Anonymous

"Well work was the, if you didn’t work you didn’t eat. Back then there's no question of that. My father was a cabinet makes and he um he started on his own in the 19, early 1920’s. He had a great uncle who brought over his sisters and who employed men who became their wives later on. It was quite a thing in those days that er in business the work people the families all got together. "

Leilah Sinclair

"My father was a cabinet maker in Bethanal Green, where the cabinet making trade was, and he he, it was called a Shidduck they it meant that they arranged my mother to meet to meet my father. It wasn’t an arranged marriage but they were brought together like that…"

Sylvia Pizer

"( My parents) Well, they were both immigrants from, one from Poland and the other from Romania, and they worked together in a workshop in the East End"

Gus Bialick

"I always used to say to him ‘Dad you couldn’t speak a word of English, you didn’t know a soul in the country, where did you go, and what did you do?’ ... ‘What could I do?’ he said. ‘Wherever the other people walked I followed them’. He says they walked through the city of London, the immigrants, past Tower Bridge, into the East End, and he says ‘by the time I got there I found that there was people there from Russia and Poland who had settled in the East End many years before I arrived."

Alan Edward Weinberg

"We were about five minutes from Ridley Road Market, off Kingsland Road, and it was lovely. We had nothing, my mother and I, we lived in a flat in a house. No bathroom, I had to go to the public baths whether I was dirty or not I had to go to the public baths."

Martin Morris Moss

Anonymous

"I do believe that, that that being Jewish, for me, is an ethnicity, rather than just a religion. It’s not a religion for me, but it is an ethnicity. I would Never deny being Jewish. Erm and part of that is to do with the Second World War and the Hitler idea that there were a lot of people in Germany who, I’m not saying they denied being Jewish, they didn’t even know they were Jewish, but I just think come another Hitler, you’d be Jewish again so I might as well be it. That’s what I am."

Rhoda Fox

"I was evacuated to a little place called Hustpierpoint, which is nine miles from Brighton."

Doreen Wajchendler

"See every year as well the forty-five aid society holds a reunion. They hold a Chanukah party. And they have meetings every month. They er, have committee meetings every month. Most of them have gone now."

Joe Kraven

"...I’ll mix up the families, a red husband with a green wife, and a blue daughter and a pink son. Mix them all up, to show that we are really all the same"

Anonymous

"So er, times change. And we’ve got the famous bagel shop, beigal shop, in the beginning of Brick Lane that people stop at. "