Centropa

Support Centropa

Other languages

Ferenc Leicht and his wife

Report an issue

This is a picture of my wife, Veronika Szollos and I, on the 13th October 1956, after our wedding. 

There was 40 of us technicians on that floor of the Lamp Factory, and 800 young women made the electron tubes. And among that 800 women there was always one who was my actual girlfriend, so to speak. First name informality was general there, but I usually addressed everyone formally. And at that time I was still called Feri, Feri, please, this was my title. I only said hi to those girls with whom I was on good terms. And there was a lot of them, one was nicer than the other. Once they ran out of some piece and they sent those who made fluorescent lamps to other departments. They sent a girl to me to teach her to work in the electron tube making. She was a typical Jewish girl, and it turned out after 2 minutes that she had graduated high school. There were a lot of breaks, and during breaks we played that one said a poem or a quote, and the other one had to guess where the quote was from. Then I thought that I was an adult man, I was 27 years old and I had to find someone for good. Then I started to pay court to this girl, and then she went back to the fluorescent lamp department, and sometimes I brought her a book to read. 

Then we started to date. I was in my last year at the technical school, so in the last year she accompanied me to school almost always when I went there from work. All her family worked at the United Lamp, her father worked as a foreman at the development department, her mother was some kind of a journalist of the journal called 'Izzo' [Lamp]. The point is that the United Lamp had an excursion to Belatelep near Fonyod that year. I went, and the girl and her father did, too. Then when we went down to bathe we discussed that we would get married. And on the 13th October 1956 we got married. We only had a civil marriage, my wife wore a nice red costume, because by the time the rabbi would have had the time the 23rd October came, and by the time things got calmed we would have been ashamed to stand in front of the rabbi. We went on honeymoon to Csucs mountain, we were there for 3 or 4 days in a tourist house, I think it's not there anymore, it had been demolished I think. We went to gather fallen wood and there was an iron stove and we heated for ourselves. We had an excellent time.