Wedding photo of Fulop Grossmann and Anna Mandel

This the wedding photo of my husband, Fulop Grossmann and his first wife, Anna Mandel.

My husband’s Jewish name was Srage, we called him Feri. He was born near Nagyvarad, in Josasel [in Hungarian Krajnikfalva, today in Romanian Josani] in June 1910, but his family moved to Des, they lived here, his father was a merchant. Formerly women had many children, and died at a young age. The wife of my husband's father, of Abraham Grossmann died too. Then my husband's father married again, all his children left from home, he was alone, and he married a girl from Ludas, who came from a very rich family. And he wasn't young, he was fifty-seven or fifty-eight years old, when he got married for the second time, and he was sixty years old when my husband was born, I didn't believe it when he told me. My husband's mother was Sarolta Fischer - she was forty-six years old when my husband was born -, she died of pneumonia in 1937, on the 26th of the month of Elul. His father was old when he died, he died in 1933, in the month of Cheshvan, on 1st October.

The first wife of my husband was a girl from Des, her name was Annus Mandel [she was born in 1920], she was a religious girl. She worked in a printing house. She didn't have any children. She was pregnant, but she didn't keep the baby, she had an abortion, well life was very hard at that time here, in Hungary [in Northern-Transylvania after 1940] and everywhere else, in whole Europe. Her husband was taken to work service, and soon after she had an abortion. Annus was deported, she was together with her sister, Sasika in Auschwitz, but they were so unfortunate, in the last few months before liberation all the women were gathered from the concentration camp, some two thousands were left, and were taken to Riga. There they were all put on a ship, and sank with that ship. Annus and her sister both died there. Annus was young, her sister was even younger, I think she had just finished high school. She [the first wife] had one more sister, Margit Fisch, she came home [from deportation], but died shortly of cardiac infarction. And a boy came home too, he died as well. None of them is alive. They were five, and not one lives. Within three years all of them passed away. They all died.

In fact at the time of deportations my husband wasn't in Des, he was doing work service, only his wife and his family was in Bungur. Bungur is a forest near Des, the ghetto was there. After the war many dead were dig out, who had died in that ghetto, so they buried [the bodies] in the Jewish cemetery. There is a place in Des, in the Jewish cemetery, where a stone is placed, they wrote on it the names of those they dig out. To be honest I never went to Bungur. We never went there, never in our life. My husband told me that when he had been in Budapest for work service, people had been stopped on the street, and if they had been Jews, they had been taken to the banks of the Danube and shot in the head. He jumped in a barrel, that's how he escaped. But in that very moment he said to himself, if he ever had a son, he would never let them circumcise him.