On holiday

In this picture, the one seated on the left, is my husband, Imre Hahn, the one on the right is my cousin, Andor Oblath, I am in the middle, and the one standing on the left is my cousin Jeno Oblath. I don't know the other man and I don't know where the picture was taken either, not even when exactly- perhaps sometime around the beginning of the 1930s. We were on an excursion. We often got together with my cousins. They also lived in Matyasfold, the two houses were close by, five minutes apart. My cousins were friends with my husband - relatives and friends as well. I liked them very much, they were intelligent, well-educated, well-read people. They graduated from secondary school. Back then, it was a big thing if someone graduated from secondary school. They were not married yet, at that time. They were even angry with my husband because he was the first one in the boat group, who got married. They owned a boat together, and they rented a space for the boat at the first boathouse, next to the Ujpesti Osszekoto bridge-the owner of the boathouse was called Magashazi. As soon as the weather started to be good they went to lacquer it and put it in order. When I joined their group, then I also went along to tidy up the boat and every weekend, we went rowing on the Danube, in two boats. It wasn't the done thing at the time, to sleep in the same tent with one's fiancée, so they went to Vac or to Horany on Saturday, and I went to join them on Sunday morning and then came home in the evening. That was the program every weekend, when the weather was good. How they settled on this sport, I don't know, but Jeno was a member of the Workers' Sports Association. My husband was also a member. He liked rowing and was very good at it. When we were rowing in a cox-less double scull, if he didn't want someone to overtake us, they couldn't. Later, we gave up rowing. Andor's wife wasn't game for it, she couldn't even swim, and he wouldn't have let her do it anyway, as he was very jealous. Then Jeno died in 1936. Jeno Oblath was my cousin of mine and also of my husband. For me, it was on my mother's side: he is the son of Uncle Naci, my mother's brother. For Imre, it was also on his mother's side: her sister, Aunty Lina, became Uncle Naci's wife. Jeno was born in 1903, and at the age of 33, he got blood poisoning, and there were no penicillin yet (at that time), so it killed him. He finished high school; he was a clerk, but he was unemployed for a long time. And in 1930 or 1931, when they were building the house in Matyasfold he managed the construction work. He was unmarried and lived at home. Andor Oblath was uncle Naci's eldest son. He was born in 1901. He was a clerk, but I don't even know where, but he was already married. He must have gotten married around 1933 or '34; their son, Peter, was born in 1935, and lives in Australia too. They used to live in Budapest, I think in Tuzolto street, but by the time the house was built, they had moved to Matyasfold as well. There was an attic room there, the youngsters and the small boys lived up there. Andor died in 1945 of typhus, supposedly due to the typhus injection. When I arrived home, he was already dead.

Photos from this interviewee