This is me when I was a teacher. The photo was taken in Budapest in 1962.
After completing eight years of elementary school I dropped out of technical school due to great poverty. I worked for a year and took a special matriculation exam. We were almost starving on my mother's salary in the Rakosi era. I was able to go to the special graduation exams because I starved less when I worked and earned 400 forints per month in the stationary factory for a year. There was a dormitory, there was breakfast, lunch and dinner and there was, I think, a stipend of 70 forints.
After that I went to the teacher training college as a mathematics-physics major. I taught there, in the 13th district, in Domb Street elementary school, and in the meantime I qualified as a teacher of mathematics at university. The headmistress was a very decent Jew, but she was a member of the Party, and she was always nagging me to join. And so I became a party member quite early and I was a pioneer-team leader. I did my work diligently in Domb Street for ten years, then I went into computing, working for a company named Imperol [which later became SZAMALK]. I was a programming mathematician, later I became a program-developer, a program designer, and system developer. And later, the Central Comittee of the Hungarian Socalist Worker's Party asked for a person for the computing centre. SZAMALK recommended me for this programmer position. Later, I was the computer-system manager of the library.
Where I worked [in the school], there were no Jews among my collegues, and I probably wouldn't have been able to love a non-Jew. So that's probably why I didn't fall in love with any of the boys. I lived with my mother, I nursed her, and I got married very late.
Edit Deutsch
Centropa Collection acquired by USHMM
The Centropa archive has been acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
USHMM will soon offer a Special Collections page for Centropa.
Academics please note: USHMM can provide you with original language word-for-word transcripts and high resolution photographs. All publications should be credited: "From the Centropa Collection at the United States Memorial Museum in Washington, DC". Please contact collection [at] centropa.org.