lot of things happening. In fact, I remember that a theater group came to our town, and my aunt and my mother went to the theater to see it. And then a committee from the shul came to complain to my grandfather that this was not allowed, to have a play, and his children went. But my grandfather was a very bright man, and he understood, and he told this committee, "These are young people, and they have to do these things."

LILLIAN:

And as far as the wigs, the shaytels , are concerned, my mother didn't wear one either. And none of the other people we remember wore them. So I guess . . .

LEVINE:

Did they wear a chipik ?

LILLIAN:

No, nothing, regular hair. They had their regular hair. That's the way it was.

LEVINE:

So it was changing. ( microphone malfunctions ) How about the town, the composition of the town? Was it equal Jewish and non-Jewish, or would you say there were fewer of one group or the other, or . . .

SHIRLEY:

I would say that the Jewish people were in the minority.

LILLIAN:

Well, I think that . . .

SHIRLEY:

But those that lived within the town were mostly Jewish. You see, we lived in a town that had, like, a City Hall, so it was not a very small town, you know. By comparison, it was not what you would call a dorf (village), or a shtetl.( hamlet). This was really a pretty big town.

LEVINE:

City, a small city.

SHIRLEY:

Because we lived in a place that had the City Hall. But most of the people within the center of the town, I would say, were Jewish. The Gentile people lived on the outskirts, and they had the farms. The stores were mostly the Jewish people, you know.

LILLIAN:

It was a very large, the town itself, that I can remember, it was a, it had a very large square right in the center where we lived, and the houses were around the square, so that, that's, incidentally, on that square, they set up their . . .

LEVINE:

Markets?

LILLIAN:

Yes, the market. And some of, the Gentile people would bring in, from the farms, they really lived on the outskirts. As Shirley said, they did not live in the town. They lived on the outskirts. They were farmers. They brought in the vegetables, and they brought in things like that. And Nat wants me to talk about the goat that we had. He reminded me, my Mama had a goat. My grandmother had a goat also. In this, where we lived, right in the court, we used to keep her on a chain and that's where we got all the milk, and I think that people have thought that the reason for our being so, shall I say, healthier than some others was due to the fact that we had this goat milk on which we were brought up to the very end of the day that, to the very end when we left for America. We had that goat. My grandmother had a goat also.

SHIRLEY:

I'm going to add that within this square we had two water wells, and that was our water supply. And we had to carry pails of water to our homes. We had, we did not have running water in the homes. We did not have any toilets in the house. We had outhouses. And we, she and I used to go in the midwinter, and the pump was like frozen, and we had to pull that pump, and our hands would stick to the metal because it was so cold, but we had to carry the water. END OF SIDE A, TAPE ONE BEGIN SIDE B, TAPE ONE

LEVINE:

And this was from the square in the center of the city.

SHIRLEY:

Right, there were two of them. There were two water pumps there. One was a little bit more elaborate than the other. It had, like, two, one had two giant wheels. To us it seemed like giant wheels because we were small, and we had to turn them to get the water out, and with our bare hands on the frozen metal it was very difficult.

LILLIAN:

The one that she's talking about is called the vodychung , V-O-D-Y-C-H-U-N-G, vodychung . I guess it's possibly, the vod y is . . .

SHIRLEY:

Is water.

LILLIAN:

Vody is water in Poland, and I guess it's the vodychun g. And then there was a small one right . . .

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

Right, closer to the . . .

SHIRLEY:

That one was frozen. We couldn't' use it. We had to go to the other one.

LEVINE:

Was it typical that children in the families would be the ones that went and brought the pails of water?

SHIRLEY:

I don't know. But I know, I was an adult at nine. My mother expected me to, a lot of things from me, and I had to live up to it. And I think she was the same way. You grow up much faster there, under those conditions, than you do here. Here children are children for a long time. We were not children for very long.

LILLIAN:

As far as the other children, whether they were responsible for bringing in the water or not, I'm not sure, because I never, we never did see any other children there.

SHIRLEY:

No, but my mother was alone. She didn't have a husband. He was in America. So we had to help her.

LEVINE:

Would you see other people there, other adults?

LILLIAN:

Not really, not really. I don't remember seeing anybody there. How come? Oh, wait a minute. There was a delivery of water. People used to get water delivered, remember?

SHIRLEY:

No, this I . . .

LILLIAN:

Yes.

SHIRLEY:

I don't remember.

LILLIAN:

Don't you remember, they carried milk. ( microphone malfunctions ) [Long gap] Carried water.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

They carried the water, and people probably paid. But I guess that's why we didn't see too many people at the, at the vodychung , because they were getting the water delivered, and we had to deliver it ourselves.

LEVINE:

Did you . . . ( microphone malfunctions )

SHIRLEY:

I never had a doll. I made one myself out of rags. I don't think, you never had one either. ( microphone malfunctions ) We never had toys. We used to make up games among ourselves. That's about it.

LEVINE:

Did you play imaginary play?

SHIRLEY:

Yes. I think we were better off that way. We didn't have toys to teach, to keep us company. We had to imagine certain things, and we did.

LEVINE:

Do you remember any ( microphone malfunctions ) imaginings or games, or do you remember any stories that maybe your grandparents or somebody told you that were part of your childhood that stuck, that stick in your mind at all?

LILLIAN:

I remember only one story. It doesn't happen to be a real lovely story. It's probably a frightening story. My grandmother was very religious, and she wanted us to be, obey the rules of the law, the Jewish law. And if you didn't do it, if you did anything wrong, my grandmother once told me, "M't dir shmaysen mit ayzener reyter [Note: May be rimen (thong)]". "When you get to the other, when you get to heaven, or to the hell, wherever it is, you're going to be whipped with iron switches."

SHIRLEY:

Metal, yeah.

LILLIAN:

That's what she told me, metal switches. I said, "My goodness, what am I going to do?" ( microphone malfunctions ) That's what she said. But, of course, I think I used to take it with a grain of salt. I did not really believe that anybody would hit . . . ( she laughs ) ( microphone malfunctions ) That's one story she told us. But just playing, we just played like children do here. I remember having little friends that I'd go to their house and spend some time there, and play the games that we all played.

LEVINE:

Like hide and seek?

LILLIAN:

Yeah, something like that, go hide and seek, or just . . .

LILLIAN:

Baseball?

LILLIAN:

No. Boys used to play stickball.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

With a shpitzik heltsel (pointy little stick)

SHIRLEY:

Yeah, yeah, a stickball. Not even a ball, they had a little piece of wood that they whittled down to a point, and they put it on a little stone or a higher piece of wood, and they'd have a stick, and hit the end of it, and it would fly, and they would hit it.

LILLIAN:

That was . . .

SHIRLEY:

Yeah, that was shpitzik heltsel . ( they laugh ) And I was once standing . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) And as the boy swung his stick, he hit me right in my face, and the . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) – he almost killed me ( she laughs )

LILLIAN:

And then there was some snowball fighting.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

When we got to school in the wintertime, there was what they called pause (pause), which means rest period.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah, yeah. What do they call it here, when you . . .

LILLIAN:

Recess.

SHIRLEY:

Recess.

LILLIAN:

Well, we would go outside, regardless of the clothing. We never had warm clothing. We went, I guess that made us healthier. We had no warm clothing. We'd go outside just as we were dressed inside the schoolroom, and play. And there was, there were, when it was snowing and there was a lot of snow on the ground, at that time Shirley had a little boyfriend there.

SHIRLEY:

I was about ten or nine! ( she laughs ) ( microphone malfunctions ) I had a boyfriend. How does a boy that age show that he likes a girl? He either hits her or pushes her down, so he was throwing a snowball at me and she was standing behind me. I ducked, and it hit her in the nose and she got, like, a hemorrhage. ( she laughs )

LILLIAN:

Right. And then the teacher did everything to stop that bleeding, and it was pretty severe. Finally she sent me home to my mother because it had stopped bleeding, but I had lost a lot of blood. But I was okay. No harm done.

LEVINE:

Okay. Well, do you remember when it was determined that you would, you and your mother, you and your sisters would come, leave Poland and come to America?

LILLIAN:

Well, I guess . . . ( microphone malfunctions until the end of the tape ) [Long pause]

LEVINE:

This is Side A of Tape Two. [ Interviewer's note: This is actually a continuation of Side B, Tape One, resuming after a long pause]. It's May 10, 1992, and I'm speaking with Lillian Levine and Shirley Rofman, who are sisters who came from Poland.

SHIRLEY:

All right. I'll tell you about this incident, about the food. We were so angry that they didn't give us the food and were selling it to us, you know. So, they kept the food in a closet which had no top, so my cousins and their friends picked me up, and I went down into the closet head first, and they held my legs, and I picked up the jam and the oranges and the stuff, and they pulled me back up again, and we stole it out of their closet. ( they laugh )

LEVINE:

Okay. Let me just, because the tape ran out on the other side, I just wanted to say that this was while you were in steerage, and the food was not being given to you, only herring.

SHIRLEY:

Right.

LEVINE:

But you knew that there was food in this cupboard.

SHIRLEY:

Right.

LEVINE:

On board the ship.

SHIRLEY:

Right.

LEVINE:

Okay. Do you remember coming into the New York Harbor?

LILLIAN:

Yes, I surely do remember coming into the New York Harbor. First of all, since I was seasick for the entire time, which I think was at least twelve days, I was very pale. And my cousin Rose was afraid that they may stop me because I was so pale and looked so sick that she slapped my face and pinched me cheeks so I would pass the exam. And we all went up, of course, onto the deck, and we were passing the Statue of Liberty, and I hear the people say, "That's Columbus." And I said, "That's Columbus? Oh, goodness." I didn't even know who Columbus was, nor did I know what the Statue of Liberty. But I was looking, I thought, "It looks like Columbus?" All right. Later, much later I found out that Columbus turned out to be the Statue of Liberty. ( microphone malfunctions ) The America. Now, Shirley . . .

SHIRLEY:

Well, there was not, I also remember the same incident when we were on deck, watching the ship come into harbor. And, of course, we were happy that the trip was over, you know. And then when we got to Ellis Island all the examinations started again. ( microphone malfunctions )

LEVINE:

What were your impressions of Ellis Island?

SHIRLEY:

And we came, and the food was very strange. First of all, they put us in a room, like a big room. We had no seats. We didn't have, we, most of us were sitting on the floor. They had benches without backs. And we had our bundles, our packages that we had to take with us. We were sitting on the floor, and then they took us in, like, for breakfast. And I remember they, at that time my mother didn't know that they served kosher food and non-kosher food at that time. So we went into the non-Kosher place, because we didn't know where to go. And for breakfast they served me cornflakes with hot milk, and I tasted it, and it was just like mud because the cornflakes disintegrated, and it was like mud, and I couldn't eat it, you know. I was like nauseated by it. But mostly I remember that terrible big room where we were all sitting on the floor. We didn't have any seats. And, go ahead, you tell them about the nighttime.

LILLIAN:

No, I wasn't going to talk about the nighttime. When we got off the ship into the, our reception at Ellis Island, of course, we had to go through the doctors and they examined us, and I did pass because I guess I was just looking bad but I was healthy. When we went into dinner that was, I think we, by the time we got through with all the examinations it was time to go into dinner. And, as Shirley said, my mother didn't know that there were two dining rooms, one was kosher and one was not. We went into the one that was non-kosher, and I still remember they served hamburgers. I did not feel like eating anything. I was still sick. I really did not feel well at all. And a man sat next to me who was apparently non-Jewish. I wasn't going to eat it, whether it was Jewish or not, whether it was kosher or not, the man was looking at that hamburger with such ogling. He was so anxious, I said, "Do you want the hamburger?" He said, "Yes." I said, and I gave it to him, but later I found out it was not kosher. I said, "I'm glad I didn't eat it." ( she laughs ) And then we were put into this room, what Shirley was talking about, this very large room with many, many people in there. And that was when Shirley got her coat stolen, and my mother, by accident, one day sat at the wrong end of the room. It was where the Gentiles sat. And a lady came back for her seat, and my mother, she spoke a different language, my mother did not understand what she was saying. So she pulled out a knife, and my mother didn't have to understand the language any more. We got up, and we went back to the place where we thought we should be, at the other end of the room. That was one time. And then the nights were, when the nights passed, when night was coming on, we didn't know where we were going to sleep, but we subsequently found out that the place where you sleep was not reserved. You had to go get your own bed, or so-called bed. It was a bed without a mattress, without, it was just coils.

SHIRLEY:

Coiled springs.

LILLIAN:

Coiled, you did not have a mattress, and that, too, although there was such an influx of people at Ellis Island at that time that the place was probably not big enough to house all those people. So Shirley and I would stand at the door before they, we knew they would going to open it up at a certain time to get the beds. You had to go in there, get, grab beds for the whole family, because the little ones didn't stand there. Shirley and I being the older, the oldest two, my mother had to watch the two children, we stayed at the door and were squashed many a time because the pushing and the shoving to get to a bed. Shirley and I would, she would lie on one bed, I would grab another one, and if we were lucky we could get still another one so that when the kids came my mother which, we double up, and we all sleep on those two. We can only hold the two beds, which was called beds. They were not beds. They were also uppers and lowers. No mattresses and most uncomfortable. And that was our existence for the time that we were at Ellis Island. I believe it was two weeks. ( microphone malfunctions )

SHIRLEY:

The beds were just spring coils. That's all it was. And a whole day we had to sit in that room like, it was like a prison room.

