Sandor Acs and family

This is the entrance to our Nagykoros house, where my I?m standing with my father and mother. I was already a big girl here. It could have been in 1940, just before my father's business went under. This was the office. And this was the entrance to the house. After my grandfather's death, his two sons, Pali and my father, took over the running of the Nagykorosi company. The business was successful up until 1941. Then the company went bankrupt. The competition ruined it. There was another wholesaler in Nagykoros, the Benedek company. This Benedek firm, who also wholesaled wine, ruined my father, when in one year, that my father also sold wine, they let theirs go for such a low price that my father couldn't sell his, and they were left with all their wine. They lost everything. They had to auction off the house, the horses, the truck, everything we had. When the business went under, we moved up here to Budapest, my mother and father and I. I continued my life here under the wing of my grandmother. The grandparents? Budapest house was a happy family nest up to the beginning of the war years. We lived at 119 Ulloi street in a four bedroom apartment, grandma and grandpa ? while he was alive, my mother and father, me and my Uncle Lajos until he got married. It was a family of love, music and literature. We weren?t rich, in fact our life was rather problematic. When my father's possibilities of putting bread on the table had already run low, my grandmother and mother started knitting. They primarily did handwork. Knit patterns were popular in the years up to the war, and they learned them well. That was the source of income. In fact, they even had people working for them. They sold the finished pieces to a shop on Vaci street. My father spent most of this time playing cards. I learned piano. I went to High School, read a lot. I didn't notice anything around me, but music and literature. My mother had a lot of nice friends, good people who visited us often. I would peek in from the curtained-off part, and listen to what they were talking about. I slept in one room with my mother and grandmother. I?d wake up Sunday mornings to them talking about some incomprehensible thing. It would turn out that they?d both read the same book and were discussing it. We kept a modest house, but while it was still possible, we had hired help come in. Just one girl, plus the German fraulein who tutored me, and helped raise me. The maids were usually little Transylvanian girls who took part in the cleaning and cooking. [The previously Hungarian province of Transylvania was annexed to Romania in 1920. Many of the Transylvanian Hungarians found refuge in Hungary, especially in Budapest, in the interwar times.] Until the Jewish Law [anti-Jewish Laws] forbid it, then later we didn't have the money for them. In the later years, the maid's room was rented out.