Gyorgy Popa and family

This is a picture of my first husband, Gyorgy Popa. This is a company excursion to Dunaujvaros. It was one of the last photos of us together, because we had a peaceful divorce, in friendship, if I remember, in 1962. Here our two children were at maximum, three or four years old. I don?t know who took the picture, most likely a coworker of Gyuri?s. I don?t even remember who we went with, because it's been more than forty years. I met my first husband at one of the schools. He was a peasant kid who had finished three years of grammar school, he was a very brilliant man. His name was Gyorgy Popa. We were married in 1950, and when I wasn?t allowed to go to the courses as the school director anymore, I got an idea ? my interest in literature came up again. I read in the Literature News, that Gyorgy Mate was the director or party secretary, and like a naïve child I went to see him. I told him, I?m so and so, interested in literature, can he help me. He picked up the phone, called Marton Buza, who was the group director at the Szikra Books, and told him: ?Marci, there's this so and so, try her out!? I went there, passed the interview, and they hired me at Szikra Books. That was in 1951. When I got into Szikra, my life consolidated. They were disciplined party members, you had to appear at the collective meetings, join the party, but it wasn?t such a big drill. My first husband and I started our life on Szabadsag Hill. That happened because my girlfriend Vera Lazar married a boy named Tibor Szoke from the Travelling Chorus. He was with the interior ministry then, he?d been a partisan, and he knew of an apartment, that was available. I went there, and it was empty. That's how I got that apartment. We moved there in 1950. I had it in my head that I had to get him schooled, because he only had three years of elementary education. He eventually finished at the Agricultural College, and became an agronomist. He work mostly in the countryside. We had two daughters. They were not easy births ? it's likely that due to the hormone treatments [from the concentration camp], I couldn't get pregnant, because my body changed. When I started gaining weight, I was skinny from the waist up, but gained weight from the waist down. It's possible, that the emotional element that comes with this, was the part of why I couldn't have kids for so long. So after a really long medical treatment, after 6 years of marriage, my first daughter Kati was born in 1956, and my second, Julia, was born in 1957. That's when I felt that I had a family again. I got back a reason to live. I was with the kids, my husband went from one place in the countryside to the next. It didn't matter that he got an education, that lifestyle of his, which he lived, and the one which I lived, couldn't be reconciled. So we got a nice, peaceful divorce.