Dr. Janos Gottlieb
Iaşi
Romania
Interviewer: Emoke Major
Date of interview: October 2006
My meeting with dr. Janos Gottlieb impressed me a lot – I spent a very interesting time with him in his apartment in Iasi, in a family house, which though situated in the center, is in a quiet area, where he lives with his wife.
Their apartment is homely; the way it is furnished speaks of educated occupants with a lot of books, works of art and a systematic disorder of his table characteristic of men of science.
So we had a pleasant environment, but the intimate, warm atmosphere was ensured mainly by the informal, friendly, helpful, merry personality of Janos Gottlieb.
I was charmed most of all by the spiritual splendor, love of life and cheerfulness typical of him, which is the somewhat paradox, though perhaps natural privilege of people who have known hell from close.
Both my father and my mother are from Maramarossziget. Besides – I found this out subsequently from Pal Sandor, my father’s half-brother – my father was a kohen, so he came from a relatively religious Jewish family, but he wasn’t religious. I’m not religious either. But that’s not the point.
In fact my father’s father, also a Gottlieb got to Maramarossziget from Austria. In those times the Austrian-Hungarian k. u. k. army 1 still existed, and that’s how he got to Maramarossziget, but I ignore precisely when. My father was born in 1897 in Maramarossziget. He didn’t know his father, who had died at a very young age. My father was a few months old when his father died.
So he didn’t know much about his father’s life either. Perhaps I have his name noted down somewhere, but I don’t know it by heart. However, we didn’t ever talk about him, we used to talk only about uncle Gottlieb. My father’s father had a brother, who was a colonel in the k. u. k. army, though he was a Jew, which was a great deal. This uncle of my father was called Lajos Gottlieb.
He considered himself such a Hungarian, and such a devoted k. u. k. colonel [Editor’s note: k. u. k. = kaiserlich und konigh, which stands for imperial and royal], that when in 1919, when the Bela Kun revolution 2 broke out, and his stripes were torn off, he went home and died of a heart attack.
My father used to speak of him nicely. He said his uncle was a man of principle, and in fact it was him who had supported my father. I’ve already told you that my father was orphan, my grandmother got married again, and she had two more children, so she couldn’t help him much, but his uncle did. In short he spoke of him nicely, he said him to be an honest, high-ranking officer – well, a colonel in fact.
[Editor’s note: According to a document to be found in the National Archives of Hungary ex-colonel Lajos Gottlieb was given the title of nobility in February 1918 (www.arcanum.hu/mol/lpext.dll/MT/918/91d?fn=document-frame.htm&f=templates&2.0 - 15k)]. He lived somewhere in Hungary, but I don’t know where. Thus both grandfather Gottlieb and his brother came from the Austrian part to Hungary, respectively to the Maramaros region. That was it from the side of my father’s father.
My paternal grandmother was called Szeren Klein. There was a village-like settlement near Maramarossziget, it is called Szigetkamara [in Romanian Camara Sighet], it belongs to Maramarossziget, and my grandmother was born there. She came from a relatively good family, I knew two brothers of her from Maramarossziget.
Unluckily one of them fell into depravity, because he wanted to become an actor, and his family didn’t let him. Thus he became a little… In turn the other was a lawyer in Maramarossziget; Artur Klein was a famous lawyer. They came from a good family, I knew both Artur Klein and her other brother.
Artur Klein had one son, who died during World War II, the other had a daughter, who didn’t come home from deportation, and a son, who came home from work service – he was called Istvan Klein, he was called Klein like my grandmother. I met Istvan Klein in Kolozsvar after the war; I have to tell you what happened to him.
He was older than me, and he was doing work service. When his unit was retreating, he managed to detach himself from his companions and hid away. The Soviet troops were following them; he waited them with open arms, but the Russians caught him and took him to Russia to work in a prison 3.
So one could speak to him about socialism endlessly, he couldn’t be convinced about how good the Soviet system was. He came back; I met him in Kolozsvar after a few years, I was already a student, and his dream was to leave Romania. He managed to do so. Finally he lived in Bogota, in Colombia until his death. He isn’t alive either. He didn’t have any children.
Both brothers of grandmother Klein lived in Maramarossziget, and they died either in Maramarossziget, either in deportation. They were already old, if they were taken to Auschwitz, they must have died there. Artur Klein wasn’t much religious; I didn’t get to know the other well.
Once I stayed at Artur Klein in Maramarossziget, so I know: he wasn’t religious. You know how it is: Jews do observe certain high days, but that doesn’t mean they are religious. My father went to the synagogue too, let’s say on Rosh Hashanah or on Yom Kippur, and he took me with him, we had conversations there with the acquaintances – this was the high day. Well, this doesn’t mean we lived a religious life.
Grandmother Klein was my beloved grandmother; she was a divine creature. My father was left orphan, and my grandmother got married again. Her second husband is known as Sandor, Arnold Sandor. Originally his name was Stern, but he changed it 4. He had a brother in Budapest – I never met him –, he was also Stern, but he became Csillag.
My grandmother’s family spoke Hungarian, at least everybody spoke Hungarian with me. Grandma was very religious. She didn’t have a wig, she wasn’t that religious, but she was very religious, she ate only kosher and so on. Not my grandfather, he liked bacon, and he had to keep it between the window-frames, he wasn’t allowed to take it into the house.
Grandfather Sandor was a bank manager, he was getting a pension, he had means to live on, he didn’t have problems. He wasn’t a bank manager in Maramarossziget, but somewhere else, I don’t know precisely where; however he was from Maramarossziget, and he went back there. When both of them retired, my father took them to Nagybanya, they had an apartment and lived there.
With Arnold Sandor, grandma’s second husband – whom I loved a lot as well – my grandmother had two children: Pal Sandor and Erzsebet Sandor, who were ten, respectively thirteen years younger than my father.
Pal Sandor was the elder; he was born in 1907 in Maramarossziget. They lived in Bucharest. His wife was called Angela Rosenthal – we called her Angi –, she was from Temesvar. My uncle’s wife was an extremely intelligent woman, and they had an outstandingly wonderful family life.
I stayed at them in Bucharest sometimes even for weeks, and I saw them quarreling once – on who should do the dishes. Everybody wanted to do the dishes. It’s really funny… First my uncle was a clerk, then he became a journalist at a Hungarian newspaper, at the ‘Szakszervezeti Elet’ [Trade Union Life].
This was the Hungarian edition of the ‘Viata Sindicala’, in those times it was published in Hungarian as well. My aunt did the same: she was a clerk, then a journalist at the ‘Romaniai Magyar Szo’ [Paper of Hungarians from Romania] – back then it was called ‘Elore’.
My uncle left for Israel at the age of almost eighty years – when his daughter, Eva moved to France – together with his wife, because it would have been quite difficult to stay in touch with his daughter during the Ceausescu era. So he left for Israel quite late, and he died there in 1997, he was almost ninety.
They had their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary a few days before my uncle’s death. He always meant an example for me, they had a very nice marital life. My aunt loved her husband very much; she didn’t live much after his death. We talked quite often on the phone, and I saw them too, because in 1992 I was in Israel; both were still alive.
I knew her husband was very ill. She said if Pali died, she would hang herself up. In short she loved him very much. She didn’t hang herself up, but she died soon after his death, she didn’t live much after. She wasn’t much younger than him, there was a difference of age of five years between them.
Their daughter, Eva Sandor was born in April 1940. Her name is Barbulescu after her husband. Her husband is Christian, he was a lecturer or associate professor, something like that at the Faculty of Chemistry of the Technical University in Bucharest. Eva was a physicist.
She studied here, in Iasi – I brought her here, I was already a lecturer at the University of Iasi. After she finished the university, she went back to Bucharest, and she was employed as a researcher by different institutions. Later she took her doctorate in physics in Bucharest.
Of course she’s retired too by now in France, because she defected to France with her husband a few years before Ceausescu’s fall 5. They have two children, who were born here, in Romania, so they left the country together. The children were quite grown-up, when they emigrated.
I’ve mentioned that her husband was called Barbulescu, the children have Romanian first names. The boy is Virgil, his sister is Irina. Irina got married there to a French man, Virgil got married this summer [in 2007].
Erzsebet Sandor was called Bozsi within the family; she was born in 1910 in Maramarossziget. She lived in Temesvar, she got married to Lajos Lobl, and she took over his name, so she wasn’t called Erzsebet Sandor, but Erzsebet Lobl. While she lived in Temesvar, she worked as a secretary; she was a very pretty woman, she was gorgeously beautiful.
I loved her very much. And she could also sing very nicely. She was such a great singer that she even had concerts in Temesvar. I don’t know what Lajos Lobl was engaged here in Romania; I was ten when they left for Palestine – I know the date when they emigrated, because I was born in 1929, and they left in 1939 –, they were great patriots 6. In turn I do know what they were doing there: they opened a photographic studio.
There was a time when Erzsebet was a news announcer at the Hungarian edition of the Kol Israel radio station – I listened to her here, in Romania after World War II, in the 1950s of course. They lived in Tel Aviv. I don’t know precisely in which year she died, however, she died at quite a young age, much younger that her elder brother, Sandor, who was two years older than her, and was almost ninety when he died.
I don’t remember the year for sure; in any case I already lived in Iasi, when Bozsi [Erzsebet] Lobl died. When I got married for the second time in 1962, she wasn’t alive anymore. Thus she died at the beginning of the 1960s at the age of fifty and something. She didn’t have any children.
Nobody was religious, neither Pal Sandor, neither Erzsebet Sandor. Not at all. Not only that Erzsebet Sandor wasn’t religious, moreover she was a nationalist.
My father was called Laszlo Gottlieb, he was called Laci within the family. His Romanian name in the Romanian era – after 1920 – was Vasile. He was born in 1897 in Maramarossziget. After my father finished high school, he got to Budapest. He studied for one year there, at the Technical University.
World War I broke out, therefore he interrupted his studies, and he was enrolled directly into the Military Academy, because he was a university student. He was an under-lieutenant, then a lieutenant. He fought during the entire World War I, he was on the Italian front line, then on the Russian front line as well, on both front lines; he had four decorations, one of them was the Iron Cross.
I will tell you why this was important: he considered himself to be a real Hungarian person. I’m telling you this now, because I was with him in the concentration camp.
They destroyed him in his spirit. Considering what a great Hungarian he considered himself, what decorations he was given from the Hungarian army, the k. u. k. army, after all this to be taken to a concentration camp, this was too much for him. So he broke down mainly mentally. That’s why I’ve told you all this.
After World War I he didn’t pursue his studies anymore, he got back to Maramarossziget, he hid for a short period, when Bela Kun failed, because he was leftist. He ceased to be a leftist quite shortly, so he didn’t become an extreme leftist. Later he got to realize what all this was about, but this happened in subsequent years.
And I also know about him that he was member to the Galileo Circle, which was in fact a leftist circle. The Galileo Circle was established in Budapest. I think it worked through the university, perhaps within the technical university. At the time of the Bela Kun revolution of 1919 he was an officer, and he joined the revolution as an officer.
I know this for sure. And when Bela Kun fell, my father went home to his mother, who lived in Szigetkamaras, near Maramarossziget, and he didn’t leave the house in daytime for many months. He was afraid of being searched for, of getting arrested.
Especially that he joined the revolution as an officer, this was a significant detail. All this happened when his uncle, Lajos Gottlieb got a heart attack, for he was so grieved about the fact that he was downgraded.
I’ve already mentioned that my father was disappointed in the left wing. Why this? He read a lot. He listened to the radio a lot. He spoke a very good English – unfortunately I don’t speak English so well –, and he listened to the BBC a lot. And sooner or later – before others did – he found out what Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union. From the BBC, from other sources. Well, television didn’t exist yet, this was in the 1930s. I don’t know exactly what was what he knew, because he was afraid to talk about this with me – I was still a child, I wasn’t even ten years old. However, I could see he was disappointed, though he flirted with the left wing. For example there were people visiting us, who were leftists, and they were arrested as underground communists; my father withdrew with them, they were talking, but without me. As far as I know, my father didn’t take part in the International Red Aid, but he supported the leftist movement. But in secret.
He tried to explain to me why he disliked communism. It was something odd that according to communism every person is alike and is judged equally, which was not convenient for him, because he learnt much more and knew much more than, let’s say, a simple worker. Why should he be alike the worker? In brief, he tried to explain this to me.
The result of this was that up to 1947 I had not even the slightest intention to become a party member. Now we make a detour to the postwar period… What happened in 1947? I was eighteen and a half years old, almost nineteen, when I went to study to Kolozsvar.
We had a very good acquaintance in Kolozsvar, I will tell you his name too, doctor Arpad Kis, a pediatrician; we had been together in the concentration camp. He was Jewish as well, in fact his name was Klein, he changed this name into Kis. We were together in the concentration camp; he had the luck to survive; it is something very rare: his wife survived as well, and they met in Germany soon after liberation in a miraculous way.
Both of them came home, but their child – they had a daughter, Agnes – didn’t come home. Agnes was born in the same year as me, and I was the kid they accepted in their family – even though they had one more child after the war. True that at an advanced age, but they managed to have one more child, he’s in Israel, I know nothing about him. Peter Kis, he’s a historian, that’s all I know about him.
During the illegal communist movement Arpad Kis was the physician of the International Red Aid in Kolozsvar. He was a doctor, he had a house, he had his own office and everything, yet he was the Red Aid’s physician.
When I got into the family of Arpad Kis in 1947, and I told him I wasn’t a party member, he said: ‘You have to join the party.’ He had me entered into the party. It wasn’t me who entered. However it turned out to be a relatively good thing, because later I realized that this made my academic career much easier. So sometimes I say as a joke that I became a party member out of conviction: I was convinced this would be useful to me. This was my conviction.
I know though that after I came home from deportation, I was still in Nagybanya, and there was an illegal communist there, a very likeable man, Jozsef Hutira, we called him Joska Hutira. He was much older than me, but we became friends, and I loved him very much, because he was a very straight character in fact.
His elder brother, Dezso Hutira, whom I didn’t get to know, was executed as an illegal communist. After World War II they established a factory in Nagybanya – I don’t know what kind of factory, all I know is that there was a factory –, which was called Dezso Hutira. He became a hero. When I got back to Nagybanya, Joska Hutira helped me, and he told everybody that I was the son of Laszlo Gottlieb, who had supported the leftist movement.
But he never told me about any actual deed of my father, so I ignore what my father had done exactly. So I rather found out things indirectly than directly.
Joska Hutira was known in Nagybanya and in Bucharest too. He had had different assignments as an illegal communist, but after World War II he got into the Militia, the police, and he was a high-ranked officer in Bucharest, at the DGM, that is the Directia Generala a Militiei [General Department of the Militia].
Later he got to Kolozsvar, and he was the police superintendent of the Kolozsvar territory. The first thing he did under his appointment was that he fired a thousand militia-men, either because they were drinking, either because of other offences – he fired them at once. This happened at the end of the 1940s, or at the beginning of the 1950s.
The maiden name of my mother was Zelmanovits; she was from Maramarossziget as well. Her father died during World War I, so I didn’t get to know him. But my grandmother survived, and I visited her sometimes in Maramarossziget – she was living there –, my father took me to her too.
People called her auntie Zelmanovits, I don’t know her first name, I never used it. She had a house, a garden and a stable, she was living on these, because neighbor peasants used to leave their horse or cow at hers. They paid her for this, so this was her source for living. She lived on her house. This was my grandmother’s occupation.
Well, the truth is that I loved very much my paternal grandmother, and I loved less my maternal grandmother. She loved me very much, I admit it, well, I was the only one from my mother’s family, who stayed in Romania after my mother’s death, and whom she saw sometimes, because the other members of the family – her son and his family – were in Czechoslovakia.
However, how should I put this, she never became a really likeable person for me. I don’t know why. Though the poor creature tried to become, but… it simply didn’t work.
That’s it, we all feel sympathy and aversion too. She wasn’t repugnant, I would not say so, but she wasn’t that person whom… I loved the other very much. I had a totally different relationship with her, I ignore why. Though when I visited her, my poor grandmother took me to the circus, took me everywhere to make me feel good at hers. I could hardly wait those few days or the week to be up, while I was there, and I was impatient to go back to Nagybanya.
I think grandmother Zelmanovits died in 1941 because of a heart disease. She was around eighty-two. So she wasn’t deported. People used to say what a fortunate thing it was that she died before deportation.
My maternal grandmother had a son – so my mother had a brother – who was a lawyer in Beregszasz – that is Berehove, it belonged to the Czechs. [Editor’s note: Today Beregszasz is in Ukraine.] He died in Beregszasz before deportation – this was his luck.
He had two children, a son – Bela Zelmanovits, I knew him well – and a daughter – I didn’t know her well, she died during World War II. The boy survived World War II, but he died at quite a young age because of a heart disease in Czechoslovakia. And this was all about this part of the family.
My mother was called Rozsi Zelmanovits, Rozalia, I don’t know for sure how her name was entered in the ID. My mother died when I was five years old, so I have only a very few memories of her. She played the piano well, I remember this.
She was a nice woman, I have a photo of her. One thing is sure, I met people who had known her, everybody loved her as well as they liked my father. I don’t know much about her. Well, I was five when she died. And not only that I was five, I have to tell you one more thing.
When I was three years old, I didn’t live with her anymore, but at my paternal grandparents, because my mother had tuberculosis, so they took me away from her to avoid that I got the disease. Finally my mother died in 1934.
So in 1919 my father went back to Maramarossziget, he fell in love with my mother, and married her. They moved to Nagybanya together in 1926 or in 1927, because there were better possibilities of employment. My father became one of the main clerks of the famous Phonix Factory, which was mainly a sulfuric acid factory.
He worked there until World War II, until deportation. He had had a job in Maramarossziget too, but I don’t know exactly what kind of job. The Phonix Factory had three owners: Artur Weiser, his brother called Oszkar Weiser and one more person, but in fact it was Artur Weiser who managed the factory. He was an extremely good manager.
My father worked for him as a highly positioned employee, but in fact the manager summoned him many times as a private secretary and asked for his advice. Artur Weiser wasn’t married; he survived World War II, he lived in Bucharest, he didn’t have any money, and he died there at an advanced age, he almost starved to death.
I don’t know what became of Oszkar Weiser. Miklos Weiser was the son of Oszkar Weiser, he supported me in the period following World War II. [Editor’s note: ‘In 1909 the Weiser family leased for several decades the sulfuric acid factory of Fernezely.
That’s how the Fonix factory was established, which was later moved to Nagybanya, in the place of the glassworks which had failed. They enlarged it with newly bought lots. In the meantime the family became the owner of the lead and zinc mine of Herzsa, thus they gave up chemistry, the production of sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, copper sulfate etc., and started to process lead and silver. Following the Second Vienna Dictate the Phonix Factory was merged into the Hungaria Chemistry Factory.’ (www.nagybanya.ro/vallas-type-5.htm)]
I, Janos Gottlieb was born in 1929 in Nagybanya. From the age of three I lived at my paternal grandparents. My grandparents lived in a village somewhere near Nagybanya for a while, I was with them there too, then in Nagybanya. But when I was five years old, my father took me with him, he rented a quite nice apartment, in a nice part, let’s say, of Nagybanya, in a villa.
The owner was a woman from Kolozsvar, a widow, her family name was Herczeg. The rent was quite high, but it was in the outskirts, the air was fine there. My father always feared that I got tuberculosis or something like that. This was when I was five.
We had somebody who did the housekeeping; my father had a good salary, in those times this didn’t mean a problem. Later it was my step-mother who did the housekeeping. Well, it wasn’t her who actually worked, but she gave out the tasks for everybody. It wasn’t her who did the cooking, we had a cook. This wasn’t a problem.
It was something extraordinary that in the neighboring villa a dentist lived, who was called Kalman Gottlieb. He wasn’t our relative though. Due to an accident or maybe to an illness Kalman Gottlieb became immobilized, he couldn’t walk, so he brought there his niece – so his brother’s daughter – to have her there to help him.
That’s how it happened that when I was seven years old – approximately in 1936 or 1937 – my father got married for the second time, he married this lady. I already knew her, Lili Garai, and we were on good terms. Interesting enough that she was called Garai, because her father changed his name from Gottlieb to Garai.
But in fact they weren’t our relatives. Grandfather Gottlieb, who became Garai, lived in Deva. So my mom, my second mom came to Nagybanya from Deva. I didn’t keep the contact with grandparents Gottlieb, but I visited them once, since they survived World War II. [Editor’s note: For they lived in South-Transylvania, which belonged to Romania during World War II.] 7 I knew them before the war already. I don’t know their first names anymore. I called them grandma and grandpa.
What can I say about my second mom? First thing is that her great merit was that she was fifteen years younger than my father. She was a clever woman, she finished high school, she didn’t pursue her studies, but this wasn’t a problem at that time. She finished high school, and she was reading a lot, so she was educated, one could have a talk with her.
She was very kind to me, but she wasn’t a mother after all. She didn’t survive the war either, but she had two elder brothers. One of them, Janos Garai didn’t have any children. They lived in Deva, later they made aliyah to Israel. Janos Garai died recently in Israel, but his widow still lives in Israel, and we are on good terms, I’m in contact with her.
The other brother, Sandor Garai had a son in Italy. Sandor Garai studied in Italy, and he took up with a lady who lived in the same house with him, and they had a child. They never get married, but he recognized the child, he’s called Garai even today, he’s catholic, he lives in Bologna. Giorgio Garai, in Bologna. I visited him once.
I said, well, we are cousins after all – there isn’t any blood relationship between us, but we are cousins. Life is complicated. He’s a very nice person. He doesn’t speak Hungarian at all. We talk in English, my wife talks in Italian to him, because she speaks Italian. I don’t speak Italian, but Giorgio speaks some English, so we could understand each other, that’s what it matters. He had a wholesale business, he was selling building components, that was his occupation. He’s an old man too by now, he retired. He has four children.
I have learnt many things from my father, for example I enjoy reading even today. My father was a very apt character, and he was always on learning and reading. He was reading a lot of literature, but he liked reading scientific books and periodicals as well. He subscribed to scientific periodicals, we had the ‘Elet es Tudomany’ [Life and Science] in Hungarian edition – it had a different content than the Romanian edition.
Concerning newspapers he was reading the ‘Brassoi Lapok’, in those times they were distributing it in Nagybanya as well. But now we talk mainly about books. He had a very good collection, he had a great amount of books, encyclopedias and other books too, all kinds of books.
He was reading a lot; he was an extremely educated person. He was much more educated than me. This has a reason. For when I started to learn mathematics, I didn’t have much time left to read other things. I was reading, but not so much.
So my father was a self-educated man. And he knew many things. He learnt to speak English well, he learnt mineralogy. He made two nice collections of minerals, one for him, and one for the owners of the Phonix Factory. These were scientific collections, for it was written there everything, the name of the mineral, where and when it was found and so on.
Concerning minerals the thing is that when the miners advance in the stulm, and find a quarry of minerals, they sometimes find a piece of mineral which is beautiful in the middle. They take out those stones and steal them. This is the truth. Nobody looked after them, they weren’t bothered – this was their extra source of income.
Sometimes I went with my father in the homes of miners, they had minerals, he negotiated with them, and he bought the quartzes there, he didn’t actually go to the mine for them. It was also the miners who informed him about the place and date of the finding, and my father noted instantly these details.
That’s how he made his quartz collection. [Editor’s note: ‘Quartz is a mineral to be found underground and made up of one or more minerals. It has special aesthetic features due to the intergrowth, color, shape of adjacent minerals, and of the particular dimension of constituent crystals.’ (http://www.museum.hu/museum/archive_temp_hu.php?ID=374) One of the most beautiful quartz museums of Europe can be found in Nagybanya.] My father was an extremely intelligent and kind man, people loved him a lot.
The workers up to the director – everybody liked him. Just to tell you one thing: I was already living here, in Iasi, so a long time after the war, when the university of Iasi organized an excursion for the students to Nagybanya, and they wanted to visit the Phonix Factory.
I was in the group as well – I was already a teacher –, and I went to the Phonix Factory to discuss with them, after all my father was an employee there. The workers’ leader used to be a worker back then. When he found out I was the son of Laszlo Gottlieb, all the doors were open at once. They loved him so much. Everybody loved him.
I inherited from my mother my liking for music. If I can, I listen to music all day. Classical music, not just any kind of music. After my mother’s death I took piano lessons too. We had a piano at home, and I enjoyed playing the piano, but I didn’t want this to be my profession. I have a cottage piano even today.
In fact I didn’t get any particular Jewish education, I received a rather Hungarian education at home as well. I didn’t learn to speak Hebrew, I don’t speak at all. Unfortunately. It’s a good thing to know one more language, but that was it. A visiting teacher taught me to read in Hebrew, but I never understood what I was reading. He used to come to us when I was around eight years old until I became twelve, for three or four years, but only once in a week.
I can tell only a few things about the Jewish community’s life in Nagybanya before World War II. I only know about one big synagogue in Nagybanya, the others weren’t synagogues, but rather prayer houses. My father rarely attended the synagogue, on such occasions he took me with him, but only on high days: to observe Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur or Pesach. Two or three times a year. And that was all.
I’ll disclose it now: once in my life I did observe a holiday. When I turned thirteen years old, my father asked me if I wanted to become a bar mitzvah. I didn’t want to, so I didn’t become. But in the same year, at the time of the great fast, on Yom Kippur I fasted. I promised to my paternal grandmother whom I loved very much that I would fast.
And I tell you that I really fasted. Because it would have had no reason at all to tell her that I was fasting, when I didn’t. Either I fasted, either I didn’t. And I did. Once in my lifetime.
Grandma was very happy. I did this for her. And I also tried out whether I was able to fast or not. I could observe great fasting. Oh, my poor grandma told me things like: ‘When you’ll grow up, you’ll have a nice Jewish wife.’ To this I always answered: ‘I will marry a woman I would love. No matter if she’s Jewish or not…’ And that’s what happened. That’s it.
Everybody spoke Hungarian with me in the family. My mother tongue is Hungarian, I didn’t speak any other language until the age of five. Later my father, who obviously had a German education, hired a fraulein for me, according to the customs of those times, and that’s how I learnt German.
I think I was five, this was after my mother died. And I got to learn Romanian only when I was six and a half, when my father simply enrolled me to a Romanian school saying: ‘You have to learn Romanian, because we live in Romania.’ And he was right. In Nagybanya there wasn’t any Jewish school, only a cheder.
There was a Hungarian school belonging to the Calvinist church, but he didn’t send me there. So I finished primary school in the Romanian public school. I finished four years of primary school in Romanian, one year of gymnasium, then in the 1940s Hungarians came in 8, and after that I learned in Hungarian, then at the university too.
My sole problem during my childhood was that I was orphan. Yet I didn’t feel so motherless, because they behaved so nicely with me. My father was not only a daddy, but a mom too. He looked after me in a very kind manner, not to speak about his parents, especially about my grandmother. Later my second mother, whom I loved a lot, took care of me very gently too. I called her by her name, Lili. I had a very beautiful childhood. The environment and the people were all very nice.
God knows how it worked back then, but I did have all kind of friends: Jews – but just a few –, Hungarians, Romanians. We got along well with everybody, we mixed with everybody; nationality or religious affiliation didn’t mean a problem. Nationality and religion was everyone’s own business.
Especially after I learnt Romanian at the age of six, being in contact with Romanian children didn’t have any obstacles. I was very distressed when I saw they were instigating people of different nationality against each other – for this is the truth. I experienced incitement in my childhood already.
There were Hungarians, who were against Romanians, and Romanians, who didn’t like Hungarians. I don’t know why, because one can not be against one nation. You can be against a person, yes, but not against a nation. That’s it. And anti-Semitism started to be present in the 1940s, I was already eleven years old.
I had Hungarian friends, I even had friends who came to Nagybanya from Hungary, when North-Transylvania belonged to Hungary, and I got along well with them too, there wasn’t any problem. I couldn’t say they were anti-Semite. However, there were people who always talked badly of Jews.
For example it was the manifestation of anti-Semitism, that after the Germans came in – this was already in 1944 9 –, we had to wear yellow stars. Then they gathered us into ghettos. Now who took us into the ghettos? The Hungarians. What can I say? I wrote down in my memoirs that they had lodged two German officers in our house.
[Editor’s note: The memoir was published in German as part of a series edited by Roy Wiehn. In this series survivors of the holocaust describe their memories. Ioan Gottlieb: Euch werde ich`s noch zeigen (I’ll show you) – Herausgegeben von Erhard Roy Wiehn, Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz, 2006, http://www.hartung-gorre.de/gottlieb1.htm.].
We had four rooms, and in those times the army used to rent rooms for the officers. We didn’t have any problems with them. The truth is that they didn’t even talk to us. They weren’t SS officers, but Wehrmacht officers, there’s a big difference. So there were two officers.
They had an orderly too, a German soldier, who didn’t live there, but came each morning. I don’t know what he was doing for them. He was a young boy, not much older than me. We became friends. He was German, I speak German well, he chatted with me, we played together…
Well, we didn’t play childish games, we talked in the garden, things like that. There wasn’t any problem. When they were gathering us into the ghetto, first they took us to a truck, where everybody from the surroundings was forced to get up. This truck stood at the end of the street, not far from our house.
The orderly wasn’t there when they took us away. But he arrived home and found out what had happened. He ran after us, found me in the truck, we hold hands, and he wished me all the best. Not all the Germans are anti-Semite. Human relationships are complicated, very complicated.
If I know well, in Nagybanya they sent people into the ghetto on 5th May 1944. To every Jewish home a commission of few persons came, and they said: pick up a few things within a few minutes, and we’ll take you to the ghetto. Without any further explanations.
They were civilians, I don’t think they had guns, they didn’t need any. For example one of the civilians who came to us was my gym teacher. And they took us away. In the outskirts of Nagybanya there was an abandoned building, I think it used to be a brick factory or something like that, which was out of function.
They built something there, and they put us in, of course ‘la gramada’ [piled up], as one would say in Romanian, one stack to the other. I don’t know how many we were there. We had to sleep on the ground, on straw and things like that. It was prepared in advance.
My father knew about Auschwitz. In Nagybanya nobody knew anything about Auschwitz and all these concentration camps. I don’t know how, but he knew these camps existed. In the ghetto my father told me they would take us away, and we would face great torments in the concentration camp and so on, and there was no reason to expose ourselves to this.
That’s why it occurred that two or three weeks after they started to gather us into ghettos in Nagybanya, we wanted to commit suicide together with a doctor’s family. Me too. The doctor – Benedek, I don’t remember his first name –, his wife, their child, me, my dad and my stop-mother, all the six of us. With morphine.
The doctor gave us the injection. Control wasn’t so tight yet in the ghetto, so he procured a dose enough for all the six of us. Only three died from the six. He, that is the doctor, his son and my step-mother. The doctor’s wife survived, my father and me too.
One might ask why we survived. I found out then that, interesting enough, even if morphine is administered through injection, it goes through the stomach, so it gets first into the stomach, and it would be absorbed from there. So when they found us, they took us at once to the hospital, and carried out gastric irrigation.
Of course I wasn’t aware of this, because I was unconscious. Besides I was young, fifteen and a half years old, at this age the organism is very strong, and it overcame morphine. My father survived, because he didn’t know that nicotine works as an antitoxin to morphine to a certain degree. And he used to smoke a lot out of nervousness.
Such odd things can happen in one’s life. That’s how the two of us survived. I also remember that when I woke up, the bells were sounding in the Calvinist church of Nagybanya, and the hospital is quite close to the church. And I didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know why I woke up.
We were in the ghetto for a few weeks, because we arrived to Auschwitz within a month. From Nagybanya they took us directly to Auschwitz, but this straight journey lasted for three days. I remember one bigger town we traveled through, it was in Poland already, Katowice.
We saw this on a board. Sometimes they opened a little the wagons, they let in some fresh air, but it wasn’t enough. In fact from our family me, my father, Arnold Sandor and my grandmother were deported. The four of us were together until Auschwitz. I never saw again my grandmother and my grandfather.
Because of morphine poisoning I had a discharge in my right ear – it was an external, not an internal discharge –, and I had a bandage on my head. I arrived to Auschwitz with that bandage.
My father knew so well what was going on, that when they opened the doors in Auschwitz to let everybody go out from the wagons – we had to leave there our baggage –, my father took down my bandage, and taught me: ‘If they ask you how old are you, you’ll say you’re eighteen.’ So older than I was – so he knew about the concentration camps for children. ‘And if they ask you whether you want to work, of course you want to.’
They examined men and women separately. First I parted from my grandmother, as she was a woman. We were only four from our family together with my grandmother, and so we were left three in the men’s row. There was an officer at the end of the row, he was the doctor, who said who should go to the left, and who should go to the right.
On one side there were the elder and some of the children – well, the children went to the concentration camps for children, and the old people to the crematorium –, on the other side there were those, who went to work. And so the doctor, who inspected the men’s row, asked me my age.
I spoke German, so I told him how old I was. ‘Are you willing to work?’ ‘Yes, I am.’ But I repeat that my father took down my bandage fearing that they would say I was sick, and they would then took me away… So he knew many things. And I live thanks to him.
He prepared me in Auschwitz as someone who knew what was to come. How he knew it, I ignore that. He never told me. He was too well informed, which of course was useful for me, but not as much useful for him.
I was in Auschwitz only for one week, because they sent us to Mauthausen, which is already in Austria, near the Danube. There too we were transported in wagons, but we weren’t so many people in one wagon as during our traveling to Auschwitz; we were guarded by solders.
We got to Mauthausen; we weren’t there for long either; I spent three days there with my father. In Mauthausen neither my father knew how we should handle all this, and when we were asked if there was any child, that should be taken out from there and taken to a different concentration camp and so on, my father told me: ‘My son, you’ll decide, if you want to, go there.’ I refused to go. I wanted to stay with him.
So we stayed together, and from Mauthausen we were taken to Melk.
[Editor’s note: In April 1944 a sub-camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp was established in Roggendorf, near Melk, where prisoners were forced to work in a quartz mine within the framework of the ‘Quartz Project’, for the behalf of the Steyr Works and the Flugmotorenwerke Ostmark (FMO). The camp was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945.]
Many people know Melk, because there is a famous abbey, the Melk Abbey. It is a very old abbey. The concentration camp was on the banks of the Danube. From the edge of the camp we saw the Danube. It was a small camp, with around a thousand people. There were only men. Usually they established separate camps for women and for men.
In Melk we had to work; a few kilometers far from the camp they made, or rather they wanted to make an airplane factory under the mountain. They wanted it under the mountain. Because this way it could not have been bombed. And they chose a mountain where it was easy to make tunnels, because it was mainly a sandy mountain.
We worked with pick-hammers, which are used to break the asphalt. The tools we used were smaller than these rippers, because one had to keep them horizontally, and lift it this way. It is quite annoying, because after eight hours one has such a headache, that all his body is trembling. So this is what we were doing.
Well, it wasn’t finished by the end of the war, we finished only a small part of it, the ball-bearing section, nothing of the rest was done. We made tunnels; there was a bigger tunnel and two smaller ones, I don’t know precisely; we made some five tunnels.
I don’t know how many hundred meters we had to advance into the mountain. We worked in three shifts, so eight hours. Of course the time it took to take us out there and to take us back… Those, who worked eight hours, were out of the camp at least for twelve hours. For we went there and came back, we waited, from the camp we walked to a small station, from there we took the train, so it took a long time. It was several kilometers far from the camp.
Yet there were quite many, who were working inside the camp. I also managed to work in the camp’s hospital. So I was working there, I was taking care of the sick people; it was an easier job than going out and working on the tunnels. But this had to be done as well. For example once they ordered us, who were working in the hospital, to put the corpses in a truck.
In Melk there wasn’t any crematorium, so they took the corpses to Mauthausen. I think twice a week a truck came and transported them. When autumn came, the weather cooled down – heating wasn’t even mentioned –, some thirty people died per day. On a single day. Just make a short calculation…
What happened? The number of the workforce diminished, so they brought new prisoners. So we had to put these corpses into the truck. They kept the corpses under the lavatories, somewhere in a cave; they put one on the other. Of course the lavatories were broken down, and the dirt flew over them; carrying them was a very unpleasant work.
We were I don’t know how many hundred persons in a room; we were sleeping on plank-beds, so it was a triple bed – with three levels – made of planks; there was some straw on it, but just a little, and we were sleeping on that. And they gave us a blanket to cover ourselves up. We were wearing striped clothes, alike punished people; we got the clothes in Auschwitz.
Luckily enough I didn’t get any tattooed number, I didn’t have a tattooed number, I was wearing my number on my arm. I didn’t get it in Auschwitz, but in Mauthausen. My father didn’t get a tattooed number either, we both got our numbers in Mauthausen. I was the 72762, he was the 72763, because Laszlo came after Janos.
They counted us in alphabetical order. It was written on a small iron plate, and fixed with a wire. One had to wear it on the arm, on the wrist; besides the number was written on the clothe too, on the chest, and somewhere on the trousers too.
There were not only Jewish prisoners in the Melk concentration camp. For example there were two Spanish men, I don’t know how they got there. So there were other nations too, but these were alike interior policemen, so they kept order in the barracks. The Spanish were nice people.
Later French people were brought there, also to replace the dead. One was leading the barrack, he was the blockalteser [Editor’s note: A prisoner assigned by the SS, who was responsible for the blocks], but he had an aid, who was taking notes when they called the roll, or concerning food, what was being brought and so on.
This was the schreiber. Schreiber, for he had to know how to write. In an interesting way this was a French person. Not a Jew, but a Christian French. Besides there were quite a lot of Poles, not Jewish.
There were Ukrainians, Mongols. How Mongols got there? Well, they got into the Soviet troops somewhere, and they got there as prisoners of war. There were quite a lot of Ukrainians. There was an English pilot, he got there as a prisoner of war. There was a Romanian, I don’t know how he got there. But the most of us were Jews, especially at the beginning, when we got there.
In the entire territory of the concentration camp we had to wear a colored triangle besides the number sewn on the chest and the trouser. The color of it showed the reason why one got there. There were three colors: red, black and green. The red were the political prisoners.
In an interesting way I counted for a political prisoner. I don’t know why. Why every Jew was a political prisoner, I don’t know either. The black were the thieves, the shirkers; for example they didn’t want to work, so they were sent to the concentration camp.
My boss, the leader of the barrack had a black triangle. He was there as an arbeitscheuer, he wore a black triangle; he might have come from a lockup. And there were greens, those were the murderers, who were taken out from the prison and sent to the concentration camp. Usually these were Germans.
[Ed. note: Nazi concentration camp badges, made primarily of inverted triangles, were used to identify the reason the prisoners had been placed there. The triangles were made of fabric and were sewn on jackets and shirts. These had specific meanings indicated by their color and shape: some groups had to put letter insignia on their triangles to denote their country of origin. Red triangle with a letter: ‘P’ (‘Polen’, Poles), ‘T’ (‘Tschechen’, Czechs). The most common colors were: black for the mentally retarded, alcoholics, vagrants, the habitually ‘Work-Shy’, or a woman jailed for ‘anti-social behavior’; green was for criminals; pink was for a homosexual or bisexual man; purple was for the Jehovah's Witnesses; red was for a political prisoner. Double triangles: two superimposed yellow triangles forming the Star of David was for a Jew, including Jews by practice or descent; red inverted triangle superimposed upon a yellow one, forming the Star of David was to tag Jewish political prisoners. There were many markings and combinations.]
Our superiors were SS. There were only a few Wehrmacht officers, but sometimes there were. There was a Wehrmacht doctor. Well, it wasn’t an SS doctor. For example it was thanks to him that I survived. Because I presented myself as being sick. I went to him, I told him in German that I was sixteen, and I couldn’t work anymore, if they sent me there, I would die. But I wasn’t sick, I wasn’t that sick to put me in the hospital of the concentration camp.
He kept me in the hospital all along. There were such things as well. But the others were all SS, the chief was an SS, those, who guarded us, were all SS officers, then there were soldiers, who escorted us to work. We marched in lines of five, and on both sides armed soldiers watched us. I don’t even know what kind of soldiers these were, I didn’t care in fact.
There were several barracks, and in each of them there were I don’t know how many hundred people. These were the workers’ barracks. It was set up who would go in the morning, who would go in the afternoon, who would work in the night. So there were barracks, and besides the barracks there was this hospital for example and the kitchen.
Each barrack had a chief, he was called blockaltester – altester means older, so the chief –, and he had a schreiber, who was keeping the record. But these were prisoners. The blockaltesters were trained to become sadist, then they were assigned as chiefs.
For example once my blockaltester told me he had been in concentration camps for I don’t know how many years – for some seven or eight years –, and at the beginning they had had a chief, and the chief had been told to take the prisoners to work, and from the hundred prisoners let’s say only fifteen should come back.
The others had to be executed on the way. As they could. For example he told me about that notorious quarry in Mauthausen – within the territory of the Mauthausen concentration camp in fact.
Somebody asked me: ‘Did you see the quarry when you were there?’ ‘No.’ I saw it only after the war. If I had seen it back then, I wouldn’t be here at the moment. For just a few came out of there. They were put to carry huge stones, big pieces of stones up on the stairs.
And as they were coming up with the stones, they were pushed, they fell back, the stones fell on them; a lot of people were killed with this method. And when all this was done, those, who survived, were given the same job. After they were taught what a great thing it was to be a sadist, they were made blockaltester.
Well, he behaved badly with the prisoners. Once I got scared of him. Because one morning a Jew overslept. He didn’t get up. The others were guilty too, because nobody noticed this. The truth is that people couldn’t look after even themselves enough, how they could care about the others.
And he wasn’t there at the appell. Somebody was missing. It is a big tragedy. Did he escape? What became of him? And when they found him, the blockaltester started to beat and hit him.
Suffice it to say that on that day I was at work, I didn’t know what had happened; only when I came back, the others told me that he was beating him until he could, but when he had seen he wasn’t dying, he had hung him up. And that was it. He did this with his own hands.
This blockaltester became homosexual in the concentration camp, and I was one of the young boys. Not the only one. And so he started to chat with me. But soon we weren’t on such good terms anymore, and that’s why I was sent to work. But I didn’t work for a while, he kept me around him for weeks. He gave me some other work in the barracks.
Thus I was closer to him. He told me many stories, what should I say? Otherwise, when he was in a normal mood, he was even nice. But unfortunately all this lasted very shortly. He kept on telling me stories. He told me this and that… I was afraid of him. Once he got upset on me, I don’t know why, and he ordered me: ‘Now, you’ll go to the wires.’
The camp was surrounded by those electric wires. And I started to walk, I’m telling the truth, I thought I would better die there at the wires than to live like this. And I kept on walking. He didn’t expect me to do this, he thought I was very much afraid. He ran after me, caught me and brought me back. He says: ‘I thought you were a coward.’ He had reason to think so. However, I was very close to the wires, when he caught me.
I heard stories about people who committed suicide. There was an interesting Polish family in Nagybanya. I don’t know how they had fled Poland. The man didn’t speak Hungarian or Romanian, we spoke German; he spoke a good German. His family name was Erthaim, I don’t know his first name.
He was an engineer, his wife was his own cousin. They had a child, who was a completely retarded idiot. Meaning that he was so degenerate, that at the age of four or five he was lying in bed, he made a mass there; he was only laughing, he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t walk, he wasn’t able to do anything.
They applied for permit to leave for America. America would have received them, but without the child. And they didn’t go. You’re asking why they didn’t leave there that poor creature. They weren’t able to leave. It was their single child… And they were deported. Well, this was the only case I heard about when somebody hang himself up in a lying position.
Imagine what a strength of will this requires… He was in bed, I don’t know how he had a string or what, and he hang himself up to the upper plank-bed, and he stayed there, he didn’t move until he died. Strange, isn’t? I know this because I knew that man.
The food was bad, it wasn’t eatable, to tell the truth. People broke down step by step. Not only because of the food, but their nerves and spirit were ruined as well. My father died in January 1945. We were together, in the same barrack. He was working too, and when he could, he didn’t work.
I was working in Melk for a couple of months, maybe two or three months; I didn’t work too much. I’ve told you about this huge work in the tunnels. After that I worked in the hospital for several months. By the end, during the last two or three months I was telling them I was ill, and I remained ill.
The doctor kept me there; when they let me out, I came back with some other disease, so I managed to escape work. I already knew how things worked. For example I said I had diarrhea.
If someone has diarrhea, he has to prove it. But I didn’t have diarrhea. And the officer kept me there to show it. Yet who was guarding me? It was a young boy from the concentration camp. He saw I was in trouble, and he took away the chamber-pot I should have used. Later, when the doctor asked him, he said: ‘Well, he produced it, I took it away to wash the pot.’ That’s how I could stay in the hospital for a while.
When Melk had to be abandoned, because the Russian troops were approaching, they took some prisoners on foot to the concentration camp in Ebensee. [Editor’s note: In the village called Ebensee was established one of the sup-camps of the Mauthausen concentration camp.] I didn’t have to walk, because I was on the sick-list; they took me back to Mauthausen by train.
I got back in April 1945, but I wasn’t in Mauthausen for long. Oh, I had seen there what subsequently you saw too on photos: little hills of dead bodies. Have you seen something like this? They filmed all this. For example have you seen the Judgment at Nuremberg, I mean the first edition with Spencer Tracy? There is a documentary part, which is an original film.
[Editor’s note: Janos Gottlieb refers to the movie made by Stanley Kramer in 1961 entitled Judgment at Nuremberg. One of the main roles is played by Spencer Tracy (1900-1967).]
I saw these hills, it wasn’t agreeable either. I haven’t seen anything like this in Melk. When they brought me back to Mauthausen, there weren’t any SS there anymore, the SS had left. There were policemen from Vienna who took care of the order, but they didn’t harm anybody. We were three in one bed, they gave us almost nothing to eat. The liberation of the concentration camp of Mauthausen was on 5th May. I became free four days before the war was over.
Altogether I spent eleven months in concentration camps: in Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk, then again in Mauthausen. But I was in a hospital for two more months after liberation, because I became so weakened, that I couldn’t even stand on my feet. I became so weak, that they had to bring me in other hospital.
That’s how I got to the hospital of Ebensee, which was somewhat restored by the Americans, and I was fed there artificially, through my vein, until I recovered. This was after liberation. Many people died after liberation. Because there was no way back, they couldn’t have been saved. I was in this hospital for almost two months, during May and June, and I set out for home at the end of June.
I was still in the Ebensee hospital, when they gave me a paper stating that I could travel by every train for free. First I went to a concentration camp; it was after liberation, I wasn’t confined there, but I had a place where to sleep for one or two nights. This was somewhere in Austria, near Linz.
So I visited Linz on the way back home. From there I took another train to get to Hungary. I traveled a lot, because we had to go round Vienna. Vienna had been bombed a lot, trains didn’t go into that direction. So I got to Sopron – it was a big detour –, and from Sopron I traveled to Budapest.
I arrived to Budapest at the end of June. I stayed there for three or four days. In Budapest I had lodgings at once, at the railway station they announced people who came from deportation where they should go. I already heard about these centers, I already knew. I went there, and they directed me further on. They asked what I wanted, I told them I wanted to go home to Nagybanya. Romania had an embassy in Budapest, I went there too, and they also gave me a paper; then I came home by train.
It’s a different issue how we traveled. Badly, if you want to know. I looked so bad in Budapest, that when I got on into a carriage which was going to Debrecen – the train was going to Debrecen –, some Russian soldiers got on as well, and they put out everybody from the carriage saying they needed it, and they would travel in that carriage, but when they saw me, they took me back. I looked so bad.
So I traveled with the Russian soldiers until Debrecen. There I had my next train to Nagybanya. Of course I visited acquaintances in Budapest and in Debrecen as well, because I had some, people from Nagybanya who moved there. They gave me the addresses of people I knew. However, my visits lasted for a couple of hours.
On 14th July 1945, at two o’clock in the night I arrived to Nagybanya. I went to my former piano teacher – she was called Erzsebet Kadar, she was the disciple of Bela Bartok. Her husband was Geza Kadar, the painter. [Editor’s note: Geza Kadar (Maramarossziget, 1878 – Nagybanya, 1952): between 1899 and 1901 he studied at the School of Applied Arts in Budapest, then he was the disciple of Simon Hollosy in Munich. He settled definitively in Nagybanya in 1923. His wife, Erzsebet Hevesi was the disciple of Bartok.]
They were both communists in illegality, I don’t know how they escaped. And Erzsebet Kadar was Jewish, but she was christened, so she wasn’t deported. Her maiden name was Hevesi, and she had a younger sister, who was a pianist in Budapest – so they were both pianists –, and who was deported. She didn’t come back.
So I went to their place. Why I chose her? It’s an interesting matter. I went to their place, because I knew they were that kind of people who wouldn’t mind about this. For the way I looked, how dirty I was, how stinking I was, I couldn’t go no matter where. I hadn’t had the possibility to wash myself regularly.
I came home to Nagybanya in my striped clothes I had worn in the concentration camp. That night I took off everything in their bathroom, I took a bath, they gave me pajamas and I went to bed. This was my first good night after more than one year. I stayed at them for a couple of weeks. I had the first photo after deportation made then. Well, I got weighed, in Nagybanya I already grew quite fat, I weighed forty-five kilos. I put on ten kilos of weight in ten days.
In the meantime I found out that my uncle, Pal Sandor was in Bucharest; I managed to get in contact with him somehow, and I went to Bucharest. He didn’t know I was going there, traffic and connections, postal services, all these were poor at that time. But his brother-in-law was at home, and he welcomed me.
My uncle was on holiday in Busteni [to the south from Brasso], but he came home instantly, and then took me there with him, and I spent there a few weeks. I recovered quite well. He asked me what I wanted, I told him, and I went back to Nagybanya. There wasn’t any problem. I kept the contact with him until he died.
So I got back to Nagybanya, and I started to make inquiries about how I could finish school. In fact there was a high school in Nagybanya, which had both Romanian and Hungarian section. I got enrolled into the Hungarian section, because it was easier for me to study in Hungarian.
They agreed that I could finish two degrees during one year as a private pupil. For I had lost one year out of my fault. I didn’t have to actually go to school, I only had to pass my exams. I was learning as I could, learning was very difficult at that time, but finally I passed my exams.
After one year I enrolled into the last, the eight degree – at that time gymnasium was of eight degrees –, and I got into my former class. Because I caught up with one year. Of course I wasn’t together only with my former classmates, because there were other newly arrived pupils as well, but most of them were my former classmates. We passed the final exams together, then everybody followed their own way.
After we had been taken to the ghetto, our house had been locked and sealed. This had been in May 1944. I don’t know precisely when, sometime in autumn – so after half a year – Nagybanya was liberated. Much earlier than we were. It was a big chaos, and the apartment was given to someone influential.
I don’t know who and how gave it to whom, but it didn’t matter, because later every apartment was given to whom the Party wanted to and so on. So when I came home, I found somebody else in our apartment – this is what it matters. Who got into my apartment?
An illegal communist called Gabor Birtas, who later became the chief of the Securitate 10. How he could occupy the apartment? He wanted to give to the Jewish community of Nagybanya all what was in the apartment. I don’t know from where a few Jews were gathered, I think they were former members of labor battalions who survived, and they formed the Jewish community of Nagybanya; it was the community who took over our belongings from the apartment.
They took out of the apartment everything they had found there, the mineral collection too. I got back a part of the collection. I still have a few pieces, I keep them in memory of my father. But I have just a few. You might ask me why. Because there was a big scandal about it, one wasn’t allowed to keep minerals, it had to be handed over to the state – alike gold and so on.
So I took the cases – the minerals were put into cases –, and I gave them in present to the Bolyai University in Kolozsvar 11. I didn’t even get a letter of thanks from them. It is there, it must be somewhere. I kept a few things for myself as souvenirs, that’s all. So I found most of the things which had been in our apartment at the Jewish community, but unfortunately not everything.
I found some of the furniture too at the community. The furniture was ours, it was our own furniture. Somehow I found our piano as well. I transported it to Kolozsvar, later we sold it and I bought a new one. I have a cottage piano even now.
I lived on aids, I was receiving aid. I went to the leadership of the town, I got assistance from the town as well, because I was an IOVR member – Invalizi, orfani si vaduve de razboi [War invalids, War orphans and War widows]. I got money from them, I got assistance from the community, so I could live on these aids.
I don’t know how I managed to live, but somehow I could go through this. And I had a great luck. One of the owners of the Phonix Factory lived in Bucharest, and he stayed sometimes in Bucharest, sometimes in Nagybanya. He was Jewish, his name was Miklos Weiser. He survived the war in Budapest.
They had deported the Jews from the entire territory of Hungary, but they couldn’t deport them from Budapest. In Budapest Jews were taken to an island, maybe to the Margit Island, and they didn’t manage to deport them all. There were too many and much too important connections between the Jews and the non-Jews, especially in Budapest, and that’s why they couldn’t deport them from there.
By the way, he got married there, he met his wife there. I know from his own telling why he got married there. For many women showed interest for him. Imagine a tall, good-looking man, who is wealthy, who has a university degree – he studied chemistry and music –, he could sing very well, he had a nice voice.
He had everything, and most of all he had money, so women were pining for him. However, he didn’t get married, because he said women all wanted to marry him for his money. But there he met somebody, who fell in love with him without knowing who he was, so he married that girl.
Miklos Weiser was very fond of my father, because my father had done for him his mineral collection besides other things. They were approximately of the same age, maybe he was younger than my father. And he helped me after the war, while I was in high school.
He helped me for real. He didn’t support me as much when I was studying at the university. This was because I went to university in 1947, until 1948 I was receiving some aids I could live on, but in the meantime – in 1947 or in 1948 – he left the country. He fled to the west.
He was right. He offered me his home. He wanted to adopt me. I didn’t want anybody to adopt me. I had my own personality, and I didn’t want to obey others. It’s not always a good thing, but that was it. They went somewhere to America, but I don’t know precisely where, maybe to Argentina.
I suppose he managed to take a lot of money with him, so he had means to live on, but unfortunately he didn’t live much, after some ten years he died of a heart attack. So he died quite early, he didn’t get old. However, while I was in high school, he supported me.
In 1947 I got enrolled to the chemistry department of the Bolyai University, and I moved to Kolozsvar. I chose chemistry, because this way I got a grant from the Phonix Factory. During my studies I was receiving all kinds of support. The Joint had a hostel and canteen for students, so I had lodgings and meal for free.
It was maintained by the Joint, and the hostel was quite in the center, in the Majalis street. I lived there during my first year of studies. After one year I got transferred to the mathematics department of the Bolyai University. I had to pass some exams, but after that I could continue the second year.
But in the meantime I got married. A different problem arose. My wife had been my classmate in high school in Nagybanya, in the last degree. I even stayed at her parents – this was the problem. She was called Aliz Butkovits, but originally her name was Aliz Berger. She became Butkovits, because her step-father adopted her.
How Aliz Berger survived the war? It’s a strange story. Her mother was christened, because her second husband was a Christian, so she didn’t have to be deported. But their daughter, though she was christened too, wasn’t married, well she was young, she should have been deported.
She was hundred percent Jewish, because her mother was Jewish too, though she was christened, and her father was Jewish – his name was Berger. But they had a neighbor, who had a vineyard in Szinervaralja – it is called Seini in Romanian –, on halfway between Nagybanya and Szatmarnemeti.
[Editor’s note: Szinervaralja is 27 km far to northwest from Nagybanya.] The neighbor brought the little girl there and kept her there until the war ended. She had accommodation and meal. That’s how she survived. They were looking for her at home in vain, they couldn’t find her.
I got married when I was in the second year, at the beginning of the second year, in autumn 1948. I managed to get a room at a relatively low price, at a Jewish family. We felt very good there. We also obtained an employment for my wife at the university, so she was earning too.
I was earning some money too, I was working. I was collecting money for the ‘Antal Mark’ – that’s how the Joint’s hostel was called. I didn’t live there anymore, but I worked for them, I was collecting money for them, thus a certain percentage of the money was mine. So I went through this somehow.
I lived in reduced circumstances for two years, then I started to earn, because in the third degree I was appointed teaching assistant. So I was a student, but I was an assistant too, I was keeping seminars of mathematical analysis for the first year. After that I had all sorts of jobs. That’s why when I retired, they recognized fifty years of teaching in higher education.
We had a son born in my first marriage, Peter Gottlieb; he was born in March 1950, when I was in the third degree. After we divorced, he stayed with his mother in Kolozsvar. This was normal, because he was five or six years old, when we divorced, so he was a little child. I couldn’t have raised a child here, in Iasi.
That was it, but when he started his university studies, he stayed at me. He finished mathematics here. He got back near Kolozsvar, than to Kolozsvar; he got married there, his wife is Romanian. They left for Israel in 1989, a few months before the fall of Ceausescu 5.
My son died in December 1996 – he was forty-six years old –, he had cancer. But I have two grandchildren in Israel. They have Romanian names, one of them is Mircea, the other is Silviu. For usually it is the mother who chooses the names. But when they left for Israel, both of them adopted Jewish names. Mircea became Miha, Silviu became Yossi.
