Tag #156602 - Interview #102599 (Gyorgyike Hasko)

My father was a chemical engineer. He graduated from the Polytechnic University in 1912 and took part in the 1919 revolution. [see Hungarian Soviet Republic]1 He was Gyula Hevesi’s class-fellow, who later immigrated to the Soviet Union. [Editor’s note: Gyula Hevesi (1890–1970) – chemical engineer, academician, he was the vice president of the Hungarian Scientific Academy from 1960 until 1967. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic he was the commissar of social production, he emigrated from the White Terror.] My father also had to leave when the White Terror started. He started to work as a young engineer at the Flora Soap Factory, which was owned by a branch of the Manfred Weiss family. [Editor’s note: The Flora First Hungarian Composite Candle and Soap Co. was founded in 1896] They also had a factory in Nagyvarad [today Oradea, Romania] or Kolozsvar [today Cluj-Napoca, Romania], and my father first emigrated there. He got to Germany from there as a refugee. In Germany, he studied the analysis of precious metals and became a lapidarist. He wasn’t a soldier during World War I, only a reservist, because the Flora Soap Factory was a defense plant.