Travel

15

​Rita Vilkobrisskaya and her husband Jacob Honiksman, Professor of History, an outstanding activist of the Jewish culture, live in a beautiful spacious apartment. They don’t have any children. Everything shows that this couple dedicates most of their time to books of literature and history. The study is full of bookshelves packed with books. Rita is an educated woman and it is a pleasure to talk with her. She is a well read person and makes an impression of a person that has had a good life.

The story of birth and youth of my father Michael Vilkobrisskiy is tragic. I don’t know his parents. All I know is that my grandfather Moisey Vilkobrisskiy was a coachman in the town of Wilno [present Vilnius – the capital of Latvia]. He married my grandmother around 1900. My father, born on 14 November 1902 was their first and only child. My grandmother (I don’t know her name) died shortly after my father was born. I don’t have much information about what happened afterward. All I know is that my grandfather left the child. My grandmother Hasia, my mother’s mother, told me about it. She heard this from some acquaintances of hers. My father never told me anything about it – he couldn’t stand any mention of his father whom he had never seen.

My father was adopted by the Jewish family of retail grain merchant, their family name was Ioffe, Ioffe’s family moved to Odessa. Childless families used to adopt orphan children. I guess, they moved to avoid any talks about adoption. They didn’t want their boy to hear that they were not his parents. In 1906 adoptive father Ioffe died and his widow and my father moved to Vitebsk, in Russia, where her relatives lived. I don’t know the name of the woman that raised my father. I only know that she went to work after her husband died. My grandmother Hasia told me that the woman became a traveling agent that was not a typical women’s job. She traveled to other towns selling commodities of a company. I have no information about religiosity of my father’s adoptive parents. My father never observed any Jewish traditions, although he knew Yiddish. He went to primary school and in 1912 - 1915 he studied at High School in Vitebsk.

In 1915 some people, probably neighbors, told my father that he was an adopted child. His reaction was weird and I still cannot understand or forgive him for what he had done. He left his adoptive mother and home. He had to give up his studies since he had to earn his living. He never saw his adoptive mother again. A neighbor said that after he left her she fell ill and died in few months. I believe, my father was sorry for what he had done for the rest of his days and this was the reason why he never talked about his adoptive mother.

My father began to work at the electro technical shop of Mr. Mendelson, a Jew, in Vitebsk. He was an apprentice and finally became an electrician. He worked there until the end of 1918 and at the beginning of 1919 he got fond of revolutionary ideas and went to work at the factory of agricultural machines that belonged to the Unemployment Committee [1].
This was the period of Civil War [2], and on 15 October 1919 my father volunteered to the Red army. He became a private in reserve rifle battalion. This battalion was formed in Kazan. On 13 December 1919 my father became a member of the Communist party and then their regiment was sent to fight with the white guard units [3]. My father took part in battles with General Wrangel [4] units. There were military from various parts of the country. They were mainly workers and peasants that believed in the ideas of communism. My father told me that they had sufficient food and uniforms. They lived in barracks that they built themselves. Their living conditions were far from good. In 1920 my father was severely wounded and stayed a long while in hospitals until he was sent to an advanced training course for professional military in Minsk, Byelorussia, in January 1922. He was eager to study and willingly went to Minsk to study aviation.

My maternal grandparents Ilia and Hasia Eishynskiy lived in the town of Lubcha in Minsk province. I don’t know where they came from. My grandfather Ilia Eishynskiy was born in the middle of 1870s and my grandmother Hasia was born in 1881. Grandfather Ilia was a cheese maker. He rented a cheese dairy from a landlord, don’t know who owned it. He worked alone and only sometimes he hired employees in summer when there was much milk. He mustn’t have produced much cheese since he was selling it by retail. The family was very poor and their life became extremely miserable after grandfather Ilia died in 1914.

Grandmother Hasia had to raise seven children. She went to do daytime work: washed floors, did laundry and worked at the bakery. She had no education and had to do any work to support her children. The children helped her about the house. In 1917 the family moved to Minsk running away from pogroms [5]. Older children went to work and the younger ones, including my mother, were sent to a children’s home. It was a Soviet children’s home for orphan or homeless children of all nationalities. Children lived and studied there. The children also attended dance, singing or technical clubs at the boarding school. The children were raised in the socialist and communist spirit. There were about 300 children in this home, 10-12 children in one room, girls and boys lived separately. Children were allowed to visit their relatives at weekends, but my grandmother didn’t take my mother home often since she didn’t have food to give her. My mother didn’t like to recall this period and told me very little about it. Before they moved to Minsk they observed Jewish traditions, but after moving to Minsk the children in the family got fond of revolutionary ideas and dropped religion. Grandmother celebrated few holidays as tribute to the past.
The oldest son died when he was a child. The next came Maria, born in 1900. She didn’t study, but helped grandmother to raise the younger children. At 14 she went to work as a laborer at some plant.

Khona was born around 1901-02. During the Soviet regime Khona worked at a timber facility. All I know is that he was married and had a daughter. After the western part of Byelorussia в 1939 joined the USSR the Great Patriotic War began [6]. They failed to evacuate and most likely perished during occupation.

My mother’s brother Efim, born in 1905, became a pilot in the Minsk aviation unit after he finished an aviation school. He married a Jewish girl and they had two children. I have no information about their life before the war. He perished in combat action in Minsk at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War in 1941. His wife Milia and daughter Tamara evacuated few hours before Germans entered Minsk. They were in evacuation in Olevsk Altaysk region. After the war they lived in Kharkov. We were not in contact with them after the war.

Max, born in 1906, was recruited to the army on the 2nd day of the Great Patriotic War. He vanished. His wife and daughter stayed in Minsk and must have perished, too. This is all I know. I never saw any of my mother’s brothers or sisters except Sophia. We left Minsk shortly after I was born and my mother was not in contact with them after she got married.

My mother’s sister Sophia, born in 1903, lived in Smolensk before the Great Patriotic War. After finishing a medical school she worked as medical nurse. Sophia married a Russian man, I don’t know his name. They had a daughter Vilena (named after Vladimir Illich Lenin) Her first marriage broke before the war and she remarried Nikanor Kabachkov after the war. During the war she was recruited to the army and worked in a hospital. After that Sophia settled down in the town of Dmitrov near Moscow. Sophia was a member of the Communist Party. I don’t know when she joined the Party. Her second husband was Russian, his name was a Nikanor Kabachkov. They had two sons: Yuri and Vladimir, that became engineers. My mother received letters from them every now and then, but I took no interest in any of them. Sophia died in mid 1970s.

My mother Bertha Eishynskaya, the youngest in the family, was born in Lubcha town in 1907. From 1917 she and her brothers Efim and Max was raised at a children’s home in Minsk where she got a lower secondary education. After finishing school in 1924 my mother went to work as envelope maker at the envelope factory in Minsk and later went to work at confectionery factory. In 1925 she joined Komsomol [7] and in 1928 she became a candidate and then a member of the Communist Party.
My mother’s family had a hard life in 1920s. My mother’s older brothers and sisters left home in search for a job. My mother never told me about this period of their life or any celebrations or traditions.

In Minsk my father met Maria Eishynskaya, my mother’s older sister, I don’t know how or where they met. They got married and in 1923 their son Ilia, was born, he was named after his grandfather. Maria died of galloping consumption in 1926. Before she died she demanded that my father promised her to marry her younger sister Bertha. She also asked Bertha to agree to marry my father. She wanted him to be well set and cared for.

My mother was an active and cheerful girl. Her friends were her schoolmates of various nationalities. Nationality was an issue of no importance at that time. She had many friends in Minsk and Smolensk where she went to visit her sister Sophia. Therefore, when her older sister Maria asked her to marry her husband before she died, this suggestion was a complete and quite undesirable surprise for my mother. My mother didn’t love my father, but grandmother Hasia said ‘Bertha, marry Michael for Ilia’s sake’. In 1929 my mother married Michael Vilkobrisskiy. At that time he had an important position in Minsk aviation regiment. They had a civil ceremony at a registry office and a wedding dinner at home in the evening. I guess, at that time my father was more like a friend to my mother. She wasn’t in love with him, but she had to follow her sister’s will. However, in due time she fell in love with him while he just adored her. The more my parents learned about one another the closer they became. They lived their life in love for 25 years.

I, was born on 28 October 1930. I got a Jewish name of Riva at the time of birth, but was always called Rita months after I was born my father was transferred to study in Leningrad [St. Petersburg at present] and we moved there: grandmother Hasia, father, mother, my half brother Ilia and I. My father studied at the Military Political Academy named after Lenin. My mother went to work at a big printing house and in 1932 she went to study at Rabfak school [8] at the printing house. My older brother Ilia studied at school and I stayed home with grandmother Hasia. My grandmother always lived with our family and moved to all locations where my father got another assignment. I have no memories of our life in Leningrad.

In 1934 upon graduation from the Academy my father was transferred to Eysk town near Rostov-on-the-Don (in Russian it sounds ‘Rostov na Donu’, it stands on the Don River) in 1000 km from Leningrad. My father was a commissar of a navy air squadron. My mother also went to work as organizer at this same unit: she taught young mothers housekeeping, childcare, cooking while grandmother took care of her own home. My mother joined the Party at this unit. We stayed in Eysk maximum half a year.

At the beginning of 1935 the squadron was transferred to Krasnaya Rechka town near Khabarovsk in the Far East in 7500 km from home. We lived in the neighborhood for families of the military – there were few two-storied buildings there. We had a two-room apartment in a two-storied building. There was no running water and we fetched water from a pump nearby and washed ourselves in a basin in the room. Grandmother did all housekeeping and my mother, as usual went to work at the women’s division of the military unit. My mother had a lot of energy and talent. She organized various clubs and concerts. She liked dancing and singing. She organized a dancing club attended by almost all officers’ wives danced Russian national and modern dances. They often rehearsed at our home preparing for celebration of 7 November [9] or 1 May. There were parties and concerts that my mother organized on Soviet holidays. Officers’ wives and children performed singing patriotic Soviet songs, reciting poems and dancing. This was a nice entertainment. We lived a life full of joy. We didn’t celebrate any Jewish holidays, I don’t know whether there were other Jews around us, it didn’t matter. I guess my grandmother that grew up in a small town where there was a strong Jewish community celebrated Jewish holidays before the revolution of 1917 [10], but after the revolution she probably was afraid of damaging my father’s reputation of devoted communist since he was a commissar of a big aviation unit. Grandmother Hasia spoke poor Russian and home my mother and father spoke Yiddish with her. I wasn’t taught Yiddish, though and Hasia tried to speak Russian to me.

My father loved me dearly. He was very busy at work and came home late after work, but he always found time to go for a walk with me at weekends and I always looked forward to his returning home. He took me out of town where we could enjoy beautiful views walking. Father bought me candy and toys, took me to the cinema and in winter we skied and tobogganed. Once my grandmother and I went hiking in the hills out of town. I saw a plane and a man with a parachute jumping out of it. I screamed ‘That’s my father flying there!’ It happened to be my father, indeed. This was his regular jump with a parachute, but it was unsuccessful: his parachute didn’t open and he landed with a reserve parachute and injured his arm and face. This was his last jump – he never did it again.

We lived in Krasnaya Rechka for over a year and in 1936 we moved to Khabarovsk where my father got his next job assignment. We got an apartment in a two-storied building inhabited by families of military. I went to a kindergarten. I can’t remember whether it was in the kindergarten or in the yard when somebody called me ‘zhydovka’ [11] I didn’t know the meaning of the word, but I felt it was an abuse. I didn’t tell my mother or grandmother about it, but in the evening I told my father. I cried and asked my father why they called me so. My father told me that I was a Jew and that evil people didn’t like Jews and abused them. He told me that I should always remember that Jews are ancient people that gave this world many famous people and that I should be proud of belonging to this nation and pay no attention to any abuse. I believed him and never forgot what he said.

In 1937 I went to a Russian school. I was the only Jewish pupil, but there were Russian, Ukrainian, two German and one Uzbek child in my class and there was a Chinese girl that was my friend; I didn’t think about nationalities then. No one ever abused me again, but I remembered that first time I felt so hurt.

In summer 1938 I went to a pioneer camp near Khabarovsk. In few days after I arrived the director of this camp came to see me and told me and few other children to pack our things. We were put on a truck and sent home. I cried all the way home. We didn’t get any explanation, but I had a feeling that something went very wrong. At home my grandmother was crying when she met me. Ilia was lying on the sofa with his face turned to the wall. My mother was not home. My grandmother and I sat at the table and she said ‘Your father is under arrest. He is accused of being an enemy of the people, but you need to know that your father is a devoted communist. He is innocent’. ‘I’ve never forgotten what my grandmother, an ordinary Jewish woman, told me. This is all I was told then, but only much later I got to know the details of this period in the history of the country – the period of repression [12]. Our life changed dramatically. Members of few other families in our building were arrested. We had to move to another house that was called ‘Round Tower’. This was an old round-shaped building with one big room – it was like a gym - where many families lived behind partitions made from sheets. There was no furniture and we slept on the blankets that we brought from home. Our main food was bread and we fetched water from a well. The only thing that united all those people was the mischief that happened. There were no conflicts or even arguments in this building. My mother went at night (since there were lines of relatives and parcels were only accepted from 7 till 8 am) to stand in line with other officers’ wife to leave a parcel for my father with dried bread, cigarettes and soap. Sometimes the jail warden didn’t accept a parcel and mother came home in tears after standing in line for half a night. My mother was pregnant and was afraid that all these happenings were too much for her and the baby to bear.

She worked at the timber trust where she was involved in public activities – same as before: organization of cultural events. After my father was arrested mother was expelled from the party. She was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and that she had been involved in it since we lived in Krasnaya rechka and that the dancing club that she organized was just another blinder to hide the essence of her activities. Her accusers demanded that she divorced from my father and acknowledged that he was an enemy of the people, but she kept saying ‘my husband is an honest man and cannot be a traitor …’. Some other officers’ wives gave up to the pressure and acknowledged their husbands guilty. Fortunately, my mother was not arrested. I believe, this was because she was in the last months of her pregnancy. My mother’s boss happened to be a very decent man. He didn’t fire her and even gave us a room in a communal apartment, even though my mother was accused of anti-Soviet activities and expelled from the Party. I remember a long hallway with doors in this apartment. There was a huge kitchen with kerosene and primus stoves. After the ‘Round Tower’ this room seemed beautiful to us. There were other children in my class whose parents were repressed, but this was not discussed and attitudes didn’t change.

On 8 January 1939 my mother gave birth to a girl. She was named Inessa after Inessa Armand, an outstanding revolutionary and Lenin’s comrade [13]. In April 1939 my father was released. He was lucky. In 1939 after Minister of State Security Ezhov was arrested [14] for exceeding his authority and new minister Beriya [15] was appointed some prisoners were released under the verdict to Ezhov about unjustified repression. My father returned home very ill and thin. He had furuncles all over his body. He didn’t tell me or my brother anything. He only said that he was accused of espionage for many countries including Japan, but he didn’t sign one single paper. I guess he told my mother about endless interrogations, tortures and what he had to endure: everything that became known after denunciation of the cult of Stalin.

My father regained his membership in the Party and so did my mother. My father got back his job and we received our apartment back. Our life continued as if there had been no arrest. In April 1941 my father was awarded a trip to a military recreation center at a resort in Nalchik town in Northern Caucasus. My father took grandmother Hasia with him: she wanted to see her children: Khona, Max, Efim and Sophia. While my father stayed at the recreation center grandmother went to visit her children. They all asked her to stay with them, but grandmother refused. Khona from Western Byelorussia was particularly insistent. She told them that she was used to living with Bertha and Michael and that they needed her assistance. Khona was a little bit hurt. When we recalled this later we felt happy that grandmother refused to live with them or she would have perished as her family did.

At the end of May 1941 my father and grandmother returned to Khabarovsk. On 22 June 1941 the Great Patriotic War began. The war seemed to be far away, but the commandment was probably concerned about possible war with Japan. They offered all officers to take their families further to the west and come back to Khabarovsk. My father couldn’t think about separation with the family. I remember he lifted me and asked ‘Rita, are you afraid of the war. Do you want to stay here with me or do you want to leave?’ I replied that I was afraid and he said ‘Let it be as my daughter decided’.

Our family along with other officers’ families was evacuated to Olevsk town in Altaysk region in Siberia in 1500 km from Khabarovsk. Ilia, my older brother, studied in Navy school in Vladivostok, a town in the Far East on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, at that time. When the war began their ship was sailing near the shores of Japan, but they turned back to Russia and did he stay in Vladivostok during the war.

In Olevsk there were four of us: my mother, grandmother, sister and I. Olevsk is a small town in Siberia with one-storied buildings and population of few thousand people. There were not many people in evacuation and the locals were quite friendly with them. We lived in this town during the whole severe winter of 1941-42. We lived in a small room in a communal apartment. My mother went to work. She went to collective farms propagating to collective farmers to fight for bigger crops to give more grain to the front. There was a slogan ‘Everything for the front, everything for the victory’. My mother was away for several days. On one of her trips the coach that she rode on turned over and mother broke her arm. She had cast applied on it, but she didn’t stay home to wait until it healed. She went to villages and my sister and I stayed at home with grandmother. I went to school in Olevsk. The school was far from where we lived and I had to walk through knee-high snow snowdrifts.

My mother brother Efim’s wife Milia and their daughter Tamara were also in evacuation in Olevsk. They left Minsk in a hurry. They were lucky to have been picked by a military truck that drove them out of the town. They found out through the state search department that we were in Olevsk and joined us there. Later Milia’s sisters Lisa and Tsylia from Moscow arrived at Olevsk. We all lived in one room, Milia and her sisters worked in a kolkhoz near Olevsk. At the end of winter in 1942 my father came to take us back to Khabarovsk and Milia, her sisters and Tamara stayed in Olevsk. Efim perished during the war and Milia remarried after the war, I don’t know who her second husband was. I never saw them again. We only rarely received greeting cards from them after the war. She lived in Kharkov with her husband and daughter Tamara.

We didn’t stay long in Khabarovsk. After finishing his military school Ilia came back home. My father wanted to send him to study in another military school to keep him away from the front. Ilia wanted to become a pilot and went to study in an aviation school. My father was transferred to the new location of his military service assignment to a small town of Nikolaevsk-on-the-Amur, located on the upper Amur, in 700 km from Khabarovsk, near the border with China. There were no comforts in the house where we lived. Water was delivered in barrels from the Amur River. There was no electricity and in the evening we lit a kerosene lamp. Soon we moved to Blagoveschensk-on-the Amur, in 50 km from Nikolaevsk and from there we moved again to Voroshylov town [Ussuriysk at present], in 100 km to the northeast. Like many other families of the military we moved from one place to another so often that we left our suitcases unpacked at a new location. I didn’t have time to get used to a new school or schoolmates when we had to move again. All military traveled a lot. They didn’t discuss and obeyed orders from their commandment. We packed within three days and loaded our belongings on a truck to go to the new area. I don’t remember any specific school or teachers. I wasn’t a success with my studies. Teachers treated me indulgently knowing that I wasn’t going to stay long in their school.

Families of the military received good food packages, with tinned meat, milk powder, sugar and candy. We actually didn’t feel hungry like it was with other people in evacuation and the local population. The products we received in food packages were sufficient and we bought something else, like vegetables. My father got a good salary, but money couldn’t buy anything. Food coupons or clothes became valuable. There was bread given on food coupons, We received sufficient coupons for living. I was responsible for standing in line that began to form at dawn, sometimes I had to stand 5-6 hours. Even vodka was given for coupons before holidays.

In 1943 my father that was in the rank of colonel was sent to the front. Father told us that he was to be there on a temporary basis and was going to return soon. Later he wrote in a letter that he wanted to stay at the front to fight against occupants. He served in a rear logistics unit, but he also took part in action. He was awarded an order of the Great Patriotic War, Order of Lenin, Order of Red Banner and medal for ‘Victory over Germany’. He served in the First Ukrainian Front that liberated towns in the West and South of Ukraine, including Lvov. He also took part in the liberation of Poland and Warsaw. My father was in Vienna when the Victory Day came. He had pictures where he was photographed with his fellow comrades near the Brandenburg gates in Berlin. However, I don’t know how my father happened to be in Berlin. I guess it happened after the victory.

At that time something terrible happened. After finishing the aviation school in Magdagachi town near Chita in the Far East a group of young pilots and Ilia were sent to Kamchatka Peninsula in the Pacific Ocean in the east of Russia, 12500 km from Moscow. My father was at the front at that time. Ilia came back in June 1943. He must have had a premonition since he was very reluctant to go where he was assigned. He asked grandmother to ask our father to take him from Kamchatka when he returned home My grandmother wrote my father to the front, but mail was slow and my father probably didn’t receive this letter and couldn’t help. He was even ready to go to the front instead of going to Kamchatka. Ilia was in the town of Elizovo near Petropavlovsk-in-Kamchatka. In November 1943 he died in a crash during a training flight. His plane got into spin and Ilia failed to catapult and perished. We received a letter from his military unit and later they sent us a picture of the monument on his grave: a pedestal with a star. My mother and grandmother couldn’t stop crying: they didn’t know how to tell Ilia’s father about his death. They decided not to write him to the front. My father heard about his son’s death when he came to us in Voroshylov in 1945 after the victory. He returned home in joyful excitement with all orders on his jacket, but when he heard about his son’s death he had a heart attack – the first one in his life. It took him a while to recover from this tragedy. Many years afterward I wrote letters to Elizovo requesting them to find my brother’s grave, but it was never found.

The Victory Day of 9 May 1945 was a real holiday for all people. We celebrated it in Voroshylov. In the morning the radio announced that war ended victoriously. We went to the street where there were crowds of people greeting each other. We believed that the worst was in the past, that when father came back our life would be a continuous holiday. My father took us from the Far East in 1945. My father, my mother and my little sister left for a new work destination of my father in the town of Langenzercdorf, near Vienna in Austria. My father was there in occupational troops. My grandmother and I lived with my aunt Sophia in Dmitrov near Moscow. My father couldn’t take all of us with him, and we decided that my little sister would go with them and I would stay with grandmother. Aunt Sophia had married Nikanor Kabachkov a short time before. This was her second marriage. He was a Russian man, mechanic at a power plant. There were two sons in my aunt’s family, her daughter Vilena was married and had her own life, and my grandmother and I hardly had a place to live in their apartment. We got on aunt Sophia’s nerves and she didn’t keep this to herself. I kept asking mother in letters to take me to live with them until in few months’ time my father came to pick me up and take to Austria and grandma stay with Sophia.

At that time my father was transferred to Noggels town in 50 km from Vienna, my father was on military service in the Soviet occupational army. My father was a high-level officer and in accordance with his rank we received a 5-room mansion. There were servants working for us: few housemaids, a cook and a cleaning woman. We took it for granted and believed that father deserved it. My mother didn’t work. Her Yiddish helped her to communicate with Austrians and she picked up sufficient German rather promptly. At the beginning of a week Soviet children were taken to a boarding school. Once a week children of the military were taken to boarding school by truck. Inessa went to school in 1946 and there was a girl – Inga - and a boy from our town that were taken to school by car. The boarding school was located in a beautiful town on Badenboyville near Vienna. It was a resort and our school was housed in an old fortress. We came home at weekends. We studied all mandatory subjects of the Soviet school curriculum. There were teachers from the Soviet country and we wore school uniforms that were also brought from the Soviet Union. Our school was in a distant castle and I only communicated with our schoolmates. After classes we did our homework and played in the yard. We celebrated Soviet holidays and studied Soviet patriotic songs and verses. There were 3 tenants in one room where we had comfortable beds, sinks, toilets and desks. There were children of various nationalities, but it didn’t matter to me.

In autumn 1947 my father’s assignment in Austria was over and shortly afterward the Soviet troops left Austria, too. My father was offered to chose a job in Kiev, Riga, Odessa or Lvov. My father liked Lvov when he was there in 1944 and he chose this town. We moved in here in September, 1947.
My father was deputy political officer in a rear aviation unit. My father got a beautiful spacious apartment in Pushkinskaya, the central street in Lvov. My grandmother joined us soon.

I went to a Russian secondary school for girls – girls and boys studied separately at that time. There were few Jewish girls in this school, it wasn’t important for me, but it seems to me that about that time I began to differentiate Jews by name and appearance. There were Ukrainian and Polish schools in Lvov, therefore, there were mostly Russian girls in my school since it was a Russian school. I got along well with my classmates. My classmate Lilia became my lifetime friend. We did homework together and went to the cinema or discotheque together.

Lilia’s father Anrei Kamalitdinov was a Tatar man and her mother Olga Vladimirovna was Russian. Lilia’s father was a hygienist and her mother was a very good children’s doctor. Lilia’s wanted to become a doctor since she was a child. After finishing school in 1949 she convinced me to enter a medical Institute. I and Lilia submitted our documents to the Institute, but failed to accumulate a required number of points. This had nothing to do with anti-Semitism – I was just a poor pupil at school. The rector of this institute offered me to go to the pharmaceutical faculty where competition was small, but I didn’t want to. Lilia was trying to convince me to go to Tomsk in Siberia where her mother’s former fellow student was Rector of the Medical Institute, but my parents were against my going there since I had a poor health – I had problems with my lungs. Lilia went to Tomsk where she entered the College and then in a year’s time she transferred from Tomsl to Lvov Medical University. There were fewer students than required in three institutes: of physical culture, commercial and polygraphy. I submitted my documents to the Faculty of Economics at the Institute of Polygraphy. I passed all exams and became a student: exams were only formal and everybody could be admitted.

There were many Jewish students in my group. There was a meeting where we joined trade unions – there were trade union units in each organization - and each student stood up to say their first name, surname and patronymic. I counted 11 or 12 Jews then of 25 students in my group. However, I only studied few months with this group since I fell ill with tuberculosis. I had to take an academic leave to go to hospital. There were no medications available, but my father managed to get some streptomycin. It worked well and put me on the way to recovery. After hospital I spent few months in a great military recreation center in the Crimea. Between 1950 and 1953 I spent my summers in recreation centers for the military elite where my father made arrangements for me. I traveled there alone, but always made friends. Those were magnificent recreation centers for the military elite. There were comfortable single rooms with all comforts facing beaches. The food was nice and sufficient and there was entertainment: dancing or cinema in the evenings. I missed one year at the Institute and studied with students that entered in 1950. I met my friend Raya Meyerhold there. She lives in Israel now, with her children and grandchildren. We correspond rarely. When we were young we went to discotheque together and discussed latest news or books that we read.

In the late 1940s the attitude towards Jews changed dramatically. Newspapers and radio kept talking about ‘rootless cosmopolites’ [16] and doctors-poisoners [doctor’s plot] [17]. There were no arrests in our Institute, although there were Jewish lecturers. But the attitude of officials towards Jews, including Jewish students, was politely cold We pretended we didn’t notice anything and hoped that we would manage somehow, but students treated each other in the same friendly manner. Nothing changed in this regard. My father was very upset about it, although the attitude toward him didn’t change. In 1952 my father had an infarction. He didn’t work for a year, but when he went back to work he had another infarction almost immediately. My father was in hospital when Stalin died in March 1953. Although my father suffered during the period of repression he felt respectful toward Stalin and did not have an inch of suspicion that Stalin was to blame for repression and persecution of Jews and many other things. I remember mother smiled when talking to someone, in hospital. My father, however hopelessly ill, forbade her to smile on such a mournful day.

There was a mourning meeting at school and many students and lecturers were crying standing by the portrait of the leader, but I didn’t feel like crying. I believed that the country had buried its leader, and also a tyrant, it was just my feeling and I never discussed it with anyone.

My father died on 10 January 1954. He was suffering a lot when dying. He said farewell to all of us and was concerned about me being single and he was worried that I was not settled in life. We buried him at the town cemetery in Lvov. Shortly before he died my father introduced me to a son of his fellow comrade, visiting him in the hospital. His name was Volodia. We went out for some time, but then we broke and he married my close friend. Then my friend Raya Reingold introduced me to her Jewish friends and I began to spend most of my free time with my new Jewish friends. We went to the cinema or discotheque like all other young people. We enjoyed being together. There were no Jewish or religious aspects in our life.

I graduated from the Institute in 1955. There was a conflict when I was receiving my job assignment. I was the second one to enter the room where a commission was sitting. There were various assignments available. But the commission offered me distant towns in the North: Syktyvkar, Yakutsk. I couldn’t go there after I was ill with tuberculosis. Job assignment was a mandatory requirement [18]. I called my mother at home and she came to the Institute at once. She managed to make an arrangement for me to receive a so-called free ‘Item 5’ [19]. I decided to look for a job by myself. What an ordeal it turned out to be especially when potential employers looked at ‘Item 5’ [17] in my passport and I got refusals. I even went to the Ministry in Kiev to ask them to help me with employment. They promised to send me an assignment, but nothing happened. Anatolmitz Zolotukhin, a lecturer in our Institute, helped me. He had an acquaintance in the Printing Committee that helped me to obtain a job assignment in Lutsk. I got a job of an economist in a printing house.

I went to work at the beginning of October 1955 and when I came home during holidays in November my mother introduced me to Jacob Honiksman, my mother’s acquaintance introduced him to my mother and she liked him. He was a very nice young man. I met with him several times when I came to Lvov: on 5 December, Constitution Day [Soviet holiday] and on New Year. Jacob proposed to me, but I told him that I had to think about it. He was divorced and had a daughter and I had to consider his proposal. On 29 January 1956 Jacob and a friend of his came to see me in Lutsk and on the following day we got married in a district registry office. The procedure at that time included a one month waiting period after submittal of application for marriage, but Jacob was full of charm and managed to convince a girl at the registry office to marry us and we became a husband and wife. It happened promptly since Jacob could only stay in Lutsk for two days and had to return to his work that was important for him. And for me the only opportunity to go with him was to marry him. I quit my work and came to Lvov. We had a wedding party at a restaurant on 10 March. It was a great party, but we didn’t observe any Jewish traditions then. We’ve been together since then.

Jacob was born to a Jewish family in Lublin, Poland, in 1922. His father had no education and was a carpenter. His mother came from a more intelligent family. Her father was a Hasid tsadik. Jacob’s family was very poor. Jacob was under the influence of his older stepbrother that was a communist. He struggled for the republic in Spain and perished there. Jacob had a younger brother Mordukhai and sister Freida. Jacob studied in cheder, yeshyva and in a Polish secondary school. He began to work as a carpenter’s apprentice and studied in an evening school. When Hitler was preparing for intervention in Poland Jacob’s mother insisted that he moved to the Soviet Union. Jacob went with his sister, but she fell ill on the way and Jacob had to take her back home. He could never forgive himself for doing this. His family perished during World WarII. We have no information about where or how they perished, but none of them survived the war.

Jacob crossed the border of the Soviet Union in the vicinity of Brest in Byelorussia. He had to go through several examinations before he obtained a passport of the soviet citizen. However, he didn’t have the right to reside in Moscow, Leningrad, and capitals of the Union republics or big industrial centers [the Soviet authorities were suspicious about people that came from other countries. They were not allowed to reside in bigger towns]. Jacob worked and continued his studies. During the war he finished Kuibyshev Pedagogical Institute and later he graduated from Kiev University Faculty of History. He was married to a woman from Kiev, but since he had no right to live in Kiev he rented an apartment outside the city. In 1945 Jacob moved to Lvov where he began to work at the Jewish library of the Academy of Sciences. He was responsible for book stocks collecting books from the houses of Jews that had perished and closed synagogues, He speaks fluent Ivrit, it’s his mother tongue. In 1949, at the height of state anti-Semitism Jacob left his work at the library. He taught History at school and Pedagogical Institute and later he became Professor of History in Lvov Polytechnic Institute where he still works now. In October 1960 my husband defended his thesis of Candidate of Sciences. He was also awarded a title of Candidate of Economic Sciences. He was transferred to Lvov where he became deputy director at an evening school. He was allowed to lie in Lvov. Before this he actually lived with me, but had a residential permit to live in a village near Lvov [20].

In Lvov my husband helped me to get a job at the printing house of the Academy of Sciences where I worked for 12 years. Later I went to work at the planning department of design institute involved in designing machine building plants. I worked at the Planning department where I worked for over 18 years until I retired and where I never faced any anti-Semitism.

We were an affectionate family. We traveled to the Crimea or Caucasus in summer as tourists. We enjoyed traveling. We didn’t celebrate at home Soviet or religious holidays, but had birthday parties. We got together with friends at birthdays and weekends to listen to music, discuss books that we read and recite poems by Soviet poets Evtushenko [21], Voznesenskiy [22] and Rybakov [23]. When Jews began to move to Israel in 1970s we sympathized with them, but we didn’t even consider moving to Israel for ourselves, We didn’t have any information about Israel, there were no publications in Soviet mass media. Our house, work and friends were here and we never imagined life in another country. We earned well, went to theaters and cinema, went to restaurants with friends and were not interested in politics. My husband had to join the Party to be able to lecture at College, but in 1980s he resigned from the Party after writing an application for resignation where he explained that he ‘disagreed with the policy of the Party and didn’t want to be its member’.
My mother and grandmother lived with us. We didn’t observe any Jewish traditions. My grandmother died in 1957. We buried her at the town cemetery in Lvov. My mother died in 1989. She was buried beside my father and grandmother.

My sister Inessa also graduated from the Institute of Polygraphy. Upon graduation she worked at a printing house in Leningrad. Inessa got married there. Her husband Efim Osherov, a Jewish man, he was a polygraphist he was also the atheist. Inessa and Efim died in 1999. Their son Michael lives in Saint Petersburg. He is my closest relative since Jacob and I don't have children. Michael’s daughter became my friend. She often calls me and sends small gifts.

Perestroika in 1980s was like new wind for us. There were many books published that had been forbidden before and the Jewish life and culture revived. Jacob has always been interested in Jewish subjects. In the recent years he got involved in the studies of Jewish history being Professor and historian. He wrote several books about the history of Jewish people and Holocaust, they were published in Lvov. His books issued by the Lvov Jewish society named after Sholem Alechem: ‘Catastrophe of Jews in Western Ukraine’, 300 pages, published in 1998, 5000 copies; ‘Jews of Brody Town 1584-1944’, 2001, 2000 copies; ‘Yanovskiy camp’, 1996, 3000 copies; ‘People, years, events. From our ancient history’, 1998, 3000 copies; ‘600 years and two years’, about the history of Jews in Drogobych and Boryslav, 1999, 2000 copies, and others. He founded the Sholem Alechem [24] society in Lvov. This society studies and popularizes books by Jewish writers. He gives lectures on the history of Jews in Hesed and I help him to collect materials for his lectures. Jacob has involved me in Jewish activities. I read Jewish newspapers, published in the Lvov community in Russian and attend sittings at the society. We visit Hesed and have many new friends there. We study traditions of our people at Hesed. We celebrate Jewish holidays and Sabbath at the Sholem Alechem society. We don’t follow any rituals or say prayers, but I cook traditional food and we always have matzah at Pesach. My husband is a big patriot of Israel. If it were not for my poor health condition (I’ve had few infarctions and have contra-indications related to hot climate) we would move to Israel. Regretfully, we’ve never been there, but we’ve read a lot and watched movies about this amazing country. Since we don’t have an opportunity to move to Israel we‘ve committed ourselves to revival of the Jewish nation and Jewish traditions in our country that is our Motherland. However, even now I wouldn’t leave my country for Israel.

GLOSSARY:
1. Unemployment Committee was established in 1918. It had employment functions.
2. CIVIL WAR 1917-1922. By early 1918, a major civil war had broken out in Russia--only recently named the USSR--, which is commonly known as the civil war between the "Reds" and the "Whites". The "Reds" were the Bolshevik controlled Soviets. During this time the Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist party. The "Whites" were mostly Russian army units from the world war who were led by anti-Bolshevik officers. They were also joined by anti-Bolshevik volunteers and some Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. During this civil war, the Bolsheviks signed a separate peace with Germany and finally ended Russia's involvement with the world war. 8 to 13 mln. people perished in the war. Up to 2 mln. people moved to other countries. Damage constituted over 50 billion rubles in gold, production rate reduced to 4-20% compared with 1913.
3. A counter-revolutionary gang led by General Denikin, famous for their brigandry and anti-Semitic acts all over Russia; legends were told of their cruelty. Few survived their pogroms.
4. Wrangel Petr (1878-1928) served in active field commands within the Russian army during World War One and was a prominent White anti-Bolshevik leader from 1917-20.
5. During the Civil War in 1918-1920 there were all kinds of gangs in the Ukraine. Their members came from all the classes of former Russia, but most of them were peasants. Their leaders used political slogans to dress their criminal acts. These gangs were anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic. They killed Jews and burnt their houses, they robbed their houses, raped women and killed children.
6. 22 June 1941 – memorable day for all Soviet people. It was the first day of the great Patriotic War when the Germans crossed the border of their country bringing the war to its terrain. The German blitzkrieg, known as Operation Barbarossa, nearly succeeded in breaking the Soviet Union in the months that followed. Caught unprepared, the Soviet forces lost whole armies and vast quantities of equipment to the German onslaught in the first weeks of the war. By November the German army had seized the Ukrainian Republic, besieged Leningrad, the Soviet Union's second largest city, and threatened Moscow itself. The Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet Union and then Russia have called that phase of World War II, thus began inauspiciously for the Soviet Union.
7. Communist youth political organization created in 1918. The task of the Komsomol was to spread of the ideas of communism and involve the worker and peasant youth in building the Soviet Union. The Komsomol also aimed at giving a communist upbringing by involving the worker youth in the political struggle, supplemented by theoretical education. The Komsomol was more popular than the Communist Party because with its aim of education people could accept uninitiated young proletarians, whereas party members had to have at least a minimal political qualification.
8. Educational institutions for young people without secondary education, specifically established by the Soviet power.
9. October 25 (according to the old calendar), 1917 went down in history as victory day for the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. This day is the most significant date in the history of the USSR. Today the anniversary is celebrated as ‘Day of Accord and Reconciliation’ on November 7.
10. In early October 1917, Lenin convinced the Bolshevik Party to form an immediate insurrection against the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik leaders felt it was of the utmost importance to act quickly while they had the momentum to do so. The armed workers known as Red Guards and the other revolutionary groups moved on the night of Nov. 6-7 under the orders of the Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee. These forces seized post and telegraph offices, electric works, railroad stations, and the state bank. Once the shot rang out from the Battleship Aurora, the thousands of people in the Red Guard stormed the Winter Palace. The Provisional Government had officially fallen to the Bolshevik regime. Once the word came to the rest of the people that the Winter Palace had been taken, people from all over rose and filled it. V. I. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, announced his attempt to construct the socialist order in Russia. This new government made up of Soviets, and led by the Bolsheviks. By early November, there was little doubt that the proletariats backed the Bolshevik motto: "All power to the soviets!"
11. “zhydy” – abusive nickname of Jews in the Soviet Union
12. Great Terror (1934-1938): During the Great Terror, or Great Purges, which included the notorious show trials of Stalin's former Bolshevik opponents in 1936-1938 and reached its peak in 1937 and 1938, millions of innocent Soviet citizens were sent off to labor camps or killed in prison. The major targets of the Great Terror were communists. Over half of the people who were arrested were members of the party at the time of their arrest. The armed forces, the Communist Party, and the government in general were purged of all allegedly dissident persons; the victims were generally sentenced to death or to long terms of hard labor. Much of the purge was carried out in secret, and only a few cases were tried in public ‘show trials’. By the time the terror subsided in 1939, Stalin had managed to bring both the party and the public to a state of complete submission to his rule. Soviet society was so atomized and the people so fearful of reprisals that mass arrests were no longer necessary. Stalin ruled as absolute dictator of the Soviet Union until his death in March 1953.
13. Armand, Inessa (1874-1920): Revolutionary and Lenin’s mistress. She became a member of the illegal Social Democratic Labour Party in Russia in 1903. After a two-year exile in Siberia for distributing illegal propaganda, she settled in Paris in 1910. She met Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in exile and became a close associate of Lenin. She returned to Russia together with Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries in 1917. After the Revolution Armand served as an executive member of the Moscow Soviet. On her return to Petrograd, she became director of Zhenotdel, an organization that fought for female equality in the Communist Party and the trade unions. She died of cholera and was buried in Red Square in a state funeral.
14. Yezhov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1895-1939): Political activist, State Security General Commissar (1937), Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR from 1936-38. Arrested and shot in 1939. One of the leaders of mass arrests during Stalin’s Great Purge between 1936-1939.
15. Beriya, L. P. (1899-1953): Communist politician, one of the main organizers of the mass arrests and political persecution between the 1930s and the early 1950s. Minister of Internal Affairs, 1938-1953. In 1953 he was expelled from the Communist Party and sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of the USSR.
16. Campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’: The campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’, i.e. Jews, was initiated in articles in the central organs of the Communist Party in 1949. The campaign was directed primarily at the Jewish intelligentsia and it was the first public attack on Soviet Jews as Jews. ‘Cosmopolitans’ writers were accused of hating the Russian people, of supporting Zionism, etc. Many Yiddish writers as well as the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested in November 1948 on charges that they maintained ties with Zionism and with American ‘imperialism’. They were executed secretly in 1952. The antisemitic Doctors’ Plot was launched in January 1953. A wave of anti-Semitism spread through the USSR. Jews were removed from their positions, and rumors of an imminent mass deportation of Jews to the eastern part of the USSR began to spread. Stalin’s death in March 1953 put an end to the campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’.
17. The Doctors’ Plot was an alleged conspiracy of a group of Moscow doctors to murder leading government and party officials. In January 1953, the Soviet press reported that nine doctors, six of whom were Jewish, had been arrested and confessed their guilt. As Stalin died in March 1953, the trial never took place. The official paper of the party, the Pravda, later announced that the charges against the doctors were false and their confessions obtained by torture. This case was one of the worst anti-Semitic incidents during Stalin’s reign. In his secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev stated that Stalin wanted to use the Plot to purge the top Soviet leadership.
18. Mandatory job assignment upon graduation from higher educational institutions in the former Soviet Union: according to the Soviet law graduates from institutes were obliged to complete a mandatory 2-year job assignment issued by a relevant Institute. Upon completion of this term young people were allowed to get an employment at their discretion in any town or organization.
19. This was the nationality factor, which was included on all job application forms, Jews, who were considered a separate nationality in the Soviet Union, were not favored in this respect from the end of WWII until the late 1980s.
20. The Soviet authorities restricted freedom of travel within the USSR through the residence permit and kept everybody’s whereabouts under control. Every individual in the USSR needed residential registration; this was a stamp in the passport giving the permanent address of the individual. It was impossible to find a job, or even to travel within the country, without such a stamp. In order to register at somebody else’s apartment one had to be a close relative and if each resident of the apartment had at least 8 square meters to themselves.
21. Yevtushenko, Yevgeny - Popular Russian poet. Born in 1933. Yevtushenko's first book of poems was published in 1952. He soon became the most popular spokesman of the young generation of poets who refused to adhere to the doctrine of socialist realism. The publication in Paris of Yevtushenko's Precocious Autobiography (1963) brought him severe official censure, and he was frequently criticized by the Russian government for his nonconformist attitude. Despite this, he made several reading tours abroad during the Soviet era. He has also written novels. In addition, he is an actor, director, and photographer.
22. Voznesensky Andrei - Popular Russian poet. 1933- Born in Moscow. In 1957 Graduates from Moscow Institute of Architecture; encourages him to pursue writing. Receives attention for first published verses Publishes first collections Parabola and Mosaic, in which all his poetic tropes are evident - polymetric lines, graphic verse, inappropriate rhymes and odd metaphors. 1979 Awarded the State Prize for Poetry; participates in official literary almanac Metropol; 1983 Three volume collection of his works appears in Soviet Union.
23. Anatoli Rybakov - World known Russian writer, the author of the Dirk, Bronze Bird, Children of Arbat, Heavy Sand and many other stories, novels, screenplays and TV serials.
24. Sholem Aleichem, real name was Shalom Nohumovich Rabinovich (1859-1916): Jewish writer. He lived in Russia and moved to the US in 1914. He wrote about the life of Jews in Russia in Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian.

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Kiev, Ukraine
2002
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​My nee name is Zinaida Yarovskaya. I was born in Kiev in 1937. I left this town only once – during World War II. ​My mother’s name was Hava. My mother’s nee name is Gorodetskaya. ​My mother was born in 1905 in the family of Nusim Gorodetsliy (a shoemaker) in the town of Radomyshl, Kiev province. Grandfather Nusim came from a poor Jewish family. I have no information about his parents. My grandfather studied in the Jewish school for 3 or 4 years. He was a very good shoemaker. He made men’s, women’s and children’s shoes. Sometimes people didn’t have money to pay for the shoes and they brought him a dozen eggs or some millet. If somebody didn’t have anything to pay with my grandfather did his work for no payment. People liked my grandfather. My grandmother’s name was Tsylia (my mother’s mother). I don’t know her nee name. I guess, my grandmother and grandmother were born approximately in 1870-1875s. Grnadmother Tsylia came from a rather well-to-do family. Her father was a teacher of mathematics in the Jewish school. But this wasn’t the main source of their living. They had a farm where they had a cow and chicken, etc. My grandmother’s father had workers to look after the farm. Their family also had housemaids to do the housework. My grandmother Tsylia must have had brothers and sisters, but my mother didn’t know them. Grandmother Tsylia had some education: she finished school in Radomyshl. My grandmother was a housewife. Their family also kept a cow, chicken and geese. She took care of the farmyard and the house. They lived in a big wooden house with 5 or 6 rooms in it. My grandfather’s shop was in the house, too.

​Nusim and Tsylia had 7 children. Pesia-Lieba, the oldest, was born around 1895. The next child was brother Moishe (1897), Then came Gershko, born in 1899. The next was Basia (a girl), born in 1902, and my mother Hava was born in 1905. Zina came after my mother. She was born in 1909. Dora, the youngest, was born in 1914. Their family was moderately religious. My grandfather had a book of prayers, but he opened it rarely. However, he went to the synagogue every Saturday. Like each respected Jew, he had a seat of his own there. The majority of the population in Radomyshl was Jewish. The synagogue was also a place where men could meet to discuss the news and say their prayers, as appropriate for real Jewish people. My mother told me that her father took her to the synagogue every now and then. She went to the 2nd floor in the synagogue with all other women. She remembers the rabbi of Radomyshl, a tall gray-bearded old man. My grandmother stayed at home on Saturday most of the time. Sabbath was a rule at the house. My grandfather Nusim kept the family budget and always gave money for food in advance. On Saturday they always had stuffed fish, chicken and confectioneries on the table. My mother baked bread (halah) by herself. Tey lit the candles on Friday for Sabbath. The rules require the oldest woman in the house to light the candles, but my mother was my grandfather’s favorite and he often said “Havka, go ahead, light the candles”. The whole family got together at the table on Saturday. They followed the kashrut in the family. At Pesah they used fancy dishes – silver dishes mainly that my grandmother got from her parents. They fasted at Yom-Kippur. Even the older children fasted. My mother stack to this tradition her whole life, she even fasted at Judgement Day during the years of hunger.

​My grandmother Tsylia was the center and the heart of the family. She managed to do everything taking care of her family. All this good living finished at once when my grandmother died from a heart attack when she was almost 40 years old. This happened approximately in 1915.

​My grandfather was there alone to take care of 7 children. However, Pesia-Lieba was already living in Kiev. She had finished school and married Aron Milman, a Jew. About half a year passed and my grandfather married another woman – Hava. She had 5 children. Perhaps, my grandfather needed a woman in the house and hoped that her children would be better off if there was one. But things went worse. The children didn’t get along and my grandfather’s new wife always stood on her children’s side. The result was that my mother and her brothers and sisters moved to Kiev. This happened some time in 1916 or 1917. Moshe, the oldest brother, learned to make shoes from his father. Gershko had finished the Jewish school in Radomyshl by that time. Basia and my mother Hava didn’t have any education. Basia and my mother lived with their older sister Pesia-Lieba in Kiev. They didn’t have children, and they took my mother and her 3 sisters Zina, Dora and Basia into their family. During the Civil war Aron was in the Red Army. Zina, a younger sister, went to live with some distant relatives and later she worked as a baby sitter in rich families. Dora, the youngest, was sent to an orphanage. She was about to turn 3 years old.

​Grandfather Nusim lived in Radomyshl with his new wife and her children. He must have felt sorry for his own children living in other people’s houses and he asked to have at least Havka, my mother, visit them for the summer. My mother visited her father during the first year after her departure to Kiev. My mother told me that her father was very happy about the October revolution. He said that it would change the life of poor people. My grandfather didn’t have any conflicts with the Soviet power. He worked and had many apprentices. He was a very honest man and people liked him. My grandfather attended the synagogue until it was closed by the Soviet authorities in 1920s. When World War II began, my grandfather’s wife and her children were evacuated. Grandfather Nusim refused to leave his house. He believed that the Germans wouldn’t hurt Jewish people. He believed, they would treat the Jewish people respectfully like it was during World War I. When the Germans entered the town they shot all Jews on the 1st day. My grandfather’s Ukrainian neighbors ran to my grandfather and took him to the basement of their house. They made a shelter for my grandfather and he lived there for over 2 years during the German occupation. These people respected my grandfather and wanted to save his life. They were hiding him for over 3 years. They gave him food however little they had to feed themselves. (They also knew that if the Germans had found my grandfather they would have killed him for hiding a Jew. But they were determined to rescue him). When Radomyshl was liberated and my grandfather went out into the street his heart failed him and he died. Perhaps, the feeling of freedom and the bright sunshine were too much for him to bear. He died in the yard of his neighbor’s house. His neighbors that were putting their lives at risk in their effort to safe his. My mother and I visited Radomyshl in 1952 and heard the details of my grandfather’s death from its people. They also showed my grandfather’s grave to us. My mother never went to Radomyshl again. She was trying to find those people that saved my grandfather but they were not in Radomyshl any longer.

​Now about my mother’s brothers and sisters. Pesia-Lieba, my mother’s older sister, didn’t work. Her husband Aron worked at the leather shop. After the revolution he went to work at the leather factory. They were in the evacuation during the war and returned to Kiev. Aron worked at the leather factory until he retired. He was a religious man and a member of the religious community in Kiev synagogue. Pesia-Lieba died in Kiev in 1975. Her husband Aron died in 1986.

​My mother’s brothers Moishe and Gershko married Jewish girls in Kiev. Moishe’s wife and Gershko’s wife had the same name – Manya. Moishe was a shoemaker and Gershko was a Shop Manager at some plant and a member of the Communist Party. They had children, but I don’t know their names. Moishe was in the army during the war. He was wounded, but survived. Gershko was a political leader on the front. He was the one to lead soldiers to attack. He perished around 1942 in Ukraine. Their families stade in Kiev (they didn’t want to evacuate) and shared the fate of other Jewish people. Moishe’s wife with her 5 children and Gershko’s wife with 3 children were shot in the Babiy Yar. They probably went off together on his mournful road. Only Tsylia, Gershko’s older daughter that had been sent to the Donetsk steppe with other Komsomol members to harvest, survived. Moishe never forgot his family. After he returned from the war he became very withdrawn. He never talked about his dear ones, although they were on his mind every moment. He never got married again and died in Kiev in 1970.

​Basia, my mother’s older sister, married a Jewish man. His name was Aron. I don’t remember his last name. During the civil war Aron was in the Red Army and then worked as a shop-assistant in a store. They had 3 children: Miena, Rosa and a younger girl (I don’t remember her name. They were very poor and they lived in a basement where they were renting a room. In the middle of 30s the Jewish Autonomous Region (its capital – Birobidjan) was formed in the Far East and the Jewish people were called to move there. Aron and Basia and their children went to Birobidjan. Aron worked as a carpenter. They received an apartment. However, their 1st year there was hard – their younger daughter died. Later Manya, another girl, was born. Their children studied in the Jewish school in Birobidjan. There was no anti-Semitism there even during the most difficult years for Soviet Jews. Basia, Aron and their children loved their new Motherland and lived there all their life. Basia died around 1980. Aron and the older children also died. Mania, Basia’s younger daughter, lives in Birobidjan. She has 2 grown up daughters and grandchildren. In the middle of 50s Manya visited us and stayed with us some time. She played the accordion very well and sang Jewish songs. When she and my mother were singing in Yiddish, all our neighbors came to listen to them. When my sisters Tsylia and Rosa decide to emigrate to Israel (around 1978) Manya wrote a letter calling them traitors. She wrote that she was terminating any relationship with them. To the best of my knowledge and belief, they never again communicated. Tsylia and Rosa have got a status of refugees and have left in USA.

Zina, my mother’s younger sister, was a baby sitter. She worked and lived in other people’s houses. Later she got married and had 3 children. That’s all I know about her. Zina died young in 1936. I know this for sure because I was born in 1937 and named after my mother’s sister.

​Dora, my mother’s younger sister, was in the children’s home. She finished 5 years of school there and then my mother took her away from the children’s home to marry her to a Jewish man. Dora got married when she was 16. Her husband’s last name was Khazin. Dora and her younger children were evacuated from Kiev, but her older daughter Zhenia stayed in Kiev with her father’s parents. They were all shot in the Babiy Yar. Dora’s husband was killed on the front during WWII. After the war Dora returned to Kiev. She never got married again. She worked at shoe factory #4 and died in 1980.
​Now, Hava Gorodetskaya, my mother, lived with her sister Pesia-Lieba in Kiev. My mother was 17 when she met my father.

​My father’s name was David Yarovskiy. I know very little about his family. Perhaps, my parents got so much attracted by each other because they both lost their parents. My father’s mother died very young. My father was born in 1906 in a town in Poland. I think it was Lodz. His father and my grandfather Volko Yarovskiy was a fairly rich man. I don’t know what he was doing for a living, but he managed to give his children both religious and secular education: Cheder and secondary school. My father had 2 brothers: Aron Yarovskiy, born around 1900 and Fivish Yarovskiy, a younger brother, born in 1908. They all went to school. When my father was 14 his mother died (i.e. in 1920). His father remarried very soon. His children Aron, David and Fivish couldn’t forgive him for forgetting their mother and left him.

Somehow they got to Kiev. My mother told me that she met my father at the synagogue in Podol. My mother was 17 and my father was 16. They fell in love with each other. Perhaps, each of them wanted to get and give the love that was gone from their lives with their mothers’ death. My mother told me that they obtained permission to get married from the synagogue. My mother’s older sister Pesia-Liba had no objections against this marriage. She liked David very much. They got married in 1922. Those were hard years, but nevertheless, they had a Jewish wedding with huppah and all Jewish traditions.
​ My parents lived at Pesia’s home a few months. But there was too little space and they needed a home of their own as they were expecting their 1st baby.

​My father, however young he was, was a very smart man. He and his younger brother Fivish opened a private shop that manufactured various goods from horns. They purchased cow horns in the surrounding villages to make combs, ashtrays, pens, etc. and sold them in their shop. This was the period of NEP. There were many private shops at that time. This business allowed my parents to rent an apartment in a private house in Podol and to purchase it at a later time.

​In 1923 my older sister Tsylia Yarovskaya was born, in 1925 my brother Vladimir and in 1929 my sister Rosa were born. My mother didn’t have a job, but she was very busy at home. She was a wonderful housewife like my grandmother Tsylia and she gladly did any work. Living in the outskirts of the city my mother bought a cow. In summer the cow was kept outside in the valleys adjusting to Podol. Nowadays this area is one of districts in Kiev – Obolon. They also had chickens and geese – everything was like in my mother’s childhood in Radomyshl. Mouther went to the synagogue, which inhered beside on Podol, observed holidays and traditions. Prayed. We had kosher kitchen.

​NEP ended in 1926 and my father’s shop was closed. My father and Fivish found a job at the Kiev meat-packing factory. My father continued to study. After finishing his studies my father became Commercial Director of the Kiev meat-packing factory. From here I make a conclusion that my father studied at the Food Industry Institute.

​My father traveled a lot. Some time in 1932 (famine in Ukraine) he saw a 6 or 7 year old homeless Jewish boy at a railway station. The boy was crying and asking for food. My father talked to him and heard that his parents had died and that there was nobody left. My father brought this poor boy home. The boy’s name was Motl. My mother accepted him as her own child. They washed the boy and gave him clean clothes and food and he became the favorite boy in the family. He lived in our family until the beginning of the war. In 1941, when WWII began, Motl was 17. He was mobilized to the translators’ school. He was good at languages. Later he became a military translator at the Army Headquarters. When in the Army he fell in love with a Russian girl from Krasnoyarsk. He married her and settled down in Krasnoyarsk after the war. He wrote letters to my mother and visited her. He deeply mourned for our father and he tried to support our mother as much as he could. After my mother died I lost Motl’s address. I don’t know whether Motl is alive or where he is.

​I was born on 4 February 1937. Although I was the 4th child in the family my parents were still young: my mother was 32 and my father was 31. My parents were very much in love with one another. They were happy. At least, my mother told me so. They were real Soviet people and were happy about everything new that came with the Soviet power. We celebrated the 1st of May and October Revolution day at home. People even celebrated the Parisian Commune Day at that time. My parents spoke Yiddish at home. My mother understood Russian, but she spoke it with a strong Jewish accent. My mother had no education and she only learned to write her signature. But this was no obstacle to her feeling beloved and happy. My father wasn’t a religious person, but my mother was very religious. My father didn’t mind her following what she thought was right. My mother said her prayers every day and fasted on the Judgement Day. She celebrated all Jewish holidays at home. My father attended the festive dinners, but he treated them as one of my mother’s weaknesses. My mother’s brothers and her sister Dora visited us with their families (her sister Basia was already living in Birobijan and Zina had died). Tsylia, Volodia and Rosa, the older children, studied in an ordinary Russian school. In 1940 my younger brother Boris was born. But for the war everything would have been fine.

​I don’t remember the day of 22 June 1941 when the war began. I was 4 years old. My father and his brother Fivish were called up to the anti-aircraft and chemical defense forces And Aron, my father’s older brother, was sent to the front. Moishe and Gershko were also called up to the army. Tsylia and Volodia were Komsomol members and they were sent to the labor front to help with harvesting and excavate trenches. Tsylia was sent to Kharkov and then farther to the East. I don’t remember exactly where she was during the war, somewhere in the Urals. She worked in hospitals and made uniforms for our soldiers. She returned to Kiev after the war.

​My older brother Vladinir Yarovskiy died tragically during the war. He was sent to Krasnodar along with other Kosomol members. When the Germans occupied Krasnodar, Volodia and few other boys were captured. They were all shot except our Volodia. The Germans identified that he was a Jew by circumcision and buried him alive. Chairman of the collective farm where this happened sent a letter to Kiev to tell us about this tragedy. Upon receiving this letter my mother and my older sister went to the station and saw the place where Volodia died. The Chairman gave them the money that Volodia had earned. Later the monument was installed on this spot and all names of the deceased were engraved on it. But the name Yarovskiy was written Yurovskiy by mistake. Such was the tragic end of my older brother.
​But this was still to happen. At the beginning of the war we didn’t know what was to happen to us. Everybody believed that it would end soon and that we would win the victory over the Germans. Moishe and Gershko’s wives refused to evacuate. As for us, my father forced us to live. He saw us off to the train that was to take us away. My mother and I, her sister Rosa and little Boris, Fivish’s wife with her 2 children and Dora and her baby were going together. Zhenia, Dora’s older girl, stayed in Kiev with her grandparents. I remember little about this trip. I only remember the overcrowded carriage and people sitting on their luggage. We were all thirsty. My mother got off the train when it stopped to exchange clothes and things for food and water. But hunger and thirst never left us. I didn’t cry. I must have felt that tears could only make things worse and cause pain to my mother. But my younger brother Boris was constantly crying. Dora’s baby got dysentery and died. Dora didn’t even cry, she was just sitting there pressing her baby to her chest. I remember this well, because my mother took away the baby and got off the train when it stopped to bury the baby. The train started and my mother missed it. I was very scared and afraid that my mother wouldn’t catch up with us. But she did on another train.

We arrived at the town of Melikes in Chuvasia where we stayed during all our evacuation period. My mother worked at the timberfelling sites. It was freezing, some people froze to death. Once the wood cutters were attacked by wolves. They somehow chased them away. Basically, when recalling the war I come to thinking about the unexpected strength of character in my mother that had actually no education. We were renting a small room. My older sister Rosa and Aunt Dora and little Boris slept in this small room. After her son died Dora gave all her life to Boris that was almost the same age as her son. Dora couldn’t work. She tried to cook some food from some potato peels and turnip. I remember that soup with potato peels was our regular meal at hat time. My legs were all swollen due to lack of food and they never returned to the normal conditions. The doctors said this was the result of starvation in my childhood. Mummy used to return from work very late and she fell asleep right there, near the door – there was no other space. My mother had very long hair that she wore in a plait. Once her plait froze to the steel jamb of the door, and my mother couldn’t tear her plait from it. The landlady brought an ax and cut off my mother’s plait. I remember myself crying, but my mother said it was O’K and her hair would grow. My mother smiled at us, but her heart was aching. She didn’t know anything about our father and she realized that he was probably not among the living any more.

​As soon as Kiev was liberated in 1943 my mother started packing to go back home. But we had to stay in the evacuation for another year because we needed to obtain permission to return to Kiev. We returned in autumn 1944. Our apartment was occupied by our prewar neighbors. They were using our furniture and even children’s beds with coverlets. When my mother entered the room the new tenant pushed her out of there saying that you, zhydy [this offensive Jew name in Russian], spent all the wartime nobody knows where and that all our belongings were theirs. This was how we became “zhydy” immediately upon our return to Kiev. My mother didn’t argue with our neighbors. There was an unkempt dirty basement in this house – with rats. We cleaned it up and settled down there.

​The worst news for us was that our father David Yavorovskiy had perished. He died during Kiev defense operation on 21 September 1941. We received the notice about his death at the recruitment office. Fivish perished about the same time – they were together in the army and they perished together. Aron, my father’s older brother, perished near Warsaw in 1944. Gersh, my mother’s brother, perished, the families of Gersh and Moishe were exterminated in the Babiy Yar, and so was Zhenia, Dora’s daughter. Upon our return my mother got to know about the death of her father Nusim and about her son Volodia. Sometimes it seemed to me that my mother’s heart was made of stone. She never cried, only prayed in Yiddish. Now I understand that she was giving every effort to keep what she had: her children.

​My mother and sister Rosa went to work at the Kultchim shop. They manufactured stationery. On weekends Rosa and Komsomol members went to clean up Kreschatik, the main street that was in ruins. In 1946 our older sister Tsylia returned from the Urals. She got a job of an accountant in a shop.

​We kept living in the basement. The conditions were terrible. We could only see the legs of passer-byes. The toilet and water were in the yard. We had no kitchen. We were cooking on a little stove. I remember that my mother and I went to see Budyonniy (Budyonniy was a hero of the Civil war, Commander of the Red cavalry, a very authoritative person in the Soviet Union). I don’t remember whether my mother got to see him, but nothing in our life changer after this visit. They only installed gas stoves in the corridor of our basement. We lived under such awful conditions until 1964 when we received an apartment as the family that had lost the man of the family to the war. We waited for it 20 years after the war.

​In 1945 I went to school. It was an ordinary Russian school where boys and girls studied together. We were separated in the year’s time. I remember that the teachers treated us, the children that had lost their fathers, very well. We received free luncheons at school in 1946-47 and gave us a delicious roll. I remember that I always looked forward to getting this roll and at the same time I felt ashamed to be in the group of children receiving it because their fathers had perished. I remember that my brother Boris and I got nice new coats. We also received textbooks for free. I studied well. I was good at Mathematics. I even helped senior schoolchildren sometimes. They used to give me a roll or a cookie for this and it was nice of them to do so.

​I can’t remember whether anti-Semitism or struggle with Cosmopolites in the early 1950s had any impact on us. I have dim memories of some discussions at school about the doctors that poisoned people and that Jews were to blame for all people’s problems. But children were talking about this in whisper. It seemed they were just discussing what they had read in newspapers or heard from adults. I remember, when Stalin died we were all invited to the concert-hall at school. Everybody was crying. Siema Mironovna, our teacher, a Jew, got all fatherless children together. She was sitting and crying with us.
In this time I at all was not interested by the Jewish life. This was not fashionably amongst acquaintance of mine nobody did not note Jewish holidays. But we with the pleasure celebrated Soviet holidays. Much liked 1 may, day of anniversaries of Great October Revolutions. Went on demonstrations, at night were going to buildings, at the table, sang cantos, danced, listened a music, in general were lucky.
​After studying 7 years at school I went to work at the hat factory. I was an apprentice there. I didn’t work there long. I went to the “Progress” shop store – they made hats there, too. I learned to make very beautiful women’s hats. I became a Komsomol member in the shop and was the leader of the Komsomol unit for 7 years. I was finishing my studies in the evening school of working young people. They didn’t pay much in this shop. I worked two shifts to make some money. In the 1st years of my work director of this shop was a Jewish man. Later the shop was converted into a factory and a Ukrainian woman became its director. She was terribly anti-Semitic. Life became more difficult for the Jews. We couldn’t earn anything extra and our rates were constantly reduced. Employees of non-Jewish origin were sent to resorts each year getting trade-union reductions for their stay there. I didn’t get to go there once.

In the late 1960s I got a job at the cinema factory. I worked at the color slide production. Many other Jewish people were working there and they were treated well. I was earning good money there until I retired in 1992.

​At the beginning of 1960 I met my future husband, Jewish, Abram Turovskiy. We met at a party and liked one another at once. My husband was born in Kiev on 10 May 1936. His grandfather was a rich man. He owned a bakery in Podol. Abram’s father was a military. He was sent to the front when the war began. During way in evacuation Abram lagged behind from the train, in which went grandparents, his mother and his one- year-old sister. Abram was sent to a children’s home in Kazakhstan and was there until 1950. In the children’s home the children teased and beat him for his being a Jew. When he turned 15 he ran away and went to look for his family. He went to Kiev and came to shoe factory #4 where his mother had been working before the war. He found his mother there. She was working in the laundry at the factory kindergarten. His mother’s name Rachil Srulevna Podmirchan. Abram’s mother told Abram that his father had perished at the front and his grandparents and sister died in the evacuation. His mother told him that she was looking for him after the war but everywhere she went she was told that he wasn’t there. His mother was very happy to have her son back.

​We got married in 1961. We had no wedding, just a registration of our marriage. Abram came to live with us. In 1964 we received a two-room apartment. Abram worked as a maintenance technician. He was a very skilled worker. He was supposed to get a state award for his work but he didn’t get it due to his Jewish origin. His boss put him on the list of awardees, but he was reprimanded by the solid alloys trade union committee for doing so. My husband heard this discussion. This was a moral trauma for my husband and he got a stroke on that very day. He was ill for almost a year and then he went back to work. But he was badly injured at work – his hands were cut off by some machine. He became an invalid and could move only in the wheel-chair. In 1998 when my husband died he was only 62 years old.
My husband was not a religious person. We were assimilated Soviet people. We always difficult live, much worked. No Jewish traditions, regrettably we didn’t save. I am sorry, but time was such cruel, surrounding situation was not favorable. Us had one free day at a week - a Sunday, and else we did not work in Soviet holidays, them and noted and else days of births to we came the guests.

​In 1966 our daughter Ludmila was born. She studied well at school but she couldn’t enter the Institute because of her being a Jew. She finished a course of kindergarten nurses, computer school and hairdresser’s school. Ludmila has several professions but she cannot work. She has four children to take care of. Yevgeniy, born in 1986 studies at school. But he is a very ill boy. He was born in the year of Chornobyl disaster and has problems with his thyroid gland. Her 2ND son Alexandr was born in 1987. Dmitriy, born in 1994, has a heart disease. He is a very smart but he cannot attend kindergarten because of his heart. Nastia, the youngest, was born in 2000. Since my husband got ill our family has had all kind problems. My daughter had to quit work because of her children’s illnesses. My son’in-law Mikhail, a professional driver, got in a car accident and lost his job. He couldn’t go on working. He has occasional earnings from car repairs. My daughter also does some work every now and then but they don’t have a permanent job. Hesed, the Jewish Charity Center supports us, but this is not enough for a family with four children. Sometimes my granddaughter takes an empty plate asking to give her something to eat. Who would have a heart to bear this? My daughter Ludmila was a beautiful girl. One can hardly recognize her now. She has become very thin and lost all her teeth. There is nobody around to help us. My mother died in 1989. My older sister Tsylia lives in Baltimore, USA. She has two daughters – Diane and Evgenia. My sister Rosa lives in Chicago. She has two grown-up sons: Dmitriy and Leonid. My brother Boris lives in Haifa, Israel, and his daughter has moved to America. They are doing very well, but they don’t support us. When our family was going to move to America, their authorities refused to give us a status of refugees. They told us that we should have been supported by our close relations in the US. But our relatives refused to give us shelter. After such attitude I didn’t call or write them for several years. Recently I wrote them that we literally starvу and asked them to send us a little bit of money. They answered that they had problems of their own and that they couldn’t help us. We get no help from the state or social services. The only thing left for us is to move to Israel. But it involves money again, and we sometimes don’t have money to use public transportation.
My mother observed Jewish traditions until her last day. She prayed and celebrated Sabbath. I don’t believe in God. We do not observe any Jewish traditions or celebrate holidays, although we are all Jews. We just never get there. Perhaps that is why God has turned away from us.
​
​

Fira Usatinskaya
Kiev
Ukraine
Interviewer: Zhanna Litinskaya
Date of interview: April 2003

Fira Usatinskaya lives in a nice one-storied apartment in a new district in Kiev. She has new furniture and a Japanese TV set in her apartment. One can tell that she is doing fine. She has many books on her bookshelves: modern editions of Russian and foreign classics and many detective novels. Her son Felix, who earns good money as a lawyer, supports her. Fira met me wearing a nice suit, trousers and jacket, and with her hair nicely done. She is very hospitable and friendly. She looks young for her age. She seems to be a strong self-possessed woman, who went through many hardships in her life.

My father, Froim Usatinskiy, came from a small town called Gaisin in Vinnitsa region [300 km west of Kiev]. Like many other towns in tsarist Russia it was located within the Pale of Settlement [1]. Jews constituted 98% of the town population. There was a synagogue, a cheder and several houses of prayer. There were beautiful big stone houses in the center of town. They were owned by wealthy local people: merchants, bread and wine traders, doctors and lawyers. In their majority, Jews were craftsmen or ran small trades and lived in small, decrepit houses with worn-out roofs. The houses were built close to each other and looked like they were supporting each other from falling apart. There were no flower gardens near the houses. Some families kept some poultry and bred them for a big holiday. Most of the local Jews bought their food products at the market. The market was open at weekends in the main square. Villagers from surrounding villages sold dairy and meat products and vegetables and bought essential goods like matches, soap, tools and fabric.

My father told me that my paternal grandfather, Yol Usatinskiy, was a tradesman. He had a small haberdashery store in his house. I know very little about him or my grandmother Feiga. They died during some epidemic. I only know that they were born in the 1860s and died long before the Revolution of 1917 [2]. My father told me that they were very religious. They observed all Jewish traditions, followed the kashrut, honored and celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays. My grandfather went to the synagogue every day and my grandmother joined him on Saturdays. That’s all I know about my grandfather’s family. I knew only one of my father’s brothers: his younger brother Yudko Usatinskiy. My father said that there were many children in the family, but almost all of them died in infancy.

Yudko, born in 1900, lived in Lugansk. He was a trader. I saw him several times. He had a wife called Tsylia and two children, a son called Leonid and a daughter called Betia. During the Great Patriotic War [3] they were in evacuation somewhere near the Urals, and after the war they returned to Lugansk. My uncle and his wife died around 1960. Leonid graduated from medical college and worked as a district physician for the rest of his life. He died in the middle of the 1990s. His sister Betia, an economist, lives with her son in Kharkov. We hardly communicate.

My father was born in Gaisin in 1890. He was the oldest son. It was traditional in Jewish families to give older children, boys in particular, good education. My father got his Jewish education at cheder like everybody else. Then he finished a grammar school. My father was an intelligent man and earned his living as a private teacher. He taught reading, writing and arithmetic to Jewish children preparing them for grammar school.

My father told me very little about his youth because my mother, Freida Pivchik, was his second wife and jealous about anything associated with the time when my father lived with his first wife. I know that his first wife’s name was Beila and my father must have been very much in love with her. They had two children: Nuchim, born in 1917, and Maria, born in 1920. Maria was born at the height of the Civil War [4]. Once my father, Beila, Nuchim and little Maria were hiding in a cellar during a pogrom [5]. Beila caught a cold that resulted in galloping consumption (which was the name for tuberculosis at that time). She died at the beginning of 1922.

Nuchim changed his first name to the Russian name of Nikolay [common name] [6] in the 1930s. After finishing school he graduated from Donetsk Medical College. He had just passed his graduation exams when the Great Patriotic War began. All graduates were taken to the front. Nuchim worked in a field hospital during the war. He is a retired Colonel of Medical Service. He lives with his wife Polina in Moscow. Their daughter Galina and their granddaughter Inna and her husband and child live in Moscow, too.

Maria’s life wasn’t so successful. She finished medical school in Lugansk before the war and was recruited to the army from there. She worked as a medical nurse at the front throughout the war. She was married, but her marriage didn’t last. She had no children. After the war she returned to Lugansk and worked as a medical nurse in a polyclinic. In the 1950s Maria moved to Kiev. We talked on the phone and visited one another. She was very lonely. She died in 1999.

Neither my sister nor brother were religious people. They gave up Jewish traditions when they were in their teens and left their parents’ home. They never resumed observing Jewish traditions.

My father was having a hard time after his first wife died. He needed to earn his living and take care of the children at the same time. He met my mother in 1923. Their meeting was arranged by matchmakers.

I know very little about my mother’s parents. They lived in Gaisin, Vinnitsa region. My mother’s father, Srul Pivchik, was born in the 1860s and was either a shochet or a senior man at the synagogue in Gaisin. The family was poor. I only have one photograph of my grandmother Esther. She was younger than my grandfather. She was born in the 1870s and was a housewife. I also know that my grandfather and grandmother died long before my parents met in the 1910s.

My mother had two sisters and a brother. They got secondary education. They left their parents’ home as soon as they grew up. They were all religious people and observed Jewish laws and traditions throughout their life. My mother’s oldest sister, born in 1890, moved to Palestine with her husband. I don’t know her name or the names of her three daughters, who were born in the Promised Land. I only remember her letters that we received before the Great Patriotic War and some time after, which smelled magnificently of exquisite perfume. There were beautiful people wearing fancy clothing in the pictures that she sent. They were my cousins and their husbands. I felt envious, of course. In 1967, when the Soviet press began to indict Israel my mother tore all letters and photographs from there apart because she was afraid that our connection with Israel would be revealed. [The interviewee is referring to the dangers of keeping in touch with relatives abroad.] [7] I don’t know what happened to my relatives there. Perhaps, I still have cousins and nephews in Israel. Only one photograph of my cousin, whose name I don’t know, survived. It was taken in the middle of the 1920s and sent to us from Israel [then Palestine].

Sarra, my mother’s second sister, and her brother Gedali lived in Bessarabia [8]. After Bessarabia joined the Soviet Union in 1939, my mother and I went to see them.

Gedali Pivchik, born in 1893, was a shochet in the town of Zguritsa [today Moldova]. He had a wife called Tsylia, and they had a daughter called Esfir and two sons called Srul and Meyer. In my mother’s family children were named after our grandfather and grandmother, thus Esfir or Esther and Srul. Before the Great Patriotic War Gedali’s family was very religious. They strictly followed all rules and observed all traditions. During the Great Patriotic War Gedali and his family were in evacuation. After the war they settled down in Chernovtsy. We didn’t see them after the war, and I don’t know whether they remained religious. All I know is that Gedali didn’t work and that the family was very poor. Gedali died in the middle of the 1960s. I know from my relatives that his daughter Esfir and her family moved to America in the 1980s. His son Srul lived in Moscow and Meyer, who was single and had no children, died in Chernovtsy in the middle of the 1990s.

Aunt Sarra Foltyshanskaya, my mother’s younger sister, was born in 1895. Her family lived in Beltsy, Moldova. Her husband was a craftsman and they had four sons and a daughter. I don’t remember the name of her oldest son, but the others were called Srul, Izia, Natan and Esfir. They were in evacuation with the family of Uncle Gedali, and after the war they settled down in Chernovtsy. We never met them. Aunt Sarra died a long time ago. She died even before Uncle Gedali passed away. Her oldest son and Srul are dead now, too. Esfir and Natan and their families live in Chicago, USA, where they moved to in the late 1970s.

My mother was born in Gaisin in 1896. She finished a Jewish elementary school and then studied at the lower secondary school in Gaisin. She didn’t finish it. I think she had to go to work to earn her living. I don’t know what she did for a living. My mother could read and write in Yiddish and Russian very well. Regretfully, that’s all I know about the life of my mother before she met my father. I know that her parents were very religious and that she was raised that way, too. She observed Jewish traditions, celebrated holidays and prayed. My mother must have been very poor and must have had a hard life if she agreed to marry a widower with two children. This means that she had no choice. Perhaps, she never talked about her youth for that reason.

My parents got married in Gaisin in 1923. They were both religious. They had a chuppah and were married by a rabbi. They didn’t have a wedding party because it was my father’s second marriage and his relatives, especially his brother Yudko, who lived in Lugansk were against it. It wasn’t because of my mother that they didn’t want this marriage to take place, but nevertheless my father stopped his relationship with his brother back then. He didn’t want to stay in Gaisin, probably to avoid gossip. After they got married my parents moved to the small town of Ilintsy, Litin district, near Gaisin.

I was born in Ilintsy on 12th February 1924. I was named after my grandmother. My brother Srul, named after our grandfather, was born in 1926. My parents were very poor. They rented an apartment. I don’t remember anything about Ilintsy. My mother told me that it was a typical small town with the majority of the population being Jewish. There was a market and a synagogue in the center and all residents knew everything about each other’s life. My father was a teacher, but in those hard years there were few people that wanted to get education and he didn’t have many pupils. He took to any work – he was an assistant in a shop and an assistant joiner – but the family still didn’t have enough food. My older brother and sister, Beila’s children, thought that my mother was to blame for their poverty since she gave all food to her own children – my brother and I. Maria suffered from this jealousy most of all. She wrote letters complaining to Uncle Yudko in Lugansk and he took her to his family every summer. This didn’t change the situation in our family. In fall Maria returned and was even more bitter and intolerant. However, all the other children in our family got along well, and we stayed friends for the rest of our life.

Our family was very religious. We strictly followed the kashrut and had special dishes for meat and dairy products. We only had meat on high holidays at the time, but we never mixed meat and dairy products. My parents celebrated Sabbath. On Fridays my mother and older sister cleaned the apartment thoroughly – there were two small rooms and a kitchen with a Russian stove [9] – and washed the wooden floors scrubbing them with sand. My mother made challah and a festive dinner: cottage cheese pudding, potato pancakes, stewed cabbage and sometimes chicken broth and chicken.

We only had gefilte fish on Pesach. My mother saved money for a whole year to celebrate Pesach. Matzah was bought at the synagogue in advance. A chicken and small turkey were slaughtered by the shochet. My mother used special kosher crockery and utensils stored in an old box – this was her only dowry. There was a dish with all the required food on the table on the holiday: eggs, potatoes and bitter greenery. My father conducted the seder wearing his tallit. He leaned back in his seat at the head of the table. This scene is imprinted in my memory. My father went to the synagogue every day wearing his tallit and tefillin. My mother joined him on Saturdays. My father always prayed at home before meals. On Yom Kippur my parents spent a whole day at the synagogue. They returned home late in the evening. We also had a festive dinner after the day’s fasting.

My mother often prayed with a prayer book that had strange, unknown letters in it. She often cried while praying. I asked her, ‘Mother, why are you crying?’, and she replied, ‘If you knew what is written in here you would cry, too’. I didn’t get to know what was written in there. My parents didn’t teach us Yiddish. They were always busy and had no time to spend with us. When I went to school and became a pioneer they tried to avoid any Jewish subjects in my presence. My parents spoke Yiddish to one another and Russian with us, children.

In 1931 my family moved to the south of Ukraine looking for a better life. We settled down in a former German colony [10] in Nagaevo, Odessa region. Besides Germans many Jews lived there. They worked in a Jewish kolkhoz [11]. My parents had no luck there either. We arrived in late fall after the harvest. There was no work for my father in the kolkhoz. After a month or two my father and older brother went to Makeevka in Donetsk region where my father’s distant relative Beniamin Usatinskiy lived. He promised to help my father to get a job. My mother, Maria, Srul and I stayed in Nagaevo. We lived in one room in a decrepit house that we had received when we arrived in Nagaevo. We didn’t have any food and wood to heat the room. We stayed on the stove bed under feather blankets with chattering teeth. The other kolkhoz farmers didn’t like us. They even believed my father and brother to be shtreykbrekhers [Yiddish for ‘deserter’, ‘traitor’] because they left the kolkhoz. The chairman of the kolkhoz, an old Jew, sympathized with us and when it grew dark he or his daughter brought us some food. He allowed us to secretly take corn to stoke the stove. My mother and Maria made hats from straw and ropes. They got a dozen eggs, a jar of milk or a loaf of bread for their hats. At the end of summer 1932 my father came to take us to Makeevka, where he and my brother had found jobs.

Makeevka is a town of miners, about 30 kilometers from Donetsk. Its population was mixed like in many other towns in the south of Ukraine: Russian, Ukrainian and those that came from Northern Caucasus. There were many Jews in town, a big synagogue and a Jewish cemetery. We first rented an apartment in Makeevka, and in 1933 my parents bought their own apartment in the basement of an old two-storied house. There were three tiny rooms in a row and a kitchen with a Russian stove. In fall and spring our rooms were flooded after it rained. We were still very poor. My father went to work as a janitor at the bakery and that saved us during the famine in 1933 [the famine in Ukraine] [12]. My father brought us loaves of bread that had fallen apart. I don’t know whether this bread really fell apart or if he helped out a little there, but in any case this bread saved us. We always looked forward to my father coming home from work and putting gray glutinous bread on the table. My mother gave equal pieces to my older brother and sister, Srul and me. My father didn’t eat any bread at home, telling us that he had had enough at work. My mother ate a very small piece.

My brother Nuchim worked somewhere and Maria was a senior student at school. Around 1935 my brother went to Donetsk where he entered Donetsk Medical College, and Maria moved to my uncle in Lugansk for good. She finished school and entered a medical school there. My father still didn’t get along with my uncle. He never visited him and his brother never came to see him either. We hardly ever saw him.

In Makeevka I went to a Russian secondary school. There were mostly Jewish families in the building where we lived. My brother Srul and I had many friends. I also had Ukrainian and Russian school friends since there were children of various nationalities in our school. Our teachers treated us nicely and there was no segregation at school. The children were different though. There was a group of pupils that called Jews ‘zhydy’ [kike]. Once they even caught my brother and me after classes and applied pork fat on our lips teasing us that we didn’t eat pork. I can say that I have identified myself as a Jew since my childhood.

I became a Young Octobrist [13] and then a pioneer and Komsomol [14] member at school. I took an active part in all activities: sang in the choir and attended dance and drama clubs. I also played checkers and chess. I liked studying at school, even though I wasn’t the best pupil. I was good at German and my teacher often asked me to help other children with the German language. We celebrated all Soviet holidays at school and attended parades on 1st May and 7th November, October Revolution Day [15]. On holidays my friends and I went for walks in the park and to the cinema or cultural center in the evening. We didn’t celebrate Soviet holidays at home. My parents went to the synagogue and celebrated Jewish holidays. They understood that my brother and I had other interests and didn’t impose their outlooks on us. I regret that I didn’t learn my mother tongue and Jewish traditions and customs, but when I was young I thought these to be a vestige of the past. I didn’t care about nationality and just differentiated between good and evil people. I still do.

Craftsmen and workers lived in our house. Fortunately, none of us suffered from the arrests in 1937-38 [during the so-called Great Terror] [16]. However, I remember that some of my schoolmates’ fathers were arrested. They were charged of sabotage and subversive activities at the mines where they worked. I remember a Komsomol meeting in 1939 when one of my schoolmates publicly repudiated his father. He would have been expelled from the Komsomol if he hadn’t done it and that would have been a horrible punishment. Our teachers were decent people and the atmosphere in school didn’t change. We believed everything our teachers told us and didn’t even question the correctness of the state policy or any happenings in the country.

In 1940 my parents sold our apartment and bought a house. It was a modest house, but there was a kitchen garden and a garden close to it. There was electricity in the house, but there was no gas and we stoked the stove with coal. The toilet was in the yard, but this was so common in Makeevka that we didn’t consider it a discomfort. There was also a radio in the house. We often listened to concerts and literary readings in the evening. Shortly before the war we got a record player and I was very fond of listening to records. I liked Soviet songs such as ‘How spacious is my country’, ‘March of enthusiasts’, etc. [Well-known Soviet patriotic and Communist songs.]

We heard about the beginning of the Great Patriotic War on the radio. There were crowds of people near street radios at noon of 22nd June 1941 listening to the frightening words by Molotov [17] about the beginning of the war. This was one day before I received my certificate for finishing my 9th year at school. After about ten days our relatives from Bessarabia arrived: my mother’s brother and sister, their children and husbands, in-laws, neighbors and acquaintances. They arrived on horse-driven carts and there wasn’t enough space in the yard for all of them to park. They were tired and exhausted and after having a meal they fell asleep on the floor. They were telling horrible details of the brutalities of Nazis and about their escape. Our relatives didn’t stay long but soon continued their way to the East by train. Nuchim and Maria were recruited to the army on the first days of the war. Maria came to say goodbye, but my stepbrother didn’t even get a chance to see us before he left.

My parents, my younger brother and I packed, ready to evacuate. My mother made rucksacks from pillowcases for us into which we put our underwear, clothes, a few textbooks and our favorite books. There were air raids and a curfew was introduced in the town. My father made a shelter in the yard where we were hiding during air raids. We only managed to leave in October 1941. Our distant relative, the one that once helped my father and brother to find a job in Makeevka, helped us to evacuate. He worked at a large metallurgical plant and we managed to evacuate to the Ural with this plant. We traveled in a freight train with a stove in our railcar. We had food to last two weeks, at the maximum. We didn’t believe we would be gone for long. We didn’t have many essential things. We didn’t have cups or all the necessary clothes. At stations we sometimes got some cereal or soup. Our fellow travelers even managed to cook some food on the stove. It was good that we had enough dried bread. During air raids on our way the train stopped and we scattered around. For some reason I was scared most about seeing dead horses in the fields. I was very afraid from then on.

We traveled for a month. We left on 7th October and on 7th November 1941 we arrived in Sosedkovo, the village of the Nizhniy Tagil timber enterprise [the town of Nizhniy Tagil is located in the Ural, Russia, 2,500 kilometers from Kiev]. We were accommodated in a local house. The owners were good to us. They let us wash ourselves – it’s hard to describe how dirty we were. They put our clothes in the stove to kill the lice. We stayed with this family a few days until we got a place in a room in a barrack. There were sheets and blankets that served as partials in this room. We were lucky to have a stove in our part of the room.

My father became a janitor at the fuel storage facility of the kolkhoz of the timber facility breeding horses and cattle. My younger brother Srul also got a job there. He was someone’s assistant. My father and Srul walked about eight kilometers to work from the village. My mother and I stayed in our cold room. We stayed in bed and tried to warm each other up. We couldn’t wait until my father came home. There was a canteen for workers at the kolkhoz, where my father got some leftover food for us: soup or cereal. This was our only food for the day. We got some potatoes in the village, but they froze because even the walls in our dwelling were covered with a layer of ice. We exchanged everything we had for food and wood. My mother displayed her dresses and blouses on our bed and the locals came and took them away for a bucket of potatoes, a jar of milk or a piece of butter. Sometimes people brought us potato peels and my mother made potato pancakes from them.

We were called ‘zhydy’[kikes] by the locals. By the way, they weren’t anti-Semites because they had never met Jews before. When we arrived the locals came to take a look at us and make sure that we didn’t have horns or hooves. However, they treated us nicely and sympathized with us. There was no synagogue in the kolkhoz and there was no way to celebrate Jewish traditions. We ate what we could get and were happy to get any food at all. We had no idea of the dates of holidays. Only in the evening did my father pray quietly in a corner of the room.

Life became easier in spring. My mother and I went to work at the kolkhoz. We worked hard in the field or threshing-floor, but we got a hot lunch and in autumn we could eat vegetables in the fields. In spring 1943 we got two rooms and a kitchen with a stove in a wooden house and a plot of land, where we planted vegetables and potatoes. I became a secretary for the director of the kolkhoz. It happened that with my lower secondary education I was the most qualified applicant for this position. The director put a lot of trust in me: I was responsible for the recruitment of young people to the army and the preparation of lists. When working there I managed to obtain a permit that enabled my brother Srul to escape his army service. After work Srul fixed irons, kettles and the tools of kolkhoz workers. I embroidered fabric for blouses after work. We got food for our work.

In September 1943 I passed my exams for the 10th grade at school and entered the Faculty of Economics at the Mining College in Nizhniy Tagil. I chose this college because its students received a higher stipend and there was a hostel. There were eight girls in my room. They came from various towns and were of various nationalities. We shared all food that we brought from home and put together our stipends for buying food for all of us. We lived like in a commune. Our main food was fried potatoes, carrot tea and pies with cabbage filling that one of the girls made. We got along very well and enjoyed our life together. I went to see my mother on vacations and she fed me well.

Makeevka was liberated at the end of 1943 and we began to pack to go home. I couldn’t get my documents – my examination record book and my certificate of secondary education – from the college since they didn’t want to let me go. I left with my parents and brother after finishing my 1st year without waiting for the permit for my departure or other documents.

Our house in Makeevka was half ruined. There was a hole in the ceiling and some walls had fallen down. There were no pieces of furniture and bed sheets left. Later, our neighbors returned some of our belongings. My friends also came back from evacuation. My older brother Nuchim was still in the army. Maria returned to our uncle in Lugansk. My brother and sister got to know our address through an evacuation agency. We corresponded throughout the war, but it took letters very long to reach us and sometimes they got lost. Our family was lucky to have survived the war.

I was a secretary at the town military registry office where I worked until summer when I went to Kiev to enter a college. I just wanted to study. I didn’t know what kind of colleges there were in Kiev or what exactly I wanted to study. I didn’t have any money or acquaintances in Kiev. I stayed with my mother’s distant relatives. I hadn’t known them before, but my mother wrote to them and they invited me to stay with them. I went to a few colleges, but they refused to accept my application since I didn’t have my certificate of secondary education and my examination record book wasn’t valid. I sent a request to Nizhniy Tagil and they sent me my documents. I was accepted for the 2nd year at the Faculty of Economics of the College of Light Industry. I also received a room in the hostel with five other girls.

I finished my studies in 1949. I had a nice group of friends in the hostel. We celebrated holidays and went to the cinema, museums and parks on the slopes of the Dnieper River together. We also went to theaters that had also returned from evacuation. We like going to parades on 1st May and 7th November. After the parades we went for a walk in the city. There were many Jewish students at college, but there were also students of various other nationalities in our group. I was involved in Komsomol activities and was a member of the Komsomol committee of the college. I took part in Komsomol meetings where we discussed issues associated with our studies and in amateur art activities. I organized contests and concerts. I met my future husband at the college. However international my views were I wished to marry a Jewish man, although I didn’t observe any Jewish traditions at the time.

My husband Michael Aronovich was born to a worker’s family in Kiev in 1921. His family didn’t observe any Jewish traditions. His father Haskel Aronovich was a communist and sincerely believed in Lenin’s ideas. His mother Charna – she called herself Tsylia – was a housewife. Michael went to the army after finishing school in 1939, was at the front during the war and was awarded orders and medals. After the war he served in the occupying forces in Austria, Germany and Romania. He demobilized in 1947 and was admitted to the Faculty of Technology at my college. I liked Michael. He was a tall and strong man. He wore his military uniform and coat with the shoulder straps removed, like many other guys that returned from the front. About 1948, during the period of anti-Semitic campaigns and the struggle against cosmopolitans [18], my husband changed his name to Michael. He said that he wanted his children to have a common patronymic to have fewer problems in life. We had the same group of friends for a long time. Michael and me spent time together, but we never talked about a closer relationship. We didn’t face any anti-Semitism. We only read about ‘enemies of the people’ in newspapers and we never doubted anything published officially by the mass media.

I graduated from college in 1949 and got a job assignment [19] to a leather plant in Nikolaev [regional town, about 400 km from Kiev]. I specialized in economical leather production. I spent my one-month vacation with my parents in Makeevka. My father worked in the commercial sector and my mother was a housewife. They observed Jewish traditions as before. There was no synagogue in Makeevka, so my father went to pray in the prayer house every now and then. I thought this all to be outdated and obsolete: religion, traditions and celebration of Saturdays.

In Nikolaev I got accommodation in the hostel located near the plant. I had a room for myself, only the toilet and kitchen in the corridor were for common use. There were hardly any other Jewish employees at the plant, but I got along well with my colleagues. At weekends my friends from the hostel and I went to the cinema or dance parties at the cultural center of the plant. I worked at the Department of Labor and Salary for a year. I had to learn many things since we had only studied theory in college and I needed to gain some practical skills. I had a good salary and for the first time in my life I could afford to buy clothes and shoes. I enjoyed it very much.

In summer 1950 I went to attend a traditional meeting of fellow students in Kiev. I met with Michael in Kiev and we realized that we were in love with each other. We spent several days going for walks and kissed in the parks, but then I had to go back to work. We corresponded for a year and in summer 1951 Michael came to see my parents in Makeevka to get their consent to our marriage. A month later we had a civil ceremony at the registry office in Makeevka. My mother made me a fancy dress of crepe de Chine, and Michael’s parents bought him his first suit. We could only afford to buy one ring – for me. We didn’t have money for a ring for Michael, and, besides, men didn’t wear wedding rings since they were considered to be a vestige of the bourgeois past. We had a small wedding party. We didn’t have a Jewish wedding. We just invited our close relatives and friends.

I had to go back to Nikolaev again, but this time I had the status of a married woman. In 1952 my husband wrote an official request to my company to dismiss me, so I could go to Kiev. My management was reluctant to let me go since I was valued as an employee and was the head of the Planning Department at that time. However, I resigned and went to Kiev. We lived with my husband’s parents in a two-bedroom communal apartment [20] in the center of Kiev. My husband went to work as a production engineer at the Metal Ware Plant. He worked there his whole life. I faced direct anti-Semitism when I came to Kiev. I couldn’t find work until an acquaintance of ours helped me to get a job at the Animal Raw Material Supply Company.