They were born in 1979, respectively in 1983. Both of them have already finished high-school and the army service, and they are students now; the elder, Miha is studying economical sciences in Jerusalem, the younger, Yossi studies psychology in Beer Sheva. Their mother lives in Sderot, but they don’t stay with their mother anymore.
The Bolyai University invited very good teachers from Hungary to Kolozsvar; only a few of the teachers were from Kolozsvar. I received a very good teaching in mathematics, which was useful all my life. In my opinion I had excellent teachers. Samu Borbely was not only a mathematician, but an engineer as well, and he had been working in Germany for a while, for example I think it was him who calculated the profile of the wing of the Stuka or some other aircraft.
[The Stuka – from Sturzkampfbomber – was a dive bomber designed by the Germans in 1935-36; its official name was Junkers Ju 87.] He wasn’t a follower of Hitler, he didn’t have any problems of political nature, but when he saw what was coming, he left Germany.
However, he was very well trained, and he was a mathematician of an excellent pragmatic sense. [Editor’s note: Samu Borbely (Torda, 1907 – Budapest, 1984) – mathematician, university teacher, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He studied at the Technical University of Vienna, then he was assistant professor there; from 1933 he was the mathematician of the Institute for Aviation Theory within the university. In 1941 he moved to Kolozsvar, and he was assistant professor, lecturer, then external lecturer at the Franz Joseph I University.
In 1944, after the German occupation of Kolozsvar he was arrested, and he was taken to Budapest, then to Berlin, where he was imprisoned. In December 1944 he returned to Budapest, at the end of 1945 to Kolozsvar. From 1945 he was professor at the Bolyai University; he was the head of the department of mathematics from 1949 at the Technical University of Miskolc, from 1955 at the Technical University of Budapest. Between 1960 and 1964 he was the director of the Institute of Mathematics within the Faculty of Engineering Industry, University of Magdeburg, then, between 1964 and 1968 he was head of department again in Budapest.]
Professor Rezso Gaspar had a less pragmatic, but a thorough theoretical grounding, and he had very good courses, for example on the theory of manifold and on real functions. Rezso Gaspar came from Hungary, I think he died in Debrecen, if I know well, he died a few years ago.
[Rezso Gaspar (1921–2001) – academician, university teacher.
Between 1943 and 1945 he was teacher at the Reformed College of Papa; between 1945 and 1953 he was teaching at the Institute of Physics of the Technical University of Budapest, in 1953 he became the head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Lajos Kossuth University of Debrecen. He performed a scientific work of pioneering significance in the field of quantum chemistry. He established an internationally acknowledged scientific school at the Department of Theoretical Physics of the University of Debrecen.]
Jeno Gergely was our only teacher who didn’t leave Kolozsvar. In fact he was already an assistant professor during World War I. Between the two world wars he didn’t leave Kolozsvar, because he got married there, so he stayed there and taught in a high school.
When in 1945 the Bolyai University was established again – by that time it was called Bolyai University, I don’t know what was it called before [Editor’s note: Franz Joseph I University, between the two world wars King Carol II Institute] –, they took back uncle Gergely.
[Editor’s note: Jeno Gergely (1896–1974) – writer of scientific works, expert in the Non-Euclidean geometry. Between 1920 and 1948 he was teaching in the Marianum Gymnasium for girls; from 1947 until his retirement he was professor at the Bolyai University, then at the Babes-Bolyai University.]
Uncle Jeno was an excellent teacher, and he was reading constantly, so he had a very good general education too. We always used to say that he was a walking encyclopedia. When he was asked something, he always could tell where that specific information was to be found. He was teaching mainly geometry, the theory of curved surface, differential geometry and so on. By the way, he was my tutor when preparing my thesis. It was on calculus of variations, but he suggested me the subject.
Then there was Gyorgy Pick, we all called him Gyuri Pikk. Previously he was a high school teacher. He was a magnificent expert in algebra. [Editor’s note: Gyorgy Pick (1907–1984) – between 1945 and 1952 he was teaching algebra at the Bolyai University of Kolozsvar; he was the founder of the school of algebra within the Babes-Bolyai University. He was the leader of many PhD theses written by Hungarian mathematicians of Transylvania (www.emt.ro/kiadvanyok/msz/msz2000/msz37.pdf).]
We had a teacher with a thorough grounding in physics as well, Tihamer Laszlo. He was a good experimental physician. [Editor’s note: Tihamer Laszlo (1910–1986) – physician, university teacher. Until 1944 he was the physics teacher of the Unitarian College, in 1947 he became head of department at the Bolyai University. He was the author of many course books and lecture notes.]
May he have not had a much too brilliant brain, but in the first year such people are needed, not prominent men of science.
And there was Teofil Vesca – who later came to Iasi, and I got here after him – who had very nice courses in the theory of physics. I attended his courses of theoretical mechanics, then a general theoretical course in physics. He had a very rich education, and most important, he was very productive. He died here, in Iasi, at the age of fifty, yet he had published more than hundred and fifty works of mathematics and physics. He had at least three diplomas: in mathematics, physics and philosophy.
At the Bolyai University he kept his courses in Hungarian. He spoke Hungarian as he spoke Romanian. This fellow had the courage to write down once, when he had to fill in a form with his personal data, that his nationality was Transylvanian. Not Hungarian, not Romanian, he was a Transylvanian.
Ferenc Rado was an excellent teacher and a very good educator, and he was outstanding as a scientist as well, he wrote very good studies. I think he died at the age of sixty-six because of rectal cancer.
[Editor’s note: Ferenc Rado (1921-1990) – writer of mathematical works. He was a high school teacher, then from 1950 he was lecturer at the Bolyai, respectively Babes-Bolyai University; from 1968 until his retirement (1985) he was university teacher. (www.banaterra.eu/magyar/I/irodalmi_lexikon/irok/irodalmi_lexikon.htm)] To resume all this, I had good teachers. This is the truth.
The young generation was also good. I could mention my friend, who is a few years older than me, but at that time he was already an assistant professor, Zoltan Gabos; he is also a correspondent member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
[Editor’s note: Zoltan Gabos (1924) – university teacher (Bolyai University). His fields of research: particle physics, general theory of relativity, analytical mechanics. He published several monograph-like works.] He still lives in Kolozsvar, he is over eighty years old, but he is still fit, I’ve seen him recently. I would mention from my colleagues Endre Weiszmann, he’s Jewish, he became a teacher at the Bolyai University; he was engaged mainly in solid state physics. Later he emigrated to America with his family, and he retired there.
[Editor’s note: Endre Weiszmann (1923) – physicist, he was teaching at the Bolyai University, then at the Babes-Bolyai University. After he left Romania, first he became a researcher at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, then a professor emeritus of the City University of New York.]
He is also older than me. None of them was actually my teacher, but they all worked in the same environment, and we were on very good terms. So we esteemed each other, we were on speaking terms; I could go to all of the teachers and ask them something, talk to them. Teachers weren’t so reserved.
We were ten in my class when I was in the second year. We were many during the first year, but a lot of students fell behind. Thus, when I became a second-year student, we were ten at the mathematics department. We were all close to each other, we supported each other.
Whoever was a little bit weaker, got assistance from somebody. From my fellow-students still is alive Ivan Singer [1929], he lives in Bucharest, he’s a mathematician and he’s member to the Romanian Academy of Sciences. He published a lot of books, he had works published in the Springer Publishing House. In fact the two of us were those who succeeded to continue, to accomplish something.
But the others were good high school teachers too. We formed an excellent community. Unfortunately people left one after the other, later the unification of the two universities was requested. The Bolyai was a very good university, unfortunately it isn’t anymore.
[Editor’s note: In 1959 the Hungarian Bolyai University was merged with the Romanian Babes University, thus the present Babes-Bolyai University was established; the Hungarian and Romanian branches were united.]
I finished my studies in 1951, then I was an assistant professor for one year at the Bolyai University. In 1952 I applied for admittance to doctoral studies in Iasi, I came here at the end of December, and since then I live here. So I spent January 1st 1953 here already.
My doctoral thesis was on general theory of relativity; it suits mathematicians well, one has to be taken up with geometry a lot. I was granted a scholarship of three years from the very beginning, and next fall I could teach, first as an assistant professor, then as a lecturer. Thus in fall 1953 I started to have courses in Iasi, at the age of twenty-six. I was teaching theory of physics, I was teaching mathematics only in recent years – I was teaching non-linear differential equations for MA students.
I was head of department at the Faculty of Physics of the Iasi University two times. In December 1963 professor Vescan died, and in 1964 I became head of department. In those times the department was called Theory of Physics and Atomistic Structure.
I had this function until 1971 or 1972, when they wound up the smaller departments, and merged them, this way they didn’t have to pay so many heads of department. This went on until 1990. In January 1990 they separated the departments again, and I became head of the department again, but it was called Department of Physics Theory.
And I was in this position until fall 1999, until my retirement. Somebody took over the department, but one year ago they merged the departments again, so there is no Department of Physics Theory anymore, it is together with the Solid-state Physics.
I kept all sorts of lectures: I started with the theories of electrodynamics and relativity, then I taught quantum mechanics until my retirement, so from 1958 until 1999. I was teaching solid-state physics, quantum field theory. Later I let others teach these, however, in Iasi it was me who started to teach both courses.
I was also teaching thermodynamics, statics, physics for students in philosophy, I was teaching theory of physics for chemists. Since I retired, I taught non linear differential equation for physicians. I had many courses. I don’t even know how many things I was teaching.
After retirement I kept on keeping lectures, I think this year [2006-2007 academic year] would be the first year, when I don’t have any lectures. However, we have so few students these days, I can’t take off the source of living from others.
I am a PhD coordinator since 1971-72. I already have some thirty ‘doctors’, and some of them became word-wide known. I will mention two of them. One is Achiba Segal, he’s also Jewish, lives in Israel, and works at the Weizmann Institute.
[Editor’s note: The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot is one of the leading, multidisciplinary research institutes in the world, which is engaged in natural sciences and technological sciences.]
He’s an expert in solar energy, because it is very important to them to use it. The other, Laszlo Vekas is Hungarian, he lives in Temesvar; he’s also a good expert in ferrofluids, and he has a world-wide reputation, he became member to the European Academy of Science and Arts.
It is very hard to tell which one I consider important from my scientific works. I liked the theory of relativity a lot, but I’m not engaged in it anymore, well, I have to do other things as well. I liked quantum mechanics too, and I wrote studies in this field as well, though not as many.
I wrote several books about quantum mechanics, I published a book on quantum field theory, theory of relativity. [I. Gottlieb: Mecanica cuantica, fascicula I (Originile mecanicii cuantice), Centrul de multiplicare al Univ. „Al. I. Cuza” Iaşi, 1973; I. Gottlieb si I. Merches: Teoria cuantica a cimpului, fascicula I, Centrul de multiplicare al Universitatii „Al. I. Cuza” Iaşi, 1975; I. Gottlieb, I. Merches, D. Tatomir: Teoria cuantica a cimpului, fascicula II, Centrul de multiplicare al Univ. „Al. I. Cuza” Iaşi, 1981; Ioan Gottlieb: Mecanica cuantica, fasc. I, Centrul de multiplicare al Univ. „Al. I. Cuza” Iaşi, 1982; Ioan Gottlieb, Ciprian Dariescu si Marina-Aura Dariescu: Fundamentarea Mecanicii Cuantice, Editura Tehnica, Chisinau, 1995; I. Gottlieb, D. Tatomir, M. Stamate: Complemente de mecanica cuantica, Editura Plumb, Bacau, 1997; I. Gottlieb, Marina-Aura Dariescu, C. Dariescu: Mecanica cuantica, Ed. BIT, 1999; Gh. Maftei, I. Gottlieb, Cleopatra Mociutchi, Irina Mazilu, D. A. Mazilu: Teoria relativitatii restranse, din seria Teorii Fundamentale ale Secolului XX, Editura Univ. „Al. I. Cuza” Iaşi, vol. I, 2001, vol. II, 2002]
I’m a member to the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation for a long time. I’m member to the American Mathematical Society as a mathematician. I’m a member to the European Academy of Science and Arts as well. In the case of certain memberships I had to pay a fee; I don’t take too serious these, for example membership to the New York Academy of Science requires money; it wasn’t bad though, because they sent us books and materials. One had to pay a membership fee there.
Now one has to pay for the European Academy as well – at the beginning it wasn’t so, but they changed the rule, because they don’t have enough funds. They sent a polite letter explaining that we were supposed to contribute to its maintenance somehow. The fee isn’t a great amount, it is around sixty euros per year. I didn’t have any awards, true that I didn’t apply for things like this.
When I moved to Iasi, I made some new acquaintances, and I tried to get close to them. I was on quite good terms with everybody. However, it is hard not only to establish good relationships, but to find people to work with. That’s how I chanced up my second wife – back then she was someone else’s wife.
She was a clever woman, and she always told me useful things. Her advantage was that my way of thinking was mathematical, hers was a physicist’s. Now then, I came here to teach theory of physics, but I was thinking hermetically about physics. She started to explain me that this wouldn’t work like this.
And she was right. She taught me how to write studies in physics. In turn I taught her some mathematics to be able to work together. And we succeeded. We have several works in common.
She didn’t work at the Department of Physics Theory from the beginning, she got there later. So it was natural that we worked more and more in common. And we could help each other in no matter what problems. For example she had to keep courses of theory of physics, and it was me who told her what and how she should do.
She told me to watch out what I was doing with physicians. I told you, my way of thinking was much too pervaded with mathematics, and this won’t do for physicists.
One has to learn the golden mean, the aurea mediocritas. So we could get along with each other well, much too well, in my opinion. Because she was having family problems, it was her husband who wanted to divorce her, he even sued for and divorced her.
I predicted to myself what was going to happen. I will tell you why. For her mind was much more brilliant than her husband’s. Women don’t bear a less clever man, and men are even less predisposed to live with a cleverer woman. Of course this marriage broke up. They broke in spring, and in fall I already asked her to marry me. I didn’t let her ponder over it too much.
I had been divorced for several years already. When I came here from Kolozsvar, my marriage was on the way to break up. In theory. We actually divorced only after that. We separated in a civilized manner, without any scandal. I didn’t go to any of the hearings. We had an agreement, and things were settled.
My first wife got married again. Now her name is Aliz Luta after her husband. She didn’t have more children. The truth is that what occurred to me and my first wife was, that everything was marvelous during the first three days, after three days nothing was ok.
So I already knew I was going to divorce, I knew this before I met my second wife. So this didn’t mean a problem. It was her who had problems, she was married and had two kids. I didn’t want to convince her to divorce, because when children are in the middle, it is a difficult case. But happily for me that’s what happened. In fall 1962 we got married, and we are together since then, for forty-four years; it is a well-tried relationship.
My first wife was born in 1927, she is older than me. My second wife is older too, she was born in 1926. My wife turned eighty this spring [in 2006]. So taking this into account, well... Touch wood! And she’s full of energy, even in this moment she’s in Bucharest, she goes here and there, she has all kind of business to do. And I have someone to discuss with. In brief, we look after each other.
She takes care of me as well, because I have health problems. I didn’t tell you yet that one of my health problems surely originates in the period spent in the concentration camp, this is a kind of diabetes. In fact it’s not that the body wouldn’t have enough substance to absorb blood sugar.
The problem is that it doesn’t absorb it well. Surely it comes from my time spent in the concentration camp, because whoever survived it… May I say improper things too? After we escaped, I had a very good friend who was a gynecologist, older than me, he was also from Nagybanya, and he survived too.
I told him that as soon as I started to eat, I began to put on ten kilos in ten days, and so on. He answered to this: ‘My son, for our body, the body of those who survived, facing this new situation was so difficult, that it proceeds even shit.’ That was it. This was a useful feature of the organism. So presumably my diabetes originates in those times, though it came out only decades after deportation.
For if they examine my blood sugar level in the morning, it’s normal. Like in this moment. It was always normal. The so-called glucose tolerance test proves the same – it means that they administer glucose in the morning to see how it is cleared from the organism.
It clears much slower from our organism than from other people’s body. This also means that it stays long enough in the blood to cause disorder. At the age of forty-five I had a heart attack, and that’s how they discovered my disease. So I renounced sugar.
Then my vision started to be affected. During my first eye operation a problem with my sodium and potassium level emerged, and this affected the nerve-center. Not my intellect, but my motor center, so I had to sit in a wheelchair. I couldn’t either walk or write. Happily I recovered from that.
Then it started to affect my bones, I have prosthesis in my right foot. I walk with a stick, because I’m afraid of falling down. After all this, some two years ago they discovered that I have a kidney disease, renal insufficiency. Luckily I don’t have to go through a dialysis, but I’m close to it. I know I will have to do it sooner or later. In brief health problems escorted me all my life.
Just to turn back to my point: my wife looks after me. But I look after her as well, because I need her. We work together even today, when we can, we discuss scientific issues. Well, if we both have the same profession, we are both theoreticians of physics, we have topics in common. She goes to the university more rarely than me, because, well, somebody has to do the housekeeping too. And she has other things to do as well, she’s older than me, she’s a woman – women retire earlier.
My wife kept her maiden name. Not in her first marriage, but after she divorced, she took back her maiden name, and we agreed that she would keep it. We decided so mainly because we were working together, and thus everybody had their own name, otherwise people would confuse us.
Her name is Mociutchi, it’s a Polish name. In fact one of her paternal great-grandfathers was Polish, he had fled the Russians; he got to Bessarabia, and got married there. So this name comes from there. In turn her given name is Cleopatra, friends call her Pati.
Her children have her former husband’s name, both of them are called Tomozei. Of course the boy kept his name, the girl got married and now her name is Timofte after her husband. After we got married, we raised my wife’s children together.
Both daughters of my foster-daughter, Mihaela studied law. The elder, Andrada Timofte works for the European Union, but not as Romania’s representative; she got this job following a competition. The younger, Mara Timofte was employed as an assistant lecturer here, in Iasi; not at the state university, but at the Petre Andrei. Mihaela’s brother, Alexandru is in Germany. They have two children: Alexandru Vlad – he studied to become a dentist in Munich, and he’s already working – and Raluca, she’s still a student.
During communism I didn’t have problems due to my origins, for I had been deported. My parents had died, and I was registered everywhere as an orphan, irrespective of my origins. I had different kind of problems. When I was filling in my personal data, I used to write that according to my nationality I was Hungarian.
If they asked about my religion, I wrote: ‘Israelite’. Sometime during the 1950s I was recommended to participate at the youth’s congress in Bucharest. They thought something was wrong about my data. So they gave me a phone-call, I think it was somebody from the party, but I don’t know whom I talked to – he told me his name, but I didn’t care –, and we had a very interesting conversation.
He refused to give in, and I hold on either. He says: ‘You wrote you were Hungarian.’ ‘True.’ ‘So why they deported you?’ I told him: ‘As being a Jew.’ ‘Now then, are you Jewish or Hungarian?’ ‘The question is what you are asking me.’ He didn’t understand this. I told him: ‘Listen to me. What is nationality according to Stalin? Mother tongue, culture, community.
I attended a Hungarian high-school, a Hungarian university, my mother tongue is Hungarian, I lived in a Hungarian community, I have a Hungarian culture. I avow myself to be Hungarian.’ ‘But why were you deported then?’ ‘Because according to my religion I’m Jewish.’ He didn’t get it. They cut me off from the list. They didn’t like this.
I will tell you that I didn’t have any troubles at the university. Neither because I’m Hungarian, nor because I’m Jewish. I had several Jewish colleagues. They were all kicked off for one reason or the other. They didn’t kick me off. I could stay as a former deported.
The other Jews were in a different situation, they were from the surroundings, meaning from Moldavia, they weren’t deported. Or if they were deported, they were taken to Transnistria, which was somewhat easier. 7 None of them could keep their job at the university.
One of them, Relu Schwartz was kicked off, after that he became the best high-school teacher of physics in Iasi, he was the teacher of my foster-daughter as well. He left for Israel, he lives in Haifa; this fall he came for a visit in Iasi. Now he’s retired, of course, but when he left, he took with him his experiences, and used them in Israel.
Following the events of 1989 5 my life changed to some extent. It changed in what concerns duality – I didn’t have to bother anymore about it. For the truth is that during the communist era everybody had two faces. I said one thing at home, and other thing outside.
One couldn’t speak out their thoughts, only in a very restraint circle. One had to watch out his mouth. And now I don’t have to keep my mouth shut. I will add something very interesting to this. I had a Jewish student, whose parents I got to know.
The father was a watchmaker and a jeweler. Before World War II he was a very wealthy man – until the war began. In the 1950s his brother-in-law, who had left for France, came to visit him, and he convinced him to apply for a permit to leave for France.
Once I paid him a visit, and the old man – of course he was much older than me – was pretending he was in a bad mood. I didn’t understand it. I told him: ‘Mister Goldenberg, you, who used to be so wealthy, and who has so many difficulties now to make a living, what is keeping you here, why won’t you go to France? Why is it such a big deal?’ ‘I don’t want to go, but my wife and children are trying to persuade me to leave.’ ‘Why don’t you want to go?’ ‘I will tell you why.
As a Jew, when I was at my mother’s breast, I already learnt what «Haltz maul» is.’ – You know what it means, don’t you? Hold your tongue. – ‘It’s not a big deal for me to shut my mouth. But the joy to see that Romanians have to shut their mouth too, I won’t have it in France.’
Well, the truth is that being a Jew, I also learnt as a child already to hold my tongue, because I lived in such circumstances. I wasn’t allowed to speak. I knew my father was listening to the London radio station, but I wasn’t supposed to know it. And so on. So I learnt this as a child. And I kept on with this in Iasi too, but I never liked this matter.
The other thing is that now one can travel abroad, and it’s not a troublesome thing to send papers. In old times it meant a problem to send papers abroad, I had to ask for I don’t know how many certificates that it wasn’t a state secret what I was writing.
My problem was not that they might have not given me the permit, but the fact itself that I had to ask for permits. It took me long and so on. Then they asked you why you were writing in foreign languages. This would mean you were a cosmopolitan.
One is supposed to write in Romanian. But what I have published here, in Romanian, nobody read it abroad. Yet I managed to send some papers: I sent papers to France, a study was published in Argentina before 1989, so I could send a few papers to different scientific journals. For example my papers were published by the Contes Rendues in Paris, the Revista de Matematica y Fisica Teoretica in Argentina, the Periodica Mathematica Hungarica in Hungary.
It was difficult to go to conferences. I’m not saying it was impossible, but it was difficult. For example in 1983 I was invited to a conference in Italy, to a scientific session on gravitation, a conference organized by the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation.
In 1980 the same session had been organized in Jena, when I could have participated. I hadn’t had problems with going to Jena. Although I didn’t tell the police why I was going there, because I should have asked for a permit concerning what and with whom I was going to speak and so on.
In 1980 I applied for a passport to visit Czechoslovakia and East Germany 12, and they gave me without any problems. In 1983 I was supposed to go to Italy. So I applied again for a passport saying that I wanted to see these countries – Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary.
But I didn’t mention in my application my purpose and that I was going to participate at a scientific session, because in this case I should have asked a separate permit, I should have told them what I had written in my paper I was going to present there…
The truth is that everybody knew at the university where and why I was going. But everybody pretended not to know it. I applied in due time for a permit, I specified which countries I wished to go to, and in two months I got my passport.
I went to Italy through Yugoslavia, and I came back through France, Germany, Austria and Hungary. I went by my own car with my wife; it was a wonderful journey. We visited the concentration camps of Mauthausen and Melk, where I had been.
We saw only these two, we didn’t go to see the others. The one in Mauthausen was open for visitors, the Melk camp was very small, the former concentration camp wasn’t there anymore, but there is a museum there too. My wife could see what a concentration camp meant.
I saw the place within the Mauthausen concentration camp, where there had been a quarry, the steps where thousands of people had been killed with stones; in 1983, forty years later the place was still stinking because of the dead.
I was in Israel once, in 1992; I was there with my wife. It is a miracle what was created there. It is fantastic how they built up the state, mainly from an economic aspect. I mean they created woods in the desert, and a pipe goes to each tree’s root, so it gets as much water as it needs – for they don’t have much water.
Computers portion the water. And they produce potatoes in the desert instead of other things. They produce potatoes which they later send to Germany. So these are fantastic things.
They send flowers to the Dutch, not tulips of course; they export tulips here, and they send there other flowers. In brief it is something considerable that they could do this. I was impressed a lot, but unfortunately they don’t let the Israeli live normally.
First I went to Sderot, because my son was there; in 1992 he was still alive, and my main purpose was to visit him. Then we saw many things. I saw the Dead Sea for example. There is a town called Arad. [Editor’s note: The interviewee mentions this town because in Romania too there is a town called Arad.]
Of course I visited Jerusalem, I was in the old town, because this is also a matter of general culture. I visited the Christian churches too, not only the synagogues; I couldn’t see only the mosque, because it was more complicated and dangerous. I could have entered, but… it’s complicated.
One didn’t feel safe, especially if they found out you were Jewish. Then I went to Bethlehem, I took a look there too. There wasn’t much peace either, but it was interesting, and it’s well organized. That’s precisely why others envy them, and that’s why there are so many problems.
I was in Tel Aviv, then we traveled to the other part of the country, to Nahariya – it is near Lebanon –, where my uncle lived – he was still alive then – and my aunt; I’ve mentioned them, they got there from Bucharest. So I visited quite many places.
In Israel the greatest investment aims at children. They invest a great part of their money in children. My son’s wife left for Israel as a philologist specialized in Romanian and Russian, but she was reeducated, and now she’s engaged with children who have problems.
Meaning that in Israeli schools if a child doesn’t learn for whatever reason – not because he’s idiot, but for family reasons for example –, they assign a specialist teacher next to that child, a teacher, who is a good psychologist and also knows the material, who learns with the child.
For they don’t want children not to learn throughout school and not to get prepared to life. So my daughter-in-law works with such children. She could learn as much mathematics as much is required in elementary school. I’m not talking about high school.
So they treat problem-children separately. Who pays attention to them in our country? Nobody at all! This is a special problem, and it’s very important. I wrote a newspaper article after 1992, which was published in the Ziarul de Iasi, and I wrote there that it counted a lot in Einstein’s case that he was Jewish; since Moses – that is for three and a half thousand years – Jews must learn to write and read, and of course this is something very useful. This is neglected in our country.
I wrote that in Romania school and education in general are not supported materially in a satisfactory manner, and this was against the people. But I explained it in vain. It’s not important when a child is three or four years old, but after he turns five or six, the state should do anything possible for his education. I kept a lecture at the Jewish community in Iasi and at the German Cultural Centre about Einstein, and I explained all this there too.
I never thought of settling in Israel. Simply because I have a completely different disposition. I could have left not only for Israel, but for America or no matter where. It wouldn’t have been difficult. I apply here, I go to Israel, and from Israel I can go wherever I wish to.
But for my state of mind the circle of friends, which I developed during my childhood, was very important. And you can never ever acquire this, no matter where you are. For example I have a colleague in Nagybanya, who used to be my classmate in high school; he sends me chestnuts every year, so that I wouldn’t forget Nagybanya.
It’s a nice thing. I keep the contact with others too. In brief, you can’t develop in any place of the world the friendships you developed here. It’s a different matter if someone leaves at the age of twenty or twenty-five. But at that age my circumstances didn’t allow me to leave.
Despite the whole story of deportation I think I had luck during my life. For mathematics is a hobby for me. To be able to make my living of my hobby all my life, this is the first luck, and it’s a wonderful thing. My second hobby is music. Just a few can understand what music means for a person who feels it. I often listen to music while working. The third thing is family life, which I found here, in Iasi. I feel good in my family. What else could I wish?
What do I consider myself? The question arises also because I live in a mixed marriage. Well, first of all I consider myself being a Jew, because both my father and my mother were Jewish; but it’s not enough. My father was atheist, and I’m atheist too.
So I don’t feel being Jewish because of religion, to be more precise. I’m convinced that my love for learning comes from my Jewish origins. This is a good feature of Jews. So my intellectual abilities for the most are due to my being a Jew. For there are a lot of intelligent people among Jews. It’s a statistical fact that there are more than among other nations.
Well, that’s it. How’s that that there are so many Jews who won the Nobel-prize, and not only? Shortly, my intellectual attitude, which I very much like, I inherited it as a Jew.
And it’s very important to me. Did I tell you that I still enjoy learning in order to know more and more? Though you might ask me how this could be useful to me at this age. Secondly, I had to avow myself to be Hungarian. So first of all I’m Jewish, secondly I am Hungarian.
Why do I have to consider myself Hungarian? Because that’s how my father raised me. This is it, Hungarian is my mother tongue, my basic education is Hungarian. In school those few years of primary school didn’t ensure me a Romanian education. In turn, what I had acquired in high school, then at the university, it was a Hungarian education. That’s it, no one can change it. I will tell you that when they offered these Hungarian certificates, I applied for it.
However, I have to confess that I feel very good among Romanians. And if I can do anything good for the Romanian state and for the Romanian community, I do it. Well, I’m living for more than fifty years in Iasi. I have so many former students in every corner of this country.
Why did I do this? I transmitted what I could. Not only to Romanians, because I had a few Hungarian students too, but mainly to Romanians. My wife is Romanian. I had a friend, I always used to say he was my best friend; unfortunately he died one year ago. We understood each other alike two brothers.
He was Romanian. But I have a lot of Hungarian friends: Tibor Toro in Temesvar
[Editor’s note: Tibor Toro (1931) – nuclear physicist, writer of specialist books, head of the Theoretical Physics Department at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Temesvar, correspondent member to the Hungarian Academy of Science (1993).],
Zoltan Gabos in Kolozsvar; some of my former colleagues are also good friends of mine. So I like people of no matter what nationality, with whom I can get along. Since I had been living in Iasi, I’m Jewish, Hungarian and Romanian too. In this order. I also wrote this down. I feel good, there isn’t any problem.
Sometimes I attend the Jewish community. However, I don’t do this for religious reasons, this has a totally different background. I go there to meet other Jews, to say so. The point is unity, the fact of being together.
For example they always invite me and my wife for Seder night; why not to go, so we go to celebrate Seder night within the community. We go on such occasions. Or at Chanukkah. They invite us for Chanukkah as well, and we go, no problem. I have a cap too, a kippah. Of course we go, because we want to be with them.
Not because I would be religious, but I want to be together with them. That’s my way of being in contact with the community. I will go again there in a few days, because I don’t have a new calendar yet. I buy a Jewish calendar every year, just to have one.
I go to the university every day, because I’m still engaged in many scientific projects – not only here, but at home too –, and I kept this hobby of mine. So I’m still busy with scientific matters; now I’m interested in these new issues, the fractals in physics; these are interesting issues, and I’m working on them. I’m writing a book, it’s about something else; however, it’s a scientific work on external shapes mainly, and their application in physics.
Do you want me to tell you how I spend my day? I get up. Not too early, but I get up at a certain point. I’m the one who makes coffee in the morning. We take coffee, then I have breakfast, in the meantime I discuss with my wife what we are going to do that day, then I go to the university. Usually I have work to do. I check my mails, my e-mails, I answer to some of them.
People come and ask me things, and so on. Usually I go home at around three or four. When I’m at home, my wife heats up the meal, by the time we eat, it’s already five or six o’clock. Then I take a rest until seven, when I listen to the seven o’clock news. It’s already eight until it’s over.
I listen to the news, and sometimes there are films I watch. Unfortunately I read less, for I had lost my left eye, I can’t see with my left eye at all. And I want to see what I can with my right eye. Thus I shouldn’t tire it out in excess. Nevertheless I must work on the computer, I must read, I must write, and that’s enough for me, so I can hardly read anything else. I don’t even start reading long novels anymore. My wife reads novels sometimes, and she tells me about it, but that’s not the same.
I play the piano from the age of four. After I came back from the concentration camp, I continued learning it, I played the piano again, because I enjoyed it. Then I got to the university, and it was over. Now I play the piano rarely – though I like it –, because my fingers don’t work anymore as they should, and it bothers me.
However, I like listening to music a lot. For example I like the violin and piano concertos of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, I very much like Schumann’s piano concertos, and I also like cello concertos. I like many things. I like all good music. And I agree with those who say there is no light music and serious music, but good and bad music. The truth is there are songs in light music, which are very nice, and I like them.
1 KuK (Kaiserlich und Koeniglich) army: The name ‘Imperial and Royal’ was used for the army of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, as well as for other state institutions of the Monarchy originated from the dual political system. Following the Compromise of 1867, which established the Dual Monarchy, Austrian emperor and Hungarian King Franz Joseph was the head of the state and also commander-in-chief of the army. Hence the name ‘Imperial and Royal’.
2 Hungarian Soviet Republic: The first, short-lived, proletarian dictatorship in Hungary. On 21st March 1919 the Workers’ Council of Budapest took over power from the bourgeois democratic government and declared the Hungarian Soviet Republic.
The temporary constitution declared that the Republic was the state of the workers and peasants and it aimed at putting an end to their exploitation and establishing a socialist economic and social system. The communist government nationalized industrial and commercial enterprises, and socialized housing, transport, banking, medicine, cultural institutions, and large landholdings. In an effort to secure its rule the government used arbitrary violence.
Almost 600 executions were ordered by revolutionary tribunals and the government also resorted to violence to expropriate grain from peasants. This violence and the regime’s moves against the clergy also shocked many Hungarians.
The Republic was defeated by the entry of Romanian troops, who broke through Hungarian lines on 30th July, occupied and looted Budapest, and ousted Kun’s Soviet Republic on 1st August 1919.
3 Jews in Russian captivity: The number of Hungarian Jews in Russian captivity is estimated between 20,000 and 30,000. A smaller part of them were forced labor workers who deserted, while the majority fell into captivity during the Red Army's breakthrough at Voronyezh. Their fate was not influenced by the fact that they had been prosecuted by both the Germans and the Hungarians, and were transported to war camps together with Hungarian and German soldiers all over the Soviet Union. They were only allowed home after the signing of the peace treaty in February 1947.
4 Adoption of Hungarian names (Magyarization of names): Before 1881 the adoption of Hungarian names was regarded as a private matter and the liberal governments after the Compromise of 1867 treated it as a simply administrative, politically neutral question.
At the end of the 19th century the years of the Millennium brought an upsurge in the adoption of Hungarian names partly because the Banffy cabinet (1895-1899) pressed for it, especially among civil servants. Jews were overrepresented among those adopting a Hungarian name until 1919 (the last year when more Jewish than Christian people were allowed to do so).
After WWI, during the Horthy era, politicians did not consider the nation a mere political category anymore, and one had to become worthy of a Hungarian name.
Assimilation of the Jewry was also controlled by this process (only the Minister of the Interior had the right to decide on it), and in 1938 the adoption of Hungarian names by the denominational Jewry was practically stopped.
After WWII, between 1945 and 1949, 50,000 petitions were filed, about a third of them by Jews, on reasons for changing German or Jewish sounding names.
5 Romanian Revolution of 1989: In December 1989, a revolt in Romania deposed the communist dictator Ceausescu. Anti-government violence started in Timisoara and spread to other cities. When army units joined the uprising, Ceausescu fled, but he was captured and executed on 25th December along with his wife.
A provisional government was established, with Ion Iliescu, a former Communist Party official, as president. In the elections of May 1990 Iliescu won the presidency and his party, the Democratic National Salvation Front, obtained an overwhelming majority in the legislature.
6 Emigration from Romania in 1939-1945: There were 6 waves of emigration before the establishment of the state of Israel. The last large-scale aliyah took place between 1939-1945, when about 150,000 Jews settled in Palestine. Approx. 25,000 of them were born in Romania.
In 1939 only 632, and in 1942 only 701 Jews made aliyah legally and, several hundred illegally, from Romania. On the other hand, thousands of Jews arrived in Romania, fleeing from territories under German occupation and trying to escape to Palestine via Black sea ports. 47 ships set out for Palestine from these Romanian ports with 26,600 Jewish emigrants on board between 1938 and 1944.
7 Jews in North and South Transylvania: According to the Second Vienna Dictate N Transylvania was given to Hungary while S Transylvania remained Romanian territory. Not only the Hungarians, but a majority of the Jewish population there was pleased by this decision, though they knew of anti-Jewish legislation in Hungary.
Approx. 165,000 Jews lived in N Transylvania, of whom an estimated 130,000 became victims of the Holocaust. The Jewish population of S Transylvania was 30-35,000. As to the anti-Jewish measures, the situation was the same including the preparations for the deportations.
On March 12, 1943, however, the Romanian government informed the German Embassy in Bucharest in a memorandum about "the only solution to the Romanian Jewish problem is considered to be emigration and not deportation."
8 Second Vienna Dictate: The Romanian and Hungarian governments carried on negotiations about the territorial partition of Transylvania in August 1940. Due to their conflict of interests, the negotiations turned out to be fruitless. In order to avoid violent conflict a German-Italian court of arbitration was set up, following Hitler’s directives, which was also accepted by the parties.
The verdict was pronounced on 30th August 1940 in Vienna: Hungary got back a territory of 43,000 km² with 2,5 million inhabitants. This territory (Northern Transylvania, Seklerland) was populated mainly by Hungarians (52% according to the Hungarian census and 38% according to the Romanian one) but at the same time more than 1 million Romanians got under the authority of Hungary.
Although Romania had 19 days for capitulation, the Hungarian troops entered Transylvania on 5th September. The verdict was disapproved by several Western European countries and the US; the UK considered it a forced dictate and refused to recognize its validity.
9 German Invasion of Hungary: Hitler found out about Prime Minister Miklos Kallay’s and Governor Miklos Horthy’s attempts to make peace with the west, and by the end of 1943 worked out the plans, code-named ‘Margarthe I. and II.’, for the German invasion of Hungary.
In early March 1944, Hitler, fearing of a possible Anglo-American occupation of Hungary, gave orders to German forces to march into the country. On March 18th, he met Horty in Klessheim, Austria and tried to convince him to accept the German steps, and for the signing of a declaration in which the Hungarians would call for the occupation by German troops. Horthy was not willing to do this, but promised he would stay in his position and would name a German puppet government in place of Kallay’s.
On March 19th, the Germans occupied Hungary without resistance. The ex-ambassador to Berlin, Dome Sztojay, became new prime minister, who – though nominally responsible to Horthy – in fact, reconciled his politics with Edmund Veesenmayer, the newly arrived delegate of the Reich.
10 Securitate (in Romanian: DGSP - Directia generala a Securitatii Poporului): General Board of the People’s Security. Its structure was established in 1948 with direct participation of Soviet advisors named by the NKVD. The primary purpose was to ‘defend all democratic accomplishments and to ensure the security of the Romanian Popular Republic against plots of both domestic and foreign enemies’.
Its leader was Pantelimon Bondarenko, later known as Gheorghe Pintilie, a former NKVD agent. It carried out the arrests, physical torture and brutal imprisonment of people who became undesirable for the leaders of the Romanian Communist Party, and also kept the life of ordinary civilians under strict observation.
11 Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj Napoca: The Babeş-Bolyai University was set up in 1958 by the fusion of two state universities, the Hungarian Bolyai University and the Romanian Babes University. The predecessor of the Bolyai University, called Ferenc Jozsef University and founded in 1872, moved to Szeged after the Trianon Peace Treaty (1920).
In 1919 the University of Cluj was declared a Romanian university by an executive decree of the new Governing Council of Transylvania and it was named after the Romanian King, Ferdinand I. After Transylvania’s annexation to Hungary (1940) the Ferdinand University fled to Sibiu and the university buildings in Cluj got back under the rule of the returning Ferenc Jozsef University.
In 1945 Transylvania was enclosed to Romania, the Romanian University returned to Cluj, and the negotiation began for the buildings and laboratories. Since 1945 the Hungarian university has been called Bolyai, and the Romanian one Babes, after the famous Romanian researcher Victor Babes. In the 1950s the Bolyai University was gradually degraded by reducing the number of its faculties, students and teachers. The last phase of this process was the fusion of the two institutions.
12 German Democratic Republic, GDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR): The state of East Germany, created on 7th October 1949 on the territory of the Russian-occupied zone set up in 1945 when the war ended. It consisted of 5 "Laender" or provinces: Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. Berlin was the capital.
GDR was a people's democracy, dependent on the USSR, which in its occupational zone introduced all the reforms typical for its satellite states: agricultural reform, nationalization of industry and trade, and a one-party political system. Power was in the hands of the SED (the Socialist Party for German Unity) created out of the merger of the KPD (the German Communist Party) and the SDP (the German Socialist Party).
As a result of the so-called second Berlin crisis, the Berlin wall was erected, separating East and West Berlin (the latter belonging to West Germany). In the 1980's a wave of dissent spread through the country, a strong opposition movement was created, and people emigrated en masse to West Germany, which was a democratic state.
On 18th October 1989, as a result of riots in Dresden, Erich Honecker stepped down from the position of SED First Secretary. On 9th November, participants in a huge demonstration in Berlin started tearing down the Berlin wall. The communist government stepped down. On 3rd October 1990, a document was signed in the Bundestag paving the way for the unification of East and West Germany.
Gotterer Borbala Piroska
Brasov
Romania
Date of the interview: May 2004
Interviewer: Paul Tinichigiu
Mrs. Gotterer is an 84 years old tiny woman, with mauve dyed hair and blue eyes, which have a sparkle of kindness and heart warmth the concentration camps she had been in couldn’t erase. She accepted the interview despite her precarious health, as she suffers with her heart and her legs, because it is very important for her to make the horrors the Jews in the 20th century had to suffer known to the world. She lives together with her husband, Sanyi, in an old house in the center of Brasov, where she has rented a room with a kitchen and a bathroom. The room is loaded with massive furniture and documents, files, papers that talk about the Jews in Sfantu Gheorghe who have been killed in the Holocaust. Mrs. Gotterer speaks Romanian very well, with an unexpected rich vocabulary, and she finds a good word in both Romanian and Hungarian for those who cross her threshold.
My family background
I never knew my paternal grandparents, but I know they lived in Hungary, in Debrecen, and that their name was Lowi; I take pride in remembering this because it is the proof that we descend from the tribe of the Levites. I know that grandfather had a grocery store and a pub, and that my grandmother was a housewife. There wasn’t much else they could do at that time, back then in the 1800s. I don’t know whether they were very religious Jews or not, my father never talked to me about that. My grandparents surely lived in Tiszadob as well, because that’s where my father, Solomon Lowi, was born, but I don’t know where his siblings were born. However, I don’t know when my grandparents moved to Debrecen.
My father, Solomon Lowi, had two brothers, Ignac and Armin. Ignac, my father’s younger brother, went to high school in Vienna; he was a grain dealer, and he was a very well off man. He lived in Kalocsa, a city in Hungary, and he was married to Ella, who was a housewife; he had three children, Agneta, born in 1923, Edit, born in 1920 and who died in 2000, and Tibor. Ignac was very religious, he regularly went to the temple in Budapest, where he was specially invited. He died in 1984 and his wife in 1981. Armin, born in 1870, was a timber trader and he lived in Debrecen; I don’t know where he got the wood from, he was buying it and selling it. He too was married, but I don’t remember his wife’s name; he had however four children, Rozalia, who died in 1986, Maria, who lived and died in Debrecen, Julia, who died in a concentration camp, and Iosif, who ran to Spain and from there to USA. He has children there, but I don’t know more. One of his children, Gyuri is his name, works at an astrology institute somewhere, I don’t know where. Armin lived until World War I, and he died of natural death, from sickness, in 1918. My father also had a sister, Charlotte, who was married to Sandor Markbreit. Charlotte lived in Karczag. They had a son, Geza, who was married to a woman called Maria.
My father was born in Tiszadob [in Hungary], a village that belonged to Debrecen, in Hungary, in 1880. That’s where he went to elementary school, and then he went to the normal high school in Vienna. He didn’t study further, back then there was no need for that. As a young man, he learnt how to work with timber from his brother, Armin, because his elder brother had a forest and was involved in timber trade. My father’s job was to go in the forests a lot, he was a forestry engineer. After he graduated from high school, he met my mother there, in Debrecen. Armin, his brother, had been in my mother’s parents’ house, and he met my mother, Eszter Hidveger. And he told his brother, after he graduated from high school: ‘Look, I know a girl; maybe you should meet her too’. And then he took him there and my father was introduced to my mother.
My maternal grandparents, Rozalia and Miklos Hidvegy lived in Debrecen as well. I know grandmother originally came from Sighetul Marmatiei, and grandfather from Hidveg. My grandmother lived with my grandfather in Hidveg until my mother, Eszter Lowi, turned six years old; after that, they moved to Debrecen. I know they were tenants on the big estate near Debrecen. The estate belonged to a Hungarian count named Carol Zoltan. This count Carol had an estate of 10,000 hectares, from which my grandfather had 2,000. There were other tenants on that estate as well. My grandfather administered the estate, and my grandmother was a housewife. I once heard my mother say that grandmother studied something at a convent school, but I don’t know more than that, and I know that grandfather had studied at cheder. Grandparents spoke Hungarian between themselves, but they must have known German as well, because they lived in Austro-Hungary. All their records were written in German. They didn’t wear traditional Jewish clothes: grandmother didn’t wear a wig, she dressed in a modern way, quite in the German fashion of the time – maybe more fashionably than an elderly lady should have dressed. My grandparents changed their name from Hidvegy to Hidveger at some time, because of the Austro-Hungarian’s oppression over Jews, but I don’t know when; however, their children were already born, so of course all the family changed their names.
My mother had three brothers: Ludovic Hidveger, born in Debrecen, who was a MAV [Magyar Allami Vasutak – Hungarian National Railways], engineer, and I know he obtained this position after an examination: he was ‘karamas’, chamberlain [kamaras in Hungarian], and people addressed him with ‘Your excellency’. [Note: The chamberlain is an officer who manages the household of a king or nobleman, or the treasurer of a municipal corporation. After 1526 the function of the chamberlain became formal, they contributed only to ceremonial events.] Emperor Franz Iosef 1 himself remarked him and gave him a distinction. Ludovic was married to Stefania, who was very rich, and they lived in Miskolc. He died in 1940 and she died in 1962. They had two children, Eva, born in 1921, who is still alive and lives in Budapest, and Stefan, born in 1919, who was taken to forced labor by the Hungarian army and died somewhere around the Don in 1944. Ioan, another of my mother’s brothers, was born in 1894; he was a soldier, and he died on the front in 1914, in Doberdo, in Italy. And Anton, the third brother, was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army [in Kuk] 2 and I know he had children, but I don’t remember whom he was married to.
One of my mother’s fourth sisters was Gizella Meizels, who was a housewife and was married to a rich merchant, Ludovic; they had two daughters: one was Clara, married to a Hungarian officer, Boki Miklos. They both died in 1944: the Russians executed him when Budapest was liberated, because he was a ‘salasist’ [partisan of Szalasi] 3. I know he loved her very much, and even if he was a Nazi, and he divorced her because she was Jewish, he fought hard to protect her from the war, and he even arranged that she wouldn’t be taken to the ghetto in Budapest. She died during the battles for the liberation of Budapest, before he did. The second daughter was Lili, who was a journalist. Charlotte Poncz, my mother’s second sister, was born in 1891 and was married to Francisc Poncz. They lived right across the street from the Hungarian parliament, near Gellert, and they had a candy shop on Rakoczi ut [street], which prospered. They were religious people, I know that Francisc wore tallit katan all the time. Charlotte died in 1968. My mother’s third sister was Juliana, a housewife, married to Sigismund Laszlo; he was the general manager of the harvesting vehicles division at MAV. Juliana had two children, Ioan, who died in Germany, and Tamas, who lives in Haifa, and has two daughters, Vera and Gabriela. Then there was Margareta, married to Alexandru Solomon, who was the administrator of an estate in Hungary, of course, but I don’t know where. They had four children, three boys and a girl: Ladislau, born in 1910, who was a colonel in the Hungarian army. Ladislau has two sons, and I know one of them is named Alexandru. Ladislau died in 1993. Then there was Mihai, born in 1912, and who died in 1942, a soldier in the Hungarian army; Paul, born in 1924, who was married to Clara, and who had two daughters, Agi and Baba. He was a clerk in the ministry of agriculture in Budapest, and he died in 1988. Margareta’s daughter was called Baba, born in 1921, a teacher in Nyiregyhaza, who was very beautiful. She was gassed in 1944 with her one-year-old child.
Before the war [World War I] grandmother and grandfather lived in Debrecen, and they were considered very wealthy people. And indeed they were. Mother told me their house had many rooms, and that there were many servants, because there were many children; and they had tap water in the house at that time. Not to mention that they had electricity as well. The house had antique, expensive and stylish furniture. Heating was made with wood, in terracotta stoves. The garden was for flowers, maybe for greens as well, I don’t know that. Their financial situation was very good, my mother told me sometimes that the girls would have their dresses made at fashion houses, and that all of them were very elegantly dressed. My mother had a governess when she was young, and she also had a chambermaid. And there was a cook in the house as well. She told me that the governesses came and went, because of the boys. But she said that they were generally not very young women, and that they were all very trustworthy people; they were Hungarians and Germans. I know grandparents had a social life, they had friends and they visited them.
Mother also said that they had two spirits plants, which were their property, it was grandfather‘s own investment. They had a manor on the estate, with a garden, but I can’t say what the estate was like. They lived there during summers, but in winters they lived in the city, on Hatvani Street. Mother also told me that every year they raised 200 pigs in the forest (there was a forest as well), because pigs needed to feed on plants from the forest, with acorns. They sold the pigs, and they kept the money. There were workers working on the estate, many of them, my mother told me, and they sometimes had to cook for them. My grandfather had an administrator there who was in charge of the estate, and some sort of a manager for the animals. They also practiced agriculture on the estate, they grew wheat; there, where the estate was, is the best plain in Hungary. Grandfather had rented that terrain, and therefore he could do anything on it, for as long as he paid the rent. All the profit from the pigs, the wheat fields and the spirits plants was his.
There was a big Jewish community in Debrecen, people were religious there. They used to go to church on Saturdays and on other holidays. I know that the children, I can’t say all, but many, went to cheder. All my uncles could read in Hebrew, they learnt that from cheder. My grandparents from Debrecen were religious, they observed the traditions, but averagely, not to an extreme. The holidays were observed, and they ate kosher food; grandmother observed the traditions in her house as she wanted, she was very religious, and they went to the synagogue.
The good situation in Debrecen was lost because of uncle Anton. Uncle Anton was loafer. Because of him the estate was lost, it went up in smoke. He subscribed a note of hand to somebody, a friend. He was an officer, and he got drunk like officers do, who knows what they did. Nobody knows. But some day they just showed up with that note to my grandfather. It had an extraordinary value, and all he could do was to sell all he had and pay. My grandfather was too generous, he didn’t have to do that because Anton wasn’t worth it. It would have served him right to be thrown in jail. My poor grandfather, honest as he was, paid with everything he had for his madness. He should have let Anton be taken where he deserved. My mother told me that much, that grandfather fell ill because of Anton, because he lost everything he ever had and that he became indifferent to all around him; he wasn’t exactly ill, but he was melancholic, nothing interested him and he died early, in 1923, in Budapest.
I knew grandmother better, because she lived with grandfather in my aunt’s Charlotte house in Budapest. I went there on vacations, I spent my holidays there with them for a while. I know the house where my grandparents lived in Budapest, that’s where I knew my grandmother after the war [World War I]. It was a very spacious house, very modern and very beautiful. There were four rooms and there was a room for the servant. They had a servant and she had her own room. There was a hallway and to the left and to the right were two rooms, plus the bathroom. It was a big deal to have a bathroom with faience at that time. The house was luxurious and they had employees. I don’t know many things about grandmother from my mother.
My mother was born in 1885 in Tiszalok, this is a little village near Debrecen as well. My mother went to school, I think she graduated from a high school for girls in Debrecen. But she did tell me one thing, that she would have liked to become a teacher, and there were possibilities, but her parents didn’t want her to. And my mother could read Hebrew, even though she didn’t go to cheder; I don’t know who taught her, but she could read it well. She also spoke French, she was a well-read woman. And the governess also taught her some things, like German, a language she also spoke. My mother knew a great deal about Franz Iosef’s empire, about World War I, how and why did that war start, how the Austro-Hungarian Empire was organized here. My mother knew these things, she told me about them. My mother read a lot. She was a well-read woman, she read a lot, a lot of literature, at the manor in Debrecen there had been a library as well.
My parents’ marriage wasn’t arranged like it was in those times, it was a love marriage; my father was a very handsome man. They got married in Debrecen, in the synagogue. I don’t know if they had chuppah, but they must have done as it is written in the law. At first they lived in Debrecen, but I don’t know for how long. From Debrecen they went to Karczag, but I don’t know what they did there, and from Karczag they moved back to Debrecen again. My mother might have gone to Karczag only to give birth: my elder brother, Emil, was born in Karczag. I don’t know anything about my parents living there. For as long as they were in Debrecen, my parents lived with my maternal grandparents.
I don’t know when exactly, after 1910, my parents moved to Romania, to Kajanto, near Cluj-Napoca [a 12 km distance]. [Editor’s note: Transylvania and the territory Mrs. Gotterer refers to in 1910 belong to Austria-Hungary, only later in 1920 became part of Romania.] There was a brick and terracotta tiles factory, which was built by Armin, my father’s brother, who was an expert in construction materials and in timber: Armin handed over the factory, which sold terracotta stoves, to my father. The factory was on my father’s name; Armin remained in Debrecen. Of course the factory had workers employed. In Kajanto there is the biggest brick factory. In Cluj, at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, my father’s name, Solomon Lowi, is written in the books as the owner of the factory. My parents didn’t live in the city of Cluj, but in Kajanto, which was close; but they had a coach with horses, and somebody to drive it, and they went in the city very often. My sister, Livia, was born in Cluj in 1912. My mother didn’t tell me what the house in Kajanto was like, but she would have liked to stay there, in Cluj. They lived in Kajanto until the war [World War I].
My father was drafted for military service and then he was a soldier. He was drafted in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914, as soon as the war started, and my mother stayed behind with three children in Kajanto. I am not sure what the events were back then, but I think my father returned during the war, closed down the factory because it was in ruin and he couldn’t recover any losses, and then he went to Covasna and became the director of the Groedl factory. When my parents moved to Covasna, my maternal grandparents came to live with them there. My brother Francisc was born in Covasna in 1914, while my parents were in Covasna. Then my father was drafted in the army again and my mother was left alone with the children again, she only had her parents with her. And what was she to do, she had no relatives near by, there was no one. So she took refuge in Hungary, to her sister, Margareta, whose husband was an administrator on an estate, there was food, a good material situation, and she stayed there with the children for as long as World War I lasted. My grandparents went to their daughter Charlotte in Budapest. After the war, my mother was the first to come back to Covasna with her three children. My father returned some time after her, because I remember my mother used to tell me about a period when she was alone with the children in Covasna and they suffered from a terrible hunger, and lived from the mercy of others. My father had been taken prisoner at the end of the war, at Skopje and two other places, but I don’t know which they were.
Growing up
I was born in Covasna in 1920, my brother Otto in 1923 and Edit in 1926, in Covasna as well. Covasna has been a spa resort for as long as I know it; there was electricity and running water everywhere. The water was very good, you could take mineral water directly from the fountain. There used to be a carbonic acid factory, acid which was put in the mineral water and the sodas. It doesn’t exist anymore, but it did, I remember that. I lived there until I was 20 years old.
There was a Jewish community in Covasna and there were Jews in the town, but they weren’t as they should be, they weren’t decent Jews. They were the kind of Jews people hate us for, with no character, I have to say that. I don’t know where they came from. They weren’t straight, honest. Those who were well off didn’t want to hear about other Jews. When there was a collection for a poor woman or a sick man, they never contributed with anything, they were mean people, I have to say that. I can’t say I felt anti-Semitism in Covasna because I lived among Jews, although we didn’t get along well with Jews either. My mother was a very honest and well brought up woman. I don’t want to say more, but there were some among them who were dishonest and my mother didn’t want to be associated with them. My father had colleagues in the office where he worked. And one of his colleagues, who later became director, was dishonest and stole as much as he could.
The owner of the timber factory where my father worked was an Austrian baronet, Groedl, who was a Jew as well. Actually they were a family of baronets, they were a few brothers, and they owned the forests and the factories in Comandau and Covasna. And this baronet had a big factory there and many employees. At Comandau, the merchandise was brought from the forest and it was processed, timber was made from the cut trees. The factory in Covasna was for storage and selling of the merchandise, it was like a shipping station: the timber came as merchandise and from the sale point it was sent to different countries. It was a big factory, the biggest timber factory in all [today’s] Covasna county. My father only worked there, at the factory in Covasna. There weren’t typical occupations for Jews in town. All Jews worked in the factory, almost all of the employees were Jews.
