These children are some two years younger than me. They were in another grade than I was.
They just finished first grade then. I knew some, but not all of them. On the back of the picture there's the complete list of the pupils and the teachers, but I don't recognize the handwriting.
Probably a child from the picture had this photo, and it was given to me because my father, Jeno Moskovits, is in it - sitting in the middle, fifth from left in the second row.
My father became the principal of the Jewish elementary school, and he was a principal-teacher because he taught, too. He didn't teach me, though.
Back then the same teacher followed a class through the four grades, just like today, and my class was assigned another teacher, Ferenc Rado, who started a new 1st-grade class. He is the grey-haired man in the picture.
There were four teachers at the school, two male and two female, and Mr. Deutsch - the man with the hat in the photo - came as the fifth, but he only taught Ivrit. The two women were Boske Rosenfeld and Ilona Kohn.
Only this Ilona Kohn - fifth from right - survived the deportation.
After the war she had a higher rank, and she even became a school commissioner. She got married before the war to Erno Salamon.
I think he was taken away to forced labor in Russia and never came back. After she returned from the deportation, she remarried. All the other teachers of the Jewish elementary school perished in Auschwitz.
Elek Deutsch, was a specialized Hebrew teacher, who was experienced in Ivrit, too. His name was Deutsch but there's no relation with my future husband's family. Elek Deutsch moved to Israel, but he came back because his wife couldn't adapt to the climate.
They moved back from Israel [still Palestine at that time], then the whole family was deported and none of them survived.
He taught Ivrit in a very efficient way, because we, the students of the Jewish school, had to study it, after all, - I don't know how many lessons we had weekly, about two, but he was so good at teaching it that we learned to read and write in Ivrit quite well.
Then, as time went by, of course, I forgot it all, and now I don't remember anything. When I started 1st grade he wasn't there yet. He came there later and took over the task of teaching Ivrit.
At the end of each school year, class portraits were taken. There was a photographer on the main square called Weintraub, his studio was in one of the courtyards.
The school always asked him to take the pictures. It is possible that he was asked because he was a Jewish photographer. The camera was on a tripod and looked like a big monster.
It had a black cover, and we used to laugh a lot when the photographer got under the black cover and then looked out and said, 'Now you must look at me!' - in other words, having a picture taken was quite a ceremony.