In January 1953 our daughter Sophia was born. I have bright memories of this time. I walked with my baby listening to street radios that broadcast information about Stalin’s health condition every hour. When he died there was a feeling that life had stopped. I went back to work two months after my daughter was born. Sophia stayed with my mother-in-law. I was fired on the grounds of staff reduction. A few months later I was employed by the Central Statistics Department for one month. Every month I was worried about whether they would extend my employment agreement. In due time I was employed permanently and I worked there as an economist until 1970. In the same year I went to work at the Ministry of Local Industry where I was a leading labor and salary specialist. I worked there until my retirement.

My husband was a member of the Communist Party. He was a fanatic communist. He never took part in party activities. He believed that work performance was his only duty. My husband paid his monthly fees and attended meetings where he listened attentively to what was said. That was his faith and his God. He wasn’t a party activist, but he strongly believed in the idea of communism and that everything happening in the USSR was just and correct. When local party units received a letter by Khrushchev [21] revealing the cult of Stalin after the Twentieth Party Congress [22] in 1956, my husband withdrew into himself. He didn’t talk to me about what was going on in their party unit. The denunciation of Stalin was a serious blow to him. He refused to believe that his idol was mean and mendacious. As for me, I believed Khrushchev at once.

When our relatives began to move to Israel in the 1970s, Michael supported and helped them in every way, but he still believed they were betraying their motherland that had given them everything they needed for a happy life. However, he thought that he had to fulfill his family duties and had to help close relatives. He took them to Kiev airport and stayed there with them a whole night. In those years this might have had serious consequences for him since he was a party member. He could have been accused of supporting Zionism and even fired from work, but actually nothing of the kind happened. Emigration to Israel was out of the question for us. My husband couldn’t imagine anything like that. He considered it a betrayal of his motherland and his ideals.

I had a good life with him. In summer we went on vacation to the Crimea or Caucasus. We also visited my parents in Makeevka and took our daughter to spend her summer vacation there. We often went to the cinema or theater and read a lot. We were fond of Russian classical and Soviet modern literature. We had many friends and celebrated holidays with them: New Year’s, 1st May and 7th November. We also celebrated birthdays. My husband and I didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays.

My father worked as a shop assistant several years after the war. He died in 1959. We buried him according to the Jewish traditions. We put him in a casket wrapped in a shroud and a rabbi said a prayer. After he died my mother sold the house and moved to Kiev. She stayed with my older sister Maria since I lived with my husband’s parents in a small two-bedroom apartment. Our son Felix was born there in 1968. My daughter Sophia was born handicapped: she suffered from Down Syndrome and was retarded both mentally and physically. Sophia studied in a special school for several years, and then she stayed at home with us. She couldn’t go to work. She had a weak heart and lungs which is typical for this disease. I understood that my daughter wasn’t going to live long, and for that reason I decided to have another baby at the age of 44. Sophia died in 1993.

We were on the list for families that needed an apartment for many years until we received a four-bedroom apartment in a new apartment building in 1982. My husband was severely ill at that time. He died of stomach cancer in 1983. He was buried in the town cemetery. His death was an irreplaceable loss for me, but sometimes I think it was better that he didn’t live to see perestroika: the fall of communism and all ideals that he had held sacred his whole life.

My mother supported me. After my husband died she moved in with me and lived with us until the end of her days. She always observed all Jewish traditions, had special crockery to follow the kashrut, celebrated Saturdays and often prayed. She died in 1985. We buried her in the Jewish section of the town cemetery. An old Jew said prayers over her grave. Since then I’ve ordered prayers at the synagogue on the days of my mother and father’s death and on remembrance days.

My brother Srul lived with our parents in Makeevka after the war. He finished agricultural college in Melitopol and then worked at the Metallurgical Plant in Makeevka. Uncle Gedali, my mother’s brother, decided to introduce my brother to a girl. Her name was Fira and she lived in Zguritsa. My uncle sent her photograph to my brother and they began to write letters to one another. They decided to get married without even having seen each other. My brother went to Zguritsa where they had a traditional Jewish wedding with a chuppah. The newly-weds moved to Makeevka. Srul and his wife get along very well. They have two daughters: Ania and Tania [Tatiana]. They finished polytechnic college in Novocherkask. We rarely saw each other after the war. He came to Kiev once every 3-4 years, at the most. He supported my mother sending her money and food parcels. In the early 1990s my brother and his family moved to Canada.

When my husband died our son was 15 years old and I decided it was time for him to learn a profession. He finished the Machine Building Technical School in Irpen. He worked as a joiner and turner at the plant and then entered the Metalwork Faculty at the Polytechnic College. At that time perestroika began and people got an opportunity to do business and earn money. My son quit college and began to travel to Poland. He took electric appliances that were in demand in this country and brought back food products to sell in Kiev. Felix lived in Poland for several years. When he returned to independent Ukraine in 1993 he started his own business: training school for masseurs, barbers and make-up specialists. He didn’t make enough money and I decided to help him. I started to learn accounting at the age of 70 to help my son. We were floundering in the world of business until we managed to make our way. My son began to expand his services issuing licenses and registering companies. He owns a big law company now. Felix went back to the polytechnic college, this time he decided to study at the Management Faculty. He finished it successfully and will soon graduate from the Faculty of Law of Kiev State University.

My son married a Russian girl called Margarita. They have an 8-year-old daughter called Karina. She’s my darling granddaughter. She studies in the Jewish grammar school Simcha. She’s very fond of studying Jewish traditions and wants her parents to observe them. I also began to get interested in the Jewish way of life. I can say that my granddaughter helps us to become obedient Jews following traditions and celebrating holidays. Even my Russian daughter-in-law celebrates holidays with us. On Pesach I invited my children, put a dish that I got from my mother with all the traditional food on the table and conducted the seder and my granddaughter asked me the four questions [the mah nishtanah]. On Purim and Chanukkah we attended parties organized by the Kiev Jewish community.

I’m also supported by Hesed. I don’t receive any material assistance from them since my son provides for everything I need, but I enjoy their cultural programs. I have friends there and we celebrate Jewish holidays in the so-called Jewish house and attend parties at Hesed. I also celebrate Sabbath and light candles at home.

I’ve been abroad several times. I went on tour to Czechoslovakia in 1986. In those years, when there wasn’t enough food in our country, I was struck by how much they had of everything. In recent years I visited a friend of mine in Germany, my brother in Edmonton, Canada, and my husband’s brother in Los Angeles, America. I’ve also been in Israel. I liked everything there. I admired and felt proud seeing the garden in the desert that my people had created. I visited several towns and bathed in three seas. I went to the Wailing Wall and visited Christian relics. This is such a Holy Land!

I like traveling, learning new things and meeting with friends, but I always remember a Russian proverb which says, ‘East or West, home is best’. Everything I saw abroad is also in Ukraine now: plenty of goods, beautiful cottages and cars. I like it that people have an opportunity to improve their life and do business, earn money and become rich. I don’t suffer from the terrible poverty that fell on many lonely pensioners. My son supports me financially, buys me expensive tours to health and recreation centers and I share with him what I have saved: the warmth of my soul.

Glossary

[1] Jewish Pale of Settlement: Certain provinces in the Russian Empire were designated for permanent Jewish residence and the Jewish population was only allowed to live in these areas. The Pale was first established by a decree by Catherine II in 1791. The regulation was in force until the Russian Revolution of 1917, although the limits of the Pale were modified several times. The Pale stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, and 94% of the total Jewish population of Russia, almost 5 million people, lived there. The overwhelming majority of the Jews lived in the towns and shtetls of the Pale. Certain privileged groups of Jews, such as certain merchants, university graduates and craftsmen working in certain branches, were granted to live outside the borders of the Pale of Settlement permanently.

[2] Russian Revolution of 1917: Revolution in which the tsarist regime was overthrown in the Russian Empire and, under Lenin, was replaced by the Bolshevik rule. The two phases of the Revolution were: February Revolution, which came about due to food and fuel shortages during WWI, and during which the tsar abdicated and a provisional government took over. The second phase took place in the form of a coup led by Lenin in October/November (October Revolution) and saw the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.

[3] Great Patriotic War: On 22nd June 1941 at 5 o’clock in the morning Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union without declaring war. This was the beginning of the so-called Great Patriotic War. The German blitzkrieg, known as Operation Barbarossa, nearly succeeded in breaking the Soviet Union in the months that followed. Caught unprepared, the Soviet forces lost whole armies and vast quantities of equipment to the German onslaught in the first weeks of the war. By November 1941 the German army had seized the Ukrainian Republic, besieged Leningrad, the Soviet Union's second largest city, and threatened Moscow itself. The war ended for the Soviet Union on 9th May 1945.

[4] Civil War (1918-1920): The Civil War between the Reds (the Bolsheviks) and the Whites (the anti-Bolsheviks), which broke out in early 1918, ravaged Russia until 1920. The Whites represented all shades of anti-communist groups – Russian army units from World War I, led by anti-Bolshevik officers, by anti-Bolshevik volunteers and some Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. Several of their leaders favored setting up a military dictatorship, but few were outspoken tsarists. Atrocities were committed throughout the Civil War by both sides. The Civil War ended with Bolshevik military victory, thanks to the lack of cooperation among the various White commanders and to the reorganization of the Red forces after Trotsky became commissar for war. It was won, however, only at the price of immense sacrifice; by 1920 Russia was ruined and devastated. In 1920 industrial production was reduced to 14% and agriculture to 50% as compared to 1913.

[5] Pogroms in Ukraine: In the 1920s there were many anti-Semitic gangs in Ukraine. They killed Jews and burnt their houses, they robbed their houses, raped women and killed children.

[6] Common name: Russified or Russian first names used by Jews in everyday life and adopted in official documents. The Russification of first names was one of the manifestations of the assimilation of Russian Jews at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. In some cases only the spelling and pronunciation of Jewish names was russified (e.g. Isaac instead of Yitskhak; Boris instead of Borukh), while in other cases traditional Jewish names were replaced by similarly sounding Russian names (e.g. Eugenia instead of Ghita; Yury instead of Yuda). When state anti-Semitism intensified in the USSR at the end of the 1940s, most Jewish parents stopped giving their children traditional Jewish names to avoid discrimination.

[7] Keep in touch with relatives abroad: The authorities could arrest an individual corresponding with his/her relatives abroad and charge him/her with espionage, send them to concentration camp or even sentence them to death.

[8] Bessarabia: Historical area between the Prut and Dnestr rivers, in the southern part of Odessa region. Bessarabia was part of Russia until the Revolution of 1917. In 1918 it declared itself an independent republic, and later it united with Romania. The Treaty of Paris (1920) recognized the union but the Soviet Union never accepted this. In 1940 Romania was forced to cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the USSR. The two provinces had almost 4 million inhabitants, mostly Romanians. Although Romania reoccupied part of the territory during World War II the Romanian peace treaty of 1947 confirmed their belonging to the Soviet Union. Today it is part of Moldavia.

[9] Russian stove: Big stone stove stoked with wood. They were usually built in a corner of the kitchen and served to heat the house and cook food. It had a bench that made a comfortable bed for children and adults in wintertime.

[10] German colonists: Ancestors of German peasants, who were invited by Empress Catherine II in the 18th century to settle in Russia.

[11] Kolkhoz: In the Soviet Union the policy of gradual and voluntary collectivization of agriculture was adopted in 1927 to encourage food production while freeing labor and capital for industrial development. In 1929, with only 4% of farms in kolkhozes, Stalin ordered the confiscation of peasants' land, tools, and animals; the kolkhoz replaced the family farm.

[12] Famine in Ukraine: In 1920 a deliberate famine was introduced in the Ukraine causing the death of millions of people. It was arranged in order to suppress those protesting peasants who did not want to join the collective farms. There was another dreadful deliberate famine in 1930-1934 in the Ukraine. The authorities took away the last food products from the peasants. People were dying in the streets, whole villages became deserted. The authorities arranged this specifically to suppress the rebellious peasants who did not want to accept Soviet power and join collective farms.

[13] Young Octobrist: In Russian Oktyabrenok, or ‘pre-pioneer’, designates Soviet children of seven years or over preparing for entry into the pioneer organization.

[14] Komsomol: Communist youth political organization created in 1918. The task of the Komsomol was to spread of the ideas of communism and involve the worker and peasant youth in building the Soviet Union. The Komsomol also aimed at giving a communist upbringing by involving the worker youth in the political struggle, supplemented by theoretical education. The Komsomol was more popular than the Communist Party because with its aim of education people could accept uninitiated young proletarians, whereas party members had to have at least a minimal political qualification.

[15] October Revolution Day: October 25 (according to the old calendar), 1917 went down in history as victory day for the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. This day is the most significant date in the history of the USSR. Today the anniversary is celebrated as ‘Day of Accord and Reconciliation’ on November 7.

[16] Great Terror (1934-1938): During the Great Terror, or Great Purges, which included the notorious show trials of Stalin's former Bolshevik opponents in 1936-1938 and reached its peak in 1937 and 1938, millions of innocent Soviet citizens were sent off to labor camps or killed in prison. The major targets of the Great Terror were communists. Over half of the people who were arrested were members of the party at the time of their arrest. The armed forces, the Communist Party, and the government in general were purged of all allegedly dissident persons; the victims were generally sentenced to death or to long terms of hard labor. Much of the purge was carried out in secret, and only a few cases were tried in public ‘show trials’. By the time the terror subsided in 1939, Stalin had managed to bring both the Party and the public to a state of complete submission to his rule. Soviet society was so atomized and the people so fearful of reprisals that mass arrests were no longer necessary. Stalin ruled as absolute dictator of the Soviet Union until his death in March 1953.

[17] Molotov, V. P. (1890-1986): Statesman and member of the Communist Party leadership. From 1939, Minister of Foreign Affairs. On June 22, 1941 he announced the German attack on the USSR on the radio. He and Eden also worked out the percentages agreement after the war, about Soviet and western spheres of influence in the new Europe.

[18] Campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’: The campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’, i.e. Jews, was initiated in articles in the central organs of the Communist Party in 1949. The campaign was directed primarily at the Jewish intelligentsia and it was the first public attack on Soviet Jews as Jews. ‘Cosmopolitans’ writers were accused of hating the Russian people, of supporting Zionism, etc. Many Yiddish writers as well as the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested in November 1948 on charges that they maintained ties with Zionism and with American ‘imperialism’. They were executed secretly in 1952. The anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot was launched in January 1953. A wave of anti-Semitism spread through the USSR. Jews were removed from their positions, and rumors of an imminent mass deportation of Jews to the eastern part of the USSR began to spread. Stalin’s death in March 1953 put an end to the campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’.

[19] Mandatory job assignment in the USSR: Graduates of higher educational institutions had to complete a mandatory 2-year job assignment issued by the institution from which they graduated. After finishing this assignment young people were allowed to get employment at their discretion in any town or organization.

[20] Communal apartment: The Soviet power wanted to improve housing conditions by requisitioning ‘excess’ living space of wealthy families after the Revolution of 1917. Apartments were shared by several families with each family occupying one room and sharing the kitchen, toilet and bathroom with other tenants. Because of the chronic shortage of dwelling space in towns shared apartments continued to exist for decades. Despite state programs for the construction of more houses and the liquidation of shared apartments, which began in the 1960s, shared apartments still exist today.

[21] Khrushchev, Nikita (1894-1971): Soviet communist leader. After Stalin’s death in 1953, he became first secretary of the Central Committee, in effect the head of the Communist Party of the USSR. In 1956, during the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev took an unprecedented step and denounced Stalin and his methods. He was deposed as premier and party head in October 1964. In 1966 he was dropped from the Party's Central Committee.

[22] Twentieth Party Congress: At the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 Khrushchev publicly debunked the cult of Stalin and lifted the veil of secrecy from what had happened in the USSR during Stalin’s leadership.

Tibor Engel
Nitra
Slovak Republic
Interviewer: Daša Slobodníková
Date of interview: February 2007

Mr. Tibor Engel is from Gemer [region], from the village of Utekac, which is mainly known for glassmaking. He survived World War II and the Slovak National Uprising 1 as a young boy. For some time he and his brother lived in illegality in Hungary. Later they hid out in the mountains and thanks to good people, and their father’s excellent nature, his eloquence, contacts and finances, their family survived this terrible time. Mr. Engel is a very educated, empathetic and communicative man. He is active in many areas, devotes himself to sport, and loves nature, literature and jazz. Despite the fact that he has lived through a great deal in his life, there’s still the spark of a mischievous boy burning in his eye.

My family background

Growing up

During the war

After the war

Glossary

My family background

My name is Tibor Engel, and I was born on 19th August 1936 in the village of Utekac, part of the municipality of Kokava nad Rimavicou.

I don’t remember my great-grandparents at all, and as I’m a quite late-born child, I’ve also got problems with my grandparents. My maternal grandfather, Markus Polak, was from Hungary, from Balassagyarmat I think. He died in 1936, and was around 80 years old. My grandma, Anna Polakova, was from Namestovo, from Orava [region]. She died at about the age of 80 in 1940, which means that she was born around 1860.

My paternal grandfather, Eduard Engel, was born in Zavadka nad Hronom in 1874, but then settled in Muranska Lehota, and that’s also where he died in 1944. I don’t know where my real grandmother was from. Her name was Berta Grünfeldova. She died in 1914 at the age of 34. Her birth year is likely 1880. Then my grandfather remarried, so that was my second grandmother.

Both my grandfathers were merchants. Muranska Lehota is a very small village, so Grandpa Engel was a universal merchant, a pub owner and a butcher. My grandfather in Kokava had a store with various goods, mixed goods as it was called back then. Their standard of living was relatively bearable, decent for the times. They didn’t have problems making a living. Sometimes it may have been necessary to struggle through life, especially for my grandfather in Muranska Lhota, but he managed to make a living. If we were to judge my grandparents according to the times they lived in, you could classify them as Neolog Jews 2. Basically, they were raised in an on the whole liberal fashion, no Orthodoxy 3. That carried over to my parents as well, and for all practical purposes to us, too.

My grandfather from Muranska Lehota [Engel] spoke Polish, Hungarian, German and of course Slovak. My grandfather from Kokava [Polak] spoke Slovak, but very badly, Hungarian even less, despite being from Hungary, and basically communicated in German. The language of communication in the Polak family was very interesting. Grandma Polakova belonged to Matica [a national Slovak cultural establishment with its headquarters in Martin], and also spoke Slovak with her children. Grandma spoke in very beautiful Slovak. Of course, when she and my grandfather spoke, it was in Hungarian.

Grandpa Engel died in 1944, so I more or less remember him. He wore normal, civilian clothing, and a large mustache, which I apparently used to pull on. Absolutely no one in our family ever wore traditional Jewish outfits 4.

My grandparents’ house in Kokava was one-story, and relatively large. It had a quite large commercial area. I’d say that it was around 15 by 10 meters, and of that 60 percent was a store and storage space. My grandparents’ house had four rooms. We lived in it after the war. It was their second house, because in 1911 Kokava burned down, and so my grandparents built this house between the years 1918 and 1920.

The Engels’ house in Muranska Lehota was smaller. It was more of a farmhouse, with about three rooms. I know that my grandfather had a cow, and also some sheep. There was electricity in Kokava. On the whole it was a civilized town. On both sides of the town were villages with glassmaking factories Zlatno and Utekac. The railway ran through there as well. Muranska Lehota is only a small village even now, and back then it was real backcountry. Even today, it’s only got 40 to 50 houses. Petroleum lights were used for lighting. Up in my grandparents’ attic I found a beautiful brass petroleum lamp with a tall cylinder. They used to have it in the store.

Both sets of grandparents had a garden. The garden in Kokava had around ten or twelve fruit trees of all types. When there was gardening to be done, my grandparents as a rule found someone to take care of it. They usually grew vegetables there.

I mentioned that my grandparents the Polaks had a household helper. I think that my grandparents were able to adapt to Slovak conditions quite well. They were quite well-liked. So they had a decent relationship with the help as well. In fact, when I was in Muranska Lehota a few times, people reminisced about my grandfather. After all, they wouldn’t have elected him to the town council if he wouldn’t have been able to communicate with the local community. My grandparents definitely observed only some Jewish traditions. To be specific, they observed Passover, where rituals and traditions were preserved. As far as I know, they weren’t kosher 5. It was impossible to observe the Sabbath, they were merchants, and so worked on Saturday. I’d say that they attended the synagogue in Kokava during the High Holidays.

My ancestors on the Engel side were leftists. One of my father’s brothers [Jozef Engel] even fought for a certain time, though out of spite, for Kun’s army 6. When the Czechs arrived in 1918 7, they beat him up. But because he was still very young – 16 – they didn’t shoot him, but just gave him a beating. The Engel family was quite liberal. Another uncle [Vojtech Engel], who alas also died in a concentration camp, was a socialist, you could say. They were like this because they were relatively poor. So this elicited a social conscience and way of thinking in them.

As I’ve already mentioned, my grandparents had normal to good relations with their neighbors. There weren’t any conflicts with their neighbors. All their neighbors were non-Jews. They didn’t have any special friendships with their neighbors. I’d call them proper and good relations. Simply put, they had no quarrel with each other. My grandmother from Kokava also had a strong social conscience and also helped many people. Materially as well as financially. They were merchants, and sometimes gave people things without being paid. They’d pay when they could. My grandfather from Muranska Lehota was the same.

I know of one of Grandpa Polak’s brothers who worked his way up to a relatively high position in the Hungarian civil service working for the railway. He lived in Budapest. As far as the Engel side goes, I know my grandfather had a brother. His name was Jozef and also lived in Muranska Lehota, and there was also a sister.

This is a good place for the following story. The Engels had this quality, you could call it an impatient soul. My father mentioned it once, when my grandfather was supposed to travel somewhere. There was no railway in Muranska Lehota, so he used to go catch the train in Muran, which was three kilometers away. Half an hour was plenty of time to walk from Lehota to Muran. When he was supposed to go catch the train at 5am, at 2am he was already banging on his brother Jozef’s door in Muran, for him to come to the station. As far as Grandpa Polak goes, there were stories about his poor Slovak causing many comical situations.

Growing up

I grew up in Utekac, which was a glassmaking community. In the center of the community was a glass factory, which actually supported everyone. The descendants of German colonists living in Utekac worked there. It was all German colonists, who’d come there as glassmakers. Along the street there were typical workers’ houses, colonies. It was a continuous row of one-story houses, with let’s say five or six apartments inside. The roads weren’t asphalt, but paved with stone. There were three cars in Utekac, if I’m correct. The manager of the glass factory had a car, my father had a truck, and I think there was one factory car there.

I know absolutely precisely how many Jewish inhabitants lived in Utekac back then. Our family had four members. Then there were the Grauners, who were five. There was Mr. Krivacek’s family, which was mixed. His wife was a Christian. According to Jewish laws, his three daughters couldn’t be considered Jewish [Editor’s note: Jewishness is inherited from the mother.] It’s quite hard to talk about the Jewish community in Utekac. We knew each other for many years. My parents ran a store that they rented from the glass factory. They also had good relations with the non-Jewish population. Not that they somehow considered us to be completely one of them. But on the other hand, we didn’t have any problems, like the Engels, we never had any real problems with making a living, with getting along with the rest of the community.

There was no synagogue or prayer hall in Utekac. The nearest synagogue was in Kokava nad Rimavicou, which was six kilometers away. There the Jewish community was already a bigger one. They had a rabbi and a shachter [or shochet: a ritual butcher]. Kokava also had a Jewish school. Especially after 1940, it was the only school that Jews were allowed to attend 8.

Before the war, there used to be markets in Kokava, and my mother used to go there from Utekac to sell things. She sold mixed goods. Back then, people we used to call ‘highlanders’ used to come there from far and wide, from the mountains. I remember the later, postwar markets. Some of them had stalls, and some of them sold things without a stall. They were arranged side by side. For example a counter, let’s say three meters long, a pole, covered with canvas, and then all sorts of goods spread out on it. Usually the merchants would spread themselves out on one side of the town square, or sometimes also on the other.

As for the political climate in Utekac, as far as I remember it was primarily a workers’ community. So that basically means that social democracy and communism dominated. Especially social democracy had grassroots support there. This also showed itself in the fact that most of the villagers actively participated in the Slovak National Uprising. It was a very active resistance. During the last days of August 1944, shooting was heard quite often from all sides. My parents’ store stood on this semi-square. There was always something going on there. Someone arrived, someone left. One set of partisans arrived, another left. It would also happen that people that were claiming to be partisans would arrive, and take something from everyone. Then a second set came, and arrested them for being thieves. I even remember very well, this was probably at the end of August 1944, when Allied planes were going to bomb the town of Dubova. They were flying over Utekac. They were heavy bombers with that monotonous droning, and there were many of them.

The first time I noticed anti-Semitism was in the form of minor slights from my elementary school classmates in Kokava. The conditions for this were present in many families. After 1945, it was very risky to publicly express hatred for Jews in our area. Despite this, it took place in various ways. They’d call me a Yid, for example. There was an ice cream vendor in Kokava, from the Balkans, from Montenegro, and whenever I went to buy ice cream, he’d call me ‘chifut’ [from the Turkish word Cühut, or Jew]. I never knew with it meant. Later I found out that it’s a Muslim swear-word for Jew. I was aware of these things, but they didn’t worry me much. Of course, a person realizes these things after the fact.

The first time I felt anti-Semitism in a more serious fashion wasn’t until after 1968 9, when they threw me out of school because I’d expressed my opinion regarding the arrival of the Russians 10 and of Husak 11. I was an employee by then, a teacher at the Faculty of Education in Nitra, and there the purges that took place in the schools had a clear anti-Semitic side to them as well.

My father, Julius Engel, was born on 21st November 1900 in Muranska Lehota, and died in 1976. My mother, Klara, née Polakova, was born on 3rd December 1904 in Kokava nad Rimavicou and died on 27th July 2005. My father was relatively authoritarian, and quite dynamic. More of an extrovert than an introvert. With a very friendly nature. Communicative, good-hearted, but it took me a while before I realized that. He was 166 cm tall [about 5' 5"], and relatively fair-haired, which many times helped him, that he looked quite Aryan. He loved us immensely. But the times we lived in were hard. I’d say that in this regard he crossed a certain line of tolerable parenting methods, but I can understand it. Taking into account the time that he lived in, and taking into account the worries that he had to deal with.

My mother was more of an introvert. She was my father’s ‘inferior,’ though not in a bad sense. Basically just an obedient wife. That’s how my mother was raised. I consider her to be a very good-hearted person. She was a typical woman. Not everything was the way I’d have liked it, later I said to myself many times that it would definitely not have done any harm for her to also defend me from my father, when my father ‘overdid’ it with disciplining me. She wasn’t capable of that.

My father had three years of council school and then was a merchant by trade. My mother had a primary education. My father’s mother tongue was definitely Slovak, and my mother’s tended more towards Hungarian due to my grandfather. Both of them spoke Slovak, Hungarian and German, and normally spoke to each other in three languages. They spoke Slovak with us children, and amongst themselves as well. My mother sometimes had a tendency to go off into Hungarian, but because of where we lived, my father insisted on Slovak.

My parents met in typical Jewish fashion. My father was already a relatively old bachelor, and my mother was a widow. One good aunt came along, I get the impression from Lucenec, who arranged a meeting. At that time my father was already an independent wood merchant, and it was known that my mother was a widow. So they met in 1934, and based on mutual sympathies, a wedding took place. They were married on 6th January 1935 in Rimavska Sobota. My parents dressed in a contemporary, civilian fashion. Their financial situation was acceptable, we didn’t throw money around, but neither did we want for anything.

The house in Utekac where we lived was a two-story council house. We rented it. There was a store on the ground floor, and up above it lived two families. The apartment had two rooms and a kitchen. The larder was out in the hallway. The toilet was outside the apartment as well. The furniture we had was fairly modern. It was actually furniture that my mother had gotten from my grandparents as part of her dowry. It was custom-made furniture, which then traveled along with us. I don’t know if there was running water in Utekac. There was electricity, because the glass factory had its own 110 V generator. The entire village was electrified. Our source of light was light bulbs, like normal. When we lived in Kokava nad Rimavicou, my brother and I had a German shepherd for a time.

For the whole time that my parents had their own store, we had a household helper working for us, who lived with us as well. They both had to be in the store, and we were little, so she actually took care of us children. We had several helpers. In the beginning it was one lady from Utekac. She was very nice. I got to know her after the war as well; we liked each other very much. Her name was Mrs. Migasova. The one that was with us the longest was Mrs. Pavla Vojtekova from Klenovec. She wasn’t Jewish. She was unmarried, and worked for us before the war. During the time of the Slovak State 12, she wasn’t allowed to be with us, that was unthinkable. She worked for us again from right after the war until 1950. She ran the household. I didn’t like her. While I was a good kid, she liked me and I her as well. But then I started misbehaving, so she behaved badly towards me, and then the relationship soured for some time. When she left us I was an adolescent, and it’s not easy to get along with an adolescent. Later, when we met up, it was good again.

My mother was a voracious reader. Our family used to buy decent and high-quality literature. My mother used to give me a lot of books to read, too, so we read at home. My brother and I were encouraged to read. My father read mainly the papers, and not so much literature.

My parents were almost completely non-religious. We observed only some traditions. We weren’t kosher. To this day I remember that one of my greatest joys at Passover was when we got matzot in coffee with milk. We also used to light a candle on the anniversary of someone’s death. We observed the basic traditions, but didn’t really cling to them much. I even remember, mainly from Kokava, that we used to have Christmas with all the trimmings: a tree, cabbage soup and so on. Currently my favorite holiday is Christmas, because our whole family gets together.

My mother was completely apolitical, and my father was a socialist, a leftist. Right after the war, he joined the Communist Party 13 convinced that all bad things were now at an end. In 1949, when the nationalizations began 14 and the anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist wave began, he definitely changed his attitude. My parents basically got along well with their neighbors. Our neighbors weren’t Jews. My father was communicative, and was able to get along with people very well, and you could say that on the whole he was well-liked. Our best friends were one Jewish family that lived in Kokava, Dr. Steiner’s family. My parents were friends mainly with them. They used to visit each other regularly. But they also had non-Jewish friends, and had very good relations with them.

As far as vacations and traveling go, in 1936 my father sent my mother to Grado, Italy. That was her only vacation. Business can’t take a break, and if my father would have taken a break from the store for a week, he’d have lost customers. The store had to be open. That was the basic idea of our whole existence. Aside from that, my mother went to a spa a couple of times.

My father was the oldest of the Engel siblings. Jozef, who was two years younger, worked as a salesman and died in Israel in 1983. He had two sons. Their names are Pavel and Ondrej. Both of them live in Israel. Vojtech, who was also a businessman, was another two years younger. He most likely perished in the Sobibor concentration camp 15. In 1906 Rozalia was born, who had one son. His name was Robert Glück. Robert died in Kosice in 2005, and his mother in Revuca, in 1956.

In January 1914 Mikulas came into the world, who worked as a civil servant, and also perished in a concentration camp. The year when he was born, in the summer, my grandmother died. So five children were orphaned, and he was only a few months old. My grandfather couldn’t remain like that without a woman’s helping hand, and so found himself another wife. Her name was Gizela, and she came to Muranska Lehota with two children. They then had one last child together, Elena, who was born in 1915. I’ve got the impression that she died in 1986 or 1988. She had a daughter and a son.

In the Polak family, the oldest of my mother’s siblings was Eugen, who was probably born in 1894. He died right after World War I, in 1922, of bone tuberculosis. He was a more or less active writer; a poetry collection of his has been found. The next in line was Melania, who was born in 1896; they killed her in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. Next was Ernest, who was born in 1902. He was a pharmacist, and died in a concentration camp. In 1904 my mother was born, then there was another brother of hers, Pavel, who was probably born in 1906, and was a businessman. He died in 1935 I think, of quick pneumonia. The youngest was Edita. Born in 1910, she perished in a concentration camp.

After the war, my parents were mainly in touch with my mother’s brother who’d survived the concentration camp. He lived in Lucenec. We mainly very often saw my father’s second cousin who lived in Muran. We saw Rozalia’s family relatively often. After the war they lived in Revuca.

As far as my childhood goes, I’d separate it into the prewar and the postwar part. During the prewar part, I mainly played near the store in Utekac. I had one friend there, who was born on exactly same day, month and year as I. When in 1945 we moved to Kokava nad Rimavicou, I was starting Grade 4. I grew up as a village boy: fights, wandering around the area, getting into mischief. My elementary schooling is pretty weak, because I didn’t start attending school regularly until 1945. Until then all I had was a few months of Jewish school in Rimavska Sobota, which back then belonged to Hungary 16. I did Grade 1, 2 and 3 through a tutor and exams.

So it wasn’t until 1945 that I began normally attending school. I finished elementary school in Kokava nad Rimavou in 1951. From 1951 to 1955 I attended the Engineering Tech School in Zvolen, where I graduated. I studied at the Institute of Pedagogy, mathematics and physics, from 1959 to 1963, and graduated that year. From 1964 to 1972 I studied at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Technology in Bratislava. Then on top of that, in 1990 I did post-graduate studies at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at CTU in Prague.

In high school I used to hate studying, my interest in school didn’t develop until later. After graduating from high school, I decided that no more school, ever, and despite that, things changed. From what I remember, I probably liked history the best. In elementary school, I liked our history and biology teacher the best. That teacher’s name was Maria Sedmikova. Her husband taught Slovak and Music, and he used to beat us with a bow. In elementary school they used to beat us regularly; they'd bend us over a desk and whip us. I was rather afraid of that Mr. Sedmik. We were also very afraid of the geography teacher, Mr. Roman. I didn’t have a private tutor. In elementary school, there were various after-school activities. I wasn’t bad at ping pong, and began to play chess quite decently. I even played a musical instrument, the double bass. I attended piano lessons for three years.

My friends at school were non-Jews. No one in the class was a Jew except for me. There were about two or three that I got along well with. My friends outside of school were basically the same ones as in school. My friends and I used to get into mischief. We used to wander around the village, and out of naughtiness would grab some fruit from trees here or there. We used to go swimming and biking, and played soldiers.

As a child I didn’t have any special hobbies. Later, from the first year of tech school, I was into motorbikes. You could say that I like technology. As far as membership in clubs went, the Pioneer organization was more or less compulsory. Voluntarily compulsory. In tech school I was in the CSM 17, that was voluntarily compulsory as well. I attended high school in Zvolen, where I lived in private accommodations as well as at a dorm. When I was attending tech school, there was still school on Saturdays, so in Zvolen I’d always run from the school to the train at 1:30pm, and at around 4:30pm I’d be in Kokava. On Sunday it’d be back again at 4:30pm from Kokava to Zvolen. That lasted for four years, every week.

The first time I drove a car was involuntarily, against my will. I was in tech school, first year, and was doing brigade work at one farm machinery repair company where they also did cars. I sat down in a Tatra car, and as I was sitting there, some guys came and turned the ignition key. The car started, and I started and panicked. I was twisting and turning everything I could, but that didn’t help me any, and I and the car ended up in a tree. I demolished the front nicely. That was in about 1952. I got a driver’s license for small motorcycles at the age of 17. But I didn’t begin driving a car until 1970, when my wife and I bought a Trabant. The first time I rode in a train was likely still when we lived in Utekac, but I remember a train ride in Hungary in 1942, on the route from Rimavska Sobota to Budapest.

My and my brother’s [Pavel Spitzer] childhood, as is described here, was very turbulent. There’s a four year age difference between my older brother and I, and in childhood that was a big difference. In a certain sense we lived side by side, but each his own life. We didn’t begin to have a normal childhood until after the war, but there was a large age difference there, and so we had different interests. My brother’s name is Pavel, and my mother had him from her first marriage. He was born in 1932. We see each other, and the older we are, the more we like each other.

Another thing that’s necessary to mention is that in order to save us, our parents converted to the Protestant faith in 1942. After that I also attended Protestant religion for some time, until I closed the door on any sort of religion. We learned some Hungarian and German from our parents, but it wasn’t any sort of purposeful teaching. The older I am, the better I remember my knowledge of Hungarian from my two-year stay in Hungary. Apparently I’m already under the influence of ‘old-age memory.’

During the war

My parents went through a lot during the Holocaust. They survived an unbelievable amount of mental anguish. My brother and I ended up in the ghetto in Rimavska Sobota. Our father got us out of there. We had huge luck. Two months later they sent the whole ghetto to Auschwitz.

In 1941, my father got an Aryanizer for the store; he found him himself. [Aryanization: the transfer of Jewish stores, businesses, companies, etc. to the ownership of another, non-Jewish person – the Aryanizer.] His name was Jozef Valach, and he was a businessman in Valkov, by Ceske Brezovo. He was a very decent man. Thanks to him, my father could stay in Utekac and survive the war there. The friendly relations between him and my parents lasted after the war as well.

In August of 1942, they took me and my brother illegally to Rimavska Sobota, which belonged to Hungary. At that time it was a relatively small town, with several thousand inhabitants. We were at my aunt’s place. During those two months after our arrival in Rimavska Sobota, nothing better occurred to me than to stand in an open window, and sing the Slovak national anthem at the time, ‘Hej Slovaci’ [‘Hey Slovaks’].

After that performance of mine, when I belted out the Slovak anthem, but also for other reasons, our uncle and his wife along with another aunt arranged for us to get into a private children’s home in Budapest. We also experienced hunger there, because there was a food voucher system, and we were there illegally. There were no food vouchers for us. In front of me I can mainly see the huge amounts of carrot fricassee that we ate back then. You ate what you could. My father supported us as well as our uncle in Rimavska Sobota by regularly sending money with the guides that helped with illegal border crossings.

The guides, who used to cross the border at certain times would inform our parents about us. My father’s brother’s wife, Vojtecha, was also hiding in Budapest. She had our picture taken, and had some sound recordings made onto gramophone records for our parents. Our parents had a rough idea of what was going on with us. We didn’t have any information about our parents. That wasn’t talked about.

In 1943, the police caught us in Budapest. But we managed to legalize our stay in Hungary, and we returned to my uncle and aunt’s place in Rimavska Sobota [in Hungarian: Rimaszombathely]. That was in November or December. They didn’t have it easy either, because my uncle wasn’t allowed to practice his profession; he was a lawyer. So he made a living raising angora rabbits for wool. On 19th March 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary 18 and within three or four days, we were transported away. Jews from Rimavska Sobota were gathered into two ghettos. One was at the former high school in Rimavska Sobota, and the second was in a farmyard on the edge of town, which is where we ended up as well.

Back then my father did what was probably the most genial thing he’d ever accomplished. Thanks to the fact that he knew how to deal with people, and that he had certain financial resources at his disposal. Through the regional government office and via his friend Mr. Vojtech Cajchan from Hnuste, who held an important position at the Regional Office, they made up this situation that our parents were going to be tried in Slovakia for smuggling minors into Hungary. In order for them to be prosecuted, the children had to be in Slovakia as the corpus delicti during the trial. This is how Mr. Cajchan arranged it with the mayor of Rimavska Sobota, Dr. Ev. Hungarian policemen took my brother and me from the ghetto. My aunt and uncle stayed, alas.

We were taken to Rimavska Bana, on the border between Hungary and Slovakia. In Rimavska Bana a Slovak soldier, a border guard, took charge of us, and drove us to the Regional Office in Hnuste, where our father was already waiting for us. My mother always used to say that that night, before they brought us to Hnuste, our father turned gray. When I returned home, I didn’t know even a word of Slovak. To prevent any problems, we couldn’t go to Utekac right away, so they took my brother and me to our grandma’s place in Muranska Lehota. There we waited until the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising. That was the first phase of our life during the Holocaust.

In August 1944, we returned to Utekac, where our parents were living. The second phase was characterized by the fact that the Germans started occupying Slovakia, and in October 1944 the uprising was suppressed. On exactly 22nd October 1944, my father loaded our family into a truck. Also with us were the children and wife of his brother Jozef, and another of my father’s sisters-in-law, Elena, who’d in the meantime returned from Budapest. We rode the truck up into central Slovakia.

Overall, it was quite a hard trip. Right the first night, we ran into some rebel soldiers, who were also retreating. They wanted to take my father’s truck, and the commanding officer even drew his pistol on my father. It got smoothed over. The second day we went a little further on. We got to Kysuc. That day, 23rd October, the Germans were already moving along the road from Hrinov to Cierny Balog. We were in a farmhouse where several German shells landed, because the house wasn’t far from the road. Right the same day we went into the forest. My father was a woodsman, and was very good at getting by in the woods. We made a shelter out of branches, and slept in the woods.

The morning of 24th October, we went further. My father was aiming towards Brezno and the Low Tatras. As we were descending towards Cierny Balog, my father stopped at the house of one game warden, talked with him a bit, and then we kept on going. When we’d gone about two kilometers, we met some people coming from Cierny Balog and Brezno, and they told us that the Germans already had Brezno, and were now pushing towards Balog. My father turned the truck around, stopped at the warden’s, they came to some sort of agreement, and he took us into his game preserve and hid us there. The warden’s name was Jozef Vojtko. After the war he received an award from Yad Vashem 19, ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ 20.

So on 24th October we got into the care of Mr. Vojtek. He supplied us with bread and his wife even sewed some ‘kapce’ [shoes made from canvas]. We lived in three various chalets, one after the other. The first one was about 150 meters above the valley’s narrow-gauge forest train tracks. After my parents once saw a German army patrol in the valley, my father camouflaged the cabin a bit, a tall tree stood in front of it, but we didn’t stay there long after that. We moved further on, deeper into the woods. In the second cabin we were once burning wood that wasn’t dry enough, and at twilight the concentrated smoke was quite visible as it was rising up into the sky. So the Germans fired about seven shells in our direction from the road. They were aimed directly at our cabin. We had incredible luck, because the shells only hit the tops of the trees. Then my parents immediately put out the fire, and we didn’t start another one for another two days.

When the villagers began coming for Christmas trees, they discovered us. That why on 1st January 1945 we moved to the third cabin. There I also heard very loud shooting. When the Germans were retreating before the Red Army from Tisov through Cierny Balog, the partisans halted them before Balog and shot a large number of Germans. This took place on 26th or 27th January. Precisely on 1st February 1945, we returned home, to Utekac. To the same Utekac apartment that we’d left. Dishes, pots, furniture, everything was still there. The apartment hadn’t been looted. At the beginning of April we moved to my grandparents’ house in Kokava nad Rimavicou.

My parents spent the whole war in Slovakia, but it was very complicated. During the time of the transports from Slovakia, my father was for a certain time the only member of the family to remain in Utekac. He sent my mother elsewhere as well. For some time she was in hiding in Banska Bystrica. How did my father manage to save the family? In the first place, his business didn’t represent competition for anyone, because he was the only one in Utekac. His ability to communicate with people was another very important thing. The third was the he had the means and opportunity to bribe people. My father, rest his soul, always used to say that sometimes a crown is a hundred crowns, and sometimes a hundred crowns is a crown. You need to know how, when, where, to whom, and mainly to use money in the right place.

As far as family members go, my mother’s sisters Melania and her husband and Edita perished in a concentration camp. The same as their brother Ernest. On my father’s side they murdered two brothers, Vojtech and Mikulas.

After the war

In 1945 a certain pause occurred in the persecution of Jews in Czechoslovakia. But everything started up again at the beginning of the 1950s 21. But it was no longer called anti-Jewish persecution, but they were after Zionists 22. What this meant in practice was that they once again began persecuting all the Jews in the country. Emigration to Israel was definitely discussed many times at home, but in the end my father felt himself to be a Slovak, and felt at home here. So that decided it. He also didn’t believe that something like what then came could happen.

There were two waves of emigration from those around us. My cousins moved to Israel in 1949, and other friends and relatives in 1968 23. Each one had a number of reasons to decide one way or the other. So I basically don’t judge who did what. Both my parents have since died, and are buried in Bratislava. Their funeral was at a crematorium, which is in absolute contravention of the Jewish religion. It was a civil funeral.

I met my wife during my university studies. I was attending her lectures. I was this elderly student, because I didn’t continue my studies until four years after my high school graduation. After finishing high school I worked as a miner, and this occupation was greatly valued. In 1959 I applied to university, and after being accepted I also got a regional stipend, precisely because of my previous employment. In 1960 I met my wife through Russian which is what she used to lecture me in.

My wife isn’t Jewish. This was absolutely not a decisive factor for me. What decided it were human, personal qualities. This type of thing had already taken place in our family, so we didn’t surprise my parents in any way. We were married on 5th August 1961 at the Nitra Town Office. My wife’s name is Olga, née Stasova. She was born on 20th January 1935. Her mother tongue is Slovak. She’s a university lecturer in Russian literature.

My first job after graduating from high school was in the former Skoda Works in Dubnice nad Vahom. At that time they were named the K. J. Voroshilov Works. It was an arms factory. I worked there until February 1957. From February 1957 to January 1958 I worked for the Vitkovice Steel Works, at first in Vitkovice, and then in a subsidiary in Bratislava, as a designer. From January 1958 to August 1959 I worked as a miner, a brigade worker in the Novaky coal mines, in the Youth Mine in Novaky. From there I then left to go study at the Faculty of Education in Nitra.

In 1966 I began working at the Faculty of Education in Nitra as a teacher. That was my Alma Mater. In 1970 they threw me out of there for political reasons. In the meantime I’d begun distance studies at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. In 1971 to August 1972 I taught at elementary school around Nitra. From August 1972, after ending at STU, I got a job at a construction company in Nitra, where I worked in various positions until 1st May 1986.

In 1986 I was accepted, after winning a competition, at a branch of the Technical Standards Research Institute here in Nitra. It was the Czechoslovak Technical Standards and Quality Institute here in Nitra. The institute was named the Czechoslovak Technical Standards and Quality Institute in Bratislava, and was run directly by the Federal Technical Standards Measurement Office. The federal office was at the level of a ministry, and we were its research facility. I worked there until 1990. That year I was politically rehabilitated. I returned to the faculty and I worked there until 2003. For a certain time I was also the assistant dean of the school.  I still have certain activities, I still go teach.

I think that I got along well with my students, and with my colleagues, too. When I sometime come to the department, my former colleagues are friendly. They invite me to many events put on by the department where I worked. I didn’t like going into retirement. I’m 67, but wasn’t a docent, so it was completely natural that I had to make way for someone younger. But on the other hand, it wasn’t some sort of tragedy, because I still taught for another year on contract. To this day, they still invite me to give lectures at the Methodical Education Center in Bratislava, so I survived my retirement without any sort of big trauma. Even now, I’m still not bored. I go to play tennis with my friends. I’ve got a garden where I feel very good, and go skiing with my son. I’ve got an Internet connection, which is excellent entertainment. I’ve got a little workshop in the basement, where I can work on my hobbies.

During the years 1965-1970, my colleagues and I used to go on one-day ski trips. Often we’d even have week-long ski trips with the faculty. Lately my wife and I have been going on vacation to Croatia for a week each year. We were on vacation in Hungary. In 1992 I was in Israel for 20 days visiting my cousin. We also went on vacation to Poland, to Krakow, and now, after 1990 24, I finally got to the West as well. Until then I’d never been in the West. I go on vacations only with my family and now with my wife.

I’ve got two sons; both of them were born in Nitra, in 1963 and 1965. Neither of them attended nursery school; their grandmother took care of them. Both of them attended elementary school in Nitra. The older one did high school and two years of economics. The younger one is a mechanical engineer. I tried to raise them to be proper and educated people. My sons were friends with everyone in their class. I didn’t raise them according to Jewish traditions; for starters, ours is a mixed marriage. They know what sort of family I come from. They know my roots very well. One could say that my wife and I are atheists, and that’s also how we raised our children.

I told them about what I lived through during the war, and even now we sometimes revisit various episodes from what my wife and I lived through. I summarized that period of my and my brother’s Holocaust from August 1942 to February 1945 into seven pages as a reminiscence of that time. They’re my memoirs, as well as a record of what I heard from my parents and relatives.

My older son was an extremely spirited child. At the age of 13, he took my Trabant and a classmate and they decided to go to Poland. Luckily my Trabant had more sense. The car stopped in Cetin [Maly Cetin: a town in the Nitra region]. Then one colleague of mine called me to tell me what had happened, and I had to come for the car and for my son. There were more such episodes...

I wasn’t sad when our children began leaving home. It didn’t happen all at once. We have them at home regularly, so we don’t have a feeling that our children are absent. Our older son’s university entrance interviews were stressful for us. Due to my political sanctions, he wasn’t accepted at the university where he wanted to study. Our younger one also had a very hard time getting into the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, but that was his only chance of getting into university. He also didn’t go in the direction he would have liked. Our younger son is single. The older one has a family of his own. Both of our sons are employed. The younger one is in Bratislava during the week, and at the end of the week he comes to our place to visit.

Overall, I like books on history best. I’m very interested in the history of World War II. I read a lot of literature on the Holocaust. I basically read everything that I get my hands on. My wife and I try to live in a cultural fashion. We attend exhibitions, concerts, the theater and other cultural events. The last thing we were at was Chagall 25 in Vienna. We of course watch television. The Internet is also an excellent source of culture.

I get together with my brother, naturally. We’re in touch very often through the Internet with our second cousin who lives in Switzerland. We also use the Internet to communicate with one cousin in Israel, and correspond by mail with the other one. I’ve got a very good friend with whom I garden in [the town of] Lapas. Then there are various get-togethers, depending on whether I’m playing chess or tennis. I of course meet with my Jewish friends that live in Nitra, too. I never discuss Judaism and Jewishness with my non-Jewish friends. Quite often I discuss this subject with Mr. Alexander Potok. We’ve got quite a few themes like this of immediate concern to both of us. I don’t regard being Jewish as a religion. I perceive it and identify myself with it as an ethnicity.

I currently observe the same holidays as most people living in Slovakia. During totalitarian times, Christian holidays adapted to the times, and were presented to the public as holidays of the people. That means that for us Christmas serves mainly for us to gather with our entire Nitra family. We make utterly traditional Slovak Christmas foods, cabbage soup with sausage and mushrooms. Then we serve fried carp and potato salad.

My memories of the first half of the 1950s are very unpleasant. It was another stage in the persecution of Jews, under the guise of anti-Zionism. My father was even jailed for a week in connection with Slansky 26. In 1951 my mother was preparing to take me to Prague. My health wasn’t completely in order. In the store that my father managed worked the wife of the Kokava police chief. They were probably the informers who construed a supposed contact with Slansky out of my mother’s planned departure for Prague. One Saturday, when I was a tech school student, the secret police 27 came, searched our house, and took my father with them. The next Saturday, when I came home from school, my father came home. He never wanted to tell me what he’d experienced. But apparently it wasn’t easy, all I know is that they wouldn’t allow him to lie down. They forced him to stand on one leg. They didn’t shut off the light in the cell and so on. After a week they released him.

In 1965 I joined the Party. A political thaw was beginning, and I believed that one could survive there. In a certain fashion I joined out of belief, not to mention there being also a bit of careerism in it. But it didn’t last long for me. By 1969 I was already thrown out; I was disobedient, rebellious.

I perceived the arrival of democracy in Czechoslovakia after 1989 as a very positive thing. The most important thing for me was that the barrier between Israel and Slovakia completely disappeared, and at last I could communicate normally with my relatives. The border with the West also opened up. After the fall of Communism, I felt and also feel much freer. Currently I’m a member of the Jewish religious community in Nitra. My old friends are there, whom I get along with very well.

Glossary:

Bedrich Hecht
Nitra
Slovak Republic
Interviewer: Dasa Slobodnikova
Date of interview: July 2006

Mr. Bedrich Hecht is energetic, vital and extremely active. He is a person that talks openly about his opinions, thoughts and feelings. He has traveled extensively, has a wide scope of knowledge, and is constantly interested in events at home and abroad. His fate has been marked by many experiences that have shaped his life. Despite everything that he has lived through, his reminiscences concern themselves mainly with nice and pleasant stories about those nearest and dearest to him, who Mr. Hecht still carries with him in his heart.

My family background

Growing up

During the war

After the war

Glossary

My family background

My grandparents were from Slovakia. My father’s parents lived in Svrbice [a town in the Topolcany region – Editor’s note], I don’t precisely know if it was the Hlohovec or the Topolcany region. My paternal grandfather was named Filip Hecht, and my grandmother was named Janka, née Weiss. I don’t remember my grandparents, all I know about them is what my father told me. In Svrbice my grandfather had a smaller farm, a store and a pub. In the store he sold sugar, salt and flour, a typical village shop, and he also had a pub. He and his wife served people in the store and pub. He also had a helper from the village. They were open every day. In the pub they sold mostly brandy. But later he sold his property and moved to Preselany [a town in the Topolcany region – Editor’s note]. There he bought a farm, which then expanded. After some time he bought another farm, and also owned a distillery. My grandparents on my father’s side had six children, three sons and three daughters. But the oldest son, Natan, died young, as he had a heart defect. My grandfather’s two sons then remained on the farms. My uncle Henrich ran the farm in Preselany, and the farm in Vycapy fell to my father, Aladar. The farming estate was named Maly Chosen.

Another thing I know about Grandpa Filip Hecht is that he was a very hard-working and
frugal person. He lived with my father when he married my mother. He took care of the cows and milk. He was so frugal that he used to ration my parents’ food. He didn’t give them as much as they wanted. My mother used to tell me that Grandpa Hecht liked my brother [Pavol Hecht] very much, because he was his firstborn grandson. So they would always tell him to go ask for milk. In Preselany my grandfather concerned himself just with farming. He also owned a distillery, which he got from Count Aponyi, who ran up a debt with my grandfather, and he bought that distillery from him.

My father also had three sisters. One, named Aranka, Zlatica [The Hungarian Aranka and the Slovak Zlatica are two version of the same name] married some Steiner in Subcarpathian Ruthenia 1. Another of my father’s sisters was married and lived in Tesarske Mlyny in the Nitra region, I don’t know what her name was. My father’s third sister was named Janka, and married someone in Hungary. There, she was named Brak. But I can’t say when exactly they were born. The one that lived in Subcarpathian Ruthenia was older than my father. Janka was younger than he was.

My paternal grandparents weren’t very religious; the Adlers were more religious, but my mother was the least religious of them, because she was the youngest. They dressed in a modern fashion for the times; they didn’t wear traditional garments, but both grandmothers wore wigs. My maternal grandparents are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Nitra, and my father’s parents are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Preselany.

The house in Preselany where my parents lived with my grandfather was quite nice. It was an oblong house with six rooms. Then my father moved to Vycapy [Vycapy Opatovce], to the Maly Chosen estate. There was this one burned-out building there that he had fixed up. The estate had a manor-house with seven rooms, which is where we lived. Both houses had a kitchen, a larder and a washroom. It was furnished in a modern fashion for the times, back then low closets were in fashion. One could say that it was more luxurious furniture than nowadays. I had one brother [Pavol], and we shared a room so that we wouldn’t be lonely. In Preselany we had electricity as well as running water. In Chosen there wasn’t any electricity, and we used petroleum lamps. There was a well there, from which water was pumped to a tank, as there were no water mains. Not everyone had running water because it was expensive. The village didn’t have water mains. That means that everyone had to have a well and some sort of motor with which water was pumped into a tank, and from there a pipe led water into the house. Otherwise, you went to the well and drew water with buckets, and carried them home. Only wealthier people had running water.

My mother’s parents were from Preselany. My grandfather was named Jakab Adler, and my grandmother was Rachel. They also farmed. I don’t remember my grandfather, but I do remember Grandma. My cousin Viliam, who died during the Slovak National Uprising 2, and I used to vex her when we were little. I remember how we used to constantly pester her for money that she’d made from selling milk.

Grandpa Adler was a devout man. He lived life as it was normally lived in villages; there was a community there, and they also had a prayer hall. Grandpa Hecht, from what people who knew him say, was approachable and hard-working. He was quite aloof, and wasn’t like my father, who was a more merry type. He would go to dances, was more cultured, lived a more cultural life. The old people were more in the background. I don’t remember my grandparents’ siblings and their children at all.

All my grandparents spoke Hungarian because they had attended Hungarian schools, German, and of course Slovak. I also learned Hungarian, but I only speak ‘kitchen Hungarian’. Most of the time we spoke Slovak, but as there were many Hungarians in Vycapy, we also used to speak Hungarian, and German less so.

The house where we lived also had a garden. We had fruit trees and grew vegetables for our own consumption. The farm had employees, as we had a medium-large farm. My mother had a household helper. As far as I know, my grandmothers also had household helpers. Our helpers did housework. They weren’t from the village that we lived in. They were usually from nearby villages, from Lefantovce or Cetin. They lived in the house with us, and had their own room. They were always single young women. I remember two of our helpers the best. One was from Cetin, was an old maid and was a homebody. She was named Agnes. She was an older, conscientious woman. I don’t know exactly how long she worked for us, about five or seven years. The other helper was from Lefantovce. She was named Stefa [Stefania]. The farm workers were full-time employees. I think that they were called hinds. They worked all year long for a certain salary, and also got grain and a place to live. During seasonal work, seasonal workers would come; they would come in the spring to cultivate sugar beets and corn, and then worked during the harvest. Back then it was scythed by hand, there were no combines. We had horse-drawn harvesters. The farm had seven or eight employees. There were more seasonal ones. Back then the term pairs was used. Fourteen pairs used to come to do work, which is 28 people. The people that worked for us weren’t Jews. Neither the full-time workers nor the seasonal ones.

In the village we lived alongside non-Jewish residents. We only had neighbors on one side, on the other side was our farm. We had good relations with our neighbors. While we were still living in Preselany, our neighbors’ house burned down. They were named the Petriks, and were saddlers. I remember how my brother and I brought them everything that we found at home. We even brought them our mother’s shoes, and when our mother wanted to go out, she had nothing to put on her feet. I can’t say much about how our neighbors helped us, because we didn’t need anyone’s help. We had our own employees. But when our neighbors needed something, our parents helped them, because we were a little on the wealthier side. For example when they had little children, my mother would give them milk and didn’t take any money from them. That’s what relations with our neighbors were like. We gave what we didn’t need ourselves.

We used to spend our vacations at home. My brother used to often go to Hungary to Aunt Janka’s. He was there mostly during the summer. I was at home. We attended school all year round, I attended school in Nitra, where I also lived. During vacations we would come home, and our father would always wake us up around 4:00, 4:30 a.m. Our mother would often reproach him for not letting us sleep, but he used to say: “Let them learn what life is like.” We had to get up, go to the stables, and take care of the animals. We had to learn how to work. In this sense, our father raised us quite strictly. I also had to help out on the farm quite early on. When the time of persecutions arrived, the poor guy fell ill. He had a hard time dealing with the time when they were confiscating property 3, the arrival of the Guardists 4 and so on. He got a brain hemorrhage, and at the age of 19 I had to take care of the whole farm. I also had to end my high school studies. Finally the numerus nulus [the complete expulsion of Jews from schools – Editor’s note] also came, and they threw us Jews out of school. I didn’t finish school until after the war, by correspondence, when I survived and returned home. Then I did a four year agricultural high school diploma. During summer vacation I used to ride my bicycle to the river to go swimming with other young people. During the fall and spring we used to play marbles. Back then there weren’t any camps. In the city there were clubs, there they maybe went to camp, that’s possible, but not in the villages.

My father had been brought up the same way. He’d also spent the holidays at home as a child. When he was young, he had to help out on the farm. His parents didn’t allow him to go on any trips. During summer vacation our mother would go to the Sliac spa for a week or ten days. Our father would come to see her, but the next day would go home, as there was farm work to be done. There weren’t so poor, but neither were they so rich that they could afford vacations. When I was small my mother used to take me with her to Sliac. My mother used to go for procedures, and I would go for walks. We’d go out, and because there were other children there too, we capered about and played together. My mother went to the spa every second or third year. She had health problems, but she would also go there to take a break.

My parents respected their parents. What was funny was that two brothers, that is my father’s brother Henrich and my father, married two Adler sisters. The Adlers weren’t very thrilled by the fact that my father wanted to marry my mother. They said that they already had one Hecht, as his brother was already married to my mother’s sister. But they couldn’t do much about it. My mother had a brother in Vycapy [Vycapy Opatovce: a town in the Nitra region – Editor’s note], and that’s where they took her so that my father couldn’t see her. But that wasn’t a problem for my father. He got on a horse and went. My grandpa Hecht was also against it, because my father had the possibility of marrying a rich woman. In those days they used to arrange marriages, and they had arranged a richer woman for him than was my mother. But he didn’t want her. I remember my mother telling me that my father’s parents went to Topolcany to see the rabbi, to get advice as to what they should do so that my father wouldn’t marry my mother. The rabbi said: “Do you know what? You can’t prevent it. Those that are against it will die, and they’ll get married anyways.” Not even a year went by, and Grandma died [Janka Hechtova, née Weiss]. So then Grandpa Hecht was no longer against the wedding. Then my parents lived together with Grandpa in one house. My father used to go see my mother, he was this dandy. They were going by train, back then trains were slow, and he would ride on a horse beside the train and they’d talk through the window. He was the type of person that wouldn’t let himself be dissuaded. Grandpa knew that he used to go see my mother, even though they tried to prevent it. Often he’d say to him: “Aladar, lend me your horse, I’m going to Nitra.” And he’d lend him his horse, because my father had his own horse. Grandpa would arrive in Vycapy on Father’s horse, and the horse would turn into the courtyard where my mother lived with her brother. He had to let the horse go, entered the courtyard, there he’d turn around and continue on his way. These are the memories I have.

My mother was born in 1893 in Preselany. My father was born in Svrbice. Both of them attended the high schools there. My mother had girls’ school, and my father agricultural school. Their mother tongue was Slovak, as in Svrbice people didn’t speak anything else but Slovak. They also spoke German and Hungarian. Like my grandparents, they also made a living by farming. My mother’s older sister married my father’s older brother. She was named Cecilia and my father’s brother was Henrich. They got married in Preselany and lived across from us. My father was attracted to my mother, and he wanted very much to have her for his wife. And he did whatever he had to, to be able to marry her. Finally they were married. So their marriage wasn’t arranged. They were married in 1918 in Preselany. They brought a canopy [Chuppah: a canopy under which the couple stands during the wedding ceremony – Editor’s note], and under that canopy they were married. They had a clerical wedding.

My father was a soldier during World War I. He worked in supply, and wasn’t directly at the front. I don’t know any stories from his army days.

In my opinion, about 15 or 16 Jews lived in Preselany and in Vycapy. Both towns had a Jewish prayer hall. There was also a cantor there. Rabbis were only in the city. On Saturday, ten people [minyan; a minimum of ten men above the age of 13 necessary for prayer – Editor’s note] would always gather. When there weren’t enough men, they’d go to the neighboring village, because Jews have this custom that there have to be ten to be able to have prayers. These villages had up to 20 Jews. There were also very poor ones. Ones that went around on a single horse and bought old rags. There was also a butcher, a store owner, and also farmers. One could say that they were wealthier people, but also fairly poor ones. The middle class too, they also had their own stores. The richer ones would give the poorer ones something, if they had a lot of children. And when the holidays came, they would give them some gifts. We weren’t segregated in the village. We played together with the rest of the children.

There was a cantor in the village, who at the same time was also the shachter [shachter: ritual butcher – Editor’s note]. He butchered poultry, because in those days my parents kept kosher 5. They had poultry butchered, and of course meat as well. There was a butcher who butchered animals in Vycapy as well as in Preselany. I know that for fairly certain. They used to visit the surrounding villages that didn’t have prayer halls, like for example Koniarovce and Belince.  They butchered beef cattle and poultry up to the time, if I’m not mistaken, until 1942. Then they stopped, because at that time the transports 6 began. They took most of the cantors away to camps, and at that time it stopped. There was one cantor who also taught children religion. During the annual holidays, let’s say the Long Day [Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement: the most celebrated day in the Jewish calendar. The day of “cleansing of sins”. Fasting is observed – Editor’s note], he always invited someone who would help him pray. And someone would come from a city where they had rabbinical schools, where rabbis studied. The cantor’s duties spanned the whole day. He prayed, he want around butchering. He taught children religion, that was his work. The community [Jewish religious community] gave him a salary, because the way it was back then was that people paid dues. I don’t know how much, but they paid them. He was then paid from the dues paid to the community.

Villages didn’t have ritual baths. People used to go to the cities for that. They were in Nitra and Topolcany. Women usually went to the ritual baths when their days ended. Once a month, they went to cleanse themselves. Men didn’t go to ritual baths. It was a women’s thing, at least that’s how I remember it. My father never went, so that’s how I know.

Growing up

There weren’t Jewish schools in the villages. There they had normal, state schools. I also attended a normal school with other children. It was a state school. Just the first three years, I attended in Topolcany. There I think there was a Jewish school, and there was a Jewish school in Nitra too. They taught in German at the one that I attended for the first three years. Then I attended a Slovak state school. I know how to read Hebrew, but I don’t know what I’m reading. I learned Hebrew letters, but they have to be the ones with punctuation below them [Hebrew alphabet: originally had only consonants and wasn’t capable of expressing vowels. Gradually, methods of indicating vowels in the text were introduced. So-called vowel punctuation, in Hebrew nikud, was introduced – Editor’s note]. Say, in the Torah, there are letters without punctuation, which I don’t know how to read. But in the prayer hall, where the punctuation is, I can read it. After that I have to read the translation so that I know what I’m reading. There was a rabbinical school in Nitra. Neither I nor my brother attended it. We weren’t as religious as that. The head of yeshiva in Nitra was Weissmandl 7, who was an important rabbi. It’s a quite well-known name. When the Germans were already here, he arranged that the bocherim [students] who were studying to be cantors and rabbis could remain here.

There were no markets held in the village; we used to go to the city. My father would go to the market in either Topolcany or Nitra. But most often he’d go to Topolcany. There he’d buy geese from village women, and those would be then fattened up at home for our own consumption. Then our father used to go to fairs to buy cattle. He took me with him a couple of times. When he had bought everything and one piece remained to be bought, he let me do the negotiating. He’d just walk behind me and laughed at my bargaining. He didn’t care at that point whether I bought something for more or for less. We went to the fair every year in the fall, in October, when the cattle were being driven from the pastures to the villages. The purchased cattle were then transported by rail to us, and were fattened up. The fattened cattle were then supplied to slaughterhouses in Prague. There wasn’t any interest in other types, because everything else could be bought in stores. My brother didn’t go to the fairs with our father, because he wasn’t interested in farming. He wanted to be a lawyer, but then the era of the Slovak State 8 arrived, so he couldn’t become a lawyer, and instead studied to be a veterinarian. So then he did that for a living, but he wasn’t interested in farming.

I don’t remember the political situation during my childhood. I only know that sometimes there’d be strikes. People that made a living working in agriculture wanted higher wages, so then they would strike. I remember that. But they always came to an agreement, the strikes never lasted long. There were also party meetings, when the Slovak State began, and when the Hlinka Guards 4 arrived. I wouldn’t say that my parents had some sort of political opinions. Why, I don’t even know what parties there were back then. As farmers, they likely were more inclined towards the Agrarian Party. I’m just assuming that, because it defended the interests of farmers. My parents weren’t members of any political party, or social or cultural organization.

I can’t say that I felt any anti-Semitism as a child. Certainly here and there someone said something, but not to your face. In school it for example never occurred to me that someone would have called me a Jew, or something similar. My friends also never said anything like that to me either. We got along well. This type of thing didn’t appear until the Slovak State was created. Then there were cases of certain students keeping their distance and shunning you. Some Jewish boys cried when they had to leave school, and there were two or three to be found whom it made happy. But that’s the way it was in those days.

We were farmers, and farmers always had problems. We never had money to burn. When there were some financial resources, they were always put into modernizing the farm. But we always had everything we needed. On the other hand, our father never gave me or my brother spending money. When I was attending school in Nitra, I got quite limited pocket money. There was one store here, I remember it even now, named Jung. I was free to take what I wanted in that store. When I was hungry, I could go and take a bun with salami, a banana, fruit, and he’s mark it down. I had friends in school that were poorer. And when I went there, I’d give them a bun as well. And my father never asked me how I could have eaten so many buns. He didn’t care about that. But he never gave me money, and used to say: “You’re not going to go to the pub for beer and go bad.”

In the beginning my parents lived with my grandfather. My grandfather died in 1923. Then my parents lived alone. In 1932 we moved from Preselany to Vycapy. We sold our house in Preselany, because no one from the family was interested in living in it. We also had a dog and cats. A village household wasn’t complete without them. When I was older, we had a dog. When I went to the village, or by coach to the city, that dog waited for me by the gate. He was a mongrel, and was named Cezar.

We didn’t have many books at home. We didn’t have religious books, as we weren’t all that religious. We mainly had novels. My parents read, but not that much. My father was a farmer, and always had work to do. He was either at home and went outside, or went to town to arrange something. My mother took care of the household. Village life was quite limited. In school we got certain books that we had to read. My parents didn’t have access to newspapers. When my father went to town he bought them, but you couldn’t get them in the village.

My parents weren’t that religious. I’m not saying that they didn’t observe things. The way things were on Friday evening [Sabbath] was that there was a Sabbath supper during which we prayed. We baked barkhes. And also the annual holidays, when they were. They ate kosher up until 1942, while the butcher butchered poultry. On Saturday they attended synagogue. When I was attending high school in Nitra, I attended synagogue there. Now it’s very nicely fixed up; it was Neolog. That interested me more, because the Orthodox had a synagogue in Parovce [a Nitra town quarter – Editor’s note]. There was a choir there and they sang, which for me as a young boy was more interesting, they weren’t so religious. It was more accessible there. We observed holidays. During Passover [Passover: commemorates the departure of the Israelites from Egyptian captivity and is characterized by many regulations and customs. The foremost is the prohibition of consuming anything containing yeast – Editor’s note] we ate matzot. During those eight days, when we really didn’t eat bread at home, we ate matzot. We observed that mainly up to 1942. Even now, when it’s Passover, matzo flour is brought in from Israel. They sell it here in Nitra at the Jewish community. So even now we buy it and use it, it’s just not observed as strictly as it used to be. My parents were members of the Jewish community, but didn’t have any function in it. Back then everyone was a member, as a certain monthly due was paid. The Jewish community in the village or town functioned from that.

I didn’t study Hebrew in school. I didn’t attend cheder or yeshiva. My parents didn’t teach me Judaism, as they weren’t that religious. During the Sabbath we didn’t read from a book. We went to synagogue, where we prayed, and after synagogue we went home. I had a bar mitzvah [bar mitzvah - “son of the Commandments”, a Jewish boy that has reached the age of thirteen. A ceremony, during which the boy is declared to be bar mitzvah, from this point on he must fulfil all commandments of the Torah – Editor’s note]. I was 13 at the time and was attending high school. My bar mitzvah was in Vycapy. We were in the synagogue, I had this speech, we said the necessary prayers in the synagogue, and then there was a feast. We had lunch together. We called together our immediate family and friends, and there was a party. I also got gifts from family members on my father’s and mother’s side. I don’t remember exactly what, but I got a camera, a watch and a suit. I don’t like holidays, they don’t thrill me. You have to observe certain rules, and you’re not as free. That gets in my way.

My parents had good relations with their neighbors, who weren’t Jews. My parents’ friends were both Jews and non-Jews. So half and half. Among their friends were also a priest, a notary and a teacher. Because Jews that had large farms were our competition, my parents saw them less.

My mother had two brothers, Vojtech and Zigmund, and two sisters, Cecilia and Gizela. Vojtech lived in Preselany, and Grandma [Rachel Adlerova] lived with him. Her other brother lived in Vycapy. Vojtech had one son, Viliam, who fell as a partisan. He was two years older than I. He also had a daughter, Heda she was called, who was a year younger than I. She died in a concentration camp. My mother’s sister Cecilia had two sons. One was named Ladislav, and the other was named Tibor, and her daughter was Ibolya. Ibolya married a doctor in Hungary. She died along with her two daughters in a concentration camp. Ladislav also died in a concentration camp. Tibor and Aunt Cilka returned home after the war. They lived here in Nitra, in the apartment below us. Them I remember very well. My mother’s sisters were older. Cilka was the oldest. Gizka was in the middle. One died the next year after the other. My mother saw her siblings often. They got along well, and with my cousins too. We lived near each other, and for example on Saturday, when there was time in the afternoon, we’d go visit, or they’d come to our place. We saw each other constantly.

As I’ve already mentioned, I was born in 1924 in Preselany. I didn’t go to nursery school, basically my mother brought me up, as she was at home. I didn’t have a nanny, but for one year in Vycapy I had a teacher. At that time I was attending people’s school, and apparently so that I wouldn’t have to commute to school, I had a teacher for one year. He taught me all subjects. When I was little I liked to play. I used to run around the courtyard, played marbles, kicked a ball around and broke windows. We played together with other children. In the village we romped about in hay and on haystacks.

When I was 6, I began attending school; as I’ve already mentioned, the first three years I attended elementary school in Topolcany, then I attended high school in Nitra. When I was attending school in Nitra, I didn’t have very much spare time. I had to study. It’s hard to say which subjects were my favorite. Probably geography and history. In high school we had this one professor. He was named Schüt, and was Czech. We liked him. He taught us geography. He was a very approachable person. We used to go skating with him. Well, and what student likes a teacher that gives him an F? I didn’t have a teacher who I didn’t totally dislike. I didn’t perceive any anti-Semitism from my classmates and teachers. Up to 1942 it was an equal relationship. I didn’t go to any activity clubs after school. Just religion was compulsory, which I attended. Then in the winter we used to skating, and in the summer swimming. Ninety percent of my friends in school weren’t Jews. We got along very well, even today I still meet up with the ones that are still alive. My friends outside of school were also not Jewish. When I was in the village, we played soccer together, rode bikes, in the summer we swam, and so on. That’s what village life was like in those days.

My hobby was farming. It had interested me since I was small. When I came home from school, I threw my schoolbag in the corner and ran outside, out to the courtyard, out to the fields. Except for school, I didn’t devote my time to political, sports or cultural activities. Only when the school held some sort of event, then I took part. I also wasn’t a member of any club. We spent Saturdays like a workday. Back then we attended school on Saturdays.

I remember the first time I drove a car. My father had a car, now I don’t know what year it was, whether 1941 or 1942. I liked driving very much. I learned to drive when I was still little, on a tractor. It simply interested me. Our driver had to join the army, and my father had to go to Bratislava with a notary from Jelsovec. So I drove, and at that time I didn’t have a driver’s license, nothing. I had to sit on a suitcase so that I could see better, and reach the pedals, and I drove to Bratislava. We of course didn’t go into the town. We stopped before Bratislava, I remember that. Our car was a Skoda. I think my father bought it in 1939.

I don’t remember the first time I took a train. I only remember my parents taking me to Budapest when I was 5 or 6. We arrived in Budapest in the evening, and when we stopped, Budapest was all lit up, which I’d never seen before. So back then I told my parents how nicely lit up it was, beautiful. It was the first time in my life I’d seen a city lit up like that. I ate with my parents in a restaurant. I don’t remember it exactly. They took me to a restaurant when I was bigger. For example, I went with them to Hungary, at that time we ate in a restaurant, but I don’t remember the details.

During the war

My brother and I didn’t have a bad childhood. We got along well. I have to say that he was a different type from me. He wasn’t interested in farming, he was more of a fun-loving type. During the summer he was more often at our aunt’s in Hungary, and he attended school, high school, in Bratislava. We got along well, and also survived [the war] together. We of course each survived in a different manner, but we crossed into Hungary together, to Budapest, and there we were saved. We walked from Bratislava. When they were obliterating the rebel territory 2, it was necessary to leave and go somewhere. We couldn’t return home, so we went to Bratislava. In September we were recommended a person who for money would help us cross over. At that time it was around 10,000 crowns [The value of one Slovak crown during the Slovak State (1939 – 1945) was equal to 31.21 mg of pure gold. The rate of exchange between the German mark and the Slovak crown was artificially set at 1:11 – Editor’s note] for both of us. He led us from Bratislava to the other side, to Hungary. In the evening we arrived at the border, and crossed during the night. We crossed on foot. He already knew it there, we crossed over in fields, among corn. He led us nicely to one house, and handed us over to the people in that house, where we slept until morning. In the morning we wanted to take the train, but at that time they were bombing Bratislava, and the trains weren’t running. Then the Hungarian police arrived and checked our ID. We had false papers. Right before the war started, my brother had been taking veterinary medicine in Budapest. But then he had to leave Pest, because Jews couldn’t study there either 9. When the police left, he said that we couldn’t stay there, because they’d return, as we were suspicious. The people that we were staying with were very decent, and let us stay up in the attic all day. They weren’t Jews, and didn’t ask for anything. In the evening we left and walked 17 kilometers to Gyor. From there we then got to Budapest, and in Budapest we both survived. We returned to Slovakia in May, after the war was over. In Budapest we lived under false names with one lady in an apartment. I was named Tóth János Pál. I’ve still got the papers. My brother had legal papers from that veterinary school. Though they’d thrown him out, he’d kept the papers. He’d met this person there that stamped his papers, so we lived off those papers. We didn’t work because we didn’t have permission. We had a little bit with us, we of course lived in poverty, and ate once a day, but we survived.

The result of the anti-Jewish laws was that 80% of my family ended in the concentration camps. My mother returned, my father didn’t. They took him to Sachsenhausen 10 as an ill man incapable of much movement, where he died immediately after his arrival. From our family, my mother brother and I returned. My mother was in Sachsenhausen and then in Buchenwald 11. After the war she ended up in Sweden. She didn’t think she was going to live, she had pneumonia and pleurisy, but in Sweden they saved her. When my mother’s health improved a bit, she sent a letter from Sweden to our reeve, for him to deliver to us. So that’s how we established contact with her.

My brother and I didn’t go to a concentration camp, we went into the uprising 2 and from the uprising to Bratislava and to Hungary. In September 1944 we left for Budapest. We were in Budapest when we learned that the war was over. It was liberated in February [the Russian 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian front completed the liberation of Budapest on 13th February 1945 – Editor’s note]. So we were saved, and when Budapest was liberated, we immediately went to the Czechoslovak embassy. Well, and then we knew that the war had ended, that was already common knowledge. We returned home in May 1945. After the war the village looked the same as before the war, nothing had changed, just the Jewish community was no longer. Besides us and one man, virtually no one returned to Vycapy.

After the war

We didn’t find out what happened to the rest of the family until after we returned. Two people from Nitra told us about our father’s fate, about his death in the concentration camp. He had asked them to convey to my brother and me that we should get along well together, for us to support each other, that he wouldn’t be returning. He knew that he was going into the gas chamber. They even told us when exactly he died, on the 26th, Christmastime. He was 60 years old. From the entire extended family, nine of us survived. The rest died. We arrived, we’d survived. It was an exceptional event. I went home to Vycapy, to the apartment where we’d lived, but it was empty, ransacked. So we started from scratch. It’s hard to say how the neighbors reacted when I returned home. I didn’t feel antagonism from them, but those that had blood on their hands, Guardists and the like, they weren’t thrilled by it, and thought that we’d exact vengeance.

The way my life continued after the war was that my mother, who’d returned, lived with me. Aunt Cilke [Cecilia] had one son return [Tibor]; they lived together, and my other aunt [Gizela], who’d lost her husband and son also lived with them. Three of my girl cousins who’d survived left for Israel. I think that as none of their family had returned, and they were young, they decided to leave and started their own families there. They had a hard life, and even today don’t have it easy. Up until 1989 12 I didn’t have any contact with them, and correspondence with them was completely limited as well. At that time it would have been detrimental to me and my family. They were watching people and opening letters. It wasn’t desirable to be receiving letters, especially from Israel. After 1989 I got in touch with them, and we also went to Israel to have a look, and they were here as well. I don’t know, it’s hard to say if I’d emigrate. I guess as a young man I’d have gone, but I had my mother... I wouldn’t have left her here alone. I was never interested in politics. After the war, when I became independent, I saw my cousin Tibor the most, who’d been in the same building as I. He was a very decent boy. He never married.

For me it wasn’t important whether my friends were Jews or not, neither when I was a child nor now that I’m an adult. I didn’t consider it to be a priority. My wife isn’t Jewish either, I didn’t consider it important. My mother, who lived with us, did have some objections, but in the end agreed and accepted my decision. My brother didn’t have any problems with it. I got married after the war, in 1952.

The way I met my wife was that we lived in the same village. Her father worked for my father. When I was young I liked her, and so we began going out together. In the meantime I had to leave, to save my life. For a short time, six months, we had no news of each other, at that time I was in Budapest. After the liberation I returned home, and in 1952 we were finally married.

My wife is named Heda, Hedviga, née Vozarova. She was born in 1925. Her mother tongue is Slovak. She finished high school and worked for three years as a bank clerk. She was from a Christian family. I never tried to convince her to become Jewish. Let her be the way she was born. Even today I still drive her to church. Why should I try to stop her? There’s one thing I say. I’m the way I was born. There’s no point in me converting. I’m not devout as a Jew, and I wouldn’t be devout as a Christian either. Even before the war I had offers to be converted, but there’s no point. I was born a Jew, and  Jew I’ll remain.

Our wedding was a civil one, and took place at the Nitra city hall with our closest family. It wasn’t any sort of big wedding, just our siblings and parents. My wife wore a coat and skirt, and I wore a suit. After the ceremony we had lunch, and spent a little more time together in the evening. That was it.

I knew my wife’s parents very well. I had an especially good relationship with her mother, we got along magnificently. She was a very steadfast, intelligent woman. I got along with her father as well, but there the relationship wasn’t as good as that. I also had a good relationship with her siblings, I got along well with them all, especially with her oldest brother. He was very similar to his mother. She had four brothers, and was the only girl. All her siblings are dead now, she’s the only one left. As I mentioned, her father worked for my father, and her mother was a housewife. My wife’s father soon died, and her mother then often came to visit us in Nitra.

My wife worked as a bank clerk for three years. Then our son was born. She only began working again when our son began attending university. She also took care of my mother, whose health wasn’t the best. That’s why it was necessary for someone to be at home. She worked at Sazka Sportka [a betting company – Editor’s note].

We have one son, he was born in 1955 and is named Peter. We brought him up in both Christian and Jewish tradition. But he doesn’t observe either one. During Communist times, our son had problems because of my father being a landowner. It was hard for him to get into university. He graduated from medicine. He’s got a son, Daniel, who’s 23 and is studying medicine. We’re proud of our son, he’s a good and decent boy.

Peter attended nursery school from the age of 3. Education was always very important for him, he was always very diligent. To a certain extent, his education was important for me as well. He didn’t have to be encouraged. He’s the kind that reads a lot and was also a relatively good student. He graduated with honors, during his whole time at school he had straight A’s. He had great problems getting into university. There were problems with cadre [political] background. On my wife’s side there weren’t any, so it was kind of neutral, and finally they accepted him. He expressly wanted to go into medicine. I advised him not to, because I knew that there would be problems, that it would be hard for him to get in. After the first round of entrance interviews, they told him that he hadn’t been accepted due to a lack of space. Back then he found it hard to understand, because he said that if his marks were good, why shouldn’t he get in? Later, at the rector’s office, he found out that 2,200 students had been at the entrance interviews, and 250 had been accepted. He did the entrance interview as second best of all, and despite that they didn’t take him in the first round. Not until he appealed. We wrote a heartrending letter. They accepted him, and at that time told him that the only reason they hadn’t accepted him in the first round was that his father had a flawed cadre profile, that he was a kulak’s son 13. He couldn’t comprehend it, but finally he began to understand what it was actually all about. Back then there were many such cases, and it was unjust. Many also didn’t get into university, which was a very big mistake by the regime back then. There were also cases when the person in question was already supposed to get his diploma, and they wouldn’t let them give it to him. That didn’t happen in our case, but we’ve got friends whose child was supposed to get his diploma, but because they were kulaks, they didn’t give it to him. But after five or six years they finally did give it to him. For younger people it was simply incomprehensible.

My son’s childhood was normal. He didn’t live the kind of life young people do now. He didn’t go to parties and discotheques. He read quite a lot. He’d meet up with friends and here and there go see a movie. When he was young, it never happened that he wouldn’t be home by 10:00 p.m. My son is a friendly type of person. When he was in elementary school and high school, there were many boys his age in this street. The street wasn’t as busy, and in the evening they played soccer here. He had five or six friends, and used to meet up with them here in front of the building. He’s fairly serious, but also sociable. He likes to read a lot, he’s a bookworm. I’m even getting annoyed with him, because he doesn’t know where to put them all. Whenever he sees some book, he orders it. My grandson is the exact opposite. All he does is sit on the internet.

While he was studying at university in Bratislava, my son lived in a dormitory. When he left, we had a hard time adjusting for the first few weeks. He used to come home every week. Until fourth year, when he was going out with our daughter-in-law, then he’d occasionally come home every other week. He’d arrive on Friday evening, and return on Sunday. When I was taking him to the dormitory for the first time, we went by car. It was quite hard for me to get used to the fact that he was already out on his own. In the beginning we missed him a lot, we were used to him always being at home. In the evening we’d always be waiting for him to come home... But within a month we got used to it. I didn’t cry over it, as he wasn’t all that far away.

My son met his wife as a student in a ski course. He came home and told us that he’d met this one girl from Bratislava, and that he liked her: “Well, that’s your problem, I’m not going to tell you what to do. I just want to tell you one thing, that what comes first is school, school, school and then everything else. When you finish school, I won’t stand in the way of your getting married.” That’s what I said to him. When he was in fourth year, he once asked if he could bring his girlfriend over to meet us. So she came over to our place and he introduced her to us. They arrived on Friday, and when they were leaving on Sunday, my daughter-in-law always reminds me of this, at the door I told them that once they finished school I’d have nothing against it, but while they were still studying, there was nothing to discuss. But there was no danger of that, as both she and he were sensible. And then, when they finished school, my son went for a year’s army service in Vyskov, they were married. My daughter-in-law is a dentist. The first time I saw her, she made a fairly decent impression on me. She was very thin and sensitive. She’s not tall. Now she’s put on a bit, but back then she was skinny. Maybe around 47 kilos. She was skinny. I’ve got to say that I love her like my own daughter. We have no problems with her. My daughter-in-law is Jewish.

My son lives with his family. We’re in touch every day, he always calls in the evening. He lives in Nitra. He’s this local patriot, he didn’t want to leave Nitra, and never did leave it. He stayed here after he finished school, and got a job at the hospital. Now he’s independent, he’s a private doctor. He’s had a private practice for four years now.

I didn’t bring my son up in the Jewish faith. Though he did see it at home, because my aunts and cousin also lived in this building. My aunts were quite religious. On of them, Gizela, was a very good mathematician. She used to teach my son math. She’d watch out the window, and when she’d see him returning from school, she’d grab him on the stairs and wouldn’t let him go upstairs. When the poor thing died, he was very distressed, saying who was going to teach him mathematics.

My son was never in any Jewish youth group. He didn’t attend summer camp either. He used to go on holidays with us, and when he was in university, he had summer jobs. My son didn’t have a bar mitzvah. It’s quite hard to say whether my son had problems at school because of his father being a Jew. He didn’t say anything, at least to me.

I told my son about how I survived the war. He’s relatively informed about it, he knows what the Holocaust is and is interested in it. With the young one it’s worse. My grandson doesn’t like to listen to these things. He is aware of these things, he knows of it, but despite that it’s all Greek to him. My son knows about the Holocaust. My mother lived with us, and I used to tell him about it too. He knows what kind of things we lived through, though he doesn’t take it to heart as much.

My working life was as follows. Before the war I worked on our farm. Due to the fact that the Slovak State 8 was created, they confiscated our property 3. The National Property Fund was created, and I worked there until the time I had to leave in 1944. In May of 1945 I returned, and again got a job in the fund; later I worked in agriculture as a superintendent of state property. Then came the year 1949, and they confiscated our property and house 14, and demolished the house. Later we did get things back in the restitutions [restitution: a law regarding the return of property – Editor’s note], but everything had been demolished. I got a job in a sugar refinery, where I worked for 37 years. From there I went into retirement. At the sugar refinery, I worked as the manager of the raw materials purchasing department. I liked my work. I never had conflicts at work due to my being a Jew, not even during wartime, when I was running the farm in the village. I can’t even say that the employees were arrogant to me, or anything similar. after the war I didn’t have any problems with this. I climbed the career ladder even despite it being in my records that I was from a bourgeois family. I had relatively good results at work. I began as an agronomist, later they promoted me to departmental manager, deputy director. I was responsible for raw materials, sugar cane and vegetable canning. We were a small collective, I and three agronomists. We had a good atmosphere at work, we got along quite well. I stopped working three years ago.

I worked in the sugar refinery for 37 years, and I can’t say that I felt any anti-Semitism there. No one ever said anything to my face. I had a quite advanced position, so I can’t say that I was oppressed in some way. I got along with people, I tried, though I was strict. I wasn’t arrogant or something similar. Yes, certainly there is anti-Semitism, but one can’t say that it was very deep. At least I didn’t feel it. With the passing of the anti-Jewish laws 3 it began. Back then it was unpleasant, when the principal called us in and they threw us out of school. At that time you felt worthless. Well, but what can you do? Those were the times. It’s only later that we realized it.

I never signed a loyalty oath. I was a department head, and we used to have various foreign visitors, so we had to sign a statement that we wouldn’t talk about certain things of a political nature. At work we had to have a socialist work brigade, which means that within the scope of our section, we had to have a brigade that was evaluated within the company as a whole . That was the case with all sections.

Neither my wife nor I were members of any political party. I may have even needed to join the party 15 due to my career, but it would have been a problem. Due to my “bourgeois” origins. During the first half of the 1950s we lived in fear 16. You never knew what was going to happen to you. I had the stigma of being from a family of kulaks, and was never sure if someone wouldn’t come and take me away somewhere. It depended on the favor and disfavor of the rulers that were here at that time. We have friends that they moved out of Nitra. They were Jews. They moved them to Levice, and even further, out to some villages.

We had to participate in holidays, like May Day and so on. If we wouldn’t have gone, it would have been noted. We didn’t participate in the holidays of our own initiative. I had to participate, as it was mandatory. Voluntarily mandatory.

I worked in the sugar refinery until I was 65. I didn’t retire until then. I wanted to retire, because I had the opportunity to take a different job, and work in the sugar refinery was a lot of responsibility and I didn’t have weekends off. I got an offer from one German company that concerned itself with greenhouse cultivation. I worked for them as an advisor. I worked for this company until the age of 79. I worked there from 1989. My employers wanted me to keep working for them, but I told them no, because I had to travel quite a bit. I had a car and driver, but still, it was tiring.

We always celebrated Christmas, even back in the days where we lived in the village. We used to give sweets to our employees’ children. And now at Christmas, while Danko was still smaller, my son used to come with his family to our place for Christmas; these days we go to their place at Christmas. They even have a Christmas three. Our family always celebrated the Christmas holidays together. At Christmastime we have everything, just like everyone else. We have carp, because without carp it’s not Christmas. Easter we celebrate at home. When I was younger and employed, I used to go pour water, but now our grandson always comes to pour water on his grandma [in Slovakia the custom is that during the Easter holidays, the boys go around pouring water on the girls – Editor’s note].

We observe Jewish holidays even now. We observed Passover and Seder [Seder: a term for home religious services and prescribed ritual for the first night of the Passover holiday – Editor’s note] while my mother was still alive, and it’s remained a family tradition to this day. During that time you can’t eat bread for eight days, we observe that evening, at that time our son also comes and the entire family is together. During the holidays we go to synagogue, even though now it’s quite problematic. The Jewish community in Nitra has a hard time getting together ten members, because in order to be able to pray, you have to have ten. But so far they’ve always managed it. One cantor from Bratislava comes. We observe it for the holidays, for New Year [Rosh Hashanah: Jewish New Year – Editor’s note], and the Long Day [Yom Kippur: The Day of Atonement. The most celebrated event in the Jewish calendar. The day of “cleansing of sins”. Fasting is observed. – Editor’s note]. We go to the synagogue here in Nitra for the Long Day, and for New Year. He goes with me the evening before the holiday, but not the next, because he has to work. My son doesn’t know how to pray in Hebrew, so he more or less reads the other part, the translation.

As far as food that we serve during Jewish holidays goes, at Passover for example you’re not supposed to eat leavened bread [Passover: commemorates the departure of the Israelites from Egyptian captivity and is characterized by many regulations and customs. The foremost is the prohibition of consuming anything containing yeast – Editor’s note]. At that time we make matzo dumplings, this rarity. And I quite like them. We also make them during the year. The custom at our place is to make shoulet out of beans, which is quite heavy food, as there’s fatty meat in it, but it’s excellent. My son also likes it, when my wife makes it, she has to make it for him too. But otherwise we eat normally. My wife learned to cook Jewish food. My mother used to live with us, but she wasn’t an excellent cook. But my aunties that used to live down below us were relatively good cooks, and she learned to cook from them. She especially learned barkhes, rolls and shoulet.

We don’t eat kosher. While there was a cantor in Nitra and poultry was butchered, you could buy kosher. Jews shouldn’t eat pork, and with beef they should eat the front portion, not the back [Strict kosher rules dictate which cuts of beef can be consumed – Editor’s note]. So when there was a butcher, we bought and cooked kosher meat and oil. But when my mother died it basically stopped, and you can’t buy kosher meat here in Nitra. We’d have to buy it in Bratislava, so we don’t keep kosher. My favorite Jewish food is shoulet. We never had separate dishes. While my mother was alive, we had separate dishes only for Passover [at Passover, so-called Passover dishes are used, which aren’t allowed to come into contact with anything containing yeast – Editor’s note].

My mother wasn’t very religious. On Friday she’d light candles, even when our grandson was there. We never hid these customs from our son, there’d be no point in it. My mother is buried at the Jewish cemetery in Nitra, and my father, unfortunately he remained in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. A rabbi from Bratislava came for my mother’s funeral. I think his name was Katz. A Jewish funeral is relatively quick. Prayers are said by the graveside, and there’s a speech that says goodbye to the deceased. It doesn’t take long. I said Kaddish [Kaddish: retrospective prayer of blessing and praise, said only with a minyan on required occasions at synagogue, the house of mourning and for the dead -  Editor’s note] for my dead mother. Only a man can say it. When there’s some anniversary and we go to the cemetery in Nitra, there’s also a Holocaust memorial here, then we say Kaddish there. In the summer, during the first ten days of July, this remembrance of Holocaust victims is held. I observe the day of my mother’s death by remembering her. I light a candle. It’s a custom with us Jews, I light a candle, pray, and remember them. Both my father and my mother.

