I was born on April 4, 1908, in Pabianice Poland.  I had three brothers and three sisters.  The oldest brother, Michael, was born in 1893, the second was Abe born in 1896, and Ben born in 1899.  My sister Bela was born in 1905, then myself in 1908, and Sara in 1911, and Ester in 1914. 

My father’s father, my grandfather, died in the city of Zdunska Wola before I was born.  He was an educated man and knew four languages.  He taught high school and was the city secretary and because of that one of my uncles living in that city had privileges many years later.  This grandfather married a very rich woman, one aunt said that the bride received trousseau of linen in silk.  In those days, the very rich were marrying their daughters to learned young men.  When he got married, his father-in-law, my great grandfather, made for him a business in an oil mill from which our name Olej (which means oil in English) comes.  In the U.S. the family name was changed to Olive.

My father, Joseph, was a feltcher which in the U.S. does not exist.  It is a male nurse who had the right to prescribe medicine and was a practice in eastern Europe.  My father served in the army for nine years during which time he learned medicine.  My father was a very good and honest man.  There were times when he went to someone sick who was very poor, not only that he didn’t take any money for the visit but also paid for the medicine himself.  Once my older brother Michael said to our father, “Don’t you think of your own children’s needs when you don’t take money from patients?”  Our father’s answer was (I was standing by the side and my father turned to me) “I don’t see him unfed and not dressed”.

My mother, Mindle, was a housewife and was very good-natured.  She was very liked by everybody and even her daughters-in-law liked her.

Father was a very religious man and wanted his oldest son Michael to be a rabbi.  Michael went to religious schools until he was 19 years old.  One day he came back and said that he had had enough learning and wanted to learn a trade.  He learnt weaving.  Of course, Father was disappointed and let all of his sons learn trades.  I wanted to go to school, but my father said that if I didn’t want to become a Doctor of Medicine, any other profession didn’t count as a Jew.  You couldn’t get a job.  To become a doctor was no good because you couldn’t get good night’s sleep.  In those days, doctors made house calls and could be called at any time of day or night.

When I was four years old, I was sent to Haider, every Jewish boy had to go and learn Hebrew to be able to pray.  It was for that reason that every Jew knew how to read and write.  One day at the beginning of World War I in 1914, I went to Haider to pray on Saturday morning.  In the middle of praying, I heard a sound like barrels falling.  The Rabbi’s wife sent us home.  Then I got to know that a war was going on, and the falling barrels were bombs.  One year later, I went to a bigger Haider where we learned the bible and the Talmud.

I was a good student and a good boy.  I never got spanked until one day I lifted a finger which meant to go to the washroom.  An hour later, I lifted two fingers, which meant something more but still to go to the washroom.  For that I was spanked.  The Rabbi always thought that if a child ran to the washroom a lot it meant that he doesn’t want to learn.  When I went home, I would never mention a thing like that.  You’re supposed to be a good boy, and if you got spanked it meant that you were a bad boy and if you were a bad boy, you got spanked again at home by Father.

The next year, I was sent to regular school which was on the other side of town.  Pabianice was a small town with a population of about 60,000 counting the suburbs.  One day, I got into a fight with a non-Jewish boy.  The next day, I had to pass the place where he was usually standing around with other boys.  I was very scared that he might recognize me.  So, I started limping and he didn’t recognize me.

Once, when I was eight years old, my father bought me a hat with a shiny sun visor.  An older girl, who was maybe fourteen-year-old, took eleven children for a walk to the forest to pick blackberries.  This was a whole day trip.  While we were in the forest, it started to rain very heavily.  My sun visor was washed down and instead of being black it turned yellow.  When I came home, I was afraid of my father so I stood outside until my sister Sara came and told me it was all right to come in and that I wouldn’t get a beating.  I did some other things that were not so nice with my friends.  When I was eight or nine years old, we caught a living mouse and packed it in a carton and wrapped it with paper and string so that it would look like a gift package.  The band decided that it was my turn to run to the other side of the street and plant the package.  Then we went into our friend’s store to look out.  A nice lady came and picked up the package and opened it and out jumped the mouse.  The lady started screaming.  After that, I realized how cruel we were. 

When I turned fourteen years old, I wanted to learn to tailor.  I worked for two years and I didn’t like it.  After tailoring, I learnt how to be a beautician.  At the same time my father became ill, and four years later he died.  My brother Abe sent us money for living in the beginning.  When I started to earn my own money, I wrote to him to tell him that I made enough money for our family to live on.  Our family at that time was my mother, Bela, Sara and Esther.  Three years later Bela got married.

