When I got married again, I got a two-room apartment in Wesselenyi Street from the Planning Office. At the time, offices and big companies had the means and it was customary to award apartments to recognized workers. My younger son was born there. And my mother and I had had enough of her living in a rented apartment, so she moved in with us. So my wife, my mother and my little boy and I lived together until 1962 when, with the help of my mother-in-law, we exchanged the two-bedroom apartment for a three-bedroom one on Damjanich Street, and we lived there until my next divorce.
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Displaying 47821 - 47850 of 50364 results
Laszlo Galla
She didn’t graduate from university, but became a very talented journalist. She worked for various papers and for the press service of the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce, for the press service of Hungaropress. Her English and German were perfect. The Hungarian Chamber of Commerce was an organ of the Foreign Commerce Ministry, and so she was often sent as Hungarian press attaché to the Hungarian section of trade fairs abroad.
During the war she went into hiding, her mother hid her in some convent.
Thirst for knowledge, reading, respect for writing, love, respect and honor – I feel these are the virtues by which I am Jewish, and not because I read the mah nishtanah or my children do. And usually, I came together with these types too.
In 1956, I met my second wife, Agnes Kovacs, on vacation. The Planning Office had a vacation resort at Revfulop, and her first husband had also worked at the Planning Office.
G. knew he was Jewish but he wasn’t circumcised. This subject was always, how shall I say, in the air, especially in the first years, when we were not far removed from it – you know, he was born in 1950 and the Holocaust lasted until 1945, but I never thought of, how shall I say, ‘holding a course’ on it. They had Christmas in their childhood. I didn’t go to synagogue, and didn’t live a religious life. Perhaps we spoke of Chanukkah, but no Chanukkah candles were lit at home, that’s for sure. So he didn’t grow up in the religious spirit. But he thinks of himself as Jewish. Perhaps more so than I do. He married a Jewish woman.
And I struggled a lot with how marriage and a child would work out. It didn’t really, because we divorced in 1953.
I first got married in 1948. We only had a civil wedding in the II District council offices. My first wife was Eva Erdos. She was four years younger than me, I believe. She was Jewish, born in Veszprem, and had studied hairdressing, but at the time we met, she was working in book distributing at Kossuth Publishers. She had a stand at the party committee office in the IV District, which was still downtown, where Kossuth Publishers, which dealt with political type books, sold books for cash or in installments. And that’s where we met each other. I was renting an apartment, she owned a studio apartment, so I moved in there.
But my real job during these events was to secure food and a normal life for us. Just like in 1945 when I never thought about not going home, in 1956 I didn’t think of defecting. I am from here, I belong here. If I look out of the tram window and spot a certain house, I know I am at the corner of Terez Ringroad. I know the natives’ language, their habits. Here I know how to think and do my thing. That’s how I feel. My father felt he had to be a merchant in Szentes, he didn’t move to Budapest, they deported him – he might have survived in Budapest. He belonged in Szentes as an iron merchant; I belong here, in Pest.
When I returned to Szentes in 1945, I had become fairly left-wing given past events, so that I immediately joined the Hungarian Communist Party [24] there in Szentes.
I did not go further up the ladder – this is probably because I hadn’t been a party member since 1956, and generally, among those qualified, they chose party members as high functionaries. But I didn’t mind, because I didn’t need to do any managerial tasks that would have taken me away from my field. For example, I didn’t have to employ or dismiss people, so I was very happy with this situation.
so at the beginning of 1953 I started working at the head office of investments of the National Planning Office and I worked there for 15 years. I started as a lecturer, and in the end I was an assistant manager, an advisor.
I magyarized my name in 1948. At the time I’d just moved from Szentes to Budapest, and I already had a job at VASERT, and no one understood my name on the telephone. I was thought to be Kuncz, and many similar names, but not a Gunst. That’s when I decided to change it, so that everyone could easily say my name. The rule was to submit three names, which the Interior Ministry could choose from. I only submitted ‘Galla.’ I mused on this one and that one a bit, then decided that the only good name for me was one that was easy to pronounce everywhere.
As much as I disliked retail, I liked national iron trading. I became a company leader, I had the task of obtaining stock. In the spring of 1948 I got a position as one of the directors of a nationalized iron trade company, until it was merged into the VASERT.
My mother – with whom I was living – told Ella in a letter about the difficulties we had in Szentes, and then I got to Pest through Ferenc Kende, who gave me an agency position to distribute various papers in certain places in Budapest and Fejer County, where I had to distribute the children’s magazine Huvelyk Matyi [‘Tom Thumb,’ children’s monthly magazine published from 1947 until 1949], and the official journals of the Material and Price Office. I didn’t get a salary, but worked on commission. I went around the countryside by train, on foot, by cart, it was hard work. I lived from this for months, looking for a way to break free from it as soon as possible.
She went to the railway cashier, where they knew her, in fact, she was a well-known journalist there, and she got a ticket on credit for the fast train to Pest. She had no money, but the ticket lady gave her one on credit. She traveled up to Pest with the next fast train – she had acquaintances here in Pest through whom she found a place. Bela Balazs was a close acquaintance of hers, he also helped. She went into hiding with fake papers, and in the end she got through everything. She had an old Christian friend, called Ferenc Kende, who had a book and newspaper distribution office, he also helped her.
