Zsuzsanna G at age two with her older sister

I'm on the left, my older sister Klari is on the right. It's a studio photo from 1930.

In connection to anti-Semitism, I have one memory, from back in the Bakats Square grammar school. More precisely, not my own, but rather my older sister's, well I only heard this much. She was in fourth grade, the class was about Ferenc Rakosi II. and the teacher spoke so movingly about him that my sister burst into tears, and miss teacher said, 'You all see Klari Klauders, yet she's a Jew?'. It was the 'yet'.

My older sister started language learning by attending a German kindergarten. Then when I became six years old we got our language teacher. The reason behind this was that in 1934, the young Jewish girls came from Vienna to look for work, and they knew nothing in the world, they only spoke German. One of these young girls, Rosa Schiller came over to us for very little money. She was with us three times a week, three hours at a time. We walked out to the Gellert Hill, and all the way she only spoke German to us. So that was an uncommon occurrence, the kind of possibility my parents could pay for.

There wasn't really any summer vacation. Our vacation was that my sister and I got season passes to the Szecsenyi beach [on the city park lake] I was about 12-13 years old when they let me go by myself. I learned to swim from the age of eight in the Rudas swimming pool. Neither my mother, nor my father knew how to swim, but they took me at the age of eight to the Rudas for swimming lessons. Neither of my parents could speak any other language, but I was learning German at the age of six. The same for my older sister. These were the kind of people my parents were. They never taught us to ride a bicycle because my mother fell off a bicycle in her childhood, and she didn't want her children to have such a bad experience. Same thing with ice skating. So we got a pass, we lived in Garay Street, from there we went on foot, all along Istvan Street where there was a bookstore, one half of which sold new books, the other half was a borrowing library. We had a pass for that, too. Every morning we each took out a book, we went to the beach, swam, sunbathed, goofed around, read the book, then on the way home, we handed it in. We read half of the world's literature every summer this way on the Szechenyi beach.