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The Orthodox population of Kuty consisted of three groups: there were the Chassidim, the Mitnagdim and those who were neither.

The word Chassid didn't have the same meaning then as it does here today. In Kuty, a Chassid was a follower of a Wunder Rebbe (Wonder Rabbi) who belonged to one of the so-called dynasties. And here the word dynasty is not an exaggeration. Like royalty, the again Rabbi chose his successor. It was usually one of his sons, and if he had no male heirs, then it was his son-in-law. In rare cases, it could be a more distant relative.

The Rabbi's followers were very devoted to him and consulted him in family or business matters. For important holidays (especially for “The Days of Awe”) they went or even travelled to the Rabbi's court (that is what it was called). There, they were fed, housed (if need be) and entertained by famous cantors, religious speakers and other celebrities. On the days following the holiday, every Chassid was received by the Rabbi who then listened to his problem and gave advice. One complained about his deteriorating business, or his problems with his business partner; another had problems with his wife or with his children; still another would have liked his wife to bear him

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a son (sometimes after already having several daughters). After listening to peoples' problems, analysing them and pondering over the advice to give, the Rabbi eventually acquired a lot of experience and almost served more as a psychologist than as a Rabbi.

It was aid that during the High Holidays, around 4,000 chassidim were guests of the Rabbi's court in Wiznitz. The other two Chassidic Rabbis in eastern Galicia were Kosow (10km from Kuty) and in Czortkow (much further away).

Another group of Jews were the Mitnagdim, the opponents. These Jews, also religious, were as their name suggests, opponents of the Chassidic establishment. For them, the only recognized Rabbi was the one who was the religious head of their own community. He supervised Kashruth, married people, settled disputes through arbitration, delivered speeches on Saturdays and on holidays, etc. The Chassidic Rabbis were considered by these Jews as kinds of “gurus” to the Chassidim only and thus, not deserving of more respect than their own Rabbis.

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The others (Neither Chassidim nor Mitnagdim)

The third group of religious Jews were not neutral in the fight between Chassidim and the Mitnagdim. They were just less vociferous in their opposition than the Mitnagdim.

Next to the religious groups were the Zionist organizations. The oldest Zionist organization was the General Zionist Organization (stam Zionists) which was founded before WWI and which was led, in my time, by Doctor Menashe Mandel, a well-known lawyer. He was also a famous speaker, a Hebraist and a Talmudist and also a political debater.

The General Zionist Organization was founded by pioneers of the Haskala (Enlightenment), a movement whose motto was: “Be a Jew at home and a human being (mensch) in the street”. (Yehay Yehudi b'ahalecha v'adam b'tzeitecha). The Haskala promoted the idea that one can go to the synagogue dressed even in European clothes and not only in a shtreimel and a kaftan. That one can learn Talmud and Tanach not only in a Cheder but also in a modern school. That one can also be allowed to study science and the humanities, subjects from the general European school curriculum that were generally frowned on by most Jews.

After WWI, other Zionist organizations were created, mostly left-wing ones. There was the

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Gordonia, the Poale Zion and others which later merged into the Ichud (The United Zionist-Socialist Organization). At the beginning of the 1930's, the Zionist Revisionist Organization was created. The leader of the World Revisionist Organization was Vladimir Jabotinsky. In Kuty, it was known as the Revisionist Youth Organization or Betar (a Hebrew acronym for Brit Josef Trumpeldor).

Trumpeldor, like Jabotinsky, was a Russian Jew. An officer in the Russian army during the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, he served on the front where he lost his right arm. After the pogroms in Russia, which followed that war, he decided to emigrate to Palestine. In 1919, the Arabs rioted and attacked several settlements of the Chaloutzim (pioneers). One day, the settlement of Tel-Chai, where Trumpeldor lived, was attacked and overrun. Trumpeldor directed the defence. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, he fell from the frying pan into the fire. In Russia he lost an arm, here he lost his life.

The Revisionists' motto was “Shtay Gdot la-Yardayn, zu Shelanu, zu gam kayn”, which means: There are two banks to the Jordan, one is ours and the other also. In other words, they claimed both Cis-Jordan and Trans-Jordan for the Jews. Their political heirs today are the members of the Likud party (a merger of right-wing parties).

All the Zionist organizations in Kuty had libraries where their members could borrow books in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish and German.

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Charitable Organizations

In Kuty there was a kind of People's Bank, run by a committee which lent money to small merchants, craftsmen and to middle-class families, interest free or at a very low rate.

Another charitable institution was the Bikur Cholim (Visit of the Sick). This was a form of health insurance for the poor. Collection drives had to be organized because Bikur Cholim depended totally on donations for its existence. I knew this organization well because my father was its President and Treasurer for several years. When a poor sick person asked for help, my father gave him a recommendation to a doctor who had signed a contract with the Bikur Cholim. The patient didn't pay the doctor and the charity received a bill for his services.

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As I said before, starting in 1919, I passed through a cheder kindergarten and then on to a higher grade cheder where I learned Chumash and Tanach. The teacher's name was Isaac Bergreen and his nickname was Itzikl Chudoly (skinny in Ukrainian). Many children of my generation passed through this school. He was the most famous and the best-liked of the pre-Talmud teachers. The cheder, part of the teacher's house, was a kind of junk room without the junk. It was a rectangular shape. In the middle there was a long table with long benches on both sides and a chair at the head. In the summer it was hot and in winter cold, so cold that sometimes we had to put on our coats while we studied. The only heat in the room was the heat coming through the open door from the kitchen. We were 15-18 pupils.

At the age of 9, I finished my primary cheder education. My parents hired a teacher, Meir der Roiter (Meir the Red). I did not know his real family name. He taught Talmud and other religious works. He had no cheder, he was a private tutor. He came to our house for an hour or more a few times a week. The exact number of visits depended on my workload at the Polish school.

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Studying with Mechele Horner

When I reached the age of 11 or 12, I finally got my best teacher, Mechele Horner, who completed my Hebrew and Talmudic education and prepared me for my Bar-Mitzvah. He was already a teacher when my father was young. He had come to Kuty from the Galician town of Bohorodczany, recruited by the wealthy families in town, because there was no cheder teacher of his calibre in town.

In my time, he was retired and no longer had a cheder. He didn't give private lessons either. However, my father went to see him and begged him to tutor me. He resisted a bit but finally he accepted my father's request. My father remembered the time when some of his colleagues were enrolled in Mechele Horner's cheder, but he couldn't go because my grandmother couldn't afford to send him there. He had little formal education but never missed an opportunity to educate himself, whether in German, in Hebrew or later in Polish.

I went to Mechele Horner's house two or three times a week until I left for college in Kolomyja at the age of fifteen. Mechele Horner was then in his late seventies and almost blind. When I started to read a chapter from the Prophets or a treatise from the Talmud, he would say to me, with his eyes closed: “Read it once more, you must have made a mistake”. And he was always right. I had always made a mistake. I had the impression, or rather the certitude that he knew all these works by heart. He was also well versed in post-

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Talmudic commentaries, legal and philosophical works based on the Torah and the Talmud, like the Rambam (Maimonides) or Ibn Ezra. He was not a stranger to world literature and to other writings shunned by many Talmudists. And last but not least, he was a Hebraist, knew modern Hebrew and was an accomplished Hebrew grammarian. He also wrote some Hebrew poetry on biblical themes and after I finished studying the first treatise of the Talmud, he wrote a poem for me. The poem was in the traditional format of the old Hebrew poetry where the first letter of each line spelled out a phrase or a name, in this case my own name, Abraham Klein.

Besides the usual lessons for my approaching Bar-Mitzvah, he also taught me to read the Torah and the lesser scrolls for Purim, Simchat Torah and Tisha B'av. The readings of these latter scrolls are different from the Shabbat reading (joyous for Purim and Simchat Torah and sad for Tisha B'av). After my Bar-Mitzvah, I put my training to doo use, reading the Torah at home during Simchat Torah and some years reading the scroll of Esther at home during Purim for my mother and some of her friends.