LEVINE:

The room with the beds?

SHIRLEY:

No, the one . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) That big room, where this woman almost killed my mother because she took her seat, it, that's where she was sitting before, and she established it as her seat. And when she got up and my mother sat down she wanted to kill her. And we all sat on the floor. We didn't have a place where, a comfortable place where to sit or anything like that. It was really horrible.

LEVINE:

So there was nothing . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) . . . during those two weeks?

SHIRLEY:

Absolutely nothing. I think once during the day they'd take us out in the yard, like, for some air. Or they had, I think a room for the small children to play it.

LILLIAN:

There was one time, I can only remember the one time . . . ( unintelligible voice off mike ) In the room where we were supposed, that's the day room, I guess you'd call it. There was a big door that would come up. I think it came up on a hinge or whatever, or maybe it just opened up. We were right on the island. But we did not have any air outdoors at any time. The one time that we were there they opened those huge doors. I guess it was a loading type thing, platform, out there, and we were able to get the air and go out there for a few minutes. There was another time, only one other time that I know, there was a place where children could go and play. I don't know how you became eligible to go there, but one day I became eligible to go there. I think, I kind of felt it might have been the Red Cross, but I'm not sure if they operated out of Ellis Island. And . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) . . . a little dress. It was a sort of a flannel-type dress. It was during the winter months. A flannel-type dress, and it was short. I loved it, because I had . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) [Long pause]

SHIRLEY:

Well, as my sister Lillian said before, my uncle prevailed on this man that he worked for, and this man put up a bond that we would not be a public charge, that we would be self-supported, that we would be taken care of or self-supporting. And so the day came when they accepted the bond and they allowed, we were allowed to leave Ellis Island. So my uncle, or two uncles?

LILLIAN:

Joe.

SHIRLEY:

Joe, or, my Uncle Joe, yes, my Uncle Joe came, and he got us, and he took us out of Ellis, signed, I guess, the papers, whatever it was, and he got us out of Ellis Island. And he took us to his home on the elevated train, and we all got so sick on the train because we were not accustomed to . . . ( she laughs )

LILLIAN:

I was deathly ill going to, from Ellis Island on that, it must have been the Third Avenue El. It went all the way to the Bronx. It was quite a trip. And they lived on Katonah Park East, and they had a very nice apartment. We were not accustomed to seeing such nice apartments, such nice homes. But since my father was still in the hospital my mother, they separated us. Families were separated. The families that could take one or two children, my mother went with two of the smaller children to my father's cousin. I stayed with my uncle and aunt, Joe and Becky, at their house. Shirley went with another, to another cousin's, a cousin of my father's, to their house. So we were all separated. And the first night that we were in America there was no bed for me either, so I slept with my aunt and uncle in one bed. And they were talking about something in English so, I guess they were uncomfortable with me staying there. But the next night I think they were able to get an army cot. They put that up in the dining room, and I stayed on that cot until we left, finally got our own apartment, much, much later, about three months later. My father was not, did not want to establish a home for us, so things were very hard for us. Staying with my aunt and my uncle, and she with her, with the cousins of my father, and my mother with other cousins, plus the two other children, and it wasn't very . . .

SHIRLEY:

It was a horrendous time in our lives, because we were separated, and I was alone with these people who were total strangers to me. I was so lonely. I missed my mother and my sisters. But this is what had to be done.

LILLIAN:

And my aunt is the one who probably registered, she took me to school. Because I hadn't been to school in Europe, so she registered me in P.S. 40 in the Bronx, and they evaluated me and they put me in the third grade, because I had gone to school for three years, I guess, and they thought it was okay for me to go to the third grade. And I did not understand one word that was going on. The teacher spoke only English, and I found a little girl who was Jewish, and they were probably all Jewish in that area, but she was able to talk Yiddish. So I was very frustrated not knowing what the teacher was explaining, what she was saying. So I would get up from my chair, from the little class, the classroom chair, and I'd go over to this little girl, and I'd say, "What did she say?" " Vos hot zi geret? Vos hot zi gezugt?" Such frustrations! And the first, in addition to which, the frustrations in class, I was frustrated even more when I came out of school, because there was no one there to take me home, and I didn't know the route to go home. I don't know how I got back to my aunt's house, and I was lost for a long time. But I must have just figured out the way to get back. It was a strange country, a strange city. I think the school was on Boston Road, and I was lost for a long time, but I finally must have gotten home. This was my first few days at school. ( microphone malfunctions )

SHIRLEY:

I, too, was registered in that same school, in P.S. 40. After I stayed with this cousin, my father's cousin, for a while, I became very lonely and I cried, you know. So my, this cousin's wife, Bertha, said, told my, she had a daughter, her name was Mae. She said, "Mae, you're going to take," she told Mae to take me to see my mother, who was at another cousin's house. So Mae, who was nine years old at the time, she had to get permission from the school to take the time off to take me wherever she had to go. So she took, she and I went back to the school, and she went up into the office to get a pass, and she left me on the street in front of the school by myself. And I'm standing there, and standing there, and standing there, and she's not coming back. So I got very frightened, and I started to call her, "Mae Bloom! Mae Bloom!" Here was a big building, and she's in the office, and no one heard me. And I was so scared. Well, finally, after a while, she came down, and she took me to my mother. But, of course, also, in the classroom, they put me, I think, in the fifth grade. And I didn't understand a word of English, so I just sat there like blind and deaf because I couldn't understand what the teacher was saying.

LILLIAN:

But, in spite of the fact that we could not speak a word of English, Shirley graduated from her school in two years, the eighth grade, and she was a valedictorian.

LEVINE:

Oh!

LILLIAN:

So that's, and I graduated in four years, because I started two years later. ( microphone malfunctions ) I was not valedictorian, but I was put in what is now called the gifted class. I was put into what they call "Rapid Advance."

LEVINE:

Do you remember any things about . . .

LILLIAN:

Oh, my husband wants me to tell you this story. I guess he liked it. ( microphone malfunctions ) . . . in the third grade, finally my mother was able to get an apartment. It was very difficult after the war to get an apartment, just as it was after the Second World War, to get an apartment. There was a very big scarcity of apartments. But her brother, my uncle, was able to get an apartment for us on the Lower East Side. But I was transferring away from my P.S. 40 and my beautiful teacher, I loved her so, Ms. Reese. ( microphone malfunctions ) I think that you're spending a lot of time, and perhaps you wish . . . ( microphone malfunctions )

LEVINE:

Are there any things that you remember being particularly taken by in this country, that struck you as very different? ( microphone malfunctions )

SHIRLEY:

It sort of came on gradually. ( microphone malfunctions ) . . . poor, but we didn't feel poor. We never felt that we . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) . . . Lower East Side, for quite a number of . . . ( microphone malfunctions ) There was really nothing unusual that I remember. ( microphone malfunctions ) And, you know, we were always in need of ( microphone malfunctions ) I don't remember anything that . . . ( microphone malfunctions until end of tape ) END OF SIDE B, TAPE ONE BEGINNING OF SIDE A, TAPE TWO

LEVINE:

This is Janet Levine for the National Park Service, and I'm here today in Margate, Florida at the home of Shirley Rofman. I'm here with Lillian Liberman Levine and Shirley Liberman Rofman, who are sisters who came from Poland in 1921 when Lillian was eleven and Shirley was thirteen years old. Today is April 26, 1993, and this is a return engagement, since the tape recorder was not functioning completely well on our first interview, which was on May 10, 1992. Well, I'm very happy to have the chance to talk with you both again, and we'll try to fill in some of the gaps from the last tape, and then we'll see if there's something new that we didn't even mention last time. And I want to mention that Nathan Levine, Lillian Levine's husband, is also here with us today in Margate. Okay. Maybe just for the beginning of this Tape Two, if you would say your birth dates and where in Poland you were born.

LILLIAN:

Well, I'm not so happy to repeat the birth date but, you know, as I said in the first tape, it was some time in February 1910, I believe. And I was born in Ostrow Mazwiecek, Poland, and Shirley . . .

SHIRLEY:

I'm Shirley, I was thirteen when we arrived in this country in January of 1921, and I, too, was born in Ostrow Mazwiecek, Lunge Gubernia. I'll add that, because it's part of our address. And we are here today to answer any questions or relate any stories of our lives.

LEVINE:

Okay. Why don't we start with stories about your grandfather, because I know he was very important to you, and I think that in the first tape there was a gap in some of the stories. So if you can just think of any experiences with your grandfather prior to you leaving.

LILLIAN:

Well, I can recall that he was a great help to my mother, packing things together. And he was running back and forth from his house to our apartment. And also that, when we didn't feel well, we used to come to him, and he had methods of curing a sore throat, a toothache, which, I don't recall the toothaches, actually, but if anybody needed that, I suppose he was able to help that, too. This is my recollection. There are other recollections, but I don't know exactly where to begin. So Shirley may have something to add.

SHIRLEY:

Well, I know that we were, we loved our grandfather a great deal. He was part of our life. And, like Lillian said, he had methods of helping any illness that we had as children. Without a medical degree, he knew exactly what to do. If I had a sore throat, he would come in with a teaspoon and squeeze out the pus from my tonsil and I would get better the very next day. But the most important part, I don't know whether you want me to repeat that story when we left Ostrow, or shall we leave that for later?

LEVINE:

When you left?

SHIRLEY:

Yes.

LEVINE:

The story when you left?

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LEVINE:

Well, it's a poignant story.

SHIRLEY:

Is there something you want to talk about before we do this?

LILLIAN:

No, it's already on the tape. I don't know if you want to repeat that. It's up to you.

SHIRLEY:

Well, Janet says she wants to make a new tape.

LEVINE:

Why, I think . . .

VOICE OFF MIKE:

Tell me about his business upstairs that he had . . .

LEVINE:

Maybe, first, also, his name . . .

SHIRLEY:

Oh, yes.

VOICE OFF MIKE:

Tell about his business upstairs with your uncle and everybody there.

SHIRLEY:

My grandfather's name was Schlomo Kwiatek.

LEVINE:

Can you spell it?

SHIRLEY:

I will spell the name Kwiatek. K-W-I-A-T-E-K. We have one relative in this country who still maintains that name. The other, his sons, who were my uncles, all changed their name when they came to America. They all changed their name to Bloom, which means Kwiatek. Kwiatek means flower, and so they changed it to Bloom. They wanted to be Americanized, and they used that name. I prefer the name Kwiatek, because it's unusual and different, but my uncles didn't feel that way. Is there anything else you want to add, Lil?

LILLIAN:

I don't know what Janet wants. I really don't have any idea what you want us to say, except our grandfather was the father figure, he was, he was instead of a father and, because our father was in America. And when he wasn't in America, he was very little at home. So he represented the father figure, and we loved him dearly, and he was very devoted to us. So that's one thing. I don't know, you wanted Shirley to repeat the story about when we left in that cold night for America, if you want that repeated, I think Shirley tells it best, so I'll let her do that.

SHIRLEY:

This is one memory in my life that I will never forget, and it's the saddest memory because we all loved my grandfather, like we have already said, and we had to leave to go to this country, to come to this country, we had to leave and make a train going to Warsaw, and we had to leave at about, in the middle of the night, two, three o'clock in the morning. And it was in the mid-December, and it was very, very cold. It was bitter cold, but it was a beautiful night. The moon was shining, and the snow and the ice were glistening. And my grandfather got up, and he helped us get onto the carriage. It was an open platform, like a truck, which was drawn by horses, to help us carry our belongings onto that, and to say goodbye to us for the last time, because he knew he would never see us again. And he helped us on, and the carriage, or the truck, started moving away, and he was running after it and crying, and it was so sad. And we all cried, and I will never, never forget this. ( she is moved )

LILLIAN:

It's very warm here.

SHIRLEY:

Do you want me to put on the fan?

LEVINE:

Maybe just, in summarizing, before we leave your life in Poland, how would you describe your life in Poland prior to leaving for the United States? Just kind of . . .

LILLIAN:

Some memories come back very fast, and one of these memories, I believe, we did not say anything about on the first tape, and that was the time when war broke out in Europe, and the battles were coming closer and closer to where we lived. We all had to get into a cellar in order to get, have some security from the bombs or from the bullets or from the guns, and that's where we stayed all night. And when we finally did get out it was very early in the morning and lots of people piled into our small two-room apartment, and we all stretched out on wherever we could find a space. I guess the children were put into bed, and the others stayed wherever they could in that two-room apartment. This is very vivid. I can recall that. But even more vivid is the time when the war was already in progress for quite a number of years, and there was an air raid in the town. We had an air raid and we, again, had to get into the cellar. We got into the cellar, but this time we did not close doors because we knew that the raid was of short duration. We left the doors open, whereas in the first time when we got into the cellars all the doors were locked very tight, two sets of doors, one up on top and one on the bottom. But this particular one, the one that I wanted to tell about, is when we did not lock the doors and when the air raids sounded, the sirens went off, there were two people that ran into our cellar. Two Polish people, a man and a woman. Shortly thereafter, some Polish soldiers came to that cellar and they saw us all assembled there, and they were very suspicious, and they accused us of being spies, and they pointed their guns at us. They were going to kill everybody in there. But luckily we had those two Polish people there. The man was an anti-Semite, and he said, "Shoot them all. They're no good."

