Lipot and Emilia Gunst's diamond jubilee

This is the most complete photo of my father's family. Everyone in it is from his direct relations. The photo was taken at my grandparents' diamond anniversary in Szentes in 1929. This is the last photo of my grandparents, indeed, they both died in the same year and nearly at the same time. They couldn't exist without each other. My aunt Maca (Droth, nee Gunst) is sitting next to my grandparents here. My uncle Erno (Gunst) is standing on the left side, beside him is Aunt Helen (Weisz, nee Gunst), and next to her is my father, Sandor Gunst.

The photo was taken in our apartment. You can see how we lived. This was what we'd call today, in bourgeois terms, our dining room. We had nice furniture, and paintings on the walls. The paintings and the furniture were all destroyed in the war. I do remember that we had some Jozsef Koszta paintings. They were valuable at the time. There's a candle-holder on the sideboard, when we lit candles we put them in this. There was a period when we lit candles.

There were six siblings altogether in my dad's family. The eldest was Erno, then Aunt Helen, then Aunt Maca - her name was Matild - then Regina. Then there was my father, and then Laszlo, who died young at 16, in 1899 - I was named Laszlo after him. My father was born in 1880 in Szentes. He attended high school there. At the time, this high school was connected with the Debrecen Calvinist High School. Since it only had six grades, anyone who wanted to go to seventh and eighth had to finish in Debrecen. My father didn't go there, so he only completed six grades of secondary school. I used to know why, but now I can't remember why he quit.

His sisters were all educated girls, but I don't know what schools they were in, or what they studied. Aunt Helen married in Kolozsvar. I think her husband died and she married again. Her second husband was Jozsef Weisz, he was a tailor in Kolozsvar. Aunt Maca was married in Hodmezovasarhely, her husband was Schenk, but I don't know his first name. She divorced, and then found a husband there called Droth through Aunt Helen, who was married and living in Kolozsvar. It was a very successful marriage. He adopted Aunt Maca's three children, Istvan, Margit and Gyorgy. Regina married in Szentes and had her children there. Then she died giving birth to her last child, Gyuri. Her husband was left a widower with three or four children, and my grandparents took on the little child to take the pressure off the widowed man. Uncle Erno became a mining engineer, went to Rozsaszentmarton and worked at the coal mine there as a mining engineer and eventually became the director of the entire mine. He died of illness there, before the war. Since my father's younger brother, Laszlo, had died, only my father remained in Szentes, and he took over the business from my grandfather.
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