Poland was always a very anti-Semitic country but in the year 1932 it really started to get worse.  It started in the University in Warsaw, which did not have too many Jewish students.  (They were not accepted.)  The Christian students started to beat up the Jewish students.  After that it spread throughout the city.  In some places the Jews fought back.  The police always accused the Jews saying that it was their fault.  I had a beauty shop with my brother Michael and in 1933 a lady which had been coming in for many years told me she couldn’t come to me anymore because I was Jewish and because of that she stood to lose her job (she was a teacher).  She apologized and said that she was not anti-Semitic but that she couldn’t lose the job.  A few days later a 17- 18-year-old girl came in and started to cry.  She said that her father gave her a beating because she went to a Jewish hairdresser.  After those two incidents, I knew that I couldn’t stay in Poland anymore.  I left in April 1934.

I will add a little incident that happened in our town.  A Jew had a weaving factory with Christian workers but needed more workers.  200 people were working and the factory wanted to hire four Jews, because Jews couldn’t get any work.  The whole factory went on strike; they didn’t want any Jews working with them.  It lasted two weeks, but in the end, they gave in and let the Jews stay.

To get out of Poland was not easy.  In those days there was no place in the world that Jews would be let in, except for Israel.  You could pay a lot of money and go there – not legally.  The British had a mandate over Israel, and they wanted to win over the Arabs because of the oil.  So, they promised not to let any Jews in.  But there were not any other places to go.  So, you went to Israel illegally and you needed a lot of money.  In those days it cost $1600.00.  This was a fortune.  Thank God I had a brother Abe in the U.S., and he helped me with $600.00.  To get a permit to go out of Poland, you had to have a visa from a country, which will let you in, and we didn’t have a country to let us in.  To get around this problem we applied for permission to go on a Mediterranean cruise. 

When we got permission to leave Poland, we went to Italy by train.  We went through Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria.  In Vienna, we changed trains and went through Yugoslavia to Trieste.  We sailed with a ship called “Jerusalem”.  We came to Haifa, in those days it was in Palestine, now called Israel.  The police which were paid off to let us go out of the port were not on duty that day.  We had to hide in the ship under the machinery, which was so hot from the motors that we could hardly stand it.  It was completely dark.  They gave us food, but we did not see what we were eating.  We had to be hidden because the British police were looking for people who wanted to enter Palestine.  We were there for 24 hours.

Then we went to Beirut on the ship and then back to Haifa.  When we came back to Haifa on the ship, the sailors taught us to walk like sailors, to hold a cigarette in our mouths, and speak two words in Italian: “de bordo” which means “from the ship” as we were getting off the boat.  On the way out of the port, there was an Arab policeman and we said “de bordo”.  We said we came from Trieste with the ship. 

When we came down from the ship in Haifa it was nearly evening and we went straight to a hotel.  We were so tired that we did not even want to eat that evening.  The next morning, we went out of the hotel to a restaurant to eat.  We were sure that people spoke only English or Hebrew.  I knew a few words in Hebrew and my friend knew a few words in English.  We were sitting in this restaurant, and the waiter came to us.  He saw that we were greenhorns (foreigners).  First, I started speaking a few words in Hebrew.  The waiter was standing there as if he didn’t understand and then my friend started speaking his few words in English.  The waiter stood there not saying a word.  After a nice few minutes, we asked very quietly in Yiddish, “Do you understand?”  Now we understood each other, and we had a good breakfast.

On the same day, in the afternoon, we went to Tel-Aviv.  We arrived there at 4:00 PM.  We walked the streets for a while, going past a beauty shop.  I went in and introduced myself as a beautician, the owner of the shop asked me to come to work the next morning.  I worked there for four and a half years.  I couldn’t work there any longer because of his daughter who wanted to marry me, but I couldn’t stand her.

After working at this beauty shop, I went to work in a German beauty shop.  I did not know any German and in this beauty shop you did not hear any other language except German.  However, German is a little like Yiddish (Yiddish comes from German).  When the first customer came in, I asked her how she would like her hair cut.  I asked her this in Yiddish (thinking I was speaking German).  Afterwards, the owner came and asked me why I asked her, “why she wanted her hair cut”.  I told him I asked how not why.  Then he told me how I should ask this.  In this way I learned to speak German.  I worked in this beauty shop for one and a half years.

In 1940, I was already married and Tel-Aviv was bombarded, the shop was destroyed and I was injured.  At the same time, 180 people in Tel-Aviv were killed.  After that terrible day, we moved to a little town called Kfarsaba and opened a little shop.  There was not a lot of work there and after one and a half years, I was proposed a partnership in Tel-Aviv.  I went back and stayed in this partnership for 14 years.

After that, we came to the U.S., to Chicago.  I worked for nearly two years at Helena Rubenstein.  Later for another company for three months.  Then I bought my own shop and stayed there for 23 years.  Then I started to play the violins as an amateur, taking lessons and playing in a symphony orchestra.