We didn’t have a household with animals or with a garden there, the majority of the goods we needed we bought from the market. Covasna was a spa resort, tourists were coming from all over and as a consequence the market was very expensive. Sometimes my father or someone else from the family – my elder sister Livia when she grew up – came to Brasov and went shopping for the necessary things here because they were cheaper. It was customary to do the shopping in Brasov. From what I remember, my sister went to the market and helped my mother with the household, and then me, when I grew up. We had a servant, a girl, back then one couldn’t raise children without help. My poor mother, she couldn’t cope with everything alone.
My mother was a well-read, cultured woman, she read books regularly. There weren’t many women as cultured as my mother, because my grandmother had been like that as well. My father read books as well. My father really enjoyed reading at home. He was the one who usually bought books. He always bought books for us, for example by Emile Zola, or ‘Egy magyar nabob’, ‘A koszivu ember fiai’, by Mor Jokai , or books by Kalman Mikszat . [Note: Mor Jokai (1825–1904) and Kalman Mikszath (1847–1910) Hungarian writers, the former is a representative of romanticism, the latter of realism in the Hungarian literature.] ‘This is for your age and this for your age…’, we always received books for reading, not for studying.
In their everyday life my parents wore clothes that were modern at the time, but they observed the tradition at home and they went to the synagogue as well, when they were in a city that had a synagogue, like Budapest or Debrecen. My father knew some Hebrew I think, but my mother didn’t, she could only read. She learnt to read the prayers, but I think my father went to cheder as a child and he could understand it as well. They weren’t involved in the Jewish community in Covasna. My mother observed the tradition at home, although my father worked on Saturdays: she lit a candle on Sabbath, she recited the prayer. There was no work done on Saturdays, or on Sundays as a matter of fact: not even the servant was allowed to work. My mother didn’t cook kosher food, but every time she got to Brasov, she bought kosher food from there. There was no synagogue in Covasna where we could go on Sabbath. So on the high holidays all the Jews in Covasna gathered in a room of the factory my father worked for, which was some sort of a club for them; and I know a Jew from Debrecen came, who knew the prayers and who led the ceremonies. He had no function in the community there, and unfortunately I don’t remember his name anymore. All our family fasted on Yom Kippur and we children fasted as well when we turned 10 years old. I know mother cooked humentaschen on Purim, but dressing up wasn’t popular in Covasna. We always celebrated Christmas as well. We received presents, we had a Christmas tree and under the tree we always had books, many books. We, the children, my brothers and my sisters, received many books, each of us for our level.
We didn’t have any contact with my father’s brothers or with his sister, there was the border. [Note: Piroska refers to the situation of the Transylvanian territory after the decision of the Trianon treaty] 4. My father wrote to Armin, for as long as he lived, and to Ignac and to his sister Charlotte. I wrote letters to my cousin, Ignac’s eldest daughter, Edit, who was my age. They couldn’t meet because there was the border and it was very difficult. My brother Francisc studied one year of school living in Debrecen, some time in the 1920s. Although there was the border, Armin took out a passport for him and took him to learn Hebrew a little and so he studied one year of school there, in Debrecen. After that Armin died and we lost contact with his family.
My mother looked after me when I was little, there was no kindergarten where we lived. We lived near the train station and the kindergarten was 2 km away and I couldn’t go there. We lived near the train station because my father worked at the shipping of the merchandise at the Groedl factory. When I was 4 years old I ran away from home: I was bored, and I knew there was a village near the town and I wanted to get there. I liked to walk when I was little. So I started walking on that 2 km country road that went to the village, but I didn’t know why I was going there. And a Romanian peasant came with his cart from the opposite direction, and he saw that I was walking alone, that nobody accompanied me. I was walking and singing and I was doing just fine. It was spring, almost summer…then the peasant stopped the cart and asked me where I was going. But I couldn’t say where I was going, I just mimed that I was walking. Why was I walking? But I couldn’t say anything to him in Romanian, because he was Romanian. What is your name? Yes, I could tell him my name. My parents didn’t find me immediately because the peasant didn’t know where to look for my parents, because I only told him my name, but nothing more. The peasant announced the militia that he had found a child. And then the peasant took me home with him, and the militia looked for me. That’s how they found me and took me home. And then mother said that that couldn’t go on like that. Actually that’s why I went to school when I was 5 years old, even if school started when you were 7, so that I wouldn’t desert!
It wasn’t a Jewish school, it was a state school, which taught in Hungarian. The Groedl factory asked for a school to be set up there so that the children wouldn’t have to go a 2 km distance to the village. There weren’t means of transportation back then, there were no buses. And then the factory managed to have this school set up, for the children whose parents worked there, at the factory. And I repeated primary school for three times, from the first grade. Everything I heard for three years, I learnt, and when the teacher would ask a child something and he wouldn’t know the answer, I would raise my hand and say what he had to say, and I was only 5 years old at the time. I learnt very well in the first grade. I liked everything in primary school. And I learnt everything without knowing to read, only by listening. Sometimes, when I was a little girl, I learnt home out loud, and my mother heard me and told me a few times: ‘this isn’t so. It wasn’t like that.’ And I noticed several times that things weren’t exactly how they were described in books. But I don’t remember examples, it was too long ago. I remember military parades in Romania on May 10th 5. The biggest holiday was the king’s day, the proclamation of kingdom. I learnt patriotic songs back then, but I don’t know them anymore. As a pupil, I paraded, I even had an artistic program: each pupil who could do something was in the program: I did ballet dancing and I sang.
My brothers went to school to Micu high school in Sfantu Gheorghe, where they stayed at the boarding school. My sister Livia also went to high school before me, she did three years of high school. There was only a primary school in Covasna, so I had to go to another town, to Targu Secuiesc, for high school, the middle school. I didn’t go to Sfantu Gheorghe because he boarding school in Targu Secuiesc was better, and my parents wanted me to eat as well as I could, because I was very thin. It was mostly my mother who insisted on me going there, she was afraid that I would starve. I was 10 years old when I went to high school – it was one year earlier than usual – and I didn’t know a word in Romanian. And the high school was a very good school and had a very good boarding school: it didn’t have a name, it was known as the high school for girls, and it was bilingual, students studied in Romanian and Hungarian. And then Emil came every day to Targu Secuiesc with the train to learn with me the lessons in Romanian, because I couldn’t learn anything as I didn’t understand anything in Romanian. He wasn’t employed yet at the time, because he wanted to take the entrance examination for university in Bucharest, so he learnt at home for a year, he thought he would get in. After that, Emil couldn’t study at the university, because racism had already begun, and numerus clausus 6 had already been enforced. I learnt Romanian from him until Christmas, I already had good grades in three months. I was a very good student, exceptional, I was the second in my class and I always received prizes. I didn’t have to learn anything, I paid attention during classes and I could do my homework without anything else, that was enough for me to be able to do my homework. I didn’t study in my spare time because I knew by heart anything I heard in the classroom, I didn’t need to reread it: I read the lesson again for those who sat next to me, not for myself. I learnt very easily, I was very good at learning. We received prizes at the end of the school year.
In middle school I enjoyed geography, French, I was the best in all the school at French. And I also liked mathematics. Of all the teachers I liked the French teacher. I liked the way she talked and she behaved nicely. And I enjoyed speaking a language that others didn’t know and that I liked very much. I had another very good teacher, who taught us physics only for a while, Mrs. Gabi; she also taught us mathematics and chemistry. I was the best in physics, I liked it very much. It is a wonder that I am not good at electricity nowadays, I only know few things. I had the key for the drawer where there were some physics objects, for the laboratory. Mrs. Gabi was so fond of me, she never had children. And sometimes, on Sundays, she would take me home with her in the after noon, for a meal. She cooked a better and more filling meal, and she always said: ‘Come on, I’ll take you home from the boarding school!’ she talked to me about many things, and I learnt a lot from her, about life, about how I should behave. And I was on a trip once – every year we went on a trip with the school – and I lay in the sun for too long; I was a bit delicate, sensitive, and I suffered a bit with my heart because of a diphtheria which affected my heart, I wasn’t even allowed to do gymnastics. And on that trip I fell ill and she took me back to the boarding school in a separate car, she took care of me. Before I left school she asked me what I wanted to study further. And we decided together that I would study at the commercial high school next. And then she told me to be careful what I studied, mathematics, algebra and the foreign languages.
I never had problems with my colleagues: I was a very good student, the second from my class, and everyone tried to take after me, they asked me how you do this or that, so everyone tried to make friends with me. My colleagues were Hungarian, only I and other three girls in our class were Jewish. The schoolmistress assigned me to tutor a girl who couldn’t hear well. And I tutored her and the girl passed the grade, because at Christmas she had failed the exams and it was then that the schoolmistress noticed that something was wrong. But I didn’t receive as much as an apple as a gift from her, and her parents were rich people in the village, they had an estate.
Before World War II, I visited my high school colleagues. I had a very good colleague, a Hungarian from Ojdula, near Targu Secuiesc. Her father was a landlord, they were rich, very rich people, and they had a daughter, Olga, and I made friends with her: we stayed at the boarding school together and we made friends and she called me to spend the holiday with them. And I went to them and she came to my house. To this day, if we hear that one of us is in Ojdula, we send word.
I studied piano in school with a teacher, she had students who wanted to learn. I still remember a few things, but I didn’t learn properly. I did study, but I didn’t like the teacher and I gave up learning to play the piano. I didn’t have other private lessons, I liked to act instead. I acted with my colleagues in my spare time. And I celebrated my birthday several times, I set up some play, I sang, I danced…I learnt to play something at the piano and invited the schoolmistress and the other teacher I liked, to come as there was a performance in that after noon. And they came, the schoolmistress brought her husband along, Mr. Ionel, who sometimes sent me to buy cigarettes, and they came. Back then I had pocket money and I bought some cake for each guest. I was 13-14 years old at the time.
I didn’t spend a lot of time in Covasna during high school, I was there only during the vacations, on holidays and during summers; I didn’t come home every weekend. I stayed at home during vacations, I didn’t go anywhere. There was a big swimming pool in town, built by the owners of the carbonic acid factory, where I went and sunbathed, but not alone, I usually went with my father. My father usually went to take warm baths. The swimming pool still exists in Covasna today. I didn’t have many other interests outside the school. At home I had to learn to cook mostly, but I didn’t like it. I liked to clean the house, that’s what I did when I came home, to Covasna, I cleaned and my sister cooked, that’s how we divided the chores to help our mother. I wasn’t allowed to work out, but for all that, I had skates and I went to the skating ring and I had a racket and I played tennis, but not so often. My mother took care that I didn’t overdo it.
Heaven forbid, I wasn’t involved in any sort of politics. However, my father was a member of the liberal party back then. He was in the liberal party, I remember that he voted when people had to vote. This was before World War II, between the two World Wars. My brother also liked politics. I remember mother cooked at home – when we got a bit older she didn’t keep a servant anymore, for a few years we did what she had to do – and then my elder brother, Emil, came home on vacation from the upper grades in high school, the sixth, the seventh and the eighth, he went in the kitchen, brought the newspaper, he had several newspapers, and he read from it out loud for mother. He read ‚Brassoi Lapok’ [Papers of Brasov, Hungarian daily issued in Brasov] or ‚Uj Kelet’ 7, which was the Jewish newspaper. My mother liked politics and my brother enjoyed reading terribly. I sometimes heard him read about Iuliu Maniu [Editor’s note: Maniu Iuliu (1873–1953) was a Romanian politician who served three terms as a Prime Minister, being a member of the National Peasants' Party.] and about Nicolae Iorga [Editor’s note: Iorga Nicolae (1871–1940) was a historian, university professor, literary critic, memorialist, playwright, poet, and Romanian politician. He served as a member of parliament, as President of the post-World War I National Assembly, as minister, and (1931-32) as Prime Minister. He was co-founder (in 1910) the Democratic Nationalist Party and was ultimately assassinated by fascist legionnaire commandos.], about them, about what they did in the parliament. I only remembered the names. After he graduated from high school, my brother Emil got a job in Cluj; he also worked at a timber factory that belonged to Groedl, at the lumber station. My brothers learnt this forestry trade from my father. Each of them moved to the place where they worked, they learnt the job as they went along, but I don’t know where the rest of them worked, it was too long ago.
I remember some events before the war. My best friend was a German girl, Clara Uhl. She was about my age and we lived close to each other. And her father, a German, Mr. Uhl, Austin Uhl, was my father’s best friend. He wasn’t from Brasov, but from the actual Germany, from Bayern. And I remember, he was a very honest man. And since my father couldn’t make friends with his Jewish colleagues at work because they were dishonest he felt more close to him because he was honest. He was a German, but an honest one. My parents were good friends with all our Hungarian and German neighbors. My father was like that, he was an honest man. And I’m not saying that there weren’t honest Jews as well, but there, in his office, there weren’t any. In 1942 a delegation came at his office, and usually if there were delegations from abroad my father attended them, because he spoke German perfectly, he had gone to high school in Vienna. And then again a group of three men came but my father told us at home that he didn’t know why they came because they weren’t talking about commerce; instead, they wanted to see everything there was, everything that belonged to the factory and the garden. They wanted to go to the forest, to see the factory. They had come all the way from Germany, but back then Nazism was already in power in Germany, and Hitler already ruled. They wanted to see the estate, the fortunes, probably to get their hands on them. Although my father had been fired in 1940, and the liquidation of his position lasted until 1941, he remained in good relations with the management of the factory, and that is why they asked him to attend that delegation.
One of these three men was young and he made friends with my friend Clara, who worked as a typist for a lawyer. She and I were best friends, we spent the whole day together when I had time to go out for a walk. And then Christmas came. And this young man came and said that that we should spend Christmas together, since he couldn’t go home, to Germany. He told me that I can bring along a boy if I wanted, or he could invite one of his German friends from the delegation. I didn’t say anything, at that time, I already knew what was going on in Poland in Germany. Poland was already invaded, Czechoslovakia was invaded. We knew that. I had another very good Jewish friend, Meihoser, and her brother was a photographer (they didn’t come home from the concentration camps after the war). And she knew many things as well, she secretly listened to the radio at her brother’s and they told me many times about what was going on in Poland and Czechoslovakia. I understood what they said. And I thought about it, but still I couldn’t believe such things. I didn’t believe that there were such camps, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t give Clara an answer about that Christmas party, and I said I had to talk to my parents. I said to my father: ‘Daddy, what do you say? They invited me…what do you think?’ And my daddy said: ‘Under no circumstances will you go. Under none’. He said: ‘What will we tell them? We will tell them the truth.’ He was that honest. I take after him. So I told this man that my father didn’t approve, and that I wouldn’t cross his will. And then this young man came in our house personally to persuade my father. He said that I could bring along whomever I wanted and that the party would be held in Clara’s parents’ house, so nothing bad would happen. We wouldn’t go anywhere else. And Clari’s father was a guarantee for anything, he was an honest man. And my father said, I will never forget: ‘Sir, if you were in my situation, would you let your girl, in this times, go to such a party?’ And he looked at father and said: ‘Sir, you are right.’ He was a German and he couldn’t say or do anything else. My father didn’t insult him with anything, but he spoke the truth. And that’s how it turned out. I didn’t go. They had the party over at Clara’s parents, but they didn’t invite anybody else. There were Romanian, Hungarian women in Covasna, all nationalities, but no one went to that Christmas party.
The first time I came across anti-Semitism was when I wasn’t allowed to go to school. When I was 17 years old, in 1937, numerus clausus was enforced. I would have liked to go, but I saw it was impossible. My parents, what were they to do… it bothered them, of course. I wanted to go to Timisoara, at the convent school, the French Institute, but one couldn’t go there either. So I went home and in 1940 I got a job there, in Covasna. I started working something at the forest ward, but I had only worked for two months I think, when the Vienna dictate came and northern Transylvania was given to the Hungarians and those offices were closed down. My parents also felt anti-Semitism, in 1940. People were laid off at the factory where my father worked. The Hungarian authorities forced it, they were Hitler’s allies and they pushed for these dismissals; and my father was laid off from the factory where he had a good job and a nice salary; I got fired too, my brothers as well, and Emil and Francisc were drafted in the army.
During the war
From 1940 to 1944, when we were taken away, we did something, which was my initiative: the idea would have been good, but we didn’t succeed. In 1941 we, the girls, me and my sister, went to visit my maternal grandmother, to get to know our Jewish relatives from Hungary, from Budapest, where grandmother was, and that took about a year. Then I thought that my parents were from Hungary and I thought it might happen to us, that we would be told at some time that we weren’t allowed to stay here. And I made up this plan in 1942, to go and hide, to move to Budapest, we had all our relatives there, there were my father’s siblings, my mother’s siblings, and we wouldn’t have been so alone. I thought we might hide better there, we wouldn’t have been so conspicuous. We were too visible in Covasna, and at that time Jews had to hide. So then we moved to Budapest. My father’s brother, Ignac, also had a house in Budapest, but it wasn’t empty, but he had a good friend who had a very beautiful house, which was temporarily uninhabited and he didn’t want to rent it or give it to anyone who wasn’t a Jew. So they settled that we would go in that house and live there. We went, it was a very beautiful house with a garden, in the center of the city. It was located where the embassies were. It was close to some movie studios, it was a nice place. The rent wasn’t a problem, we paid what we could and wanted. And because it was very beautiful, we accepted. And in the spring of 1942 we received the approval and moved to Budapest. The war events had taken a different turn back then in 1942, at Stalingrad 9. The Russians defeated the Germans and the German defensive and the Russian offensive began. So the political life changed, but we didn’t feel that change because the hortists [those who made common cause with Horthy’s regime] 10, the Hungarian authority remained Germany’s allies.
We stayed in Budapest for half a year, we stayed until fall, but we couldn’t get an approval to stay in the city of Budapest, and without that one wasn’t allowed to stay there. I don’t know how the police tracked us down that we were Jews and that we stayed in Budapest without the necessary approvals. The problem wasn’t that we came from another country, but from another city. At first we were taken to jail. We stayed there for about three weeks, not in the actual jail, but we were forced to stay where all those without their papers in order had to crowd in. It was a separate room for the Jewish prisoners and another for those who were thieves or who know what else. And there was a poor girl, who had run from Czechoslovakia, who was also in hiding. But they had found her, and I don’t know how, through some miracle, she had been kept there for over a year, and she was praying to God to keep her there, where we were too, in ‘tombhaz’, even in that jail [Editor’s note: the actual meaning of the word in Hungarian is block], only not to be taken to Auschwitz. That’s where I first heard about Auschwitz. And she knew many things. Her parents, her family were executed there, and she was left all alone. I heard those things from her. But, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t believe that such things could happen to us as well. I thought they happened to her, in Czechoslovakia.
Ignac had an acquaintance, a good friend of a counselor who was an important person there, at the Ministry of Justice, and that person could solve what was almost impossible, he arranged that we wouldn’t be sent to Auschwitz after three weeks. The rest of the people there, the other Jews who were found without approval to stay in Budapest were sent immediately, in 1942, to Auschwitz. But rumor had it, that Hungarians didn’t actually want to send Jews to Auschwitz, they wanted them to stay. They enforced all sorts of punishments in return: they confiscated firms, houses, radios, but they didn’t want to let the people be deported. [Note: Piroska refers here to the anti-Jewish laws in Hungary.] 11 And we stayed there for three weeks, Horthy still ruled and he didn’t allow us to be deported and then my uncle arranged with this counselor that we would be sent back to Covasna.
From 1942 to 1944 we stayed in Covasna. It was a so-called house arrest, that’s what we had, forced residence, until the police deported us. It was the same house where we had stayed before. We couldn’t go anywhere: we could go out of the house, but not out of the town. We were good friends with Ovidiu, the prefect there. And when we were sent home from Budapest, his first question was: Did they hurt us there? That man was a real human being, and very kind. And nothing bad happened to us in Covasna, we just had house arrest and that was all. But my brothers, Emil and Francisc, who had been drafted in the army before we left for Budapest, were brought back to Covasna and then again they were taken in the army. They weren’t soldiers, they were in the fatigue parties, at forced labor for Jews. That was in 1942.
I had found a job in the meantime, at a lawyer, on the black market, who hired me as a secretary and typist, and who gave me a salary better than the one the county chief had, it was such a salary he gave me between 1942 and 1944. He knew that we were in an extraordinarily difficult situation and he had a lot of money, he collected a lot of money, and he trusted me and let me and not some other employee – because he had two more employees - handle the pay office; he trusted me and wanted to help me. He sometimes paid a fine for me, every month, to his friend, the county chief, so that I could remain in his service, because I was a Jew. He was an extraordinarily kind man. After the war ended, he went to Sweden.
We had just one nuisance in Covasna. We stayed in the house together with a kindergarten teacher, and she was a big Hitlerite, an elderly woman. There were two apartments, they lived in one apartment and we lived in the other. But she was so ill willed, she caused quite a row, said that we didn’t leave her alone there…and she went and complained until she had us kicked out of the house. But my father had a friend, a lawyer, whose mother had a big house, and he said: ‘move to my mother’s and live there in peace’. So we moved there.
Before we were deported from Covasna, my friend Clara wanted to go to a woman who predicted the future. This happened a month before the deportation (we left in May 1944), in April she said, ‘let’s go to that woman to see our future’. ‘No, I don’t want to know the future’, I said. It was like I felt the future wouldn’t be good, although I didn’t think it would turn out like that, the thought of me being deported never crossed my mind. But still we went to that woman, I don’t think she was a gypsy, she was a Hungarian, and she told some things to Clara and then she said: ‘let me guess for the young lady as well’ (that was me), ‘no, I don’t need that’ – I didn’t really want her to read in my palm – ‘it’s alright’, she said, ’don’t pay me, but let me see all the same’, the woman wanted to foretell the future. She had some bean pods and she read in them, and she grew all sad and said: ‘I won’t say a lot’. She said: ‘you are a large family’, and she had never met me before, ‘you are a large family, eight people’, she guessed from the beginning that we were eight people, and that wasn’t something to be known easily, because my brothers were never home, they had been in the army for a long time, ‘eight people, but you will all be in 16 places’, that’s what she said, I will never forget that. It meant that we would be scattered and that we wouldn’t know about each other and I didn’t forget that in the concentration camp or anywhere else: it happened exactly like that woman said it would.
One night a friend of my little brother Otto came with a cart. I don’t know his friend’s name, I think he was a boy from the Furtuna family, but I am not sure. My brother had many friends, I don’t know who was which and what their names were. It was in the spring of 1944, in May, on May 3rd, in the evening. This friend of my brother’s came during the night, it was after 10, and showed us a paper which summoned him to the city hall: he had to be at 5 o’clock at the city hall with the horses because he had to take part in the transportation of Jews. And he came to tell us that if we wanted to, he would take us over the border, he knew the roads very well, and he would take us to Romania. He asked us if we had anybody in Romania to go to, if not, he would take us to his relatives. He was an extremely good man. Can you imagine that he risked his life with this, but my father said: ‘I don’t want to risk your life because you are a young and decent man and heaven forbid something should happen to you, and I don’t want to risk my family’s life either, because if we are caught there, we will be executed o the spot. ’ Whoever was caught at the border was shot. We didn’t go and we lost the opportunity and it was a wrong choice to make, because it would have been better for us to go: we could have gone to Romania, there were Jewish institutions there and maybe they would have helped us. We had relatives in Timisoara, but they too had been evicted from their home by the legionaries 13. So we stayed home.
In the morning, on May 4th 1944, the military police came and took us out of the house. They were Hungarian soldiers who were conscripted at the time. And one of them was a boy who knew me very well from the office where I had worked. The militiaman behaved, he told us to carry along all the food we could because they wouldn’t feed us, and that he couldn’t say more except the fact that we were taken to the ghetto and that we wouldn’t receive any food there, and that we could starve if we didn’t bring any with us. When they came to take us out of the house, Mr. Uhl, who lived next door, came and went to the militia man and shook him and said: ‘I am a German and you want to take these people away in the name of all Germans? But as a German I say that they are the best and the most honest people and that you can’t take them away.’ That he said, I remember, in the last moments when we were forced to get on the train. And the militiaman said this: ‘I am a militiaman. I receive orders only from my superiors and I can’t do anything else because I received this order.’ Mr. Uhl had courage, no one else had courage. He was brave enough to come there and shake that militiaman to leave us alone. He was a very kind and honest man. But all others helped us as well, they put in the cart everything we had in the pantry, all the food, flour and lard and everything we had, and a counterpane and a pillow and everything we could carry and they transferred us to Sfantu Gheorghe. We were all gathered there in the farming school, together with those from Sfantu Gheorghe. This farming school was still in construction, it wasn’t ready, it had no windows, it had no doors, it had no stairs, we had to go up to the first floor on a board, which was very difficult for my mother and other elderly persons. It was miserable. And we slept on the ground, one next to the other, packed like sardines, without water, without food. We had food, thanks to that soldier who took everything from the pantry and put it in the cart; my poor younger brother, Otto, and my father carried everything along so that we wouldn’t be left without food, they wanted to carry the food as long as they could. There was nothing, no sanitation, what can I say, filth. We stayed there like that for a week. There were Jews from all Haromszek (Trei Scaune) county, as it was called back then, the present Covasna county, even from other places. We stayed there for a week until they gathered the Jews from all over the county and then we were transferred to Reghin.
I know we were about 1000 people, that’s what I found out when I came back and worked for the community in Sfantu Gheorghe. And we stayed at Reghin, there was no roof over our heads, nothing, it was in the open air, and when the rain started we stayed in mud, there was no food or water, no sanitation. It was cold and muddy, only I know what I suffered because of the cold and the rain. It was during the raining season, about two weeks, and we stayed like that. My father took the blankets we had brought with us and he made some sort of a tent, but it wasn’t useful, there was water from beneath us as well. In the end, we accepted to be taken anywhere, just to be taken away from there. At Reghin some sort of a record of all the people there was made. The SS was already there, the SS had taken over us from Sfantu Gheorghe. And some people from the convoy slowed down, and the SS militaries started to yell: ‘Loss, loss!’ [‘Faster, faster!’ in German]. They took everything from us, the clothes, the jewelry and the money and all we had.
We stayed in Reghin for a month, we left in June. We left home in May, at the beginning of May, and we left Reghin at the beginning of June, so we stayed there for a month. There was another operation in Reghin, which was meant to rip us off, some SS soldiers came together with Hungarian policemen, that I don’t know fore sure, and they built up a room and they started making enquiries there. And they enquired, who was rich, where the money was, they tortured people, they did everything a SS soldier did to make them confess where was the fortune and to make them give it up, what factories they had and where. For example, the director who was my father’s colleague at that factory was taken there with his daughter and they abused the daughter in front of her father to force him to say where the money was. But his daughter was a very smart woman, already a woman, and very decent, and she didn’t speak at all. The money is still in a bank in Switzerland today, because he made the deposit under somebody else’s name, for fear the SS would find that money: Irina Magyary, a teacher from Covasna who was their friend. The rightful owners of that money from the account under the name of Irina Magyary are still looked for. But because nobody from that family came home, that nice and kind girl, the director died together with his wife, they all died, the money is still in Switzerland. They had a lot of gold and a lot of money and rumor has it the fortune still exists. That’s what they did to several other persons, they beat them; that was their strategy. I know there was another woman, a doctor, whom they took there and I saw her when she came out, I was still a young woman at the time, and I got sick from the fright when I saw that woman coming out of that room so badly beaten; my father had to take me to a doctor, an acquaintance from the ghetto there, who gave me some sedatives. It was the first time I got sick because of all these things I knew were going to happen.
They did that for a month, and when they finished the enquiries, we were taken to Auschwitz, I don’t know the exact date, the 10th of June I think it was. [Note: the Jews from Reghin were deported on June 4th, 1944.] We left everything there, we couldn’t take anything with us, no food, no jewelry, no coats, they said we wouldn’t need anything; they knew why we wouldn’t need anything because the gas chamber waited for us there. There was a militiaman there, a Hungarian boy from Zabala, very kind, Goncz, who was the leader of the train which took us to Auschwitz, and he told me: ‘Don’t be afraid, Miss’ we were terribly worried, you can imagine the situation, my brothers were in the army and we were all going where we were going. The told me that the young would be taken to labor and that if we made it there, we still had a chance. He was right and at least he comforted me. I think it took us five days to get to Auschwitz. We went in a cattle wagon, but there were no chairs, absolutely nothing to sit on, very little place, no food, no water, no toilet. He, the boy, was very nice. I remember I looked him up when I came home, I wanted to thank him at least for his help, but I didn’t find him. He brought us a bucket, a clean one and a dirty one and he stopped the train where it was possible, he took care and gave us water at least, because we couldn’t get off the train. I don’t know where he got a peasant’s bench from, and my mother had that bench to sit on, and we could at least sit down, not stand the whole way.
Before we got to Kosice the train stopped and I asked him where we were and what was going on, and he said: ‘we are 10 km away from Kosice, and the SS guard waits for you at Kosice, you will be turned over to the SS. That’s it.’ And then, as a kind and decent and merciful man that he was, I say that to this day, he left his rifle next to me in the wagon and said: ‘Look, I will let my rifle here.’ He wasn’t allowed to leave his rifle, he was a militiaman. ‘I’ll go, he said, up to the last train wagon and we will stay here for at least an hour or two, and there’s nobody, they are all with me in the last wagon.’ He did anything but telling me outright to run where I wanted, that’s why he left his rifle, so that I could run. And I didn’t. I said, how could I leave my parents and leave alone? Nobody could come with me and even if I ran away, we were already in Czechoslovakia, I didn’t know a word of Czech. Whe he came back and saw me there, he said: ‘Why didn’t you run away?’, he said: ‘I gave you the opportunity to run.’ I couldn’t, it wasn’t possible and God wanted it like that and that’s how it happened. The guard changed, we were turned over to the SS, and from there on I don’t know how much farther we went on, because the doors weren’t opened after that. Until then, we traveled with the doors of the wagon open.
I know we arrived to Auschwitz, Oswiecim it was called, at some time, after an hour or two. They told us we had to get off the train and leave everything there, although there was nothing to leave behind. I kissed everybody and I didn't know it was for the last time, and we got off. Mengele and all his curs were there, may they still be cursed, and they lined us up. And there they separated us, they separated us immediately, from mother, father and my little brother Otto. I think Otto went with my father, I don't know for sure to this day, because I never heard of him again after that. My father never had a missing tooth, he didn't know what a headache was, he had never been ill in his life until he got there. Mengele was there to select people, who went to the gas chamber and who still went to work, those went in the barracks. [Editor's note: it is only a presumption that Mengele himself selected people]. There were women prisoners, Jews from Czechoslovakia and Poland, who had to show the way for the new comers. I and my younger sister, Edit, were taken to some place and my elder sister, Livia, was immediately taken somewhere else, to a armament factory, where bombs were made, in the town Stutthoff, in Poland; there she had the number 39401. She was assigned there and that's where she remained. She made bombs, the poor soul, and the gas she worked with ate up her organism, her bones, and she suffered the consequences of that all her life. In November 1944 my sister Livia was taken from where she was, from Stutthoff, to Bergen-Belsen. I know that the allies' army advanced and surrounded Germany, and they started to evacuate the prisoners from different factories, and then she was taken to Bergen-Belsen. Until the liberation, I had absolutely no news from her.
My mother and my father were immediately taken to the gas chamber, and I remained with Edit. Otto went with my father, I don't know for sure, I couldn't find out anything about Otto, nobody found him, none of my acquaintances knew anything about him. Only Edit and me remained from this large family, the rest were scattered and none knew anything about the others. I didn't know anything about my brothers Emil and Francisc, and they didn't know anything about each other, each one of them was in a different place with the army. I was left with my younger sister, we were taken to the bathroom and tattooed. When my sister saw that my number was thirteen, she started crying, because I let it be thirteen. It was 20513A. She thought something bad would happen to me. She watched over me more than I did over her. I was older than her, but she was more careful. I told her that if no one else came home, she definitely would come home, she was so enterprising, and she didn't come home after all.
I was in Auschwitz two times. The first time I only stayed there a week, I think, they put us in some barracks, and after a week we marched to the doctor. We went to the train station, and from there we were transferred to Krakow. The camp there didn't have a name. Everybody told us we should be happy, because there was no gas chamber there and they didn't kill people. They told us to go there and stay there for as long as we could. It wasn't ok there either, but there was no gas chamber and there were barracks and there was better food than in Auschwitz. They cooked some surt hay soup, from thorns and thistles, and that's what we had. In the evening we had a small slice of bread, but very-very thin, bread made from bran: it was about five cm long and 5 mm thick. That was the bread for all day; except that we had coffee, a black liquid which contained who knows what. They put bromide in the water we drank, so that we would be calm and not rebel. We only found out that after the liberation. All people were like animals, passive. In Krakow, we sometimes had a teaspoon of marmalade on the slice of bread, and we had a soup in the after noon, made from cabbage and margarine, and it wasn't bad, it tasted like soup and it was food after all. This is what we ate very day, it was autumn and the cabbage was in season. The camp had connections with the Polish resistance from Krakow and they sent this and that with the carts with the hay for the militiamen's, the camp's general staff, horses, who enjoyed riding: of course, they had horses, just as fat as they were, only we were so thin. And they sent hay from the city and under it they hid sugar, flour, marmalade. They cooked and gave us to eat very quickly so that no one would see anything.
We had to carry rocks to a big hill and my shoes were torn in the first weeks and I was left without shoes. There was a shoemaker's for the SS, but for whoever didn't have shoes, they made some with wooden soles, some sort of slippers; it was something to cover your feet in and that's what we walked in for three months. For as long as we were there, in these three months, I climbed those hills 10 times, 15 times every day, in those shoes which didn't hold onto the foot, I ruined my feet, that's why I have arthritis now. There were people in the camp who worked at the train station, that's where the camp was, and it was close to the coal mines and many were selected to work there: there were small wagons these foodless people had to push and many were ruined there; it was better to go to the hills. I had an acquaintance who came from Comandau, from Covasna, a Mrs. Vertzberger, whose son was a friend of Otto, my brother. The boy came back home, but he didn't know anything about my brother, they were separated. His mother was there with me, in the camp in Krakow, and, poor woman, she died there, they didn't know how to cure her. She was still young for her age, a very nice woman. There was one painful thing for us in Krakow: there was a Pole with us, I don't think he was a Jew, and he had a eight years old child with him and every day he was beaten at the call in front of his father, but beaten so badly that blood came out, it was a scene that terrified and pained us all. Men and women were separated in the camp in Krakow, they weren't together at the call either, they were in separate rows, but everyone could see the scene.
We stayed in Krakow until September I think, we left in June and we stayed for about three months: June, July, August. In September we came back to Auschwitz, because that's when the red army surrounded Krakow. Then we were quickly evicted and the SS soldiers ran with us to Auschwitz. When we came back to Auschwitz in September we were all taken to roads and railways constructions, but we didn't go up in the mountains, we went on a field, but we had to go through a 10 km long forest, we had to go there, carry the rocks from there here and back again, that was our job, it was only meant to get us tired as soon as possible and finish us. The second time we were in Auschwitz we were mixed with those who came from Holland, Greece, Italy and France, and some of them were Jews and others weren't.
We stayed in Auschwitz, and from October it started getting worse. The rainy season came and the cold and we weren't allowed to wear clothes, if they found somebody wearing a topcoat or some clothes they were forced to throw them away. We had the call at 5, 6 o'clock in the morning, although it was still dark, even in summer, and they counted us after blocks, it had to be the exact number of the block and we had to stay for the call. Men and women were separated. That’s what killed us, the calls, we had to stand for three, four hours, whether it was cold, raining, snowing, and having to stand there, thin and starving as you were, it was terrible. There was some sort of a sickroom, and if someone fell ill and could be cured without medicine, because there weren't any, then the people working there helped as much as they could.
My sister Edit and I stayed until November together, I don't know how we got in the group that went in the gypsies’ camp – because they too had been deported. On November 27th, Mengele came and asked for workers from Auschwitz; the Pauline army [Note: the German 6th army, led by the marshal Friedrich Paulus (1890-1957), which had been defeated at Stalingrad on February 2nd, 1943.] had been defeated, 200,000 men, and the factories were left without workers. [Note: because the majority of the German adult men were on the front, prisoners from the camp were taken to work in the German factories.] I was completely crushed, I was so thin that nobody could recognize me, I didn't have a strong organism; my sister did better, she was stronger and younger, at 17. Mengele came and selected people, those for the factory to the right, those for the gas chamber to the left. I was selected for the row to the left, and my sister cried and screamed...I just sat there and I couldn't cry. Somehow, somebody came to me and asked: 'What's going on?', 'I was separated from my sister.' My sister went and talked to Mengele and signaled me to run in the other group and I did it. [Note: it is a presumption it was Mengele, but it is not likely.] The people from the other group hid me among them and no one saw me running. I thought I had made it, but those selected for the factory weren't enough, so the next day Mengele made another selection: he came to see the others again, and I don't know how, but from all those people he saw and selected all those months, he recognized me and said to me in German: 'I selected you yesterday, how did you get here?' Of course I pretended I didn't understand, although I did, and I didn't say anything. 'Ready, who's in this group is off to the gas chamber!' he said, and my sister screamed, and cried, poor thing, and I said 'Whatever happens, it will be as God wants it.' And I was taken to the waiting room of the gas chambers, where we all had to take our clothes off and had to go in like that. But there was a certain number of people needed for the gas chamber so that they would turn on the gas, and we weren't enough, and I saw him with my eyes when he said: 'They are not enough, I will make another selection in the morning and then we gas them.' I spent one night there. What can I say? Can I say what happened that night? I only thought that it should be as God wants it, and I prayed to God to watch over my sister, to keep her healthy and help her get home.
We got there in the evening, at 5 or 6 in the after noon, and we stayed there until morning. What happened the next day, you can't imagine! Around 3 or 4, it was still dark, it wasn't even morning, a heftling came ['prisoner' in German], a messenger, one who ran and delivered the news immediately. It was a very beautiful 'heftling', a pretty 16-year-old French girl, and the poor thing came with joy and brought news. The telegram from Himmler, who was Hitler's deputy, number two in Germany, had come, and it said: 'stop all executions immediately', signed by Himmler. That was it, nothing more. Everybody cried, they said no one who had been in that room where we stayed until morning ever came out alive, and we, those who were there, were set free. It was a great thing, God, God made this miracle happen, that this piece of news came in the last moment, not too late, just in time to save me! Not only me, there were others there as well, but I know it saved my life.
After I was taken out of the gas chamber, SS soldiers didn’t guard the camp. And then the Czech and Polish prisoners came, they had more strength, those who had been there for a while, the poor souls endured many things we don't even know about, they didn't even have a roof over their heads when they were taken to the camp, they built those barracks where we lived. They said that we, all those who were in the waiting room, should be taken to a barrack and that there we should be given something good to eat to recover; if God saved our lives, they would see to it that they save us from there on. There was a leader in that barrack, a Greek woman, Dezi, I remember, and she went to the kitchen and got from the cooks buckets full of boiled potatoes. A boiled potato there was more valuable than a million lei is here, and they gave us ten boiled potatoes each, twice a day. And we got more bread, a quarter of bread and soup, so that we somewhat recovered in a month, though not fully.
I lost a lot of weight, because since September, when we came back from Krakow, there were rainy cold days, and it was cold in that forest in Auschwitz, and I had nothing to wear, and I fell ill with pneumonia. We had to carry wood, to break rocks for the railway. The selection for the gas chamber was made daily. I went to the sickroom, but they had no medicine, the doctor did what she could and then said: 'Only God can save you.' And God saved me then as well from a serious illness, I wasn't aware of anything for two weeks, I was unconscious, I didn't eat. I know that at some point another patient came to me and forced some food in my mouth and forced me to drink some coffee, so that I wouldn't starve to death. In the end I recovered, but I was a wreck. After a month I had to go to work again in that forest that was 10 km away; if I didn't go I didn't get any food. Sometimes I didn’t go, when it was cold I would have rather not eat, but that meant ruining my health even more. Christmas passed, New Year's Eve as well. I got sick because of the cold, I had no shoes, I wasn't dressed and I ended up being unable to move my leg; it was sciatica, but I had to go with the others in the forest and thy told me, 'you will freeze here, it's cold, you have to come', but I couldn't move my leg. And then those girls, weak as they were, carried me in their arms, and carried me like that for 10 km.
In January my arm froze as well, and the next day it started swell, it was hot and the swelling went up to the heart. Then I said I had to go to the sickroom about my arm, and when the doctor saw me – she was a Russian, not a Jew, she was a political prisoner; her name was Lubova or Lobovaica or Lubovita, an elderly woman, but strong and fit – she started cursing in Russian, I don't know what she said. She said 'to surgery', that I understood, and she showed me a bench where she performed the surgeries; she brought chlorine and she used that to put me to sleep, she didn't have anything else. I didn't feel anything, I just counted to thirteen, I remember that, until I fell asleep, and I only felt when she touched me with the knife. When I woke up, she was slapping me to wake me up: 'Wake up, I want to tell you something!', and she joked: 'Do you want to write your will, do you want to write your will?' She took me as I was, just in my shirt, to a cot, she lied me down and wrapped my arm in toilet paper, there wasn't anything else. That woman operated very well: from the frostbite the arm was full of liquid, she had to drain it.
There were some clues while I was in the camp that the allies would come. A soldier from Wehrmacht, who guarded us while we carried the rocks, when I was still in Krakow, said: 'Now I sit in the armchair, but believe me, in two months I will carry the rocks and you will sit in the armchair!'. He said that in September; October, November passed, the man wasn't mistaken a lot, in January the red army surrounded Auschwitz. The red army was also in Poland when Krakow was evicted, but they didn't make a move then, they waited for the allies, although they could have got to Auschwitz, but they didn't have guns, or back-ups, I don't know what. On January 27th they came with the allies.
When I got in the hospital, in the sickroom, a Polish nurse sat on the bed next to me. Niuta was her name, and she saw that I was conscious. Mengele entered the sickroom – I know he was Mengele, he was known among the other prisoners, and they pointed him out to me: his name was the first thing I found out when I got off the train – and he said: 'Everybody must get out!', but in a strange voice, not like he meant: 'Get out! There's danger! I'm telling you to go!', but not everybody left, Lubova stayed behind. All those who could move had left the camp, and 2,000 people who were sick stayed behind. I accidentally looked outside when the gate was open, before Mengele closed it, and I saw that there was nobody at the gate, and I said to myself: 'How come they left the gate open?'; 10,000 healthy people left then. And I thought we had to go as well, no matter what, because it was known that the camp was mined all round, and if the SS left, then the camp would blow up, that was known, and I tried to leave, and there were -40 degrees outside. I got out to the gate in my sandals and with just a shirt on, and I took a blanket to cover myself. Mengele looked at me and said: 'What do you want?', I said: 'I want to go...', 'You want to leave? You will freeze after ten steps, you will fall and freeze to death there, there are – 40 degrees outside!' he closed the door in my face and said: 'Go back to bed, we will come to pick you up with the cars, we'll take you away', and I said: 'How do I know what car is that and where do you take us?' I knew that the camp would blow up and I only went back because he closed the gate. But you never know where God takes you. If I hadn't gone to the sickroom I would have been among those who had already left the camp, but in the sickroom I was undressed, weak, sick and Mengele, who had sent me to the gas chamber twice, saved me on that occasion, by closing the gate in my face, because otherwise I would have fallen and frozen to death there. Then I went back and I said: it's best, whatever God wants, let God's will be done, and then I went to bed and I stayed there and I thought about what and how would happen, if we would live until 12 o'clock in the midnight or not.
The nurse came at 5 o'clock, when it dawned, took my blanket and bed sheet and folded them, made a pack and sat next to me. I said: 'Niuta, what do you want, what are you thinking, what are you doing?', 'I don't want anything, my fiancee is coming at 12 o'clock!' I looked at her and I said to myself, 'how could her fiancee come after her during the night?', but she didn't leave, she just sat nicely on the bed. But she knew what she was talking about, because she had contacts with the Polish resistance who worked wonderfully in Krakow and here as well. All the merit for the Polish resistance. When the camp was mined, the Polish prisoners, not by the Jews, mined it; they were forced to plant the mines all round the camp, therefore they knew where the mines were. And although they were locked with us, they sent word to the resistance and when they got out they defused all the mines. I didn’t know about that, but Niuta knew. And at 12 o'clock her fiancee was there, a pilot, a handsome and strong man, and Niuta said: 'look, there's my fiancee', and he waved her and they left.
Then the Russian soldiers came, and said: 'you're free', and when they came in all the patients ran to them and kissed them. They only knew Russian, but they had some bread, which they gave to the prisoners; they told us to be calm because the next morning the red cross would come and bring us food. And so it was, in the morning the red cross came, and after two-three days a group of doctors from USA came with the red cross and they made a record of everyone who was there, and they tried to persuade us to go to USA. There was a doctor Schmidt, who spoke in German and I understood him, 'Miss, come to USA, I can tell you still have to go to school, if you want to study for 10 years you don't pay anything for 10 years, for food or for housing, you'll have everything you want for as long as you go to school, and we will help you after that.' But I wanted to meet my brothers at least, with my sisters, because I knew my parents were dead.
After we were liberated, we were turned over to the Polish Red Cross. I didn't leave for USA because of my sister, and it was a good thing that I didn't, because she would have been left all alone. We stayed there, in Poland, with the Red Cross for a month, I don't know in which town, it was too long ago. After a month or two passed, at the end of April, the red cross took us to Cernauti 14, so that we would be taken to Romania from there. I was there on the day the peace was signed, on May 9th [Victory Day] 15, and rumor had it that we would get in train wagons and we would all go to Romania, we were about 2,000 people who made it from Auschwitz alive: we were Romanians and Hungarians who had to got to northern Transylvania. A few days after the signing of the peace they came to prepare us to get on the wagons, so that we could go home. We went to the train station, at the train station they showed us a train in which we had to get on: on that rain there was a plate which said Romania in Russian, and we stayed there for a whole day, we slept in the wagon.
The next day I saw a sentry by the train, who wasn't there until then. We knew we were free, but the sentry said that no one could come get in or get off the wagon. What had happened?! Someone from CFR [‘Caile Ferate Romane’, ‘The Romanian railway company’], an Ukrainian, took the sign off the train. Next to us there was another long train on the other line, and he took off the sign from that train and put it on ours, and ours on that train. We didn't know what it said on the sign, it was in Russian: it said that the train had to go to Siberia, because it was full of German, fascist prisoners. The other train left, and the next day we left as well, and we saw that we were crossing the Niester, which we weren't supposed to cross if we were going to Romania! After that we found out that we weren't going home, but to Russia, and we didn't know where! We were miserable, in grief, to see that after Auschwitz we still wouldn't get home! Two or three men jumped off the train when they saw we were heading for Siberia.
We traveled for four days, maybe more, and we got to Berdicev. We stopped there, because after four days they had to give us something warm to eat. It was a barrack and they could get us out of the wagons because there was nowhere to run. We didn't know Russian, we couldn't talk to the sentry, so we waited to see what would happen. There was a canteen in front of the train station and we went in to eat; next to the station master there was a soldier. And our Jewish girls cried out from one wagon to the other: 'Come, let's go eat, wash ourselves a bit!' in Yiddish. And that soldier came, looked at them and went up to the one who cried out and asked her: 'How come you know Yiddish?' 'how could I not know, I am a Jew, I speak my people's language ', 'Are you a Jew? What are you doing on this train?' 'We are all Jews and we come from Auschwitz.' 'And where are you going?'. She answered that were going to Romania. The man didn't say anything, but asked who the leader was, there had to be someone to coordinate everything for so many people. The leader was someone we called Mihai, a Jew, but a Romanian, who knew Russian well. And he took the Hungarians' leader, a man Berger, as well, and asked them to write down everything they knew, where we came from, why, and where we were going. Berger wrote that, he knew Russian as well, and gave it to that soldier, and we stayed for one more night in the train, but after that we went on, not in the original direction however, we were told that we were going to Slucak, which is now in Belarus, 20 km away from Minsk. There we were taken to a large garrison. Italian prisoners were with us as well, an entire detachment, soldiers who had surrendered, they had to be sent home with the same train we were supposed to get home. We were told that everything would be all right, and we were given good food. That’s where we found out that because of that Ukrainian an entire train with SS soldiers got away.
The memorial was sent to Moscow, and the next day a plane was sent for Berger and took him. Five days after that, Mihai received a letter from Berger, from Budapest, with the diplomatic mail, in which he said that he got home and that he was alright, that the whole affair had been cleared and that we would be set free: the memorial was taken to Stalin's office, and there it went to the secretariat, where the general staff was, and there, the general, that soldier, knew one of the secretaries, went to her and gave her the memorial. The woman looked at the memorial and told him: 'this is my husband’s handwriting!', imagine that, she recognized her husband Berger by his handwriting. She had been a Moscovite: during the war communists were called Moscovites. And she ran to Russia, but her husband was deported. Mihai told me this story, we met after the war, he was a receptionist at Coroana hotel, here in Brasov.
We stayed there in Slucak until August, three months, because there weren't any railways, we needed papers, one couldn’t send 2,000 men just like that, without anything, without checking. They checked us, and in the meantime we were very well treated, Americans sent us cans with ham every day, in a cart for us and we had some other food except the macaronis one could find during the war, they had some concerts arranged for us, some performances to make us feel better. We were allowed to go in town, but not somewhere else, because we had no papers and we could get lost anywhere, or we could get shot by any security guard. We stayed there calmly, and recovered a little.
After the war
On August 16th I got home, I came through Arad by train, I don't know the exact itinerary. There was a hostel specially for us Jews in Arad and I made a phone call from there. I was the only one who had a relative in Romania, in Timisoara. I phoned, I had an aunt, my mother's sister, Laszlo Juliana and a cousin, Laszlo, who hadn't been deported. I went there and I found my sister Livia there, who had come since April; I should have been home by then too, if it hadn't been for all that mess. I met my sister and I was very happy because I wasn't alone anymore, I had been desperate before that. I have always been close to my sister Livia. She had been like a mother to me, this is what this sister had been to me. I was left without a mother when I was 23-24 years old, it shouldn't have happened to a woman of that age, I needed my mother to tell me how to do this and that, what to do...she was to me anything she could after my mother died. We came home to Covasna, where we left from, but we didn't find anything there, not even a nail in the walls. Then I went to the Jewish Community from Sfantu Gheorghe, because Covasna was a smaller town and belonged to Sfantu Gheorghe. Only my sister and me came home, from a family of 8; only my brother Francisc came after us, who had been to Mathausen in November 1946; that was all.
After World War II, we kept in touch with Ignac because he was all we had left, the rest of the family died. During the Holocaust he had been in Budapest, in the ghetto. He took care of us, he helped us, he did everything he could from Hungary. When we came and didn't have as much as a nail in the walls, he helped us as much as he could. And then, after the borders were opened, after we returned from deportation, he invited us to spend each vacation with them in Hungary. And I went every year, together with my sister. After that, under communism, he was a clerk at CEC [Casa de Economii si Consemantiuni, ‘The Loan Bank’]. [Editor’s note: Mrs. Gotterer was using CEC which is in Romania, however the identical loan bank in Hungary is called Takarekszovetkezet.] Ignac was a kind man indeed, honest and warm-hearted like my father. I loved him very much.
They gave us something in Sfantu Gheorghe, from the Jewish community there, very little money, 50,000 lei, you couldn't buy a pair of socks with it; money were sent, but the money got lost on the way somehow and didn't get where it was supposed to, the money was stolen until it got here. And then my first husband came (we weren't married, not even engaged, at the time), but we were good friends.
My first husband, Francisc Pollak, was a Jew, and he was born in 1914 in Serbia, in Novi Sad. His mother was from there, but his father was from Sfantu Gheorghe. He grew up here, in Romania, in Sfantu Gheorghe, and his mother came after her husband here; he studied in Timisoara, at a French school for priests, but the school had nothing to do with Judaism, he studied together with everyone else. Then he went to high school there. His parents, his father, his brothers, had land, they worked at a lumber station, in forestry operations. After that, when he was 14 years old, his father died and he remained an orphan. He had a brother who was drafted in the army during World War II and who died at the bend of the river Don. Francisc was in the second largest camp after Auschwitz, where the political members were sent, at Buchenwald.
He had come on the same train from Timisoara to Sfantu Gheorghe as me, but we didn't meet on the train, I tracked him down after that. We knew each other well, since 1938, from Covasna, he was adopted by some business partners of my father's. We went together to Sfantu Gheorghe, we thought we would receive some more substantial help from the community, but they didn't give us anything, there was no hostel made for us. In Arad there was a very beautiful and well-attended hostel, and food, and all who had come could stay there for a month, or two or three. What could we do? We had no money, my poor aunt didn't have any either because they too were evicted during the war by the legionaries, but they still said that we should stay in Timisoara with them if we could, because whatever they had they would share with us. And so they did. We stayed there for two weeks, until we recovered a bit, especially me. And then we went to the community in Sfantu Gheorghe and my husband said (he was part of the community) that I should remain there as a secretary, and we would see, they would give me a salary and food as well, so I stayed there. I stayed there and I worked in the office in the community and next year, in 1946, we got married. We had a religious ceremony as well, the rabbi from here, from Brasov, Deutsch, came. There was a canteen at the community in Sfantu Gheorghe, and my husband hired a can manufacturer from Bucovina, Zisu Percel was his name, he was a Jew. My husband went to him and told him about our wedding and asked him to send some food. And he sent lots of cans, but I didn't receive anything, not a piece of bread, nothing. Everything was stolen. Ferencz sent food, he sent canned meat for cooking, ham, the most beautiful meat. Everything was sent to the community's canteen and when I asked for the food to be brought, they said that 'everything has already been eaten’. It wasn't true, I found that out after a long time that they sold everything, they stole it and sold everything for money in town. A month after that we came to Brasov.
I worked at the community in Sfantu Gheorghe for a year, but after that I wanted to make some money and you couldn't do that at the community. And then I wanted to go to the textiles factory from Sfantu Gheorghe, because the director there was our godfather at the wedding. He told me to go to the factory because he would hire me. And when I got to the factory he signed all the hiring papers, and when I got out of the gate a woman from U.F.D. [Uniunea Femeilor Democrate, ‘The Democratic Women’s Union’] and told me I was taken out of the production and that from the next day I would work at UFD. I didn't work in the factory for one day, and that’s how I got to UFD. I was an accountant, a cashier and a secretary. When I was in UFD, a lady from Bucharest came and wanted to take me to the Women's Central Committee in Bucharest, but I wanted to stay with my sister, who was all alone, and with my husband, I didn't want to move from Sfantu Gheorghe and I said that. She said she understood and she didn't promote me.
After the forests were nationalized 16 my husband was first hired at a coop, there was no state commerce back then, there were coops. At the coop he was director at the biggest unit in Sfantu Gheorghe for a while, and after that he worked for a while at O.Cl [The Commercial Organization] in commerce, at a commercial unit. When the state commerce was introduced he was commercial director. When my husband was deported he was young, he wasn't into politics, and when he came back, he was labeled as a communist, although he wasn't a communist, he was a social-democrat. He was a party member, and for a while he was a member of the World Jewish Council, he was the leading member from Sfantu Gheorghe, and when the party purification 17 was made, they found out and kicked him out of the party. The one who kicked him out was the biggest fascist, Magyari was his name, I knew him personally, he was part of the Hungarian fascist party that deported us.
I didn't have any children with my first husband. I observed the Jewish holidays during communism. I was at U.F.D. and when the autumn holidays came, I dressed up, I went to our secretary, who was our leader and I said: 'I have a Jewish holiday, the biggest holiday, Yom Kippur, I couldn't celebrate it in the concentration camp and I want to celebrate it at home.' 'Go home nicely, and go to church and come back when the holidays are over.' This secretary, Magdalena Vas was her name, was very nice. She had been a colleague of my younger sister, Edit, and she knew me since then. There was a synagogue in Sfantu Gheorghe, very beautiful. After deportation, after I got married, I celebrated the holidays at home, but I didn't cook kosher. I always light two candles on Friday, even today, and I say the prayer, I know it by heart. That's what supported my in camp, I always thought about my mother lighting candles on Saturdays, and that I had to make it home to light the candles. I always said the prayer in camp, it was the only thing that they couldn't take from me.
After repatriation, I had more Jewish friends. That's how it turned out then, Jews were more around Jews and Christians around Christians. Each was comfortable with his kind. When I heard that the state of Israel existed, we had a big dinner at home, all my friends came, I was very happy. I had many friends, we were a circle of 20 persons, but they left when aliyah was made in 1960, and they all left. Clara and I lost contact. I don't write letters to her anymore, but when I go to Covasna, we meet and talk.
I knew I couldn't emigrate, because I couldn’t stand the heat. My sister couldn't leave either, she was still ill after the camp, and my husband didn't want that because he too was sick. I would have liked to go even in those conditions, but my husband told me I wouldn't stand the heat and that we wouldn't go there so that I could get sick. My first husband always listened to the radio from Israel, and my sister and me listened as well. The 'Bucuresti 500' TV had appeared then, in the 1960s, and he bought a radio and a TV. He always listened to radio and records. I listened to Free Europe 18 under communism, I knew everything that happened around me.
