I think my grandmother Sarah Gittel’s name before she was married was Rappoport ii). She had a nephew of that name, a shochet, who used to come from Breslau (in Russia) for Shabbat once or twice a year. This was when she was an old lady. I think his name was Rappoport, I'm not certain.

My grandfather Shlomo died in 1929 when he was 86 years old. Sarah Gittel died in 1931 when she was 87 (she was a year younger than Shlomo). I remember her well. She used to daven, but with my help, because she could not read. At the end of her life she was paralysed , but she still knitted socks and gloves and woollen things despite her paralysis. She could remember all the stories in the bible, but she could not read.

My mother had several brothers. Henech was the oldest. His wife was Chana. He died in Lithuania, but his daughter went to Brazil. She died of TB in about 1969. Her daughter, also called Chana lives there and she once wrote to me, but unfortunately it was in Portuguese. The next child was mother Shane Tsyril. The next brother was Heikel. He had a son Wolfie, also named after my mother's mother's father. He died in the war.

The youngest brothers were Louis, David and Eliezer. Louis went to England in 1908. Eliezer, also known as Lazar or Leslie was not married. He was in England for a short time, but he wanted to go to the USA on the Titanic. It would have been very expensive, but he was a specialist in machinery so he was taken on as a reserve engineer and given a cheap passage. Unfortunately he died when the Titanic sank. He was one of 19 people who saved themselves on an ice floe, but they were not rescued and froze to death. My grandmother used to say that she heard about the Titanic disaster when she was going on the train from Vilna to Ignalina, and the names were given in the newspaper, and she fainted on the train.

My father was away for four years in the First World War, and my mother was at home. She had a shop. As her husband was a prisoner of war the German Occupation gave her a licence to run a shop. It was not a shop like we have now, which sells just one kind of item. In those days a shop sold a mixture of four or five kinds of goods. She sold cloth and household goods.

We were a very close family. In the first years after the First World War business and shop keeping were very bad and we were very poor. The grandfather Shlomo was sent money two or three times a year from England. It was from the insurance (compensation?) money on Leslie's death. The grandfather could manage quite well on it for several years.

My mother used to tell us that she bought clothes for her brothers when they went to England, Uncle Louis and Uncle David. Louis used to write us just five or six line letters, saying "We are well" , and a few words more and "here is some money". His knowledge of Yiddish was poor because he learned it in cheder but he did not learn enough to write a long letter.

When I was a boy in Ignalina I went to a Jewish primary school. There we learned in Yiddish, which is the language we spoke at home. I also knew Lithuanian and Polish, and later learned Hebrew. By the time my younger brothers went to school there was a Hebrew school in Ignalina which they attended.

In Paluszj the family was engaged in farming and fishery. There was a lake on their land at Garbun . This lake was big enough for them to supply themselves with fish. However they leased the fishing rights at another lake and they would sell the fish from that lake in Vilna and other places They knew about fishery because of their lake at Garbun , When I was a boy of about 12 or so,  I went. as a spectator to see how they did the fishing in the winter.

You had a hole in the ice about two metres across and small holes at intervals in the ice, each about half a metre across. You put the net into the large hole and spread it in such a way that it formed a semicircle of a few hundred metres under the ice. The idea was to bring the edges to the open hole. Long sticks were poked through the small holes to bring the edge at the net around to the big hole. The ends of the net were attached to ropes, and the other ends of those ropes were wound round wooden drums on the sledges. You could not see the net under the ice. People wore leather gloves for the work. When the net was wound in through the big hole the people pulled the fish out of the hole . If a fish was free within the net then it was part of the owner's catch. But if the fish was caught in the net so that it could not escape, then it was considered that it belonged to the workman who took it out. This was the custom and the workman would put the fish in his own basket.

The whole thing took a few hours. It was about half an hour or an hour before you started to wind in the rope. Catching fish that way needed about half' a dozen workers. The fish were put in baskets tied at the top with strings, and taken by horse drawn sledge to the local station, and then by train to Vilna.

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