SHIRLEY:

They're Jews.

LILLIAN:

"They're all Jews, and shoot them all." The woman, on the other hand, was very sympathetic, and she got on her knees, and she pleaded with them, and she said, "These are innocent people. We ran in from the street." She thought that we had run in from the street, which we had not, but that's what she thought. And, "Leave them alone, and leave us alone, we are innocent people." She pleaded so long until they finally got, they left us alone and they went away, but our lives were very much in danger at that time. The guns were pointed right at us. This I'll never forget. This is one memory that I'll never forget. In fact, I told this very story to my third grade class when we, I was here such a short time, but my teacher asked questions, and I answered that question by telling that story, and I think the little girls and the little boys in that class were very much concerned, and very interested in that story. So that's my story. Now, is there anything else, Janet, that you would like to know? Shirley may have something to say about this.

LEVINE:

Well, I guess we're, we'll be talking about leaving Poland, so if there's anything . . .

LILLIAN:

Shirley, do you want to add anything to that story?

SHIRLEY:

Yes. Of course, I remember it very clearly, too. And I remember being so frightened and so scared that I wanted to, like, creep into the wall. And when we finally, when this woman, she crossed herself and begged these men, she said, "These are innocent people who ran away from the bullets." There was an air raid or something, and we heard the, you know, the bullets being shot at us. And so when we finally got out of that cellar and went into the house, I remember I threw up my, everything I ever ate in my life, because from fright, I was so scared that I didn't know what, and I was like sick for the rest of the day. Those are the things that we went through many times. We lived in that cellar a lot during the war, because there were attacks, all kinds of attacks. Until the Germans took over we had all kinds of battles going on in that little town where we lived, so we lived through this a lot. We were in the cellar a lot trying to hide. That was the only place that we felt safe that the bullets wouldn't reach us, and this is what we had to go through during our young days.

LEVINE:

Were there other incidents of anti-Semitism?

SHIRLEY:

There were quite a few. Yes, there were.

LEVINE:

In your experience?

SHIRLEY:

Yes. I remember one time we went berry picking in the woods, my mother, and all of us children, I think. I remember you and I, Lil, were there. And we spent, we took along bread and something to drink, and so we spent most of the day picking berries, and I remember we filled up a whole bucket full of berries, and we were on our way home going on the road and some Polish boys saw us and they attacked us and they spilled our berries all over the road. The Polish people, unfortunately, I have to say, were very anti-Semitic. They didn't like the Jews, which is too bad because we were very peace-loving and just trying to get along. We didn't want much from them. But this is the kind of things that last in your mind, you know, you can remember.

LEVINE:

What was the composition of the town? Was it about half and half, as far as Jewish and Gentile, or was it most of a difference in the balance?

SHIRLEY:

Well, I would say that the town, the main streets of the town were more or less Jewish, more Jewish. The Polish people were mostly farmers around the town, but the Jewish people lived within the town. They had small businesses, a grocery store or a bakery, or a ready-to-wear store kind of thing, a shoe store, like Ben was in the shoe store. And, but the Jewish people lived in the town. The Gent-, the Polish, outside of the town.

LEVINE:

Can you describe the house where you lived?

LILLIAN:

Yes, of course. It was, actually there were more than one apartments. I think they had about three or four apartments in that particular area of the building. Ours, you had to walk up about four steps. It was just a two-room apartment. The living room, the dining room, the bedroom, was all in one room. And then there was a kitchen with a large living room, dining room, bedroom. The kitchen was sort of a narrow, long, the same length, the whole length of the apartment. And we had, I think it was coal that we used to use, or wood, for heating. And the part, the oven part that you open up to put the wood in was in the kitchen. And on the other side of the wall was the place where you got a lot of heat. There were tiles, white, or some colored tiles. I think they were white mostly. And that wall became very warm, and that's, we used to stand up against that to get some warmth. And we had all the furniture we needed, I suppose. Two big beds where we shared, that's all. My mother and two children slept on one, and we slept on the other, Shirley and I, and occasionally there were other people sleeping with us, my mother's brother, my mother's brother-in-law, which was I think the wrong thing to do, but we didn't know about those things, and certainly not I, and I hope my mother didn't either, because she shouldn't have allowed that, I feel. But anyhow, that's the way it was, and the four chairs were around the table, and if we should see someone coming to visit, we were four girls, and we didn't want anybody to sit on those chairs. So we saw someone come in toward the, from the street, we would run into the house, and we would sit on the chairs. We'd fight with one another. We did not want anyone to take our chair, so we came and we sat. The people who came to visit, I don't know what they did, because we wouldn't give up the chairs. ( a telephone rings )

LEVINE:

We'll pause here. ( break in tape ) Okay, we're resuming now after a phone call. Okay, so you were sitting in the chairs so that the visitors couldn't.

SHIRLEY:

And until my mother, of course, would tell us to kindly get up and give a seat to the, but we had our chairs, you could have printed our name on it, because we were always in the same chair. But I wanted to add, as she, Lillian explained about the heating system that we had. The stove was in the open part of the oven, was in the kitchen where it was fed with wood and heated the whole apartment. On the other side, in the other room, was the tiled wall which got hot from the, but we also had like a pripechik (open hearth). You may have heard that word. It was part of the oven that was flat, of the wall, and we used to be able to sit on that and warm up, yeah.

LEVINE:

Well, now, was the stove like a range? Like a kitchen range?

SHIRLEY:

That was different, no. We had a kitchen range which also was fed by wood. But this was a heating system which had, like, a little door on top where you could put food in to warm, a part, you know, like a little closet up on top, a cabinet, or a cabinet where you could put in things to warm, and the whole wall on the other side got all heated up, so it heated the second room. And this was our heating system. For cooking we had another kind, also fed by wood. We had no electricity or anything like that.

LEVINE:

What did you use for lighting?

SHIRLEY:

We had kerosene lamps, one kerosene lamp in the whole big room.

LILLIAN:

And, during the war, candles.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah. That's right. And we had to do our homework by that light when we went to school. I went to school, and Lillian went for a while also.

LILLIAN:

About the lighting system that we had, as Shirley said the kerosene was, of course, probably the most effective. But during the war we must have had a shortage of kerosene, and we had to use candles. And candles were scarce, too. And there was one family who lived upstairs. Their name was Abramchik, and Hannah was my friend. They had no candles, and they had no kerosene, and they had no lamps, and they had no food either, for that matter. And I recall we felt so sorry for them. We were poor ourselves, but they were even worse off. So we used to take the tallow that would melt from the candles. I remember that very distinctly. And we would put a thread into the soft tallow and roll it to make a candle out of it, and bring it up to them. That's exactly how I remember it.

SHIRLEY:

I remember that, too. From the overflow of the tallow, we'd use it again, yeah.

LEVINE:

Now, how about your cousins. They lived nearby?

LILLIAN:

Yes. They lived right across. We had, as I think I explained in the first tape, that we were right off a very large square, and the buildings were all around in a square. We lived at the, let's say the south side, and they lived on the east side of that square. I used to go there for the lessons that Rose used to give me. I went there quite often, because it was a daily thing, I guess in those days, when I couldn't go to school, so I went there often, and I knew that apartment very well. But they came to us, mostly they came to us. Ours was the meeting ground. Everyone was always welcome at our house. I guess it was my mother's attitude toward children and towards her family. And they used to come to us. I remember that also, again, during the war, those were the most vivid memories. Rose and Sylvia used to come Friday night, and after the candles went out we used to sing, mostly sad songs. Those were my recollections. Rose had a beautiful voice, and she had, and Sylvia had a beautiful voice, but Rose, even more beautiful. And we sang Polish songs from the war, and they knew so much Polish, and we were able to join in, and we sang Yiddish songs, and the atmosphere in the dark, it was very plaintive. I remember it was so sad. And we got to know them so much better, they came so often we were always very close. And I think Shirley may be able to add a few things herself.

SHIRLEY:

I just want to say that, you know, this family, our cousins and my Aunt Esther and her family, who had six children, her husband also was in America. He left Europe, our country, Europe, to come to America when the war broke out, because none of the boys wanted to be in the army, so they all left. My father, and my uncle, and they all went to the, but I want to tell you, the way we lived, to give you an idea of the way we lived, my aunt, who had six children, lived in one room. I don't know how they slept. I can't imagine how they slept. She and six children were living in one room. Also, Lillian told you that they used to come to us all the time because, I don't know, well, they had one room, we had two rooms, and my mother, of course, always invited people to come. They used to come on Friday night and Saturday, all day Saturday we'd sit and sing songs. And, in fact, Sylvia, who was the younger of the girls, she was the second girl, the second youngest in the family, she slept in our house a lot. She slept with us. She slept with Lillian and me. We were two in the bed. She was the third. There was always a third in the bed. And she got very ill at one time. I think we spoke about it during our first recording, that she got typhus, and she got very ill. She had a very high temperature, and her mother, or the whole family, didn't want to put her in the hospital because they did not trust the hospitals or any other care that was given to the sick people in the hospital during the war. They really didn't care much about civilians. So we had to hide the fact that she was ill, and they had to get her out of our house so that we shouldn't be infected with that disease, so they carried her at night. They took her out of the house, they carried her in a blanket across the square, to her aunt's house, who had an apartment somewhere also off the square. And on the way they dropped her into the snow, but anyway, she was carried to that house. They put her in a room by herself, which must have been zero degrees, but I think that's what helped her sickness, that cold room, and she was wrapped up in blankets. And she, of course, survived and got better, and she was okay. But at least we had to get her out of our house so that our four children should not be infected. I later on got it anyway, but I don't know whether it was through her or some other sources. But anyway, what I want to stress very much is the closeness that we were with that family. There weren't, we didn't consider them like cousins. They were almost like sisters. They were part of us. Whatever we did, we always did together, the sisters and brothers. There were six, and we were four.

LEVINE:

What were their names?

SHIRLEY:

Rose was the oldest, then came Sylvia, then came David, then Madeline and Sol. Sol was the youngest. There's a little . . .

LILLIAN:

There are only five, by the way, not six. The sixth one must have died quite some time earlier, before I can remember. ( break in tape )

LEVINE:

Okay, we're resuming now again. Was there something that you wanted to add about your cousins, and you had mentioned about them earlier.

LILLIAN:

Well, I don't want to miss David, because David was very, very close, devoted friend and cousin. We were very close to him and loved him. He loved us. Shirley was his friend, and they used to socialize.

SHIRLEY:

Because I was closest in age to him, that's why.

LILLIAN:

And I, of course, was not in his company, because I was maybe a couple of years younger, but he shared with us all his knowledge. As soon as he used to go to kheder (Hebrew school), and as soon as he learned something in kheder , he would come over and teach us. He taught me the alphabet in Yiddish, how to write it and how to read it, and to this day I can still read and write Jewish, all thanks to David, whom I miss very much, I must say, because I really was very fond of David. And Madeline was my very close friend. She took me into the Madison House. That was a settlement house which was at 214 Madison. She lived at 216, and we lived at, no, she lived at 214, and we lived at 212, and the Madison House was at 216.

SHIRLEY:

Madison Street.

LILLIAN:

Yes. That was Madison Street. Madison House.

LEVINE:

This was in New York now.

SHIRLEY:

The east side of New York.

LILLIAN:

This is the Lower East Side. And when we moved, finally, to the Lower East Side from the Bronx, it must have been, Madeline became my very dear friend. She took, introduced me to all her friends. By then she had made some, and there was a club and she got, took me into the club as a member, and I, we had about fifteen or twenty girls in that very club and we were always very, very friendly, lots of fun. But Madeline was my dearest friend. Now, of course, she lives in Miami Beach and she has other interests and other friends, and we do see each other occasionally and speak to each other more often, but I still recall our dearest friendship, and that was with Madeline.

LEVINE:

And your friendship with Madeline was also in Poland?

LILLIAN:

No, Madeline was not friendly in Poland with us at all. The only ones that we saw in that family were Rose, whom we loved, Sylvia, whom we loved, and David, whom we loved. They were our dearest friends, dearest cousins. They came to America with us so that we were never without them. We were always together. But now we're without them unfortunately, but that's not anything that we could have done anything about.

SHIRLEY:

David was a, he didn't, he didn't have a very long, formal education, but he was very well-educated in Hebrew, and he became a director of a Hebrew school in Teaneck, New Jersey. I think it's comparable to the principal. Wouldn't you say that, Lil?

LILLIAN:

Yes.

