Lili, Ariana and Jozsef Farkas

This picture was taken by my father-in-law, Albert Balogh. Me, Jozsef Farkas and my wife, Lili Farkas, are in it, with our little girl, Ariana Farkas, in my father-in-law's apartment in Kolozsvar in 1964.

My wife was born in 1935. My father-in-law, Albert Balogh, was a mechanic at a railway workshop. And my mother-in-law, Berta Balogh, was a housewife. They were genuine Kolozsvar inhabitants, they lived on Emil Zola Street No. 9. I was in a delegation in Kolozsvar, I visited my sister there, and when I started to come back to Bucharest, she said, 'Wait, I'd like you to meet a nice girl.' Lili worked as an accountant at the former Metropol, there was the ICRTI - Intreprinderea Comertului cu Ridicata Pentru Textile si Incaltaminte. My sister was the accountant of some similar wholesale company; they met each other this way. We went on Horea Street, because my sister worked on Dacia Street, before the Urania, and this girl, my future wife, went to buy bread right then. My sister stopped her, and we were introduced. We kept in touch, we got engaged in March 1956, and we got married on 19th May.

My daughter, Ariana, was born on New Year's Eve in 1961. The wife of my friend was the clerk in the Stanca, and she said, 'Look, I'll register your daughter on 1st January 1962, to be younger by one year.' And according to the register she was born on 1st January 1962. My mother-in-law's family baptized my daughter according to the Catholic or the Reformed religion, I don't know which one, but it was never an issue for me. Because as far as I remember, my father-in-law was Catholic, and my mother-in-law was Reformed, but this wasn't a problem for us. While she was small, we spoke to her in Hungarian, and when she became a schoolgirl I spoke to her in Romanian. My wife spoke to her only in Hungarian as a mark of esteem for her grandmother, my mother-in-law. But my daughter grew up in our family, and I thank God she grew up so that she is more Jewish than me. We can say briefly that I'm not the fighter type. I do what I can, in silence, but my daughter is a fighter. And she fought for the Jewry, as well. I taught her what I could, and bought her the Jewish calendar translated into Romanian, every year. It contained many appendices, many things, and she learned them all.