Francisc died early, from a heart attack, at 50, in 1965 in Sfantu Gheorghe. He suffered a lot in concentration. I remember I used to say something that my husband remembered in his last hour, when he died. He said that I was right after all. I used to say that communism has good parts as well, it has beautiful and good ideas, but that Lenin understood that this ideas were not for a nation that wasn't cultured, that doesn't know much and that has a lot to learn first to understand communism. I still sustain this idea, that the cultured men should uphold the society.
I found out when the wars in 1967 and 1973 happened, I listened to the radio. In 1967 Israel broke the diplomatic relations with a lot of countries, but they were always good friends with Romania. I know who Moses Rosen was, Moses Rosen 19 arranged so that so many people could leave. And I always said that he did a very good thing.
I think I was there, at U.F.D., for a year, and after that I made to an agreement with the secretary, who was a member of the party bureau. I told her I would like to go to an company, where I could improve in my job, to be a good accountant, because I couldn't progress there. I told her that I couldn't go on the field, because I had walked enough, I had to stand for a year in the camp, and that that wasn't for me, I wanted to be in an office, where it's warm. She asked me where I wanted to go, and I said: 'to the bank'. There was only the National Bank back then, but exactly at that time the Investment Bank from Sfantu Gheorghe was set up. A director, a general instructor from the board had come to organize the Investment Bank in Sfantu Gheorghe, which was the county's capital, because a county branch had to be set up; the first name on the hiring list was mine. The party secretary at the time, Sogoran, was Luca's brother-in-law, Vasile Luca was in power then 20. And Luca came from our county, and therefore his brother-in-law was first secretary there. And when this bank instructor came to organize the county branch, he first went to the party to see how things were and ask for help. The party secretary said: 'the first thing I have to say is that I'm hiring Mrs. Pollak (that was my name after my first husband, Mrs. Pollak). I say she is an excellent clerk'. He saw my reports, about what I had done in a year at U.F.D., I had a recommendation for Ferdinand Furgaci, who was the director of the bank, and I was hired at the Investment Bank. Because I was not qualified, they hired me at first as a secretary-typist and secretary-cashier, and then I caught on fast, I learnt accounting in three months, and after that I was promoted accountant, main-accountant, and then I was promoted chief-accountant. Then I was promoted inspector, and chief inspector, and I was director for two or three years, but it wasn't for me because I didn’t want to get involved in politics. The director had to get involved in politics from time to time. I said I'd rather do my job and I remained assistant director.
My work colleagues were good and bad. The good ones were the friends, I remember an accountant, they were usually the people in my suborder. But there were about three inspectors who couldn't stand me, who wanted to get me fired several times, but I had a good friend among the communists as well, he was a Jew, Lemorti, who had been a chief in Bucharest, and who had come home to Targu Mures, to the party committee. He was an old communist, but he was a true communist, not one of the phony ones. He told me 'don't worry, when you have problems let me know.' I didn't intend to do that, but a friend from Sfantu Gheorghe went to him and when he asked 'How are the Pollaks?', he was told 'they are firing Mrs. Pollak from the bank because she has some colleagues who want her job'. But a call came, and a telegram, which said that they should leave me alone if they don't want to be fired from the bank.
I once had a problem because I was Jewish. I went to a meeting in Bucharest once. It was summer, and I went in a blouse with short sleeves and one could see the number. A very nice and kind colleague, the Greek Linbidis, came to me and she said to me privately: 'Next time get a blouse with long sleeves, because these [the communists] can't stand Jews'. And indeed I felt that in their attitude. But I also had a very good colleague, a Romanian from Bucharest, he was a boss and he always asked me if I had any displeasures. Of all my colleagues, there was one who was a Jew: he was a director at the Investment Bank, a certain Weis, but he was accursed, he wanted to be more Catholic than the pope, Jews are like that, and he was also a great communist, and in the end he ended up in the canal [Note: Mrs. Gotterer refers to the canal Danube-The Black Sea 21, for whose construction political convicts were used.]
I was not a party member, my file was so well made up. They asked me once and they told me I had to bring a recommendation from certain people. And I said: 'If I, who has been to Auschwitz have to bring a recommendation from that person, who was the biggest fascist, then I don't want to get in the party!'. And it was like that, I never signed in, but I didn't have any other problems either. Under communism I had to know everything that was going on in the country, we had to read the newspaper, and we had to explain what we read in the newspaper during party meetings. I had to take a course on communism, I had to know who was Stalin, since when he was in power, things like that, and I had to take an exam. I didn’t want to get involved into politics, and I didn't, I kept clear of these issues, but I knew what was going on. I never had problems, they couldn't do anything to me because my file was made up by the party secretary. One of our superiors from Bucharest told me that I could have been a minister with the file I had.
I participated in different events, I marched where we were told to go. Every year, on May 1st, on August 23rd 22, we had to go out, to listen to what they said there, from the stands. The lines had a degree of economic importance, we, the ones from the bank, were in the second line, but I don't know who was in the first line. All these units had to take part in the marching in front of the stands, after that we could go home.
Communism in Romania wasn't bad at all. I had a good job, but a lousy salary, I got half a kilo of salami every month like everyone else, and half a kilo of meat. But I say there were good things as well, some, but they weren't done correctly. For example, at the bank in Sfantu Gheorghe I didn't agree with how people were elected, it was full of fascists there. They are well written by Lenin, but you know how it is, it's like a housewife who has a good recipe but who doesn’t cook it well. That was my opinion. I worked in Sfantu Gheorghe until 1975, when I retired.
I had a brother, Emil, who was drafted to forced labor during Holocaust and who ended up after that in Bergen-Belsen. He was liberated by the Belgian Red Cross, which he also joined as a volunteer, and in 1945 he got to Brussels. He was a merchant there, but it didn't work out very well for him, because even after the war there was an anti-Jewish atmosphere. There were no laws or violent things, but he had obstacles as a merchant. Around 1952 he decided to go to Liberia. He wrote to me, and I wrote back. But I had a job with a lot of responsibility and my letter came back with the mention ‘unknown addressee’, but in fact it never left Sfantu Gheorghe. I was a trustworthy person for them, I never did anything wrong, but still they gave me a hard time with the correspondence.
My sister Livia married Izidor Berkovics, who had a tragic fate. He was shot in the head during the war, while he was at forced labor probably, and he had locomotory and speaking deficiencies, Livia bought a tobacco shop and a took care of it. When I came home I took her to the doctor, I did everything I could, but in the end she still died because of that, her bones grounded, from osteoporosis; she died in 1995 in Sfantu Gheorghe.
I met my present husband, Alexandru Gotterer after a few years, in 1980. He was from Brad, from Hunedoara; his father had been a teacher, and his mother had been a housewife and a sahter’s daughter. During Holocaust he was in Brasov, at forced labor, between 1942 and 1943. He came once in Sfantu Gheorghe with rabbi Ioles from Sfantu Gheorghe. I was there, and I asked that my sister would be given a package as well, if it were possible, because my pension was small and I had to help her. My sister had a very small pension, 400 lei, that was nothing. And I told him to help us; that’s how we met and then we got married in 1984, here in Brasov, in the synagogue. There was a cantor from Bucharest at the ceremony. The civil marriage was held in Sfantu Gheorghe. In 1984, after I became Sany’s wife (that’s what I call my husband, it comes from Sandor, the Hungarian version of Alexandru), I moved here, in Brasov, I went to the synagogue; he was employed as vice-president of the community for 18 years. I learnt here some things I didn’t know, and I heard about the things that happen in Israel, I celebrated the independence day at home.
My husband has been married before, but his wife died in Brasov in 1981, and he has two children from his first marriage, Ivan Gotterer and Veronica Iancu. They both consider themselves Jews. Veronica was born in Brasov in 1963, and she died here in 1996. Ivan was also born in Brasov in 1953, and now he lives in Rehovot, in Israel. He had brit mila, and he married religiously in the synagogue in Targu Mures, where he studied medicine. He left for Israel in 1984. He worked as a surgeon in Israel, at Hadasa hospital, in Tel Aviv. He has two daughters, Iris, who is a dentist-surgeon, and Karen, who is a psychologist. I keep in touch with my husband’s children, and we get along very well.
We thought everything would be all right after the revolution 23. I wasn’t glad that they killed Ceausescu 24. We thought that culture, freedom were coming…but, what do you know, something came, but there are a lot of steps to be made. I receive help from the German government, because I was deported. It is a monthly fund, and we don’t receive as much as the others, we only get 100 euro per month, others, in other places, receive food as well. In the meantime I received compensations in marks. My health is very bad: I went to the doctor a few days ago and he told me that he couldn’t cure anything, I could walk until now but because of the advanced age the state of my legs has worsened. Now I spent most of my time at home, reading, filling in information in the files I have made about the Jews in Sfantu Gheorghe, and walking with my husband.
Glossary
Zoltan Blum
Gherla
Romania
Interviewer: Cosmina Paul
Date of the interview: July 2005
Mr. Zoltan Blum is the only Jewish survivor of the Holocaust in Gherla. He takes care of the synagogue that was left in this town. On Jewish holidays, he travels to one of the larger Jewish communities in the region – Dej or Cluj-Napoca.
He lives with his wife in a medium-sized house located on a street that’s close to the Armenian church – the town’s most important historical monument.
The house still lacks finishing; the rooms and the garden are decorated in a simple fashion. Every summer, the Blums spend their time on the porch, reminiscing...
I have no recollection of my paternal grandfather; all I know is that he was a Blum. He spoke Jewish [Yiddish]. In fact, let me tell you something: every Jew from this region, from Transylvania, could speak Yiddish. But they used the language that served them best.
They spoke Hungarian when talking to Hungarians and Romanian when talking to Romanians, as their trades required them to. What I mean is that the Jews had nothing but respect for foreigners; we have this saying: ‘Be a good Jew, but also respect the country you live in.’ For the Jews in Gherla, this country was Romania. The fact that they all sent their children to the Romanian school gives you an idea of the extent to which they respected their country.
As for the language, it’s like I said: we used Yiddish at home and, for the rest, we used the language of our interlocutors. I heard my paternal grandfather was a religious man, but not a bigot. He didn’t wear a beard – I could say he was ‘modern’, using a term of nowadays.
He was buried in a nearby commune, Unguras, at the Jewish cemetery [Editor’s note: There are 25 km from Gherla to Unguras.] My father took me to his grave. He brought by horse carriage a gravestone which he placed on his tomb. At that time, I was about 7-8. This means that it happened in 1934-1935. That’s all I can remember.
The name of my paternal grandmother was Scheindl Blum. Blum was the name he took from my grandfather and Scheindl means ‘beautiful’ or, better yet, ‘pretty’. She spoke Jewish. But she also spoke Romanian and Hungarian. She only ate kosher food. She was religious and she wore a wig. I did meet her, but I was only a small kid – I was 4-5 years old. All I can remember is how I used to help her get to the garden, for she had become rather shortsighted. She died in 1932 or 1933 and she was buried at our Jewish cemetery [in Gherla]. Although we lived in Fizes [Editor’s note: Fizesul Gherlei, 6 km away from Gherla], we brought her over here because Tiberiu Blum lived here [one of Scheindl Blum’s sons and brother of Mr. Blum’s father].
My father had three brothers. One of them lived in Gherla. His name was Tiberiu Blum, but I couldn’t tell you where he was born. I can’t even remember his Jewish name. He owned a fabrics store here in Gherla. His wife was Jewish. He had five children: Beri – Ber would be the correct form in Yiddish and this is how he was actually registered; Zalman – Leibe in Yiddish; Mendl – which means Eugen. There were also two daughters, but I can’t remember their names. Beri, Mendi, and Leibi are still alive today.
My father’s second brother was Iosif Blum. His Jewish name was Iosef. He lived in the commune of Sannicoara, in Cluj County – about 30 km away from Gherla. [Editor’s note: The exact distance is 36 km.] It was a small commune located in a valley. He spoke Romanian very often because he lived in a Romanian community. He was a tradesman. He owned a store of ‘colonial goods’ [Editor’s note: pepper, tea, cocoa etc.] as they used to call them back then. He was married and he had three children.
One was named Lajos – he was officially registered under the Romanian name of Ludovic [Ludvik in Yiddish]. The other one lived in Arad. I’m sure he was a boy too, but I can’t remember his name. Iosif also had a daughter whose name is Vilma. The children were all born long before the Holocaust. Of the three children, only Ludovic and Vilma got deported. They both survived. Before being deported, Iosif was sent to work [forced labor].
My father’s third brother was Martin Blum. He was very religious and he only spoke Yiddish to us. Martin is the Romanian translation of Mordechai. He was never married and he didn’t have children. He lived in Fizesul Gherlei and was a tradesman. All these brothers used Yiddish at home and Romanian and Hungarian outside their home. They were all deported and none of them came back. They were assembled with the others here [in Gherla], at the brick factory. I remember I was with them in the brick factory in Gherla, then in the brick factory in Cluj. The final destination was Auschwitz. There we lost track of one another.
My father’s name was Mauritiu Blum – Moshe Iankef by his Jewish name. In the spoken language, it was Moishe. He was born in 1888. I can’t remember the month. As for the year, I only learnt it later and with great difficulty, going through papers. [Editor’s note: Mr. Blum refers to the documents regarding the origin of his parents that he needed after World War II.] I was only a child and my parents didn’t talk about such things with us… They were busy with their own things.
It was only after I had come back from deportation that I needed to know these things – and I found them in papers. We didn’t celebrate birthdays back then – people had other things on their minds. A child’s birthday may not have passed unnoticed, but, generally speaking, people were much more concerned with providing for their families than with anniversaries. This is how things went. My father was probably born in Unguras, since my grandfather was buried there – but I can’t pledge for that.
My father didn’t wear a beard, but he didn’t shave either – Jews aren’t allowed to. He simply trimmed his beard off using a special device and some powder. Not wearing a beard, one could say he was pretty modern. He didn’t wear a kippah, but he always wore a hat. He went to the cheder, like any other Jewish boy.
They taught prayers there. No matter how poor a family was, their children still went to the cheder. It was vital, since they learnt the morning and the evening prayers and the basics of religion. Apart from the cheder, my father went to the public school.
My father served in the army of Austria-Hungary during World War I, but I don’t know where. For a while, he lived somewhere near Budesti [Editor’s note: in Bistrita-Nasaud County, 57 km away from Gherla]. He worked as a sort of manager, but I couldn’t tell you for whom; all I know is that it wasn’t in some factory, but on a farm. Then he moved to Fizesul Gherlei [Editor’s note: 6 km away from Gherla].
I don’t know how my parents met each other or the circumstances of their marriage. All I know is that, after the war, I had to go to the commune of Budesti to get the papers I needed – which proves they met and got married there. But they never told me anything about it.
I think my maternal grandfather’s name was Gaspar Salamon. I have no recollection of my maternal grandparents because they lived in a different place than ours – the commune of Budesti, in Bistrita-Nasaud County. I think they were farmers – I remember my mother saying she had some land over there. As for my maternal grandmother, I never met her.
My mother’s name was Berta Blum – Berta Salamon by her maiden’s name. She was born in 1888, in the commune of Budesti. My mother always wore a wig – at least, this is how I remember her from the moment my mind started to store memories. She also went to bed wearing a kerchief.
She was very religious. She had poultry slaughtered by the shochet alone, and, if he was missing, we would travel to Gherla. We only ate kosher. She was a great cook. The local women didn’t know how to make too many cakes, so they used to come to my mother for help.
We had a large stove – since we had a large family – and all those women baked their cakes at our place. They would bring the eggs, the flour, and the oil, and my mother would take care of the rest, using our own pots. She also cooked cakes for weddings. I remember the pancove and the minciunele [Editor’s note: local cakes that are more or less similar to doughnuts].
My mother used to force feed geese. He bought them from a peasant, laid them on the ground and force fed them. Have you ever seen how this is done? With one hand she opened the goose’s beak and with the other she stuffed corn beans down its throat. Now they do it with a mechanical device.
Then she had it slaughtered, but the liver was kept, not eaten all at once. Geese sometimes choked – since beans went down the trachea, the same way air did. My mother knew what to do: she would put her hand down the bird’s throat, locate the bean, and pull it out. Peasants would come to my mother’s: ‘We’re going to Mrs. Blum ‘cause our goose choked.’
Jews aren’t allowed to slaughter chicken themselves – that’s the shochet’s job. When she got back, my mother would remove the feathers by hand and fry it a little, to make sure the body is clean. She used to keep the feathers. In winter my mother would summon a claca [Editor’s note: Romanian term designating a group of peasants that gather to do voluntary work in order to help one another].
Every woman in our village was there – it didn’t matter if she was Romanian of Hungarian; there were even Gypsy women. Back in those days, Gypsies had trades of their own – they made stoves or sickles, for instance.
My mother offered them sweet brandy and they all sat and turned feathers into down to make pillows for their daughters’ dowry. The pillows could only contain down, not feather stubs. The down was stored in sacks. My mother used to keep the sacks on the bed and she removed them when we went to sleep.
The pillow cases were kept in the wardrobe. Those cases were only filled when a young daughter got married. By the time we got deported, my mother had collected two sacks of down weighing about 30 kilograms each. They went down the drain, like everything else we left behind…
Here are my siblings in chronological order. The eldest was Matei Blum – Mayer in Yiddish. He was born in 1917. Then came Ernest Blum – Gershun in Yiddish, like that musician, [George] Gershwin. He was born in 1919. My only sister, Margareta Blum – also known as Malvina – was born in 1921. Eugen Blum was born in 1925. I was the youngest.
Growing up
My name is Zoltan Blum. This is the name I grew up with. But my parents also gave me a Hebrew name, Sloimer Zalman [Mr. Blum refers to the brit milah ceremony]. Zalman is a rough translation of Zoltan, you see. Many Hungarians use the diminutive form for Zoltan, which is Zoli. But I am recorded as Zoltan in all the official papers. I was born on 10 October 1927 in the commune of Fizesul Gherlei.
At the time when I was a kid, my parents didn’t talk to us much… Their problems kept them busy. They did own a sort of store, but it didn’t generate enough income to support the entire family. We didn’t own land. There used to be a law that prohibited Jews from owning real estate – I only learnt about this after World War II –, but, eventually, they acquired the right to be citizens [Editor’s note: The Romanian Constitution of 1923 granted citizenship to the Jews.] 1.
To be honest, I didn’t read about this in a book, I only heard about it… Many pointed out that Jews had a lot of money because they were involved in trade, but no one said why they were tradesmen. Well, the reason is that they didn’t have the right to own land, so they couldn’t support themselves otherwise. You see? These are the facts.
So my parents had a store and a bar – and that was all. When he was deported to Auschwitz, my father’s list of debtors was that thick… He used to sell on credit and the amount of debt that had accumulated was so high, that it was almost worth the entire store! The store was located in our house. We had four rooms.
Two were the living quarters, one was for the store, and one was for the bar. In addition, we had a small summer kitchen. We also had a courtyard and a vegetable garden. My mother was in charge with the garden. She would grow tomatoes, cucumbers and the likes. My parents were poor. They didn’t have a horse cart, so they walked.
My parents were only too good. As good as gold. They were very devout [when it came to food]. Every time I went out to play with the peasants’ children, I was warned: ‘You may go, but don’t eat anything but fruit.’ And I obeyed. We only ate kosher meals at home. We had separate pots for dairy products and for meat.
We also had a larger vessel that we called parva – meaning large cup or bucket –, where water was stored. Using the water from the parva for cooking both dairies and meat was okay; but our faith didn’t allow us to take the water from the dairy products and use it to cook meat.
We didn’t eat pork – Jews are not allowed to eat any animal whose hooves are not split or that doesn’t ruminate. Take camels, for instance: they are ruminants, but their hooves are not split. Furthermore, we can’t eat blood. We didn’t just roast the chicken right after having it slaughtered. We took it home and sank it in cold water, then in salty water, then in cold water again – to remove all trace of blood.
As you know, Jews must have the blood veins removed from the meat. But the shochetim from the parts where I lived didn’t know how to do this, so we never ate the rear part of the animals – only the front part. Some people made a joke out of this: ‘Do you know why Jews don’t eat the rear part of the animal?
Because the animal went out from the barn and scratched its behind against a Christian cross’. The truth is the shochetim weren’t skillful enough to remove the veins. In Israel, for instance, they also eat the rear part – but they have trained people who know how to remove the veins.
My parents were not extremely religious. Being extremely religious means that you wear beard and whiskers, wear a kind of tallit [tallit katan]… We did wear a kippah though. We, the children, wanted to wear straw hats, just like the other [Christian] kids and my dear mother bought us ones and let us wear them, but sewed a kippah on the inside.
This way, she wanted to make sure that our heads were covered at all times. When we went caroling with the other boys [on Christmas’ Eve], my good mother always told us: ‘You may go, but be careful what you eat! Don’t accept bagels or anything else except apples. And walnuts.
And so we did. When the Christian Easter came, it was the same story – we didn’t eat anything from the peasants. I still wonder how I managed to refrain myself from ever eating bacon as a boy, despite the fact that I was surrounded by Christian friends who would have kept the ‘secret’. Can you imagine that? My mother’s word was that strong! She told us ‘you can’t do that’ and we listened to her. I never ate bacon before we returned [from deportation]. I committed to tradition from all my heart. The kashrut was sacred.
When there was a holiday, we would have a chicken slaughtered. Purim wasn’t such a big fuss, like it’s today. We went to the prayer house and my mother baked a large bagel. She bought milk from the village and made some butter for us. She lived by the principle that the children mustn’t lack anything – especially food.
Maybe our clothes weren’t always new and shiny, but food was never a problem. Even the religion says that it is a sin not to have anything to eat on holidays, because you cannot focus on a prayer properly when your mind keeps saying ‘What will I eat’? There was no synagogue in Fizesul Gherlei – only a prayer house.
Any house can be a prayer house as long as it has been stripped of beds and storing furniture. It can only have tables and chairs. That house wasn’t Jewish-owned – we just rented it from the Christians; no one lived there. The place is deserted now.
The tradition requests that a deserted house be demolished – and this goes for a synagogue too. Anyway, it’s better to demolish it than to let it be used by another cult. [Editor’s note: Mr. Blum likes to refer to sayings from the Romanian and Jewish folklore whose authenticity cannot be verified.]
When I was little we used to visit my uncle and aunt. I remember we came with our parents here, in Gherla, especially before the high holidays. They took us to the Jewish bathhouse [mikveh] before Rosh Hashanah and before Yom Kippur. We didn’t have a Jewish bathhouse in our village and the closest one was in Gherla.
Sometimes they took us to the tailor’s and ordered new clothes for us. In that period we went to my uncle’s with my mother and father, but we went only with them, children were not allowed to walk back and forth by themselves, but only with their parents. On Saturday, we only washed at home.
On every holiday, we would all have a large meal. No matter how poor a Jew was, he had to have a decent meal on holidays. My mother laid a white tablecloth (which wasn’t for everyday use) and two candles. As the candles were lit, we would say the ‘Baruch ata...’ prayer.
In my childhood I did have my share of being called a Jew – but let’s not forget that my classmates were country boys. In the first six years of school, I studied in Romanian. Then, in 7th grade, we switched to Hungarian [from 1940, during the ‘Hungarian era’] 2. I also went to the Jewish school, the cheder, where they taught us the Jewish faith. I woke up at 6 in the morning. My mother put something to eat in my bag and sent me to the cheder. There we learnt the prayers, as well as writing and reading in Hebrew.
But we only got as far as learning to read… I must have been three years old or so when I started going to the cheder. From there, I would head straight to the kindergarten or, when I got older, to school. At noon, I came back home, where I had lunch, then played with the others a little. In the afternoon, it was back to the cheder. We studied the Talmud Torah and the rest.
We learnt the prayers we were supposed to say on various occasions: in the morning, in the evening, before biting from the bread, before washing [our hands]… We learnt ‘Sema Israel’ – the Hebrew equivalent of ‘Our Father’. We also learnt how to read. The elders did a big mistake.
We say our prayers in Hebrew, but talk in Yiddish. There’s a big difference between the two. So I recited ‘Sema Israel’ in Hebrew or learnt the weekly pericope in Hebrew, but I used Yiddish to express myself. [Editor’s note: Students read in old Hebrew, but commented on the texts in Yiddish.] And the teacher translated for us. It was very, very hard. But we didn’t realize this contradiction. At home it was the same: we used Yiddish to communicate, but the prayers were in Hebrew. At least until the deportation.
I can hardly remember my bar mitzvah. All I recall is that, before the event proper, we learnt how to put on the tefillin and the tallit, and we memorized the prayer. It took place in our village – there were ten men, so it could be done.
In 1938 and 1939 the Goga-Cuza cabinet 3 was in power. At the Romanian public school there was only one teacher who picked on my brother Eugen for being Jewish. His name was Calugaru and he was a local. As we were devout, my brother refused to light the fire on Saturday, so this teacher forced his head inside the stove. I was a very bad pupil, as opposed to my siblings, who were always the first in their class. They say Jews have had to deal with rejection since time immemorial. And it’s true.
If it rains on Easter, they say it’s because the Jews have their own holiday. You see? Jews were always responsible for everything. This is why Jews have always kept a low profile: they didn’t get involved in politics and in debates, and they respected other people’s faith.
They had to respect the others, because those others were the ones who bought from them. Right? Then the Hungarians came in 1940 4. To tell you the truth, I didn’t realize what was going on. We were hoping to get rid of something bad [the persecutions endured under the Romanian rule], but things only went from bad to worse. You can imagine my confusion.
People were envious of the Jews, because they were the first in almost any field. They say Jews are smarter. Well, I don’t think that Jews are smarter; I think they were forced to be smarter in order not to starve. They were forced to study hard and acquire an education in order to advance. About a tenth of the Jews were lawyers, doctors or teachers.
The rest were workers, craftsmen – shoemakers, belt makers, tailors etc. – or tradesmen. There was this commune called Sanmartin [Editor’s note: Mr. Blum probably refers to a village located 7 kilometers away from Oradea, in Bihor County. There is another village with the same name located 16 kilometers away from Miercurea Ciuc, in Harghita County.], where there lived Jewish farmers.
But they only sold goods to other Jews. That’s because the [non-Jewish] farmers prepare the cheese in the same pots they used for bacon. So there had to be Jewish peasants who made kosher cheese and sold it to other Jews. Those devout and pure-hearted Jewish peasants were mostly shepherds from Maramures.
Then there were the Jews who went from village to village carrying wicker baskets with “albastreala” [Editor’s note: Romanian for an indigo-blue substance that can decompose the color yellow and that is used at home and in industry to increase the whiteness of some objects.]. When women did laundry, they added albasteala to make them look cleaner and smell better. It also went by the name of mireala. It was also used to give lime a bluish tint. [Editor’s note: These practices can still be found today in the backwoods of Romania.]
But I can tell you that there were people who lived from one day to the next. They formed the destitute peasantry. I know this from my own experience. There were people who came to my father’s store to trade an egg for four lumps of sugar.
They went to the butcher’s and asked for a funt of meat – that only meant a quarter of a kilogram. [Editor’s note: ‘Funt’ is a Regional form of the Romanian ‘pfund’, an old weight measure unit equal to 0.5 or 0.25 kg – depending on the region where it was used. It comes from the German ‘Pfund’.]
People just couldn’t afford to buy by the kilogram. One would say ‘Sell me on credit and I’ll pay you on Saturday evening, as I’m going to Gherla to chop wood.’ He went to Gherla, did the work, got paid, and came back on foot, wearing opinci [Editor’s note: ‘Opinca’, pl. ‘opinci’ (Romanian), The oldest type of footwear is peasant sandals (opinci) worn with woollen or felt foot wraps (obiele) or woollen socks (caltuni). http://www.eliznik.org.uk/RomaniaPortul/footwear.htm]. ‘How much do I owe you, Mr. Blum?’ he would ask. There were eight Jewish families in Fizesul Gherlei: Mauritiu Blum, Herman Hiller, Weiss, Sigismund Feierstein, Rozika Deutsch, Baumel, Szerena Abraham, and Ludovic Feierstein.
We looked different from the peasants because of how we dressed. The peasants wore homemade clothes – like some still do today. As of 1943 or so, my own mother started to weave clothes at home, as we didn’t have money to buy new ones. We began to have our boots patched too.
We would show my father a broken boot, and he’d say: ‘Well, go and have another patch added.’ When the Passover had passed, people gave up their warm clothes and only wore a long shirt. That was all – no underwear or anything. We all had a long shirt and walked around barefoot. We only wore shoes on holidays. We, the children, would join the peasants’ kids and play in the field barefoot. My parents dressed modestly too – but they were Jewish clothes.
All my brothers graduated from primary school in Fizesul Gherlei 7 grades. Matei went to Gherla to study in a commerce school for an extra five years I believe. He worked for a Jew who owned a hardware store. But, one day, the man told him: ‘My boy, you should go home; I have no use for you here anymore’ – they had confiscated his store. So my brother came back home.
My parents owned a store until 1943. Then things got really hard… Here’s what happened. The store sold most of the items needed in the countryside: tobacco, alcohol, petrol, cotton, sugar, and so on and so forth. But the State began to enforce its monopoly in trading most of these goods; they started with tobacco and alcohol, but didn’t stop there. Soon, the items that my father could sell legally were limited to so few (candy, flour etc.), that the store couldn’t secure our living anymore. My parents had a very hard time.
Today I have this little home and a small pension – but it’s already more than we had back then… If they bought food, they ran out of money and couldn’t renew the store’s supplies anymore… Plus they had to provide clothes for the two sons who went to work [in the forced labor detachments] – and the Army didn’t give them anything. And there were three more children at home to take care of. Things were very, very tough. You can’t imagine how tough they were unless you were there… This is what happened in 1943.
After 1943 we had to wear the Yellow Star 5. Of course we had to. When we were among kids of our age – Romanians and Hungarians – we felt ashamed. It’s not like they pointed their fingers at us or beat us. It’s just that we were sort of embarrassed. But the only times we really felt discrimination was when we went to the so-called ‘pre-military training’ – they called it Levente 6 in Hungarian. We weren’t allowed to walk alongside non-Jewish recruits. They had special caps, while we only wore our everyday clothes and caps.
They took us to work at the priest’s house or at the places of the other Levente commanders. Most of them gave us something to eat. But the priest’s wife didn’t let us sit at their table. Nor did the notary, who had us clean his garden. If truth be told, we weren’t treated very badly – it’s just that we were tagged. Matei and Ernest were drafted and sent to the Hungarian labor detachments in 1942 and, respectively, in 1943. They didn’t give them working clothes – they had to bring their own.
After my older brothers, Matei and Ernest, had been taken to forced labor – along with all the other Jewish men –, my brother and I started working with horse-pulled carts. We borrowed them from the Jews who had been left at home (women, children and elderly ones). What did we use them for? Well, the Hungarians were looking for natural gas.
The Romanians were already extracting it in Sarmas and Sarmasel [Editor’s note: Currently in Mures County, in an area that remained under Romanian authority even after the Second Vienna Dictate] 4 and we were close to the border, which passed through Sucutard [currently in Cluj County] and next to the lake. So the Hungarians thought there must be natural gas here too.
They were using a method of detection based on coal. The coal was brought to Gherla by train from the mines and it had to be carried further by cart. This is where my brother and I stepped in. But we didn’t do it for nothing, you know? Both the families who owned the carts and us got paid.
We began to sense something bad was going to happen [before the deportation], but my mother kept saying: ‘Oh, it’s nothing really; they’ll take us to work, but the war will be over soon and we’ll be right back.’ At 16, I was the youngest in my family. Who could have foreseen the deportations? When talking to each other – in Yiddish –, my mother and father seemed to agree that we would only be taken to work somewhere else and we would return as soon as the war was over. My poor mother! She genuinely believed in this…
Then, one morning, in 1944, my brother and I were on our way to two Jewish families who lent us their carts. They lived in the opposite part of the village. When we reached the center of the village and crossed the bridge – I remember it was a clear morning, in the month of May – someone called us to the mayor’s office. We entered and found two Hungarian gendarmes and the mayor. ‘You are under arrest!’ he announced. I had no idea what ‘arrest’ meant, since I had never been ‘under arrest’.
But my brother Eugen, who was 2 years older than me, knew what it meant. They didn’t let us return home. They escorted us to the Jew who lived closest to the mayor’s office – a destitute fellow who made pottery and whose house was near the Christian-Orthodox church. He had a horse and a cart, so they made him and his family (4-5 children) board the cart and prepare to go. Then they took us home to get dressed for the road.
Our poor mother and father were already aware of what was going on. When we got home, the house was already surrounded by pre-military servicemen. When I got inside, my mother told me: ‘Put on an extra change of clothes.’ I packed a change of clothes and I put on an extra change, like she said.
My father grabbed some bread, a pillow and things like that – they didn’t let us exceed a certain weight. The carts were already waiting for us outside. We didn’t have a cart, so a Hungarian neighbor carried us in his. Most of the other Jews did have their own cart.
So they put us in the cart and took us to the brick factory in Gherla. All the carts were sent back to the village, where the deserted houses lay defenseless, with everything that had been left behind: clothes, furniture, and other belongings. As soon as we got to the factory, they confiscated my father’s wedding ring, my mother’s earrings, and my sister’s earrings too. The place was surrounded by gendarmes. We stayed there two or three weeks – I can’t remember exactly, but I think there were two.
We lived the sheds that were used to manufacture bricks. They didn’t have walls – just ceilings. We could only rely on the things we had brought along. Think about it: there we were, all the Jews from the villages located in Gherla’s proximity – a total of about 7,000 people. Each village had at least two or three Jewish families.
One day, the order to move out came. We could no longer carry any of the few things we had brought along – not even a pillow… They put us in train cars whose windows had been covered with planks and took us straight to the brick factory in Cluj. I was only a child and, although I was witnessing those things first hand, I didn’t realize why they were doing them. I’ll tell you the truth: after two weeks spent in Cluj, any sense of normality had been lost. Everyone cried. The only people who still prayed were rabbis and the really devout…
The others had lost all hope in God and even claimed – may God forgive me – that there is no God! You can imagine how serious things were, if people had reached this state of mind… And things were pretty serious. There were Jews whose legs were burnt with red-hot iron to make them confess where they had hidden their gold. They didn’t torture the ones from the countryside – only those who had owned large stores and were known to be well-off. You know how life is: some people get rich, others don’t.
My parents, for instance, didn’t go through this ordeal, because they were known to be poor – our captors were pretty well informed. No one came to help us and bring us food because the gendarmes were everywhere. Anyone who claims otherwise is making up stories! [Editor’s note: Mr. Blum probably refers to the individuals who claim to have helped the Jews in distress back in those days.] You know how it is: … There may have been one or two people, but the vast majority didn’t raise a finger. You know why? They were afraid.
Or they simply didn’t care: ‘Why go there and help them? Let them rot in hell!’ There are two kinds of human beings in the world: good and bad. When we were deported, some thought ‘It’s a good thing they’re finally gone’ and others thought ‘Maybe, but what about the children?’ You see? No one did anything. Romanians, Hungarians, Gypsies, Germans and the rest – they all just sat there and watched.
The way from Cluj to Auschwitz was by train. We were put in cattle cars. [Editor’s note: 16,148 Jews were deported from Cluj in the period 25 May - 9 June 1944.] Forgive me for saying this, but there was no place to relieve ourselves. No water or anything else.
Babies were crying in the arms of their mothers, whose bosoms were dry for lack of food. Whenever an elderly died, we would stack the body upon other corpses, to make more room in the crowded car. I didn’t do this myself, but I witnessed it being done. I was still young, so I didn’t quite grasp the meaning of what was going on. But can you imagine what was going on in that car? We finally got to Auschwitz [Mr. Blum’s voice is more and more feeble], and they made us get off.
The whole family was there. The Nazis were selecting the newly arrived and two groups were being formed: men and women. My brother Eugen and I were pointed in one direction, while my mother and my sister were sent to the other group. I don’t know what became of them. That was the last time I ever saw them… Some inmates later told me that they spotted them at work – which means they weren’t sent straight to the gas chambers. This is how we ended up in the Auschwitz-Birkenau labor camp.
They shaved our heads, removed our clothes, made us take a bath, and had us tattooed with numbers. I ceased to be an individual with a name as I became ‘Auschwitz 10919’ [Interviewer’s note: Mr. Blum shows the tattoo on his left forearm.]. There was a factory near Auschwitz. It belonged to I.G. Farben [German industrial conglomerate] and was called Buna. [Editor’s note: synthetic rubber plant located at the outskirts of the Polish town of Monowice; it was established in the spring of 1941.] 22,000 of us ‘Heftling’ – which means ‘inmates’ – worked there. [Editor’s note: Established in 1942, Buna was the largest sub-camp of Auschwitz.
In November 1943, it became a separate administrative unit designated Auschwitz III. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Buna.html]. Next to our camp there was a place where they kept American prisoners of war – captured in combat or parachuted from planes and caught on enemy territory. They let them keep their uniform. There were thousands of them, but we only saw them from a distance. There was no contact with them – it was strictly forbidden.
In the morning we would get a sort of coffee. That’s what they called it, but it was anything but coffee – it was a substitute. They also gave us a little piece of bread. I don’t know what they made it from, but it wasn’t nourishing at all. You know that ‘real’ bread is rolled in flour after it’s done, to prevent loaves from sticking to one another – well, they rolled it in sawdust over there. A loaf was split in four quarters and had to suffice four people. There was also the synthetic marmalade.
And let’s not forget the ‘sausage’ – they called it ‘Wurst’; it looked like foam and was made from leftovers – certainly not meat or anything like it. At noon they gave us beet – the kind of beet used to feed cattle, not sugar beet. In the evening we got a sort of soup – but never as much as we wanted. The number of ladlefuls to which every inmate was entitled was very limited.
As for the ‘plates’, they were coarse metal bowls that were never enough. You had to wait for someone to finish eating to get their bowl. There were 50-100 bowls for ‘Essen’ – which means ‘food’ – and many more inmates. Trust me, we were like animals! It was every man for himself. If you didn’t hold on to your piece of bread, another inmate would grab it from you. Like animals, really.
In the morning and in the evening they aligned us and counted us. None of the 22,000 inmates was allowed to miss that count, unless he or she was dead. The wake-up call was at 4 or 5 a.m. They started early because they had to move us out of the camp, to the factory. It was already 10 o’clock when everyone had left the camp.
The inmates aligned for counting according to their barracks. The head of each barracks – called block leader – stood at the front of each group. I can’t remember the number of the barracks I lived in.
I only remember that the block leader was a political prisoner, as his badge indicated – a red inverted triangle superimposed upon a yellow one, forming the Star of David. I had my own badge here, on the jacket, and here, on the pants. [Editor’s note: Nazi concentration camp badges, made primarily of inverted triangles, were used to identify the reason the prisoners had been placed there.
The triangles were made of fabric and were sewn on jackets and shirts. These had specific meanings indicated by their color and shape: some groups had to put letter insignia on their triangles to denote country of origin. Red triangle with a letter: ‘P’ (‘Polen’, Poles), ‘T’ (‘Tschechen’, Czechs).
The most common colors were: black for the mentally retarded, alcoholics, vagrants, the habitually ‘Work-Shy’, or a woman jailed for ‘anti-social behavior’; green was for criminals; pink was for a homosexual or bisexual man; purple was for the Jehovah's Witnesses; red was for a political prisoner. Double triangles: two superimposed yellow triangles forming the Star of David was for a Jew, including Jews by practice or descent; red inverted triangle superimposed upon a yellow one, forming the Star of David was to tag Jewish political prisoners.
There were many markings and combinations.] The counting was made by the ‘Schreibestube’ [clerks], who kept a record of us all. Then the SS officer came and redid the counting. Then the block leader called our names. After we had eaten in the barracks, we would align according to the work squad we belonged to. Each squad was led by a Kapo wearing a green triangle.
Those were the actual convicts. The Nazis picked them from regular prisons and sent them to concentration camps, to be in charge of the inmates. They came in various forms – some were good people, some weren’t... ‘Hundert und fünf und fünfzich’ – 155: that was my work squad. When the block leader gave the order, we all went out marching in the sound of band tunes. When we got to the gates of the camp, there was a final counting. Then we went to work, with the Kapo in front.
We worked at the construction site of the new factory. There wasn’t such thing as a work schedule: we practically worked till we dropped. There were certain rules for the ‘deployment’ of the work squads. The SS would have them move in a certain order. We had to wait until we could line up and start marching. The factory was located about one and a half kilometer away from the camp. We walked all the way. Some began working at the construction proper, others did other things. I [recently] got involved in a discussion about gas.
I watched on TV that blast which happened in Bucharest. And I recalled the pipes… I was working at some sort of concrete foundation they were digging in the dirt; it was narrow and several kilometers long. I imagine they were planning to insert pipes, like one would do in the case of a refinery. That’s what I think they were doing.
The site was located next to the existing factory and was followed by two kilometers of empty land. Several squads worked there. The premises were surrounded with barbed wire and watched by guards posted every 50-100 meters. There was also an electrified fence. Just like in the camp. Those who claimed it was possible to escape from the camp didn’t know what they were talking about.
There were electrified barbed wire fences everywhere – so it was impossible to escape. The few attempts were mostly made by people who had lost all hope; they would usually be shot by the guard from the tower before they even got to the first fence. No one was allowed to pass that fence.
There was a sign with a skull and the word ‘Achtung!’ [‘Keep out!’], indicating that the territory beyond that line was off-limits. Further away there was another barbed wire, then another fence, then a final fence. They were all electrified and their height increased gradually. As if they weren’t enough, there was also the guard tower, outside the camp.
The barracks were very crowded – I think there were at least three hundred of us in each block. There were three rows of ‘beds’ and we were as crammed up as sardines. During the night, if one wanted to turn around, he caused the entire row to turn around at the same time. No mattresses, just straw. And there was a blanket ‘downstairs’ and one ‘upstairs’. We didn’t have separate beds – just three rows of planks.
There were times when we were so many that they had to use Zertlger. That was a sort of tent – like the ones the military use today – that could accommodate some twenty people. The worst thing that could happen to a tent dweller was to end up in the upper part – the sun really heated up that tent.
The transports kept arriving and there was no room for new-comers anymore. To be honest, I can’t remember exactly why they took us out of the barracks and put us there [in the tent]. But I suppose they did it to make room for the new-comers. We were already ‘well trained’ – we had got used to the camp’s routine. The Blockführer [block leader] simply showed up one day and told us: ‘Everybody follow me! From now on, this is where you will sleep.’
My brother and I lived in the same block; we even slept next to each other. I had the ‘bed’ no. 19 and he had no. 20. I was inmate no. 10919 and he was inmate no. 10920. He was a handsome fellow. So I kept very much in touch with my brother, but I didn’t know anything about the other members of my family. And I never found out what happened to them.
One day I hurt my hand [the index finger of the right hand]. The camp had a sort of infirmary, but the sick and wounded that got there didn’t come back alive – unless they were easily recoverable. The camp needed laborers, not sick people! IG Farben paid the SS a certain amount for each inmate that worked for them.
The corporation had a sort of contract with the Third Reich. So the SS had no interest in killing us all at once when they could trade us as workforce. This is why they built this infirmary. I remember this doctor from Cluj – his name was Kiraly. He took me to the infirmary and inserted a rubber tube in my finger to drain the pus. He’s one of the few people in the camp that I remember.
The camp was a terrible nightmare. And I believe the entire mankind should feel ashamed for what happened down there. Look, if a guy came to me with a gun in his hand and wanted to shoot me, it would only be fair that I defend myself and try to shoot him first – this I can understand; it’s common sense, after all. But torturing, gassing, and burning elderly people, babies, and little children are things that don’t make any sense! Here’s how I found out about the gassing.
There were a number of inmates that had been there since the beginning – Jews and non-Jewish Poles who had survived since 1939 or 1940 because they were in good shape when they arrived. We, ‘the new ones’, kept complaining about the living conditions and the ‘veterans’ told us: ‘Stop whining! For the past years, you’ve been eating well at home and living a normal life.
As for us, it’s been the same ordeal every day since 1939-1940. Wait till you see the smoke from the chimneys and you’ll be thankful you’re still alive.’ On occasion, we spoke in Yiddish with them. I mean, the older inmates did – I was just a kid [and he was too young to get involved in conversations with the grown-ups].
Soon we began to lose weight… Among us, we used to call one another a ‘Muslim’ – because of the way we looked. [Editor’s note: A Muslim represents in the Eastern Europeans popular believes someone who is very skinny and starving, a term associated with African and Asian poor developed areas.] Every week there would be an inspection.
The weakest inmates were taken away. The guards used all sorts of tricks. For instance, they would claim those people were taken to a place where they would regain their strength.
Then the Poles told us where they really took them: to the gas chambers and to the crematoria. We asked those veteran fellow-inmates when we would see our parents again and their evasive reply – ‘Don’t worry, that day will come’ – made us realize the terrible truth…
The Nazis didn’t see us as human beings. They were the only ones whose idea of a shower was lethal gas instead of water. We had been ‘lucky’: when they sent us to the showers, the day of our arrival, they really poured water. But many others got the deadly gas. Inmates who had been close to the crime scene told us the horrible details.
The gas fell down from the ceiling, but it was only when it came in contact with the wet floor that the deadly reaction was unchained. When the first victims collapsed, the others began to wander around like crazy, looking for a safer spot. But no spot was safe and the doors were closed tight and locked. In the end, the room was filled by a sea of dead bodies.
The SS had selected the fittest of the inmates and formed a special squad, called Sonderkommando – I don’t know what it means. [Editor’s note: The ‘Special Squad’, also known as the ‘Death Squad’, was formed of inmates who were in charge with the asphyxiation and the cremation of the deportees; their job was to keep the gassing chambers and the crematoria running properly. Their ‘office’ lasted for four months, at the end of which they were gassed themselves by means of a new special squad.] The members of the Sonderkommando lived in a separate camp.
They were the ones who entered the gas chambers and removed the corpses using pliers and crowbars. The Sonderkommandos were divided into several groups, each with a specialized function: some removed the bodies from the gas chambers, some cut the inmates’ hair, some extracted gold teeth and removed clothes and valuables etc. Every three or six months, the Sonderkommandos were gassed themselves. I didn’t see all these things with my own eyes, mind you – I learnt about them from ex-inmates, after we had been liberated.
Work [in the factory] continued until 15 or 16 January [1945]. I later heard from others that it may have been until 15-20 January. Then things got even harder. They stopped feeding us at all. Like I said, Mendl [Eugen] and I had been in the camp together ever since we had got separated from our parents. But, in the end [in 1945], we lost track of each other. When the Russians entered Poland, the Nazis began to evacuate Auschwitz-Birkenau – I was living in Buna [also known as Auschwitz III]. They started to herd us like cattle, by the thousands. My brother and I got separated from each other in this commotion and we never saw each other again. This happened in January 1945. They took us to Mauthausen, Austria. A part of the trip was made on foot and the other part – by train.
But the Americans were closing in, so we had become a burden for the Nazis. I spent about one month in Mauthausen. They didn’t put us to work anymore. They just kept us there with no food or anything. Many others arrived in labor detachments from other camps – some of them were people I knew. For instance, my brother Gershun [Ernest]. The Hungarians had taken him to forced labor in Ukraine. From there, he somehow ended up in Mauthausen. But he didn’t recognize me. He was so sick and weakened that he wasn’t aware of who I was anymore. He was a wreck. My cousin Ludovic Blum was in a better condition – at least he recognized me. He took me by the hand and urged me to keep marching, although I was tired and desperately needed to rest. But the SS would shoot the inmates who sat down.
So we [left Mauthausen and] ended up in a forest near an Austrian town called Wels. We were totally exhausted. I weighed no more than 21 kilograms… They wanted to get it over with and kill us in that forest – they really had no use for us anymore. But we were liberated by the Americans on 5 or 6 May 1945. The GIs took us to a barracks that was turned into a sort of hospital.
The place was enclosed and guarded by sentinels, so no one could walk in or out. They gathered all the physicians they could find because we needed a special diet. Many of the inmates who could move on their own had scattered in the neighborhood. The German and Austrian civilians – we were in Austria – took pity on them and gave them food. But the poor men – who had been starving for months and years – ate too much and died because their body couldn’t deal with the unexpectedly large food intake. So the Americans confined us in that hospital and fed us small portions.
They identified the doctors and nurses among us and – regardless of the reason why they had been sent to Auschwitz – they assigned us to take care of us. It didn’t matter whether they were Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Romanians, Gypsies or any other nation. Whoever had basic medical training was forced to attend to us.
They started feeding us diet food – I don’t know what it was, but their intelligence knew all about it. [Editor’s note: What Mr. Blum means is that the Allies possessed information about the existence of the extermination and labor camps and about the way inmates were treated in these facilities.]
Anyway, they started by giving us instant oat porridge. I stayed in that hospital until October. My brother Gershun had died in the meantime [after they had met in Mauthausen]. Ant all the others were dead too. [Mr. Blum means Margareta and Eugen.] When I checked out from that hospital, I weighed 25 kilograms.
While we were still in hospital, they asked us: ‘Where to now?’ The American and British armies had Jewish servicemen. They wore the Star of David on their uniform and urged us to go to Israel. But I was only a kid and, like many others, said that I wanted to go back home and reunite with my family.
One day they asked us for the last time and some of us said we had to go back to Hungary – that’s where we lived [Editor’s note: At the time of the deportation, northern Transylvania belonged to Hungary.] 4. Our passports arrived and we went to Hungary, near Budapest. The country was controlled by the Americans and the Russians – each party had its own territory.
The Americans accompanied us to the Danube. The bridge had been bombed, so we crossed the river on a pontoon bridge. In Budapest we found this organization… [Editor’s note: ‘Zsidó Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottsága’ (DEGOB), an organization financed by the American Joint Distribution Committee that helped the former concentration camp inmates to return home.
The organization was located at 2 Bethlen Sq.] We didn’t stay in Budapest long – the trains had began to run again. I was accompanied by my cousin Iosif Blum and by Geza Deutsch, a friend. The three of us eventually got to Fizesul Gherlei.
We couldn’t return to our houses – they had been confiscated. The mayor had assigned three families to live in my house. My brother Matei was already in Fizesul Gherlei when we got there. He had been to our house, but hadn’t moved back in, since there was no furniture left.
None of the Jews who returned from forced labor – my brother Matei, Ludovic Feierstein, and Emanuel Abraham, who was a former fellow-inmate of my brother’s – could return to their old places, so they rented a house together and started working. My brother opened a small store. Ludovic worked as a butcher – he only slaughtered small animals, like poultry and lambs. This is how they earned their living when I found them. I moved in with them.
We didn’t get any help from anyone. We received no foreign aids. The Joint 7 only showed up in 1947 or so – but they only brought clothes, not food. The Joint was based in America. And they had no idea we needed help down there in the countryside. [Editor’s note: What Mr. Blum means is that they had to get by without the organized forms of support that were active in cities – such as the Organization of the Jewish Youth.]
Our old house had been stripped of anything. After we were gone, the village leaders took all the ‘good stuff’: furniture, clothes – which my mother poor mother had prepared for our sister’s dowry –, blankets, pillows etc.
The ‘prey’ was split among the mayor, the gendarme, and other notabilities, you see? They even held a sort of auction for a barrel. We had no one to turn to. We had no choice but to act as unkindly as those who had acted against us… But we did get our house back in the end.
After he was given the old house back, my brother Matei opened a textile store. He married a woman named Miriam in 1946. She was Jewish too. She had been born in Cluj and she was religious. They had a son whom they named Iankef, just like my father – the baby’s grandfather.
But the newly emerged communist regime didn’t seem to have abandoned persecution as a means of governing the country; they were beginning to ask questions: ‘Who are you?’, ‘What are you?’ (My father had been a tradesman and this occupation was seen very badly by the new officials.)
My brother Matei got very upset and applied for emigration. He left for Israel in 1949. That was not the best time to travel, especially if you had a small child. He couldn’t fly, so he had to embark a ship. He lived in various places and spent most of his active life as a farmer in a moshav. His last residence was in Akko. [Editor’s note: Israeli town on the shore of the Mediterranean located between Haifa and Nahariyya.] That is where he passed away in 2002. His wife had died 2 years before.
During the entire duration of the communist era, all those who didn’t want to go to the army were sent to work – a rule that applied to everyone, Jewish or non-Jewish. [Editor’s note: In the communist period, people who refused to do the military service had to do community work instead.]
There were Jews who preferred to work. But I said to myself: ‘Damn it, I had my share of work without pay!’ And I joined the army. I was in Ploiesti and Campina, both localities are situated in the South of Romania. The military service lasted 2 years. I was discharged in 1951. I did it because I was simply fed up with shoveling dirt!
When my brother Matei left for Israel with his wife and daughter, in 1949, I was already serving in the army. I made no attempt to go with him. Perhaps if I had spent more time with him and he had insisted enough, he would have persuaded me to join them… But it wasn’t the case.
After I got back from the army, I lived with Ludovic Feierstein, the butcher. With my brother gone, the house was empty [in the sense that Mr. Blum didn’t have any close relatives near him]. I got along well with Ludovic, who was much older than me. He used to have a wife, Reghina Feierstein, and a little boy, Emil, but they lost their lives in the camp. His wife was the one who lent me the cart at the time when I was working in the village, before the deportation – Ludovic had been taken to forced labor in 1942 or 1943, but his family had stayed in the village until we were all deported. Then, in 1965, Ludovic left for Israel too.
Here’s how I met my wife. I had come back from the army to Fizesul Gherlei, but there were no Jewish girls in the village anymore. As you can imagine, back then, it was considered a shame for a Jew to marry someone who wasn’t Jewish. There were cases of Jews marrying Christian girls, but they were very rare.
Nevertheless, I didn’t find the thought of spending my entire life alone appealing at all. So I found me a Christian girl. Her name was Rozalia, nee Hideg. She was born on 16 September 1933 in Fizesul Gherlei. Hungarian was her native tongue. One of her uncles was a neighbor of ours and that’s how I met her. After courting her properly, I asked her if she wanted to marry me. She said yes.
She had no income. As for me, thanks to my trade, I did have nice clothes, but that was it – I had no fortune. So I told her: ‘Take a good look at me and think it over. I have nothing except the house where I grew up.’ She was poor too, but that didn’t matter. We went to the mayor’s office and got married. We didn’t have a religious ceremony because it’s not allowed for a Jew [in case of a mixed marriage]. We got married in 1952. We’ve been together for 53 years now.
We didn’t wish to leave for Israel, unlike many Jews who emigrated. Ludovic – a cousin from Iosif’s side – was among them. They kept leaving. Commerce was on the verge of a crisis – and most of the Jews had been involved in commerce. People began to face all sorts of shortages and Jews were the first who took the blame.
We felt that we didn’t belong here anymore. Some hesitated to leave because of their children, who had been raised here. But the same children also gave them a pretty good reason to leave – because there was no future for them here anymore.
Besides, many Jews wanted to keep the faith alive and were aware that interethnic marriages would cause the faith to fade away… [Editor’s note: With the Jewish population dramatically diminishing, religious Jews thought it was a moral duty to emigrate to Israel in order to avoid interethnic marriages.]
So I was left alone [without his brother and his brother’s friend]. I just didn’t go and that’s that! No point in discussing this. Before, we weren’t allowed to bury goyim in our cemetery. But look at people like my wife and me: we’ve been together for so many years.
So the rabbinate gave a decree that allowed it. Apart from that, the Jewish religion is still very strict. If it weren’t so, it would vanish. I don’t mean to sound patriotic or something – I’m just a country boy who never got further than 7th grade –, but here it goes: when you think of all the religions that disappeared over the centuries, you can’t but wonder at how the Jewish faith survived – even scattered in the four corners of the world.
I owned horses and a cart until 1962. I worked as a wagoner. I was also a bit of a butcher, but I was soon forbidden to work on my own – the State became the owner of everything 8. So I relied on my cart. Peasants would need to have a lamb slaughtered from time to time.
I took care of this, bought the hide, and took it to the authorities. They paid me and I, in my turn, paid the peasants for the hide. I had to deliver 150 hides. I did the slaughtering on Sunday and delivered the hides on Monday morning. When cars began to appear, I knew my cart had lived its days.
There was little left for me to do in my village, so I threw away my cart and started looking for another job. My friends found me a position at the sausage factory [in Gherla]. Two of their employees had been drafted, so there was an opening. They hired me as an untrained worker in 1959.
That was only fair, since I had no education except my 7 grades. When I came back [after World War II], I made no attempt to continue my education. When I moved to Gherla, I had already been working in the factory for some time. From 1959 to 1962 I commuted by bike from Fizesul Gherlei to Gherla.
The road had no asphalt. This was also true for the town proper, where streets were paved with stones, not covered with asphalt. The commute became a pain in the neck – I worked till late and got home close to midnight or even after midnight. So we decided to move to Gherla, which we did in 1962. We sold my parents’ house in the village and built this one over here.
When we moved in, it had no doors or windows. At first, we occupied a single room that we had fitted with windows. It took three years to finish the house – I was just a worker and didn’t have money… I spent 20 more years or so working in the sausage factory.
