Janos’ mother

This is my mother with her grandfather and with her aunts.

My great-grandfather was called Steiner. He must have been born around 1840-1850. He had a sort of guesthouse in Gyongyos. He died relatively young. He had 7 or 8 kids, boys and girls mixed. If I look at his picture, I had a really 'gutmuttig', dear, and very handsome grandfather. He wasn't deeply religious. He had a true Jewish family, full of love. But the rest of the siblings, the kids all married Jews. He wasn't a Neolog in the sense of today - he surely kept the great holidays. I don't believe the house was kosher. Well, the guesthouse wasn't kosher for that matter. One of his sons took over the guesthouse. He tried out all the serving girls there, and so had syphilis too. But he was nice. He was a great singer.

My mother was a beautiful woman. She was truly beautiful. She was a closed, unusually pleasant, delicate, but very reserved somebody. She and her siblings were born in Pest. They lived in Rozsa Street, and they went to school there where the Basilica is. They only went to Gyongyos to visit their grandparents. But they always spent their childhood summers there. During those visits they learned all sorts of dirty poems, and phrases from peasant children, and the local dialect. My mother finished trade school, but just a one-year course, and before that she attended grade-school like her siblings too. My aunt Iren and my mother started to work, because they needed to. Both of them wrote beautifully, expressively, and could take shorthand. My mother got into the National Manufacturers' Alliance, before the First World War, because she wrote so well and beautifully. And she worked there until it was closed, until '47 or '48.

Photos from this interviewee