Tag #135890 - Interview #78511 (Vasile Grunea)

We usually went from Brasso to Kolozsvar and then on to Noszoly; my parents put me and my sister in charge of someone who took us to Kolozsvar. Until 1938, as long as Uncle Valter lived here, we spent a week or two with him and until my aunt Piroska left for Israel, we spent one or two weeks at her place. Then my uncle or my aunt took us to Szamosujvar by train. When we were older, my uncle took us to the station but he didn’t take the train with us. It wasn’t a problem: we got in the train and got off in Szamosujvar. The father of my aunt Margit’s first husband had a workshop, which was incorrectly called a soda water factory. In reality it wasn’t a factory but two machines for filling bottles with a worker who filled the bottles with soda water. Sometimes we stayed there and waited to be picked up, at other times the horse-drawn cart was already there when we got there. Later we took a bus to Noszoly, which was 24 kilometers from Szamosujvar. Our last trip to Kolozsvar together was in the summer of 1940, just before Transylvania was handed over to Hungary [this was the so-called Hungarian era] [10]. It was announced on the radio and it was an open secret that the Hungarians would occupy the territory. That’s when we went to Noszoly for the last time, and that was our last meeting with Uncle Marci Sporn and Elli. I still remember that we returned home from Kolozsvar under horrible conditions. The trains were terribly packed because they were the last ones to go from Northern Transylvania to Southern Transylvania before the Hungarians occupied Kolozsvar. We got into the compartment and then we couldn’t go out until we got to Brasso, it was simply impossible to walk down the corridor.