Janina Wiener’s friend Tusia Fisch and other friends from their vacations in Skole

This is a picture taken during summer vacation of 1937 or 1938 in Skole [some 120 km south of Lwow].  I do not know who tore this picture apart or who gave it to me, but I was on the torn part of the picture. From left: Danuta Wilk, Jozef Grosskopf, Kubus Rosenbaum, a girl who’s name I can’t recall, Tusia Fisch, Marian Urich, and Edek Bertrand.

My parents were friends with the Fisch couple. The Fisches had two daughters. One was older than me and was called Fela, the other was younger and her name was Tusia. Fela was a black-eyed blonde. The younger one, Tusia, had red hair and green eyes. We frequently went on summer vacation together. To keep each other company and not get bored, our mothers would arrange where to go on vacation every year together. Our two families, I mean. Tusia and Fela's father was a businessman, but what his business was, I don't know. If I remember correctly, we stayed in Skole, in a villa called Arkadia. 

We had these dirndl dresses, with short, leg-of-mutton sleeves, tight here [at the waist], wide there [at the bottom]. All the dirndls were black, with flowers embroidered on a black background - I don't remember who had flowers of what color. There were blue ones, red ones, and green ones, and to go with that a matching mini-apron. Yes, those aprons were the same color as the flowers. And I remember that when we appeared for the first time on the promenade, some boys we knew nicknamed us 'the three graces from Arkadia.' 

The tallest of those boys was named Kubus Rosenbaum. His uncle was called Probst and worked as a doctor in Skole, and Kubus would come to stay with him for the vacation from some other place, not a large one, where, if I'm not wrong, his father was a public notary. I also remember Marian Urich - not a relative of ours - and Edek Bertrand, I remember those boys. That Edek Bertrand was from Lwow, he was younger than me, and Marian Urich was a friend of Tusia's. I also remember Jozef Grosskopf and Danuta Wilk. If the weather was good we'd spend the mornings by the river. The Opor and the Prut are mountain rivers, but you could always find somewhere to bathe. I remember that we played volleyball, too. After dinner we would go for walks, and then supper and to sleep. 

As far as my friends from my pre-war vacations in Skole are concerned, one who survived the war was Kubus Rosenbaum, whom I met in Frankfurt am Main. My husband's cousin, who, as it turned out, knew Rosenbaum, also lived in Frankfurt. One day, in some conversation, my name was mentioned. The cousin told me later that Rosenbaum was very pleased to hear it, and said: 'She was my friend from vacation.' I don't remember where he came from, but not from Lwow. And one time, when I went to visit that cousin, I met him - that was a surprise. Rosenbaum was married to a German girl, a pretty blonde. He died some eight or ten years ago. Another girl who lives in Frankfurt is Danuta Wilk. She is alive, but she is a vegetable, not a person. I met Jozef Grosskopf in 1957, when I visited Israel for the first time. He was an officer in the Israeli army. If I remember correctly, he spent the war in Russia. He told me he was in the escort that took Herzl's ashes from Vienna to Israel.