Bella Levai, Kati Andai's maternal aunt

My mother´s sister Bella on Marguerite island in Budapest. My mother had two sisters. Bella, was sent to university in Budapest, too [like my mother's other sister]. She hated university as well. Bella was a very strange woman. She was married off to a bartender. She wasn't so young any more, though she was very pretty, and she was happy that she got married. Her husband was a Jew from the country who had a high school education in commerce; he had a bar at the corner of Thokoly Road and Muranyi Street. They had a good financial situation. Bella didn't work, as she didn't like to be among people. She went to the cinema and read. She couldn't even cook, her mother-in-law cooked while she was alive. They never had any children. They both survived the war. Her husband wasn't taken to forced labor service, but he was a member of the skeleton staff, and they kept his rank of officer, because in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 he had gained distinctions. I didn't like them because they made us feel acutely that they were in a much better financial situation than we were.

Photos from this interviewee