He taught me something which none of my colleagues knew; how to find out which of the years in the Jewish calendar are leap years (i.e., years of thirteen months). Our calendar is a lunar calendar and thus is based on the various periodic cycles of the moon. One of these cycles lasts 19 years. In this cycle the same years are always designated as the leap years: these are years 3,6,8,11,14 and 19. So the rule I learned was to take the year on the Jewish calendar, divide it by 19 and then check the remainder. If

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the remainder is a 3,6,8,11,14 or zero (there is no remainder of 19), then the year is a leap year. For example; now we are in 5763n divided by 19, the remainder is 6. Conclusion: the year 5763 is a leap year. And we can see that the next leap year will be in 5765 (when the remainder will be 8).

If I have spent more time here writing about Mechele Horner it is for this reason: All my knowledge of the Jewish religious and literary treasures comes from him. When I meet people of my generation, ordinary Jews not specialists such as teachers or Rabbis, be they Galicianers or Litwaks (I can't talk about Sephardim because I don't know their system of education), and I compare what I have learned to their learning, I am always amazed to see that I have been taught much more than them. The difference is even greater if I compare myself to Jewish intellectuals or other Jewish professionals, most of whom had little time or interest in Jewish studies. And that difference in what I was taught was due to my great teacher.

Mechele Horner had two daughters. One married late in life and had no children, the other was handicapped and never married. And so, he had no heirs. Even for those Polish Jews who had children, there was more than a 90% chance that they would have perished in the Holocaust. But in this case, I know for certain that there is nobody alive to remember him. In my opinion, people are not completely dead as son as someone remembers them. I am writing this down here so that as long as there is someone to read this passage, my teacher will be remembered as a complete human being, a great teacher, in one word, a GAON.

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Schools

For years there was no modern Hebrew school in Kuty. There were cheder schools, Talmudic schools and Talmud teachers. After WWI, there came to Kuty a professional, modern Hebrew teacher, Mr. Issachar Spiegel. He founded a modern school where everything was taught in Hebrew. With the Zionist movements gaining more and more importance, the Hebrew school was very busy. The school, in a modern building, became more and more popular. It formed several Hebraists, a few of whom continued their studies at a seminary for Hebrew teachers in Lwow. Unfortunately for Kuty (but fortunately for him), Mr. Spiegel emigrated to Palestine in the thirties and then the school started to decline. It was later taken over by a group of recently formed teachers and lasted only for a few more years.

I personally can say that I would have missed the boat by not passing through these schools, were it not for my teacher, Mechele Horner. He largely compensated for my not attending a modern Hebrew school.

There was also a school called The Talmud-Torah school for children of poor families who couldn't afford to pay for their children's education. The school was subsidized by the Kutier Kultus Gemeinde (a name dating from the Austrian times), which can be loosely translated as the Autonomous Cultural Community (ACC). It was a kind of Jewish municipal government with powers of taxation. The Kultus Gemeinde had to see to the education of the Jewish community and

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to coordinate and help organize the Jewish religious and social life.

I used the word “autonomous” and that's what it was supposed to be. Once a year, elections were organized to the council of the ACC. It was understood, however, that only those who had the support of the Starosta, the head of the county who lived in Kosow, could be elected. The funds of the council came from a tax paid by every family that could afford it, according to an assessment of the council. The council imposed taxes on the sale of kosher meat, on tickets to the public bath-sauna and on the sale of cemetery plots. From this income, the ACC had to pay the Rabbi, the shochetim, occasionally a Dayan (A Jewish judge), the Chazan of the Great Synagogue and other clergy. There was also a staff of white-collar employees who had to be paid.

The Rabbi was Chaim Gelernter. He was already a Rabbi before WWI. During that war, he, like many Jews, fled with his family to Vienna. He came back to Kuty after the war with his wife, but his son stayed in Vienna where he became a well-known lawyer, Rabbi Gelernter, like his name suggests, was a famous Talmudist. He wrote a book called “Eitz Chaim” and other commentaries on religious works. When he passed away, the community hired a young Rabbi from western Galicia, after a lot of bickering among diverse groups. This was Rabbi Leib Yetches who was to be the last Rabbi of our community, and who perished “Al Kiddush Hashem” with his community during the Holocaust.

For several years, our ACC president was a rich lawyer, Dr. Hartenstein, an assimilated Jew, who was often in conflict with the clergy.

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The shochetim were Leibish Kohn and Raphael Schechter, both our neighbours. I remember another Shochet, Meir Shechter as a very old man who didn't work any more and died when I wasn't yet ten years old. I was told, and later saw it written on my birth certificate, that he had performed my circumcision.

I would like to mention another member of the Kuty clergy here – the Sofer (scribe) Reb Dovid who was known in the whole region for his skill in writing Torah scrolls, Tefilin and Mezuzot. When I reached the age of ten, my father ordered from him a pair of Tefilin for me. Reb Dovid was in his late seventies at that time. “He is a very old man”, my father said to me, “and I don't want you to wait. I want you to have your Tefilin from him”. When I was ten, I already had my Tefilin which I put on with pride the day of my Bar-Mitzvah.

In those days, a Bar-Mitzvah was not a big celebration as it is today, especially in North America. There was no Bat-Mitzvah then for girls. There was just the giving of a name for the girl before the Torah reading. But a boy was called to the Torah, then there were sweets and vodka for the participants in the Minyan, and that was all. Thus, a neutral observer of both events would conclude that, based on the degree of celebration, today we are more Jewish than in the olden days. Far from it! In Kuty and elsewhere in Galicia, a boy had his Bar-Mitzvah after a few years (7 or 8) of Jewish studies in a cheder. He was ready to become a full-fledged adult member of the community long before his “admission exam”, which was the formal Bar-Mitzvah. Unfortunately, today, the Bar-Mitzvah boy doesn't know very much, except in the Orthodox circles. The boy is

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taught to read his Parshe and Haftorah in a few months and in many cases, will never engage in Jewish studies anymore. His Bar-Mitzvah is then not an entrance exam into Judaism but an exit exam. His parents spend a small fortune on a lavish celebration for what - ? to the uninitiated, looks like a very important religious event! There is a tired old joke about today's Bar-Mitsvahs. When asked: “How was the Bar-Mitsvah?” a guest replies: “The bar was excellent but the Mitzvah much less”.

Contrary to the Bar-Mitzvahs, weddings were more rich and noisy celebrations. One wedding that still stands out in my memory, even though I was only seven at the time, is the wedding of my mother's cousin, Lisa Kasner, daughter of my great-uncle Leiser Kasner and my great-aunt, Rivtzia Kasner (or as we called them, Der Vetter and Die Mihme, uncle and auntie). Lisa was a technician in the only pharmacy in Kuty and she was my mother's pharmaceutical and medical consultant. She as already approaching 30 and had resigned to remaining an ”alte moyd” (old maid) when she married a neighbour, Meniu Sender who worked in the lumber industry.

The wedding took place in the Yakel Seidman Hall, where all the big Jewish weddings were celebrated. There was an abundance of food and pastry prepared by Reina the bekerin. She was a kind of “two-in-one”, famous baker and an even more famous cook. She was the caterer for most of the big weddings. There were several kinds of hors d'oeuvres, pot-au-feu, roasted meats, desserts, fruits and drinks. There was a head table for the family, tables for the guests and another table for a few invited poor. As was the

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case in most of the big weddings, my grand-uncle hired the Hlinitzer Capelle, a group of Gypsy musicians from the village of Hlinitza near Wiznitz on the Rumanian side. These musicians were very good at playing Klezmer music because they often performed at Jewish weddings. At the wedding, there was eating and dancing until dawn. There were a few rooms next to the hall with some beds for the young children. Even small children came to the wedding and were sent to bed after the main meal. That is what happened to me. I was woken up at dawn when we went home. Even at that time, this celebration came close to the Jewish-Canadian wedding of today.