In the end, I was transferred to a butcher’s shop. Here’s how it happened. The Hungarian Jew who worked as a butcher in this State-owned consumption cooperative [Editor’s note: In the communist era, the service industry was dominated by the system of ‘consumption and credit cooperatives’, thousands of distinct State-owned ‘business units’ that activated in fields such as: retail, production, services, restaurants and tourism, wholesale trade with food, credits. These cooperatives formed Centrocoop (The Central Union of Consumption Cooperatives), a gigantic, centralized, State-controlled organization founded in 1950.] applied for emigration to Israel. The manager of the cooperative came to our factory to look for a new butcher.
My boss recommended me. I was just a worker, but my boss thought I would be good for that job. The problem was that the job came with greater responsibility: I was supposed to do bookkeeping too. So the manager of the butcher’s shop had to get the Party’s approval to hire me. [Editor’s note: Getting the Party’s approval for a transfer was a practically unavoidable step in a highly centralized, bureaucratic, State-owned, and Party-controlled economy.] My work schedule improved: 8 hours a day. For instance, at the factory, I was used to working until I finished my task, not according to a fixed schedule… I spent 32 years in this butcher’s shop. I was the one who kept the keys – my boss trusted me a lot. I retired in 1991.
I never had any problems at work because I was a Jew or because I had a brother who lived in Israel. After all, I was a simple worker… Had I held a higher position – like clerk – or had I been working for the Party, things may have been different. I never tried to hide my faith. When my coworkers saw me come, they would say ‘Here comes the jidan’. [Editor’s note: ‘Jidan’ is usually a derogatory term for Jew in Romanian, but, in this particular context it is used as a familiar and even kind appellation.]
But I didn’t mind; on the contrary I would admit it: ‘Yes, it’s true, I am a jidan’. Besides, they didn’t mean it as an insult, you know. In these parts, we don’t say ‘Jew’, but ‘jidan’. It wasn’t pejorative or anything. On occasion, my coworkers asked me to tell them stories from my deportation days.
Being a Jew is not easy. [Editor’s note: Mr. Blum often uses this expression in Yiddish. To illustrate it, he tells the following story.] There was a Jew in Gherla. His name was Bela Stein and he used to be a printer before the deportation. His father made kosher cheese and employed several Jews who milked sheep for him.
The entire family was deported. Bela Stein survived. When he came back he began the formalities to take the land of his family back. By 1946, he had got his properties back. But he couldn’t enjoy them for long: in 1948 the regime confiscated them again and sent him to the Canal, like all the other kulaks 9. [Editor’s note: In 1949 began the construction of the Danube-Black Sea Canal. Many of the workers were political prisoners from the communist jails. Work came to a halt in 1955, only to be resumed in 1975 and completed in 1984.
The Canal starts south of the town of Cernavoda and ends in Agigea, south of the city of Constanta. It connects the Danube to the Black Sea and cuts down the way to the sea with almost 400 kilometers.] The new regime finished the job of the Nazis and Hungarians: those who had escaped the Holocaust were deported by the Communists and ended up at the Canal. [Editor’s note: This must not be taken as a general truth; this is Mr. Blum’s generalization.] Stein only got away after friends of his from the US made pressures on the Romanian government. He left for Israel.
This wasn’t the only in which a Jew was released as a result of foreign pressure. For instance, there was another Jew from Dej who used to trade cattle… I don’t know what they had against him, but they put him in jail. In his days as a cattle trader, he had helped a shochet with kosher meat. That shochet, who had fled to America when the Communists came to power, went to our embassy in the US and arranged for the trader to be released.
I want to stress out that a destitute peasant had a far easier time than us. No one picked on him – they just let him live his petty life. But Jews were under constant suspicion. Think of that trial that took place in Hungary, before World War I [Editor’s note: Mr. Blum refers to the Tiszaeszlar trial.] 10 Jews were accused of using Christian blood when making matzah. That’s no story. It’s an accusation that has been inflicted on Jews since I don’t know when. Or think of the Dreyfus trial 11.
As a Jew, these things grieve me. But what about them? They killed my parents and my siblings. Isn’t that a shame for all mankind? No matter what they give me in compensation, they cannot redeem themselves. I may say I forgive them, but my heart will never forget what they did. Think of those who move to another faith… How can they do that? Don’t they think of their mother and father, who are in Heaven? What would they say if they knew their offspring gave up the faith they were born into? It’s the same with Jews.
Once a Jew, always a Jew! You can’t turn a Jew into a Catholic. Similarly, a Christian will never become a Jew, even if he formally converts to Judaism. We must be true to the faith we were born into. I told my daughter: ‘You tell everyone that you come from a Jewish father and a Hungarian mother. Whether they accept you or not – that’s their problem!’
The friends we had in Gherla were Jews, Hungarians, and Romanians. We used to visit the Jewish ones especially on Purim, when we exchanged the traditional cakes. When I was little, I would go around with cakes more often than after the war.
All these troubles caused some of the faith to be lost… But a rabbi said: ‘In the middle of all this cruelty, turn not to God, but to Man, for he is the one responsible.’ [Editor’s note: This phrase can be heard on the occasion of the Holocaust commemorations. Mr. Blum may have heard it from Liviu Beris, survivor of Transnistria, vice-president of the Romanian Holocaust Survivors’ Association.]
As a Jew, I always felt a bit fearful... I kept to myself more than others. I did play with other kids, but I hesitated before going to the teacher’s or to the priest’s house… I think I was born with this. I was fearful under the communist regime too. Did I have faith that things would get better after the war?
When I came back from deportation, no one welcomed me with open arms. There were some who said ‘The poor man, he has returned… Let’s give him a slice of bread.’ But there were others who thought ‘He should’ve stayed there!’ That’s why I say there are two kinds of people in the world: good and bad. I experienced this first hand. It’s true, I was a bit of a coward in the sense that I didn’t go after the ones who took away our things while we were gone.
But my brother spotted a guy who was using a pair of scales that had belonged to our store – back then, this was a valuable item, especially if you were penniless. The guy wouldn’t give it back, so my brother took his case in front of the mayor. Eventually, the man was forced to return the pair of scales.
My brother didn’t get involved in politics at all. That’s why he left. As for me, I didn’t care about Communism. I just did my job and cashed my paycheck. That was all. Let me tell you something: Communism wasn’t meant to be a dictatorship. It was supposed to be a form of socialism: if one has the right to own 100 hectares or a factory, the workers, in their turn, should have the right to say ‘Look, I won’t work for 1 leu, but for 5 because that’s how much I worth.’
This is what Socialism is about. I accidentally became a member of the U.T.M. [The Union of the Working Youth], but it did me good. I may have attended one or two meetings, but I never said a word. When they drafted me, they sent me to the school for instructors. Back in 1949 the army needed to create new officers. Everyone who had the right social origin could end up in the officers’ academy in Brasov.
My own social origin was a bit tricky. The ‘good’ part was that I was a Jew and my parents had been poor. The ‘bad’ part was that my father had been a tradesman and I had a brother in Israel. Still, they were willing to send me to the officers’ academy, but I declined. I chose the school for instructors instead. I was an artillery instructor and I was in command of three canons.
You see, I’m telling you things as they come to my mind – good or bad. My daughter, for instance, wanted to go to college and study cybernetics. I gave her money to go to Bucharest, but she brought it back: they had given her a scholarship.
She would come home once a month and I would wait for her at the airport. And now I’m asking you: could a worker’s afford college today? I have lived under four or five different regimes – and every one of them had good things and bad things. Take Communism, for instance. If the Russians hadn’t come, what would have become of all of us?
We would have ended up in the ovens! One should not condemn a certain regime, but the individuals who do bad things. The ones who do good things should be praised and the ones who do bad things should be eliminated.
Our only daughter, Berta, was born in 1955. She went to college in Bucharest and got a degree in economic cybernetics. She is not ‘officially’ Jewish – according to the Jewish tradition, you are a Jew only if your mother is Jewish. However, we registered her as Jewish in school. She now lives and works in Oradea.
She’s married to Francisc, a man who has both Romanian and Hungarian origins. Her surname as a married woman is Marian. They both have decent jobs, but they’re not rich or anything… My daughter thinks of herself as Jewish. She has a son, Petrisor, who has just graduated from college. He’s into commerce, just like his mother. She raised him as a Jew.
One more thing about the deportation. Speaking of the Righteous among the Nations… There were priests who said ‘What are you doing to these people?’ But there were also priests who said ‘Take them away, they don’t have the same faith as we do!’ That’s why I say that a man’s soul is his true religion.
I may not be an educated man, but you should take my word for it! One must respect other human beings, regardless of their differences. Think of the Ten Commandments. People who have lost their parents can at least visit their tombs. But what about us Jews? Where can we go to mourn our parents? In Heaven?! They turned them to ashes – and that’s a terrible crime.
After I came back from deportation, I didn’t observe all the religious tratisions. I have to admit I didn’t keep the kashrut, for instance. Since there weren’t enough Jews for a minyan in Fizesul Gherlei anymore, I came to Gherla for the high holidays: Purim, Pesach, Yom Kippur, and Rosh Hashanah.
But I didn’t keep the Sabbath as a holiday – I worked on Saturday… That was a sin. I did recite the Kaddish for my parents though. Now I’m the only Jew left in Gherla. I always go to Dej or Cluj for the high holidays. And I fast.
1 Constitution of 1923: After the foundation of the modern Romanian state the problems of citizenship and civil rights of the Jewish community were largely debated, although this issue was not included in the first Constitution of 1866. After the Congress of Berlin in 1878, this problem became an issue of constitutional law.
During World War I several great changes were put on board, such as the new electoral system, the land reform and the extension of civil rights. They formed the main axis of the new Constitution of 1923, which allowed the Jewish community of Romania to receive Romanian citizenship.
2 Hungarian era (1940-1944): The expression Hungarian era refers to the period between 30 August 1940 - 15 October 1944 in Transylvania. As a result of the Trianon peace treaties in 1920 the eastern part of Hungary (Maramures, Crisana, Banat, Transylvania) was annexed to Romania. Two million inhabitants of Hungarian nationality came under Romanian rule.
In the summer of 1940, under pressure from Berlin and Rome, the Romanian government agreed to return Northern Transylvania, where the majority of the Hungarians lived, to Hungary. The anti-Jewish laws introduced in 1938 and 1939 in Hungary were also applied in Northern Transylvania.
Following the German occupation of Hungary on 19th March 1944, Jews from Northern Transylvania were deported to and killed in concentration camps along with Jews from all over Hungary except for Budapest. Northern Transylvania belonged to Hungary until the fall of 1944, when the Soviet troops entered and introduced a regime of military administration that sustained local autonomy.
The military administration ended on 9th March 1945 when the Romanian administration was reintroduced in all the Western territories lost in 1940.
3 Goga-Cuza government: Anti-Jewish and chauvinist government established in 1937, led by Octavian Goga, poet and Romanian nationalist, and Alexandru C. Cuza, professor of the University of Iasi, and well known for its radical anti-Semitic view.
Goga and Cuza were the leaders of the National Christian Party, an extremist right-wing organization founded in 1935. After the elections of 1937 the Romanian king, Carol II, appointed the National Christian Party to form a minority government.
The Goga-Cuza government had radically limited the rights of the Jewish population during their short rule; they barred Jews from the civil service and army and forbade them to buy property and practice certain professions. In February 1938 King Carol established a royal dictatorship. He suspended the Constitution of 1923 and introduced a new constitution that concentrated all legislative and executive powers in his hands, gave him total control over the judicial system and the press, and introduced a one-party system.
4 Second Vienna Dictate: The Romanian and Hungarian governments carried on negotiations about the territorial partition of Transylvania in August 1940. Due to their conflict of interests, the negotiations turned out to be fruitless. In order to avoid violent conflict a German-Italian court of arbitration was set up, following Hitler’s directives, which was also accepted by the parties.
The verdict was pronounced on 30th August 1940 in Vienna: Hungary got back a territory of 43,000 km² with 2,5 million inhabitants. This territory (Northern Transylvania, Seklerland) was populated mainly by Hungarians (52% according to the Hungarian census and 38% according to the Romanian one) but at the same time more than 1 million Romanians got under the authority of Hungary.
Although Romania had 19 days for capitulation, the Hungarian troops entered Transylvania on 5th September. The verdict was disapproved by several Western European countries and the US; the UK considered it a forced dictate and refused to recognize its validity.
5 Yellow star in Hungary: In a decree introduced on 31st March 1944 the Sztojay government obliged all persons older than 6 years qualified as Jews, according to the relevant laws, to wear, starting from 5th April, “outside the house” a 10x10 cm, canary yellow colored star made of textile, silk or velvet, sewed onto the left side of their clothes.
The government of Dome Sztojay, appointed due to the German invasion, emitted dozens of decrees aiming at the separation, isolation and despoilment of the Jewish population, all this preparing and facilitating deportation. These decrees prohibited persons qualified as Jews from owning and using telephones, radios, cars, and from changing domicile.
They prohibited the employment of non-Jewish persons in households qualified as Jewish, ordered the dismissal of public employees qualified as Jews, and introduced many other restrictions and prohibitions. The obligation to wear a yellow star aimed at the visible distinction of persons qualified as Jews, and made possible from the beginning abuses by the police and gendarmes.
A few categories were exempted from this obligation: WWI invalids and awarded veterans, respectively following the pressure of the Christian Church priests, the widows and orphans of awarded WWI heroes, WWII orphans and widows, converted Jews married to a Christian and foreigners. (Randolph L. Braham: A nepirtas politikaja, A holokauszt Magyarorszagon / The Politics of Genocide, The Holocaust in Hungary, Budapest, Uj Mandatum, 2003, p. 89–90.)
6 The Levente movement: Institution set up for the promotion of religious and national education, respectively physical training. All boys between 12 and 21, who didn’t attend a school providing regular physical education or who didn’t actually do a military service were forced to join it.
Since the Treaty of Versailles forbade Hungary to enforce the general obligations related to national defense, the Levente movement aimed at its substitution as well, as its members not only participated at sports activities and marches during weekends, but practiced the use of weapons too, under the guidance of demobilized officers on actual service or reserve officers.
(The Law no. II of 1939 on National Defense made compulsory the national defense education and the joining of the movement.) (Ignac Romsics: Magyarorszag tortenete a XX. szazadban/The History of Hungary in the 20th Century, Budapest, Osiris Publishing House, 2002, p. 181-182.)
7 Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee): The Joint was formed in 1914 with the fusion of three American Jewish committees of assistance, which were alarmed by the suffering of Jews during WWI. In late 1944, the Joint entered Europe’s liberated areas and organized a massive relief operation.
It provided food for Jewish survivors all over Europe, it supplied clothing, books and school supplies for children. It supported cultural amenities and brought religious supplies for the Jewish communities. The Joint also operated DP camps, in which it organized retraining programs to help people learn trades that would enable them to earn a living, while its cultural and religious activities helped re-establish Jewish life.
The Joint was also closely involved in helping Jews to emigrate from Europe and from Muslim countries. The Joint was expelled from East Central Europe for decades during the Cold War and it has only come back to many of these countries after the fall of communism. Today the Joint provides social welfare programs for elderly Holocaust survivors and encourages Jewish renewal and communal development.
8 Nationalization in Romania: The nationalization of industry and natural resources in Romania was laid down by the law of 11th June 1948. It was correlated with the forced collectivization of agriculture and the introduction of planned economy.
9 Kulak (‘chiabur’ in Romanian): Between 1949-1959, the Romanian peasants who owned 10-50 hectares of land were called kulaks; those who owned more than 50 were ‘exploiters’. Their land was confiscated. They were either evicted from their houses (and deported to the Baragan Steppes and the Danube Delta, where they had to work in inhuman conditions) or they were discriminated in every possible way – by forcing them to pay impossibly high taxes, preventing their children from entering higher education etc.
The persecutions against the kulaks were part of the larger collectivization process. Shortly after the Communists had come to power in Romania, the industry, the medical institutions, the entertainment industry, and the banks were nationalized (in 1948).
Then, in 1949, Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, announced the socialistic transformation of agriculture. The collectivization process came to an end in 1962: by then, more than 90% of the agricultural territories had been turned into public ownership and became cooperatives (Cooperativa Agricola de Productie).
10 Ritual murder trial of Tiszaeszlar: A 14-year-old servant girl, Eszter Solymosi of Tiszaeszlar, disappeared on 1st April 1882. On the same day the Jewry of the surrounding settlements arrived to join the local Jews in electing the shochet.
The coincidence opened the door to charge the Jews of using blood in religious rites. The accused Jews were defended by Karoly Eoetvoes who not only proved their innocence, but also the impossibility of the charge itself. At the time of the action at law (summer of 1883) anti-Semitic disturbances broke out.
The crowd attacked and robbed Jewish shops and flats in the bigger towns, and then in the country. This also influenced the foundation of the National Anti-Semitic Party by Gyoezoe Istoczy in the fall of 1883 (which obtained 14 seats in the elections a year later).
11 The Dreyfus Affair: Based on anti-Semite prejudice, the French counter-intelligence accused Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Jewish origin, of espionage in 1894, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Doubts arose regarding the evidence.
Writer Emile Zola demanded retrial in a public letter, which was rejected by the rightist, nationalist, Catholic and military circles, which referred to the authority of the army and national interest. In the end Dreyfus was exonerated in 1906, he was granted the Legion of Honor and ended his career in the rank of a Lieutenant-Colonel.
Zsuzsanna G.
(nee H.)
Budapest
Hungary
Interviewed by: Mihaly Andor
Interview Date: November 2004
Zsuzsanna G. is a wiry, active lady who lives in an apartment building from the 1990s. The apartment is decorated with modern furniture, complete with books in English and Hungarian and a computer. Zsuzsanna still works, directing her own business enterprise.
My family background
I know little about my great grandparents. My maternal grandmother, Laura Engel was an infant when her father died. I know that his name was Jozsef Engel and he worked in some larger estate in Gyoma [In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of settlements, mainly in the Alfold and Dunantul, got market town rights, as did Gyoma in 1830. The legal definition of free royal cities and market towns was absolved in 1870, and the majority of market towns were absorbed into the cities.] he was some kind of manager. His wife’s maiden name was Kati Weisz, and shortly after my grandfather’s death she got married again, to some Goldstein, I think, I don’t know his Christian name. There were two children from the first marriage: Sandor Engel, born in 1870 and my grandmother, Laura, who was born in 1872. Then, from the marriage to the Goldstein person, Miksa, Gizella, Antonia and Szami [probably a family nickname for Samuel, the interview subject only knew him as Szami] were born.
On the paternal side, my grandfather David Kauders was already quite an old person when he had the wedding that our family issues from. As a widower, he married my grandmother, Franciska Steiner, whose father Salamon Steiner, likewise lived in Gyoma, and was a grain merchant. Apparently, he was well-to-do but then became poor.
Both families probably lived in very hard conditions. I can only assume this from what I heard as a child. My maternal grandmother lived with us, and though I wasn’t quite nine years old when she died, I have many memories connected to her. Her siblings always came to her, because she was highly-esteemed in the family. And the conversation always went that ‘But you didn’t help when mother…’ ‘I helped but you didn’t help then, when…’ ‘You didn’t come then…’ So conversation was made up of this kind of continual disdain, which revealed one thing clearly: that they had needed help.
The other thing that makes me think that my maternal grandparents were poor: the daughters were married off badly. Gizella and Antonia both married widowers. I don’t think they had dowries. My aunt Giza lived in a very good marriage to Samuel Klein, who had two sons from his first marriage, Andor and Bela, and they had a daughter, Erzsi [Erzsebet = Elizabeth]. They were so poor that my Aunt Giza cut up bed linens, to sew shirts and dresses for the children. Samuel Klein was a factory worker in the Ujpest [An industrial suburb north of Pest] tanning factory of Wolfner [Wolfner Family] 1. His son Bela was also a factory worker there, and stayed a worker to the end of his life, by the end becoming a kind of shift boss. He survived the Holocaust, got married, had two children, but after my mother’s death we lost contact with them. Andor was an junk dealer. He worked on Teleki Square. In 1944, he married a gypsy [Roma] girl, they had a son who became the most exceptional Jazz drummer in Hungary. We didn’t get together with their family, only Andor came to visit until my mother’s death. Erzsi Klein married Gyorgy Steiner, from whom she had a son. Then all of them, Giza, Erzsi and the little boy were executed in Auschwitz. The husband survived the work service [Forced labor] 2. He visited us for a while, then remarried, he even brought his wife over, then we never heard from them again.
Aunt Toni [Antonia], my other aunt, married Marton Singer, who was also a widower. It was a terrible marriage, they had no children. Antonia also died in Auschwitz.
I know a little more about my paternal grandparents. My paternal grandfather was born in 1854 in Gyula. I don’t know what kind of education he received but he was a house painter, and a very talented painter. He didn’t just paint the interiors of apartments, according to family legend: ‘Mr. Kauders, please paint a bouquet of flowers over there.’ ‘Mr. Kauders, paint this over here and that over there.’ Indeed, according to family legend, the huge fresco in the Gyula county courthouse was partially painted by my grandfather. I looked into it, they say the fresco’s creator was Gusztav Veres, but it’s commonly known that these Pest painters employed ghost-‘painters’ to do this work. And on one of the figures, allegedly, the characteristics of my grandfather can be found. My grandfather played cards. So he made a lot of money, yet still they lived in very great poverty, because he had six children [they had seven children, though one died in infancy], and little money made it home. My grandmother was understandably a housewife. When they came up to Pest, sometime around 1914, then my grandfather got a scene-painting position at the Hungarian Theatre [The Hungarian Theatre in Erzsebet Town was owned by Laszlo Beothy, and mainly performed dramas.] I don’t really know why they came up to [Buda-] Pest, I’ve got a foggy notion that it was a period of great bustle, people came en masse from the countryside. I’d guess that they found better job opportunities in Pest, in the positions of those people called up as soldiers to go to war. The children had to be taught some trade, obviously there were more possibilities here.
The first child of my paternal grandparents, Aladar, was born in 1890 and became a house painter. Margit, who was born in 1893, became a bookbinder. Imre, who became a printer, was born in 1895. He studied with Imre Kner, and worked there in Gyoma. [Izidor Kner founded a printing house in Gyoma in 1895. His children (Imre, Endre, Erzsebet, Albert) made it a prestigious Hungarian workshop of the bookbinding arts. Kner Imre was five years older than the interview subject’s uncle, so the possibility of their common schooling is not great, and probably family legend.] Meanwhile, there was Sandor who died, my father who was born in 1901, Andras in 1902 and Pali in 1904 or 1905. My father was sent to be a merchant assistant, because he was a very puny kid. My father was an apprentice, the merchant took him on to train him in the fashion merchant trade – he had no concurrent schooling. He worked in the shop, cleaned, took merchandise home, packed, he did everything, but they trained him to dress and groom himself like a merchant’s assistant. Andras also became a merchant’s assistant. Pali became a locksmith’s apprentice. So you can see that Grandpa gave his kids to industry, put a trade in their hands. So after six grades, some trade. My father had no more schooling, and in the 1950s they even nagged him because of it.
Aladar’s wife was called Mariska, they had two sons, Sandor and Gyuri. Sandor was born between 1920 and 1922, and took part in the Young Communist movement. He was known as Lexi, and he was killed. I don’t know exactly how or when. Gyuri was the same age as my older sister, he died as a work serviceman [forced laborer]. I remember them from my childhood, but we didn’t have a close relationship. Aladar survived the war, I don’t know exactly where. His wife came home from Bergen-Belson and then they divorced. Aladar remarried.
Margit never got married, she lived with her mother, and she took care of her. Imre, the printer was my favorite uncle. He worked in the University Printing House, and that was such a prestigious thing in my childhood. Even before the war, he was a well-known person in the trade union movement, but after the war he remained a printer, didn’t become an independent functionary, but to the end he was a dedicated left-wing person. His wife, Mariska was a peasant girl from Bugac, who wasn’t Jewish, and with whom he lived in a very happy marriage. In 1944, his wife saved him like a lion. Uncle Imre was taken somewhere, not to the work service [forced labor] because he was already too old for that, but I don’t know where, and Mariska went after him, got him out of there, and they went into hiding together. [There’s no data on when this happened but mixed marriage was regulated from the beginning of 1945 like so: In the beginning of 1945, the Arrow Cross parliament authorized Christians married to Jews to divorce their spouse with no type of responsibilities. The law stipulated that Christians in mixed marriages with Jews who are not willing to divorce, fall under the jurisdiction of the anti-Jewish measures. There was no practical significance of this, because the Arrow Cross directors (including Ferenc Szalasi and his government) had already fled Budapest by this time, and their regulations had no real effect on the Jews of the capitol city.] Among all my father’s siblings, they were the ones who had a very close, very intimate relationship until both of their deaths. They lived in Rakosszentmihaly, and it was the relation that gave my dogged love a home in the summers of my childhood. They didn’t have children. They died in 1970. They’re buried in the urn cemetery, it was a funeral of the [worker’s] movement. It was quite horrible. It was the first communist funeral that I attended. He and his wife had looked out for my family until their deaths.
We met with the other two younger brothers, Andras and Pali pretty rarely. Andras and Pali got along better with each other. Andras was childless, his wife was called Sari [from Sarolta], both of them were killed in the war. I don’t know under what exact circumstances. Pali likewise died during the war. His wife was called Bozsi [from Erzsebet = Elizabeth]. They had two children, Tibi [from Tibor] who was the same age as me, and Agi [from Agota = Agatha] who was probably four years younger.
So that the reason there weren’t close relations between the two groups of siblings is understandable, first I have to explain the formation of the maternal branch. I already mentioned that my great grandmother married twice, and bore children in both marriages. So besides my grandmother’s brother, Sandor Engel there were four step siblings: Miksa, Gizella, Antonia and Szami Goldstein. There were no inequalities between the Goldstein and Engel siblings, it was a very fused-together family.
Sandor Engel married three times. In the beginning of the last [i.e. the 20th] century, he moved up to Ujpest. [this heavily industrial suburb north of Budapest was not part of the city at that time]. There was a son named Ervin who was a technician and worked to his dying day as a technical draftsman at Egyesult Izzo [Egyesult Izzolampa es Villamossagi Rt - The United Lightbulb and Electrical Co. was created by Bela Egger and brothers in 1896. In 1903, they worked out production methods for a Wolfram-filament, gas-filled light bulb, and in 1911 they began production. From 1912, they began using the Tungsram product name.]. In those days, that was a very big thing. Incidentally, Ervin was married, his wife was Ella Hoffman, and they had a son in 1931. Then Ella, her thirteen year old son and her seventy-four year old father were executed in Auschwitz. Ervin came back from work service, but didn’t survive the war too long. He died of the grief in 1945.
Miksa Goldstein was a leather craftsman. He took a well-to-do girl as his wife in Jaszbereny. Her name was Fanni Donath and she was some relation to that Donath family one of whose members was that politician Ferenc Donath, and his son, Laszlo became a Protestant minister. They had two children, Ilonka and Laci [from Laszlo = Leslie], in 1911 and 1912. During the First World War, they went bankrupt and moved up to Ujpest. Laci Goldstein died as a work serviceman, Ilonka survived the Holocaust. She never had children. Her first husband died during the First World War, then she married again, to a widower from the country, whose wife and child never came back from deportation. Ilonka died in 1981, she’s buried in a Jewish cemetery.
The smallest son, Szami Goldstein worked at the BESZKART [BESZKART] 3. I think he was a guard in his last position, and like those kind of jobs, it was his retirement job. Though he was held in fantastically high esteem in the family. His wife was called Janka. They didn’t have kids either, and they lived in Kelenfold [suburb in southern Buda]. Szami died in 1944, right on March 19th [19 March 1944] 4 and his funeral was in the Jewish cemetery in Obuda [Obuda] 5.
My grandmother married Mor Freiberger, who died in 1904 or 1905, and my grandmother was left a widow with three children. It was probably terribly difficult to secure a situation to satisfy her needs for the three kids. She took on all work. She went house to house sewing. When they quartered soldiers in Gyoma, she cooked for them. So she raised her kids by herself, Ilona, Ervin and Rozsa, and my mother. It shows what kind of expectations my grandmother had in how she schooled her children. Ilonka, the oldest girl studied to be a young lady of the post (sic), and she worked in Gyoma at the post office. Ervin studied to be an electrician. That was a very serious trade at the time, and an elegant trade, since it was such a new thing. The smallest, my mother, was sent to Civil [Civil School] 6 in Ujpest. Because in the meantime, when her siblings Sandor Engel and the Goldsteins also came up to Ujpest one after the other during the 1910s, she also came up with her three children.
In Ujpest, without the siblings’ approval, Grandma married a lawyer, also named Engel, who was likewise a widower, and he had a son, Kalman. The marriage didn’t work out. There were emotional problems, Grandma had imagined things would be different. By my count, she could have been over forty, and she likely imagined the marriage would be a financial boon for both of them. So it didn’t work, though my mother had a brotherly friendship with her stepbrother, Kalman. Kalman took her around with him among his circle of friends, and that’s where mother got such ideas of civil lifestyles, which were very important to her for the rest of her life, her standards. And she guided our lives in that direction. I have to say, successfully, because in the end, both of her children became graduates.
My mother’s two siblings died in 1919 in the Spanish Flu [Spanish Flu: the first big epidemic of the 20th century, took 20-21 million victims from 1918-1919. For example, in October of 1918, 44 thousand died of this disease in Hungary.] and grandma was devastated from that point on. Her life nearly ended from that time on. They died in the hospital. That’s why me and my brother were born at home, because it was such an experience for my mother as a young girl, that someone who goes into the hospital, stays there and never comes out.
And here I come back to why there wasn’t a close connection among the Kauders siblings. There was a lifestyle problem, a difference in living standards. Our life was that of the up and coming lower middle class, and my father was partner in this, he himself stuck out a bit from the family. We were taught foreign languages from the age of six. They sent us to gymnasium [high school, 4th to 12th grades]. With the exception of my father and Uncle Imre, the other Kauders siblings lived a day to day lifestyle. They took on Grandpa’s card-playing easy-going lifestyle, and my grandma’s lack of ambition that comes from poverty. They were very generous. My father told me that one of his uncles, when he got his first salary in hand, he took his little brother to the ‘Vurstli’ [The predecessor of the amusement park in the City Park was called the Vurstli and was put up around the beginning of the 1880s, with the same mass entertainment intentions of the English Park, started in the beginning of the 1900s.]
My two grandmothers were natural cousins to each other – I think Kati Weisz might have been the sister of Franciska Steiner’s mother. So my parents were second cousins. And that’s important, because my grandma Laura knew the Kauders family, and had formed a strong opinion of their lifestyle, the way they lived it. The other exception besides my father was Uncle Imre. So Imre’s wife was a peasant girl, but for women especially, if they love their partners, they have a fantastic talent for getting along and fitting in. To the end of Aunt Mariska’s life, she used foreign words incorrectly, but she paid attention to how her daughter-in-law, that is my mother, dresses, how she grooms herself, what she cooks, how she cleans, how she decorates the apartment, and she paid attention.
Mariska didn’t convert, and it was never a question. Now I have to digress a bit to the family religion. My grandpa, David Kauders, paid absolutely no attention to religion. My father, as he told us, was in the third or fourth grade in a Jewish grammar [school] when the teacher smacked him, and he split with religion for the rest of his life. Except, naturally, for his death bed, when he asked a religious friend to write down the words to the father’s blessing for him, because then it was important to him, that he bless his children. Concerning my mother, keep in mind that the Jews from the Alfold were totally assimilated. So the Jew who stayed religious, did so in such a very neolog way [Neolog Jewry] 7, that is, they kept the high holidays, my grandma even lit candles on Friday evening, my mother also, but for example, they never kept the Sabbath. It never came up. There was school, you had to work. We didn’t work on High Holidays, of course. The candle-lighting and dinner on Friday wore us out. The point I’d like to stress is that my family thought of itself as Jewish Hungarians. Hungarians of the Israelite religion. The stress was on the Hungarian. Starting with the fairy tales, folk songs, the culture that I soaked up from when I was tiny was Hungarian culture. There’s a scene in the ‘Sunshine’ film [by Istvan Szabo] when the Jewish family are singing ‘The Spring Wind Sows Rain” at the dinner table. That reminded me of how much we sang together during my entire childhood, and what we sang: folk songs, so-called ‘Hungarian tunes’, popular operetta songs.
My parents were married in 1924. They met when once they passed one another on the street and both of them looked back. According to my father’s version, not just because mother liked him but he liked mother, too. According to my mother, she looked back because he looked like Imre whom she knew from Gyoma. Imre worked in Gyoma then, yet the family lived in Gyula. So that’s how it’s possible that she only knew Imre. My grandmother wasn’t pleased about the marriage. She would have preferred some better party for her last remaining daughter.
Growing up
When I was born, we lived in Bakats Street, and I went to the Bakats Square grammar (school) for the first two grades. It was a community school [Both community and state schools got their financial funding for functioning from the central budget, but while the community school chairman was chosen by the community, the education director of state schools was chosen by the state school board of directors.] We moved into the VII. District [of Budapest], to Garay Street in 1936 and then I wound up in the Bethlen Square Jewish school. That only happened because when we moved there in May, they had enrolled me in Muranyi Street, in the local grammar [school] where I learned very ugly words in less than a minute, so that my parents immediately decided that this wasn’t the atmosphere [for me]. Well, anyway, this was ‘Chicago’. [Chicago: slang for a part of the VII. District of Budapest, named for the speed that it was built, as Chicago had been famous for at the time. After the war, it’s name referred to the district’s bad social conditions and general lack of safety.] The two years I spent in the Jewish grammar school gave me a big experience: compared to the religious classes we had had twice a week, here they had them everyday, many Hebrew classes, we read the Tora, translated Moses first book [Creation], had a separate class for learning songs; the youth religious service every Saturday had a very strong emotional effect, where the blonde rabbi who looked so pretty to me then, gave his speech directly to me. A person regretted in tears all of their childhood uselessness. What stuck with me from religion, feeds on those one or two years. The Friday night devotion of candle-lighting remained – the best students were deserving of this privilege. I even got the chance once, but there was a problem, I wasn’t allowed to touch matches at home. On the first of September, I started going here, and my grandma had died already by January. It’s a good feeling to think back on how happy it made her when I recited everything I’d learned everyday. The songs for the Friday evening service, all kinds of Hebrew holiday songs, or when I could say a prayer. Because she was still religious.
But in an interesting way, the effect of this school couldn’t have been strong enough that there would be a conflict from the fact that at school Saturday was a holy day and at home it wasn’t. Thinking back on it all, I see that I felt Jewish school was burden. Sunday morning, my older sister who was in high school at the time, could go to the movies with my daddy, I had to sit in school. It was guaranteed that I got a fever every Sunday. We had an amazingly clever and benevolent school principal, mister Pista Erdos, who regularly took my temperature on Sunday afternoons, then escorted me home with his ‘pedallus’[janitor]. The pedallus took my book bag. There was one change. There had never been a seder evening at our house, so I arranged it that one of my mother’s uncles – either Uncle Sandor or Uncle Szami – come over to hold a seder. Seders were completely traditional, the uncles who were called were well-practiced at it. We had everything: Haggadah, we read, we sang the Chad Gadiya, I said the mah nistanah, because I was the youngest. If Uncle Szami came, then his wife was there – they didn’t have children, if Uncle Sandor came, he didn’t have a wife at the time. I don’t remember any other guests, everybody in the family was Jewish, anyway, except for my father – or rather, my maternal branch – everybody held their own seder with their own families. My mother had prepared everything beforehand, there was matzah balls, charoset, celery greens, horseradish, eggs. But she made them before, it didn’t cause me any conflict. I have to add to that, that my parents were totally assimilated believers, and for example, after the fourth year of grammar school, it was never even considered that we be enrolled in the Jewish gymnasium.
We both went to the Prater Street Ilona Zrinyi [High School] which was a municipal gymnasium. To get a Jewish child enrolled in gymnasium in 1935, you had to get some seriously heavy ‘protekcio’ [slang - inside influence, sometimes favors from friends or simply paid for] on your side. A state school was out of the question, there wasn’t enough money, and a social democrat[-ic Party] representative was able to get my older sister into a capitol city school. At the time, the rule was that those whose older sibling was already enrolled there, they were automatically accepted. So my parents didn’t think about a Jewish school. My father got the ‘protekcio’. He’d been a member of the Social Democratic Party since 1921 [MSZDP] 8. He wasn’t that active as Uncle Imre. My mother wasn’t as interested in the worker’s movement, as much as being part of the ‘middle-class’, so she was capable of holding my father back a bit, and giving him more prosaic tasks.
Returning to religion, I have a very clear childhood memory of when we lived in Bakats Street. At the time, we went to the Pava Street synagogue for the fall holidays. I can see before my eyes, we went there with my mother and my grandmother. And it was the same. when we lived in Garay Street and went to the Bethlen Square synagogue. But just for the high holidays. Then, we would go, and we fasted and there was a holiday diet. My father never came with us. He took part in the seder evenings I arranged, but then the war, the work service dwindled that all away. After the war, it never came back. The war, the Holocaust totally broke my faith apart. Now I’m building it again from crumbs.
So my paternal family branch was not religious at all. The maternal branch was, although in that very assimilated Neolog way. Keeping the main customs was just a cultural thing, not religious. It was tradition, not faith in god. I had faith in god, but it wasn’t a topic of discussion at our house. I loved my father to death, and all the way to my teenage years, which unfortunately, coincided precisely with my father’s constant work service [forced labor], I saw my father as perfect. I despaired so for him, like a kitten. I adored him. So I never questioned anything in my father for a second.
We lived our ‘Jewishness’ like a person brushes one’s teeth. For example, in school religion classes were mandatory. We went to our classes, the Christian girls went to their own. We went to the Friday afternoon youth service, the Christian girls went to mass. It was part of a person’s lifestyle, that a person has a religion. There was nobody who didn’t have a religion. It was a system of habits, it was part of social acceptance. That part which says, ‘I’m a proper, respectable family’ and the part that says, ‘We belong to a religion and practice it to some degree.’ But this is never about faith.
In connection to anti-Semitism, I have one memory, from back in the Bakats Square grammar school. More precisely, not my own, but rather my older sister’s, well I only heard this much. She was in fourth grade, the class was about Ferenc Rakosi II., and miss teacher said, ‘You all see Klari Klauders, but she’s a Jew?’. It was the ‘but’. Then there were the times, like the school celebrations. Both of us were terribly good students, because they expected this from us, it never caused any difficulties. At the year end celebration I always recited the poem. They’d tried other children before, but then when it didn’t really work, then well, I said maybe I should after all. And the oldest childhood memory of mine. I didn’t go to school yet, Grandma took me down to Boraros Square (Petofi Bridge still hadn’t been built then), and then it was usual for the children to hide next to their mother’s or grandmother’s skirts. The braver ones went over to the other: ‘Little girl, do you want to come play?’ ‘Yes.’ Second question: ‘And what religion are you?’ ‘Israelite.’ ‘You killed the baby Jesus.’ Later in gymnasium – I was in the sixth grade in 1944 – there was a teacher woman, who came in with an Arrow Cross [Arrow Cross Party] 9 armband, she taught us economics. I was an ‘A’ student for this “Mrs. Sir Dr. Karoly S”[Husband’s title]. In her own classes, she sat the Jews and the non-Jews separately, but in our class for some reason she didn’t. When in April 1944 the school year ended sooner, and we went with our yellow stars to get our report cards, the Hungarian teacher woman, who wasn’t our homeroom teacher anyway, she came in, embraced us, kissed us and bid us farewell in tears. I knew there were kids in our class who were cheering for German victory, but there was never anything like that in class. Very interesting. Afterwards, when we went back after the war, my only classmate who didn’t believe in the death camps was there then. We got into a serious, hard debate then, that it’s not true, it can’t be true. So there wasn’t any discrimination. Quite a lot of Jewish kids went to that high school, because it wasn’t an elite school, it was the school for lower middle class.
The streetcar on Ullo Road was very good transportation for the Kispest, Lorinc [outer suburbs in southern pest] kids also, and there were local kids, too. It was that kind of community. Among my classmates’ parents, there was one Jewish lawyer, a doctor from Lorinc, a couple teachers and the rest has simple trades. The class was homogenous, though that’s also relative. When the German teacher woman in high school asked in the first class if any of us had studied German before, about five or six of us stood up, we were all Jews. One of the Jewish kids stood up because she’d only studied English. In our class of thirty-eight, there were about ten of us Jews. We mixed well with the class, made friends, but the most intimate, the trustworthy girlfriend was always Jewish. But there was no isolation in either the seating arrangement nor in invitations among each other. It’s true, in class we never spoke about the Jewish Laws or anything about the subject. There was an ‘eight’, with whom we continually got together, but more than half were not Jews. From the first day of gymnasium to the end, Dolly R. was my girlfriend. They herded us together in a classroom, and the priests came in lines, took their own to the Veni Sancte service. It turns out that only the ‘other religious’ (that’s what they called us) stayed. Dolly looked at me and said: ‘You, are with me.’ That’s what happened. It was a selfless friendship, through fire or water, so much so that our parents would have forbidden us to meet, because of the ‘bad influence’ of the other. Dolly was a very pretty, clever little girl, her parents had divorced before she was born, she never knew her father, her mother really intimidated her. She was much more wild than I was. Her mother worked, there was less control, I followed cautiously. She was much more interested in boys and sooner, so she made room from when we were about 16-17 for Mariann S., who was a very ugly, very smart, a child of a truly intellectual family. Her father was a lawyer, with a very weak practice, they had no money, but they were well above me in standard of living, I learned a lot at their house about a different way of life, I smiled at her mother with grand poses. Her nickname was Muci, intellectual curiosity bound us together. She became a doctor, died a couple years ago of breast cancer. Dolly left in 1956, she lives in Florida now, she was here at home for a couple high school reunions, she’s still pretty, unfortunately life swept us apart.
In Bakats Street, we had a three-room apartment on the second floor in a huge corner house. The last apartment on the second floor corridor, was on the courtyard, half looked out on this courtyard, and half on the other, but it had a bathroom and a tiled stove. We lived with grandma. I had a very happy childhood. In that social strata, in which I grew up, the children didn’t have separate rooms. The bedroom was a big room, we slept in there with our parents. Grandma slept in the other room. There was a salon with a vitrine, a round table and chairs, where the guests could be seated. There weren’t any armchairs, and there wasn’t a piano, because we didn’t learn music, we learned languages. If I remember well, there wasn’t a separate dining room, we ate in the kitchen. In that apartment, there wasn’t a maid’s room. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we always lived well. Every week they bought a goose. My mother always said, that we’ll be able to make this last, we’re going to eat for a week. We usually ate it in three days, because if something tasted good to us, then my mother would tell us to have some more.
My parents adored each other and us. There was a terribly big love between us. And my childhood is full of the kind of memories where we’re together. Every Sunday we went on an excursion to the Buda hills. Mostly with friends. For me it seemed that every Sunday finished with me waking up on Monday. Because on the way back already, I would fall asleep on the streetcar, and from my father’s arms I wound up in the bed. We went on a boat trip to Visegrad with friends, and their children.
Friends came together in two ways. There are two families whose acquaintances are from the area, know each other since they were pushing baby carriages. Both are Jewish. Their mothers were expecting Gyuri Lantos and Bandi Herbst, then pushing them around, like my mother did Klari. Lajos Lantos was an official, from a well-situated family, they lived in the building next door. Gyuri, who was the same age as my siblings, died as a work serviceman. We never met the Lantoses again after the war. Sandor Herbst was a traveling merchant. I don’t know what he sold, but he had a well-situated family. They had only this one son. The father didn’t survive, the mother and son did, and the friendship with them remained to the end. It’s interesting that the connection was completely broken with those families who didn’t suffer equally from the war. Then the Herbst’s also moved to the VII. District. 1936 was a year when everybody moved. There was never a year again when every house had an ‘apartment for rent’ sign.
By the way, the reason we moved to Garay Street was because my father got work on Baross Square. He was a window dresser, and a passionate one at that, who was an artist in his work. Window dressers considered their work to be art. They organized competitions, gave out awards. When we looked at window displays during family walks, it wasn’t just to see how much things cost. It was to see what the other window dressers were doing. In the 1930s, my father somehow arranged to get a German trade paper [subscription]. Part of it he saved for and part was contributed by those he worked for. He even went on a research trip. He travelled every year. He went to the German cities, and was in Paris and Vienna. He always got enough contributions from his employers that it worked out. But he made these trips from very little money. In his youth, he went to Paris and immediately ate a bunch of figs to upset his stomach, so that he wouldn’t have any more [food] expenses. There were small companies in those days, and that meant that a window dresser had to visit ten places, because one shop had one or two windows which didn’t have to be dressed so often. And at that time, the Baross Square Filleres Aruhaz [exact name Filleres Divathaz or the ‘Penny Fashion house’] – now there’s a hotel where it stood – they were looking for a head dresser. It was a very pretty department store with sixteen display windows. They had two stores (the bigger one on Baross Square, was rectangular shaped, one of them, the shorter side was on Rakoczi Road, the longer on Rottenbiller street, almost to the corner of Munkas Street. The smaller store was on Teleki Square. It was the ‘Country Department Store’: the owner built the store for a clientele like the country peasantry arriving at Keleti Station. He didn’t allow mirrors to be placed in the store, so the badly dressed, barefoot customers wouldn’t be ashamed of themselves. The name ‘filleres’[Hungarian adjective: ‘penny’] meant that the prices weren’t written in pengo [the larger currency of the time] but in filler for example, ‘2599 filler’. In the snack bars, they sold a pair of hotdogs for ten filler, with mustard, a slice of bread and a small cup of soda water. The line of merchandise was appropriate to the intended clientele, the personnel were allowed to shop at reduced prices before opening once a week. The code for the wholesale price was the owner’s son-in-law’s name: Weil Oszkar – this gave you the ten numbers. It had a peculiar place in the competition of stores, today I’d call it a ‘bovli’ [approx: ‘junk store’], but it went really well for them. Then, the owner left, never came back, the department store was mostly bombed anyway, I don’t know anything about any renovations. My father got this job, and it was logical then for us to move as close as we could. That’s how we ended up in 3 Garay Street.
The other level of friendship had to do with some kind of professional connection. Window dressers. My father lived closely with the window dressers in his trade union life. These were his friends. They were all Jews. Window dressing was a Jewish trade. There were hardly any window dressers who weren’t Jewish. There were two bigger department stores in Pest, the Corvin and the Divatcsarnok, they didn’t have Jewish head window dressers. But they were such gentlemen, compared to us they were honorable gentlemen. The rest of the window dressers running about were all Jews. I’m sure of that because, when we lived already on Garay Street, and the Jewish Laws came out – I think the second one – my father called together a friendly meeting about it. We had a very pretty apartment, with a huge [main] room and there were about thirty of them there, and they discussed how to get a ‘Strohmann’[Strohmann System] 10. My parents were fighting people, which I inherited, thank god. So there was no giving up. If something happened, then they immediately looked for a way to defend themselves. Us kids were squeezed out into the front room, and we entertained ourselves by switching all the caps that were hanging up. So while I knew about what was happening, I never felt the whole time that it was tragic. Lately, I thought a lot about that, and I figured out that I was spiritually a child for a long time. What do I mean child? Someone who is taken care of by others, whose problems are solved by others, who doesn’t take responsibility for the things they do, and who could never come to harm because their parents, who love them, are right there. I lived like that all the way up to 1944. Everybody was willing to stand in line, and they reinforced that belief in me, that no harm could come to me.
My father’s best friend was Laszlo Lautenburg, likewise a window dresser. We were on very good terms, they lived close. We went on excursions together, the two families regularly gathered. They had two sons, Bandi and Ervin. Bandi was born in 1926, Ervin in 1932. Bandi didn’t survive the work service [forced labor], the others survived the war but we lost contact with them. We had no contact with anyone whose family survived the war without loss. It was not at all intentional, it just happened this way. But in fact this is just concerning the children. In the families, where mother and son survived, the father died, we still had contact with them.
Then for example, there was a shoemaker in Raday street who wasn’t Jewish. My parents really liked him, and went to him. He was also a person from the movement. But it’s interesting, that he didn’t take part when we spent our common free time, or went on excursions. Only Jewish families came to then.
Aside from excursions, we went to the cinema a lot. We saw all the Hungarian films. If you go to the Film museum [Orokmozgo cinemateque] and watch the Hungarian films from that time, you can see that even little kids could watch them. Only the family went to the cinema, us four. Then, plus when we lived in Bakats Street, on Sunday mornings my father walked with us to the City Park, and back on foot. Nothing to drink, no pretzels, there was none of that stuff. ‘Learn, my son, to discipline yourself. Once he put us in a hansom cab on the way home.
I don’t remember any childhood conflicts with my parents. I was a good kid in the sense that my conscience could be influenced. If I didn’t get an ‘A’ in school, my mother said, ‘Zsuzsikam, your father will be so sad.’ And then I sobbed. Later I found out, that my father wasn’t interested at all. All he was interested in, was that I was brave, and I dared to climb everything, and dared to sit on a horse. Until I was about thirteen, I was an expressly good kid. Then I started puberty, and as much as you could contradict your parents, I contradicted them and that lasted a long time. Others had already grown up, when I was still an adolescent spirit. My poor father just became a work serviceman [forced labor] then. The greatest compliment I could say about my parents is that they could stand my horrible teenage period, when I had my own opinion about everything that I could opposed them about. Not only that they could bear it, but well, I became like that in their surroundings. That stayed with me, that one of the most important things in life is my sovereignty, a kind of 'uncompromisingness'. I got smacked one time in my whole childhood. I was going to the Bethlen Square Jewish school, there wasn’t school on Saturday, and one Saturday I was playing with my classmates at our house. And all of a sudden my mother came in the room, and slapped me. What happened was that my mother went out shopping and didn’t take a key. She thought that I’m at home so she’ll ring the bell. We were playing so, that I didn’t hear her. She yelled from the street, rang the bell, the neighbors stomped, we didn’t hear. My mother’s only thought was that we were all dead. She had to call a locksmith. So a huge event like that had to happen for her to smack me. Punctuality, reliability, stamina were so self-evident. I learned from my mother that you have to help the elderly. But I didn’t learn it from what she said, but from what she did. It was an environment in which a person couldn’t be anything else. If I promised something once, that I would be at home at this time or that, then I was at home. Of course, I did a lot of things on the sly, like reading books that weren’t allowed, but looking back on them today, those were such innocent things.
In those days my father had a social circle who really loved – what they called at the time – ‘mulatni’ [Hungarian: having fun]. They went with their friends to small pubs. We were still in Bakats Street, and there was a little pub in Liliom Street, probably called the ‘Liliom’. Mother went with them to have fun. My father couldn’t dance, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke but he was a ‘mokamester’ [Hungarian: life of the party, master of ceremonies]. That he didn’t play cards was natural, because my grandmother made her children vow never to take cards in their hands. He was a born ‘mokamester’, who radiated joviality. He was a terribly popular person in the group. My grandmother disapproved of this kind of fun. Her puritanicalism was in that. Aside from that, she was extremely intelligent – she read a lot, but only what was extremely conservative. It’s likely she never knew love, the loving joy of a being in a marriage, the kind of love my parents had, and that’s why these kinds of life’s pleasures were untouchable to her.
My parents loved to travel. In 1935, the two of them went together to Vienna by boat. Then in 1937, they took us too, along with a pair of friends, a married couple, Laszlo Lautenburg and his wife. They paid for a several week tour in Vienna and Czechoslovakia. The only thing that I can recall from Vienna is that Klari dropped her salami sandwich in front of the Maria Theresia statue, and they grumbled at her because of it. I remember a lot from the Czech part of the trip. We were in Prague where we paid for a city tour. To this day I remember the explanations [of the sites]. We were in Zlin, in Bata town, and there we saw the college dormitory, and how the kids were housed there, and how contemporary the whole thing was, we saw how the police wore antelope shoes, and you could walk on the grass. [Zlin: a town in southern Moravia was the Bat’a company headquarters. Tomas Bata (1876-1932), a ‘poor cobbler’s son who became a big businessman’, founded a shoemaking studio here, which developed into Europe’s biggest, modern shoe factory outfitted for mass-production. The company also began producing bicycle and automobile tires from the 1930s on.] In the next two years, we spent two weeks in Postyen in a ‘Panzio’ [Hungarian: ‘bed and breakfast’]. After that there was no more traveling. Then later, when they could allow themselves to, my parents travelled quite a lot.
There was no summer vacation. Our vacation was that my sister and I got season passes to the Szecsenyi beach [on the city park lake] I was about 12-13 years old when they let me go by myself. I learned to swim from the age of eight in the Rudas swimming pool. Neither my mother, nor my father knew how to swim, but they took me at the age of eight to the Rudas for swimming lessons. Neither of my parents could speak any other language, but I was learning German at the age of six. The same for my older sister. These were the kind of people my parents were. They never taught us to ride a bicycle because my mother fell off a bicycle in her childhood, and she didn’t want her children to have such a bad experience. Same thing with ice skating. So we got a pass, we lived in Garay Street, from there we went on foot, all along Istvan Street where there was a bookstore, one half of which sold new books, the other half was a borrowing library. We had a pass for that, too. Every morning we each took out a book, we went to the beach, swam, sunbathed, goofed around, read the book, then on the way home, we handed it in. We read half of the world’s literature every summer this way on the Szechenyi beach.
My older sister started language learning by attending a German kindergarten. Then when I became six years old we got our language teacher. The reason behind this was that in 1934, the young Jewish girls came from Vienna to look for work, and they knew nothing in the world, they only spoke German. One of these young girls, Rosa Schiller came over to us for very little money. She was with us three times a week, three hours at a time. We walked out to the Gellert Hill, and all the way she only spoke German to us. So that was an uncommon occurrence, the kind of possibility my parents could pay for. That lasted two years, and in 1936, when we moved to Garay Street, then I went to a ‘tante’ [German: ‘aunt’- a form of respect used to address teachers and tutors] in Bethlen Street for two more years, so until gymnasium. I don’t remember how many times a week I went to the tante. She held a language class, and didn’t leave any kind of deep impression on me. Then in gymnasium we had regular German classes.
My mother was at home the whole time, she was a housewife. We could live from a window dresser’s pay so that we always had a maid. In the Filleres Department Store, my father earned good money, his salary was 560 pengos. Our rent, when we took that out was 100 pengo a month, which the new owner raised to 110 a month. Why did a family like this have a maid? Because at that time, house work was heavy physical work. Nothing was automated. The iron was heavy, it was a coal [heated] iron. Washing was heavy physical work, then there was cleaning, washing up, heating, bringing the kindling up, taking out the ashes. It was quite natural in that society that a family had a maid. This didn’t mean that the lady was a useless, red-nailed Madame, but that they worked together. My mother did the shopping and cooking.
I can thank my mother that I find kitchen work a cheerful thing. It was a pleasure to work with her, she was never a kitchen martyr. Beside her you soaked up that it is a great thing to put good food out for a family. I don’t remember, if there was a maid living in the Bakats Street apartment, but there was one in the Garay Street apartment. Her name was Margit. In the huge kitchen there was a foldable bed. At night she opened it, and slept there. We never went into the kitchen at night.
The relationship between the maid and the family was a loving one. Us kids called her Aunt Margit. Once my mother realized that she was always sad. Well, she got it out of her that the reason for her sadness is that she has an illicit child– in today’s words: born out of wedlock – a five year old girl. So my mother immediately arranged to bring her up [to the city], so she should live with us. The child lived in the kitchen for a short time, because then it turned out that the child has a father too, and they’re in love, they’re just poor, and they don’t have a place to live together. Then my mother arranged for them to get the vice-custodianship for the building and the apartment that goes with it. From then on they lived there, but Margit continued to come over to work for us. She was the one who looked after what little jewelry or valuables my mother had left during the Arrow Cross period. The biggest thing they did was in 1944 when the Ujpest Jews were already in the ghetto. [In May of 1944, there were about 14,000 Jewish residents of Ujpest. ‘In the middle of May, they were given a special order to move into the yellow star houses, from six in the morning to eleven that night they weren’t allowed to leave these houses.’ Towards the end of May, they, along with residents of other areas in Pest, were taken to the Budakalasz Brick Factory, from where they began to be deported on the trip towards Auschwitz between July 6th and 8th.] She went to the ghetto at my mother’s request, and tried to get year and a half old son Pisti [from Istvan = Stephen] of Erzsi [Erzsebet Steiner nee Klein] out, by [saying] that the mother can’t flee if she’s got a baby in her arms, but without a child she’s got a chance. They didn’t give her the child. The four grandparents said that their only joy was the little child. Then all of them were executed in Auschwitz. As for Margit, this was an unthinkably huge risk, but she took it. Then her husband died in the war, and for a while after the war we kept in contact.
