Pearl Fichman Quotes

fact, all the other war news was almost disregarded and the population had no way of getting any other news reports, since radios were unavailable. My Russian boss, for whom I prepared all the lists and bread ration cards, was a blond, slim Northerner from Leningrad. When sober, he was distant and quite proper; but when he was drunk, one had a hard time fighting him off. He was very demanding and we were forever writing. In the entire section there was not a single typewriter. Everything was written longhand. The bookkeepers were using the abacus, the only available calculator.

And the one here in my hand isn't brown and shiny like the rest. It is flat and sleepy like the sand, which through my fingers I set rolling. Slowly, step by step, as if unwilling I let my feet wander on, ahead. (September 24, 1939) p. 7

Besides, Prague is famous for its many churches with gold-leaf covered domes. In the sunshine, Prague is golden. I fell in love for ever. At the end of the five day stay, the entire group boarded a train for Paris. Although my parents knew the time of my arrival, they could not travel on the

At Columbia University, the semester had already started in the first week of September and here I was, in the middle of October. I arrived in New York on October 17, 1947. Crossing the Atlantic took one week. Most of the passengers were Americans of English, Irish or Scottish descent, who had visited their families, for the first time after the war. The food on the boat consisted mostly of fish, all kinds of seafood that I had never eaten before, that I knew only from reading and from dictionaries. Whether it was turbot or cod or hake or even salmon - everything was boiled and tasteless.

At that same time, the Communist regime let the inflation run its course and then, devalued the currency. They issued a new kind of lei. Everybody could exchange 80,000 lei for 20 new lei. The day before the exchange, I had 2 million lei. For that amount, I bought two pairs of hand crocheted summer gloves; there was nothing else available. I would have preferred to purchase a kilo meat, but that was out of the question, unrealistic thinking.

not really a scholar, not trained to be a university professor. The level of the university had dropped considerably, compared to what I experienced before, in two years of studies. Yet, we had a difficult time with the two new languages and also a course in military preparedness. All the students, men and women, had to learn military tactics and had to train in the fields, to become efficient shots. The training was done out-of-doors, in rain, snow or sleet. At every session, one was given three bullets. If you did not achieve a good score, you got a low grade. Fear of losing the scholarship made me try very hard and I lay so long on the frozen ground or soggy field, in order to do it right. In the end, in May 1941, I got very sick with pleurisy and just barely made it through the exams in June 1941, that fateful month when the Germans attacked.

We were facing a great number of uncertainties and dangers. First, whether the Russians would treat us decently, us who had lived through the German occupation; whether the survivors from Transnistria would come back; how many had survived the retreat of the Germans; whether our friends and relatives in the Russian army and those who had fled voluntarily would come home; whether any of them had survived the almost three years of war; whether we'll have food to survive. The Russian military, in pursuit of the retreating Germans, were angry, aggressive and contemptuous of the local population. The ubiquitous question: Why did they kill all the other Jews and left you alive? That thought implied that the survivors were all collaborators of the Nazis, whether they were Jewish or not.

learned to read and write in the Slavic alphabet from a single sheet. Then, I proceeded to make up my own dictionary using a small notebook with every page a different letter. An added impediment was the difference between these two Slavic languages. The writing presented also slight differences, also the orthography. All this added to the difficulties and the confusion, at first. The new, Soviet administration never thought of offering language classes for the new citizens.

One day, the soldiers chased out everybody in the street where we were "Yudengasse" (Jew Street). My parents and myself took our sacks to go to the rail road station. While we were going with the rest of that day's contingent, half way to the station, a woman walked by and said: "They called your name at the certificate station." On the spur of the moment, I said to my parents: "You continue going. I am going back, get the certificate and will take you out." Nobody would have let all three of us go back without a permit. Of course, it was easier said than done. The military watched all along the roads and they said that Jews can go only one way - toward the rail road station, not back. I was a young girl, 21 years old and desperate to go look for that elusive piece of paper.