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The same year that I graduated from the public school, my parents, like many others, thought right away of sending me away to the gymnasium (this was a combination of today's high school and junior college). It took a year for them to decide if they could afford it or not. The nearest state gymnasium was in Kolomyja. There were also private Jewish gymnasiums in Kolomyja, Sniatyn and Stanislawow. There were many things for them to consider. While it was difficult to get in to the state gymnasium (Panstowowe Gymnasium), they were less expensive than the private gymnasiums. In addition, at the state gymnasium, a student with high marks paid only half the fee, which was already very low. After a year of thinking it over, my parents hired my former teacher of religion, Mr. Steinkohl, to prepare me for the admission exams. This preparation took another year, so that when I went to the exams in the summer of 1929, I was already 15 years old. The policy of the Gymnasium was more or less the following: they rejected the majority of Jewish candidates and those who were accepted had to lose a year or two of credits. I passed the exams and was accepted but I had to lose two years. So instead of going into the fifth grade of the gymnasium, I had to go into the third. I could have refused or my parents could have refused.

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We now had this problem to think over between the summer and the fall. After considering the advantages and disadvantages of state versus private gymnasiums, we (especially my parents) decided to accept the decision of the state gymnasium and not try to enter a private one. The monetary considerations weighed heavily here. I remember my father speaking with my teacher-tutor about the cost of keeping me in Kolomyja for several years. My father said: “I don't know if I can afford it”, and my teacher answered: “Mr. Klein, you send him, the Lord has deep pockets”.

So, in the fall of 1929, I went to Kolomyja where, except for vacations, I stayed for six years. For the first two years, I stayed with a middle-aged couple, the Rosmarins. Mr. Rosmarin had, for many years, been a high-ranking employee at the post office in Kuty. He was the only Jewish employee at the post office. But in the late 1920's, Mr. Rosmarin, the last Jew, was fired. He had some connections and was able to get a job at the post office in Kolomyja.

Mrs. Rosmarin was a distant relative of my father. When they still lived in Kuty, I used to visit them sometimes. I was not the only boarder at the Rosmarins'. There was another boy there, Franek Prokocimer. He was exactly my age and like me, had been put back two years at the entrance exams. His parents were wealthy landowners who had several farmhands working for them. They lived in a small town near Kolomyja. I don't know if it was before Franek's birth or right after WWI that they moved to Czernowitz. They were assimilated Jews and spoke German or Polish at home (not Yiddish). In the late 1920's, for reasons

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that I don't know, they decided to return to what was now Poland. This caused problems for Franek because he had just finished the Rumanian public school in Czernowitz and now he had to switch to a Polish school in Kolomyja. After tutoring by a professional tutor, he passed the same exams that I had passed and with the same result “downsizing”. He was a very good student all the way to the Matura (graduation). We were good friends and sat together in school on the same bench (students sat on benches for two). The Rosmarins were very strict in supervising us, me because they knew our family for a long time and Franek because his parents were very rich, paid more for his board and brought them gifts on several occasions.

Here in Kolomyja, I acquired another first name, Bumek. In Kolomyja all the Abrahams were called Bumek or Rumek, diminutives of Avrumek or of Avrume. This was my name only in the circle of Jewish students. There was not much socializing between us and the Polish students. When we did socialize with them, we called each other by our family name.

From the beginning, I had the best marks in the class. Maybe it was because I was older than the average student. Later I got a rival, a Polish colleague, Kazimierz Szatkowski, who often shared the best marks with me until the end. Kazio was the only non-Jewish student with whom I socialized. He came to my house and I visited him. I went to some other non-Jewish students' homes, but only to tutor them, not as a friend. I would tutor them in Latin, mathematics and some other science subjects. I never spoke with their parents nor did they converse with me.

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One of these students was Kazio Bialowas and another was Eugene Aleksiewicz. I remember that when I once saw Kazio Biatowas' mother washing her hair in the same basin in which she used to knead her dough, I said to myself, “The Jewish Kashrut laws are not so stupid”. The house of the Aleksiewicz family had this particularity; it was crammed with books about American Indians. Eugene had a full collection of Karl May's books (in Polish naturally). This German writer about the American Indians never travelled to the United States, but his vivid imagination largely compensated for it. Eugene also had a collection of several years of issues of a magazine about American Indian life, wars between tribes and wars between Indians and whites. Apaches, Comanche, Sioux and their chiefs, Winneton, Sitting Bull and others held no secrets for him.

Kolomyja was a city of about 40,000 people. Compared to Kuty, it was a big city. The Jewish population, as in most Polish cities, lived mostly in the centre of town and diminished as one approached the suburbs. Except for the very poor, most Jews were businessmen, craftsmen, contractors and professionals. There were also a few very rich Jews.

I remember one very rich family, the Brettlers. They owned the biggest brewery in the region. They also owned huge tracts of land where they grew their own barley and hops for the brewery as well as some other crops. We could call them the Molsons of Kolomyja. There was a saying in town: “There are two categories of Jews in Kolomyja: Brettlers and bettlers (a beggar in Yiddish”). One story can illustrate the power and influence that

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This family had in official circles. Mr. Baran was a Brettler son-in-law. He was an athlete and a very strong man. Once he got into an altercation with a farm hand and hit him, slapping him strongly across the face. The man collapsed and was taken to the hospital where he died. Nobody knew if the man was sick or weak, or whether he had been hit so hard that he had been killed by the low. The investigation and the autopsy were over very quickly and were something of a cover-up and Mr. Baran didn't even have to serve any time in jail.

I stayed at the Rosmarins' for two years. In 1931, the family of a Jewish schoolmate offered me a deal. I would tutor their son and they would give me full room and board for a nominal fee. They were the Fund family (pronounced foond). I accepted right away knowing that my parents would be happy to hear this. And so, I moved in with them.

They were originally from a village, Pistyn, between Kosow and Kolomyja. They had emigrated to the United States before WWI but had come back to Galicia after a few years. Moishe Fund had returned with enough money to buy a small factory where he produced silk fabrics. He had saved the money working as a milkman in New York. He and his sister owned a flour mill in Pistyn which they had inherited from their parents and which was very profitable. The Fund's son, Michael, was a skilled photographer and was very handy at electrical and mechanical work, but he was a very poor student. I spent a lot of time tutoring him but after two years, he dropped out of school and I had to move again.

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My father and brother in Vienna and Klagenfurt

Before I left for Kolomyja, my father took my brother to Lwow because of the problem with his leg. When my brother was 10 or 12 months old, we had noticed that when he tried to stand up, he would always put his right foot down and would let his left leg dangle back and forth. We had also seen that his left leg was a little bit thinner than the right one. When he started to walk, he limped a little and with time, the limp got worse. So, my parents took him to Lwow to consult a well-known orthopaedic specialist. The specialist told them that the limp was a result of the midwife's inexperience or carelessness. He prescribed a special orthopaedic shoe for my brother and said that this would help. The shoe was very heavy and not only didn't help, but it made the limp worse.

When I was already in Kolomyja, my parents decided to take my brother to Vienna. Vienna remained for years after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the best-known medical centre of Central Europe. I don't remember the name of the hospital they went to, but I remember the name of Dr. Lorenz, the orthopaedic surgeon. He operated on my brother's leg, near his ankle. My brother stayed in the hospital for several days after his operation, as was generally done in those days. Dr. Lorenz told my father that he had to see my brother again in three months. This was bad news because the trip to Vienna was very expensive. Vienna is only 1000 or 1100kms from Kuty but in those days, that was very, very far. So instead of going home

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right away, my father called his nephew, my cousin Max Klein who lived in Klagenfurt, the capital of Carinthia near the Slovenian border. They talked it over and Max said to him: “Why don't you come here. You will stay with me for three months and after seeing Dr. Lorenz again, you will go back home”. My father hesitated but after talking it over with my mother, accepted Max's offer. And so, my brother and him stayed as guests at Max's house for three months.

Max and his wife, Mali, were very busy people. They had a store where they sold clothing, shoes and fabrics. But they made time for their guests. Mali was very nice to both of them. They introduced my father to some Jewish families, Galician immigrants like Max, and took their guests out to eat in restaurants. My parents never forgot their warm hospitality.

After the second visit to Dr. Lorenz, my father returned home with my brother. With time, my brother's leg improved. He wore normal shoes and although he still limped a bit, he could walk much better.

In 1933, Max came from Klagenfurt with his son, Dagobert (later Danny) to visit his mother (my aunt Pesha Leah) in Czernowitz. From there, he went to Kuty to visit my parents. Since I was living in Kolomyja the, he also went there and spent a day with me. He took me out to eat in a famous restaurant. If not for him, I would never have eaten in such an expensive restaurant. Rosenman's was a very popular place (for people who could afford it). I had several Gespritste which made me a little dizzy, but I was very glad that Max had taken a day out for me in spite of his busy schedule. Max was a passionate

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photographer and the only picture of my mother which I have left, is the one Max took on this trip to Kuty in 1938.

