Tag #130830 - Interview #78461 (Stefan Guth)

After I finished high school, I went to the Faculty of Biology in Cluj-Napoca in 1950. I had to take an entry examination, and I wasn’t very well prepared because I had spent my last two years working and not studying. So my mother came to me to Cluj, and we stayed in two houses, whose owners were Jewish families. We found them with my mother’s help, because she had been a student in Cluj. Uncle Arnold could have helped us as well, but it wasn’t necessary. She stayed with me for about a month, until I took the examination. I started some preparations with a university assistant; he was a nice fellow, but we both got bored of studying pretty quickly, so we decided to go study in the open air, at the swimming pool to be more precise! But I did study, and I passed the examination – true, not among the first – without any help from my uncle Arnold Lobl, who was the pro-rector of the Babes-Bolyai University. I didn’t want to use this relation.

In my first year of college I was a mediocre student, but beginning with the second year I was a good student, all my grades were ‘excellent’.