Family get-together

This photo was taken in Topolniky, in the yard of the house of my grandfather, Heinrich F. in 1932.

The first person standing on the right is my grandfather, Heinrich F., standing beside him is my father's brother-in-law, Mr. Deutsch, then my uncle, Alexander F., his wife Terezia, who we used to call Liza.. Standing from the left is my father, Julius F., and on his left is his sister, Berta Deutsch. On his right is my mother, Helen.

Sitting in the bottom row are the children. My father's sister Berta had four sons, but I don't remember their names anymore. I don't know the names of the children in this photograph.

My grandfather lived in a typical village house that had a front hall and part of the courtyard was roofed over. They didn't have running water, but drew it from a well in the yard. In the front part of the house there was a store with various goods. You entered the store through the kitchen. Behind the kitchen there were two rooms, and in the back there was a stable. There was a small garden behind the house, and they also raised animals, but I don't remember anymore which ones. After the territorial division, when Nyarasd fell to Hungary, I never met my grandfather again. He most likely died on the way to a concentration camp.

My grandparents, the F´s, had three children; the sons were named Alexander and Julius, and the daughter Berta. Berta married Mr. Deutsch, who came to live with them in Aunt Berta's family home. After the wedding he took care of the store, and Aunt Berta was a housewife. She and her husband had four sons.

Uncle Alexander worked as the superintendent of a sugar refinery in Dioszeg, now called Sladkovicovo [the town's Hungarian name of Dioszeg was changed to Sladkovicovo in 1938. Since 1989 two names have been used for this small town: Sladkovicovo in Slovak, and the Hungarian Dioszeg - Editor's note]. They had one son, Herbert. During World War II, Herbert did munkaszolgálat in Budapest, and later hid out on the grounds of the sugar refinery, where he survived the Holocaust. He died much later, in Bratislava. Uncle Alexander died before the deportations, in 1942, of natural causes.

We didn't visit Uncle Alexander often, because Dioszeg was a part of Hungary. I actually remember only one visit. My uncle was the superintendent of a sugar refinery that belonged to the Kuffner family. There was a set of railway tracks that led into the sugar refinery, on which they transported sugar beets, and we arrived on those tracks when we came to see my uncle.