My grandfather traded grains and hides. He ran his business in Arad. He had a grain warehouse near his place and a hide warehouse located somewhere else.
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Andrei Popper
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Grandmother Matilda was in charge of the household; she went to the synagogue for the two great holidays: the New Year and the Day of Atonement. She didn’t keep the kashrut and wasn’t too religious; she did light the candles on Sabbath.
Her husband worked as a veterinarian in Glogovat.
The girl, Terezia, who married a Szekely, had a son named Ladislau.
The two of them had a daughter, Vali Ilona, which was her stage name, who was a very well known actress in Budapest. I don’t think her family had any problem with her being a renowned actress.
The other daughter of Ignatie’s, Terezia, married Dr. Venetianer, who was chief rabbi in Budapest. [Lajos Venetianer (1867-1922) became a rabbi in 1892. In 1893, he was in Csurgo, in 1896, he was in Lugoj; he became chief rabbi in Ujpest in 1897. Apart from theological studies, he wrote works on the history of the Jews. He was a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary-University of Jewish Studies in Budapest and chief rabbi in Budapest.
One of them, Margareta, who married a Szolosi, was a teacher and a high school principal in Arad; she had a daughter, who was a housewife.
Ignatie Pollak owned a vineyard in Cuvin.
My maternal grandfather, Carol Werner, was born in Santana on 15th May 1850. He went to high school in Beius; it was a Greek Catholic high school. I was told that the teachers there were wonderful. A painting he made when he was a student is hanging on one of my bedroom walls. It’s a very beautiful painting: a country house in the middle of the field, a lake in front of it and a boat with two fishermen on the lake’s shore. Everyone says it’s a very valuable painting. My grandmother didn’t know that my grandfather could paint. She only learnt about the existence of the painting after her husband’s death.
Adolf was the last of the Werners who lived and died in Santana. He was a tradesman and had five children: Mici, who married a Zeisler and had no children, Renee, who married Dr. Wiener and had a son who is a physician in Germany, Pavel, Lajos and Laszlo.
Eszter married Sandor and the two of them had two children: Artur, who had no children, and Lenke, who married a Krausz and had two children: Anna and Dr. Miklos Krausz, a physician in Cologne [Germany].
Adolf had two children: Dr. Miksa Werner, who worked as a physician in Arad, was a bachelor, had no children and died in 1920 in Arad, and Eszter Werner.
In time, some of the members of the Werner family moved from Santana to Pancota, Beliu or Baia Mare; many of them went to Budapest, where they changed their name to Timar.
My mother’s paternal great-grandparents, the Werners, came from Germany. My maternal grandparents came from a German family; Werner is a German name. One of the Werners fell in love with a Jewish girl and converted to Judaism for her sake. But the girl’s parents chased her away from home, from Germany, and the couple emigrated some time between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century and settled in Santana, in the Arad County; Santana was a village of Germans. The Werner great-grandparents were buried in Santana.
Then he went back to the front and became a prisoner of war in September 1914. He was taken to Vladivostok in Siberia, where he stayed for seven years: from 1914 to 1921.
The interesting thing about it was that the prisoners of war received an officer’s salary back then; the Russians actually paid them. When the war ended, they were in the Eastern part of the country, close to the ocean. They were gradually moved to East Siberia. The Americans came to rescue the officers of the Austro-Hungarian army; they took them to an island where there were a lot of children who had been evacuated there. The island was located east from Siberia. My father and the other officers were taken there as laborers. What he had to do was take care of two furnaces lest the fire should go out. They were very well looked after and the food was very good. They even received an honorary diploma from the Red Cross acknowledging their work there. My father spent a year and a half there and came home by boat. In his lawyer’s office, the three credentials hanging on the wall were: his BA degree, his PhD in Law degree and the worker diploma from the Red Cross.
The interesting thing about it was that the prisoners of war received an officer’s salary back then; the Russians actually paid them. When the war ended, they were in the Eastern part of the country, close to the ocean. They were gradually moved to East Siberia. The Americans came to rescue the officers of the Austro-Hungarian army; they took them to an island where there were a lot of children who had been evacuated there. The island was located east from Siberia. My father and the other officers were taken there as laborers. What he had to do was take care of two furnaces lest the fire should go out. They were very well looked after and the food was very good. They even received an honorary diploma from the Red Cross acknowledging their work there. My father spent a year and a half there and came home by boat. In his lawyer’s office, the three credentials hanging on the wall were: his BA degree, his PhD in Law degree and the worker diploma from the Red Cross.
