Jeno Moskovits with his pupils

This is a picture of my father, Jeno Moskovits, and pupils of the Jewish elementary school in Marosvasarhely.

I don't really recognize anybody from the picture because they were much younger than I was. They are the first grade pupils from 1937-38.

I think I got this picture because I know the girl in the first row, sixth from left. She had two older sisters, and one of them, Marta Revesz, who was one year older than me, was a good friend of mine.

She didn't come back from deportation. Probably the other sister, Vera Revesz, who also was my friend, had this picture and gave it to me. She was around 16 when she came back from deportation.

She emigrated very early on to Israel and probably got married there, but I haven’t heard anything about her since her departure.

My father became the principal of the Jewish elementary school, and he was a principal-teacher because he taught, too. He didn't teach me, though.

Back then the same teacher followed a class through the four grades, just like today, and my class was assigned another teacher, Ferenc Rado, who started a new 1st-grade class. He is the grey-haired man in the picture.

There were four teachers at the school, two male and two female, and Mr. Deutsch came as the fifth, but he only taught Ivrit. The two women were Boske Rosenfeld and Ilona Kohn. Only this Ilona Kohn survived the deportation.

After the war she had a higher rank, and she even became a school commissioner. She got married before the war to Erno Salamon. I think he was taken away to forced labor in Russia and never came back.

After she returned from the deportation, she remarried. All the other teachers of the Jewish elementary school perished in Auschwitz.

At the end of each school year, class portraits were taken. There was a photographer on the main square called Weintraub, his studio was in one of the courtyards.

The school always asked him to take the pictures. It is possible that he was asked because he was a Jewish photographer. The camera was on a tripod and looked like a big monster.

It had a black cover, and we used to laugh a lot when the photographer got under the black cover and then looked out and said, 'Now you must look at me!' - in other words, having a picture taken was quite a ceremony.

Photos from this interviewee