My wife and I own the apartment that we live in. Our son has his own house. We’re more or less middle class. We have what we need. When my mother returned from the concentration camp, she lived with us in this apartment until 1968. She died in June.

I read almost all the newspapers, books not so much. I’m not a bookworm. Here and there my wife and I got to the theater when there are some interesting performances. We’ve got it close by. When we were younger we used to go to the movies. Now, when there’s television and we’ve got satellite TV, we watch that. Television has reduced theater and cinema attendance quite a lot.

The way that my weekday looks is that I look for work to do. Something always comes up, when I have to fill in or arrange something. My son is a doctor, from the morning he’s at a job which he can’t leave. And when he needs to arrange something, I take care of it. I have a cottage on Zobor [Zobor: a hill by the city of Nitra (588 m above sea level), in the Tribec mountain range – Editor’s note], where I go to cut the grass, or I go to town. We don’t sleep over at the cottage on Zobor, though we have furniture there. We’ve got gas, water and electricity there, but in the evening we always go home and come back the next day. We don’t grow anything there, and just have fruit trees there. In the beginning we had a vineyard, but got rid of it, because it was always being decimated by starlings.

When I was employed, I used to go on vacations depending on what the opportunities were. In the beginning we used to only go to Balaton, to Yugoslavia and to Bulgaria. For a long time I worked in Sportka, in soccer, and because of this I used to travel abroad, to Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Austria. Well, and now all we do is go to spas here in Slovakia. Our favorite place is Piestany, it’s close and we’re content there.

We used to take our son with us on vacations too. We went to the Tatras often. Well, and later, when he was bigger, he used to go do brigade work. We also used to go on vacations with my brother and his family. When we were on vacation in Yugoslavia in 1968 17, news began spreading that the Russians would occupy us. We were afraid, and I think that we wouldn’t even have returned from there. We had friends there, and they were inviting us to Switzerland. As our whole family was there, we were very seriously considering it. Well, but three days before they occupied us 18 we returned from the vacation. When we were at home, we had a hard time deciding what we should do. Then we stopped thinking about leaving. We also used to go on company vacations, we were in Romania, but we weren’t very satisfied there. It wasn’t as clean as we’d have liked. Other vacations we took ourselves, not through the company. We also had good, friendly relations with Hungarian sugar refineries. They had a guest house at Balaton, and so we used to go on exchanges. We liked going to Balaton very much, it was very pleasant, they especially had good food. As far as this goes, Hungarians are excellent. My favorite there was csirke paprikás, or chicken paprikash. Then they’ve got excellent bean soup, and crepes. In a word, everything they did was good. They were very hospitable, also when we went on a business trip to a sugar refinery. When they came here, we had problems returning the favor. They’ve also got good Tokai wine. I’m not a big wine drinker, I’m quite a moderate alcoholic. They’ve got excellent pear brandy in Hungary, peach brandy too, but the pear brandy is better.

I went on business trips to Western countries later, mainly after 1989. Not much during socialism, just to Hungary. And as far as the canning industry goes, once we were in Bulgaria.

I wasn’t tempted to emigrate to Israel. The only temptation I had was in 1968, when I was on vacation with my brother and his family in Yugoslavia. At that time the situation was very tense, and we were listening to the news. They were saying that they were supposed to occupy us. We came home from vacations, and three days later they occupied us. I don’t know what we would have done. But we were thinking about whether we should return home or not. I didn’t even think about whether or not I’d have supported my son if he wanted to emigrate. I’ve got only him, and if he had really wanted to leave, I don’t know how I would have behaved.

My wife and I were in Israel in 1991, something like that. I visited two cousins of mine. One lives in Haifa, and the second in Tel Aviv. My wife visited the church in Nazareth. They took us everywhere. We brought back only some trifles as souvenirs.

During the fall of the Iron Curtain 12 we watched television and waited for it to arrive here. I accepted the fall of the Iron Curtain with love. I can’t say that Jewish identity has changed with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The change was perhaps in that many people who before didn’t identify themselves as Jews, now do. There were a lot of people like that. There were even mixed marriages.

My political opinions are quite neutral. I don’t like extremes. I can’t say that I’m active in the Jewish community. There are very few Jews in Nitra. When there are some annual holidays, we go to the synagogue or to the cemetery. But basically there  isn’t an active life here like there is in Bratislava. The problem is mainly in that there aren’t enough people here. To be honest, at my age I see my friends very rarely. I can’t say that all the Jews that I meet up with in Nitra are my friends, because some of them are very young. It’s hard to express the number of my Jewish friends in terms of percentage. Maybe it’s 20 or 30%. I was never fixated on selecting my friends according to whether they were Jews or not. My friends and I talk about various things, normal things. We don’t discuss Judaism or Jewish matters, we’re not that religious. I accepted compensation from the Claims Conference. During the last census, I definitely wrote that my religion is Jewish. I don’t remember exactly if I wrote nationality as Slovak.

We keep in touch with our grandson mostly by phone, because he studies and lives in Bratislava. I don’t have a computer at home, and don’t even know how to use one. My grandson is always sitting on the internet and writing with his friends. My grandson didn’t attend any Jewish school. His relationship with Jewry is such that he knows that his mother is Jewish, pureblooded Jewish, and my son is mixed. He’s neutral. He’s not anti-Jewish, but neither is he convinced that he should be involved in Jewry.

Glossary:

Henrich F.
Bratislava
Slovak Republic
Interviewer: Martin Flekenstein
Date of interview: May – June 2006

Family Background

Growing Up

Beginning of the War

In Hiding

After the War

Glossary

Family Background

My grandparents on my father’s side were from the town of Topolniky. In those days the town was named Nyarasd [the town’s Hungarian name of Nyarasd was changed to Topolniky in 1948. After 1989, two names are used for this village: Topolniky in Slovak as well as the Hungarian Nyarasd – Editor’s note]. My grandpa was named Heinrich F., and my grandmother Ema, née Blauova. My grandfather was a door-to-door salesman, who used to walk from village to village with a cart, and sell textiles. My grandmother died before I was born, likely of stomach ulcers. She underwent surgery in Bratislava, where she died of her illness. She’s buried in Bratislava, at the Orthodox cemetery.

My grandfather was already in his golden years. I met him only a few times, because Dunajska Streda, to which Nyarasd belonged, was taken over by Hungary during the war 1. My grandfather, like his children too, was completely modern, including his observance of religious customs. The family observed mainly the holidays. During holidays they would visit the synagogue in Dunajska Streda. My grandfather didn’t survive the war.

I remember Nyarasd really only foggily. The last time I was there I was 3 years old, on the occasion of some relative’s birthday. The village roads were dusty. My grandfather’s house stood on this bit of higher ground. I don’t even on what occasion it was, that my parents left me with my grandfather for a few days, so that I could improve my Hungarian. Beside my grandfather’s place stood the house of the local reeve, who had a son that was older than I. There was an apple tree in the yard, and he often said to me that when an apple fell, I should call him. And I would yell out: “Jánoska, lepotyant az óma.” [in Hungarian dialect: Janoska, an apple fell. – Editor’s note]. That I remember. He’d come over and we’d eat the apple together.

My grandfather lived in a typical village house that had a front hall and part of the courtyard was roofed over. They didn’t have running water, but drew it from a well in the yard. In the front part of the house there was a store with various goods. You entered the store through the kitchen. Behind the kitchen there were two rooms, and in the back there was a stable. There was a small garden behind the house, and they also raised animals, but I don’t remember anymore which ones. After the territorial division, when Nyarasd fell to Hungary, I never met my grandfather again. He most likely died on the way to a concentration camp.

My grandparents, the F.s, had three children; the sons were named Alexander and Julius, and the daughter Berta. Berta married Mr. Deutsch, who came to live with them in Aunt Berta’s family home. After the wedding he took care of the store, and Aunt Berta was a housewife. She and her husband had four sons.

Uncle Alexander worked as the superintendent of a sugar refinery in Dioszeg, now called Sladkovicovo [the town’s Hungarian name of Dioszeg was changed to Sladkovicovo in 1938. Since 1989 two names have been used for this small town: Sladkovicovo in Slovak, and the Hungarian Dioszeg – Editor’s note]. They had one son, Herbert. During World War II, Herbert did munkaszolgálat 2 in Budapest, and later hid out on the grounds of the sugar refinery, where he survived the Holocaust. He died much later, in Bratislava. Uncle Alexander died before the deportations, in 1942, of natural causes.

We didn’t visit Uncle Alexander often, because Dioszeg was a part of Hungary 1. I actually remember only one visit. My uncle was the superintendent of a sugar refinery that belonged to the Kuffner family. There was a set of railway tracks that led into the sugar refinery, on which they transported sugar beets, and we arrived on those tracks when we came to see my uncle.

My mother’s family was from Bratislava. They were natives of Bratislava. My mother’s father, Filip Schwartz, died before I was born, and I only know him from stories I heard. He was a shoemaker. His workshop was in Zidovska ulica [Jewish Street]. He and my grandmother, Jolana, lived in Mikulasska Street. My grandfather loved fish. If you know Bratislava, there were pontoons by the old Rybne namestie [Fish Square] from which fishermen used to catch fish from the Danube. They’d sell their catch right there. Every single day, my grandfather would go for his fish, which he’d prepare and eat. That was his specialty. Otherwise I don’t know anything else about him.

Grandma Jolana was a seamstress. She sewed for clients, but also for her friends and family. Mainly for us, her grandchildren. She was a merry old soul, always smiling and in a good mood. As Grandpa had died, she lived in the apartment in Mikulasska Street alone. It was an apartment, with one room plus a kitchen. The apartment had electricity and running water.

She used to regularly visit all her daughters, who were six. I’ll begin with my mother. She was named Helena. Another daughter was Greta, married name Perlova. Then there was Zelma, who married Freundlich. Next was Bella, Rozalia, or Roza. Aunt Roza married Adolf Fischer. Fischer was a well-known typographer. He had a memorial plaque in the Pravda publishing house in Bratislava. Aunt Roza had two daughters, Edita and Lydia. Another of my mother’s sisters was Irena, married as Ehrenreichova. After her wedding she lived with her husband and children in the town of Sahy. Her children were named Stela and Richard.

As children, we saw our grandmother on a daily basis. Either we’d visit her, or she us. She lived in Mikulasska Street, and we in Venturska, where my parents had a store. While my parents were in the store, I was usually at Grandma’s. My grandmother didn’t dress differently from other people. She dressed in a worldly fashion, like most women. Grandma wasn’t religious. I remember that she’d occasionally buy a goose, and make soup from it. She’d prepare goose innards with tomato sauce, and bake barkhes. That I foggily remember, those were frequent Friday suppers. During the High Holidays, our whole family would go to the Neolog synagogue on Rybne Square. Bratislava had many prayer halls that were attended by Jews. But our family observed only the High Holidays. I can’t describe them, as I was still small. As children we didn’t really observe the fast during Yom Kippur [Yom Kippur: The Day of Atonement. The most celebrated event in the Jewish calendar. A day of “cleansing of sins”. Fasting is observed. – Editor’s note]. But I do remember Simchat Torah [Simchat Torah: the main significance of the holiday lies in the continuation of the Five Books of Moses. The cycle of reading from the Torah ends and begins on the same day, and the public celebration connected with this expresses the joy inspired by this process – Editor’s note], how we would walk, with stops, around Rybne Square, but that’s also a long time ago. I didn’t even have a bar mitzvah [bar mitzvah - “son of the Commandments”, a Jewish boy that has reached the age of thirteen. A ceremony, during which the boy is declared to be bar mitzvah, from this point on he must fulfill all commandments of the Torah – Editor’s note]. My 13th birthday took place during the war year of 1941, and by then people had other things to worry about.

My father was born in Topolniky, at the time Nyarasd, on 25th November 1900. He finished mercantile school in Dunajska Streda, and then got a job in Bratislava. I don’t think that my father had any hobbies, besides our whole family regularly going on trips. Most often we’d go somewhere around Bratislava. For example Zelezna Studnicka [recreational town in the region around Bratislava – Editor’s note]. Several families would get together there. Walking around all morning wasn’t a problem. My parents’ friends were from various circles, they weren’t only Jews. But most often we were with my mother’s sisters and their families.

My parents met in Bratislava, during a St. Nicholas Day party. They were also married in Bratislava, on 27th February 1927. They definitely had a religious ceremony. My parents spoke several languages. They spoke German, Hungarian and also Slovak to each other. But with my father, Hungarian and German were dominant. My mother’s native tongue was probably German. But I don’t know that for sure. My parents’ style of dress didn’t differ from the people around them either, which is also documented by photographs from that time.

In 1918 my father entered the Czechoslovak Army, to do his army service. He ended up in Ruzomberk, as a hospital orderly. If I was to describe my father, I’d say he was a fantastic person. A truly good man. He was purposeful, of sound character, and punctual. He always managed to achieve what he wanted. There were never any disagreements between us. He was so tall, that he towered over everyone around him. He was around two meters tall. My mother was a good, respectable woman, and an excellent companion.

Our first home was in Lazaretska Street. Among our neighbors was the Burian family, who weren’t Jews. The Burians had three daughters, who used to play with me when I was a little tyke. At that time I might have been about one year old. I still remember like it was today, Mrs. Burianova washing the stairs and courtyard gallery. She had a pail of water, and I kept tottering around it, until finally I fell into it headfirst; since that time I avoid pails. That’s one of my memories. Mr. Burian was a butcher. He’d had diphtheria or something similar, and had a tube sticking out of this trachea [windpipe]. When he talked, he always had to plug it. This friendship from Lazaretska Street lasted even after we moved away from there, up to the year 1942. By that time the girls were already married off. One of them had by coincidence married a butcher, the same profession as her father. They had a butcher’s shop in Dlha Street, today it’s Panska. When meat was being rationed during the time of the Slovak State 3, they’d always give us a bit extra. This lasted up until 1942; what happened to them after that, I don’t know.

Our apartment in Lazaretska Street consisted of a kitchen plus one room, and you entered it from the courtyard gallery. The toilets were in the hall, shared with all the residents on that floor. But there was already running water and electricity. From there we moved to Zizkova Street. It was in a neighborhood named Zuckermandel. Our move was related to my father’s work. At that time my father was working in Dlha Street, today Panska Street. So we moved closer to his workplace. At that time I was about 3 or 4 years old. We lived on the first floor. From the hallway we had a view straight out onto the castle cliffs. There was also a pile of kids in the neighborhood.

After the war, they gradually tore down all of Zuckermandel. A lot of Germans and Jews lived in this quarter. There were fishermen there, who had their pontoons on the Danube, where they caught and sold fish. Tradesmen also lived there. For example, right across from us was a stonemasonry that belonged to Bernat Löwinger, Grandma Jolana’s brother. Grandma had seven siblings. Most of them lived in Bratislava, close to each other. Her brother Bernat was a stonemason. He made gravestones for the Jewish cemetery. Her second brother was Illes, who lived in Nitra, where he had a furniture factory. During the war we hid out at his place for some time, but I’ll get back to that. The third brother was Jakub, an upholsterer. He had an upholstery workshop in Mickiewitzova Street. Next was her sister Regina, who had a hat store, and made hats. She lived right across from grandma Jolana, in Mikulasska Street. Then there was Roza [Rozalia]. She had a store on today’s Namesti SNP [SNP Square]. Then there was Mozes, who was also a stonemason, and had a workshop in Venturska Street. Later we also moved to this street. The last was Juliska, who also had a hat manufacture in Klariska Street.

As little children, we ran around the town and during our wanderings we would always run in to see one of our relatives. I might have been about 10 years old at the time. I remember that we used to go see Aunt Juliska and watch hats being made. Pieces of felt cloth would be stretched over forms, making various styles. Aunt Juliska survived the war, and moved away to Israel. We’d always also run in to see another of Grandma’s sisters, Regina. Eventually, she lived right across from Grandma. Regina was deported during the war, and probably died in a concentration camp. At Bernat’s we’d wander around the stonemasonry and watch him carve letters. Mozes was also a stonemason, and because he lived across from us, we also visited him often. We’d amuse ourselves by painting ourselves with gold paint that he used to paint the letters on tombstones. Bernat and Mozes were deported and died in a concentration camp. During the war we visited Illes, who lived in Nitra. My brother, grandmother and I hid out in the courtyard that was next door to his furniture factory. Illes was also deported. After the war, Jakub returned and emigrated to Australia. So that’s the entire family tree on my grandmother’s side.

I don’t remember my grandfather Filip Schwartz’s siblings, and neither do I know anything about the siblings of my paternal grandparents. I knew only these ones on my mother’s side, because I saw them often.

We’ve already talked about the fact that my father had studied in Dunajska Streda; my mother studied to be a sales clerk and merchant, in Bratislava. Before my parents had gotten together at the aforementioned St. Nicholas Day party, they had already been colleagues from work, at the Kurtz Company. My mother worked in a store, and my father worked as a traveling salesman. In 1934, as a result of the depression 4, one store after another was going under. The Kurtz Company ended up the same way. My father then opened his own clothing store in Venturska Street. He sold notions, buttons and accessories for tailors. Later he sold underwear as well. He and my mother worked in the store together. Thanks to the business we weren’t poor; we lived fairly well.

In 1934 we moved from Zuckermandel to Vidrica, where we lived on the first floor. My parents got to know our neighbor, Mr. Trojan, who had a barbershop in Dlha Street. Underneath our apartment there was a butcher shop. We had a wooden floor made of beams that had holes in them, and through them we could see into that shop. It was only this temporary apartment for us. Then another apartment became available, right above my father’s store, where we then moved. Count Bilot had lived in that apartment before us. He moved somewhere, and handed the apartment over to us.

Growing Up

I was born, as my parents’ first child, in 1928. They named me Henrich, or informally Harry. Several years later, on 28th February 1935, my brother, Siegfrid, was born. My brother and I got along very well. He was an agreeable kid. But we didn’t get to enjoy very much fun and games outside, because the anti-Jewish laws 5 began coming out, so we mostly stayed inside.

When I was very young, my parents registered me in nursery school. I don’t remember much from this time either. The nursery school was in Venturska Street. Tante [Aunt] Ruth was in charge of us. We used to go to nursery school with these little baskets that hung from our necks, which contained our snack for teatime. We used to play with plasticine, and I hid a piece of it in that basket. Later, when I was hungry, instead of bread I took a bite of the plasticine. Those are the tiny little pearls hidden in the human brain.

Besides that, Grandma Jolana used to watch over us a lot. Actually, she watched over all her grandchildren. We’d walk with her to the park in Hviezdoslav Square, to the Janek Kral Orchard. We’d take a ferry across the Danube, and there was this huge park there, where we’d play. Besides this, we also used to go for walks with her around Bratislava. We used to go out into the country with our parents. In those days vacations weren’t much in fashion. Mostly we’d go out into the countryside around Bratislava. In the summer my parents would send me to rest homes. These were pensions that took children on recommendation. There we’d play games together and walk around in the vicinity.

We kept in closest contact with that part of the family that lived in Bratislava. When cafés, cinemas and theaters were already forbidden, a large part of the family and friends would then also get together at our place. They’d play cards, mainly Marias [Marias: a card game originating in Bohemia played with the Czech 32-card German suited pack – Editor’s note]. As far as we children are concerned, Aunt Roza lived the closest, practically around the corner. We used to go to her place almost every day. Auntie had two daughters, Edita and Lydia. Edita was born the same year as me, so 1928, and Lydia was born in 1935, like my brother. They deported their entire family. Only Edita, who went on the same transport as my parents, survived the war. She returned from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

We also used to go visit my mother’s sister Bella. She didn’t have children. She worked in a clothing shop. We also used to go to Aunt Zelma’s, who had two daughters. One of them was named Erika; I don’t remember the second name. They had the luck to move to the Palestine in 1938. My mother’s sister Greta lived with her husband, Perl, who was a typographer. They had two children, a son named Tibor, and a daughter, Olina. They lived on Dunajska [Danube] Street They deported them all. My cousin Tibor got to Bergen-Belsen, where he luckily survived the war. My mother’s sister Greta was also lucky, she survived the concentration camp. My mother’s last sister was Irena Ehrenreichova, who lived in Sahy after getting married. She had two children, Stela and Richard. Except for her husband, they all died during the war. He remarried, and then died of a heart attack. His second wife emigrated to Israel.

I started attending people’s school 6 in 1935. The school building stood at Zochova Street No. 3. I went there until Grade 5. Then the year 1940 came, and they nationalized the school. I was supposed to go to council school, and here’s where the first jolt and turning point in our lives came. Jews weren’t desired students in state schools, even though from a religious standpoint our family our family was quite far removed from Judaism. Our family was modern; we didn’t feel anything major towards religion. Everyone could feel that something dangerous was approaching, and that it was very close. The period of baptisms arrived. With a certificate from the parish office, I was accepted at the First State Council School at 3 Zochova Street. At the same school where I’d already been for five years. I also had godparents, who were supposed to protect us. But it didn’t help very much, because we were still obliged to wear a yellow star 7. I dealt with this problem in such a way, that instead of a permanently sewed-on star, I had it on snaps. In case of danger, I could remove it, and show my ID, that I’m a student from a state school. Unpleasant, especially for me, were morning prayers, catechism and defense classes, where we’d march around singing: Friends Stand on Guard!, We’re Native Slovaks and similar things. Already at that time things were coalescing towards the People’s regime 8. Apprehension settled upon us when our teachers began appearing in uniforms of the Hlinka Guard 9 or those of officers of the Hlinka Youth [Hlinka Youth: The Hlinka Guard 9 founded youth groups and helped organize their activities. These groups were named Hlinka Youth – Editor’s note]. In the morning we’d greet each other at the school with the People’s greeting, On Guard! Can you imagine how a person felt when he went to school?

During that time, I personally lived in constant fear, because at this school they had severe corporal punishment. For example, we had this teacher that was named Macko. He was from Liptovsky Mikulas. He had a hand like a lumberjack, when he gave someone a slap, it spun him around like a top. His slaps were a common thing. Another teacher had a switch, another a ruler. They’d either beat us with that, or their hands. Another would yank our hair. We were physically punished for every stupid little thing. For example when we threw a sponge, basically for everything... I have a slap from Macko engraved in my memory. After that I tried to avoid being punished in any way I could. I was on my best behavior.

Before the war we had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends. But the anti-Jewish laws had a big influence on mixed friendships. It began with the fact that customers stopped coming to my father’s store. They began saying that they won’t buy things from Jews. You know, you eventually notice that. Friends turned away, from one hour to the next, they stopped talking to us. It very much affected us children. Good thing that my cousin Edita lived nearby, in Dlha Street. We used to go play at their place. But mostly we were at home, because the prohibitions limited us to the degree that you almost couldn’t go out into the street. When we did go out into the street, German boys would start chasing us.

As a native of Bratislava, I knew all the little streets, passages and nooks and crannies of the city. I knew Zidovska Street, Klariska, Kapucinska... So I knew that if in Klariska I enter a certain building and crossed two courtyard galleries, I’d get to Kapucinska. Or if I entered in Kapucinska, I’d exit into Zidovska. We knew routes through attics and cellars. Sometimes that saved us from those German boys. So, when the Hitlerjugend 10 would begin chasing us, we’d run into a gateway, and through a courtyard gallery we’d get to the next street. It basically saved us from a certain beating.

Beginning of the War

Sometime in 1939, NSDAP [Die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or Nazi Party] and Hitlerjugend headquarters were set up on the corner of Venturska Street, where we were living at the time. The headquarters of the Hlinka Guard were located in the building of today’s University library, not far from the Michalska Gate, and the Hlinka Youth, which regularly met in the evenings, was also there. Their drums and horns thundered through the streets of Bratislava. All you heard was boom, boom, boom, the Hitlerjugend was marching. Boom, boom, boom, the Hlinka Youth was marching. They sang songs and shouted. They for example sang Kamarati Na Straz! [Friends, On Guard!]. Like Slovenska Pospolitost 11 does today. They marched around with their arms in the air. Then they smashed windows and storefronts. They carried daggers with them. After dispersing, it ended with them catching someone and stabbing them with one of those daggers, or beating them to death. That’s why we used to run away from them over those courtyard galleries.

Slowly it happened that my father’s good, old customers stopped coming to the store. Then came vile graffiti, swastikas and Jewish stars that were painted on stores. We also had our shutters painted many times. That’s how it slowly started, until many friends turned away as well. Luckily not everyone renounced us. There were also people that helped. At the beginning I already mentioned the butcher, Mr. Burian, and his brother-in-law. Mr. Dobos, who had a bakery, also helped us. So we always had a bit more bread and meat than others. But gradually even these connections stopped working. Because even these people also gradually had less and less. Finally, in 1942, one woman from Vienna, Karolina D., who wanted to have a store too, came to see us. She told my father to give her the keys and cash register, that she’s the new owner of the store. She was our Aryanizer [Aryanization: the transfer of Jewish stores, companies, factories, etc. into the ownership of another person (the Aryanizer) – Editor’s note]. Subsequently they put us in the Patronka collection camp. Luckily the Aryanizer didn’t know how to run the store, and arranged for us to return from there. My father worked in the store, because she didn’t know how to order goods. As I’ve already mentioned, Karolina D. was from Vienna, and was only staying in Bratislava.

Father got some sort of exception 12. There was a huge number of exceptions. According to me, there might have been at least fifty kinds. In the morning a yellow ID card was valid, by evening it was a green one, then a white one, then there was a seal from the Hlinka Guard, from the ministry, the president... So that what was valid in the morning, they didn’t have to accept in the evening. You had to pay for everything, of course. It was extortion.

Around the same time that we lost the store, they also took the beautiful apartment that was above it away from us. One day a certain doctor arrived, and pointed out that Jews can’t have an apartment with a view out on the street, especially when the Hlinka Guard and Hitlerjugend were marching there. He told us to kindly leave the apartment. It was a truly beautifully appointed three-room apartment in the center of Bratislava. They moved us into a space that had previously been occupied by the Hashomer Hatzair movement 13, which had already been banned. Where we lived had most likely been a warehouse before. It had no floor. Father had a plank floor put in. One large room was divided into two. So we had a “bedroom” and a kitchen. Leading to these rooms was a hallway about 15 meters long and one meter wide. It was isolated from the outside world. An ideal place for people that were working for the underground. For example, at our place the escape of Jews to the Palestine was planned, by boat down the Danube...

Relationships in our family were always on the level. Our parents always told us what was happening. For example, I knew how much our father made in the store, I knew about his relationship with the Aryanizer. We knew what the political situation was. Many people and family members used to come to our place. They played cards and at the same time discussed politics. Actually, we knew about everything. My two uncles, Perl and Fischer, worked in typography, as typesetters. They worked for the underground. They printed flyers and various exhortations against the regime. My father wrapped goods in these flyers. So besides persecuting us for being Jews, they were also after us because of this.

These people met at our place daily. Practically every day we also experienced banging at the door, kicking at the door accompanied by loud shouting. The Guardists were arriving. Our visitors would be sitting at the table playing cards, and the Guardists would say: “Do you know that you’re not supposed to be meeting?” Well, then they’d have a shot, take an envelope and leave. But they were insatiable. It would happen that they’d even come more than once a day. If there was an arrest warrant out on someone present, they’d take him with them for interrogation. Those were perilous times.

In Hiding

When it was already very bad, our parents would always send us to safer places. They tried to save the second generation; we traveled from one place to another. I also got into a sanatorium for lung diseases in Kvetnica. At that time, my brother was at home with our parents. Working in Kvetnica was Dr. Kohn, who concealed many “ill” Jews there.

Upon our return from Kvetnica, my brother and I left with Grandma Jolana for Nitra. Grandma’s brother Illes, who had a furniture company, lived in Nitra. This company’s courtyard was next door to the courtyard belonging to the company Vychterle & Kovarik, which sold tractors, threshers and similar farm machinery. They had one long building. In the front there was a showroom and offices. In the back there were company apartments for the employees. We rented one of those apartments, and hid our there for some time. Then we returned to Bratislava, where it was also dangerous, and so our parents sent us to a Protestant youth camp in Brezova pod Bradlom. Usually one went there for two-week stays, but we were allowed to stay there for two months. I’m sure there were other Jewish children among us.

After we returned  from the camp, our parents sent us to some farmer in Devinska Nova Ves. We were in hiding there for only a few days. From there, they sent us to northern Slovakia for the summer. We left Bratislava by train for Liptovsky Hradek. There some lady was waiting for us. We got on a farm wagon with hay, and she drove up to a game warden’s cabin in Vychodna. I don’t remember us paying for anything. But we didn’t last very long there, either. The couple that was taking care of us had a son who worked in Svit during the week, and had gotten involved in various schemes, and of course also with the Slovak National Uprising 14. They began to have problems, and in fear that they’d be raided, they put us on a train and sent us to Bratislava. It was the last train that passed through the tunnel in Vrutky. They then blew the tunnel up. So we had at least that bit of luck. At home things were heating up. They were grabbing people every day, and deportations were taking place. By then our parents weren’t safe either. My father was still working in his former store that they’d Aryanized.

In the past, my father had often done business with Romanian boatsmen. They used to buy fashion goods in the store, and he’d made friends with them. He also got to know a few customs officials, and other people from the harbor. So it was also thanks to them, that we knew people at the Bratislava harbor. In those days there used to be pontoon piers in the harbor, on which were dwelling units that people lived in. Steamboats used to anchor by these pontoons, and would stock up on coal and water. Father found a place for us and our mother with a friend of his on coal pontoon No. 3, where the Zatko family lived. The coal pontoons floated on the water on two hollow cylinders. When things got bad, we crawled in one of those hollow cylinders. It didn’t take long for someone to inform on them, that they were hiding us. We had to leave there in a hurry. My mother and brother went home, and I went to another of my parents’ friends. His name was V.

As I later learned, that night there was a big roundup. My whole family, my father, mother, brother, grandma Jolana, along with the Fischers, they rounded them all up, only I remained free. Mr. V., who concealed me that night, was a taxi driver. He lived across from us in Venturska Street. He contacted Mr. B., who had a gas station at the corner of Palackeho and Jesenskeho streets, to send me to some family in Podunajske Biskupice. I took a bus from Safarik Square to the end of the line in Prievoz. Waiting for me there was a boy who addressed me by my name. He told me to come with him. I stood on the back axle bolts of his bicycle, and he took me to [Podunajske] Biskupice. The family I had arrived at was named Pagac. I was only supposed to stay with them for a few days. In the meantime, however, deportations had taken place, and I found myself completely alone. What were they supposed to do? They didn’t want to throw me out, so I stayed with them. All I had was one set of summer clothes, shoes and a windbreaker.

The Pagac family rented a two and a half room house. The husband and wife, three sons and an 80-year-old granny lived in one and a half rooms and the kitchen. The second, large room belonged to the owner of the house, and was locked. The lady that owned the house was abroad for an extended period. Mr. Pagac was a jack-of-all-trades. He was a driver, a locksmith, he could repair and manufacture machines. Mrs. Pagacova was a very kind woman. She was from Budapest. The oldest of the sons was named Karol, then there was Tibor, and the youngest was Lacko [Ladislav]. They accepted me as their fourth son, with the difference that no one could know, see or hear anything about me. This principle became law, and was strictly adhered to. At that time the youngest, Lacko, was only about 3 years old. His words became unforgettable for me. Instead of airplane he used the word angidádo, and his other words were ‘tüjn el’ [Hungarian: get lost, disappear]. Always, when there was someone nearby, he shouted to me: “Tüjn el!”

At night I slept on a haystack at a nearby farm. During the day I’d be behind some clutter up in the attic, or in the cellar. The stairs to both places were camouflaged. This went on until the first frosts struck. The haystack kept shrinking, until it didn’t provide a safe hiding place and a feeling of security. I caught a cold. Calling a doctor was impossible, so they found me some medicine. Despite this, there were complications. I got inflamed joints, and couldn’t move. I lay paralyzed in granny’s bed, who soon after died. When people were paying their last respects, and during the wake, they moved me up to the attic and covered me with old blankets and sacks. I was there until the last relatives from Bratislava and Hungary left, who also spent the night there. After granny’s funeral, they carried me down onto her bed, but the state of my health kept getting worse. They called Mr. B. over, to consult with him what they should do if I died. Through his friends, Mr. B. got a hold of some salves and salicylate [salicylate: salicylic acid, effective primarily against fevers, and partly against pain – Editor’s note], which slowly put me back on my feet.

Outside it was freezing, in the attic and cellar it was cold. Ujo [Uncle] Pagac thought of another hiding place. In his and his wife’s bed, between the springs on which the mattress sat and the B.m part of the bed, which stood on planks, he made this drawer. It was made so that I could crawl into it in case of great danger. The smallest munchkin in the family tested it out by yelling “tüjn el”, and I then crawled under the bed and into the drawer. The drawer enabled you to lie horizontally in such a way that when someone looked under the bed, he didn’t see anyone, and neither could you see anyone when the bedclothes were stripped off. During the day I stayed mainly in the attic, and at night I preferred to make the journey down to the cellar, which was behind a camouflaged door. In those days house searches were a daily matter.

The house where the Pagac family lived stood at the intersection of two main streets leading to the train station. If you know Podunajske Biskupice, today they sell good ice cream there. At that time they were loading material for the German army at the train station. On orders of the SS high command, the commander of counter-intelligence was moved into that half-room where before granny had lived, and I during my illness. I don’t know what his name was, but he had a lot of medals and various crosses. No one had foreseen such an event. Luckily he was often away from the house, even for several days at a time. So we lived “harmoniously” side by side, or more exactly one above the other, from Christmas 1944 until April 1945. It was a matter of life and death. No one can describe my anxiety, and Mr. Pagac’s fear for his family. In those days, they shot people for such infractions. To banish my nervousness and anxiety, I darned by candlelight, day and night, the socks of all Pagac family members far and wide. I also copied recipes that Mrs. Pagacova had very many of. This time passed. Once Mrs. Pagacova proclaimed that when the war ended and if we survived, she’d adopt me.

You could already hear the booming of cannons in the distance. The traffic in the streets grew denser. The Germans were on the move, they were arrogant, aggressive and there were very many of them. One day, in the early hours of the morning, the commander came home all muddy. He packed his things. Through the closed door I heard him say: “Soon the weather will be nicer.” He saluted, and without a word of thanks sat into his staff car and was seen no more. At night mortar fire, which had already been nearing for several days, began. Mortar rounds were falling around the house, and I counted them out of boredom. In the morning the firing slowly tapered off. Only here and there, a machine gun sounded. From a window in the roof, I could see the first Russian soldiers. One was pushing a bicycle, the second even had two of them, and he had a machine gun on his shoulder. A beautiful feeling enveloped me - I was saved. Even today, it still brings a lump to my throat. I carefully came down from the attic, so I could tell everyone what I’d seen. After hesitating for a long time, I decided to be the first one to walk out into the courtyard, into the sun, into the garden. At that moment, a Russian soldier rang the bell at the gate. To this day, I still remember our brief conversation:
“Any Germans?”
“Nyet [No]” I answered, with my knowledge of the Russian language from my school days.
“Any women?”
“Nyet”
“Any vodka?”
“Vodka nyet, water yes.”
“What time is it?” I drew up the sleeve of my only windbreaker that I had, and said:
“Ten o’clock.”
“Give it here!”
That watch was my only property. So, I paid the price for my liberation.

After the War

Today I don’t exactly know if it was before, or after the May 1st celebrations in 1945 that a tall, badly dressed man with a huge head rang at the gate. He had a shaved head, sad eyes and was very skinny. He asked whether the Pagac family lived there. I said that yes, they did. At that point he said my name, Harry. I recognized that it was my father, who I hadn’t seen for a long time. We fell into each other’s arms and cried together. He told us about what had happened when my mother and brother had returned from the harbor, how they’d deported them to Birkenau, how they’d separated them and led them off to the “showers”.

My father was in truly horrible condition. Two meters tall, he weighed only 45 kilos [6’ 6.5” and 99 lbs.]. In Poland he’d ended up in a coal mine. The conditions there had been horrendous. They worked in inhuman conditions, and suffered from hunger. When they were very hungry, they ate coal dust, so that they’d have something in their stomachs. That same dust also got into their lungs. He had open sores from the wooden shoes they wore. When the front was approaching, they rounded them all up from the surrounding camps onto a march 15 into the interior. They marched, hungry and exhausted. Those that died were left where they fell. The Germans were always asking those that couldn’t go on anymore to stand aside. My father stood aside, along with another about 90 fellow prisoners. They were mostly from Bratislava, and were keeping together. They didn’t shoot them on the spot, but loaded them onto a truck and drove them back to Birkenau; when they unloaded them from the truck, the Russians started firing. The Germans took fright, ran away and left them there, and so they were liberated by the Russian army. From there, together with the others that had been saved, he set out for home. They went by train, hitchhiked, and on foot. He returned home in a roundabout fashion. From Poland, through Kosice and Budapest, to Bratislava. He was spurred on by the desire to find me, as he knew that I hadn’t been in a transport.

The Pagac family didn’t want anything for concealing me and risking their lives. On the contrary, if my father wouldn’t have returned, they were intent on adopting me. We remained in a very close, literally family relationship with them. We visited and brought them gifts at every opportunity, to show our great thanks. We lost contact with them in 1968, when they left for Germany to be with their children. Their sons had already emigrated earlier on.

My father and I returned to our apartment. We of course didn’t find anything there, only a pile of family photographs. They were stored in a box in the attic. Besides this, we also found some documents. We saw our furniture at our neighbor’s place, but nothing could be done about that. As far as the store goes, we got it back, along with permission to once again operate it. However, there was also nothing left in it, besides one lamp sticking out of the ceiling. The shelves were completely bare. Unfortunately, not long after, they nationalized our business 16.

After our store was nationalized, my father worked for Vesna [Vesna: a chain of textile outlets offering a wide assortment of textile goods – Editor’s note]; they then renamed it to Otex [Otex: textile company offering a wide assortment of men’s and women’s clothing – Editor’s note]. There he somehow didn’t get along with the management, and so he left to work at the Tuberculosis Research Institute. He was in charge of the warehouse and materials and equipment. Unfortunately, the concentration camp had left its deep marks on him. His lungs were full of coal dust, and this caused complications, to which he succumbed in 1964.

My cousin Herbert F. also survived the war. Herbert’s father and mine were brothers. Uncle Alexander had already died before the deportations. In his honor, Herbert also took on his father’s name. So he was named Herbert Alexander F.. Before the war, Herbert lived in that part of Czechoslovakia that then fell to Hungary. He ended up doing munkaszolgalát. After the war, he worked in a sugar refinery, in Dioszeg, where he lived in a company apartment, in a mansion. Soon after they had to give up that apartment, and got a replacement apartment in the town of Nebojsa, by Galanta. That was sometime at the beginning of the 1950s. Herbert married a Christian girl. He graduated from university in the field of pomiculture [fruit growing], gardening and the breeding of fruit trees. Because he was an expert, he ended up in Prievidze around the middle of the 1950s, where he started up a pomiculture breeding station. At that time he was also working as a correspondent of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Near the end of his life, he moved to Bratislava with his wife and daughter, who had in the meantime been born. There Herbert worked at the Agriculture Commission. From there he went into retirement. Unfortunately he’s since died, here in Bratislava.

Because we had lost our apartment in Venturska Street during the war, we applied for a replacement. At that time you could even be granted a villa left behind by Germans that had been expelled 17. But my father was careful. He claimed that those Germans would return, and would ask for their property back. Today’s restitutions [Restitutions: law regarding the return of property – Editor’s note] confirm his words. So we got a small apartment on Hviezdoslav Square. You couldn’t even call it an apartment. There were two small rooms and a kitchen. In 1964 I got married, and my wife and I moved to [the neighborhood of] Kramare, to our current apartment.

After the war, a social group formed, where Jewish youth used to meet. We met each week for “tea”, at the Carlton [Carlton: one of the oldest and most luxurious hotels in Slovakia – Editor’s note]. We’d occupy the entire hall, buy ten raspberry sodas, dance, and then leave. There were both girls and boys there. That’s where people got together. But I didn’t last long in any relationship with a girl. I was mostly abroad, working. In those days I met one girl, through my cousin Herbert. Miss S., who they called Csöpi, who worked at an orthodontic clinic, on Kozia Street. She was a very pretty girl. But she was pretentious. Back then it was in fashion to go out with doctors and lawyers. So we split up. In 1963, someone mentioned a S. at some get-together, whether I’d like to meet up with her, so I said, why not. Back then, the way it was in Jewish society was that people met through friends and acquaintances. When I saw her, I said, hello Csöpi. The reply was: “I’m not Csöpi, I’m Eva.’ It was her sister. Csöpi had in the meantime gotten married. Eva and I met in January, in the Iskra Café, and in March we already had our engagement party. Right after, still that same month, we also had our wedding.

Our wedding was a Jewish one. The Bratislava rabbi, Katz, married us in the courtyard of the apartment building in Nesporova Street, where he lived. There weren’t very many people there. We had dinner in the Jewish kitchen, there where Chez David [Chez David: pension and the only Jewish restaurant in Slovakia, opened in 1993. It was kosher, but due to a lack of interest, today they no longer have a kosher menu – Editor’s note] is now. The wedding banquet wasn’t very large, because it was during Passover [During Passover, the consumption of many types of foods is forbidden, which is why the selection of foods was limited during the wedding banquet – Editor’s note]. Mrs. Schönefeldova was in charge of the kitchen. Then we also had a civil wedding.

My wife’s maiden name was Eva S. She was born on 27th January 1934 near Lucenec. Her mother was originally from Sahy. Her father worked as a superintendent on various properties, and so they moved a lot. Before the war, he was working as an adjunct on properties belonging to the nobleman C., in Liptovsky Mikulas. They were gathering Jews in the schoolyard, for transport. As they were standing there, they saw a vehicle in which C. was arriving. He spoke to the transport commander. He told him that her father is an economically important Jew, and that that type of person wasn’t allowed to be deported. They were fortunate that he managed to get them off the transport. Her father then continued working for him, and her mother did handiwork. My wife used to tell me that even at 2:00 a.m., she’d be darning things, so that they would at least scrape by. At that time, her father’s salary was 250 Slovak crowns [The value of one Slovak crown during the time of the Slovak State (1939 – 1945) equaled 31.21 mg of pure gold. The rate of exchange of the German mark against the Slovak crown was artificially set at 1:11 – Editor’s note]. They were living not far from Liptovsky Mikulas, in Vrbica. Later, they hid out in the mountains around Liptovsky Mikulas until liberation. The entire family survived, the parents and three children.

After the war, her father worked as a superintendent of farm properties, in Nebojsa, by Galante, in Jatov, near Nove Zamky, and finally in Geni, near Levicie. But the Jewish community in Levicie was falling apart. There were always less and less people. My wife’s mother was a very religious woman, and wanted to continue to lead a traditional, religious life. That’s why they decided to move to Bratislava. My wife’s family was exceptional in their observance of religious regulations. Her mother was very religious. My wife is a faint copy, as far as religious life is concerned. To this day, we still observe the Sabbath, light candles, and my wife prays. Her mother paid great heed to these rituals, virtually to the last moments of her life. Then, when she became very ill, she eased off of these principles, but still kept on observing all holidays. She kept a kosher household 18. Even after the war, my wife’s family had poultry slaughtered for them, just so everything would be kosher. When she was of an advanced age, she was in a nursing home, where she also died.

After my mother was pronounced missing, my father met Mrs. Haarova, and in 1946 they got married. Just like my mother, her husband had also died in a concentration camp. In our family we used to call her Manci. She and my father had met in a store. She was a seamstress, and had a large fashion shop. She employed about twenty people. They used to make made-to-measure underwear. During the time of the  Slovak State, she even used to sew shirts for Tiso 19. Because in the post-war period it was hard to find buttons, thread and similar goods, she used to come to our store to shop. So they met and got married.

My stepmother, Manci, was one of seven children. Four of them survived the war. Manci was in a concentration camp together with her sister Ester. Ester married Mr. F. They’ve got a daughter, Ema. But Ester was very traumatized by her time in the camps, she had a nervous breakdown and died. Mr. F. also nearly died. He suffered from serious diabetes. Ema finished university and moved from Nitra to Bratislava. There, she got an apartment with gas heating. Unfortunately, she didn’t live to an advanced age either, she ended up poisoning herself with the gas. Ernest and Hugo were my stepmother’s brothers that had survived. After the war, Hugo lived in Switzerland, in Zurich. He had a daughter named Frida. Frida lived in Sant Polten, was a heavy smoker, and died very young. The last of my stepmother’s siblings that survived was Ernest. Ernest moved to Israel after the war.

Both my wife and I got along very well with Manci. Our family relationship that from a young age we had been brought up in, still before the war, also transferred itself to this one. Everything was honest. After my father’s death, he died in 1964, we continued to have good relations with Manci. She was very cosmopolitan. She traveled even during the times no one could. She even managed to arrange things with the police. She was a small, delicate, charming blonde. She also dressed very well. In short, she had good taste. My wife claims that she was the best mother-in-law, because she was always several hundreds of kilometers away [this comment was made with a smile and meant as a joke – Editor’s note]. We were really very good friends with her.

As I’ve already said, after our wedding my wife and I moved to a new apartment. Slowly, we furnished it. Slowly we improved it here, until it was livable. Then we could finally think about starting a family. On 26th August 1965, our sons, were born. Right up to the last moment we didn’t know that they were going to be twins. Back then they didn’t have ultrasound, only X-rays, but those we refused. When she was ready to deliver, I took my wife to the hospital. There she was being taken care of our friend, Dr. Pakan, the head doctor. He was a very sympathetic man. For a long time nothing was happening, and so my wife got an injection to induce labor. I was waiting downstairs in the lobby. Back then, you weren’t allowed to go up to the maternity ward. Suddenly the phone at the security desk rang. It was the doctor: “Mr. F., congratulations. You have a daughter on the way.” A little while later, the phone rang again: “Actually, it’s not a girl, but a boy, and quite cute. Congratulations... but wait a bit...” and hung up. A little while later he called: “Cross my heart, there’s another one there.” After the delivery he asked me: “Tell me, how did you do it?” “Dr. Pakan, with carbon paper.” Back then that was this saying, that twins were made with carbon paper. I took them home. We quickly bought one more baby bed. We exchanged the baby carriage, and then we commenced their upbringing.

When they were 6, I introduced them to the violin. My reason was that I wanted them to do something. Back then there were many children who were just running around outside, romping about, and doing all sorts of bad things out of boredom. So we said to ourselves that we needed to occupy them somehow. We bought them little violins. Because my workplace wasn’t far from a music school, I would walk to work each day with two little violins under my arm. After school was out, the boys would come for their violins and run over to the music school. So in this fashion they played up until Grade 5. Back then they said to themselves that they’d end with it. The violins were just lying around here. At that time I was working in Prague. I was walking by some publishing house, and I brought them all sorts of notes to folk songs. I put them on the table at home, and just like that, one of them took the notes, put them on a music stand, and began to play.

They liked the folk songs more than those prescribed fiddle exercises. So they began to play again. At that time the Bratislava Children’s and Youth Symphony Orchestra was being formed, where they were invited to come and play. They traveled through half of Europe with this orchestra, and were successful. For example, they brought home first prize from Holland. As time passed, they got into university, where they joined the folklore ensemble Technik, with which they then continued touring around Europe.

Glossary:

Dusanka Necak

Serbia and Montenegro

Name of interviewer: Julija Caran

Date of interview: April 2002

My family background

Growing up

During the war

After the war

Glossary

My family background

Grandmother Serina and grandfather Mor Bergel, mother’s parents, lived alone. We had our own house which my aunt and uncle shared with us. Grandfather was born in 1847 in Senta, and grandmother somewhere in Banat, now part of Serbia. They lived alone. They had their own nice house and I spent most of my time with them.

Grandfather was a merchant. He worked in his own shop where he sold cereals and breads. He had also a bakery in Senta, and traded abroad. The employees in his shop were Hungarians; no members of the family worked there. The customers were Jews, Hungarians and Serbs, but mostly Jews because there were a lot of Jews in Senta at that time, three Jewish communities. Grandfather gave credits to everyone; he was really a good man.

In the morning on the way to school I would visit the whole clan. First, I would stop to see grandfather and grandmother where I would get a dinar or two. Then I would visit my uncle Andrija, mother’s brother, who had a pharmacy on the other corner; there I would get another dinar or so. Then I would go to school; across the street there was a Nestle shop where I would eat chocolates.

They spoke Hungarian and German at home. Grandmother spoke more German and grandfather more Hungarian but he knew German. At home we spoke Hungarian. Mother spoke a lot of French with my aunt from Budapest as she also knew French.

My grandmother was a beautiful woman, simply beautiful. I should be so lucky to have some of her beauty. She was a housewife and never worked in her life. She dressed the same as they do today, but I remember that my grandmother never wore short skirts, only long skirts. And hats, of course. Grandfather had the look of a tough guy. He dressed like everyone else. He always wore a hat on his head. In the winter he wore a “Gromby” coat, and had a coat for the spring as well.

Grandfather went to the synagogue for Yom Kippur, as far as I know. Grandmother was the most religious member of the family. She kept Shabbat, ate kosher. We celebrated all the holidays in her house, Yom Kippur, Pesach, Purim, Rosh Hashanah. We ate particular dishes on certain holidays, but I don’t remember the names. I remember only one special dish she used to make, cholent. That was delicious. On Yom Kippur they always went to synagogue for the whole day, from morning to night. We, children, also went. When I was 15 or 16, I had a friend who was at the university and was already, in those days, a Communist. He always laughed at me and wondered why I went to synagogue. I only went to synagogue for Yom Kippur to sit a little bit with my family and friends. “How can you believe in that sort of thing?” he would ask me. “Where is that God? Did anyone see him?” “Don’t talk to me, please. Keep it to yourself,” I said. Believe it or not, I met him later in life. He was a doctor. He wrote to me once, and at the end of the letter he wrote, “With Tito in victory- your Aleksandar.” I wondered if he was crazy. He was just like that.

My grandparents’ house was divine. It was a big two bedroom house with a living room, a salon, a dining room and a big hall. Grandmother’s house was nice. Ours was actually bigger, but grandmother’s was nicer. The house was heated by tile stoves which worked on wood. It was wonderful. They had two servants.

They were never active in politics. They did not know anything. For a long time I also did not know anything. Since my husband was an officer, we were not allowed to be involved in politics. I did not even know when elections were. After the war, actually during the war, I got involved in politics.

I remember that the Kohn family lived on one side of my grandparents; they were also merchants and had a big textile store. When I was 15, my grandmother very much wanted me to marry one of them. “No chance. I wouldn’t think of it. God, grandmother, what is with you?” I would say. He was a good and honest man, but he was not for me. And that is how this idea for my marriage ended.

That was one neighbor. On the other side there were Hungarians, across from them Serbs, some Lolins. There was not even a little anti-Semitism. We never talked about who was what. We all socialized together and visited one another: Serbs, Hungarians, Germans. They were guests in our house for our holidays, and we went to them for their Christmas, I even went to midnight mass. There was no difference.

Grandmother did not have anyone and grandfather had a brother in Senta. He was also a merchant. My grandfather sent people to wash him, and then he did not speak with my grandfather after that. Despite that I remained in good relations with him. Here’s the story of how grandfather made a big mess. He was incredibly funny and he loved to joke around. He found some people who washed corpses, and he said to them, “You know what, this and that guy died” and he gave the address, “go and tell them that you came to wash the corpse.” This was his brother. When his brother heard this he was sick. When he learned that grandfather was behind it he never spoke to him again. I went to visit him, but they never spoke.

Senta had 30,000 residents, and in my opinion it was a nice place. There were a lot of Jews in Senta. I can tell you there were a few thousand. We new each other, not everyone, but we socialized with some. We would go to their house and they would come to ours. Jews did not strictly socialize with other Jews. We also socialized with Hungarians. We socialized with the Hungarians the most. There was no anti-Semitism at all, not from any side.

There was a beautiful synagogue in Senta which the Hungarians destroyed during their occupation.1 It was not a very religious synagogue. Behind the synagogue, there was a perfectly nice section of Senta where the orthodox Jews lived. They lived there and did not socialize with us or anyone else, only amongst themselves.

One day someone asked me, “Do you know what is new?” There was an orthodox Jewish girl named Regina who went with me to elementary school. It is a wonder that they let her go to gymnasium, because at the time they did not go to elementary school. However, she was in the first or second grade of the gymnasium. I remember her. I was already married when someone asked me, “Do you remember that Regina?” I answered, “Yes, vaguely.” “She married and ran away to Belgrade with a Serb.” I came to Belgrade and saw her by chance at the green market. She had a wonderful husband, a Serb from Pirot. He went to Israel every year to visit her family. He loved it there. Her family remained in Senta. They did not move. They had disowned her so she did not go home anymore. Nonsense for such a thing.

In Senta at that time Jews were usually doctors, lawyers, dentists. Very few were merchants.When I started school, there was still a Jewish elementary school. But, I did not enroll there, I enrolled directly in the Serbian school and I went straight through to the Serbian gymnasium. There was a Hungarian and a Serbian gymnasium and that Jewish elementary school which later disappeared; I do not know what happened to it. There was no interest. The orthodox Jews did not let their children go to school. In my school there were other Jews. More or less they were all rich, well-situated. I do not remember that there were poor people there. They lived well.

I don’t know a lot about my father’s parents because they died when I was very young. I remember that they were not as wealthy as my mother’s parents. They also lived in Senta. They were religious, but not orthodox.

My mother, Tereza Hacker, was born in Senta, in 1895. In general she did not work. We had two girls working in our house, a cook and a maid. She would wake up in the morning and start from the beginning of the day to dress up. A tailor would come to make new dresses. At home mother played, read, guests came over, she went to visit friends and they made little parties in their houses. Both my mother and my aunt, Andrija’s wife, lived well. They traveled a lot; they went to Paris, Prague, Egypt, Berlin and every year to Karlovy Vari.

Once I remember I had to stay at home. There was a ball in Senta. I came on vacation and I was always running around the garden barefoot and I stepped on a nail. Naturally, mother became hysterical and I immediately received a tetanus shot. That night they went somewhere, my aunt and I went to sleep. She was so beautiful, unbelievably so. Even though I was very young, I sensed that something was not right with her. Mother sent someone to check on me. She told him to knock with a stick if he could not reach the window. And he knocked with a stick. My aunt slept in the fourth room from me and she heard the knocking. I came out, went to her and she was beside herself, hysterical, “God, what is that?” She was nervous, she shook and trembled. In general, I told my mother something is not right with her.

My father, Halman Hacker was born in Senta in 1878. There wasn’t a book that he had not read. He had an enormous library. He even had books in German because he studied in Berlin. He spoke German and Hungarian (my mother also spoke French). They read a lot. And there were books that were borrowed. We always had a lot of books and were always buying magazines. My father taught in gymnasium so he did not have time in the mornings or the afternoons.

He was an excellent student in a Catholic high school in Szeged. When he finished high school he got a scholarship from the Catholic Church for further studies. He went to Berlin to study classical philology and finished his education there. At the beginning of his studies a professor noticed how brilliant he was. He moved into this professor’s apartment, and in return he helped around the house. He finished his PhD there in Berlin. Although he was sent by the Catholic Church, he kept the Jewish traditions while he was there, and later when he came back to Senta.

In Senta he did not have anything to teach. It was suggested that he teach mathematics and so he taught mathematics in the Gymnasium of Senta. At some point he also taught Hungarian, because at the time there was still a Hungarian gymnasium. He was also the secretary of the Jewish Community in Senta.

Once he filled in for my mathematics professor and taught my class. I did not how what to call him, he was my father and my professor. I mainly kept quiet. In elementary school, I remember this well, first we learned syllables and then we would repeat at home what we had learned at school. One night, after hearing how badly I read, I heard my father say to my mother that I was an idiot. He did not understand because he worked with older children. At first I laughed, but then I thought about it, “Maybe it is like that. He is a professor and has experience with children; that is why he said it.” Years had past, I had walked a lot with my father and on one occasion I asked him, “OK, father, why did you say that I was an idiot that night?” “Forget about that; I said it because you had a hard time reading.”

My parents were not very religious. Mother fasted on Yom Kippur and father went to synagogue, and respected Shabbat. I remember that in my room there was a window with a big windowsill where he would light the candles and then bow and pray. Then I would ask what he was doing. He said it was Chanukah and the candles were lit. Father was more religious than my mother; he kept these holidays, and Saturdays he did not write at home. When I worked on Saturdays he would tell me that I should not do that on Saturdays. My son says that it was a real wonder that such an intelligent man did not teach me more about Jews. Today when I think about it I come to the conclusion that he thought there was no use from all of that. He did not teach me therefore I did not learn anything.

We celebrated all the holidays at grandmother’s. We wore masks on Purim. In Senta we also celebrated Easter. On that holiday the Jews sprayed cologne water or perfume on girls. It was a custom among the Hungarians that on Easter young boys sprayed girls with perfume. The Jews also did this. Serbs did not do it, only Hungarians and Jews sprayed one another.

My parents’ friends were a mix of Serbs, Hungarians and Jews. There was no distinction; there were many mixed marriages. During my grandparents’ time there were no intermarriages. When I was a kid there was already a lot of intermarriage. One day I went home with the rabbi, our rabbi was Doctor Svajger. At the time everyone looked old to me. He was fifty like my father. On the way, we spoke about a Jewish girl who married a Serb and converted to the Orthodox religion. He said to me, “So what!! You know what that means. You were a goose and now you are a fish. She is still what she was even if she changed religions a hundred times.”

Later when I married I converted to Orthodoxy. By then my father was no longer living. I do not know how he would have accepted that, he probably would not have accepted it well. I was thirteen when he died. When rabbi Doctor Svajger died we went to his funeral. When we came home that night my father said, “I did not feel well at the cemetery and if you had been there, it would have been easier for me.” “God, dad, I was standing right across from you. I was looking at you the whole time, and you did not look at me.” The next day when I came home he had fallen unconscious. He had pneumonia but there was no penicillin so they had to bring down his fever with leeches. He died in 1929 in Senta. He was fifty-one years old.

Mother had a brother Andrija. He and his wife had no children. My aunt could have had children but she did not want them. She told us, “I want my own life to live, to travel, to go where I want. I do not want to have to worry about them.” She was selfish from my perspective, but anyway she did not want children. And father had a sister Berta. She had a salon in Senta, she sewed. She was poor and did not live well. Whenever I went with father to visit her it was strange. Her husband was a Jew who died soon after they got married. They had a daughter Kati who did not work. I always said to my father, “Why don’t we help them since we are well-off and they are so poor?” “Those stories are not for you,” he would say. My mother probably did not have good relations with her. They never came to our house, but I went to their place. I was sad for them.

Growing up

I was born on February 25, 1915 in Senta. I went to Serbian elementary school and then gymnasium. There was a Jewish school there at that time, but almost all the Jews went to Serbian schools; a few of them went to Hungarian schools. Only orthodox Jews went to Jewish schools. I finished the fourth year of the gymnasium and then stopped going to school in Senta. I went to Zrenjanin to the “Mesinger boarding school”. I was there for a year and finished the fifth grade. My mother moved to Subotica and took me with her. I almost finished the gymnasium in Subotica. Then I married in the eighth grade, much to my mother’s dismay, as she wanted me to study medicine. She had nothing against my husband, she just thought that I was too young. My husband was an officer and got transferred very often, so he wanted us to get married right away. We went to Zagreb and were there for a very short time before moving to Prilep. We returned to Zagreb again after Prilep. There I went to the gymnasium to finish my education. In  school they did not even know I was married. I graduated, and after this I was finished with school.

In school I adored physics but hated mathematics. God really punished me; all my life I was a bookkeeper and worked with numbers and yet I truly hated mathematics. One day my boss said to me, “Since you are on duty this afternoon organize the whole card catalogue.” I had no idea how to do this. The next day he yelled at me; I thought I was such an idiot. How did I not see that they were different bills and that they could not go together. I enrolled in night school here-where, in Belgrade?. I went two and a half years, I passed the state exam, and that is how my job became clear to me. Until then nothing was clear to me.

I speak German, French, Hungarian and Serbian. I learned French privately. I played the piano for eight years but I was not interested in it at all, although I liked music very much. A friend of mine from Argentina, when she visited me a few years ago, played so nicely and we went together to classes. I did not have talent.

In school there were no differences between the Jews and the others except for the religious studies classes. Orthodox priests always came and worked with the Orthodox children. The Catholic children usually went to the Hungarian gymnasium, although there were a few of them with us. They had separate religious studies classes. Doctor Svajger, our rabbi, came to us Jews. I do not really remember what he taught us. He taught us about those holidays. He was a very tolerant man. He was not strict and did not give out bad grades so we did not need to know anything. He did not ask a lot from us. He knew my father was religious. He came to visit my father, they were friends.

When I went to school in Subotica I had to go to synagogue. The religious studies classes were there. But I did not go to even one class. At the end of the year I needed a final grade; my mother was very ambitious for me. She wanted me to be a good student. “You are not allowed to bring home fours; I want all fives!!” At the end of the year I did not have a grade from religious studies. The rabbi asked me why I did not come to the classes and I answered, “to be honest, it does not interest me at all.” “How is it possible that it does not interest you?” “Are your parents Jews?” “Yes they are. I do not have a father. He died. I live with my mother. She is religious but I am not interested, and that is why I did not come.” He gave me a three. That was my only three. I never went to religious studies classes. The classes were full of children, but I did not go. When I saw that I would make misfortune for myself I went to beg.  

There were no organized gatherings of young Jews in Senta. I know I had friends and my mom would play bridge with their parents in the evenings and she would take me along with her. They also did not go to synagogue but they observed some holidays, nothing special. Neither in Subotica nor in Senta, nowhere did I see a specially organized holiday celebration. No one was all that interested in these things. That is why there was no difference among us. There was no anti-Semitism. We were all one - Hungarians, Serbs.

I was the only child in the whole family. Sometimes I really liked it, everyone bought me things. I didn’t have Bat Mitzvah since my father died when I was 13. Where we were this was only for boys not for girls. Every holiday was special because we celebrated them at my grandparents’ house. They celebrated the holidays according to the rules. On Yom Kippur, when one did not eat the whole day, we went to their place after church [synagogue]. Those were big dinners. Also for Purim and Pesach we went to their house. We ate matzot. There was a matzah factory where we lived. The orthodox Jews had a factory that made matzot. We ordered from them, and they delivered them to us. Then we, the children, competed to see who could eat the most. We never ate kosher. I heard the most about kosher food and kosher behavior nowadays.

In that time I had a good friend Klara Rotmiller [nee Donat] who moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina. We went to the same school in Senta, though she was a year older than me. She married a very rich man from Brod in Vojvodina. She died six years ago. Her two daughters live in Argentina. One of them, Mirna, was here. I have good friends in Melbourne, Australia, too. My friends were also Laci Donat, Klara Muller, Viktor Deutsch, Laci Zentai. During the winters we went sledding and ice skating on the lake. In the summer we swam all day on the Tisa. I had a small boat, we went skiing on the water. Mother taught me to swim when I was five years old. I was an excellent swimmer. We went to dances in Sokolan where they had wonderful dances. In Subotica officers came to dance with us in the gymnasium, there were dances in the afternoon. We went to Chok, a place near Senta, where we would be invited or where we would go to steal fruits from the trees. The owner of the whole place was a wealthy Jew named Lederer, a friend of ours. During the war his estate was “bought” by Goehring. For vacations we went to the seaside, sometimes to Krk or to Italy with my mother. We traveled by train.

I met my husband, Dusan Necak, at a school dance. He came to the dance. He went with Jewish girls a lot and they called me all the time to go to these parties. Rich Jewish girls were often making parties and inviting officers. He was born in 1910 in Lika; and his mother and father died soon after that. By the time he was three he had no parents. He had an elder brother, however, he realized he could not raise a small child. From Lika he went to Fiuma (now Rijeka in Croatia), a command post, to live with an uncle. He was an Austro-Hungarian officer, and his aunt, I think, was Hungarian or half-Hungarian. He spoke Hungarian and German excellently and Serbian so that we did not have a problem with language. My mother did not speak Serbian only what she learned from us. My husband grew up there in Fiuma. He finished gymnasium there, then he transferred to the Commercial Academy in Belgrade, and then to the Military Academy.

We got married in Senta, in a church. I had to convert to Christianity because of the marriage, but I never became religious in that way. That is when I changed my name from Suzana Hacker to Dusanka Necak. My mother didn’t complain because he was a non-Jew, only because I was too young. They got on very well, Dusan and my mother, he even sent postcards to my mother for Yom Kippur, postcards that only she understood.

We had two children, Marina was born in 1936 on the 24th of  May in Prilep, and died six years ago, in 1996. Sasa was born in 1938 on the 3rd of February in Novi Sad

I was already married and living in Prilep when Hitler started. My husband hated Hitler from the bottom of his heart and considered him to be an absolute monster, a degenerate. However, in Senta he was not spoken about a lot. My mother was with me later in Belgrade and I said, “Mom, I greatly fear the Germans will occupy you in Senta”, they had already been under Hungarian occupation but no one touched them, “and take you to some camp.” I had no idea. I thought that they would have to go to some forced labor, however, unfortunately there was no forced labor, they were taken straight to Auschwitz. More or less everyone from Vojvodina.

During the war

In the beginning of the war, as smart as I was back then, I went to register myself. My mother and grandmother were my guests at the time and I registered them as well. Then someone told me that the Germans were gathering people from their homes. Then I sent my grandmother and then my mother home to Senta. Then I got to know this family, a wife and husband, Jews, who lived near Terazije, above “Dusanov Grad”2, in Belgrade.  One day I was their guest. While sitting at their place at lunch with Sasa, my son, a German officer came in with one of those boards on which was written “Feldgandarmerie” [Military Police], that they used to carry during the war. When I saw him I thought I would fall through the floor. When he left I said, “Are you people normal, why did you let such a person into your house?” They answered, “Leave him alone, he is a good man. He pulled our file from Tasmajdan.”[the files for all the Jews were in an office in Tasmajdan, in the center of Belgrade] So, they did not look for them. The next time I came to their place, I said, “Tell him to pull my file as well” and I gave them all the information. He pulled my file and that is why they did not look for me.

I don’t know what happened to him later. He left and who knows if he is still living. He saved the two of them and me. He really did pull my file so that they did not have any information about me. I don’t remember his name, not now. We used to call him Hans, but I do not remember his full name. I detested them, especially those with the boards.

While the Germans were around I did not work anywhere; I was in an apartment where my husband’s family had a nice one floor villa. When the Germans entered Belgrade a man named Djoka Djordjevic told my mother, “You know what Tereza, go home to Senta, we will find someone to take you and leave your daughter here. I will take care of her.” I lived with them together with my children for the first year of the war, until the Germans rounded up the Jews. Then we moved to another Djordjevic family, and from them in 1942, we went to live in my apartment on Zorina Street, also in Belgrade. Then I already had very few things; I had sold everything of value, pictures, rugs to the Hungarian embassy, that was how we supported ourselves. In 1942, I went to a post office to register for my father’s pension. In the postal form I wrote I was Jewish. When the clerk saw that, he took me in the office and tore the paper up. He said that I should never write that again, anywhere, because I could get hurt.

I lost my grandmother, uncle and mother in Auschwitz. When the Germans came to take them to Auschwitz, my aunt went to the synagogue where they were locked up. They herded them into freight cars, that is what they say since I did not see it, they gathered them and sent them to the synagogue and closed them in. For days they could not get out. Who knows what they ate. From there they sent them to Auschwitz. At the Vospaus station, they went to Szeged [Hungary]. Someone who lives in Australia told me this because his mother was with my mother and aunt in the train. The story goes that she was already so nervous. They were already in a delivery truck naturally. He said that it was terrible. The delivery truck was closed, they could not go outside nor to the toilet. He said it was terrible and cold, and that mother brought only one blanket and she was cold. My aunt did not give her a blanket to cover up with. What is this?  I saw that something was not OK with her but I did not think it had gone this far. They arrived in Szeged and that night she killed herself. My uncle was a pharmacist so he certainly gave her some potassium cyanide; he saw that she was finished. That was smart. It was the smartest thing one could have done. She would have suffered even more till Auschwitz, and there she would have gone to the gas chamber. This way she finished life there in Szeged-- a lovely memory.

During the war I was active in the Resistance. I was carrying notes, money, food medicines. I was visiting convicts. In the first apartment where I was hiding, we lived on the last floor. We had a radio, and my friends and I from the Resistance were listening to Radio London and Radio Moscow. Under our apartment was the apartment of SS officers. Once my daughter, who was mentally ill, yelled from the balcony, “Govorit Moskva” as Radio Moscow was on at the time. The SS officers asked the Djordjevic family how she knew something like that to say, but it ended well. They thought of something intelligent to answer. All the people from the group that gathered in the apartment, except for me and one other woman, became members of the Communist party after the war.

Once, in 1941 or ‘42, I went to buy toys for Sasa to play with. I had a big handbag from my father. On the way home, I realized I had two identical handbags in my hand. I went back quickly to the center to go to all the shops I had visited that day to ask if somebody had looked for the bag. No one had and I went home with both bags. When my friends and I from the Resistance opened the other bag, we realized that it belonged to a German officer and inside was a list of the people that were about to be prosecuted, killed, arrested. My friends from the Resistance learned all the names by heart, then they burned the lists, and went around to warn the people. They forbid me to go out from the house for a few months because they were afraid that German officer would recognize me on the street.

After the war

After the war, I went with my children from Belgrade to Senta, with the Russians, to see if anyone from my family was there and to see what was left of the house. Sasa started going to school there, and we stayed there for two years. Then when we moved back to Belgrade where Sasa continued his studies, primary school, secondary, university. He finished architectural studies at the university. I started working as a bookkeeper in Belgrade. They called me to join the Communist party, but I didn’t want to. Nobody knew that I was Jewish. No one asked nor was it written down anywhere. No one paid attention to this. I told my friends in the company where I worked that I was Jewish, when I was already a widow. I was already a widow when I was 27 years old.

Sasa’s peers knew that he was a Jew. He did not have a problem with his friends because of that. There was a woman named Olga Cohen, his philosophy teacher in gymnasium, who called him “Mosica.” One day I asked her, “Why do you call him that?” “He is a Jew.” “Yes, he is but his name is Aleksandar.” She said to me, “He is a Jew and that is why.” I told her, “Don’t do that because if you do, you will have problems with me.” That was it. However, with his friends there was nothing like this. There were some other Jews in his grade. And at the university there were even more.

Until now I never had any connection to the Jewish community. I did not have Jewish friends here. When Sasa was little he asked me if he was a Jew. “If you go by me you are, if you go by your father you are not.” He started with all this suddenly, and that is why I was surprised one day during the war in Bosnia. I did not know where he was. Normally we spoke on the phone. No one knew where he was. In the afternoon I saw him on TV waiting at the station for Jews from Bosnia to come. Then I saw him a few times in the Jewish community, then he was already going frequently.

I was very happy when I heard about the establishment of the State of Israel. I thought now they have a country, and it will not be possible for something like what happened during WWII to happen to them again. But I did not see myself there.

Glossary

1. During WWII Hungary occupied the part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia where Senta was. The occupation lasted from April 1941 to October 1944.

2. Dusanov Grad is an old restaurant in the center of Belgrade, in the quarter called Terazije, that still exists.

Leya Yatsovskaya
Vilnius
Lithuania
Interviewer: Zhanna Litinskaya
Date of interview: February 2005

I met Leya Yatsovskaya at the United Jewish Community of Lithuania, where she works as an accountant. I didn’t have to talk her into giving an interview, she gladly agreed to it. Leya is a beautiful elderly woman with arched eye-brows, and beautiful bright eyes. She is still attractive. When I saw her pictures, I acknowledged that she was a real beauty. I was in Leya’s house. It’s a small, two-storied mansion ‘tightly pressed’ to the other neighboring houses. There are no homestead lands or front gardens in Vilnius. There are a lot of shoes by the large staircase to the second floor. Leya’s daughter and grandchildren live there. Her sons have their own apartments, but their children come over here as well. The house is very cozy. There are paintings of Leya’s children on the wall. All of them are artists. The hostess asks me to sit at the table in the cozy kitchen. To begin with she treats me to imberlach. Unfortunately, she has very few family photos left. She didn’t manage to preserve them in the war years. I liked the story of a poor girl from a Lithuanian town, who managed to overcome the hardships of war and start a wonderful family.

My family background

Growing up

The Soviet invasion of the Baltics

During the war

After the war

Glossary

My family background

I was born in the Lithuanian town Ukmerge. During my childhood and adolescence the population of Ukmerge was about 12,000 people, and 5,000 out of those were Jews. Therefore, Ukmerge can be really called a Jewish town. My parents were from Ukmerge and as far as I know their ancestors, too.

My maternal grandparents, Toybe and Leizer Treivsh, were truly religious Jews. They were born in the middle of the 19th century. I didn’t know Grandfather Leizer; he died in 1919. I was told that he read the Torah and Talmud all day long. He prayed and went to the synagogue. Grandmother Toybe did all the work. She was the bread-winner. My grandmother baked bread in a large Russian stove 1 and sold it.

Apart from work about the house and baking, Grandmother Toybe had to bear, feed and raise the children. There were five of them: two daughters and three sons. In the early 1920s, the children became adults and left the house. This made Grandmother Toybe sad, and then she got ill and went to Vilnius, where her younger son Haim and daughter Fanya lived. Before 1939 Vilnius belonged to Poland [see Annexation of Vilnius to Lithuania] 2, so we happened to be in different countries: we were in Lithuania, and my grandmother was in Poland. That’s why I don’t remember my grandmother. I know she died in Vilnius in 1930. My mother’s two elder brothers, who were born in the 1870s, were pharmacists. One of them was called Azriel and the other David. They both lived in Ukraine, then USSR, in some small towns, where their wives were from.

During the Great Patriotic War 3 both my uncles remained in occupation with their wives and children. All of them perished during the mass actions against Jews. I never met neither them nor their children. I don’t know their names either. Another one of my mother’s brothers, Haim, the youngest, born in the 1890s, lived with his sister Fanya in Vilnius, on Nemetskaya Street. Haim was single. He was about 50 when World War II was unleashed. I don’t remember Fanya’s husband’s first name or surname. All I know is that they had one child: a son, who was about ten before the outbreak of war. Uncle Haim, Aunt Fanya and her family became prisoners of the Vilnius ghetto 4 and perished.

My mother was born in 1883 in Ukmerge. She was given a rare Jewish name: Rayne. I don’t know exactly what kind of education she got. I think it was elementary. But still she was literate. She knew how to read and write in Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and Yiddish, and rudimentary mathematics. She helped me with that when I was in school. Her mother tongue was Yiddish, which was common for most of the Jewish population of Lithuania. Before getting married, my mother helped Grandmother Toybe about the house. I don’t know how my parents met. I don’t think it was a pre-arranged marriage though.

All I know about my paternal grandparents is that they were from Ukmerge. They died long before I was born. My father was much older than my mother. His parents were born in the 1840s. My grandfather’s name was Abram Faingolts. I don’t remember my paternal grandmother’s name. My paternal grandparents died in Ukmerge in the 1900s, long before World War II, and were buried in the local Jewish cemetery, which was closed in the post-war period. My father had siblings, and his younger sister Mikhle was the only one I knew. She lived in Vilnius with her husband and two daughters. All of them died in the Vilnius ghetto. My father’s brother, whose name I don’t remember, left for America with his family in 1923. We didn’t correspond with them. I don’t know what happened to them. I don’t know anything about my father’s other siblings. I’m sure that my paternal grandparents were religious.

My father, Mane Faingolts, was born in Ukmerge in 1867. Like all boys from poor Lithuanian families he went to cheder, where he got rudimentary knowledge. He didn’t go on with his education. My father did hard physical work. When he was young he was a house painter. When he got older he worked in a workshop where lemonade was bottled. It was hard labor. My father stood in water and cement, in a damp and cold environment.

Growing up

My parents got married in 1907. Of course, the wedding was in accordance with all the Jewish traditions: under the chuppah, which was mandatory back in that time. In 1908, my mother gave birth to my elder sister Dora. Then there was quite a big gap and in 1916 my second sister Riva was born. Then in 1918 my mother gave birth to Malka. Our family was poor and when my mother got pregnant at the age of 37, my parents decided to leave it like that hoping that a boy would be born, but then my mother gave birth to me. My mother felt so ashamed that a fourth daughter was born, that she told my father not to go outside so as to avoid the questions of the neighbors. I was born on 25th October 1920. I was named Leya, in honor of my deceased grandfather: Leizer.

Our family lived in my maternal grandparents’ house. My grandmother left for Vilnius and we were then the true hosts of the house. I remember my early childhood; since the age of three. As far as I remember, my mother, Aunt Fanya, who lived in Vilnius, and I, were drinking cocoa from beautiful blue cups. Aunt Fanya had a white and brown checked dress on. I think that’s my first recollection of my childhood. A little later, I was settling down in the house and, of course, my recollections from childhood are connected with that.

Our house was on the street called Synagogskaya [Synagogue Street]. A big synagogue wasn’t far from us. Then, in the1930s, our street was renamed Rybnaya [Fish Street]. My grandmother’s house was one-storied with an attic, which we always leased out. Our family was very poor and we wouldn’t have made it without the money derived from leasing. Like most of the apartments in Lithuania, our house was of a longitudinal layout: there was a hall from the entrance, then a kitchen, followed by a small bed-room partitioned from a drawing-room, which was used as a dining-room. There was a door in the dining-room opening to the yard. There was a big Russian stove in the kitchen, where my grandmother baked bread for sale. There were shelves in the hall, where she put freshly baked bread. There was also a bell in the hall. Visitors rang the bell when they entered the hall because at that time doors weren’t locked. We thoroughly insulated the door of the dining-room with blankets and the like as it was cold in winter time. There was a tiled stove in the room, but it required a lot of firewood. We didn’t have any, as it cost a lot of money and my father couldn’t provide for it.

To save firewood, my father made a stove himself from a sheet of iron. Its chimney joined the fixed furnace, but that furnace was clogged and emitted a lot of smoke into the room so this made it difficult for us to breathe and see. It hurt our eyes and we asked not to heat the premise as it was better for us to stand the cold than smoke. Malka and I shared one bed. Before we went to bed, my mother warmed our blankets before the stove. My sister and I got our clothes off quickly and my mother covered us with the warmed blanket. My parents, sisters and I, all shared one bedroom. We had beautiful furniture, inherited from my grandmother together with the house. There were large wooden beds, and a large wardrobe, which was in the bedroom. A beautiful carved cupboard took the larger part of the dining-room. My mother kept linen in the three bottom drawers. There was a flap board in the cupboard, which we used as a desk. There was a tea set on the top shelf. The above-mentioned blue cups were part of the set. A chandelier was made from a kerosene lamp, so the room was hardly lighted.

My mother did all the household chores with the exception of laundry. We had a large family and didn’t even have running water, so my mother gave our linen to the laundress. We had to walk up the hill to get water from a pump, and for the toilet we fetched water from the River Shvenchena [in Russian it means Holy]. Usually the deaf and dumb poor Jews brought us water, but Malka and I did that as well. I liked it when there was a lot of water, so that I could fill up the water barrel. My mother was a wonderful cook. She made delicious dishes from inexpensive products. Potato and herring was the most common food for poor Jews in Lithuania. There was a shop not far from us where only herring was sold. Usually there was fresh herring, and herring which had been salted the previous year, which was twice as cheap. My mother bought the cheaper herring and we ate it everyday. Even now I consider herring and potatoes to be the tastiest food in the world. Sometimes we had soup. In winter time we had it with grain, and in summer with vegetables.

In summer it was easier for us as lemonade was in demand and my father received a certain percentage of the sales and made pretty good money. My mother had been saving all week long to lay the Sabbath table: we had gefilte fish on Saturdays no matter what. There was a lot of fish in Ukmerge and it was cheap. I still cook fish the way my mother taught me. At that time usually pike was stuffed. The fish was disemboweled, and cut into large pieces. Then, fillet was removed from the back. Fish meat was minced. Then croutons, onion, salt and a little black pepper were added in the mince. Then it was added to the remaining pieces of fish, from which fillet was taken. Vegetables were put in the pot: onion rings, carrots, then fish and then vegetables again. My mother didn’t use beet. All that was sprinkled with salt and put in the oven for a couple of hours before the fish bones turned soft. Tsimes 5 was a frequent dish on Saturdays. My mother cooked it the following way: she boiled fat beef, put there a lot of peeled and sliced carrots. That mixture was boiled, and then kneydlakh were added. Those are small dumplings made of flour, chicken broth or goose fat, egg, onion and salt. When there was no meat, my mother cooked carrot tsimes without it, and it was still very delicious.

My sisters and I helped my mother get ready for Sabbath. On Fridays we cleaned the house thoroughly, put a clean table cloth on our dinner table, dusted the rugs, furniture and cleaned the floors. Besides, my mother cooked dinner for Friday night and Sabbath. On Saturdays Jews weren’t allowed to do anything, even fire a stove, warm food, or put lights on. Talks about work were forbidden. I remember a joke since childhood: A Jew went on Sabbath to his neighbor. They were sitting at the table and chatting. The host said, ‘If it wasn’t Saturday, I would say: Ivan, warm the samovar.’ The joke is that Jews are forbidden to talk about work on Saturdays. Ivan wasn’t Jewish, and he did all the work for the Jews on Saturdays [shabesgoy]. We didn’t have any extra money to pay somebody else. On Saturdays, the children did everything: first my sisters, then I. It was considered that it wasn’t sinful for children who hadn’t come of age, boys no older than 13, and girls no older than twelve, to do simple work on Sabbath and holidays.

There was a baker, who lived not far away. On Thursdays all the Jewish ladies from the neighborhood baked challah, fancy bread in his bakery. Each of them brought their own dough. My mother took pride in her challah, which was the longest and tastiest. On Friday, the challot were taken out of the oven and the Jewish ladies put chulent, Sabbath food, in the oven for it to be kept warm. Each hostess had her own pot which she took to the baker’s. My mother usually cooked chulent with meat, potatoes, onion and beans. When we had enough money we had chicken on the Sabbath table. On Friday evenings, freshly baked challah was put on the table and candles were lit. There was kosher wine on the table as well. Before the evening came, my mother said to me that it was time for me to put on a dressy outfit. I had only one dress like that.

When my father came back from the synagogue, we sat at the table and my mother, having a trendy laced head kerchief on, put her hands on her eyes and read a prayer. Also on Saturdays, my father went to the synagogue, and I often accompanied him and carried his prayer book. Usually my father went to a small prayer house, which was close by. He attended the synagogue on holidays. The synagogue was two-storied, but the first story was in the basement. The men had to walk downstairs. When I asked why the first floor was so deep, one of the old Jews said that it was done for the synagogue not to be taller than the other buildings, so that the Jews wouldn’t be envied. I enjoyed going to the synagogue with my father and look at the Jews with tallits and tefillins. Being a young girl I was in an elevated mood when I went to the synagogue. The building of our old synagogue is still in Ukmerge. Unfortunately, it was converted into a gym during the Soviet times, and didn’t change afterwards. There were hardly any Jews in Ukmerge after the war.

The kashrut was observed in our family. I tried pork for the first time when I was an adult and lived in Kaunas. We never had pork in our house. Kosher meat was sold in special Jewish kosher stores. My mother sent us to the shochet, when she bought chicken. He tied the legs of the fowl, cut it and then suspended it by the legs on special hooks and then gave us the chicken when blood poured from it in a special tub. We had separate dishes for meat and milk: from hardware to pots, pans and rags.

We were rather poor, though we weren’t starving. We wore the clothes of our elder sisters. So I had pretty worn out clothes. My mother made most of the clothes herself. She was good at everything. In 1925, my eldest sister Dora left for Kaunas. She finished the Teachers’ Training School and became a teacher. Dora got married and her marriage was a success. Her husband, a Jew from Kaunas, Srol Moskovich, was a well-bred businessman. Having finished school, Riva left for Kaunas as well. She finished a medical school there and became a nurse. Riva worked in a Jewish hospital in Kaunas and lived with Dora. Dora helped us a lot. She often sent parcels to my parents. On holidays she always sent presents. That’s why I always looked forward to the holidays. I always got presents from my elder sister. Pesach was my favorite holiday. There was a large chest with kosher dishes in the attic. My sister and I climbed up there to get the dishes on the eve of the seder. There was also a box with ancient books. One of the thick books was with pictures, and there was a beautiful girl in a pink dress with a bow, on one of them. Every year my sister and I looked at the picture and couldn’t help admiring the girl. We probably envied her a little bit because she was so beautiful and fashionable.

We only had table porcelain dishes. Pots and pans were pig-iron. Malka and I took them to the river and thoroughly scrubbed them with sand. Every corner of the house was immaculately cleaned. The furniture and floors were polished, clean tulle and curtains were hung, the paschal white-starched tablecloth was taken out. Later, our sisters came from Kaunas with presents. In my early childhood we were together. We put on stylish things. My father reclined at the head of the table on the first day of seder. He also dressed up. He didn’t have any festive garment. He just wore a clean starched shirt. He hid the afikoman under the cushion. Usually I was the one who had to look for it and find it. I also asked my father the questions [the four traditional questions at Pesach], which he answered and then carried out seder. Though we were poorly dressed and our parents couldn’t afford to buy presents for us on holidays, the festive table was full of dishes, which even rich people didn’t have, as my mother was the best cook. Shortly before the holiday, my mother bought the best chicken at the market. Besides, she looked at their bottom to see whether they were fat enough. She also bought goose fat. She bought a minimum of 240 eggs. She looked at each egg in the light. She always did it patiently.

Long before the holiday honey wine was made from hop. It was in the bottles covered by gauze in several layers for the chametz not to fall into it, God forbid. Of course, the matzah which my father brought from the synagogue in the basket, covered with a clean bed sheet, was the main food. We ate it instead of bread and made keyzele, cookies and cakes. Every day during the Pascal period we ate eggs fried on goose fat, with matzah. It was delicious. Apart from traditional gefilte fish, chicken and chicken broth with matzah kneydlakh and all kinds of tsimes and stew, there were also desserts. Imberlach is a dessert cooked as follows: carrots, ginger, sugar and orange peels are stewed for a long time until it gets thick. Then it’s spread on the board and cut after the mixture cools down. There was also angemach. It was made from sour beets with nuts. Beets were pickled before Pesach. My mother also cooked Pascal borscht from those sour beets. We ate it with matzah. On seder night we put a goblet with wine on the shelf in the hall. The wine was meant for the Prophet Elijah. The door to the hall wasn’t locked. When I was a child, I believed that Prophet Elijah really existed and that he went over to every Jewish house. Other holidays were marked in our family as well, but we didn’t prepare for them like for this one, so I don’t remember them that well.

My parents fasted on Yom Kippur, and went to the synagogue. Then my mother made a festive dinner. As for the fall holidays, I remember Sukkot because my father put a sukkah outside, by the house. During the holiday my father ate there, and my mother either joined him or stayed in the house with us because in Lithuania it was rather cold and rainy at that time. I liked to go to the sukkah and join my father. On that holiday my father bought me little colored flags. There were special Jewish little flags in Ukmerge. Jewish lyceum students walked around with them in the street. No matter how hard life was, during Chanukkah my father gave us money and gave each of us little presents. My mother baked scrumptious potato fritters, and fried patties in oil. There was a pageant procession along the town on the most mirthful holiday of Purim. When I started school, I also took part in it.

Since early childhood I got parental love. My father liked me more than any of my sisters. He said if he had two houses, he would give them both to me. He couldn’t imagine a greater richness. He paid more attention to me than to anybody else. He told me interesting stories, and sang songs. I still remember one of them which he dedicated to me:

You are as beautiful as Greta Garbo,
The most gorgeous woman in the world,
You are as beautiful as Greta Garbo,
But you don’t have as much money.

Our town, Ukmerge, was a Jewish cultural center. The center was mostly inhabited by Jews. We liked to stroll in the downtown area, at the square with the fountain. The inhabitants of Ukmerge liked to saunter there in the evenings. The majority of the Jewish population was poor and middle-class like us: I didn’t consider us to be poor. Jewish traditions were strictly observed among the poor and their violation was unspeakable. I remember, in the late 1920s, a Jewish girl fell in love with a Lithuanian and married him without her parents’ blessings and left for another town. The entire Jewish community in Ukmerge was simmering with rage. When the wrath was finally mollified, and the parents forgave the girl, they had to see the newly-weds stealthily as to not disturb public peace.

The synagogue was the Jewish center of the town. People went there on holidays and Saturdays. All the Jews of the town went there without any exceptions. They went there not only to pray, but to communicate and find out about the news and rumors. There were rich men in the town, though they were very few. They were owners of stores. Jewish stores also were in the center. There was a book store, owned by Koltun, not far from us. Murschik owned a shoe store. There were manufacture stores belonging to Ryshanskiy and Katz. The jewelry store, where gold pieces were on offer, belonged to the wealthiest merchant: Joffe. Doctors also lived in the center. A pediatrician lived close by. He was also involved in social activities apart from his work. That doctor treated us and other poor Jews for free and his wife, a dentist, treated my mother’s teeth for free. In winter I often went to her to borrow some skates. She never refused me as I didn’t have my own skates. There were two Catholic cathedrals in the town, and one of them was in the center. The military orchestra went there and I went over to listen to them. There was an Orthodox church in the town as well.

There were other Jewish institutions in Ukmerge: Jewish health organizations and charity organizations. Educational institutions were considered to be in the cultural center of the town. There was a Jewish kindergarten. I didn’t go there as it was too expensive. There were two Jewish elementary schools in the town. In one of them the subjects were taught in Yiddish and in the other one in Ivrit. There were two lyceums which did the same. There was also a religious school, but none of my friends went there. When I turned six I went to the half-first grade, pre-school in modern terminology, of the Jewish school, where the teaching was in Yiddish. I’ll never forget that wonderful Jewish school. I remember my teachers with awe. They didn’t merely teach, they put their heart and soul in us. There were three teachers at school: Leib Morgenstern, his wife Shifra Morgenstern, and another teacher, Rivl Itskovich, and the school headmaster.

Mostly poor children went to this school. They were so indigent that Malka and I appeared to be rich as compared to them. The director managed to arrange free cocoa or tea and rolls for the children. Besides, orphans, who had nobody to take care of them, were given free clothing: pants, dresses, and boots. I still recall one case and I start crying when I go back to it. One of the girls from our school got ill and we went over for a visit. The indigence I saw can’t be compared with anything: earth floor, a tiny window stuck in the earth and the hungry eyes of many brothers and sisters. I’ll never forget that.

Having finished school I entered the Jewish lyceum, where teaching was in Yiddish. It was a private institution, where tuition had to be paid for. My father managed to get some subsidies for education of four of his daughters. My elder sisters Dora and Riva also finished that lyceum. Malka and I had studied there for several years. In 1933 it was closed down and we had to transfer to the lyceum where subjects were taught in Ivrit and we successfully finished it. We studied the same disciplines as we had studied in Yiddish. I studied Ivrit rather swiftly. I did well and got prizes and awards at the end of each year. We had to wear a lyceum uniform: brown dresses with aprons and white collars and caps with green visors. Dora sent the fabric for the uniforms and my mother made dresses for Malka and me.

There were great teachers here as well. It was wintertime. Once on Chanukkah we staged a performance under the supervision of our teachers. I took part in it as well. One time we staged the performance ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ I played the part of the princess, whom an evil sorceress enchanted for 100 years. We had beautiful costumes from ruffled paper. The performance was accompanied by a pianist, who played classic melodies. My father was sitting in the assembly hall and was crying from admiration, affection and pride for me.

I liked drama performances very much. I loved music as well. Our pianist, who accompanied our performances, showed me a beautiful world of classics, getting me to know the pieces of the world’s composers. I also knew Jewish songs of klezmer musicians. I remember one Chanukkah song: ‘Оh Chanukkah, oh Chanukkah, beautiful holiday, it’s so merry, there is no other holiday like that. Every day we play with a whipping top and eat hot potato pancakes.’ My father taught me a sad song about a Jew who went to America to seek his fortune. He didn’t get rich, but he was so homesick, missing his wife and son. The Jew asked the starlet in the sky to come and visit his house in the village, where they lived and tell his son to learn the Kaddish, because it would be needed soon. My father always cried when he was singing that song. I was fond of arts in general. Literature appealed to me the most. I was very good at languages. During my studies at the lyceum I learnt Lithuanian, German, Latin and English.

I had a lot of friends and almost all of them were Jewish children. I had different hobbies. Unfortunately, there was no Jewish theater in Ukmerge. At least there was a cinema. I liked movies a lot, but I couldn’t go to the cinema very often as we couldn’t afford it. Sometimes I went to the movies for lyceum students and school children as the tickets were cheap. In that period of time German and American movies were mostly screened. I don’t remember what they were about. All I remember is that those several movies I saw were funny comedies. We liked to go on walks along the central square and listen to the wind orchestra.

Back in that time the Lithuanian society was politically minded. Political passion didn’t obviate a small and calm Ukmerge. Оne of the groups was involved in ‘inoculation,’ propaganda and teaching of Yiddish and Yiddish culture. But I don’t have any information about such organizations as I just heard of them. The most common among Jews were Zionists, and those supporting Jabotinsky’s 6 ideas. There were also visitors from Sochnut 7, who got the youth ready for repatriation to the historic motherland. There were also underground communists in the town as well as all over Lithuania. Our family, including me, didn’t belong to any groups. I was inclined to ‘left’ ideas, more democratic and attractive for poor Jewish people.

In 1938 I successfully finished the lyceum. I didn’t mind to go on with further education, but my parents had no money for that. They had educated four of their daughters. By that time, all of my sisters had moved to Kaunas. Dora was married already, her husband wasn’t poor and she helped two of my sister’s: Riva and Malka, when they went to Kaunas. Riva stood on her own feet. She worked in the Kaunas hospital as a nurse. She was very beautiful, tender and feminine. She was a very good nurse. If there was an opportunity for her to continue studying she would have made a great doctor. Malka finished Kaunas Ikh Duh Arbet 8 school. It was a school for Jewish girls where they were trained in crafts. Malka finished that school and became a seamstress. She lived with Dora, but Riva rented a separate room.

