My father was born in 1904, a Jew in Northwest Poland, in a small village called Kodnya that bordered Russia. He worked with an uncle who was a leather man who used to make shoes. The farm workers used to come down to the village with rags on their feet.
In 1920 they decided to leave the village. He came with his father by horse and cart across Poland and when they were hungry they used to go in the fields and eat anything they could find, a cucumber or something like that, just to keep going. As they came across Poland the Cossacks still roamed and raided people and they were stopped. And his father was very clever, he had all his money at the bottom of the horse’s bag that you feed a horse with, so they wouldn’t get found. And they eventually got to a coastal town, Gdansk, where they were held back before they could get onto a ship. There was a shortage of food and he used to go get as much food as he could in his pullover, sweater pockets. Eventually they did get to England and they decided to come to London.
My father was 16 and he met my mother who’d also come to find work from Bristol, and they got married in ’34, I was born in ’35. And I can remember they used to have a small, little grocery shop in Holloway, after that he had a greengrocery shop in Boundary Road, Walthamstow, but he also used to have a barrow which he used to load up with all his vegetables and whatever food he could get and wheel it right down over Blackhorse Road into the Warner’s Estate. We had the shop all during the War. We used to see the doodlebugs coming along. I do remember raisins in a big crate, it was rare to get hold of, but a bomb went off and all the glass broke into the raisins and I remember my mother was picking out the glass; every bit of food was precious.
Leaving Poland, he did leave a brother, Lazarus, who was a saddle maker, and Aaron, who was in the Russian Army. After the War, we found one brother in the American Sector. Lazarus we couldn’t find and we think, obviously, he ended up not in a very good way. But Aaron, we eventually got him over to England and he got friendly and married Dora and she’d also been through the camps and lost a child. And she did look on to me like one of her sons that she lost in the camps.
I helped my father, but then I was getting engaged and I ended up having a sweetshop. I ran two, one in Lea Bridge Road and one in High Road, Leyton, and that went for 14 years. And then after that I went into the garage business with the Esso Petroleum Company and I retired from my garage in Chingford 16 years ago.
