Growing up in Skala
Chapter Five
Before World War I. Skala had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After it was ceded to Poland in 1919, the river became the border with the Soviet Union and Skala became a garrison town, with about four officers and fifteen soldiers quartered near the marketplace. They rode about on horses and spent most of their time drinking, playing cards, and womanizing.
The town had 5 500 inhabitants. About 3 000 Greek Orthodox Ukrainians; 1 000 were Catholic Poles; and 1 500 were Jews, the vast majority observant, including our own family.We knew little about gentiles; they lived their lives and we lived our lives.
Business was the main contact between us. There was a marketplace on the main venue facing my Wasserman grandparents’ house. At least twice a week. the Ukrainian peasants would bring their produce – eggs, beans, grain – to sell there to Jewish merchants, who exported these commodities to Western Europe and elsewhere. After the market they would go to a kretchma, a little inn, to drink. The Jews would be standing on the avenue, one after another, outside their little stores located in the front rooms of their homes. The peasants would come out of the inn to buy kerosene, salt, sugar – which was very expensive and sold in lumps – fabric and clothing, hardware and farm tools, and leather.
There were also occasional fairs where the Jewish merchants went in carriages to sell the peasants suits and other clothing they had made, and boots, shoes, and quilts. Our only other contact with the Ukrainian peasants was when we needed them to be shabbos goyim, to light the stoves and ovens on the Sabbath. Once a year, on New Year’s Eve, the Polish officers held a big ball at their garrison, inviting only “fine Jews” – my father, my mother, and her beautiful younger sister Suza among them.
We had a very rich social and cultural life centered around our two-story Bet Am (community house). It had a large auditorium where lectures and concerts were held, an amateur theatre troupe performed, and where we celebrated Purim and Chanukah and other holidays; library with 5 000 books; a reading room; and a very high-level Tarbut (Hebrew cultural movement) school which ran from kindergarten to the eighth grade.
The situation in Poland after the First World War was difficult for Jews, but it deteriorated even further after the death of Marshal Pilsudski, a socialist whom the Jews looked to as their protector, in 1935. The Jews cried bitterly when he died – they knew what was coming – and shortly after, the fascists took over and implemented official anti-Semitic policies, hoping to forbid ritual slaughter and instituting an economic boycott of Jewish enterprises.
Jews felt they had no future in Poland, and many – including a second cousin of mine – become Communists or Zionists. We had an active chapter of Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, religious Zionists, and pioneering movements that sent young people on hachsharah to training farms where they prepared for aliyah (immigration) to kibbutzim in Erez Israel. Hashomer Hatzair, Betar, Hanoar Hatzioni – all these youth groups met in the Bet Am.
Chapter Six
Mendel was their oldest child, and after him came Esther. She married a boy named Mendel Gottfried, who had left Skala for Paris, where he set up in business importing eggs from Skala. He did very well there, but returned to Skala to find a bride. He and Esther brought five of her brothers and sisters – Mendel, Usher, Krenia, Brana, and Tuvia – to work with them in Paris. Esther and the others sent money to their parents, and Azriel used some of it to set up a small hardware store. He never forgot that he had been poor, and every Friday gave needy Jews potatoes, flour and bread, and matzah for Passover.
Every year Esther took her parents to a spa. She and the other children used to visit them in Skala in the summer, and this was always a major event for us.
From the Paris they brought grapefruit, oranges, chocolates, and the best sardines, and left us their clothes before going home. …
Azriel and Hinda’s three other children – Leo (Leibish), Sophia, and my father – remained in Poland. Leo became a very wealthy and successful businessman in Lviv, but he returned to Skala after the German invasion.
Sophia was an intellectual and who knew Tanach (the Hebrew Bible) and quoted Bialik’s poetry by heart. But she was not considered marriageable because she did not live up to conventional standards of good-looks: fair, pink, and plump, with beautiful hair and full breasts. But because of the money Esther and others sent their parents, there was enough of a dowry for her to have married a doctor or lawyer, about $ 1,800 by the going rate. She married Zygmunt (Zisha) Zimmerman when she was twenty-four – then considered an advanced age for a girls’s marriage – and they had a son, Dolek.
Chapter Seven
None of our homes had electricity, and the rooms were heated with coal stoves. Our drinking water came from a well, via pail and rope, in the Wassermans’ garden.
Chapter Eight
My father had no head for business; he was a scholar, a man of the Haskalah (Enlightenment movement), a believer in education who loved literature and loved Yiddishkeit (Yiddish culture). He was part of the small intelligentsia in Skala whose members came to our house to play chess and cards and discuss politics and current affairs. They included the commander of the Polish garrison, the postmaster, the manager of the estate of Count Golochowski, the principal of the Polish elementary school (a rabid anti-Semite), a rich landowner who came to my father for advice, a man named Ulanowski who was a member of the Polish Szlachta (gentry), and Moizesevich, an Armenian, who owned the only pharmacy in town. I used to go to his beautiful old pharmacy with its dogwood, jars and scales, and fantastic smells, to pick up medicine for my parents.
Our home was full of books in several languages – French, Russian, German, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish. When I was a little girl, my father would hold a book in his hands and I would trace the words as he read. Sometimes the book had no pictures, but I didn’t care. His voice, the resonance of it as it came into my back, my hair, my ears, filled me with comfort, and sometimes I stopped listening to the words and just held on to the sonorities of sound.
My father wanted me to be educated, but my mother didn’t care. She was not an intellectual, and her passion was being a balabusta, a meticulous housekeeper with the reputation of having the cleanest home in Skala. She wanted me to get married, and worried that I wouldn’t because there was no money for a dowry.
