Oto Konstein with his parents

This picture was taken in Maribor, on April 3rd 1930.

I wouldn't remember the exact date, but it is handwritten on the back of the picture. I was only one year old then. My parents must have been visiting their family that lived in Maribor.

My father Emil Konstein was born in 1898 in Moravia, and when he was a young boy, he came with his parents Jeanette and Salomon Konstein, and his siblings to Maribor.

My father was a leather worker; he finished a leather-worker's school in Vienna and worked in his parent's leather factory in Maribor.

He had six siblings: two brothers and four sisters. One aunt stayed in Brno and one married and lived in Vienna.

The rest of the family moved to Maribor and lived there.

My mother Vilma Konstein (nee Heimer) was born in Kotoriba in northeastern Croatia in 1911. She lived with her parents and her two brothers, Bela and Stjepan.

Her father Leopold Heimer worked in a textile factory in Cakovec. I don't know how my parents met, but after they married they moved to Cakovec where I was born in 1929.

My father had a leather store in Cakovec where he worked. My mother, even though she finished a sewing course, was a housewife.

I had one younger sister Tea but she is not in this picture; she hadn't been born yet. I was taken to Auschwitz, together with my mother and my sister. Both died in a crematory in Birkenau in 1944.

My father died in 1945, also in the war.