Tag #138070 - Interview #78465 (Egon Lovith)

The workers received housing from their factory. I have horrible memories of this period because we weren’t able to get a decent apartment. Our first home on Majalis Street was torn down in the 1950s and they built the new student palace [the House of University Students], on Beke [in Romanian Pacii] Square. Everybody who lived in the house that was to be demolished got some kind of housing, everybody except us. They all got it because they had children. After a lot of effort we finally got a worthless apartment in Andrei Muresanu district. It was further out from the last bus stop and we wouldn’t even have had a kitchen. In 1956 I was suffering from tuberculosis and it took me a long time to recover. I really didn’t want to move into that apartment and eventually we got a different one-bedroom apartment on Mocok Avenue [in Romanian Motilor Avenue, close to the city center]. We could enter from a common yard. There was only gas installed in the house so there was no water in our apartment. We bought a bucket and we used it to bring water in from outside and that’s how we took care of washing. There was no bathroom, we bathed in a washtub. The horrible thing was that we didn’t have a toilet. We had to go through the yard to knock on the neighbor’s door, they opened their door for us and we used their toilet. The walls of the bathroom were made of plywood and so the smallest noise could be heard. Once we were done we had to thank them and then we left and the neighbor locked the door behind us. Margo and I were so uncomfortable with this that we would rather run to the main square where we used the public toilet. It was awful and we were embarrassed to use a bowl for peeing because we didn’t even have anywhere to empty it. We lived in this place for four or five years. There was a communal toilet near my atelier and it saved us many times.