Gyorgyike Hasko’s class picture from the first year of secondary school

My class picture from the first grade of high school.

When I started high school, I could only enroll to the Jewish high school on Abonyi Street. But there was so many of us there, that the Jewish community rented from a woman called Piroska Lazar her private girls' school. There was a corner house on the corner of Szemelynok Street, now there is a park in front of it, it was an enclosed territory at that time, in the summer we could play tennis there, and in the winter we could skate. This Piroska Lazar rented I don't know how many apartments on the first floor, all of them around, and she also lived there. I don't know how old she might have been, I was once in her apartment, she had cats and all kinds of soft furniture. I went there for 2 years, there were quite sad schoolrooms, as far as I remember, the floor was gray, I think, because these were separate rooms in fact with separate entrance, and they made a gym out of one of these rooms. But we had teachers like Rozsa Peter, who was a university teacher otherwise, but she couldn't teach because she was Jewish, and Klara Feuer, who taught geography, so there were quite excellent teachers there.

At that time uniforms had to be worn strictly at every school. Every school had its own uniform, and we couldn't go in civil clothes. It was a navy blue pleated skirt, there were buttons on the blouse, and the skirt had to be buttoned on it. Tights didn't exist at that time, and when the weather was nice we wore knee socks, and when it wasn't, we wore ribbed stockings, with garter, we had to clip them on. We hated it so much! And if we wore holes in them at the knee, they darned them. We wore high shoes, and our hairdo couldn't be of any kind either, either pigtails or normal short hair. At elementary school there wasn't uniform yet, but we had to wear an apron, we had luster aprons, usually navy blue, and they were decorated with red and white dots. It was pull-on, and tie-belt in the back. It was obligatory even at high school.