Margareta and Andrei Popper
This is my mother, Margareta Popper, with me in 1915, the year I was born.
My parents got married in July 1914. They also had a religious ceremony at the synagogue. The next day after they returned from their honeymoon in Austria, World War I broke out and my father was drafted. He became an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army.
I was born on 29th June 1915 in Arad, in the house of my maternal grandparents. I was my parent's only child. At the time of my birth, my father was already a prisoner. They would take a photo of me every month and send it to him in Siberia. In the evenings, my mother would pray with me so that God could bring my father home. I first saw him when I was five. He came back from the war in 1921. We lived in Arad until 1923, when we moved to Buteni, I was eight. But my grandmother continued to live in Arad. Before World War I, my father had a practice in Arad. In 1923, a lawyer passed his Buteni office to an uncle, who in turn gave it to my father. The Buteni courthouse spread its jurisdiction over more than 50 communes, and the town only had three lawyers; one of them was my father.
