Vasile Grunea and his friends

These are my friends. We grew up together from kindergarten to university, and we still keep in touch, although I am the only one who stayed in Romania. The photo was taken in Brasso. The date of the photo is on the back, it's 1947, and everybody put his name down as well. All five of us are Jewish and our parents lived in Brasso. All five of us went to the Medical Faculty in Marosvasarhely, three of us became doctors and two of us dropped out and became journalists. The first boy on the right is me. I was very proud of this suit at the time, it consisted of a homespun blue jacket and gray trousers made of a thinner fabric. I graduated from secondary school in 1945, and went to Medical Faculty in Marosvasarhely in 1946 and 1947, but I didn't like it there, so I transferred to the Faculty of History in Kolozsvar. I started journalism in 1948 and I have been doing it ever since. The second on the right is Gyorgy Elopataki, he is a pensioner today, and he lives near Vienna. He graduated from Medical Faculty in Marosvasarhely and then emigrated to Austria and worked there as a pulmonologist. He lost his wife, the poor man, and he married again and has two daughters. None of his wives were Jewish. The third boy on the left is Andras Weiss. His father was a doctor and the owner of woods, he had woods in Northern Transylvania. They moved to Kolozsvar in 1940, so Andris was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 together with his father and mother. His brother Pista was some four years older than him; he died under tragic circumstances in Pest in 1944. Andras was taken to Buchenwald from Auschwitz; he came home and finished two years at Medical Faculty in Marosvasarhely, but he graduated from university in Switzerland and then went to America. He was a doctor, a psychiatrist at the health department of the UN and afterwards he worked in Washington, in America, as a private doctor, a psychiatrist, for years until recently. He has a daughter and a son. The second boy on the left is Gyorgy Dan, originally named Stein. Dan, with whom I shared a flat, also left after the Medical Faculty. He lives in Germany. He went to England in the 1950s, then from England to Germany, where he worked as a reporter at the Romanian broadcast of the Deutsche Welle, the German state radio, for years and he has been to Romania several times as the interpreter of the German delegation. The headquarters of the radio are in Cologne and he also lives in Cologne. The first one on the left is Laci Vaintraub; he graduated from Medical Faculty in Marosvasarhely and is a dermatologist. He also emigrated to Germany and worked as a dermatologist, I think, somewhere near Bonn; today he is a pensioner. Vaintraub has two sons, they are both dentists. Apart from Andris Weisz, whose wife is a Swiss Jew, we all 'became treyf', that is we all married non-Jewish women.