He served in the Northern Carpathians, in Poland. He found a stone there, which he sent to my mother; she had a silver plate added to it, with the place and the date: Komarno, 8th September 1914. This is where my father suffered a leg wound; he was sent to Arad after that.
The next day after they returned from their honeymoon in Austria, World War I broke out and my father was drafted. He became an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army [4]. All my grandfather’s employees had been exempted from their military duties and my father could have enjoyed that status too, but he wouldn’t stay home as long as there was a war going on.
They got married in July 1914. They also had a religious ceremony at the synagogue.
How did my parents meet? Arad wasn’t a very big city. My father was a Law student and my mother had gone to school in Timisoara. I think they met after they came back home.
He did his military service in Arad.
He graduated from the Faculty of Law; he had a PhD in law and worked as a lawyer his entire life. He studied the first two years in Budapest, but he finished in Cluj, in 1908/1909. He entered the faculty in 1905 and he was the youngest among his fellow-students, as he had begun going to elementary school at the age of five; he wanted to be the first to get his PhD. The only places in Hungary where the graduation exam, the most difficult, could be passed were Budapest and Targu Mures. My father passed it in Targu Mures.
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Before WW2
See text in interview
They lived in Arad and had a son, Ladislau, who left for Israel, where he was wounded and died in the last day of the War for Independence.
Irina married Samuila Havas, a hide tradesman.
Ileana lived in Arad with her husband, Friederic Fulop, a musician.
They had two children: Zoltan, who committed suicide around 1969 and had a daughter, Eva, who married Pavel Brenner and left for Israel with him, and Edita, who was married too, lived in Oradea, got deported to Auschwitz [today Poland] and died there.
Towards the end of World War I, around 1917, the Jewish Orthodox Community [3] was established in Arad. The Orthodox synagogue was erected in 1921. Its architect was Tabacovici, a Serb who also designed the Roman Catholic cathedral of the Minorites. I met him; he was a great architect.
Until 1940, a summer theater would be rented on holidays; it used to be located on the banks of the River Mures, but it was demolished in 1940, and a service would be held there too.
There was a Neolog [2] community in Arad. The great synagogue was built in 1834. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Back then, the city didn’t belong to the Hungarians, nor to the Romanians, but to the Serbs. And they prevented any attempt of erecting something permanent. As a result, some representatives of the Jewish Community in Arad went to Vienna and offered the land to the Emperor as a gift. Gendarmes were hired to guard it and the construction could thus be completed. The entrance is through a courtyard, as the synagogue is surrounded by other buildings. Every now and then there’s a concert held there. It has a very good organ. An expert claimed that such a good organ is a rare thing and that moving it would destroy it and so the organ must stay in the building. I read somewhere how it was purchased and set up inside the synagogue: the Jews organized a ball in 1850, and all the intelligentsia of the city were invited, regardless of their faith; the income from that party was used to buy the organ. This information was found by Professor Gluck in the library of the University in Cluj. [Editor’s note: The interviewee is talking about Jeno Gluck who’s a present-day historian in Arad.]
On holidays, the synagogue was overcrowded with people.
On holidays, the synagogue was overcrowded with people.
Romania
Neither my grandmother, nor my grandfather was very religious. They were like most of the Jews in Arad. My grandfather wasn’t a devout man, and the Jews in Arad kept their stores open even on Saturdays. However, the New Year and the Day of Atonement were special days. They all closed their businesses and went to the synagogue. On Friday evenings, women would light the candles, but they didn’t usually go to the synagogue to pray. This is how things were in Arad.
My grandfather had a rather large store in Arad too. He was a tradesman; he sold all sorts of things and, apart from the store, he also ran a kind of pub. The store, which had been painted by Eugen Popper, a cousin of my father’s, was at the front of the house, while the dwelling space was in the back. My grandfather was widely known among the railway workers; they were his regular customers, since the store and the pub were located opposite from the station.