Wedding of Istvan H. and Rozsa Freiberger

The wedding picture of my parents, Istvan Kauders and Rozsa Freiberger in 1924. Location - in front of the Dohany Street Synagogue. A wedding in the temple was very expensive, my parents wouldn't have had the money for it. My mother got herself together, went to the cheif rabbi, Simon Hevesi, and told him that she was a poor girl, but she'd like to be married here for free. She succeeded.

First row from the left: Bela Klein, Andor Klein, the newlyweds, in front of my father is the little girl Erzsi Klein, next to her is Laci Goldstein, behind him is Ilonka Goldstein, his sibling. In the back row the gentleman with the moustache and striped tie is the father of the Klein children, Samuel Klein.

My aunt Giza lived in a very good marriage to Samuel Klein, who had two sons from his first marriage, Andor and Bela, and they had a daughter, Erzsi. They were so poor that my Aunt Giza cut up bed linens, to sew shirts and dresses for the children. Samuel Klein was a factory worker in the Ujpest [An industrial suburb north of Pest] tanning factory of Wolfner. His son Bela was also a factory worker there, and stayed a worker to the end of his life, by the end becoming a kind of shift boss. He survived the Holocaust, got married, had two children, but after my mother's death we lost contact with them. Andor was an junk dealer. He worked on Teleki Square. In 1944, he married a gypsy [Roma] girl, they had a son who became the most exceptional Jazz drummer in Hungary. We didn't get together with their family, only Andor came to visit until my mother's death. Erzsi Klein married Gyorgy Steiner, from whom she had a son. Then all of them, Giza, Erzsi and the little boy were executed in Auschwitz. The husband survived the work service [Forced labor] He visited us for a while, then remarried, he even brought his wife over, then we never heard from them again.

On the Klein children, it can be seen by their clothes and whole posture that they're proli [working class] kids, compared to Laci and Ilonka Goldstein who looked like children of gentry did back then. Their father, my grandmother's other half-brother, was a leather craftsman who married a well-to-do Jaszbereny girl, a certain Fanni Donath. Ilonka and Laci were born in 1911 and 1912. They moved to Ujpest during the First World War.

Above Andor Klein, the young man in the grey hat, with a tie and dark suit was Ervin Engel, my mother's cousin. [Her true uncle Sandor Engel's son]. Ervin was a technician, and worked as a technical draftsman at the Egyesult Izzo [Lightbulb factory] until he died. That was a big thing then. Later he married Ella Hoffman, and they had a son in 1931. Then Ella, her thirteen year old son and seventy-four year old father were executed in Auschwitz. Ervin came back from work service [forced labor], but didn't survive very long after the war. He died from the grief in 1945.

The moustached man in the grey suit, standing taller in the third row, was Uncle Szami Goldstein, also one of my grandmother's half-brothers. The smallest son, Szami Goldstein worked at the BESZKART. I think he was a guard in his last position, and like those kind of jobs, it was his retirement job. Though he was held in fantastically high esteem in the family. His wife was called Janka. They didn't have kids either, and they lived in Kelenfold [suburb in southern Buda]. Szami died in 1944, right on March 19th, and his funeral was in the Jewish cemetery in Obuda.

My parents adored one another. They were terribly in love. My grandmother never knew love, loving happiness in marriage, and that's why the kind of joy of living that my parents had was impracticable to her.