Ladislav Porjes as a child

In this picture I'm three years old, as captured by a photographer in Zilina. I was born in the year 1921 in Zilina. At the age of three I became a complete orphan. Because I became an orphan while still a baby, they found me a wet nurse, a single mother, some Miss Balazova, whose first name was the same as my poor mother's - Ilona. She apparently had enough milk to go around and loved me perhaps more than her own child. As a little boy I was probably a beautiful child, because I even won a beauty contest in Michalovce. When I was six, the town of Michalovce held a beauty pageant, someone entered me into it, and I won in the boys' category. In the girls' category the sister of one of my friends won, her name was Litzi Goldfingerova. Back then they took our picture and our photo was published in some literary magazine. I unfortunately don't have the photo; we lost everything during the war.