Ernest, Andrei and Pavel Lorincz with their great-grandmother Seiger

This is a photo of our great-grandmother, my mother’s grandmother, with the three of us and with Teresa, our nanny from Vienna. I’m standing in the middle, on my left side is Pavel and on my right Ernest. The picture was taken in 1930.

I was born on 4th November 1924, in Deva. I had two brothers, Ernest and Pavel, who were both born in Deva too. Ernest was born in 1923, and Pavel in 1926. I was the middle child. I got along well with my brothers.

I grew up in a beautiful house. It belonged to my parents and it was large enough to comfortably accommodate my father, my mother and us, the three brothers. The house was located at 1 Lucian Blaga Street. It had five or six rooms and a beautiful courtyard. We had running water. We used wood and terracotta stoves for heating. We didn't have animals, except for a dog. We always had a service staff of two Ceangai: a cook and a maid. They both lived with us and we got along very well with them. We, the children, also had a nanny from Vienna - her name was Teresa. She lived with us for four or five years, as long as we were little, then she went back to Austria. We had books by the thousand: all sorts of books, in German, Hungarian, French, and Romanian. My mother may have been a housewife, but she was an extremely cultivated woman. She spoke French fluently and she also knew German. We must have had about 2,500 books at home.