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 | Rick and his baby sister. |
Eva was a beautiful, happy and healthy baby, always smiling, rarely crying. She was more outgoing than Rick. Rick was proud of his little sister and protective of her, always wanting to hold her and change her diapers. I imagine that’s how Gitta was with me. Leon ordered a fancy, expensive, stroller for Eva from Poznán. It was the latest thing and very few children had them; it was red with a lot of shiny, stainless steel.
Rick came down with scarlet fever while I was in hospital after giving birth to Eva. At that time, when you had a baby, they kept you in hospital for two weeks. I was worried about going home with Eva, fearing Rick was contagious, but he had the disease in a light form and the doctor said a baby is immune during its first six months and that I could bring her home. When I got to the apartment, I found a kitchen full of empty pots. Friends had been bringing Rick chicken soup to cure him. But he was so sick of eating chicken soup, he said to me, “Mommy, make me something good to eat, please.”
 | Rick's milk mother, Wanda Witecka; Eva's milk mother, Helena Broniewska. |
We actually had a milk mother for Eva. One of our neighbours, Halinka, had a baby who was three or four months older than Eva and I was again having trouble breast feeding. She used to feed both children at once, hers and mine. Eva would feed on one breast while her child fed on the other. Although she and her husband were badly off, they wouldn’t let us pay them for their kindness. Leon later insisted that she accept a gold watch he bought for her. In 1989, when I visited Poland, I found Halinka still living at the same address. She still had pictures of my children on her buffet.
With both my pregnancies, I had strange food cravings. When I was pregnant with Rick, I craved eel, fresh smoked eel on a fresh kaiser roll. That would satisfy my craving — temporarily. When I was pregnant with Eva, I craved radishes. I would walk around with my pockets full of them and eat them constantly. I loved the strong bitter taste. Marian, a young man who worked for Leon, brought me fresh-picked radishes from his garden. Sometimes if my supply was running out, Leon would hop on his motor-cycle and ride all over town searching for radishes. I still love radishes. So do my children. They must have inherited the craving from their mother.
 | Leon and Eva on vacation. |
When I married Leon, I was surprised to discover that I knew how to cook. Maybe it’s because I’d spent so much time as a young girl watching my mother. I was always with her in the kitchen. I used to cook, bake and make pastries. Whenever fruit was in season, I made jam — raspberry, plum, cranberry, and so on. I used to pickle mushrooms and cucumbers. Leon and I would make our own sauerkraut; it was delicious. Our sauerkraut involved Leon tromping on the cabbage with his (clean) bare feet. We also used to make our own grape wine and sour cherry liqueur and slivovitz.
In summer, I grew vegetables for everyday use, even in winter. I’d learned a trick. If you placed an empty bottle around a young growing cucumber, it would grow inside the bottle. When the cucumber was a nice size, I would cut the stem and seal the bottle. Cucumbers could stay fresh this way for a year or more. When we had company in winter — we often had guests — Leon would cut open a bottled cucumber with a glass cutter and everyone would be surprised that we had fresh cucumbers at that time of year.
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