And I was at home for a while and Imre found a job through a highly placed Nyiregyhaza man at Betex (a textile company). I remember that the 630-forint pay was very little but at that time we had a little extra for a while. He found a place as an assistant salesman and – because textiles was his trade – he was for a long time the deputy director of the business, as some party functionary, who did not understand the trade, was the director, and he was never seen. And in the end he became the director, he ran the silk department. And retired from there.
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Displaying 47911 - 47940 of 50402 results
Blanka Gallo
My husband was called Imre Grossman and he magyarized it to Gallo. I believe we were still in Nyiregyhaza when he magyarized his name. (If I hadn’t had a Jewish suitor), they would have denied him.
(From there) we arrived with great difficulty back in Nyiregyhaza. Not a stick of furniture survived, they had taken everything. Not even a photograph remained.
We wanted to emigrate in 1949. At first it was to be Israel. I can’t remember the date, only that Judit had been already born. And we had prepared so much that I even got a tranquilizer from the doctor so that (Judit) would not cry when we crossed the border. It was to be a Sunday. And those who organized the trip for us went to look round on Friday to make sure everything was alright and they caught them and locked them up and that’s why we stayed.
My mother-in-law did not wear a wig. And my husband became very religious (after the war) – perhaps in memory of my parents. Every Friday night, and Saturday he went to synagogue, and every holiday – of course when he no longer worked. And at home every morning we prayed in tallith and teffilin.
Judit was brought up Jewish, in that we had a man come to us from the synagogue in Hegedus Gyula Street -- just as we had a female teacher for English --, who taught her Jewish history and prayers. She forgot it all. I’ll tell you why, because in 1956 the man emigrated.
I often (worked) on Rosh Hashanah but only once on Yom Kippur – this was during Rakosi regime [3] and people did not dare say anything – but later we took holidays in order to be able to fast, everything. At Yom Kippur I only worked once, but Imre worked then several times.
I just remember that as a manager he could just look in wherever he was, but we always went to synagogue. Then we went to the Desewffy synagogue as that was nearby. But I also fasted when I worked. And on Tisha be-Av too. Today I just semi-fast on Tisha be-Av. But I still fast (on Yom Kippur). This is the one thing Judit also does, she works but fasts then too.
I just remember that as a manager he could just look in wherever he was, but we always went to synagogue. Then we went to the Desewffy synagogue as that was nearby. But I also fasted when I worked. And on Tisha be-Av too. Today I just semi-fast on Tisha be-Av. But I still fast (on Yom Kippur). This is the one thing Judit also does, she works but fasts then too.
(When the state of Israel was established) it was such a good feeling. It still is. I was only there (in Israel) once.
,
1948
See text in interview
My father was a tropical fruit dealer in Nyiregyhaza. Until the outbreak of the war in 1939 my father brought the fruit from Italy. There (were) oranges, mandarins, chestnuts, dates, grapes, figs. It was a big business.
The grandparents must have been religious (as) even my own parents were Orthodox. They obeyed every Jewish law to the letter. Which meant that on Friday afternoon they got ready, cooking the holiday lunch. There was (only) a light lunch at noon. Then, when the holiday began, the men went to the synagogue, the women did not. (In Nyiregyhaza) there were two separate ones: the Orthodox and the Status Quo [2]. Both were big but there were also many prayer houses besides. The Orthodox one survived but the Status Quo one was blown up. It was very beautiful.
Jews lived all over Nyiregyhaza. There was a Jewish district but the better off did not live there. We, for example, lived first in Bocskay Street, which was in the heart of town. There was a bakery in the same street. Then later in Kossuth Lajos Street which was also a main street as the tram went down there.
The Kossuth Lajos Street place had four rooms, a glassed in veranda, a big kitchen and a maid’s room. There were two other apartments (in the block) on the other side. We rented them. My father was well off but he did not put to much emphasis on buying property.
The Kossuth Lajos Street place had four rooms, a glassed in veranda, a big kitchen and a maid’s room. There were two other apartments (in the block) on the other side. We rented them. My father was well off but he did not put to much emphasis on buying property.
It was an orchard of around 100 acres and in August there was a great harvest and then Kallai called my father over to Kallosemlyen to tell him how good the harvest was and how cheap he had rented it for. Then my father asked ‘Sir, do you want to use force? Because if so, I’ll rip up the contract.’ In the end they agreed that he would give back 50 thousand pengo and half of the fruit would be his.
