KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
He charged a zloty to cross with a wagon; pedestrians could go free. The bridge was not strong enough to support wagons with huge loads of lumber. It floated on empty barrels, and sometimes when you got to the center, it would sink slightly and water would come up over the edge, although not above the rims of the wheels. Every year, it was removed before the river froze solid so the ice would not damage the bridge and the drums. Besides, who would pay to cross on a bridge when they could ride across the ice for free? About a year before the war, in 1938, changes occurred near the border. The Polish army decided that certain sections of the country were vulnerable and, as a result, the entire population in our area was required to get new documents. My mother’s photo studio was given the contract to provide most of the photographs for these documents. The job involved traveling with the Polish officials from village to village to take pictures of the farmers. She did not want to do the traveling herself, but the contract was so lu- crative that my father freed himself from his own business affairs to supervise and handle this enterprise. They hired people to help with the photography. That summer, when I was ten years old, my father took me along with him for two or three weeks, traveling with a govern- ment- provided horse and wagon to the villages to take photo- graphs. We spent a couple of days in each village. Three or four Polish officials were sent with us with their list of all the inhab - itants, against which they verified their documents. The vil - lagers were supposed to sign their names to the papers, but most of them could not write so they signed with a thumbprint. Then they were sent to us to be photographed for identification on their documents. The photographs were not developed immediate- ly, but eventually each photograph was identified and wound up on the proper document. There were many villages with hundreds of people each, so it was a big job. The Polish government paid my father a fixed sum provided
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