In the public school in Kuty, the Jewish children didn't go to school on Saturday. With half the class absent, there was not much studying on Saturdays. Either the teacher repeated previous lessons, or if new material was presented, it was always repeated on Monday. But the gymnasium in Kolomyja we (Jews) went to school on Saturdays like everybody. I couldn't bring myself to write on Shabbos. I asked to be excused f rom writing on Saturday and amazingly, I was granted permission not to write. I was even excused from written exams on Saturday which were then deferred to a week day for me. I would only have to pass oral exams on Saturdays.

One Shabbos, my mathematics professor, Mr. Wojciechowski, a Ukrainian with a Polish name, nicknamed Pitzus because he was very short, called me to the blackboard. He started to dictate an algebra problem which I had to solve. He was facing the window and looking outside while dictating. I stood in front of the whole class at the blackboard, not writing anything down, doing nothing. He turned around and said: “You're not writing. Don't you see the chalk in front of you?” I answered: “Panie professorze!” (Or Monsieur le Professeur, which was the required form of address by a student), “You know very well that I am excused from writing on Saturdays”. He

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replied: “You should have enrolled in a rabbinical school and not in a state gymnasium”. Then he grilled me for half an hour, testing my knowledge of different formulas and axioms, in a kind of oral exam. As I answered everything he asked perfectly, he dismissed me and never tried his trick again.

I also recall another, funnier incident, which occurred in my first year in Kolomyja. I was returning home from school through a busy commercial street where my Rebbe Mechele Horner's son had a bookstore. Who do I see but my Rebbe coming out of the bookstore. I quickly ran up to him and said: “Shalom aleichem Rebbe, what are you doing in Kolomyja?” He said: “My dear young man, you are making the same mistake as many others make from time-to-time”. As I looked at him with a strange expression, he said: “I am not Mechel, I am his brother”. I suddenly remembered that I had heard that the Rebbe had a twin brother who lived in Kolomyja. He had the same face, the same voice and the same gait as Mechel Horner.

After the Funds, I moved to another boarding house. It was run by a widow and her daughter. They had three other boarders: Mr. Markman, a man in his thirties who was a certified accountant; Mr. Chayes, a widower in his sixties and was a semi-retired businessman and Miss Toni Schmerz who was a student in a school of commerce. All three were very interesting people. Markman and Chayes had a common interest – business. Me and Toni share our interest in our studies and student problems. I also had some common interests with Mr. Chayes. He was not just a businessman but was also very

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knowledgeable about Judaism, history and many other subjects, so we had a lot to talk about. Mr. Markman and Toni also had a common interest, flirting. We didn't share all our meals together (due to our different schedules) but when we did eat together, the meals were accompanied by some lively conversation. I stayed there until 1934.

Then, once again, I moved, although now I cannot remember the reason. Was it because there were some new boarders and the company became less interesting, or was it for some other reason? I just don't recall now. This time I went to a boarding house run by a Mrs. Hilsenrath, a divorcee with a daughter of 10 or 11. Her former husband, a Mr. Goldschlager, got remarried to a woman from Kuty and ironically moved to Kuty where he and his new wife ran a small store.

My years in gymnasium passed without any dramatic events. The studies were very easy for me. After I finished with my tutoring, there was not much homework left for me to do as I often reviewed my own homework as part of the tutoring. Sometimes I would have to read a few pages of a history book or of some Polish literature. As I had a very good memory, reading the text once over was usually enough to remember it. I earned enough from my tutoring so that, besides paying for my room and board, my parents didn't have to send me any extra money. From time-to-time, I also took on some temporary students, in addition to my regular students.

Smoking was forbidden at school but many of my colleagues spent a lot on cigarettes. The

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corridor leading to the toilets and the toilets themselves were permanently hazy with a cloud of smoke. Every time someone asked to go to the washroom it was almost certainly because he wanted to smoke a cigarette. There was no opportunity to smoke at recess because we had to stay in the schoolyard under the supervision of some teachers. As I didn't smoke, this was one less expense for me.

One of my short-term students was Basil Jasielski. I had tutored him for a while and at the end, he owed me some money. He couldn't pay it, so he gave me his bicycle instead. I kept it and later took it back to Kuty with me and used it during my vacations there. It was the only bicycle I ever had.

Another student I tutored was Jacob (Yanciu) Klarman. I tutored him every year for the months leading up to the final exams. His family was very rich. They owned all the buildings of one street. And it was the same street where the Fund family lived. The Klarman's own house was on another street. It was huge and the furniture consisted of rare and expensive antiques. There was also a huge lot in the back which his mother (his father had died young) rented out to the circuses which came to Kolomyja periodically. They would erect a massive tent in the lot with one end attached to the second-floor balcony of the house. When the circus came to town, Jacob would call me and invite me over for our usual treat. We would go upstairs and lie down on the balcony and there we could watch the circus through some openings in the top of the tent. Jacob was an average student but he had trouble with

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mathematics and Latin. He passed every year.

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My last boarding house in Kolomyja

As I said before, at the end of the seventh grade of the gymnasium system, a year before the matura (baccalaureate exam), I moved into the house of Mrs. Hilsenrath. This was the most comfortable of all the boarding houses I stayed at. I had more privacy, even my own room, which I had never had before in any of the others. Mrs. Hilsenrath treated me like a member of the family. The gymnasium periodically held what we would call today, parent-teacher meetings where teachers met with parents and reported on the student's progress or difficulties. Mrs. Hilsenrath always went to these sessions for me, inquiring about my studies. She kept a kosher house and I ate very well there. She also made the lunches which I brought to school. One day, I opened my wonderful beef brisket sandwich and what did I see on the bread? Butter! Yes butter. I couldn't believe my eyes. I angrily brought the sandwich back home and asked for an explanation. Mrs. Hilsenrath and her sister, who lived next door, both burst out laughing. They told me that it wasn't butter but a new kind of ersatz butter which was pareve. I had never seen or even heard of margarine before. Fridays, my lunch was different. Grated potatoes with added flour and yeast, baked in the oven in a deep dish made of a kind of a large latke. I would get two slices of this, covered in goose fat with some broiled liver between the slices and a fresh Shabbat pastry. This lunch tempted even my gentile schoolmates who would often steal my lunch. I had to resort to every new trick to hide my lunch on Fridays.

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There was another reason why I felt so much at home at Mrs. Hilsenrath's. Her brother-in-law, the husband of her sister, Zade Glatt, was a university graduate and a professor of mathematics. Jews were accepted by the faculties of teaching and law in Polish universities.

The Jewish lawyers, after finishing the lengthy studies (eight- or nine-years including articling), could open their own office. These lawyers graduated with a doctorate. Later, it became possible to finish the law studies more quickly and graduate with a Master degree (Magister Praw).

Unfortunately, the graduating Jewish teachers had a great deal of difficulty in finding a job. A teacher had to be hired to get a job and very few Jewish teachers were hired by the state gymnasiums. So, some found jobs in private Jewish gymnasiums and others had to be content simply by tutoring. Mr. Glatt was one of these others, a tutor. He was very intelligent, an excellent teacher and a very knowledgeable person in general. Very often, I went to his house and we would have conversations over coffee or tea until late in the evening. We discussed many different subjects: science, politics, the situation in the universities and the plight of Jewish students in general. I remember one such discussion which sticks out in my mind because it concerned me. I was complaining to him that I had already lost a few years of studies, that I was older than most of my colleagues and that all this made me uncomfortable. He then said something which amazed me: “My dear Klein, losing a year or two, or even more is of no importance. Everybody

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Loses or wastes time at some point; one before his studies; one during his studies and still another one after his studies”. I thought that he had said this in order to console me. It was only much later that I understood what he meant and that he was right. How many years was I to lose during and after my studies? Compared to this, the few years I lost before going to gymnasium, the years that I was older than my schoolmates and that bothered me so much then; those few years didn't matter much.