All of us understood that I had to study as well in order to get a specialty, but there was no place to study in our town and it was decided in the family council that I should go to my sisters in Kaunas. I remember my saying good-bye. I had mixed emotions: on the one hand, I was excited to go to the city, study, work, meet new people, and have an interesting life. On the other hand, it was hard for me to leave my parents, especially my father, who couldn’t help crying when he saw me off to the big city. I was his favorite little daughter.

I lodged with Riva, slept on one sofa with her. Dora watched that I wasn’t hungry, if I didn’t manage to have lunch at her place; she gave me one litas for lunch. With that money I could by half a liter of milk, a roll and a piece of salted Lithuanian cheese. Kaunas really impressed me. It was beautiful and huge as compared to Ukmerge. I started looking for a job but it was impossible to find one without letters of recommendation. Then my sister decided to help me. Once, Dora had a talk with a rich businessman, who had a large warehouse. She talked about me, boasting about my capabilities and beauty. She even showed him my picture. The businessman said he liked me, but not for work. So, I remained jobless for three months and then accidentally found a job via one of the girls I knew. What really helped was the knowledge of English and typing skills. I did all kinds of work: maintained the documents, kept the office in order, ran errands around the town. First the owner paid me 50 litas monthly. I worked for a month and he appreciated my work so much that he raised my salary to 75 litas and in a couple of months to 120 litas.

I became materially independent. Now I could help my parents like my elder sister. I took advantage of any opportunity to send my parents parcels with food, presents, and money via any acquaintances from my hometown, who came to Kaunas. Now I feel that my assistance wasn’t enough, but my parents were happy that their daughters were on solid ground, got professions and were strong for them. Riva and I rented a better apartment now. I could afford many luxuries: theaters and cinemas. I went to the opera in Kaunas for the first time. There was also an amateur Jewish theater. I went there as well. We always attended performances of groups touring Vilnius or any other Jewish theaters.

I made a lot of friends, with whom the husband of my sister Malka kept company: a lot of interesting young people, Jews and Lithuanians. I was very pretty and there were a lot of admirers around me. Gradually I started admiring one guy, who with time became the closest person, friend, husband and father of my children.

His name was Evsey Yatsovskiy. He was born in Kiev [today Ukraine] in 1918. He came from an intellectual Jewish family. Evsey’s parents were from Kiev. Before the outbreak of the October Revolution [see Russian Revolution of 1917] 9 they moved to Lithuania to escape pogroms [in Ukraine] 10 and the communist regime. Evsey’s father, Jacob Yatsovskiy, was a real merchant, businessman, who knew how to make money. He did really well. Jacob owned a movie house in Kaunas, as well as a video library, which he founded with a Lithuanian companion. Apart from the cinema business, Jacob Yatsovskiy also represented some world-known Swiss firm, which produced lacquer and paint. Jacob donated a lot of money to charity and helped the poor. His wife, Maria, found another way to spend her husband’s money. There was a coup d’etat in Lithuania in 1926 11 and the nationalists came to power. Four communists were executed in the central town square. Touchy Maria was deeply impressed by that and she soon became a member of an underground communist organization. Maria easily talked her husband into contributing rather large amounts of money to the communist party. Maria and Jacob had two sons: Evsey, and his younger brother Alexander.

Evsey was a very gifted artist. He was late for the entrance exams for the arts department and he entered the construction department of the university instead. He was a great interlocutor. I liked to listen to his stories. It seemed to me he knew everything. In 1940, Evsey was drafted into the Lithuanian army. He served in Marijampole [50km from Kaunas]. On weekends he came to see me in Kaunas. He couldn’t stand not seeing me no longer than a week. I introduced Evsey to my parents. My father wasn’t very happy. He wanted a prince for his favorite daughter, but he turned out to be the heir of the owner of the movie houses. Even if I brought a real prince in the house, my father wouldn’t have approved of him, as he sincerely believed that nobody was worthy of me.

The Soviet invasion of the Baltics

On 15th June 1940, the Soviet army peacefully came to Lithuania [see Occupation of the Baltic Republics] 12. In Kaunas many people, mostly poor Jews, who had a hard living, had high expectations for the Soviet power. They welcomed the soldiers with flowers and cried out to them, ‘Bravo.’ Rich Jews were of different opinions and they were right. All private enterprises were nationalized soon after and its owners were exiled to Siberia. It was dreadful: streets, squares, and parks were empty. People lived in fear of deportation. All the same, a lot of people of all kinds of nationalities were exiled and most of them never came back [see Deportations from the Baltics (1940-1953)] 13.

Those who were connected with the Zionist movements were touched by repressions as well. The communists, who were in the underground, were assigned to high posts in the new state. Then it turned out that Maria Yatsovskaya actually rescued her husband and son. Her assistance was appreciated by the communist party. Shortly after the Soviets came to power, Jacob Yatsovskiy voluntarily gave all his property to the state and became the chairman of the Cinematography Committee of the Lithuanian Republic. Maria went to work in the Central Committee of the Party. The owner of my firm was exiled right away and I lost my job. Evsey’s mother, who treated me like her own daughter, gave me a hand. She helped me get a job as an accountant in the Central Committee of the Party. As a matter of fact, I worked there all my life. Both of us recognized the new ideology. I became a Komsomol 14 member, and Evsey became a political officer 15 in the invincible Red Army. We sacredly believed in everything the communists said, including the invincibility of the Red Army. I couldn’t help thinking of war, when in Western Europe and neighboring Poland fascism was thriving. But still we were calm as we firmly believed that the fascists would be utterly defeated by the Soviets at once.

During the war

In 1940 Dora gave birth to a daughter and my mother came over to take care of the baby. Malka also got married. Her husband was a Jewish guy, Shleime Atamuk. That summer Riva was going to have a wedding party. She was very close with her friend Birger. On 22nd June 1941, on Sunday, I was getting ready to meet Evsey, who was supposed to come back from his squad. Riva came back home from night duty and said that there were severely wounded soldiers and she thought that the war had begun. I went to see what was going on in the town. Hardly anybody could be seen. People were leaving Kaunas. The Central Committee of the Party, where I was working, provided an opportunity to make arrangements to evacuate its employees and their families. I didn’t think of myself. The first priority was to send my mother, Dora and the baby, who had turned nine months. I made arrangements for them to get on a train and then I started thinking of myself. On Monday, 23rd June, the fascists were right outside Kaunas. I had to leave. Both Riva and Malka left the town. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t leave my father no matter what. By the building of the Central Committee cars and buses were parked for the average employees of the Committee. I talked to some of them to go via Ukmerge. When I went over to my father, he was at a loss for words, feeling despondent. He didn’t know what had happened to us and my mother. He took his coat, but left his passport. I had to go back for his documents. We were on the road, and I didn’t say goodbye to Evsey.

We reached the Latvian border. There were Jews. One Jewish lady gave us tea and I was thinking that in a couple of hours she would also have to go in an unknown direction. I told the lady not to linger. We were placed in a village school. In the morning we were to take the train. At night the town was glowing. An oil cistern was set on fire at the train station and everything burned down to ashes. All the fugitives went on foot. My father, aged 74, and I were the last ones. It was hard for him to walk, but I decided not to leave him. We had been walking for a long time along some sort of railway station. Finally, we managed to get on the passing train with the fugitives heading eastwards. There was nothing to eat or drink. I wasn’t even hungry because of my strong emotions. Though, I was really thirsty. At the stations I was able to get some water. We didn’t even have any containers to fill with water. We didn’t think that we were leaving for a long time and hoped that in a week or two the Red Army would start attacking and we would be able to go back home. Though I was the youngest in the family, I was the only one who stayed with my elderly father and I felt neither panic nor fear of the future. We were lucky. We got off in Velikiye Luki [Russia, Pskov oblast, about 500km from Moscow] and accidentally met Malka and Shleime. Maria, Evsey Yatsovskiy’s mother, was also with them.

Further on we went with Malka’s family. Maria stayed in Velikiye Luki to wait for the news from her husband and sons. We went on the open coal platform. By the end of our trip we looked like stokers or miners, who had just left the mine. Our impression was aggravated by our looks as well. Half way we all lost some weight. It was the hardest for my father. In three weeks we reached Kirov in Ural [2000km east of Vilnius, Russia]. He stayed at the evacuation point for a couple of hours. We had a chance to take a shower and eat a bowl of soup. Then we were sent to a kolkhoz 16, named after Kirov, not far from the town. The chairman of the kolkhoz was a kind and good-hearted man. First all evacuees settled in the rural club. Then our large family was given a separate room. So we were together: Malka, her husband and my father. I, Malka and Shleime worked in the field. We gathered flax. The kolkhoz gave us some ration: flour, and the baker, one of the evacuees, baked bread for us. The chairman of the kolkhoz gave us butter. I was sure that the other people from the kolkhoz didn’t get it. We lived in the kolkhoz for two to three months.

Shleime, Malka’s husband, was actually the head of our family. My father wasn’t a decision-maker but he said that there was a construction site of a paper plant, evacuated from Leningrad [today Russia], not far from us, and there were openings for workers’ positions. We decided to move to that construction site. In fact, we got jobs there. I worked as an accountant in the office of the plant. There was a small village not far from the construction site. It was the exile area for political convicts from tsarist times. We settled in one of the houses. The hostess, a tall and tacit woman, treated us well. Though, when we got our wages and decided to buy a jar of nanny-goat milk from her, as she had a couple of nanny-goats, she preliminary poured water there. My father could immediately tell that the milk was diluted. She didn’t sympathize with us maybe because we were Jews, or mere strangers, urban pampered people. The first winter was hard for us. We hadn’t taken any warm clothes with us and had hardly anything to wear. We were suffering from hunger and cold and our optimism helped us get over it.

Shleime started looking for my sisters and mother via the evacuation inquiry bureau and he succeeded. Soon we received a letter from Dora. She, her husband, his brother, Еvsey Moskovich, and my mother were in Pensa [today Russia]. In early 1942 they headed in our direction. It’s hard to describe the meeting of my parents. Each of them had thought that they would never see the other again. They didn’t stay with each other for a long time. Misfortune came into our family. I still have twinges of remorse. It seems to me that my fault is that I wasn’t protective enough of my father, who was an ill and elderly man. When we were at work, he helped me about the house. The winter was severe and my father fetched water from the river, having to walk in the deep snow. He caught a cold and stayed unconscious for a few days.

I went to the construction supervisor and asked him to give me a horse. It wasn’t that easy. They only gave us a horse after a few days. It was too late when Malka took my father to the hospital. The nurse said that she had given my father an injection and he had asked whether he could take a nap. It was the last nap my father took. He never woke up. I also feel guilty of the way my father was buried. There was a frozen cadaver of some Lithuanian who had died from hunger in the firewood storage facility. He couldn’t be buried, as they couldn’t find a horse. When we came with a sleigh, they put two coffins on it: my father’s and the stranger’s. The corpse was so stiff that they couldn’t close the casket. It was a horrible scene. We mournfully followed the coffin and my mother was whispering some Jewish prayer. When it rains it pours, as they say, and it poured on that day. Right after my father’s death, all our men were drafted into the army: Srol Moskovich and his brother, Evsey, and Shleime Atamuk.

The only joy I had was that Evsey Yatsovskiy found me. His aunt, his mother’s sister, Sarah Glieman, lived in Moscow [today Russia] and was asked by Evsey to find us and she did via the inquiry bureau in Buguruslan [today Russia]. It happened while my father was still alive and Evsey sent him a parcel with tobacco. My father really suffered without cigarettes. Evsey helped us by sending money and parcels with food at times. He served in the headquarters of one of the squads at the leading edge.

In 1943, a new Lithuanian orphanage was opened in Konstantinovo, Kirov oblast [today Russia]. Employees, who knew Lithuanian, were in need. When we heard about it, we decided to move there. We walked past a couple of villages. Common Russian women gave us a warm shoulder: they fed us very well, and asked us to stay overnight. I will never forget their kindness. We arrived at the orphanage. We felt like home as we were from Lithuania and it seemed even warmer here. There were a lot of orphans: Jewish, Polish and Lithuanian. Some children had mothers, who were given some work by the orphanage. There was a homelike atmosphere. We didn’t feel like outcasts and tried to help each other. We were given work at once. Dora was employed as a teacher and I as an accountant. After some time Riva came. She registered her marriage with her husband while in evacuation, in Central Asia. He was drafted into the army and she followed him. She found a job in the orphanage as a nurse.

I received a letter from Evsey shortly after our arrival in Konstantinovo. He asked me to go to Balakhna, Gogol oblast [today Russia], where the Lithuanian division #16 was being formed. [Editor's note: The battalion was called Lithuanian because it was formed mostly from the former Lithuanian citizens, who were volunteers, evacuated or serving in the labor front.] Evsey was there and he was entitled to a vacation before leaving for the front. I packed my things very quickly. I was missing him so much, as I hadn’t seen him since the beginning of the war. I left quickly, but I didn’t arrive there fast. In Malmyzh [today Russia], I had been trying to take the train to Kazan [today Russia] for a couple of days, but my attempts were futile. It was impossible. I missed a lot of trains. Some marines helped me get on a passing train. I didn’t manage to get on the train in Kazan either, but finally I reached Balakhna. Therefore, it took me about eight days to get there. I didn’t inform Evsey of my visit so it was a surprise. Both of us were happy to see each other safe and sound. Evsey took me to the regional marriage registration office, where we registered our marriage immediately. We didn’t have neither wedding rings nor clothes or a feast. I didn’t manage to put on a wedding gown and veil like I had dreamt in my childhood. War had made its adjustments. I never regretted that I became Evsey Yatsovskiy’s wife. I stayed in Balakhan for three days. Then Evsey was to start work and he returned to his squad and I forced myself to leave for Konstantinovo.

I went back to the orphanage being a married woman, with a new last name: Yatsovskaya. Hardly anything changed in my position. I started getting more letters from Evsey. They were even more tender and affectionate. I also corresponded with my mother-in-law, Maria. By that time she was quite a dignitary: she was a plenipotentiary of Lithuania in Tartaria and Kazan.

Another year had passed. In spring 1944, my mother-in-law was transferred to Moscow and Evsey insisted that I should go there with her. So I turned out to be in Moscow with Maria. She facilitated me in getting a job as an accountant in the Lithuanian embassy. I was in Moscow for the first time. Of course, it would be hard to compare Moscow during war times with a pre-war capital. The windows were disguised. Many of them had paper bands in the form of a cross. Though the war was approaching the Western borders of the USSR, Moscow was still rarely bombed. Nonetheless, I enjoyed staying in the beautiful city. I attended museums, theaters, most of which returned to Moscow. Not all of them were operating. Many of them didn’t bring the masterpieces of the world art from evacuation. Even the things I saw there were enough for my reminiscences about Moscow. I made pretty good money and received a good ration. I had a chance to considerably help my family, who stayed in Konstantinovo.

After the war

I had stayed in Moscow for some months. In summer 1944 Lithuania and its capital Vilnius were liberated. My father-in-law left for his motherland immediately as well as the government. Like in the pre-war times he was assigned the head of the Cinematography of the Republic. In September 1944 Maria and I also returned to Vilnius. We had been roaming for a couple of months: renting apartments or staying with relatives. Evsey continued his service and was far from Vilnius.

I was immediately employed in the same position I had before the war. I resumed working as an accountant in the Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania. I managed to get an invitation letter for my kin rather quickly. In January 1945 I was meeting my loved ones: my mother, Dora, Riva and Malka. They didn’t have a place to stay and so they rented a small apartment. My sisters’ husbands were coming back from the lines: Srol Moskovich and Shleime Atamuk. The families of Dora and Malka got their own apartments. At that time there were many unoccupied houses in Vilnius: mostly Jewish, as their hosts had perished in the Vilnius ghetto, in Ponary 17 and other places of mass execution. Riva’s husband had perished in the lines. My Evsey still served in the army.

At the beginning of 1945, my husband was on leave for a few days. Then, many Lithuanians went to the forest with their guns. On the Lithuanian territory the war hadn’t ended, but now it wasn’t against the fascists, but against the Soviet occupants. Evsey was a communist and he was afraid that he would be killed. He wrote a letter asking for a vacation, where he openly wrote that he wanted to leave heirs in this world. We conceived our daughter during that short-term vacation. We felt so happy on 9th May, the Victory Day. We had been awaiting it for so many years. Shortly after that my husband’s parents were given a wonderful mansion in the center of Vilnius, and we moved there. I had spent all my post-war life in that house. I’m still living there. It’s a small two-storied house with a staircase inside with beautiful tiled stoves and a large kitchen, the place to live for our family. In 1945 I gave birth to my daughter. We called her Alexandra after my husband’s brother. Alexander was in the group of the partisans, which was catapulted to the forest in March 1942. A forester saw the traces in the forest and betrayed the group. Alexander and the other guerillas were shot by the fascists.

My husband was transferred to Vilnius shortly after Alexandra was born and continued his service in the headquarters. During the war, he joined the Communist party. I joined the Party in 1948. I can’t say I did it deliberately. I didn’t have the guts like many Komsomol members, nor did I have strong beliefs in the ideas of communism. I couldn’t have acted in a different way. First of all I lived in a family where communist ideas reigned owing to Maria, who was able to inculcate all the family members with them. Secondly, I worked in such a place where it was mandatory for me to be a member of the Party. I did that, as I wasn’t strongly against communism. Before joining the Party, I was asked a question whether I wished to do that, and I honestly said yes.

Then in 1948 I gave birth to a son and we named him Adomas. It was the name of the secretary of the Komsomol organization of the partisan squad, Alexander’s friend, who had perished with him. It was the period of time when maternal leave was given only for two months. So, I went to work as soon as the leave was over. My mother-in-law helped me raise the children. In the post-war period she retired. My mother helped me a lot as well. She lived with Dora, but called on me almost every day.

It was the period of state anti-Semitism, which was spread from Moscow to the outskirts like a multi-headed sea serpent. The struggle against rootless cosmopolites [see Campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’] 18 was in full swing. The papers were full of articles about doctors being murderers [see Doctors’ Plot] 19. My husband and I understood that we could become victims as well. That was the way it happened.

In 1951, my husband was demobilized from the army without any explanations. He remained jobless. He felt dejected. I tried to support him the best way I could. After some weeks I was fired as well. The true hypocrisy of the Soviet regime was shown now. They didn’t want to dismiss me completely as I was very literate, and had an excellent command of Lithuanian, Russian and even foreign languages. They couldn’t leave me in the administration of the Central Committee of the Party because anti-Semitism was thriving. In one of the publishing offices of the party, they introduced a new position with a personal salary especially for me, and I was employed there. All those events affected the nerve system and health in general. My father-in-law, Jacob Yatsovskiy, was stricken with an illness, having been worried about anti-Semitic campaigns and the troubles of his children. He stayed in bed for a couple of weeks and died in 1952. He was buried in the town cemetery in Vilnius.

Stalin died in 1953, and my father-in-law had passed away by that time. I don’t think he would have cried or mourned like many others. Both he and Maria practically disbelieved the ideals which they had devoted part of their lives to. At any rate, my mother-in-law took the death of our leader more or less calmly, even ironically. I cried and suffered sincerely. Maria and Evsey gladly took the resolutions of the Twentieth Party Congress 20 and divulgement of Stalin’s cult. It was more obvious for them than it was for me. After Stalin’s death I was hired by the administration of the Central Committee as the chief accountant. Evsey also got an excellent offer. In the post-war years he entered the Moscow Juridical Institute, which had the extramural department in Vilnius and graduated from it with honors. Evsey was offered a job at the Presidium of the Supreme Council of Lithuania. He worked there for many years and became the head of one of the departments. Evsey was joking that before the war he couldn’t have imagined himself anything but an artist, but he became a lawyer which didn’t seem to be fit for his nature.

We had a happy living. I loved my husband very much and he cared for me, too. Both of us doted on our children. My husband treated my relatives really well, too. I was always close to my mother and sisters. My mother got ill rather often after the war. She tried to observe Jewish rites while she was breathing. She went to the synagogue and ordered a Kaddish for my father. My mother always tried to observe the kashrut and didn’t work on Sabbath. She fasted on Yom Kippur and marked Pesach. She always had matzah for that holiday and we, children and grandchildren, went over for dinner on the first day of Pesach. In 1957 my mother died. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery and an elderly Jew recited the Kaddish for her.

My mother didn’t live to see her third grandchild. In 1959 I gave birth to a boy. He was called Jakuba, after Jacob Yatsovskiy. My mother had passed away, so my mother-in-law helped me raise my boy. Maria and I bonded well. She didn’t have a daughter, but she considered me to be her daughter. I loved and respected her as well. Maria died in 1972. She was buried in the town cemetery, the way she wished. After all, she was an atheist.

All those years I was keeping in touch with my sisters. The eldest, Dora, worked at a secondary school as a mathematics teacher. Then she retired. Dora died in 1985. Her daughter Elena got higher education. She lives in America with her family. Riva couldn’t forget her husband, who perished, for a long time. She was often proposed to, as Rivasya was a beauty. She couldn’t make up her mind to get married. Finally, she agreed, but it wasn’t the best choice. Her husband, a Jew, Shtrenene, didn’t act the way a Jew was supposed to. He liked liquor and got drunk, and then he became harsh and aggressive. Riva moved with him to Klaipeda. There she gave birth to twins: a boy and girl. Riva died early, in the mid-1970s. She was afflicted with jaundice. She was taken to the hospital and passed away there. When she died, her husband took the children away, and we didn’t get in touch after that. I don’t remember the names of Riva’s children. I only saw them two or three times in my life. My third sister, Malka, and her husband left for Israel in the late 1970s. Shleime died a couple of years ago and Malka lives by herself now. They didn’t have any children.

My husband and I were happy together, raised children. We had an average living wage. Our salaries were a little bit higher than average, and it was impossible to make more. We had enough for a living, but we had neither a car nor a dacha 21. Though, once my husband bought a ‘crate’ and he spent more time under the car, repairing it, than in the car. We always went to the best resorts in the country, getting trip vouchers from our organizations. We went to Palang, the Crimea and Caucasus. Sometimes we took the children with us, but mostly they went to pioneer camps. We also were avid readers. We didn’t miss a single cultural event in Vilnius: we attended all theater performances and concerts. We nurtured love for beautiful things in our children.

Our children embodied the dreams of their father. We, parents, were so happy to see what we could have never expected. All our children had artistic talents like my husband. Alexandra, Adomas and Jakuba graduated from the Vilnius Institute of Arts. They are specialized in different fields. Alexandrа deals with theater decorations. Adomas is a theater artist. He has worked in the Vilnius drama theater for many years. Now he is teaching at the Academy of Arts. He works with many producers, often goes on trips overseas. Jakuba became an expert in computer graphics. He is considered to be one of the best experts in Lithuania.

Jewish traditions weren’t observed in our family and the children weren’t nurtured in them. On Pesach I went to Dora’s or Malka’s sometimes. We just commemorated our parents. We paid close attention to things happening in Israel, sympathized with our national brothers during the Six-Day-War 22, and other conflicts. Our family didn’t think of leaving the country. Our children were raised as internationals. All of them are Jews, but the epoch they were raised in, made certain adjustments. They never observed Jewish traditions, though they respected them as much as the traditions of other people.

All my children decided to marry non-Jews. Alexandra’s private life wasn’t easy. She married a Lithuanian, Jurovichkas, and gave birth to two children, one after the other. She has a son, Lukas, who was born in 1975, and a daughter, Maria, born in 1976. She was named after her grandmother Maria. Unfortunately, Alexandra’s family severed in 1979: her husband took to the bottle. My husband and I helped Alexandra a lot. She wouldn’t have made it without us, neither from the moral, nor the material standpoint. We have always livеd together. Now, in 2005, Maria, my favorite, is finishing the Academy of Arts having followed in the footsteps of her mother. She is to take training abroad. Lukas wasn’t willing to get higher education. Now he is a manager in some firm. Adomas got married too early, in my opinion. It wasn’t in my principle to object to the choices of my children. His wife Laima is a Lithuanian. She teaches English. Adomas has a son, Marius, named in honor of his grandmother. Jakuba’s wife is also Lithuanian. They have a son, Justas.

My husband worked in the Presidium of the Supreme Council for about 20 years. Then he went to work for the Supreme Court of Lithuania. At that period he took a keen interest in Lithuanian and Jewish history. He defended his dissertation on history [see Soviet/Russian doctorate degrees] 23. He wrote five books on the history of Lithuania. When our republic gained independence [see Reestablishment of the Lithuanian Republic] 24, and the opportunity of revival of new Jewish culture, my husband was one of the first who took the initiative to start the Jewish community. He was there when the United Jewish Community of Lithuania was founded. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the chance to work for a long time. In 1994 Evsey died.

Since that time I have lived in the house with my daughter and her children. Adomas and Jakuba have their own apartments. My daughter and I are real friends. Neither of us interferes in somebody else’s life. We have our own interests and respect each other. In spite of my elderly age, I feel myself as totally independent. It’s my main trait. I have worked for the Jewish community as an accountant for quite a few years. I’m among the people who have the same values. I’m happy. There is an opportunity of national revival in the independent Lithuania, and I deem it to be the most important achievement. Now I mark Jewish holidays with pleasure and my children with their families come over to my place on Pesach, Chanukkah, and Rosh Hashanah. I fast on Yom Kippur, often cook Jewish dishes like my mother did, and teach my daughter and granddaughter how to cook. As Alexandrа says, ‘Better late, than never!’

Glossary:

Riva Smerkoviciene
Kaunas
Lithuania
Interviewer: Zhanna Litinskaya
Date of interview: October 2005

Riva Smerkoviciene is a petite elderly lady with light, bright and young-looking eyes. She gladly welcomes me and agrees to an interview. Riva lives in a large, rather unkempt apartment in a stone building, constructed on the quay in the 1950s. Riva looks the way a 91-year-old woman is supposed to look: a lot of wrinkles, dry strained hands, very thin gray hair, but her soul is young and she readily dips into her recollections. Her advanced age speaks for itself - she gets tired very quickly. I interviewed Riva on three different days, not exhaust her. Unfortunately, her memory has some gaps. The hardest effort for her is to recall what happened comparatively recently - in the postwar years. Riva’s daughter Lena helps her recollect that period of her life. She is currently living in Russia and came here to visit her mom. Both mother and daughter were crying when they talked about the hardships of their lives.

My family background

Growing up

The Soviet invasion of the Baltics

During the war

After the war

Glossary

My family background

I have lived all my long life in Kaunas with the exception of the several war years. My paternal grandfather, Yakob – Lithuanians called him Yokubas – Gershenovich, was born in Kaunas in the 1860s. He lived with his wife, my grandmother Leya, in a small house on Grushevaya Street in Zelyonaya Gora [there is still a district in Kaunas with that name]. The streets in Zelyonaya Gora had the names of the trees, which were planted there: Grushevaya – pear tree, Slivovaya – plum tree, Vishnevaya – cherry tree. Such neutral names never changed, no matter who was in power and those street names still remain unchanged. Mostly poor people lived in this district, some of them were destitute. The population was mixed, like in other places all over Lithuania – Jews, Lithuanians and Russians. There were several synagogues there, which my grandfather Yakob attended with zeal.

Grandfather was a very religious man. Every Friday he went to the synagogue, having put on his festive kippah and tallit. Jewish customs and holidays were strictly followed in the house of my grandparents. Grandmother always covered her head with a simple kerchief, but on Saturday and on holidays she put on a white lacy kerchief and dressy apron. Both Grandfather and Grandmother Leya were very pious people and raised their children and grandchildren in a religious spirit.

Yakob worked as a warden at a brewery, owned by a German, Engelman. Grandfather spoke German with the owner. He was fluent in German as well as Yiddish and Russian. Of course, Leya didn’t work. She tried to save every kopeck to buy the necessary food, clothes and footwear and educate her children. Yakob had a steady income, but it was rather low, so the family was rather poor. Nevertheless, Grandmother always found something to treat me to, when I dropped by them. I often visited my grandparents Leya and Yakob, as we lived not very far from them, in the same street. My grandfather Yakob and grandmother Leya died in the mid-1930s. I wasn’t present at their funeral as I was in political exile. I know that both of my grandparents were buried at the Jewish cemetery in Kaunas in accordance with all Jewish rites and traditions.

Yakob and Leya had five children – two sons and three daughters. The eldest, my father Chaim Gersh Gershenovich, was born in 1886. Father’s sister Chaya Feige was two years younger than him. I cannot recall what Chaya Feige’s husband, Itshak Grobman, did for a living. I think he was a worker. Chaya Feige and Itshak had five daughters – Hanna, Taube, Bunya, Dvoyre and Sarah. The youngest, Sarah, was born when Chaya Feige was over forty years old, so Itshak’s hope to have a son wasn’t realized. Chaya Feige wasn’t to raise her children – she died in the hospital in 1938 after some operation. The girls were brought up by their father, who wasn’t able to put them on their feet. Bunya died from typhus before the Great Patriotic War 1. Itshak and Dvoyre died in occupation. Hanna, Taube and Sarah somehow managed to leave and happened to be in one of the orphanages in Udmurtia. The eldest, Hanna worked there; Taube and Sarah were fostered there. The sisters returned to Lithuania after the war, got married and lived a long life. As far as I know, only Sarah is still alive. She left for Israel with her family in the 1990s.

Father’s second sister Sarah, born in 1889 also had a short life. Sarah was afflicted with tuberculosis since early childhood. It was strange that being so feeble she gave birth to three children. Sarah’s husband, Gersh Shteintlef, was a painter. Sarah died in 1938, the same year when her sister Chaya Feige passed away, leaving three children behind: her daughters, Toybl and Esther, and her son Chaim. All of them perished in Kaunas ghetto 2 with their father.

The youngest daughter in the family, Reizl, born in 1895, was much more well-to-do than the others. She married a tailor named Alexandrovich, who provided for his children rather well. She had two sons. One of them was called Ruvim. I don’t remember the other one’s name. In 1936 Reizl gave birth to a daughter, who was named after her grandmother Leya. During the war nobody from Reizl’s family survived – all of them perished in Kaunas ghetto.

The youngest in the family, Father’s brother Michl, born in the 1900s, left for Palestine with his wife shortly before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. I don’t remember his wife’s name. Their children – two daughters and a son – were born in Israel. I cannot recall their names. I don’t know what happened to the daughters. I only know that Michl’s son perished during one of the wars in Israel in the 1960s. Michl died in the 1970s.

My father had very poor eye-sight since childhood. He was practically disabled. Nonetheless, he managed to finish cheder as Grandfather Yakob couldn’t allow that his eldest son got no Jewish education. My father knew Yiddish, Hebrew and knew by heart several chapters of the Torah. There was no chance that Father could go on with his education – neither from the physical standpoint, his eye-sight, nor from the material one, as Father was the eldest out of the children and had to start working as soon as possible in order to help out his parents. When he turned twelve, Grandfather bought him a small, but strong horse and Father became a cabman. He transported production items of the concrete plant, the owner of which, a Jew called Tipograf paid rather skimpy money. The production items were rather heavy: stairs flights, concrete slabs, well discs, and Father couldn’t cope with loading or unloading them by himself. The most important thing is that he could barely see the road and couldn’t handle the horse. That is why Father hired an assistant, who traveled with him and with whom he shared his skimpy earnings. Thus, Father earned his bread and butter in adolescence and when he was a married man with a wife and children.

My mother came from the small Lithuanian town of Zarasai, located about 100 km away from Vilnius. There her parents rented land for a long time, keeping a small farmstead with dairy farming. They made sour-cream, butter and cheese from the milk of their own cows and took it to the market to sell. My maternal grandmother died rather young. I never saw her. I don’t even know her name. When she died, my grandfather Berl Idl Gar, born in the 1850s, married for the second time. His wife’s name was Hanna. She was a kind Jewish lady. They didn’t have their own children and Hanna treated her husband’s children wonderfully, as well as loved and pampered her grandchildren. My mother deservedly considered her to be her second mother, and we also called her grandmother.

The eldest, Motle, born in 1880, left for America in 1914. He changed his name there and started calling himself` Max. That was the way he signed his letters. He didn’t write very often. Motl’s fate was quite good. He became a businessman, got married and had children. I don’t remember their names. Motl helped our family a lot in the prewar times; he sent parcels and money. In the postwar Soviet times it was dangerous to keep in touch with people from Capitalist countries 3, so we stopped corresponding with my uncle. I don’t know what happened to Motl and his family. He died a long time ago, somewhere in the USA. My cousins and nephews are there. I would like to find them, but I have no time for it.

Dovid was the second in the family. He was born in the 1880s. Dovid and his family – his wife, whose name I cannot recall, and children lived in the small town of Krona near Vilnius. His family had a pretty good life. They owned a bakery, a bakery store and it yielded a pretty good income. In the late 1930s Dovid was struck with palsy and died before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, without seeing its atrocities.

The eldest daughter in the family, Chaya, left for Palestine in 1930. Her husband died shortly after that and Chaya married again. Her second husband was a Jew called Kaplan. They didn’t have children. As a grown-up woman she adopted a girl and named her Chavira. Chaya died a long time ago. Chavira Kaplan and her large family are currently living in Israel.

Before the war Dovid’s eldest son Joseph finished a Teachers’ Training College and taught in Jewish schools in Lithuania. He turned out to be in Kaunas with his wife during the Great Patriotic War. Their daughter Getele was born in the ghetto, but the girl was very feeble and died shortly after the liberation. In 1945 Joseph and his wife left for the USA in order to forget what they had to go through and start a new life. He couldn’t obliterate his experiences from his memory. Joseph wrote a book about his life in the Kaunas ghetto. It was published in America with a huge circulation. Joseph died in 2003. The youngest in the family, Yankle, perished in occupation in Krona. There was no ghetto there, and Jews were executed during the first days of the war.

My mother, Mushe Ita Gar, was born in 1886. Before getting married, she lived with her parents, helped them about the house and took care of the cows. When Grandmother died, and Mother’s brothers – Motl and Dovid – left home, my mother stayed with her father and his second wife. They didn’t stay on the farmstead long. In 1909 my father proposed to my mother. Of course, old Jewish match-makers played their role. My parents wouldn’t have met each other without them. Their wedding took place in Zarasai. My parents were wed under a chuppah in a local synagogue. They moved to Kaunas after the wedding. Grandfather Berl Idl bought them a tiny house on Grushevaya Street in Zelyonaya Gora. He and Hanna also moved there as it was hard for the two of them to take care of the farm without my mother. Since that time Berl Idl and Hanna lived with my parents. Grandfather died in 1919 and Hanna was buried in 1928.

Growing up

In 1910 Mother gave birth to my elder sister Hanna and in 1913 Rochl was born. On 14th December 1914 I came into the world. I was called Toybe-Rivke. My parents dreamt of a son and fate sent them two. In 1917 Efraim was born in and in 1920 the youngest son was born and named after Grandfather Berl Idl, who had just passed away.

We were very poor. Our small house on Grushevaya Street consisted of two rooms: one rather large room, which served for the entire family as a drawing-room and a bed-room, and a kitchen with a big stove. There was hardly any furniture: there was a big round table, a bed where my parents slept and a small cot taken by Hanna, whom we loved dearly. We, the children, slept where we could think of. Some of us slept on the boards, other ones on two chairs put together or on the floor on sacks stuffed with hay. There wasn’t enough bed-linen for everybody, so we used our clothes. I always shared one mattress with my younger sister Hanna.

Our food was also scarce. During the week Mother cooked thick potato soup with onion for everybody to fill up their stomachs. It was easy to stop the hunger with that, but low-calorie food didn’t quench hunger for a long time: we were hungry before soon. There was meat on the table as well. One of my mother’s friends kept a butchery store. She was sorry for us and sold my mother small pieces of meat dirt cheap and Mother managed to concoct something out of it for all of us. She knew how to cook things almost out of nothing. She cooked tasty latkes, kneydlakh. We had chicken broth only on holidays. Grandmother Hanna daily went to the charity Jewish canteen, where the poor were given some food. She brought thin soup or porridge from there. It was also helping our family. Nonetheless, we didn’t starve. Mother knew how to calculate the ration in such a way that we always had something to eat, be it even the simplest food.

Apart from food, it was also necessary to save money to get fodder for the horse as it was our only source of income. Father, a very frugal man, made a small box, with the help of which he measured oats for the horse, so it wouldn’t eat more than needed. We loved our sweet horse and stealthily gave it handful of oats. The horse knew us and always stretched towards us, touching us with her mouth and wet warm muzzle. That horse was the only entertainment and a toy for me ever since my earliest childhood. All of us had hand-me-downs passing from one to another. Mother knew how to remake and remodel old things like a true milliner.

We began every morning with a prayer. I still remember its words. All of us thanked God for having awakened and started a new day. Every morning Father went to the synagogue, which wasn’t far from our house. It was a small two-storied synagogue, where women prayed on the second floor. Mother and Grandmother Hanna often went there. In spite of living in one room, I never saw my father with his head uncovered. Mother and Hanna always wore kerchiefs on their heads: dark ones during the week and starched white ones on Fridays and on holidays.

Usually we had bread for breakfast. Sometimes butter was served with it. Dinner was as modest. The kashrut was strictly observed at home. We didn’t have a lot of dishes. They were very old, mended many times, but dairy and meat dishes were kept separate beginning from a pot and up to the cutting board and knives. Mother got ready for Sabbath beforehand. She tried to stash a little bit of money away by Saturday to celebrate it worthily. On Friday Mother baked two challot from the flour of the highest sort, cleaned the room and oven. We were looking forward to seeing our father. Upon return from the synagogue he said a prayer and the meal started. It was also very modest, but still it differed from our daily food. Beside challah, my mother also baked small rolls, one for each member of the family. Sometimes she cooked tsimes, made stewed fruit in the summer. Chulent was one of the mandatory dishes. There was very little meat, but Mother still managed to make it really scrumptious. Chulent was kept in the bakery nearby, where all our neighbors brought their Sabbath chulent.

My parents got ready for the Jewish holidays in advance, Father saved every kopeck he could in order to celebrate Jewish holidays in accordance with traditions. Grandfather Yakob gave our family three litas [Lithuanian currency] for every holiday. At that time it was a lot of money. Owing to that money and our savings we could celebrate holidays. There was always fish on Rosh Hashanah. If there wasn’t enough money for vegetables and spices, my mother cooked gefilte fish. If the year wasn’t good, she made the so-called empty fish, but it was also cooked with vegetables.

On Yom Kippur my mother bought everybody poultry for the rite of kapores: girls were given hens and sons roosters. We went to the synagogue, to a shochet, who would twirl the poultry over our head and read the prayers. I still remember that prayer. Then he cut the poultry and we took it home. Mother cooked some fatty broth and made kneydlakh. It was a real feast for us. She baked special buns for Yom Kippur. Sukkot came next. Father made a sukkah himself. He did it in a very original way. He put fir branches in front of the entrance to the yard and that way people came there right through the entrance. Mother put a small table there, a candle stick and my father had meals and prayed there during the entire holiday period. We ran into the sukkah thinking that it was a game.

For the holiday of Simchat Torah my brother and I bought multi-colored small flags made of cardboard, and put a potato on the top of flags. We took them to the synagogue. It was fun for us. We took part in the procession, danced and sang with the adults. It was a great merry holiday. All of us had a good time.

We always looked forward to Chanukkah. Grandfather Yakob gave the children Chanukkah gelt: 20 cents each. It was a lot of money for us. I usually bought a roll and a glass of carbonated water. I ate the tidbit slowly, in small pieces. Every evening at home a new candle was lit on the chanukkiyah. There were potato latkes on the table. My mother was a very good cook. Mother always had some flour and poppy seeds in store for the holiday of Purim. She baked wonderful hamantashen. We lived from hand to mouth and Pesach in a month required a lot of money so Mother reckoned that each member of the family should get only one. I ate mine rather quickly and hungered for another one. There were years when Mother could make two pies for each of us, and it was a very great joy for us. Every time each of us got equal portions as our mother loved all of us equally. We didn’t bring shelakhmones to friends and relatives, as we couldn’t afford it.

After Purim everybody was looking forward to the big holiday, Pesach. Father bought matzah way in advance. He brewed honey beer long before the holiday. He poured it in bottles and covered them with a special gadget. I still keep that gadget. It is very deer to me for the sake of the memory. Mother took care of the cleaning and all the dishes were scoured and koshered. We had separate table dishes for Pesach. Every year I and my younger brothers were looking forward to seeing our mother open a cherished chest, where cups for all the members of our family were kept. Our parents had tiny golden ones and the rest of us had silver and tin ones. Later I was asking myself why my parents wouldn’t sell their golden dishes in hard times. I found the answer to that question. Jewish traditions were sacred to them and besides the golden cups were given to them by their parents and they would never let them go no matter what.

On the eve of Pesach my father walked around the house taking away any chametz. The remnants of leavened bread were burnt by him in the yard. On seder he was at the head of the table, reclining on a pillow. He hid three pieces of matzah and we had to find that afikoman and got a present. The gift was rather conventional in our family, but we gladly stuck to that tradition. One of my brothers usually asked the four questions about the origin of the holiday. Father read the Hagaddah. Everything happened in accordance with Jewish law. There were all obligatory dishes on the table: eggs, potato, bitter herbs etc. At the best time we had gefilte fish, but it was a real delicacy for us. Mother cooked traditional Jewish dishes: imberlakh, all kinds of tsimes. Of course, all of us ate chicken, broth, matzah kneydl during the Paschal period. In general, the celebration of this holiday in our family wasn’t worse than with other Jews, our neighbors. It made our father happy. Mother made very tasty curds dishes on the summer holiday of Shavuot: pancakes and casseroles.

There was a Jewish public kindergarten not far from our house. It was for poor children. My elder sisters went there. I had to go there as well. We were given modest food there, but it was good. That kindergarten was funded by the charitable donations of rich Jews. We were taught Jewish traditions, we sang songs in Yiddish and danced. In general we spent the time the way it was proper for children. Though, we weren’t put to bed as the premises were too small to put beds in. I went to the first grade of a Jewish elementary school after kindergarten. It was some type of pre-school, where the studies lasted for one year. I will always remember my teacher Rainits from that school. I cannot recall her name since we always called her Ms. Rainits. She loved and cherished the children.

After elementary school I went to the second grade of the Jewish school. Our director Meishe Livshin taught Mathematics. He was a very strict and demanding teacher. Everybody sat still in his class. I preferred Arts. I liked literature. We studied the classics of Jewish literature. I was a mediocre student, but I was active, took part in amateur contests. I loved performances. Most of all I liked the scenes from the plays written by Sholem Aleichem 4, which we staged for the holidays. The students’ parents came to watch them, but mine came very rarely. They were very busy, Father at work, and Mother at home. Not only children of the poor went to this school, but also the representatives of different strata of society. There was a democratic air at our school. Everybody communicated with each other and was friendly to each other without considering the social position.

I knew about the existence of Zionist 5 youth organizations. There was Maccabi and some other organizations in Kaunas. I didn’t feel like going there. There were other stronger tendencies at our school, namely the Communist ones. There was a free Socialist organization. When I was eleven, I became an underground pioneer 6 and took an interest in Communist ideas. My sisters joined a Communist underground organization before me. First, my brothers were fond of Zionist ideas and joined Hashomer Hatzair 7. Then they followed our movement. We didn’t have pioneer scarves [Pioneers wore red scarves]. We were called ‘pioneers without scarves.’ We were involved in propaganda: spread slogans, distributed flyers praising the Soviet regime, made red flags, wrote slogans on them and then hung up them up at night. We were regularly involved in political enlightenment, read the works written by the classics of Marxism and Leninism.

There was an underground press. Small dirt cheap books were published in Yiddish, covering the biographies of great people – Lenin 8 and his brothers-in-arms. We spread that literature and gave it to people in the street or placed it stealthily in the houses of people. We became atheists, against all religions. At home we weren’t brave enough to stand up openly against Jewish traditions; besides, we loved our parents and knew how important it was for them. Once, my mother asked us to wash up, and my sister and I mixed meat and dairy dishes. Having seen that my mother said that it was a sin against God and my sister and I were ashamed. Being pioneers, then Komsomol members, 9, we still celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays with our parents, for them to be pleased by that and to feel calm. We expressed our protest against religion after the holiday. We bought pork sausages, pig’s fat and got together to eat that banned non-kosher food. Luckily, my parents didn’t find out about it; violation of traditions would have been a big blow for them.

There were Communist leaders in our organization. I cannot recall their names now. As a rule, they were school teachers. Headmaster Livshin was against that organization as he understood that the school would be threatened with closure as the Communist Party was banned and its leaders were detained and imprisoned. In the late 1920s Smetona 10 came to power in Lithuania, and all political organizations were closed down, there was a reaction in the country. Livshin told us many times to cease that underground activity and do what we had to: study. We wouldn’t listen to him. In 1929 his fears came true – our school was closed down. Some students, children of rich parents, were transferred to other schools, mostly to the Commercial Lyceum. Most people found a job. I understood that I couldn’t go on with my studies. My family couldn’t afford the tuition fee. It was clear to me that my childhood was over and I had to work and help my parents. I became an apprentice of the tailor Lind. He was a very good tailor. He had his own atelier and many apprentices.

The organization had got stronger by that time. We became Komsomol members and kept on with our underground work. I performed ideological work with my colleagues – apprentices and some of them also joined the underground organization. I became the leader of the Komsomol group at the age of fifteen. During Smetona’s reign some of our leaders were arrested, but we kept on working. Our organization originally consisted of Jewish youth as during Smetona’s regime anti-Semitism was common and young people tried to find a way out. Then Lithuanians began joining our organization. Every weekend we went for a picnic out of town. On Saturday, on our day off, the Jewish youth got together and on Sunday Russians and Lithuanians did. We read revolutionary papers and other press from the USSR, sang songs. Besides, we played different games: some people role played workers and others policemen. Workers organized demonstrations, and policemen chased them with clubs. That way we worked on the tactics of street fight. The interesting thing is that none of the underground members was willing to play the part of policeman. During the casting people had tough arguments. My group counted more than one hundred people.

In spring 1933 arrests commenced: either somebody gave us away or our jaunts attracted too much attention. Our house was searched. Nothing was found at my place due to my neatness and discretion. I was arrested and taken to the police quarters, where I met a lot of my friends. It was my first arrest, so I got away with an administrative punishment. I was exiled without a trial. All of us were exiled to different places so as not to create conditions for us to continue our underground activity. I came to a small town. I was hired as a housekeeper by a family of Jewish pharmacists. I lived at their place, helped them with work about the house. In general, it was a pretty good place. Though, I wasn’t allowed to leave the town and had to check in at the police station every week. Local citizens treated me with respect and I, of course, I didn’t chuck away the chance to popularize the Soviet regime. I wrote home every week and got letters from my parents where I was asked to calm down and not to get involved in any dangerous matters.

Hanna was arrested the same year. She carried a red flag at some of the demonstrations. She was savagely beaten while being arrested. There was a trial. First, she was sentenced to nine years of imprisonment, but taking into account her young age, her sentence was changed to six years. Hanna’s first incarceration was in Kaunas, then she was moved to the prison in Bayura. My poor mother spent so many nights crying, thinking of her daughters. At that time we didn’t understand her grief and kept on getting involved in underground work.

In 1934 my exile was over and I came back to Kaunas. Straight upon my return, I became a member of the underground Communist Party and zealously started working. There was a boom of revolutionary movement in that period of time as Fascists came to power in Germany and we were aware what kind of dreadful prospects it could bring to us. Our hopes were with the Soviet Union. We knew something about arrests and repressions 11 over there, but our sincere beliefs in the politics of the USSR and Stalin were so strong that we truly considered all those arrests to be fair. We continued our propaganda, taking any chance to stand up against Smetona’s regime.

In 1936 a terrible thing happened in Kaunas. A Lithuanian worker was driven to despair by the factory owner – a capitalist, who exploited him. He killed the owner and himself. All of us went out to a demonstration. We were dispersed and arrested right in the street. This time there was a trial and I was sentenced to three years of imprisonment. I was sent to the political prison. This prison was a high-security prison. We weren’t fed too poorly. At any rate it was better than what I could get at home. There were a lot of like-minded people there. We talked about the bright future and our struggle all nights long. In the afternoon we worked in the garden: we dug potatoes.

Three months had passed like one and I came back home. In 1937 and in 1938 I was arrested again. I was arrested seven times before the Soviet regime [Occupation of the Baltic Republics] 12 came to power. In 1938 I was sent to the concentration camp in Dimitrav by administrative means. It was a very hard arrest. We worked in a quarry, breaking the stones with a heavy peck. Time flew by so fast for us, we were carried away with an idea. We looked towards the east with hope, anticipating the Soviet regime.

The Soviet invasion of the Baltics

In summer 1940 I was exiled to Onuskis [30 km from Vilnius]. Of course, I had things to do when I was in exile. I even managed to establish a Communist group. We held demonstrations against the Smetona regime. Here in Onushkis, I found out that the Red Army came to Lithuania. We were delighted by the event and went out with the welcoming slogans. There was a lot of work apart from that: we had to organize accommodation for the Soviet military. I was eager to do that and organized accommodation for the Soviet soldiers. We were so happy to see them. We held them tight. In a while I came back home. Here I was met by my friends and family. My sister Hanna was set free from imprisonment. She worked in the nationalization committee, dealing with expropriation of the property of the rich and capitalists. I was appointed to the editors’ department of the Jewish paper Dir Enes - Pravda. That paper was published illegally before the Soviets came. Now it became the leading Yiddish Communist press for the Jewish population of Lithuania. I was often on business trips and collected materials for my articles.

We had a wonderful life. We lived to see things that we’d been waiting for for years. The power in Lithuania belonged to the poor. It was an overall euphoria. We went to the cinema, enthusiastically watched Soviet movies, walked in the parks and squares of our native town. My sister Hanna got married. Her husband Fyodor Filimonov was Russian, and my parents didn’t object to their marriage. Rochl was also married. She married a local Jew, Alter Kannenman, and in 1939 their daughter Zelda was born.

I also started noticing pleasant young people. One of them had been my friend since my school years. He became the closest person to me. Gutman Shmerkovich was born in 1916. Gutman came from a very poor family. His father, a craftsman, had died a long time ago, and his mother Leya worked in our school as a janitor. Gutman’s eldest brother, Ilia Shmerkovich, was exiled from the country for his Communist activity. He lived in Argentine. He was a headmaster of a Jewish school there. Iliah had two daughters – Kunya and Catalina. Before the war Iliah wrote letters and when it became impossible to keep in touch with relatives abroad we stopped corresponding, so I don’t know anything about his fate.

Gutman had an elder sister, Chaya. Her husband – I can’t recall his name – was an underground Communist. In 1933 he fled with his family to the USSR in order to avoid persecution. He was arrested on the border with the Soviet Union for being a spy and then executed. Chaya and Maria were exiled to Kyrgyzstan in accordance with article 58. [It was provided by this article that any action directed at upheaval, shattering and weakening of the power of the working and peasant class should be punished.] She got married for the second time and took her husband’s name – Kantorovich and changed her daughter’s name to that as well for her not to have any trouble because of her father. Consequently Maria’s father was rehabilitated 13. Chaya died in the 1980s. Maria Kantorovich lives in Israel. Gutman’s younger sister Riva was married and had two daughters – Rosa and Gita, born one after another. Gutman’s brother Itshak was also an underground Communist. Gutman and he composed wonderful verses, which were published in Jewish papers.

During the war

Gutman proposed to me and on 31st December 1940 we got our marriage registered in the marriage registry office. My parents didn’t even insist on a Jewish wedding as they clearly understood that we would be against it, so they let us do as we wished. My husband and I moved into our house. We were given a corner in the drawing-room. Our nook was behind a partition. Gutman was loved by my parents and my mother literally adored him. Soon I got pregnant, but I didn’t stop working. In mid-June 1941 I went on a business trip to take care of the problems of the local Rokiskis newspaper [about 150 km from Vilnius]. I felt anxious and there were talks that German troops were deployed at the border. Late in the evening on 21st June I came back to Kaunas. At 4am the war broke out.

My husband and I went to the district Party Committee at once. All Communists got together to resist the enemy. Hanna’s husband Fyodor was being trained in the army at the time. Hanna told me to stay at home as how could I go in my condition! I replied, ‘I will join!’ There were buses near the regional committee. They were ready for evacuation of party activists. The three of us – I, Gutman and Hanna – took one of the buses. We thought our trip would last for about three days until the Red Army would defeat the enemy and banish the Fascists. We didn’t say goodbye to our parents, sister Rochl and brothers. On our way the Fascists were close on our heels. We passed through Latvia and reached the former border with the USSR. Here we took trains and went through the huge territory of Russia. We met our brother Berl Idl on our way and found out that our parents, sister and brothers had managed to leave Kaunas on a horsed cart. Berl Idl joined a group of young people and got evacuated with them.

We were on the road for about three weeks. We were fed porridge; sometimes we were given some gruel and bread. Thus, we reached the town of Slobodskoye in Kirov oblast [about 1000 km from Moscow]. We moved into the apartment of some local people. It was hard. We starved. We had stayed in Slobodskoye for a while and then my husband found a job as a journalist with the paper of the neighboring town Nagorsk. We moved there. My time to give birth was getting close, and there was a good hospital in Nagorsk. I didn’t feel very well during the last weeks of my pregnancy. The labor was hard. I lost a lot of blood. I was infected. I was in a delirium for over a month. My husband and sister carried me in their arms like a child. Hanna became like a second mother to my daughter. I called her Lena after Vladimir Ilich Lenin.

My dear baby daughter was famished from the first days of her life. I starved and I didn’t have milk. It was hard for us to nurture the baby. Gutman was willing to go in the lines. He wanted to fight the Fascists, besides he would be able to send me his certificate. At first, Lithuanians were not drafted into the army. As soon as my husband found out about the formation of the Lithuanian division 14, he said goodbye to us and left for Balahna, where the division was being formed. It was early 1942. We got to know that the Lithuanian government, which was evacuated to Kazan, founded an orphanage for Lithuanian children, who remained without parents. There were Lithuanian children there, who at the beginning of the war happened to be in the pioneer camp in Palanga. Some children were rescued and the rest became first foster children of the orphanage. It was located not far from us, in the town of Konstantinovo, Kirov oblast.

Hanna, Lena and I moved to Konstantinovo, where my sister and I were given a job as mentors in the orphanage. By that time we found out that my parents were in Udmurtia. Soon they joined us in Konstantinovo. My husband wrote heart-breaking letters, full of love. He was in a training unit of the 16th Lithuanian division, and then he was deployed deep in the front, in the vicinity of Orel, where the huge Kursk battle 15 took place. Fyodor Filimonov, Hanna’s husband and my brothers were also in that division. My husband and Fyodor survived that battle. All of the other Jewish guys were killed in action. Unfortunately, both of my brothers, Efraim and Berl Idl Gershenovich, were killed in action in that brave battle. When we were notified of the death of our brothers, my mother started getting sick. My parents tried to stick to Jewish traditions, even in evacuation. Every morning they prayed for us, our children and husbands.

We lived in a small room in the orphanage. It seemed to us that starvation and cold would never end. Of course, Lenochka was given food in the orphanage. I also had some meals. The food was scarce, but we didn’t starve. The children lacked fat, meat, fruits and vegetables, but they always had their portion of porridge and soup. However, it wasn’t like that for everybody. The management of the orphanage purchased meat, chickens, ducks, sausages and ham for themselves and their children. It was covered with ice and stored in the fridges in the shed. The children of the management weren’t ashamed of anybody. They ate chicken and teased everybody showing tidbits to other children. I am ashamed to recollect such things, that it was a sad bitter truth.

My mother starved, we didn’t get enough gray bread with our food cards 16. Once, I was in despair and took some of the thin soup to my mother. Those managers, who were stuffing their kids with chicken meat, were informed of that. There was a terrible scandal. I was threatened with losing my job and being turned out in the street. My mother couldn’t overcome the grief after her sons’ death. She died from starvation in winter 1943. She was buried at the municipal cemetery. It was hard to dig the burial hole for her as the ground was frozen. Father observed the shivah and read a prayer. In general he tried to observe Jewish traditions.

After the war

When my mother died, Father went to stay with Rochl, who lived in Tartar SSR. As soon as Lithuania was liberated, Hanna was called there to be a manager of Party nationalized assets. Soon my father also came there. My daughter and I stayed in Konstantinovo till December 1944 until the entire orphanage was re-evacuated. It was a long trip. Everybody had his seat on the train. In general, our way home differed from the trip when we ran away from Lithuania in 1941. When we came back to Kaunas, it turned out that my daughter and I had no place to live. Hanna and her husband Fyodor moved to Vilnius. They didn’t have children. Rochl, Alter and Zelda also settled in a poky room.

Our house in Zelyonaya Gora wasn’t destroyed. It was occupied by a Lithuanian. She moved from Viliampol. Father got settled there as well and he waited for that Lithuanian to vacate it. I was offered a job to be in charge of the Jewish kindergarten. It was established under the auspice of the Jewish orphanage. I went to work in the kindergarten and occupied a poky room on the premises with my daughter. It was hard work as I had never held an administrative job before. I had no other way out as I had no place to live. By that time our house in Zelyonaya Gora was unoccupied, but I couldn’t live there as it took me too much time to get to work. We had no right to live in the kindergarten. In accordance with the law I wasn’t entitled to live on the premises of the kindergarten and some commission had my daughter and me leave the place. I was in despair.

At that time I bumped into my cousin Joseph Gar, and he suggested that we should move into his place. We lived with Joseph for a couple of months. In 1945 Joseph and his wife decided to leave for Poland. Joseph and his wife, who went through the ghetto and concentration camp, couldn’t forget their daughter Getele, who was born in the ghetto and died a couple of days after the liberation. They hoped to turn a new leaf in another country. I had to leave his apartment, as in accordance with the legislation if the apartment had no owner, the property was transferred to the state. So, we lived on orphanage premises again.

The kindergarten was in the same house where the Jewish orphanage was, on Kestuchio Street. The Jewish community, founded upon liberation, was also located there. The orphanage and kindergarten were under the aegis of the Jewish community. Many Jews helped out the best way they could. There were orphans in the kindergarten, who lost parents and felt the horrors of war in early childhood. Rebelskiy, the colonel of the Soviet Army was the one who provided most of the assistance. Using his connections and acquaintances, he went to different organizations for them to provide financial assistance to our orphanage. He got food products for the children. He brought the cow, which was kept in the shed in the rear yard. So the children had milk. They loved it, their ‘wet-nurse.’ Rebelskiy also brought linen, mattresses, pillows, quilts to the kindergarten. Before that the children used anything they could find as bed cover. The state didn’t have time and money to take care of the Jewish orphanage. We hardly got anything from our regime. Rebelskiy gave a set of linen to me. So my daughter and I had something to sleep on.

Rebelskiy helped the orphanage for a couple of years. Later, in 1948, with the outbreak of Stalin’s repressions against Jews 17, he was arrested and declared an enemy of the people 18. Rebelskiy vanished into thin air. He was most likely executed by the NKVD 19 in the early 1950s.

Being employed by the Jewish orphanage, I witnessed many dramas which were the consequence of war. I remember that one common Lithuanian woman brought in a Jewish boy. She rescued him, by hiding him at her place during the occupation. She put her life at risk. After the war, when there was a food card system, the woman had to take the boy here in order to rescue him as at that time many people were starving. She had nothing to feed the boy with, so she brought him here. She tried to talk him into staying here, convincing him that he was a Jew and had to stay in the orphanage for the Jews. The boy was sobbing, hanging at the woman’s skirt and crying that he didn’t want to be a Jew, but to stay with her. That Lithuanian forced him into staying and left. She never came here again. Soon that boy Shmulik Aronson, got used to us, loved the orphanage and forgot his rescuer. In a while some of his distant relatives came and got him.

During the war one of our teacher’s wife perished and their daughter was rescued by a Lithuanian. When he came back from the evacuation, he took much effort in finding his child, and he succeed. He found his daughter with that lady. When he came to get his daughter, she didn’t want to come with him. She was a baby at the beginning of the war and didn’t remember her father. Besides, the Lithuanian lady wasn’t willing to give up the child. Then he kidnapped the baby. The woman turned to the militia. The man was arrested and the child was returned to her. He had to resort to the court, and by a court ruling the child was to stay with the father. The girl couldn’t get over the separation with the Lithuanian, who had saved her, but finally she got used to her father. There were a lot of such sad stories. I took it personally and could share those things only with my friends, Riva and Taube, who also lived at the orphanage.

In early 1946 my husband Gutman was demobilized. I was so happy to see him again. Towards the end of the war he served in the summer unit of the Lithuanian division, which was located in the Romanian town of Constanta. Gutman was involved in technical maintenance of aircraft. Upon arrival in Kaunas, Gutman found out that his loved ones had perished in occupation. His mother Leya was executed during the first big action in Kaunas ghetto. His sister Riva, not having found her daughters Rozele and Gitele, who were taken away during the action against children, surrendered for an execution. My husband’s favorite brother, Itshak Shmerkovich, a talented Jewish poet, lived to see the liberation. He was very exhausted and famished. On the first day when he ate a lot of food, he died from volvulus. Gutman took the death of his kin really hard. My daughter and I were the only joy he had.

Upon our return we moved into our apartment. We rented a dark room in an old house. In October 1946 I gave birth to a son and called him Ilia – my husband’s brother’s name also began with an ‘I’. Our life was getting gradually better. Gutman found a job. First he was a staff journalist, then he became the director of the Communist paper ‘Communism Banner’. It was a party paper, meant for the denizens of rural areas. My husband worked really hard, went on frequent trips. Right upon his return, we addressed the municipal Ispolkom 20 with the request to provide us with an apartment. First, we were given a room in a communal apartment 21 on Donelavichus Street. We lived there for two years. Then we received a small isolated apartment on Laivess Lane [in Soviet time that central street was called Stalin avenue]. We celebrated New Year 1959 in our new apartment. I am still living in that apartment. The house on Nemanas Street was built for party activists and leaders. Part of the apartments was given to people like us, former underground members. We got a wonderful three-room apartment.

The first postwar years were hard on us. I kept on working at the kindergarten. I came back to work right after Ilia was born. The boy was feeble and he couldn’t go to a nursery, so we hired a baby-sitter. A Lithuanian peasant girl, Aldona, started living with us. These were the times of starvation and our scarce food cards were to be shared with five people. I was used to famine, but I was so sorry for my children!

My father, whom I loved very much, was very sick. He turned blind when he was about to die. Nonetheless, he was a very independent man. He didn’t want to live with me, or with his synagogue. We were active Communists at that time and didn’t understand our father. My daughter Lena loved her grandfather very much. She often called on him, took him to the synagogue. Father died in 1948. We invited an old Jew to read a prayer over the dead, though at that time it was fraught with danger and trouble for us, the Communists. I took my father’s death very hard.

As they say, when it rains, it pours. It was the time when state anti-Semitic campaigns commenced. Luckily they didn’t affect my husband: he kept on working as he was a respectable man. The Jewish orphanage became a target. It was constantly criticized. We had commissions and audits. They did their best in order to destroy the Jewish kindergarten. By that time the Jewish school had been closed down. They sent non-Jewish employees and foster children there – Russians and Lithuanians in order to pursue assimilation. But they didn’t think that would do. In 1952 when the Doctors’ Plot 22 rang out in the country, I was charged with poisoning a Lithuanian boy. Good thing, my husband insisted that I should quit my job, so that I wasn’t sued. It was a deep personal tragedy. I exerted my every effort at work and was very dedicated to children. My husband helped me find a job in a republican library. I was well accepted by the team. I worked there until retirement.

In spite of the things going on in the country, my husband and I sincerely believed in Communist ideas, thinking that all those events were caused by people on the ground. We raised our children in the spirit of dedication to Lenin’s ideas and Stalin. I think there wasn’t any other family, which would spend so much time with children, having conversations about the leaders and Communism. We told them about our underground activity. We took them to the museums, showed them the jails, where we were detained. There was my picture in the jail among other inmates. We mostly spoke Russian, sometimes Lithuanian at home. The Jewish language was rarely spoken by us.

Stalin’s death in 1953 was a personal tragedy for us. I cried all night long and woke the children up with my sobbing. On the day of the funeral we came to Stalin Avenue with crape bands. There was no traffic in the street, the city was imbued with the mourning honks of cars. The ХХ Party Congress 23 was like a bolt of lightning amidst blue skies, as well as Nikita Khrushchev’s speech 24, where he revealed Stalin’s cult of personality. We couldn’t believe that as all our ideals were shattered. I remember one night when Stalin’s monument was dismantled in Vilnius central square. On the way to work everybody was shocked that the square was empty. It was horrible. However, my husband and I found the strength to understand and correctly assess what was going on. The fact that Stalin turned out to be an enemy, didn’t diminish the attractiveness of Communist ideas. We were still members of the Party. At that time I wasn’t involved in social life, but my husband was an active party member.

Our family treated Israel in accordance with the propaganda in the Soviet press. We read the papers and believed the things written there. Even in the years when Israel was at war, we took the information the way it was covered by the Soviet propaganda: where Israel was a malefactor and a horrible aggressor, having attacked helpless Arabs. We didn’t dare express our judgment on Israel in front of our children, trying not to focus their attention on that. There was no way we could immigrate to that country. We lived modestly. We didn’t have a car. We enjoyed no riches. In the 1970s we got a tiny plot of land, and tilled it the best way we could 25. Here we used to spend our summer vacations with our children. 

I devoted a lot of time to my children. First, Lena went to a Jewish school. Soon it was closed down. She went to a Russian school, and finished it successfully. I plied my daughter with love for books and she decided to follow into my footsteps. Lena entered Vilnius University, the extramural library department. However, the teaching in Lithuanian turned out to be hard for Lena and soon she was transferred to the library department of the Leningrad institute, which she successfully finished. Lena married a Russian man, Gennadiy Grigoriev. He was a military, demobilized in Kaunas. Lena and her husband traveled all over the huge former Soviet Union. She lived in many cities of Lithuania, as well as in Odessa and Nikolayev. In 1975 Lena’s daughter Natasha [Natalia] was born. The girl had asthma and some doctors recommended that the climate should be changed. Gennadiy was assigned to Blagoveschensk [about 7000 km from Moscow]. My daughter’s family hasn’t left the Far East since that time. Natasha gave birth to her son Vadim in 1995 and Maxim in 1996. My daughter is a happy mother and grandmother. She often comes over to help me.

My son finished a Russian school, where Lena had also been studying. Upon finishing it, he entered the Vilnius Polytechnic Institute and graduated from the sanitary faculty. Ilia married a Lithuanian when he was a student. Thus, our family happens to be international. In 1970 Alina gave birth to a daughter, Diana. Diana married a Lithuanian, Deinis, and left for Germany in the 1990s. My great-grandchildren were born there: a boy, Karolis, and a girl, Camilla. Ilia’s younger daughter Laura was born in 1986. She is currently studying at the Polytechnic Institute. In 1994 my dear son suddenly died at the age of 48. He had an extensive heart attack. It was a great sorrow.

My husband and I took the events related with the separation of Lithuania from the USSR very hard. Lithuania gained its independence in 1991 26. Our adolescence ideals were crushed. The ideals we had devoted our youth and lives to were crushed. Since 1991 Gutman has been in a deep depression and it was aggravated by another sorrow: his son’s death. Gutman was getting sick and four years after Ilia’s death he passed away – on the same day his son had died.

I have been on my own since that time. My sisters’ husbands, Fyodor Filimonov and Alter Kannenman, died a long time ago. In 1995 Rochl, being of a senile age, finally agreed to Zelda’s constant invitations and left for Israel. She died there in 2000. Hanna was very ill. She was afflicted with Alzheimer disease. When Gutman died, I took her to my place and looked after her until she died in 2002. Thanks to my sister, I found out about the Kaunas Jewish community. It was the only positive consequence of the independence of Lithuania that Jews obtained their own community and reestablished Jewish community life.

I, who had never celebrated Jewish holidays and had never observed traditions, felt joy when the traditions were revived. I celebrate Sabbath and go to the community when I physically can. Recently the Jewish fall holidays were celebrated in the community, and I participated in celebrations along with other Jews in the Kaunas synagogue. I involuntarily recalled a prayer, taught by my father, the rites, the Hebrew words I hadn’t used for years. I get assistance from the community, and I’m grateful to those who are providing it for me.

The employees of the library, where I had worked for over 20 years, often come to see me. In spite of my being the only Jew there, they loved me. They are still inviting me to attend all their events. Recently I was invited to go to the cathedral, where the service had been ordered to commemorate all the deceased employees. I couldn’t attend as I felt rather unwell on that day. But still, my life wasn’t futile. People have always been nice to me. I raised two wonderful children. My daughter is the closest person to me. She comes from the Far East rather often. To my regret, I saw her children only once in my lifetime. Alina, my daughter-in-law, also treats me kindly. I would like to have a longer life, in spite of getting senile.

Glossary:

Samuel Eiferman

Braila

Romania

Interviewer: Roxana Onica

Date of the interview: July 2004

Samuel Eiferman is a modest man whose face bears the traces of the hardships inflicted on him by life. He is grey-haired and of average height. He lives with his wife in a three-room house on a peaceful city street. Having lost their only son a few years ago and lacking closer heirs, they support a niece (from Mrs. Eiferman’s side of the family) through college. It seems misfortunes made their relationship stronger; perfect understanding reigns between the two spouses, even when they prepare the meal in the kitchen side by side.

My family background

Growing up

During the war

After the war

Glossary

My family background

My paternal grandfather was born in Galicia 1, Poland, in 1876. His name was Haim Eiferman. I don’t know when he and his wife settled in Sipot [Ed. note: Nowadays Sipot is called Dolishniy Shepot and is part of the Chernivtsi Region, Ukraine.], Storojinet County, Bukovina 2, which belonged to Austria-Hungary back then. I don’t know my paternal grandmother’s maiden name or her birth date. All I know is that she came from Galicia too. I never met her, as she died in 1925, shortly after I was born.

My grandparents spoke Yiddish and were religious. I don’t know about my grandfather’s education, but I know he worked at the forest rangers’ office in Sipot – the area was all woodland. The village of Sipot is where the River Siret [Siretul Mare] has its source; back then it was near the frontier with Russia. The village was crossed by a narrow-gauge railroad and a highway that led to Storojinet and to Chernivtsi. The houses bordered the road, but there were also houses uphill. Most of the Jews resided on the same street, but didn’t live next to one another; their houses were 100 meters to 1 kilometer apart. For instance, our house was some 100 meters apart from the closest Jewish house. I don’t know how many Jews had lived in the village when my grandparents were young, but there were only 12 families left by the time I was born.

My father was my grandparents’ only child. He bore the same name as my grandfather, Haim Eiferman, and was born in 1902 in Sipot. I don’t know how many grades he had completed in school. Just like his father, he worked at the forest rangers’ office, where he was a clerk. The office was under the jurisdiction of Count Vasilko, a “grof” [Ed. note: “Grof” is Hungarian for count.] who owned all the mountains in Northern Bukovina. His administration was based in Berhomet [Ed. note: today called Beregomet, in Chernivtsi Region, Ukraine], a larger commune located on the Siret Valley, some 20 kilometers away from Sipot. When I was a kid a narrow-gauge train would run through our village. It lasted until after World War II, when the Russians brought in tractors and cars. We would take it to get to Berhomet, from where we could travel further to Storojinet and Chernivtsi.

My maternal grandfather’s surname was Weiner and he came from Galicia as far as I know. I don’t know his first name or his birth date. I don’t recall much about Grandmother Weiner either; I have no idea when the two of them settled in Sipot. They had three children: Etty Weiner, born in 1900, my mother, Gisela Weiner, born in 1904, and Adolf Weiner – but I don’t know when he was born.

My mother’s sister, Etty, married David Dauber. They had three daughters; my cousins’ names were Roza, born in 1924, Suzana, nicknamed Coca, born in 1926, and Sarah, nicknamed Sally, born in 1932. Aunt Etty died in May 1940, before the deportation. Uncle David Dauber and his three girls were deported at the same time with us. My mother ended up in the same camp with Roza, while Coca and Sally were taken to an orphanage, as they were younger. We found out from Sally’s letters how she and Coca witnessed the end of their father. The girls were boarding a ferry when David Dauber rushed to take Sally in his arms, to help her get through the mud; the gendarmes hit him in the back with riffle butts so hard, that his lungs broke. He died the following day. Roza became ill and my mother watched over her in the camp’s infirmary. She died in 1944. Coca and Sally survived the Holocaust and left the country – but I couldn’t tell you when or how they left. Coca is now living in Spain; I never met her again. She has a son who was born in 1950. Sally is living in the US, close to New York City. The last time I saw her was in 1968, when she came to Romania and we went to the seaside [the Black Sea]. She’s the one who contacted the mayor in Sipot in order to start the formalities to get the family house back. But neither of us received any answer so far. They won’t give us anything back. But it’s not like I need anything anymore… I’m happy with what I have now.

Uncle Adolf Weiner was drafted to the Red Army and died during the bombing of Bryansk in June 1944. [Ed. note: Bryansk is a city in Russia located 379 kilometers southwest from Moscow. It is more likely that the bombing Mr. Eiferman refers to took place in 1943.]

My mother, Gisela Eiferman nee Weiner, was born in 1904 in the village of Sipot, just like my father. I don’t know how they met. They got married in the early 1920’s and I was born in 1925. I was an only child. I don’t know how many grades my mother had completed in school, but she also knew the Gothic alphabet. My grandparents and my parents used Yiddish at home. I can still speak Yiddish. I can also speak German – we lived amidst Poles, Germans and Ukrainians.

My mother was a housewife and my father worked in the timber business. They didn’t have machines back then – they used horses, so the work was harder. The village had timber tradesmen, house builders, carpenters and even a timber yard – plenty of jobs were available. My parents’ economic situation was average.

Growing up

We lived in a large house made of wood beams, like is the custom in the mountains. It had 7-8 rooms. We had a kitchen, a pantry, a large cellar, a henhouse and a stable for the cattle. We grew two cows, a pair of horses and many chickens. Nowadays the village has new houses covered in tin plates. Back in our days, we used shingle. Our furniture consisted of the regular pieces of our time: wardrobe, bed, small couch. Pictures hung on the walls, because Jews don’t have icons and cult artifacts to display. The timber yard had a power generator, but few houses were connected to it. Our family used gas lamps. We didn’t have plumbing – our water supply was a spring nearby. There were many small tributaries of the River Siret in the area and one of them passed by our house.

Our neighbors were Ukrainians; they were nice people. We spoke in their native language with them. Sipot and Banila [today Banilov] were villages of Ukrainians. There were also villages of Romanians in the vicinity – like Krasnailski [today Krasnoilsk]. The region had been under the Austrian administration until 1918. It was only in 1920 that they started to use Romanian as the official language. In out village, the gendarme, the priest and the teachers were Romanian. The mayor’s office had Romanian and Ukrainian employees – but the latter could speak Romanian too.

The traces of the Austrian administration were clearly visible in the education that people had received. They were simply more cultivated and more polished than the inhabitants in Walachia and Moldavia 3. Sometimes I would hear the Ukrainians telling my grandmother: “We were better off under the Austrians”. Life wasn’t bad under the Romanian administration either, but they didn’t like the fact that the gendarmes would prevent them from keeping their old holidays. They celebrated Christmas 13 days later than the Romanians and the gendarmes would beat them if they caught them caroling. This tradition wasn’t Austrian, but Slavic. I remember this quite well – I was old enough to remember these things.

The village had a Christian-Orthodox church. Ukrainians had basically the same holidays as the Romanians, only they celebrated them 2 weeks later. There were also Adventists, but they were very few. They held a service every Saturday in a private house.

Jews didn’t have a synagogue, but they congregated in a prayer house. My parents would go there too. Men would go every Saturday. Women and children would only attend the place on large holidays. Religious marriages were officiated in the nearest town, because the village only had 12 Jewish families; there were many elderly people and very few children, since many families didn’t have offspring.

My parents dressed in the Jewish fashion of the time. My father wore a hat called “hut” – it’s called the same in German – or “kopheletz”, but didn’t wear whiskers; he had already become more modern. Women were quite modern too; in summer they didn’t cover their head anymore. My parents were religious. They had prayer books at home and they read them.

We kept all the major holidays: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Chanukkah, Pesach, meaning the Passover. We celebrated them down in the village, although there were so few of us. But we weren’t the only Jews in the area: other villages down the Siret Valley, all the way to Berhomet, as well as Berhomet itself had their own Jews.

My mother would cook chicken on holidays. For instance, on Rosh Hashanah, we would have chicken stake, soup and many sweets. We didn’t eat bread on Passover, only matzah. We also had chicken stew, “meatballs” made of potatoes and a particular type of cake that I can’t remember anymore. We were supplied by people from Berhomet with beef that had been ritually slaughtered and was sure to be kosher. My mother kept a chest as large as a bed in the pantry; it contained special dishes that we only used once a year. Wine consumption was scarce in my parents’ house. We usually had a small glass on Passover. It went the same for ‘tuica’ [plum brandy].

The village was too small to have a kindergarten, so all the children were brought up at home until they were old enough to go to school. The school was located up on a hill and consisted of seven grades. When I entered the 1st grade I could speak German, Ukrainian and Polish, but I couldn’t speak Romanian, so I had to learn it in school. We were taught by two Jews – a schoolmaster and a schoolmistress. I forgot their names. I later met them in the camp. I started going to school at the age of 7 and I attended 7 primary grades. Classes were taught in Romanian. The teachers were Romanians who had been brought from the Kingdom [Ed note: People living in the territories that were the last to become part of Romania, in 1918 (as is the case of Mr. Eiferman’s native Bukovina), used to refer to Walachia and Moldavia, the two provinces that united to form Romania in 1859, as “the Kingdom”], since our village only had Ukrainians. There were one female teacher and two male teachers. The men’s names were Cozma and Lefter. I can’t remember the lady’s name though. Both men were reservists, wore “pre-military” uniforms and service caps and conducted drills with the boys aged 18-19 in order to prepare them for the military service. Teachers weren’t the only professionals who had to be “imported” from elsewhere; it was the same for priests. The pupils wore whatever their parents could afford. Some were dressed in traditional outfits; others had watchmen’s uniforms 4. After the Russians invaded Bukovina, classes were taught in Russian. In 1940-1941, we completed 7 grades in one year. I actually enjoyed the stories and the poems of the Russian authors.

I didn’t want to learn Hebrew. We were two Jewish boys in school and were supposed to study Hebrew, but, being a couple of spoiled brats, we said no. Our parents didn’t force us. And this is why I never got to learn Hebrew.

I really can’t remember whether I had my bar mitzvah or not. We were already living in Braila when two Jews who had come from America put those sacred scrolls called tefillin on my forehead and on my left arm and read to me in Hebrew, while I repeated after them. I suppose that was it.

As a kid, my favorite pass time was playing with the ball and hiking in the mountains in summer, and sleighing and skiing in winter. The skis were made of beech by our village carpenters. The sleigh was essential, due to our long winters that lasted from September to May. We would go hiking in summer, during our training as watchmen. In 1938 we even received the visit of Minister Sidorovici, accompanied by some 8 cars. [Ed. note: While the King 5 was the watchmen’s supreme commander, Maj. Teofil Sidorovici was his lieutenant, as executive commander of the Watchmen’s Guard. On 28 June 1941 he was appointed minister of national propaganda, a short-lived office which he held until 3 July of the same year.] Back in those days, Romanians paid special attention to the territories that used to belong to Austria-Hungary. We, the watchmen, would often serve as guides for the groups of tourists that came from the Kingdom. We took them hiking in the mountains for as much as 7-10 kilometers.

Anti-Semitism wasn’t an issue in our area. Even though the Cuzists 6 came to power in 1937, the Ukrainians weren’t aggressive to us. This went for the Romanian gendarme and the Romanian priest too. When it was time for the religion class, the priest would ask the two Jewish boys, one of whom was me: “Would you like to leave?” – “No, Father, we’ll stay.” So we stayed with the others and watched the Christian Orthodox class being taught. I made friends with everyone, regardless of their faith. We didn’t know what racial hatred was. Even when Cuzist supporters spent one month in our village, with clubs, swastikas and everything, they didn’t harm anyone, despite the fact that they were already in touch with the Gestapo.

During the war

In 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland 7, the Romanian Army held parades. An infantry regiment was particularly noteworthy – they were wearing new uniforms and were equipped with the latest weapons. It was the way in which Carol II 5 showed that he wasn’t going to yield to the Russians. But Hitler ordered the surrender of Bukovina and Bessarabia 8 and the king had no choice but to comply. The Army held its last parade in the fall of 1939. A major addressed the troops and the audience, which included children that had been summoned for the occasion. He said: “All around our borders, the gunpowder is drawing near. It will soon light up and we have to be prepared for that.” Then, after the surrender of Bessarabia, the Romanian Army slowly withdrew. There were plenty of troops stationed in the area, for the Polish border was only 25 kilometers away.

When war broke out, in 1941, we felt it directly, because we were so close to the border. On a Sunday morning, German planes bombed the headquarters of the Russian border patrol. The noise woke us up. 10 days later, Hitler [that is, the German Army] marched into Kiev [19 September 1941].

On 2 June 1941 all the Jews in our village were assembled and sent to Transnistria; we weren’t allowed to take any belongings with us. There were 12 Jewish families in our village. We were assembled by a forest ranger who kept in touch with the Romanian troops and already knew what would happen to the Jews when the Romanians would get there. As soon as the Russians withdrew and the border patrol left, that forest ranger took us out of our homes. His son, who was 18-19 years old at the time, later apologized to us for what his father had done. In 1944 he fled to Germany, fearing the Jewish revenge.

I got separated from my father and my grandfather, who were put with a third Jew in another cart. That was the last time I ever saw either of them. They probably caught up with the Russians, who were withdrawing, and made it to Chernivtsi. But there was no one to save them there. Elderly people were usually shot because they couldn’t keep up with the rest. My grandfather didn’t make it to the camp, so I assume he died along the way, in 1941. He was about 65 years old. I later found out about my father’s end from some Jews who had been in the same camp as him; they told me he had fallen ill and was unable to work, so he was shot in 1942. This happened in some stone quarry in Transnistria. Only those who were able to work till the end made it out of there alive. This was my case too.

The rest of my family and I were taken to the next village. I was with my mother, with Uncle David Dauber and with my cousins. Sally was in 2nd grade, Coca was in 4th grade and Roza was in 7th grade.

In the next village the gendarmes took over us. We walked for 20 kilometers, on Siret Valley, to Berhomet. The Russians were still there, so our escort had to wait for the Romanian Army to arrive. Before they left, the Russians gave all their food supplies to the peasants: sugar, flour, chocolate. Then they burnt down the barracks and they pulled back.

They marched us via Storojinet, Chernivtsi, Novoselita, Lipcani, Ocnita, Iedinit [today Yedintsy] and Moghilev. On our way to Moghilev, we spent the nights sleeping on the ground. The journey lasted from 2 July to 1 September 1941; so it took us two months to walk some 300 kilometers. Like I said, some elderly people were shot because they couldn’t keep up. Others died of heart attack. They didn’t give us any food. In order not to starve, we had to sell the few belongings we had managed to take with us. Jewelry, shirts, linen and the likes were actual lifesavers. Also, we worked for food when we could find someone who needed us.

All the Jews who had been gathered from Bukovina ended up in the Moghilev 9 camp, divided in several ghettos. We were 13,000 Jews in Moghilev alone. When the Romanian Army arrived, they shot many Jews. Then they occupied Transnistria and they relocated the Jews to Odessa, Rabnita [Rybnitsa] and Doaga. Moghilev had Jews coming from various areas: the town of Dorohoi, Northern Bukovina, Bessarabia; in the end, they even began to deport Jews from the Kingdom. The bridge over the Dniester was right there, in the town of Moghilev, in Atachi.

When we got to Moghilev, they just left us there. We took over the empty houses which they had freed for us. The houses had been flooded all the way to the ceiling, but the water had withdrawn. My mother, my cousin Roza and I lived in an empty house that had no windows and no furniture, except for a bed made of planks. My other two cousins, Coca and Sally, were taken to an orphanage, because of their young age.

In Moghilev we were sorted out by the gendarmes, who assigned us to work either for the German or for the Romanian regiments. Representatives from both armies came to the gendarmes’ station, were handed the lists of inmates that had been assigned to them and signed us out. The gendarme colonel set up a Jewish community led by a Jewish man named Jagendorf who was later replaced by Danilof. He had them fix the water station, the power station and the steel foundry, which began using Jewish workforce. Thus, many Jews stayed in Moghilev instead of being reassigned to other camps.

[Ed. note: “…another native from Bukovina was Siegfried Jagendorf, an engineer from Radauti who was deported to Moghilev and served as the leader of the local Jewish committee for a while. Jagendorf got the prefect’s approval to rebuild the town’s foundry using the Jews who came from Bukovina and to sell the finished products – mainly spare parts for farming equipment. This way, he secured a relatively decent living for more than 1,000 who resided in town. He and the Jewish skilled workers were allowed to live outside of the town. (…) he used his position in order to obtain favors from the authorities, not just for himself, but also for the skilled workers whom he led. However, these favors caused resentment among the less privileged members of the Jewish committee in Moghilev, namely the unskilled workers and the destitute families that formed the majority of the ghetto. (…) The egalitarian rules that had been established to govern the participation to and the exemption from forced labor were sometimes overlooked. Article 6 of Resolution no.23 required the ghetto leader to draw up a list of all the Jews that could be used for forced labor. He had to take into account the survival instinct too. Many Jews sought to avoid this kind of work, for it often had to be performed away from the ghetto, in inhuman conditions. Some of the Jews were in a position to bribe their way out of performing forced labor by paying the ghetto leader. Those who had strong ties with the head of the Jewish committee or with other members of the committee often took advantage of their connections in order to be assigned to a clerk’s position instead of being sent to physical labor. This was the case in Moghilev and Sargorod, where the members of the committee and its leader all came from the same town and, in some cases, were either relatives or close friends.” Deletant, Dennis, “Transnistria: Cateva consideratii despre semnificatia acesteia pentru Holocaustul din Romania” (“Transnistria: A few observations on its significance in the Romanian Holocaust”) in “Romania si Transnistria: Problema Holocaustului. Perspective istorice si comparative” (“Romania and Transnistria: The Holocaust issue. Historical and comparative perspectives”), coordinated by Viorel Achim and Constantin Iordachi, Bucharest, Curtea Veche, 2004, pp.183-184.]

[Ed. note: “On 25 November 1941, 3 weeks after Jagendorf had started the foundry, Mihail Danilof and Janco Marcu, the leaders of the Jews deported from Dorohoi County, made a ‘donation’ of 500,000 lei ($2,500) to deputy prefect Moisev to persuade him to authorize 649 persons to remain in town as workers. After receiving the money, the deputy prefect handed Danilof and Marcu blank permits which he signed as soon as the leaders from Dorohoi had filled them in. On the one hand, Danilof, a former attorney from the Kingdom, thought corruption was an unavoidable reality. On the other hand, Siegfried Jagendorf, who thought more like an Austrian than like a Romanian, felt corruption was degrading and irrational from a political point of view. The engineer chose to act on a larger scale, enticing the authorities with the profit that could be drawn from using disciplined workers in factories and workshops. (…) The organization chart of the Jewish Committee in Moghilev would change six times over the 30 months of deportation. Jagendorf presided over the first 3 committees, from November 1941 until June 1942, when he resigned.” Hirt-Manheimer, Aron, “Introduction and comments” in Jagendorf, Siegfried, “Minunea de la Moghilev. Memorii 1941-1944” (“The Miracle in Moghilev. Memoirs 1941-1944”), Bucharest, Hasefer, 1997, pp.48-50.]

Anyone who was fit was sent to work in those places. The colonel supported the Jewish initiative and he provided the spare parts that were necessary to get things moving – he brought them from Romania and from Ukraine. The three plants worked until the Russians came. Employees were even paid. But I didn’t work in any of them. I was assigned to various other sites, like fixing bridges and roads, demolitions, clearing snow, collecting phone wires or building roads for the German regiments.

In the camp we would eat boiled potato peels. We would steal wood and sell it in winter to make small money. Uncle David had some gold he helped us from time to time. My mother sold her gold teeth. We also came across some gold in an abandoned house in Bessarabia, where we stopped along the way. By the looks of things, the looters had left in a hurry, before finding the jewels. Our buyers were Romanian invalids who came there to purchase everything the Jews were forced to sell in order to survive. The invalids had the right to travel free of charge anywhere, so they came from Romania and bought clothes, jewels and everything else the Jews would sell. I remember this mixed family – the husband was Jewish and the wife, who was not, chose to accompany him to Transnistria instead of staying home. They survived thanks to the parcels they received from their relatives.

The camps were all about weeping and graves. Many people died before we were liberated and many others died after the liberation, as a result of the horrific conditions in which we had lived. Of the Jews who had been brought from Bessarabia and Bukovina, some 180,000 perished; they were murdered or they died of typhus and other diseases, starved to death or froze to death. Uncle David was hit by the gendarmes and he died the following day; they had broken his lungs.

In 1942 the Jewish community in the camp began to receive aids from the Joint 10. The Queen Mother had pleaded for us in front of Antonescu, begging him to allow the sending of clothes and medicine.

[Ed. note: On 10 December 1942 the Queen-Mother of Romania, Elena, informed Marshal Antonescu that she did not want the name of her son, King Michael I, to be in any way associated with the anti-Jewish persecutions in Romania. Two days later, the German Ambassador to Romania, Manfred von Killinger, notified the German Foreign Affairs Ministry that Marshal Ion Antonescu was considering a plan to send 75,000-80,000 Jews to Palestine for a ransom of $107 million. (…) On 15 December 1942, while de deportees were facing their second winter spent in Transnistria, Jagendorf began his last term as chairman of the community (…) and decided his two main priorities were: to prevent the outbreak of a new epidemic and to keep the orphans alive. Neither the Romanian authorities, nor the Jewish Central in Bucharest offered any support.” Hirt-Manheimer, Aron, “Introduction and comments” in Jagendorf, Siegfried, “Minunea de la Moghilev. Memorii 1941-1944” (“The Miracle in Moghilev. Memoirs 1941-1944”), Bucharest, Hasefer, 1997, p.133.]

In 1942 Antonescu began to cut the Jews some slack, realizing the war would be lost. In February 1944 a Jewish delegation sent by the Romanian government was allowed to gather 5,000 orphans from all Transnistria. They were taken by train to Constanta, then by sea to Turkey, then again by train to Palestine.

[Ed. note: The orphans of Transnistria were a special case. Their repatriation was intended to be an image boost for the Antonescu regime at a time when the outcome of the war was clearly favorable to the Allies (after the Battle of Stalingrad). Of the 10,744 Jews that were repatriated, 1,960 were orphans, a fifth of the ones who had survived by the fall of 1943. Their food was provided by the Jewish Central; initially placed in Jewish families in 9 towns of Moldavia, most of them emigrated to Palestine (later Israel). The orphans came from 5 areas of Transnistria: Moghilev (1,349), Balta (435), Tulcin (100), Iampol (65), and Golta (11). Some of the children were repatriated to the Soviet Union, which viewed the Jews in Bessarabia and Bukovina as its own citizens; 100 children were sent to orphanages in Odessa only to be rescued once again, in 1946, by Rabbi Zissu Portugal, who managed to send them to Bucharest. On 20 January 1944 the Ministry of Internal Affairs, through the Department of Public Order, gave the General Inspectorate of the Gendarmes the order to repatriate 3,965 orphans from the following counties: Moghilev (2,690), Balta (793), Jugastru (276), Golta (95), Tulcin (111). ACSIER, Fond III, Ds.931, p.32.]

The locals were anti-Semitic. I remember this young Ukrainian who was about my age and lived on a street near the camp; he kept making fun of me for a while. But, when the Russians began to close in on us, he tried to make up with me. I told him: “So now that ‘Ivan’ is near [that is, the Russkis are near], you’re getting all nice on me? Why couldn’t you behave like that before?”. However, other Ukrainians were good to us and gave us food. One of them even kept me hidden for more than a month.

My mother was sent to labor once, but she broke her arm. In fact, very few women actually worked. Two or three young women were working alongside their men at the bridge, by the concrete mixer, when the engine caught fire. They got away with a few minor burns, but, after that incident, women were exempt from work. We spent one year and a half in Moghilev. In 1943 we were taken to another camp in the town of Scazinet.

[Ed. note: “On 29 and 30 May 1943, 3,000 Jews in Moghilev (…) were lined up in 4 rows and sent to Scazinet. They walked all the way. When they arrived they were put in two decrepit buildings that had belonged to a military school. (…) One year before that, tens of thousands of Jews had passed through the same barracks in Scazinet, being pushed back and forth across the Dniester, first by the Romanians and then by the Germans.” Ioanid, Radu, “Holocaustul in Romania. Distrugerea evreilor si romilor sub regimul Antonescu, 1940-1944” (“The Holocaust in Romania. The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944”), 2nd edition, Bucharest, Hasefer, 2006, pp. 312-313. http://www.romanianjewish.org/en/In_Romania.html ]

In the summer of 1943 they had us level some trenches near an airfield. The Germans were in the process of withdrawing, with the Red Army approaching from the direction of Kiev. They were only a few hundred kilometers away. At noon they gave us food and let us rest. While others were smoking, I fell asleep. I only woke up in the evening. I found myself alone. They had assembled the workers, but hadn’t counted them, so they had no idea I was missing. I hid in a nearby forest and spent the night there. In the morning I noticed I was close to a cemetery; it wasn’t older than 2 years. Romanians, Germans, Hungarians, Italians and Russians were buried there. I couldn’t make it back to the camp, for I wasn’t familiar with the surroundings. I went up to a Ukrainian local who was harvesting in the field. I was certain he wouldn’t turn me in, since the Russians were close. He took me to his place, fed me and, in the evening, he returned me to the camp in Moghilev. I stayed there until March. My work consisted of cleaning snow and collecting German telephone wires.

The Jews in Moghilev would pray on occasion, but they couldn’t observe their holidays properly, because they were never given a break. We weren’t given any day off. The Romanians kept saying: “Our troops are dying on the front, so the least you can do is help the war effort here”. What could you say to that?!

Those who could speak German were better off than the rest. I, for instance, was on good terms with the Germans and I had even made a friend among them. He shared his food with me. They would have goulash, pea soup with vermicelli and all sorts of canned foods from Holland and Denmark. He belonged to the Todt Organization 11, which was part of the Wermacht. They wore the same uniforms as the regular soldiers, only their insignia displayed a pickax. They were combat engineers and their job was to build bridges, roads and railroads. The Romanians had pontoniers.