SHIRLEY:

And he became very active with helping Israel, and during, he went to Israel many, many times, and he finally died in Israel, and I think that was a, that was the place where he should have ended his life because Israel was his love. He did a great deal of work for Israel, helped them. He went at least a dozen times. He'd speak to me or be in my house on Thursday, Saturday he was in Israel. He couldn't tell me that he was going, or he couldn't tell anybody. It was a secret. Because he did certain things for Israel that could not be spoken about. END OF SIDE A, TAPE TWO BEGINNING OF SIDE B, TAPE TWO

LILLIAN:

And he died in Israel.

SHIRLEY:

And he died in Israel. And at that time one of our other cousins was connected with CBS. He was a reporter. He reported the news from Israel, and his name was Danny Bloom. He was my Uncle Joe's son, youngest son. And he was there at the time when David, when David came to Israel he always contacted him, because he worked with CBS and he had a lot of things, you know, that he could do. So he, Danny, of course, when David died Danny called the family from Israel to tell them what happened. And, of course, it was a very sad time for all of us. I unfortunately was in Florida at the time, right after a very serious illness, and I could not come, they would not allow me to go to New York for the funeral, and that I regret a great deal.

LILLIAN:

I was there for the funeral, and some very nice things were said about David. He was a very unusual person. He had so much knowledge. Never mind the education formally, he had so much knowledge, he was so well-informed that education couldn't have done much more for him if he had a degree in whatever.

LEVINE:

Maybe you could say something about the attitude of your family and most of your cousins about education and about learning.

LILLIAN:

Well, it was important but, unfortunately, other things were even more important. Supporting the family was very important so that, I personally hadn't, did not get enough time for education. I had to go to work as soon as possible when I was sixteen years old. I did get some training, of course, at a business school, for which my mother paid, and I got some jobs doing office work and also become very proficient at that, and made our salaries. But education was never out of the picture. It was always very important. Especially to me, it was always very important.

SHIRLEY:

Well, the reason that we didn't, couldn't afford to go to school, was because my father abandoned us and we had no one to support us. So that as soon as we reached the age of sixteen, and when we came to this country there was, someone had to guarantee that we would not become a public charge, and we would not go on welfare, which is now known as welfare, so that someone had to guarantee this. And one of my uncles finally got his boss to sign for us that we would not be a public charge. So as soon as we became old enough, we had to go to work to support the rest of the family, and that's why we couldn't get any education. When I was sixteen I left there. I had to go to school until I was sixteen. So, and then I went on to night school, night high school. I used to go to school at night and work during the day so that I could bring in some money for the family to live on. My mother tried very hard, but she had four small children, four young children to take care of, and she couldn't leave us all alone. So she did work at home. I remember we used to help her. She used to go and get work. At that time they had people taking home work. We did all kinds of things at home to make some money, but as soon as we were sixteen we had to go to work, and we could not continue with any education. Of course, we always tried. We read, and we tried to learn, but we don't have formal degrees.

LEVINE:

When, what was your mother's name and maiden name?

SHIRLEY:

My mother's name was Malke Kwiatek. That was her maiden name. She married a man named Sol Mendel Liberman, which was arranged. The marriage, of course, was arranged. She was introduced. She never went out with him on dates, as we are accustomed to. She met him maybe once, looked at him, and then after a certain proper time there was an engagement which in, in Hebrew is tnoim (engagement contract), and after that they got married, and they lived together. My father was a, he was a carpenter or, I would say, he was more like a . . .

LILLIAN:

A master, a master cabinetmaker.

SHIRLEY:

He was a, yeah, a master carpenter, a cabinetmaker. But we lived in such a small town he could not find work. So he always had to go away to find a job, and so we really didn't have much of a father. But my mother filled both parts very beautifully. She was wonderful. We never had any problems.

LEVINE:

Is there anything else that you would say about life in Poland before we talk about leaving there?

LILLIAN:

Well, mostly, I can recall during the war, because prior to that I was probably too young to remember very much. I do remember, however, when my father did leave for the United States. I was not very old, I must say, but I was, I must have been three years old.

SHIRLEY:

You were three years old at that time.

LILLIAN:

But I recall, I recall grabbing at his leg, for him not to go. I don't know whether he was going to America or not. He may have been going on a job. But I recall grabbing at his leg and trying to hold him down, he shouldn't leave. I guess we had an affection for him. I don't have that recollection as I grew older, but that's the only one that I do remember. And, during the war there were so many trials and tribulations. My mother had to do a lot of smuggling to make ends meet. One day she told me while the Germans occupied our town, the Germans occupied our town for quite a while, I believe. They stayed until the Russian Revolution, probably, or probably till 1918 when they signed the treaty in November 11, 1918. But I do recall this incident when my mother was smuggling some flour, or sugar, or whatever it was, and she told me to watch out for the German policeman. He was the Chief of Police. And he used to wear a cape. And they used to call him, everybody had some kind of a name other than his given name, they called him the pelerina . In Jewish that means, "the cape." My mother said to me, "Stay, stand on this place." There was a, sort of a little bit of water that used to run through the town. I don't know what it was.

SHIRLEY:

It was a rov (ditch).

LILLIAN:

They called it a rov A rov is, I don't know.

SHIRLEY:

A canal.

LILLIAN:

It was a very, very narrow canal.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

I remember that very well. And there was a wooden bridge that was level with the ground, because the canal was depressed, and the wooden bridge was on top, and my mother said, "You stand on that bridge, and if you see him let me know, come to me." She told me that he's coming and I should go in another direction. I was standing there, and I did finally see my mother coming from the left. And the pelerina coming from the same direction. I said, "What am I going to do?" So quickly I decided if I move I'll attract attention. I stayed there, glued, and my mother saw that, what was happening, and she realized that he was right behind her, and she quickly ran into some kind of a store or another one of the teyas [ toyern (gates)]. The, that's what we called them, and that's how she was saved from punishment. But this incident also stands out very clearly in my mind. I think I've mentioned that a few times to my husband. He said no, but I think I, I thought I did.

LEVINE:

What was the word you used? teyas ?

LILLIAN:

The teya , yes.

LILLIAN:

That's, what do you call that, a teya ?

SHIRLEY:

It's like the entrance to a fort. There were big doors.

LEVINE:

Oh.

LILLIAN:

Each court had this type of entrance, and we called it a teya . I don't know what you call it here. It's just the entrance to the place where you live.

LEVINE:

But it's large.

LILLIAN:

Oh, very large.

SHIRLEY:

Well, to us it was large. It may not have been as large as we thought. We were small, so for us it was enormous.

LILLIAN:

In that very same teya we used to, we used to do all sorts of things.

SHIRLEY:

To play.

LILLIAN:

We used to play there. And one time we used to, we made stilts for ourselves, and we walked on stilts.

SHIRLEY:

Right.

LILLIAN:

I remember that was one of the things, how we played. One time you asked us how we played. And we did that, we made the stilts, and we walked on stilts to see how well we can walk on stilts. And that's how we enjoyed our . . .

SHIRLEY:

We had no toys, ever, to play with, so whatever we had, we had to make it ourselves, like I told you once before. I never had a doll, or neither one of us, none of us ever had a doll, so we had to make one. I think in a way it was good, because we used our imagination, we used our skills, like she said, to make the stilts. We had seen them somewhere. Maybe, I don't know how we knew about it, and so we repeated, we copied, and we used our imagination. We took pieces of wood and make stilts, and we walked on stilts.

LILLIAN:

And we kept our balance. It took a little while, I guess, to really keep it well for a longer period of time, but it developed that we were doing that quite well.

LEVINE:

Maybe you could describe the courtyard with the families around, and what that was like.

SHIRLEY:

Oh, yes. I'll tell you. I think ours was the only one with a teya .

LEVINE:

What is that?

SHIRLEY:

The entrance. Because we lived in what was the City Hall, the same place where the City Hall, there was a big, brick building, it was the City Hall, and it had an entrance like, I would say, like the entrance to a palace. Big, wooden doors, and you came into, like through a grand entrance.

LILLIAN:

A teya .

SHIRLEY:

A foyer, an enormous foyer, with these great, big wooden doors that opened up. And the floor of that foyer was all wood, and there was the entrance to the City Hall, and then on the left side was the entrance to a store, a fabric store.

LILLIAN:

Outside.

SHIRLEY:

No, no. On the inside, also, they had an entrance on the inside. And then you came through these doors and through that foyer, and there was a big courtyard o, and it was surrounded by buildings. There was one big, brick building in which the rich person of the town, who owned the store on the main street, lived, and whose, the young girl was my friend. Her name was Hadassah. Then there was another tenant, and then there was a bakery in the basement, and then there was a wooden, wooden buildings, which my grandfather and grandmother lived, and my grandfather had a little factory upstairs, a tanning factory. Then there were the outhouses and stalls for the animals, and then around the other side there was another building in which we lived and two tenants upstairs, and then there was an entrance to, that woman with the cards, what was her name, who played cards? Ayn imir gegangen mit di korten (the one who always went around with the playing cards) -- Rivka. She had the store, and she lived in back of the store. And this was the courtyard, and it was all, what do you call it?

SHIRLEY:

Cobblestones.

LILLIAN:

Yes, cobblestones. Right. And this is where we lived. And we had two rooms. My grandmother and grandfather had two rooms, and the factory, the little factory upstairs where he had three or four young boys working for him. And I remember when I was very small, after my father left and we moved to that courtyard. We had been living somewhere else, but when my father left my mother wanted to be close to her folks, and so we moved into that courtyard, and I remember going upstairs, and there was this big vat with the leather in a big vat with certain brine, and I wanted to look in, and I fell into it. So that was really funny. And the boys that worked there, some of them were not, were not so nice to me, anyway. I don't want to really say anything about that. It wasn't nice. I was only about six years old.

LILLIAN:

There were lots of other, there were lots of neighbors we had. We used to have the children in the, in this very court, and we used to play with them. We used to have games, and we played with them, and subsequently I became very friendly with this Hannah, like I mentioned her before, Hannah Bramchick, and she went to school with me. And when I got the measles, she continued to go to school. And at that time they gave out wooden shoes to the children, wooden-soled shoes to the children in school. And since I had the measles, I didn't get the shoes, and I'll never forget how awful I felt because I didn't get the shoes. ( she laughs ) They were clopping around with the shoes, and I couldn't clop around with the shoes, so I felt very neglected and very, but they didn't have another pair of shoes to give me. So I was very unlucky when I had the measles. I was very sick when I had the measles. It's a terrible disease, and I'm glad to hear that they have now some anti things for measles.

SHIRLEY:

What you want to say is that we had no doctor in town.

LEVINE:

What, did you have, like . . .

SHIRLEY:

We had what is called a fel'dsher (medical assistant). He was like a pharmacist. And we had a pharmacy, and he was, he substituted for the doctor. We didn't have a doctor in town, although we, during the war I think there was a hospital there. Wasn't there a hospital?

LILLIAN:

We must have had one.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah. But we didn't have a doctor that we could call on if a child got sick. I remember my sister Esther, she got scarlet fever and she almost died, and we had no way of doing anything for her.

LILLIAN:

That's right. And it's amazing, really, amazing that we were all living in such small quarters, such close quarters, that all of us didn't get these diseases. Shirley had the typhus, which is not typhoid fever. It's entirely different. The typhus is a much more serious disease. I didn't get it, the rest of us didn't get it. Esther had this scarlet fever, which it was treated for something else. She needed to be treated with heat, and the doctor, who was a German woman, came in and treated her with ice packs, and she was about three years old, and she almost died. And my grandfather came in to see if she was living or dead, and he put a feather under her nose to see if she was breathing, that's how sick she was, but she recovered, just naturally, I guess by the grace of God.

LEVINE:

Well, did people die very often? I mean, were you aware of people dying because there was no medical, real medical attention?

LILLIAN:

I remember that Dreyjshe 's little daughter died of scarlet fever just before Esther got better. A little girl died. She was also probably about five or six years old.

SHIRLEY:

We were really not aware of death.

LILLIAN:

Not too much.

SHIRLEY:

No.

LILLIAN:

No.

SHIRLEY:

We weren't. We were too young to even know, you know, to think about it.

LILLIAN:

But I do remember this child dying in the same court where we lived.

SHIRLEY:

Well, also, we, from malnutrition, the children suffered a great deal. Lillian was one of them. She had such infections on her scalp.

LILLIAN:

Boils.

SHIRLEY:

They were big blisters of pus all over her head from malnutrition because she didn't get the proper food. All we lived on was potatoes and bread, when we had it. So it was really, an orange was, when you were dying you got an orange, you know.

LILLIAN:

Or you had to be very sick.

SHIRLEY:

You had to be very sick to deserve an orange.

LILLIAN:

Or, for that matter, chicken soup was also scarce. Everything was scarce.

SHIRLEY:

So she was very ill, with all those infections.

LILLIAN:

All my hair fell out on that side where I had, I remember it was this side, the right side. It was all covered with pus. And then Sylvia got that later, and when we came to, we were going to America, Sylvia still had a little bald spot right there where she had it, but her hair was already growing, so the doctors did not take too much notice of it. But she got it also, because we were all malnourished. Not only, and here, too, in this country when I was thirteen years old I think I weighed seventy-eight pounds. So I was eligible to go to a camp for children, deprived children, and I went there because I qualified with my weight, and so I benefited that way because I loved the place. Madeline and I both went there. We had such a great time.

