Kati Andai's maternal grandfather, Zsigmond Brichta

Grandfather Brichta. My mother's whole family lived in Oberland [today in Slovakia]. I don't know anything about them, they all died, nobody survived. My grandparents lived in Kassa [today: Kosice]. Grandfather was a sportsman, he was tall and neat, a very neat man. He swam splendidly. He had a little moustache. They were not orthodox (nobody was in the family), no, they weren't religious at all. He was completely uneducated, but he educated himself. He was a very curious man, he read a great deal; he spoke Hungarian, German, Slovakian impeccably. He also wrote in these languages. He had a beautiful handwriting - he wrote with Gothic letters. I think their mother-tongue was German. They talked to me in Hungarian, but not to my mother. My grandfather always wrote to her in German. He tried all kind of things. He had a pawn-shop, then a hotel, then he was a book-keeper. I think they went a bit bankrupt. When I was born there was a private house, and it seems that they sold it, because when I went there in the summer they only had a flat that opened onto a yard. The toilet was inside. There was a wash-hand stand in the kitchen, where one could wash oneself. [This was] in a one-storey house; the sun shone into the yard, and there was an oleander in a pail. My grandparents poisoned themselves in the ghetto of Kassa, so they were not [deported]. My grandfather was over 80 when he died in the ghetto.

The Centropa Collection at USHMM

The Centropa archive has been acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. USHMM will soon offer a Special Collections page for Centropa.

Academics please note: USHMM can provide you with original language word-for-word transcripts and high resolution photographs. All publications should be credited: "From the Centropa Collection at the United States Memorial Museum in Washington, DC". 

Please contact collection [at] centropa.org (collection[at]centropa[dot]org).