In all, I spent six years in Kolomyja studying for my bachelor's degree. But some of the most interesting time was my vacations. Except for some short vacation trips I made to different places, most of my vacation time was spent in Kuty. I remember only two short vacations of about two weeks each.

One year, before I went home for the summer vacation, I went to see the family of my uncle Hersh in Jablonow, near Kolomyja. It was a very small town, half peasant village and half small town. I spent a very pleasant two weeks there. His two daughters, Salka and Donia, introduced me to their friends and took me out on excursions and hikes to see the beautiful scenery of the countryside and , generally, pampered me.

Another summer, the Fund family invited me to Mr. Fund's sister house in Pistyn. We spent most of the time at the flour mill or fishing for trout in the brook which drove the mill. There too

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I had a pair of female guardians, two of the Fund daughters, Yetti and Gusta (Dora, the eldest was engaged to be married and had stayed in Kolomyja). Their brother Michael and me did some weight lifting at the mill. We used bags of flour for our weights. These were very heavy and came in sizes of 50kg,75kg and even 100kg. It took both of us together to pick up and load a bag of 75kg. There was also a Swedish student who was working at the mill for his room and board and a little pocket money. He stayed for a few weeks and then moved on to another place. In the tradition of their ancestors, the Vikings, these Scandinavian students invaded central and southern Europe during the summer vacation months. However, this time it was a peaceful invasion. The only thing they had in common with their ancestors was their great strength. The Swedish student I mentioned above, was a blond Viking giant, about my own age. I was stunned to see the way he handled the bags of flour. Loading a bag onto a truck was child's play for him. He would crouch down, hug the bag between his arms, stand up with the bag and throw his load into the waiting truck.

I used to go home to Kuty for certain Jewish holidays and for the summer vacations. Actually, I only went home for two holidays: Pesach and Simchat Torah. For the religious High Holidays, I stayed in Kolomyja. I lived near a shul where the Baal Tefila was a Chasid of the Wiznitzer Rebb, and his style of leading the service resembled the style I was accustomed to at home.

There were very good Chazanim in Kolomyja, especially in the Great Synagogue. The Chazan Lichtenstein in the Great Synagogue was an

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accomplished singer, musician and an alumnus of a well-known cantorial school. But Pesach and Simchat Torah were joyous and relaxing holidays in Kuty, so I liked to go home for them. You had a lot of time for yourself to visit people, and so on. At Pesach, I enjoyed the food and the springtime atmosphere. During Simchat Torah, I loved reading the Torah for the minyan in my grandfather's house and the reception after. As for the High Holidays, I was convinced that the prayers were directed to the same place, independently of the location of the synagogue, shul or Klaus they came from. And so, it was all right for me to stay in Kolomyja. But the real reason I came home so seldom was the expense. I don't remember now what the cost was exactly, but it was something like three or four dollars. The first year that I lived in Kolomyja, I went by horse and carriage. It was a trip of 40-50km, depending on which road was taken, and it took about five or six hours with numerous stops along the way. After my first in Kolomyja, the balegoula's (owner of the horse and carriage) son bought a small bus and from then on, I went by bus.

The Christmas holidays lasted about two weeks in Kuty and they were very dull. There was not much for us to do as sports, like skating and skiing, were still in their infancy (they were more developed in Kolomyja). We didn't like to go out in the evening for several days because of the carol singers. It was often very cold and so we stayed at home a lot.

The summer vacations, on the contrary, were in today's language “the mother of all vacations”. They were a mixture of a little work, the beach,

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excursions, visits, and so on. My work consisted in helping out in our store before noon. The afternoons were reserved for the beach. Some years, I worked at packing apples for the fruit exporters. There were a lot of orchards around the town and in the surrounding villages. In the fall or winter, Jewish merchants used to buy up the growers' entire next year's crop. It was a risky business because it had happened sometimes that the whole crop, or a part of it, was destroyed by bad weather (frost or hail). But, if the weather was good, there was a huge profit for the merchants. Buyers came to Kuty to buy the crop from the local merchants from as far as Lwow, Krakow or Lodz. They would hire local people to pack the apples in crates and then send these to the big cities. The crates went through Rumania first as there was no direct rail link between Kuty and Kolomyja.

A few students, including myself and my friend Bubi Falkenflieg, were employed as packers. Bubi Falkenflieg studied in a private Jewish gymnasium in Stanislawow and would also come home for the summer vacation. We went on excursions, hikes and made short trips of a day or two around our region. We went on short hikes that started at the foot of Mount Owidjusz, climbed high up and then came down to a village nearby. We would come back home by the road.

One year, it must have been 1933 or 1934, Bubi and me went back-packing for a whole week. We went through the Carpathian Mountains from Kuty to the village of Zabie. Administratively, it was called a village, but its population was the same as Kuty's, if not greater. It was really a town with nice stores, gravel pressed streets, street

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lighting and entertainment, but it was known as the biggest village in Poland. We spent the night at Mr. Sausie Schussel's (formerly from Kuty). We didn't sleep in his house; however, we slept in the barn on bales of hay. It was not the worst hotel. We were very pleased and after being served a good breakfast, we continued on our way, happy that the first day hadn't cost us anything. On the road to Zabie in one of the villages of the lower mountains, I met Hutzuls whom I knew because they did business with my parents. They invited us home, gave us something to eat and guided us through some shortcuts that only they knew. From Zabie, the next three villages were still in the mountains: Tatarov, Mikuliczyn and Jaremcze, which was a famous tourist attraction. The scenery there was breath-taking: the waterfall, the lake, the brooks filled with trout, the forest reaching to the edge of the lake and the beautiful beach. The weather was perfect the whole time that we were there. From Jaremcze, the road started to slope down. The last village which was still in the lower mountains was Mikuliczyn. From there we continued on the road to Lanczyn. In that village, Bubi had some relatives who owned a small inn. Here, again, we were able to stay for free and spend nothing. We were pampered and sent on our way with lots of food. After that came the villages of Dobrotow and Delatyn and then a few kilometres further was Kolomyja. Here we met a few of my friends, but we didn't stay long because we had already been gone for a week and we were anxious to go home. From Kolomyja we just took the main road back to Kuty. It was the least interesting part of our excursion. In all, we completed a circle of about 250km.

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Swimming at the Czeremosz

When I was at home, I used to spend most afternoons on the beach of the Czeremosz, which was the border between Poland and Rumania. At the beginning of the 1920's, relations between the two countries were strained. We weren't allowed to approach the shore of the river itself and we had to bathe in the Czeremosz canal. There was a lot of smuggling across the river and the border patrols were always on the lookout on both sides of the river. But in the 1930's, relations between Poland and Rumania improved and we were allowed to go to the river itself to bathe.

There were beautiful sand or gravel beaches on the river. We would spend hours there, whole afternoons. So, after returning from our excursion and resting for a couple of days, we started to go there again.

Our backs were not just tanned but often burned with skin peeling off. Most of my colleagues were smokers. It was a time when not many people except for a few specialists, had ever heard of UV radiation and skin cancer, or of lung cancer caused by smoking. The scaremongers of today were not yet born.

Some people still went to bathe in the Czeremosz canal. These were the Orthodox Jews. They didn't risk sunburn as they stayed almost entirely covered at the beach. Nor did they take the even bigger risk of seeing women in revealing bathing suits.

Still, it wasn't entirely healthy to bathe at the beaches of the Czeremosz canal. This was for two reasons: There were two beaches half a kilometre

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from each other – one for women and one for men. Near the women's beach, there was a slaughterhouse where the shochetim slaughtered cattle once or twice a week. The big day for this slaughtering was on Thursday because of the upcoming Sabbath. All the blood, dirt and intestines were just flushed directly into the canal without any filtering or treating.

The men's beach had a different problem. The balegoules (horse and buggy owners) brought their horses to the canal, drove them into the water and tied them to some trees on the opposite shore from the beach. There they would wash and soap their horses among the bathers. Needless to say, that the horses left more than soap and sweat in the water to mix with the bathers.

In contrast to the water in the canal, the river water was pure and crystal clear. The river beach was upstream from the flour and sawmills. There were no sewers in Kuty and no factories upstream to discharge pollution into the water. The only activity along the entire course of the river was timber transport, and this was non-polluting.

