In this picture you can see my parents - Maximilian Klein and Edith Kleinova. I don't know when and where the photograph was taken.
My parents were married on 10th January 1939. I was born on 16th February 1940, during World War II. My memories of this time period are sporadic. No one really talked about the war much in our family. I don't know how my parents met, as I never asked about it. They were married in a synagogue, but whether it was in Surovce, that I don't know. The wedding was Orthodox, you can see it from photographs. The wedding was with a veil and under a chuppah. After the wedding they stayed and lived in Surovce. They had a little house there, I saw it a few times and then it fell down on its own. At that time there was already great repression here. My father said that when I was born, that day was the first time they drove Jews out to clear snow from the railroad tracks. Up to then it was more or less all right. I don't know how much snow had fallen, maybe even two meters, apparently there was so much on the tracks that the locomotive couldn't get through it.
Maximilian Klein and Edith Kleinova
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).