Maria and Tamas Feheri

This is a picture of me and my husband, Tamas Feheri. He magyarized his name from Weisz in 1948. The photo was taken in Budapest in 1946, three years before our marriage. After graduation, I got married right away. At the banquet I was already married because Tamas, or Tomi, Weisz was to be sent to the Soviet Union to study right away. I said that we should get married because I had been dating him for years. Around 1943, I frequently went out to Marguerite Island with girlfriends, and boys always went there with us. He was one of them. And then he disappeared in the war. He was hiding with his mum in parks, everywhere. He was taken to a brickyard, and he escaped. And then he and his mum somehow always came and went to and from parks. They went home at night, then into a yellow-star house in Ujlipotvaros [a bourgeois part of Budapest, where a lot of middle-class Jewish families used to live]. After the war Tomi graduated from the College of Theatre and Film Arts. His father, Lajos Weisz, was a dry goods agent, but he died of a disease in 1943. His mother was a dressmaker and she supported Tamas as long as he needed. After college, Tomi found a position at the Hungarian Film Newsreel Co. When we got married we didn't know where to live. We went to my mother-in-law's for two days, but she was married by then, and her husband said that this wasn't the reason he had gotten married: to share the place with us. Then my aunt Rene, who had also got married again, put us up in the rear quarter of her villa. My other aunt put us up for a few months. Slowly a year passed and Tamas got a single-bedroom union apartment at the Newsreel for his good work. We lived there for a while, until we came here in the spring of 1956. Tomi was still working at the Newsreel, and later it became the Newsreel Documentary Film Studio.