Wedding picture of Marika Krpez's parents (Lazar and Jelena Deutsch)

The picture was taken in Subotica in 1937. This is my parents' wedding picture. At the age of 14 my mother came from a town called Martonos, thirty kilometers away, to Subotica, where she met my father. They dated for five years, but my paternal grandmother Regina (Holtzer) would not allow this relationship. Grandmother did not like my mother because she was not a Jew. Only when my father Lazar became very ill, and my mother devotedly took care of him, did grandmother agree that her son marry a shiksa (non-Jewish woman), as she called my mother. My parents had a wonderful marriage. My mother, even though she was not a Jew, very quickly mastered the basic concepts of Judaism. She learned how to cook Jewish food from her mother-in-law. She acquired considerable knowledge about Judaism, and she raised and educated me in this spirit. During the war, the two of us were hidden in the homes of two Hungarian families, the Domsodis and the Boroshes. Mother died in Subotica in 1985. Unfortunately my father did not survive the war, but died in 1945 in the Mauthausen camp from tuberculosis.