The Garay Street apartment was on the first floor [one above the ground floor], two huge rooms to the street. One about six by five meters [305 sq.ft.], that was the bedroom, all four of us slept there. The other was eight by six meters [520 sq.ft.], plus that one had an alcove. There was a bathroom, toilet, huge kitchen and a huge foyer. You could have called that a hall, if the entrance door didn’t open into it. Wood paneling all around and built in cabinets. We ate there. The bigger room was the salon, we were very proud of it. Grandma lived in the alcove. She lived almost a year after we moved there. There was a maid’s room also, which had a door that opened on the stairwell and another opened on the kitchen. A renter lived in the maid’s room. This maid’s room renter had a huge role in things later, they saved my father, they hid him. The whole apartment was of a high standard, beautiful stuccos on the ceiling. The owner of the building lived next door to us, incidentally. They were also a Jewish married couple, and at some point, he’d built it so the whole first floor facing the street was altogether. It was directly on Rottenbiller Street, so it wasn’t part of ‘Chicago’. And on the other side of Rottenbiller Street was the Filleres Department Store.
The building itself had four stories, without an elevator, characteristic of VII. District buildings, with a street façade, two apartments per floor, three on the highest floor. On the back side there were three apartments per floor, with those kind of common toilets next to the stairs on the highest floor. The majority of residents weren’t Jewish, that’s why it didn’t become a star house [Yellow star houses] 11. Relations with the other residents were friendly. One of courteous greetings. There weren’t any special get-togethers, nor mixing. There was only one family who we knew were Arrow Cross. This doesn’t mean Arrow Cross armbands, just their sympathies. But for example, they didn’t report us, didn’t make things uncomfortable during the Arrow Cross period. It’s characteristic of the residents that after 1945 they came over to us to complain how hard life is, how little there is of everything. I can still hear when they said ‘what a beautiful idea the Arrow Cross was, too bad it couldn’t be realized’. There was a lonely woman named Olga Fuhrer, who manufactured cosmetic articles, and really loved us very, very much. Later we found out that she hid many people during the Arrow Cross period. But after 1945, she immediately started to pity the persecuted Arrow Cross. She didn’t have political reasons, just humanitarian ones.
We had theater passes from the age of ten. There were youth performances, for which you could buy tickets in school. That was a completely great thing. We sat in the cheapest seats, but we were always there. Half the time in the National Theater, the other half in the City Theatre [The Erkel Theater started in this building later (1951)]. So you had this one, the school one. Then there was the so-called Folk art Institute pass. That was for the National Theater. We had one of those, too. Then there was the Vajda Janos Company [from the end of the 1930s, it was a functioning literary circle, the last bastion of liberal, civil literature. They also published books.] on 49 Erzsebet Ringroad, on the corner of Kiraly Street, which held exceptionally high quality literature programs on Sunday mornings. That was in 49 Erzsebet Ringroad, on the first floor [- one above the ground floor] in a large, long hall with a podium. After 1945, it became the seventh district MKP [Hungarian Communist Party] headquarters, and there were no more performances. But until then, on Sunday mornings there were performance evenings – True, they were in the mornings – with the best performing artists. For me, the peak was Oszkar Ascher [1897-1965; performing artist, innovator of the early style of poetry recitation], his performances were thematic, about Villon, Ady [Ady, Endre (1877-1919)] 12, French poetry, English or German literature, etc. The audience were high school kids, university age kids, I’d say the young Jewish intellectuals and their incumbents. I heard some of Brecht’s ‘Three-penny Opera’ here, the song ‘The Lover of Pirates’, the chansons and prose, too. Names like: Eva Demjen, Katalin Ilosvay. We went to those, too.
During the war
You have to constantly remember that there was a war on during this time, from 1939. You know, Hungary wasn’t immediately in the war, but it was hanging over our heads. My older sister was taken out of gymnasium in 1939 at the age of fourteen, to learn a trade, because there was trouble coming. They put her into the Rakoczi Square higher trade school [Trade schools] 13, and she learned to be a seamstress. In 1942, they didn’t take me out since the war [seemed like it] had to be over soon. That was the thinking of a Jewish family. Meanwhile, my father was called perpetually called up [to the forced labor battalions]. There were [anti-] Jewish Laws, we had to get a Strohmann. The greatest question was what we were going to live from, but during all this they [her parents] financed us unerringly, if only with a trifling sum, to cultivate our minds. They didn’t consider it entertainment.
At the beginning, we went to the theater with our parents, then later just the two of us [daughters] went. Meanwhile, boys started to appear in my sister’s life. She would have liked to follow the spirit of the times, that my sister would be chaperoned [sic – ‘gardiroztak’: In the times before the war, young girls would only be allowed to go out socializing, to public events, etc. with a chaperone – her mother or a so-called ‘gardedam’. A couple decades earlier, in the beginning of the 20th Century, girls from middle class family backgrounds often wouldn’t have been allowed in the street alone.] But my mother couldn’t do that, so they sent me with her. So, I was my older sister’s chaperone. We went to the [Ferenc Liszt] Music Academy, and the Vigado for concerts. I was so bored I counted the seats. But in the end I can be very thankful for that. Although somehow that clearly defines a lot about our value system, about what you could ignore and what you couldn’t. And I think that’s what is precisely the interesting thing: the intellectuality of a very everyday, lower-middle class Jewish family.
We didn’t feel like an oppressed minority because of our clothes. While we could afford it, a seamstress sewed our clothes, and as youngsters, grandma did. It was a big deal to clothe us. Later, our mother signed up for a sewing-tailoring course, and with unbreakable enthusiasm tailored and sketched, and sewed for us. There was a small fabric shop there in Garay Street, whose owner was very close with my mother. Once, she nearly bought a [whole] bolt of gingham. There was a sewing machine from my grandmother’s time. I think that looking back now, what she sewed wasn’t of too exacting quality, but for a youngster, if you put a bedpan on your head, it looks great. There were uniforms in school, there you couldn’t feel bad about your clothes, and anyway there wasn’t any one better-off class. But there was always one or two things. In the window dresser profession, you would have merchant friends. Like I remember that in 1943, my sister and I each got a pretty coat. Uncle Laci Lautenberg worked at Herczeg and Fodor as a window dresser, and got them at employee prices. There was always something like that.
Meanwhile, of course, world history was happening, and at home we talked about everything. From the first Jewish Laws [Jewish Laws in Hungary] 14 to the coming war, Hitler’s rise to power, Mussolini, Gyula Gombos [Gombos, Gyula (1886-1936)] 15, everything was talked about, and my age didn’t matter. Like when it came up about whether we should emigrate or not. Us, as children had a full right to vote, and I, the zealous Hungarian national sympathizer objected to the most, but my parents would have been hard pressed to do it themselves. But we looked at the map thoroughly, and New Zealand looked the most enticing, but we didn’t have any connections to anywhere in the world. Our only acquaintance was the owner of the Filleres Department Store, Erno Ungar, a rich, clever and good man who had gone to America while there was still time. My father turned to him for a letter of sponsorship, which arrived at the end of 1945. By then, though we thought we didn’t have any need for it. So we followed what was happening in the world with total precision.
The constantly called my father up for work service [forced labor]. I can’t recall the exact date of his first conscription, probably in 1940. At the time they said, three months, and they took him to Diosjeno. Somehow, we lived through that, that it has to be this way because they’d called up the so-called ‘age group exception’. My father was born in 1901, and aside from them, there were three other age groups who were not called in to be soldiers right at the end of the war because of the peace treaty. And the general term for that was the ‘age group exception’. Later, when we were already in the war, work service became more regular and longer. Thank god, they didn’t take him to the Ukraine, he was very lucky indeed that he spent the longest time, around eight months, in Esztergom-Tabor, whose commander, Karoly Gidofalvy Kis was well-known as a decent man. Naturally, it was hard work, pick-axing and humiliation, but not like there, where they let the Jutasi training wreak havoc [Jutasi training: Between the First and Second World Wars, only those in the Hungarian National Guard who finished officer school on the Jutas wastes were allowed to ‘sub-officers’ (this rank was later called ‘vice officer’). The four-year course (in ‘hadaprod’ school), became a two-year course in 1934 (but could be finished in one-year of intensive crash training).] So we had a lot to be thankful for, in the sense that we had this kind of opportunity: My mother sent [him] a telegram that ‘Father is dead. Come home for the funeral.’ For that you had to go into the congregation [center], and get a death certificate, say, for Samuel Stern. Nobody bothered you with what relation he is to you, he could be your step father or anybody. And then they gave him permission to leave. This, by the way, is how we made friends for life with somebody who was a work serviceman there with Father. You could visit and mother met this person’s wife on the train, who we called Aunt Ella. The whole family was significant to me, because it was the only religious Jewish family I got to know in my life. They were Neologs, but they kept the religion.
I don’t know exactly what they did in the work service, only that they pick-axed. But my father told us that at one place they slept on the ground, and mice or frogs were jumping on his face. So these were horrible trials, the whole thing had the character of some kind of boy scout camp. It’s very difficult to explain why it had this feeling, afterwards. They gathered these forty year old men, who wanted to live, who had lived a good part of their lives, whose goal was to someday get past this and go home. Whose families supported them spiritually, cared for them and took everything they could to them, boots or gloves. The boarding conditions were terrible there, and our situation wasn’t rosy either.
The Jewry somehow accepted that they deserved some kind of punishment. I heard this kind of grumbling from my mother, that those Jewish ladies with a ‘button’, who just sit in the coffee houses, could do something about all this. This ‘lady with a button’ comes from the button-shaped diamond earrings they had in their ears, so from the English word. That was the expression, the ‘buttonos’ Jewish ladies. I consider it tragic-comical that we accepted this as if we deserved some punishment, some worse fate, because our life is so much better. It’s very strange, I can’t explain why it was, probably our minds were manipulated that way for decades. And my mother even had this hostile feeling toward wealthy Jews.
So there were departures, he was home for a couple months, and we tried our hardest to live like we were living in a normal world. On exactly, March 19, 1944, they buried my mother’s uncle, Szami Goldstein, in the Jewish cemetery in Obuda. It was a beautiful sunny day, I was there with my mother. And after the funeral, we came back on Becsi Road, and a lot of German soldiers on motorcycles roared passed us. We went home, not on foot, by trolleybus. That was the first trolley-bus in Budapest. The others were all started on Stalin’s birthday. We got home, my father and Klari deathly pale, informed us in a tragic tone that the Germans had invaded us. [German Occupation of Hungary] 16. The horror of it was enormous. My father was at home when during the occupation, when the regulation for wearing the yellow star came out, but when we had to move to the [yellow] star houses he wasn’t at home, so sometime between the two [regulations] he was called up again. He wound up in Ratonyara in Transylvania.
Well, the yellow star came, the school year ended, limitations on going out, we were ordered into the star house. My mother and I looked at lots of apartments, but couldn’t find one place, until somebody from the building across the street, from 4 Garay Street, which was a star house, told my mother that they recognized my mother from sight and they’d offer us a room. We moved there. It was horrible. We had to throw everything together, and make an inventory of what we could bring with us, and it was a very short list. We took our beds and our personal things over. Cabinets, table, armchairs, no, but well the apartment there had furnishings. Even before that we had to hand in our radios, carpets as gifts from the Hungarian people to the Germans. [From April 1944, Jews could not be in possession of radio sets. (This was preceded by the obligatory submission of telephones) From April 7, Jewish travel was restricted, use of personal automobiles, motorcycles was forbidden, they could no longer travel by rail, taxi, or boat or public transportation. After the institution of the star houses, Jews were banned from leaving them were brought in: from the end of June 1944, these houses could only left during restricted hours. ] One advantage of the star house, was that in this apartment we met two young women, who worked in the Bethlen Square relief hospital. This relief hospital was established, because they took the building away from the Jewish Charity Hospital [This Chevra Kadisa Charity Hospital, its’ building houses the Hospital of the National Neurological Surgery Institute today.] on Amerikai Road, and it was moved to the Bethlen Square Jewish school building. It was created with the purpose of treating Jews sick from the Kistarcsa Internment Camp 17 there. So it was a guarded building, there were armed guards. These two young women were nursing assistants, and in May of 1944, they took me and my sister there to work. [Braham: ‘The modern, well-equipped Szabolcs Street Jewish hospital was taken by the Germans in May 1944. After this the Jewish Council established two relief hospitals, one in the Wesselenyi Street Jewish Community School building, and the other on Bethlen Square, in a part of the OMZSA headquarters building. Since these hospitals were outside the ghetto, they could be used only with a special permit. They called the hospitals International Red Cross Central Relief Hospitals to protect them from the Arrow Cross. Within the ghetto there were smaller assistance units, which were also called Red Cross hospitals, but the Arrow Cross attacks couldn’t take control of those outside the ghetto nor inside the ghetto. (For example, the Arrow Cross attacked on December 28, and for 24 hours held the Bethlen Square hospital under terror, then left taking 28 patients hostage with them. The hostages were later killed.)] This was important, because we didn’t know anything and were afraid of everything. There was always some new news. That they’re not taking ladies away, just girls. Quickly everybody had to get married in name. They only take those away who don’t have work. Those who work, don’t go. Once they even said they aren’t taking those who get converted to Christianity. So that a priest even came to the air-raid cellar below the building, to give classes. That’s how I know the New Testament so well. Not one of us wanted to Catholicize [sic], but it was interesting and we had the time for it.
So I got into the hospital at age sixteen, as the kind of a child whose only obligation to that point had been to study well. At home, the most I ever did was dry the already washed dishes. I wound up in a forty-bed ward, where there were sacks of hay and cots. The school gym had been converted. I ended up with the kind of nurse, who sat down to teach me what a hospital is and how to work. I experienced so unbelievably much benevolence in the hospital. My work was a difficult as it possibly could be, I hauled cauldrons, distributed food, collected dishes, washed them, emptied bedpans. But there was an atmosphere to the whole thing, a totally positive atmosphere. People were good to each other. Like sometime in July the nurse called me over, that the gentleman doctor L. needs to go to Elemer Street to look at patients, I should go with him, and take the blood pressure meter. I thought to myself, is the gentleman doctor’s hand going to break if he carries it? But I didn’t dare talk back, I took it. It later turned out that she sent me because an old man was dying in the ward, and they wanted to preserve me from when a person dies. In the middle of 1944. In the middle of the bombings and everything. It was important that I shouldn’t see somebody die.
In any case, it was very lively in the hospital, there were a lot of young people, nurses, doctors. Escaped work servicemen were appearing constantly so that soon the temple building was also filled up. Food was ever scarcer, it had to be shared in more directions, but in the middle of all that, we really had a good time.
It was still summer, probably the end of July, suddenly the hospital is full of small kids. It turned out that on Columbus Street there was some kind of transit house. [Columbus Street Refugee camp] 18, there they collected the small kids and brought them over to the hospital saying that if we had any time, take care of them. They were such lost, lonely children. I started tending one terribly sweet, two year old little boy, and I took him home. When he saw my mother, he ran over to her with open arms, ‘Mommy!’. That was it. Everything was taken care of. His name was Sanyi Freund, we found out later, that his parents were refugees from Szatmarnemeti. They had a little girl too, my mother’s friend took her in. What happened was the parents gave up their kids so they could flee. A couple days before the Arrow Cross takeover, the parents appeared, they found us, and took the children saying that somehow they were going to try to get to Palestine. I hope they got to Palestine, I never heard about them again.
We were in the hospital on September 17th when my mother walked in with stone dust in her hair and clothes. She came to see if the hospital was bombed, because they’d bombed us out of 4 Garay Street. A bomb went straight through the apartment we lived in and blew up in the cellar. You couldn’t walk the streets during an air raid. If they’d seen my mother, they would have shot her without warning. But she absolutely had to know what had happened to us. We rushed home in our nurses clothes, and immediately somebody stopped me: ‘You’re a nurse, identify this corpse.’ So I got what they’d tried to preserve me from in the hospital. It was repulsive.
After the bombing, we moved to 76 Rakoczi Road, which was a corner house. To this point whoever could escape, did, so it was relatively easy to find a room in the star house. This house had two gates, one on Rakoczi Road, the other opened on Szovetseg Street. That’s where [news of] the Horthy Proclamation [Horthy Proclamation] 19 reached us, which we were very glad for. We had already taken the star down from the house, when Szalasi came, and suddenly we look up and see they’re massing people together in front of the house, and taking the Jews away. We decided then in one second that we were going to escape through the other gate. In that one dress we had on, without a star of course, we took Mother by each arm. I remember I was saying constantly, ‘Mother, act like your child is telling you a delightful story. Don’t go out with that despairing face.’ We went to Hernad Street to my uncle the printer’s Christian friend to ask whether he could help us or not. His wife told us in tears that they couldn’t take us in. What do we do? There was still Bethlen Square. We went to the hospital, where naturally they took us in. They took my mother on as a assistant nurse. Where was there room? Well, in the contagious ward. Later the hospital got so full, that they covered a little windowless closet space with blankets, and we slept there on the blankets.
By the way, I acquired some kind of a tough skin. It was a very contradictory period. I couldn’t imagine the whole time that something bad could happen to us. My gymnasium [high school] report card disappeared in the bombed out apartment. What did I do in October of 1944? I wandered into the gymnasium [high school], where school had already started but I wasn’t allowed to go. ‘Would you be so kind as to give me another report card.’ While I waited for them to make it, nobody would talk to me, just the custodian’s wife who pushed the oily sawdust there. I don’t know what they could have thought about me, what I was expecting, from having my school report card in order.
Somehow the atmosphere was such that, for example, the bombings barely interested us. Once I went with another girl to the roof during an air raid, so we could see something. It was an incredible cultural life. In the evenings we sat in the large pretty stairwell on the steps, we sang, sometime someone recited a poem.
In the beginning of November, the order came for Jewish women born between 1904 and 1928 have to report in. [On October 22nd, posters appeared on the streets of Budapest which said ‘all Jewish men from the age of 16 to 60, as well as all Jewish women from the age of 18 to 40 must report for ‘sorozas’ [roll call]’. By October 26th, nearly 35,000 Jews, among them 10, 000 women were mobilized. They were quickly arranged in work service companies, and were sent to ditch digging or the construction of defensive fortifications in the south and southeast perimeter countryside of the capitol’.] My since my mother was from 1904, and I was from 1928. And then my mother said, that they’re not going to force her. We didn’t go. And nobody reported us, because when we went into the hospital, we disappeared in front of the eyes of those who would have. There were many raids on the hospital, but we were in the contagious ward, and neither the Germans nor the Arrow Cross really wanted to go in there. Once they took fifty men away. This was supposedly a deal, that they would take fifty men and they would leave the hospital alone. There were a lot of us there. In the end, my older sister got typhus on Christmas eve. She slept on the upper bunk of a windowless room, with a typhus patient below her, that’s probably how she got it, and my mother stood on a chair and held her hand, and nursed her. She recovered.
In the beginning of January 1945, my father suddenly appeared in the hospital. Up to then we knew nothing about him. I already mentioned that in the maid’s room, which had a double entrance on the stairwell and from the kitchen there was a entrance, from nearly the first minute lived a renter, a woman named Anna L. who worked in a 24 hour news and tobacco stand nearby. She was a very strait, soldierly, masculine-looking woman. She loved us, and this was mutual. When we went into the star house, an Arrow Cross couple moved into our apartment, but Anna stayed in the maid’s room. As soon as the retreat started, my father escaped. He skipped out about the same way as Laszlo Tabi with the bucket. [Refers to the humorist Laszlo Tabi’s sketch in which he describes that he escaped from the work service with two buckets, and if they asked him for ID, he said he was just going to the well for water.] He got a small hand car somewhere, on top of that was an old stove, as if he were taking it to a blacksmith, and he came to Pest. His clothes were quite acceptable as a worker’s clothes, and he even grew a mustache. He tried to find some place in Pest. I don’t know where he talked to Anna, probably at the tobacco stand, it suffices to say that Anna hid him in her room. He lived for about three months there and they never noticed. He wasn’t even allowed to go piss in the day time. Then in January, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he went to the hospital. And there, we were all liberated together on the 14th of January [Liberation of Budapest]20.
After the war
My father had lost a terrible amount of weight, because from 1937 or 1938 he’d had a stomach ulcer. It followed him everywhere, that he had to diet, he had to be careful. And he did that all the way to the year 1944, then after the liberation he collapsed. He wound up in the MABI hospital [MABI – Private Employee Insurance Institute. Today the Peterfy Street hospital].
Life started over, we didn’t have a thing in the world, not food, not lights, and still we were unbelievably happy. From the first minute, we went everywhere. At the end of January, the Hungarian theater had a big recruiting meeting, and it was a huge experience, because our favorite actors Tamas Major, Hilda Gobbi, Zoltan Varkonyi performed [Tamas Major (1910-1986): Actor, director, theatre director. He had a defining role before the war in the creation of the National Theatre’s youth performances. Director of the National Theater (1945-1962), then was head director (1962-1978), and a member of the Katona Jozsef Theater from 1982; Hilda Gobbi (1913-1988): Actress who spent the longest part of her career in the National Theatre as well. Zoltan Varkonyi (1912-1979) – actor, director, theater director. The main director of the Vig Theatre (from 1961), then director of the theatre (1971-1979). Previously had been a member of the National Theater, the Madach Theater, as well as the Muvesz Theater. His name is connected to the screen adaptations of many classic Hungarian novels.] We looked for friends, and they looked for us. When my father first went home to the apartment, he told the Arrow Cross couple to leave because the owner came home. They immediately disappeared. Then my father and I brought home the beds one at a time from Rakoczi Road. Life started.
Klari married Sandor B. in 1947, whom she’d met at a student ball during the war. Sandor was born into a religious Neolog Jewish middle class family in 1922. His father was an agent, his mother a housewife. Sandor had a sister one year older than him, who survived the war with her husband and little daughter who was born in 1943. The girl became an accountant, married a number of times, and has no children. It made no difference that Sandor graduated as an ‘A’ student, he couldn’t go to university [anti-Jewish laws forbade it]. He learned a trade, worked in a factory, then became a work serviceman [forced labor]. Then in 1945, they accepted him at university, and he became an engineer. Klari graduated later in the Hungarian English department of the College of Humanities, and taught until she retired. Sandor died in 1980. They had a son who emigrated to Australia. Klari left to live with them in 1992 and lives there ever since.
At the beginning of 1945, high school started again, and I continued in the seventh grade of gymnasium. We didn’t lose a year, because those who started back in school in September of 1944 didn’t really go that often: there were coal shortages, then came the siege [of Budapest], then right away there wasn’t any heating, or electricity, so we continued together with them.
And now comes the thing that even now, sixty years later I can’t find an answer for: we didn’t talk about what happened. Not with each other, not with other Jews. Two Jewish girls from our class were lost there. We didn’t talk about it. One girl came back from deportation. And we didn’t ask her anything, and she didn’t tell us anything. We know she came back from being deported because she was bald and her face was covered in spots. It was more like that we didn’t even dare to go talk to her. My girlfriend and I just hung on each other’s necks saying, ‘You survived, that so great!’ – and we didn’t tell each other what happened.
Something else happened in 1945. We Magyarized our name from Kauders to ‘H-‘. To this day, it is still difficult for me to say that I’m Jewish. I could never go back to the religion. Not because I was afraid, indeed, I even escorted my mother to temple. In 1949, when I was already working, a colleague of mine good-naturedly told me that I shouldn’t go to temple because it’s incompatible with party membership. And when I told my mother that, she said, ‘look at his stinking Jew, he must have also been there in the synagogue, otherwise where else would he have known that you were there?’ Still in 1948 I had a bad feeling when I got on a tram with a friend on Saturday [the Sabbath] to go somewhere. But I had already lost my faith by then. I lost my faith in degrees as we found out what had happened to our Ujpest relatives, that Ervin Engel had been consumed with grief.
I graduated in 1946, and I went to the Hungarian-English department in the college of Humanities. I had studied English earlier, but I didn’t know it really well. There was a very big social life at the university, politics first entered my life then. I joined the Communist Party in 1947. My father and my older sister had already joined in 1945. I didn’t really like the College of Humanities. I was really good in Hungarian literature, I could say that I was the teacher’s favorite, and for years I got used to her explaining things in class, practically just to me. Then I sat in classes in the university, and I felt that it was flat and didn’t say anything. Pretty soon it turned out I wasn’t going to classes as much as I was going to the corner coffeeshop for a single [espresso].
Then I decided, that I wanted to make money instead, and I left university. I’d gone for two years, but I didn’t take the basic examination which was mandatory at the end of the second year. From the entire class, at least among the party members, only Gyuri Litvan took it, who was a very enthusiastic and diligent boy. [Gyorgy Litvan, historian: Joined the party opposition beside Imre Nagy in 1955. He became famous at the Party meeting in Angyalfold on March 23, 1956 for publicly demanding the removal of Matyas Rakosi. He was imprisoned after 1956, and given amnesty in 1962.]
I was already working in January of 1949. And then came a period when I saw something here. I went here to work at the time, when I saw something here I took it, something there then I took that but meanwhile I got it a third job. I thought about it later, and for a long time I thought that it was only about an over-extended teenage period. But no. I realized that this was the Holocaust. It knocked me, like a pendulum [demolition ball], the kind they demolish houses with, out of the well-defined life, well-circumscribed around the Holocaust. I didn’t know where I was. It took me a long time before I figured it out. But then I found my place, I chose a great trade, and with a grown-up mind I graduated from the Economics University. I was always good in languages, so I had a successful professional life. I look back a my life and see it was successful. I earned, and earned, I left what wasn’t good behind, I dare to decide, I dared to change.
I got married in 1951. We met at work. He wasn’t Jewish, but that didn’t cause any problems. All my Jewish girlfriends married non-Jewish boys. Not because, like a lot of people say, that we didn’t want to be Jewish. We didn’t convert, we didn’t deny our Jewish past, but we thought that we should be just like anybody else, the non-Jews. In any case, one of the decisive motivations of my life is equality, that there shouldn’t be second-class in any sphere, and a lot of people apparently lived this way. I didn’t even bother with it. At work I had no idea who was Jewish and who wasn’t for decades. My circle of friends was like this, that half were Jewish, and half weren’t. My husband came from a working class family. He got his law degree while we were married. He also did it at night school. Their family didn’t mind that he married a Jewish girl. It wasn’t an especially close family. His father was no longer living, it didn’t matter to his mother. The relative who really loved him, accepted me. And there wasn’t any opposition in my family either. Anyway, my husband looked more Jewish than I did, so much so that he would get comments at work like, ‘because us Jews, you understand…’ and he never corrected anyone. He considered it exceptionally important to assume responsibility for [having] his wife. We had two children, both have diplomas. One of the children has a Jewish spouse and one doesn’t. My children are great, both live in good marriages, the most important thing being that I have five grandchildren, with whom I have an extremely good relationships.
In the 1950s, we lived quite poorly, but somehow we didn’t feel it. We were young. We filled our free time with family programs, attended the theater a lot, and the symphony. In the 1960s, we wound up in a continuously better financial situation, we regularly went to the Theater, the cinema, we read the ‘Nagyvilag’[The Big World], the ‘Kortars’[Contemporary], the ‘Uj Iras’ [New Writing], and ‘Elet es Irodalom’ [Life and Literature]. Our society of friends mainly came from work acquaintences. It was not at all important who was Jewish and who wasn’t.
In the meantime, we finished university at night school. We helped each other a lot. There was a big cultural difference between my husband and I, because since he didn’t get so much out of his family as I did mine, but he was an outstanding talent, had a brilliant mind, he took in everything. He only knew one language, German, but he spoke it quite well. Not like I did, but he made himself understood, he could watch films [in German]. And he was very endearing, enormously helpful person.
I don’t want to talk in anymore detail about my life after 1945. What I think I had to say, that is, that I became a Party member in an extremely naïve and idealistic way. I took everything deathly serious. I believed that the Soviet soldiers came to Hungary to save me. My husband was much smarter than me, he enlightened me to so many things, like how the glorious Soviet groups stood around just before Warsaw, what kind of games are going on and about everything. He saw very clearly, so clearly that there was a time in his life when he was on the verge of depression whenever he thought about how bad it is like this. While I took this as correctable situation, then he saw clearly that it wasn’t, and it bothered him that we’re doing something that is futile. Of course, he listened to Free Europe [Radio Free Europe] 21 and the Voice of America. I didn’t because I didn’t like the tone of the announcer’s voice. In retrospect, this causes a big problem for me: I know that I did a lot of good in my workplace, in the field of ‘cadre development’ [In socialist firms HRO people were always on the lookout for people who were worthy of becoming communist cadres, these people were then sent to various specialized and political courses to be properly educated especially politically.], on questions of promotion, and still I was the servant or administrator of something that turned out to be bad. True, I didn’t know, and if I could have known, then I would have quickly closed my eyes and ears. My mother was the only one, who never believed anything. My father and I did. My mother didn’t believe the Rajk trial [Rajk Trial] 22, and never got taken in by anything.
We were all happy about the establishment of the Israeli state. This didn’t even bother my communism, because the Soviet Union even voted for it. But the thought of emigrating never came up. The 1967 war [Six-day war] 23 was terrible. There was a party decision at that time that Israel should be judged as an aggressor. The party decision pertained to us. Both of us protected ourselves from having to make a statement about it anywhere. I don’t consider it an heroic thing, but my husband for example was invited to hold party meetings all over the place. He was a very dynamic, very talented person with a good stage presence. In those times, he didn’t accept anything [any speaking engagements]. He told everyone, that he doesn’t have time. It wasn’t an intelligent thing in those days to provoke the Party discipline. But both of us were cheering for Israel with all our hearts. My husband and Uncle Imre had an argument about it. That is, Uncle Imre argued with my husband before the ’67 war, Uncle Imre had a high opinion of Nasser, my husband said he would like to kill all the Jews into the Red Sea. At the time, you couldn’t tell that it would really happen, but my husband saw things very clearly. The same thing for the 1973 war [Yom Kippur War] 24, and also, when Hungary broke diplomatic relations with Israel.
I was in Israel for the first time in 1995. We have no relatives, my sister and I went as tourists. I got a list of Israeli hotels, sat on the telephone, wrote faxes, and we took a completely independently arranged tour.
GLOSSARY
Eva Gora Moldovan
Brasov
Romania
Interviewer: Andrea Laptes
Date of interview: December 2003
Mrs. Eva Gora looks rather young for her 73 years; her black hair only has some white strands in it, and her black eyes are vivid. She lives alone in a three-bedroom apartment, which is a bit crowded but neat. She has doilies on all the tables. She always has some home-made cherry brandy, cookies and coffee ready for guests. She socializes a lot with her neighbors. She speaks in a laconic and unique way: she doesn’t hold back, but she seems to believe that her personal experiences and life are of little relevance. She has a suppressed sense of humor, and she speaks of all the hardships in a very accepting and indulging way.
My family background
My paternal grandparents, Perec – or Pavel, as I have seen it written in other documents – and Fraidla Feld, lived in Poland, in Belchatow, but that’s all I know about them. I never met them because my father, Samuel Feld, came to Romania as a young man and they remained there. My father came from a large family: he had ten siblings, but I don’t know their names. I only know that one sister left for the USA – I don’t exactly know when – and lived in New Jersey. I don’t know more about his family because I don’t remember him ever talking about them.
My maternal grandparents were from Poland as well, but I never met them either. My grandmother was called Etel Friem. I don’t know her maiden name and I don’t know my grandfather’s first name, either. I couldn’t find it in any documents. They lived in Kulikowka, and that’s where my mother, Rifke Feld, was born. I think they moved to Lvov after that because my mother used to tell me stories that happened in Lvov. My grandfather worked as a baker there, and my grandmother was a housewife. They had twelve children, and they weren’t rich, but they managed to raise them somehow. They lived in a house and shared a courtyard with the owners of other houses.
My grandparents were religious, but not Orthodox Jews; I can guess that from the way my mother observed tradition. My mother used to tell me that at one point, one of her siblings died, and her mother bewailed him or her so desperately, that her neighbors came to her and told her, ‘Come on, don’t be so upset, you have eleven other children!’. But grandmother, in her grief, said, ‘No, I have only one Smuel, one Iosif…’ and so on. She meant that each child was unique for her. When World War I broke out, my mother told me, that they had to hide the flour, so that it wouldn’t be confiscated. Grandmother died during World War I. Many of her elder children were already married and had their own households. My grandmother found out that street fights were about to break out, and, as a caring mother, she ran over to one of her daughters’ house, to warn her to close the gates. But when she got there, the gates were already closed, street fights broke out and she was shot in the street.
My mother, Rifke Feld, nee Friem, was born in Kulikowka, Poland, in 1897, and her native tongue was Yiddish. I think she went to elementary school as a child, but that’s all the schooling she had. Of all my mother’s siblings, I know only of Eugenia Goldstein, nee Friem, who lived in Resita, Romania, with her family. She moved there some time before World War II, but I don’t know the exact year. That’s why my mother came to Resita: her family found out that Eugenia was ill, and they wanted to send somebody from the family to take care of her, and that was my mother. She came to Resita in her early twenties, some time at the end of World War I, and she never went back to Poland again, nor did she see her parents again. Her mother died shortly after my mother left for Romania, and her father passed away some time after that. She came by train to Resita, to look after her elder sister Eugenia, and she stayed here for good. My mother told me that the journey to Romania was a nightmare: she came with a train full of soldiers, and, as you can surely imagine, that wasn’t easy for a young single woman.
My father, Samuel Feld, was born in Belchatow, Poland, in 1893, and his native tongue was Yiddish. I believe he graduated from high school. He came to Romania to look for a job when he was a young man, and he ended up in Resita because the town had a strong metallurgy industry. There were many factories and one could find a job as a laborer much easier. And that’s what my father did for a living in his first years here. He met my mother in the Jewish circles in Resita, I think. They met, fell in love and got married in 1918. It was a religious wedding, but I don’t know if they went to the synagogue or if the rabbi came to their home. It was at the end of the war and times were rather troubled. My parents didn’t have Romanian citizenship for a very long time, I think they only received it after World War II: periodically, they had to pay a fee and renew their passports.
In the beginning, my parents worked very hard to support themselves. My father worked as a laborer. My mother used to raise and fatten geese, slaughtered them and sold the lard and liver. Those were rather expensive and most people preferred goose lard to unrefined oil because it tasted better. When I was little, my mother still raised a few geese and stored the lard in cans for winter, but that was just for our own use. All the time I can remember, my mother used goose lard for cooking.
In 1920 my mother gave birth too early to a baby boy – she was eighth months pregnant – and he died. After that, in 1921, she gave birth to Etel Feld, my sister. I never got to know her though because she died in 1929 or 1930 of meningitis. My parents were devastated; she had been the joy of their lives. From what my parents told me, she was a very smart girl: she was the first in school, and she always received prizes and so on.
Growing up
I was born in 1931, and at that time, my parents lived in a rented house with three rooms, whose owner was an old Jewish woman, Schwartz neni [Hungarian for Aunt Schwartz]. The furniture was ours. I remember I had my own room, and the furniture was white, and the edges had little black wooden beads on them; I even had a mirror and a dressing table. The house had a garden with beautiful roses, but we weren’t allowed to enter it; the roses belonged to the owner. We had running water and electricity, but it was the same everywhere in Resita. We didn’t have a big library at home, but we did have some religious books, like the siddur, which my mother and father used on the high holidays. My parents never advised me what to read; there was no need to.
We got along well with our neighbors, with the owner, Schwartz neni, and with the Tauber family, who were also Jewish and had a daughter older than me. Her and me weren’t close friends, but we got along well.
By the time I was born, my parents already had a small-wear shop, and from what they told me later, the business didn’t go very well until I was born. I brought them luck: after I was born, the business started to pick up. The shop was in the house we lived in; from the shop you went through a door into our living room. It was small, only one room, and thickset with all sorts of merchandise: clothes, fabrics and so on – I think you could find anything in it! My father usually went to buy merchandise at different fairs, my mother worked as a cashier in the shop and they had one employee who attended customers. We could also afford a Hungarian servant to do the chores around the house: she did the cleaning and the shopping. I don’t remember ever going to the market with my mother.
Although we had a servant, my mother did the cooking herself, and there was never pork on the table for as long as she cooked. She had a separate pot for milk, but she didn’t observe all the kashrut laws strictly. She didn’t have separate utensils for dairy and meat products, for example. And, my father even had some salami when he didn’t eat at home. And the poultry was always cut at the ‘sakter’, that is the shochet. On Friday evenings my mother said the blessing and lit the candles and there was soup for dinner. We had challah as well. My mother made the dough and took it to the baker’s; I don’t remember if it was on Thursdays or on Fridays. On Sabbath we usually had geese and one of my mother’s puff pastry specialties. Most of our time was spent with eating and drinking, as one does on a holiday.
Whenever there was a high holiday, I received presents. I was a spoiled child. My parents had already lost two babies, they were rather old and I was their treasure. Heaven forbid something should have happened to me! So on Chanukkah I received Chanukkah gelt, and on Pesach, I hid matzah [the afikoman] and my father never found it, of course. You can imagine what tragedy it would have been if he had found it – no present for me!
My favorite holiday was Pesach, probably because there were many presents. I received more or less what I wanted: toys, clothes and things like that. My father asked the mah nishtanah, and I answered with mah nishtanah ha-layla ha-ze [Why is this night different (from all other nights)?]. There was a big cleaning before Pesach, but we didn’t have special tableware for Pesach. My mother just boiled all the pots. Of course, nobody ate any bread on Pesach. The seder was observed in the family, and my father led it. I remember we always had as a guest an old Jewish lady – I don’t remember her name – whom I pretended to be my grandmother because I was jealous that all other children had one, and I didn’t. She always brought some dessert with her, but I don’t remember what it’s called; it’s a paste made of apple, sugar and ground nut kernels. I didn’t do anything special with this lady, I just liked to call her grandmother.
On Yom Kippur my parents fasted, and I fasted, too, but when I was little, I only fasted half a day. My father never took me with him when he went to the synagogue on Sabbath, I only went on high holidays with my mother. And he never taught me religion. We never read from the siddur together, for example, but it happened that he explained things to me, like why we light candles and so on: I remember him telling me that there are two Sabbath candles because they should remind us that there were two tables of laws. [Editor’s note: According to widespread belief, the fact that there are two candles refers to two versions of the ten commandments, where two different words remind us that Jews have to keep the Sabbath. One is ‘zahor’ which means ‘Remember!’, that is ‘do not forget it’ and the other is ‘shamor’, which means, ‘keep it!’, that is, observe it. In many places they light as many candles as there are children in the family.]. When we went to the synagogue, I couldn’t wait for the Yizkor to be read, because the children whose parents were still alive weren’t allowed to listen, and I could go out in the synagogue’s courtyard to play with other children. [Editor’s note: Yizkor, read out during the maskir ceremony, is a memorial prayer for the deads’ souls. In the Ashkenazi ritual, it is said after the reading of the Torah, during the morning service of the last day of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, and on the Day of Atonement.] I don’t remember dressing up for Purim, or building a sukkah on Sukkot, but all the family went to the synagogue.
My parents never punished me for anything, but they didn’t have a reason to: I was a good child and rather obedient. My mother told me later, when I had grown up, that she used to be a bit jealous of me because I was always daddy’s girl. I don’t know if I really was closer to my father; I loved them both the same.
I don’t know how big the Jewish community of Resita was, but there was a beautiful temple, and there were functionaries like a chazzan, hakhamim, shochetim, and so on. The community wasn’t Orthodox, I remember in the temple there was an organ, and I know the Orthodox Jews don’t have that. There weren’t particularly Jewish neighborhoods in Resita. Most of the Jews I knew were merchants, jewelers, shoemakers, rofim [Hebrew for doctors] as well as lawyers.
My parents’ closest friends were the Pollacks, who were also Jews. They had a boy, Aristide, who was older than me, but would still play with me sometimes. Later, they also had a girl called Reghina. They owned a tailor’s shop. Mr. Pollack, whenever he saw me he gave me pinch on the cheek and told me to wash my eyes because I had very black eyes. And he said that he wanted to have a little girl just like me! My parents were also close to my aunt’s family, the Goldsteins. We spent holidays together sometimes. However, the Pollacks were always visiting us.
When I was little, I had a fraulein [governess], but I don’t remember if she was Hungarian or German; she stayed with me only for a little while. After that I went to the normal state school, but it was only for two years because the anti-Jewish laws in Romania 1 were introduced. I remember rather little from those two years in Resita, but I do remember I was a strajer 2.
The first time I was confronted with anti-Semitism was when I was in the 2nd grade of elementary school, in 1939 or 1940. One day my teacher came to our house, and told my parents, ‘Please don’t send your daughter to school anymore, we are not allowed to accept her. I didn’t want to tell her that in front of the other kids!’. He was a good man considering that he thought of that. I heard that the principal of another school in Resita, who was a legionary 3, told the Jewish kids in the classroom that they were stinking Jews, and that they wouldn’t set foot in that school again; and he said all that in front of the other children.
During the war
After that, my father lost the shop, and a Nazi, a German, took it over. Soon after that, the legionaries gathered all the Jews in the house of a Jewish lawyer, Deju was his name. He was single and he had a big beautiful house. Rumors had it that they were going to be shot or deported, and my father was taken there, too. I remember I went to that house with a little package for my father, and the legionary guarding the door allowed me to talk to him. He called him to the window and let me give him that package. I was a very cute kid – black eyes, curly long hair – and he was probably touched. However, soon after that the legionaries broke their necks [on 21st January 1941], and I believe that’s why the men weren’t deported or shot. I was just a kid, I knew nothing of politics, but I believe not even my father knew more about what happened back then. After the legionary rebellion had been defeated, they were simply allowed to go home. All of them felt pretty lucky because from what my father told us later, it was almost certain that they would have been executed, if it hadn’t been for the defeat of the legionaries.
We were affected by the anti-Jewish laws. First I was thrown out of school, then my father was sent to forced labor in Oravita [small town in southwestern Romania, in Caras-Severin county], and we had to go with him, so our forced residence was there as well. We went to Oravita in 1941 in a cattle truck, and the soldiers guarding us told us that if we stuck out our heads, they would shoot us.
In Oravita, we rented a small place with a courtyard; we lived in only one room that had a kitchen and a bathroom, and we had electricity and running water. We didn’t breed any animals or grow vegetables in the garden, but my mother was busy all the same with the chores around the house. Moreover, we had no income: my mother was a housewife, and my father wasn’t paid for his work. We had to manage with our savings.
My father had to work hard; he was in Lisava [Lisava tunnel on the Oravita-Anina railway, 91 meters long, located near the town and small river Lisava, in the Semenic Mountains] and in Tantari [former name of commune Dumbravita, in Brasov county], building railways, bridges and tunnels. The unfair thing was: my father wasn’t even supposed to be taken to forced labor because there was an age limit, and he was above it. From what I understood, another Jew from Resita was supposed to go, but he had high connections, so he got out of it and my father was taken instead. All the Jews from Resita were taken to forced labor, except the rofim and the lawyers; I don’t know why, they were probably needed. Life was hard in those three years. We barely saw my father: he came home and then he was sent to another workplace again. There wasn’t much of a family life. I spent most of my time in school. The occasions when all the family was reunited were rare. I remember we tried to observe the high holidays, to the extent it was possible, but it wasn’t on a regular basis.
The Jews deported to Oravita organized some sort of school there, so that the Jewish kids wouldn’t miss out on years: an accountant taught arithmetic, a lady dentist taught Romanian literature , and so on. We also had some religion classes, where we learnt some Hebrew; a chazzan taught us. All the classes were held in a building that belonged to the synagogue in Oravita. Moreover, we were allowed to take exams at the Jewish high school in Timisoara, so we, the Jewish kids, went there periodically by train, accompanied by an adult. Of course the classes we improvised were small: three kids in the 1st grade, two in the 2nd, and the like. I remember, one time when we were traveling to Timisoara, the train was derailed and we got stuck in the snow; it was winter. Another time, we were in Timisoara, in the Jewish high school, taking an exam, and the Americans came in to bomb the city [the American raids occurred on 4th April 1944]. The teachers took us out of the classroom and brought us to some trenches dug in the courtyard: I remember seeing human bones there. The place had probably been a graveyard. You can probably imagine that we were scared to death.
Immediately after 23rd August 1944 4, the Germans came to bomb with their Stukas [JU87 Stuka model airplanes, the dive bombers used by the German Luftwaffe during WW II]. That in-law cousin of mine, Dezideriu Lowinger – he was the husband of my aunt’s daughter, Etus, who had been a fervent communist for a short period of time, just like many Jews during that period – realized that the Germans would come looking for communists. It was known that all communists and their families had to suffer repercussions from the Germans, had they been caught, so Dezideriu wanted the whole family to go to Lugoj [town 70 km from Oravita] immediately. I don’ know if we needed or got any special approval to go there.
Dezideriu had a sister in Lugoj, Irma Weiss was her name, and we all went there until the bombings were over. We stayed in his sister’s house. We were ten people crowded in just one house. The Germans were still bombing with their Stukas; it was dangerous to stay out in the courtyard – an old man was killed that way. One time, my mother was at the market with my cousin, when the alarm went off, and the bombing began. She told me there was total panic, people were running, falling off the bridge. While we were in Lugoj, the Germans bombed the railway station. We didn’t live far from it, and when a bomb fell, the milk pot, which was on the windowsill to cool, flew all the way right into the middle of the room. We stayed in Lugoj for a few weeks, until the Germans were defeated, and then we moved back to Oravita.
Only after we came back from Lugoj to Oravita we found out what had happened while we were gone. Across the street from us lived a woman, who was a big Hitler fan – we had no idea – and when the Germans came with the trucks in Oravita, she started screaming, ‘Heil Hitler!’ and other crap like that. She climbed on the trucks and started to scream that in that house – our house – there were Jews. The Germans came looking for us, but the owner told them that we weren’t there, which was true, and when they wanted to come in, he told them that we were poor and that they would find nothing to take.
When the Russians came, it was truly a liberation, no matter what others say, even if it was short-lived: we could go back to Resita and reopen our shop. Of course we saw pretty soon what communism was all about, but its first effects were good for us. My father never joined the Communist Party, but many Jews did and I wasn’t surprised.
After the war
When we came back to Resita from Oravita in 1944, we rented the same house we had stayed in before and we got our shop back. My mother’s sister, Eugenia, and her family – her son, daughters and their families, who had also been deported to Oravita with us – didn’t go back to Resita. They settled in Caransebes. Her husband, who had also been in forced labor, had died in the meantime, and her son-in-law, Dezideriu Lowinger, wanted to go to Caransebes. He had some business there I think, so they moved there.
We got our shop back, which was empty of course, so my parents struggled again to reopen it. The political situation got funny at one point after the war, I remember, because our shop was right next to the police station and we were good neighbors. When all the issues with Tito 5 in Yugoslavia began, nobody knew what to think, the news was so confusing: one day he was our friend, one day he was an executioner. My father had a picture of Tito and tried to keep up with the political preferences of the time because he didn’t want any more trouble from the state. So he would put that picture up on the wall or take it off, depending on the political situation. And one of those days, my father lost track of what Tito was to us on that particular day, until the policemen came to him in a hurry and told him to hide the picture because Tito was an executioner again! But soon after my father got his shop back, communism forbade private commerce, nationalization 6 followed, he lost his shop, and he was destroyed: he wasn’t a young man anymore, and he had to support his family somehow. So he went back to working as a laborer, but he did that only for a short period of time.
When we came back to Resita, I continued school – I was in the 5th or 6th grade – and after elementary school I went to high school. Luckily, the certificates I had from the Jewish high school were recognized. We had to have religious classes, and everybody went to study their own religion: Catholics went to their church, and we, the Jewish kids, went to the synagogue. We studied religion until it was banned from schools in 1948, I think, with the reform of the teaching system. [Editor’s note: the reform in the teaching system banned religion from schools, imposed Russian as a foreign language, and started the sovietization of all high school and university curricula.]
I didn’t suffer from anti-Semitism from my teachers or colleagues. I made friends in school with everybody, but my circle of Jewish friends was more like the nucleus, unintentionally, probably because we had more in common. There was Evi Klein, a Jewish girl and a good friend of mine to this day, even though she lives in Resita nowadays. I met her after school as well, we went to the theater or the cinema, and when our friends and we grew up, we started having parties on our birthdays and so on. I can’t remember titles of plays or films; it was too long ago.
I had some private lessons, but I wasn’t a constant pupil: first I wanted to know German, so I studied German. Then I wanted to know English, so I studied English, with an old lady who spent a lot of time in the USA and tutored little girls in American English. I went to her with another girl. Then I switched to music. I wanted to take accordion lessons, so I did. And then I took Gothic-writing lessons as well for two or three years. My gift was for languages, however, and I’m sorry I wasn’t more diligent as a child! My parents probably couldn’t afford it easily, but they thought my education was important, and so were my whims, as the only child!
I used to spend Saturdays at home, but it wasn’t a rule, nobody imposed that on me. My mother was very close to me, even though the age difference between us was big. I never hid anything from her, I told her anything I did or I was going to do, so that way she could keep an eye on me at all times. She didn’t scold me, and let me experience things, not bad or dangerous ones of course, but I learnt not to be afraid of her and shared everything with her.
I spent the high holidays at home with my parents and we observed them, ate and drank mostly, like all people do. My mother was an expert when it came to puff pastries, pies and the like, so holidays were always a feast. My father used to make egg liqueur with vanilla; one third of it he blended with coffee, one third with cocoa, and one third remained plain. It was delicious, and I was allowed to drink it as well, on special occasions, like the high holidays or when we had guests. I wasn’t so young anymore; I was a teenager and the liqueur wasn’t very strong. During communism we only observed the high holidays, but we did go to the synagogue. Sabbath wasn’t observed entirely because my parents had to work, but my mother continued to light the candles and say the blessing on Friday evening.
I don’t remember eating out with my parents when we were in Resita. My parents tried to observe the kashrut: they could buy kosher meat, but they no longer kept separate pots for dairy and meat products. When we were on vacations we ate in somebody’s home. They weren’t Jews, however, so the food we ate wasn’t kosher – but my father made arrangements not to eat pork at least. I always went on vacations with my parents; they had nobody to look after me, so I went to spas like Bazna [Bazna spa, located in Sibiu county, 18 km from Medias], Buzias [spa located in Western Romania, 37 km from Timisoara and at 25 km from Lugoj], and so on, for one or two weeks.
I don’t remember the name of my father’s sister, who was in the USA, but she was very upset with my father; they even broke up all contacts until World War II was over. She wanted my father and my mother to come to the USA before I was born, and they said they would. Everything was set and they even had the boat tickets that she had sent them. But my parents changed their mind at the last minute – I don’t know why – and his sister was so angry that she broke all contacts with him.
We only heard of her after the war, when everybody was trying to find whatever relatives they had left. So, a chazzan from Resita went to the USA after World War II, and my father gave him his sister’s address and asked him to contact her if he could. He was a nice man, he did, and my father’s sister was so happy that he was alive, that she forgot all her grudge. I remember she sent us a package with chewing gum, nylon stockings and other things we couldn’t find here. It was nice of her.
I know this aunt of mine had sent a letter to the Red Cross to find out what had happened to the rest of her siblings and their children. She found out that the only survivors were two girls from one of their brothers. She sent my father a letter with all the data about their siblings, how and when they died, but unfortunately I threw it away. I didn’t think I would ever need it again. Anyway, this aunt wanted to help her relatives: one of her nieces was in Israel, and she helped the other get to the USA. However, my aunt died before she could meet her nieces, in 1947, I think. This aunt had three children of her own, two daughters and a son, my cousins. They wrote to us, one of them even sent us a package with oranges that got rotten on the way, but the intention was nice! But after father died, in 1950, and after we wrote to them about it, they cut all bonds with us and never wrote again.
My father had a work accident, a severe burn, and shortly after, he died of a heart attack. Of course, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Resita, and someone from the community recited the Kaddish because there was nobody from the family who could have said it. After my father’s death, I sat shivah with my mother. Because of my father’s death, when I finished high school, I had to go and look for a job –I was the only one who could support the family. My mother didn’t speak Romanian very well, she mostly spoke Yiddish. It was difficult to find a job, however, because my origin wasn’t ‘healthy’: we had owned a shop and I was what was called a petty bourgeois. I finally got a job at the designing department of a plant. Once I got there, I had no problems with my colleagues because of being Jewish.
Nobody at home was involved in politics in any way, but I was a member of a Zionist organization, Hashomer Hatzair 8, for a short while, in 1948. I didn’t participate much in any activities, but I remember one time I went to a camp in Sangeorz [town in the Northern extremity of Romania in Bistrita-Nasaud county, situated upstream the river Somesu]. The idea of making aliyah got into my head somehow, and I was so stubborn, and I nagged my parents so much, being the spoiled child and them being old and all, that they finally filed for emigration. We were refused, and we filed again, and so on. And after my father died in 1950, we gave up the idea of emigrating: my mother had no qualification whatsoever, she didn’t know the language, and I was just out of high school and sitting on a fence, so to speak, as far as my future profession was concerned, so we didn’t file the papers once more. And from then on, I never mentioned in any CV during communism the word Zionism again; it wasn’t well seen.
Anyway, my cousins’, the Lowingers’ papers for emigration were approved, and so were our friends’, the Pollacks’. Cousin Lowinger had been a fervent communist for a while, but he woke up soon, and he filed for aliyah as soon as he realized what communism was all about and that the communists weren’t the liberators everybody thought they were. However, they were liberators in so far as they did set us free from the anti-Semitic laws. They left in the early 1950s I think, but my aunt, Eugenia, who wanted to emigrate as well, died before that. It wasn’t a problem keeping in touch with them, I received all letters and so did they. They didn’t come back to visit, though; it wasn’t possible during communism. I didn’t have much family abroad to keep in touch with during communism: I only had three cousins. One cousin of mine, Etus Lowinger, left for Israel, then her husband, Dezideriu, who had a weak heart, died, then she remarried and moved to the USA, and left her son behind in Israel. And then she came back to Israel in the end, where she eventually died in 1992. All my three cousins died in Israel.
I met my husband, Mircea Gora Moldovan, in my society circles, at the end of 1950, when we were having birthday parties an so on. It didn’t matter to me that he wasn’t a Jew, but my mother wasn’t very thrilled, at least at first. She gave in when she saw that he was a good man. I never met my mother-in-law, she had died before I got to know my husband, but I knew his father, Isidor Gora Moldovan. He wasn’t excited about our marriage either at first, but he grew very fond of me later, and we went to visit him in Suceava, where he lived.
My husband was born in Brad in 1926. He studied at and graduated from the Faculty of Constructions in Timisoara. He worked as an engineer. We got married in 1954, but we had no religious wedding. After that, we received a two-bedroom apartment in Resita because of my husband’s position: he was chief engineer at a plant in Resita. Soon after that, in 1959, our son, Marius Gora Moldovan, was born, and then we moved into a three-bedroom apartment. My mother lived with us.
I started celebrating the Christian holidays after I got married: I always trimmed a Christmas tree on Christmas. I was more into it than my husband was, he didn’t insist that we have one after our son grew up; he said it was for kids. But I didn’t give up. I still always have a Christmas tree, I think it’s a beautiful custom! There weren’t many Jewish traditions kept in our house during communism. The kashrut wasn’t observed because there wasn’t a hakham, and I cooked pork as well. But my mother, to the day she died, never ate pork, even though she was living with us. We kept Jewish and Christian holidays alike: my mother and I fasted on Yom Kippur, we had matzah on Pesach and didn’t eat bread for eight days, we had a chanukkiyah, which we lit on Channukah. But we also had red Easter eggs, we had a Christmas tree, and so on. My mother used to light the candles on Friday evenings and say the blessing, but I didn’t, not even after she died. I thought it was too late for me to take it up. My son knew I was Jewish, I never hid it from him, and he considers himself a Jew.
We moved to Brasov in 1967 because my husband decided so. Our son Marius had started school, he was in the 1st grade – which he finished in Brasov – and my husband wanted us to move to a town, which had good schools and a university. He was offered a job in Bucharest, but he refused because he didn’t like the city. He chose Brasov instead. I worked in Brasov as a commodity expert at ICIM [the state constructions and fitting company during communism] as well. My mother came with us, and we all lived in the apartment I still live in now, one with three rooms.
I entered the Communist Party because I had to. I worked as a commodity expert, and it was a year, I don’t remember exactly which, when there had to be a precise percentage of female members and of male members. But the female members had to have a diploma or work as technicians because in the warehouse worked plenty of women without a diploma who could have joined the party. A colleague of mine was the secretary of the party, and he pleaded and insisted that he needed me to be a member because he had nobody else to turn to. I finally gave in and accepted. It wasn’t like I was threatened; it was my choice to help him. I had no activities in the party, of course, I was just one more in the crowd.
My husband joined the Communist Party later because he was considered to have unhealthy origins: but the Party eventually accepted him because he had an important position. My husband had been chief engineer in Resita, then he was chief engineer when we moved here, to Brasov, and he worked at ICIM. After that he became manager of the building site, and then manager of the design department at Tractorul [factory in Brasov that manufactures tractors], where he retired from.
