By comparison, fishing in the summer was easy. I was only a spectator of the winter fishing, but in the summer I actually helped with the fishing. We would go out in a boat. There was a very long (rectangular?) net with wooden floats at the top and stones at the bottom to weigh it down, to make a "wall" in the water . The idea was to spread out that net in the water and bring the ends of the "wall" together to make a big circle in which the fish were trapped. Only a fish that was free in the middle of the net belonged to the owner - like with the winter fishing a fish that was trapped in the net belonged to the worker who pulled it out. The workers were both Jews and gentiles, and we got on very well with the gentiles.

The family only did fishing on that scale after leaving the farm. Their other business was forestry - they would buy the timber in a piece of forest and cut it in winter time. That was the only time of year when you could take the logs away, because the cold made the ground very hard. You could never take out the timber on carts with wheels. In winter time there would be horse drawn sledges. A sledge is lower than a cart and is easier to load, and can take four times more weight of timber than a cart.

After the war my brother Ziska made his career in forestry - he was a supervisor, measuring the timber and directing which trees were to be cut. (He now lives only 30 or 40 miles from Ignalina. There are very few Jews there now, say half a dozen families, and most have made mixed marriages. Only my brother has married a Jewish woman.)

In some seasons the family would buy crops such as flax and wheat from the villagers and sell it in the town. Many farmers came to the market at Ignalina to sell their produce, and merchants came from Vilna to buy it. We knew the Lithuanian language but the Vilna people could not speak it, they spoke only Russian and Polish, so we acted as the middle men. The Lithuanians would not sell to someone who could not speak their own language. When the trains stopped at Ignalina the conductors would come to buy milk and eggs in the market. The Lithuanians used to say "If you ask us in Polish we won't sell to you".

We lived in the same house as my grandparents. My grandfather Shlomo built it big enough for my mother's family as well as him and my grandmother. We needed three rooms and he had one room.

I would not say that we were extremely religious. We did not have peyut. In those days everyone was frum. We went to shul, we went to daven, we ate kosher. I don't remember people at that time who were not frum. On Shabbat we would go for a walk, perhaps five or six kilometres, to the lake, further than we should have walked on Shabbat, but we would not go bathing on Shabbat.

Was life very comfortable? Comparatively. I remember that in winter we had to go with a sledge to bring water from a place, and put the water on the sledge - it was about half a mile - as the water near our house was frozen. Carrying one or two wooden buckets of water was quite hard work But then after supper we would take the sledges and look for hills and play sliding down the hills. In summer we used to go swimming in the lake.

There were plenty of different kinds of fruit - cherries, plums and apples. I used to make vishnik out of cherries and sugar. My mother used to take half a dozen different kinds of fruit and make confitures. We had strawberries and other kinds of berries - I don't know all the names.

But it was not so comfortable - I would not go back to it.

We ate chicken, and of course we had our own cow, and that gave us enough milk. In those days a cow was half the food for a family, providing sour cream and different kinds of cheese. Mainly the produce from the cow was for ourselves. I used to go to get the cow in from the field. Someone was paid a little to have the cow in his field. The cow would come to our house herself most times, because there was a great dish of food for her, scraps and water, and the cow was keen to get to it. A cow was a part of the family. Apart from what we ate which came from the cow the other half of our main food came from eggs and meat and bread.

Near our house we had an area of land with a good garden so we had potatoes, carrots, beans and vegetables, and cucumbers in the summer season. My mother looked after the garden, and before that my grandmother did. The children helped with the garden, and we would sow and hoe the potatoes, that was our task. We children liked beans so we sowed extra beans, which were ready a month or so before the potatoes. There was no shortage, But the house was not so comfortable because you had to get water from outside.

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