The photo was taken in 1934, I was five years old then. It was my father [Laszlo Gottlieb] who took the photo in the garden of our house in Nagybanya.
My father was a great photographer, he even had his own studio at home.
I was born in 1929 in Nagybanya. From the age of three I lived at my paternal grandparents.
My grandparents lived in a village somewhere near Nagybanya for a while, I was with them there too, then in Nagybanya.
But when I was five years old, my father took me with him, he rented a quite nice apartment, in a nice part, let's say, of Nagybanya, in a villa.
The owner was a woman from Kolozsvar, a widow, her family name was Herczeg.
The rent was quite high, but it was in the outskirts, the air was fine there.
My father always feared that I got tuberculosis or something like that.
This was when I was five. We had somebody who did the housekeeping; my father had a good salary, in those times this didn't mean a problem.
Later it was my step-mother who did the housekeeping. Well, it wasn't her who actually worked, but she gave out the tasks for everybody.
It wasn't her who did the cooking, we had a cook. This wasn't a problem.
My sole problem during my childhood was that I was orphan. Yet I didn't feel so motherless, because they behaved so nicely with me.
My father was not only a daddy, but a mom too. He looked after me in a very kind manner, not to speak about his parents, especially about my grandmother.
Later my second mother, whom I loved a lot, took care of me very gently too.
I called her by her name, Lili. I had a very beautiful childhood. The environment and the people were all very nice.
In fact I didn't get any particular Jewish education, I received a rather Hungarian education at home as well.
I didn't learn to speak Hebrew, I don't speak at all. Unfortunately. It's a good thing to know one more language, but that was it.
A visiting teacher taught me to read in Hebrew, but I never understood what I was reading.
He used to come to us when I was around eight years old until I became twelve, for three or four years, but only once in a week.
Everybody spoke Hungarian with me in the family. My mother tongue is Hungarian, I didn't speak any other language until the age of five.
Later my father, who obviously had a German education, hired a fraulein for me, according to the customs of those times, and that's how I learnt German.
I think I was five, this was after my mother died. And I got to learn Romanian only when I was six and a half, when my father simply enrolled me to a Romanian school saying: 'You have to learn Romanian, because we live in Romania.'
And he was right. In Nagybanya there wasn't any Jewish school, only a cheder.
There was a Hungarian school belonging to the Calvinist church, but he didn't send me there.
So I finished primary school in the Romanian public school.
I finished four years of primary school in Romanian, one year of gymnasium, then in the 1940s Hungarians came in, and after that I learned in Hungarian, then at the university too.
