Tag #115868 - Interview #78642 (Ferenc Leicht)

I went to our apartment, where the bakery used to be, and it turned out that it wasn’t possible to go in because the Soviet soldiers had moved into the apartment, they used it as storage, because they weren’t interested in the apartment but the bakery where they baked bread for themselves. They made square bread in tin pans, which stunk so bad that I almost fainted, because as it turned out they put waste oil on it so that it wouldn't burn. They didn’t let us in, and for a couple more months, until the unit, which was stationed there left, we couldn't go neither into the house nor into the bakery. My father lived at the neighbor's, they received me in, too, and I moved there.    The neighbor woman who lived across from our house came crying, she was happy to see us, she loved us. She asked me if I wanted her to cook chicken for me. I said ' Aunt Kati, I would like some noodles with peach jam.' I craved for something sweet. Then she made  noodles out of half a kilogram of flour, she boiled them and gave them to me with some peach jam. I ate them all in a minute. She cooked for us, and my father and I lived at the other neighbor's. One of the apprentices ran the bakery, a Christian baker called Szabo, who said when my father arrived that as soon as the Russians left he would give everything back to us. Nothing was missing from the bakery, because they started to use it immediately, and the Russians didn't take anything either, but the apartment was emptied from wall-to-wall, even by the nice Hungarian neighbors. Nothing was left there, nothing at all. When the Russians left at the beginning of the fall Szabo let my father back. Until then we lived off Joint aid. The Joint gave us money or something, and we gave that to the neighbors who cooked for us. Though I could cook, they didn't let me close to the stove. Because they thought it wasn't appropriate for a 16-year-old boy to cook, when the housewife was there.