Selected text
My elder brother, David was two years older than me; he got his name after our grandfather. He was cross-eyed, he was born with this defect; the sun was shining and he looked into it...
Mirjam had a twin sister, who died during childbirth because of the umbilical cord. My poor mother cried so much; when she went to the graveyard, she used to look at the rows and say: where these are, there is room for one more; and that’s what happened indeed: she gave birth after all this to Fajge, who also died as a child. Mirjam was deported together with us, and she died in Auschwitz.
Fajge was my favorite among my siblings; we were sleeping in the same bed, and she always went to bed earlier to heat up my place. It was war time, the Hungarians came in, and Fajge got ill right when the tanks were passing through Szeretfalva, so they couldn’t take her to the doctor, we had to wait until the tanks went off, then we took her to Kolozsvar, to the Matyas hospital. [Editor’s note: The founder and physician-director of the Park sanatorium – more popularly Matyas sanatorium – was Dr. Matyas Matyas. He graduated at the Jozsef Ferenc University in Kolozsvar, he became a general surgeon, obstetrician and gynecologist there. The private sanatorium founded by him employed quite a few physicians, it was in the Furdo street. In 1948 it was nationalized and transformed into a pediatrics hospital. It still works.] The doctor said we came too late, her appendix was perforated. Yet I stayed there with her, but later they told us to bring her home, because her abdomen got full with pus. We were so close to each other that she couldn’t die until I didn’t go out of the room. She was ten years old, when she died in 1943. Fajge is buried in Szeretfalva, in the Jewish cemetery. The cemetery still exists.
In 1944 Salamon was very little, he didn’t even go to school yet, when he was deported with us, and he died in Auschwitz.
Mirjam had a twin sister, who died during childbirth because of the umbilical cord. My poor mother cried so much; when she went to the graveyard, she used to look at the rows and say: where these are, there is room for one more; and that’s what happened indeed: she gave birth after all this to Fajge, who also died as a child. Mirjam was deported together with us, and she died in Auschwitz.
Fajge was my favorite among my siblings; we were sleeping in the same bed, and she always went to bed earlier to heat up my place. It was war time, the Hungarians came in, and Fajge got ill right when the tanks were passing through Szeretfalva, so they couldn’t take her to the doctor, we had to wait until the tanks went off, then we took her to Kolozsvar, to the Matyas hospital. [Editor’s note: The founder and physician-director of the Park sanatorium – more popularly Matyas sanatorium – was Dr. Matyas Matyas. He graduated at the Jozsef Ferenc University in Kolozsvar, he became a general surgeon, obstetrician and gynecologist there. The private sanatorium founded by him employed quite a few physicians, it was in the Furdo street. In 1948 it was nationalized and transformed into a pediatrics hospital. It still works.] The doctor said we came too late, her appendix was perforated. Yet I stayed there with her, but later they told us to bring her home, because her abdomen got full with pus. We were so close to each other that she couldn’t die until I didn’t go out of the room. She was ten years old, when she died in 1943. Fajge is buried in Szeretfalva, in the Jewish cemetery. The cemetery still exists.
In 1944 Salamon was very little, he didn’t even go to school yet, when he was deported with us, and he died in Auschwitz.
Interview
Berta Grunstein
Tag(s)