Adolf Fajner with friends

This picture was taken before my uncle, mother’s brother Adolf Fajner left Germany in the 1930s.

My uncle is second from left, and there are his friends, but I don’t know their names.

My mother's maiden name was Fajner. Her parents' names were Maurycy and Roza Fajner, but I don't know the maiden name of my grandmother.

Later her family moved to Lodz. There were very many of them. In my father's family there were three brothers and two sisters [my father's siblings], but here there were as many as eight children [my mother's siblings].

Her sisters: Bella and Helena; and her brothers: Samuel, Jakub, Maksymilian, Adolf and Jozef. Eight altogether.

Up to about 1922 Adolf worked for my father. My father had an electro-technical establishment.

Adolf learned the profession while working for him, but then things got difficult in Poland, so he emigrated to Germany [in the 1920s], to Dortmund in the Rhine region.

He lived there until more or less 1938, working, among other things, as a taxi driver.

Then he moved to Manchester in England. He was struggling financially and he believed things would work out better for him in America.

Just before the war he was planning to join his brother Samuel in Cleveland, he even sent all his belongings out there.

Then the war broke out and he stayed in England, in Manchester. He survived the war, just as Samuel's family in Cleveland did.

After the war, in March 1946 I returned home from the Soviet Union. At the beginning I was in Lodz.

There was nobody left from my closest family, and Bela, my fiancee was also gone.

I was continually in touch with my uncle Adolf Fajner, the one who lived in Manchester.

After the war he played the role of a link between the family members who were still alive.

Everyone would ask him to find out about the others. So he put me in touch with my uncle Samuel, my mother's oldest brother.