Tag #135721 - Interview #78511 (Vasile Grunea)

In other respects, the school had the same curriculum as all the other schools, with one big difference, namely that the teachers lectured at a very high level. The majority of the teachers had been educated in Hungary or Austria. The director of the school, Mark Antal [3], was originally from Hungary. He was school inspector during the Hungarian Soviet Republic [4] and he had to leave Hungary because of this and he got to Kolozsvar in the 1920s as someone who escaped from the Horthy [5] regime. He had two sons. One of them was an economist and poet; he died in forced labor in 1943. Before that he spent many years in jail in Pest [Budapest] because he was convicted as a communist. His brother, Istvan Antal, was a world famous pianist. My aunt Margit remembered Mark Antal warmly and mentioned that he always gave nice long lectures on French, German and Norwegian literature. He also held lectures on the theory of relativity; Einstein’s theory was novel at the time, and these lectures were attended not only by students of the lyceum but also by many people from town because Antal’s lectures were of very high standards and he was a very pleasant lecturer.