Tag #115792 - Interview #78642 (Ferenc Leicht)

Then we first went to the courtyard of the small synagogue with my mother. The big synagogue was built in 1826, it was a huge, internally arched monument. On the outside it had a roof, on the inside it was domed. The synagogue was the so-called big synagogue, there was an organ in it, too. [Editor’s note: Otherwise first at a synagogue in Hungary, in 1845!] Besides that there was a small synagogue, too. The small synagogue was in a huge building complex, in which there was the Jewish elementary school, the commercial school, because that had been a Jewish commercial school originally, but the town took it, but many Jewish teachers and young people went there, the Jewish rest-home, an apartment house, where there were apartments in which besides the people from Nagykanizsa the employees of the Jewish community lived, and the small synagogue. Since we lived in the outskirts of the town, by the time they got to us with the gathering, the big synagogue had become full, and then they started to cram the Jews into the small synagogue. My mother’s other sisters, all 5 of them were already in the big synagogue. Even my father’s sister, Juliska, who lived in Nagykanizsa was there, only Olga remained in Somogycsurgo, and Frida had moved to Pest with her husband before. And on the 28th in the morning they put me in the apartment of my aunt Juliska, who lived in the apartment house near the small synagogue, and she paid rent to the Jewish community, and who had been taken to the big synagogue by then, We were there for a night with my mother and about 10 other families were jammed there, there was about 30 of us. And the subject of my adoration, the neighbor girl, the daughter of the grocer was also there, and we were very happy that we could be together. And on top of this my uncle’s angora rabbits were also there. Because my Aunt Juliska’s husband, Imre Hirschler, who was a clerk, had been fired because of the anti-Jewish laws, and because he had to make a living he started to deal with angora rabbits. At that time it was in fashion, because its fur could be sold for good money. And as they were taken to the big synagogue, nobody fed the rabbits, even though the Lucerne had been put next to them. When they took us there I started feeding the rabbits, and once a young SS came next to me, because the ghetto was already guarded by the SS, and we fed the rabbits peacefully next to each other. I didn’t have any bad experiences in the ghetto. And when they brought the Jews from Csaktornya and Murakoz, they transferred us to a room of the rest home.

In Nagykanizsa there was an internment camp in the former coffee factory. There were leftists there, too, and all kinds of people, and a lot of Jews.