In winter, the Hutzul lumberjacks logged the forests that sloped down from the mountains along the upper Czeremosz. They would move the logs down the snowy slopes and leave them near the shore of the river. In late spring, when the danger of large blocks of ice on the river had passed, the gates of the dam were raised. The logs were then sent downriver. The lumberjacks made rafts from logs which they tied together with cables. They joined three or four small rafts of about 20 logs to make a larger raft. The cables passed through holes made near the front and back of each log. The small rafts were also tied

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together with more cables. In front of this train of logs, one short log was fixed across the raft. A hole was made on this piece of long and a long pole with a plank of wood nailed at an angle was fixed to the cross log in a cardan joint. This served as a rudder. These log rafts were guided downstream by experienced raft drivers. Some of these rafts ended up in the sawmills of Kuty, others continued down the Czeremosz to other destinations. Some even went into the river Prut. These timber rafts came down twice a week when the gates of the dam were raised and the level of the river was high enough.

Me and my friends would wait eagerly for these rafts to appear for this reason. Groups of us used to walk along the riverbank for a few kilometres (2 or 3) upstream. There, in some special spots well-known to us, the rafts came close to the shore and the water was neither very shallow nor very deep. That was where we would jump onto the rafts, two or three of us to a raft. The water couldn't be too shallow because then the logs danced up and down and one could break a leg or an ankle when jumping on. If the water was too deep, it made it difficult for us to hoist ourselves onto the raft. Two or three of us would jump onto the same raft while the next group waited for another raft to come by, which usually took about ten minutes or so. We talked to the steersman and his helpers (a timber train of four rafts needed a second steersman in the rear). We ran back and forth along the logs, from front to rear and back again, amusing ourselves until we came near our beach. There, we were sorry to have to leave our raft and umped off into the river, taking great care not to get caught

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between the logs. Some days we were lucky enough to be able to repeat this feat, two or three times.

Another source of pleasure was our contact with kids (and here I am really talking about girls) from Wiznitz. We called Wiznitz (which was in Rumania) the “other side”. Some of the girls were relatives of some of our group, and some were their friends. We knew many of them from our visits to Wiznitz. I remember three sisters, Dziunia, Luzia and Ciacia whose family had moved to Wiznitz from Kuty a few years earlier. Boys and girls made dates which they were seldom able to keep, because after all, we lived on opposite sides of a border where cross-border visits were not very frequent events.

There was also another beach which could be called the 'gentile' beach and with few exceptions, there was not much contact between this beach and our beach.

Some of our other summer activities included going to the movie theatre which was only open on Saturday and Sunday. From time-to-time, an out-of-town theatre company, Polish or Yiddish, came to Kuty. Some famous Yiddish actors passed through Kuty: Ida Kaminska, Jonas Turkov, Zygmunt Turkov and others. Sometimes a Jewish organization (mostly Zionist) presented a play. Political speakers, speaking in Polish or Yiddish, frequently gave speeches. This was interesting and at the same time pleasant.

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The Rise of anti-Semitism

In the middle of the 1930's, however, dark clouds started to appear on the horizon. The Nazi were already in power and Hitler's ravings were being heard on every radio station. The Poles, already strongly anti-Semitic, were very receptive to these ravings and eagerly absorbed the poison coming from the West. The German minority in Poland, numbering more than one million, started to agitate against the Jews. The Poles, instead of arming themselves to fight their hereditary and (as it would turn out later) their real enemy from the West, prepared to fight an “(imaginary) enemy from within” – the Jews.

They began by arresting both Jews and non-Jews (such as for example known Ukrainian separatists), but the thrust of their attack was against the Jews. They arrested Jews under phony accusations and put them in a concentration camp (not an extermination camp). Jews were charged with having “offended the Polish people”, for example, by not flying the Polish flag on national holidays and for other ridiculous offenses. New laws were passed against the Shechita (ritual slaughter), other laws were passed raising taxes, more restrictions were added to the admission of Jews in the universities, and so on. A moratorium on debt was voted which then ruined a lot of small-town Jews, including my parents; all the debts that farmers and mountain people owed their creditors were either abolished or frozen for ten years, depending on the kind of debt.

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There was another reason why, specifically in Kuty, the number of anti-Semitic incidents rose. In the last years before WWII, the region became known as a summer resort. More and more vacationers from inside Poland descended every summer on the small towns in the region. And given its beautiful landscape, especially on Kuty.

Older couples of retired Polish professionals, teachers, engineers and others came to Kuty from the big cities to build villas or inns for the vacationers. These were people who had left Kuty to work in the big cities years ago and were now returning home for their own retirement. They specialized in the care, food and lodging of the summer vacationers. This brought a lot of business to the town from which the Jewish population of storekeepers, tradesmen, transport people, also benefited. Unfortunately, most of these summer vacationers were also rabid anti-Semites, especially the young.

There were not many violent physical attacks, but taunts and insults were common, and harassment like pulling beards of older Jews occurred frequently. We even felt this climate on our beaches. Although our beaches were separate, it would happen that some hooligans (usually students on summer vacation) came down to our beach causing trouble and looking for a fight. These troublemakers didn't last long against us. First of all, we were a big group and there were always a few tough guys among us whose menacing looks were enough to make the intruders hesitate and retreat. I want to mention here that there was in Kuty, a group of three friends known as “The Company” who already, before this time, were called on in case of an

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attack, a riot or any other disturbance against Jews.

These three friends were: Gedalia Landswehr, Shloime Moshkovitz and Zayde Mandel. They acted, one could say today, like a kind of small Jewish Defence League. There had always been, from time-to-time, anti-Jewish incidents coming either from Ukrainians or Poles. An appeal to any one of the three friends, let alone all three, always made the attackers flee. They were so well-known in anti-Semitic circles that the mere sight of them made the attackers run. Those few attackers who dared to stay and fight, experienced the blows of our defenders, and long remembered them.

On May 2, 1935, I passed the last and most important exam in college with the mention of Summa Cum Laude. This exam was called the Matura and I was now a Bachelor of Humanistic Sciences (or humanities). The exam was given in two parts, written and oral. The written exams were held first and I had to choose three of the following subjects: Polish literature or history, mathematics or physics, Latin or German. I chose history, mathematics and Latin. If all three written marks were high, a student only had to pass one oral exam in either Polish literature or history. So given my marks in the written part, I only had to pass one oral exam, in Polish literature.

My written history exam was on “Salamina Grunwald I Tzud nad Wisla” (Salamis, Grunwald

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and The Miracle on the Vistula). This was the story of three historic battles in which Europe was attached by forces that wanted to destroy its civilization and its way of life. Salamis is an island near Athens where in 480 B.C.E., Themistocles pushed back the Persian army in a great naval battle. Grunwald is in East Prussia and in 1410 C.E., the Polish army of King Ladislaw Jagiellon defeated the Teutonic Knights in a famous battle. In 1920, the new Soviet army made a push towards the West and stood before Warsaw. Fierce battles followed and, in the end, the Soviets were defeated. I had to discuss the consequences of a victory by these invading forces on Western civilization, and especially on Greece and Poland. The easiest exam for me was the written Latin. We were allowed four hours for this exam, which I finished in an hour and a half. I looked around the room and seeing everyone tense and sweating, I decided to wait a bit longer and left after about two hours. The first ones to come out of the exam room after me, came after three hours. Many students didn't even finish the translation at all.

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University in Nancy and Grenoble – Deciding how to pursue my studies

I went back home to Kuty after six years of study in Kolomyja. Now started all over again the discussions and hesitations over my future education. It was taken for granted that if I was to continue my studies, it would be in medicine and that I would have to go abroad. Jewish students from Poland usually went abroad to France or Italy. In one of these discussions, my father reminded me of what my former teacher had advised him before I left for college: “You send him, the Lord has deep pockets”.

And so, after months of hesitation, it was decided that I would go to France. Meanwhile, the year 1935 passed and it was now too late to apply for the fall 1936 session. In spring 1936, I sent all my papers to a Jewish student organization in Lwow where all the necessary documents were prepared for university admission. Soon, I was ready and in October 1936, I left Kuty for Nancy, France.

