The Jewish cemetery in Marosvasarhely

The Jewish cemetery in Marosvasarhely

This picture was taken by my husband, Gyula Deutsch, in the Jewish cemetery of Marosvasarhely in 1984. I am somewhere in the crowd. I think it was the 40th commemoration of the deportations, which is organized every year. This service used to take place in the cemetery. In recent years, now that the members of the community are old, and find it difficult to go all the way to the cemetery, they decided to organize it in the synagogue. The deportations began on May 3rd 1944. The commemorations weren?t always organized on exactly this date, but always in early May. The open door you can see in the picture is the burial ground: the deceased were brought here in the coffin before the burial. On the right, beside the trunk of the tree, there's a memorial to all those who died in World War II. The structure on the left, with the magen David on it, symbolizes a common grave. It's not too big, the inside is like the grave of many people. The names of those who had been deported to Auschwitz and never came home are engraved in its walls. The names of the parents of my husband, Gyula Deutsch, as well as my parents, are among them. There are names missing because many emigrated shortly after they came back from the deportation, and this structure didn't exist yet, so their relatives' names never got on the walls. I don't know exactly when this symbolic building was erected. There were others who preferred to engrave the names of their loved ones lost in Auschwitz on the graves their relatives had before the war.
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