I was glad when I heard about the state of Israel being born in 1948, just like every Jew. And I was quite worried about the wars in Israel, in 1967 [the Six-Day-War] 9 and 1973 [the Yom Kippur War] 10 because my nephew, my cousin’s son, was a soldier in both wars. Moreover, I had friends there: my childhood friend Aristide, the Pollacks and so on. We were worried for everybody in general, but when you know people there it’s worse.
I didn’t have many Jewish friends during communism, but the truth is I didn’t care about my friends’ nationality. We had a circle of friends at work and nationality didn’t matter: I had Hungarian, German, Romanian and Jewish friends alike, and I still do.
I went to the synagogue during communism, on the high holidays, with my mother because she was too old and couldn’t go alone. It was never a problem for me to go being a party member because I wasn’t a director, or anybody important. We also went to the performances of the Yiddish theater from Bucharest when it came on tour to Brasov. My husband drove me and my mother there, and then he came to pick us up again. He didn’t stay, of course, because he didn’t understand the language.
I did have to participate in marches whenever Ceausescu 11 came to Brasov, and in party meetings, because I was a member and I couldn’t get out of it. We were told that we had to go at all costs, and since I was – and still am – the kind of person who did what she was told she had to do, I went marching. It was something unbelievable in the 1960s! Everybody participating had to crowd in the street where Ceausescu would go, and of course he had to see lots of people saluting him and so on. And then the organizers realized that he wouldn’t come this way, but some other, and everybody had to run to that other street, on foot, to meet him. There were no buses in the street when it was known that his car would pass. After we did this a few times, I actually felt like fainting from exhaustion, and I wasn’t old! And I was afraid to just go home; I didn’t want to get into trouble. I couldn’t have cared less when his car passed by, I was just happy it was over and that I could go home. People talked against the government, but only at home, or with friends, where they knew they were safe: of course it was forbidden, but the jokes about Ceausescu were very popular all the same! I listened to Radio Free Europe 12 all the time it broadcast, at home. It was a necessity for me and my husband.
I wasn’t a dissident during communism, but I didn’t approve of the life style: you had to stand in a queue for everything you needed. There was a paradox, something people used to say during communism was: ‘You couldn’t find anything, but the refrigerators were loaded!’ I shared my office with several colleagues, and it happened that one of them came in with the news: ‘They have I-don’t-know-what in Racadau [one of Brasov’s neighborhoods]!’ Everybody ran there like they were giving things away for free, and one had to stay behind to lock the office, and called after the others to keep him or her in line as well! That was no life, standing in a queue for hours for chicken wings! And every time I heard there was something, anything, in a shop anywhere, I would buy it, even if I didn’t need it, and put it in the refrigerator because I didn’t know when I would find it again! However, I cannot complain that I suffered from lack of heat, which was a serious problem for most people. The apartment block where we lived belonged to ICIM, and all the bosses from ICIM lived there as well, so we had our own little power station in the front yard.
I regret that there were all those restrictions concerning traveling because my husband and I loved to travel, and if it hadn’t been for the regime, we would have seen much more of the world than we actually did. But in those circumstances, we saw all of the socialist camp. I remember, when there was this big fuss with Czechoslovakia [during the Prague Spring] 13, we were at the Czech border! We were on a trip in our car – my husband, my son and I – to see Hungary and Czechoslovakia. That was allowed. We visited Hungary, and then we headed for Czechoslovakia, but it was getting dark, so my husband and I decided to pitch our tent for the night and sleep before we would enter Czechoslovakia. We traveled with a tent, and near the road there was the skirt of a forest, where a lot of other people camped: there were Polish tents, Czech tents, and so on, and we thought of camping there, too, so that we wouldn’t be alone, and cross the border with Czechoslovakia in the morning.
We set up the tent and went to bed, and after a while, we heard some sort of rattling, and the tent turned all orange: there was light coming through its cloth like it does when the sun is shining through. My husband opened the tent, looked out, and said, ‘There’s an army! Tanks! Russian tanks!’ This was happening during the night, and I was afraid that my son would get scared, and I kept whispering to my husband, ‘Don’t stick your head outside! Don’t look!’ When it finally dawned, heads started to appear, carefully, from all the tents! And then we turned on the radio and we found out from [Radio] Free Europe that the Russian armies had entered Czechoslovakia. What to do next? The Czechs said they were going home, but they didn’t let anybody cross the border, not even the Czechs. Finally, everybody headed back to Hungary, only we stayed behind, at the side of the road, alone, near a forest!
My husband said, ‘This cannot last long, we are still going to visit Czechoslovakia!’ Everybody left – they were scared – whereas we started cooking breakfast, with a small cooker we had with us, and then we thought of what to do. Clearly the only option was to go back to Hungary. My husband still wanted to go to Czechoslovakia, but I was afraid that we would end up shot, so I said, ‘The hell with it, we will go when all this is over!’ So we went back to Hungary. When we approached the Hungarian border, we heard the words: ‘Ki jon ott?’, ‘Who is coming?’ You can surely imagine: we were calmly driving to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, and they knew that the border was closed. Who knows what they were thinking! Our luck was that I could speak Hungarian, so I explained the situation to them. Then the frontier guard asked me, ‘Do you speak German?’ ‘I do’, I answered. ‘Then please explain to these people that they cannot pass’, he burst out. There was a party from the GDR [German Democratic Republic], who wanted to pass through Czechoslovakia, then to Austria and flee. I told them that they had bad luck, and that what they had planned wasn’t going to happen.
The Hungarian authorities set up some sort of camping for the unexpected Polish, German visitors, where they could stay until this mess with Czechoslovakia was over. All the others had gratuities, but the Romanians had to pay for their stay there; I don’t know why. So we stayed in Budapest, in a camp near the Roman baths, Romai Furdo; we had Czech money with us, but nobody wanted to exchange that. Luckily, my husband had stashed away some Romanian lei, and they accepted those, and that’s how we paid for the camping. We weren’t allowed to take Romanian money out of the country, or just a small standard sum, I think, but as you can see, taking more with us proved to be very useful. I wanted to go home immediately, but my husband hoped it would all be over in a couple of days. It wasn’t, our money ran out, so we eventually went back home and gave the Czech crowns back to ONT [‘Oficiul National de Turism’ in Romanian, the National Tourism Office, the only travel agency in Romania during communism], and that was the end of our trip. We visited Czechoslovakia after all, but in another year.
Our son went on trips with us, but I think the one in Czechoslovakia was the last one we went on together. After that we traveled to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the GDR, but he stayed back home with his grandmother because she was too old and couldn’t be left home alone. Moreover, my son already took more pleasure in the company of his friends.
My son studied for three years at the Faculty of Polytechnics in Brasov, but he didn’t finish it. He didn’t have problems because he was a Jew. People knew that his mother was a Jew; I never hid that. My son’s wife was Jewish too, Liliana Davidovici was her name before she married. She was from Tecuci. They got married in 1984, but they had no religious wedding. She was rather religious, though. She lit the candles every Friday evening.
After university, Marius worked as an engineer at Codlea, where he was assigned to, then at Tractorul and then at Rulmentul [factory in Brasov that manufactures bearings]. He left for Israel in 1988, but he had to wait rather long before his file was approved. It was a period when a lot of Jews from Brasov were able to go: Jacques Friedel’s son [Edward Friedel], the former president of the Jewish community, [Milu] Leibovici, and so on. I don’t know why, but all who were about to leave had to go to the police headquarters rather often, and answer: ‘Present!’. But many of them were at work during those hours, so I asked from the community for a list with the people who had to be there, and I answered for them; it was a mere formality.
When he left, my son was married already, and his wife was pregnant with their first child. They left together in early February 1988, and they settled in Tel Aviv, that’s where they did the ulpan 14, and that’s where they found work: he works as an engineer, and she worked as a doctor. They have two children, Silvia Gora Moldovan who is 16 years old, and Stephanie Gora Moldovan, who is six. Liliana died last year, in 2002. When my daughter-in-law died, it was around Rosh Hashanah, so my son couldn’t sit shivah after her. [The topic is very distressing for Mrs. Gora, and she refuses to say more about it]
I went to Israel before 1989, in the fall of 1988: that time I stayed over at my cousin Etus’ in Holon, the one who had returned from the USA, because my son and his family were in the ulpan. I went because their first child was born in April and I wanted to see her. I could see them all in the ulpan, where they lived in a small room; conditions weren’t great at the time.
When the revolution [see Romanian Revolution of 1989] 15 broke out, I knew exactly what was about to happen from [Radio] Free Europe. My husband and I were both retired – I retired in 1987 – and I remember he was sick and in treatment. We heard shots being fired close to our apartment block, but that was the closest we came to the events back then.
For me, personally, life didn’t get better after the fall of communism: my husband passed away in 1990, my son had left for Israel. Of course, the system changed and it was good to be able to go visit my son and his family whenever I wanted. After that I went to Israel every year to visit my son’s family in Tel Aviv, except for one year, when Liliana’s parents came to visit, and I stayed with my cousin Etus again. The first times I went to visit, I saw a lot of places: the Dead Sea, Nazareth, Haifa, and so on. But in the last years, I didn’t go around to visit so much, I preferred to stay with the children and enjoy my time with them. I usually stayed a month or two, but last year, when my daughter-in-law died, I stayed for three months because the children needed me. I talk to my granddaughters both in Romanian and Hebrew.
My mother died when she was 99 years old, in 1996. She had no help from the community or from the state, even though she was entitled to social help, but we didn’t know that at the time. She was a member of the Jewish community, and after she passed away I became one, too. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery here, in Brasov. Somebody from the community recited the Kaddish. I intended to keep Yahrzeit after both my parents, but I didn’t know the exact date, and I postponed it. I didn’t sit shivah after my mother because it was on Yom Kippur. You are absolved of sitting shivah if the death occurs during a holiday. I did sit shivah after that year, though.
I only became active in the community when I started working there, not long ago. I offered my help before, but they didn’t need it. When the lady who had filled my position previously left, they called me. I work as a cashier and accountant for the community’s canteen until 3 o’clock. I come home tired, but I like the fact that I have an occupation; it’s important at my age to still feel useful.
I don’t go to the synagogue on Saturdays for a minyan, especially since women don’t count, as far as the number of ten is concerned. It’s enough for me that I go there during the week. I do go, however, when there is a high holiday, or a special event with important guests. I don’t receive help from the community, only the salary, like every other community employee. And I receive some support from the state because I was able to prove that we were forced to move to Oravita during the war. Under law 118, I have the benefit of free bus and train rides, I receive a little more money for my pension, I don’t pay taxes, I have some free medication, and free rental TV and radio. It doesn’t sound like much, but my life-style has certainly improved a bit since I started receiving all this.
Glossary
David Wainshelboim
Kishinev
Moldova
Interviewer: Zhanna Litinskaya
Date of interview: July 2004
David Wainshelboim requested that we meet and conduct this interview on the day of my arrival at Kishinev. He was sort of in a hurry to tell me the story of his family to pay tribute to his loved ones who perished during the Holocaust. David lives in a small one-bedroom apartment in a five-storied Khrushchovka 1 apartment building. There are books, notes and pads scattered all around his apartment. He was not happy with questions regarding his personal life and he didn't even tell me his wife’s name due to his failing memory. However, we parted as friends. David called me at my hotel every day asking about my progress.
My family background
My paternal great-grandfather, Avrum Wainshelboim, moved to Bessarabia 2 from some place in Russia in the early 19th century, escaping from recruitment to the tsarist army: young people were regimented for the 25-year army service at the time. Knowing about the liberal attitude towards Jews in Bessarabia, my great-grandfather Avrum moved to Kishinev [Chisinau in Moldovan]. He became a melamed, teaching Jewish children. I can’t remember the date of his death. His grave is still there in the old Jewish cemetery. All I know is that my great-grandfather was married twice: he had a son, Iosif, from his first marriage. He died in the early 1950s. In the 1870s my grandfather, Mehl Wainshelboim, was born from my great-grandfather’s second wife.
My grandfather may have finished a commercial school. He was an educated man. He worked as an accountant in a private company during the tsarist regime before 1918 and during the Romanian regimes 3 after World War I. Grandmother Bobtsia – I don’t know her maiden name – came from a rabbi’s family. She was a housewife, which was common among Jewish women. My grandmother and grandfather rented a small apartment of two rooms and a kitchen. The apartment was always clean and festive, however modestly furnished. On Friday, when their children and their families joined them for celebrations [of Sabbath], there was always a crispy tablecloth on the table, fancy crockery, wine glasses, red kosher wine, mouth watering challah that my grandmother baked in the big stove in the kitchen, and silver candle stands. My grandmother Bobtsia lit candles before Sabbath.
Grandfather Mehl was a religious Jew; he had his own seat in the synagogue. I don’t know which synagogue this was. There were over 60 synagogues in Kishinev and they belonged to [were maintained by] the craftsmen guilds. There was also a choral synagogue headed by Rabbi Zirelson, a well-respected man in Kishinev. He was a senator of the Romanian parliament. [Zirelson, Yehuda Leib (1860-1941): rabbi, member of the municipal council of Kishinev and its delegate to meetings with government authorities. He yearned for a Jewish state based on Torah principles. He was killed in a bomb attack on Kishinev.] Grandfather Mehl died in 1934, and Zirelson recited a prayer at his funeral. Grandmother Bobtsia lived through the war, evacuation, returned to Kishinev and died in the 1950s.
My grandfather was an educated man and wanted to give his children a good education. My father was the oldest, and the next one was Gershko [affectionate for Gersh], born around 1900. After finishing a gymnasium he went to Italy where he finished the Medical Faculty, unfortunately, I don’t know in which town he studied or which college he graduated from. When he returned to Bessarabia, he became a doctor and worked in a small town. Gershko was married. His wife Riva was my mother’s sister. Ruya, Riva and Gershko’s daughter, moved to Israel in the 1980s. I correspond with her. Gershko died in evacuation in Kyrgyzstan, and Riva died in Kishinev shortly after the Great Patriotic War 4.
The life of the two sisters, Fania and Basia, born after Gershko in the early 1900s, was tragic. Fania married Weinstein, a Zionist activist 5. In 1940, shortly after the establishment of the Soviet power 6, Weinstein was arrested in the street and exiled like many other Zionist activists. Shortly afterward he died from tuberculosis in a camp of the Gulag 7 in Irkutsk region [today Russia]. Fania’s older son, Yakov Weinstein, served in the army during the Great Patriotic War. After the war he became a veterinary. He lived with his family in Lugansk in Ukraine. He died a few years ago. Fania and her younger daughter Lilia were killed by the Fascists in the Northern Caucasus where they had evacuated from Kishinev during the Great Patriotic War in 1941.
Basia was married to Matus Bobis, a Jewish man. He was also involved in Zionist activities. During the Soviet period he worked as a proofreader in a newspaper. He missed a mistake in his newspaper and, being scared of many arrests 8 happening all around, threw himself under a train. Basia and Minna, their little daughter, evacuated to the Northern Caucasus together with Fania, where they perished when the Fascists came there.
My father’s brother Genia worked with my father in the Jewish medical organization. He did some technical job. Genia married Sarrah, a Jewish girl, shortly before the Great Patriotic War. I was at his wedding. Genia and Sarrah stood under the chuppah since their parents insisted on it. He wasn’t a really religious man. During the war Genia, his wife and Grandmother Bobtsia were in evacuation somewhere in Central Asia. After the war they returned to Kishnev. He had no children. In the middle of the 1970s he and his wife moved to Israel where he died in the 1990s.
Hona, born in 1910, was the youngest in the family. Influenced by the Zionist idea of the establishment of a Jewish state, Hona quit Iasi University [Iasi University named after A. Kuza, Romania, was founded in 1860. Iasi University was an important educational center. Its scientific and educational achievements were highly valued and acknowledged in Romania], where she studied at the Medical Faculty, and moved to Palestine in 1929. I remember her farewell party at my grandfather’s home, when the whole family got together to say ‘good bye’ to Hona. In Palestine she married Rabinovich, a Jewish man. They were involved in the construction of the first kibbutzim. Hona knew Golda Meir 9. They were friends. Hona visited Kishinev in the 1950s. She told us about Israel and tried to convince us to move there. This was the last time I saw her. I know that she died a long time ago. Her children and grandchildren live in Israel.
My father, Moisey Wainshelboim, was born in 1895. He finished a cheder, a Jewish gymnasium [lyceum] and then grandfather Mehl sent him to Saint Petersburg where my father entered the Psycho-neurological College named after Behterev [Institute of positive psychotherapy, trans-cultural therapy and psychosomatic medicine named after Behterev, Vladimir Mihailovich (1857-1927), Russian neurologist and psychiatrist]. After three years of study he returned to Kishinev in 1916 due to the aggravated political situation. My father didn’t study for a few years during the Civil War 10. Upon the annexation of Bessarabia to Romania he resumed his studies at the Medical Faculty of Iasi University. He graduated from it in 1924. Around this time he met my mother and they got married.
My maternal grandfather, Avrum Selewski, born in Kishinev in the 1860s, was involved in trade when he was young. When he married my grandmother Sarrah, he became a supervisor at the mill. The mill belonged to a wealthy Jewish man. Avrum’s family lived in a small house by the mill. My grandfather was short, wore a kippah or a yarmulka, had a beard and mustache, but despite his plain appearance, my grandfather was known for his intelligence and prudence. My grandfather was very religious. He went to the synagogue on Friday, Saturday and on holidays. On weekdays he prayed at home with his tallit and tefillin on. Grandfather Avrum died in 1930. My grandmother Sarrah, a quiet and kind woman always wearing a dark dress, a snow-white apron and a matching kerchief, moved in with us. She lived with us till the Great Patriotic War.
The oldest in the family was my mother’s sister Tania, born in 1888. All I remember about her is that she was married and worked in trade. Aunt Tania and her son Mikhail failed to evacuate in 1941. They perished in the ghetto in Kishinev 11, and her husband perished at the front.
The next of the children was my mother’s brother Rafail, born in the 1890s. In 1918, after Bessarabia was annexed to Romania he happened to live in the Soviet Union. He finished the Dnepropetrovsk Mining College, worked at a mine and later lectured in Moscow Mining College and was a dean. During the Great Patriotic War Rafail served in the Territorial Army [People’s volunteer corps during World War II; its soldiers patrolled towns, dug trenches and kept an eye on buildings during night bombing raids], escaped from captivity near Dnepropetrovsk [Ukraine, 420 km from Kiev] and returned to Moscow. He died in the mid-1950s. His wife Polia followed him soon. Their daughters Vera and Victoria live in Moscow.
My mother’s sister Riva, born in the early 1900s, married my father’s brother Gersh. She worked as a medical nurse. I dimly remember Tsylia, my other aunt. She lived in Galas in Romania before the Soviet power was established. In 1940 she moved to Kishinev with her family. They died during the Fascist occupation. My mother’s youngest brother, Lev Selewski, born in 1910, died in a car accident, when he was young.
My mother, Nena Selewskaya, was born in 1900. After finishing a gymnasium she went to Kharkov [today Ukraine] where she entered the Medical College. In 1918 she had to quit the college since Kharkov and Kishinev happened to belong to different states. Mama stayed in Kishinev. She met my father in 1920. Actually, my grandfathers Avrum and Mehl, who went to the synagogue together, arranged for their children to get married. My parents got married in 1922. They had a traditional Jewish wedding, but all I know is that they stood under the chuppah in the central synagogue in Kishinev. Zirelson, the rabbi of Kishinev, conducted their wedding ceremony. I still have this certificate of my parents’ wedding.
Growing up
After the wedding my father rented an apartment on Harlampiyevskaya Street [during the Soviet period (1940-1990) Lieutenant Schmidt Street, renamed to previous name of Harlampiyevskaya Street]. Our family lived in it for several years. In 1923 my older sister Rahil was born, and in 1928 I, David Wainshelboim, came into this world. Some time later our family moved to a bigger apartment on Alexandrovskaya Street [Lenina Street during the Soviet period, present Shtephan cel Mare Street], where I started walking, talking and studying the surrounding world.
There were four rooms in the apartment: a living room, my parents’ bedroom, the children’s rooms and my grandmother Sarrah’s room. The rooms were nicely furnished with dark polished furniture; there were velvet drapes on the windows, and a fringed tablecloth on the table. I liked playing hide-and-seek behind it. I had a wonderful childhood. My mother, father and grandmother loved me dearly. My family mostly spoke Yiddish at home. My grandmother observed Jewish traditions and taught my sister to know them. I remember Sabbath: my grandmother lit candles in a high silver candle-stand saying her blessings. There was challah, wine, chicken, tsimes [fruit-and-vegetable stew typically prepared for Sabbath], cookies on the table, covered with a starched tablecloth. On Saturday no work was done at home. There was a holiday dinner: gefilte fish [filled fish balls in sauce], chicken broth, potato pancakes, and stew with prunes. It was kept in the stove since Friday. My father and mother went to the synagogue on Saturday, though they belonged to a more democratic generation of Jewish intelligentsia. The synagogue was most likely the place where they could feel themselves Jewish, socialize with their friends and discuss the latest news with them.
On Yom Kippur my parents and grandmother fasted and I enjoyed stealing food from the cupboard, though nobody forbade me to eat [Editor’s note: children under the age of nine don’t fast, then they start fasting little by little. Boys start to fast as long as adults do by the age of thirteen, girls from twelve], and I couldn’t wait till the delicious dinner after the fasting. I remember a number of fall holidays followed by Simchat Torah. I went to the synagogue with my parents and saw old Jews carrying a scroll of the Torah in the street. On holidays we usually visited Grandfather Mehl. This was a traditional family gathering.
I remember Pesach, when my grandfather reclined on fancy cushions conducting seder [as the first Kiddush at seder has to be recited by reclining on something soft, some use cushions for making this position more comfortable]. I asked him about the history of the holiday. At home we also prepared for Pesach: cleaned the house thoroughly and removed the remaining bread crumbs [mitzvah of biur chametz]. I remember the koshering of crockery, when the stones burning hot were placed in a tub and then the crockery was placed there. Children got new clothes for the holiday and Mama got a new dress. The feeling of the holiday arrived, when a huge basket with matzah covered with fresh napkins was delivered from the synagogue. The smell of matzah spread all over the house. After the first seder at my grandfather’s Mama also made holiday dinners on the following days.
I remember Purim. I liked the whipping top and on Chanukkah I liked the gifts and money that children were given. In my boyhood I took part in the carnival procession on Purim.
Grandfather Mehl died in 1934. I was too young to go to his funeral. Jewish children whose parents are living don’t commonly attend their relatives’ funerals. I know that my grandfather was buried in accordance with Jewish traditions. Rabbi Zirelson recited a prayer at his funeral.
Kishinev was a rather big town, when I was a child. It had a Moldovan, Russian, Jewish, Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, Polish population. We lived in the Jewish area in the central part of the town. Jews were involved in crafts and trades. There were also Jewish doctors and lawyers. According to some data Jews constituted about 80,000 before the Great Patriotic War [Editor’s note: In 1930 the 41,405 Jews living in Kishinev constituted over 36 percent of the total population numbering 114,896. Under Soviet rule, from July 1940 to July 1941, the number of Jews in the city increased to an estimated 60,000.]. There were up to 65 synagogues and prayer houses in the town. Besides religious establishments there were Jewish schools for boys and girls, children’s homes for orphan children and children from poor families, elderly people’s homes, a Jewish hospital and a developed charity network. Young Jewish people were fond of Zionist ideas.
Though we observed traditions and celebrated holidays, my father gave the priority to science and education. My father belonged to the progressive Jewish intelligentsia. He worked in the Jewish Health Organization, this organization was financed by the Joint 12. My father worked as a children’s doctor [pediatrician] there. I remember staying in his office at times. His visitors were children and their mothers. His work was much needed and so was the organization supporting poor Jewish families and mothers in Bessarabia. Mothers were provided with consultations, baby food and medications for free.
In summer children went to special camps and recreation houses in rural areas. My sister or I didn’t go there. My father would have never taken advantage of his position to arrange for his children’s recreation. Mama and we rented a room in a village for the summer. My father visited us once a week. He spent all his time at work. Besides his medical practices, he collected statistical data related to death rate among Jewish children in Bessarabia. In 1937 my father was delegated to the Jewish Health Organization congress in Paris where he made a report. I adored my father and could watch him working for hours. When I grew older I often went to his workplace and the Jewish Health Association. It was probably then that I decided to become a doctor.
In the mid-1930s we moved into another apartment provided to my father by the association. It had five or six rooms. Mama and grandmother did the housework. We never had housemaids. It was against Jewish ethical principles to use hired work. Mama spent most of her time with me. We walked in the park on Pushkinskaya Street almost every day. This park is still there. We also visited my mother’s brothers and sisters, and on holidays we visited my grandfather. My cousin brothers and sisters were my first friends. I took the surrounding world very seriously since my early childhood. I took no interest in children’s games, but I could look through my father’s medical books for hours, asking him rather adult questions at times.
I went to a Romanian elementary school at the age of seven. My father knew that to be able to enter a college and deal with science – and this was the only future he could imagine for me – I had to study the state language. I don’t remember the elementary school. After finishing it, I passed entrance exams to the Romanian state-owned gymnasium. I received the highest grade in the exam, and the teachers were good to me. There were many Jewish boys at school, and I can’t remember a single incidence of prejudiced attitude or anti-Semitism towards any of us. What mattered was the attitude of the boys to their studies, and it was even more important than the grades they received. I had the highest marks and my teachers and fellow students respected me all right.
There were Zionist organizations in the town. There was Maccabi 12 for young people, and many students were fond of these ideas. All I cared about was science and I took no interest in politics. I remember posters, announcing the arrival and meeting with Jabotinskiy 13. My father, who was fond of Zionist ideas, went to this meeting and then discussed it with Mama, but I took no interest in their discussion. In 1938 Fascism began to spread in the Romanian society: the Cuzist parties 14 and legionaries 15 were established. On the other hand, young Jewish people united in the underground Komsomol 16 and Communist organizations, propagating the Soviet way of life and unification of Bessarabia with the Soviet Union.
I was too young to take any interest in politics. I liked Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. I wanted to become a doctor like my father, who was ideal in my opinion. Since I turned eleven I often visited my father at work and even helped him, taking samples to the private bacteriological laboratory of Yakir, who was an uncle of the Soviet commander Yakir 17. I remember how my father spoke with horror about the arrest and death of Yakir in 1937. This was probably the only act of terror in the Soviet Union that we heard about. We knew little about the horror happening there. We believed the Soviet society was the real fair Communist society.
On 28th June 1940 the Red Army 18 came to Kishinev. This was a peaceful change of regimes: Romanians left the town peacefully. A Soviet tank stopped near our house. The tank men were talking to the locals quietly. A [Soviet] Communist held a speech in the center of the town. He said that the Soviet power had been established in Bessarabia and there would be no exploitation and injustice in this area. Many people rejoiced, particularly, the Jewish residents, who had always been attracted by the Communist ideas of equality and fraternity. During the first days it was allowed to move from Bessarabia to Romania or vice versa. People were aware of Fascist atrocities in Germany and their attitude towards Jews. Fascism was growing stronger in Romania and many Jews, even the wealthy families, left their businesses and houses to move to Kishinev that belonged to the Soviet Union. My aunt Tsylia and her family also moved here.
Our life was gradually changing. There were positive and negative changes. About three days after the establishment of the Soviet power, food products and other goods disappeared from the stores. There was no sausage, ham, caviar or chocolate left, and even white bread became a deficit. However, this wasn’t the worst thing. Enterprises, stores and shops were subject to nationalization and their owners were arrested and deported. Besides, the NKVD officers 19 didn’t take into consideration whether an owner used hired labor or made his living on his own. The Jew Zolotaryov, our neighbor, who owned a small store, in which he and members of his family worked, was arrested, for example. He and his family were deported and I never heard from them again.
Active Zionist activists were also arrested and persecuted. To start with, all Zionist organizations were eliminated. The Jewish newspaper ‘Neue Tsayt’ [‘New Time’ in Yiddish] was closed. The Jewish Health Organization was also eliminated. Its leaders, who failed to move abroad, were arrested. The rabbi of the Jewish Health Organization was arrested. People said he was the treasurer of this organization and state authorities demanded that he gave all money to the state. Alexandrowski refused and paid for this with his life: he was executed by the NKVD authorities. Many Zionist leaders, writers and journalists, including my uncle Weinstein, were arrested and deported.
My father was also very nervous about the situation, especially, when it came to his organization. He and Mama often whispered among themselves, stopping in our presence. However, my father got a job offer from the Ministry of Health. He became chief of the department of children health care. This was the first official position my father held and he was grateful to the Soviet power for this.
The Romanian gymnasium was closed. My sister Rahil and I went to the Russian general education school: she went to the tenth grade [age 16-17] and I went to the seventh grade [age 13-14]. It was hard for our other schoolmates to adapt to Russian as the language of instruction. It was all right for my sister and me. Our father had studied in Saint Petersburg for three years. He loved Russia, often spoke Russian, read Russian poems and we could understand Russian well. I became a pioneer 20 and my sister joined the Komsomol at school.
I remember a meeting in the middle of the academic year, when the director of the school introduced us to some refugees from Romania, mostly Jews, who had escaped from the Antonescu 21 regime. These guys spoke at this meeting, telling us about Fascist atrocities against the Jews and other civilians. We were scared hearing this. We sympathized with those children, who had lost friends and relatives and only miraculously managed to survive. When I told my father about it, he noted that we were lucky to be in the Soviet Union. The situation was rather tense. We knew that the war was inevitable.
During the war
We heard from Molotov’s 22 speech on the radio on 22nd June 1941 that the Great Patriotic War began. We had a radio in our apartment and a few neighbors joined us to listen to the speech. Several days later Kishinev was bombed. My father was waiting for the official evacuation to be arranged by the Ministry of Health, but our departure was delayed. My father hired a wagon, we loaded our luggage on it, whatever we could pack: food, water, warm clothes. My mother, father, grandmother, my sister and I departed. I remember a long line of wagons and people, consisting of civilians and the retreating Soviet forces. We were bombed on the way, and then people scattered around in the fields of sunflower and corn. Only Grandmother Sarrah stayed in the wagon, refusing to leave it. So we walked for about a week till we reached Krivoy Rog [today Ukraine, 370 km from Kiev, 300 km from Kishinev]. My father paid the cabdriver. We stayed a few days at the railway station, waiting for a train to the east till we managed to board an open train loaded with iron ore. This iron ore was to be delivered to a metallurgical plant in Lugansk region. We arrived in the town of Alchevsk [today Ukraine, about 780 km from Kishinev, 680 km from Kiev].
This was July 1941. Alchevsk was in the rear and it seemed that the Fascists were never to reach it. Our family decided to stay there. My father went to the town department of health and was appointed chief doctor of a hospital. We received a room at the hospital and settled there. There was little space to live, but we didn’t fret, having a roof over our heads and also, my father had a job. My sister, who had finished school, went to work as a receptionist at the hospital. I went to the eighth grade of a local school. Soon I became the best student in my class. However poor my Russian was, I studied better than many local classmates, helped them with their studies and made friends with them. Of course, we didn’t have sufficient food and this was a common situation, but we managed somehow. My father managed to get food products, received a food ration and once he brought home a bag of cereal. We even celebrated Jewish holidays. We fasted on Yom Kippur and celebrated Rosh Hashanah. We didn’t have any matzah for Pesach, but Grandmother baked something like it on the stove. We lived like this for a year.
The front line was approaching and German troops were already in the vicinity of Debaltsevo [Donetsk, today Ukraine]. I still can’t understand why my father failed to arrange for us to depart farther to the east. He was probably too busy at work. There were flows of the wounded delivered to the hospital from the front. Anyway, on 12th July 1942 the Fascist tanks and motor units entered Alchevsk. We were at home. A German trooper broke into the room: ‘Juden, Uhr!’ [‘Jews, watches’ in German] I gave him a watch and he left.
A few days later an order was issued: all Jews were to gather near the town hall under the threat of execution. We didn’t sleep the night before, packing our belongings and talking about the past life. Nobody mentioned what we were up to: in our family we were used to caring about the feelings of each other. The Jews were gathering near the town hall. We were lined in columns and convoyed to the barracks located in the northern part of the town, near the metallurgical plant. There was a camp arranged there, I never heard any name of this camp. We slept on planks on the floor of the barracks. Some time later my father managed to make cloth partials to separate us from others.
Every day we were taken to work, cleaning toilets in the town, dragging logs and cleaning the territory of the plant. We weren’t given any food or water. Many inmates starved to death. Ukrainians came to the camp bringing potatoes, vegetables, bread or pork fat to exchange them for clothes. Many inmates were getting ill. My father supported people, but the only help he could offer was a kind word. There were no medications available. So we existed for about half a year.
We had no information about the situation at the front. We could only guess what was going on by the conduct of our German wardens. The occupiers became brutal after their defeat at Stalingrad in December 1942 23. In January 1943 my father was ordered to make his appearance at the camp commander’s office and he never returned from there. We got to know that he had been taken to jail. I never saw him again.
There were rumors in the camp that Fascists were preparing for the massacre of inmates. Mama insisted that my sister and I escaped. In early February we got a chance to do so: a policeman agreed to take us out of the camp for a bribe. Mama hugged me and I ran out of the barrack. This was how we said ‘good bye.’ We were taken out of the camp at night. My sister and I went to the hospital where our father had worked. We came to see the logistics manager of the hospital, a Ukrainian, Kuleshov, with whom our father had worked. He gave us shelter and we stayed in his house for several days.
Kuleshov must have had contacts with partisans. His comrade from the other side of the front line visited him. He said that we could cross the front line over the frozen Severny Donets River. Kuleshov gave us cotton wool coats that local residents wore and my sister had a kerchief on her head. He accompanied us to the river and when the German patrol went farther on, my sister and I crossed the river. My sister was scared. She sobbed, saying that we would be killed. I was trying to calm her down, though I was five years younger than her.
The night was dark and we managed all right. On the opposite bank Soviet soldiers met us. We were lucky, meeting good people on the Soviet side. The first person we met was a Jewish captain. We told him our story and he believed us. We were given food from the field kitchen. We had a common soldiers’ meal: soup and boiled cereal, but it tasted very delicious after the six-month starvation in the camp. We went on till we reached Lugansk [today Ukraine].
This was a big town where nobody knew us. We went to the regional department of health, where our father was known. My sister and I were given a job as medical registration clerks. We rented a room from an attendant. We received salaries and bread cards 24. My sister learned to cook from whatever was at hand: soup and boiled cereals, and in spring we gathered greeneries. Our childhood was over and we entered our adulthood before time.
My sister wrote a letter to our uncle Rafail Selewski in Moscow. He was happy to hear from us and invited us to Moscow, but we were afraid of going there since there were Germans all around. In September 1943 I wrote to my former Tatar classmate Chiitov in Alchevsk, asking him to tell me what had happened to my family. My friend told me that they were dead. My father was executed in the yard of his jail in early February 1942 – later I obtained a certificate of his death from the archive – and that Mama and Grandma were executed at about this same time in a quarry of the plant and so were other Jewish inmates of the camp.
After the war
After the war I visited Alchevsk. My friend and I went to the scene of execution. I was told that in spring 1943 the graves were opened since all the dogs gathered to the terrible smell of the graves. They ate the human remains, probably including those of my parents. After the liberation of the town, a small monument was installed at this place. My friends photographed me beside this obelisk, and this horrible memory about this place where my parents and grandmother Sarrah perished has stayed with me for the rest of my life.
My sister and I didn’t stay in Lugansk for long, feeling like leaving this area as soon as possible to probably start a new life and to stop thinking all the time about the death of our family. Besides, we were scared that the front line was approaching. In November 1943 we went to Moscow, having saved a sufficient amount of money to buy tickets. Uncle Rafail, his wife Polia and their two daughters lived in a nice apartment in the center of Moscow. He was already a professor of the Moscow Mining College, received food packages with basic food products and delicacies: ham, smoked sausage, tinned meat and black caviar. I was responsible for getting food products by his cards at the grocery store in Smolenskaya Square near the house. We were given a warm welcome and felt at home. My sister and I were given a room in the apartment. I passed exams for the tenth grade externally and entered the preparatory department of the Moscow Mining College.
After a year of studying at this department I realized I had no talent in the mining engineering industry and I was still attracted to medicine. I went to work as a lab assistant at a department of the Medical College. I had friends and met my first girlfriend there. I fell in love with her with all the passion of my youth, she responded to my love and we got married soon. We were young and inexperienced and a few months later we separated. I try to forget my first unsuccessful experience. I even forgot my first wife’s name. Her surname was Altman. I never met with her again and this is all I know about her. After the divorce I moved to Kishinev in 1946. My sister Rahil stayed in Moscow and entered the Moscow Dentist College.
I already knew that my paternal aunts Fania and Basia and my mother’s sister Tsylia perished during the Great Patriotic War. In Kishinev my uncle Genia, his wife Sarrah and Grandmother Bobtsia lived in a small apartment, where the kitchen and the toilet were in the yard. However, they gave me a warm welcome. My uncle helped me to prepare for entrance exams to the Medical College of Kishinev. I passed the exams successfully and was admitted. However, I had to pay for education while I had no money. The rector of the college, whom I came to talk to, was very kind to me. He advised me to write a letter, stating that I was an orphan and my parents had perished. I was exempt from all educational fees and given a stipend. The rector also talked to the housing department about providing me with a place to live since I was born in Kishinev. On 28th June I was given a small room in the center of Kishinev. There were no comforts [sanitation] or even a kitchen in this dwelling.
One year later I managed to obtain a permit to build an annex, where I cooked on a kerosene stove. Life was hard: the stipend was too low for adequate living. I worked night shifts at a hospital. This was the period of the outburst of state level anti-Semitism: the murder of Mikhoels 25, disbanding of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee 26 and struggle against rootless cosmopolitans 27. This affected the heart of each Jewish person and I was very upset about it, but I can’t say it affected my own life in any way. I studied well. When I was in my third year, I chose my specialization: ophthalmology and surgery. Our lecturers respected me. I joined the Komsomol in the college, but public activities didn’t attract me. Though I was the best student of the course, I wasn’t offered to enter the postgraduate course. This was the period of support of national Moldovan staff that I didn’t belong to.
I finished my college in 1951 and got a job assignment 28 to the hospital in a small district town in Irkutsk region in Siberia. My sister Rahil moved into my little room. After finishing her college she also moved to Kishinev and started work as a dentist. The war and the hardships that we lived through must have affected her health. My sister fell ill with tuberculosis. I felt responsible for her and supported her as much as I could. I sent her money for medical treatment each month. Rahil recovered and married Yefim Taksir, a Jewish man. He worked for the Academy of Sciences.
I worked as a surgeon/ophthalmologist. The hospital where I was sent was a complete mess and I took over my job with great enthusiasm. I operated on patients with various problems: I helped at baby delivery, went to the taiga, when workers were injured, and provided treatment to all kinds of patients. I made friends in Siberia. One of my friends worked at the power plant and Sasha Kligma, another friend, was procurer at the shipyard. They were both Jews. We were friends and supported each other: my friends refurbished my room. We also celebrated Jewish holidays. I started fasting on Yom Kippur in 1943, when I got to know that my parents perished, and I still observe this fast.
I felt well in Siberia. I knew that people needed me. However, I was eager to become a scientist and master my professional skills of surgeon/ophthalmologist. I wrote to the Odessa Ophthalmologic Institute, headed by the great eye-doctor Filatov, and received an invitation to a course of training in this institute in early 1953. [Filatov, Vladimir Petrovich (1875 - 1956): academician, outstanding Russian ophthalmologist and surgeon. He developed methods of skin plastics, transplantation and therapy methods. He created the theory of biogenic stimulators.] This was the period of the outburst of the case of the ‘Kremlin poisoning doctors’ 29. Fortunately, Filatov and his followers weren’t affected by this case. I got a warm welcome in Odessa; I received a room at the dormitory of the institute and started my training. I remember the announcement of the death of Stalin in 1953, and how we sighed with relief. We understood that this was to put an end to the persecution of our colleagues.
I worked and studied in Odessa for a year. Then I returned to Kishinev. I stayed with my sister before I received this one-bedroom apartment. At that time it was a luxurious dwelling with running water and a toilet. In Kishinev I went to work at the trachomatous clinic. I was a doctor and often went to Moldovan villages to visit patients with trachoma: it’s an eye disease resulting from lack of vitamins. It’s common in poor countries. Later I went to work at the Kishinev ophthalmologic hospital. I was a surgeon and worked there till I retired. I got along well with patients and colleagues. I performed the most difficult operations and my opinion was important. I earned well. At least I managed to support myself and my sister.
Grandmother Bobtsia died in Kishinev in the early 1950s. I was in Siberia and didn’t come to her funeral. In 1955 Aunt Hona from Israel visited us. She told us a lot about her country. She told us affectionately how the people in Israel were building their own state. Hona said that all Jews should come to Israel. After perestroika 30 when departures were allowed, Uncle Genia and Sarrah moved there at once. My sister, her husband and their daughter Nelia moved to Israel later. My sister lives in Jerusalem now. Her husband died. Her daughter Nelia is a teacher of Physics at school.
I’ve always remained a Jew, though I am not religious. However, I celebrated holidays and fasted on Yom Kippur. On Pesach my friends – by the way, most of them are Jews – brought me matzah. I sometimes go to the synagogue on holidays, and I always go to the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah. I sort of see all of my loved ones there, I develop the feeling of quietude... I went on vacation every three-four years. I was fond of my work and always felt reluctant to leave it. I spent vacations at the seashore or in the mountains, or traveled around the country. I’ve never considered Soviet holidays as such, they were just days off for me. I visited my sister or friends to sit at the table together and socialize.
I’ve always been interested in everything going on in Israel. I listened to the forbidden radio stations ‘Radio Europe’, ‘Free Europe’ 31 to hear the words of truth about Israel. I never considered departure, probably because I’ve been alone, and it’s hard to overcome difficulties if you have no family. Remembering my failed marriage, I never considered marriage again, and so I am single.
Every two-three years I visited the place where my parents and grandmother died. The obelisk installed there in 1943 is gone. There is a huge plant at the place where they died. Though local authorities state that they hauled the remains to the cemetery, the cemetery is abandoned and nobody takes care of it. I met a woman there. Her surname is Pinskaya. Her mother left her as a baby on the road side and a Ukrainian woman picked her. Only when she grew up, did the girl hear about where she came from. She was the only survivor of the massacre in Alchevsk. She and I try to convince the local authorities to restore the monument, but it seems nobody else cares about it and things are still where they were before.
I’ve lived in harmony with life and myself for many years. I read a lot. I was hardly affected by the changes that happened in the USSR in 1991, and the establishment of independent Moldova 32. My work was important for any state. As for material hardships, I am alone and don’t need much. My father taught me to take life philosophically and I believe that the current level of science doesn’t tie us to the concept of a state; we have to be people of the whole planet. I stopped performing surgeries many years ago, but I’m involved in scientific work. I systematize my experience. Hesed 33 provides assistance to me. It has also paid for the refurbishment of my apartment. However, I’m not a passive member of the Jewish community, I consult patients at Hesed, help them to choose glasses. I often attend meetings of the Association of Jewish organizations of Moldova, read new publications related to the history of Jews of Kishinev. I try to keep pace with life. I even hope to consider repatriation and move to my sister in Israel. I would love to see Israel and touch upon its history.
Glossary:
8 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.
The pandemic that fell upon us in March 2020 has been difficult for everyone. But our hearts go out to Holocaust survivors who had years of their lives stolen from them as children, only to find themselves, in their eighties and nineties, locked away once again.
In the fall of 2020, we started the Centropa Book Club by sending books to our seniors from independent, Jewish-owned bookshops in Prague, Vienna and Budapest.
We then staffed the phones and sent emails to donors in Austria, Germany, and the US to look for sponsors.
Thanks to donors in Austria and the US, by early 2022, we had sent out more than 1,500 books and packages of sweets to our Holocaust survivors.
In Budapest, we not only sent out books, we sent Andris Schweitzer, a university student, to each of our seniors to set up their computers for Zoom calls.
Centropa does not have a social club for the Holocaust survivors we interviewed in Prague, but we continue to work with one of our best Czech interviewers, Pavla Neuner.
On Centropa’s behalf, Pavla has been sending books to 26 seniors in Prague, all of them between the ages of 90 and 99.
As a non-profit organisation, our ability to carry out projects like this solely depends on donations. Consider supporting what we do.
Elizabeth Waiser. Biography
Elizabeth Waiser
Kiev
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ella Levitskaya
Elizabeth Waiser is a tall woman looking young for her age. Six years ago her son died and her husband died two years ago. She lives with her husband’s older sister Clara Waiser in a two-room apartment. Clara is about 90 years old. Elizabeth was confined to bed 4 years ago due to hip fracture. Volunteers from Hesed helped her to learn to get up and move about her room. Her apartment is in the basement and the windows are on the level of the ground. Elizabeth is a very sociable woman. She just loved to talk with me. When she gets overwhelmed with the discussions she begins to use words in Yiddish. Her neighbors interfered with our interview several times asking Elizabeth how she was doing. They came to the window to give her few apples or a newspaper.
My father’s family lived in Bairamcha, Saratsk district, Ismail province in Rumania. It was a very small provincial town with small houses and the population of about 150 families. My grandfather Shmil-Gersh Braverman came from Bairamcha as well as several generations of his ancestors. My grandfather was born in 1860s. My grandmother Zlota, I don’t know her nee name, also came from this town. She was also born in 1860s. My grandfather owned a food store. He also had other essential goods: kerosene lamps, candles and clothing and footwear. When there were more than few customers in the store my grandmother or my father helped my grandmother. It was a small store in the house where the family lived. It was a small stone-faced wooden house. The family had 3 small rooms and a kitchen. There was a living room, my grandparents’ bedroom and a children’s room in the house. I remember the living room. There were small windows in the house and it was always dark in there. There was a sofa, a table and six chairs with velvet upholstery and carved legs in the living room.
My grandparents had two sons. My father Isaac was an older son, born in 1890. He had a younger brother Berl, born in 1896. My grandmother and grandfather were religious people. My grandfather went to synagogue every day. My grandmother went to synagogue on Saturday and holidays. They celebrated Shabbat and Jewish holidays at home. My grandmother was a housewife that was customary for Jewish families at that time. A Jewish woman was supposed to be a good wife and mother. Perhaps, that was why Jewish families didn’t make it their goal to give education to daughters. Jewish boys studied at cheder and girls were taught to read and write, traditions and prayers. My father’s parents were not rich. They made ends meet in the family and had sufficient food. My grandmother made and fixed clothes for the family. They didn’t have a housemaid.
We don’t have any photos of my grandfather, but I can see him looking at my father’s photographs. My father looked very much like my grandfather and even smiled in the same way. My grandfather wore a dark suit, a tie and a hat that was customary at that time. He didn’t have a beard or payots. He had a moustache. My grandmother always wore a shawl. She wore long dark skirts and blouses almost covering her neck. Even when it was hot in summer my grandmother still wore long-sleeved blouses. She had a fancy dark blue gown to go to synagogue.
They spoke Yiddish in my father’s family. They also knew Rumanian that was a state language. My father and his brother studied at cheder located near the synagogue. My father told me that he had a very strict teacher that could punish the boys if the didn’t do their homework appropriately. They learned to read and write in Yiddish and Hebrew, studied the Torah and Talmud. They also studied mathematic, literature, history and geography. When my father turned 13 he had Barmitzva at the synagogue. My grandmother arranged a festive dinner at home.
Most of the population in Bairamcha was Jewish. Thee were also Moldavians and Russians. Jewish families lied mostly in the central part of the town and non-Jewish population lived in the outskirts, as they were involved in farming for the most part. Like in most of small tows Jews in Bairamcha were handicraftsmen and tradesmen. There was a very skilled hat maker in Bairamcha. He was a Jew. He had customers come even from distant villages to have him make a hat or a winter coat for them. There was a shoihet in the town and butchers sold kosher meat at the market. There was a big two-storied synagogue in town. All Jew attended it on Saturday. They had a very good rabbi. Jews came from other towns to listen to his sermons. My grandfather and father had a pew at the synagogue. My grandfather was a very respectable man. He was wise and fair and always tried to help people.
My father helped my grandfather in the store since he was in his teens. He managed very well and it gained good experience. At 18 my father became a clerk at a garment store. My father was a very decent employee and his customers were very pleased with his services.
My mother’s family lived in the town of Ataki. There was Jewish, Moldavian and Russian population in Ataki. Ataki belonged to Russia before 1918. After the revolution in Russia Pridnestroviye became part of Rumania. Russian was spoken there as much as Rumanian. my mother’s father’s name was Yankl Shein. He was born in Ataki in 1860s. My mother told me that my grandfather came from a very poor family that had many children. He had to work very hard to build up his own life. My grandmother’s name was Pesl and she came from a village near Ataki. My grandfather was introduced to her by matchmakers. I don’t have any information about my grandmother’s family. My grandmother was born in 1870s. I only know that she came from a poor family and had many sisters. It was difficult for a girl from a poor family and with no dowry to find a match at that time. There were matchmakers that traveled from one town to another offering their services. My grandfather accepted their services and liked the girl that they suggested. He decided that she was not spoiled and would not nag to him about his not earning much enough. They got married and my grandmother moved to her husband in Ataki. They lived in a small house near the Dnestr.
My grandmother and grandfather came from religious families. They observed all traditions, celebrated Shabbat and all Jewish holidays. My grandparents had two children. My mother Mindl was born in Ataki in 1901. Her younger sister Freda was 3 years younger. My grandfather had to work hard long hours to provide for the family. My grandmother was a housewife. My mother and her sister had classes with a teacher that taught them at home. My mother could read and write in Hebrew and studied the Torah. They spoke Yiddish at home.
My mother told me how she met my father. He came to Ataki on his business related to purchase of goods for his store. He saw my mother and liked her a lot. My mother was very pretty. My father came to Ataki several times and then he finally asked my mother whether she would marry him. He met my mother’s parents and they liked him. My father was a very reserved and calm man. They got married shortly afterward. They had a traditional Jewish wedding with a huppah in Bairamcha. My mother wanted to keep her wedding gown for her daughter or granddaughter. I loved to try it on when I was small. It was a white silk gown decorated with laces. When we were going to evacuation in 1941 we left the gown at home and it burnt along with the house.
After their wedding my parents rented a 3-room apartment. My father worked at the store and my mother was a housewife. The owner of the store noticed my father’s skills and appointed him as supervisor at the store.
In 1920 my parents had their first baby. My mother was 19 then. Few months before their son was born my mother’s father Yankl Shein died. Jewish mothers are usually given the right to give names to their first babies and my mother named her son Yankl (Jacob) after her father. My second brother was born in 1922. He was named Joseph. In 1924 my third brother Froim was born. This childbirth was very difficult for my mother and doctors didn’t allow her to have more children. But my mother wished to have a daughter. She told me that when she got pregnant she decided to have a baby in spite of what doctors had told her. So I was born in 1927. I was named Lisa and only when the authorities were issuing my passport in 1944 they put down my name as Elizabeth.
I was the last child in the family. I was much loved and spoiled. My grandfather Shmil-Gersh loved me dearly. He always cuddled and kissed me when I came to see my grandparents. I used to ride on my grandfather’s shoulders in the yard.
My father’s younger brother Berl met my mother’s younger sister Frida at my parents’ wedding and fell in love with her. She was as beautiful as my mother. Berl decided to marry her. Jewish rules didn’t allow brothers to marry sisters. They say that if this happens God will give everything best to one family and everything bad including ailments and poverty – to another. But Berl didn’t want to believe any of this. My mother said that he probably obtained rabbi’s consent to this marriage. One way or another they got married in two or three years after my parents’ wedding. They lived in Bairamcha. Their older daughter Lisa was the same age as I. They had four children. Their youngest son was born in 1940.
We had a good Jewish family. I had wonderful parents and good brothers. I remember how clean our house was. My mother was a great housewife and was very handy. She embroidered and made clothes, looked after the children, did shopping, cooked and cleaned. We never wasted money in our family and my mother managed to have everything necessary for our living and save something for a rainy day.
My parents were religious and were raising us religious. They always celebrated Shabbat. My mother didn’t cook on Saturday. She did her shopping and cooking on Friday morning. My mother cooked enough food to last for two days and put it in the oven that kept it warm for few days. In winter our non-Jewish neighbor came to start a fire in the stove. On Friday we sat to dinner after the evening prayer and lighting candles. My father blessed the children and holy Saturday. We had Gefilte fish. My mother was best at making fish. She also made halas. There was a bakery in the town, but my mother preferred her own halas. She said they tasted different. My mother also made a boiled chicken. Jews traditionally make broth and boiled chicken. On Saturday my parents went to synagogue and had a rest They did not work at all. Sometimes my father’s brother Berl and his family visited us and we played with their children.
We celebrated all Jewish holidays at home. At Pesach my mother always bought over 3 dozen kilos of matzah, sufficient for the family and guests that we usually had on holidays. My mother always did the general cleanup of the house and we helped her. On the eve of Pesach my brothers and I walked the house with a candle and a chicken feather gathering all bread crumbs. We had to sweep them on a sheet of paper with the chicken feather and burn them all later. My mother cooked very delicious traditional food. She made fish and chicken and puddings: potato pudding, mamalyga (editor’s note: a dish made from corn flour and water) and matzah and egg pudding. She also made tzymes from carrots and beans. My mother made strudels with jam, raisins and nuts and honey cakes. In the morning we went to synagogue. We had guests at Pesach. We also had the first Seder. I didn’t know Hebrew and couldn’t understand what my father was saying. My mother used to explain me later. We all drank special red wine. I was too small and had water with a drop of wine. My father also put an extra wine glass for prophet Elijah. My mother told me that this prophet comes to every Jewish house at night at Pesach and sips wine from each glass. When I was small I couldn’t understand how he could manage to make the rounds of all Jewish houses. We had guests on all days at Pesach and visited my grandmother and grandfather and my father’s brother Berl. His daughter Lisa was my friend.
At Purim all neighbors shared delicacies with one another. My mother baked fludn. She made the stuffing from ground nuts, sugar, cocoa and honey and baked thin leaf-shaped cookies. She put the stuffing between two leaves. My mother put a white napkin on the plate and fludn, a couple of slices of strudel, few candy, an orange and an apple on it. She covered this plate with a napkin and we, children, took it to our neighbors. Their children brought us their treatments. My mother was a great housewife. I learned a lot from her.
At Succoth my father made a small booth in the yard covered with green branches. He placed a table inside and we had all our meals in this booth.
Besides Jewish holidays before 1940 we celebrated one Rumanian holiday: birthday of the king of Rumania. I don’t remember the king’s name. I only remember how festive this celebration was. All people celebrated this holiday regardless of their nationality. We were citizens of Rumania. It was a lot of fun. People danced and sang in the streets. My mother told me there were fireworks in bigger towns on this day, but we didn’t have then in our town. When I was 4 my mother made me a beautiful Rumanian fork costume. I recited poems at the celebration wearing this costume. I remember this very well. People applauded me and I enjoyed it greatly. Then people gave me candy.
In 1932 my grandfather Shmil-Gersh died. I went to my grandfather’s funeral. All furniture was removed from a bigger room. My grandfather was lying on stray on the floor wrapped in white cloth. We all were sitting on the floor wailing. My mother told me to take off my shoes. She took off her shoes, too. Then I saw that other people also had their shoes off. People were saying that my grandfather was a very good and king man and how well loved he was. Many people came to the cemetery. The rabbi said a prayer. When people were leaving the cemetery a woman at the egress poured water onto their hands. After the funeral my father didn’t go to work for a few days. My mother told me that one couldn’t go to work during mourning. My mother and I often visited my grandmother. My grandmother died in spring 1940.
My brothers and I studied at a Rumanian secondary school. As for Jewish schools, they were primary schools,4 years and our parents wanted us to get a good education and sent us to a Rumanian school to study Rumanian and have no problems with getting further education. I have a good conduct of Rumanian. There were Jewish, Rumanian, Moldavian and Russian children in our school. We were all friends and had no problems with our nationality. I studied 6 years at school when the Soviet power was established in 1940. Few people in the town were arrested including my father’s master. The Soviet authorities explained to employees of the store that there no more masters and everything belonged to the people. My father continued to work as supervisor in the store. Our town of Bairamcha was renamed to Novorossiysk, Saratsk district, Odessa region. My school became a Russian school. I studied there for another year when the war began.
The Soviet authorities were propagating for getting education in Russia. Our older brother Jacob decided to go to Russia and convinced his brothers to join him. All three of them went to Russia in 1940. They went to different locations in Russia. Jacob became an apprentice at a fire unit in the town of Kaminski, Rostov region. Joseph got a job at a plant in the vicinity of Gorky in Ivanovo region. The youngest Froim became an apprentice of locksmith in the town of Rubtsovsk of Rubtsovsk region. He was 15 years old.