Despite her 61 years, my mother was like a 40-year-old in many ways, she didn’t like being idle. On top of that, my father’s cousin, from whom we rented the two rooms was quite a difficult woman to bear, my mother also wanted to get away from her, so she got a job through an acquaintance as a cashier in a state enterprise called ‘Clothing Store.’ And my mother had very good times there, she worked for at least ten years until she retired. Somewhere there are certificates praising her work, what a good worker she was.
Our house was our own and when I knew that I was coming to Pest, I wanted to sell it. There were not many idiots who bought houses in 1947, when the winds of nationalization [23] were blowing through the country, yet I found two who divided it up and bought it. Naturally, for a ridiculously low price since I needed the money to get furniture in Pest. After selling the house we moved to Pest. My father had a cousin here, a widow who had a big apartment, which was also empty, so we rented two rooms from her and furnished it with our own furniture. I lived there with my mother until I got married, and my mother stayed on there.
At the end of the war, many people fled. It wasn’t only Jewish apartments left without owners, instead there was the Government Lost Property Commission, which packed its own warehouses with what they could find and had not been stolen by the local inhabitants. So my mother got a mattress and a cupboard from somewhere. When I came home we got another mattress and a table. The five-room apartment was completely empty, totally ransacked.
When I got home to Szentes in August 1945, our big shop was completely empty. There were 10-15 sacks on one of the shelves, my mother sat next to the sacks and ‘sold’ them. My mother got empty bags on consignment from some contacts who were Jewish corn traders. And I started as an iron merchant without any capital, which usually doesn’t work.
Then, a few days after 4th April 1945 [the liberation of Hungary from German occupation] it was liberated, and they immediately set off for home in adventurous circumstances. My mother came home on the roof of some truck filled with metal.
They took my mother to Austria, she worked in the Treff Koffer- und Lederwarenfabrik with a bunch of people from Szentes. This factory was in Tribuswinkel [about 20 kilometers south of Vienna, Austria]. I think they divided them up at Strasshof [22] and took them to various factories.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
When I saw that they were leading Jews off and went closer – we couldn’t go over there – I saw that my mother was in line and was put into the wagon and I told this Maschke that they were taking my mother and asked if I could somehow speak to her. And Maschke went to the constable captain [21], who was directing this whole thing, and spoke to him, asking if my mother was in the wagon and if the door was already closed, then could I go over there, accompanied by a constable, to speak to her for twenty minutes. And so it was. My poor mother wanted to give me something to eat from what she had, yet I could say that compared to her, I was in clover.
I was not able to meet my mother then, who was later taken to Szeged, because the Jewry from the region were rounded up in the ghetto there and were deported from there. And by chance our unit was in Szeged when my mother was put on the train, and by chance, I was working at Rokus station under German military command when my mother was put in the wagon.
In Szentes, there must have been 400-500 Jews who were not in forced labor, but the Jews from Szegvar, who were very few, less than 100, were also put in the Szentes ghetto. For sure there were six or eight to a room. Single-story family houses were appropriated from the residents. My mother went there in May 1944. Our forced laborer unit, which had been in various places over the years, was in Szentes when ghettoization took place, indeed the authorities took twenty men from our company to build the fence around the ghetto. I know that the company commander made sure when he picked the twenty, that Szentes men or men from around there should not be involved as they would surely help, or make contact with the Jews there.
My father was deported shortly after the Germans entered, on 19th March 1944 [19]. He was the chairman of the Jewish community at that time, and he and other notables were rounded up at the Szentes police station. He managed to submit an appeal against his internment, naturally he thought he was innocent, and he knew that they only rounded him up because it was easy to find him through the Jewish community. Well, you can imagine what happened to that appeal, and the following week they deported him to Auschwitz, to be more precise, he was taken from Szentes first to Pest [Budapest], from there to Sarvar and then to Auschwitz and there he was exterminated.
On 1st August we got under Soviet rule instead of American rule because of a territory exchange, and my chance came in the middle of August: I went straight home, a good way on foot. As it turned out, the place where my mother was deported and Harka, where I was, were only about 40 kilometers apart, but we had no idea about each other.
I was liberated in Gunskirchen [Austria] in May 1945. Then we wound up in Wels [Austria] in a reception camp, and the International Red Cross transmitted the names of who was there on various radio stations.
I was in forced labor until 1944 when we were handed over to the Germans at Hegyeshalom [on the current border with Austria], but not as laborers but as deportees. Then we were brought down to Harka with a little trip through Austria and then to Mauthausen [18] where we were for about two weeks. In Harka, we dug tank traps for the Russian tanks. We spent nearly five months there.
Then, from the beginning of 1942, I was continually a forced laborer. We had an exceptionally unpleasant company commander but his subordinates behaved more sympathetically towards us. Nobody in the company died, we covered all Transylvania, the Alfold, Transdanubia [eastern Hungary].