Zsuzsa Diamantstein

I am in this picture. It was taken on 17th December 1922 when I was exactly six months old. It was taken in the lumber-mill in Lonya, where we lived in that period. The saw-mill my father Fulop Riegelhaupt managed was there. I am together with my foster nurse. I needed one because my mother Paula Riegelhaupt, nee Mittelmann, wasn't able to breast-feed me, and there were no nutriments then.

It seems the picture was sent by my mother as a present for auntie Giza. She was my grandmother Sarolta Mittelmann's sister. This auntie Giza was famous in the family for living 101 years. In the 1930s she moved with her widow daughter to her other daughter, who was married in Bucharest. This is the story of this picture.

I was born here in Marosvasarhely on 17th June 1922, but we lived in Lonya, near Petrozseny, in the Zsil valley (Valea Jiului in Romanian). While my father was still alive, I remember we had a very nice apartment in Lonya, with four rooms, a bathroom and a terrace. After he died in 1928, mom moved back to grandpa in Vasarhely.

My mother couldn't feed me, because there were no nutriments then, so I had a foster nurse. My grandmother found out in the meantime that in Vasarhely there was a nutriment, a Swiss one, called Nestle. This product appeared just then and my grandmother sent it to my mother, to try to feed me with it, because I was hungry all the time, I cried almost all the time, because I had no food, and babies used to be breast-fed then. Later I had a governess called Grete, she was a girl from Szaszsebes and she remained with us until I started school. I learned German from her.