Chana Sznejser

This is my sister Chana Sznejser. This picture was taken in Lukow sometime in the 1930s. Lukow was a very pretty town. There were two churches, two grammar schools, the 22nd Riflemen's Regiment, a unit of the army of the Second Polish Republic. It was a lovely life! And Lukow was bigger than Radzyn. In Radzyn you had to walk nine kilometers to the train station, but in Lukow there were two stations, one for Lublin and one for Warsaw. There were a lot of Jews in Lukow before the war. They had bakeries, and there was a Jewish slaughterhouse. The Jewish slaughterhouse was in this big building near the river. There were two slaughterhouses in the building: the Polish one and the Jewish one. The Polish part was closer to the river. But the slaughterhouses were separate: separate entrances and exits. If they did something wrong with the meat in the Jewish part and it wasn't kosher, they would give it to the Poles. And then they settled up with money. But normally everything had to be kosher. And on the right side the Poles slaughtered pigs and other [non kosher] animals. And all the blood flowed down into the river. When the war began in 1939, Chana stayed with my Mother in Lukow while me and my brother Abram escaped to the forest. I never saw her again, I don?t know where and when exacly she died.