Arnold Negrea

This photo was taken in Fagaras in 1947. Here you can see the husband of my mother's younger sister, Arnold Negrea. This is his new name. He was born in Fogaras [Fagaras, Romania], he was called Lobl; that was his original name. He finished the Academy of Commerce in Berlin and the University of Economics in Basel. He graduated magna cum laude, they usually gave such high marks only to Swiss and Germans, and they wanted him to stay at the university. No, he said, he wanted to come home. At that time it was very usual at the universities to ?lean? to the Left so much, because they taught Marxism to young people at the universities. He contributed a great deal to the leftist orientation. And when he came back to Romania, he contacted the most leftist party of the time, the National Peasant's Party. And he was the private secretary of one of the peasant's party leaders. He was very well educated, and that was the main reason for admitting him. He became an active member of the Red Aid, and later of the Communist Party. He spent most of his life in Fogaras. In 1941 the illegal Communist Party appointed him as party secretary for Torda. It functioned mostly without documents. He lived a fugitive gypsy life and in this time he met my aunt who lived in Torda. After the war he was the first party secretary in the county. If I remember correctly, they got married in 1948 or 1949 and he went to Kolozsvar where he had lots of functions, as far as I know, at the same time. One was university professorship; the other was as the director of the Party's export-import company. Later he was the director of what is today, Transylvania Bank. Finally he just stayed on at the university. His wife was a lawyer and they lived here in Kolozsvar and remained here until retirement. It should be added as a matter of curiosity that a considerable number of the old illegal communists were in prison during communism. He wasn't, but they excluded him from the Party, partly because he was a Jew. He remained a professor until his retirement, even though they excluded him. It wasn't he who romanianized his name; it was the man whose private secretary he was. His wife and children are called Negrea, too. They left for Israel with their children after the changes [after 1989]. He had two children, a girl and a boy, the girl is an English teacher, and the boy is an engineer.