This is a photo of me, Alexander Singer. It was taken in Kezmarok in 1918. I got the photo after the war, in Samorin. They found it in the Nagymagyar - Zlate Klasy ghetto, where my parents must have lost it.
I was born into the worst poverty, in 1916, in Kezmarok. My parents named me Alexander, Jewish name Shmuel.
With my father I spoke mostly German, but with my mother Slovak as well. I spent my early childhood in Kezmarok. Later, in 1926, we moved to Samorin, where my father became the head rabbi.
For us it was a change to abundance. It was a very good and big change from the standpoint of accommodations and supporting the family.
Compared to Kezmarok, Samorin was a village, as Kezmarok was a town of artisans, but from the standpoint of supporting the family, it was incomparable.
A rabbinical position came up in Samorin, because the rabbi there was a former classmate of my father's, Dr. Weiss.
He was a modern person, and became a rabbi in Wiener Neustadt [New Vienna].
For one, he himself recommended my father for his old position, and Akiba Schreiber also recommended him for it.
Samorin was only a small town, about sixty Jewish families, which was about 200 souls.
But the problem was that there was only a Hungarian Jewish school there, and in Kezmarok I'd been attending a Slovak school, and my other siblings a German one.
So we began learning Hungarian.
