Edit Kovacs' mother, Katalin Halasz

Photo of my mother, Katalin Friedner. She was born in a derelict district of Budapest densely populated with petty bourgeois Jews. She was quite uneducated, having only gone to elementary school for three years. She later learned the hat making trade. She worked in a hat maker's workshop as an assistant until my sister was born. She was at home until my father was fired and set up his clothes business at the market. They took on a servant girl who had to sleep in the kitchen because we had only two rooms. When her husband, after two years of unemployment, took up trading in clothes and underwear on the market, she gave him a hand in it. During the Holocaust, she looked after her two daughters' children, first in a yellow-star house, later in the ghetto. She died in 1982 in Budapest.