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This is a picture of my sons, Peter and Gyorgy Kallos, taken at the end of the 1960s in Tusnad. Behind them, on the left, is the house where we were staying. We always rented the same house when we went there on our summer holiday.
We spent one or two weeks of our holiday in Tusnad almost every year. We usually went there with our friends, the Roth and the Toth families. Andras Roth is a sociologist; he lectured at Babes-Bolyai University in Kolozsvar. Sandor Toth is a philosopher. He lectured at the same university in Kolozsvar, and he now lives in Nagyvarad. They were my husband's colleagues, both of Jewish origin.
We also travelled abroad many times. My husband and I traveled with the children all over Eastern Europe, and after 1970 we were allowed to go to the western countries, as well. We went to West Germany, Italy and France. We used to travel by car, and used to take with us a tent and a good supply of food.
Peter was born in 1950 and Gyorgy in 1955. At home Peter used to sit in his father's lap all the time. I don't know how my husband managed to work while his son was sitting in his lap, continually asking questions. My husband was working with the typewriter, and in the meantime our son learnt every letter on it. The director of the day-care told my husband, 'Your son is our greatest help, but he is the examiners' nightmare.' The trainees of the kindergarten-teacher school were examined in the day-care of Bolyai University. For example one day a Szekler girl was being examined and she had to tell a story. As she was telling it, and talked about an automobile, she kept saying 'oetoe' instead of auto. My son, of course, interrupted her saying it's not 'oetoe', but auto. He used to interrupt the examinees, so they often got confused. The same happened in primary school. He was too bright and he wasn't too ashamed to show it. He could already read and write when he started school. He was disturbing the teacher, always interrupted the classes. And at parents' meetings I had to listen to all this. The teacher was desperate.
Currently Peter lives in Bucharest and works as a translator for the Hungarian broadcast of Romanian national television. Gyorgy is an engineer. His wife is a Hungarian Christian; her name is Marika. They live in Nagyvarad. They have two daughters: Renata, born in 1989, and Patricia, three years younger.
