Not online: the recording is held by the project and is not on Media Collections Online, YouTube or archive.org. Everything below is a paraphrase of a machine transcript, the weaker of this site's two transcript layers — see how it was made.
Interview in Siget on 4 June 2012 with Golde Salamon (born 1926), in her family home. She talks about her parents and siblings, her prewar childhood and religious home, her deportation to Auschwitz and Belsen, Mauthausen, her hospitalisation and return, her two marriages, and trips to Israel, America and Canada. Kerler asks a few questions about words along the way, and the recording ends mid-talk about a Jewish arbitration custom. Second half of an audio recording with Salamon, an elderly Yiddish-speaking woman in Siget (Sighet), 4 June 2012. Kerler asks about prewar Jewish life. She talks about the oath in the synagogue, folk healing against the evil eye, Sabbath and holiday customs and foods, Purim plays, weddings, and the Hasidic rebbe and cantor. She sings Yiddish and Hungarian songs, describes her forced labor in a camp, and talks about languages, phone calls, her travels, and visitors who came to interview her. Kerler and a second voice (S2) ask some terminology questions.
Opening talk. The radio is turned off, Kerler gives the date and greets Salamon. She states her birth year (1926), her father's and mother's family names, her siblings and the family's deportation in 1944 through the ghetto to Birkenau and Auschwitz, where she was the only one of nine to return. The gassing and crematorium at Auschwitz are mentioned, she says she is losing her Yiddish, and she describes the languages spoken at home. Her father studied in a yeshiva in Czechoslovakia.
She recalls her grandparents (the grandmothers Ester and Henie Reyze, grandfather Yankl) and her mother Beyle. She describes her childhood, with a house run by hard work and no appliances, a baking oven, weekly bread and challah baking, livestock, fields and poultry, and a calm life.
She tells of learning to knead and bake from her first husband, a baker, whom she married although he was much older. Neither marriage produced children. She mentions an acquaintance in America (Leykhter, Lebovitsh family), her three-month stay in New York and Brooklyn, and a two-month trip to Israel, living in Holon.
Kerler returns to her childhood and asks what her mother said when preparing challah and salting meat. She recalls blessings only in part, describes salting meat and the lack of a shochet in Siget, and recalls Jewish weddings in the large family house with its oven. Her grandfather had a distillery for brandy, and Kerler asks about the word for it.
She talks about her uncle Mordkhe, a wedding entertainer and rhymer, her father's yeshiva travels, the cheder for boys and the Romanian school she attended. She recalls her devout grandmother who read the Bible and foretold the war, Sabbath songs (zmires) and havdalah, her non-observant sister-in-law in Israel, and the decline of Jewish life and the emigration of relatives.
Answering Kerler's question about whether singing was allowed in the camps, she describes marching to work to music played by Jewish boys, work on a field and in a munitions factory at Belsenberg (?), and a friendly kapo. She recalls the bread rations, the American liberation at Mauthausen in May, a Polish doctor, her hospitalisation and recovery, and a cholera scare at the border with the Russians.
She describes the journey home by train through Vienna, a hospital stay there and in Cluj, and her return to Siget to find the house turned into a stable. She names her first husband Yona Shimonovitsh and her second husband Salamon, and tells how he rebuilt the house and farmed. Kerler asks about singing in the camp; she sang Hungarian songs there.
She shows her wedding photograph and photographs of her parents. Her father was not a Hasid, since he wore no tie. She and others discuss the synagogues of Siget, the Sephardic synagogue, the rebbes (Kretshnev, Barsh, Spinka (?)) and her father's prayer and tefillin. She tries to recall a lullaby of her mother's and mentions Buchenwald (?) and her smoking.
She tells of a trip from Brooklyn to Canada, with a visa problem, an overnight stay at the border and her stay with relatives, and a niece's family from Regat (?). Back in Siget, she talks about languages at home (Hungarian, Romanian, Yiddish), schooling, and Elie Wiesel and his father Shlomo Wiesel as an arbitrator in business disputes.
Salamon describes how an oath was sworn in the synagogue before the Torah, in a white kittel with two candles, and the fear it caused. She tells a story, which her husband told her, of a man who swore falsely and whose sixteen-year-old son died that night.