SHIRLEY:

Why don't you tell the name of the place.

LILLIAN:

The name of the place was called Felicia. Later on, after we were growing older, we were fourteen, fifteen, we were able to go to Camp Madison, and that was a charge. For Felicia, we paid three dollars for the two weeks. My mother paid that. And the next time I think we had to pay five dollars for two weeks for each child. And then my sisters Esther and Sylvia went also. Through the Madison House, they arranged all these things. It was a settlement house where we learned a great deal, how to . . .

LEVINE:

Let's talk about that. Let's first talk about how was it that it was decided that you and your sisters and mother would come to America?

LILLIAN:

Well, my father sent for us. He sent money. The war ended, and he sent us money. I guess there was some correspondence between Mother and Father, and he sent us five hundred dollars to, and we had applied to come to America, and that's how it was. We were, I guess it was always intended that the family would be joined together. He certainly wasn't coming back to Poland, so we were going to America. And that's how we did it. We came to America. We decided to go to America to be with our, with my mother's, my mother, her husband, and we with our father, but it didn't work out the way we had originally planned, and I think we spoke about that on the first tape, when my father was ill in the hospital, and resumed a relationship probably with a young woman whom he had had a relationship prior to our coming, and he had second thoughts about taking on such a big responsibility, a wife, four children, there was no apartment, he didn't get us an apartment, he was still in the hospital, and we sort of wandered around for a while among the relatives. Shirley with one cousin of my father's, although my father was the one who did not wish to start a life together, his cousins were very sympathetic, and they, Cousin Morris Bloom took Shirley, Morris Bloom and Bertha Bloom took Shirley to live. I went with my Uncle Joe and Aunt Becky to live with them until we could establish a place that, my Uncle Joe was on my mother's side, but my mother went with my father's cousin with two children, and that was a very big bunch of, I can only say that was a big sacrifice on their part to take in three people when they themselves had three children in a two bedroom apartment. But they were the ones who were sympathetic and believed that my father should have done it, but as long as he didn't they took us in.

SHIRLEY:

I just want to emphasize the fact that when my mother and we came to this country, ( a siren is heard in the background ) into a strange land, a strange, with strangers all around us, my father was ill, and we had to be separated, and the family had to be separated. It was the most painful time in our lives. I went to live with my father's cousins, whom I never saw in my life. She went to live with an aunt and uncle whom she never saw in her life. The two younger children, of course, went with my mother, so they were a little bit more secure, but we suffered painfully to be separated from the rest of the family and have to live with strangers. It was a very terrible time. And I lived with them . . .

LILLIAN:

About three months.

SHIRLEY:

About three months, until my mother, until my uncles were able to find an apartment for us on the Lower East Side, on Henry Street, 37 Henry Street, on the fifth floor, and we all, a two-room apartment, a bedroom, no, a bedroom, living room and kitchen, three rooms. And it had a toilet in the house, which was a great advantage. Just a toilet, no bath or anything, and we, so we moved down there, and we went, we started going to school in P.S. 1.

LILLIAN:

We transferred to P.S. 1, because originally we were, we were in . . .

SHIRLEY:

In P.S. 40.

LILLIAN:

Yes, 40, in the Bronx. I went from my teacher, whom I cannot forget either. Her name was Reese, Miss Reese, and she was a doll. She, I think, mentioned that on the tape. I hate to be repetitive, but, should I repeat the story? Well, she was very sweet to me, I guess. She asked me to tell the story when I was able to speak a little bit, so I did tell that story, which I mentioned earlier. And when I had to leave I had to be transferred out of the school from her class, she embraced me, and she kissed me. I thought that was, looking back upon it now, I have not seen a teacher do this, and nor have I ever heard anybody doing this. Teachers don't do this. She was very demonstrative. She embraced me, she kissed me, and I said, "Goodbye, children." That was my experience in P.S. 40. And I still remember that, because it was pleasant. It was very pleasant. I learned to speak. I learned to read. She was very proud of me reading. I came from Poland and I could read Polish very well, so I came here and read the, all the same sort of alphabet, and I read here, probably very wrongly. But she told me to read in front of other teachers. I didn't know what I was reading, but I was reading. I read very well. I guess I could have said, "Jack and Jill." Jack, I can't imagine how I could have said Jack, because the C and the K in Polish are pronounced not, it's not a K altogether, but I must have been able to read other things, because she always told me to read in front of the teachers. And this was when I was here only a short time. So she was a very understanding person. She was young. She was young and very beautiful. I loved her. And she must have been a very good teacher. She let me go to the other kids, the other children's benches or seats when I couldn't understand her the first day or two, I was very, very unhappy. I did not understand one single word, and she did not mind my getting up to sit next to another Jewish child who I knew could speak some Yiddish, and I asked her, "What did she say?" and, "What was going on this classroom?" So she never stopped me from going out of my seat and into this other child's seat. And I think she was a lovely teacher, and I wish there were more like her.

SHIRLEY:

Well, I, too, had the same experiences, as far as understanding the language. I didn't know any English at all, and when I got into the, they put me, according to my age they put me, I think, in the fifth grade. But they might have put me in any grade, because I didn't understand. I was like deaf and dumb. I could not understand what they were saying. And then when I was transferred, finally, when we moved to the Lower East Side and we started going to P.S. 1, I began to understand some English and be able to speak. But I had a problem, I think over there I was okay with the arithmetic already. I had a problem with arithmetic in the earlier grades, but I finally mastered that. But I, too, had a wonderful teacher. One teacher, Miss Adler, who wanted me to continue going to school during the day, after I graduated. At that time we used to go up to the eighth grade, not like now where you, from the sixth you go to junior and so on. At that time the elementary school was through the eighth grade. So when I was ready to graduate she wanted me to go on to day High School, and she said she would try to get me a scholarship. Would I go? And I said, "I can't. I have to start working and supporting, and helping support the family." And I couldn't, I had to go to night school. But she was the one who really was very understanding also, and very helpful in my life at school. There were other, there was another teacher who was very mean. She was horrible. But anyway, I graduated with honors, and everything was just fine.

LEVINE:

Were you treated badly as far as being greenhorns or being immigrants, in any ways?

SHIRLEY:

I don't remember anything. Do you? I don't remember.

LILLIAN:

Yes. I remember that the children used to say, "Oh, you're a greenhorn." Or, "Where you born in Boston?" At that time I guess I spoke with a broad A, because that's how I read English, and I still speak that way. So they, very often they would say, "Were you born in Boston?" They would ask me that question. And, or, and, but they did say "greenhorn." I recall being, not called, maybe, but I heard the word very often. I'm not sure if it was applied to me specifically, but I did hear the word. And I don't think it bothered me very much anyway.

LEVINE:

Let's see. Getting back to before you got here, the voyage itself. Do you remember your feelings about being in steerage on the boat?

SHIRLEY:

Well, the only thing, I didn't really care that we were in steerage. I didn't know any different. So wherever they put us was okay with us. I mean, we were never used to any luxuries. We were, you know, as I said before, very poor, and we didn't know the difference. But the only thing that I remember, I was already thirteen, and we, our cousins Rose and Sylvia were traveling with us, and they were older. And they, of course, maybe were flirting, and there were some women from Czechoslovakia who were married women coming here to meet their husbands. But they were not very nice. I remember how I was introduced to sex, on the boat, on the ship. I remember waking up during the night, I might have gone to bed early, I don't know what time it was, maybe eleven, twelve o'clock at night, and these women were with the stewards. We were all sleeping in a big dormitory, maybe five hundred people in one room. And these women, or these stewards, the sailors, were sleeping with those women, and they were having sex with them. And every, the lights were on, and everybody was yelling and applauding while they were having sex. This was my introduction to sex. That was how, I didn't know what they were doing but someone, I think my cousin explained it to me. I didn't know what

LILLIAN:

I remember seeing that also, but I also did not know exactly what was happening. Anyhow, I was seasick throughout the . . . END OF SIDE B, TAPE TWO BEGINNING OF SIDE A, TAPE THREE

LEVINE:

Okay. We're resuming now. We ran out of the first tape, now this is tape two [Interviewer's Note: Actually, Tape three], and I'm talking with Shirley Rofman and Lillian Levine, and we'll continue talking about the voyage.

LILLIAN:

Well, I think that we were at, the kinds of foods that were offered to us, we were on mostly, since we were on the Holland American Line, and I think we mentioned the name of the ship, if it didn't get on the first tape, we'll repeat that. It was the S.S. Riindam [Ryndam]. I think it's spelled R-I-I-N-D-A-M [Ryndam]. There may be some, Shirley thinks it's another spelling, but it can be checked out, and whichever it is, it is the Riindam [Ryndam], pronounced that way. Anyhow, what I started to say was that the food consisted mostly of herring. I guess that's the national food of the Dutch people. So we were fed herring a lot. I don't recall any other food, because I was not very interested in eating anyway since I was seasick. ( she coughs ) But you wanted to know about the voyage. It was very stormy, very severe. The ship was rocking and rolling, and it was really a very, very rough voyage. One time I went upstairs to the lavatory, and I wanted to see what it looked like on the outside, because being downstairs in the steerage there were no windows, and we really did not know, we even might have been below sea level, for all I know. And so I stood up on the toilet seat. I wanted to see what was going on outside. And I quickly ran down, because it was so frightening. There were two huge waves, one on either side of the ship, black water, and I was frightened from that. And I said, "My goodness gracious. This is very, very rough and very dangerous." So I quickly left the area and went down to my bed and lay down again.

SHIRLEY:

To emphasize about the scariness of the ship, I was not as sick as she and my mother and the other children were. I was walking around with my two cousins, Rose and Sylvia, and we went up on the deck. And it was so frightening, like Lillian said, two black walls, and the ship looked like a spec on the bottom that any minute we would be absorbed into this ocean. So I ran down, and I was scared, and I never went up on deck again until we reached New York Harbor. But as far as the food is concerned, we were being cheated all the time. They ripped us off wherever, as soon as we started, as soon as we came to Warsaw they started ripping us off from all directions. My mother was told that each and every one of us had glaucoma, we had to be treated for glaucoma, which was no such thing. We were healthy children, and she was healthy. We were told we had all kinds of diseases that we had to be treated for. And the same cheating went on as long as we were in Warsaw, until my mother finally got all her papers and we were able to leave. We had to travel to Rotterdam all, to a good portion of Europe. We went through Germany until we got to Rotterdam. And we finally, when we did get on the ship and we were supposed to get certain kinds of food, all we got was herring, and they stole the rest of it and put it away, and they were selling it, those sailors were selling it, the stewards were selling it. So my two cousins, Rose and Sylvia, and a friend of theirs, a young man, we decided that we're not going to let them get away with it. We're going to get some of that food. So they picked me up and lowered me into this open-top closet, and I picked up all the goodies that we were supposed to get such as jelly and oranges and cookies and whatever, and I handed it out to them, and we got it back, and this is how we got some of the food that we were supposed to get.

LEVINE:

What happened in Warsaw? In other words, somebody wanted to convince your mother to pay them to treat you . . .

SHIRLEY:

That's right. They invented all kinds of diseases for us. First of all, we didn't live at a, stay at a hotel. We couldn't afford to stay at a hotel. So they had these, like bed and breakfast places that we have here. We slept on the floor for as long as we were in Warsaw which, I think, was about ten days. I don't know how long we were there. We had no beds. They laid out, these people who rented their homes to the immigrants, they laid out mattresses on the floor, and we slept on them. I don't know how much my mother had to pay for that accommodation, but this is how we stayed, and every time my mother went to a doctor we had to get papers, certificates for the eyes and ears and whatever else. She was told that we had all kinds of diseases and we had to be treated for it. Which wasn't . . .

LEVINE:

But did she believe it?

SHIRLEY:

She did not, and she didn't follow through, and we started out for the port, and that's how we got there. And it was not necessary, we were fine, we were wonderful, but everybody tried to make money on the immigrants that were going to America.

LILLIAN:

I just want to mention about Warsaw, this place that we finally landed. They, where Shirley said we slept on the floors. There were some people that slept in beds. They must have had more money or they came before us and they wouldn't relinquish the beds. So we stayed on the floor. My cousin Rose thought this place was so awful that she made up a song, and she called it, she called this place the Hotel Nosan (give). She says, [singing] " Di Hotel Nosan sennen mir ungekimen, yo, yo ungekimen" (we arrived at the Hotel Nosan; yeah, yeah, arrived). She made this up. And to this day I remember it.

LEVINE:

Could you sing, is that the whole song?

SHIRLEY:

Do you remember the rest of the words?

LILLIAN:

There may have been more, but this is all I can remember.

LEVINE:

What did it say?

SHIRLEY:

It says, go ahead, tell her.

LILLIAN:

It's Yiddish. It says, " Im Hotel Nosan ." Nosan means "give me," "give me." We came to this place, "Yo, yo, ungekimmen" "Yes, yes, we came to this place." Rose had a wonderful imagination. She was . . .

