Margareta Grunbaum

This is my mother, Margareta Grunbaum, nee Kohn. The photo was taken in Israel in the 1950s. My mother was born in 1898 in Oradea, she was eight years younger than my father. My mother met my father on the train - they were both going to Curtici. My father was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, and my mother was working as a clerk. My father, Andrei Grunbaum, was born in Hungary, in a village near Debrecen called Konyar, in 1890. My father fought in World War I, but I don't remember where. Both my father and my mother graduated from Commercial High School - my mother in Arad, my father in Debrecen. My parents spoke Hungarian, but my father could also speak Yiddish. They got married in 1919. In 1941 my parents were forced by a new law to move to Arad. All Jews who lived in villages had to move to towns and Arad was the closest one to Curtici. I was 21-22 years old then. Although the law which didn't allow Jews to live in villages was annulled after the war, my parents didn't move back to Curtici. However, they went there every week and sold textiles. In 1950 my parents moved to Israel, where my father died in 1951, somewhere near Tel Aviv, but I don't know precisely where. After his death, my mother lived in Nahariya for some time. She used to make cakes and sell them. She died in Quiryat Yam in 1989, a few days before the Romanian Revolution.