Kerler asks about old women warding off the evil eye. Salamon describes the cure of pouring burning coals into a glass of water, with a recited formula and counting, and the child's face being smeared with the water. She also recalls home remedies used for children instead of a doctor.
Salamon talks about Sabbath food, including the cholent taken to a neighbor's oven and the Friday-night food. She names onions with eggs, filled fish, and the false fish made so that children would not choke on bones. She recalls her mother's dumplings (farfl).
Salamon recalls the High Holidays: kapores with chickens, women's straw slippers and white headscarves in the synagogue, Yom Kippur, the cantor, and the shofar. She says unmarried girls did not go to the synagogue on Yom Kippur.
Kerler asks about Purim. Salamon recalls mishloach manot and a Purim play, which she recites in part, performed by boys in masks going to Jewish houses. Kerler mentions a chimney-sweep play and recites part of it. Salamon then describes the Passover seder at home with her father, who explained in Hungarian so that the girls would understand, and the four questions asked by her older brother.
Questions on Passover food: krimzlekh (probably fried matzo-flour cakes) and gefilte fish, which Salamon learned from her husband. She gives the recipe, with fish chopped with eggs, onion, salt, pepper, and sometimes bread soaked in water, and cooked in a broth. She says the dish was not made at Passover. She adds that she has eaten sweet fish only in America.
Salamon speaks of Auschwitz and the languages of tourists, and of her camp experience in Poland. She describes wooden shoes, selling half of her bread ration to buy shoes, standing roll call in the rain, and the Polish Jews' resentment.
Kerler asks about Sukkot and Shavuot customs: eating in the sukkah, dairy foods and fillings at Shavuot, and the reason for eating dairy. They discuss Hungarian and Russian words for dough and a summer borscht with sour cream. Salamon also covers brit and naming customs, and weddings, with many marriages on one day, the huppah in the courtyard and the Friday wedding and Sabbath sheva brokhes.
Kerler asks about a Hasidic rebbe in town. Salamon answers that there were Hasidic rabbis and talks about the famous cantor in the big synagogue and Kol Nidre. She says that before the war she did not travel to other towns because the family had to wear a yellow star. A short exchange follows on 'today or tomorrow' and Kerler's thanks.
At Kerler's request Salamon sings a Yiddish love song she remembers from before the war: a tailoress girl's song to a faithless man, with a warning to girls not to trust men. She then sings a second song about a son who loves a brown-haired girl against his mother's will. Kerler praises the songs, and she recalls going to Hungarian theater as a girl.
Salamon sings several Hungarian songs she learned from her mother, with talk of her mother's singing. She and Kerler discuss the languages of Sighet Jews, which were Yiddish, Hungarian and Romanian. She recounts how she learned Romanian as a child and that Hebrew was not taught.
Kerler asks about a song on the Messiah, and Salamon recalls her uncle's rhymes. She tells how she lost her singing voice because of cigarettes, how a teacher said she had a beautiful voice, and that a Jewish woman would not sing for men. She then speaks of a Danish professor (Stefan?) who is writing a book about Sighet and has been collecting her Yiddish words.
Salamon speaks of her daily life: her doctor brings food weekly, they discuss phone numbers and codes, a mobile phone and money, and her hearing. Kerler and S2 then ask for the Romanian word for 'excuse me' and the like. Answers include 'scuzați-mă' and other Romanian phrases.
Kerler recounts his trip through Hungary and Transcarpathia, Bukovina and Galicia, and where he has been this time. Salamon tells of a lawsuit over her daughter's field in Siget, Baia Mare (Bay'amare) and Cluj, with her grandson (?) in Cluj. Kerler mentions plans to return in a year, and says that the doctor tells her she has a good memory.
Kerler and Salamon speak of how Yiddish differs from place to place, of people from America, Canada and Moscow, and of the Jews who lived in Russia. Salamon describes bringing cloth from America and selling it. She also talks about other visitors, and how she found their Yiddish hard to understand. The stretch ends with a Polish visitor who photographed her mezuzah.