SHIRLEY:

She was really, she was a woman with an imagination, and she was inventive, and she should have been something other than what she did in her lifetime. She, her wish and her hope was to be an actress. But that was not what she was, and was never encouraged into it. Her parents certainly, her father discouraged her greatly, and it was, in those days it might have been a lot easier to get into the movies or the theater because the competition wasn't as great as it is now, and New York was the hub of this type of work. But she was always really, how shall I say, she was being made fun of.

LILLIAN:

Ridiculed.

SHIRLEY:

She was ridiculed because she wanted to be in the theater, and that's where she should have been.

LEVINE:

Can you remember any other instances of being cheated as immigrants?

SHIRLEY:

Yes.

LILLIAN:

Not really, because there was more cheating, perhaps the older people would have remembered, but I don't remember that. I do remember one thing, however. On the trip, a very long trip, to Rotterdam from where we started, many, many weeks, I think it must have been. And we slept in all the stations waiting for trains for hours, depots, and once in a while my mother and my aunt, too, she was traveling with us, my Aunt Esther, she with her children, my cousins, they would buy something for the children. And once they bought a, it must have been a coconut, a coconut cream pie, there was a lot of soft stuff in the middle. And they bought this pie for us, for the children, there were so many of us kayn aynora .(no evil eye = let no evil eye befall us). But David, not knowing that the pie was on the chair, he sat right down on that pie, and everybody was licking his behind. ( they laugh ) And that's true. David was one of those, shall I say, a temperamental artist? No, not quite. He was a very . . .

SHIRLEY:

He was a clown. He really was a comedian.

LILLIAN:

He was a clown, even in those days, but particularly later he was a clown. He was, he had such crazy ideas, novel ideas, which we went along with. Everything David said we did. And so this particular time it was one of those places where we had to wait for a train for many hours, and they, I was sleeping, and I got up to find out that that's what happened. I couldn't believe that we lost that pie in such, in such a terrible way. ( they laugh )

LEVINE:

Do you know how it was decided that your Aunt Esther and your cousins would leave at the same time you did?

SHIRLEY:

Well, yes. Because my Aunt Esther depended on my mother a great deal. She loved her dearly. She was her sister-in-law. They were sisters-in-law. But somehow, you know, in this country the connotation sister-in-law or mother-in-law has a very funny meaning, you know. Something isn't right, you know. "Your mother-in-law," you know, quotations. But they were sisters-in-law, but they were really very loving, and they loved each other, and they were like sisters. And my Aunt Esther depended a great deal on my mother, because my mother was, oh, I don't know.

LEVINE:

Spunky.

SHIRLEY:

She was able to do things. She had a lot of . . .

LILLIAN:

She was very aggressive, and independent.

SHIRLEY:

And she was an independent woman. She was able to do things. My Aunt Esther was not able to do anything. She couldn't accomplish too much. She wasn't, she was sort of a sickly woman. ( she laughs )

LEVINE:

Well, now, did her husband send money?

SHIRLEY:

Yes, he did, he did. He sent money at the same time, and they made arrangements to travel together. Because my, they loved each other and they wanted, and we all loved each other, and we wanted to travel together, and that's what we did. And my mother got all the papers for everybody. She got all the visas. She got all the accommodations. She . . . ( a telephone rings )

LEVINE:

Okay. We're stopping here for a telephone call. ( break in tape ) Okay. We're resuming again after a telephone call.

LILLIAN:

Yes. And I just, Shirley was talking about our trip with our cousins and our beloved Aunt Esther. Aunt Esther was a wonderful person. This is truly from the heart. She loved people. We loved her. She understood everything. And she was such a kind woman. She was a wonderful mother. Madeline, each time she talks about her mother to this day there are tears in her eyes. And she, and we really felt very close to her, as well as we did to the rest of the family. Now, talking about David, Nat wants me to tell this story. When we were very small, and David was very small himself, we had a death of a bird . . .

SHIRLEY:

Oh, God.

LILLIAN:

. . . in our court. A little bird died. And David said, "Let's make a funeral, and let's have a burial." He carried the bird somehow, in a box. And we all marched together behind him, and he dug a little hole someplace near his house, and we all cried about the bird, and we buried the bird, and we thought that it was a very honorable way of disposing of the body. One day David says, "You know, I wonder what happened to the bird in there." So we dug the bird up, and we were shocked to see the cavity filled with worms. And that's the last time we'll ever do that again.

SHIRLEY:

And I want to tell you what effect this thing had on me. That years and years later, when I was married and my husband and I went to an affair in his family, and they served, what's that chicken from . . .

LILLIAN:

With wild rice.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LEVINE:

Cornish hen?

SHIRLEY:

Cornish hen with wild rice. I cut open the little Cornish hen and I saw the wild rice, and I never could eat it because it reminded me of the worms in the cavity of that bird.

LILLIAN:

And strangely enough David, who was our cousin, he and we were doing things together, whereas I don't recall that he ever did this with his own sisters and brother, just with us. So we really miss David a great deal for many, many reasons.

LEVINE:

Okay, let's see. Ellis Island. How long did you have to stay there?

LILLIAN:

I reckon, I sound like a Westerner, ( Dr. Levine laughs ) I think that it was no less than twelve days due to all that reason, for my father being sick in the hospital, had still not been discharged, and then we had to get a bond, and it took a long time to get a bond. Finally there was this bond, and we were released. But the experience in Ellis Island, I think we had that on the first tape, was the most unpleasant. We bore it all. We had to stand and wait for a cot or some sort of sleeping arrangement, which were just the coiled springs, nothing else. There were no mattresses on the beds. And Shirley and I had to, we knew they would open the doors at a certain hour. We wanted to be first to get the beds, so we stood in front of that door and people piled up behind us. And before they, when they would open the doors finally there was so much pushing and so much shoving. And we finally, we ran, being small and children we were able to run fast, and we were able to get a couple of cots. She lay on one, I lay on the other, and the other, when the rest of the family came, my mother and the small children, we shared those two coiled springs as beds. And this went on for the length of time that we were there. So Ellis Island is not a pleasant place to look back on. However, it was a wonderful sight when we finally came to it and saw the Statue of Liberty, and we felt the journey was over, and we would finally land, have our feet on the ground. So Ellis Island, though not a pleasant experience, it is a life experience, and something that we had to live. And I don't know whether, Shirley, you want to say anything about Ellis Island?

SHIRLEY:

Well, nothing. I think you've covered it pretty well except, unless Janet wants us to repeat the story about Mama and that woman from, who, where they had the incident about the hair, the seat. We had no seat. We were in a big room in Ellis Island. There were a lot of people, all the people who had to be there in one big room. We didn't have a place where to sit. We sat on the floor, or there was a bench without a back. But there were some seats near the windows facing the ocean that were occupied by other people, and so we didn't have any. But one woman got up, and she must have gone to the bathroom. So my mother noticed that there's a seat near the window. She went over to sit down and rest her back a little bit for a while. When that woman came back she said to her, "Get out of that seat. That's my seat." She was a, it was a different language.

LILLIAN:

Italian.

SHIRLEY:

She was an Italian woman from Sicily. She was a Sicilian, I think. And she said to her, you know, to "Get out of the seat." My mother understood what she meant, but she said, "I'm sitting here now." Well, when my mother didn't get up quickly enough she pulled out a knife and was going to stab her unless she relinquished that seat. So that was one of the things that we had to live through. And I remember when I came, we came to Ellis Island. Before we left for America, my mother made me a very beautiful coat. I should come in looking like a somebody. She made me, it was like a military blue, double-breasted coat which some seamstress made up for me. And Lillian and I had dresses alike, red plaid dresses, and I had that dress and the coat to wear over it. Well, while we were there in that room I didn't have to wear a coat, so I must have left it lying somewhere. And, before I knew it, somebody had stolen it, and it just broke my heart. This brand-new coat that I was so proud of that my mother made, had made for me, was stolen. And so, of course, I don't remember too much about the food in Ellis Island. The only thing I remember is the first time I ate breakfast they served me cornflakes with hot milk. And the cornflakes melted into the milk and it was like brown mud, and I couldn't eat it. But otherwise I don't remember any of the food that we had there. Do you?

LILLIAN:

I remember the first night, that we had the hamburgers. And there were two dining rooms. One was for kosher, and one was not kosher, but being greenhorns we didn't know which was which and we went into the one that was non-kosher. And we were served hamburgers, not knowing that it wasn't kosher everybody was eating, but since I myself was not feeling well, I wasn't eating anything. And the man next to me on my left was really looking at that, longingly at my hamburger, which wasn't being eaten. I asked him whether he wanted a hamburger, and he said, "Yes." So I gave it to him. But later when I found out that this was not a kosher dining room I was so happy that I had not eaten an un-kosher hamburger. ( she laughs )

LEVINE:

How did you feel? Were you, what did you do during the days, all those long days.

LILLIAN:

Oh, that, those are the days that we did very little. First of all, we were not allowed out. We were, I think we were locked in, but they did have the very large doors that I can recall only one time they opened up those doors to the water. You could see the, it was like a loading platform, I think, because you could walk out on the loading platform but not any further. And we could get some air from there, but just the one day. I'm sure there was never another day, but what we did, nothing. The only time that we did do something was the day that I became eligible to go up to the playroom. They did have a playroom for children. And how I became eligible, I don't know but I did become eligible, and I went up there to play. They had a game room that had dolls, and they had the other toys with which to play, and the person who was there in charge gave me a little flannel dress. This little dress, it became my joy, my delight. I had never had a short dress. This was a dress way above my knees. And I loved it. Up till that point everything was below my knees and very long, because it had to be handed down to the next person, the next child. This little dress, I don't know what happened to it to this, of course it's many years since, but I wish that I had been able to keep it and hold onto it for memory, that I think that it must have been given away eventually, because when we moved to Henry Street I never had it any more. So my aunt, that's another thing. When we came to this country, there was a belief that everything we came with had to be thrown away, and everybody had to get milk of, not milk of magnesia, citrus magnesia, and I had to drink citrus magnesia. It was horrible. But that's what they thought needed to be done with people who came as immigrants. I don't know where that came from, but we had to do it. I remember drinking that milk, not milk, citrus magnesia. It is awful.

LEVINE:

It was the idea of some kind of . . .

SHIRLEY:

Cleansing us.

LILLIAN:

And clothes, too. They had to give everything away. They must, they gave away my other things, all my other things. I didn't have too much, but whatever we came with, I don't know what happened to it, so they must have given it away. And that little dress, they didn't know that that was an American dress or I would have been able to keep it. They thought I brought it probably from Poland, and they gave that away too, I guess. I can only guess, 'cause but I really don't know what happened. Nothing was left. So that's it. I mean, but Ellis Island, that's one good memory I have of Ellis Island, that playroom with this lady who was in charge. As I said on the first tape, I think she was from the Red Cross, although I'm not sure if they operated out of the Ellis Island at that time.

SHIRLEY:

It was from some social organization.

LEVINE:

HIAS.

SHIRLEY:

Maybe HIAS, maybe.

LILLIAN:

Some social, maybe HIAS.

SHIRLEY:

Social workers.

LILLIAN:

Maybe social workers. But that's the one good thing that I remember about Ellis Island, having to go up there for the afternoon and play. Just pleasant then. But that's all. The other things that stand out very much in my mind are those, waiting for those cots, for those . . .

SHIRLEY:

We really didn't have much to do on Ellis Island. It was a very boring time. We just sat around and sat around. There was nothing. They didn't, I don't know, they didn't do very much for the people who were sitting there all day long.

LILLIAN:

Well, the thing is, I don't think people spent as much time as we did. They came and they went, they came and they went. That's probably . . .

SHIRLEY:

They didn't stay.

LILLIAN:

That's the reason why they didn't have much for anything, for anyone to do. They didn't realize that there were four children there for twelve days, and we had nothing to do there. They should have certainly had a teacher or somebody. But that was 1921, and I guess things were different in those days.

LEVINE:

Can you say any more about the difference in clothing from what you were used to in Poland, and then when you got to the United States and what you wore?

LILLIAN:

I can remember some things. In Europe we had very little clothing. When it was very cold, we had no coats. We used to call, what we wore, we used to call it a derale [ph]. It was sort of a balbriggam shawl. It was supposed to be warm, but how warm can it be when it's very cold weather.

SHIRLEY:

It was like a woolen stole. That's what it really was.

LILLIAN:

That's all we had. And we also had some kind of very warm shoes, the volikas ("woolies"}.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

I didn't have them. Some people had them.

SHIRLEY:

Did I have them?

LILLIAN:

David had them.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah, I think I had them.

