Klara Karpati's father Herman Grunberg and her stepmother Matild Grunberg

This is my father and my step mother in Vancouver, Canada in 1960. They emigrated to Canada in 1957-58. We were on good terms with Matild; I visited her in Vancouver. She was crying when I left, because we knew that we would not see each other again. My father died in the 1970s, Matild died a few years ago. 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. The boy was one or two years my senior and the girl was younger. Matild had two brothers in Paris and one of them, who was a furrier, took the boy in and he learned the fur trade. Rozsa went to school here. Later she went to university, but her studies were interrupted by the war. 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. There were richer Jews who made real trousseaus for their daughters. She had some women from the provinces who did the embroidery for her. (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.