Tag #135891 - Interview #78511 (Vasile Grunea)

In Hungary there was official anti-Semitism [that is, there were anti-Jewish laws in Hungary] [11], which went back to a longer time than in Romania, but my parents didn’t think that the Hungarian situation was any better. Older Jews, people a generation older than my father, were reminiscent, of course, of the good old Franz Joseph times, saying that ‘things were better under Franz Joseph’, because Franz Joseph was a good emperor from a Jewish point of view. One part of our larger family was in America and the other in Israel, the only closer relatives who were left in Noszoly were my uncle and my aunt. We talked it over in the family whether it wouldn’t be better if I and my sister came to live in Kolozsvar, as there was a Jewish lyceum here and we could attend it, but we didn’t actually agree on doing it. Later on, towards the end of the war Jewish refugees started to arrive in Southern Transylvania from Northern Transylvania, who told us about the deportations, so we didn’t really feel like going to Hungary any more.