Chapter Ten
Lotka’s parents, Mottel and Szencia Sternberg, were among the few Jews in Skala who did not keep a kosher home. Their cook, Lotka once told me, used to prepare ham and fry pork chops in butter. In the 1930’s, Mottel had lived in Prague. Upon returning to Skala, he married Szencia, and they opened a very fancy grocery in the large front room of their house, patronized by the Polish officers and the town intelligentsia. I used to be entranced by the chocolates and jams and fancy cakes, and sometimes Lotka shared a package of French butter cookies with me.
Chapter Thirteen
Sweet, brilliant Shimek Bosek had been my friend since I was a young girl in Skala. His father and mine were best friends and had studied together at the university in Chernowitz. Mr.Bosek came from a fine family, some of whose members had settled in Paris, and his brother, Mandel, was a violinist.
Shimek’s father was a Zionist who had settled in Palestine in the 1930s. But he had suffered from malaria and the unsettled conditions and had become disillusioned. Returning to Skala, he married and open a little store. Shimek was an only child.
The excerpts presented here are drawn from the memoirs of Fanya Gottesfeld, a Jewish girl from the Galician town of Skala, who survived the Holocaust. In her recollections, she revisits her youth, which unfolded in interwar Poland. Her account bears a distinctive quality: at the onset of the Holocaust, she was eighteen years old—old enough to perceive and record the events unfolding around her, yet still young enough for her reflections to remain free from the hardened frameworks of political dogma or inherited prejudice.
Her memories can be interpreted through five overlapping contexts—cultural, economic, political (interethnic), and ethical. The following analysis engages with each of these dimensions to reconstruct the anthropological perspective of her experience and to illuminate how the events she describes intersected with broader social processes.
Fanya’s personal recollections as a young woman offer a compelling microhistory of a town in interwar Galicia and provide an opportunity to envision how she perceived it as a teenager—in all its fullness and contradictions. The reliability of such sources, however, is both their strength and their limitation. Their strength lies in the vivid, detailed portrayal of everyday life—elements often absent from official or public records. Their limitation, in turn, stems from the need for continual verification and comparison of the described events and facts with other sources.
Recognizing that all memories constitute a subjective narrative of lived experience, the authenticity of Fanya Gottesfeld’s recollections can be viewed in parallel with the travelogue of Chone Gottesfeld, a relative of the author. Chone, who later became a well-known journalist for the New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts, visited his native Skala in 1936 and recorded his impressions of what he witnessed there. Since his travelogue aimed to portray the hardships of Galician Jewish life to elicit support from American Jews, it is reasonable to assume that he may have deliberately omitted certain aspects of local life that did not serve this purpose. Fanya’s memoirs, by contrast, were not written with any audience in mind. Taken together, the two accounts complement one another, offering a more nuanced picture of life in a small Galician town.
In her recollections of interwar Skala, Fanya constructs an image of a lost idyll—di alte heim. Despite the financial hardships of her relatives, her memories evoke a sense of harmonious adolescence: a happy family life, a love of learning, first romance, and many friendships. Her portrayal of the Skala shtetl—a border town with its own distinct features—largely mirrors the experiences of other Galician towns that shared comparable cultural, demographic, and economic conditions.
Fanya’s memories reveal how the norms of traditional society are intersected with modern practices in everyday life. Her family can be seen as typical of Galician Jewish households in the interwar period, in which the life choices of her parents differed markedly from those of earlier generations who had lived in the region under Habsburg rule. A close reading of the life trajectories described in her memoirs sheds light on various forms of adaptation—individual choices, patterns of social mobility, emigration, and re-emigration. The latter is illustrated by the example of her friend’s father, Shimko Bosek, who returned from Palestine to Skala in the early 1930s after failing to adjust to the harsh working conditions and climate of the settlement. His disappointment with life in the Middle East and return to Europe exemplify why many Jews, after the difficult process of emigration, ultimately came back to Poland. This case also illustrates the tension between political discourse and social practice. Although Zionism gained significant popularity in Galicia during the interwar period—particularly after the financial crisis of 1924–1925—the number of those returning from Palestine exceeded the number who managed to settle there permanently. This excerpt from Fanya’s memoirs highlights several factors that shaped changing attitudes toward emigration (aliyah) to Palestine, the most important being the emergence in the 1930s of systematic preparatory training (hakhshara) for prospective emigrants.
The details provided in this excerpt about cultural, educational, and political life in Skala enrich our understanding of several key modern processes: how the Jewish community functioned within a small-town environment, how state authorities influenced and regulated local social life, and which political and cultural initiatives of contemporary parties found genuine support among the population. For instance, the mention of the Bet Am community center illustrates how, during the interwar period, the local community succeeded in creating its own cultural institution—one that became both a hub of national life and an educational center, where Jewish children received schooling and developed a sense of modern identity.
Fanya began writing her memoirs in 1988, a circumstance that makes them distinctive for several reasons. First, they were composed decades after the war, rather than during the period of postwar criminal investigations, which allowed the author far greater freedom in shaping her own narrative. Second, a challenge for the author was an already established canon of collective memory within her community—one that, for example, tacitly portrayed Ukrainians exclusively as collaborators and accomplices in crimes against humanity. Fanya’s account of survival diverged from this convention. Without renouncing her testimony—and despite criticism—she remained convinced that her story of rescue carried essential lessons of human kindness that needed to be shared.