The Friedmann girls

These are the four Friedmann girls, from left to right: my sisters Piri Deri, Rozsi Schwarz and Bozsi Spiegel and me. I'm sitting in a pram or something the like. You can see how nicely we were dressed. Our parents dressed us charmingly because they had a good taste, both Mom and Dad.

Mom was 17 or so when she got married and she gave birth to Piri soon after. I was born in 1915, Bozsi in 1910, Rozsi in 1908, and Piri was born in 1906. She was a very beautiful girl. Piri always ran away from home. Once she ran away to the neighbors and they were standing over her at a loss, wondering who she could be. She was a nice blond little girl and she could already talk, only she couldn't tell what her name was and who her father was. And finally they found out who she was because she kept saying, 'He is always ironing, he is always ironing'. And so they realized that if he was always ironing, she could only be the tailor's daughter.

I was the youngest child and the fourth girl. My father almost threw me out! He said that if I was also going to turn out a girl, I would be thrown into the Eger stream. He didn't mean to throw me out, of course, he just kept threatening my mother with it because he wanted to have a male heir who could inherit his workshop. Looking back at my childhood, it was absolutely untroubled. It wasn't an issue whether we were Jews or not. We were on very friendly terms with our neighbors. We didn't get together but we got on well. In school [non-Jewish] children were told that on Saturday they had to write the stuff in our student's record and everything was going well. Nobody touched us, all the more so because my dad was a very honest and decent craftsman.

Photos from this interviewee