Selected text
My son and my daughter-in-law started liking each other at professor Scheiber’s. They told me later that they fell in love with each other at the first sight. I had never seen such thing in my life. I must knock on wood that they will celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary next year and I have three beautiful granddaughters. My daughter-in-law was born in 1960, she is originally a teacher of Hungarian language and literature and history, but in Israel she studied to become a nursery school teacher and she also studied remedial education. At first I was a little bit afraid of her, because her parents had divorced and I feared that the example would be contagious, but I was agreeably disappointed. Otherwise her parents didn’t raise her Jewish either, she also realized her identity later. We had been in Israel with the family in 1983. Laci, Vera and I. My daughter-in-law started dating Laci at that time, they met at that time. But we didn’t tell her either where we were going. Because our passport was for Greece, for 4 weeks. And from Greece we went on. This was quite risky in 1983 [Editor’s note: Hungary didn’t have any diplomatic relationship with Israel between 1967–1989.]If one didn’t make phone calls or didn’t write it didn’t turn out. Supposing that one didn’t set off from Vienna. Because the Hungarian authorities rented the apartment across the embassy in Vienna, and they took a picture of everyone who went in or came out. And if one asked for a passport after that they showed him the picture of where he had been in Vienna. At that time one could go in every three years, and they gave 200 or 300 dollars for shopping. [see Blue Passport][19]. But I had my connections in Israel already at that time, which I had built out earlier, since I had been a soldier in the Israeli army together with people who had been deported with me, and with whom I had gone to school together in Nagykanizsa before the war. We were in Greece for one week, and 3 weeks in Israel.
Period
Interview
Ferenc Leicht