Thomas Molnar's class picture

This is the picture of my class from school year 1940-1941. The teacher is Armin Fleischmann. In the upper row 4th from right is Beno Benedek, he is in Canada and I correspond with him permanently. In the 2nd row 3rd from left is Miki Kaszas. Miki Kaszas was my classmate at high school too. When I come to Pest I always meet him. He plays the violin, but only as a hobby. I don't know what he did professionally. I am in the 3rd row, 4th from left. This was the Bethlen Square Jewish elementary school. I had my bar mitzvah at the Bethlen Square synagogue, but not exactly when I was 13, because the Arrow-Cross men were here at that time, only after the liberation in 1946. We were still living on Thokoly Street when I started going to the Bethlen Square Jewish elementary school, which was about a kilometer away from our apartment. Usually I went on foot there and back, and during these walks I first encountered anti-Semitism. Some ragamuffins used to bother the Jewish children, shouting abusive words, like dirty Jew, stinking Jew etc, and I learned at once that because of being Jewish I was different from the other Hungarian children. We never came to blows, and later I didn't have any other personal experiences, because I went to the Jewish elementary school, then to the Jewish high school, and this diminished the chance of anti-Semitic affairs. I was quite a diligent pupil at the elementary school, with all excellent grades, but I didn't really like school. I hated especially the religious subjects and I hated that on every Saturday morning and on all the Jewish holidays I had to go to the synagogue.

Centropa Collection acquired by 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.