Mum put us girls to work, we had to do everything from the age of ten. A little at a time, but always something, as they said that we had to learn this as one could never tell what life would bring, and if you are not forced to do the housework yourself, at least you could run the household staff. We learned crafts at school, that is, knitting, crocheting and embroidery. And the routine was that we helped in the morning and in the afternoon sat down to sew. There was a permanent maid.
(During the war) he paid to be in the mental ward of St John’s hospital in order to avoid forced labor. He played the lunatic but ate kosher, they got his food from some kosher restaurant.
Gyorgyike Hasko
My father was a chemical engineer. He graduated from the Polytechnic University in 1912 and took part in the 1919 revolution. [see Hungarian Soviet Republic]1 He was Gyula Hevesi’s class-fellow, who later immigrated to the Soviet Union. [Editor’s note: Gyula Hevesi (1890–1970) – chemical engineer, academician, he was the vice president of the Hungarian Scientific Academy from 1960 until 1967. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic he was the commissar of social production, he emigrated from the White Terror.] My father also had to leave when the White Terror started. He started to work as a young engineer at the Flora Soap Factory, which was owned by a branch of the Manfred Weiss family. [Editor’s note: The Flora First Hungarian Composite Candle and Soap Co. was founded in 1896] They also had a factory in Nagyvarad [today Oradea, Romania] or Kolozsvar [today Cluj-Napoca, Romania], and my father first emigrated there. He got to Germany from there as a refugee. In Germany, he studied the analysis of precious metals and became a lapidarist. He wasn’t a soldier during World War I, only a reservist, because the Flora Soap Factory was a defense plant.
He returned from emigration in 1923, but he was excluded from the Chamber of Engineers, and he couldn’t work as an engineer. Then, his brother-in-law, who was a goldsmith, employed him. There was a small room in his workshop, and my father started chemical laboratory there, and started to work for the goldsmiths.
My paternal grandmother was a very strict tiny little lady. Her father was a corn merchant in Bratislava [today Slovakia]. She didn’t speak Hungarian well. They weren’t religious, at least my grandmother wasn’t. She wore a Gretchen haircut, she braided her hair and rolled up the braid on the top of her head, and she wore long black dresses with small pattern.
My grandmother had two brothers. They lived in Vienna [today Austria] and dealt with coins and antiquities. They lost everything, Needless to say, after the Anschluss 2. One of the uncles married a Swiss woman, who took him to Switzerland. He survived the war, but in poverty. He sometimes came home before the war, and I remember that he brought chocolate and oranges from Vienna, and bananas too. I was small at that time. We last heard news from him in the 1950s, he wanted to move back home, but he didn’t live to see that. He must have been older than 80 at that time, but he still wrote a Hungarian letter with flawless spelling, though he had never lived in Hungary, he wrote a letter to my parents with beautiful italics. He died sometime around 1959 in Switzerland. The other brother died at a death camp.
My grandfather lived in Bekes, he was a stock wholesaler, a butcher. At that time they drove the herd to Vienna [today Austria] or Bratislava [today Slovakia], and sold their goods there. Perhaps this is how he met my grandmother. My father wasn’t at school yet when they moved to Pest, and they had a butcher’s shop where my grandmother sat all day long.
My mother was born in 1906 in Miskolc. She completed four classes of middle school. After that she studied all kinds of things, as permitted by her father. She learned French and German; she learned to make hats, to sew, to sing, to play the piano and to dance; she used to go to balls, just like any decent middle-class girl, and when she was a teenager, she ran the administration of my grandfather’s workshop.
My maternal grandfather was a coppersmith. He was born in Satoraljaujhely in 1879. He, as my mother told me, got a slap in the face from his father or mother at the age of fourteen, which he considered unfair, and because of this he left home. He worked all over Europe as a coppersmith, he traveled near and far, he was a wanderer. And though he was a coppersmith originally, he later became the first plumber handicraftsman in Miskolc. He plumbed the Miskolctapolca bathing establishment, he had the water laid on and installed heating in the surrounding castles. It is also relevant to mention in this story that there was economic depression several times. My grandparents lived in their own house one time, and there was a time when they didn’t have anything, because they had lost everything. My grandfather was a very cultured man; they were social democrats. [see MSZDP (Hungarian Social Democrat Party)]3 My grandmother told me, that in 1917, when there was the revolution they demonstrated in Miskolc and sang the International. [Editor’s note: The march of the international labor movement].
