Vacation at Balaton

This photo was taken at [Lake] Balaton in 1943. My wife, Eva B. and I are in it. We were married in February of 1943. Eva was already expecting our first daughter, Zsuzsanna, when the picture was taken. We went down there on a Triumph motorcycle, later compulsorily surrendered [to the state - anti-Jewish Laws], and stayed in a local hotel on the Balaton lakeside for a week. I met my wife in Budapest. She was thirteen years old, when I would tease her on her way to school with a big bag on her back. We lived in the same house in Budapest, 16 Paulay Ede Street. They lived on the third floor, we lived on the first floor. I flew up the steps everyday just to ask her what she's doing. She was studying to be a seamstress. She accepted me when she had to take a dress home before it got dark: You're walking me home, right? These are the kind of memories, I can't forget. We lived a peaceful life for sixty years. Our civil marriage was on February 10, 1943 on a simple workday. I called my boss to be a witness, the other witness was his father-in-law. I got a really respectable, pretty gifts, for example, I got a truly serious music machine [phonograph] with a stand and records. Later they transformed it into an automatic machine with a permanent needle. When the record was over, the gramaphone turned itself off. That was a really new thing at the time. I've still got the chandelier that I got from my other boss for my wedding. A few days later we went to the Hosok Temple next to the Dohany temple [synagogue]. They said, the same thing as at the Dohany Temple only more elegantly. The synagogue was packed full for our wedding. Rabbi Hevesi married us. They played the organ and the most famous, baritone cantor sang. It was wonderful. They performed everything according to proper Jewish tradition in the Neolog Dohany [Street] temple. After the wedding, at my parents apartment, there was a little lunch, there were about thirty of us there. We didn't stay long, we went to a hotel and then went on our honeymoon from there to Matrahaza. We stayed there for about a week, in the local hotel. We started our life together as a young married couple in my in-law's apartment in Paulay Ede Street. On November 17, 1943, my daughter Zsuzsanna was born. I gave her a Jewish name according to the Jewish ceremony. During the war, it was very difficult to get food for here, and my wife breast fed her for a long time.