Hershel Vider grew up with three brothers. He attended cheder and spoke with his parents in Hungarian and with his grandparents in Yiddish. As an adolescent, he was involved in Zionist movements, such as Betar and Hashomer Hatzair. During the war, he was imprisoned in a Russian labor camp in Vorkuta,Russia, from which he was released in 1946. He was married in a traditional wedding in 1949.
Other Interviews:
Coming HomeVorkutlag
Bubbie Zisl
Mukacheve, Ukraine
In this clip Hershel Vider talks about his great-grandmother, who died in 1927, when Hershel was only a child. He remembers, though, that every evening she would have a dinner of two rolls from the nearby bakery and a glass of red wine. He proudly states that his family has lived in Mukacheve for several hundred years.
Mukacheve was what some have called a typical Jewish town in Transcarpathia under Czechoslovak sovereignty; its Jewish population was about sixty percent of the total population of the city. Not only was it a center for Hasidism, led by Rabbi Chaim Eleazar Spira, but it was also housed one of the best Hebrew gymnasiums east of Budapest.