Tag #115776 - Interview #78642 (Ferenc Leicht)

The middle school was quite far from our apartment. In winter there was always a lot of snow, and I had to beat a path every morning in the huge snow, and sometimes I was absent, because I couldn’t beat my way to school. At that time there wasn’t coeducation, the boys and girls were strictly separated, and I had a permit from the headmaster of the girls’ school to walk the neighbor girl, the daughter of the grocer who was of my age, to school and home. We were 10 years old, and in the mornings we beat the path to school together. She was a small, delicate girl, and she was afraid of the other boys, because they said nasty things about her being a Jew. At that time people said very nasty things about Jews. The children shouted ‘dirty Jew’ and they fought, and the adults, the teachers did it as people do it today, in a covert way, but it was obvious. Especially at middle school, where mostly non-Jewish children went. Most of our customers were also very anti-Semite, but they bought bread from us, because it was good. Two corners away there was another baker, a certain Gyozo Ferenczi, who painted an arrow cross on his gate at the end of the 1930s, and he asked the people around him why they supported the Jew, and didn’t buy bread from him, because it wasn’t far away, but they still didn’t buy rolls from him. They told him, that because the Jewish bread was better than his, and that he should have made better bread, and then they would have supported him.