My father never spoke much about the war. Perhaps he never wanted to, or maybe it was because he spent so much of his time working his shoe-making machines. Maybe I just never bothered to ask him. The fact is that I knew almost nothing about my father's past.
As was the case with many Jews in Poland at that time, my father also came from a poor Jewish Orthodox family. At my father's funeral in 1994, a Rabbi said they belonged to a group called the Alexander Chassidim.
My father did tell me about the rigorous and spartan condition at the Cheder where he received his Jewish religious education, but that may have been simply to draw comparison between my lucky existence and the hardships of his own childhood days.
I found the photographs below in my father's possessions after his passing.
My father, as I knew him in my childhood, had a keen ear for music, especially the classics. We had a phonogram and many records, ranging from opera excerpts, to symphonic pieces, to Polish and Russian folk music and pops. My father had a mandolin, although I never saw him play it. Although never to be an accomplished musician, I inherited his love of music. I would dearly love to have looked into my father's past, and see where the musical flair came from, and why it halted. I was told by a Rabbi at the synagogue my father attended after the marriage break-up between him and my mother, that one of the Alexander Chassidic songs he sang there, long forgotten since the war, had been recorded and sent to Israel where it is now sung there by other members of the Alexander Chassidim.