In a way, we were lucky we had to deal with the Wermacht, the German regular army, not with the SS or the Gestapo. I can only remember one instance when the Nazis shot a Jew: a nasty warrant officer dressed in the SS uniform shot an inmate because he wore red pants, which made him, in the German’s opinion, a Bolshevik and a Communist. The leaders of our community reported the incident to the gendarme colonel, who was Romanian. The commander of the German battalion was summoned and he promised that the warrant officer would be sent to the front. I think he really kept his promise, because that warrant officer soon disappeared and was never seen again in the area. Anyway, that was the only case of a Jew being murdered while working for the Germans. However, the cases of Germans mocking the inmates were quite common. For instance, they would have an inmate sit on a moving conveyor belt; or load some logs in a small carriage, have some inmates climb on top of them and launch them into the River Dniester – which, fortunately, was quite shallow; or boarding 10 inmates in a boat instead of the maximum required number of 4. Things like that.

In the beginning, there were two companies of Romanian enlisted men. But the Germans said: “Pull them out and send us Jews instead.” So the gendarmes’ commander started to gather as many Jews as were needed. Anyone who was below 50 years old was considered fit for work. The work included digging out the German phone wires from the fields, since the Russians were approaching, or leveling the roads using charcoal, to secure the German retreat. There was plenty of work to do. We dug out the phone wires because the communications unit was among the first to retreat. The armored units were the last to retreat.

One day I reported to the station agent who was also the customs clerk, since the Romanian border passed through Moghilev. 4-5 German officers ranging from second lieutenant to captain had gathered there. None of them looked older than 45. They could only speak German and needed me as an interpreter. They wanted me to tell the customs clerk that they had things to sell. “Well, get them o’er here to show me what they’ve got!” the clerk ordered me. I didn’t feel too comfortable, but I thought that, given the fact that they were communications officers, not SS, I shouldn’t be afraid of them. They had leather coats, winter jackets and many other things to sell. I asked them what kind of money they wanted. “Lai, lai” they replied, as they couldn’t pronounce “lei”. [Ed. note: “Leu”, plural “lei”, was the Romanian currency of the time. It still is nowadays.] The customs clerk was loaded with money, so he bought everything. Then I asked the Germans where they were heading. “We’re communications officers and our unit is the first to withdraw. We’re going to Bacau.” The customs clerk withdrew that same night too.

That night I was in the railroad station, watching the trains filled with retreating German troops. It was 15 March 1944. I was approached by a German captain. He was dragging two large suitcases, was full of sweat and was carrying his service cap in his hand, despite the cold. He hadn’t managed to get on the train – the enlisted men held hand grenades and prevented him from boarding, saying “You’re the one who brought us here, you stick around and wait for ‘Ivan’ [the Russkis]!” The captain had me negotiate with the Romanian engine drivers. They agreed to take him in the engine.

Two days later, the Germans lost an important battle on the River Bug and were pushed back. They blew up the bridge on 17 March 1944. That is the day when I finally considered myself liberated. The Russians were here. I took off with the first Red Army unit that crossed the Dniester. The others weren’t as lucky as I was, because the Russians decreed a general mobilization and drafted all the men below 55 years of age to the Red Army. Most of them died on the front. The women stayed behind and gradually went back to Bukovina and Bessarabia, which had returned under the Soviet administration. The Romanian army only repatriated the Jews from Walachia and Moldavia; those who had come from Bukovina and Bessarabia were left to the Russians. It was a political move.

[Ed. note: “Transnistria finally ceased to exist on March 20, 1944, when the Red Army reached the Dniester. The last weeks saw less of the suffering to which the surviving deportees had grown accustomed. A witness recalled about that time, ‘No one was abusive, not the officers, not the soldiers, not the military prosecutors, not the pharmacists, not the agricultural engineers. The «Jidani» had now become the «Jewish gentlemen»’. But liberation by the Red Army brought new tribulations for the Jews, who were forced into work battalions and who now would experience enormous difficulties trying to return to Romania.” Ioanid, Radu, “Holocaustul in Romania. Distrugerea evreilor si romilor sub regimul Antonescu, 1940-1944” (“The Holocaust in Romania. The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944”), 2nd edition, Bucharest, Hasefer, 2006, pp. 326., http://www.romanianjewish.org/en/In_Romania.html ]

I wasn’t able to return to my native village, Sipot, because the front line was right there. Passage was forbidden beyond Berhomet. The Germans had relocated in the mountains. My mother stayed in the camp with Roza, who was ill and was confined to the infirmary, where she soon died. I only saw my mother in Storojinet, in the summer of 1945.

I served on the front lines and I was discharged in July or August 1945. I worked for a spirits factory in Krasnoilsk until 1946. In April I returned home.

After the war

I hadn’t seen my village since 1941, when we had been deported. I found my home empty – it had been looted back then, in 1941. That forest ranger I told you about must have had a whole gang of henchmen who helped him seize everything the Jews left behind: cattle, horses, carts and sleighs, chicken, furniture, clothes and anything else that bore any value whatsoever. I stayed for a day in the village and the sight was discouraging. There were no Jews left and other people had moved into their houses. The village had a new mayor whom I didn’t know. I went to him and filed a statement that expressed my consent about assigning my house to another family. The mayor then issued a certificate stating that I made no material claims. I rushed with that paper to Storojinet and I crossed the border with Romania through the town of Siret. I had to give up all my possessions in order to be allowed to cross the border, you see.

After the Revolution 12, my cousin Coca wrote to me that our old house had been demolished and that a Gypsy family had built a new one in its place. It hurts me to remember all these things I have been through from 1940 up to this day. My mind shudders. That camp and everything that followed left deep marks.

On 6 April 1946 my mother and I returned to Romania. The Russians had allowed us to cross the border on condition that we would go to Israel. Many Jews took that opportunity. Although we were only supposed to transit Romania, my mother wouldn’t go any further, so stayed here.

The first time we came to Braila, my mother and I were lodged by the Herscovici family who lived at the last number on Republicii St. We stayed one year with them. Then we moved at the corner of Unirii St. and Republicii St., where Mrs. Gross lived. She had a dye store downstairs. She didn’t charge us anything. Back then, it was still easy for Jews to find a place to stay. The old Jewish houses were usually occupied by one elderly woman who lived alone in as much as 10 rooms. Our landlady, Mrs. Gross, owned a store, but she didn’t have any children.

We later received aids from the Joint 10. They gave us money because we had been to Transnistria. And they gave us a house in Braila. If you were able to prove you had been deported, they would give you clothes, money and food. They also ran a canteen. I found a job. I provided for my mother for as long as she lived. I arranged for her to receive a surviving spouse’s pension, as my father had been shot to death. She spent 20 years in the retirement home in Braila, for she was ill. The town didn’t have an exclusive home for the Jewish elderly, like some other cities in Romania. She died in Braila on 17 June 1981. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery, but I can’t remember whether a rabbi attended the ceremony or not. The town still had a rabbi while my mother was alive. Today there isn’t any rabbi in Braila.

In 1946, when I returned to Romania, I was assigned to the town of Caracal; I went there a couple of times, but didn’t like it, so I came to Braila. I still didn’t hold the papers that allowed me to settle in the country. In 1951, when I wanted to get married, I had to apply for Romanian citizenship. I was received by Commissioner Ieseanu; I explained what my situation was and he issued an identity card for me.

My wife’s name is Eugenia Eiferman nee Paraschiv. She’s Romanian. She was born on 17 December 1931. I met her at a friend’s place in 1951, right after she had graduated from high school. She had attended the economics high school in Braila, which was then called the Middle School for Finance. Both her parents had been married once before. My wife has a sister whose name I don’t know. Her father had two boys: Vasile Paraschiv, born in 1926, and George Paraschiv, who died in December 1989.

We got married on 1 April 1952. It is true that, before the war, the custom for Jews was to marry within their faith; but I married a Romanian. My mother didn’t oppose my decision. Things ceased to be that strict after the war, so no one was surprised. My mother always addressed her daughter-in-law as “Mrs. Eiferman”. She was an educated woman who worked as an accountant.

We had a son whose name was Jorj Eiferman. He was born in 1954. He worked in the same factory where my wife worked, the Textile Factory. The management there was very friendly. He died in 2001, at the age of 47. He wasn’t buried in the Jewish cemetery, but in the Christian Orthodox one, as he had been baptized in that faith. They’re about to create a plot in the Jewish cemetery for the couples who have a mixed marriage. There are many of us here in Braila who have non-Jewish spouses – about 35.

In 1964 we filed a request to leave for Israel for good. But they wouldn’t let us go. I remember there was a Securitate 13 colonel named Rizea who rejected our application. I wanted to take my wife and son with me.

The house we’re living in used to belong to my parents-in-law. It is the house where my wife was born. We moved in after we got married. We have three rooms here, plus an extra two rooms on the other side [of the house]. When our son died, we moved his furniture over here; we also sold some of it.

In 1946 I started working for the Russians near Lacu Sarat, in an ammunition warehouse located in a forest, between Radu Negru and Satu Nou. I rode my bike to work. In 1948 I got another job at the Comlemn warehouse. I worked there for 10 years, and then I moved to the Wood Processing Plant, where I worked for 25 years, until my retirement. The plant made matches, particle boards and furniture.

I haven’t used German for a long time. Some 20 years ago a German engineer came to our factory to install some equipment. Back then, it was dangerous to have contacts with Western foreigners. The Securitate officer who was in charge of our factory warned me not to invite that engineer to my place. Every factory had its own Securitate operative in those days. The German engineer was paid 300 lei per day, which was a lot of money 23 years ago. The chief engineer summoned me and told me: “I’m assigning you the German fellow; you are to show him around for three days.” You see, the engineer had installed the new equipment faster than expected, because he was very well trained and I did a good job translating everything there was to know for him. Not wanting to leave for Germany 3 days in advance, he decided to stick around. In 3 days I took him to the most expensive restaurants I could think of. 3 bottles of wine cost 41 lei. We went downtown, to where the Communist Party’s headquarters used to be; that was the fanciest place in town. Then we went to the Traian Hotel and to Lacul Sarat. I felt like taking him to my place too, because I had a very good ‘visinata’ [cherry brandy], but I needed to avoid being followed. So I thought of a trick – you see, I was young and quite sharp at the time. I took him to Lacul Sarat, where we had a beer and a snack, and then I told him: “And now we’re going home.” Back then there wasn’t a streetcar on Dorobanti St., but only on Carol Ave. So we came down Carol Ave., and then we took Republicii St. It was about noon and everyone was at work or in school. We then entered a back alley and I looked behind us to make sure we weren’t being followed – I knew their tactics pretty well by then. We reached my place, where we partied, we drank and we ate properly. In the fourth day, I went to the railroad station and bought him a ticket, and then I saw him to the train. The factory was also visited by a Swedish engineer who spoke German and dated a German student who had been born in Sibiu. This engineer was afraid of the Securitate. He wouldn’t even have a beer in the company of a foreman. Actually, all foreigners were afraid of the Securitate. We also had Poles, who had come to build a melamine factory. They brought lots of Polish vodka – the one made from rye.

I never hid my Jewish origin. There were Jews who did. I registered with the Jewish Community in 1946, as soon as I arrived. They issued a paper certifying I had been in the camp and they gave me aids. In 1947 I joined a Jewish party 14, but I didn’t activate because my job didn’t leave me time to. Many Jews didn’t sign up for any party back then. They only did it after the Revolution. Not me. I was never a member of the Communist Party and I was never forced to become one either.

There were coworkers who picked on my Jewish origin, but I would punch them on the spot – I was a bit of a bully and I didn’t think twice. I felt little anti-Semitism under the communist regime – and, in the few instances when it came out, it was motivated by stupidity, not by politics. However, after the Revolution, the Legionaries 15 resurrected. They wrote nasty words against the Jews right in front of our house, on the pavement. They obviously knew a Jew lived here.

All my life I had both Jewish friends and non-Jewish friends. The factory had a staff of about 1,500 people and only one or two of them were Jewish. So it was only natural for me to have Romanian friends too. I didn’t have any problems with them because of my Jewish origin. In fact, I didn’t have any problems with the Securitate either – I had friends among them too. I worked as a clerk for about 5 years, and then I was assigned to man a mechanical hacksaw. I did that for about 16 years, until I retired. While I was a clerk, someone kept nagging me: “So, you’re sitting around in an office instead of doing real work in production?!” As soon as there was an opening at the mechanical hacksaw, I seized the opportunity. I showed them!

I always attended the farming labors 16. I never lacked food or drinks, but I also worked as hard as I could.

After I got married I didn’t go to the movies or to the theater as often as before. But my wife and I ate out quite frequently and we attended the New Year’s Eve parties. She worked at the Textile Factory and her sister worked at the bank; we alternately went to the parties held by the factory or by the bank. We were quite happy with our life; we didn’t have too hard of a time. We would stroll in the Public Garden, go to Lacul Sarat or go fishing. For 20 years we went fishing very often. But we stopped doing it 3 years ago; we just don’t have the energy anymore. We didn’t go on vacation too often. Sure, I remember going to Slanic Moldova, to Baile Herculane or to Constanta; and we once went touring the whole country. But, on the whole, we didn’t travel much.

I go to the Jewish Community on every holiday; on certain occasions I even go there twice a day. Men sit in the right half and women sit in the left half. There are very few of us left – only 14 of us still attend the services. The youngest Jew is 60 years old. There are only three men in Braila who are older than I am: Bernstein, 81, [Max] Wolf, 84, and [Silo] Oberman, 86. [Ed. note: Centropa also made interviews with Mr. Max Wolf and Mr. Silo Oberman.] When none of them shows up, I’m the oldest man in the synagogue.

My wife goes to the synagogue too, but only on major holidays, 3-4 times a year. Women don’t attend the regular service. Prayers are read in Romanian because most of us can’t speak Hebrew. In fact, Bernstein and Mr. Luthmar are the only ones who can. I can speak Yiddish though. Bernstein and I are the only ones in Braila who can speak Yiddish well. The rest can barely understand it because they grew up in the Kingdom, where Yiddish wasn’t that widespread. Their fathers may have spoken it, but the Jews of my generation didn’t learn it.

The current chairman of our Community is the former manager of the Wood Processing Plant, where I used to work. His name is Esric and he’s 69. He ran the plant from 1969 until 2000. There’s another Jew named Lutmar, who’s 75.

For a long time I didn’t care too much about keeping the Jewish traditions. It was only after the Revolution that I began to pay attention to them. Holidays are a nice thing, after all. We have the Passover, then Rosh Hashanah in October, then Chanukkah. I wasn’t familiar with the customs; all I could do was remember my days as a child and have my wife cook the same things as my mother used to: meatballs with noodles, beans with noodles, dumplings, meatballs with mashed potatoes…

On Pesach we buy matzah from the Jewish Community and we cook traditional dishes. They’re not too particular – you need to have chicken or beef, soup, stake, “meatballs” made of potatoes with eggs and matzah flour. There are fasting periods when you’re not allowed to eat certain foods. But I can’t observe the fast because I’m on medication. We still get aids from the Community: 8 parcels per year.

Ever since we returned to Romania I have listened to foreign radio stations broadcasting in Romanian, German or Russian. I still do that today, even with Communism gone.

Communism didn’t stop Jewish newspapers and books to be printed. Today I only skim through the Jewish press – my wife is a more ardent reader than I am. I have frequent headaches and I stay indoors most of the time. I also have problems with my prostate, but I didn’t resort to surgery. I undergo a yearly treatment.

The Revolution didn’t cause our lives to change dramatically. I can’t say we had a hard time before; we had everything we needed – not more, not less. 5-6 years ago, in July 1998, I started to receive a pension from Germany and things got better for us from that day forward. I was 16 when I was sent to the camp and I did forced labor at the railroad bridge over the Dniester that connected Moghilev and Atachi. I worked there for a year and a half, from April 1942 until July 1943. It later turned out I was registered on the lists of the Wermacht’s combat engineer corps. They didn’t pay us back then, but they’re paying us now. I first got Deutschemarks, and now I’m getting euros. They also paid me war compensations in Deutschemarks. But money can’t reverse the hardships I endured.

I’ve never been to Israel. I had friends who went there, but I didn’t keep in touch with any of them. I exchange letters with my cousins Coca and Sally. They send me medicines whenever I need. I also get help from an organization in Switzerland that supports German-speaking Jews. In the 1960s I wanted to leave for Germany, but they wouldn’t receive me – they didn’t say why. I never tried to leave again.

I often go to the Jewish Community in Braila. We have a local club where we gather with our spouses, many of whom aren’t Jewish. There’s also a women’s club where members reminisce about the old days. Unfortunately, there are so few of us left.

Glossary

Bella Steinmetz (nee Bacher)

Marosvasarhely

Romania

Interviewer: Ildiko Molnar

Date of interview: August 2005

Bella Steinmetz is a 94 years old tiny, lean lady. She lives in a spacious apartment in the city center. On the basis of an agreement a married couple looks after her by turns, she always has company. Aunt Bella reads regularly, and she always watches the tennis games shown on television. In the mornings, if the weather is fine, she takes a walk in the vicinity with the person looking after her. She receives many letters, photos and gifts from the descendants of the distant relatives emigrated abroad and from the members of the Tirgu Mures Trust, a Jewish organization in Scotland, which meets the needs (for medicine among others) of the elder Jewish persons in Marosvasarhely. The ‘Scots’, as the locals refer to them, visit regularly the persons listed in their registry, aunt Bella is one of the favorites. Her kindness charms everybody off his feet.

My family background

Growing up

During the war

After the war

Glossary

My family background

My paternal grandparents lived in Maramarossziget [today Sighetu Marmatiei], we lived in Gyergyoszentmiklos [today Gheorgheni]. My paternal grandfather came to Maramarossziget with his family, the Bachers, with his parents from Poland. Nadvirna [from where they came; today in Ukraine] was a large settlement. That is why my grandfather spoke so many languages. People fled before World War I, from Russia downwards, but in Poland too the persecution of Jews had already begun. I don’t know in which year my grandfather arrived, but he must have come at the end of the 1800s. I have no idea whether he got married here or back in Poland. Grandma, Beile died very early, I didn’t even know her. I knew my grandfather, Pinkasz Bacher, because he died in 1939, he lived until the age of 93 years. I remember him very well. I got married in 1931, and I visited him. Me and my mother, we went together to visit grandpa. He called me ‘mama’. He was in bed for about two months, with a big pipe in his mouth. He was very glad that we came, that I visited him, since it was a great distance back then. [Editor’s note: Maramarossziget is 267 km far from Gyergyoszentmiklos.] The trains didn’t run [like now], but one had to change three times.

Maramarossziget was a great Jewish center. There were several communities, my grandfather was the clerk of a small Jewish community, he did office work for the Orthodox community. They also had accounts, a budget on what they were spending money: funerals, expenditures, incomes. So my grandfather was a literate. He was a simple poor man, but a self-taught person, as he spoke four languages. And he tried to provide education for his children. I understand that he spoke Romanian, Hungarian and Hebrew, but I have no idea where did he learn German perfectly. I only know that when I went home once in 1936 [from Marosvasarhely] to visit my parents, my father had just received [from my grandfather] a letter informing him on the fact that grandpa hadn’t received the Wienerische Zeitung, the journal from Vienna for two weeks, and it seemed they had forgotten to order it for him. We lived too far from each other to know his political views, we were happy that he was alive. He didn’t have financial problems, because he had two sons who supported him. He rented all his life the flat where he was living. There was a long house, with three other tenants. He had two rooms and a kitchen, the other three tenants lived separately.

He was observant, well, he was the manager of a community office, but I never saw him praying. He observed Sabbath strictly. He was Orthodox, a bearded man. He would never work on Sabbath. Every Saturday he had some brandy, beautiful snow-white challah, meat-soup. They were simple persons, but they never hungered. His sons had a more progressive way of thinking. Grandfather ate only kosher meals. He had a divorced daughter, who moved to his house, and she took care of him to the end. We didn’t go too often to Maramarossziget, as until grandpa was able to move, until the age of 70-75, an uncle who got married in Torokszentmiklos, in Hungary, always came and brought him to us to Toplica for four weeks. My father was no longer alive, and grandpa stayed with us for four weeks. Last time I visited him in Maramarossziget for three days, he was confined to bed, and he could only speak.

There were six siblings in my father’s family. The eldest was Sari Bacher, the second was my father. Eszti was the third. The rich uncle, who established a family in Torokszentmiklos was called Jakab Bacher. He was younger than my father. Mirjam, the wife of uncle Ganz was the fifth, and the sixth was Manci. She was the youngest. I don’t know the names of my aunts’ husbands.

Aunt Sari Bacher left for America, I don’t know in which year. She had left before I was born, before World War I. She got married here, and she left from Maramarossziget for America with two children already, because life conditions were very bad here. They went to America to find work. Actually his husband left earlier, and he could bring there his family one year after. I suppose he found a place where to bring his family. Well, I didn’t know her, but I know that’s how it happened. I know they provided education for their two sons, they became teachers. 25 years ago one of them was sent to Israel to teach. English language obviously, well I don’t know, but he didn’t have to teach Hebrew. So I only know that my aunt’s son was alive 25 years ago. I know nothing about the other.

Aunt Eszti Bacher’s family lived in Maramarossziget. My father worked in the defile of the Maros river as an office-holder, we lived in Gyergyoszentmiklos, and they in Maramarossziget. In those times it was a great distance, and traveling wasn’t too easy. My dad had holidays once in a year, and then he visited grandpa. And I suppose he visited his sister Eszti as well. Her husband was a merchant. I mean by merchant a shopkeeper. Eszti didn’t work. Back then women didn’t work at all. Not only my mother wasn’t allowed to work, my husband didn’t let me work either. She had about five children. They were deported. Eszti too died in Auschwitz with her husband. And a miracle occurred, as all the five children returned. They got deported to different places. Some did work service, some were in Germany in different concentration camps. But not even after one year all of them, as they could, left for Palestine, as Israel wasn’t established yet. And they all died there one after the other.

Mirjam was married in Viso [Felsoviso or Alsoviso, today Viseul de Sus or Viseul de Jos], it’s a somewhat larger settlement near Maramarossziget. They lived there. Her husband was called Ganz. They had two children, David Ganz and Bernat Ganz. One of them established a family in Szatmar [today Satu Mare], the other in Nagyvarad [today Oradea]. And both left from Israel from there. The grandchildren of my father’s sister live in Israel. I didn’t know the elder’s, David’s children, but Bernat Ganz has two children, and I was in touch with them. Bernat contacted me through a letter sent via the militia, because he never came to Marosvasarhely. And he started to write me, and to gather the existing members of the family. For example he knew that my uncle from Torokszentmiklos wasn’t alive anymore, but that his wife escaped, so he did research so persistently in the community and via the police that he found out where she lived. A former servant of her supported her until her death, because she was old. They corresponded all the time. In Israel, in Bnei Brak Bernat had three children. His daughter is called Mirjam. Her husband is Chaim Birnbaum. They call me sometimes. They are my second cousins, because their father was my first cousin. Bernat was a very warm-hearted person, and he sent me sometimes small packages. And this man wasn’t wealthy. I know that they lived from day to day. I met them when I was in Israel, in 1973. I met Bernat too, he was alive yet. Bernat died after that. David too has sons, but I’m not in touch with him. I only know that one of the children is in America, and he is a rabbi.

There was one more sister, the youngest sister of my father, Manci – her name was Margit Bacher I suppose – who got divorced. I don’t know what her husband’s name was. She didn’t assume her husband’s name, she remained Bacher. She had a son, who joined the Youth’s Communist Movement, and disappeared at the age of 14, before World War II. [Editor’s note: The Youth’s Communist Movement was considered illegal between the two world wars. The Romanian Communist Party and the related organizations were prohibited at the beginning of the 1920s.] Well, it was a sin [illegal] in those times to be a communist. Manci stayed with grandpa until the end. She was deported too, and she didn’t come back.

The Ganz family, who lived in Viso was religious. In fact all of the siblings from Maramarossziget were observant, they were Orthodox. They didn’t eat milky meals with meat. Those from Maramarossziget [the women] had wigs too. My mother didn’t have any wig, nor had my aunt from Torokszentmiklos, despite the fact that they kept a kosher household. Only my father who moved here and his brother who moved to Torokszentmiklos were religious only in a moderate degree. I don’t even know how to call this, since we got chopped [animals by the shochet], and we didn’t eat pork. But my father worked on Saturdays. In this case he couldn’t have been called an Orthodox. And if needed, he traveled, he wrote and did other things too which an Orthodox is not allowed to. But otherwise we never had pork in the house. And before the meat was prepared, there was a ceremony, it had to stay salted for half an hour, after that they threw water over it and it had to stay for one hour in clean water, and only after that they started to cook it. My mother always proceeded so. Me as well. Well, not me, but the servant. It was enough for me if the girl did it. We had a kosher household at home, at my home as well until 1940, until it was possible.

My father, Izidor Bacher was a high school graduate. In Maramarossziget, at the catholic gymnasium it was possible, as they were humane; it was possible to bring the books to the gymnasium Friday after-noon [and to leave them there]. I don’t know if they had exams on Saturdays, but they didn’t have to write for sure. On Saturday evenings they went to take the books, they learnt on Sundays, and Mondays the ordinary lessons begun.

After the final examination daddy got employed first in Szeged, he was a cashier, he lived there for more than one year. And he knew that there was wood and woodwork here by the side of the Maros river, and he came to Gyergyoszentmiklos and settled here. My grandfather lived in Maramarossziget, and my father moved to Transylvania 1 alone. He met mammy here, she was from Gyergyovarhegy [today Subcetate Mures]. He got married there, he married my mother.

I know nothing about my maternal grandparents. When I was born or I was a little child nor my grandfather, nor my grandmother was alive. They were from Gyergyovarhegy. My grandfather lived in a small village. It still exists, I think the train stops there: you pass by Toplica [today Toplita], Galocas [today Galautas] and then Gyergyovarhegy. This small village was on the hillside. It was completely Romanian, there wasn’t any Hungarian family. My grandparents spoke Romanian perfectly. And my mother too, as she was among Romanian children. There is a photo too, it shows my mother dressed up in Romanian clothes. My grandfather was a shopkeeper, everywhere the Jew was a shopkeeper. It is important that in 1880, in the Bach era – that’s how they call it – there was a law saying that Jews couldn’t own land. [Editor’s note: Until the 1850s Jews weren’t allowed to own land, plot and real estate, and they couldn’t have state functions either. The restrictions were abolished after the Compromise (after 1867).] Thus a Jewish farmer class couldn’t be formed. He took his ‘pintli’, it’s a kind of haversack called ‘pintli’, but maybe just here in Transylvania, or it may come from a Polish word. He went from one to village to the other, and he shouted “‘Handle!’ What is for sale?” [Editor’s note: ‘Handle’ is a word derived from the Yiddish verb ‘handlen’ meaning to bargain, bargaining.] But they did the same in Budapest too. These are all Jewish words. This was an exclamation. When I was a grown-up, 18 years old girl, and later too, poor Jews still did this in Budapest. They stopped down in the yard – these storied houses all had small yards – and they shouted: “‘Handle!’ What is for sale?” And there were worn-out clothes, shoes that people gave them for free or for peanuts, well for two times nothing. He brought these to the villages, sold them and earned some money. The Jew was like this in order to make his living. He couldn’t be a farmer, he wasn’t good in agricultural work. One had to support his family.

My grandfather’s family, the Alschuchs was the only Jewish family in the village. People are angry about Jews, because the Jew was always a merchant. What did he sell? What needed the villagers? Carriage grease, dressing, since there weren’t motors then [cars]. And people needed horseshoes, as horses had to be shod, boot-polish, needle, salt, maybe corn flour, sugar… He might have sold rice, because at pigsticking people prepared white pudding, and it needed some rice. He didn’t have to sell pork bacon, as they [the villagers] cut pigs. They didn’t need curd cheese either, since they had sheep. Well, these were his merchandise, and what a rural merchant could sell. What did a farmer need? Such a retailer was glad if he could earn his living, not and let’s not talk about employing someone. He had five children, he had to bring them up. And he raised five children from this. And he could manage to bring them up so that the eldest sister of my mother got married to an elder, rich man from the Regat. He fell in love with her, and married her. But they didn’t live in the Regat, but in Gyergyoszentmiklos. And when mammy and the other children grew up a little, they all went to her. None of my maternal grandparents was alive in 1944.

My mother, Helen had four siblings: aunt Berta – the eldest, in fact she raised my mother –, aunt Netti and two brothers, Henrik and Salamon. I was very small when Henrik Alschuch died, I don’t know anything about him, I don’t remember his occupation either. I only know things about aunt Berta and aunt Netti. I stayed at them when I was in school. There was aunt Berta, who married someone from Piata Neamt. The uncle was called Berko Mozes, he was from the Regat. Berko Mozes was engaged in wine-growing, he had a wine cellar in Gyergyoszentmiklos, where they lived. He sold wine for shops and transported to villages. At vintage he went south to the wine region, and bought in bulk the prepared wine, that’s what he did. My aunt was also a great a businesswoman, she also bought all kinds of brandies. In one word they traded. They were well-of. They didn’t have any children, but they brought up two [the children of Salamon Alschuch, the brother]. But one after the other, as they adopted one, they paved the way for her and married her, then took the other.

I stayed at aunt Netti’s in Sepsiszentgyorgy [today Sfantu Gheorghe] for one year, when I was eleven, in the first year at the gymnasium. I got to know her as a widow, I didn’t know her husband, I don’t even remember his name. Aunt Netti’s husband died during World War I. They had four children: Stefi, Henrik, Misi and one more girl. I have no idea how, from what she supported her family. Perhaps she received some kind of indemnification or aid for her husband had died on the battle field. And presumably her children were grown-up, and they supported her. I know that one of them – he must have been the eldest – was an office-holder at the weaving mill in Sepsiszentgyorgy. And I also know that all of them finished four grades at gymnasium. The apartment was furnished in a bourgeois manner. Henrik lived in Sepsiszentgyorgy, but I didn’t know him. When I lived for one year in Sepsiszentgyorgy, I don’t know, he was already dead, or worked in Kolozsvar. I think he didn’t get married, and I don’t know what his occupation was. Henrik didn’t live at home, but he sent money. When I stayed at aunt Netti, mammy provided for my living. They were badly off, very badly off. They always were very hard up. A Jew was forced to use his mind and to learn in order to earn his living, because anti-Semitism exists since time immemorial. So generally it wasn’t easy. There was nothing interesting at my aunts, they had a smooth life, there was nothing interesting around it. They were simple middle-class people. My mother’s siblings all died in Auschwitz. As far as I know, nobody survived deportation. Maybe some of them died before. I didn’t have any contact with them.

My mother’s youngest brother, Salamon Alschuch was the black sheep of the family. He was a shady character, he didn’t like to work. He didn’t drink, but he played cards, and that’s a drogue too. But he had, I don’t know, about four or five children. Salamon had a store, but he sold I don’t know what: salted bacon, salt and shoe-polish. Salamon’s wife was Jewish, but I don’t know how she looked like. He lived in Toplica. Toplica was five kilometers long and it had one street, which led to Borszek [today Borsec]. One should know that one has to get off [the train] in Toplica in order to go to Borszek… The mineral water was gold. Only the water of Borszek could stand up transportation through the see. There were three or four fountains, they streamed constantly. There was a main fountain, it was built up beautifully. Whoever wanted to could go there. We weren’t in touch, because he was a loon. I lived already in Marosvasarhely. My father supported him, but when he found out that his brother was playing cards until the morning, and he was gambling away his last penny, so that he couldn’t buy a piece of bread for his children in the morning, my father forbade him to enter our house. But my mother helped him in secret. The poor woman, she found the way to do it, she always brought the food to a family from the village. She brought them milk, butter, bread, fat, rice, food. Always without my father’s knowledge. Since my father was such a straight person, he couldn’t bear that someone gambled away his money.

So Berko Mozes’ family adopted two of their children. They raised two children, and both abandoned them. On left for America, and the other was a crook. He was such a disgraceful character, that he wrote all the family fortune to his name in secret. He lived there though, since the house had eight rooms, so they lived together. [After Berko Mozes died] he just simply kicked out aunt Berta from her own house. His wife [as he got married in the meantime] had some relatives somewhere in the Mezoseg [area in the historical region of Transylvania in Cluj County], near Panit, in a village, and he brought poor aunt Berta there. They were Jews too, because he married a Jewish woman surely. She found out later [that his foster-son wrote the house on his name], but it was already the Hungarian era 2, so aunt Berta couldn’t do anything, besides she was at least eighty years old. I remember that once she came to the town to visit mammy. And I was shocked because of what I heard. She had a ragged room, she said, and she got hardly to eat. Then she went back, and I never heard anything about them. Those were already such times, it wasn’t possible for mammy to go there and take a look. Aunt Berta was deported, I suppose together with those who she lived with. She had no chance to return, because she was very old. Berko Mozes had died a long time before, he didn’t live to experience deportation.

My mammy attended the convent for eight years in Gyergyoszentmiklos. She also finished two years of I don’t know what, so she qualified as a teacher. Of course she had a Hungarian qualification. She said then ‘I’ll go to look for a job.’ She went home, my grandfather lived a few kilometers from Gyergyovarhegy, on the hillside, in a completely Romanian village. Only an Armenian family lived there, and there was a teacher in that family too, who was commuting to Ditro [today Ditrau], to Gyergyoszarhegy [today Lazarea], and the husband worked in a factory, he was a clerk. My grandfather was desperate that a daughter would go to a foreign place to work, to Marosvasarhely or somewhere else. Back then it was something inconceivable. And my grandpa wouldn’t let her go. My mother was crying, and she said: ‘Why did you let me learn then?’ He answered ‘Listen to me! – that’s how my mother related it to me – If you learnt well the lesson in Hungarian, and you speak Romanian perfectly, here is a four grades primary school – there was a Romanian school in Gyergyoalfalu [today Joseni] –, pay a visit to the schoolmaster, and ask him if he could employ you.’ My mother had no choice, she went there, they employed her, and she was teaching there. There was a schoolmaster, a teacher and a Romanian teacher, so there was room for my mammy too, because there were quite a lot of children. So mammy was teaching in Romanian, but not for long, since dad came and married her. And in older times it wasn’t fashionable that a woman who got married went to work. My father didn’t let my mother work as a teacher, he used to say: ‘What’s in your mind? What would people say, that I can’t support a wife?’

Not far from Gyergyovarhegy, about five kilometers far from where grandpa lived there was a huge timber mill with 6 frame-saws. The factory was installed in Gyegyovarhegy and Toplica. These two locations are quite close to each other. It takes half an hour by train. The one in Toplica was a large factory, with a few hundreds of workers, and if we take into account the employees working in the forest, it had a few thousands. The factory in Gyegyovarhegy had 6 log frames, the one in Toplica had 12 log frames and 12 saws. It had a few thousands of employees. At the beginning papa was cashier in Gyergyovarhegy. Well, it was close, and I don’t know how, but he met mammy, who married him. Perhaps there was a cultural performance on May 10th, and perhaps the office-holders were invited and they went to see it. Mammy couldn’t be more than twenty years old. They had a religious wedding surely, because there were many Jews in Gyergyoszentmiklos. Mammy lived in Gyergyovarhegy. I think they lived there for two years, dad was cashier there, and he got promoted, so they moved then to Toplica. When the director saw that my father was very good in his profession – actually he was a mathematical genius – he became a factory manager. The factory had two directors: a technical and an administrative director. My father was the technical director. He had a secure job and a great salary. He was the expert.

The owner was a Swiss tycoon, and he had a Romanian partner here in Romania, so they established a Swiss-Romanian firm in fact. Its center was in Brasso [today Brasov]. The owner didn’t live here, he lived in Switzerland. The Swiss enterprise had three factories in Romania: in Gyergyovarhegy, in Toplica and in Kommando [today Comandau]. The enterprise had a narrow-gauge railway, the train went up to the forest at dawn, and it carried down all the logs cut down by the woodworkers. The whole enterprise employed a few thousand persons. Dad took his holiday once in a year, at Christmas, because the enterprise in Toplica ceased work four weeks before Christmas to repair, clean, maintain the machines.

It was a very beautiful and modern enterprise. For example when the boss came here from Switzerland, he built such a tennis court for the office-holders… In Toplica we belonged to the illustrious society: those who worked on the timber-yard, the enterprise employees considered themselves a separate class. They [the contemporaneous enterprises] could have learnt democracy [from this one] by the way. As imagine, the Swiss boss built a public bath in both places [in Gyergyovarhegy and in Toplica], separately for the workers and the office-holders. The sole difference was that the office-holders’ bath had sauna too – I didn’t even know this word back then. Sauna, can you image? It consisted of a small cabin with multi-leveled benches, for everybody. Somebody went in, and the vapor started. But of course, only office-holders were allowed to use it. The workers’ bath didn’t have a sauna. In the bath there were two bathtubs next to each other and about two showers. The office-holders’ bath – not all office-holders had their own bathroom at home, we did – had bathtub, shower and a basin. So there were madams who went in and soaked themselves. There was a person responsible for the bath, she was staying there like a policewoman, since first one had to wash under the shower from head to foot, and could enter the basin only after that. I never was there, nor was mammy. We weren’t. But those who didn’t have a bathroom, or it was agreeable, I don’t know to rub their sore feet… they were sitting inside and chatted. In my childhood, when I wasn’t married yet, I saw it, I even went to the sauna. I didn’t need it, but how to say, the vapor was good… It [the bath] was used alternately by women and men. They didn’t stay there for hours, and most of them didn’t use the bathtub, but mainly the shower. It was a great thing, no such thing in other places. And we didn’t have to pay a penny.

There was a difference of age of 6 years between my brother [born in 1905] and me. My mother didn’t want more children, and she already was so modern and clever – though there weren’t contraceptive pills yet. My father wanted a girl. My mother withstood it for 6 years, then she gave up, and she became pregnant, that’s how I was born after 6 years. A scene took place then, because they say I weighted 5 kilos and I was wonderful, and when they placed me into my father’s arms, he went to my mother’s room and told her: ‘Well dear, with all this pain why didn’t you born one more such beautiful child?’ And my mother got so angry, that she didn’t talk for three days. Since she was struggling for three days. There was a midwife at a village, it turned out at the end that she wasn’t a midwife in fact. She was struggling for three days, but there weren’t any problems.

Growing up

Before school, I couldn’t read and write yet, but my father taught me the French and the Hungarian cards. And how to play dominoes and chess. And it’s also due to my father that I know the Hungarian history. He was a great Hungarian patriot. He brought me toys related to the Hungarian history. When he heard the Hungarian national anthem at the radio at noon – we didn’t have television yet –, his tears were always flowing. The national anthem was always at noon. He was always a reader, he talked politics, and so he was aware of politics. My father was always a great admirer of Kossuth, therefore he brought me toys, for example a pack of cards with thirty-forty pieces, with questions related to history. When was the Battle of Mohacs? What does the Golden Bull mean? Things like this, and the answers were on the back. I had to learn all these, and from time to time he asked me the questions. My mother gave me books fit to my age. We had such a library, one could transform it into a public one. I read the newspaper since then, I order the newspapers even today. So I had a middle-class family. In 1923, at the age of 12, I was given a radio, it even had earphones, but I don’t remember its name. The radio was installed in my room, and it was connected to my parents’ bedroom through earphones. But we could pick up only Pest then. It was a battery radio, we always had to recharge it. I don’t know what my parents were listening to. I don’t remember anymore what I was listening to, but surely only music. News? Who cared about the news in those times?

My parents sent me to school to different towns. I attended the first grade of primary school in Gyergyoszentmiklos, my aunt Berta, the eldest sister of mammy was living there. I attended the catholic convent for four years. I finished there the four grades of primary school. I attended religious classes, I had to. The nuns didn’t care about it. The religious education was shallow. We had a teacher of religion, he didn’t even give lessons in the synagogue, but in a room, where he lived. We were a few girls in the convent who attended it. Those were observant Jews, they didn’t eat bacon or pork at home.

The convent had a higher elementary school too. My father wanted me to attend a gymnasium, and since there wasn’t a gymnasium for girls there [in Gyergyoszentmiklos], and my mother had a married sister in Sepsiszentgyorgy too, aunt Netti, they sent me to the Szekely Miko College. I attended it for one year. When I went home, I had a Szekler dialect: ‘Nay, nay, I don’t wanna. I won’t go there!’ Well, when my mother heard this: ‘Well, you won’t go there anymore, you can be sure of that!’ That’s how I got to Marosvasarhely. I finished the second and third grades of gymnasium there, at the Hungarian section, in the Liceul Unirea de Fete. [Editor’s note: The Unirea (Union) High School was called the Ferenc Rakoczi II Roman Catholic Gymnasium previously to Marosvasarhely’s annexation to Romania. Until the nationalization in 1948 the school was a Roman Catholic gymnasium, then with the occasion of the educational reform carried out in the same year the building was given to the Hungarian girls’ grammar school, which in 1962 was unified with the Romanian girls’ grammar school.] I couldn’t write correctly after four years of primary school, my father taught me later. And he invented such tricks! I had to correspond with him, he underlined where I made a mistake in the Hungarian spelling, and he sent me back the paper.

When I was already here [in Marosvasarhely], I was still attending the gymnasium, my father paid a teacher, so that I really learnt our religion. Until the forth grade in gymnasium a student, a bocher came once in a week, in the after-noon to teach me. He taught me how to write the Hebrew letters, to read in Hebrew. He taught me prayers, the blessing over bread, how to wash hands before every meal. That is to say that the Jewish religion outdoes all the religions in hygiene. I can read in Hebrew, I know the letters, I know some prayers. Both my grandfather and my father had a progressive mentality in the sense that he provided us everything a Jewish girl or a Jewish boy should know on religion. My father always used to say: ‘I give you and your brother everything a Jewish child is ought to be given. It’s your own business what you will keep of this. My conscience requires me to do so.’ This was the principle.

When I started the forth grade, a law entered into force: a Jewish child might attend only a state or a religious [that is Jewish] school 3. There wasn’t religious school here, only primary, the Jewish school was in the present Horea street, but there wasn’t any secondary school. My father said then: ‘If there isn’t, you’ll go to the Romanian school.’ I finished the forth grade in a Romanian gymnasium. I was 14 years old. I had hard luck that the Iron Guard 4 movement had begun already. And in an after-noon they beat soundly a Jewish girl, a classmate of mine on the Bulgar square – it wasn’t built up that much as now – in the evening. We were desperate. But we had friends too, Jewish boys at the gymnasium. We told them: ‘You see what happened to Juci, just like that!’ They had heard for sure about the beating of Jews in Iasi. And of course, our boys watched them, recognized one boy who had beaten the Jewish girl, when he was going home in the Ballada street, since he lived there. They beat him so hard that he couldn’t walk for one week. All this should have been ok, but my father found out the story. He came instantly from Toplica, as he was employed there at a large firm: ‘Oh my God, my child is in danger! I’m taking you home.’ ‘Oh, dear daddy, thus I will finish not even four years of gymnasium!’ I implored him to let me finish that year. He agreed to it with difficulty.

Luckily for me the French language and French culture started to be promoted. And they established three French institutions in Romania: in Marosvasarhely, in Bucharest and in Iasi. My father made arrangements immediately, he bought shares, he ensured my right to certification. [Editor’s note: Usually the right to certification was granted to institutions, which meant that such institution had the right to issue final examination certificates.] It was in the French Institution, up in the clerks’ district. The French Institution was placed in three villas. French teachers came from France, they didn’t speak Hungarian or Romanian, they couldn’t even say yes or no. And I got enrolled in the fifth grade. I was fifteen years old when I entered the fifth grade of gymnasium, and finally I finished eight grades of gymnasium in the French school. When I attended the French school, I was helped, a teacher came to me in the after-noon, and helped me to do my lessons, to learn the language. I even ate frog in the French Institute, they adored it. In the spring the whole school went out up on the hills, and we were catching frogs for the French teachers. As there were only French teachers. They loved it, and they offered us too. I tasted it, I ate it, I didn’t get sick, but I don’t want anymore. I wasn’t a gourmand, I didn’t have a favorite meal, I wasn’t a hearty eater. But I tasted everything, I ate everything.

In Marosvasarhely I always stayed at families with board. One had to pay for that. And I always stayed at families where they educated me how to eat, how to wash myself regularly, how to wash my teeth. A child has to be taught good manners. First I stayed at a Jewish widow, her name was Mrs. Nagy, she was a piano teacher. She had a daughter. I stayed at them for four years. Then they moved to Bucharest, because the piano teacher’s daughter got married to someone from there, and she took her widow mother with her. Then I found other family, where there was a piano too, as my parents checked that, because I attended piano lessons to. I have a qualification of piano teacher, I finished it simultaneously at the conservatory. [Editor’s note: The conservatory was established in 1908 by dr. Gyorgy Bernady, and it functioned until 1949 in the Palace of Culture in Marosvasarhely. The conservatory organized from time to time concerts too. After the educational reform in 1948 the institution was transformed into an art school; today it is installed in the High School of Arts.] It wasn’t that hard in those times. I always went home for holidays, we lived in Toplica then.

The family connections were very strong on both sides. There was no place for envy, there weren’t disagreements. But people lived far from each other. Everybody was minding his own business. Traveling wasn’t that easy as today. We knew about cars only from books. When I got married in 1931, there were two cars in Marosvasarhely, as far as know. We didn’t care about its brand, as it was such a rarity. I only knew that a very rich Jewish family owned them. One belonged to Reti, but he didn’t even use it. [The company called] ‘Szekely es Reti’ had a furniture factory here, which became later the ‘Augusztus 23’ factory. They were very wealthy people. The other car belonged also to a rich Jew, he was a flashy Jew. He liked to come into sight. For example on Sundays he got in the car – the husband didn’t even know how to drive [he had a driver] –, and he circled two or three times the center. As it was a habit to saunter on Sunday morning. Everybody from the middle-class, where I belonged too, dressed up elegantly, and they took a walk.

These were peaceful times. For example when I got married, there were Romanian families, they moved recently to Marosvasarhely. And we lived so peacefully. We went to cafes, to nice pubs to have a barbecue: here set the Jewish family, there the Romanian family. The Gypsy played for the Romanian his own songs, for us Hungarian music. None of the songs bothered the other. We clinked. They spoke our language. We spoke theirs too, I spoke Romanian better due to my mother. Most of the Romanian intellectuals were studying in Budapest. We didn’t go to Kolozsvar, but to Budapest. Marosvasarhely was famous because of its pubs, but those were in fact small high-class restaurants, for example the Surlott Gradics [the Scrubbed Steps], that’s how they called it. [Editor’s note: The restaurant-tavern called Surlott Gradics was in the present Mihai Viteazul (former Klastrom) street no. 3. “The small tavern consisted in fact of 2-3 small intercommunicating rooms, which represented a small part of the owner’s house, counting the garden, his apartment and the kitchen. The table societies were taking a glass of wine in the small, whitewashed rooms with the timber beam ceiling, at their usual table. (…) The owner or his wife was welcoming and serving the guests. They expected the company of teachers from the schools around the Surlott Gradics as permanent guests, but after funerals the people paying a tribute entered too for refreshments or for a glass of boiled wine.” (Gyula Keresztes: Marosvasarhely regi epuletei / Old Buildings of Marosvasarhely, Difprescar, Marosvasarhely, 1998)] It was in an old, small house, but inside it was gleaming clean, not a drunken man, a coachman or I don’t know who could enter there. These were all distinguished places. We used to go to the Maros restaurant Saturday evening, after dinner of course. Jews usually don’t drink, but one had to order, so we asked a liter of wine, as we were sitting four or five persons, half of the wine was drunken by the musicians, the rest by us. The Jew would rather play cards. I was a great card-player too all my life.

Marosvasarhely was famous because of its barbecue and the varga strudel-cake. [Editor’s note: Marosvasarhely is called sometimes even today ironically ‘The Village of Barbecue’ in the Szekler’s Land.] When I went to Budapest [in those times], sometimes I saw written at restaurants: ‘Today we have varga strudel-cake a la Marosvasarhely’. They didn’t sell it, you could get it only if you entered and ate it there. The varga strudel-cake was a specialty for restaurants. I prepare it too: the upper and lower part is made of strudel, between them pasta boiled in milk, with curd cheese, two or three eggs – one has to beat it up –, and full with raisin. Not any kind of pasta, but vermicelli, in milk with vanilla. It has to be boiled so that the milk pervades the pasta. It is so delicious!

My brother was born in 1905. He was called Sandor Bacher. He lived in Maramarossziget at grandfather’s until he finished four grades of gymnasium. But he lived there under very strict rules, he had to pray a lot. At dawn my grandfather woke him up to teach him how to pray in the morning and in the night. The Jewish religion is an extremely rigorous, so difficult religion. And my brother said that ‘I would rather go to chop wood, but I won’t go back to Maramarossziget.’ And he got then here [to Marosvasarhely] in the fifth grade, and he took his final examination here. I still have the photo on his fiftieth class reunion. In Maramarossziget he didn’t have to have payes, there wasn’t such a demand, my mother stipulated that. He attended the catholic gymnasium there. Back then life was very different there. The schoolmaster let the Jewish children to bring into the classroom the books [and they let them there until Saturday]. And they didn’t have to write on Saturdays. They compiled the timetable intentionally or accidentally [or it was the schoolmaster who allowed this] in such a way that they didn’t have to write, as a Jewish child is forbidden to write on Sabbath. And Saturday evening, after dark they brought home the coursebooks. A catholic gymnasium for example was capable of this. World was different then! Such a world that this could have happened. When my brother got here in Marosvasarhely, he wasn’t religious anymore. In Maramarossziget he didn’t attend the cheder, my grandfather taught him enough – my mother stipulated that what my grandfather taught him was enough. That was too bad, because he taught so much the poor child: he woke him up at dawn, and he went to bed late in order to learn, so that he became an atheist by the time he got here.

We had a good relationship, though he was spanked many times because of me. I was a bad child, because I always wanted his toys, of course. I wanted to play football, to climb the trees. He went with his sixteen-seventeen years old friends to pick raspberry in the wood. And I was crying to take me with him. They had to play football with me. What was to do with a snotty child? They put me to keep the goal, but they played in front of the other goal. I noticed that, and I started to bite my hands and to claw myself, and I went home. As I was approaching our house, I shouted: ‘Sanyi beat me, Sanyi did this, Sanyi did that!’ And when Sanyi came home, he got some slaps. He was saying that he didn’t do anything, but they didn’t believe him. Luckily for me once a worker returning from the factory saw me clawing myself with a willow branch in my hand. Everybody knew the director’s children, so he asked me: ‘Belluska, what are you doing?’ ‘Well, nothing.’ Then the worker followed me, and he saw why my brother was getting slaps and beatings. He came in and said: ‘Madam, please forgive me, but don’t beat Sanyika, because I saw the girl biting and clawing her arm.’ Thus I got beaten. Sanyi was spanked many times because of me. I started to smoke in a similar way. He was smoking. I asked him a puff. ‘Go away, you snotty!’ ‘Won’t you give me? I will tell them that you stole the cigarettes from daddy’s drawer!’ ‘Here you have, snotty, smoke!’ Of course I was dying of smoking it, I was coughing, stifling, but after three days I was blackmailing him again. I kept on doing this until I was seventeen-eighteen, when I started to smoke on my own.

When we were both here in Marosvasarhely for a short time, he was blackmailing me as well. He got pocket money, I got too separately, because we stayed at different families, not at the same. I hated mathematics. ‘My dear Sanyi, take a look [at my mathematics home-work].’ ‘You have pocket money, I want one lei.’ He did it, but I had to pay. I gave him, let’s say one lei. He came every third day, and he did all my math home-work. This cost me much more later. As he was older, he took his final examination at the end of the 1920s, and he left, he went to Vienna to study. I stayed here, and stupid me, I didn’t even know how much two times two was; I didn’t have any grounds. Thus I had had only ten in math, then I failed. [Editor’s note: In the Romanian educational system ten is the best mark and four means unsatisfactory.] After a while he discovered where I was keeping my money, and he stole from it, because he loved to play billiards. Every evening I counted my money like a niggard, and once I tell to the woman [where I stayed] ‘Madam, my money is wanting.’ She says, ‘My child, I didn’t touch it surely.’ And she added: ‘Listen, Sanyika was here in the after-noon. And yesterday after-noon as well.’ I wasn’t at home then. He came when I was at piano lesson in the after-noon, at the conservatory. As I always had piano-lessons in the after-noon, in the morning I went to school. And that’s how it came to my mind that it was likely that he had stolen from my money.

My brother passed the final examination here [in Marosvasarhely], at the catholic gymnasium. After that my brother was sent to study to Vienna. He didn’t want to go to university, he adored the wood industry. He said he didn’t want to be sent to university, because he wanted to work in the wood industry, he adored woods, he adored timber. But my father kept on repeating: ‘High school degree? I have a high school degree, let my son have a superior education!’ So he went to Vienna and enrolled to the academy of commerce. He said in vain: ‘Daddy, I won’t go to university, I want to work in the wood industry!’ Daddy used to tell me as well: ‘My child, I don’t mind if you get married to a shoemaker, but not to someone in the wood industry! Because wood doesn’t grow on the asphalt. Thus you have to live your life in a forest or village.’ My brother wouldn’t listen to it. In his fourth year daddy went to Vienna to visit his son and to take a look at his course record. There was nothing written in it. He says: ‘How’s that? Aren’t you attending the university? Pack up and come home.’ So daddy was very strict and very determined. Anyway, he made the profit out of this on the ‘ladies’, that he learnt English and German perfectly. My father said: ‘It was quite an expensive course, you could have learnt German much cheaper in Szeben or even in Brasso.’ However he saw the world, more than in Gyergyovarhegy. My unfortunate brother was in Auschwitz and in Ukraine too, and in all that misery this [the knowledge of languages] helped him out a little.

Later, after he came home from Vienna, my brother was employed at an enterprise, next to daddy, but daddy never wanted his son to be close to him. That is he never wanted to grant him backing. My brother was everywhere: in Szeben, there was a factory next to Szeben, the same rich man owned it, the place was called Talmacs [Talmaciu in Romanian], where the factory was, it was close to Szeben. So he went to Szeben every weekend. It had the great advantage that it was a completely German town. And my father asked the management – as my brother was persistent in his will to work in the wood industry – to send him to learn all the branches of this profession, starting from felling the trees to the shipping. Thus he was in Galati and Constanta too. He got back step by step, so when my father was in Toplica, he worked in Gyergyovarhegy. And after my father got ill, he couldn’t go on, they exchanged them, my father moved back to Gyergyovarhegy, and my brother took his place. He wasn’t appointed as a manager, yet he fulfilled my father’s duties. My poor father died there in Gyergyovarhegy, in 1938, he got a heart attack. At that time I was married already in Marosvasarhely. Daddy visited us two weeks before. War-related troubles had already begun. In 1938 we were having fun here, we were dancing, but the war had already begun.

As grown-ups my brother and I adored each other. He had problems with women, because he was a lady-killer. ‘I’m in trouble, dear Bellus, Emilia is pregnant.’ He was a clerk, he didn’t have money, and the woman blackmailed him that she was pregnant, but in fact she wasn’t. So I gave him money for the abortion.

Mammy was a housekeeper. They observed all the high days according to the Jewish religion. Friday morning mammy cooked the Friday dinner – what she prepared depended if it was summer or winter – and she cooked for Sabbath as well. Friday evening we had fresh dinner – for us [Jews] every holiday starts in the evening, and it ends next day, when the star rises. For example we liked fish very much, and Friday evening we had fish in aspic, tee for those who wanted and challah. The challah wasn’t milk loaf, but dough kneaded with water. The difference was that the challah was made of whites, and it was twisted to make it elongated. [Editor’s note: The flour was ground in many ways, depending on the distance between the millstones. ‘Whites’ means the soft grist of the wheat.] We called this challah in the family. They baked two challah for an ordinary Sabbath. And the custom was that they put the challah one next to the other, it was covered with a tablecloth, my father took it down and cut it into slices, and he gave a small piece for everybody. That’s how it started. But we didn’t salt it. We dunked it once, at Shavuot. But not into salt, but we had honey in a little pot, daddy gave everybody a bit. It is a symbol, so that the new year would start sweet and well. We were a small family, four maximum, as my brother didn’t come home every time.

On Friday evening mammy lighted two candles. There was a specific prayer she recited. I light candles too even today. I light two candles for seventy-two years. I recite that prayer in Hebrew, as it has a prayer. These prayers are called broches. The Jews, the Orthodox, when they eat bread, they say a prayer, they thank God that they can eat a piece of bread. There is a separate broche for the meat, there is a prayer of thanks over every meal. I forgot some things, I observe the basic thing: the lighting of candles on Friday evening. Everywhere, even if I stayed in a hotel in Budapest, I lighted candles even there. I have a small folding candlestick; it can be carried in a handbag. And nobody ever asked, nor the chambermaid, nor the waiter, nobody why I was doing that, because they knew. Certainly I wasn’t the only one who did this. I wasn’t kosher: I ate here and there, but there were traditions that I observed.

We didn’t do [big] cleaning on Fridays. We did it when we had to. Our house was clean, we had two servants at home. We did big housecleaning only at Pesach, because then we had to change every pot, otherwise we did just ordinary cleaning. And everything had to be washed, the drawers in the kitchen had to be cleaned from every breadcrumb. And we had to put out every pot we had used during the year. My mother observed this one strictly. The servants worked with my mother, and she checked if everything was alright. We had a large apartment, there was a great store [some kind of shed] above the summer kitchen, where the kneading troughs and the chopping boards were, that was their place [of the Pesach pots]. Whoever had a loft, they put it there. We brought down from the loft the Pesach pots. That’s how I still have some of my dear mammy’s stuff, as we put them up as well at my place, when she moved here in 1942.

We observed Seder eve. There is a prayer book, the Haggadah that has to be recited and explained. And there is everything on the platter: horse-radish, one boiled egg, green parsley, nut [and apple] mixed with wine in a small glass. And when he [my father] was speaking about it, he showed it, why the matzah was there, that the Pharaoh chased out the Jews so quickly, that they didn’t have time to let the bread rise and to bake it, but they were running, and when they arrived on the plain, they rolled it out and dried it on the sun. That’s how the myth of the matzah was born. We had already learnt it, the bocher who had taught me, explained me all this, but I saw at home in my childhood. And it has an element of play too, he [the head of the family] smashes a piece of matzah and puts it in a napkin. The dinner is over, but in the meantime he has to go out three times to wash his hands. While the father went out to wash hands, the child hid it, always the smallest, because it’s a game. So daddy is searching for the matzah, where could he put it, but he doesn’t find it. ‘Where is the matzah?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Where is the matzah? Now, give it to me!’ ‘I won’t give you, daddy!’ It was always me who hid it. My brother was rarely there for Pesach. And we started to negotiate. ‘Daddy, I know where it is. What would you give me for it?’ Well, he offered me, let’s say five penny. ‘No, I won’t give you for that money.’ ‘Well then, I’ll give this or that sum.’ Finally we came to an agreement, ‘You’ll get this.’ I know that once I was twelve, and I asked for a piano… And dad said: ‘Well my child, dad doesn’t have so much money.’ ‘Dad, save up the money, but promise me that you would give me.’ In fact I and my mother had agreed that dad had already saved up the money [for the piano]. So he promised that in one or two weeks ‘I’ll go to Marosvasarhely and buy you the piano.’ And I was so happy, I gave him the matzah, and everybody was given a bit of it. Children waited this impatiently, you can imagine, where there were three or four children, all of them got a present, because they all said ‘I know as well! I know as well!’ But it was the most interesting for the youngest, for a twelve years old child it wasn’t that interesting. It was a game for him too, because of the negotiation, and they asked something too. Dad asked the four questions, and I always answered them – I knew the answers more or less, but I read it out from a book in Hebrew. Dad asked me in Hebrew, he translated it into Hungarian, and I answered in Hebrew.

We had two eves of Seder. They observe two in Europe, and one in Israel. [Editor’s note: In the Diaspora the Seder eve ritual is conducted on the first two nights of Pesach. In Israel Pesach lasts seven days, while in the Diaspora it lasts eight days. In the ancient Israel the beginning of months, the appearance of the new moon was observed in Jerusalem. Watch-posts were placed on peaks, which transmitted immediately the news to the communities in Babylon and Persia, thus these were informed on the appearance of the new moon in the same night. The watch-posts emitted signs of smoke in the daytime, signs of fire in the night from one mountain to the other. This became impossible under the Roman rule, since then, in order to avoid uncertainty certain holidays last one day longer in the Diaspora than in Israel.] Both were the same. Especially the children weren’t bored by this, because they got presents twice. It happened sometimes that after dinner, after I got my present, I fell asleep. We always had very fine sweet wine, I drank a bit as well, as we saw it from dad, and I fell asleep. Dad kept on reciting with mammy. Mammy was just sitting, she didn’t pray. In fact women don’t have to recite any prayers, everything falls to men. Only among very Hassid Jews women go to the synagogue. It’s not compulsory for women. For Elijah ha-nevi we had a special glass, it’s a silver glass, it was always filled. One didn’t drink of that. It had some story related, the door had to be open to let him out, then we closed the door, but nobody touched it [the glass]. Then we poured back the wine, because nobody touched it. But it was on the table, together with the Seder plate. We had Pesach cake, but we didn’t eat of it, because one can’t eat milky food after meat. I don’t know, maybe after four hours after meat one can eat milky. My mother always prepared orange cake with orange cream, and it had coconut butter. But sometimes we had nut cake with orange cream. Sometimes she put an orange into the dough, two in the cream: the skin and the juice of the orange. It is very delicious. Next day we had coffee for breakfast, and we chopped the matzah into it. At New Year Ilka [Editor’s note: The woman who takes care of Bella Steinmetz] ‘stole’ my recipe, as I have a recipe book, and she surprised me with an orange cake.

At Pesach we didn’t have bread or any kind of flour for eight days. We didn’t have rice or semolina. My mother put dumpling made of matzah meal in the soup: many eggs, pepper, salt, it had a bit of goose fat too, it thickened, and it was cooked in the soup alike the dumpling. It gives such a good taste. Sometimes when my vegetable soup is flavorless, I make soup with matzah meal dumpling, because it gives a good taste. At Pesach we had guests. There were many employees, many young men in the factory where dad worked. And we had a special meal, the ‘hremzli’ [latkes] or potato pancakes: mashed potatoes, eggs and matzah meal fried in goose fat. Jews didn’t use any other kind of fat. My mother never waited the Pesach, because she had to be prepared all the time. The table was covered all the time with white table-cloth, a glass of wine on the table – we always had wine at home. In the mornings guests dropped in – they weren’t all Jews – that ‘Aunt Helen, could we get some latkes?’ They knew that it was Pesach at aunt Bacher’s or aunt Helen’s, and she had delicious latkes. She had a big baking dish in the summer kitchen – not in the interior kitchen, thus all the apartment would have been full of the smell –, the girls were frying it there, they knew as well how to do it, they brought it in a large plate with sugar on it. Three or four employees ate all in two minutes, and they drank a glass of wine. They adored this latkes. In some cases we didn’t put icing sugar on it, but my mother put pepper. They loved it even more with pepper. I like it with pepper as well, my father ate it so too. Only mammy ate it with sugar.

On Sabbath we had a good lunch. Dad didn’t go to the synagogue, he had to go to the office. My mother didn’t go to the synagogue on Sabbath, only on high holidays: at Pesach and at Yom Kippur. Sometimes I entered the synagogue for one hour or two. For example there was a synagogue in Toplica. But dad rented a large room, where the Banffy baths are today, I think it’s transformed into a restaurant now. In the autumn, when we had holidays, dad rented it, I think on his own expenses, and they celebrated there, because there were many Jewish workers at the enterprise. There were at least 30-35 Jewish families there. And all the men went to the synagogue, and women too, but in a separate room. They had a Torah, he sent for a chazzan, they had everything. The room had glass above, like a glass door let’s say, and it was open, so the chazzan’s prayer was audible. And in the women’s room tables and chairs were installed, that was the custom in villages. Before praying we all took breakfast. I don’t know what the procedure is in the very observant communities, but we took breakfast. We went there with mammy. Mammy went up at nine o’clock, me at ten, half past ten and at one, at half past one it was over, and we left. We walked there, anyway this was the single way. And after that we had lunch, then we rested. Dad didn’t go to the office at high holidays, at Shavuot and Yom Kippur.

We never celebrated Succoth, since I was always in Marosvasarhely because of my studies. While dad was alive, I went home at Shavuot and Yom Kippur, after his death I didn’t go at all. After that we celebrated here in Marosvasarhely. I wasn’t at home on other holidays, but they observed them surely. It consisted of a different [more ceremonial] meal. I don’t know for which holiday they prepare fritter, maybe at Pentecost. [Editor’s note: Fritter is prepared at Chanukkah, because Jews prepare meals fried in oil for Chanukkah.] The fashion [custom, tradition] is that they eat mainly milky, but fine things. Mammy prepared milky lunch, potato soup with sour cream and varga strudel-cake, and cake with sour cream or pudding also with sour cream. Mammy prepared very tasty things.

My parents didn’t discuss politics, as far as I know. I know only one thing, dad was a great Kossuth follower. Before the war I didn’t know what politics was, I wasn’t interested in it, I was such a blockhead. But I was engaged in music, literature, languages, I was living an average [middle-class] social life. Usually women didn’t discuss politics, but there was a Jewish Women Association in Marosvasarhely. It didn’t have branches in smaller settlements, like where my parents lived.

My father had holidays in winter, he visited my grandfather in Maramarossziget for about three or four days, from there he went to Torokszentmiklos, to his younger brother. He was very rich, he had two huge factories in Torokszentmiklos. They adored each other. They went to Pest together, and had fun, they went together to the theatre, but mainly to clubs. Commercial Club was its name. It was a very elegant club – a huge house in downtown, with marble stairs, – where transactions took place too. I was with them once. And people were playing cards, but not the ‘here’s the red, where is the red’ type, but it was funny, and they were playing five or six hours long. In the meantime my uncle established business connections. He didn’t have any children, and he was always trying to persuade daddy to give me to him, so that he adopted me, saying that daddy had a son too. ‘You’re completely nuts! Have you ever heard about a Jew who had two children and gave one for adoption? You’re not in your right mind.’ They didn’t talk to each other for days, but then in today words he sponsored me, he invested a lot of money in me.

I went to Pest for the first time when I was 17 years old, and since then every year. I stayed at one of the sister-in-laws of my uncle from Torokszentmiklos, as I wasn’t old enough at the age of 17. I was at my uncle for three or four days, I picked up the money, then I went to Pest, and I was enjoying myself. My uncle had a sister-in-law, the sister of his wife, she had a student son, he was studying law, and I made friends from his society in Budapest. His [the student’s] parents lived in Pest, his father was a teacher. Thus I got more education too if I needed. But I didn’t. I think I learnt home everything, I could eat with knife and fork… He introduced me to a lot of his colleagues, so I had partners to go with to museums, to theatre, to balls. How could I have got otherwise my society? I had so many suitors. I learnt a lot from them, since they all were cultured kids. They took me to performances. I heard there for the first time what a reciting choir was, and I heard the famous reader of Hungary – I don’t remember his name. But they took me not only to gaffs, but we went in the after-noon to elegant hotels for a five o’clock tea. A piano and a violin, soft music. We ate a cake or a chocolate, and we set there for two hours. I went out with them, they were suggesting: let’s go here or there in the after-noon.

In the theatre I watched operettas with Hanna Honty, Kalman Latabar, I watched all [the repertoire] every autumn, I was in the theatre every evening. No matter if the boys came or not – but usually they did. For four weeks performances went on from seven until nine, by the time one came out from the theatre it was half past nine. Sometimes one or two waited for me after the show, and we went together to a café, we drank a simple coffee or a champagne-and-soda. And we were listening to a performer who sang couples, poems set to music with piano accompaniment and bass drum. There were famous performers, for example Vilma Medgyaszai, she was like Edith Piaf. Her performance was magnificent. And there were Gypsy children bands with hundred members. I remember the Emke café, but they didn’t play there, there was a café next to it, and the Gypsy children played there. The Emke was more commercial-like, I used to have breakfast there and read the newspaper to find out what they would be playing that night in the theatre.

In the morning I wandered alone. That’s how I got in the armchair of Ferenc Deak, alone. I walked and I walked. The Parliament is like this and like that – I heard so much about it. Well, but I want to see the Parliament from the inside! I kept on hanging around until I entered at the back entrance. I saw a small door, a man was standing there, he wore some sort of hat. I tell him: ‘I would like so much to see how the Parliament looks like from the inside!’ ‘Well, my child, it’s forbidden to enter here.’ And I answer him: ‘Please mister, I come from Transylvania… – this was a kind of great password – and I’m so curious. Just for a second…’ I begged him so long, that finally he got touched, well, a young girl is so interested, and he came with me, and entered the great hall… He showed me great things: ‘Quickly, quickly…’ The platform was enclosed, and there was a big armchair and a big table, this was the largest room in the Parliament. And he said: ‘You see, my child, that’s the chair of Ferenc Deak, he used to sit there, in that armchair.’ It was surrounded by a thick cord, as they usually enclose such things. I jumped over it, and got inside, and I sat down…! ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Nothing. Now I can tell that I was sitting in the chair of Ferenc Deak!’ I came out quickly, and I apologized. He caressed me. Of course I went home and told this to my relatives, and they waved their hands saying it was a lie. They wouldn’t believe it: ‘Such a lie, etc…’ At the end I related them how it happened: ‘Come with me…, I’m not lying!’ When I told this to my father, he liked it a lot, and praised me. He said: ‘You were interested in such things too!’ And I was interested in so many other things!

When I was 19 years old, I stayed in a pension-house, there were two of them, but I stayed mainly in one, on the Nagykorut [one of the main roads in Budapest], I don’t remember its name. On the sixth floor. But it had an elevator. And a famous actress lived there too, she had a permanent room there. I wondered at the fact that she was the actress of the National Theatre and so she lived… So I stayed in a pension-house at the age of 18-19. I traveled, got down in Torokszentmiklos, I stayed there for 3-4 days, picked up what I had to: my uncle gave me a lot of money, and I went to Pest. I already knew my way around, better than in Marosvasarhely.

I finished school in 1927-28, I already knew my husband, because his elder brother, Izold Almasi was a bank director for a while in Toplica. He moved then to Kolozsvar, he was transferred there to a bank. He had a family and children. There is a photo too, my husband is on it with his brother’s son in front of the Matyas statue [in Kolozsvar]. His wife was called Irma, she was from Segesvar [today Sighisoara]. My husband, Andor Almasi was already enrolled at the university in Kolozsvar, he was a correspondent student. He studied to be a lawyer. He got his doctoral degree in Kolozsvar [at the University of Law]. Nagyvarad, Iasi and Kolozsvar had such universities. Back then one didn’t have to get a doctor’s degree in all places, Kolozsvar emitted the diploma only if he took his doctorate. Fortunately there wasn’t any university in Marosvasarhely yet, that’s why it was cheap, it was a small town with 45 thousand inhabitants. In summer he always came to visit his brother, there was the Banffy bath, he liked bathing, so we knew each other. [Editor’s note: Today the Banffy bath is called Fenyo bath (Bradet in Romanian). The local medicinal bath is 685 m high, it’s surface is 17 hectares. It is famous due to its lukewarm (mezothermal) waters. In 1882 one of the owners of the woods in Toplica, Daniel Banffy builds the multi-storied holiday home, today there is a hotel in its place. In 1900 the small spa was registered as Banffyfurdo. In 1940 a new concrete basin was built. At the beginning of 1970 a smaller basin and a camping were established there. A 65 degrees thermal water was found near the baths, in a 100 m deep bore-hole. http://www.cchr.ro/jud/turism/hun/6/66/6601marosheviz.html] And it came once to my sister-in-law, to Irma’s mind to put me in touch with her brother-in-law. She was successful. Thus he came more and more often.

My father-in-law was from Nyaradszereda [today Miercurea Nirajului], and he had six children. Almasi was such a character, he wanted that one [of his sons] stayed home in the shop, and managed it further. He had a beer bottle-filler – that was his occupation. He had a large house just in the center of Nyaradszerada, in one side there was their apartment, in front of it, in the same yard there was the workshop. He bought from the Burger brewery in Marosvasarhely a wagon beer, they transported it on the narrow-gauge railway, carried it home, and there were three or four women who poured it into bottles. [Editor’s note: The brewery established by Albert Burger in 1893 in Marosvasarhely functioned until the 1930s. He was the first to introduce in his brewery a generator station used for local lighting. Thanks to the purchase of the most modern machines the brewery he produced 150,000 n hectoliter a year.] He had cart and horse, and a lad carried the Burger beer to the innkeepers all along the Nyarad river’s side until Korond [today Corund], because there was an inn in every village, so he handed over the beer bottles there. The Burger palace was in the Kossuth Lajos street, but he didn’t live there. The Voros Kakas was a Burger palace too. [Editor’s note: The two buildings mentioned by Bella Steinmetz are the same: the building of the today Aranykakas (Golden Cock) restaurant. It is in the present Kossuth street no. 106. The family villa was built by Albert Burger in a secessionist style, he lived there with his family until 1937. The building was surrounded by a park. After nationalization the building was used as a deposit for alcohol, and it got deteriorated. Later the poultry-farm called Avicola restored it and opened a restaurant called Aranykakas. (Marosvasarhelyi Utikalauz, ed. By Sandor Fodor, Impress Publishing House, 2000, Targu Mures.] The brewery was in the Sorhaz street. [Editor’s note: The Sorhaz street leads into the Kossuth street’s ending.] He was transporting to the whole country. He was extremely rich.

My husband didn’t want to [take over the business] at all, therefore his father didn’t give him any assistance. He provided him lodgings and meal, nothing else. Thus the poor fellow could hardly finish the five grades. My husband spoke Romanian perfectly, despite the fact that he was born in Nyaradszereda. His father originated from Beszterce [today Bistrita], his grandparents were glaziers. The grandparents from Beszterce were called Apfelbaum, but my father-in-law Magyarized his name into Bernat Almasi. The fact is that a nice Romanian gymnasium was built, it still exists in Beszterce, that they glazed in for free. He received for this a document saying that all the Almasi children can study there for free. This was very convenient for my father-in-law, he had two sons [apart from Andor]. He sent both of them to the grandfather, and they attended there the Romanian gymnasium. I know nothing about his time in Beszterce. His benefit was that the county-court was placed in Nyaradszereda, and the former lawyers didn’t speak well or didn’t speak at all Romanian, they all studied at Hungarian universities, and my husband spoke Romanian perfectly. In the morning he was helping my father-in-law, and in the after-noon he went to offices to translate from Romanian to Hungarian, from Hungarian to Romanian. That’s how he finished the five grades.

When my father-in-law saw that he finished the five grades, and he was preparing for the doctorate, he said: ‘Well, I have no hopes anymore.’ Thus everything got open for him, and he gave him money to buy himself a dinner-jacket and patent-leather shoes, since he had to wear already that collar and patent-leather shoes. And he gave him [money] to rent an office. But not too much: he bought a typewriter and a cheap sofa with two armchairs. My father-in-law went further, he got up on the cart, next to the coachman, and he told everybody he was delivering the goods: ‘If you have any problems, I have a lawyer son in Marosvasarhely, go to him, he will solve it at a low price.’ The office was open and then we had the wedding in 1931. He opened the office a few months before. His lawyer office was in the center, he rented two rooms, it was large, [the surface was] 5x4 m or 5x5 m. It was on the floor, the windows gave to the street. Actually he dared to tell my parents in the last minute that he wanted to marry me. As a student he didn’t dare even to open his mouth, though my parents saw well that we were dating. But they weren’t against him, because he was a very nice person. And he earned enough money to live on in the first month already.

My first husband had three sisters, Irma, Mariska, Magda, and two brothers, Izold and Bandi. The girls were all married. They were all housekeepers, in older times just a few worked, they all had a simple life, and their husbands supported them. Magda was married in Korond. Her husband had a shop too, they didn’t have any children. Mariska stayed in Nyaradszereda, she had two daughters and a son. They had a large butchery. Her husband was quite well-off. The third girl, Irma lived in Szovata [today Sovata], she had one child. And they all died in Auschwitz with their children. Nobody returned from my husband’s family. That’s how I was left with nothing, as they would have been my family after my husband. My father-in-law’s family moved to Marosvasarhely in 1940, because right after they [the Hungarians] came in, they took his house after half a year. [Editor’s note: Presumably later, in 1941; the beer bottle-filler was wound up because of the Anti-Jewish laws, their house was seized, so they moved to Marosvasarhely in order to make their living, and they were deported from there.]

The grandparents from Beszterce were observant, as observant as my grandfather. But my husband didn’t observe anything. After we got married, he only escorted me to the synagogue, and after it was over, he waited me outside at the gate, to go home together. After four or five years he took me once to Beszterce, I think he had some business there. And he showed me, ‘Look, this is the school where I took my final exams. And here was the small house where I used to stay at my grandfather’s.’ I don’t know more about his family. I don’t know the name of my husband’s mother, she was from Makfalva [today Ghindari]. She wore a wig. They were very religious. They weren’t delighted about his marrying me, because I had a certain reputation, since I was dancing until the end at every ball. I had a bad reputation in the sense that I was demanding; however I was the daughter of a factory director, who would look down at them surely, because they were simple people from Nyaradszereda. Otherwise they knew my father’s name, because he was a mathematical genius. His son told him: ‘I’m going to Toplica, there is a girl I’m courting.’ Whose daughter is she, so they could make plans, that he would be lucky, if she is the daughter of the OFA director… That was the name of the enterprise where my father was a director.

I visited my uncle in Torokszentmiklos twice every year, in autumn and in spring, even after I got married. I did other things too in Pest, I was already married then. For example when I was a married woman already, the vending machines were introduced. Around there was the glassed-in counter, in one sandwiches, fried sausage, in the other cakes, in an other drinks, and it turned around. You introduced one forint, the glass opened in front, and you took it out. But you could take out the only thing you chose. And once I realized that the size of one forint is similar to the size of lei. I went there at noon, I was very hungry. I say: ‘I won’t go home to take lunch. I’ll go up to the Svabhegy, and I’ll take lunch there.’ I introduce my lei, it works perfectly. I had enough, I ate about three sandwiches. I was happy, I’m good in manipulating. It succeeded. I did all this because of the spirit of adventure. Once I was with a friend, and I tell him: ‘Come, come, we’ll have lunch here, we go to the cinema after that.’ I take out my lei coins. He says, ‘Bellus, what are you doing?’ ‘Hush! Shut up! – I say – We’ll take lunch with this.’ I had bad luck, it didn’t work, it didn’t turn. ‘Bellus, what have you done?’ I say, ‘I put in one lei. I took lunch with the same yesterday.’ He grabbed me and started to drag me. ‘Come out quickly, they will close the door.’ Since the kitchen was at my back, and they were watching if somebody was not cheating. How could I have known that? ‘They will lock the door, ask anybody’s papers, and they will see a Romanian passport on you. You’ll get caught, detained!’ Oh, I got very scared then, I never did such thing anymore. So I did things like that, I was a tough. I could enter the theatre too, I didn’t cheat there, Transylvania was a password then. I said: ‘I’m coming from Transylvania, I couldn’t buy the ticket in advance, give me a place somewhere.’ And I always got a ticket for the best place. I was resourceful.

Or I got on the tram, and I didn’t punch my ticket just for the kicks, and when the inspector came, I kept on bustling until I got down on the other side. But I never had serious problems. I didn’t steal, I was just playing pranks. It’s not about miserliness, but sparing, I had that in my veins, that money should be spread out, because we always lived on fixed money, fixed salary, I learnt sparing at home. In such a degree, that when I was a bride, my uncle from Torokszentmiklos gave me a big amount to buy my wedding dress: the morning dress, the evening dress, the reception dress – back then we had such things. ‘Dress up! You are a bride! Buy yourself a wedding dress and everything you need!’ Well then, it was a lawyer’s wife who had to impose herself, and this didn’t suit to me. Sports suited me better. But I had to because of interests. Perhaps I never had so much superfluous money, I couldn’t even spend them on myself. I said ‘I need this amount, this is enough.’ I bought my husband a wonderful modern golden Doxa watch in Budapest, in the Vaci Street, with the money my uncle had given me. It cost a huge amount. I showed it to my uncle: ‘Look what I bought to Bandi!’ He was tearing his hair. ‘Why didn’t you tell me your money wasn’t enough, that you wanted to buy this? I would have given you more money.’ I told him: ‘I didn’t need anything else to buy myself.’ I could have bought shoes, underwear, dresses, fur-coat, but no: ‘It’s enough for me, I have everything, and I’m elegant enough!’ Last year I sent the watch to my crony in Israel.

Irma, my sister-in-law was a real Pest-lady, she bought all her clothes only in Pest. She was a great fashion lady. It was her who helped me, when I was a bride. She took me everywhere: to a saloon, where the models came [and presented the dresses] so that I chose which dress I needed. I said: ‘That's the last straw!’ I was so bored! However they lived very differently in Pest. She told me: ‘This will be fine for the morning, we need a costume, this will be your wedding dress. This will be suitable for reception dress, when guests will come in the after-noon.’ She ordered me everything. I was happy to get out from there, because models bored me as they were posing in front of me. I was interested in music, I was completely different. I was so elegant when I came home, but it broke my heart to spend so much money on rags. Reception dress…! What for? Who am I to receive? Well, my girlfriends. I was very naive in this respect. I don’t have a photo of my own wedding dress. They didn’t take any picture. As I was so bored by the wedding, so bored, I could hardly wait its end to get in the car and go home. I wouldn’t have stayed there to take photos of me. Now I’m sorry, because I had a very nice wedding for my first marriage.

And I was the most elegant in Marosvasarhely, because it was always others who dressed me, they dressed me even from Kolozsvar. My sister-in-law and I went together to Pest. ‘Do you have this kind of dress? Do you have that kind of dress?’ She stayed a lot at me, she came to visit us. She was the brown Mrs. Almasi, I was the blonde Mrs. Almasi. I always had blonde dyed hair. I dyed my hair until I got married for the second time. In short I was always elegant, and back then it was uncommon – but [I dressed] only within the limits of good taste. Otherwise my husband wouldn’t have tolerated me. However people received me everywhere. I frequented the club. When I was a bride, my society was still together. Some were married already, some weren’t. If I went to Pest, we met. I went to Pest until late 1941. My father bought us a house with five-rooms and two bathrooms. It is 500 m far from here, where I live now. If I stretch out my neck well, I can see my house. It was in a small side street, in the continuation of the main square. It was furnished. My uncle furnished it. And he met all the expenses of my wedding. We didn’t invite many guests, because then you had to requite it. Well, we were invited as well from time to time. My husband made acquaintances easier among the colleagues at the court. The region was large: we had district-court, tribunal, even a court of appeal, which is only in Bucharest now. My husband had an advantage, he spoke Romanian perfectly, and sometimes he helped the elder lawyers, he translated as well. We had society due to him, the friends invited us for cordiality. I wanted to go to work at the lawyer’s office, or to give piano lessons – I had a diploma in piano as well –, and I could have had students. My husband wouldn’t even hear about it. ‘What do you think? Any client who would come into my lawyer’s office, would say: Why did this fellow get married, if he can’t support a wife?!’

It was typical for my husband how he adored me and loved me, for example he didn’t even know how much dowry I had. My father told me that the money was deposited in the bank, and we could buy the house, whichever we’d like to. I didn’t ask either: dad, how much did you deposit? After two months my father asks me, ‘How’s that, you still didn’t find a house? You pay, you live in a rented apartment!’ Then he said very modestly [she laughs] ‘Dad, in fact, to be honest, I don’t know how many available funds we have for that.’ I didn’t ask it either. So he told us the amount, and we went then [to buy a house]. Briefly my husband was a very modest man.

I played tennis since I was 11. My father was the manager of a large Swiss-Romanian enterprise, which ensured everything, not only to the office-holders, but to the workers as well. It was a huge factory. The big boss came from Switzerland, and said: ‘You need sports and entertainment here…’ – since Toplica was a big village – ‘Wouldn’t you like it? We should make a tennis court, don’t you think?’ He issued the order and gave money, everything. One of the engineers was good in it. He went to Budapest, copied the ground-plan of the tennis court on the Margit Isle, and we had the same type of tennis court. A tennis court for competitions. He kept on sending tennis balls, since balls were very expensive. It used to be a very expensive sport, it is even today in fact. It wasn’t fashionable yet, it was rather an elite sport. In those times bowling and football were coming into fashion. I have a photo with my racket in hand and with my partner. It’s true that I was only 14-15. My partner was a young woman, the wife of my father’s colleague. First I didn’t have a racket, but my brother had, or I asked from somebody. While they were sitting, I played with the ball-boys. I was skilful, and when I got 14, the grown-ups played with me as well. I always played tennis, as a wife too.

Here [in Marosvasarhely] I was the member of the MSE for 11 years, until they kicked me out. The MSE is the Sports Club of Marosvasarhely. Whoever wanted to play tennis, frequented the sports club. One could find there Romanians, Hungarians, Jews. But Jews were just a few. There were just two of us, Mrs. Reti and me, the poor Mrs. Almasi. I had the possibility, my uncle always gave me money so that I had everything. So I had a racket as well, and he gave me for my birthdays the most expensive Dunlop. The former tennis we were playing back then, as all things 60 years ago compared to present-day things, was a child’s play, as I see it now. My father was right when he said: ‘Sport is healthy until one doesn’t get fagged out.’ Now they are ten, fifteen persons injured in tennis permanently. This was unimaginable in our times. We didn’t play like this, it is a jugglery what they are doing now. I was playing until the age of 32, when they kicked me out. There wasn’t any difference [between people] until 1940. Then a law was introduced, that I couldn’t be [a member], because I was a Jew. In the meantime three tennis courts were made in the ‘Liget’ [the City Park], there was a club called Muresul. [Editor’s note: The City Park was called Elba, then Erzsebet Park, later August 23; today it is called City Sports Park. In 1815 Jozsef Houchard, an expert skilled in architecture transformed the marshy territory into an entertainment garden. It had a summer restaurant, summer stage, cold and warm bath and a roundabout. Hundreds of flowers grew among the trees planted according to a design. In 1905 tennis courts were established in the Park, later a smaller football ground, which was enlarged in 1920 to international size. The Park lost gradually its entertainment feature, and became the home of sports events. (Lajos Sipos: Marosvasarhelyi meselo hazak / Story-teller Houses of Marosvasarhely, Difprescar, Targu Mures, 1999).] It had different sections: bowling, tennis section, I don’t know what else. And they told me: ‘Come, play here.’ Two Christians came with me out of solidarity. They quitted the MSE and came with me. I would have had anyway a partner at the Muresul. I was welcomed, because there weren’t many members. I suppose the MSE had more members. It was sponsored by the Hungarian Casino as well.

There was then the Tornakert [Sports Garden] uphill, next to the gynecology [today Sportivilor Street]. It was such a nice garden, it had five courts. There were about 12 players permanently. For example the first Romanian champion, Reti’s son, Tibor Reti came from there. He went to Bucharest very early, because his father’s enterprise had a big warehouse there, and he lived there for a long time. Well, I don’t know what he was doing, as our destinies separated. Besides he belonged to the ‘upper ten-thousand’. The second wife of Reti was an extremely likeable Jewish woman, she was very ugly, but a very charming, intelligent woman. I played tennis with her. You could never feel directly that she belonged to a different class to say so. The first wife died, and she left two boys. Reti had a daughter with this second one, she must be living somewhere in Hamburg.

Generally women wore knee-deep white skirts [for tennis], and a nice short-sleeved blouse, always white. I couldn’t even imagine a colored suite, because I never saw something similar. Moreover, I never saw it in Pest either, [I saw] only white suits. That is why it was called once the white sport. I was always a little bit more modern as [the other women] here, because I played tennis yet in a small white shorts. Only me! As I went to Pest, and I could see it there, and I wanted the same. There was a dressing-room there [in the Tornakert, so I could change], but sometimes I dressed up at home. I was pretty! My poor mother used to tell me: ‘Bella, you aren’t beautiful, you aren’t beautiful at all, but you are very pretty! And you are also good in presenting your prettiness, but don’t exaggerate!’ My poor mother… I had a wonderful pink wrap I used to put on, it wasn’t buttoned up, and I ran up on the Artei [on the Artei street]. Well, sometimes the shorts was showing a little… In short I had some coquetry, to be honest… However I couldn’t bring into fashion the shorts in Marosvasarhely. People got used to the fact that I was a bit extravagant. Though I didn’t have many clothes, because I wasn’t interested in this. I got them by chance.

I went to competitions sometimes, but my husband wouldn’t let me. I participated in competitions in Gyergyoszentmiklos, in Csikszereda, the farthest place I reached was Kolozsvar, my husband agreed to it at last. However I could see he wasn’t pleased with it at all, and I quitted. Bad times came as well, and I didn’t feel like competing. I was happy to be willing [to play tennis], because from 1942 I was no longer in the mood for it, because they took my husband. My past ended in all means.

When I think back, my life was quite vivid before 1940. I was living as a young is supposed to live. I had a decent marriage, I was dancing, because I liked it, I went in for sports, because I enjoyed it. I was a housewife, I didn’t like it, but I did what I had to. With a servant. There was a girl who cooked at my mother’s house for three years, she was called Viki, Viktoria, and my mother sent her to me. She always used to say: ‘You’ll see, your husband will send you home, he will divorce you, because you’re not able to cook a caraway-seeds soup.’ Viki stayed at me for more than two years. However in summer I was at the market every morning at six. I liked to pick out the fresh ones, I always bought the best. Bottling, eating them… I took care to buy the cheaper ones, because I couldn’t spend much. Mammy used to say: ‘It should always be the best what you bottle. So that it keeps.’ It [bottling] was fashionable then, we had a hundred of bottles. Oh, ten years ago I still had a hundred of bottles in my larder: compotes and jam. Now I have a freezer, I preserved green beans, aubergine, mushrooms, sorrel. Back then I preserved the same in bottles.

I had some lard in my house, because I liked bread with lard, but I took care not to mix it [with goose fat], because my parents ate at me and my parents-in-law ate at me – so I took a great care to this. They were kosher, but even my father wouldn’t have eaten at me, if he knew. He arranged in a way to eat it [treyf meals] out, so that we didn’t find out. He worked on Sundays, but we accepted that we had to have something to live of. We brought home many times a little piece of ham, but we had a tin plate, and we ate it half from the paper, half from that plate, in the kitchen, where we would never have eaten otherwise. My husband didn’t know for a long time that I was eating bread with lard. I never picked up breadcrumbs before Passover, I never organized Pesach [separately]. At Pesach we always went to mammy, until my parents, more precisely my father was alive. After my father died, we had nobody to lead that ceremony. Here [in Marosvasarhely] was a Jewish Club in the main square, it organized Passover for 8 days, and we took lunch there for those 8 days. They laid the table up on the first floor, there was somebody who told the tale [Editor’s note: That is he read out the Haggadah], as a symbol. The stealing of the afikoman was ignored, it can be hid only within the family.

I never belonged to any organization. I did only sports, I had only that membership [at the Sports Club]. I got involved in charity activities as a woman, of course. I was a WIZO member. The WIZO’s activity consisted in gathering money for the establishment of Israel; there was a little money-box in every Jewish house. I don’t know if they had a name. [Editor’s note: These were the Keren Kayemeth Leyisrael boxes.] It was a nice little box made of tin, and it was placed in every house in a visible place, and everyone who wanted dropped into it. Someone always came to empty it, and they collected it in a specific place, but I have no idea where. The centre was in Bucharest. The initiator of all this was Tivadar Hertzl, not on a religious basis, but on national basis. We had such a box in our apartment too. My mother-in-law didn’t have one. There was no need for a special occasion or whatever, I just came home, I had a lot of coins, and I just put them in the box. Or somebody came to visit me, they saw it, had some change, so they dropped them in it. That’s how it piled up, and people say those were quite big amounts, that they brought finally to Vienna. They collected the money from the country first in Bucharest, then sent it to Vienna. I don’t know anymore how often they emptied the boxes.

The boys had an organization, the girls didn’t. I wasn’t member of the WIZO when I was a girl, only as a married woman. We gathered so that we organized game of cards in the after-noon. It seems we didn’t like to chat a lot. We chattered half an hour, that was it, it was enough. Playing cards seemed to engage our interest more, and it attracted people. I was a great card-player before the war already. Of course not with millions, but according to my pocket. There were WIZO evenings, the gains went for the WIZO, so I gave to the WIZO what I gained. Whoever had a proper apartment and money, organized such parties four times in one year. I had five rooms, and my dining-room was large, so I could organize it. If I opened the hall, the dining-room and the hall were so big together as a chamber. I organized about four parties, and my girlfriend organized as well. It meant that four times four, sixteen people [were invited]. I provided them with teacakes, coffee – I don’t’ know whether it was coffee or tea –, so with something modest, not gateau and things like that, just something to serve the purpose, so that sixteen persons would gather. The gain after sixteen persons went for the WIZO.

There was a Jewish Club here, some people went out there. There was a separate Hungarian Casino as well. Jewish Club and Hungarian Casino – these were their official names. I think it [the casino] too had Jewish members. As far as I know the Retis also frequented the Hungarian Casino. But whoever frequented the Hungarian Casino, wasn’t member of the Jewish Club. One could play cards in the Club, there was a lecture room with periodicals and music. It had a separate small room, a small kosher restaurant, so one could have there for dinner something simple. The small restaurant didn’t have a name. However the main emphasis was on cards. Men, my husband too played ‘Chemin de fer’ – this is a French expression –, it’s like the roulette, but it isn’t roulette, it’s also a game of chance. Then there was the poker, it was the main game. There were private rooms, small ones, people played there for high stakes. Well, who had money. We never went there. My husband played poker as well, but only within our purse. I played rummy three times in a week. We had fixed days when to go to the club. On Tuesday, on Thursday and on Saturday evening. From early spring to late autumn they used to tell me: ‘You’re not serious, we don’t like you…’ – since I rather went in for sports in that period, so I didn’t go regularly. On Saturday evening yes. But on Tuesday for example, at eight o’clock it was still daylight, and I was still playing tennis. However they didn’t let me out from the games, they got me back. When autumn arrived, I got back my place. This was a middle-class lifestyle. We were together in the hall, but men set apart, and there was more than one room. Simple room with the adequate square tables, suitable for a rummy game. There were five or six tables with four chairs each. You couldn’t sit there in fauteuils just like that. If you wanted to sit down, there was other large room, there were fauteuils, reading matter, periodicals. In some cases the wife liked to play cards, the husband didn’t. He didn’t stay at home, he had fun too, he went there, found a partner who wasn’t alone as well, and he drank for example a beer in the summer. There were several such men. All women played. If it was the wife who didn’t play, she stayed at home. A woman wouldn’t have stayed there to watch his husband playing rummy or cards until one o’clock.

