The Seiger family

This is a photo of my mother’s family, taken in Deva in 1920. I don’t know who the two persons sitting on the left and on the right are, but my maternal grandparents, Hermina and Gottlieb Seiger are sitting in the first row, and my uncles are standing - on the left side Ernest, and on the right side Bernat. My mother, Gabriella is sitting in the middle.

My grandmother was a nice person; she kept the accounts for my grandfather's butcher's shop. We didn't use to eat at her place, but we visited her at least three or four times a week, especially because she lived very close to us: ten or twenty meters away. My most beautiful memory about my grandmother is that, every Sunday, before noon, my brothers and I would pay her a visit and she would give us money to go see a movie. Back then, a theater ticket cost about 1 leu and 50 bani. When the war started, in 1940, she didn't live on her own, but with her granddaughter, Irina Lorincz.

My mother had two younger brothers: Bernat and Ernest. Bernat was born in 1900 and graduated from the School of Electrical Engineers in Bratislava. He lived in Deva and worked as a butcher and stock exporter. He was a very hard-working man and made a fortune after my grandfather's death. He delivered cattle and swine - live or slaughtered. Uncle Bernat owned refrigerating cars. In winter, he stored ice in cellars; ice was collected from the Mures River. He went to many places, from Israel to England: he delivered cattle in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, England; he went to Constantinople or to Rome countless times, for instance. He traveled across the entire Europe from 1930 until 1940, that's for ten years. Bernat never got married; he didn't have a family. He died in 1980, in Deva.

Ernest was born in 1901. He worked as a butcher in Deva too. He sold both kosher and non-kosher meat. He and his wife, Gabriela Herschkowitz, had two daughters: Sonia, born in 1929 and Nadia, born in 1932. The family also raised a third child, Vera Breier, who was Gabriela's daughter from her first marriage to a man named Eugen Breier. Ernest lived in two other places: he stayed in Cluj Napoca until he was arrested by the communist regime, but he never worked there, and in Ineu, where he died, in 1976. However, he was buried back home, in Deva. At that time, I was living in Ineu too; Uncle Ernest died at my place. His wife left for Israel before he died. Sonia and Nadia lived in Cluj until his death, and then they left for Israel too. Sonia married Doctor Mihai Marina and bore him a daughter, Marina Monica. Marina is a doctor in Fula, Israel, and is married to engineer Blanaru. Nadia married Victor Klein; the two of them had a boy, and then got divorced. Their son, Norbert Klein, became an engineer in Israel, but I don't know where exactly he lives.

My mother, Gabriella Seiger, was born on 10th January 1899, in Deva. Between 1916 and 1918, she went to the Medical School in Budapest for two years. In 1918, when Bela Kun brought Communism to Budapest, she came back home. [Editor's note: Mr. Lorincz is talking about the 1919 events, when the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Hungary.] Afterwards, she never went to college again and she married my father. He had been courting her ever since the age of four. He had met her while in kindergarten and he had waited until she grew up.