The four Friedmann sisters

This is us, the Friedmann sisters. My oldest sister Piri Deri is on the left, next to her is Rozsi Schwarz, then Bozsi Spiegel and I am on the right. The photo was taken in Eger in 1937. we were both Orthodox and Neolog. Because we were Neolog through Dad and Orthodox through Mom. My mother's family, the Pollaks, were all Orthodox. There were sometimes disagreements between Dad and Mom because of this because Dad worked on Saturday and Mom didn't really like that. I wouldn't have liked it either if this had been my conviction. There were two synagogues in Eger, a Neolog and an Orthodox synagogue, and both were close to us. We went to the Orthodox synagogue [on high holidays] but on Fridays we went to the Neolog one. Dad usually didn't go to the synagogue on Friday and Saturday because he wasn't so religious. Mom used to go every Saturday. She put on her nicest dress and proceeded to the synagogue. Sometimes she took me along, other times she didn't. We used to chatter and chortle and laugh a lot. We could make a pass at boys from above [from the women's gallery] because there was a grid, some kind of a railing and we leant over it and ogled at them. The adults let us do everything, there was no supervision. You went in, you were there, you went with your mother and that was it. But they [the adults] really prayed. The other synagogue was Orthodox, there you couldn't look down and do other 'nonsense'. There you couldn't really see through the grid and they had different rules. We went to the Orthodox synagogue on high holidays when several people fainted. We always knew in advance who would faint because there were some women there who had eaten a lot the previous evening [before the fast started] and the following day we were waiting for them to collapse and they were then taken outside. But we didn't take all this seriously, it was all just very interesting and funny to us. My parents had their own seats; they had to pay for them.

Photos from this interviewee