As we come from the Kossuth Lajos street towards the center, after the Labashaz there is a big multi-storied house, the Hungarian Casino used to be there, it has a vaulted gate. The Jewish Club was in the Main Square, now there is a hairdresser under it, a grocery, and I don’t know how many shops. A big house. The balls weren’t organized there. In the Tipografiei street, where the cinema is today, there was a large hall, which belonged to the Jews. The Jewish balls were organized there. [Editor’s note: In fact the interviewee talks about the Jewish Cultural Center, which was the building of the former Progres cinema (next to it used to be the Pitik cinema for children) in the present Tipografiei street. It was built in 1928 with the support of the Jewish community for cultural purposes. Many festivities, literary and religious gatherings were organized there. The companies of the Iasi and Vilna Jewish Theatres performed there. Since the 1930s it was used as a cinema until 1994, when it was transformed into a snooker saloon. (Marosvasarhelyi Utikalauz / Tourst Guide to Marosvasarhely. Impress Publishing House, 2000)] In Marosvasarhely it [the ball season] started in autumn, and we had a ball almost every week. Every association organized a ball once in a year: we had Bethlen Kata ball, the MSE [organized] the sports ball, then the Lorantffy Zsuzsanna [Women’s Association] ball, that was the Hungarian women’s society, four or five balls were kept each year. The Jewish Women’s Society [the WIZO] organized a ball once in a year in the Palace of Culture. One could go to a ball with invitation, and the snack-bar was always supported by the respective association: drinks, meals, meat. The snack-bar was very well provided, and this produced quite a lot of money. One wanted to surpass the other, well, all of them wanted a more and more beautiful ball. So that I had my specialty as well [at the ball of the Jewish Women’s Society], cake a la Almasi. For me it was the simplest thing to prepare. It was a simple cake, but of course I put whipped cream on it, and all kinds of colored, green, red, violet little jelly on the top. I chopped up almond and hazel-nut, and the top was sprinkled. It looked so nice, like a flower garden. And that was all with the cake. People always looked for it, for Mrs. Almasi’s cake. We had discussed that five of us would bring cakes, three, four, five would bring meat dishes, men drinks. We also prepared fine punches.

We received invitation for everywhere, and participated at every ball, because my husband was a young lawyer, and he had to show himself, so that people would learn about this young lawyer. We never went just the two of us, there was always a little company, two or three families besides us. We always went everywhere together. We had our own society. My evening dresses were extraordinary. I had my dresses from Pest, the material came from Pest, and the dressmaker made it here for me. This was created by her, this is made of velvet. [Editor’s note: Bella Steinmetz refers here to the dress she wears on photo ROBST007.jpg and ROBST 008.jpg] She used to say: ‘Listen to me! I will make you an evening dress, I won’t endure any remarks that I shouldn’t do it like this… I will do it. If you like it, you take it, if not, I won’t work for you anymore!’ I always had my dresses made by her. However I didn’t order many, because I bought ready-made dresses in Pest or I had dresses made there. My sister-in-law took me to an elegant saloon, so I saw these dresses there. That’s how I brought myself this kind of velvet. This is a special, very expensive velvet, as velvet can be coarse and soft as well. The dress was black, and it had a backline. The whole town was saying that what a ‘thrifty’ person this Mrs. Almasi was, that she had saved half a meter of material just to show her back. But I had a cape for that dress. I put it on only when we set down to the table. If we set down, I took up the cape. Whenever I danced, I took it down. In the evening we were going to the ball, and I put on the dress. My husband said: ‘Oh well, but my dear…’ I say: ‘Why, what should I be hiding? What is it I should be ashamed of?’ ‘Well, after all…’ I say: ‘Don’t worry now, look, I have a cape, I will put it on if someone finds it too flagrant.’ We addressed each other formally with my first husband as ‘maga’, I don’t know why. Not with the second one, but first-name informality didn’t work at all with the first one. We always addressed each other with ‘maga’. Although it was such a great love, my God…

For example in Pest a bulky gossip journal, the ‘Szinhazi elet’ [Theater Life] was published. One could read about theatres, plays, one could find crosswords, and this kind of who-with-who, who-to-who… What is interesting, that after the war books were sold here at the flea-market, and ‘Szinhazi elet’ as well. We had an acquaintance who always bought it, that was his ‘literary’ lecture, and who told me: ‘Hey Bella, do you know that you appear in the Szinhazi elet?’ It was written there that ‘There was in Marosvasarhely a very pretty young woman whose fame is due to that she was saving dress materials…” It was then that I found out what they had written on me. It wasn’t interesting anymore. This was after the war.

Before the war all kind of music was played one after the other at balls. In the evening, at the beginning there was a short performance, let’s say until eleven, then the ball started, the dance started. The czardas dances were towards the morning, after five o’clock. People used to joke: ‘Well, Mrs. Almasi has swept again the hall.’ Since I was always the last one to leave the hall. Oh, I danced so much… I got used to, as I frequented clubs that people would gaze at me. Sometimes I liked it as well that people stared at me.

My husband was quite reticent, but he felt good in society. In fact he was living his life. Because I didn’t want… [children yet]. ‘Let’s wait one more year, so that you get into your job, and you let me go to balls a little more, and you have fun as well.’ We had a good life. However he didn’t let himself be terrorized, so that I was given a hard lesson in the third or forth month [after marriage]. I told him that I was 20 years old, that I wanted to keep playing tennis, going in for sports, going to concerts. Once it was almost dark, not completely, but it was twilight. He was sitting at home. As I was coming, he told me through the window: ‘I wasn’t aware of the fact that they had changed the tennis balls for phosphorous ones!’ Meaning that I arrived home so late… So he had such remarks once or twice, so I told him: ‘Now pay attention, while you know where I am, and you can control me in every minute, I won’t tolerate such remarks. Because if you forbid me things or something similar, then I will do it in secret. You can choose.’ That’s how I set him a lesson. After that I got it back. One year passed. We went out to the café. He got accustomed by then [to the society life], and he’s taking on a nice pink shirt. I tell him: ‘Put on other shirt, I don’t like this pink shirt. Choose, you have here light blue, white shirts.’ We were going to the café after dinner to listen to music. ‘Why? I like it, it’s very suitable. What objections do you have to it?’ I answer: ‘That I don’t like the pink shirt. You have a light blue.’ He says: “I like this one.’ I reply: ‘In this case I won’t go out.’ ‘Well, if we don’t go out, we’ll stay home.’ I say: ‘So that’s where we got in a few months, in one year, that you can’t adapt yourself to me in such a minor thing?’ ‘I can tell you the same’, he says. I was fuming with rage. I told the girl to bring down my suitcase from the loft, I’m going home next morning. Like a dumb, he didn’t hear it. He wasn’t dumb, he just wouldn’t react to it. I told him: ‘I’m going home, that’s it, I’m leaving you.’ He didn’t react. I was crying all night of course. He let me cry. So that’s how I got back, that one couldn’t turn such thing into a problem. As I didn’t leave at that the phosphorous balls either… That’s how he gave me back that I shouldn’t get involved in what shirt [he should be putting on], if it’s a clean one…

My husband didn’t quite like water. He could swim, but didn’t enjoy it. However sometimes I went to row, I prepared lunch, and I called him to come to the Vikend, we would take lunch there, and the sun would shine on him a little, and he would bath. [Editor’s note: It is the most attended holiday camp of the town. Inhabitants started to go out on the area between the Mures river and Sangeorgiu streamlet from the 1930s, where boathouses and weekend cottages were built. Since 1962 weekend cottages of enterprises, swimming-pools, sports grounds, restaurants were established as well on the Weekend Holiday Resort called ‘Vikendtelep’.] So he came out, and finally he felt very good. That’s how we evened ourselves up.

When those from the motherland came [in 1940, according to the Second Vienna Dictate] 5, the mayor was kicked out instantly. They kicked out even the Hungarians. I had a friend here at the town hall, a chief town clerk, he was Hungarian, and he was transferred to a lower position. They behaved very badly, with their own nation as well, not only with Jews. Well, the new clerks needed apartments, and for example they turned out my girlfriend from her apartment, though she was Hungarian, and she had to move to her parents. Let’s not talk about this, as the world already knows about their behavior. When Hungarians came in, I became exasperated at once.

In 1940 my husband didn’t get paid from the Bar. Only the Jewish lawyers [didn’t get paid]. Then they obliged him to accept a Christian lawyer partner. But he had no means. He couldn’t deal anymore, they weren’t allowed to. That would be bread and butter for a lawyer. They behaved badly, because there were a lot of lawyers here, 90 percent of them were Hungarians of course. And none of them offered him to solve at least the current cases. None of them. No. And a Romanian lawyer turned up, who didn’t care much of his office, he was a landowner. It was written: dr. Micu. He paid my husband well. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had a little reserve. He had a more normal way of thinking, respectively he was considerate. And he didn’t support much the Hungarians because of their behavior. Maybe three or four of the lawyers were Romanians. Maybe… But the Romanian wasn’t kicked out from the association. My husband had to pay a certain percentage after his work. He says: ‘I know, I know the situation, I don’t even want to take it.’

This was a small street [where we lived], where petit bourgeois lived, and elder persons than me. I was everyone’s Belluska. Because everyone had some sort of ‘stomach-ache’. For example ‘Oh Belluska, we inherited a piece of land, ask your husband where we should submit this document.’ Belluska asked it. The other: ‘We bought some land…’ or ‘We would like to build here. Would you mind compiling a request?’ My husband did it. And in 1940, from one moment to the other, when they saw us – though we didn’t wear the yellow star yet – they looked at the sky, as if I didn’t exist. I had this bad luck, but not everybody did, so I couldn’t conclude something general.

During the war

In 1942 I didn’t dare to go to Pest anymore. Then miseries came. My mother lived in Toplica with my brother. He was taken as well in 1942 to Ukraine, for work service. My husband was taken too in ’42. Unfortunately [we were together] only from 1931 until 1942… I said then: ‘Mammy, come here definitively, because I don’t know what will come. It makes no sense that you stay there alone, and I stay here alone.’ She, in her large apartment, me with my five rooms. And she said that she would come only if she brought something from hers [from her vessels] too. Well I said: ‘What you want, what you are very attached to.’ Poor mother, she carried here her Passover vessels, and I put them up on the loft, that’s how I still have them. I placed over them my husband’s files, because he was a lawyer, and the clerks nagged me that I should empty his office, that they needed the place, and my husband wasn’t there anyway. And I thought, ‘Oh my God…’, I carried them tied up, I was so afraid. We put them up on the loft, in a big, clean, tidy chest, but below there were my mother’s vessels. And of course they went up, and started to check if there was gold, or what we had hidden there. One file, two files, three files… everything thrown all over the place, they knew he was a lawyer, or at least they realized it seeing the files. They kept on throwing for a while, finally a package was left there [in the chest], and a few vessels of mammy were below. I still keep them, it was a beautiful porcelain. I don’t have them all yet, as I broke some of them, but I still have a few pieces in the kitchen. Otherwise the nice vessel was a mania of mammy.

In 1942 they put in requisition two of my rooms, and gave them to a Hungarian royal captain. The captain was the son of an extremely rich landowner, it was war, so they called him up. He had an estate of five thousand Hungarian acres. That is he wasn’t a professional soldier, but he had to do the army service, and they called him up on the basis of his age. He could certify that he had bronchial asthma, he was delegated here in a separate car, so they got in requisition, he had two rooms at my house. He behaved very correctly, he introduced himself gentlemanly, he sent in his visiting card, and asked if I could receive him, he would like to pay a visit to me. I answered I would be glad to receive him. He entered like a gentleman, I offered him a glass of liqueur, cakes, he thanked me, we talked a little. He tells me: ‘Don’t worry, as far as possible, I will be able to protect you from everything. You won’t be bothered ever.’ He was a mole, but by communism, he didn’t spy for Hungarians. That was the point. He wasn’t communist, but he rather sympathized with Russians. What did he do, what was his work… [I don’t know that]. He behaved very properly, it was just that I didn’t trust him. He announced me the news all the time, ‘Don’t be afraid, because Russians are pushing back the Germans…’

At first I was distrustful, because he invited me in many times in the evenings to listen to the radio, because I was forbidden to have a radio. A Jew couldn’t have one. Either you handed it over, either you sold it, or threw it away, or you gave it to somebody. We weren’t allowed to own radios. Well, we must not have learnt the news! We couldn’t have a bicycle or typewriter, I won’t mention radios. [Editor’s note: Starting from April 1944 Jews weren’t allowed to own radio sets. (This was preceded by the mandatory surrendering of telephones.) From April 7th they set limits to traveling for Jews, they couldn’t use cars, motorcycles, they couldn’t travel by train, taxi, ship or passenger cars.] I was listening to it by chance, because the captain took in my radio, otherwise he had his own. And soon after his arrival he put a slip on the door: ‘No admittance in official matters.’ I didn’t know if I should be happy for this or not. So I was rather happy. I thought, [this would be like] Hansel and Gretel, he behaves nice with me, then once he just throws me to the wolf. Mammy always used to say: ‘Don’t go in, I’m scared, don’t go in! Don’t go in, so that he won’t do this and that… He’s a young man, and you’re a young woman…’ But I was interested in news… And I could see from his activity, from his remarks, that something was wrong. In short he was an infiltrator against Horthy, that is against the Germans, but I wouldn’t believe that in those times.

He was curious where they [the frontlines] were. Since he was against the war. He considered it an idiocy that the war was still going on, and destruction, murder continued. As he could see that there was no escape, that the Russians would sweep over… as it occurred finally. We listened to it in Hungarian, for example the Voice of America or the Radio Free Europe in Hungarian, together with him. [Editor’s note: Presumably they listened to the Hungarian program of the BBC. They had Hungarian broadcasts in London and in Moscow too: Hitler’s propaganda was counterbalanced by the multilingual World Service of the BBC, usually prohibited in the aimed areas. The Hungarian broadcast was transmitted for the first time 4 days after the outbreak of World War II. The Radio Kossuth, the secret, clandestine radio station organized by the Foreign Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party with the support of the soviet government started its broadcast on September 29th 1941 in Moscow. The anti-fascist station opposing to the war was transmitted for a while from Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan (the Hungarian program of the Radio of Moscow was operated next to it). From 1942 the broadcast was transmitted again from Moscow, until its ceasing in April 4th 1945.] Though I was frightened, I thought he surely wanted someone to come and catch me in the act. Because the neighbor wanted to report that I was emitting signals – we had to make dark in the evening – for the Datas. Data corresponds to the present MiG aircrafts. But those are small fast aircrafts, they run here and there. And that I’m emitting signals for Data aircrafts. He sent word. He threatened me. But then he got a message, he didn’t know from where, he only knew that he got a report from the Securitate, that he ought to shut his mouth, because he might be hanged. Otherwise they would have finished me, or until I would have got to the captain, they would have hanged me already. But when I told him, he said: ‘You shouldn’t mind about it!’ He always said: ‘Stay calm!’ But anyway, he left off speaking after a while, since a note was put out: ‘No entrance here without permission!’ So he protected me somehow. Then the poor fellow asked me: ‘Don’t you trust me, Bella, after all this, that all I’m doing, I’m doing because I’m on your side?’

He had bronchial asthma, he was indisposed many times, and mammy always went in, and gave him honeyed tea or milk with honey, everything. The poor fellow was so grateful to mammy. He brought me home everything, food – bread, meat –, so that I wouldn’t need to go out frequently. So I could see that he behaved very correctly. And well, I wasn’t allowed to have this and that, so finally I gave him jewels, mainly mammy’s, not mine, and money, everything. By the end, when he knew already that they would take us away, he implored me. He already knew where they would take us. He asked me to let him take us to Romania by his own car, the border was fifteen kilometers far. ‘There – he said – you have to walk with your mother only one kilometer. You will be taken…’ I said: ‘It doesn’t matter, Frici, they take us to the Hortobagy to work on the fields. Mammy is healthy, I am too, we will work.’ In 1944 the Russian canons were already roaring here, at the Romanian frontier. Imagine that, they took us in May, and on August 23rd 6 the region here was liberated, Russians were already here. [Editor’s note: Bella Steinmetz confuses a little the events in Northern Transylvania and those in Romania; though on August 23rd 1944 Romania changed sides to the Allied Powers, Northern Transylvania remained under Hungarian rule, and all of its regulations remained valid for it.] This was the greatest crime of Hungarians: they were the last ones who effectuated deportation. Couldn’t they have handled somehow three months more that miserable people?! That Frici begged me. But I answer: ‘All right, you take me over the border, but where should I lay down mammy?’ ‘Go – he says – you’ll get help in the first house.’ I said myself, he wants to own the whole house – as I had a nice, five-roomed, furnished apartment, he had my money, jewels, everything –, now he wants this too. I was unable to believe that a Hungarian royal captain would want to do such a good deed.

People came from Poland, brave and young people, who succeeded to escape not to get to concentration camps. Hungary wasn’t involved in the war yet. And they went to the Jewish communities, and asked the addresses of Jews. They came to me as well, that ‘This and this is happening to us, they want to kill us, they are killing the Jews. They take them to Auschwitz.’ I gathered some food rapidly and I told them: ‘Leave me alone, go now, so many lies…! This isn’t true, this is a bullshit!’ Everybody was angry on them for what nonsense they were telling. We said that it wasn’t true, that they were lying, they were Jews of naught.

There were some here too, who were smart – not in Marosvasarhely. The Jews from Maramaros were more in their right mind. I lived in Maramarossziget for almost two years with my second husband, and I met a man from there who knew many things. Among others he introduced me to a boy who went up in the mountains, load up with money, food, whatever he could carry. He went to a shepherd and told him: ‘Look, save me. I will stay here, and if you shield me, I will give you this and that.’ The shepherd had a wife, who sometimes went up to bring food to her husband, so she brought to the young man too. Thus the young man escaped the ‘oven’. When the wife told him that Russians were in Viso, he came down, went in his house, he found there all his things. He had his life too, but not his family unfortunately… The family couldn’t go with him, it would have been too striking. However, the parents were old, they were approximately sixty years old. They wouldn’t have gone up to the mountains! For the mountain is so close in Maramarossziget, as if we would be climbing up to the Cenk in Brasso. Whoever knows the mountain and undertakes such thing, can go up.

[In Marosvasarhely] They announced that everybody should bring food enough for three days. Rumors were circulating a week before [putting people into ghettos], but officially I think they announced a few days before. I haven’t seen any posters. The town was small, with about 40-45 thousand inhabitants, it was enough for one to learn it, and that person started [to spread the news]. We called the Arany Janos street the Jewish street, because many poor Jewish families lived there. One was delivering bread from the bakery. Some were shoemakers or cobblers, or did woodwork at home. The other, let’s say was a tailor apprentice, and was an outworker. But lately Jews weren’t employed usually, because it wasn’t allowed. The Jewish merchants were forced to accept Christian partners, so that the business would be at least 60 percent Christian without them contributing even with a penny. They wouldn’t waste laws on us, only a decree was needed for this, there was no need for a law. [Editor’s note: The anti-Jewish laws introduced in Northern Transylvania were brought in by the Hungarian parliament starting from 1938. When following the Second Vienna Dictate the northern part of Transylvania was re-annexed to Hungary, the anti-Jewish laws and measures approved by the parliament were brought into force immediately.]

The march was approaching our street. They knocked on every Jewish house’s door, so that we go to the brick factory. And they didn’t come into my house. Me and my mother too, we packed in what we could in a rucksack. When they passed by, I shouted after one of the guards: ‘A Jewish family lives here too, and you didn’t ring here!’ He comes back very angrily: ‘What’s your name?’ I tell him ‘Mrs. Andor Almasi’. He takes a look on the list: ‘Don’t play jokes with me, you’re not on the list.’ And the march goes away, and we stay there with mammy in despair, as, well, there were quite a lot of Jewish families around us, they are all gone, and we were left there… Well, I thought: ‘So they want to hang us up here, or what the hell?’ I could hardly wait that the captain arrived home, and I told him what happened. ‘It’s alright, it’s alright! You stay home. I told you I would take you over the frontier. The border to Romania is just a few kilometers far, and you and mammy have the chance to escape.’ But I didn’t want to hear a word on this. I said: ‘I have nobody over there. Where would mammy lay down in the evening?’ Because I was concerned all the time with mammy… But he kept on repeating: ‘I would like if, I really would like that…’ I implored him on bended knees to call for a soldier or policeman, and take me in, because I couldn’t leave for the brick factory by myself, with mammy, wearing that big [yellow] star 7. He says: ‘If you insist so much, I can’t resist it.’ So he sent his orderly, then two soldiers came, two rotters, seventeen-eighteen years old kids – these were the most dangerous – and ‘Now go…!’ That’s how we got to the brick factory.

When we were taken to the brick factory [at the beginning of May], they kept us there under inhuman conditions, in the open air. Frici’s Romanian orderly came in every second day. The high-ranking officers usually have a servant, a soldier, who served him, stayed [with him] all day, he entered the caserne only for the night. Frici came into the brick factory with his lad, and he always brought us something, for example two blankets for mammy. He brought in a bread, a piece of roasted meat, food, since we didn’t get any food at all. They said: ‘Take with you package, food for three days.’ Finally it was much more than three days. Everybody ran out of food. He came in dressed in uniform, he pretended to look for somebody. He could come in, well he reported that ‘I’m looking for So-and-so.’ Otherwise he didn’t have to identify himself, because he had his rank there [on the uniform]. And he helped us, but it was too late, I didn’t dare to get out from there anymore. However, if we had had courage, then I could have got out even from there with my mother, and I could have gone home, so now take me by car to the border, and let me there. But this was our fate. Where should I escape with my mother?! I didn’t believe, and when I realized it, it was too late.

The brick factory was in use once, but it was ruined by then. The first ones, who were in front, could find some place to be inside [under the roof] and protected against rain. At the end of May it rained already. We were left outside. In the open air. We took some blankets with us. Well, who could. Then one or two families who knew each other, we got together. It was a disorderly, filthy yard, and we found some slats. Men knocked them into the ground, put a blanket above it, or a cardboard, whatever they could find. So we set down outdoors, on the ground. And that was that. There was to it. That’s how inhumanity begun.

I recall from the days at the brick factory that there was a deep hole dug at the end, and one had to sit on a bar, and that was the toilet: for young people, children, elders, men, women… There was a tap with running water somewhere, but sometimes they gave us water, sometimes they didn’t. There was no other place to wash. In fact we didn’t take our clothes off, because nights were cold. And we had rainy days, and we were happy if the sun was shining. We were squatting inside all the time.

I had to hand over the jewels, because they knew that Mrs. dr. Almasi must have had a ring, a bracelet, or at least a watch. I didn’t dare not to surrender it at the bank. In those times the Commercial Bank was in the centre. However, I didn’t surrender everything either, but I gave the other part, which I wore more, to this captain. It is a custom for us to give a ring as a sign of the engagement, together with the wedding-ring. And we had had to surrender everything, except the wedding-ring. But when they took us from the brick factory and put us into wagons, there was a box, and everybody had to take off even their wedding-ring, and drop it into the box… They transported to the motherland or shared out among themselves what I handed over in the bank. That wasn’t taken by the Germans, but by those who were clerks here. That vanished without a trace.

We were here at the brick factory for about ten or twelve days. And they put us into wagons after that. Everything was a mere lie. They said they would take us to the motherland, and we would do some sort of agricultural work. And we believed that, because it seemed reasonable. We thought that if Germans, the frontlines were pushed back this far – shootings could be heard in Bucharest –, the Hungarian Jews wouldn’t be deported, because where should they deport them? We thought it was just a matter of days or weeks, and the war would end, as it ended indeed. We were put into rail freight cars on May 1st, 2nd, we arrived to Auschwitz on May 4th. [Editor’s note: Deportations from Marosvasarhely were effectuated on May 27th and 30th, respectively on June 8th; 7549 Jewish persons were put into carriages. (Carmilly-Weinberger Moshe, Út a szabadság felé! / Road to Freedom, Cluj, 1999)] And on August 23rd Romania was already liberated. This was the greatest sin of Hungary, that it was the last to deport in Europe, when he knew as well where the front was. Wasn’t Pest informed on where the front was?

We had to get on the wagons, then destination Auschwitz. We didn’t know that of course, just as we traveled, traveled and traveled, and one day passed, and we were still traveling in the wagon. We traveled for three days. Eighty people in one wagon…, so it didn’t mean that everybody could sit down. We were happy if we could let somehow the elder people sit down. I was shocked for the first time in the wagon, when a mother was holding her child in her lap, he was crying badly, and she didn’t manage to calm him down, and in her despair she caught the urine in the nappy, and that’s how she wiped the child’s chapped lips. Nobody had water anymore. Everybody brought a little water, a bottle – there weren’t plastic bottles yet –, but that was off for a long time. And that little baby… he didn’t even suck anymore…, and one couldn’t put bread into his mouth yet. This was the first shock I got, so ‘Good Lord, what’s this?!’ There weren’t any problems after, they went straight into the gas…

We had no idea in the wagon where they would be taking us. The train stopped at the Hungarian border, they opened the doors, the gendarmes with cock-feather on their hat came up: ‘Whoever has any gold or any kind of value, hand it over, because if not, we shoot you in the head right here!’ Some of us had. Me either. I was wearing, and mammy too hand-made sweaters, and we sewed into them thin chains. In 1942 my husband had been taken to the front, and we had heard that they could have got bread for gold. So who had had the possibility, had bought very thin golden chains, and had sent these for them. There had been two men who had guarded the work service group. Their families had been at home. We had stuffed them with everything, with money, food, so that we could have sent them something. Well, I could hardly wait for the night to come to undo it somehow, and I searched for a small hole on the wagon to let them out. Not so much time after that Germans took us over, direction Auschwitz. We knew already [that it wasn’t true what they had said], because as we were advancing, we saw the name of the stations. And who knew a little bit of geography, could see immediately, that ‘Hoops, this is close to Austria, we are even going in Poland’s direction!’ – since we saw Polish labels too. In fact Auschwitz was in Silesia [Editor’s note: in East-Silesia], that used to be Poland, but Germany annexed it by then. However, we did not know what Auschwitz was…

We arrived in Auschwitz on May 4th [Editor’s note: It is much more probable that Bella Steinmetz arrived in Auschwitz at the end of the month, either on June 4th.] I know this because for us, Jews from Marosvasarhely that is the day of mourning. When we arrived, they pulled us off [the wagons]: ‘Los, los, aber schnell, fast, fast!’ Only the cattle are driven like this. This was carried out by the men from there, the haftlings, the prisoners. Everything had to be left in the wagons. We got off without any packages, only with the things we had on us. We walked straight about 50 meters, maybe even less, and the slaughterer was already in front of us, in black clothing: Mengele, in patent-leather boots coming up until this, elegantly. He had a stick. We found out very soon that it was Mengele, because there were Polish girls already. Many were deported already from Austria, Poland, Estonia, what the Germans had invaded, they deported from all those countries. Then he looked at me, and he just made a sign with the stick… I didn’t know yet what would happen to my mother. Only after that the Polish girls from there told us, ‘Can you see, there, how the chimneys are smoking? The previous transport...’ From Szatmarnemeti, from Maramarossziget, I don’t know from where. However, the furnace was smoking at full steam. There was such a smell permanently, and it was so terribly hot, that at the beginning we almost suffocated. Especially when it was gloomy, and it pressed down [the smoke]… That was it.

After we were selected, they took us straight to the bath, undressed stark naked, removed all our hair. They cut our hair as well. They treated us roughly. The old hatflings who were in the camp already were in the bath. With supervision of course, women in German army clothes… After bath and depilation we entered a hall, for example I was looking for my girlfriend I used to walk with hand by hand: ‘Bozsi, where are you, Bozsi?’ And she says then: ‘Bella, Bella, can’t you recognize me?’ Well if someone cuts their hair, she becomes unrecognizable when baldhead.

My girlfriend is called Boske Darvas. She is still living, in Israel. She had luck to escape. Her husband too. They came home, had a child very soon, and left for Israel immediately. Her husband died, she was left alone, she raised her child, she has grand-children. She had an elder brother who had studied in Paris, he didn’t return, he stayed there, so he wasn’t deported. And he was extremely rich. He died, his sister inherited everything. When she wasn’t needed anymore, she entered to a retirement home. But it’s such a place, they have to pay 4 thousand dollars a month. They have everything there. Separate rooms with bathroom, television set, three or four menus, they have swimming-pool, a doctor of their own. Briefly, just a very few can afford this. She had money, so she pays it from that.

For example in Auschwitz we had to change clothes, and we threw down the old ones, there was a big-big heap of clothes. We had to pass one by one, but ‘Quickly! Quickly! Quickly! Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!’ – this was the slogan all the time. We had to pick up the clothes fast, so we tried to choose from afar. Well, but we couldn’t see from that far. I picked up one, but I could see that it was for a corpulent person, and I threw it back, and I took other one. I got two big slaps in the face from a soldier, but tough ones. He looks into my eyes and says: ‘Didn’t it hurt?’ I say: ‘No! Not from you.’ He looks at me: ‘From me?’ ‘No. Why should it hurt?’ Having heard this he went on. If he asks me one more question, he shoots me in the head for sure, because I would have told him: ‘You’re not a human being, but an animal…’ After this I thought over: ‘You fool! It costs you one word, and with a ball [they shoot you]!’ Maybe it would have been better, because after that I had such a hard life.

In the first month they tattooed us already. We were very happy, because we thought if someone has to be given a number, it meant that we existed. But it was for no use at all. The tattooing didn’t hurt, because they were very skilful, German girls did it. I had luck, she was skilful, because she made me a small one. But for example my sister-in-law had such a big one, and all in a mess. I have it in all the documents I got. My number was 13317. I have heard only of one person from Marosvasarhely, who removed it [the tattoo from their hand]. I haven’t heard the same about anyone else. This is a shame [that they removed the tattoo from their hand].

In fact there [in Auschwitz], that was a torture. They drove us out from the block at four, half past four in the morning – we didn’t know what time was, we just suspected it looking at the sun. A hundred thousand people were in the C concentration camp, where I was. [Editor’s note: This is supposed to be the Birkenau, Auschwitz II concentration camp, where more than 90,000 prisoners were gathered.] There were one thousand persons in every block. So there, ‘in fünfte Reihen‘, lined up nicely by five, we waited between the blocks, and we waited, and we waited. And they came, I don’t know, after five hours, six hours. There was an intense sunlight, it scorched. They counted us to see if we were all there, and they let us stand further. We weren’t allowed to enter the barracks. Then they started to shout for somebody to go for the food. They carried it in a big stainless aluminum slop-pail [cauldron-like vessel]. They prepared us soup from marrow, it’s a kind of turnip, maybe they produce it Germany, however it wasn’t vegetable marrow. It had grass, it had cattle-turnip, many times sand was creaking between my teeth. Of course a very few could drink it. Sometimes eight of us got one pot. So we took it one by one: a sip for me, a sip for you, and we watched so that no one would have two sips, because every sip was a matter of life. In the morning we were given, I think, twenty decagrams of bread, one slice. For the whole day. Also in the morning they brought us in a slop-pail too some black wish-wash, without anything. On Yom Kippur 90 percent didn’t eat that little food we got in Auschwitz, when people’s life depended on one sip. We got so minimum food, that 15 decagrams of bread and that little thin soup made of cattle-turnip and grass counted as well. I didn’t eat either of course. Not only me, but those who never observed any festivals, on that day they didn’t eat the food either. That’s a saint day.

Nobody had any special thing to do. There was a small enclosed hole in the front, where somebody watched over the internal order. That was a kind of position. They chose somebody from us. You needed a great luck for that. However, that person was the first to draw from that food, hoping to get something more consistent. It’s a little tiring for me to speak, because it upsets me… I haven’t had any kind of assignment in the concentration camp. On the other hand I was very brave. What I did was that I skipped off in the night. The kitchen was quite far, about a hundred meters, maybe even more. In the night I sneaked in, though it was illuminated. Every five meters there was a lamp, the German stood there, with his gun on standby. I sneaked to the kitchen, where there was a rubbish heap, and the girls who worked at the kitchen threw out sometimes a cabbage or a rotten tomato. So I rummaged there something, and I ran back. That’s what I did. Just a few dared to do this, because it was dangerous, if they saw you, they shot you. They hit an acquaintance from Marosvasarhely, and shot her in the eye. She lost one eye. However I didn’t do this every evening, just occasionally.

Four or five of us from Marosvasarhely, we always tried to stay together. During selections, when they saw that someone could hardly stand [on her feet], then the person behind her held her, so that the slaughterer wouldn’t notice [Editor’s note: Bella Steinmetz refers to Mengele] that she was collapsing, because in this case he called her out immediately and sent her into the gas. He had a good eyesight, he noticed everything. It also happened that the slaughterer asked: ‘Who is your sister?’ If someone was attached [to somebody], he asked right away: ‘Is she your sister? Or cousin?’ so one realized that they shouldn’t tell this, because they would be separated. So we said no. ‘Yet why do you care for her?’ We exchanged glances: aunt, acquaintance. In short we told all kind of lies in order to keep together those four or five persons. It wasn’t much use to us, but we managed somehow to stick together when we started to work. The wife of the poor Marton Izsak [Editor’s note: Centropa made an interview with him as well], who died recently, so his wife was with us too. When we started working, we were laughing on our misery, that ‘Tell me, what sort of relative are you for me? The grand-mother of the wife of my aunt’s nephew?’ Thus we were given to lying, so that she would be neither relative, but to still keep us together.

A committee arrived, but we didn’t know who was who. However we were happy, because this meant that they would take us somewhere. But we had to undress stark naked, clothes on the arm, and we had to walk before the committee’s eyes. We noticed that they’ve been watching mainly everyone’s legs, if they weren’t sinking, so how capable she was. We realized after that, that they were taking us for a stationary work. From May, June, July, August, they took us in September. First they took us in Bergen-Belsen, that was a concentration camp too. But we had a much better time of it. They kept us there for two weeks at least, to strengthen us a bit. Big tops were set up there. We were on the ground, but we got a lot of blankets. The food was somewhat better; we didn’t have to get up in the morning. We had water, we could wash ourselves and go to the toilet. There was a piece of carrot or potato left on the ground sometimes, or things like that, and we could get these. So let’s say we were well off there. We didn’t have to line up for appel. If it rained, they came in the tents and counted us there. And they took us to the factory by train. We were one thousand five hundred in total who were taken to work in the [aircraft] factory. This was close to Leipzig, as close as Marosszentgyorgy from here. [Editor’s note: That is less than 5 km far.] A silk-factory used to be there, but they transformed it into a war factory during the war. And there was a small bathing room as well.

When they took us there, it was more humane in that sense that we lived in barracks, and everybody had two blankets. Where we lived, it was a large building, a corridor in the middle, rooms to the left and to the right, but settled differently. Ten persons lived in one room, six in the other. Once it must have been a caserne, and I suppose they transformed it, but I don’t know it for sure. They let us in, like a herd, and everybody started to clutch. The eight of us from Marosvasarhely ran in a room. Boske Darvas, Mandel after her husband, the wife of Marci [Marton] Izsak, Lulu, a girl called Emma, three sisters: Klari Izsak, Gizi Kelemen, Nusi Kelemen. They kept secret that they were sisters. We, from Marosvasarhely knew it, but they always stood in different lines, and they didn’t even resemble each other. What a bed we had there! It had some kind of straw, but it was so cold like hell. So we put a blanket above, and three others on us. We were laying two on one plank-bed to warm up each other. Some bricks were broken, we could peek out so see if the Fuhrer, the boss of the concentration camp was walking in the yard, or if anyone else was out. There was a washing room, it was like a fountain: the ice-cold water was flowing out in the middle. We watched each other. We kept discipline. A young girl, the poor child, she was always cold, and she didn’t want to wash herself. We told her: ‘Whoever doesn’t obey our rules, can go out from this room!’ She didn’t want to be with the women from Maramaros, but we turned her out, she went in other room. The poor girl cried, knelt down so that we take her back, because from now on she will join us in the morning or in the evening to wash. We were afraid of louses, because louses ravaged people. However people had hardly louses in our block. For dinner we got margarine, honey in packets. Sometimes we got some sort of salami. For example I always changed the meat for margarine or honey. Others would give even bread to get some meat in change. But I never gave bread.

We worked twelve hours, and we had that luck that it was warm in the factory. We made aircraft parts for Messerschmidt aircrafts. It is a world-famous brand. They brought smaller or bigger automatic machines from Czechoslovakia, they were already installed in the factory. I could say I had luck here, that I had quite an easy work. For example my friend had bad luck, she had to make big bolts. This meant that she had to install iron of two kilos on the machine. Mine was a small bolt, I had to fix the machine with that. They didn’t really control us. But the German supervisor said, ‘Pay attention to work accurately, otherwise I will transfer you to the heavy machine, to the «schwere Maschine»!’ I had a Polish Vorarbeiter, a foreman who taught me how to handle the machine, and who was responsible for me. He was a Christian Pole, they were taken from Poland, France, Italy, because they were against Hitlerism. They were gathered and transported to Germany for free work. However, we heard that they lived in better conditions, it was warm in their block. They lived somewhere else, not among Jews. They got little money, so they could buy a shaver, they could buy a piece of soap, they had water. So they looked more civilized, because they could get shaved.

At five o’clock they rang the bell, because we had to be in the factory by six. The factory was at a distance, like the Palace of Culture from here [a few minutes walk]. We walked there in lines, under military supervision. We had luck that the frontline was close. There were extremely many air-raid alarms. Often it lasted twenty-twenty five minutes. We had to run down to the shelter then. It was obligatory for everybody to go down. The factory still had an air-raid shelter. There was a tight, long-long bank. We were sitting there, it was warm, and we fell asleep. Once we saw a bombing, when Hamburg was demolished. We found out this later from the Poles, because they had a hand-made radio – they worked in some workshops, and there was a technician. Thousand aircrafts flew above our heads, so many went at once that one couldn’t see the sky.

There weren’t Jewish men with us, only women. Men were all Polish or French Christians, but there was also a mole. For example my master said: ‘Don’t mix with that French Häftling, because he’s a mole.’ As he wore prisoner clothes. They knew everything. They were caught once listening to the radio, and one of them was hanged up. He was hanging for days in the factory’s yard, so that everybody saw him. However this event didn’t frighten the Poles. Not even after one week they had a radio again. I respect deeply the Polish heroism. They told us for example every morning: ‘The frontline is here, the frontline is there.’ They explained how to disconnect the electric current from the wire fence, in which the electricity was introduced, so that we could come out, ‘if they want to empty the concentration camp’. My supervisor showed me that I should throw a small piece of iron so that it touched two wires, because the electricity would be off. He had ten machines he was responsible for in front of the German boss, reporting if everything was alright. After a while he said: ‘Listen to me! You make twenty or twenty-five bolts, very accurately. You put them aside, but then you make it like this, to produce rejects. You put them at the bottom. I will verify, if you don’t do this, I will transfer you to the heavy machine.’ So he taught me sabotage. The Germans came to verify, they checked the bolts at the top. They had an instrument they used to measure the bolts, it was ok, that was it. But only rejects were underneath. Well I wouldn’t have liked to get up on the plane I did. They taught the others how to sabotage.

It happened at the workplace, one night my machine was kaput, so it was broke down. My master wasn’t there. I set down on the boxes, and due to the fatigue, exhaustion I fell asleep. Right then the executioner, the commander-in-chief came to verify us, his eyes were full-blooded. I could see he was out of his mind. He said: ‘You present yourself to me in the morning.’ I knew what it meant. When the sichta was over, so at six in the morning, when the other turn arrived, we were going in the concentration camp, the office was there, and one had to stand in front of it. It meant that he would put me at one meter distance from the wires. I could stand hunger, but I suffer terribly of being cold. I said to my colleagues: ‘Guys, I won’t stand there. I won’t bear that.’ They implored me. ‘Dear Bella, we will all bring you hot bricks.’ When we went to the factory, we got a boiler suit, a work clothes. They said: ‘We bring you a warm overall.’ I told them: ‘No, because I won’t bear it anyway.’ ‘Bella dear, he will put you in the bunker.’ There the water was high like this. I said: ‘It is all the same if I die this or the other way! I won’t go. Don’t be upset, we will all suffer, I’m one with you, but I don’t want to die like this. Believe me, I saw he had no idea, he forgot it a long time ago, you didn’t see how he looked like.’ Well, and that’s what happened. I didn’t go. We were watching all day if he was coming, but he didn’t. That’s how I escaped. I can’t imagine how anyone could bear it. I felt I couldn’t. I would have lost my balance because of tiredness and cold, I would have fallen on it [on the wire-fence]… I didn’t suffer at all from hunger during one year. Others suffered a lot. I never had a good appetite, and I ate every shit they gave us. I said: ‘You want to survive this, so you must eat everything.’ I wanted to live to see what would happen after that. This was my slogan. Especially when it was coming to the end.

Nobody hurt people in the factory. Everybody was working there. When we were already in the factory, whoever was thinking, they could see that it was a lost case. So they weren’t course, but they were revenging. When the executioner found me asleep, my girlfriend wanted to protect me, and she begun to speak in a foolish way, in a perfect German: ‘The poor woman, she’s not used to such hard work, she’s the wife of a lawyer.’ The German boss who was responsible for work heard this. When the executioner was left, he says: ‘Du bist Frau Doktorin? [In German: ‘So, you’re a doctor’s wife?’] Hold on, Frau Doktorin!’ Each day, during break, from one to two o’clock, when we had one hour lunchtime, he took me into his office: ‘Clean the window, scrub the floor, Frau Doktorin. That’s not well done, Frau Doktorin!’ Well, this was his revenge. Though I was a simple human being, a lawyer’s wife, that’s also a simple citizen, not a somebody.

When the gunshots could be really heard, he [the supervisor Pole foreman from the factory] taught us: ‘Don’t go anywhere! They will command you in the yard, but don’t move! Don’t obey!’ And he showed us how to evade. A few of us really went there, eight or ten to the fence, and he knocked the iron to it skillfully, and we saw it worked. However we didn’t dare to touch it, but he did. We said: ‘We went through this terrible year, should we die like this now?’ But he grabbed it, drew it apart – nothing happened –, and he slipped through it. Then the second slipped through. I didn’t dare. About four slipped out, but I wasn’t among them. They weren’t searched for. The Germans themselves, the supervisor soldiers escaped too. We started to notice that they are less each day. On the third day even less. That’s how we became courageous. We didn’t go anymore to the factory, but they wanted to empty the concentration camp. One night, when they took us out from the concentration camp, we lay down in quiet on the roadside. The procession passed, and we stayed there. This must have been by the end of March or middle April [1945]. Only the chief of the concentration camp kept on walking, he thought that if he took them [the prisoners] to a certain place, and the Russians caught him up, he would be saved, because he would have said: ‘Here’s the writing, the order to execute the prisoners, and I didn’t.’ So he would have escaped as a reward. But nobody protected him. They asked how he behaved. Everybody told them that he was an alcoholic crook, so they arrested him at once and took him away. He didn’t survive for sure, he didn’t deserve it at all. The war ended officially on May 9th [1945], we felt safe only then, that we weren’t prisoners anymore.

After the war

Everybody went home from deportation. Only the Poles didn’t. They answered with astonishment, when I asked them, ‘Are you going home?’ ‘Home? Where? Which one is our country? That one, where they sent us to Auschwitz, where they sent my mother to Auschwitz?’ So all the Poles emigrated, and they pursued studies. Though Palestine wasn’t Israel yet. They supported themselves somehow, and they graduated. They all speak three or four languages at a native speaker’s level.

It took a long time to come home, because the rails were bombed, so trains didn’t run. We didn’t even know where we were, in which direction to go. We departed on foot. We asked Germans in vain how to get to Prague – we thought they knew better where Czechoslovakia was. One showed in this direction, the other in a different one. We got on a small vicinal train, then they dropped us down, because ‘We are going this way, that’s not good for you, try to go that way…’ We got on a truck full with Romanians – we told them we were Romanians, if we met Hungarians, then we were Hungarians – and they took us for a while. Finally we arrived to Prague, and there we found a freight train, which took us to Pest. We arrived in Buda, but we couldn’t cross to Pest, because all the bridges were bombed. I know Pest like the centre of Marosvasarhely. I had been in Budapest for many times until I got married, and after that too I was there a lot. Every year twice. They took us from one bank to the other by huge rafts, boats, because the Danube is large at Pest. As the Hungarians were retreating, they blew up the bridges so that the Russians couldn’t pass. [Editor’s note: The bridges were blown up by the retreating German troops at the end of the World War II.] Idiots, did they want to win the war here…?!

When we came back from the concentration camp through Pest, they set up a kind of hostelry, perhaps they vacated a school. We arrived there to be registered. I saw there Ilonka Kohn, the wife of Marton Kohn. This family had had an automobile in Marosvasarhely. Marton didn’t learn how to drive, he didn’t even want too, because he was swanking. He had a storied house on the corner, where the McDonald’s is, and upper there was a separate tennis ground too, where the poor Marci Izsak’s atelier was. That happened in Ceausescu’s time [under Ceausescu’s 8 rule]. [Editor’s note: The atelier was built after the World War II, but before Ceausescu’s coming to power.] I had been there once [before the war], I didn’t go again, because it was a bad ground, and they couldn’t play well. They acted so sensibly, they scented what was going to happen, and they went to Budapest in time, together with the two children and with a few bags – they didn’t mind leaving here their fortune, everything. They hid there for a while. When the Szalasi 9 government started to stink strongly and to be dangerous, and when the Arrow Cross started to gain ground, they could bribe a German SS officer, so they went by a German train to Bucharest, because Bucharest was partly liberated, it was liberated very soon after that. So they all survived, the two of them and the two children. After Pest was liberated, she came back, so we met. All the four of us knew her. She fell on our neck, and she took us to her place. That’s how I found out the story. She kept us there for one week, and she provided us with food and everything. She gave us money saying: ‘Go to the hairdresser, because you look like savages.’ Since our hair was cut too, and well it grew in one year a little. But I dyed it. That’s how I came home, I was the blonde Mrs. Almasi, and I remained the blonde Mrs. Almasi to the end. But dye was unavailable after the war, so once my hair was straw-yellow, then violet. I got very angry. Once we went to Nagyvarad, and I dyed my hair to its own color. So I stopped dyeing it, I remained with the original color. So she was very nice, and she also gave us so much money, that we could have lived on it, let’s say for one month. They never came back to Marosvasarhely, they stayed in Pest, and after a very short time they left for Germany.

In Pest we went to the railway station – we were five – and they let us climb up to the top of a freight train. ‘Travel laid down, because we don’t know where the tunnels are, we go to Bucharest’ – said the main engine driver. So we traveled laid down and we arrived to Nagyvarad. There one of my girlfriends could inform her younger brother, Jozsef Helmes, because her brother lived in Bucharest. He came by a large microbus, and took us home to Marosvasarhely, all the five of us went directly to her. Four scattered, because all of them got back their apartment somehow, or she took a look, closed it and left. One of them went to Temesvar, the other to Maramarossziget. Everybody who found there a family [who found a family installed in her apartment], turned it out [the occupants]. When Transylvania was liberated, he [the brother] came home quickly, on a cart, by foot, on a donkey, how he could, entered his apartment, and found almost everything untouched. Not like me, I didn’t find even a glass. I helped her a lot in Auschwitz, because if I stole a cabbage, I gave half of it to my girlfriend, because she was starving terribly. She found everything when we arrived home. She didn’t let me go home, she took me to her place. ‘You stay at me until you find a job or you recover a little.’ That’s how she repaid me. However we were friends before as well. I stayed at her place for almost two months.

As far back as 1943 I got sad news that my husband had been shot. So I went to Auschwitz as a widow. He was taken in 1942 [to do work service]. I didn’t know anything about my brother. He was taken in 1942, from Gyergyovarhegy to Ukraine. He was married already. I didn’t even hope that he would survive, but he came home. I couldn’t have imagined meeting him again, that he would resist, because he spent twelve months in Ukraine, in hell. And he barely was home for five months, and in 1944 they took him to Auschwitz. He was a thin, meager man. So I came home very sad. I came home in summer. I knew nothing about him. He was in Auschwitz, then in several concentration camps [forced labor camps] to work.

I was home for several months, I mourned already my poor brother, I buried him in my heart. Once, it was around the middle of summer, I was going to work, when a stranger comes to my place from somewhere the countryside. He was a Jew from the surroundings, he knew the town. I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me either, but my brother explained him: ‘Go there, look for this person.’ He explained him where our house was, he told him my maiden name and my name after my husband. He found me at once. ‘I bring you news about your brother, he is in Germany, he works in a factory, and he doesn’t want to come home.’ My brother knew that my mother wasn’t alive, and because he thought too about me – well, I was a young, protected child, though he knew I was a sportswoman – that I wouldn’t survive Auschwitz or working in a factory. He was in a place, where a group of women worked in the wood, at logging. Imagine women, like we are, chopping wood, in such a weather, with ‘druzba’… [Editor’s note: the Druzba is a Russian chain-saw; this was the only type available in Romania during the communist regime.] So women didn’t have the slightest chance to survive. My brother didn’t want to come home at all. I was very desperate. He found employment in Germany, in a factory, and stayed there. A friend of him too stayed there. ‘Let’s not go home, it’s useless. Let’s start a new life!’ Especially that he spoke German perfectly, it wasn’t a problem for him to do every kind of work. His wife was a young woman from Nagyvarad, they took her to Riga, the capital of Latvia. People still hoped there that the Germans would win. So the Fuhrer from there received the command to shoot all the concentration camp. My brother knew this. He felt he had nothing to come home for: ‘I have no wife, Bella – that’s me – won’t resist, I have no mammy, Bella’s husband died.’ ‘And one night – he says – I felt I had to come home.’ So I arrived home around June, and he stayed there until the end of October, one morning he got up and said: ‘I’m going home though, perhaps Bellus is alive.’ In November he just stepped in one day. The poor man, how bad he looked like… in an awful clothe, shabby, famished. The trains didn’t run then [as they do now]. So he related me that one night he dreamt that maybe – as he knew me as a fit girl, who has such strength of will –, maybe I’m alive after all. And he came home.

At home I found out that the Russians arrested the captain who had lived in my house, they took him to the Regat in transit camp to transport him in the Soviet Union as a prisoner of war. [Editor’s note: Between August 23rd 1944 and May 15th 1945 the Romanian army caught 117,798 German and Hungarian soldiers. The armistice concluded on September 12th 1944 didn’t dispose separately over the German prisoners of war; under the terms of the international agreements and regulations in force they should have been placed at the disposal of the Romanian military staff. Its contrary happened, most of the prisoners of war were taken over by the Soviet army, in most cases without any certificates; by October 1944 a total number of 36,433 German prisoners of war were taken over and deported immediately to the Soviet concentration camp in Focsani. Further concentration camps were established in the following locations: Romula, Budesti, Calafat, Bucharest, Turnu Magurele, Maia, Ramnicu Valcea (for German prisoners), Corbeni (for Hungarian prisoners), Barbatesti (for Szekler prisoners), Lugoj and Feldioara. (Al. Dutu, F. Dobre, A. Siperco - P.O.W. in Romania and the International Red Cross) No. 3, March 1997 http://www.itcnet.ro/history/archive/mi1997/mi3.htm ] He had a mistress in Marosvasarhely, so I asked her: ‘Didn’t leave Frici here something for me? Not even jewelry?’ ‘Nothing, nothing.’ And she says: ‘I don’t even know where he is. Lately I got a notification that he was in a prison camp.’ So I went there. Without thinking, only dressed up, without money or anything, I got on the train, and I went there, I searched for the camp. I got on the train, they asked for my ticket, I say: ‘What do you want? I’m coming from the concentration camp.’ I showed them the tattoo. When I arrived there I asked people where a Jewish community was. I went there, I told them my business, and I asked where that camp was. I told them at the gate I was looking for somebody. Why? I say he stayed at me, I want to talk to him by all means. They let me in, the gate shot after I entered, and I fainted. I felt again I was in the concentration camp, I remembered everything, and I collapsed. They brought me round, took me to the guard-room and looked for the captain. I asked him: ‘Frici, where are my belongings?’ He answers: ‘Look at me, I’m without food or drink, without anything.’ ‘Tell me where are they? You were the last to leave my apartment. I visited Duci [the mistress] too, and Duci said she didn’t receive anything at all.’ ‘It’s not true, Duci doesn’t tell the truth. She came with me by car for a long distance. But our car was caught, I was taken, and they continued their way.’ At the end it turned out that they [Duci and her family] traveled separately, her with her mother, father and two brothers until the Russian frontier. They were fleeing away from Russians, from war. But none of them could drive. They left together [with Frici], perhaps because Frici wanted to escape. But he was stupid, because he wore his uniform. I don’t know the circumstances. It’s not interesting where they went, but he got arrested and became a prisoner of war. The woman came home. And when I had returned [from deportation, thus before the visit in the concentration camp in Regat], I had gone to her family – her father was a lawyer by the way –, I had asked: ‘Didn’t he leave here something?’ ‘No, no.’ They interrogated me about Frici, they registered what I said, how this captain behaved. I gave him such a [positive] reference, so I returned his goodness, I have a clear conscience. On the basis of my statement he was released after four months. He didn’t stay then in Hungary. He was [the descendant of] a rich landowner, but communism came for him too, they took surely from his property, and he didn’t stay there. He left for Holland, and got married there. He never wanted to marry this woman from Marosvasarhely. The poor man, he died three years ago.

I don’t know, maybe after one year, there was a Jewish boy who first courted me, he wanted to marry me, he implored me each day, he filled my head with this. Once he finds me crying, and I say: ‘Leave me alone! I don’t want to get married, you see, I have nothing to eat tomorrow. This captain told me he had given my jewels to these people, I could do something if I had those.’ ‘Well then – he says –, come with me.’ It was dark already, it was about eight o’clock. I tell him: ‘What do you intend to do, dressed in civil clothes?’ We visited that girl’s father, and he said: ‘Mister, I’m here officially. Either you give me the jewels, silver objects of Mrs. Almasi, either you come with me to the police.’ And he shows his badge, as every ‘szekus’ [Editor’s note: member of the Securitate, that is the Romanian secret police] had a certificate. It [the badge] was a brooch of course, he was a cunning fellow. The lawyer was in a blue funk when the boy did this. He went at once to his big cash desk, took out a small box, like mine, which I had given [to the captain], mainly my mother’s small jewels were in it. ‘I was here a few months ago, and you told me you had nothing.’ His daughter was there too: ‘How should I have known which one belongs to Mrs. Almasi?’ ‘You gave me straightaway, as you opened it – I say –, you found it at once. How could that be possible?’ I slapped that man in the face, and I spat him on face. In such a case one looses his good sense and self-command. I say: ‘Let’s go, because I will faint in a minute. It’s worthless, I lost my mother, I lost my husband, and now should I fight for jewels?’ Then he [Duci’s father] gave me back some things and said: ‘Believe me or not, that was it, because we took some when we were escaping [with Frici], but when we came home, we couldn’t carry them, and we threw them on the street.’ I had big silver platters, silver cutlery. He gave me back a set for fish and a set for ice-cream, with eighteen teaspoons. This young man left for Israel later, at quite a young age.

Then life begun… I restarted life very hardly. Two tenants lived in my house… Part of my furniture was lost: the furniture of the drawing room, of my husband’s office, of the living-room, the piano, everything that could be taken easily. The big, heavy pieces were left, they didn’t take those. I found my furniture from the dining-room in the stable of a person, it was very beautiful. Back then it was a very modern dining-room, with antique chairs, it seems someone needed only the chairs. The furniture didn’t have any value like this, because they couldn’t make such chairs in those times. Furthermore I didn’t get back any glass. The neighbors didn’t rejoice much at the returned people. This doesn’t mean that there weren’t many straight people, because I slept on the pillow of a Christian until I got married, from 1945 until 1947. I had a neighbor, Nora Scitea, a Romanian woman, she gave me a pillow. The wife spoke Hungarian perfectly, the husband just a little. He wasn’t in a too high position. In the Hungarian era 2 they moved, but only to the frontier, it was 15 km far from here. It turned out only after the war that they were so close. The captain who was lodged at my place had implored me that ‘I will pass you through the frontier.’ If I knew Scita was so close, she would have given me accommodation or a piece of bread. They moved back. The husband treated mainly thieves at the police. But then he fell sick and died.

I didn’t come to see my house for two weeks. I couldn’t come, I had no energy. And when I arrived in the street, it was then that I realized, what did I come home for in fact?! Who is waiting for me, and why did I come home!? I burst out sobbing… I was walking on the right side, and I was looking at my house, which was on the left side. I stopped in front of my house, on the other side – I was looking at it, an unknown curtain at the window – and I was sobbing aloud. The window was open, because it was summer. The owner looked out [on the side where I was staying], and tells me: ‘Oh dear, it’s not true after all what people say about you? It’s not true, is it?’ I looked at him, I said: ‘No. Why don’t you ask me where is my mother? Why don’t you ask me where is my husband?’ Hearing this he closed the window! I fell down, so that he would come out, that he would stand by me, that he would take me inside. He didn’t even bring me a glass of water, though he could see how I looked like! This was the neighbor who lived opposite, and whom my husband gave so many good advices. It was a couple, they didn’t have children. They were drudging, they did sewing, they were rich. He was such a neighbor! Oh, I didn’t care anymore. They behaved badly. I didn’t come in my house’s vicinity for two weeks.

I came only after two weeks to see my house. I regretted it however, because I got so upset. Two families were staying in my apartment, because I had five rooms: a family, husband and wife, in the other family there were three children, the eldest was seventeen years old, then a fifteen and a twelve years old. I was shouting on them, like a jackal, when I entered the house: ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my house?’ Imagine that you go home now, and you find strangers in your room, and everything is unfamiliar. And I could see there was nothing. I didn’t even have a glass. One of them was very impertinent. He had broken through the wall between two rooms, so he made a kitchen-and-room apartment. I gave him three days to remake it as it used to be. He will whitewash it and disappear in three days, upon this he will show a clean pair of heels. I left there the other. He had three children. He apologized. He says: ‘Well, we came in…’ I don’t know from where he was, Csik [region] maybe, a Hungarian teacher. They had come here to Marosvasarhely. I don’t know in fact how they had got precisely in my apartment. They had wanted to move to the town, and there had been many [empty] Jewish apartments. Everybody was happy, because a lot of apartments became available. The merchant was happy, because competition ceased. There were nice apartments, and one could ‘zabral’ [scrounge]. We learnt this from the Russians, it means to steal, to filch, to loot. Who looted my apartment? There weren’t German or Russian soldiers in Marosvasarhely. The German and the Russian didn’t even pass through. The Russian army marched next to Szaszregen [today Reghin]. The bridges were blown up, but Hungarians blew them up, so that if they came this way, they couldn’t have passed the Poklos brook. I don’t know what the inhabitants were doing, anyway, a lot of people moved in from the villages, because they knew there were empty flats. A lot of strangers settled down. And one could see a lot of foreign characters in the shops. As the owners didn’t really come home… The local residents were replaced. Some [of those who came back from deportation] got away, because the behavior [of the inhabitants] wasn’t convenient for them. After all they had done to us, there were some among the Hungarians who didn’t feel ashamed to reveal that they were happy. Everybody gained from it [from the deportation], that’s the truth. For example a few Romanian families were left here, they didn’t go away [Editor’s note: in 1940, after Northern-Transylvania became an area under the jurisdiction of Hungary]. People treated them so badly. The hospital was on Szent Gyorgy square. When the Hungarian army was retreating, they wanted to take with them the radiographs, they wanted to bring to the motherland all the movable values. And a Romanian doctor tells them in a perfect Hungarian (as he took his diploma in Pest): ‘I won’t let you take it, we have patients here!’ He put up resistance, and he didn’t let them take out even a chair. They kicked him out. In 1940, we were still home, so we saw this. When the war ended, he was kicked out from his flat too, because he had a nice, marvelous apartment, he built it next to the hospital. [Editor’s note: This could have happened due to the nationalization 10 in the communist regime.] He had a good salary, so he could have a house built of it. Not mentioning that he came from a wealthy family. They put him out in a room, somewhere near the Russian market.

The husband and wife got lost from my apartment in three days, because they were insolent. The others stayed a few weeks more. But the children were noisy, and I couldn’t stand it. So I asked them nicely: ‘I hope you don’t mind mentioning, but please look after an apartment, because you are too noisy, there is too much traffic, I can’t stand this noise.’ So they left normally, then I rented it out to an unfortunate couple. I didn’t have anything to eat. I got back things of no value for me due to house search, figurines, crystals, I don’t know what else. These were worthless for me, when I didn’t have a cooking pot, I had nothing to prepare a tea in… Well, that was misery. [Editor’s note: The survivors expected the new Northern-Transylvanian, respectively Romanian authorities to repeal the previous anti-Jewish laws as soon as possible, to return their seized movable and immovable properties, to compensate them for those properties which couldn’t be returned, and to assist efficiently the reorganization of the communal life. On September 1st and December 19th 1944 the racial laws were repealed, the Jewish communities and the Zionist organizations were gradually reorganized and started to function, but a lot of obstacles impeded the return of possessions, thus it was carried out extremely slowly. http://adatbank.transindex.ro/inchtm.php?kod=231 ]

I wasn’t a working woman, or a self-supporting [woman]. I was dependant. When the child got married, her husband supported her. Only a very few women worked from the middle-class. I got a job. A good old acquaintance came home, his merchandise was walled up, and he found it, so he opened a store in the yard, he became a merchant. I became the cashier, he trusted me. I was so desperate, and I was so rootless. I got back part of my jewels, but I wasn’t interested in this. I had an employment, but I couldn’t get accustomed to loneliness. There were many young widower, and hundreds of widows. I had company, we fooled each other, we were together every evening, but that didn’t offer any solution for me. These were all young Jewish people, who came back. Everybody had a place to stay. One had a better, the other had a worse one. I lived under difficult circumstances, because I let out instantly three rooms, I kept two, hoping that the good Lord would bring home my brother, so he would have a room of his own. I had nothing. Thus I lived under the hardest conditions, but a young person endures it more easily, and this was a common tragedy. In the meantime I became 33-34 years old. I was still a young, athletic-looking woman, I came home healthy, despite all the misery, so I endured it more easily. I was working, I could buy a pair of stockings, then I got a package from abroad, from aunt Sari, the sister of my dad. It arrived to the militia, because she didn’t know the name Almasi, and she sent it to the name Bella Bacher! The militia, I don’t know how, but found out that Bella Bacher was searched. Many Jews worked there. So everything is a matter of chance. I still have a terry towel. I used it as a bath sheet for a long time. I was very happy with the package. It had second-hand things too. She didn’t know if I was fat [or not], perhaps she didn’t even know how old I was, only approximately. She left before the war, I was about 4-5 years old.

After my brother came home, he lived in one room, me in the other. He got married in 1946, that was his second marriage. He married a Jewish woman. I got married for the second time in ’47, he a few months earlier. He got married quite stealthily, I don’t know why. Bozsi wasn’t deported, because she was in Gyulafehervar [today Alba Iulia]. So all I got, a few valuable things, I inherited from them. They met each other as she came here. She was a dental technician, and she worked here, a common acquaintance introduced her to my brother. He got married in 1946, and he was placed in Brasso. So he lived in Brasso. When I got married in 1947, he came with his wife already, they stayed in a hotel for one night, then went back. He moved back when the wood association was established. His name was known, he got employed immediately. This happened one or two years after. This association was established very soon, his name was well-known, he was in too, and a few other former producers came too, Christians, Hungarians, so they established together the wood association. They restored the factory as they could, so they formed a wood trust here, and it was due to my brother too that this could have been established. That was in the Hangya building. The Hangya didn’t exist anymore, because this was Romania again. But he wasn’t a party member, nor later, nor him or my husband. He got married, and was a clerk here. They made him a chief clerk, because they knew he was an expert, they asked him his opinion. There were Christian producers too of course, this is normal, but most of the people in this industry were Jews. Experts. It doesn’t mean that hundreds of office-holders were Christians, but they had other possibilities. He was good in it, well, they couldn’t make him a director, but he was the chargeman of the commercial department. Of course, in the beginning there were people here, who knew the name Bacher, because they knew my father’s name, since he was a good expert. There was a good-for-nothing drinker chap here, a doorman, who was shouting every morning in the market for example: ‘It’s over with the masters, it’s over with the Bachers!’ Then the state seized everything.

My brother and I had different societies. He played bridge, and adored the cinema. I played rummy, and I preferred the theatre company to a good movie. Well, it’s true that I watched an exceptionally good movie, but he had a subscription ticket, and he frequented… [the cinema]. My poor sister-in-law never could dispose of her time well. She couldn’t keep her job as a dental technician, as she was working there too, and to prepare a lunch… the poor, may she rest in peace, she was unable for that. She was such a trifler: she went in the bathroom, and she stayed there for one hour, and the laundress waited her outside. Besides, the poor woman, I don’t know why she got obsessed with the idea, that my brother loved me more than her. That’s when our relationship started to get worse. She didn’t know what was to love a brother or sister. I always felt she was envious of me, if my brother came to me and embraced me. I always told her: ‘But Bozsi, it’s totally different to love a sister than to love a wife. Why are you doing this?’ But she went on about the same idea. She was alone, the poor woman lost her parents at a very young age, in fact she didn’t even know her father, he had died during the [First World] war, and her mother too, at a young age. So two old people, an uncle and an aunt raised her. She finished the gymnasium, and they sent her at 14 to learn a profession. My brother worked here too, because the wood association was here [nearby]. Finally my poor brother, to avoid all this – he always had a coffee break during the morning – just a few steps, so he came over, that’s how we met. At the end, when my brother fell sick, I visited them regularly, but I couldn’t endure to see my brother’s suffering. My brother died in 1984. Then my brother’s wife had a physiotherapeutic treatment: her back, her back… she couldn’t bend down, she suffered terribly. Finally she had to go into a hospital, she was operated, and they took out a malignant tumor in her back, big as a mandarin. I couldn’t take her out from the hospital. I paid in the hospital to keep her there, because she had only weeks to live. She died in two months, may the poor woman rest in peace. She is buried here, at least they rest next to each other. They are both buried in the Jewish cemetery, this is normal.

How did I meet my second husband, Albert? There was a girl from Maramarossziget, Flora, and she was a very good friend of mine. Flora Steinmetz was the younger sister of my [second] husband. She got married here, to a merchant. He was called Jeno Baruch, his nickname was Onyi. He was her fiancée before the war already. But they didn’t get married because of the situation, she didn’t want to get so far from her family, since Marosvasarhely was the ends of the earth for those in Maramarossziget, there weren’t buses or planes. Both [Steinmetz] siblings came home from misery, and my husband’s sister got married here in Marosvasarhely. My husband visited her every weekend, because only the two of them survived from the eight siblings. In those times he worked in Szatmar, and there was a flight from Szatmar to Kolozsvar, so he visited his sister every week. So my girlfriend had this idea, that he wasn’t married, I was a widow, and she introduced us to each other. However, as she knew well, that I would refuse people to arrange for me, she visited me Sunday morning, and said: ‘Come out, stop that cooking! Come, let’s take a walk!’ The promenade in the morning was fashionable. It wasn’t for us though, because we weren’t elegant… But she agreed with her brother that ‘You too, come out, and we will meet on the esplanade.’ And my husband escorted me until the door already. He took his leave from me so hardly… And he asks me if I would let him to visit me. ‘Well – I answered – you are welcome.’ I got married [again] in 1947. I came home in 1945, and I took more than two years getting persuaded, I was afraid to marry him. I told myself, he was 41-42 years old, and he wasn’t married before, either he wants a cook, either he is impotent. So I started to wonder, what the hell… I was a married woman for 14 years. The poor man courted me, he came from Szatmar to Kolozsvar every week by plane, from there he came here. Finally I told him: ‘You know what, we have nothing to loose, we get married, if the marriage is working, fine, if not, one of us steps out.’ I didn’t have any children, nor did he. That’s how we got married.

Albert had eight siblings, three of them were girls, and five were boys. I didn’t know any of them besides my husband, only this sister of him who lived in Marosvasarhely. I only know their nicknames. There was Abi, then Magda, the eldest, who got married in Maramarossziget. Albert’s family was fleeing before World War I, I don’t know who went crazy this time, the Poles or the Russians. The whole family fled to Pest. They were afraid that Russians would come in. They had relatives there, they went there. They were badly off there. They still had seven children, as the eighth was gone, and they got two rooms and a kitchen. The children were all at school except two. They all waited the summer to come, to go out in the city park or to the zoo to learn, because it was impossible in that small flat. His mother was very ill, she was diabetic, so it was extremely hard for them. The two elder brothers tried to sit for an entrance examination, but the numerus clausus was already introduced. His father was a merchant, they had a textile shop, but he died early. One day at noon, it was the first day of Pesach, he just dropped from his chair… and the funeral had to be organized quickly. [Editor’s note: Due to the kevod ha-met (honor to the dead) the dead should be buried as soon as possible, but within three days the latest. High days are not exceptions from this obligation, though in such cases the funeral service is modified to some extent (i.e. there is no funeral oration).] However all this happened long before the war [World War II]. The eldest brother took it over. So the boys supported the whole big family. The whole family lived together with their mother, they had [later] a large house. They lived in Pest for eight years, Albert attended the conservatory for six years in Budapest, he played the violin. His younger sister had a diploma too, while they lived in Budapest [they finished school]. My sister-in-law learned to play the piano. Comparing to my sister-in-law and the boys my husband was the youngest. He didn’t play the violin at home. Where was my piano after the war, where was his violin, where was his furniture at all?

The boys didn’t get married, they all had everything, one of them had a girlfriend. One of the boys was the black sheep of the family, that’s how they used to call him. He was a careless, unreliable man, he didn’t want to learn or to work. The family could see it was useless, they took out a passport, and sent him to America: ‘Make your living yourself!’ Only the eldest sister was married. I don’t know when they came back in the country. They never found out where their mother was buried, because Jews were in ghettos for about two weeks, and his mother didn’t get insulin. Ill people died in the meantime, and I suppose they were put in common graves. Two returned from deportation from the whole family. Only Albert did a work service, that’s how he survived. The other three boys were in concentration camps, it is sad, because two of them died two weeks before liberation in a concentration camp. One of the sisters had a four years old child in her arms, she went to the left. The other didn’t resist. One endured it, Flora. These were so absurd things. After the war Albert didn’t have any relatives, only a cousin in Szatmar, but he left for Belgium in a very short time. His daughter is still alive.

Albert survived, because he was taken to Kassa for work service. He had luck, because there was a stupid guy at the office, who had no idea about accounting, about management. Once he announced: ‘Is there anyone among you who knows a little office work, accounting?’ My husband presented himself. He says: ‘Yes, I do.’ He took him in and asked him: ‘Well, can you fix this?’ When my husband saw it, he realized that was a child’s play, and he said: ‘Well, I will try. I might be able to arrange this.’ Of course, he says, he could have fixed it in one hour, because it was so simple. ‘But I kept on prolonging it, and after two days I said: ‘Well – I have no idea about his rank – it’s done, take a look, it’s fixed now.’ ‘You were really skilful. You stay here, you will get separate meals, and you will get a decent bed.’ That’s how my husband survived, otherwise he was a thin little man. Briefly, he wouldn’t have survived even a transportation to a concentration camp, not mentioning that there… So he was in Kassa until the end, he was set free there. He was provided with bacon. The sergeant was very grateful to him for having saved him, because they came to check what he had done at the work service, how much food he took over, and it was extremely hard for him to calculate these. That’s how my husband escaped.

Flora lived in Marosvasarhely. My sister-in-law and her husband were industrious people. They were both quite aged, 50 years old, when they left for Israel, and they died there. I met accidentally a cousin of my husband, Sarolta Steinmetz, after we got married. She got married in Nagyvarad, and we went on our honeymoon to Nagyvarad. She was the little one among his siblings, and she was called Pirinko, Piri. She wasn’t deported, because she was in Temesvar. The state of Israel wasn't established yet, it means they left before 1948. She went there right before ‘closing-time’ by ship, because there weren’t flights yet. With seventy kilos, a baby in her body, and she already had one. Her husband was a very wealthy man, I know he was engaged in trade there. I keep the contact with Piri, she was the one who always helped me financially, under the communism and after that, after my husband died. I was left with 500 thousand lei revenue, and she supported me. She lives now in Tel Aviv, she is 87. I’m in contact with her even today. I spoke to her last week.

I got married to my second husband in 1947. First we got married at the local council, that was the civil marriage, then we had a religious one too. It was a typical Jewish wedding, under a wedding canopy. It started at noon, at half past twelve. It lasted maximum half an hour, and it was quite close, in that large synagogue, which wasn’t finished, in the Brailei street. They started to build it before the war, and gave up in 1942, what would that be good for?! [Editor's note: Bella Steinmetz speaks about the former synagogue of the Orthodox Jewish Community. The building was built up in 1927, in the time of secretary Ferenc Friedmann, and it could hold thousand persons. Next to the main building two smaller prayer houses and several other premises were built. Due to deportation and mass emigration after WWII the synagogue was left without members, and it wasn’t finished. Its façade was rebuilt completely, this resulting in the ruination of its style. At present the walls are even unplastered, this showing as well its unfinished feature. Presently only the synagogue in the Scoala street is in use.] In 1947 two rooms were finally plastered, to have an office. Later there was an office, the office of Jews, so to have a centre for the Jewish community, because Jews were coming home. You see, there were even weddings! Quite a lot in fact, because there were a lot of young people, widows.

The ceremony was held in the yard. We still had a rabbi, even a shochet, but I don’t recall the rabbi’s name. I was so angry that I was hopping mad. I had agreed with them previously to set up the wedding canopy not outside, but in the office, because I had been married before. I knew anyway that I didn’t have any relatives, nor did my husband, so I didn’t need at all a public or a fuss. They said ‘Alright, no problem.’ My brother lived in Brasso, but they came, they stayed in a hotel, because I had one room in that big house. I said: ‘Don’t come to pick me up, I will walk to the synagogue by myself.’ I was ambling alone very sadly, I walked all the way crying. You have never seen such a sad bride in your life like I was. I remembered my first marriage, and this one was so miserable, without a family… The fact that my mother didn't escort me, nobody escorted me... I was very sad... Not even Hitler could take away the memories. Until this present day. I was walking, and then I saw that the canopy was set up in the yard, and the crowd – there was a lattice fence – was standing there and waiting for me. I got so angry! The person I talked to knew that I had been married. But he didn’t ask me if my husband had been married before. So I fell angrily upon this fellow, that ‘We agreed to set it up inside, so why did you do this? Do you think I need all this circus?’ My tears started to fall. He said: ‘Excuse me, dear Madam – he spoke a bad Hungarian, he was from Regat –, but you didn’t tell me that the bridegroom was still a boy!’ That’s how he expressed it. My husband was a single, he was 44, me 36. I got angry. I said: ‘So what?’ So he informed me that a person who wasn’t under the chupa, the canopy, must be in the open air. [Editor’s note: According to the tradition the wedding ceremony is held outdoors, in the open air. In case of a second marriage the wedding usually is much more modest – that is why it could become a custom to celebrate such events within the building.]

I didn't wear a wedding dress, first of all because I was a married woman. Well, if I had had money, I would have bought a more elegant dress. I was wearing a suit, and a hat of course, and they put a veil on my head. My groomsman was my brother, my husband’s best man was Flora’s, his sister’s husband, Onyi. The canopy has legs. They recite a prayer, pour wine in a small glass, first the man drinks, then the woman, after that the man puts it on the ground and treads well on it. I walked round my husband too. The groomsman took me by my arm, nicely, and we walked round twice the bridegroom under the canopy. That was all. After that – my sister-in-law’s place was very close – we went to her, and she offered us a good wedding lunch. A good and delicious meat-soup, we had roast, we had gateau, we had fruits. That was it. It was in May, we had what one could find in May, vegetables. Then my husband ordered a taxi, and took me to Kolozsvar, we stayed there for one day.

After that we went to Maramarossziget, because we had to sort out things, because I had this condition that I wouldn’t stay in Maramarossziget, I wanted to come back to Marosvasarhely. He had a serious employment, it couldn’t be passed just from one day to the other, he was the manager of a large company. He worked in the wood industry in the valley of the Maros river and in the surroundings of Maramarossziget, there half percent of the wholesalers were engaged in wood industry. My husband worked in the central accounting office, the company had even a notarial. People were paid in dollars. He came home from Budapest to Maramarossziget because of the family. They left together, and they returned together. They decided to come back, so he quitted his job [in Budapest]. He got employed at once, by this boss [of the wood producing company]. After the war the boss came back, he got back for the moment his property, the factory, and he took back my husband. His boss was a Jew. One shouldn’t think there aren’t any crooks among Jews. There are precisely as many as among other people. We have our one killers, rascals. Four chaps gathered, young men, they weren’t relatives, but four dealers. There is much salt there, like in Szovata [Editor’s note: 54 km far from Marosvasarhely]. The difference is that they took advantage of it and they were sending the salt to Hungary, and they got paid in dollars. They [the members of this association] entrusted my husband with the financial matters, because they trusted him, and they paid my husband in dollars. This was a separate revenue for him, he did this outside the company, so when I got married, he had more than 15,000 dollars. I haven’t seen a cent from it, of course. I found this out later. The owner [of the wood factory] left for Israel. Since Piri, my husband's cousin decided that all her siblings and us too would go there, my husband gave the money to the boss saying that ‘Start some business, so it would develop by the time I emigrate too.’ My husband saw again one dollar from that money as you did. Because in the meantime they stopped emigration from Romania 11, they didn’t let out anybody, but the boss could make it. We didn’t emigrate because they stopped emigration. We kept on postponing it, besides my husband was afraid. He was exposed anyway to being kicked out, because communism became more and more severe. He was an inadequate cadre, the fact that he finished high-school in Budapest, was also a trouble. ‘You must be the son of a grand seigneur – said the personnel manager – if you finished school in Pest.’ When he repeated the same for several times, my husband told him: ‘Sir, can’t you understand that we lived in Pest for eight years, I became eighteen years old there. I couldn’t come here to Marosvecs or to Regen to have my final exam. I had to have it there.’

We agreed to go there for three months, so I went with him. Unfortunately the arranging dragged on for almost two years, because it got complicated. While we were there, nationalization 10 begun. And especially due to nationalization, it became much more difficult. So this required half a year. I did nothing there. He introduced me to a lot of people, to acquaintances. He had an office, he worked there, and came after me. In the morning I was housekeeping, in the afternoon I was playing cards. I played with those who came back [from deportation] and got together: widow, widower, people of the same age. In the meantime my husband was liquidating his part. He had a profession, he did the bookkeeping, and he was the chief of the department, so he was liquidating what he had to pass to somebody. This couldn’t be done in two days. He came here [to Marosvasarhely] to inquire, because people engaged in wood industry started to establish a co-operative, in order to have a centre. The factories were already there, they just had to be put into operation. The co-operative was established, and he got employed at first. I stayed there for a while, until he found an apartment, to have a place where to move. Well, but in the meantime I heard that the militia was looking for him, because bookkeepers were needed, he was registered, because he was an excellent bookkeeper indeed. This was proved by the fact that they employed him for 17 years with a ministerial authorization, because one needed a college degree for this position. He was really a good accountant, but his training was good as well. After he passed his final exams, he had a relative in Budapest at the Hungarian National Bank, who recommended my husband to the accounting department. He was born in 1903, he must have finished school at the age of 18. Right after that he got in there, and they taught him well. Being a chief accountant is a profession. Today chief accountants earn a lot. They were needed in the Ceausescu 8 era too, because one had to juggle with numbers, because accounts had to be made about what they produced, spent for this and that, he took from here and put there. And he was always the first. He even got a red flag, a fee from the ministry. This was an award. This must have happened in the 1960s. He took care of it of course, he guarded it well. When the liberation came in 1989 12, one afternoon he was resting here [in the room], the door was always open [between the two rooms], I was staying between the rooms, and I took the scissors and I started to cut it into pieces. The poor creature looked at me: ‘What are you doing?’ I say: ‘Well, what am I doing? This is a rag, what am I supposed to do with it? Should I keep this? This one – I say – because you’ve been a skilful juggle? You got it because you were a smart juggle, and because you didn’t record the real numbers…’ He says: ‘Well, you are right in a way.’ He tore it to shreds, and threw them out.

I had luck with my husbands, that they dressed me, and my sister-in-law. My second husband too. Though we didn’t have money anymore, however, he bought me all the beautiful things I have. He went to Bucharest many times, he was in Bucharest for two or three days in almost every second month. He had quite a good job, yet his salary was low, because he wasn’t a party member, but he had to work at breakneck speed. For example he arrived home, I still have the winter suit he brought me. He saw some elegant textile on the Victoriei Avenue, and he entered [the shop]: Well, I have to buy this to Bella! And I told him: ‘We live in such a misery, in these two rooms – from the five rooms –, so why do you buy me so expensive things?’ I still have it, and I still wear it in wintertime.

I didn’t work after I got married. ‘I come from a large family – he said –, I miss the family. If you go to work – we used first-name informality from the beginning –, if I go to work too, when I return home, maybe you will go to an assembly, and I will always find an empty apartment, or I would have to heat up alone the soup, well this wouldn’t be a problem. I want to have a relaxed woman next to me.’ But that’s what I fell victim to, with my neurosis. I fell ill because I stayed idly in that two rooms and a kitchen flat – my apartment was small. I finished housekeeping in two hours, two and a half, and I had nothing to do, and I was together with a mean crook tenant, whom I let out a room, because my house wasn't nationalized. It seems it was accidental that the house wasn’t nationalized, a house with five rooms and two bathrooms. This was our luck. At least I could keep this from my father’s work. After the war I kept only two rooms, I let out to the tenant three rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. He had a family, he had a 1 or 2 years old little child. Unfortunately somebody recommended this person. I gave it to him for a rent, he paid to me. That's how I could keep these two rooms for 26 years. And I had to listen each day, ‘stinking Jew, stinking Jew. Why don’t you go to Palestine?' There wasn't any witness to this ever, but I don't think he would have got punished for this. Living under the same roof with such an enemy, walking the same stairs with him… This disease started in 1956-57, when I fell ill with my nerves. That was precisely the problem, that I didn’t do anything, I was just listening to the disparagement and the anti-Semite… [speech of the tenant]. And one couldn’t just simply kick out somebody, without ensuring him a similar flat, that was the communist law. I had my living space, I had no right for other apartment, that's how they decided. I asked for a change hoping to have at least one of the bathrooms.

I had an awful life. For 26 years I had no bathroom, I wouldn't even mention a vestibule. In the first time, when we had no money, I used a washbowl for bathing, while I had two bathrooms. When I let out the rooms, my condition was that I would use the bathroom once in a week, because luckily it was next to my room. I bathed once or twice. When I wanted to take a bath for the third time, I went in, and I saw the potty left dirty in the bathtub – he had a little child. I never set foot there once again. I got so ill, I couldn’t go out, I had to bath in a washbowl. But let's not talk about this, it unsettles me a lot. It is thanks to my mother, it was her wish to make a washbasin alcove with a toilet. Otherwise I would have gone out to the yard, to that toilet no matter if it was summer or winter, I should have bathed in that washbowl. Sometimes my husband took a bath at my brother, because he had a separate nice apartment, and me at his sister, at my sister-in-law.

Then a law was introduced saying that if part of a flat, which wasn’t nationalized, becomes available, the state has no right to dispose over it. So after 26 years [approximately in 1971] I got back a room, a bathroom and the vestibule. That’s how I had three rooms, a bathroom and a vestibule. This family lived there for 26 years, when I could finally sell the house [that part of the house]. I couldn’t even sell it until then. Well, I could, but I had no buyer, because I couldn’t offer it for sale, as there was a tenant. Whoever buys it, does this because they want to move in it. I exchanged this apartment 22 years ago, it was under the communism. A veterinarian lived here. You have no idea how stupid laws we had. For example a family with three members couldn’t buy my house, it couldn’t own a [whole] house, because it still had available living space. The apartment was too large for a family with three members, it was defined how many square meters may I own and how many may the buyer. So an other family had 2 children of different sexes, so the children could have separate rooms, the parents could have a third one, they all could have a common room, so using some influence they could buy it. After 26 years one more room became available, I could offer the three rooms, vestibule, bathroom with kitchen.

There were nonsense things at my husband’s workplace in the communist era. In the morning, before starting to work, they had newspaper reading. My husband told them, ‘I got used since I was a student to read the newspapers, I took the paper, I read it at home.’ He had this habit of reading the newspaper from home. We subscribed from the beginning to the local newspaper, the Nepujsag. I was a housekeeper. Then I fell sick with my nerves, and we had to renounce emigrating. It was a misery at that time. We had a very hard life in the 1960s. None of us was a party member, neither me, nor my husband. I didn’t take part in anything. It didn’t mean a disadvantage that my husband wasn’t a party member, they acknowledged it. He wanted to quit it. They offered him a chief accountant position at the August 23 [the local furniture factory], at the sugar works, and he wanted to quit, but they didn’t let him go. And if they don’t issue the paper, he looses his years [so they wouldn’t take them into account when calculating his pension].

At the beginning, when this association was established, they organized so-called social evenings [for the colleagues], so we brought some cakes, biscuits, everybody at their choice. Once somebody was talking there about baking, from what and how one could bake, and I let it slip that: ‘Oh my God, the yellow gateau is so simple, one puts a little cacao on it, it has to be stirred, and one prepares a marbly pie.’ At this moment a saucy comrade started to laugh: ‘Well, her ladyship got used to cacao…’ When I really would have worked on it, I was organizing, so that as many people came as possible, and that buffet would look [nice], and a chief bigmouth hurls this into my face. Well then, I thought, to hell with you all, I will never come here again.

I never cooked on Saturdays before the war. After the war there was nothing special, my husband worked on Saturdays too, because it was a workday. But he always organized in such way to have some free days left when holidays came, to have free days at Shavuot, at Yom Kippur and at Pesach. So I always prepared lunch. I wouldn’t say that gateau too, since I cooked enough the whole year, because my husband adored it. This one too liked very much sweets. And I had the opportunity to learn. Before the war one of my neighbors attended a cooking school in Bucharest, and I learnt everything from her. Then, when we came back from the war, me and my girlfriends gathered, one remembered this, the other that, and that’s how I collected my recipes. I have a thick recipe copy-bock, where I wrote all the recipes. I have recipes that require tens of eggs and twenty of [decagrams] almond… But I have simple ones too, which aren’t expensive, but are still good.

I light candles on Friday evening even today. Since I got married, from the first Friday evening. I light two candles. Our religions says that it has to be lighted when the first star rises, and it has to burn at least half an hour after the star rose. [Editor’s note: The Sabbath candles have to be lighted before Sabbath begins, that is before sunset, and not before the star rises; it is the end of Sabbath which is related to the rise of stars.] And I put a shawl on my head, and there is a prayer [the candle lighting blessing] that we recite in Hebrew, I know it by heart. I light the two candles, I recite that short blessing, then I say to myself what I want. I ask God that my dear dead rest in peace. On Friday evenings, since my husband liked fish, I prepared some fish dish. I can prepare it in many ways. If I didn’t feel well, he liked to have coffee with challah, so we had that. I can’t knead the challah. At my mother always the servants kneaded it. At holidays, at Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur [the evening before the fast] we prepared challah, we always had challah on those days.

At Pesach my husband never ate bread during all his life. Me, when I couldn’t chew well, and I couldn’t eat matzah, because it pricked me, I started to eat bread. But I didn’t eat bread I think until the age of 80-85. We had other meals, we had so many good dishes at Pesach. While my second husband lived, I followed through this circus [the Seder] for the two of us. It was just the two of us, because we had nobody, nor me, nor him. My husband went through the Seder ritual, he read me from the Haggadah. I was the child, I said the Mah Nishtanah, we played the whole ritual. He said its own part, and me – when he hides that specific matzah, after that one has to wash hands –, while he was washing his hands, I took it, and hid it somewhere else. Then dinner followed. We had dinner, then we took out the afikoman. And I didn’t give it until I didn’t ask something. I asked what I needed at that time, and what he was able to buy. To buy me a new toothbrush, a little eau de cologne, so trifles. And it was so good, it was a nice evening. And everything was delicious. I did my best to prepare fine things, good gateau, for example one can prepare Pesach gateau as well, without flour. I have a recipe, gateau with nuts and orange cream, it doesn’t require flour, only one tablespoon nut and one tablespoon mashed matzah or matzo meal. It is a delicious and expensive thing. I needed two oranges: one in its dough, and one in its cream. And 30 decagrams of butter. I got orange, sometimes people brought me. I always got things somehow. Then I washed the dishes, because there were a lot, since I laid the table properly.

We didn’t observe Purim and Chanukkah. When we had to go to the synagogue, we went together. He had very nice colleagues. It happened sometimes that a delegation or a superior came from Bucharest, from the ministry right when it was holiday. My husband says: ‘Woe, the delegation is announced for tomorrow…” His colleague, Abi says: ‘Never mind, just go to the synagogue, we will settle this in your place. Go tranquilly, don’t you think at all about coming to the office!’ He had such colleagues, and such a director too, he overlooked it. In those times they started to look after to have results, they came to their senses. The personnel managers didn’t have so much influence anymore. The ‘csebres’ [bucket maker], that’s how my husband called the cadre class. You know, those who make the ‘cseber’ [buckets] are called ‘kadar’ [means cooper, but refer to the cadres]. [Editor’s note: Mrs. Steinmetz’s husband made a pun from the similarity of the words ‘kadar’ which means cooper and ‘kader’ which is cadre.] So the management didn’t care so much, they were interested in how people worked. During the communist era we were members of the Jewish community, we always paid the membership fee. We paid it under our own name. There were people who paid, but not under their own name. However my husband never thought of proceeding otherwise, especially that they knew he was going to the synagogue. They accepted him as he was. This was an elite class, there weren’t so many good-for-nothing people, one had to be good in his profession, so a milkman from the street couldn’t have been employed there. Perhaps in the cadre class. There were times when the financial management of the wood industry from Maramarossziget to Csikszereda was in his hands. I don’t know how many thousands of workers got their salary in right time, that’s why he got his award, as it never ever occurred that the salary would be late.

At processions my husband had to present himself. I never thought of going with him. I never agreed with the communist ideas of those times. Whatever is established through violence, I can’t agree with that. It can’t be right what is ruled. I don’t want that someone tells me what to do.

There were times when we were very poor, respectively we had to spread out well the money. There was one salary and an illness… My husband had a salary of 1,000-1,5000 lei. During communism I had to keep servants next to me for seven years. It didn’t matter that I paid 100 lei to a 14 years old villager girl, the point was to have somebody with me in the house. I didn’t need the help itself, but to have somebody next to me. They were Hungarian girls, and also a Romanian one. By the end, when I felt I could stay alone in the mornings, the sewing school was launched. I went there on the first day of school, when they came out to the yard in the break, I was asking: ‘Who needs accommodation?’ Everybody needed, because many girls came to this school from the villages. And a small lean Romanian girl ran with her plait and told me in Romanian: ‘I don’t have, Missis, I don’t! I have an elder sister, but her host won’t let the both of us stay there.’ I gave her the address. She left. I thought she had just came a few days before from a village next to Szaszregen, she wouldn’t come, she wouldn’t find this small street anyway. At two o’clock she steps in: ‘Here I am, Madam!’ She stayed at me for three years. I told her I couldn’t give her meal or anything else, only accommodation. And she was sleeping in the kitchen. I told her she had to get up early, because the Mister went to work at 7, and he was taking breakfast in the kitchen. She passed her exams with excellent marks, she was very clever. Everything was alright for 3 years, but we were in touch after that too. 7-8 years ago, maybe less, we lost contact. She lives in the third village from here, she was successful, she became a manager, she was very skilful, but she fell sick or something, and our relationship interrupted. She was the last one I kept for money.

During communism we visited Pest and Israel two times. It wasn’t difficult to get our passports, because I had an acquaintance at the Securitate who obtained it for me, and brought it home. When we wanted to travel 13 for the first time, I was so ill, that I couldn’t go there to pick up my passport, so he brought it home. I had a girlfriend – a widow, a young and good-looking woman –, and he was her friend. The man wasn’t married. And he did it for me, but he came off well. I brought him as much Kent cigarettes that it meant currency then. I brought him special things. I didn’t bring as many things even for myself. I got things too, I came with many packages. We were in Pest in 1975. I spent there two weeks and a half, but I know Pest like the back of my hand. However it looked differently after the war. In 1976 we were in Israel, and we were there in 1983 for the last time. We visited my husband’s cousin. We stayed only two weeks at aunt Piri in Netanya. We never stayed in hotels [but in cheaper lodgings]. Once I was there for three months, and once for six months uninterruptedly, so I had the chance to get to know it. I saw not only nice things, I saw other things too. It is a very hard-working nation, but one can find human weaknesses and defects, which all nations have. There are enough crooks, there are enough infamous people, but there are also industrious and capable people as well, and they do work. And they built up such a modern state, one couldn’t even dream of a better one. I visited the Garden of Gethsemane, the Hill of Calvary, I never saw such a Christian church, though I visited the Capuchin Church in Vienna, the St Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest. In Israel there are agencies where they run buses daily, they show this and that, for one day, for two days, you can choose. I was interested in the water of Jordan. I brought water from there in three small bottles for my Christian girlfriends. I had the courage to go down, because one had to descend to get water. I filled the bottles, I entered the church, and I asked the priest to sanctify them. So I did all kind of things. At some other time I spent two weeks in Jerusalem and its surroundings. I saw there the Dome of the Rock and the other [the Church of the Holy Sepulchre]. They are quite close to each other.

In 1994 my husband died. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Marosvasarhely. They recited the Kaddish as well, Grunstein was the chazzan then, and he led the ceremony. But let’s not talk about this, because it’s something that hurts a lot. After so many years, eleven years passed since I lost him, and I still receive respect due to him. Where my husband worked, there were a lot of young people, activists, party members. They still greet me. Because of him. He was such a person, that even after 60 years: ‘How are you doing, Missis Steinmetz?’ For example a few weeks ago they offered me to bring me fish from the lake. Considering his personality, he was an absolutely fair man.

