Pal Antal at work

This is a picture of my father, Pal Antal (first from left), at work. The photo was taken in Budapest in 1949. My father was born in Budapest in 1898. First he was an internal specialist, and when they began to dismiss or displace Jewish doctors he learnt pathology, and he was a pathologist until he died. My father worked as a pharmaceutical advertiser for a German company for a while in 1938. In the 1930s one could foresee that Jews weren't going to be allowed to stay. That was a very good position. That was one point. The other one was that he used to go out to the counties to tell the medical officers which medicine was good for what. Then he would stay with them for a few days at a time, and it would come out who-and-what he was, when, on Sundays, he didn't go to church with them. He wasn't that religious, for him it didn't mean anything, I think, that he converted to Christianity only because he could support his family better this way. We didn't talk about this much, unfortunately, and that's all I know about it. During the war my father was fired from his German company, then from the university hospital, then from Janos hospital - there, too, he was a pathologist, but he worked for free. And then he stopped going in when a decree was issued that Jewish doctors couldn't enter the hospital area [which was part of the anti-Jewish laws in Hungary]. In 1944 he was taken to forced labor. He was in Pocsmegyer for a short while. The Russian troops were already close then and they brought them back home to Pest [Budapest] and took them to the ghetto.