Tag #156744 - Interview #78355 (Mrs. Gábor Révész)

From the time my father died, we found it difficult to make ends meet. We now knew that we were poor. While my father was alive, we took it for granted that we lived normal, well-tempered middle-class lives. But afterward my mother made it clear, again and again, but we felt it too, of course, that everything had to be carefully portioned out. For instance, when she made stew, we were each given three cubes of meat to go with the potatoes, because she bought a quarter kilogram of meat, and it had to serve the three of us. She was a very economizing and thrifty person till the day she died. When there was no need for us to be so thrifty any more because we were living better, even then it was in her blood. It went back to her childhood, when there were four of them children to be cared for. We had to live very frugally, and it became part of her essence to always think about tomorrow.