I don’t get any support from the community. Gifts sometimes, when Rosh Hashanah comes, and they have superfluous food, they send me a package. The truth is that the pension I’m getting from Germany is enough for the moment. And for example I got something recently, but just a little, from Hungary, after the parent. I got support every week from a Scottish organization. [Editor’s note: The Targu Mures Trust was established in 1999 by Ethne Woldman, the manager of the Jewish Care Scotland. The organization pays three persons to visit and help elder people. http://www.eastrenfrewshire.gov.uk/holocaust/testimonies/holocaust_remembrance_2004_-_targu_mures.htm] They come every Tuesday.

I feel good, I have nothing to be ashamed of. I was born here, I live here, and I will die here. Unfortunately there is nothing to tell about everyday life at this age. Days pass slowly, because all kind of health problems appear each day. I had problems even with my ear, I need this one [the hearing aid] too. I can’t listen to music anymore, though music was everything for me. I solve crosswords, I read the daily paper, I watch television, I choose for myself 2 or 3 stupid soap operas, which I can understand even if I don’t read [the subtitles]. Unfortunately they don’t broadcast enough music, though I have 30-40 channels with this television set. People like me very much, a lot of people come to visit me [the members of the Targu Mures Trust among others]. But the nicest thing is that [the person who lives] there, opposite – I don’t know their name and they don’t know either my name, but we communicate, we talk. They showed me that two flowers [were put in my window], and they say [show] that no one has flowers, but you do. Well, we have such amusements. They keep me in mind as a very old person. Maybe they know my age as well, because they can see me.

Glossary

Eva Anna Gaspar
Marosvasarhely
Romania
The interviewers: Zsolt Orban and Ildiko Molnar
Edited by: Zsuzsa Kusztos
The date of the interview: March 2005

Anna Gaspar is a small, thin, bespectacled woman, who fascinated me each time we met with her mental alertness and humor. She is a whole-hearted and friendly woman. Her hobby is embroidering and she adores her plants. According to her, the plants grow so well because she talks to them. Her daughter’s family lives in the same flat 2 floors below her, but she doesn’t like to disturb them. However, her daughter visits her on daily basis, calls her up several times a day to inquire about her. Auntie Aniko cooks invents meals and cooks them for herself. One of her kind replies to my goodbye, take care, is: ’All right, all right, my only concern is to take care of myself!’ And she laughs. This is what auntie Aniko is like.

Family Background

Jewish Traditions

Parents

Growing Up

School

After High School

Ghettoization

Auschwitz

Forced Labour in Riga

Forced Labour on the Baltic Sea

Stutthof Concentration Camp

Liberation at Gdansk Internment Camp

Returning Home

Remarriage and Children

Life Today

Glossary

Family Background

My paternal grandparents were originally from Debrecen, Hungary. My grandfather’s name was Menyhert Schwartz, and I think my grandmother’s was Elza. I don’t know what their occupations were, because I was too small, around 2-3, when my grandfather died. I don’t really remember him. He was much older than my grandmother. I remember once I was taken to my grandfather and he had a walking stick. He sat in the armchair, and he pulled me closer with that stick. He put the hook of the walking stick around my neck and pulled me with that. I was afraid, very afraid. This was the only time I met my grandfather. My grandmother gave up the apartment, sold the house, and moved to be with her son in Kisszekeres, also in Hungary, and she died there. I met her several times there, we used to visit her during the summer, and I used to stay there for a month. She was a homemaker, she didn’t work in the garden, and she helped out her daughter-in-law, this is all I know.

They had three children, the eldest was my father, he had a sister, Etelka Grunstein and a brother, Samu Schwartz. Etelka died when I was around 10-15. Her husband was a farmer, but I didn’t know him. They had a huge estate, but the family died out. They had three children, three daughters who lived in Kassa. At that time we lived in Romania, so we couldn’t visit them. When Northern Transylvania was annexed to Hungary [according to the Second Vienna Dictate] 1 I went several times to visit them, and I think I met auntie Etelka, but I'm not sure. The eldest sister, Bebi, emigrated together with her daughter Zsuzsi to Israel. The two younger sisters were deported from Kassa [today Kosice, Slovakia]. The family where my grandmother lived [at his son Schwartz Samu] had no children. Samu and auntie Erzsi, Samu’s wife, had no children. Samu was a farmer too, he lived in Kisszekeres. He had his own estate, which they managed. They had animals, poultries, they raised all kinds of animals. They never took me out to the estate, I just lived in their house. I know only that uncle Samu used to go away early in the morning and came home late in the evening.

My father’s name was Hugo Schwartz, he was born in 1888 in Debrecen. I know he was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. He was very proud he was lieutenant. He had a decoration and he was so proud he was showing off with it all the time. He related us much about the war, because he fought through World War I. When he was demobilized after the war, he became a farmer. He graduated a university as agricultural engineer.

My father wasn’t religious at all, he didn’t wear a hat, he wasn’t even kosher. And he didn’t observe the traditions. Jews are allowed to eat only kosher meals, pork meat and pork fat is forbidden. That’s why they must use hen or goose fat for cooking. The shochet has to slaughter the chickens, cows and calves. But my father didn’t observe these rules. We had everything: bacon, sour cream and meat.

My maternal great-grandfather and grandparents were originally from Zerind [Nagyzerend correctly in Hungarian]. This is a village in Arad county, between Nagyvarad and Arad, 60 km from Nagyvarad. My great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather are buried there, as well. My grandparents never related about their parents, great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents. Interestingly, things today are completely different, at least from my point of view. I am terribly fond of my grandchildren. They [my maternal grandparents] kept me at a distance. For example I never got a caressing or a kind word from my grandparents. I don’t know why. I had no attachment to my grandmother or to my grandfather. My mother was different. Between us there was a strong attachment.

My maternal grandfather, Emanuel Weiss, Mano in Hungarian, was a deep religious, decent man. His children weren’t so religious. My grandmother Regina Weiss was religious too, but she didn’t wear a wig. I remember them very well, because I spent every summer in Zerind, if we didn’t go for holiday somewhere else. But if we did, we only went to Borszek to take some fresh air, but even then we spent a part of the summer holiday in Zerind. When Northern Transylvania was annexed to Hungary 1 we didn’t go to our father, me and my brother went to Zerind. We were there every summer, sometimes for as long as three months. My mother was there as well. They locked the apartment and we all went to Zerind. It was a large house, later it was nationalized, and I never regained it. I couldn’t obtain my uncle’s death certificate. His wife didn’t want to give it to me. She said the wealth belonged to my uncle and she inherited it. Poor of him died 15 years ago. He escaped from the deportation. And so the house was nationalized. I managed to regain some land that formerly belonged to my grandfather.

I can still see the large old house, it was in the center of the village. There was a dining room, a living room, a bedroom for my grandparents, a spare room, a separate room for my uncle – he was single at that time, he got married later, when I was a big girl already – and there was a kitchen and a bathroom too. We had a pump in the yard. Once a week, the coachman, uncle Gyuri, pumped up the water into a reservoir, which was in the loft, and we had water in the bathroom for one week. We had a boiler in the bathroom and stoves in the rooms. There wasn’t and there still is no gas in Zerind, we used to heat with wood. One of my uncles built a new, modern apartment near the grandparent's house, and they lived there. There were four or five rooms also. But I saw that building only after the war. They kept cows in the yard and they used to give milk for free to the poor. My grandfather was really charitable, and he helped the poor very much. They milked the cows every morning and every evening and there were some people who came with their pots and got milk for free. There were a few poor people in the village, and they knew already who got milk for free in the morning and who in the evening. It wasn’t necessary to be Jewish to get milk for free. There was no anti-Semitism then. They knew my grandfather was the wealthiest in the area, but nobody said a word against him.

They were involved in farming, they did agriculture. They had a large estate. They raised animals, but not many, agriculture was more important. They even grew rice. My grandparents had an enormous estate. The yard was incredibly long, it was very, very large. The temple was there and some offices in the street, and the coachman lived there too. There was a large stable on the left. There were a few horses, as many as needed for the carriage. Two, three or four, but I don’t know exactly how many. In the back of the yard was the vegetable garden and the fruit-garden. It was an enormous lot. There were people who managed the vegetable garden and the stable. We called them servants. They were usually Hungarians, because Zerind was a Hungarian village, I don't know if there were any Romanians at all there. It was a totally Hungarian village. I don’t know how many servants we had. Some of them worked the land, but there were some servants in the house as well. Those who worked in the house were considered of a higher rank than those who worked the land. And those who worked in the agriculture had houses in the yard. The house servants were villagers and they always went home. The grandparents were so democrats they built bathrooms and toilets, water-closets, for the servants. It was a huge house with an “L” shape.

For example they tried to grow rice and they succeeded. Nobody grew rice in that area, but they tried and succeeded. The Koros was near by, they drained the water from there with ditches, because the rice needs water. The ditches were made from metal, not from wood. First they tried on a small area and when they saw its success, they made a larger plantation, because it was a rarity to grow rice in Transylvania. It was lucrative, so it returned the investment. For example, my grandfather managed to breed the white buffalo. The buffaloes are usually completely black. And only my grandfather had a white buffalo in that area. They probably had an unpigmented [albino] buffalo, and they made it mate with a cow and so another white buffalo resulted, but I don’t know exactly how. Even now, when we were there, my husband was really impressed when the people came and said: ‘well, we still remember Mr. Weiss, who bred the white buffalo...’ It died out, there are no more white buffaloes left. But my grandfather bred it.

There was an administrator. The wholesalers used to come and buy from us. There was a completely different world then. My grandfather gave up farming and my uncle took over. In fact, they just managed the estate. And each part of the estate had a responsible leader. My grandfather just managed things. He did the paperwork, and he only dealt with the large enterprises and the suppliers. They didn’t bother with small things like retailing. And to be honest, I was a child and I didn’t care. Not to mention that after we were annexed to Hungary, and Zerind remained in Romania [Editor’s note: It was in southern direction from Nagyvarad, so it belonged to Southern Transylvania.] I didn’t go there anymore. The border was there. Until then we went to Zerind by train, so I got used to travel with the train since my childhood. I sat near the window and I stuck my head out, I remember that the wind got in my eye, but I wasn't afraid.

My grandfather was Orthodox, a strict one. He observed the Sabbath, the Pesach and all the other holidays. He used to pray every morning, he wore all the religious clothes on his head and his arms. When they visited us in the town, and we lived in the same place, he never missed the morning prayer. He was deeply religious. I saw him praying in tallit. I got out of the room, but my presence never bothered him. It was mandatory to read the prayers. Once I asked him why, if he has to say the same prayer every morning. You are not allowed to recite it because you could omit a word. That’s why one has to read it. And he read the Talmud almost all the time. He read a few Hungarian novels as well, he was allowed to. He always used to say these novels had only two kinds of outcome, the people [the characters] either died or got married. He was a very educated old man, I was the only one who argued with him quite a lot.

Jewish Traditions

My grandfather built a Jewish temple in the yard of their house. It wasn’t a synagogue, just a prayer house. It wasn’t allowed to build storeyed houses, I don’t know why, but there was a separate hall for men and women. I was a child, I didn’t go to the temple, but I saw people coming on Friday evening, and they were quite many, around 40-50. The ceremony took place according to the Orthodox ritual. A rabbi used to come there on high holidays, but he didn’t live in the village. There was a chazzan, but there was no rabbi. The temple was only open on Fridays, Saturdays and on holidays, on weekdays people used to pray at home, at least those who did...

But Saturday was a very important event. It was not my grandmother who prepared things, I don’t want to show off, but we had a house-maid and a cook, and they did everything. My grandmother only told them what to do, and they did that. The cook was a villager, so she went home every day, but there was a house-maid who helped her, and she did the housework. On Saturday it was forbidden to do anything, we were allowed only to read the prayer book. I read it, but I didn’t pray too much. But it was forbidden to tell the house-maid to ‘turn on the light’ when it was getting dark. It was forbidden to sew as well. In a word we could do nothing, because my grandfather didn’t let us. I spent the time with reading, and I used to go out for a walk. I was a child, and I went with my girlfriends. I didn’t stay at home on Saturdays, I went home just for lunch and then I went away again.

On Friday evening my grandmother brought out a Menorah, she lit all the seven candles and she prayed. She held her hand above it and she mumbled the prayer. My mother [at home] lit only two candles, separately, but I don’t think she prayed. My mother wasn’t religious. And then came the dinner, which itself was a whole ceremony. For side dish we had fish aspic, and then meat soup, roast and a meal called ‘ritschet’, which I didn’t like at all. It was a specialty made from bean and gershli, but I did’t like it, and my grandmother always scolded me because I didn’t eat it. Then we had fruit. But it was a great dinner, it always commenced quite early, because, you know, the candles were lit already at dusk, and lasted quite long. Grandfather graced us, he put the shawl on my head and the cap on my brother's head. He always took up my brother, telling him ‘Laci, where is your head?’ This meant he had no cap, he wasn’t wearing it. And he graced all of us, first my grandmother, then my mother, my brother and I was the last. This happened before dinner, after the candle-lighting. He said the 'broche' for everything. I think I knew some broches then, but now I don’t remember any of them. You had to say broche for every dish and for the fruit also. And then you had to mumble something.

They prepared the cholent for Saturday. On Friday the house-maid took the cholent to the baker, to put it in the stove. It was always a big question mark how the cholent would be. For example I liked it more juicy. My grandparents liked it toasted. We competed with each other – but usually I won. And there was kugel in the cholent, they removed the skin from the gooseneck, but they didn’t cut it, and they stuffed it until it looked like a sack. After I came home I always tried to find out how they made the stuffing, but nobody could tell me. I liked the kugel very much, boiled in the cholent, and when the bean became toasted, the kugel became toasted as well, and then they cut it up. It was delicious, I loved it. They baked the cholent in a pot, which was covered with paper. The servant had to go after the cholent on Saturday at a fixed hour. On Saturday we had cholent, soup, meat, and all kind of meals. My poor grandfather liked very much to eat, he had two strokes, both of them after Saturday. Finally my mother didn’t let him eat fatty things, she cooked garlic soup for him, but when my mother turned away, he always took the dip from the meat soup terrine and he put it in the garlic soup, to make it tastier. We ate in the room, of course, not in the kitchen. Now we eat in the kitchen. But then we didn’t go to the kitchen at all. Grandma didn’t really go to the kitchen, she just gave out the instructions. My mother did. The eating was a ceremony in itself.

The really big ceremony was at Pesach. Before Pesach there was the chametzing. My mother spread crumbs and my grandfather gathered them with a small dustpan and a brush. He had to go to every room to gather the crumbs. And then they brought down the Pesach dishes from the loft in a big chest. The Pesach dishes were a different service. They changed the chinas, the glasses, the cutlery, the cookers, absolutely everything. Nothing remained from the everyday ones. They put the everyday ones aside and took out the Pesach dishes. The Pesach dishes were a Rosenthal service, the most famous china. I don't know exactly whether they were made in Germany or Austria, but I think the Rosenthal chinas were made in Austria. We couldn’t use wheat or yeasty flour at Pesach, but we could buy potato flour from the store. My mother made yellow cake from that…I didn’t eat it and I will never eat that good yellow cake, made from potato flour. She made it like the normal cake. She mixed the egg-yolk with sugar, put in the mousse and the flour. And from this a yellow cake is made. And then one can put coca in it, or nuts, but the base is that yellow cake. And it had to contain flour. But instead of flour she put potato flour in it, but that wasn’t that dry, but this yellow cake was quite dry, and has a much better taste, at least I liked it better. There was a label on every food-product that ‘sel Pesach’. We had special milk; we couldn’t buy milk from the store, we got the milk from the Jewish Community and that was Pesach milk. We did it in the same way at my grandparents, in Zerind and in Varad also, because they lived in Varad since 1940. The chicken are taken to the shochet and he slaughters them, right? It was forbidden to eat it, the shochet had to see it first whether it was kosher or not. There was a shochet in Zerind. He slaughtered the cows and the sheep and all the other animals too.

At Pesach the first evening is the eve of Seder. On the eve of Seder all the family gathered in Zerind, and we sat to the table in the enormous dining room, it was a very long table there, my grandfather sat at the head of the table in a large armchair and he leaned against the armchair, because one had to lean sometimes to the right, then to the left, just as it is written in the Haggadah. [Editor’s note: According to the Haggadah, during Seder eve one has to lean aside to eat what’s on the table. The Haggada provides an instruction for this in the section starting with ‘Mah nisstanah’ (What is the difference? i.e. between this night and the others): The fourth question of Mah nishtanah: ‘Why is this night different from the others? On the other ones we eat sitting down and leaning, but this night leaning.’ The custom of leaning comes from the Roman custom according to which the free, full citizens used toe at leaning on pillows. The Jews gain their freedom at the holiday of Pesach, when they managed to get free from the pharaohs rule. The custom of leaning on pillows symbolizes the status of freedom. There is no chalakhic rule for this. One has to lean to one side, but according to some traditionsone has to lean to the left and to the right, but this has no chalakhic motivation.] My oldest uncle, Bela, together with his wife, sat on my grandfather’s right-hand side. They had no children. On my grandfather’s left-hand side there sat uncle Vili with his wife, then my mother and my youngest uncle with his wife and we, the children. We were four, my two cousins, my brother and myself. We sat at the other end of the table. All the grandchildren were there. My grandfather sat on the head of the table and he led the Seder. That was a great experience. He told us what to do: we had to eat this and drink that. And of course we, the children, used to giggle, because we didn’t care too much… We sat at the other end of the table, and we played silly pranks, but it was very impressive… Not really because of the religiousness, because I'm not religious at all, I couldn't believe in something after what I went through, but the grandparents imposed us the ceremony. The plate I have now in front of me is a special china plate, a large white plate with a few dents. In every dent there were different vegetables, horseradish and parsley and I don’t now what, but to be honest I didn’t really care. But my grandfather gave it to me to put them between two matzot, and that matzah was a special matzah, not this thing we eat now. They were thick and handmade, not machine-made ones. The other matzot, the ones we bought, were machine-made, but those from the top of the plate, separated with table napkins, were special ones...

My grandfather had a big, silver goblet, the boys a smaller one, while we had a little one, but also made from silver. That was in front of us, and we had to drink from it when my grandfather told us to. It was a really intimate atmosphere. We put a separate goblet for Eliyah. That one was an even bigger goblet. There are so many things that were wiped from my memory, and I don’t really want to think about them, but I remember the table very well. Everyone’s face was in front of me. Although I had no photos of my uncles and aunts or anyone else, I can still see them even now. Everyone had a silver goblet. I was very upset because aunts had smaller goblets than the uncles. Feminism was already working inside me. From the head to the other end of the table the goblets became smaller and smaller. But it was only allowed to use those goblets at Pesach, on Seder eve.

We had to say the mah nishtanah, and my grandfather read the Haggadah in Hebrew. We didn’t understand it, nobody explained it to us. They told us if we didn't understand something we only had to ask and they explained it. But who cared? We were children. Adults always told the children what they had to do, so we did the same. I remember we had to dip our sins with our little finger in the glass and shake it off to get rid of them. And when one of the children, I don’t remember who, put his/her finger in his/her mouth, my grandfather scolded him for that, because he/she could remain with the sin in this way. He explained it something like this. At mah nishtanah they always asked another child’s name, and he/she answered. We, the children, had approximately the same age. One of my cousins was born in 1923, the other in 1924 and my brother in 1921. So we had almost the same age, and we always decided who would say the mah nishtanah. My grandfather asked who would say the mah nishtanah. In fact there are some questions in the mah nishtanah regarding how/why we did this or that. It is a crying shame that I don’t remember the mah nishtanah, even though I finished the elementary, the middle and the high school in the Jewish school. We had religion classes and separate Hebrew classes, taught by that poor Leichmann, and we learned how to write and read in Hebrew, but I don’t remember anything now. One of these days it occurred to me that I don’t remember even the Hebrew letters. But then they asked the mah nishtanah in Hebrew, the booklet was in front of us, but it was written with Roman letters. Not with Hebrew letters, to avoid the confusion. In a word we had to read it out if we didn’t want to stammer.

There was a ceremony where one of my uncles distracted my grandfather's attention, and we had to hide a piece of matzah somewhere in the room. He didn’t have to know where the matzah was, he just told that the person who hid it to bring it back. It wasn’t so strict that he had to find it. Usually a child hid it, and he gave it back, in exchange for a present. A kilogram of chocolate, or anything you asked for… I know my brother requested some writing utensils, because he always wanted to learn. There were no computers and this kind of things. I think my cousin asked for clothes, but I don't know exactly... But we had everything we needed. Every year it was a different grandchild who stole the thing we had to hide, and he/she got something for it …, he/she gave it only in exchange of a present.

We opened the door, and we waited for the Messiah to come in. [Editor’s note: According to the liturgy Elijah is expected, who is the messenger of the Messiah’s coming.] A really funny thing happened once. There was the new part of the house, my uncle built it. It was near the old house, and we had to go up ten steps to the corridor. And the apartment opened from the corridor There were many rooms there. And they opened all the doors, the door of the dining room, the front door and the outer door. And who came in? A cow popped in its head through the door. I’ll never forget this. Everybody was so shocked about how could this have happened...? They surely took up the coachman for that. The cows were in the stable, and probably this one wasn’t tied well, nobody knew, I don’t remember, but I know it was a great fuss because of that, and they sanctioned the coachman. And the cow popped in its head. But only its head. I can almost see it even now, it had a mottled chop, but you could imagine the face everyone made. My grandfather told that if he was superstitious, he had to believe that the soul of the Messiah moved in a cow. But he didn’t believe in such things… he opened the door for the Messiah. Well, this was funny event. And I related this to my religion teacher, and he enjoyed the story also. This really happened.

At the holidays of fall we made a tent in the yard, in our garden from Varad, because the grandparents were already in Varad in the fall. There was a kind of summerhouse which had a removable roof, they covered it with twigs and so they converted it into a tent. But we never ate there. My grandfather used to pray there, several times a day, but we didn’t eat there because it was too small. My grandfather never ate or slept there. Children used to decorate the Sukkah. I decorated it together with my brother, we used colored paper, branches and flowers… But it was a really pleasant place for sitting, but it was forbidden to go there when my grandfather was praying. It wasn’t a large place, it was a small summerhouse. Otherwise it had furniture, a table with chairs, but it was small. 

My favorite holiday was Purim. Purim is a high holiday. If I remember well, we had to eat eight kinds of fruits. They were winter fruits, there was St. John’s bread, and that is a kind of fruit too. We had to get eight kinds of fruits. They observed this. And we, the children, were very happy. They got bananas, oranges, apples, plums and I don't know what else... [Editor’s note: Anna Gaspar confuses the customs of two subsequent holidays. One of them is Purim, the mitzvot and customs of which are based on the story of Esther and the Jews living in the Persian empire, and the other one is the Tu bi-Shevat, the new year of Trees. At Purim one of the mitzvoth is the shelakhmones, that is the sending of at least two small packages, presents, which include, beside the pastry called hamantashen people used indeed to put some rare fruit. The Tu bi-Shevat (the 15th day of the month of Shvat), the new year of Trees is the holiday when it is a tradition to put as much fruit on the table as possible. During the period of the Tabernacle the Tu bi-Shevat referred to bringing the first ripe fruit of the trees to the Tabernacle. After the disappearance of the Tabernacle new customs have developed around this holiday: taking the example of Seder of Pesach it is a custom to organize a 'fruit Seder', where people put on the table many types of fruit, especially ones originally from Israel.]

I also loved Chanukkah. It had such an intimate atmosphere. There was a special candlestick, the chanukkiyah, which had 8 candles instead of 7, and they lit every day one more candle. My mother didn’t light candles, I think my grandfather lit them. There were eight plus one candles, he lit one of them, and the others using this one. [Editor’s note: The first candle was the shammash.] It was forbidden to light every candle with match. They always gave presents to the children at Chanukkah. But not only at high holidays. They were very open-handed. To be honest, they were wealthy enough to be open-handed, but my grandmother was a avaricious woman. I wasn’t on good terms with my grandmother, I couldn’t accept her temper. She was so avaricious that when they brought in the terrine, and my mother drew out the soup for everybody, she looked into the terrine and said what was left was not enough for the housemaids. And she took the water-jug and poured water in the soup. I stood up from the table and I wasn’t willing to eat together with her anymore. These things irritated me terribly. She was very avaricious indeed. If she was poor, I would have understood her. My poor husband used to say when I didn't buy something for me: ‘I can tell you are your grandmother’s granddaughter’ – and this was the worst scolding I could get from him. So I didn’t love her, I know it’s not nice to say such things, but she was a bad woman. As good as my grandfather was, so bad was she, with everybody. She was angry all the time because she had to do this and that, to cook separately for that kid, this was me, but she went to the pantry [in secret] and she ate enough. She, alone…

My grandfather was a religious, honest and reliable man. The father of his son’s wife always told him that ‘You are a…’ – it was a special expression for that and it meant he was not a believer, although they met in the synagogue almost every Saturday. He disesteemed my grandfather because he wasn’t so deeply religious. He observed the religious rules generally, but he wasn’t a bigot… he did only what was necessary. I think he didn’t cheat anybody during his life. He didn’t wear payes, he had nice white hair. He had a small, white goatee. He wore a hat. He always had a problem with my brother because he didn’t wear a cap: ‘Laci, you lost your head again! Where is your head?’ Especially when we sat down, and my grandfather said the prayer, then we had to put on a cap.

I never heard my grandfather discussing politics. My grandparents were not interested in politics. All what I know is that my grandmother Regina sat down near to the radio, and when Hitler spoke, she scolded him all the time. This was their only political manifestation.

My grandparents always spent the winter in the town, in Varad. They were old and they had to be under permanent medical supervision. They were in Varad when the annexation took place, and that’s why they were deported. If they remained in Zerind, they would have avoided the deportation… But unfortunately they were taken away. When this happened, my poor grandfather was around 83-85 and my grandmother 74. [Editor’s note: By the time of the deportation the grandfather was 79 and the grandmother was 76 years old.]

Parents

My mother had three brothers, she was the only girl among her siblings. At that time we all had our own governess [Fraulein] for the boys and for the girls. This was in vogue in the elite families, and we belonged to those. My mom’s oldest brother was Bela Weiss, he lived in Kolozsvar. They had a distillery on Arpad street 38. I spent many holidays there, mostly the Christmas holidays. They were wealthy, but they had no children. My uncle married auntie Irma, an extremely decent woman, they were full cousins, the mother of auntie Irma was the sister of my grandfather. She became pregnant, but there were complications, premature birth and thrombosis, and the baby died. And the doctors told them they couldn’t have more children. When my brother started the seventh grade, my uncle came to us and he asked my mother to give him my brother. He wanted to sign over their wealth to him, and he said a boy needed a father, a man, to raise him. And my poor mother cried so much after my brother… but enough about this. And my brother finished the high school in Kolozsvar, and he was taken away to forced labor from there. I never saw him again. They didn’t adopt him, just raised him.

The other brother, uncle Wili, lived in Szilagy county, not far from Nagykaroly, in a village called Tasnad. He built a family house there and he was a farmer. He married the wealthiest girl from Varad, a girl called Leitner. She was the wealthiest girl and my uncle married her. So there was plenty to bite on. Money wasn’t a problem for them. They had two daughters, Agi and Evi. They were deported and their parents didn’t come home. None of them. The girls didn’t come home, neither. When the girls were liberated, the Swedish soldiers asked them, who wanted to go to Sweden. The girls didn’t want to come home, and they spent one or one and a half year in Sweden. They met their future husbands there, one of them went to America, the other to England. One of them died in America.

My mother had a third brother, uncle Herman Weiss, who remained in Zerind. His wife wore a wig, her father forced her to do so before the war, but then she took it off. I was a big girl when he got married, it happened around 1933. He wasn’t deported neither, because he lived in Romania, and they emigrated to Israel in 1948. The Jews were taken from the villages to Arad. And they lived there during the war, but then they moved back to Zerind. He wrote me in a letter what he found in the two houses, and how many wheat and corn there was in the granary… so he wrote down all the wealth and he said it would all be mine...

My mother’s name was Olga Weiss, she was born around 1890. She was the only girl of her parents. She attended the Catholic school and high school from Nagyvarad, but I don’t know why. There are things I remember and I realize I reconciled with everything. I agreed with everything they did. Why mom was raised by nuns? Her parents were in Zerind, she was in Varad, and she attended the convent there. I don’t know why. I am sure this she was so warm-hearted because nuns raised her. She graduated the high school, although the girls weren’t really used to graduate then. She knew only one Romanian sentence: ‘Merge la padure’ [Goes to the forest]. She didn’t speak Hebrew neither, but she knew German. In our family everybody knew German [we learnt from the governess].

I found out how my parents met only after the deportation. My husband and me were from Varad and we had a good acquaintance, Dr. Deutsch, Elemer Deutsch, and he invited us for a Seder eve. He wasn’t religious, but he observed the traditions. His cousin, Dengelegi, was there, too. The wife of his cousin, Edit Palfi, a lady doctor, was invited also. They lived in Vasarhely. Another guest was the cousin of Deutsch’s wife. They invited both us and them. I knew better his wife, Marta, she was my French teacher in the Jewish high school, and they asked me about my father, because they knew only my mother. And I began to relate. And then the doctor said – he was a big, fat man: ‘I remember now, I was the sadhen…! I arranged for your mother to meet your father, but then I heard that the marriage went wrong.’ I don’t know where he knew my father from, but it doesn’t matter. But he blamed himself for that. Around then the parents made kind of a fair, and traded what they would bring in. What could one feel for a stranger? Nothing. There wasn’t any courting. My mother became a fiancee, and then they made arrangements for the wedding. It was a great wedding, I think. They married around 1917-18.

My parent’s marriage wasn’t a subject of conversation, it took place probably in Zerind, but I don’t know exactly. They had both a civil and a religious marriage, and it was particularly difficult for them to divorce. Jews usually didn’t separate the couples like the Catholics. [Editor’s note: The comparison is incorrect because the Catholic Church forbids the divorce. Anna Gaspar referred to the fact that the Halacha strictly regulates the divorce procedure. The Halacha doen't recognize the civil divorce, the divorce procedure must be conducted under the supervision of the bet din (the Rabbinical Court).] It took quite a long time, but my grandparents insisted on the divorce. After they divorced, my mother assumed again her maiden name, and was registered as Olga Weiss. After they divorced, my mother remained single and so did my father. My mom’s photo was all the time on my father’s desk. He claimed my grandmother was the one who separated them. To be honest, my grandmother was a damn bad woman. It’s not nice to say this, but she was a very bad woman. And I believe she separated my parents. But I never found out why.

They divided the grandfather’s estate during their life. Each child got his/her share and lived on that. My uncle built a house in Tasnad and bought land from his share. They managed my mother’s estates as well, and she got some share after her those lands. We lived very well on that.

Growing Up

I had only one sibling, my brother, Janos Laszlo Schwartz. He was born in Nagyvarad, in 1921. I was born in Alsoszopor, in 1923, where my parents lived at that time, but I grew up in Varad We were on very good terms with my brother, although I wasn’t such a good to him as he was to me. My mother had another baby, who died when my mother was nine months pregnant. She fell over a sack of potatoes… she stumbled upon the sack and she fell on the baby... I told her it was a pity not to have another sibling, but she told me if it lived I would have never been born.

After my parents got married, they lived in Alsoszopor, because my mother got an estate there as a marriage portion and my father was a farmer there. And the house is still there, even today. Then they divorced and I don’t know how they divided the estate after the divorce, I was 3 years old, so I couldn’t know and I didn’t care much. But I was in Alsoszopor, and twenty years ago, when I was there, the house was still there. And I entered the house and I could tell where the dining room, the spare room and the bedroom was. I could tell because I remembered exactly. We had a separate children’s room. I remember even the cribs, in one corner there was my brother's crib, and in the other one there was mine. These are things people remember. But there are things I completely forgot. My brother was 5 when my parents divorced. I don’t know why my mother went to Nagyvarad to give birth, probably she thought she would be in better hands, especially after she lost a baby. She was probably afraid.

After my parents divorced, we moved to Varad. First we lived on Kalvaria Street, but that house was rented, and then they bought this duplex house. This was a bigger house, with a large garden. It had two gates and two apartments, and the middle wall was common with the neighbor. I remember the times we lived in Varad. I regained that house after the deportation and I sold it.

I lived together [in the other part of the house] with my mom, my brother and my two cousins, Agi and Evi, my uncle’s daughters, who were villagers, but they attended school in Varad. We were like four siblings: my brother and the three girls. It wasn’t enough for them to meet only at Christmas and Pesach, so my cousins’ parents rented a car. The driver used to carry my uncle’s family with his own car. And when we visited them, at the summer holiday, we went by car. I was 15 when I first got in a car.

I corresponded all the time with my father, he used to visit us twice a year. My father lived in Hungary, in Tornyosnemeti, near the Bohemian–Hungarian border. He was a communicative person – everybody liked him in the village. The half of his estate was in Bohemia and the other half in Hungary, so he had a permanent pass, I used to go with him quite often to Kassa. He had his share inherited from the family, he managed a part of his sister’s and brother-in-law’s estate also, and he had his own estates too. Probably he bought more land with his capital. My daughter badgered me all the time: ‘Mom, why didn’t you go there and asked him to give you your land back?' Before 1940 I visited my father every year, and he used to come twice a year to visit us in Varad. In 1940 we were annexed to Hungary, and traveling wasn’t a problem anymore. And then we used to visit him almost every summer. When we grew older, my mother allowed us to spend the summer holiday with our father. So we were on good terms, we had no problems. He used to help us, so he asked all the time what we needed, but I had to answer: ‘Thank you, we have all we need.' A child always needs something, but I had to answer that. But he always brought something. He lived in Hungary, he could get more things than us. Not to mention the Bohemian shoes he brought. He brought skating boots, heavy boots and many other things. Once he asked me in a letter what I needed. I wrote him I needed a raincoat. ‘All right, please send me your measures.’  And we went to a tailor and he took my measures, he added some centimeters to them, not to outgrow the coat until the next year. My father received my letter, he went to the store, and he told he needed a raincoat for his daughter. ‘Well, you know, we have to add some centimeters not to be too tight.’ And when I put the raincoat on and I looked into the mirror, I almost burst out crying. all of them added some centimeters to the measures, and I was a thin, puny girl. It looked on me like the trousers on a cow. My poor mom said: ‘Never mind!’ I remember where the tailor in Varad was, in the small marketplace, and he altered it for me. And it became so nice everybody from my class envied me.

At first period I felt awfully at my father’s place, probably because I was accustomed to the kosher household. My father didn’t observe the Jewish traditions. He had no kosher household. He had a woman cook, a house-maid and everything he wanted. But I couldn’t eat the meals made with sour cream. For example I remember I liked squash, but they made it with sour cream, so I couldn’t eat that. My father called my mother on the phone and asked her how should they cook for me. There was ham, boiled ham. I got so sick from it I vomited it out, so I wasn’t accustomed to the treyf household  Then I got used to it, but I still don't like having sour cream in the meal. We used to spend 2-3 weeks there. At most four weeks, not more. My father had a lady friend, we got acquainted with her, she was a very attractive woman. But my father never got married again. He lived alone in a mansion-like house. We were on good terms with him, we had no problems.

My father’s estate was more than a thousand acres large. I don’t know if they grew plants there. There were all kinds of things; they had to feed the animals and to maintain the farm. So they had wheat and corn for sure, but I didn’t care about it. I admired the animals, there were seed-horses and stocker cows, who gave I don't know how many liters of milk daily. He liked farming very much. He had an manager, kind of an administrator, who managed the thousand acres estate, and each year they used to bring animals to Budapest to the international fair. They grew all kinds of animals, from pigs to Icelander hens. Those had rings on their legs. The cock was really handsome. Once they took up a three hundred kilogram fat pig to the fair… So they had all kinds of animals, and many acres of land too. It was a model farm. My father enjoyed his job very much. He used to go everywhere with a britzka. The young groom sat in the back and my father drove the horse. I was very happy when we three, together with my brother, went with the britzka and the white horse... That horse had a problem, I remember such silly things, it used to bite off the villager women’s knot. He had sharp teeth, the women wore shawl, but the horse bit off the knot together with the shawl, and the knot remained in its mouth. We had to be careful because if the horse noticed a woman, it went after her to bite her knot off. This was its mania. My father told me not to beat the horse for this, because the animal wouldn't understand it.

I have to tell you that in 1940 when we have been annexed to Hungary 1, we got automatically the Hungarian citizenship. My father didn’t give up the Romanian citizenship because of us. We became Hungarian citizens automatically, but he didn’t. A German soldier was moved to our house, he was a decent young man and he asked us about my father. I don’t know how this came into question that we are Romanian citizens after our father. He advised us not to tell this to anybody, because we could get into trouble otherwise. We never told it to anybody, nobody knew nothing except his administrator, who reported him at the police for that. The administrator wrote in his report that my father is a Romanian spy. My father ended up in Kistarcsa this way. My brother went to visit him in Kistarcsa in 1940-42 or 1943, and I told him I would go with him. He answered Kistarcsa is not a place for girls. I don’t know anything about my father from then on. I know, because he related to my brother, that he had hernia and I don't know whether before or after the operation clinical death occurred. They took him to the hospital, and put him into cold water and hot water and resuscitated him. After that, they took back him to Kistarcsa. That’s all I know. I don’t know if he was deported. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. These are the things I can relate about my father.

In my opinion my mother was the best woman in the world. She was the best mother and the best wife. She was very nice. If any problem occurred in the family, they called her 'Oli, come please!' If somebody was sick, she went to nurse him/her. The governess took care about the children. She was a helpful, very decent woman. We had no financial problems. We had problems with the health. After my mother divorced, the acquaintances brought the suitors, but she didn’t want to marry again. This came in useful for me as a child, because the suitors used to bring presents for the children. When I was elder, I asked her, why she didn’t marry again. Then she said: ‘Listen my daughter, if a father scolds – we didn’t talk about beating – his child, that is normal. But I couldn’t tolerate a stepfather to rebuke my children.’ So she devoted herself for us. She was a blessed woman. Everybody says his/her mother is the best, but I say that she was better than the best. So I loved her with all of my heart. I lost her so many years ago, and I mourn for her even now…She was everything for me. My father was a stranger in comparison with her.

She wasn’t religious, she didn’t wear wig, but she observed the traditions because of the grandparents. That was the only reason; otherwise the grandparents wouldn’t eat together with us. So she strictly observed the traditions. When my brother was forced laborer, and she bought bacon for him, to put it into the package, she put it first in the stove and she told 'There is draft and the bacon needs it.’ [Editor’s note: It is very likely that she also intended to hide the bacon from the eyes of her parents, not only to keep it in a cool place.] I remember, that poor of she told that she would like to taste the bacon. I told her ‘Taste it without fear, nothing bad will happen!’ She told ‘No. No, no. My grandparents instilled her not to eat bacon.

She went to the synagogue only at Yom Kippur. The highest Jewish holiday is the Day of Atonement, the Yom Kippur. Is forbidden to eat or drink anything on that day. It was forbidden to put anything in your mouth. And usually you had to spend the whole day in the temple. My mother always observed this. She went to the nearest prayer house where the women used to pray…and they chatted all day long. And we, the children, ate the prepared foods at home, instead of fasting. We were ‘very good’ children also. So these things happened.

My mother liked to concoct and she baked very well, although she wasn’t enforced to do this. She learnt the secrets of the confectionery. She applied to a confectionery course by replying to an advertisement, she went to a confectioner and she learnt to prepare cakes and candies. She baked splendidly. But of course, her receipt-books disappeared together with her other things. And she liked to bake very much. She prepared always what I liked, for example candies with sour cherry with and fondant. The fondant is the white filling, what they used to put in the chocolate candies. The fondant is a French word. The fondant is a white mass what they used to mix with sugar and I don’t know with what, and then they used to put chocolate, coffee and fruits into, those gave the fondant's taste. Then they dipped it into chocolate glaze, they put it on a special paper and dried it. She prepared such kind of candies, what we could buy from the store also. And when I was in the camp, I always wished to be closed in the pantry...in our pantry, from home. It was beautiful and almost so large that this room. And there were the fondants, the jams, the stewed fruits, the candies in a big canister, the honey-cakes and a lot of other things…And they were prepared for me, I could eat what I wanted. There were so many things in the pantry…beginning with the flour-bin, we had a lot of things there. There was everything what we could conserve then. My mother made ‘dulcseaca’ [Editor’s note: This is a Romanian word, the original spelling is ‘dulceata’, and it is a Turkish sweet made from fruits.], which was a rarity in Transylvania, usually the people from Regat made it. [Editor’s note: „Regat”, ‘Kingdom’ was used by Transylvanians in everyday speech when referring to the Romanian Kingdom, before the unification of 1918. It remained in use after the unification, designating the regions of Moldavia and Wallachia that had formerly composed the Romanian Kingdom.] She learnt this from our household teacher, Mrs. Cimpeanu. We needed a woman cook, because that was the fashion in the distinguished families. My mother went to the kitchen only when she wanted. I liked better my mother’s meals that the woman cook’s ones. She cooked delicious foods. She taught me to stir the different creams and mousses. I loved to taste very much. I liked to lick out the cooking pots, and my mother told me, that would rain on my wedding. This is a popular belief, that if you are dainty, it would rain on your wedding. Despite of this fact I licked out the cooking pots, that’s why I was fat all my life... [Editor’s note: Anna Gaspar joked about her built, since she was thin all her life.], I ate plenty of candies, those kept me alive.

Once happened a funny event: It was summer and my mother prepared some kind of fruit cream and we had to stir it. My brother took the pot – he liked to lick out the cooking pots also - and he went out to the yard, to the garden, to stir it. My mother shouted, I never forget this: ‘Laci, are you ready? You finished the stirring?’ ‘It will be ready in a minute! It will be ready in a minute!’ And when he came back, the plate was empty, he licked out all the cream, I don’t know how many yolks with sugar and strawberry. My brother, Laci, did this with us. He was a funny guy.

I tell you straight, I had a German governess [Fraulein] from Dusseldorf, so I spoke rather in German with her, because she demanded that. Her name was Lia Britz, she was around 20, and she was a true German lady. She was young and cross-eyed. We had many photos with her, but she blurred her face on every photo. On the old photos naturally you stood straight, I was on her right side, and my brother on her left. And we were photographed this way, it looked like a postcard. She blurred her face on the photo, to hide her eyes. She couldn’t see herself, but she knew that she is cross-eyed. She could see it on the photos. It was forbidden to my mother to educate us, the governess did that. ‘Don’t intervene. If you didn’t need me, I go home.’  That was her prompt. She was very severe, and we hated her for that. She was an intelligent, clever woman, but she came to us to earn money. These German women used to work as governesses, this was a source of income for them. They came to Romania, educated children, but they requested a lot of money for that. There were folders, we found her this way. The grandparents told that the Germans are good educators. They were appreciated for their work. But as a small child I considered exaggeration what they [the governesses] did. She raised me austerely, after the German example. She taught us good manners, how to sit at the table, how to behave and how to dress. I learnt that I had to eat this way not that way…And I do a lot of things how I learnt from her. She pursued hers point, but she didn’t intervene when my grandparents asked me not to turn on the light [at Sabbath]. She used to turn on the light then. She accepted it too, but I she didn’t put any pressure on me, she just focused on my education. She wanted me to be well-educated. All of my life they tried to educate me not in the Jewish, but in the European spirit. Not to mention that she didn’t speak Hungarian at all, only German. We spoke German with each other. We scolded her so badly, that I had no words for that. She asked us ‘What you say? What you say?’ ‘Nothing, we just chat.’  When we were together with my brother and my cousins, we spoke about her of course. We detested her because she had no sentiments. I don’t remember if she ever praised me. The governess was so severe, that once - I don’t know why - when my mother screened me, she rebuked my mother: ‘You educate the child or I?' This hurt my feelings very much… I was a puny, weak child. I'm a small eater, and I was small eater in my childhood also, but the governess said that I had to eat what is in my plate. She didn’t understand that I couldn’t eat it, she said that I had to! I ate it, and I vomited it. Then she went to the kitchen, and she brought another portion, what I had to eat. If I vomited it again, she brought a portion again. Everything must happen how she wanted. I remember that I felt very miserable then.

In my opinion she was a very ugly, bad woman. We detested her, we complained about her and then my mother dismissed her. She didn’t oppose, she went home. The next governess was an older woman. But she wasn’t much better. Elza? Auntie Matild? I don’t remember her name anymore. She wasn’t so severe like her predecessor. They raised us for seven years. When we went to school, we were happy because we got rid of them.

These governesses lived together with us, they were almost family members. But for example we didn’t eat together with our parents and grandparents. Not with my mother or with my grandparents. The children ate separately. At a separate table, in a separate time. We went together with the Fraulein everywhere. We were together all the time, all the day. I think the Fraulein introduced the separate eating. That is not a Jewish tradition. For example my mother ate together with her parents. After the Fraulein went away, we could eat together with the grandparents. And how happy we were!

We used to eat in the dining room, not in the kitchen. The servant girl brought in the meal, and then she cleared the table and brought the second dish. They brought the bread from the nearest bakery. I liked very much the fresh rye bread with butter. I never ate so good bread since then. The meat soup was my favorite meal. I didn’t really eat meat because I didn’t like it, I preferred rather the different pastas. My mother was all over me, she cooked always what I requested. My brother ate everything, but I was very picky. My mother gave the instructions to the woman cook what to prepare for us, we had no said in the matter. My mother asked us: ‘Tell me, what you want to eat?’ – and she requested the woman cook to prepare that. But we had nothing to do with the woman cook. So we lived well. But honestly speaking, my mother didn’t let me to the kitchen – I desiderated this very much, and I blamed her because she didn't take me to the kitchen, and didn’t teach me to cook, although she cooked very well. ‘You'll have to spend enough time in the kitchen anyway! Don’t spend your youth with cooking!’ And when I came back [from the deportation] I couldn't make even scrambled eggs. I was always a puny, thin girl, so I was never fat. My mother always wanted me to eat more and better. Everybody told that the candies and the cakes make me fat. The canisters were always full with homemade cookies. They put a plate of cookies near my bed every evening, and I used to nibble them. My favorite cake was the ishler. And I learnt how to bake it.

We had a four room apartment, and a porch along. You went up the stairs, and there was a hallway at right hand side. How you entered the hallway, there were two doors. One led to the drawing room, the other one to the grandparents’ bedroom. Next to that was the children’s room and the dining room, so they were intercommunicating rooms. The dining room had two doors also, one of them led to the bathroom and the other one to a corridor. From the corridor you could reach the pantry, the kitchen, the loft and the servant’s hall. So it was a long flat. It was the same on the other side also. And if you went down a few steps, you could see that all the windows opened to the porch, only the foremost room’s and the hallway’s windows opened to the street. If you went down more steps, you reached the yard, the garden, the kitchen garden and the vineyard. The porch had pillars and roof, but had no walls. I remember that the porch, the window shades and the doors were green...My mother was about to repaint them white, but this never took place. We had parquet floor in the house.

We had only bathtub and boiler in the bathroom. There wasn't hot-cold running water. So if you liked to take a bath, you had to make a fire in the boiler. We heated with wood, the boiler warmed up the water, and if you put more wood on the fire, the boiler warmed the water constantly. My grandfather took bath once a week, on Friday. He took the bath before the Friday ceremony. We didn’t use to go to the mikveh. There was a mikveh in Varad, and I had a few religious girls in my class, who told that you had to go to the mikveh before your wedding. I don’t know if I should be able to go there. I detested even our bathtub, if it wasn’t scoured out how I liked…so I shouldn’t be able to go to the mikveh, even if they forced me. I took bath rather at home. So my grandfather wasn’t bigot.

In 1940 the Hungarians 2 introduced a law according to which the families who had a male member could only employ male servants, grooms. The maid servant and [later] the man servant had a separate room. The woman cook, Helenke, didn't live with us, she came only to cook. Initially we had house maid and woman cook, until the Hungarians introduced this law. Then we dismissed the house maid and we employed a boy to help out in the household. The servants and the groom were considered family members in our house.

We were wealthy, rich people. We had paintings at home also. I grew up in that ambience, it wasn’t a big deal for me. Nobody was art collector in the family. My brother liked the art, but I didn’t really, although I had a few reproductions. I don’t know, it wasn’t a problem for us. The paintings were still-lives, I think my mother liked rather the still-lives. But none of them was painted by such famous painter like Rafaelo… They bought the paintings from Nagybanya. The people from Varad considered that the most beautiful paintings were painted in Nagybanya. But they don’t speak about them already.

The books and the encyclopedias belonged to my mother. She didn’t go to the public library, she bought the books what she liked. They were Hungarian books, because my mother didn't know Romanian at all. My grandparents knew less than she. They didn’t need it. My mother attended Hungarian school, where she could use the Romanian language? She liked the romantic novels, and she used to read out many times for me. When I was sick, she entertained me with read out, because she did it so well. She didn’t read out only, I could say that she acted the novels. She related that she acted many times in the convent also. We had Jokai, Mikszath and other Hungarian classics. She used to recite poetry very well also, but then I went to Romanian school from the first grade, and my mother couldn’t help me anymore. I had to read literature, what was obligatory in the school. My father liked to read also. Every evening, when he went to bed, he took the book and read. But if you ask me what, I can’t answer. We read systematically. Once happened [right after World War II] that we had to fill out a form about the things what we had in the house: what disappeared, what was taken away. Even my poor husband – he came to us many times, we were friends - knew better what we had, what books were in our library.

We had no Jewish neighbors in Varad, so we didn’t live in a Jewish district. My parents rather kept in touch with the relatives. My mother had one-two lady friends who used to visit her, but they rather kept in touch with the relatives. They were distant cousins, but they were on visiting terms with us. Otherwise my mother was an unobtrusive person, she lived for her family. Rarely, when we went to the theater, she used to come with us, but she wasn’t a carnal woman. We didn’t care if our friends were Jews or not. We were on good terms with every neighbor. For example, two older Serbian women, two spinsters lived next door to us. Auntie Matasits always came to us to phone, because they had no telephone. We needed it [the telephone] because the relatives lived far, the grandparents were in Zerind, and they always inquired about us, because we were a very loyal family, and we had to know about each other. At that time if we wanted to call up somebody we asked the number from the central and we talked. For example there were no pulses, you could talk as much as you wanted. I think that we had to pay a minimal sum just if we phone to another town. But it wasn’t a problem to call somebody up. The telephone wasn’t a luxury article then. I remember that I never saw them [the two old Serbian women] in the street. What they ate and how they ate? They had guinea-hens. These guinea-hens had a very nasty voice. They cackled all day long. But my mother never rebuked the neighbors for that. There was a Serbian baker, and my parents ordered the bread from him. The baker’s man servant used to bring it to us.

The Jews originally from Varad lived in a kind of ghetto. There was a huge temple, a Jewish hospital, so that area was entirely populated by Jewish people. We weren’t originally from Varad, because we moved there just in 1925-26. But the Jews originally from Varad lived around the temple and in the adjoining streets. There was the mikveh, the shochet, the chief sochet. Maybe there was assistant shochet also, but I don’t remember. Those [who lived in that area] didn’t use to visit us, because…I don’t know why. I think that I didn’t know even one rabbi in my life. There were many Jewish people in Varad at that time. There was Orthodox and Neolog community also. There was an Orthodox and a Neolog elementary school too. The Neolog one was closer to our place, but it was forbidden to go there. They sent me to the Orthodox school, because they said: ‘You are Orthodox’. When we moved in Varad, my parents bought a house at the edge of the town, so we lived very far from the Jewish district. But my grandfather expected my parents to enter me in the Orthodox school, moreover he came and entered me. If I stepped out, I needed half an hour to reach the school. And this was a long time in a town like Varad. They entered my brother to the Orthodox boy’s school. I grumbled enough about this. Because in wintertime…there was streetcar only on the main street, so it was hard to come and go. Sometimes we had classes in the afternoon, and then we had to go one more time…But my grandfather demanded this, and we had to do it so. There was a kindergarten near us, but my mother didn’t let me to go there. Probably it was a poorly rated kindergarten. Oh, how many times I told that I liked to go?! But my mother didn’t let me. I had governess until age 7, until I went to school. The governess went away before I became a schoolgirl.

Near the school were a huge Orthodox temple and an huge Neolog one. Once, I don’t remember on which holiday, may be at Purim, because the Purim is the only Jewish festival, the girls from my class invited me to the Neolog temple. I went with them, I didn’t know that it would be a problem. There was always a big conflict between the Orthodox and Neolog Jews. The Neolog temple had choir and organ. Those were forbidden in the Orthodox temple. The service was really nice. I went to the temple to hear organ music only once. Then I went home and I told that to my grandfather. I thought that he would beat me, although he didn’t even raise his hand… My grandfather explained me, that if I went to the Neolog temple, it would make him feel bad. He told that the Neologs are blasphemers: ‘Don’t you ever set a foot there!’ The Neologs were his enemies, rather than the Christians. I never asked him why. I didn’t want to make him feel bad, because I really loved my grandfather. After he asked me, I never went to the Neolog temple. In Varad we had these two temples and many prayer houses. I don’t know how many, and to be honest it didn’t care for it. For example we lived far from the Orthodox temple, but it was a prayer house near-by, and we used to go there. My grandfather used to go to the same prayer house, at least when he did. But he didn’t go every Saturday, only on high holidays. At New Year’s Day and Yom Kippur he spent the day in the prayer house. On Yom Kippur all the family fasted. I don’t want to lie – I didn’t keep fast. All the friends came to our place and we pinched the cookies what we found in the pantry. I don't know why I did this, may be I was similar to my father? I can say that I was religious, but I wasn’t. What am I to do? And after the deportation I became even less religious than I was before.

School

I attended the Jewish school, my grandfather demanded this. He took me first to the school. He came to Varad and took me to school. I finished there the four grades of the elementary and middle school, there wasn’t Jewish high school for girls. I finished the Jewish middle school and I had to sit the entrance examination in the public high school. The entrance examination took place in a public high school called Oltea Doamna, and if you passed it, you could go wherever you liked. The successful entrance examination authorized you to choose the high school which you wanted. There was the Ursuline school, which was a Catholic school, Catholic nuns led it. The most distinguished and expensive school was the Notre Dame de Sion, a French school. Both schools admitted those girls who passed the entrance examination in the Oltea Doamna public high school. So this was a law. They named the Oltea Doamna high school after Stefan cel Mare's mother. [Editor’s note: Stefan cel Mare (1433, 57–1504) is a Romanian historic character, the Ruler of Moldavia, who famous for his battles with the Turks.] My mother insisted that if I had to choose anyway, and there was no Jewish high school for girls, I should go to the Ursuline school, because she also studied in a convent. It was a very clean, tidy place. The entrance exams were only in Romanian, we weren’t allowed to speak Hungarian!

The boys had a separate school, the cheder, where they learnt the Talmud. [Editor’s note: The cheder is an elementary Jewish school, where the children learn how to write and read in Hebrew, it is unlikely that they taught the Talmud there.] The Jewish high school for boys was in the yard of the temple. Our school was after the corner, so near-by the Orthodox temple. But I never got inside the temple. I liked very much weddings. When we came out from school, we used to run and watch the ceremony under the chuppah. I wasn’t a temple-goer. The boys had a 12 grades high school [the Jewish high school]. I found recently my husband’s graduation group photograph [he graduated there]. My brother finished a few grades there also. But there were 12 grades only for the boys, the girls had only middle school, but we went to the public high school until 1940. The public high school wasn’t coeducational, the boys went there in the morning and we, the girls, in the afternoon. The other schools weren’t coeducational also In my time there was a separate high school for girls and for boys.

I have to mention that unfortunately there were only two large social classes in Varad [among the Jews]: the rich ones and the poor ones. There was almost no middle class. There were very rich and very poor people. I know this because in the Jewish school the poor children were exempted from school fees, and the wealthy children paid the fees conditionally on how wealthy they were. And there were very wealthy children. I was the fifth or sixth downwards among the rich girls [on an imaginary scale].

We wrote in copybooks, and like today, we had written tests, examinations and moreover they introduced the middle school graduation. For example I graduated from the middle school, and I had to sit an entrance examination to the fifth grade when I finished the elementary school. Unfortunately I had to learn alone, although my mother was at home all the time, but she didn’t speak Romanian. And I learnt in Romanian already I did my homework alone. My brother helped me sometime, but I had no coach. I tell you straight, I was a quite good pupil. I got a diploma every year until I finished the middle school. I was a good pupil, a conscientious one, I learnt the lessons even it wasn’t necessary. I couldn’t go to the school without reading and learning the lesson. But it was pretty hard to us to speak in Romanian. For example, the boards from the street were in Romanian. Even in the corridor of the Jewish school was an inscription: ’Vorbiti numai romaneste!’ [‘Speak only in Romanian!’] But of course we didn’t speak in Romanian… The teachers were obliged to speak in Romanian. Our history teacher was auntie Ida, she spoke bad Romanian and she always planted a guard at the door. The guard’s mission was to notice if somebody came on the corridor. ‘Tell me, son, if somebody came!’ and then she related the history. We listened her open-mouthed. But if it was necessary to spoke in Romanian, she took the book and she read out the lesson from the book. But when she was in a good mood, we used to ask her: ‘Auntie Ida, would you relate?’ And then she related. She loved Napoleon. She related about almost everything, she was an older woman and it seemed that the principal didn’t want to dismiss her, although she spoke bad Romanian. She was a really brilliant woman. Poor auntie Ida. But we had to learn the lesson in Romanian. We learnt nothing in Hungarian. Then we learnt French, Latin and German. We began to learn French from the third grade, German from the fifth grade and Latin from the first grade. They pointed up very much the Latin language then, it was a very important subject. In the Jewish school we learnt Hebrew at religion classes, but I don’t remember anything. I didn’t learn the Hebrew language. I remember, our religion teacher was called Leichmann and he was angry all the time because we didn’t want to learn. We learned how to pray, the Hebrew letters and Jewish history. We had class with poor Leichmann almost every day.

The cheder was in the Jewish district also. I was never there. Only boys could go there, the bocherim. And from there they sent somebody to our place every week, to have the lunch with us. And they were very affected, because they could eat together with us, not in the kitchen, where they were usually admitted. At our place they sat at the table. In the dining room. But they were so puny and so pale. And they were badly dressed also. It was so repulsive. They usually came for lunch, not for dinner. My grandfather called them up, and arranged the day when these children came to us. I think that the school administrator did the arrangements. We didn’t receive them at the eve of Seder, because we always spent that in Zerind, not in Varad.

I didn’t feel anti-Semitism in the Jewish school, although we had Romanian teachers also. We didn’t feel anti-Semitism there. On the other hand, terribly hurt my feelings what happened when I got in the Ursuline. The Ursuline was a Hungarian Catholic order. There were many girls from Bucharest, and I didn’t understand how the girls from Bucharest ended up in Nagyvarad. But I never found out. I was 15 and I went together with my girlfriend. We sat down in the classroom where we could. We were four in a desk, a blond girl sat near me. On the first day Klotilda Mater came in – she was the headmistress – and she asked us where we came from, from which school, what marks we had in the school, with what mark we passed the entrance examination and other such kind of things. So she questioned us. When she asked me, I answered that I finished ‘Gimnaziul Evreiesc’ (Jewish middle school [in Romanian]) – this happened in the Romanian era [before 1940] – and the girl who sat near me, (her name was Ionescu) got up. She got up from beside me and she moved from there. This reaction was like a slap in the face for me. This was the first slap in the face what I got. Later we got acquainted with the classmates, among others with her also, and she apologized for her reaction. She thought that the Jews are like the blacks or aboriginals, who knew what was in her mind. We were 35 girls in the class, and 12 girls were Jewish. They never let us felt that we were Jewish. For example on 1st of March everyone found a ”martisor” on her desk. [Editor’s note: This is a Romanian folk custom, on 1st of March the boys used to give a ‘martisor’ to the girls, and the men used to give that to their older and younger lady friends. This is usually a small, metallic object, which had a white-red strip, and the girls wore it on their collar.] I didn’t know about this custom. And every girl got this present. We were on very good terms. I finished the first two grades of the high school in the Ursuline, this means the ninth and tenth grades now We had to pay school fees there, because it was a private high school and it belonged to the Catholic Church. It wasn’t a public high school. But they were very, very nice indeed. I finished two grades there. I don’t know if the school still exists. There were boarders also, they came from other towns, and all these Romanian girls lived in the hall. It was forbidden to us to enter the hall, I never saw how they lived there. The boarders had the lunch in the Ursuline’s building.

We learnt music also, choral works and history of music. Our teacher's name was Sarane. She was a very skillful, laical woman. We used to sing Schubert and Brahms compositions also. We had a very good choir and we had appearances also. We learnt how to cook as well: four girls from every class on every week. There was a kitchen in the school and it was well equipped with cooking utensils and dishes. We learnt how to cook in the middle school and high school also. There were four girls from every middle school and high school class who worked in the kitchen and everybody had her duty. Somebody was responsible for the laying, the other one for the scraping and so on. But when we cooked, we did it together. We learnt how to scrap, how to do the washing-up, how to lay the table, so special things which many of us didn’t learn at home. They didn’t know that the knife and the spoon had to be on the right hand side, and the fork on the left hand side. Right? How should they know this? And the glass over here. There were all kind of glasses and we learnt how to put them on the table, where to put the small glass for spirit, and where to put the drinking glass… I don’t know, I don’t remember already. We learnt everything. In fact they took into all the class until everybody learnt it. We prepared side dish, soup, second dish and some dessert if we had enough time. We brought the ingredients, we cooked and ate it. And of course we wrote the recipes down. We brought a plenty of recipes and our teacher ‘doamna Cimpeanu’ [Mrs. Cimpeanu] was a very good housekeeper. For example she taught us to prepare egg-plants [vinete in Romanian] – I think that she was the first in Nagyvarad who heard about the vinete. They brought it to Transylvania from the Regat. She prepared roe, so she always liked very much the specialities. She was an excellent teacher. We learnt needlework and embroidery as well. That’s why my hobby is the embroidering. We learnt to embroider, to use the sewing machine and everything else. We sewed knickers, slips and nightdresses with the sewing machine. For example, in the last grade of the middle school, we had to sew a Romanian folk blouse called ‘ije’ which was embroidered. [Editor’s note: the Romanian spelling is ‘ie’, and is a sewed or embroidered women’s shirt a part of the Romanian national dress]. I know all kind of needlework and embroidery.

Lili Szekely, a girl from our company, who is in Germany now, had a Romanian boyfriend. And her parents didn't intervene, they said nothing but the teachers found out this and they wanted to expel her. She was in the second grade in the Oltea Doamna high school. The teachers from the school could intervene in the relationships, and they could forbid the relations with the boys. It was forbidden to walk with boys in the street. The boyfriend of Lili, Mitu, was a really handsome boy. Mrs. Goiculescu, the headmistress, told Lili’s mother to take her daughter to the gynecology and examined her if she is virgin or not. But Lili refused this, she didn’t want to go to the gynecology. There was an enormous fuss, but finally she wasn’t expelled. Mrs. Goiculescu, the headmistress of the Oltea Doamna high school, used to go by car on the streets and she checked if we wore the uniforms. If she found somebody without uniform, she took her/him with her car to the police. And the police drew up a protocol and fined the parents.

It was forbidden to go to the cinema. And once, together with my eight classmates we went to see a movie called Halalos tavasz [Deadly Spring] with Katalin Karady. Next day Klotilda Mater came very angry. ‘Va place sa mergeti la film? You like to go to the cinema, don't you?' Those who were in the cinema had to stand up. I remember that I stood up. Trudi stood up, Papci too, so six from the nine girls stood up. ‘You are expelled.’  She expelled us for three days and we thought that we could sleep at least. But we couldn’t sleep, we had to go to the school’s kitchen and unshell bean and lentil instead of learning. They wanted to give us nine for our behavior, but finally they gave us ten. And the three girls who didn’t stand up laughed like a drain. You richly deserve it, does it pay to be honest? No. No it doesn’t. And we didn’t go to the cinema in school time, only in the holiday.

We couldn’t use the main street, we had to walk in the back alleys. And when I went to piano-lesson, I had to go on the main street for a while. I was afraid all the time that Mrs. Goiculescu came and took me to the police. That woman was a sadist. So the truth is that they introduced very drastic rules for the pupils. They made everything more severe. They believed that the children became well educated in this way. The forbidden things are much more interesting like the not forbidden ones.

In 1940 we became Hungary and they introduced the numerus clausus 3 in the Ursuline also. This meant that they admitted only one Jew in a class. It was a big fuss, because the boys had the Zsidlic [the short form for Jewish high school], which was a 12 grades elementary, middle and high school. And we, the girls, were dropped out. Then the teaching staff of the boy’s high school got together and they decided that the girls will attend the high school in the afternoon. The teachers who taught us probably got a higher compensation also. But this was an unofficial thing. We took examinations with the teachers and with the headmaster also. The teachers lectured the lessons and we learnt like in a private school. And it is very interesting, that in the paper called Zsidlic - I had a few copies - they wrote that we, the Jewish girls were dropped out from the high school Although is not true, because I attended the high school there. First they put us in the kindergarten. They kept the courses there. It was very uncomfortable, because we had to sit in those small desks. I finished there the third and fourth grade of the high school. I had to tell, that once I received a slip from that young boy who sat in the same desk. ‘Answer if you want.’  We wrote to each other for years, but I didn’t even know how he looked. He put the slip in the desk and I put it also. I don’t remember his name already, and we never met, although he always suggested that to me, but I wasn’t disposed. More than twenty girls attended the high school. The Jewish girls had to choose between the Zsidlic and the Notre Dame, because there they were admitted too. Kati Deutsch, the wife of Gyuri Adam graduated there. But I don’t know how she got there. Perhaps she got into the six per cent. For example, my cousin - who died in America – got into the six percent in the Oltea Doamna, she was the top pupil in her class. She learnt and graduated in that public school.

After High School

I graduated in 1942, two years after the annexation to Hungary. After that I wanted to become a doctor but I wasn’t admitted to the university. I asked my uncle, Vili Molnar, who was the director of the Jewish hospital to employ me as a nurse. And he told me: ‘Until I’m the director, I don’t employ you.’  I was a weak, puny and sickly child. And what to do now? I had to learn the sewing. My mother suggested that. And then I went to a sewing-tailoring course. I had my certificate somewhere among the photos, that I could work as a tailor or a sewing woman, but I never used that because I got married.

We had a company and I spent my free time with them. There were three Romanian boys and the others were Jews. We were six girls and I think more than six boys. My [second] husband was among them. And his fiancée, Edit Lang, was one of my girlfriends. When he was forced laborer, he supplicated in a letter the marriage by proxy, so a picture marriage. They had to send the data and they would receive a paper with the following text: Edit Lang and Andras Gaspar got married, they were considered husband and wife. This paper would make out from Andris’ unit, where he was forced laborer. A lot of marriages took place this way. Quite a lot. The regular soldiers used to marry the girls from the town this way. But they didn’t get the permit. They received a letter, that the picture marriage between Andris and Edit wasn’t allowed. And Edit didn’t come back [from the deportation]. If somebody told me then that I will be Andris’ wife, I spat in his/her face. Although I was enough well educated to don’t do such a thing. I didn’t even think about, because he was Edit’s fiancé!

We gathered here and there but mostly at our place, because we had the largest yard and garden and the company felt very comfortable there. We spoke only in Hungarian. We used to go to the dancing-school also. There we learnt modern dances, not Jewish dances. We learnt tango, waltz and they introduced later the Charleston. I don’t know Jewish dances. We didn’t dance in the school or in the Jewish school. So we were raised very worldly. We weren’t Jews with payes – those went to the Talmud school. Those belonged to another caste. There were different castes: we were the enlightened Jews and the others were the religious Jews, who weren’t disposed to mingle with the secular Jews. There was an enormous distance between the two castes. The the religious Jews had a district around the Kolozsvari street. They lived there in a gaggle. The religious Jews had a rule which forbade the men to pass through between two women. So they were awful bigots. And then we, the girls, waited around the Kolozsvari street, we watched the coming men, and one of the girls went near the wall and the other one at the edge of the sidewalk. And the man had to pass through between us. Then they went down to the street and skirted us. We were children, we were no better than we should to be.

I spent the Saturdays and the holidays together with the young people. It was forbidden to do something on Saturday. For example, it was forbidden to go to the cinema. I couldn’t say that I didn’t go, but without my grandparents’ knowledge. My mother knew it. She didn’t oblige me to observe the Saturday, only in front of the grandparents. On Saturdays we used to say that we went to walk and we went to the cinema. But who came to check us? Sometimes even my mother wanted to detach from the traditions, but she didn’t want to get known, because if somebody saw me, he/she repeated that to the grandparents. And my mother didn’t want to outwit them that much. But this didn’t really disturb me. She didn’t force me to approve my grandparents’ principles. ‘You have to do it how the grandparents demand.’ - this was the motto – ‘Do it how they request! At least in front of them.’ Probably she wasn’t a believer also, but I don’t know. We didn’t speak too much about religious things, this wasn’t a topic of conversation. I believed in my truth and I behaved accordingly. My grandparents didn’t know about a lot of things. They were old and I was young and I wasn’t disposed to return to their allegiance. My grandparents moved to Varad [already] because they needed a permanent medical supervision and they lived together with us. My youngest uncle remained in Zerind and he managed the estate.

On Saturdays was forbidden to make a fire, my grandfather forbade it. It was forbidden to turn on the light also. We couldn’t even lift the receiver. So it was forbidden to use any electrical apparatus on Saturday. And the maidservant knew that if the phone rang she had to come in and lifted the receiver. And after she lifted the receiver, you [or the grandfather] could speak. The maidservant used to turn the light on, and she made a fire in the afternoon in wintertime. My grandfather always told that I’m the biggest shiksa [non-Jewish woman in Yiddish] because I was revolted permanently. For example: ‘Grandpa, where is written in the Bible that we must not turn the light on? Please show me that part!’ And because of this he was a little angry with me. My brother took the dispute seriously, but I joked rather. He didn’t want to become religious, he argued with everything. For example, the Jewish religion taught that the Earth is plain, not spherical. I asked what happen if somebody reach the edge of the Earth? He/she fall down...? But my brother explained this scientifically to my grandfather [that the Earth is spherical]. And finally my grandfather told to my brother ‘You know what? You have right. But I couldn’t believe this. It’s written in the Bible this way so I have to accept it.’ Then you dispute with him! There are some nonsense things. They exaggerated the restrictions of the former times. None of my uncles were religious. And this was interesting. They weren’t religious, but they didn’t confess it.

I used to go to the theatre from infancy. In the house lived an other family also, the Toth family. They were actors and their daughter was actress too. Janka Pogany and Elek Toth were two famous names, the old people from Nagyvarad remember them even now. So this Janka Pogany loved me very much. When I was 4-5, I went to the theatre already. The theatre from Varad was of very high standard and nice, but it wasn’t large. There were intimate and very good performances, but secular performances. I saw all kind of performances. I remember that the operetta called ‘Ciganyszerelem’ [Gypsy Love] moved me very much. [Editor’s note: Ferenc Lehar shows the romanticism and mistery of romance in Vienna-Budapest of the 1910s in this 3 act opera. The essence of the story is: Dragutin the wealthy boyar wants to marry her beautiful daughter Zorika with the boyar Jonel Boleszku. But Zorika loves Jozsi, the gypsy.] An actor called Barankai was the gypsy baron, and he was wearing such a make-up I was terribly afraid of him – I remember this.

I went in for sports also. I swam, moreover I took part even in swimming matches at county level. I tell you straight, that’s why I’m still alive at this age. There was a very nice lido in the park, and later they made it wider. I used to go to the lido early in the morning, when nobody was there. The water was clean, and I remember that the bottom of the pool was painted blue, and the water seemed nice blue from that. And then I swam a few hundred meters. This happened every morning in the summer, from age 7 until I got married. And in wintertime I skated. I liked very much to dance also, and I used to go to rhythmic gymnastics together with my cousins, twice a week. I played tennis frequently in the summer holiday, because my uncle had a tennis court in the end of the garden. We went there every morning with my cousins and the neighbors. I used to play tennis in skirt. We used to go on excursions, although there weren't forests around Nagyvarad. But only we, the young people went on excursion, my mother never joined us. My father never came with us also. He was busy all the time with his estate. He had no time for holiday, too. He said he was happy there. My mother let me went on excursions, she wasn’t afraid, she put her trust in me. We were boys and girls [together], so my mother raised us in a very modern way.

In 1937 we spent the summer holiday in Borszek, they took me there in every summer because I was a thin, puny girl and I needed a change of air. The doctor advised my mother to take me to Borszek, on the stipulation that we had to remove the drapery and the bedspreads, because those could contain bacilli. Not to fell sick. It was terrible how they protected me from anything, not to fell sick. We went to Borszek by cab. It was expensive, but it didn’t matter. My poor mother didn't bear the serpentine road, she always felt unwell. We spent there maximum 3-4 weeks. We ate in the kosher restaurant. It happened that we were just two, my mom and me, but sometimes my two cousins from Tasnad were together with us also. Sometimes my mother went together with the three girls, and sometimes my cousins’ mother, auntie Tusi, that is the short form of Etus. We lived in a mansion, we had to reserve a room with four beds and I remember even now where the mansion was. If we go to Borszek now, I should find the mansion, it was near downtown, at right hand side. There were many young people. We got acquainted there with young people from Kolozsvar, Nagyvarad and a few girls and boys from Bucharest too. And the young people came together. Once I saw that a young man looked at me, and I asked him why on earth? He said: ‘I have a classmate, who resemble very much to you.’  I knew that he is from Kolozsvar. ‘Don’t joke with me.’  ‘Some kind of distant cousin…?’ Finally we found out that it was my brother [who resembled to me].

My mother got acquainted with the other mothers, they sat on the terrace and we, the youth, went to walk. And we went on excursion. If you went on excursion from Borszek, you could find beautiful places in every direction. Once my uncle from Kolozsvar came to visit us. He rented a room there, but he came alone, I don’t know why. Perhaps he had a quarrel with his wife. And we, the young people who got acquainted there, used to walk arm-in-arm, - one boy one girl - on the street in the evening. And we occupied the entire street. And who wanted to pass through, he/she had to ask us to open a gate for them. And my uncle noticed this. And when I went home jolly, with a laugh, my uncle bawled at me: ‘you are unashamed of doing this…’but what we did? He told that I walked arm-in-arm with two boys. One was on my rigth side and the other on the left. Try to tell this to the young people of today… But my uncle was shocked by this. He nettled me so much, that I began to cry. He told me that I ought to think shame of myself, because a girl didn’t behave so. All right, but everybody…’It’s all one to me, I talk about you. Don’t do such a thing anymore.’ ‘I shouldn’t…’But there wasn’t a problem to be Jew. They knew very well that we are Jews, because they asked us in which restaurant we ate, and we told them that in the kosher one. But they didn't care.

I didn't set on a high value on something. For example I told once [at home] – I think I wasn’t a schoolgirl yet - that I never had a pink dress. On the next day I got a pink dress from my mother. I could exploit my mom shamelessly, but I knew, that if I wished for something, I got it. In 1941 I had my own camera already, I got it as a birthday present from my uncle, my cousins' father, uncle Vili. My mother said that the photography does not look nice for a girl. But I wished a camera. Agi and Evi knew this, and they told their father. It was made by the Agfa company, it was like an accordion and I think that was a 6x6 format camera. I could make 12 small photos with my camera. It had to be operated with a long wiry thing [the cable-release], which I had to push and exposed this way. And how I rejoiced at my camera… I liked to take a photo about everything what lived and moved. I wanted to record everything and I took a plenty of photos. I think that I had some rolls of film which remained undeveloped. The camera had a brochure in his box, and I joined the instructions. The first few photos were unsuccessful, because I didn’t open the diaphragm correctly. And sometime the camera or the subject moved. It was forbidden to move, because otherwise the photo became obscured. The camera wasn’t so good like these from now, that you could move because it caught you in a split second, and I learnt this from my experience. It was used for the photo made in our yard, in which on one side of the bench Edit is sitting with her back and on the other side there’s Andris sitting, as if they were upset with each other. I took this photo. My mother took the next photo, on which we sat arm-in-arm on the bench, Andris sat in the center, and I was on his left side and Edit on his right side. Potyi Vadasz, a boy from our company, stood behind us. We called him Potyi because he was small. When I knit a pullover for Andris, – he was a tall, handsome boy – I told him that if he was as small as Potyi, I had less to work. He asked me if I should marry Potyi. I answered that never, because I was taller with a head like Potyi. We got the films from Varad, from the studio where they developed it. That studio was in the main street. The studio was called Foto-Revu, and we took the photos there to be developed. There were more studios, but this was the best known, because the word had it made the best pictures. The owner was a Jew, but I don’t remember his name anymore. His studio was really well equipped. We took the film out, we stuck it and we rolled up in silver foil. We took the film to the photographer, he removed it [from the silver foil] and he developed and enlarged it. And he made so many prints, how many we needed. There was a young man in the studio where they developed the films and he gave me some advises when he saw the unsuccessful photos. I think that I enjoyed my camera more than everything.

My brother also attended school in Varad, the Jewish high school. He finished the tenth grade there, and then he went to Kolozsvar, to the ‘Liceul Pedagogic Universitar’ [Editor’s note: The institute in matter was the Teacher Trainer College, but it doesn’t exist anymore]. This was supposedly the best school in Kolozsvar. He went in for sports also. We used to swim and skate in the same place, we always went together until he lived in Varad. It didn’t matter that he was two years older than me. He introduced me to his company from Kolozsvar too. If I said that I didn’t want to go, because I had no acquaintances there, he said that he wouldn’t go also. He was a very good child. He was too good, and he always said that he wouldn’t get marry, he will live together with mom. He stood aloof from politics. He preferred the cultural activity. He liked very much to write. I remember this: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I write, please let me…give me a little time!’ - because he was inspired then. After the graduation he learnt chemistry, because my uncle decided that my brother will inherit the distillery from him. The distillery still exists in Kolozsvar. My brother finished the middle school, and at age 16 he went to Kolozsvar, to my uncle’s family. They had no children. I went together with mom to visit him in Kolozsvar, before he became a forced laborer. This happened around 1942… And then I saw him for the last time.

He was 20 when he became forced laborer and he was taken to Nagybanya. And I never saw him again. He was in Nagybanya for one, one and a half year. We corresponded with him, and we sent packages monthly. His letters were censored. He was very careful, because if somebody wrote something ambiguous, they didn’t send the letter and punished the writer. So he didn’t write any ambiguous thing, it didn’t worth. And then the Germans took him to Poland. After I came back, [from the deportation] I went to Kolozsvar and I inquired about him… but his whole troop disappeared. He and his classmates, a troop with 25 members disappeared. They joined the partisans? They were shot by the partisans? Maybe the Germans caught them? I shall never find out. I hoped that the Russians captured him, and he will come home from somewhere. I hoped for a very long time. But in vain… And the most terrible thing about it is, that I don't have even one photo with him.

After I graduated I was single for a very short time, because I had a suitor since the eleventh grade. He was called Sandor Taub, and his nickname was Saci. He was the son of a wealthy family, his father was a landlord and he had mill also. They lived in Alsoszopor, this village belong to Szatmar county now. They were the wealthiest in the village. Saci attended school in Varad. When my parents were together, they lived in Alsoszopor too, they had an estate there. And we were neighbors with Saci’s family. And when he [Saci] ended up in Varad, we met and he ‘reproached’ me that [at that time when we lived in Alsoszopor] he came to me for Easter sprinkling and I received him in the bed. [Editor’s note: Sprinkling is an Easter folk custom, it is thought to be a booster of fertility and have a cleaning effect, this is why girls and women were sprinkled. Sprinkling takes place on the second day of Easter, on Easter Monday. This custom is beginning to fade away.] I was around age 2 then, because I was 3 when my parents divorced. And so we became friends and he began to court me. He was older than me, and when I graduated he was summoned to forced labor. He spoke with my mother, because he was afraid that he would lose me. He told that if he went to forced labor, I marry somebody else, and better we married before he joined the army. We had to marry because of this. There were such things then. My mother wasn’t agreed, she opposed the marriage tooth and nail: ‘My daughter, don’t do this!’ Try talking with an girl in love... And I don’t know even now, why mom got agree, although we were very young. Perhaps because I wanted so. The fact is, that we married in 1943 in Nagyvarad.

Marriage

It was a great fuss... they brought the chuppah and they cooked and baked all the night. I went to my room and I slept. I didn’t care for it. They waked me up in the morning and the woman hairdresser came... My dress was ready, because I married in a white suit, not in a long dress. Then came the dresser, they fussed around me, and they made up me also. Once the door of my room was opened – I don’t know why they didn’t use the bathroom for the arrangements – and the groom came in. Then all these women shouted at him: ‘Please go out immediately, you must not see the bride!’ ‘But she is my bride!’ - I can hear even now how he raised his voice. But he was turned out. And I found out later that the men had to put on a white tallit or something like this. But he didn’t put up that on his suit, he put it up under the suit. So he married in a black suit. And of course the invited relatives were there also. The wedding took place in our house, in Varad. We had yard too. We went to the yard, my poor grandmother went in with me, and I think that my groom was seen in by his father. I remember that my grandmother was switched on very much, she needed a beaded hat, and she had the beaded hat made, although I was the bride not she... They stood the groom under the chuppah and I had to walk round him. I had to walk round him three times, and my poor grandmother stumbled over something. The guests stood round the chuppah. And of course the neighbors were there also. There were only a few Jews in that area. They couldn’t see anything from the street because of the gate, and then they climbed the fence of auntie Matasits and they watched the wedding from there. They didn’t see something like this before – even I saw wedding only when we peeped in to the temple's yard. None of my relatives got married until then. We had to drink wine from a glass, and we had to break the glass after that. This is the ‘Mazel Tov’. The ceremony ended with this. The rabbi shouted 'Mazel Tov’, this meant good luck to you or something like this. But it was a really stunt. I didn’t like it at all. But seriously. The rabbi told us in Hebrew that we could kiss each other, and then we went to the dining room. There was an enormous ‘U’ shaped table, we sat at the head of the table but there was only one place setting. When I noticed that I asked: ‘Who wouldn’t eat, me or my husband?’ ‘You have to eat from the same plate!’ I began to laugh like a drain...It was ‘gold soup’, meat soup in fact, and I remember exactly that really looked like the gold, and one of us could eat with his/her right hand and the other with the left. I don’t know how we did it, but we laughed more than we ate. I don’t remember the different dishes although there was side dish too, I remember only the gold soup. There wasn’t any kind orchestra on my wedding. We had no music and the quests didn’t sing near the table Later they took me to my room, I got changed, and they called the cab already and we went for honeymoon to Pest. This happened right after the dinner because we had the train around 4-5pm. They took us to the railway station by cab, and it was very affecting, because my mom gave us the tickets as a present and she put some money in my pocket too. My father-in-law put some money in his son’s pocket also, they took care about our spending money this way. And then we went for honeymoon to Pest, for two weeks. The room was reserved already...Oh dear, I knew the name of the hotel...but I don’t remember now. I passed through on so many things that I couldn’t remember every minor issue.

I was 19 and my husband 21 at that time. And after the marriage I moved to Alsoszopor, to my father-in-law’s house. I lived together with my husband for one year. We lived together with my husband’s parents, they had a nice, two-storied house. My husband’s parents were well-situated very nice people. I had no problems with them at all. My mom came to visit us every six weeks or two months. She didn’t come more often, because she didn’t want to disturb us.  She missed me of course. My brother lived in Kolozsvar at that time.

We had a common household with my mother-in-law. They didn’t have kosher household, although they were Jews. They weren’t religious at all, and this suited me very much. They slaughtered the geese and the hens, which is forbidden for the Jews [only the shochet can slaughter]. They ate pork meat also. My mother ate with them, but for example my grandfather wouldn’t eat there. Maybe they used to go to the temple when they were young, but I never went with them to the temple. There was a synagogue in the village and there were very religious Jews also. It was a very nice and loyal village. For example we were on good terms with the Catholic priest. My neighbors were Hungarians too and they had a small boy, who loved very much my father-in-law: ‘Uncle! Uncle!’- he wanted to be together with my father-in-law all the time. They were Hungarian people and we used to visit each other. So, there wasn't anti-Semitism in the village.

There was Hungarian era 2 then, they introduced the Anti-Jewish laws 4, and the Jews lived in poor conditions. The situation was better in the villages, but in the towns there were a lot of restrictions, regarding what the Jews could do, and where they could travel. So they persecuted the Jews already. There were disturbances. They attacked us in the street. Although we weren't Jews with payes.... but they beat some of us. There were fascists too. The most painful was that these things tried my poor grandfather very much. They lived in Varad already when the Hungarians came in, and Zerind remained in Romania [following the Second Vienna Dictate] 1. The Hungarian-Romanian border was near Zerind, so my grandfather’s estate remained in Romania. He got a stroke because of this. Then my grandfather was 76 and my grandmother 72. Our circumstances of life remained almost the same, because my uncle took over the estate from my grandfather. The post worked, my uncle could send money through the bank, and there was no problem. My poor mother felt sorry only for her younger brother, who remained in Zerind and once they arranged a meeting on the no-man's-land. They didn’t take me with them, because I was a very sensible child. I’m a sensible woman also. But my mom went, and she met her younger brother on no-man’s-land. After 1940 we couldn’t go [through the border]. But the furnishing was weaker because of the war. The Germans warred already. We couldn’t obtain this, we couldn’t obtain that. They came to us from Romania, they brought flour, sugar and basic aliments, that’s why we had no problems with the food. But the atmosphere was bad because of the war. The Romanians weren’t deported.

We lived far from Varad, and we didn’t fell the restrictions so much. I went only a few times to Varad, because my dear husband was jealous. He didn’t like if went to Varad, because I used to meet my old friends there. And I didn’t want to provoke him. So I went perhaps two times to Varad during that one year, as long as I was married. The topic of conversation was the everyday life. And we were afraid from the war. We were very, very afraid. We could listen to only one radio station, the station from Pest. The others were forbidden because they were anti-German. And the Hungarians were allied with the Germans already. Some people were reported by their neighbors, that they listened to the Voice of America and London. These two [radio stations] were the bloody-bones. They heard it from the street or the servant related it, nobody knows. The Hungarians never reported each other... Probably they got something to report more people. These were the arrow-cross men. At that time they used to seal up the radios. But there was a method to remove the seal from the radio. So everybody was everybody’s enemy. You didn’t know who would attack you or who was ill intentioned. I had no problems with our neighbors at all. The neighbors mentioned above, who lived on the other side of the street, weren’t Jews. They could write down what I told, and if they reported me, the arrow-cross men would take me away. They didn’t verify at all, they didn’t have to prove that you said that or not. So everybody lived afraid.

Ghettoization

The atmosphere changed slowly. We were afraid, although we didn’t know from what. The air vibrated around us... We didn’t think about what will happen, because we couldn’t listen to the radio. They probably announced that the Jews were deported from Poland and the French Jews were deported also [in March 1942]. But we didn’t know this. That’s why everybody was shocked, [mostly afterwards] mainly the Americans, that no man alive lift a finger to save the Jewish people... They couldn’t or they didn’t want. I don’t know. In those days we lived for our family. We phoned continually, but we took care what we said. We was so afraid, that we didn’t dare to say the real things through the telephone We were afraid that the central intercept the calls. And one denunciation [accusation] was enough. My mother-in-law used to go to the kitchen in the morning, where were servants also. In the villages the people could get job easier.

I remained pregnant. We called my mother and there was a discussion with the parents of my husband. The discussion took a week. My father-in-law was a very intelligent man, he used to listen to the radio [until it was possible] and he heard a lot of things from the foreign radio stations. We decided to abort the baby – we went to [Nagy]Karoly, because there was a doctor who did the operation. My father-in-law tried to persuade us to abort the baby, he said that it would be better this way. But of course we kept this in secret. I passed through this pretty hard. My husband was forced laborer, he couldn’t come home. I think that we wrote this to him, but just when I got through. If I had that baby, I didn’t live now... They killed all the mothers who had baby...I lived together the parents of my husband for half a year after my husband became forced laborer. We were on very good terms. I was deported from there.

In May [1944] the gendarmes with sickle-feathers entered and we just watched how they invaded the village. We didn’t know why. And we just looked why these gendarmes came? What they were looking for? They looking for somebody, maybe for a delinquent? We were the delinquents...In the village, in Szopor, we didn’t use to listen to the illegal radio stations. Even walls had ears there. We listen to those stations in Varad, because there was nobody who could do in us. But in the village we didn't. A very decent Hungarian officer was lodged into the spare room, who used to take the dinner with us. This chief lieutenant spent only 2-3 months in the house of my husband’s parents. First, when my mother-in-law invited him, he didn’t want to eat with us, he made excuses, but later he has got used to, and he always arrived to dinner. He drew our attention on everything, not to do this and that...He told that the strangers could provoke us. Not to speak about anti-state things, not to blame Horthy, so we had to be very careful what we said. Not to speak even with the neighbor. And he was who asked me where is my mother and my father. I answered that my mother is in Varad, and my father in Hungary, in Hidasnemeti. He said that my father is surely Hungarian citizen, and we are Hungarian citizens also. I answered that my father is not a Hungarian citizen, we became Hungarian citizens in 1940, and my father, who lived in Hungary, remained Romanian citizen. He advised us not to tell this to anybody. Moreover I had to write somehow hidden to my brother – he was forced laborer then and the letters were censored – not to speak about this. I wrote it somehow, even my mother-in-law gave advises what to write to avoid the problems, otherwise they would locked up us, because we remained Romanian citizens after our father. But nobody knew this. So he was a very decent, jovial, graduate man. There were decent men in the Hungarian army also. I don’t remember his name, because everybody from the family called him: ‘Mr. Chief Lieutenant’. They didn’t use to say his name. He said nothing about the deportation. Maybe he didn’t know, maybe he didn’t want to frighten us. What we could do? We could go to Pest, because my mother-in-law was originally from there. And her relatives, her siblings and the grandparents survived. They lived in a safe house in Pest. We all could flee if we knew this, but who even think about?

They came to us also [when the ghettoizing took place]. The midwife came together with the nurse, who worked in the doctor’s office. They came in two. And I went up to my room, and she told what I could take with me. Two handkerchiefs, two knickers and so on. ‘You put on this slip, this knicker and this dress! And a jersey, shoes, stocking and nothing else!’. They didn't let me to take even an extra handkerchief... Of course they took away everything, but I had to watch, God damn it, as I wasn’t allowed to do what I wanted with my stuff. They sent other people everywhere. I relate what happened at my place. I don’t know who were in the other places. (After we came home from the deportation, that midwife never had an unbroken window. They put it one day and on the next day it was broken. This was the only way of revenge. But it was just malevolence.) They came with gendarmes, but the gendarmes didn’t come up to my room. The gendarmes surrounded the house. They put clothes on men also, they could took one day’s food with them. They didn’t say anything, it was forbidden to talk and to inquire.

They drove out us like the animals from the house. They didn’t take us directly to the railway station, first they kept us in the school for three days. But I don’t know why. The Hungarian inhabitants of the village watched how they drove in us to the voided school building... Then the villagers and the farmers began to come, everybody brought eggs, sugar, cakes and food. They [the gendarmes] didn’t give us anything. We spent there about five days, the villagers brought the food and they cried. They cried, because they said that they wouldn't see us anymore. How they found out this, I don’t know... And during these five days we slept on the floor, we had no even blankets. The villagers came in, during the night, and brought us pillows, quilts and blankets. So the villagers were very nice, they behaved fantastically. We had a small Hungarian sheep dog, called Buksi. It was a big fuss, – because it came with me – they didn’t want to let it in. But finally they let the dog in, it lay near me. We slept on the floor, because we didn’t bring bed-clothes with us. What was there...a procession... I don’t know how many we were, but the school building was full. There were adults, old people, cripple, blind and deaf. They gathered everybody. They had no regard for anybody. I didn’t know everybody. They took the jewelry away from us – we couldn’t take out any jewelry from there. After five days they lined up the families, and they called out us to the railway station, which was far enough. When we went to the railway station, a gendarme walked in front of us with the exhibits: silver candlesticks, jewelry and such values.

There happened a very nasty thing. One of the gendarmes shouted: ‘Bring a table here!’ Two young men came forward. 'No! Imre Taub and Miksa Taub have to bring it!’ So this was a kind of humiliation, because they were the wealthiest and top-ranking men in the village: my father-in-law and his younger brother. They brought the table there. They brought a chair also, the gendarme sat down and he wrote down everybody’s name. I don’t know where that list ended up. Then they entrained us and we were taken to the brick factory, near Szilagysomlyo. The whole Jewry of Szilagy county was gathered there.

A lot of people were there. I can’t tell how many, but quite a lot. I don’t want to plunge, but a few thousand people were there. We could buy tents, blankets and pillows from the peddlers who came there. The parents of my husband had money surely, because we bought a big tent. The three Taub families lived in that tent together with the children. There lived my father-in-law with his two brothers, my cousin from Tasnad with his wife and his father, and my two cousins, Agi and Evi. My husband had no siblings, he was a singleton. Eleven people lived in this tent. Everybody had his/her small curtain. We spent 2-3 months in this tent. [Editor’s note: Probably only a few weeks] The SS soldiers gave the orders in the ghetto, not the Hungarians. It was an enclosure, we couldn’t go out. Who entered, remained there. I remember that the son of our acquaintance, who was forced laborer and got a few days permission, visited us. They didn't let him back to the army.

We, the youth, got together and we went to walk in the enclosure. We didn’t have to wear yellow star, because they knew, that the people from there were Jews. The Germans are usually blonde. I was terribly blonde... There was a young German SS soldier, he was around 20, and I was scared stiff of him. He always picked on me. He came to me and he said that I’m not a Jew, I must be German. And he wanted to take me out from there. I was so afraid from him, that I never went out alone. I was afraid, that once he will catch my neck, take me in... and he will rape me. We always went two, three or four. I was afraid because I was a woman and he was a man... There was a family in Varad, the Deutsch family, their daughter is still alive, she was the same age with me, and she was my classmate. Her elder sister, Lili, went to bed with the camp commander and she saved her whole family. She rescued them to Switzerland. Once we saw some airplanes: ‘Now the Americans come and liberate us'. But they didn’t come.