LILLIAN:

David had all kinds of sores on his feet when we came to the, when we were traveling, from the cold, frostbitten. It was very cold where we were. It was on Russia, very close to the Russian border. It was very cold where we were. But however, even with the little derale [ph], which we wore, I went to school that way, the day that I described on the first tape, where I went to school and there was such high snow that, and it was so very cold, but I wouldn't miss school. When we got there, when I got there the school was not open, it was closed, and I had to come back the very, it was quite a trip to go to school. It wasn't around the corner. It was a long distance. For me it seemed like a long distance, and I came back and my hands were so frostbitten I remember crying and feeling so much pain because I was so cold, and my hands were all frostbitten from the pain, how to get this way. I was crying. I do remember the clothing, the clothing that I had there, as I said before, if I had a dress it was down to my ankles maybe. When I came here and they gave me that little dress, I loved it so. So the clothing was different. Here, we didn't even have sweaters. We had no coats, no sweaters, no nothing. I don't know if other children had it, but we didn't. And, I don't know.

SHIRLEY:

I remember our father sent me a sweater. It must have been from Morris' factory. His cousin, Morris Bloom, had a knitting factory. He made all kinds of knitted things. Later on in life, after I was married and had a child, I remember going to his factory, and he gave me some suits, you know, knitted suits, like a two-piece dress, or whatever. But I remember my father sent me a blue sweater, which I wore in the winter. It was a little thin sweater. It was something that I would wear here like the top over my shoulders, but I wore it during the wintertime for warmth going to school. I don't remember any clothing that we had. I just don't remember.

LEVINE:

Do you remember shoes?

LILLIAN:

I was going want to say about the shoes. In the summertime, we wore no shoes. Barefoot. Everything was barefoot, and I don't remember having shoes. I think once or twice my mother did get us shoes for Passover.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

I do recall that.

SHIRLEY:

With the high laces.

LILLIAN:

With the buttons.

SHIRLEY:

With the buttons and high laces.

LILLIAN:

Yeah, laces and buttons and whatever it was. It was, they were very pretty.

SHIRLEY:

Beautiful. They were very big. And she had them made. Those shoes were custom made for both of us. The two older children got. And if the shoes got small later on, someone, another child had them. So we had those high shoes, up to about, oh, way, mid-ankle at least, mid-calf at least. And they were with buttons, and then laces, all the way up. They were beautiful.

LILLIAN:

Yeah, I loved them. However, those, Shirley said they were made to order. They had to be. There was nothing sold that was ready-made. Dresses, shoes . . .

SHIRLEY:

Everything had to be made.

LILLIAN:

To order.

SHIRLEY:

Linens had to be made, everything.

LILLIAN:

To order. Everything. There were no stores that sold these things like they do in this country, You have all kinds of competition.

SHIRLEY:

And you made it yourself mostly.

LILLIAN:

Oh, Nat wants to, I told him the story, oh, that's very nice.

LILLIAN'S HUSBAND:

That's because you traveled to another town.

LILLIAN:

No, this was not, it was in the same town. It's a story about we went to . . .

LILLIAN'S HUSBAND:

When you had shoes.

LILLIAN:

Right, this was after that. This was right before we came to this country, where we had those lovely little dresses that were made by Feyga , you remember.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

And there was a wedding, Leya got married.

SHIRLEY:

My Aunt Esther's sister, younger sister, got married. So, of course, whoever lived in, all the family was invited, everybody, all the relatives were invited.

LILLIAN:

So my mother was invited to take two children, and we went. I was, I guess you didn't have to get an invitation when someone in the family got married. You just assumed that you would be there. And my mother took Shirley and me. We had the clothes for going to America, so she must have felt very good about that. And when the klezmer , (musicians) now, we have klezmer now, in this country, Klesmer music.

SHIRLEY:

Klezmer music? You must have heard of that, yeah.

LILLIAN:

They had klezmer at that wedding, playing music. And if you wanted to dance, you had to pay. So my mother paid for Shirley and me to dance. We had learned a very beautiful dance from my Aunt Malke , several beautiful dances. And my mother always wanted to show us off, I guess. And we went to this wedding and we did this dance solo, so that's . . .

SHIRLEY:

The two of us, a patch (clap) dance we did.

LILLIAN:

Whatever it was.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

Yeah.

LEVINE:

Patch ?

SHIRLEY:

Patch Tanz (dance), the one-two.

LILLIAN:

Okay. So that's what the story that Nat wanted us to tell. I guess he enjoyed that one.

LEVINE:

Okay. END OF SIDE A, TAPE THREE BEGINNING OF SIDE TWO, TAPE THREE

LEVINE:

. . . being in America that struck you as different when you first arrived? I know it was tumultuous time, but that were different, and that you had not been used to. Any things that struck you about this country?

SHIRLEY:

Well, when we came and we finally were taken out of Ellis Island and we explained to you how we got out, that a bond had to be put up. No one in the family had enough money to put up for the bond, so my uncle arranged with his boss, who was very kind and very understanding, and took a chance on us, and he put up the bond so that we would not be a public charge, and so we were able to come out. And as we explained to you before the family was broken up and went to different places to live. The most amazing thing to me was first of all what the streets looked like, and we were taking, we were taken into an elevated train. I think it was the, uh . . .

LILLIAN:

Third Avenue.

SHIRLEY:

Third Avenue El, and we never saw anything like it, and we got deathly sick on it because, from the motion and the whole thing. She got sick, and I got sick. We had to get out on the station, because otherwise we would just throw up, you know, in the train. We couldn't take it. But really, actually, when we got here, we were in such a dither. We were so mixed up. We didn't know where we were. Everything was different. There wasn't anything that we were accustomed to at all. Everything was so big, and the streets, and the trolleys and the elevated train. Everything was different to us. We could not possibly imagine anything like that.

LILLIAN:

I remember being struck very hard by the amount of food that I saw on the tables wherever we were. I remember even going to your, where you were staying at the Bloom's, and she, Aunt Bertha put out, Cousin Bertha put out so much food. I had never seen so much food. Cheeses and rolls and bagels and whatnot. I said, "My goodness, this is very wonderful food. Rich people must live here." And also about the lights, so much light in the streets. I was very impressed with the lights. I remember going that one time to Aunt Esther's house, when Mama had left me with Esther. Where were we? She left me with Esther in Uncle Joe's house. She took Sylvia. Shirley was already at the Bloom's. And I got, anyhow, she went to visit my uncle and my aunt, Uncle Shmulke and Aunt Esther, to the Lower East Side while we were still staying in the Bronx. And so I said to Esther, "Come on. I think I know how to get there. Mama went, but she didn't take us, but I think we'll go anyway." And I took my sister Esther, who was younger than I, and I said, "We'll go see what's over there." She said, "Okay." So we, I took her. But at that time you had to have a ticket to go into the elevated. You had to have money to pay, buy the ticket, and go through. Children, I think, were free, but you had to have an adult and there were no adults. My mother had gone. So I waited for some adults to come along. And I said, when I saw some adults going I said, "This is the time. Let's go." And we went right through. And I saw the man standing at the other side of the turnstile, and he was smiling. I wonder if he knew what was going on. He was smiling. And when I got off that, at Canal Street, I got off that train, that elevated, I was impressed with the lights. There were so many lights. It was daytime, but lots of lights were still on. And when we must have gone home there was, I was very impressed with the lights. The lights struck me as being so different. And the streets, of course, so crowded. We hadn't seen so many people. Where we lived in Ostrow, there were just a few people around most of the time. But here there were, the streets were teeming with children and adults, and it was, to me that was a lot of difference. The lights, the streets, and especially the food. The food was very impressive. Aunt, by Bertha, very impressive. She had lots of food.

SHIRLEY:

Well, they were well-to-do people, really. You know, he was a manufacturer.

LILLIAN:

I didn't see that kind of food even at Becky's.

SHIRLEY:

I stayed with them, and I remember one time he took me and his daughter, May, to the Capital Theater, and that really, I was like mesmerized when I got in there. The beauty of the place, it was like a palace. I know that you probably were never in there, but if you, would you, had you ever been in Radio City? Well, this was more beautiful. The Capital Theater was much more beautiful. It was very elegant and very, with the portiers of velvet and lights and chandeliers and mirrors. I think I walked into one of the mirrors because I didn't, he took me to, he took the two of us on a Sunday afternoon to the Capital, the movie, and whatever else. I don't remember what the movie was about. I'm sure that I didn't understand it, because it was in English, and, but he took, in his car, in his automobile, he took us downtown in the Bronx to the Capital Theater on 51st Street. It was very beautiful, very impressive.

LILLIAN:

But they were rich, because I can only gauge that by the amount of food that was on the table. They had a lot of food, and wonderful food, delicious.

LEVINE:

Was it your uncle's, your Aunt Esther's husband, who's boss put up the bond?

SHIRLEY:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Right. This man that I lived with was my father's cousin. ( she clears her throat ) This Morris and Bertha Bloom. They had two children. They had a daughter, May, and a young child, Teddy. They were young people.

LEVINE:

Do you remember any instances about learning English? Any particular experiences in the process of learning English?

SHIRLEY:

I don't remember the process of learning, but all of a sudden I was able to speak. And I didn't seem to have any problem with it at all. In fact, it came so quickly and so suddenly that the principle of P.S. 1, she wanted to speak to me and see me. What happened? And she couldn't believe that I was an immigrant of such a short time.

LEVINE:

How long, just roughly, do you have any idea how long it was before you . . .

SHIRLEY:

It might have been maybe before I graduated. I was two years in that school, P.S. 1, and then I graduated. So it may have been maybe close to my graduation. I don't remember. But she was so impressed and so, she couldn't imagine how quickly I learned to speak. She said, she told me, I think her name was Miss . . .

LILLIAN:

Wilson.

SHIRLEY:

Wilson. And she said, "I can't believe that you're here in this country so short a time." And that's when, that Miss Williams, she wanted to talk to Miss Williams, why I was getting bad marks in her class, but that Miss Williams, she was a real anti-Semite. She, they were . . .

LILLIAN:

A witch!

SHIRLEY:

She was a real witch. First of all, she was a woman with gray hair, tall and heavy, and she never should have been a teacher because it was a neighborhood, a very mixed neighborhood that we lived in. P.S. 1 was in a neighborhood that there were Italians, Jewish, Greeks, Chinese, all nationalities lived in that neighborhood. In the building that we lived, our next door neighbor was Chinese. The ones across the hall were Greeks. And we had Jewish people. In the school, my class at that time had seven Jewish girls and the rest of them were of mixed background, mostly Italian.

LEVINE:

This is on Henry Street?

SHIRLEY:

On Henry Street, 37 Henry Street. And I was really very bright, and I knew my work. I had caught onto the arithmetic, and I was an outstanding student in every subject, really. And this teacher, Miss Williams, called on me one time. And I knew she didn't like me, so whenever she called on me I got very nervous. And she asked me to describe the Hudson River, you know, the boundaries and how it flowed, east or west or whatever. Well, I got up, and I started, I got very nervous, and I started to describe the Mississippi River instead. So she said to me, "Sit down, Liberman. I wish you were there."

LILLIAN:

You see, that's the difference be . . .

SHIRLEY:

Those are the things we had to live through.

LILLIAN:

And that's the difference between my teachers, whom I remember very, with a great deal of affection. That first one, who was called Miss Reese, and the second one, who was called Mrs. Dunkel. And she was a doll. This was on the 3-B. ( an airplane can be heard flying overhead ) I was already six months in this country when I had Mrs. Dunkel. She was a wonderful, wonderful teacher, and I think everybody felt this way about her. She was a good woman, a wonderful woman, and loving to all the children. In our class, there were just four Jewish girls and the rest, about twenty-eight, were of a different origin or ethnic group, and there are good teachers. I just don't want Shirley to give the impression that all of them were so bad.

SHIRLEY:

I was in that same school. I had Miss Adler, who was wonderful.

LILLIAN:

That's true.

SHIRLEY:

And other teachers who were great. But this woman never should have been a teacher because she certainly didn't know how to deal with children, especially a foreigner, an immigrant, who was doing so well, and the principal was so proud of me, and she treated me this way. It was very painful to me.

LILLIAN:

Learning English for me was probably different. First of all, when I was at Miss Reese's class, I was told to go down to the yard, and there was another teacher there. And they had cards that they, she held up cards. I don't know what it said on the cards, but I was supposed to learn from that I think. I don't know. And I was, I went to that, to that area in the school, at P.S. 40, maybe for a couple of weeks, but I don't know what it was supposed to be for. But we learned as time went by, reading and, it wasn't, it didn't seem to be as hard as it is for older people. I think children adapt much quicker, learn much faster, and it was not hard at all. I think when we moved to Henry Street, by that time they were here three months, I was able to speak pretty well, yes. And I think you were, too.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LEVINE:

Now, in your school, then, were a lot of the children immigrant children?

SHIRLEY:

No.

LILLIAN:

No.

SHIRLEY:

None.

LEVINE:

They were of different ethnicities, but they were, had been born here.

SHIRLEY:

Right. It was a mixed neighborhood, but everybody got along fine. Everybody was lovely. We had, we had no problems with other religions. None at all. I remember the girls in my class, they were a lot older than I was. They were, they were girls who were young women, but they weren't, they were very troublesome to their teachers. Especially one I remember was very bad, and she gave the teacher a lot of trouble. She was unruly. So the teacher made her president of the class, and after that she was fine, and she graduated. They finally got rid of her. ( they all laugh )

LILLIAN:

No, the teachers were very nice at P.S. 1. It's the oldest school in the city.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

And . . .

