William West

So I got my high school degree in 1939 and there were tumultuous times. We had a radio at the time, there were no TVs available obviously, and this radio was always set on Warsaw. Because Warsaw always had jazz music which we kind of all favored, some American music, but in between it was like a German station. And nothing but Hitler speeches and oh, it frightened the heck out of us. My mother strictly forbade to have this station [on]; she was afraid of it. So things were getting kind of bad, real bad, and then worse than bad. New laws. Every month a new law against this and this. Eventually it got so bad that you could not sit in the park anymore if you were Jewish. You could not do this or that, all kinds of various laws restricting even your movements.

So when my dad approached the principal of the school, by the name of Dr. Kugel K-U-G-E-L, he told my dad, you know, if your son wants to go to higher education later on, it will be very, very bad if we admit him now to school and he flunks. If he flunks the grade, he won’t be admitted to university ever. And he said he’s got this experience already and he suggested I should take off a whole year, go to school, but no grades or anything, just be like a bystander in school. And my dad had no choice, so he agreed to it. So now I’m in school, three years behind already. Certainly I was the oldest one in the class. So now I had to learn how to write Hebrew, speak Hebrew, this kind of stuff. Which really came easily to me because I could speak Yiddish and my grandfather would use lots of Hebrew words so I knew some of it. But certainly nothing to converse with. And Hebrew school was very fashionable at that time because so-to-speak all the elite Jewish people in town gravitated towards this school. It was a non-Orthodox school and of course the local Rabbi was very much against it so all the Orthodox Jews were against the school because we wore no head covers and couldn’t be taught anything about Jewish history. The friends I made in school were all actually local people. They were all the elite of the city. The city was practically 50 percent Jewish – the highest number of Jewish people percentage-wise in all of Central Europe. The friends I made in school at the time became permanent friends. Now, later on, after several grades, we all just spoke Hebrew amongst ourselves. It was our main language. So forget about Hungarian, Czech, about Russian. All we spoke was Hebrew among ourselves. So we had to write the language, read, and speak it. This kind of thing. And really it was very good of all of us, every one of them.