There was a kerosene lamp, we used to cook with that. It was like a storm-lantern. It had a tank for the kerosene, and it had some bulb-like thing, just like the lamps, you had to wind up the match, ignited it and there was a thing from glass you could put a pot on. Every food had a smell of parafinny. We had no hotplate, because there was no electricity in the tent. We had kerosene lamp, we called it cooking lamp. They distributed the aliments and the ingredients for the food there. Everybody was put on. The boys helped us to sweep and to do other things, and we, the girls, got the milk cans and we had to deliver the milk for the small children from the camp. We had a list, and we knew who had small child, because the tents were numbered. I think the children got milk until age 6-7. We had to deliver this milk, and we finished our duty just in the afternoon, because there were a lot of people, the whole Jewry of Szilagy county were there. The Germans helped us out with the catering. There were SS and Hungarian soldiers also. Every family cooked separately. They didn’t give too much food for a family, you didn’t have enough. But we could divide up it. I think we got a lot of potatoes, which were the main food and the bread. Then we made watery soups, you just showed the vegetables to the soup, but it was good. Everything was good. And we didn’t hunger. The deep religious Jews had to choose between eating and death.

I don’t know how, but I had an extra dress in my package. Somebody came and related us that a girl’s dress caught fire or something like this, and they heard that I had an extra pleated skirt and a blouse. He/she asked me if I could give those to the girl. ‘Why not? Take it with you!’ I gave the clothes to the girl, although she was a stranger for me... We had only one suit of clothes, and just we knew how we could wash that. We washed the clothes successively. My mother-in-law washed her clothes and she gave them to me. Then she washed my clothes. It was summer, and until the clothes became dry, the owner sat in the tent... We washed the undergarment and we put it to dry... there were wires and strings everywhere. It became dry quickly, and we put it on. You became very inventive in the last resort. The days passed, the young people always had to discuss about something. For example there were people who brought cards with them. Then we played cards, and the others played chess.

My father-in-law sank into himself completely. He had no idea about the future, I could say that he didn’t speak at all. The SS soldiers knew very well who is wealthy. Probably they got a statement, because they knew exactly. They took my father-in-law with his two brothers to the office. And they were not coming, we waited, and waited, but why weren’t they coming, what’s wrong? Finally they brought them back... They interrogated him, where he put his money, where is his wealth and his gold. First they tried prettily, and my father-in-law told them that he had no money, but they didn't believe this. However it was true, because they ran through the money what they had. And then they beat his palms and foot-soles with a truncheon until he fainted. It was terrible. And he had to tell where he hid the jewelry, because it wasn’t enough for them what they found in the closets. There were rolling shutters in our house, we could drew up and down them. There is a place above the window, where the shutters were rolled up. They put there my entire dowry. And my father-in-law revealed this. The gendarmes visited the house, because the headquarters informed Szopor about the hidden things. My father-in-law lay ill for a long time, and he didn’t recover entirely until the total entraining began. He didn’t recover [entirely]. His hand looked so bad, that I never saw such thing in my life... My father-in-law was around age 45-50 then. My poor mother-in-law cried all the time when she looked upon his husband. ‘What the future had in store for us?’ But nobody could answer this question.

Auschwitz

On a day the SS soldiers took us to the railway station and entrained us in cattle-trucks. They squeezed sixty people in a truck, more families together. Everything what we had remained in the camp. We took some food with us, but before the entraining they took the food away from everybody. That was a dread. My SS acquaintance let me keep my bag. I carry the food in small bag, which looked like a sac, and he let me keep it. This was a nice gesture from him. And then we started. We were entrained on 4th of May 1944, so I spent my birthday in the cattle-truck. [Editor’s note: Anna Gaspar misremembers, because the Jews from Szilagysomlyo were deported on 31st of May, 3rd of June and 6th of June 1944. They deported 7851 Jews from there.] And we went for a very long time. You could imagine what was there...that we had no food. They opened the door once a day, then we could go to number one and number two, and they gave us bread and margarine. And once they didn’t open the doors for two days. We were closed for two days and two nights. If somebody had to do number one, he/she had a pee through a gap. Nobody did number two.

We arrived to Auschwitz. It was night. They opened the door of the cattle-truck and men in zebra suits got on the truck. We thought that they are mad, because they behaved so. But seriously. They mumbled and tried to explain something. They said: ‘Gave the children to the old people!’ ‘Gave the children to the old people!’ So they tried to advertise us, that the mothers who held a baby in their lap, were taken to the gas-chamber. That's why they told us to give the children to the old people. They were old Polish haftlings. They were there since one or two years. And they spoke a bad German, because they were Pole. But the mothers didn’t give the children. Those who had no old relatives what could do? Or those who had children led by the hand? The mothers didn’t give those also.

We got off. They told us of course that the women had to stay on the right side and the men on the left. In separate groups, five in a row. I took my mother-in-law’s arm, and my aunt, together with her daughter, Evi, were in front of me. [Editor’s note: Eva Gaspar refers not to her aunt called Etus Weiss from Tasnad and her daughter Eva (Evi) Friedmann, but to the sister-in-law and her daughter of Eva Gaspar’s father-in-law.] There stood a man with flashlight, - later we found out that he was Mengele - together with a few SS officers. My aunt and my cousin, Evi, were in front of me, and Mengele directed them to left. And when I got there, he directed me to right. I told:  ‘I’m not mad to go to the right alone!' And I tried to go with my mother-in-law [to right]. She had a shawl on her head, because she felt cold. And the SS told us: ‘Die Frau nicht!’ [The woman not!]. ‘If you don’t let my mother-in-law to go to right, I go with her to left!’ Then he took out his handgun and pointed it at me. He told that he would shoot me, if I didn't go to right... Thus it was thanks to Mengele that I’m alive. Because those who went to left, were taken straight to the gas-chamber. There wasn’t getting away.

I went to right with the other young women. They drove in us in a large room. There we had to stay five in a row as well, because the Germans were maniacs. We had to keep order! Five in a row! We had to take off our clothes, the SS soldiers walked among us and they watched us. The lower age limit was 18, depending on pour looks. If they were young looking, they admitted 50 years old women also, but the age limit was around 30.

The other group, which went to left, was taken directly to the gas-chamber. I didn’t know this then, I just noticed a permanent, very strange and terribly tang smell around the camp. The smell of the burnt flesh. This smell haunted me during many years, and even now, if I think of that, I’m on the verge of bursting into tears. That my grandfather and my mother... went together to the gas-chamber. And they had to take her clothes off... and when they turned on the faucets, because there were faucets in the gas chamber, gas flowed instead of water. I found out just later what happened exactly. A doctor from Varad, Dr. Nyiszli, who came home, worked there, in the incinerator. This doctor worked there, in the incinerator. And he published a book. I read it, and I felt sorry so much, that I was sick for two weeks. When I imagined that my mother had to take her clothes off in front of her mother and father... they were very prissy and very shied! Up to this day I awake when I see in my dream my mother naked in front of my grandfather. This haunted me. I think that the title of the book is ‘Orvos voltam Auschwitzban’ [Auschwitz. A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account] [Miklos Nyiszli: I was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant. The Memoirs of a Physician from Auschwitz, published first in 1947.] Andris wanted to buy it, but I forbid this. Somebody loaned the book for me, and it was enough for me to read it once. I became ill from this book.

I didn’t know anything about my mother, the connection broke off entirely. I know that she was together with my girlfriend, Trudi. They gathered them in Varad, in the brick factory, and they were deported from there, And then my mother told Trudi that ‘Trudi, I shouldn’t see my children any more.’ Those were my mother’s last words. She was a very good mother. Her cousin’s husband, Dr. Molnar, [the husband of the daughter of my maternal grandmother's sibling] Vilmos Molnar found a cellar, a bunker, where they could hide from the deportation. We had to build a bombproof cellar also. They knew already that they would be deported to Poland, and he invited my mother to join them to the bunker. My mother told him not to hide there, because the soldiers will find them. My mother asked him this, and finally they didn’t hide in the bunker. (Thirty people survived in that bunker, they weren’t deported. The soldiers didn’t find them. I found out this later.) Dr. Molnar continued his activity in the camp also, and he was alive when the liberation took place. But he died in the camp, a stray bullet killed him. Somebody just pulled the trigger and killed him. So he didn’t come home.

They stood me upright mother naked and they walked around me. The SS soldiers selected me first. They remarked me, because I was very blonde – my hair was gold-blonde – they made me sat down on a chair and they trimmed my hair. They cropped me with the shearer. The other women said later, that I watched with turned away head, how my curls fell down. I had shoulder-length hair, I wore it unfastened, I didn’t like if they tied it. Then they whispered, because it was forbidden to talk: ‘We escaped.’ They thought that I was the deterrent, and they will remain untrimmed. But they were wrong. They cropped everybody. The shoes were in our hand, we had to dip them in a fluid, and we got a dress. A long, gray dress. Some even got a belt. The dress was similar to the nun’s dress, only the gray color was the difference. I didn’t get a belt and I went up to the SS woman, who was with us and gave the dresses, and I asked her prettily: ‘Bitte schon...’ [Please...], gave me a belt. I got a slap in the face, that I saw stars. It was the first such kind of experience, because nobody beat me until then. ‘Now! There is your belt!’ I swore that I wouldn’t make a single observation in front of an SS. We had no rights there, we weren’t considered people, and they treated us like the animals or even worse. That was a dread.

They began to register us, they wrote a number near the names. Everybody got a number, and we had no more name, we became just a number. They stuck the number and a triangle on everybody’s dress – we had a yellow triangle and the Polish a red one. We didn’t wear the Star of David, just a triangle and a number. We were the emancipated Jews: They called us ‘Zigeuner Bande' [Gipsy band]. It wasn’t enough that we were Jews, they considered us gipsy also. We were the assimilate Jews. We got a mess-tin and they drove in us in a structure, in a longish barrack. There was nothing in the barrack, it was totaly empty It was a half-finished barrack. We were there for 2-3 days. We didn’t get food at all. Fortunately it began to rain, and the rain flowed in. We drank the rainwater from our mess-tin. It is interesting; you couldn’t have enough with rainwater. But we drank it, because filled our stomach. I say that we weren’t in our right mind then. For example, we talked about how we will lie down in the mud. Because it rained. ‘How we will lie down there?’ We looked for a place, shrank up and slept. We slept! It wasn’t cold, but in Poland the climate is raw and very bad. The air was very wet. After three days we got margarine and bread, and a mess-tin of beet soup for dinner. Later they gathered us again, five in a row of course, and they entrained us. That’s why I had no tattoo. We spent only 4-5 days in Auschwitz. Those who remained there, had their number tattooed on their arm.

They entrained us how was usual in Germany. Thirty people to the right and thirty to the left, and a very young, 16 years old SS soldier in the middle of the truck. His mission was to guard us. The cattle-truck was closed, he could go out but we not. If he went out, he closed the door from outside. It wasn’t a girls dream for him neither, because he had to sleep on a bench. We slept on the floor. There was a bucket on both sides, we did number one and number two in those. The buckets were emptyed from time to time by a stronger woman and the SS soldier. This young man – a good-looking, handsome child – probably was bored, because during the day, when we had to sit round in the truck, he used to ask us: ‘What you did?’ ‘What I did?’ I did nothing.’ ‘And you?’ Every asked person answered the same. ‘Then why are you here?’ He thought that we are regular prisoners. I told to him: ‘Juden! We are Jews!’ ‘What does this word signify?’ - the young man didn’t know... I told him that this is our religion. ‘You are here for this?’ ‘Yes. For this.’ This young soldier got a big portion of food every day. He ate from it, and he gave us what remained. He was humane. He did everything he could. We got food also. We got carrot or cattle-turnip soup, once a day. And we got barrack bread, which was divided in three and a half portion. It meant less than a third part of bread for a person. And we got margarine also. This was the ration. We didn’t get water. We got coffee, bitter coffee, and we drank that instead of water. Everybody had her mess-tin, what she got in Auschwitz. I remember as well, that we hanged up the mess-tins on the nails which were in the wall of the truck, not to occupy some place, because we were crowded there. Once the train jerked and the ice-cold coffee spilled on my head. On my close-cropped head....So it was terrible...

Forced Labor in Riga

Then we arrived to Riga [to Latvia]. There they waited us already. We got on a truck, and we went through the town. That was a great experience. It was a completely different world. There were no painted buildings, the houses were built from red bricks. Riga is a very nice town. There was no warlike atmosphere. The people walked about and the stores were open. They stopped and looked at us. ‘Who are these close-cropped women?' We were the first group. They took us to the other end of the town and they lodged us in a brick building. There were rooms in the building. I don't remember already that we were 25 or 30 in a room. They told that the Luftwaffe [the German air force] took over us. We found out that we had to make lawn for an airfield. This means we had to cut a square shaped portion of the grass, we knew the size we had to cut out, we had to dig under it and to take it elsewhere and to place them side by side. So we had to turf an area. This was a labor camp. There were no men groups just several hundred women. The airfield from Riga was enormous, you couldn’t see the whole area from the ground.

I was there until autumn. We had no watch, we had no sense of time. We noticed only that the leaves fell or is cold outside. They took and brought us back on foot every day. They counted us in the morning, at noon and in the afternoon also. So they counted us all the time, to see if somebody is missing. We were six in a group, from the same village. We got our minimal ration. The soup was thick, and contained meat pieces too. Nota bene, we belonged to the Luftwaffe. We got more bread, half bread was the ration, and we got margarine and marmalade also. We ate twice a day. We got even newspapers. We could read in the evening, it was daylight, because Riga belongs to the Baltic area, and the nights are very short during the summer. In comparison with what we passed trough, we lived in good circumstances there. But there was a drawback also: we were roasting under the sun all day long. Not to mention that we acquired needle and thread – there were wanglers there – and we cut off a strip from the dress and we tied up our head with that. We made belt also, and we got a zebra suit. Everybody had only one dress. We washed that in the evening and we put it on in the morning. We wore a kind of slip and knicker during the night. There was a Washraum [washroom] with faucets. The water was cold, but we could wash up at least. We acquired rags for towel, there were very smart wanglers, who could obtain and sale everything. I wasn't a wangler. Never in my life.

They put bromide in our food, to avoid the menstruation. They treated me for half a year after I came home. The bromide is a kind of sedative also. We found out later that we got bromide. The food what we got had a strange taste, but we didn’t know from what. One of us, poor Ica, menstruated normally, although she was hearty eater. She was in trouble. But the others didn’t menstruate. It seems that they gave us such a dose of bromide, that we had no problems in the labour camp. We didn’t menstruate in the labour camp. I came home but I had no period. And Dr. Kupfer - he was a writer also, and he moved to Hungary later - cured me. I had menstruation just after that. After a long time. I spent six months in a Russian hospital.

I found out later that they brought a group from Varad to Riga also, and they dropped off like flies, because they got a touch of sunstroke. Me, who used to go to the lido, under the burning sun, I never had to put anything on my head, I resisted the sun. But the religious Jews, who didn’t use to do gymnastics and didn’t bask in the sun, were pale and sickly. They dropped off like the flies. They took in the sick people to the ‘Revier’ [to the prisoner’s hospital]. Every camp had a hospital, but God forbid how was that: it was enough to come by the hospital to feel the terrible smell. They died there. They had so bad burns, that they didn’t survive. I escaped none the worse.

We used to chat, sing and tell tales in the evening. I was together with a lot of women from Munkacs and Kassa. There were mostly Czech and Ukrainian women in the camp. And I mentioned that they were more cultured, more decent, so they got a better education than us. Auntie Erzsi gave lectures about literature, music, poetry and everything. When we felt that we were at the end of our tether, auntie Erzsi upheld us. She was much elder than us, she had no children, and I think that she worked in the education, perhaps she was a schoolmistress or a teacher, but I don’t know it for sure. She had a very good memory, she narrated the stories instead of reading out. From where we could get books in the camp? I got 3-4 German books just when I was in the Russian hospital. Auntie Erzsi gave the lectures from memory. After the lecture we debated that. We debated that who heard about this and that and who didn’t. We used to sit round her in the evening when we couldn’t sleep or when we rested during the day, and she upheld us with her stories. And she was so funny. We ate, and after a hour she asked us: ‘You ate the food already? I eat the nassak now’. ‘Nassak’ was the name of the extra food, what we got sometime. ‘I winkle out the leftovers from my teeth.’. So poor of her said that she had enough one more time with the leftovers... She was so humorous. I don’t know what happened with her later, because when we fled from the Russians - the SS soldiers drove us - she fell behind. She knew Czech and the Polish people understood that. And the Germans used to shoot the runaways dead.

We had a relatively normal life here [in Riga], they didn’t beat or torture us, even the privates behaved very nice. On the airfield we worked for the Luftwafe, not for the SS. The privates were very really nice with us. If they saw that somebody fainted, they slashed water on her, and took her to the shade. Then let her to rest before continuing the work.

The Latvian Jews took their money with them when they were ghettoized. They took their small stuff with them, and they had money also. Later they found out that money had no value in the camp. You couldn’t bribe the SS. For example, if you would like to buy something from somebody, you couldn’t pay with zloty. They used money instead toilet paper, so the closet was full with zloty.

Forced Labour on the Baltic Sea

They told us in a morning ‘Now, take your stuff and we go on a trip!’ We traveled by a ship called 'tengerfenek’ [sea-bottom in Hungarian]. It had no name, the prisoners named it ‘sea-bottom’, because it looked like a bottom and it floated. It was like an oval platter, and had walkways with barriers. The guards were up there. The bottom of the ship was empty, and we were lodged there. We saw the sea only when we were embarked, and after the embarking just the sky. We didn’t know what will happen. Maybe they wanted to sink us, maybe they took us somewhere. It was a terrible panic there. The ship was black. I was black, so they could take and bring us during the night, because nobody could see us. This ship belonged to the army, so it was a service vehicle. There were two ships, and we found out later that one of them was sank, and just the other reached the Baltic sea. A girl escaped from the sank ship, she swam out and fastened on to our ship. That girl related that they felt once that their ship was sinking, and they noticed that the soldiers disappeared  And she, who was a good swimmer, fastened on to our ship and a humane soldier fished her out of the water. The girl was maximum 15 years old.

We worked in a camp, which was improvised near the Baltic seashore. First we dug trenches and after that we built tank-traps. The tank-traps were three and half meters deep. Our entirely group (the six women from the same village) was there, and we had group norm. I had a disagreement also. In the nearby group was a woman, Kitti, who didn’t use to work. She just held a spade, a hoe or a pickax in her hand, but she didn’t work. I tolerated this for a few days, but then I said to her: ‘Shame upon you! The others work instead of you’ – ‘Yes, it is easy for you, because you are used with this work from home!’ I attacked her very badly: ‘Well – I said – yes, I used to pickaxe in Varad, in the main street everyday!’ If one of us felt sick, we used to do her duty also. But I couldn’t tolerate if a healthy woman didn’t work... The guard heard the quarrel, and he came there to ask what is the problem. And he told Kitti that ’I keep an eye on you! If you don’t begin to spade, you get into trouble!' Kitti wasn’t very glad, but I didn’t care for it.

There were white nights near the Baltic sea. We returned to the camp, we had supper, we washed up and we prepared us to lie down. We weren’t sleepy, but then we got used to. We got the minimal food: we got the three and half portions of bread, we got soup for dinner, they brought the soup to our workplace. We got coffee in the morning and margarine for supper. I can’t eat margarine since then.

When we worked near the Baltic sea, we moved all the time. We finished a place and we went forward. The circumstances were almost the same, because the kitchen moved together with us. And the Revier was moved with us too. Sometimes we lived in barracks, sometime in small buildings. That was a very nice place, we lived in small cabins, and we had straw and blankets on the floor. But it happened that we had to live in a 'Zelt’ [tent]. The girls lay on a rounded iron structure, but of course we put straw and blankets on the floor and we slept round. The stove was in the middle of the tent. And we brought twigs from the wood, we made a fire, and it wasn’t so cold then. But we had to do the work. They let you home just when you finished the norm. It happened that we had to wait for more other groups, and then we sat down to rest. The guards were more decent, but they used to hit our back, as “l’art pour l’art”, just for fun.. I was terribly afraid from beating, so I was careful, not to give them reason to beat me.

We had an interesting case. Our group finished the work, and the guard told us that we could go home, and he came with us. It was a nice, summer day, and we began to sing Hungarian songs. We went singing back to the camp. The camp commander noticed us – we had a very decent Lagerfuhrer [camp commander]. He didn’t make things warm for us. He used to give wooden shoes to the people, whose shoes were damaged. The wooden shoes were nasty, but at least we didn’t have to walk barefoot. So he did everything he could. So the camp commander came and told us ‘I wanted to see those who came home with the first group!’ - those who sang. The joke was that some people who weren’t in the group, stood up also. But of course, we said nothing about this. The camp commander declared loudly that we sang Russian songs and we are condemned to death... They drove in us in a barn. There was straw, because there were animals too. And they locked up the big door. The women from there began to cry, wail, scream and shout. I didn’t cry, I didn't feel sorry for myself, that I had to die so young - and undeservedly. There I heard for the first time the Jewish death-song. They used to sing that song if somebody died. Nobody died in my family until that, so I didn’t use to take part on funerals. Everybody was all in tears...They opened the gate in the dawn. It was dead silence, not a sound was heard. And the camp commander told us ‘Go out!’ What happened? There was a Hungrian soldier among the SS, who heard that we sang, and we sang in Hungarian. He went to the camp commander and told him that. He wasn’t forced to tell it, who cared if another 25 Jews died? We found out this from the camp commander, and moreover he told us that he knew this already in the evening. ‘You deserved the punishment!’ So it was a terrible experience. It was thanks to a Hungarian SS that we are alive. We tried to find out who was that, but they didn’t tell it. Anyhow, he was a decent man. The girl who sang the death-song told, that she would pray for the life of this soldier. She was a deep religious girl.

Once we found out that the Yom Kippur is coming. [In 1944 the Yom Kippur fell on 27th of September.] We talked over with the camp commander because it was possible – he had a lover from Munkacs, a girl called Szidi, who mediated between us – not to bring out the food. We stored what we got in the morning, they didn’t take out the dinner at noon, because we would have the dinner in the evening. Because we wanted to go home and wanted to fast. The camp commander told us: ‘Kinder’ [Children] – he called us so – ‘Kinder, you go to work, finish your duty and everything will be alrigth!’ We got a very small norm for that day. And indeed, the whole team sat down, so we swung the lead. And what happened then? The controllers came to see us. Perhaps somebody reported us, we will never find out. And they saw that the whole line rested. Oh dear! They began to shout, they gave orders and a huge norm. They brought searchlights, we worked almost until morning, until we finished the norm – hungry and thirsty. We worked 36 hours instead of 24 with empty stomach. I took an oath that I shall never keep fast during my life... And I kept my oath.

The camp commander’s lover, Szidi, was a Czech girl. She was religious, but she lived well. In the camp everybody took care only about herself. There wasn’t a point of view, why she did it this way. She ate. But she never brought an extra piece of bread for us. She had enough and that’s all. She lived in the same place, we slept next to each other, and we always knew, when she came home. She never went to work. I don’t know what she did during the day. She couldn’t sleep every night with the camp commander, because the controllers could come there everytime. And if the controllers found her there, they threw out the commander to the frontline. We had a Joker, who was sadist. He was an ugly, dark skinned, terribly bad man. And on one evening he stopped in the door and began to shout 'Who entered now?' It could happen that who lived on the other side didn’t know that Szidi entered, but we knew. And he shouted 3-4 times: ‘Tell me who entered!’ Deathlike stillness. ‘Alle raus! - Everybody out!’ It was winter already. We got some padded coats. The stitches were coming out, they took out the lining. I had my boots from home. They were good, bespoke boots. We stood there in the cold, there was one meter of snow. He told us ‘Take off your coats!... Who entered?’ Deathlike stillness. Nobody said a word. We had to undress everything. We had no stockings, we wore foot-rags, but we had boots. We took off our boots also, and we stood stark naked in the snow. Fortunately the latrine was outside, and a girl, who came out from a tent and wanted to go there, noticed the 25-30 [naked] angels, and she run straight to the camp commander. The Joker and the camp commander were big enemies. The Joker wanted to become the camp commander. We heard how the small steps of the camp commander crunched on the snow, and when he saw us, he couldn’t believe his eyes: ‘Go in immediately!' Everybody snatched up her rags and ran in. Finally we got a day off and the Joker was taken to the frontline. I don’t know what the camp commander wrote in the official report, but the Joker was taken to the frontline.

We had to dig trenches in that big snow. The place for the tank-trap was traced out. We removed the snow, and we had to pickaxe, because the ground was frozen. The tank-trap was three and half meters deep and its bottom was approximately one meter wide. We had to leave a piece of land as bench, and we had to stand there and straighten the walls. There was some room for our feet, on a prominent section, just like a flower holder, so we put one of our legs on one such section, the other one on another one, and had to smooth out the wall this way, because we had to smooth it out because it had to be nice, because it wasn’t the same thing for a tank, it needed a nice wall... Because if we left any prominences, the guard immediately told us to scrape that away. It’s side wasn’t straight, it was askew. The wall was askew and we first made the straight wall, then the approach trenches, but this was much more difficult, because they were deeper. And we had to build this steep wall. Then the foreman came and received the work. And if he wasn’t happy with something, we had to keep smoothing it.

We had fire in the evening just until somebody was there to put the twigs on. But it wasn’t so warm, because we could see our breath. There was an old SS, he was the orderly guard. We called him 'opapa’. He was an old man with white beard, that's why we called him 'opapa'. He sat down near the fire, he put twigs on and he began to relate about his children and grandchildren. He told us 'You are young, and you will go home and find your family – he related these on one evening – but what will happen with us? They will kill us. You had to think about that. I don’t care for it because I’m old, but I feel sorry for the young people.’ He related a lot of things, but I remember just this. That we go home, but he will perish. And I would like to ask him, why he joined the SS.

Stutthof Concentration Camp

At very late winter [at late winter of 1944, or at early spring of 1945] they moved us to a relocation camp, to Stutthof [the settlement in matter is situated in Northern Poland, 34 km from Danzig]. ‘Hof’ means village. That was a dirty, messy, terrible relocation camp. There we suffered from hunger and we became lousy again, because the barracks were covered with lice. So it was a terrible place. There they sent people to the gas-chamber too, and we could feel the terrible smell. The people became rotten in front of the Revier, so there were terrible circumstances...The way out was to go to work, because there I got the minimal food. There were people who suffered from hunger. I didn’t. I wasn't a big eater during my life. Even now I eat a very small quantity. I didn’t suffer from hunger. I couldn’t say that I had enough even once, but we got the minimal food. But those who lived in relocation camps like Stutthof or Auschwitz, didn’t get that. Not to mention that they did nothing all the day, they just waited the counting. One of the guards shouted ‘Apell! - Counting!’ Then we stood there for more hours and they counted us. They counted us from the front and from the back also. So it was a kind of psychological offensive against us. They did nothing, just counted us. And they counted us how many times the guard wanted. Four times? Five times? Three times? In rain? In snow? And they took a look at everybody, and if they found a pimple on you, they sent you to the gas-chamber. This is not a joke. If a guard saw that somebody couldn't stay longer he told 'You can go!' And you went. Willy-nilly. There was woman, who said, that she couldn’t get up. Simply she couldn't get up. And then the guard always went in, to see if everybody came out. And if the guard found her lying, they took her to the hospital, and we didn’t see her anymore. I tried to do everything so that to be always in ahead, and to remain healthy. I knew that those who were at the back, will perish. Ninety per cent of the people who remained in the relocation camps perished there. In the labor camp we got medicines also. We found out, that if we were in labor camp we could survive. Those who were healthy, didn’t die in the labor camp. Who was sick, remained in the relocation camp and perished there. I didn’t spend a long time there – they always needed workers somewhere – and I talked over with my group, that we would apply for the different works. And they took those who were more skillful. Then we succeeded to go away, because if you remained in the relocation camp, you perished there. You simply died of.

The spring came and we got some news that the Russians were not far from us. We went through villages, where the people got us pieces of bread and many of them told ‘Don’t give up, just a little time and the war would be over!’ We didn’t work already, they squeezed us in a former labor camp where were terrible conditions. After a short time we went forward, and once we heard that we had the Russians at ours heels. Then we had to flee. We fled from the Russians, the SS soldiers drove us. We went on foot. We slept where we could, in bushes and under trees. If we got food it was alright, if we didn’t get... There were estates, where they let us in and gave us a hot meal. There were humane people too, although the Polish are blessed bad people, in my opinion at least. They let us in to the yard, usually in the barn. I got some dried and cut beet. They used to cultivate beet on that territory. The Polish people like very much the sugar-beet and the cattle-turnip as well, they use to cube and dry it. And I found a such kind of nest in a corner. It was so delicious! It was crunchy and sweet.

They drove us like the cattle. That was a dread. They shot those who couldn't walk, who fell behind. Nobody wanted to remain in the last row, everybody made an effort to advance, so we pursued ourselves to remain alive. For example they shot Szidi near a kilometer stone, when she sat down to fasten her shoestrings... We couldn’t fall behind. There were some Polish people from the other relocation camps from Stutthof for example, or from other places, who joined us, and certainly they spoke the Polish language. And they fled away. I don’t know what happened with them. The SS soldiers found out this, because they counted us every morning and evening. And in the evening a few people were missing. The SS soldiers told us, that they will shoot ten people for every runaway. Finally they didn’t shoot ten people, just the weaker ones. The SS soldier went between the rows, he looked in everybody’s eyes, and you couldn’t know if you would be the next or somebody else. They selected mostly the old people, and they shot them in the back on the spot. There, in front of us... The group became smaller and smaller, we remained approximately two hundred people...There was a guard for every ten row, and our group (the six women from the same village) was there also. One of us, Manci, was killed. Two of us carried her, arm-in arm. And when I couldn’t carry her because I was exhausted, the guard came and told us ‘Leave her!’ And the gun was in his hand... and Manci’s sibling was there too... It was terrible. We, the other five women, came home. Five of us survived.

Liberation at Gdansk Internment Camp

We reached Danzig [Gdansk]. There was a big relocation camp also, and they squeezed us there. I got typhoid fever there. I think we were 80-90 in a barrack, and almost everybody was sick. I remember my dream. I dreamed, that I’m in a hospital, and there are doctors round me and they cure me. Once somebody ran in, and told us that the German guards go away and before that they will blow up the camp. So my dream hospital disappeared. I was in very bad shape already. I went on all fours to the door of the barrack, at the precise moment when the carpet-bombing took place, when Danzig was bombed. It was daylight in the night. I said that there is no way out from here. I went back and in we slept in that noise made by guns, machine-guns, bombings. We slept for a long time. Once somebody woke up and it was deathlike stillness. The Germans fled away. They didn’t blow up the camp. And 2-3 days later the Russians came in. I don’t know what day was. We found out later that we were liberated on the same day with the town, with Danzig. This happened on 26th of March [1945].

We could hardly crawl, they took us on stretchers to Danzig, to the hospital. They examined everybodyseparetely. We got blood transfusion – I had Russian blood in my veins... So they were very, very nice and humane. Everybody got dietary regimen. They prescribed 10-15 kinds of ‘pierve stol’ [first category] and ‘dva stol’ [second category] diets. There was first, second and third category of diet. Where the Americans liberated the people, they stuffed them with food and many of them died. But in Dazig we remained alive. Everybody had his/her diet. The doctor examined us, and when he saw me, he began to cry. ‘What they did with you, my children’ this used to be his say. We were nothing but skin and bone. We had no even a decagram of fat, nothing. And naturally, we got the adequate dietary regimen. They brought the food, and they wrote on the platter that ‘pierve, dva, tri’ three different regimens. This means first, second and third in Russian... You got one kind of diet, your neighbor other kind of diet. They told us not to keep changing the foods. ‘It is your interest to eat it.’  And I was in so many hospitals! In three? No, I was in four hospitals. I liked the diet very much. Everything what I could chew, every food was very good. I got the ‘pierve’ [second category] of diet. We had to eat pulpy foods, I could say baby foods. And we got a lot of liquid because we were dehydrated, but everything was delicious. They gave us such kind of foods... but we ate them, because we knew that were beneficial for us. First when I stood up to go to the toilet, I had to pass through a glassy door. I looked into the door pane, and I looked back, because I thought that somebody stood behind me. I didn't recognize myself. That was the first time when I looked into a mirror since I was taken away from my husband's native village. I had 23 kilograms at age 21. I had 48 kilograms when they took me away. A lot of people were liberated by the Americans. And the Americans, I don't know in which camp, stuffed the men with chocolate and candies. Many of them died, because they couldn't assimilate those. In our hospital nobody died. There was woman, whose foot became frozen, because when we fled from the Russians we walked almost naked in the snow. They amputated her foot, she had just heel. The third girl, called Irenke was who lost her foot, she had only heel. Poor Irenke learned to walk so, she came home on her heel. She found some relative and she emigrated to Israel. I don’t know anything about her

Once happened a very affecting event. My camp sibling - I used to call her camp sibling – who was my mate in the camp and we came home together lives in Brasso. Her name is Edit Schumeg, and she is religious, she uses to light candles. I don’t know from where we found out that we had a Jewish holiday. I think that was New Year’s Day (Rosh Hashanah). And she lit a candle on the bedside table. We were in the Russian hospital already. And the woman doctor ‘the knotted’ entered the room. She was big, tall, red-haired woman with a big knot. That’s why we called her ‘the knotted’. She asked us: ‘Why you lit candle?' We answered that we had holiday. She look upon us: ‘Then I had holiday too.’ It turned out that she was a Jew. She was high-rank officer and doctor also. She visited us every day. She picked on me, she tried to tempt me not to come home, because I wouldn’t find anybody there – and she was right – and to go with her. She wanted to adopt me, and enter to the university, because I told her that I graduated only the high-school... She asked me almost every day: Have you change your mind? I still hoped that somebody from the family will come home. Oh no! I didn’t want to go to Russia...

It was a large ward, we were approximately 20 people there, and two Ukrainian women lay in the last two beds, in the corner. They used to scold us. One of them was called Nina, but I don’t remember exactly, I know only that she was a very ugly woman. She named us ‘zigauner bande’ [gypsy band]. The two women were Ukrainians, not Russians, but they were taken up, they got other kind of food, so they were treated exceptionally.  And they were very angry with us, because we spoke in Hungarian, and they didn’t understand that. And we were angry with her, because she quarelled with us all the time, not to speak in Hungarian. We began to understand Russian, but we didn’t speak the language. We spoke a good German because we got used to. She scolded us in Russian and in German also. They told that they were prisoners. It was a very big fuss, I don’t know who were they and I should never find out, because they didn’t use to talk with us. But the doctors showed favor toward them, they got perfusion and many other things. We said that they are the uncommon patients. Then the Russians interrogated us [and they also]. I represented our group, so they interrogated me. They interrogated Nina for a very long time, for many hours. We noticed that she didn’t come back to her bed, although she could walk already. And on the next day Edit came and shouted ‘Come quickly, and see how Nina and the other woman... A carriage came, there were two Russian soldiers in the front and two in the back. They seated Nina and the other woman in the carriage. It turned out, that they spied for the Germans. And they were so loud-mouthed. And they pestered us all the time. They were taken away by the Russians, and I think that those, who showed favor toward them, bit their nails. Why we didn’t find out this before?

The first hospital [where I was], was a barrack hospital. They transformed one barrack into hospital, because we were so many, that we couldn’t get in to the regular hospital. We were there quite for a long time, and later they took us to Torun, with huge ambulances. I lay, so I could see just walls, because there weren't any undamaged houses. They took us over to a large hospital, which had five floors There were a lot of people who had tuberculosis, but they were cured. They were really nice people. We were together with the Russians. We were on the second floor. I had terrible stiffness when I had to go up to the second floor... there was our department. We spent those six months mostly in bed. Everybody was sick. We were aching all over. It was terrible when we went down for a walk. There were Russians in the hospital also, their department was on the first floor. We were on the second floor, and the German soldiers above us... they were SS soldiers. The Russian cured the sick German soldiers too. When I was feeling better, I told Edit to come with me, and talk with the German soldiers. We entered to one of them. We found a half-dead man where we entered. I rebuked him very badly. I was glad that I found a German soldier, on who I could wreak my vengeance – I spoke a good German then. We used to speak Hungarian only between each other. He said that he didn’t anything wrong. That he didn’t anything wrong! Everybody could say that. I have to tell you sincerely that he Russians were very humane. They were really careful and very nice, they had time for everybody, because everyone had his/her healthy problem. For example they examined my lungs monthly because I was weak, and they didn’t let me home until I didn’t recover entirely. That’s why I spent six months in the hospital. After we were liberated, I spent six months in hospital, in Poland. They didn’t let me home.

When I was feeling better, we used to sit on a stone with Edit, and we chatted. Once a young man came to us – he was around 20-21 – and it tourned out, that he is a Hungarian soldier from the German army. He was shot, his arm was incorporated in plaster, and he was extremely glad that he could spoke Hungarian at last. We met several times. I was very shocked, that as a German soldier, he was treated ‘especially’ and he showed us that the worms came out from under the plaster The doctors told him that those worms cured the wound...! God forbid...

Auschwitz, Riga, Stuthoff and Danzig – these were the four big places where I was. Not to mention the labor camps. I spent one year in the camps and half a year in the hospital. I came home after one and a half year. I was away for one and a half year...

Five women came home from our group, but I'm the one alive. And there is Edit, who lives in Brasso. She recovered much sooner than me, but we said that we are sisters. 'The knotted one' understood that we are siblings, and she asked us 'Why you have different names?' We answered that I adopted my husband’s name and Edit kept her maiden name. We lied. She didn't want to come home without me. And we came home together. I’m keeping in touch with her since. We talk on the phone every month, sometimes I’m calling her, on other occasions she does. In the past we used to visit each other, but she’s not young anymore, although she is younger than me with four or five years... I only know about her, nobody else. The one who had her foot amputated, emigrated to Israel. I know one more person, who emigrated to Israel. I don’t know anything about the other ones. I gave my address in the village, but then I divorced and disappeared in the country. So even if they wrote me, there was nobody to forward my letters to me. I wondered so many times about what happened with them...

There was a young Russian officer who began courting very intensely. Probably by then, after six months in hospital, I started to have a more human look. He asked me how many we were, and how we were, and whether I knew our names. I told him, of course. I even wrote down all the names, and he told me he would give me a ticket. I told him to get me three, to Czechoslovakia. So we were three who came home to Romania. Irenke, Edit and myself. He made us the tickets and asked me, whether I didn’t change my mind and would go with them to Russia. I told him I wouldn’t. So we got this ‘passport’, because we were told it was accepted everywhere, and advised us that if we would not get any seats on the train, we should go to the patrol. This was the soldier who was on duty, that is who was watching the order at the station, and was wearing a red armband with the letter P on it. An he was supposed to make place for us. It was so awkward [the situation]. In Poland each car had a separate door, not like those we have here, with a hallway. The door was on the outside, like the ones you can see in the old movies. He opened the door and told us in Russian: 'Everybody out!’ There were six seats inside. So we sat down. And we had to go to the patrol several times because we had no seats. One time we didn’t go to him, because we were very ashamed, although we had nothing to be ashamed of, so we traveled on the bumper. At a certain station, we probably looked funny, almost bald, it was obvious we have been deported... Anyway, the town was full of deportees. A lady came to me and gave me a bunch of grapes. In Poland, in Torun or I don’t know where. And I told her I don’t know Polish, but I asked her whether she could speak German. Yes. So I thanked her very much, but I couldn’t eat grapes on an empty stomach. I fell asleep there, while hanging o to the handrail of the bumper, and I felt like it was morning. Then I told her: ‘thank you very much, but I can’t...’ Suddenly I was behaving as a lady. But then I accepted it, I guess. There were many people coming there and giving us food. There were occasions when we asked when our train was leaving, then we sat and slept in the waiting room. There is a long way home from Danzig, several thousand kilometers. And we came, and came, and came...

First we went to Budapest. There we had to go to the Russian army base and they made out a single paper for the three of us, because we traveled to Nagyvarad together. They told us that if we had any problems we should go to the Russian soldier on duty and ask for help. Well, this was all nice, but we needed one who could speak some Slavic language, because the Polish people, for example, were able to communicate with the Russians, but we could not. In the end two women from Kassa joined us, they were Jewish too, one of the was called Helenke, and then they were able to help us free one car. We came together until Kassa. There also were two women from the Czech Republic, Eszti and Sara. But they didn’t come with us to Budapest.

We got on a bus and the check-man came to sell us tickets. We told them we had no money. ‘What do you mean you have no mone?’ We told him we were coming home from the deportation. ‘And how was I supposed to know that?’ We got some Russian documents which included our names, but he told us he is not able to read it. Then one of the women told him: ‘Look at them and you’ll see. Just look at them.’ (The Russians cut our hair, because we were nitty.) And [the controller] went on. He wasn’t too pushy. The woman was very nice, and we thanked her, and she even gaves us some food, we suffered the pangs of hunger. There, in the tram she explained us where to go, because she knew where we can get some aid from. We reported there with the Russian document, and got fifteen hundred pengos. There, in Budapest, we were told at the station which school we had to go to. This was before September 15th, before the school year began. We were accommodated in a school. They gave us someblankets and we slept on the floor, but we were used to that, we had no problem with that. They gathered us there. I you had any relatives, you were allowed to go and sleep there and the next day you could return. We got some food. The Association of Jewish Deportees helped us, so we became human again. With the fifteen hundred pengos we were able to buy ourselves food, soap, toothpaste and toothbrush. This was the first thing we did. So we brushed our teeth... At the hospital the Russians gave us some ‘stony soap’, which didn’t lather or rub, so we were quite dirty, we used soil. And all that dirt soaked in our skin. In Budapest we wanted to go to the Nagyatadi Szabo Street, my husband’s elder sister, aunt and grandparents lived there. I looked for the Nagyatadi Szabo Street, but I wasn’t able to find it. I am a person who asks many questions, and I asked everyone where should I go and at a certain point a young man came, I was leaning against the wall, and asked him: ‘Can you please tell me where can I find Nagyatadi Szabo Street?’ He looked at me, then over my head, looked at me again and walked away. He thought I was crazy. I asked myself I was insane or he was? So I looked up and I saw the plate for the Nagyatadi Szabo Street.

So I slept at my relatives. I was very happy. The first thing I did was to take a bath, I haven’t had a bath in a bath-tub for one and a half year. And they weren’t able to get me out of there: ‘come out now, are you still alive?’ they were shouting. I didn’t take a bath for one and a half years... it was no use to wash up in cold water... anyway, enough of that. I managed to brush my teeth and they gave me fresh underwear, but the clothes didn’t fit me so I had to wear the ones I got from the Russians. When we left the hospital we received skirts, a blouse, a jacket, a handkerchief, some stockings and other things. My relatives already knew my husband was at home. They gave me something to eat right away, and while I was there in Budapest I was together with my two former inmates. They were so happy they were chearing that they could eat so many delicacies without paying for them from those 1500 pengos. Edit was unable to find her relatives. We spent there three days, and then we went to the railway station. The relatives gave us money, they were really nice, and we managed to get on the train and each of us went her way.

To be completely honest, when I came home I told everyone I’m the fearcest anti-Semite in Nagyvarad. Because the Jewish foremen hurt us more than the SS. And they did it only to impress the Germans. And they had a very easy life. How is that possible that your own people would do you wrong? We had to stand in line for meal. Ant there were some very resourceful young girls who did it twice. The cook came out, who was a Jew, too: you already got some, and she took me out of the line, as well, among others, and I was left without food until the evening, because they didn’t give me lunch, neither. And then I started crying. I wasn’t hurt because I was hungry, but because of the unfairness. There was no counting in the labor camp. Bu they [in the concentration camp] counted us. An they made us stay out there in the heat and rain. So... but all credit to the exceptions.

Returning Home

I went home to Alsoszopor, to my husband. He remained there, he wasn’t deported. He was in Budapest all the time, free. He had some relatives there: His grandmother, grandfather and aunt. His mother was originally from Budapest. My husband managed to escape from the labor camp in Nagybanya and lived in Budapest until the end of the war. He hid there. He was smart and managed to give out himself as Hungarian. He wore Burger boots. That was in vogue than, it had long legs, had a yellowish-brownish, leather-like color and had laces. These were the so-called Burger boots, it is most certainly of German origins. He considered himself a Hungarian patriot. And not everyone could afford themselves to wear Burger boots. This could also be a symbol of nobility. He used to walk around Budapest and he didn’t look like a Jew, and probably this is why he was never asked to show his papers, otherwise it would have been al over for him. And when the war was over and Transylvania was reattached to Romania, he came home from Budapest. The rest of his family didn’t come home. He was the only one, and one of his cousins, Laci, Miksa’s son. Laci came home, and then emigrated to America. I don’t know where he lives, if he is alive. My husband took over the management of the estate and of the mill, and he made loads of money.

When I came home, in 1946, I went to Nagyvarad, but there was nobody home. There were people living in our apartment, some strangers have been moved there. There were people moved in every house and apartment, I don’t know who moved them in. The house was there... empty. I couldn’t find anything. There were no pieces of furniture, only the chandeliers. I still remember that out in the yard our white sideboard, the Russians took everything else away. They emptied the house. None of our pieces of furniture were left there. They made a law that if they found any locked, uninhabited house, they broke in and everything [they could find] was taken to a warehouse. I don’t know when this happened, because I wasn’t there, the neighbors related me this. Those who came home could go to the warehouse and could pick out the things they said it was theirs. By the time I arrived home, the warehouse was empty. Well, it was easy to say that something belonged to you, a piano or something... There was a Steinfeld piano, the furniture for four rooms, in a word they took away everything. First the Russians, than anyone who were interested could take from the warehouse whatever they wished to. Pots, everything, everything.

This was already after the end of the war, and my husband was managing the farm and the mill, and made lots of money, he became quite rich. ‘He lived like fighting cocks’ and he was so strange, so unfamiliar. Well, one and a half years have passed, and I probably changed, too, but I’m sure he changed, as well. And he told me to have patience, because he is still young and needs to live the moment. He was two years older then me. My ex-husband was away quite a lot, his job required it, but he mostly didn’t take me to the entertainment events and balls. And the truth is that in time I found out he only cheated me with two women: anyone and everyone... And I was there alone in that big house, and in order to be able to defend myself, he gave me a gun. A pistol trimmed with pearls. And I shot myself. I tried to kill myself, because I thought I couldn’t live with this man, and I have nowhere to go so I didn’t want to live anymore. I related this one month ago to my daughter, she didn’t even know that. Although I had no financial difficulties, I told myself I couldn’t take it anymore. The bullet missed my heart by half a centimeter. I was taken to Szatmar and I got well. But then I decided it was all that I could take... So I didn’t wait for him to settle down. This was the reason why we divorced.

My ‘dear’ husband wasn’t willing to give me what I was entitled to... He was fond of me in his own way, but I wasn’t willing to live with him anymore. After some hard time he gave me back my clothes, but he refused to give me my things, like the photos left in the apartment the neighbors gave back to him. I was quite desperate. First because none of my relatives came home, my brother, my father or my mother, nobody. My two cousins, who were studying in Nagyvarad, chose to leave Romania. I had nobody left here. So the only one I had beside me was my husband. As I walked on the streets of Nagyvarad I met former classmates, acquaintances, but no relatives. One of the neighbors, a ‘nice’ one, told me: ‘No wonder they told us the Germans treated you well, because you’re looking quite chubby!’ What was I supposed to answer to something like that...? So I didn’t. I had nothing. No money at all. I only had the shirt I was wearing. I thought myself I had to do something, because I had to make a living and I had to live somewhere. My lady-friend allowed me to live at her place, but I couldn’t stay there for the rest of my life. I sold the house. But first I had to arrange for my poor mother and brother to be declared deceased, because the house was registered to my mother’s name, and I had to prove I was the only heiress. My lawyer was such a swindler, he twisted and turned everything so that I was left with nothing. He made me sign all kinds of documents, sold the house and in the end I only received half of the amount we established. The house was bought by a salon keeper. I went to him and he told me to wait, because I would get the money. I never did.

When I had a little money, I rented a room, a small apartment, I wasn’t willing to take advantega of my lady-friend. It had a small vestibule, a washbasin alcove and a toilet. It was just what I needed. In the meantime I learnt stenography and typing from a teacher called Rado, because I wasn’t feeling strong enough to go to university. I thought I wasn’t a complete person. My daughter said: ‘Mom, you managed to survive in a camp, you lived to see the liberation, came home from Poland almost on your own, with two of your friends, and you were afraid to go on your own?’ No.

Remarriage and Children

After I moved to Nagyvarad I met on the Main Street Andras Gaspar, Andris. He fell on my neck, since we were friends and lived opposite to each other. During the Holocaust he was a forced laborer in Poland. To be honest, we didn’t really talked about this subject. Some time ago I wasn’t able to talk about this, I didn’t even tell anything to my children. He was a real sportsman, he played tennis and was a swimmer. But when he came back, he was nothing but skin and bones. In the last weeks-months of detention they were all thrown in a relocation camp. He was amongst the first to come home to Nagyvarad. His elder brother has not been deported, because he, for the sake of his wife, converted to Christianism and he wasn’t taken away because he wore the white armband. [Editor’s note: The white armband was worn by the Christians of Jewish origins, that is the ones who converted, and whom, according to the anti-Jewish laws in force were considered Jews. They have been deported to forced labor units for Christians. Ses also: forced labor.] Andris was a late-born, his mother was 43 when she gave birth to him. He had an elder sister, who was 16 years older than him, and she didn’t come home, neither. And none of his relatives, especially his mother. His father was a lawyer, but he died of heart-attack when Andris was in twelveth grade of high school, and he left them nothing. By then his bother was already working and he had to help out his mother, while Andris had to sustain himself: he gave lessons to the weaker students for money.

When we met he was already working at a mining company, he was the manager at a clay and kaolin mine in Rev [Bihar county]. He was hired as manager although he only had a high school graduation diploma. And from then on he came to Nagyvarad every Saturday-Sunday. Andris was glad too to have someone he could talk about the things [before the war]. We were getting along very well and on Saturday nights we used to go to the Astoria, which was in vogue then. Otherwise the Astoria was owned by my lady friend’s father. My lady-friend used to come along, she was already married. And he told me joking that, and I’ll never forget this: ‘We should get married!’ I asked her: 'Are you nuts?' I respected Andris very much, but love or something like that it was out of the question... Then he wrote a statement, it got lost once we moved: ‘In full possession of my faculties I sign that I will take Anni as my wife.’ The whole thing was a joke. I gave it a thought, because I went through a marriage once and was a love match.

And then we got married in 1948. We only had civil marriage. I didn’t divorce according to the Jewish prescriptions, because we went to the Jewish community and they advised us not to, because it is a long procedure and we couldn’t afford it. I got my civil divorce, I still have the decision. So my second marriage was only a civil one, with two witnesses, and after that we and our friends, former classmates went to a restaurant. I even remember that we couldn’t order too much because we had no money, and I found a fishbone in my potato soup. This happened in Nagyvarad’s most elite restaurant, the Transilvania. And it turned out to be such a wonderful marriage you could rarely find, to be honest. We had no arguments or any misunderstandings for 48 years.

From the little money I have left I bought some furniture I’m still using, but we had nothing. We were so poor that the first thing I did was to have him made six pairs of pants. He was employed, he had a salary, and we never had financial problems. We always discussed what we could afford from it and we bought those things. Since my husband was working in Rev, we moved there, in the village. We lived there for about one year, then the whole office was moved to Bratka, come thirty kilometers from Rev in the direction of Kolozsvar. [Editor’s note: to be more precise, the distance between Rev and Bratka is 15 km.] We were given an official quarters so we had no such problems.

In the meantime my grandfather’s estate was nationalized. Recently I got something back from it, but nothing then. My youngest uncle has not been deported. He and his family lived in Arad, and the Jews from the countryside were all moved in the town, but the Romanians have not deported the Jews. So he managed to survive. He managed the estate. I visited him in Arad, in the apartment, and it was so weird when I saw it was full of huge crates. In 1948 he, his wife and their little girl fled from the country. Later he wrote me a letter from Hungary, describing me everything there was there [on the estate], with all the wheat, rye, animals, and that was all mine... But I tore it up because Andris told me that if I went there, they would have locked me up as a kulak. So I never set a foot there. But I could never forgive my poor uncle that even though he knew very well the situation I was in, I only had two pillows I bought from the flea-market, because I couldn’t buy them anywhere else, he didn’t make us a package to ease my condition. He never sent me anything before, because he probably was afraid someone would find out they were planning to flee. Because if someone found out, he would have been locked up that instance. Then they emigrated from Hungary to Israel in 1948, and they remained there. My uncle died there, so did my aunt and my poor cousin, who died of lung cancer. He was the youngest so it hurt me the most, because I liked Marta very much.

In 1950 my daughter Veronika Gaspar was born. I gave birth to her in Nagyvarad, when I was 27. Andris was 28. We moved to Borsabanya. This is a small country town in tip of Maramaros. We felt quite well there, it was a beautiful scenery. I, as wife, I moved like a snail, with the house. We never asked ourselves the question whether I should go with him or not. We went together. There they gave us a one-room flat with all mod cons. This meant the bedroom, the children’s room, the bathroom and the kitchen were all in the same room. I wasn’t cooking because I didn’t want to have smell of food in the room, so we subscribed at the canteen. I never ate so much bacn than in that period. If I was kosher, I would have never eaten it! My husband didn’t observe the Jewish traditions, nor did his parents. After the war we had no problems because we were Jews. We never felt we were considered different [by the non-Jews]. I have been among Hungarians and Romanians, but we never faced such problems. Wherever we went, our neighbors, and everyone knew who and what we were, because they could find out from the office. But we never had any conflicts with anyone. We always were on good terms with people.

We lived in Borsabanya for about eight months, and then we received the notification from Bucharest that we had to move on, they never asked us whether we wanted to or not. Andris loved to get the works going. We moved to Borpatak, ten kilometers from Nagybanya, and that was a beautiful village, as well. There was a gold-mine there. We lived in the castle of the former owner of the mine, a Hungarian man called Pokol. (He flee abroad during the war, and never came back.) Allegedly on top of that building, up on the tower, there was a golden globe, made of massive gold. Nobody took that off. A relative of this Pokol once invited us to dinner [he related us these things]. Pokol was a very wealthy man, he owned the gold-mine, he built it, based on his own designs. He had a daughter called Rita, who had lung disease. Her profile was cut in the French doors of Mrs. Pokol’s rooms. There were around ten families living in the castle. Each of them got one or two rooms, depending on the fact that the employee was alone or with the family. Everyone had a bathroom, kitchen, closet, everything they wanted. We liked it very much there. It was beautiful, a nice little apartment. If it was rearranged after Pokol went away, that is whether it was the same when he lived there, with this many kitchens, I don’t know. In front of the castle it was a beautiful garden. We didn’t live there too much, only one winter and one spring. We stayed there less then a year, and our daughter [Veronika] got sick. So I had to go to Nagybanya , and there was no vehicle, except a cab, a drag Mr. Pokol used to travel around. The coachman was called Vasile, and it was the only means of going to Nagybanya. There was no coach service between Borpatak and Nagybanya, there was no railway there, either, and I thought if something happened to Vasile I wouldn’t be able to go there. You never know what can happen to a small child, can you? It took us two hours to get to Nagybanya by carriage. The doctor [in Nagybanya] gave us the wrong medicine [for the treatment].

One time Andris came home, and told me: ‘What do you think: should I enter the university in Kolozsvar?’ I said yes. He graduated with the highest grades. When my sister-in-law heard about this: ‘What?! He has a good pay! Why does he need a university degree? He has a decent job without university. You’ll be so poor as a church mouse. It’s expensive.’ – Then I told her: ‘I will be the poor one, and Andris, not you.’ He signed up for the correspondence courses of the mining faculty. But he received a notification from the center in Bucharest that stated that mining could not be studied through correspondence anymore, and he had to choose something else, and they were willing to enter him to any other department, he wouldn’t have to take the admittance exams one more time. So now there was that big question mark, what faculty should he enter? I didn’t interfere in his option, he decided to enter the department of mechanical engineering, and he was transferred to Bucharest. He went to Bucharest, signed up and came back. Well, Bucharest was very far away from Nagybanya. And what happened then? Some people came from Bucharest, from the Ministry, to check how things were going, and they had lunch at our place, because there was no restaurant there. One of them asked us how is life there, and I told them I would go in my knees anywhere we could have medical assistance, because of the child. ‘Where do you want to go?’ I don’t care, but anywhere we could find medical assistance. [One of them] promised me he would arrange for us to be transferred. I didn’t really believed him, but in the end he did, and not just anywhere, to Gyulafehervar. So we ended up in Gyulafehervar. We stayed there for six years, until Andris graduated from university. We had no holidays, Andris had no vacation for six years, because he took his holiday during the examination period, because back then there was no vacation for studies. Anyway, those were hard times. But the professors were very nice. He sent them the works and they sent them back to him corrected. And he had to take the exams once a year. If he had to retake any exams in the fall, he had to take them once again.

In Gyulafehervar there was a well-known Jewish lady doctor, everyone told us we should go to her. She found out that my daughter’s organism couldn’t assimilate anything. She ate her meal, but we found it unaltered in the chamber pot. Her name was Iren Salamon. I went to her and told her my problem. She began treating my child, and I have to thank her for my daughter’s life. She told me that if we stayed some more in Borpatak, my daughter would have been most certainly dead. I would have probably found her one morning asleep, because of the weakness. If there was anything, she [my daughter] got measles, then mumps, and all kinds of diseases, she got on her bike and came to us immediately. As soon as I called her on thye phone, she came there at once. Very quick, very quick. She was a spinster who graduated Sorbonne. She wasn’t deported. [Editor’s note: Gyulafehervar remained under Romanian authority during World War II.] She lived in her own house, in a private house [together with her parents]. It was a big house, but I was only in the consulting room, the bathroom and the waiting room. They weren’t poor, after all she graduated Sorbonne. You had to have money to pay for it. She was atleast twenty years older than me. One time, when we turned onto the street where she lived, my daughter began screaming because she knew she would get n injection. She called he inside, into the consulting room, leaving me outside. I only found out later why. ‘Let’s fool mummy. We’ll tell them you didn’t get an injection today. Don’t cry, don’t say anything, we’ll fool mummy.’ And I was expecting my daughter to scream even louder. But it was a dead silence. ‘We fooled mummy’ – they said with one voice. And from that day she found out the injection wasn’t painful. And from that moment on she never screamed again. So she was an incredibly intelligent, cultivated lady. My daughter was quite big when I heard Iren Salamon was going to get married. My daughter heard that, because while she was out playing she heard this: ‘What do you mean? But the lady is old! How come she’s getting married?’ And she moved to Kolozsvar, to her husband. Her husband was Jewish, as well. She [the lady doctor] died here in Kolozsvar. She was very nice, incredibly nice. Each year, on New Year’s Eve we used to send her a greeting card, and one time we received a letter in which she wrote we were her only patients who remembered her. She was very excited by this. And asked us hat did she do to deserve this? And we answered that nothing more than our child’s wife. She was an incredibly nice lady. Later I visited her in Kolozsvar, she was living opposite to the New York hotel, on the second floor, in an old house that had an elevator. My daughter was four or five years old, and she has never seen an elevator before, but we prepared her. I knew she was living upstairs, so her father told her: ‘You get in the closet, push a button and it takes you up.’ ‘And if I get in any closet and push a button?’ ‘You can do that, but it will take you nowhere.’ She wanted to go up and down [with the elevator].

Then we received the transfer notification to Stej, ‘Orasul Petru Groza’ [Petru Groza Town in Romanian, in Bihar county], some 50-60 km from Belenyes, in the direction of Biharfured. [Editor’s note: It is in fact 16 km away from Belenyes.] This small town was built by the Russians, because they found uranium and built a uranium mine. Andris was appointed shop-floor leader. He wasn’t an engineer yet, he did not have his diploma yet. The Ministry had a department. A huge building was built, it was like a smaller ministry. I don’t know why, but Andris had to go there. And this all was built by the Russians. They even measured the air in front of the department, and the gauge was clicking stating ‘poluat’ [polluted]. The army was responsible for the uranium. This was a military secret. Andris was a civilian, he was an engineer, and he worked there in the shop-floor. But the army was supervising everything. It was order, order, and again order. There was no stealing there. The uranium was transported away by the Russians. They processed it. Here it was just extracted. Once a car tipped over while transporting uranium. It was transported several kilometers through the field from the mine, and it turned over. The land in an area of one kilometer was removed, and not only what the truck was transporting. The uranium was a military secret, so we were transferred to the M.A.I. [Ministerul Armatei Industriale, Ministry of Defense Industry], the army. This is a very hazardous material, but weren’t aware of that. At least I didn’t. It is possible that Andris knew the M.A.I. was looking for trustworthy people, offering them a very good salary, and we finally could breath again, because it wasn’t that easy to go to Bucharest all the time with a child. So they lured us there. There was a lido, and everything. And there was a large market, where the village people used to come, because there was a very good life there. There was meat, and what else did we need after that starvation?

I was a housewife, and took care of the children. My daughter started school in Stej, and finished two grades of elementary school there. She studied in Romanian. Andris wanted badly to have another child. I told him: ‘If you can get me a mother-in-law or a mother, or an aunt, grandmother, then we will have another child.’ I was working: knitting, sewing, everything that had something to do with needlework. I worked for the neighbors and everyone. I had so much work I was almost unable to keep up. I started knitting, sewing in Gyulafehervar. I couldn’t take a job because although there were opportunities, but what about the child? Back then there were no daycare centers. So I made money as I could.

In Stej there were those flat blocks with four apartments. Two of them on the ground floor, two upstairs. And between the blocks there were green belts. And there were these ‘VB’s, the Russians called them this way, small green houses, small villa-like houses for one family. I just watched those beautiful houses, made of wood, but Andris wasn’t watched those beautiful houses, made of wood, but Andris didn’t want to move in such a house. So there was a little block, then a ‘vb’ and a little block again. And lots of green belts. It was a beautiful way of building. It was a beautiful little place. When we arrived in Stej there were still many Russians living there. My neighbor, for example, living in the same block, was a Russian family. An engineer working there and his family, just like ours, and another family, the Sugars. The lady, Elza, was Saxon, while Laci was Jewish. She saved her husband. He wasn’t deported from Kolozsvar. This was the chief accountant, they lived on the first floor. And there were the Calianus, originally from Temesvar. We called the lady ‘Kajla neni’ [auntie Droopy], my daughter gave her that name. To sum up, only the very best were brought to Stej from the different companies. Because it was a very lucrative company. So in that block there was a Russian family and three local families: a chief accountant, an engineer and us.

One day the Russian’s little girl came to our kitchen window, saying ‘malinki koshka’. I asked her: ‘What are you saying?’ And she kept saying ‘malinki koshka’. I had absolutely no clue what that meant. It turned out we put some crates outside, because we just moved in there, and a cat had kittens in one of the crates. Malinki means small and koshka means cat. They used to come to us and we threw about our arms trying to explain them if we needed something, and they gave us anything we needed. It was a young couple, the little girl was around six or seven. Later they went back to Russia. The Russians had their separate store, and we were not allowed to shop there. But they were allowed to shop anywhere. We had money too, we could loosen up a little.

It was forbidden to go even in the area of the mine! On one evening Andris didn’t come home because some misfortune happened in the shop-floor and asked me to bring him some sandwiches, if I could, because he hadn’t eaten since morning and he wasn’t able to come home. It was the first time I went there. He explained me, though, where I should go, because there was an asphalt road leading there and it was already dark. Well, a soldier jumped ahead of me every minute! They asked me what was I doing there. Fortunately Andris told me to bring along my pass I could prove my husband was working there. They searched me before I went in. They searched Andris, as well, because they wanted to prevent him bringing out anything. He was searched both when coming out and when going back in. Andris couldn’t bear this atmosphere. People had to submit their Resumes two or three times a year. Because you never know when one’s background changes, right? And Andris hated this very much. And he didn’t like this army life anyway. We only stayed there for two years. So he started sniffing around [looked around]: ‘where can we go?’ They were looking for a man in Govora, Vilcea county. So he requested a transfer, and what a fuss they made of it. He just wanted to get out of that army life. I believe if we wanted to we could stay for there even until now, but we chose to go to Rimnicu Vilcea.

So he moved to Rimnicu Vilcea, in the first [true] block of flats of my life. It was an L-shaped building with three staircases. In each staircase there were twenty families. So al in all we were living sixty in the block. In the center there was a small yard, garden, and we made some benches. We lived there for more than ten years, my daughter graduated from high-school there, in the ‘Liceul Balcescu’ [Balcescu High-school]. She didn’t manage to enter the university first try, only the second try. So she got a job as secretary. So she worked, because everyone of us had to do something. I continued to sew, the needlework, and didn’t get a job. I wasn’t able to, because Andris was changing jobs all the time, and it would have been a problem for me to change them as he did. By then he already had his engineer diploma, that is he became chief engineer. He started off the construction. There was a beautiful factory there in Vilcea, I was there several times. The alleys between the different departments were asphalted, but they were always covered with mud. So Andris punished them for all that mud until they removed it. So he was a very good organizer, an extremely good one. I believe he was a better organizer than engineer. He was a good engineer, but his organizing skills were outstanding. Then he started up the soda-works in Govora. There was an alkali factory that needed to be started up. He wasn’t willing to leave until it wasn’t started up, and then soda was a very well-selling products, but now I heard it has fallen back very much. Andris worked there, each morning a bus took them to Govora, which is around 20 kilometers from Vilcea. We were living in Vilcea. Because why would I stay in a village when my daughter was a student. They started telling him what wage they would give him. Andris told the people from Govora to give that up because they couldn’t afford to pay him the salary he was getting in Stej. He didn’t leave there because he wanted a better salary, but because he wanted to get out of the army.

People were very nice in Rimnicu Vilcea, but very uncivilized. They were the first generation in shoes, because until then they wore laced-up sandals. There was one Hungarian family and us, the Jews… The rest were Romanians. These were my ‘oltean’s [Oltenians – people from the region of Oltenia]. They were very bad at broiling. And they couldn’t cook, neither. They were sticking pigs, but they only used the meat and only made bacon. They didn’t know how to butcher the pig, they only cut up the plucks, the liver, the kidneys… You know how expertly a Transylvanian butcher butchers the pig, don’t’ you? For them, everything inside the pig was ‘spurcat’… spit. It had to be thrown away. They came to me, for example, asking how could I make Hamburgers so it had such a good smell. So I told them I mince the meat. Then they asked what’s a meat-grinder? A mincer. They had no idea what a mincer was. Then I asked them how they were making the Hamburgers. They told me they used to boil the meat and then cut it with a knife. This was Hamburgers for them. Another occasion was when they smelled cake. They said Easter was coming and they didn’t know how to cook. So I taught them how to cook cake [pastry]. They were very strict about taking off the shoes in the vestibule when entering the house. They were very particular about that. Not otherwise, but overparticular about this. The neighbor came over and I asked him not to take his shoes off. Well, how on earth… – he wanted to look at the painting we had in the room. Well, I wasn’t able to air my room… that smell it was terrible. The other one asked me how could she convince her husband to change his socks? They were coming to me with all kind of problems, because they knew I always gavethem good advice. Evn with issues related to their kids.

There were no other Jews in the block. They didn’t know what a Jew was. They just didn’t know; there was no anti-Semitism there. Once some neighbors came asking me why I was looking over the fence at the entrance of the block. |On the other side of the fence there were some small houses. They told me there are some very weird people in the back of the yard. So what was I doing there, looking what on the other side of the fence was? In the end it turned out there was a Jewish prayer-house. And it was Friday evening, and the kids heard some singing and they were very amused about that people were nodding and singing in tallit. Then I explained them whom the Jews are, because they had no idea what a Jew, an ‘evreu’ [Jew in Romanian] was. They didn’t even heard the word ‘jidan’ [the derogatory term for a Jew], it was only used in the Regat, in the area of Bucharest, I suppose. All right then, they said they would forbid their children to go there, because for them it was like a circus performance, a curiosity, which they have never seen before. So they forbid the children to go there, that is to climb up the fence and watch them. Me and my husband never went there [to the prayer house]. To be completely honest, the town was completely unfamiliar for me, totally unfamiliar. I’m not the person to make friends too easy anyway. If I become friends with someone, that’s a different story, but not this way. There was no anti-Seimitism at the soda-works, neither. They never made Andris feel he was a Jew, although I’m sure they knew.

At that time communism was established for quite a while. My husband was a member of the party, and he couldn’t have been chief engineer otherwise. When he came home [after the war] he could have sworn the communist party was the only one which that could protect the Jews. I didn’t see anything in it [in communism]. I just wanted people to live in peace. I couldn’t sympathize with communism because I was brought up otherwise. When someone showed me a communism, I was still a child then: ‘Look, that’s a communist!’ , and I’ll never forget this, I was puzzled: ‘What kind of a disease is communism?’ My grandmother never let me play or make friends with poor children, because she wanted me to maintain a certain level. I told her I didn’t care who their mother or father were, I just liked the kid and I like being friends with them. She really bugged me a lot with this. Because: ‘You should only make friends with the rich ones!’ So I was raised according to opposite mentality. I had no problems during the communist era. I weren’t happy with it, but I kept quiet During the communist era Andris has never used in his favor the fact that he was a chief engineer. He wasn’t willing to ‘get’ even a pin, never…, because to ‘get’ meant to steal. It was very hard when we had to stand that starving, and the humiliation of lacking this and that. We were never able to buy our child what we wanted to. Andris soon realized this was unacceptable and this was shown by the fact that everything was bothering him, the decrees, official reports, which were all false. I suffered quite a lot because of the Ceausescu 5 era. I was feeling humiliated as a human. Well, we had to live under continuous constraints. Then we heard the terrible rumors about our phone being tapped.

My daughter was admitted to the university, and then Andris came home saying he heard something that a chief engineer was needed in Dicsoszentmarton. So we went there. He used to start up everything and then he moved on. The chemical plant in Dicsoszentmarton was built. But I wasn’t willing to move there because there were terrible apartments there. The local mayor told us to contact the local authorities of Marosvasarhely to get an apartment here. [Editor’s note: There are 39 km between the two towns.] And we were able to arrange this, and we got this apartment then, on the first floor, where the children are living now. We were the first dwellers. We moved to Marosvasarhely in 1973. I said I would be carried out of here only with my heels foremost… but I moved away twice [since]… He was coming here twice a week: On Wednesday and on Saturday, otherwise he was living in a hostel. Then he was transferred here to the Prodcomplex [Editor’s note: the plastic and glass factory].

My daughter was attending the university in Bucharest. She was in the last year, and during the Christmas holiday they came home and then she married Doru, her current husband. They had no religious marriage, just a civil one. Nor I, nor Andris had no problem with the fact that her husband was not Jewish, but Romanian. Doru also graduated the university in Bucharest, but we already knew him from Vilcea, their friendship began there. In Vilcea, in the yard in the back of which there was that prayer house, in that section of the street lived Doru together with his mother and his elder sister. So I know Doru since he was a child. And I know very well my ‘nora’, my daughter’s mother-in-law. She is an incredibly beautiful and smart, she was the most beautiful woman in Vilcea. She was a very beautiful woman. Doru’s father was a Romanian Orthodox priest, he died already. He ran away, went to buy some cigarettes, and never went back. Doru was still a little boy. He managed to get across the border when the Russians came in [in World War II, after 23rd August 1944] 6. He never saw his father again. So they went through quite a tragedy. Her mother worked at the Orthodox episcopate as clerk in Rimnicu Vilcea. She had nothing against Doru marrying my daughter. Although she knew we were Jews. After one year of marriage Andriska was born. A sweet thing happened when Andriska was born; she [Doru’s mother] came from Vilcea to visit the child. He was out on the balcony, in the wicker cradle. Andriska was a beautiful child, and she looked at him: ‘A iesit ceva bun din amestecatura asta.’ [‘Something good came out from this mix’ in Romanian]. This was her only allusion... I mean that the mix had a good outcome. He liked very much being here, he used to stay here for weeks. We were getting along very well.

I told my daughter if anything happened to her child, I would solve it. She burst out: ‘What do you think? I give birth to the child for you or for myself?’ They took away the children... Then they received their assignment, they were transferred to Galac. They went to Galac with the child. They couldn’t find a maid, and there was only that week-long ‘camin’ [daycare]. She told me their children had to live in such filth in Galac... It was a daycare where you took your children on Monday morning, and you brought them home on Saturday afternoon. And when my daughter went there and saw the children were underfed, with bruises, it was terrible, and there was such a smell and filth there. She decided she couldn’t let her children there, and while she was pregnant she look for a maid. And after a few days I she called me on the phone, saying: ‘Mom, we have a problem.’ The husband of that maid suffered stroke, he became paralyzed. So she was unable to get there. ‘What should I do now?’ I said: ‘Take the child and bring it here.’ And that’s it. So I brought up the child. We weren’t willing to destroy him. They were working at the local designing institute, and I brought up Andriska. So I had something to do then.

We had a friend called Ferko Fili, originally from Nagyvarad, and he came once to visit us, and I told him we are desperate because the child is in Galac, and when my daughter was pregnant, I went there, of course, to help her out. It was horrible, you should look at that place from a plane. They were extremely filthy, the block they were living in was full of bedbugs, and even though they disinfected the place, after a week they reappeared; they were living in miserable conditions. And this friend arranged for them to be transferred here to Marosvasarhely. We lived together for four years. All the rooms were empty, we were living two per room. The two children (the first one, the boy, was born in 1974, while the other one, the girl, Daniela Anca, was born in 1978), they and us, six in three rooms. By then they were working here at I.P.J. But someone needed to move elsewhere, because we were too many, six in three rooms. Andris came home tired after work, and he used to take a nap after lunch. Then he always had something more to do, some more work. He used to translate, he did this and that, and if one child started screaming or running around, it was unbearable. But one time Doru became quite desperate, saying: ‘Nu sunt in stare sa-mi fac rost de o locuinta?’ [‘Am I unable to get an apartment?’ in Romanian]. So he went to Macavei, the manager of the institute and requested an apartment. ‘Ce-i? Te-ai certat cu socrii?’ [‘Why?’ Did you have a fight with your parents-in-law?’] He told him we had no fight, we were on very good terms, but he thought that as the head of the family he is entitled to have his own apartment and his own, independent life. Although we never said anything. The living room and the children’s room was theirs, and we lived in the small room, but we were together. I used to do the laundry, and I did this for them, as well. And in the end they gave us an apartment in Meggyesfalva. It was a two-room apartment upstairs, without an elevator. Then I told them it wasn’t ‘fair’ for two people to live in three rooms and four to live in Meggyesfalva in two rooms! So we left them this apartment and went to Meggyesfalva. When this fuss with Ceausescu took place [in December 1989] 7, he got angry, and one week after the revolution poor Andris had a preinfarct. Then the lady-doctor told us to be careful with those four floors, because his heart couldn’t take it. From then on I took a chair with me and after each turn he sat down and we climbed those four floors this way. But then we moved here to number 272 on the boulevard, to the ground floor.

I got alienated from religion, we weren’t members of the Jewish community for quite a while. You want me to be honest and tell you why we became members of the Jewish community in Marosvasarhely? Due to our friend, Ferike Velcer, who worked at Prodcomplex as manager, and who used to buy us matzah, because we liked it very much. At one moment he told us, look, guys, I can’t get you more, because they would only give for me, that is they only gave them the amount allotted for a family. So we signed up. And the people from the Community were very nice, because they never asked us why did we sing up that late. Andris wasn’t religious, but neither was I. Andris told me: ‘We have to belong somewhere!’ There was someone who came every month to collect the membership fee. The poor man has already died. He liked so much to tell stories, and I enjoyed listening to him, but I don’t know what his name was. He was an old gentleman. But he stopped coming for a month, for two months, and then we received a call and found out he died, and they asked my husband to go there and pay the fee. It was Andris who went there every time. I have never been at the Community. In 1982 or 1983 we attended a memorial for the Holocaust and I promised myself I would never go anywhere. I was a Jew who didn’t know I had to go to the synagogue wearing a shawl. I was so embarrassed there... There [in the synagogue] I knew very few people, because I had no way of knowing any Jews from here. A woman sat next to me, and she gave me one; I don’t know why she had two shawls. Several people gave speeches. I know Misi Spielmann also gave one, I knew him because we were on good terms with his parents, but I didn’t know the other people from the Community. My daughter said she feels a stranger there, too. Because those who were there, my friends, almost all of them died. Some of them emigrated, but most of them died. I read in the Zsidlic [the publication], I wish I hadn’t, because it troubled me to see how many from Nagyvarad were here. The Zsidlic was founded in Israel in 1980.

Andris wanted to emigrate to Israel, right after we got married, but I didn’t really liked Israel. Many of his friends are there, and he was there. I often reprove myself for it, because I was the one who said I don’t have the strength to move to a new country, because it is possible that it would have been better for my child. But I knew I could never learn that language. I have a very bad sense of language. And that one is one of those dead languages. I liked living here, and I was hoping my mother would come home. Then I hoped my brother would come home. But I got no sign from him. My daughter was seven or eight when I showed her our house in Nagyvarad. I stayed in front of it like a beggar. I didn’t go in, because by that time it was already sold. I only was there once, I wasn’t able to go there again, because my heart sank, although I wanted to show Doru how beautiful the house was, because he is an architect and he could have valued it. But I never took him there. I have been done out of my money. My uncle’s alcohol factory was nationalized. We went with our children at showed it to them. They couldn’t believe the factory was still there. We couldn’t revendicate it, because it wasn’t registered to my uncle’s name, but to her wife’s father’s name. [Editor’s note: It was probably transferred during the strohmann regime.] 8

I didn’t know where they were, or if they were alive, I knew nothing about my cousins, but one day Andris, while we were still living in Vilcea, came home and told me he has such good news I would be more happy than to see him. ‘What happened?’ He looked around and found out that Leitner, my cousins’ uncle was still living in Bucharest. He went to him and asked him whether he knew anything about my two cousins, the daughters of my uncle in Tasnad. ‘O course I do! One of them lives in England, the other one in America.’ And he gave him their addresses. I was so happy I started crying. As I found out later, the worked in a factory [during the Holocaust]. Those who worked in factories had a much better situation. They had a roof over their head, and weren’t cold. And they weren’t starving as much as the others. After they got liberated, a Swedish company from Sweden took them under their protection and took them to Sweden. They told them ‘You can stay there as long as you live.’ But how did Agi get acquainted with her English and Evi with her American husband...? Probably in Sweden, but I never found that out. We arranged with my husband’s cousin, Gyuri Herschdorfer, to go to Germany still under the Ceausescu regime. This was in the early 1980s. And what a fuss they made until they let us go! We only managed to get the documents following much fuss. We had to produce the invitation and some documents stating they would provide for us, and that we would return; we needed lots and lots of documents. 9 Andris arranged everything. But he always came back displeased. I remember a militian came to us, Andriska started crying in the little room, he was still small, around one and a half years old, and he asked us why we wanted to go to Germany? ‘Do you want to dicker?’ I told him by no means, I just wanted to meet with my relatives. ‘Or your husband has some ideas, he looks for a job?’ Under no circumstances, I can guarantee you we’ll come back. Well, you can never know. He behaved very badly with me. Then there was another one who came, but this one was more civilized, he only asked me to be careful what we said, because people were talking. The documents have reached the Ministry, and in the end we got the documents. Otherwise I don’t think they would let us go. I don’t believe they would. Our relatives from Germany sent us money for train tickets for going to Bucharest, and from there we went by plane to Frankfurt. Gyuri was living there, who, I hope, is still alive there in Germany.

I met my cousin Agi, she came to Frankfurt and we spent a week together. We arranged beforehand that we would meet in Germany, because I had only one opportunity to meet them. While we were waiting the plane I was wondering: would I recognize Agi? I saw her so long ago... But we recognized each other. It was a very touching moment. Agi’s husband was Jewish, he was called Levi [his surname]. But her daughter married a Christian, and her son also married a Christian woman. They are already assimilated. I don’t believe they were observing the traditions. They weren’t religious neither. The husband of Evi, the younger one, is called Friedmann. So he is a Jew. They have three daughters, but I don’t know any of them. The eldest studied at Oxford. I never met Evi. This is what our family has been reduced to, but I still keep in touch with my uncle from Israel, in my mother’s memory, and we write each other. He wrote me, and I wrote him. I never complained to him.

As for the period I spent in Germany, they [the relatives] weren’t willing to let me go. Everyone I met, former classmates, acquaintances, former acquaintances from Nagyvarad, they all put some German Marks in my hand. At a given point I went to my room and started crying because I wasn’t a beggar. I never complained about anything, never told anybody I needed anything... because people who had relatives or acquaintances abroad used to complain all the time. They used to say you couldn’t this or that... I never complained to anyone. I never asked anyone to send me anything. And it seems these Germans or those who emigrated to Germany knew this, so everyone gave me some money. What was I? A beggar?!

I never went to Israel. My husband was there, though. They organized their class reunion each year, because there, in Israel, there are... there were many people from Nagyvarad. But they only organized the first one in Nagyvarad, only once after the war. Just very few of the ones living abroad used to come, because they were afraid of the Romanians and of the Russians. So after that they organized it each year in Israel. I attended the evening classes of the Jewish high-school and graduated there, so I was entitled to the transport costs, but by the time they realized this, my husband was already dead and I didn’t want to go alone. They didn’t see there was a section for girls, so they only invited the men. They sent the invitation and money to my husband, and the accommodation there was fully covered for him, because we were forbidden to have foreign currency. The Romanian state never made it difficult, because if they sent money and an invitation they were compelled to let them go. Andris visited my uncle from Arad who emigrated to Israel. His daughter was the most beautiful house he has ever seen, although he saw quite many beautiful houses. He became so ‘poor’. We never had money to go together, although I made some quite clear hints to my uncle about me wanting to go visit them. I wasn’t that eager to see Israel, I was more interested to see Marta, my cousin, and my aunt. The answer I got was he had no money... He had no money for this [transport], but if I went to Israel, I could live there and they would have given us food. My uncle was a typical Jew, who loved only himself and his small family, but not her sister’s daughter. Later it turned out he sold the land he owned in Romania in small pieces to be less conspicuous. ‘Anni, you should sign this! Anni, you should sign that!’ Because I had the same rights as heiress of my mother as him, and he was aware of that. I signed everything without asking what I was signing, because I was stupid and trusted people. So my and his signature were there on the sales contracts. He never gave me a dime from the money he got. He never gave me anything, and sent the money abroad. He managed to send it, I don’t know how. And he was my uncle, my mother’s brother; he was very observant, he used to pray with tallit each morning. It was incredibly religious. He was a bigot. Each morning he said his prayers and used to go to the synagogue. But he inherited the y maternal grandmother’s ill nature. My uncle died there in Israel. My other two uncles were very nice people.

Andris died in 1994, in August there will be ten years [in 2004] since then. He went to Hungary, because there was a smaller class reunion in Budapest with the friends who were still alive, including people from Israel. He was 72 then. I arranged here with the Red Cross, the SMURD [emergency ambulance] to take him over, because they would put him on the plane there, but my family doctor said it was better that it happened there, because they would heal him there. But they didn’t. It was terribly hot that summer, there were 40 degrees in Hungary and they didn’t let us bring him home. They cremated him there, and we had to request a special authorization for my daughter to bring the urn home by bus. There was no memorial service, many people asked me why I never buried him. I didn’t bury him. He’s here. If we were able to bring him home in a casket, I would have buried him according to the Jewish tradition, since he was a member of the Jewish community. I think even the community asked me whether I wanted to bury him. I didn’t. He is here with me... His death shocked me very much and half a year later I got sick and I was taken to the hospital. I was there for 2 weeks. My poor daughter came to visit me each afternoon. Then an apartment became vacant here, and the poor thing was afraid to tell me they would move me again. ‘Mom, don’t do anything, just come with Anca and Picu [the grandchildren]’. Thus I ended up here. I didn’t like moving to the sixth floor, but I kept quiet. I got used to it.

I never told anything about the Jewish traditions to the children. It wasn’t a subject for discussion. My son-in-law Doru used to ask me things. On one Christmas eve, we always observe it, Doru told me he had some idea about the Jews, that they are very smart and they do anything to get everything to themselves, and he would have liked to have at least one person in the family with the brains of a Jew, who can handle any situation, because this is what he heard about them. We are all so soft. We have no Jewish blood. But – and I haven’t told him this – if my grandfather was still alive, this marriage would never have taken place. He would have never accepted it. But we had no argument or misunderstanding on this subject... And Andriska, my grandson, is already thirty years old, so they are together since thirty one years. When my husband was still alive, we always had a Christmas tree and gave each other presents. We even celebrated it if y grandparents weren’t there [in Nagyvarad]. I think it is a beautiful holiday, it is an intimate, family holiday.

My grandchildren were not baptized. I have no say in this matter. But my daughter, she is Jewish, like me... she wears the Star of David on her necklace, although she is baptized as Christian. I had her baptized when she was seven. She is Catholic, because my lady-friend was also a Catholic. I loved Kamilla very much, and she loved my daughter, as well. She was baptized in the Saint Ladislaus church in Nagyvarad. I wanted to prevent her going through I did. Andris told me to do what I wanted, and the priest told me, because we had a preliminary discussion, to bring her father, as well. I told him I thought I didn’t think I was able to. And he didn’t go there. It was all the same to me what religion she would have, I only wanted her not to be Jewish. But now she considers herself Jewish. She doesn’t observe the religious prescriptions, she doesn’t attend the service even on high holidays. But when we have been invited to the Pesach festivity [Editor’s note: to Seder eve to the Jewish community of Marosvasarhely], I was really sick then, so I wasn’t able to go, but she attended it with my grandchild. She usually goes to the Community on Seder eve. And each month she goes there for medications. The medications are supplied by the Scots [Editor’s note: Anna Gaspar refers to the Jewish organization ‘Targu Mures Trust’ from Glasgow, which provides financial aid for the Jewry from Marosvasarhely, http://www.eastrenfrewshire.gov.uk/holocaust/testimonies/holocaust_remembrance_2004_-_targu_mures.htm], and I’m getting three kinds of drugs from the district doctor, some more expensive ones, because I as getting them for free until now, but not anymore, I can get some of them with a discount of 50%, one of them with a discount of 90% and the three cheaper ones are supplied by the Community. And I was really moved when they came and offered me to supply me with medications. Of course I accepted, I have to take six or seven types of drugs. This meant a lot. When the Scots come here they usually ask me whether I can receive them. So they come here. I only ask them not to stay too long. I’ve been visited already by three groups.

Five or six years ago I’ve started to get some compensation from Germany, every three months. I don’t know exactly how much, at first they gave me German Marks, then Euros. Each year, in December or January, I have to send a notary power of attorney stating I’m still alive, and as soon as I die [this expires]..., my children don’t inherit this. And the truth is I help them out with this amount. I bought Andriska a computer, the first one, then a second one, and now we had the gas connected for him, central heating. They are opposing this anyway they can, but in the end they will accept it. I wish at least to see while I’m still alive that they have some benefit from my suffering. I receive half of the pension of Andris as retired chief engineer. The Romanian government also gives me some compensation as former deportee, 300,000 [old] lei per month. From the pension and from the compensation it’s not possible to sustain this apartment. If I was not getting the compensation from Germany, I would die of hunger... I don’t like to receive, because I would feel indebted. But if the children get me flowers, I’m very happy. But if feel sick and ask my daughter to bring me some bread she does, and I give her the 9,500 lei [for the bread]. I wouldn’t like to be provided for.

Life Today

I have a fixed routine. Everyone who knows me laughs at this. Well, I don’t get up early in the morning. First of all there is no reason why I should. Secondly I'm a light sleeper. If I manage to sleep four hours a night, I’m feeling like I slept a lot. I usually wake up around seven or eight o’clock, but mostly around eight, and if I see it’s just half past seven, I stay in bed for half an hour more. Then I wake up, go to the bathroom; I don’t have to tell you what I’m doing there, do I? I can’t stand if someone walks around in night robe or pyjamas. I get dressed, go to the kitchen, put the water for tea on the stove, come back to the room, put the bed-linen to air, then lock everything, make tea and drink it while eating a slice of bread with nothing on it. I don’t need to put anything on it. My breakfast is a slice of bread, nothing more. Before I ate even less for breakfast, I only had a cup of coffee, but I stopped doing that. I never go to sleep until I don’t decide what to cook the next day. And I don’t usually cook for one day, the soup I’m making usually lasts three or four days, because I love soup. I’m usually make it, let’s say, on Monday. On Monday I don’t have anywhere to go, because the woman from the Jewish Community comes here. By eleven o’clock lunch is prepared, and I usually eat lunch around twelve o’clock, she leaves and I go to the bathroom and take a bath. An Mari becomes a lady, because until then, while I’m in the kitchen, I’m just Mari. I usually sit down in the room to watch TV and knit. I always have to have something to knit, because otherwise I’m going crazy, because I can’t just sit there and do nothing, and I never take a nap in the afternoon. At five o’clock I eat my apple and a slice of bread; this is my snack, and I eat dinner at seven. Then I sit down again, but I never do needlework at electric light, except for winter, because I can’t just watch TV from four o’clock. The Hungarian TV station is good for me, because I can work better when it’s on. I usually go to bed around 11 pm. This is my typical Monday.

On Tuesday the same goes around, in the morning I water the flowers, because I water them every other day, make the bed, and it takes me a while to do the room, because I don’t like mess. Then I go out. No matter if for matches or bread, I just go out. And I walk on the banks of the [Poklos] creek, there are some benches there. [Editor’s note: The block is almost on the banks of the creek.] If I get tired, I sit down. I go shopping, today a kilogram of potatoes; ‘Only a kilo?’ [the seller asks me]. Well, then make it two kilos, but you bring it home to me. I’m buying poatoes, vegetables, eggs, for each other day I have some shopping scheduled. Because they told my daughter once ‘your mother came home with two shopping bags.’ I told her: ‘look, dear, can you even imagine I’m carrying stuff?’ In one of them I had the bread, in the other one the vegetables. I had two bags just to help me keep my balance. I never carry heavy stuff, because I can’t. If the weather is nice, I have some bench-acquaintances I don’t even know their names, but we used to gather there, five-four ‘young’ women like myself, and we discuss things of life. I arrive home around 11 am, I heat the lunch, but I don’t take a bath then, only every other day. Not that I wouldn’t take a bath, but because it’s one of the highlights of my life, when I can sit in hot water. I have a very dry skin, so I have to use some cream, otherwise it really itches. I either take no bath or scratch myself. I have a really funny neighbor; if she hears water seething for quite long, she turns on the tap as well. So she doesn’t have to let it run, because I usually have to run it for ten or twenty minutes, and today, for example, I had to run it for half an hour, and I still had no hot water. It just can’t come up until the sixth floor. We reported this, but they told me I should go and ask the dwellers to bathe more frequently. How am I supposed to do that? So this is my routine.

And on Wednesday it all starts over. I go and buy some bread, every other day I buy myself half of a piece of bread with potatoes from the Eldi, and some fruit, I still eat apple, while strawberry is too expensive for me. But what is really difficult for me are the Saturdays and Sundays. The kids built themselves a small weekend cottage. It is really nice, my daughter told me their relaxation means growing potatoes and onion, because they have a small garden and they can relax there… it is a beautiful area in Ratosnya. Anywhere you look you see only mountains and the air is really fresh. There is a stupid cock in the neighborhood, I really like listening to it, it crows from dawn to nightfall. Not only in the morning, but all day long. And you can hear dogs barking, well, it has a typical countryside atmosphere. They took me there for my birthday. And I loved it. The problem is I can’t stay there for two days. They usually go there on Friday afternoon and spend the Saturday and Sunday there. So Doru would have to come for me, but I don’t expect him to do this. But on that occasion they only went there for a day, and they took me along. My doctor come to me the next day. My family doctor visits me once a month. I’m not allowed to go there because it’s full of coughing people. He told me: ’Ceva nu-mi place la dumneavoastra, ceva nu e in regula.’ [‘There something I don’t like, something is wrong’ in Romanian]. And I told him I was out. He told me wouldn’t tell me not to, but to do it more rarely. This is some stress as well. Everything is stress. So on Saturdays and Sundays I’m here alone. They call me on the phone every day, because this is not a problem anymore, now with the mobile phones, but still I’m here alone. It is hard, because when my daughter comes she usually calls me from the office in the morning, so we keep in touch. But on those occasions she only calls me once a day. And when they go out on the weekend I always think about what would happen if I fell sick then. I can’t call them in Ratosnya with this phone. 'Mom, let us by you a mobile phone.' Don’t, because I don't need it. I don’t need a mobile phone. But I gave their number to my neighbor. I hope I'll be strong enough to walk there. So these are the toughest days of the week. But my former inmate from Brasov, Edit calls me on the phone on Saturdays or Sundays. Just to make me feel I’m not that alone. And I'm not on very good terms with ay of my neighbors , because I don’t need them spreading around all kinds of rumors, I don’t need it.

At the last census I filled out the form as follows: Nationalitatea: evreu, Religie: mosaica [Ethnic origin: Jew, of Jewish religion, in Romanian]. The lady congratulated me, she was a teacher, because many prefer to deny their religion. She was a Hungarian woman, and since then, every time we meet on the street, she embraces me and tells me: ‘I would like to chat more with you.’ And I get this reaction everywhere I go, and I really enjoy being loved by everyone I’m speaking or got acquainted with. But I’m not able to make new friends and I never go anywhere. I very rarely visit he kids, although I only have to take the elevator. They celebrate Christmas and Easter according to the Christian traditions. The children are usually here on these occasions, and I’m invited too, of course, for Christmas Eve. I became unwell, although I didn’t do anything, but the stress that’s not for me.

I’m not proud to be Jewish because I suffered quite a lot due to this. And suffering is much stronger than pride. Jews are the chosen nation because they had to endure constant suffering. They are suffering since antiquity… And anti-Semitism is present even to this day. But I don’t know why. What is the cause? What makes us different from the others? We have different customs. But why should that nation be harassed? Why? And why did the Albanians fight the Serbs? Why? Because one is Albanian and the other one is Serbian? I think man is all the same, not Romanian, Hungarian, Jew, Serbian or whatever. It would be nice to see the man in the other person and not his/her religion or customs. Respect his/her traditions, the spirit he/she was educated in and what he/she tries to practice. Respect his/her traditions the same way he/she respects yours.

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