Klara Karpati's first husband, Laszlo Schachter, with a friend

This is my first husband, Laszlo Schachter, with one of our friends on an excursion in the mountains of Buda. The photo was taken in the 1940s. My first husband, Laszlo Schachter was born in Budapest in 1909. He was much older than I. I met him while working at a company that was a commercial agency in toiletries and represented several foreign companies. My boss was a Jew, and I was a shop manager there. I went around the perfume shops in Budapest. There were people who worked in the provinces too. They were called agents. One of them was the elder brother of my second husband. Laszlo, my first husband, also went to the provinces. There were seven children in his family, five boys and two girls. I was friendly with the girls and with four of the boys. We used to go out together on outings to Harmashatar Hill, but the boy who later became my husband and I didn't really know each other. Then the elder of the two girls thought that it would be nice to organize a date for Laszlo and me to get to know each other better. They organized a date for us at the Astoria hotel, a posh hotel of that time. Well, this resulted in an unbelievable love. In 1942 we had our wedding in the synagogue in Rumbach Sebestyen Street.

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).