The engagement photo of Katalin Schwarz and Istvan Domonkos

This is my engagement picture. It was taken before 15th October 1944. My wife's name is Katalin Schwartz. She was born in 1925 in Miskolc. She was in Palestine as a child with her parents sometime in the 1930s. They were there for a couple years, but her mother was in a very bad health and the circumstances were adverse. They lived in a kibbutz where her father did earthwork. He was a qualified locksmith, but that wasn't needed there. After a couple years they came home at the doctor's advice who said that it would be better for the mother to go back to her former environment. My wife's mother is a Groszman girl and that family had an ironworks in Miskolc. Her father worked there. They were poor. My wife finished four classes of middle school, after that she learned the seamstress trade. She started to work in Miskolc at a quite young age. She ran away from the ghetto in Miskolc with young Zionists. She went through many things, she ran away several times. For the last time she hid at the Technological University with Zionist kids. It was in the summer, it might have been July or August. There was a very nice assistant and he made room for them in the attic. There weren't many of them, there were five to ten young people, and they hid there. But the darkness, the deprivation, and the fact of being locked up was very nerve-wrecking, and she ran away from there. At that time she still had some fake papers; she got hold of a room and lived there under the name of Maria Toth. The police was looking for a child kidnapper with the same name. She was registered, and the policemen thought that it was her. Luckily she wasn't at home when the detectives went there, and her resettler, who suspected who she was, waited for her at the entrance and warned her that the cops were there. So she cleared off from there only with the clothes she had on her. An elderly cook, Uncle Zoli Strausz, saw her browsing about, took her in and gave her room in a closet. Since there weren't other young people there, it was my task to take care of her a little bit. My wife-to-be went to the ghetto after the liberation, at that time everyone was looking for someone, and in the commotion of the ghetto she reunited with her father. Her father survived the forced labor, her mother and siblings were deported to Auschwitz and died. In the ghetto I met Katalin and her father. With the marriage we had to wait for me to attain my majority, that was the age of 24 at that time, and my parents weren't happy at all about me wanting to get married, because they wanted me to continue my studies. At that time I still had university ahead of me. I couldn't go to university before, because of the anti-Jewish laws, I was a simple electrician, and my father thought, of course, that I would go and study right after the war. He simply told me that he didn't agree with this marriage, and as long as he was the head of the family, he wouldn't give his consent. We didn't quarrel, we had already been living separately; we lived in rented rooms. After August 1945 we got married, we did it then because I turned 24 in August. We went to the local board, we addressed two servants or deliverers in the hallway and asked them to be our witnesses, and that was the marriage procedure. There wasn't any celebration; there were no relatives, nothing.