We had decided that I would try to go to Nancy where a former neighbour of mine, Mendel Glasberg, now lived. He had emigrated to Nancy a few years earlier where he enrolled in a school of commerce. There, he graduated as an “Ingénieur en Commerce”, or a kind of chartered accountant with an impressive sounding degree. He worked for a chain of clothing stores. After a few years, the owner died and his widow, who could no longer

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manage the business alone, offered Mendel a share of the business. He was very well off. Also, Mendel's sister, Babcia (in France she became Vita) lived in Nancy. She hadn't studied much but she had followed her brother to Nancy. She was exactly my age.

The trip from Kolomyja to Nancy, about 1000-1100km took two days and a night, roughly 60 hours. The train was not an express and not direct and stopped in many small stations. My mother prepared several packages of food for me: bread, cold cuts, fruits and even a thermos. This way I would not have to spend any money to eat in the restaurant car. During the trip, I met many people heading for France. They weren't students but mostly Poles and Slovaks who were going to France to work in the coal mines or in the construction industry. They didn't eat in the restaurant car either. So, there was always some eating going on around me: salami, ham; hard-boiled eggs, cheese, etc. From time-to-time, someone would go out to buy a soft drink or a coffee at one of the many stops. The compartment was crowded and there was nowhere to lie down to get some sleep.

When I arrived in Nancy, I went immediately to see Mr. Glasberg. He was very busy but graciously took the time to help me get settled. First came a trip to the police where all foreigners, students and workers, had to register. He had a lot of friends there from the time when he himself

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had been a foreigner (he had by then become a citizen). He found me a room not far from his own apartment. He introduced me to the owner of a student restaurant whom he knew from his own student days. Then he accompanied me to the university where I got an unpleasant surprise: there had been a mix-up. The student organization in Lwow had enrolled me, not in the pre-med programme (called P.C.B. or Physics, Chemistry and Biology) as I had thought, but in dentistry. For me, dentistry was something far inferior to medicine. Once again, my Guardian angel, Mr. Glasberg, came to my assistance and helped me straighten out this bureaucratic mishap.

Finally, my papers for entering the PCB-Faculty of Medicine, were ready. A person who was never experienced it will never understand the bewilderment and confusion which overcomes a student who arrives in a foreign land, among people whose language he doesn't understand at all. My vocabulary was limited to a few dozen words gleaned from a booklet of “Assimil French”. I started going to the courses for about 10 days but I didn't even unpack everything from my suitcases because I wasn't sure that I would really stay.

After a few days, I stopped going to my courses and concentrated on learning some French. I stayed away from class for about a month. Then, with the little French that I had picked up from some books, from the radio and from the street, I went back to school. Fortunately, the language of science is not as difficult as that of law or literature, so little-by-little, I learned to take notes in French. After three months, I could already take

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notes which were useful and understandable and which I could use to study for exams.

For the first few months in the student restaurant, I couldn't understand how people could drink that red liquid they called wine. When I tasted it, I thought that it must be wine that had turned sour. However, after a while, I began to order a glass with my meal because I felt strange being the only one there who drank water instead of wine. Until that time, the only wine I had known was the sweet wine we drank at home at Pesach, a wine like the Manishewitz or Kedem wines of today. I never learned to drink the ordinary French vin rouge without diluting it first with some water. Even today, I can only drink an undiluted red wine if it is a very good quality wine, and my favourite kind of wine is a semi-dry white wine.

In the middle of the school year, I moved. My rookie months were over and I had made some friends. I took a better room with my colleague and friend Dziunek Weisblüth (he called himself Arnold in French). He came from Rawa Ruska, a town near Lwow. He was younger than me. He was a very fine person, honest and trustworthy, and we became very close friends. He had some difficulty learning French and in following the courses. We stayed in that new place until the end of the school year.

Like all students, I became a member of the AG (Association Générale des Etudiants). It was, in theory and as the name implies, an association for all students. The reality was, however, different. We all carried ID cards with our picture, name, address and nationality. And this identification of nationality led to problems for the

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foreign students. There were the French students and the foreign students. The students in general didn't mix much, and each nationality kept mostly to itself. In addition, Jews from eastern Europe and the Balkans did not even socialize with the non-Jews from their own country. These non-Jews were, for the most part, anti-Semitic. They were not interested in knowing us and in turn, we didn't want anything to do with them. Now the university administration could not support two separate Polish or Rumanian (for example) groups with the same nationality. So, the East European Jewish students (this happened before I came to France) asked the university administration to specify their nationality as Jewish. Thus, my AG ID card bore the inscription: Nationalité Juive. This ID card was, therefore, a unique one because all my other French documents read: Nationalité Polonaise. Religion was never stated on official French documents.

The years 1936 to 1939 were politically stormy years, especially in France. There were problems for France when Germany occupied the Rheinland and La Sarre. There were problems when the French prime minister, Laval, expelled many foreigners and sent them back to Poland (for example), entire villages of Polish workers and coal miners. These Polish workers, miners and their families, mostly from Northern France in Lille, Roubaix, etc., were all legal immigrants who had lived in the region for years. Immigrants were now spied on and the German propaganda worked full speed against them, even inside France. This atmosphere was also felt in student circles. The AG had a big building with many

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rooms and a few halls so that each student group could have its own permanent office and could get a hall assigned to it for special events. Things weren't too bad inside the AG building but in our university classrooms, we were all together and we would hear insulting remarks. This also happened on the street.

The year passed. We studied a lot of chemistry, physics, botany, zoology and a little anatomy. In the zoology lab, we dissected frogs, mice and other lower animals. My favourite place though was the chemistry lab. Exam time came at the beginning of summer. Except for physics, I passed all the other exams. I failed physics with a result that was only three points less than the required pass mark. This failure has a small story behind it and here it is: The PCB exam was not an easy exam as many French students failed it on their first try. And seldom did a foreign student manage to pass it the first time. There was a Jewish student from Rumania, a classmate in Nancy, who did pass it. But he had graduated from a French Lycée in Bucharest (there were French Lycées in several European capitals), with teachers from France and the same curriculum as the Lycées in France. This student spoke a fluent French without the slightest accent, and had studied some parts f the PCB curriculum before. In my case, I took the exam before a professor who was once the principal of a French Lycée in Poland. He was known to systematically fail foreign students on their first attempt because, it was said, he believed that foreign students should learn French properly before they studied medicine. So, unless the student was clearly a genius, he wouldn't let them pass.

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After I received the shock of my first failed exam ever, I had to think about the vacation months. My parents were only allowed to send me money during the school year. The government did not permit money to be sent to students during the summer vacation because it said that the students could go back home during this time. But this was out of the question for me because the trip home was much too expensive. Students were not allowed to get a job either because they only had student visas and not working visas.

But I knew some students in the faculty of agronomy. These students were allowed to work on farms as part of their training, for room and board and some small pocket money. They just put my name on the list of students requesting a summer job, as if I was one of them. And soon I was assigned to a group that was going to an experimental Government farm in Grignon, a small village near Paris. It was the best of all my vacations in France. We worked long hours, but we were not strictly supervised. So, we took it easy in the fields. The only really hard work came at harvest time. We had to bind heavy sheaves of wheat and then load them onto two or four-wheel carts (tombereaux in French), drawn by a pair of oxen and guided by a driver (bouvier in French). The farm had no tractors. We had plenty of food and we got a litre of cider and a small bottle of wine every day. We earned a little pocket money so that we could afford to go out on the weekend and enjoy a few extras. There was a bistro and one store in the village and that was enough for me. The non-student farmhands were mostly Polish, some immigrants and some born in

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France. I always remember Grignon and the vacation months of 1937 as a very pleasant time.

As the summer vacation of 1937 came to a close, I realized that I was again in an awkward situation. I had lost another year of school. Zade Glatt's words still hadn't sunk in. With hindsight, I know now that I should have stayed in Nancy and tried the PCB exam a second time. I say that I should have “tried” the exam a second time, but there is no question in my mind that I would have passed it the second time. My French was already much better and was improving from month-to-month.

