Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
A Happy Childhood
commander of the Polish cavalry in our region chose our lovely house as a suitable place to live. The officer had a separate entrance and a front balcony in addition to his three rooms. After he moved in, we were crowded and our overnight guests had to sleep on the couch in the living room. We were not happy, but we had no choice. Attached to the house was my mother’s photography studio, which had a glass roof for light. There was no electricity. When you were inside, it felt as if you were in a glass house. There were curtains you could draw when it was too sunny. The studio building had its own entrance from street level. My mother kept her photog- raphy supplies in one of the unheated storage rooms, and geese in the other. A hallway led to the steps of the cellar, where we stored preserves. A big shed provided additional space. We had a radio that ran on batteries in our house. Installing a radio in those days involved putting up a huge antenna, built from two tall poles with a wire stretched between them and running down into a drum of coal. Inside the house, we had a switch on the wall. As soon as a lightning storm would start, though we had lightning rods on our roof, we ran to disconnect the antenna so that it wouldn’t attract lightning. Our housekeeper was a Polish girl who helped with the cook- ing, cleaning, and other housework. She slept in the kitchen above the big brick oven, twice the size of a kitchen table, with a sleep- ing platform on top. She lit the stove every day. We also had a kitchen fireplace with a long chimney that zigzagged behind the walls through the rest of the house; each room had a brick wall that was warm and radiated heat. The fire did not have to be burning all the time for the house to stay warm. The bricks held the heat well, sometimes all night. We would light a fire for a few hours in the morning and then again in the afternoon when the bricks had cooled. Another woman brought water every day to fill the big water tank. There were several wells in town. Next to our house was an old-fashioned well, with a big pole that was split on top, and a long stick balanced across it and anchored with a pin. A heavy metal
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