The birth certificate of Fulop Grossmann

This is the back of the birth certificate of my husband Fulop Grossmann. This is the official translation into Hungarian of the original Romanian birth certificate.

My husband’s Jewish name was Srage, we called him Feri. He was born near Nagyvarad, in Josasel [in Hungarian Krajnikfalva, today in Romanian Josani] in June 1910, but his family moved to Des, they lived here, his father was a merchant. Formerly women had many children, and died at a young age. The wife of my husband's father, of Abraham Grossmann died too. Then my husband's father married again, all his children left from home, he was alone, and he married a girl from Ludas, who came from a very rich family. And he wasn't young, he was fifty-seven or fifty-eight years old, when he got married for the second time, and he was sixty years old when my husband was born, I didn't believe it when he told me. My husband's mother was Sarolta Fischer - she was forty-six years old when my husband was born -, she died of pneumonia in 1937, on the 26th of the month of Elul. His father was old when he died, he died in 1933, in the month of Cheshvan, on 1st October.

There were many siblings, there were some five girls and four boys. The former Jewish families were like this. There were such large families. Because a wife died, he married another wife, they had children too. There was Vilma, Jeno, Veronka, Hersi, Heinrich, Blima, Berta and my husband. Only her elder sister, Frida was his full sister.

In fact at the time of deportations my husband wasn't in Des, he was doing work service, only his wife and his family was in Bungur. Bungur is a forest near Des, the ghetto was there. After the war many dead were dig out, who had died in that ghetto, so they buried [the bodies] in the Jewish cemetery. There is a place in Des, in the Jewish cemetery, where a stone is placed, they wrote on it the names of those they dig out. To be honest I never went to Bungur. We never went there, never in our life. My husband told me that when he had been in Budapest for work service, people had been stopped on the street, and if they had been Jews, they had been taken to the banks of the Danube and shot in the head. He jumped in a barrel, that's how he escaped. But in that very moment he said to himself, if he ever had a son, he would never let them circumcise him.