This is a photo of my father Jozef Vidor taken in Slovakia in 1944.
My father was born in Pest in 1882, and finished school there, a commerce school as the oral family tradition goes. As an exceptionally clever young man, he got into the bank right after graduation. The bank where he worked in Budapest, opened a branch here in Bratislava. They were so happy with him, that they named him branch director at age twenty-three, which was already considered a big career then. Judging from pictures of him as a youth, he was a very handsome man, good-tempered, nice, and full of humor. He met my mother here in the theater. They took my mother and her siblings to all the bigger performances. That acquaintance then became a marriage.
When I was six, World War I began, and my father was drafted to the Hungarian army, Honved No. 13. My father was among the first to make it to the eastern front, namely to Poland. And I have to say that a number of my classmates' fathers never came back from the war. But my father did. Afterwards he stayed in Bratislava.
It was only in 1944 that my parents were deported; my husband and me, too. I'm the only one, who returned.
Jozef Vidor
The Centropa Collection at USHMM
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