Support Centropa. I met Mr. Wacek Kornblum in his apartment in Saska Kepa, a district of Warsaw. We talk in his living room. There are pictures and photographs hanging on the wall β Mr. Kornblum is an amateur photographer. There are plenty of books around. Some in Hebrew, some in Yiddish, most of them in Polish β both Polish classics, as well as works of Jewish authors published in Polish.
The house has a warm air to it, someone is cooking, somebody else is cleaning up, Mr. Kornblum willingly talks about the pre-war times, his stories are colorful and full of details, I often feel as if I was watching a movie about his life.
I was born to an intellectual family. Father, Szlomo Kornblum, born in , was a writer, he used to write in Yiddish. Mom was born in , her maiden name was Zamosc, she came from Mszczonow [49 km south-west of Warsaw], near Warsaw. He must have died fairly early. There were also kids there, there was Mosze, there was Miriam and Reginka [diminutive for Regina].
They were all much older than us, of course. Father had a couple of sisters and a brother. The oldest sister of Father was Aunt Frania [Franciszka]. She lived on 26 Wielka Street, if I remember correctly, they were best off before the war. And they had a daughter Maniusia [Mania, diminutive for Miriam], most emancipated, there was a son older than her who had already left home, and a younger one, Salek [Salomon], who was about two years older than me.
Maniusia later married some other Salek and they had a daughter Paulinka [Paulina] in And later they went to the United States from Paris. Uncle married a Jewish woman from Warsaw. One of them, Suzi, committed suicide in Washington after the war, as a very young woman.