So, instead of preparing for a second try at the PCB exam, I was making and remaking the calculation of how many years I would have to spend studying medicine. My reasoning was the following: Medicine normally took seven years in France, and now it would be eight. Also, it would be impossible for me to work as a doctor in France after graduation because there would be no way for me to get French citizenship. The powerful and anti-immigrant French Medical Association used its influence to limit the number of foreign doctors in France. Thus, I would have to return to Poland and take the Polish qualifying exams (Nostrification in Polish). They accepted some Jewish students for these studies, but one had to be on a waiting list for about two years. The qualifying studies took another two or three years. This added up to a total of 13 or 14 years before I would become a doctor, and even this estimate was uncertain. This was a staggeringly long time. My parents would never be able to afford that.

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Some students did try the PCB exam a second time. Many ended up very badly during the war. Some enrolled in the Polish regiment which fought alongside the French army and were killed or taken prisoner by the Germans. Many were deported from Nancy and never came back. Only a few did come back and were able to finish their studies after the war.

When I came back from vacation, I decided to look for a faculty where the studies were much shorter. I made inquiries about engineering and chemistry. I did a lot of soul-searching and had many discussions with as many people as possible. Finally, after much deliberation, I decided to go to the University of Grenoble and study at its Institut d'Electrochimie et Electrométallurgie. To tell the truth, I didn't know much about this school, in spite of all my inquiries. I didn't even know exactly what kind of studies they offered. I supposed that it was mostly about chemistry, and that reassured me. I was very good in chemistry. My friend Weisblüth, who had also failed the PCB exams, joined me and in the fall, we left Nancy for Grenoble.

Right from the beginning, I saw that the “Institut” was not what I had thought it was. It was true that chemistry was very important there, but the emphasis was on engineering. In fact, the degree they awarded was “Ingénieur en Electrochimie et Eletrométallurgie”. There, engineering meant design of experiments, design

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Of procedures, working with the mechanical aspects of factories, and all these types of engineering involved a lot of drawing. Besides that, électrochemistry is not exactly chemistry and electrometallurgy are not exactly metallurgy. Examples of electrochemical plant operations are: plating of metals (such a nickel, chrome, copper, silver or gold); production of chlorine and sodium hydroxide from salt solutions. Examples of electrometallurgical plant operations are: production of calcium carbide from coke and calcium; production of aluminium from bauxite and cryolite (which is a double fluoride of aluminium and sodium); production of artificial gemstones like rubies, amethysts and sapphires from mixtures of bauxite with trace amounts of different metals (which give the stone its colour); production of corundum; etc. All these plants require huge amounts of electricity and, therefore, are usually found in countries producing cheap hydroelectric power (such as Canada).

I was disappointed by what I had chosen, but I wasn't going to waste any more time searching for something else, and I decided to tough it out. The “bête noire” of my studies were the drawing lessons. My innate sense of spatial disorientation made it difficult for me to convert planimetric drawings into stereometric visualizations. In the beginning, I skipped some of the drawing classes, but soon realized that it was better to attend because I did manage to learn something by being there. I have to admit that the professor was very nice and understanding with students like me. Unfortunately, I don't remember his name. (I think it may have been Mr. Martin).

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There was still one unpleasant task before me after I arrived in Grenoble. I had to inform my parents of my decision to change my course of studies. This was very difficult for me. How could I tell them that I had switched from medicine to something that I myself did not know too much about? I knew that whatever I said to explain my decision would be impossible for them to understand, and that they would be deeply hurt. I tried to justify to them the steps I had taken. I knew what they really thought about everything, although they pretended to go along with it all. My poor parents, what could they say? “Come home. We won't send you any more money”. That was in fact the case of some other students I knew in similar circumstances. They all felt that they had hurt their parents. Some abandoned their studies altogether. One taught French to new students, another became a barber in the AG barbershop. I often had my hair cut there by this former student, turned barber. Yet, in spite of all these difficulties, I passed the first year with good marks (except in drawing where I had the bare minimum needed to pass).

Grenoble, capital of the Dauphiné region, was at that time a city of about 200,000 inhabitants. It is situated in the valley of the river Isère, where it is surrounded by towns and villages with manufacturing plants for all kinds of products. The region was especially famous for its paper mills. Consequently, the University of Grenoble determined that there was a need for a special kind of engineer and created a Faculté de Papeterie which awarded a degree called “Ingénieur en Papeterie”. Electrometallurgical plants in the area produced artificial gemstones,

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And there were electro-plating workshops, sawmills and so on. The nearby mountains stayed snow-capped during the entire year. It was a dream city for amateur alpinists. After a short hike of only a few hours, one reached an altitude of about 1500m or so. It was also a paradise for those who loved to do some sports (which I didn't).

For a long time, the city didn't grow much. This was probably due to the fact that the city lies a little off the main routes of France. It didn't have a direct rail link to Paris or Marseille. The main line passed through Lyon and then to St. Etienne, Valence and Avignon, but not through Grenoble, which lies a little to the east toward Savoie. Today, however, due to the post-WWII boom, the city has a population of around half a million.

It is worth mentioning here that the city is historically important since the French revolution of 1789 had its origins in the Dauphiné, starting in Vizille, a few kilometres from Grenoble. Another interesting thing about the Dauphiné region is the fact that it is a region of France where people speak a French with no particular accent. Unlike Provence, Auvergne or Le Nord where the accents are marked and distinct, the people of the Dauphiné speak, what is know there as a “good French”.

In 1938, I couldn't get a job on a farm during the vacation month as I had done the previous year. But I got some help in another way. We (the Jewish students from the different faculties) had our own student restaurant on 10, Rue Bayard. We administered it ourselves. The only full-time employee was a professional cook. The buyer of food, the “économe” (administrator), the waiters

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and the dishwashers were all students. When a student worked as a waiter or dishwasher either at lunch or at suppertime, he could then eat both lunch and supper for free. I was already doing this during the school year, but only part-time. But, during the vacation months, I worked there every day so that I didn't have to spend anything for my food. This helped me out a lot. My only personal expenses were some small things like an occasional movie ticket. As I had a good memory, I never mixed up anyone's order and I had no problem with the customers nor with the cook, an irritable Russian immigrant.

At the beginning of 1939 our 'économe' disappeared with all the cash that he was supposed to pay out to our Armenian grocer, Mr. Kelledjan. It was the end of the month and he took this grocery money from our monthly receipts. I then became the 'économe' and also the buyer. I didn't want the job and refused it when it was first offered to me, but the committee kept on coming back to me and insisting that I accept it. So, I asked them: “Did you trust him?” They answered: “On lui aurait donné le Bon Dieu sans confession ». (In other words, like a brother). « But what if I do the same as him?” I said. They all burst out laughing and so I had to accept the job. And I kept it until I left for my vacation to Kuty on the eve of WWII.

The school year of 1938-39 passed without much of a hitch or anything unpleasant concerning my studies. But it was a fateful year otherwise. The first event that shocked me was that my roommate, Weisblüth decided to drop out of university. He had difficulty following the courses and decided that he was wasting his time

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there. He left for Paris and I soon lost touch with him. On the political front, the clouds became thicker and thicker.

Already in March, 1938, the German army had marched into Austria. In September, 1938, it went into the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia and in March, 1939, it occupied Moravia and Bohemia. Hitler then proclaimed the two regions a German protectorate. Slovakia became “independent” and an ally of Germany. The first republic of Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. Sub-Carpathian Russia joined the Soviet Ukraine. There were a few protesters in the streets of Grenoble, as in other French cities, but the politics of appeasement prevailed. The prime minister of Britain, Chamberlain and the prime minister of France, Daladier, accepted the fait-accompli after a trip to Canossa-Berlin.

Notwithstanding the menacing political situation, I decided that after three years in France, it was time to go home for the summer vacation. My reasoning was the following: in spite of the occupation of several Central European territories by the Germans in 1938-39, there was no war. And I felt that there would still be no war if Hitler tried something new. So, after the final exams, I bought my train tickets and on July 26^th, 1939, exactly 35 days before the outbreak of the war, I set out for my hometown. I said to myself: “So long Grenoble, see you in three months”. But it was not to be. This “summer vacation” would last six years from 1939 to 1945.

They were the longest, saddest and most traumatic years of my life. During those years, Germans, Russians and Rumanians left scars on

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my body and my soul, scars which I still feel today.

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