Klara Karpati's father Herman Grunberg

Klara Karpati's father Herman Grunberg

My father photographed in Gyomro in 1951. (Before the war) he worked at the neolog Jewish community, as a sort of a secretary under the chief secretary. For long years there was a very famous secretary at the community, Sandor Epler, whom my father liked a lot. He was quite busy, because Epler was a workaholic. He worked late into the night on many occasions and my father did the same. I was twelve or thirteen when my mother died. My father and I were left alone. When I was fourteen my father married (again), to a very observant woman, who started teaching me to be more observant. Matild was a widow, she had two children: Rozsa Rosner and Laszlo Rosner. Matild tended to the household. She had had an underwear-sewing shop while she was alone with her children and she went on working there. (During the war) my father, Matild and Rozsa, her daughter, were in the cloth-gathering battalion in the Jewish Gymnasium. When it turned out after the war, that my father and Matild could not go back to their old flat, they were offered a shared flat. My father said that he would not go to any shared flat, he had another house in the province and he would go and live there. This house was in Gyomro, close to Pest. It was a nice detached house and they (my father and Matild) had built it. (Before the war) they lived there from spring until autumn. Matild was a very skilled woman, she knew how to work in the garden, too; it was she that told my father what had to be done there. They had a kosher household and every Thursday she came to Pest to kill the poultry at the shochet and for beef. There was a nice little synagogue in Gyomro, and he attended it. Every morning he prayed in tfillin.
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