My maternal grandmother was born in Sajoszentpeter sometime around 1884. He was only a little bit older than my father. My grandmother had several siblings. Their father was an innkeeper in Sajoszentpeter. My mother told me that her grandmother was a tiny little woman, but every day at dawn, by the time the inn opened, she had kneaded and baked fresh bread to serve to the guests. She worked very hard.
o avoid competing with each other, my other uncle moved to Nyiregyhaza with his wife and became a handicraftsman there. Their child was ten months old when the Germans deported them to Auschwitz [today Poland] and burned them. My uncle had been a forced laborer for a long time then, and a prisoner of war.
My grandmother lived in a single story, three-bedroom-apartment. There was another apartment, too, in the house with an inner courtyard. Perhaps Grandma’s children supported her, as she was a housewife for her entire life. I don’t know if she was religious or not, but she managed a kosher household. I remember when my uncle mixed up the knife for the meat and for the milk, my grandmother stuck it in the ground to make it kosher again – and she used to go to the mikveh [ritual bath], too. I went to the shochet [kosher butcher] with her, too. He would cut the chicken; there was a round stone in a dark room, and the chicken hung on a hanger so that it would bleed out –as far as I remember, at least.
My parents got married in 1928 in Miskolc, in the courtyard, under a chupah, despite the fact that my paternal grandfather couldn’t give a big dowry. Because at that time, if someone married an officer, or an engineer, or a doctor, it was told how much the dowry should be. So that a doctor, for example, could open a doctor’s office. So the girl had to bring nice big money into the marriage. My grandfather couldn’t afford this, but my father was a gentleman, and anyway, he didn’t care.
We lived on Kertesz Street 39. I don’t know when my parents moved there, they didn’t tell me. Anyhow, when I was born, they already lived on Kertesz Street in a middle class apartment, where there was a maid, too, of course. It was as absolutely normal thing for a middle class family to have a maid. These were girls from the country, they lived in a maid’s room, they had a night out once a week, then they went to the funfair, and in the meantime they learned to cook, to clean the house. As a young woman I also had a maid for a long time.
In 1935 my father bought laboratory equipment and we moved to Paulay Street 12, but Grandma didn’t come with us there. I lived there until the house was knocked down. Our apartment was a four-bedroom-apartment with a hall; it must have been about 160-170 square meters. There was a big room in it with a loggia and the big room, which they called the elegant room. The instruments and the chemical balances, which were delicate and couldn’t be in acid steam, sat on a long marble table because that didn’t wobble. There was also my father’s desk, a big reference library, his instruments in a cabinet, but the piano, a table with armchairs and chairs were also there, so it was a very big room. We used the hall as a dining room. We held the Seder was there, as well as every other holiday. Two small hallways opened from there, the bathroom, the toilet and the pantry opened from one of them, the kitchen and the maid’s room from the other one, and in the front there was the children's room and the bedroom. The children’s room was beautiful: up on the wall, where usually there are stripes, many dancing girls and boys in national costumes were painted in a wide stripe all around the room. I didn’t know how it got there, my mother told me later that her uncle, the poor thing who was also killed, was an artist, but he made a living as a painter and painted these kinds of figures on the walls of many castles in the environs of Miskolc, so the uncle must have been a known artist. When my mother repainted the children’s room, she always left this pattern around the wall. The outermost room was the chemical laboratory and my parents worked there. And there was a big pantry, where there was a tier stand for my mom’s jams and another shelf for my father’s stuff. In the children’s room and in the big room there was a tile stove, wood stove, in the laboratory and in the bedroom there wasn’t any heating.
We were raised in a Neolog, and not expressly religious family. We always had a Christmas tree with candles; it once lit on fire. There was a big scandal: my father threw a carpet or something else on it I think. I don’t remember whether we exchanged gifts, perhaps we gave some, since our maids were always Christian girls.
On Friday evenings Mom lit candles. We celebrated Chanukkah, which is also a very nice holiday, and we sang „Maoz tzur” and such songs. Purim is also very nice. We also observed Pesach. We observed it strictly, properly, as it is prescribed. My father made beautiful Seder nights! When we celebrated the holiday together, the first night was at our place, the second night at my father’s sister. The table was set beautifully, and there were matzah balls and the Seder plate. My brother read from the Hagadah, they lit candles, Dad put on his hat, and the children also got a sip of wine.
Several Jewish families lived in the house, all of which were religious to a different extent. But everyone observed Yom Kippur. In my opinion, there wasn’t anybody who could live without traditions and not fast on Yom Kippur and go to synagogue. I remember that we were very proud when they allowed us to fast for half a day, because it wasn’t obligatory for children. And when we were older and fasted a whole day, that was a big thing!