SHIRLEY:

I don't know if it's still in existence.

LILLIAN:

I think it still is.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah?

LILLIAN:

It still is, right. They may have made some changes, but, uh . . .

SHIRLEY:

It's on Henry Street.

LILLIAN:

We lived on Henry Street, and for my first Christmas, by that time we were here nine months. No, even more, close to a year, but I was still with Mrs. Dunkel. And I remember that the children, they were going to have a Christmas tree, and I had not known what that was, and the children brought in these toys for the Christmas tree that broke very easily.

SHIRLEY:

No, the decorations.

LILLIAN:

What do they call those?

LEVINE:

The ornaments?

LILLIAN:

The Ornaments. And I was intrigued by that, and fascinated by it. "What are those things?" I never saw them before. And eventually I must have understood that this was for the Christmas tree. And Mrs. Dunkel gave us presents for Christmas. Each child got a table in a little box. ( an airplane flies overhead ) It was a table and chairs, four chairs, wooden chairs, and a wooden table, in a little box. They all fitted under. And it was such a nice thing for her to have done. And she received gifts too, I guess, but I didn't bring any. I didn't know about that. So that was it.

LEVINE:

Okay. So how about socializing. Like, your parents. Did they join clubs, social clubs, or how, did they simply, uh, like your mother, was she simply with the other family, the cousins and your aunt and all that, or were there like social clubs that the adults belonged to?

LILLIAN:

Well, there was a club at the Madison House. It was called a Mother's Club, and it was run by a Mrs. Dorf, something like that. I don't think that was Dorf, but anyhow, that was the only club that my mother belonged to. The socializing was done with the family. My Uncle Schmulke and his wife Esther, and that was all the socializing that other, and then there were some other people who had come to this country from Europe and they, too, had some sort of getting together occasionally, like on a Saturday night or a Sunday afternoon, but mostly it was just the two families.

SHIRLEY:

But once in a while they used to have, like, a big banquet. Not a banquet, a ball, some sort of a ball. All the people that came from our town used to organize like a dance, you know. So my mother would go and would take me and her, the two older children. I don't know what she did with the younger ones.

LEVINE:

Would there be a lot of people from Ostrow there?

SHIRLEY:

Yes, there were a lot of people there from Ostrow that I didn't know.

LILLIAN:

We were grown by then.

SHIRLEY:

We were more grown.

LILLIAN:

Yeah.

SHIRLEY:

But I didn't know them. It was my mother who knew all these landslayt (countrymen), you know, and she used to take us. But most of her social life was with the family. It was, I don't remember, some landslay t used to come . . .

LILLIAN:

Well, Yankel Green used to come.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah, and his wife.

LILLIAN:

Yes. And they would come mostly to Aunt Esther's house.

SHIRLEY:

Yeah.

LILLIAN:

And that's, that was a social activity. But also she used to go to the Jewish theater.

SHIRLEY:

Right.

LILLIAN:

She loved the Jewish theater.

SHIRLEY:

Right. I went with her.

LILLIAN:

And we went, I went to the Jewish theater a few times myself. And my mother used to tell us about Jenny Goldstein, who was an actress then, and some of the . . .

SHIRLEY:

Real tear jerkers.

LILLIAN:

Yes.

SHIRLEY:

Of that time.

LILLIAN:

Right.

LEVINE:

Would they be about, about Europe? Would they be about the old country or . . .

SHIRLEY:

No. They were dramatic stories, you know. But real tear jerkers, really, when you had to cry. Otherwise you didn't enjoy the show.

LILLIAN:

Yeah, I think so. I think you really had a good time if you were able to have a drama like that to make you feel very bad. ( they laugh )

LEVINE:

Now, how did your mother feel about coming here?

SHIRLEY:

Well, she was, her husband sent for her, so she was ready to go. He had been away for seven years, during the time of the war. And until things got better, we had no communication with him during the war, no mail, nothing. So really he was far removed from her, too. Seven years is a long time for separation. And so when she came, she was ready to go, and she made all the arrangements to go and we got here, but I think, first of all, my mother was thirty-four when we came to this country, wasn't she? She already had four children. And my father probably was the same age, and he was here alone for seven years, a young man, so if he had some affairs here, I don't blame him. He had to have some sort of release.

LILLIAN:

But I do blame him for his lack of responsibility when . . .

SHIRLEY:

Right, this I do. I mean, he knew, he sent for a family, he should have been ready to accept us and make a home for us. What he did before we came, I don't want to know, and I forgive him. But he should have made a home for us when we came.

LILLIAN:

He wasn't nice at all. He was very un-nice. I recall the trip to the hospital the first time when he was still there, and where my mother was staying with my father's cousin. Her name was also Bloom, but B-L-U-M. It was a different Bloom. And they took my mother and me and perhaps you, I think you were there, too, to visit my father, who was still in the hospital. And this was the first time that my father saw us after these many years of separation, and I can still remember when we, he walked toward us, we were walking toward him, he was already ambulatory and what he said, "I'll be right back." He did not embrace my mother, he did not embrace me, and he surely did not embrace you, because he walked right out. And I thought, "This is . . ." Later, of course, at that time I didn't really remember him, I didn't know who he was, he was so, I didn't really cared. But later, when you think about it, in retrospect, my God, how do you do such a thing? You haven't seen your wife for so long, and she went through so much during the war. You hadn't seen your children for so long. What kind of a father, and what kind of a husband are you? This is how I thought later, and I think I still feel this way.

LEVINE:

Well, how about your mother? After it was clear that she wasn't going to be reunited with your father, was she happy in this country? Did she adapt, adjust? Did she . . .

SHIRLEY:

Well, she made it the best of a very terrible situation. We all tried to help. My uncles tried to patch things up, but they were not doing it right, doing it properly. They, uh . . .

LILLIAN:

They were not diplomatic.

SHIRLEY:

They didn't know . . .

LILLIAN:

They're not psychologists, they're not psychiatrists.

SHIRLEY:

They didn't know how to behave in such a, they sent me, as the oldest child, to talk to my father to come to be, to join the family. I could not speak to him. First of all, I didn't remember him. I was a young child when he left. I was only thirteen when I came. And I could not, every time I tried to talk I got hysterical. They put me through this terrible ordeal all the time that it just, I don't know, it was such a traumatic thing for me, to ask me to talk to my father, he should come back to us, I could not speak to him. And, of course, my mother also felt terrible. She didn't know what to do. What is she going to do? Here she is in a strange country with four children. It's a terrible time. She wasn't prepared to make a living or anything.

LEVINE:

Did she work at some point, your mother?

SHIRLEY:

She couldn't work. We were her, she had four children. Like I explained to you, she took home work, so we all worked on it. Children, everybody.

LILLIAN:

She took home lots of things from factories that were given out to be done at home. It paid much less than it probably, they paid very little to the people who were in the factories, but you can imagine how much they paid the people who were out of the factories.

SHIRLEY:

This was the time of the sweatshops.

LILLIAN:

Right. And Shirley was talking about my father, and how she had to plead with him to come back to us and make a home for us, and I remember that he was judged to give, to offer, to support us. The amount, I subsequently read in the decree, was six dollars a week, a month, I think . . .

SHIRLEY:

A week.

LILLIAN:

For a child, per child. And I don't think it was, it was not a week. In those days six dollars a week would have been a lot of money, twenty-four dollars a week. I don't know. Perhaps it was. But, anyhow, he was negligent about sending it. Maybe he didn't even know how to send it. Maybe he didn't even have a checking account at that time. Or maybe, whatever.

SHIRLEY:

I'm sure he didn't have a checking account. Where was he going to get money to put in a checking account?

LILLIAN:

Right. Well, he was making a living. But . . .

SHIRLEY:

He didn't know from (?).

LILLIAN:

So my mother chose me to go collect the, whatever he can offer, and he lived as a boarder in an apartment where he had just one bedroom, I presume. And there was a woman there who was the owner of the apartment, the lessee, I guess. Anyhow, I would go and have to wait for him. I sometimes stayed outside, and if the weather was bad, the woman who lived in the apartment, whose landlady she was to him, would tell me, invite me to come in and sit and wait for him inside the house, and I did that on occasion. When he would finally arrive, after me sitting there for so long, he would take the money out of his pocket, hand it to me without a word, and I would, couldn't wait to leave, and that's what, this is how, you asked where my mother worked. We used to get some money from him, and my mother maybe got some help from her brothers. Joe would come over with some food, occasionally. He had a delicatessen store, and he would bring some canned foods, and whatever my father gave me is the way we were able to manage. It was not the best way, but that was the way it was. And my impression of that time was simply awful. My father was not a father as a human being should have been. ( she clears her throat )

LEVINE:

Was your mother's spirit, I mean, your mother sounded so spunky in the ways that she managed in Poland. Did she, did that carry over to the United States, or do you think because of the language barrier and all that had happened that it was, that she changed somehow?

SHIRLEY:

No, she didn't. She tried in every which way, like I told you.

LILLIAN:

But how about the candy store?

SHIRLEY:

Yes. After we lived on the East Side . . .

LILLIAN:

We were living on Henry Street when she got, they got in touch with Gussie, and they both went into business and . . .

SHIRLEY:

We had a candy store.

LILLIAN:

They were in the Bronx again, on Brook Avenue.

SHIRLEY:

Right.

LILLIAN:

Now I think it's probably a very depressed neighborhood, but in those days it was not. And they had this candy store, and that's how she tried. It didn't work very well. The candy store was not a good, it was a flop. It didn't make any money. So we came back to, that when we came back to the Lower East Side at Madison Street, at 212 Madison Street next door to my aunt and uncle. Then she worked at the Madison House. She used to, she used to, at the Madison House there were things that could be done. They served lunches at times. My mother helped out with that. And they served box lunches when we would go on picnics or outings and she would help do that. So she made a few dollars that way. Again, there was homework. We took the work into the house and we all helped. There were ties that we used to work on. There were even pants.

SHIRLEY:

Belts we made.

LILLIAN:

Oh, all kinds of things. So this was the way it was. And, of course, by, as we grew older we went to work. I went to work. We made six dollars, part-time, when I was going to school. After school I made six dollars a week. I worked for Miss Kerr. She was an accountant. That was on Broadway. And I contributed the six dollars. I walked from the, all the way from Broadway to 212 Madison Street. I walked to save the nickel carfare. That's what it was. Because we needed the nickel, and that's what I did. And in the summertime I worked in a factory where they made greeting cards. ( an airplane can be heard flying overhead )

LEVINE:

And how old would you have been then?

LILLIAN:

I must have been about fourteen by that time.

SHIRLEY:

Well, I worked part-time when I went to high school. I made two dollars a week, from eight to twelve. Then I'd run home, quickly had my lunch, and I had a late pass for school so I could come and, let's say about a quarter to one they allowed me to come in. I made two dollars a week filling tea bags. And, of course, summers I always worked. And then when I was sixteen I had a full time job from nine to five.

LEVINE:

Well, before we close, because we're practically at the end of this tape, maybe each of you could say what effect all of what we've been talking about had on you for the rest of your life, once you married and were adults, that your early life, what, how do you think that changed you, or what impression on you do you think your early life in Poland and also in the United States had on you later?

LILLIAN:

Well, naturally our experiences early in our life had a great effect on us. But I don't think it harmed us, because we grew to love and to be loved, and I had a lot of experience at the Madison House with young people of my age, boys, girls, we learned to dance, and we forgot the trials and tribulations of the earlier years because it was fun. I mean, I enjoyed it very much. We had so many things to do at the Madison House. We used to go on outings in the summertime and in the spring we'd have races, and Madeline and I won the three-legged race and we got medals, and life was wonderful in those days. We lived on the Lower East Side without a bathroom, without a toilet, and without all of those things, but it didn't matter. And again, I say this. My father, I don't think that it made much difference at all in our lives, simply because we did not know any better. We had no experience with a father, so we did not miss that, and it did not affect our lives as far as our husbands were concerned or our sex life was concerned. We were able to function very well as human beings. And, as I said before, we learned to be in love, we learned to love and be loved, and it was really not bad at all.

SHIRLEY:

All right. Okay. I'll . . .

LEVINE:

Very short.

SHIRLEY:

Okay. I'll make it very short. The fact that we didn't have a father all our lives made no difference in our lives. We didn't miss him. My mother and our family gave us enough love to last us a lifetime. We had a loving family. We had lots of love all around us, so it didn't really injure us at all that our father was so mean to us. We didn't need him.

LEVINE:

Okay. Well, we're going to close here. I want to thank you so much. This is Janet Levine. I've been speaking with Shirley Rothman and Lillian Levine, and I'm signing off. It's over, just two full tapes.

LILLIAN:

Ready.

SHIRLEY:

The interview.

LILLIAN:

I just want to say, Janet, it was such a pleasure to meet you and it was so wonderful to have you and you went out of your way, and you spent so much time. We appreciate it. You were wonderful with us at Ellis Island. You are lovely here, and we really, really got to know and like you very much.

LEVINE:

Thank you, thank you.