On 22 June 1941 the Great patriotic War began. We were woken by the roar of explosions and couldn’t understand what was going on. On Sunday morning we heard an announcement on the radio that fascists attacked the Soviet Union. There were many Jewish families in Bairamcha. And only 2 or 3 families evacuated. The rest of Jews perished. They were slaughtered like sheep. My aunt Frida had 4 small children. Lisa was of my age. The youngest was 9 months old. Frida was holding the baby when a fascist came a stabbed the baby with a bayonet. Frida fainted and fascists shot her. Her husband Berl and three older children also perished. Fascists killed our 28 relatives. Many other people perished on that day. We got to know about it when we returned to Bairamcha after the war.
My father insisted that we left Bairamcha. He said that he could only pray for his sons that were in Russia but he wanted to rescue my mother and me. My father was ordered to evacuate fabrics from the store. He loaded a cart and there was little space left for us to load few pillows and some clothes. We headed for Nikolaev where my father handed all fabric over to the sales and consumer department obtaining a confirmation that he had handed over all goods. My mother egged him to leave some fabric for a dress for me, but my father said that he had never in his life touched something that was not his. He said that if we were in need God would help us to get what we needed. We got on a train and moved on. We reached the town of Guriev in Kazakhstan. I was 13, but I was tall and looked like a 17-year-old girl. There was evacuation agency at the railway station in Guriev and its employees offered me a job of a telephone operator. I agreed. This was how my work career began.
We moved to Novobogatinsk where we found a place to live. It was a 4-room hose. Our landlords lived in two rooms. We moved into one room and another room was occupied by a family from Moscow: a mother, a grandmother and two children. My father got a job at a store. My mother didn’t work. She was a housewife. She spent her time receiving bread and cereals per our food coupons. She had to get up early to stand in lines. Sometimes she had to stand in lines a whole day. My mother didn’t have any warm clothes with her. My father got a pair of pressed wool winter boots and we took turns to wear them. It was a very cold winter and my mother had continuous colds. She also had to bring and cut wood for the stove and fetch water from the ice-covered well. My mother was doing her best to make something eatable from what was available. I was a telephone operator and was doing well at work. Most of operators were married women whose husbands were at the front.
I didn’t go to school. I had to earn my living. My father and I had certificates of employees and my mother had a dependant card. We could get 600 grams of bread per day per our cards. This was different bread of bran and peas. It was heavy and when shop assistants were weighing it there were always smaller make-weights. My mother always told me to eat make-weights as I was growing up and was constantly hungry.
We had no information about my brothers. My mother kept crying. Once we received a money transfer for 1000 rubles. I went to the post office and saw that the sender was Jacob Braverman. That was how we got to know that Jacob was alive. He was wounded at the front and stayed in hospital. He found us through the evacuation inquiry office. My brother got a two-week leave after he was released from hospital and he came to see us. How happy we were to see him! However, we didn’t know anything about Froim and Joseph until the end of the war.
In 1944 when Odessa region was liberated we returned to Bairamcha. Half of the town was ruined. There were very few locals that survived. All Jews were exterminated by fascists and non-Jews perished during air raids and bombing. Many houses were empty. We moved into one of such houses. When Chairman of the town council heard that we were back he called my father and said to him: “ Isaac, you have a beauty of a daughter. Look, she won’t even find a match to marry in Bairamcha, because fascists killed all Jews. I feel sorry for the girl and you have to take her out of here”. My father decided to move to Chernovtsy. Chernovtsy wasn’t destroyed by the war. Shops were open; there was plenty of food and goods. People treated Jews nicely in Chernovtsy. There was no demonstration of anti-Semitism. We felt there at home soon. The local people told us that it had been so for ages. The Jews were patrons of arts and music. This area initially belonged to Austrian Hungary, then Hungary and Rumania.
There was a Jewish school and hospital for poor Jews and a Jewish children’s hospital in Chernovtsy before the war. There were 67 synagogues! At present there is one synagogue in town. At one time Chernovtsy was called “a small Paris”, because it was a very culturally developed town. We packed our things and moved to the village of Storozhenets not far from Chernovtsy. We were allowed to move into an empty house. My father went to work at the hardware store. I got a job of telephone operator in Storozhenets. My mother didn’t work. She became very sickly in evacuation. Doctors diagnosed heart problems that she had. Her condition got worse gradually and in 1951 my mother fell very ill and had to stay in bed. My father and I were looking after her. Shortly after we moved to Storozhenets my three brothers came to see us. They wrote to the town council in Bairamcha and got our new address from there. They were at the front during the war, but they survived. After leaving their parents’ home my brothers forgot all about Jewish traditions. They got fond of communist ideas instead propagating equality and brotherhood of all people. They became Soviet people that had no nationality. Their families didn’t observe Jewish traditions or celebrate holidays, either.
They were all married. Joseph had a Russian wife. He met her at the front. She was a nurse. They had three sons. After the war Joseph returned to Gorky. He was a turner at the same plant where he had worked before the war. He died in Gorky in 1992. My younger brother Froim lived in Rubtsovsk. He had a Jewish wife. His beautiful wife Fania and he had a daughter. In early 1970s Froim and his family moved to the US. He died in 1999. His wife and daughter live in the US. His daughter got married. She has two children. My older brother Jacob went to Guriev after the war. Americans worked on construction of a plant there. Jacob worked at the construction and upon its completion he went to the US. He settled down in Brooklyn, New York, where he opened a store “Yasha Braverman”. Jacob died in Brooklyn in 1990.
In March 1953 Stalin died. I cried a lot. But I din’t understand the extent of our loss. Life was much better during the Stalin regime than it is now. It was a good and merry time. I miss this period. There was no unemployment. People had work and received salary with no delays. Stores were full of goods and products. People could afford to buy what was sold in stores. As for now, I can only recall this good old time thinking of how to manage with my small pension. They say there was anti-Semitism during Stalin regime. I don’t know, I never faced any myself. I could get a job and I never heard the word “zhyd”.
My mother was very sad when my brothers left. When she was dying she said that a flame of yearning for her children was burning in he heart. My mother died in 1953. She was 52 years old. My father and I buried her according to the Jewish tradition at the Jewish corner of the cemetery in Storozhenets. I missed my mother so much. I wore mourning clothing and my eyes were always full of tears.
In 3 months after my mother died I went to see a friend of mine in Chernovtsy. She asked me why I looked so sad. I told her that my mother died and my heart was broken. She poured me a cup of tea and asked me to wait while she went to see her acquaintance. This acquaintance happened to be a sister of my future husband. She lived with her brother and their aunt Rachel. My friend went to see her acquaintance and left a note for my future husband to come and see her as soon as he came home from work. In less than an hour the door opened and my future husband came to see my friend still wearing his working clothes. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a very good and kind face. My friend introduced him to me and he said that he was lonely and wanted to have his life organized. He also expressed 3 requirements to his future wife. She was to be a good housewife(I told him that I was good at housekeeping, I learned everything from my mother. Then he said that she had to know how to handle money. I also learned from my mother to save money and handle it well. His 3rd requirement to his future wife was to be a beautiful woman. I said to him ‘As for this, it will be up to you”. I had long legs and a mop of thick hair. He asked my permission to meet my father and ask for his consent to our marriage.
My husband David Waiser was born in Dombroveny village in Rumania in 1923. He could hardly remember his parents. They died when he was a small boy. His older sister Haya -Clara in Russian, raised him. During the war Clara was in evacuation in Karaganda. She worked at a coal mine. David was in infantry at the front. After the war he returned home where he was told that their house was ruined and his sister moved to Chernovtsy. David came to Chernovtsy and got a job of laborer at the ‘Vostok” factory manufacturing domestic chemicals.
Before his arrival to Storozhenets I did shopping at the market and cooked a dinner. My husband met my father and liked him a lot. He talked with my father. My father told him to talk to me about his proposal, because it was me he was going to live with. We got married within a month. I didn’t know him. But I took the risk. I always dreamed to have a hardworking husband. I didn’t want an intellectual. We didn’t have a wedding. We had a civil registry ceremony and his sister made a small dinner at his home. My mother saved all the money I was earning after the war in a bank. When we got married I gave this entire amount to my husband. I also packed my belongings and we moved them to Chernovtsy. In Chernovtsy I went to work as telephone operator and worked there until I retired in 1986. I did well at work and got along well with my colleagues.
We received a dwelling in a basement from the factory. We've lived here all our life. We renovated it for the money that my mother had saved for me. David was very handy. There was nothing he couldn’t do. He was good at welding and was a good tinsmith. He could fix sewing machines and was a good electrician and plumber. He did everything at home. He also helped other people to fix things. He didn’t charge anything for his services and I always said to him “God forbid to take money from our neighbors. Neighbors are closer than a family. Our relatives are far away and neighbors are here. They need something from you today and tomorrow you will be in need”. I get along well with my neighbors.
My husband’s aunt Rachel, his father’s sister, was a communist during the Rumanian rule. When the Soviet power was established she was sent to Siberia. She was good at sewing and she worked as a seamstress in exile. After she was released she returned to Chernovtsy. She was a presser at the garment factory. My husband’s sister and aunt were renting a room. My husband asked my permission to have them move in with us. I had no objections and they moved into this dwelling. Aunt Rachel was looking after our son and we all went to work.
My son was born in 1955. We named him Efim after my husband’s father. According to Jewish customs it is a mother’s right to name her first baby. When my husband asked me what name I was going to give him I replied that I give this right to name our baby to my husband. My husband loved our son dearly. He even bathed the baby. My father came on a visit to take a look at his grandson. Once he went out, slipped and fell in the street and broke his hip. We had to take him to hospital. After he came home from hospital we realized that he couldn’t go on living just by himself and he stayed with us. We put a wardrobe in the middle of the room and put my father’s bed in the corner. I looked after my father. My father said to me before he died “I don’t know what I would have done without you”. My father died in 1969. My husband and I buried him at the Jewish cemetery in Chernovtsy according to Jewish tradition. The rabbi said kadesh over my father’s grave. My husband’s aunt Rachel Waiser died in 1984.
My husband and I came from religious families. We always believed in God like our parents taught us. We observed all Jewish traditions in our family. We fasted before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and celebrated Pesach. I was a good housewife and had all traditional food made on holidays. I cooked Gefilte fish like my mother taught me. We worked at Shabbat, because Saturday was a working day. But I always cooked on Friday. In the evening my husband and I prayed and I lit candles and only then we sat down to dinner. On holidays my husband and I went to the synagogue. We didn’t go to synagogue on Saturday. My husband and I spoke Yiddish and Russian at home. We spoke Russian to our son, but he has heard Yiddish since he was a baby and so he learned it himself.
We also celebrated Soviet holidays and got together with our neighbors in the yard. We sang Soviet songs and went to parades. Although we couldn’t afford much we enjoyed what we had.
In 1970s many Jews were moving from the USSR and my husband and I were thinking about it. We decided to stay. We were born here and grew up in this country. Members of or family were buried here. We decided to stay and live our life here. Not all Jews live in Israel. Of course, it was our dream to visit Israel, but we could never afford it.
My son was very successful at school. I tried to convince him to go to the institute after finishing school, but he saw how difficult it was for us to make our living and he decided to go to work. He took a course of electronic equipment maintenance specialists and got a job at the “Electronmach” plant. My son was a wonderful, kind and caring man. He was interested in the Jewish religion, culture and history and studied a lot. After Ukraine gained independence my son was one of the founders of the first Jewish association. Efim taught Jewish history at Hesed. He was very fond of it. Girls liked Efim, but he didn’t have time to meet with them. I told him that he had to think about getting married and having his own family, that his father and I would not always with him. It could never occur to me that I would bury my own son.
When he told me that he was planning to go on vacation to Poland with his friend I tried to talk him out of it as if I had a bad inkling. He fell ill with encephalitis in Poland and his arms and legs were paralyzed and his friend escorted him back to Ukraine in an ambulance vehicle. He stayed in hospitals for a long time and I was always beside him, but there was no working cure for him. My son died in 1996. My husband and I buried him at the Jewish corner of the town cemetery and installed a gravestone on his grave. After my sons funeral I was overwhelmed with grief. I fell at home and broke my arm. My husband was taking care of me. David was a very good husband and father. I was a happy wife, because I only heard words of love from my husband. In a year I fell another time and broke my hip. I’ve been confined to bed for 4 years. In January 2001 my husband had an infarction. When he was dying in the reanimation unit he said “ I mustn’t die. My dearest wife is at home. She is an invalid and can’t walk”. His grave is beside my son’s grave. My husband was a very good, decent and nice man. He didn’t smoke or drink. He loved his family, his son and wife. He loved his sister and loved people. My husband’s sister Haya lives with me. She is 87. She can’t hear or see.
If it were not for the assistance of Hesed and Jewish Charity Committee I would be desperate. A nurse from Hesed comes to help me. She is a wonderful woman. She cleans my room and washes me. I get meals from Hesed. At Shabbat Hesed sends me a hala and dinner. Volunteers come to help me stand and walk. They read me Jewish magazines and newspapers and tell me news. They help me to overcome the feeling of loneliness. I know that there is somebody to bury me when I die. They’ve become my family.
Clara Shalenko
Odessa
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ada Goldferb
Date of interview: January 2003
Clara Shalenko is an old, short and gray-haired woman. She is a very reserved person, but she enjoys telling the story of her life. She lives in a cozy and well-furnished one-room apartment. She keeps her apartment ideally clean. A year and a half ago Clara had an infarction. She hardly ever leaves her apartment. A volunteer from Gmilus Hesed visits her to help her wash and clean the apartment.
My great grandfather on my father’s side Haim Shterbul was born in Odessa in 1845. I don’t know what he did for a living. My grandfather’s mother Esther (my great grandmother) was born in Odessa in 1850. She was a housewife. My great grandparents got married in 1868. They were religious and attended a synagogue on all Jewish holidays. They fasted at Yom Kippur. They had two sons: Leivi-Itzhok and Emmanuel. In 1898 my great grandparents moved to America. I don’t know for what reason they moved or why they didn’t take their sons with them. They lived in New York and my great grandfather owned a hockshop. In 1899 they mailed my grandfather Leivi-Itzhok a shiftcard’ – a boat ticket to go to America, but my grandfather stayed at home since he had a family to take care of. His younger brother Emmanuel went instead. When Emmanuel arrived in America my great grandfather sent him back to Odessa ‘I’ve called Leivi-Itzhok to come here. As for you, you should go back to Odessa’. Emmanuel returned to Odessa after a short stay in the US. This is all information I have about my great grandparents.
All I know about my grandfather on my father’s side is what my father told me. My grandfather Leivi-Itzhok Shterbul was born in Odessa in 1869. He was a tall, handsome man with a moustache. On the only photo I have he has no beard. My grandfather was very religious. He had a tallit and teffilin. His friends came to see him at Sabbath holidays they went to a synagogue all together. My grandfather’s family followed the kashrut. They had special utensils and dishes for Pesach and they had specific utensils for meat and dairy products. They fasted at Yom Kippur. They lived in Staroriznichnaya Street near Privoz [a popular market in Odessa]. They had two rooms and a kitchen. They were not a wealthy family. I believe my grandfather studied at cheder. My father didn’t tell me about what he did either. My grandfather died in 1922. He was buried according to the Jewish traditions at the Jewish cemetery. I remember my grandfather’s younger brother Emmanuel Shterbul. He was born in Odessa in 1872 and studied at cheder. He was a tinsmith. Emmanuel got married in 1899. His wife’s name was Clara. Clara was a dressmaker. Emmanuel’s family was religious. They went to synagogue and fasted at Yom Kippur. They always had matzah at Pesach. Since I didn’t know any Jewish traditions in my childhood I didn’t pay attention to any details and don’t remember any. They had two children: Zina and Fima. Emmanuel and Clara died in evacuation during the Great Patriotic War.
My father’s mother Reizl Shterbul was born in Odessa in 1878. I don’t know her maiden name. She came from a religious family. She went to synagogue on Sabbath, and on big holidays. There was a number of synagogues in Odessa at that time. My grandmother got married in 1894 when she turned 16. She was a housewife. My grandmother celebrated all Jewish holidays and raised her children religious. . My grandmother Reizl died of infarction in 1922. My grandparents had four sons: my father Mendel was the oldest, then Abram, Obysh and Motl.
My father’s brother Abram was born in Odessa in 1898. I don’t know where he studied. He was a baker. Like other brothers he was a communist. I don’t know for what reason they joined the Party. Perhaps, they were attracted by the idea of equality and justice proclaimed by Bolsheviks. All the communists were atheists. In 1919 Abram got married I do not know if he had a wedding in the synagogue. His wife Manya was a Jew and came from Lithuania. Manya was very religious and celebrated all holidays. She had a menorah and lit candles at Sabbath. She prayed and wore a shawl leaving her ears uncovered. I don’t know whether there were any conflicts due to the spiritual difference since they were a separate family. Abram and Manya had four children. Manya wasn’t raising her children religious. She did not take them to the synagogue, I do not know whether all of them observed kashrut in full extent, but they did not eat pork of course. They did not celebrate Jewish holidays at home but at Pesach they always had Gefilte fish and matzot. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War their family evacuated to Fergana where Abram continued to work as a baker. After he was appointed director of a bakery since he was a communist. Two of his sons were taken to the front from evacuation. After the war Abram became director of a bakery in Odessa. Later he was elected chairman of the regional committee of Trade Union of bakers where he worked until he retired. Manya died in 1980. Abram died in 1983. They were buried at the Jewish cemetery. Their daughter Sonya is an accountant, she lives in Odessa. She has two daughters Soya and Anya. Their older son Lyova and his family live in Chicago. Their middle son Volodya left for Israel where he died. Younger son Anatoliy live in Odessa, he has a daughter Natalia. I know all of them married Jews, while they all always felt themselves Jews. [Anti-Semitism increased in the USSR after WWII. In contrast to prewar period when the international marriages were popular, the Jews returned to their old practice – to marry Jews. They wanted to keep together.]
My father’s brother Obysh was born in Odessa in 1901. He worked for trade unions and was single.. In 1941 Obysh went to the front where he perished.
My father’s younger brother Motl was born in Odessa in 1905. He was a shoe modeler at a shoe factory. Motl got married in 1925. His wife’s name was Adelia she was Jewish. In 1926 their son Lyova was born. He was named after grandfather Leivi-Itzhok. Motl went to the front in 1941 and his wife and son stayed in Odessa. Adelia and her son were killed in the ghetto in Odessa and Motl perished at the front.
My father Mendel Shterbul was born in Odessa on 3 January 1895. I know nothing about father’s childhood. In 1914 he was recruited to the army. My father didn’t go to the army, but got involved in some revolutionary activities and went underground. Therefore they made forged document for him with the name Finegold. He had this name all his life long. He was hiding at his friend Shymon Barskiy’s apartment. In 1917 my father joined the Bolshevik Party. During the Civil War he was in the Bolshevist underground movement. In 1919 my father was sent to the town of Galatz in Romania to take money to Romanian communists for liberation of Russian communists from jail. When my father came to the secret address there was an ambush of gendarmes. My father was scared to death. He had a lot of Party money with him. Gendarmes took my father to sigurantza [secret police of Romania] where they interrogated my father where he got such a lot of money from. My father replied that he was going to his father in the US and his relatives in Odessa collected this amount for his trip. He was imprisoned and convoyed to work every day. My father’s job was to wallpaper rooms in a Romanian lord’s mansion. Romanians Bolsheviks sent their messenger to my father. She called herself his fiancée and brought him food to jail. She managed to give him an escape plan. My father escaped at the time when he was at work at that mansion when his convoy dozed off. He met with Romanian communists at a secret apartment and they helped him to get back to Moscow. In Moscow my father entered the Communist University named after Ya. Sverdlov. His co-students were communists from many countries. My father remembered Anna Pauker [one of the leaders of Romanian communist movement, a Jew] – they were friends. He graduated from the Communist University in 1923 and was sent to do Party work in Odessa. The Party town committee of Odessa appointed my father a leader of the Party unit of the town mental hospital.
My mother’s father Aron-Duvid Meyerovich was born in Odessa in 1879. I don’t know where he lived or what he did for a living. He was religious, I don’t know how much. My grandfather had a sister – Perl, born in 1876. She was very religious. Perl got married and lived a wealthy life. I don’t know her husband’s name or what he did for a living. They lived in Spiridonovskaya Street in the center of the town. She had two children: daughter Tsylia and son Yasha. During the war they were in evacuation. Perl died in 1953 I have no information about her children. There is no information about where she was buried.
My mother’s mother Haika Meyerovich was born in Odessa in 1886. I don’t know her maiden name. My grandparents got married in 1903. My grandmother was a housewife. She wore kerchief. They followed the kashrut. In 1922 my grandfather Aron-Duvid and my grandmother starved to death in the hard times after the Civil War. Perl’s husband was greedy and had no intention to help his wife’s relatives. My mother didn’t even mention this subject to me – she had too hard memories about this period. My grandparents had four children: two daughters – Zisl and Clara and two sons – Lyova and Isaac.
My mother’s younger sister Clara was born in Odessa in 1907. She married David Waiss. David was a docker in the port, he was leader of a crew of loaders. They lived in Miasoyedovskaya Street in Moldavanka. Clara and David had three children: daughter Lena and sons Ilia and Shura. Before the Great Patriotic War Clara gave birth to another girl. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War her husband went to the front. Clara was confused. She sent her older daughter with her husband’s sister in evacuation to Samarkand. Clara sent Ilia and Shura to a children’s home that evacuated to the Krasnodar region. On the way there they were captured by Germans. Germans exterminated all Jewish children. Clara and her baby stayed in Odessa where they were killed in the ghetto. Clara’s husband perished at the front. Of all family only their older daughter Lena survived. After the Great Patriotic War Lena returned to Odessa, got married and had two daughters. Lena died of breast cancer in 1990. Her daughters moved to Israel. I have no further information about them.
I know little about my mother’s brothers. Her older brother Lyova was born in Odessa in 1910. I don’t know where he worked. He was single. He perished at the front during the Great Patriotic War. Her younger brother Isaac was born in 1912. He was also single. He perished at the front during the war.
My mother Zisl Meyerovich was born in Odessa in 1905. My mother didn’t tell me much about her childhood. I only know that she lived in the family of her father’s sister Perl’s since she turned 12. She worked as a housemaid cleaning the apartment and doing the washing and laundry. I don’t know where her sisters and brothers were at that time, but my mother told me that she was supporting them as much as she could. During the period of famine she gave them food leftovers. She had to do it in secret since Perl’s husband was greedy and had no intention to help his wife’s relatives. I don’t know where my mother studied, but she could read and write in Russian and Yiddish. At 18 she went to work as a nurse at the town mental hospital in Slobodka in 1923. My mother was a pretty girl – she had thick beautiful hair.
My father met my mother there and they fell in love with one another. They got married in 1923, but they didn’t have a wedding party since life was hard and they couldn’t afford it. My father and mother were ‘kaptsans’ [very poor in Yiddish] they just had a civil ceremony. They got a room with a kitchen and toilet for medical personnel in the hospital where they worked. After the wedding my father insisted that my mother got some medical education and she finished a school of medical nurses at the mental hospital in Odessa in 1924. She began to work as a medical nurse at this hospital. I remember well two of my mother’s friends: Gitia and Katia. They were Jewish and worked as doctors at the mental hospital. They often visited us and we got together to celebrate birthdays and soviet holidays: the October Revolution Day and the 1st of May. On these days we went on march with the red banners and Communist slogans, there played music people sang songs everybody was happy. Afterwards the families with the friends got together at the dinner table. Gitia stayed in Odessa during the Great Patriotic War and was killed in the ghetto. I have no information about what happened to Katia.
I was born on 15 November 1925. I was the only child of my parents and they spoiled me a lot, of course. In 1930 my mother went to work as surgical nurse in the clinic of Professor Nalivkin in Slobodka. She worked there until 1934. My mother had good working relationships with her colleagues and she didn’t face any anti-Semitism. In 1934 she went to work at the military hospital in Yasnaya Street. My father was a secretary of Party unit at the plant named after Khvorostin in 1932-1933 [secretaries of Party units were responsible for implementation of the policy of the Communist Party, Party meetings and collection of monthly fees].
He got an apartment in Bazarnaya Street in the center of the town. It was a communal apartment and there was another tenant in it. We all were good neighbors. We had two rooms, and a common kitchen and a toilet. The apartment was heated with wood. I had a desk, a bed and many Russian fiction books in my room. My parents had a wardrobe with a mirror, a big bed and a chest of drawers. My father and mother were very much in love with one another and loved me dearly. Our home was warm and cozy. My mother cooked delicious food and also, made traditional Jewish food. She made tsymes, gefilte fish and baked strudels. We went to parades on Soviet holidays and had guests. My father and mother were communists – therefore, we didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays. However, we always had matzah at Pesach since my mother’s brother Abram worked as baker at a Jewish bakery before holidays. We had many Jewish neighbors before the war. Adults spoke Yiddish and children communicated in Russian. My mother and father also spoke Yiddish in our family. I can understand Yiddish, but I cannot speak it well. There was a Jewish theater in Troitskaya Street in Odessa. Yudia, a daughter of our acquaintances, was an actress in this theater, she was very pretty. My parents and I often went to this theater. My father sang me songs in Yiddish. I don’t remember my parents to speak about Jewry or Judaism at home though.
In 1933 my father became secretary of the Party unit in the children’s recreation center of general type in Kholodnaya Balka, a smaller town in 10 km from Odessa. He commuted to work every day I spent my summer vacations at the recreation center. There was a big park in the recreation center and children were well fed: I enjoyed my time there. My father and I stayed there through a summer and my mother visited us at weekends. I made friends with children of my father’s colleagues. I remember children of my father’s colleagues Mark Krieger and Luba Voitushka. Mark was a Jew and Luba was Russian. We played a ball, hide-and-seek, and climbed tress and walked. After the Great Patriotic War Luba lived in Slobodka neighborhood in Odessa, but I have no information about Mark Krieger.
I remember 1933, (I was 8 years old) when I saw many people swollen from starvation in the streets – they scared me and I ran away. Our family was in a better condition since my father was a Party activist. Party officials received food packages – I remember how delicious was khalva [oriental sweet mix of nuts, seeds and sugar]. There was a so-called old market in Bazarnaya Street. We, children, went to see people selling slices of bread and meat. We could only afford staring at it since it was way too expensive for our parents to buy. There were many such traders that took advantage of other people’s misfortunes.
In 1933 I went to a Russian school where we also studied Polish. There were Jewish and Russian children at school, but I don’t remember any Polish children. I remember Nora Kuzmenko, a Russian girl. She was an anti-Semite. She used to say ‘Jew, you should die!’ Few Polish teachers were also anti-Semites. They treated us with disdain. I became a young Octobrist at school. In 1935 I became a pioneer. We had pioneer meetings and helped other pupils with their classes and did some chores for older people. We had weekly meetings when our pioneer tutor told us about pioneers and about Pavlik Morozov.
I attended an embroidery and sewing class at school. I had a friend – Raya Khomskaya that was my neighbor. Her father was a plumber. I don’t remember whether her parents observed Jewish traditions, but she knew more about them than I. She and I used to go to the synagogue in Meschanskaya Street not far from our house just of pure interest. In 1930s the town authorities began to close synagogues. There were few synagogues in Odessa before the Great Patriotic War. I remember a synagogue in Pushkinskaya Street and the synagogue in Ekaterininskaya Street. It was forbidden for the members of pioneer organisation to visit churches or synagogues and I ceased to.
Raya’s father had nothing to do with politics, but he was arrested and executed in 1937 [Great Terror]. I don’t know what was he accused of. Raya, her sister and mother lost their breadwinner. Their Jewish neighbors supported them continuously. Raya became a hairdresser after the war.
I also remember my father’s friend Shymon Barskiy arrested in Moscow in 1937. My father and Shymon were in the same Party unit in Odessa. Later Shymon moved to Moscow. My father in 1937 got a subpoena to the NKVD office, where he was interrogated about where he was in 1921 – 1922. He was suspected of espionage due to his short-term stay in Romania during the Civil War. We were concerned about what might happen to my father, but he managed all right.
On Sunday 22 June 1941 I was cleaning the house when I heard on the radio that the war began. I didn’t know what a war was like and didn’t listen to details. On 23 July Odessa began to be bombed. I saw splinters of shells falling on the pavement. Children used to collect them.
We evacuated at the end of July 1941. My father was responsible for evacuation of children from the recreation center where he was secretary of the Party organization. There were children from many towns. My father also took his brother Abram and his family and me to evacuation. My mother was working at a military hospital and she couldn’t go with us. We boarded railroad platforms for transportation of cattle. We didn’t go far from Odessa when German planes began to drop bombs on our train. The children ran to hide in surrounding bushes and my father was trying to keep them together. My father was wearing white pants and other adults yelled at him ‘White pants, you decamouflage us – they will start bombing again’. My father didn’t have any clothing to change, though. The train and the rails were not damaged, we moved on. Uncle Abram and his family and I stayed with some relatives in Artymosvsk [570 km to the northwest of Odessa]. My father and children went to the next station of Debaltsevo – to take children to the children’s home there. We stayed few weeks in Artyomovsk having no information about my father. Since the frontline was getting closer we left Artyomovsk to go further to the east. We went by freight train and it was a hard trip. We came to Buguruslan [1 700 km from Odessa] of Orenburg region from where we were taken to Bolshoye Kuroedovo village on horse-driven carts. We were accommodated in a hut in the woods near the village. The only food we had were pickled mushrooms in a barrel. Later chairman of the collective farm of the village accommodated us in the house of Julia, a village woman whose husband was at the front. There were a number of us: five children and my aunt and uncle. We got a job – we picked raspberries. I got a horse and a cart to transport boxes with raspberries to the collective farm. There was lack of food. Julia made pies stuffed with onions from dark flour and this was the food we had. We didn’t have winter clothing and villagers were so poor that they didn’t have any clothes to share with us. The only support the chairman of the collective farm could provide was to help us move from there. In October 1941 we left for Fergana [3 000 km from Odessa in Uzbekistan] a small dusty town of one-storied mud-houses. In Fergana my uncle Abram went to work at the bakery. He was a communist and was appointed director of the bakery. Life was very hard and we starved. Abram’s wife Manya said to me ‘Clara, you are a big girl and it is hard for us to provide for you. Go to the Party town committee and tell them to accommodate you since you’ve lost your parents’. The town committee sent me to the town industrial association where I got a bed in a hostel – there were two other girls in the room. They were in evacuation, but they were not Jewish. We were sewing winter coats for the front, but we still earned a little and had little food. We got a piece of bread, boiled water, tea and few raisins in the canteen. I had no information about my father or mother and missed them a lot.
My father went to the front at the beginning of autumn 1941 after he left all children in the children’s home. He wrote a letter to Artyomovsk, but it didn’t reach us. My father was at the front and didn’t have any information about my mother or me for two years. In 1943 my father was severely wounded – his jaw was injured. He had to wear a bandage for the rest of his life. He was demobilized and began searching for my mother and me. He found out through the evacuation agency that the hospital where my mother was working had moved to the Krasnodar region. He got information from an evacuation agency that the hospital where mother worked in Odessa moved to Krasnodar region where it was disbanded. My father found my mother in Arkhangelskaya village in Krasnodar region. She worked as a medical nurse there. My mother and father went to Stalinabad [Dushanbe from 1961, 3 250 kms from Odessa]. My mother got a job at the medical unit of railroad agency. My father was very shy about his injured jaw and just went to work as a house-painter – he didn’t go to see any Party officials to ask about a position. My mother received a one-room apartment with all comforts. Through this whole period my parents were trying to find me. Once, when my parents were standing in line to get some kerosene, they began talking to a Jewish couple. Those people knew uncle Abram and told my parents that he was in Fergana. My father immediately wrote to the director of bakery in Fergana since he knew that my uncle was a baker. This director of bakery happened to be Abram. He replied ‘Mendel, come here – Clara is with us’.
At the beginning of the fall of 1943 my father arrived to take me to Stalinabad. I was my parents’ only treasure and they hadn’t known anything about me for two years. When my mother saw me at the railway station she fainted. We were so happy to be together again. I went to study at the medical school in Stalinabad and finished it in 1944. Many graduates of our school went to the front. I got a job assignment to a hospital in a small town of Khorog in the mountains near the border with Afghanistan. I worked there with my schoolmate Luba Dymshytz and her sister Rosa. They evacuated from Gomel. Rosa learned the Tadzhyk language and worked as an accountant for chairman of the collective farm. She was a smart and intelligent girl. She could also ride a horse. Luba and I went around the neighboring villages riding a donkey to inoculate children from smallpox. The local Tadzhyk people treated us well. They gave us food since we were always hungry. I remember baked pumpkin that we got from them. We lived in jurta [portable Tadjik dwelling from felt round in perimeter, with a cupola-shaped roof]. Tadzyk people took their children to get treatment. We made inoculations and gave them medications, mainly quinine since many of them had malaria. I also had malaria. I worked in Khorog for about a year. In summer 1945 I returned to my parents in Stalinabad. In the end of August we went to Odessa via Moscow. We arrived in Moscow at the beginning of September. My parents and I were in the Red Square when the radio announced that the war with Japan was over. People rejoiced.
We arrived in Odessa in autumn 1945. My father became a crew leader – they built a department store in Pushkinskaya Street. Our house was ruined. Our former janitor told us that there was a vacant apartment in the same neighborhood where we moved in. It was a dark two-room apartment on the first floor – no kitchen or toilet. My father, being a construction man, built a verandah, toilet and a bathroom. My mother continued to work as a medical nurse in the municipal vegetation trust. There were no Jewish schools or Jewish theater in Odessa after the war. Jewish culture was in decay and suppressed. I think there was a synagogue in Pushkinskaya Street before 1953.
In 1945 I went to work as a medical nurse at the vitamin manufacture factory. In 1946 I entered the construction college. There were many Jewish students there. In 1947 I became a Komsomol member. There was anti-Semitism after the war. However, our acquaintances treated us well. Quite a few lecturers in our college were anti-Semites. One of them Vlad Maximovich Shakhiev, an Azerbaidjan man, called me Finegold-Minegold [Fine gold means ‘fine gold’ and Minegold means ‘my gold’ – he was probably joking in his own manner.] There was famine in 1946. There were plenty of food products in the Privoz [main market of Odessa], but who could afford to buy them? I remember that our food was corn pudding or frozen potatoes. We bought a small piece of meat just to make soup once a week. There were coupons to receive bread. Bread was weighed in small slices and there were even smaller pieces of it added to make up the standard weight. We used to eat those pieces on our way home. When at home we divided or rationed slices of bread to last for a day. Students received food coupons to get meals at the canteen. We didn’t have enough clothes either. Americans sent humanitarian aid. I remember I was given a dress. It was checked one with the white collar. I can’t recall now who and how distributed such things. I finished the Construction College in 1949.
In 1949 I went to work in Sevastopol upon finishing College [there was a system of mandatory employment of graduates from higher and secondary special educational institutions in the USSR and they were obliged to work a certain period]. I met a young Russian Navy officer. We met at a dancing party at the Navy Officers’ House. I introduced him to my parents before we got married. He made a good impression on them and they had no objections to my marrying a Russian man. . His name was Vladimir Georgievich Shalenko. We got married in 1950. My husband was born in the town of Shuya, Ivanovo region, in 1923. He had a mother and two sisters. During the Great Patriotic War he studied at the Higher Engineering School in Leningrad. He participated in the parade of Victory in Moscow. I was a construction technician in a military unit in Sevastopol – we built houses for officers. My husband was a lieutenant. We had a big 3-room apartment with all comforts in Sevastopol where my mother-in-law lived I got along well with her. We didn’t have any children. There were few Jewish officers in the military unit. We often got together to talk about life telling Jewish jokes and trying to keep some sort of relationship atmosphere. My husband never cared about my Jewish nationality. Don’t know whether there was a synagogue in Sevastopol.
I remember the period of the ‘doctors’plot’. I went to see my parents in summer 1953 and wanted to enter the Odessa Medical Institute. I wasn’t even allowed to take entrance exams, since there was my maiden name – Finegold in all documents about my secondary education. . We heard rumors about deportation of Jews to Siberia and were very concerned about it. When Stalin died I was in grief, cried and even joined the Communist party. My mother couldn’t care less about it and my father just said ‘Thank God, this Osetin man left this Earth’. My father recalled when he was interrogated in the NKVD office. He was glad that Stalin died.
When Khrushchev came to power we believed what he said about Stalin’s criminality and his promises of a better life. Khrushchev started extensive housing construction in order to give families separate apartments. Many families in Odessa received apartments, therefore, many people believed in him, but he lacked education that was clear from his speeches and actions.
My husband died in 1963 after happy 14 years of life together. I moved to Odessa. We exchanged apartments and my parents and I got a two-room apartment with all comforts on the first floor in a new neighborhood of the town. I was having a hard time after my husband died and led a secluded life. My parents did their best to support me. In the evening we watched TV and read books. We were moderately well of: I received a salary of a Soviet engineer and my parents received pensions. We didn’t have a dacha [summer house] or a car. I worked as a safety engineer in the town construction trust for twenty years. I didn’t have any problems with getting employment, but many Jews did. They were offered jobs that Russians didn’t want. I had good relationships at work and went along well with both Russians and Jews. There was no anti-Semitism in my environment, but of course, Jews were more familiar to me. We had a good understanding and took up the meaning of what one wanted to say quickly. I had friends and celebrated soviet holidays and birthdays together with them at the festal table. We went to the cinema, theatre, on trips. At Pesach we visited each other and had matzah, but we gave very slight religious overtone to it, I guess.
I remember when Jews began to move to Israel, our historical Motherland, in 1976. I attended Party meetings where communists blamed Jews for leaving the USSR. Back in 1948 when Palestine became Israel my father told me about the history of Palestine with enthusiasm. He was very pleased that Jews gained a Motherland and hoped that life would become easier for many of us since we’ve got our own country. My father told me it was better for Jews to live together; therefore, I was loyal to those that left the country. I never spoke against Jews at such Party meetings. We had deputy party leader that was a Jew and adamantly blamed Jews that were leaving calling them traitors and holding them up to shame. In few years’ time he left to the US with his family. We didn’t go to Israel since my parents were old and didn’t feel well. I sympathize with the families that leave this country and feel concerned about the troublesome situation in Israel.
A common engineer could afford to travel in the Soviet Union in 1960s – 1970s I traveled a lot when I worked I dropped by a synagogue in every town I went to for pure interest.
In 1969 I was in Budapest. Since I didn’t speak Hungarian the guide explained to me how to get to a synagogue. When I came there a shames opened the door for me. It was evening and a redhead boy was saying a prayer standing in a kippah. Other Jews surrounding him were listening. Then the shames showed me a big hall of the synagogue (he and I spoke Yiddish). When we entered there I was stupefied: there was white marble and oak wood all around. The shames showed me where the Torah was kept. Then he took me into the backyard of the synagogue to show graves of tsadiks that were buried there. At the end of our meeting he said he was very pleased that a Jewish woman from Odessa showed interest in Hungarian Jews.
My mother died of heart problems in December 1977. My father died in January 1978 – in a month after my mother passed away. My parents were buried at the town cemetery since the Jewish cemetery was closed for burials due to its ‘overpopulation’. Only those whose closest relatives were buried at this cemetery were allowed to be buried there. I went to the synagogue when I was in Tbilissi in 1979 and ordered a memorial prayer for my parents.
In 1989 I visited my friend Sopha Lutza in the US. She lives in New York. Sopha took me to the Jewish cemetery of Yablochkov in New York where her little granddaughter was buried. I traveled to other towns in the US. I particularly remember Boston where many of my acquaintances from Odessa reside. We got together to go to synagogue.
Since 1985 I’ve attended the synagogue regularly. I went to the synagogue at Yom Kippur, Pesach and Simkhat-Torah. The Jewish life has revived in Odessa after perestroika. I am very interested in the Jewish history. I feel very much a Jew and I am proud to be a Jew. The attitude towards Jews has changed – we have a higher status now. Things have undoubtedly become easier for us.
There were Representative offices of Sokhnut and Joint established in Odessa, the Cultural Center of Israel opened and there are two Jewish newspapers published and Jewish TV programs broadcast. I receive Jewish newspapers and read Jewish books. I borrow books from a Jewish library in Odessa. I gave books by Jewish writers that I had to the library of ‘Gmilus-Hesed’, but I keep my favorite book of Joseph Utkin, a poet that wrote in Russian. He perished during the Great Patriotic War. I like his poem ‘The story of Motel the Redhead’ about Motel, a Jewish man.
I live alone. I get assistance from Gmilus Hesed. Once a month I receive food packages. A volunteer from there spends with me 3 hours per week. She is a very nice woman. She even stays longer than 3 hours. She cleans my apartment, washes me and buys potatoes and bread. She tells me about her granddaughter that studies at a Jewish school and has a good conduct of Hebrew. I’ve had an infarction and it has become a problem to me to go to the synagogue. My acquaintance Arkadiy Shoihet attends a synagogue every day for a morning prayer. He is eighty years old. He brings me news from the synagogue. Before I fell ill sometimes curator from Gmilus Hesed called me to invite to the theater or to a tour with groups of Jews. There were 15 of us on that tour. We went to the places related to the Jewish history in our town. We took pictures. I remember going to the synagogue in Evreyskaya Street that was returned to the Jewish community few years ago. I lost my breath so strong the spirit of the Jewish atmosphere was there. It was refurbished in such a wonderful way. Jews leave their books of prayers on their seats and they remain there until they come next time. Jews are alive and will live.
Mihaly Eisikovits
Nagybanya
Romania
The interviewer: Emoke Major
Date of the interview: October 2004
Mihaly Eisikovits lives alone in Nagybanya, in a two-room apartment on the ground-floor of a flat block.
The furniture of the living room is middle class style, typical for the apartments furnished in the communist era, the family photos on the walls make the apartment a special one.
There are both old and new photos. The tie and the shirt are the indispensable components of Mihaly's wardrobe, he pays attention to the elegance even of the smallest things, for example the napkin and some fancy biscuits have to be near the coffee cup.
On holidays and on Saturdays he goes to the synagogue to make up the minyan and to make possible the prayer, although he is not on good terms with the president of the Jewish Community.
The Eisikovits family – I found out from my uncle, Moshe Eisikovits, who lived in Israel, but died already – got to Romania approximately 240 years ago [from Russia somewhere] through Odessa, when they were running away from the pogroms.
There were three brothers, and one of them was called Heisikovits, not Eisikovits, because there was a law in Russia saying that if one had three sons, one of them had to join the army. And then, to save his son, the father changed his son's name by putting an H before his name.
[Editor's note: The Jewish children enrolled in military institutions in the Tzarist Russia were forced to convert to Christianity by the circumstances, and they were called Cantonists. They introduced the mandatory military service for the Jewish boys between 12 and 25 in 1827, and they transferred the underage in Cantonist institutions.
The Jewish Communities had to assure a quite high number of draftees for the army. The difficulty of the military service and the fact that weren't allowed to observe their religion made the affected ones to try to avoid this somehow.
The leaders of the Jewish Communities sent mostly the boys from poor families to the Cantons.] The family was quite large and they were all millers. And because they were millers, one part of the family settled down by the Maros, the other by the Kukullo, and the others by the Szamos [rivers]. They were millers, but they also built some water-mills, as well, because that was the fashion then.
Some relatives from the third generation were corn traders, and the others were intellectuals. As far as I know, one of my great-grandfathers was greffier in Nagyiklod, the other had the same job in Balazsfalva.
His children were already famous intellectuals. One of them was Max Eisikovits, a musicologist and composer, for example he was the founder of the Hungarian Opera from Kolozsvar and the headmaster of the music academy.
The family relations were strong, so we were always aware what the others were doing, moreover, approximately 70 years ago, there were some old relatives who were always asking about the others. I remember a one of my grandfather's cousins from Marosvasarhely called Heisikovits.
I spoke with him, and he always asked: 'So, how is Jakab?' The old man had three sons. One of them – he looked very much like my father, he was somewhat shorter, but he had the same face – had two daughters and a son.
The son, Joska Heisikovits, emigrated to Israel around 1935, and he was a member of the group that founded the Dalia kibbutz. One of his sisters, Julika, is a doctor in Israel, she is retired now. She married a man from Vasarhely, Bandi Frits. The other daughter lives in America, in New Jersey, her husband was a mechanical engineer called Gerson, but he died already.
My paternal grandfather, Jakab Eisikovits, was born in Nagyiklod in the 1860s. There was a large Jewish Community in Nagyiklod, and the synagogue was as big as the one in Szamosujvar. I'm sure there were 40-50 Jewish families living there.
There were landowners, carriers, cobblers, tailors – many girls took up tailoring. My great-grandfather was a greffier. My uncle from Israel told me that even today there are documents in Nagyiklod written by my great-grandfather – they began each paragraph with ornamented letters then. There was no typewriter then, and everyone who knew how to write could be a greffier.
One of my grandfather's brothers was Max Eisikovits' father. They lived in Balazsfalva, but they moved there from the county. He was a merchant, a corn trader I believe. He had three sons. One of Max Eisikovits' brothers was a very good doctor, the other one an economist.
The doctor's name was Karoly Eisikovits. For a while he was local practitioner near Vasarhely, in Sarpatak [the distance between Sarpatak and Vasarhely is 67 km]. Later he got to Vasarhely, and he was the principal of the Maros county Sanepid [public health department]. He emigrated to Israel in the 1970s, to Beer Sheva, he worked there also as doctor.
His son, Zvi Esikovits, is a full professor, he teaches criminology. He travels all the time because he is invited to several universities to hold courses, mainly in America. His wife is also a full professor in Haifa. The economist was called Dezso Eisikovits, my father's namesake. He had a son Hari and a daughter who perished in Auschwitz.
Hari survived, I don't know how. He was in Balazsfalva. [Balazsfalva is in Southern Transylvania, territory which remained under Romanian ruling between 1940 and 1944.] After the war he got to Kolozsvar, graduated the Faculty of Medicine, and he was a pediatrician in the children's hospital on Mocok [presently Motilor] street.
He married a Romanian girl. Parenthesized, it wasn't the most happy of marriages, at least that's how I felt. He came to me very often while I lived in Kolozsvar. They had a son and a daughter, both of them live in Kolozsvar. The daughter, Marta, is a doctor. The son, Gyuri [Gyorgy], if I am not mistaken, is a mechanical engineer, I heard that he even took part in the choir of the Jewish Community from Kolozsvar.
I already mentioned Max Eisikovits. He was born in 1908 in Balazsfalva. Let me tell you an interesting story about him. After he graduated the Music Academy from Kolozsvar, he came home to Balazsfalva.
His old, his father, asked him: 'So you graduated, what will you do for a living?' 'Well ... music. What else?' 'You can't make a living with music. Go to the law school!' Thus he, dr. Eisikovits, also graduated the faculty of law, but never worked in the field, he was only interested in music. Let me say that I found even today – both in Nagyvarad and Kolozsvar – students who are studying based on his theory.
But the most beautiful thing in his activity was that when he was a student in Kolozsvar he went to Sziget and the environs, where there were much more Jews living and he collected Jewish folklore, Jewish music.
I saw Elie Wiesel's two movies about his journeys, his visits to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sziget and around Sziget, both movies had the music composed by Max Eisikovits. His essays based on his Jewish music collections were published several times in America.
I got a booklet from America also, but once, when the rabbi from Temesvar (who was his colleague and his friend) was here – because during World War II he was a music teacher in the Jewish high school from Temesvar – I gave it to him hoping I will get it back. In the meantime he got sick and died, so they didn't send it back. I was very sorry, but I will try to recover the booklet somehow.
Max Eisikovits told me the following story. In addition to the tallit which one wears sometimes, there is another Jewish skin cover [the small tallit, that is the tallit katan, a square piece of cloth which covers the breast and the back] every Jew is compelled to wear.
It is a piece of canvas with fringes in front and at the back. The Hasid Jews wear these [the fringes] on the outside, while modern Jews put them in the trousers. According to the Jewish rules you have to wear it all the time. You may only take it down for the night, when you go to sleep.
When waking up, one says the only prayer allowed for a Jew before wash: 'Majdi ani lofunechu, melehajd dukajo' [Modeh ani l’fanecha, Melech chai v‘kayam…] – I give thanks to You for You have returned my soul to me, awaken me and letting me do my everyday routine and show my love for You ['I'm thankful to You, ever living King, for compassionately returning my soul to me, how great is Your faithfulness.'] After one says this prayer, washes up, puts on one's shirt and this tzitzit on the shirt
[Editor's note: Mihaly Eisikovits referred to the tallit katan here, which is usually worn under the shirt] and gets dressed. The tzitzit are actually the four fringes in the corners.
The fringe is made of eight threads, but it also includes a ninth one, which is longer, and with this one must tie up them seven times first, then a kink [knot] must be made, then one should tie up nine times, eleven times, thirteen times with a kink between them.
My father wore it for a while, but my grandfathers wore it all the time. I also used to wear it in my childhood, until I went to middle school at age eleven. And I also wanted to tell you that Max Eisikovits visited the Jewish populated regions when he collected Jewish folklore.
He came to Borsa, Tecso, I don't know, to these places where there always was a rabbi. There was no way he could just drop into a Jewish house and ask the family to sing for him. He had to go to the rabbi first and had to tell him why he came, and ask the rabbi to help him, and ask him to assign one of his disciples to help him.
Once, I think it happened in Viso or Borsa, that the rabbi told him: 'Alright, but please tell me, do you have a tzitzit?' He answered: 'Unfortunately I don't.' 'If you don't have, there is nothing I can do for you.' And the rabbi sent him away.
He went to the village then, and walked until he bought a tzitzit. He returned to the rabbi and the rabbi asked again: 'I asked you if you have a tzitzit?' 'I do!' 'Alright then!', and he assigned a disciple to help him, and they went to the families, who already knew him, because Viso is not Paris.
He listened to their songs and wrote them down with a pencil, of course, on paper. I will never forget when I visited him – he was already ill – and he sat down at the piano and played from this Hasid songs he collected and I trolled them. I still remember one of these songs! [He trolled its melody.]
Otherwise the whole Eisikovits family is a musical family who liked music in general. They were not unfamiliar with Jewish music, because the Jewish melodies – I don't mean the liturgical music, although they have their own magic – are very catchy.
It is a known fact that the great rabbis [especially the Hasid rabbis] had their own court and school. Thus every rabbi has his own team and his own march, as well.
March is not the most adequate expression, I'd rather say they have their own music. And in many cases they don't have lyrics. But the music is able to express moods, feelings. And the Jews from the rabbi's court, the older ones, younger ones and the children, know these things. And they sing them when they meet.
For example they sit down to the Friday evening supper and they sing after the supper. They also sing on Purim, Pesach and other holidays. They sing on other people's holidays, as well, if they are allowed to. And Jews also used to dance! With their unwieldy top boots and clumsy caftans, if they felt like taking the floor, they danced.
Because they cried enough when they were forced to! Because the Jewish nation in many, many cases was force to live at the periphery, they were ostracized. While they were at home, in Judea, some were shepherds, others were farmers, cobblers or fishers. But when they were dislodged and lost their homes, they went to new places, where they couldn't find trust.
They only were allowed to stay at the margin of the villages and only for a while. They weren't able to raise cattle, sheep, goats or lambs, they had no land for agriculture. What else could they do? They had to huckster. Because they had to live, their children needed milk, you know. I can tell you many things, especially about the misery of the Jews!
My grandfather learned the Talmud, but I don't know exactly where. He worked in the distillery from Nagyiklod, and he knew distillation – distillation was a profession, after all. He was an average height man with mustache. His mustache was just like any other Hungarian middle-class man's, and had no twirl.
He also wore top boots, as far as I remember, and breeches and a short mikado winter coat with side-pockets. [Editor's note: The coat probably got its name after its dyeing. The Leonhardt and Co company (Muhlheim, Hessen) made some commercial dyes (that is dyes which dye the cotton without mordant) which derived from the di-sulphonic acid of azoxy-stilbene.
When they used this dyes they put into the dye a large quantity of table salt (50-100%). Such dyes are the mikado-yellow, mikado-orange, mikado-brown etc. From all these the mikado-orange is remarkable by its durability compared to the other commercial dyes.] And he wore hat.
This grandfather of mine used to talk like: 'Hey, gimme the fuszekli! ' Fuszekli means nether-stock, where fusz [from the German 'fuss'] means leg and szekli or sekl [from the German 'sack'] means bag.
His wife died around 1899. I don't know many things about her because my father was around 4 when she died. If I am not mistaken her maiden name was Fejer, and I think they were originally from Szaszregen.
I knew about two of her siblings, a girl, Malka, and a boy who had two sons, one of them was chief accountant at the textile mill from Sepsiszentgyorgy, while the other one ended up in Pest and he was the first violin of the philharmonic orchestra from [Buda]Pest.
According to the Jewish traditions, if the wife dies, the husband has to marry the wife’s sister. And it happened so. My grandfather married his sister-in-law, Malka. The children who were younger than my father remained in Nagyiklod.
Two of them remained there, uncle Izidor and a girl, Rozsi. The others went away from home, for example my father went to Balazsfalva. He was adopted by Max Eisikovits' father.
They were a family of orthodox Jews, so they observed the kosher rules, and other ethical rules which are generally speaking mandatory for the Jews. And since there are 613 Jewish rules, observing all of them is very difficult.
There is a saying: 'It’s not easy to be a Jew!' This has several meanings, but the main one is that it’s not easy to observe the Jewish rules. The orthodox Jews observed the rules which are their basic obligation: never to eat meaty food with milky food, never slaughter the animal yourself, there is person for this etc. What is the shochet for? To never let the cattle suffer when one slaughters them.
That's why the shochet's knife has the size according to the size of the slaughtered cattle. For example, the shochet used a 22-24 cm long knife to slaughter a barn-door fowl, a broad. He had a bigger knife for geese, and a much bigger one for calves – I believe that knife was 60-70 cm long. But it wasn't allowed to cut more times!
He had to cut the throat and the trachea with one cut. Moreover, it had to be perfect, without any little nicks, because that hurts, is painful. And the Jewish ethics said 'tzaar bale chayim'. This means that it is not allowed to inflict pain. Not to mention the human beings.
As far as I remember, they checked the knives from time to time, by running the smaller knives on his finger nail, because they could feel whether there any little nicks. There is this so called etica iudaica.
Every civilized nation has ethic rules and feeling for ethic, don't they? So have the Jews, the essence of this is the Sulchan Aruch. Many things are included in the etica iudaica, specific for Jews, among other things it is not allowed to eat meaty food immediately after eating milky food – or vice versa – only some time after.
For example, if you eat milky food, I don't know exactly, but I believe you may only eat meaty food after 50 minutes. Because if you drink milk, that leaves your stomach after 50 minutes. If you eat meat, you can drink milk only after six hours.
[Editor's note: After the admitted custom after eating milky food we must wait half an hour, we had to wash out our mouth and then we can eat meaty food. After eating meaty food we must wait 6 hours, but there are local traditions where 3 hours are enough.] Is not allowed to the meat to meet the milk, because is written: 'Lo-tevashel gedi bachalev imo.’
This means ‘Thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother's milk’. [Editor's note: The 'izim' mean goats, which fits in this context, but it does not appear in the original text.]
They didn't work on Saturday. On Saturdays my grandfather used to go to the synagogue. They lit a candle on Friday evening at home, and there was some supper on Friday evening. On Saturday [Sabbath] they ate the traditional Jewish meals: egg with onion, cholent, which in fact was bean but prepared differently.
Usually the Jewish crowds were poor, and that’s why the traditional meals remained the same. They ate during the week that lousy egg with onion, which was the cheapest, and so was the bean.
On Saturday they added a small amount of oil or grease, put a piece of beef or 3-4 – depending how large the family was – poultries in the cholent, which was only a dish of beans during the week. They made the loaf at home on Fridays.
So if they made the bread for the whole week on Friday, they made the loaf from the same duff, to give a different shape for the loaf for the holiday. As far as I remember, there were these baking tins, they used to grease them with oil and sprinkled it with poppy-seed in order to give it a festive look.
On every Friday evening and occasionally at Saturday dinner – not every family, but only those who had the possibility – there also was a glass of consecrated wine.
[Editor's note: One usually didn't say the Sabbath sanctifier phrase for the wine on Saturday, but on Friday evening, on Saturday only the appropriate blessing.]
There was prayer on Saturday evening, and at the end of the day as well, then they wished a pleasant week to each other.
And the most typical thing that must be stressed out: although the Jewish prayers were formulated thousands of years ago, the Wisdom of Solomon is rhyming and the rhymes and meters are in accordance with the requirements of the poetry of our days.
That is, when others still lived in the forest, on the trees, ate each other, killed each other, there were people interested in poetry, not only doing agriculture and livestock-farming. Furthermore, before modern world used the musical notes, the Jews already had their special notes for many, many centuries.
There weren't staves, there only were signs above the words, as far as I remember, there were at least twenty signs. I was familiar with them once, I knew them, we learned them at school. The Jewish prayers had another feature, they are not only referring to the Jews. When they ask for blessing, peace, they are asking it for the whole world.
My grandfather died around 1925, in Nagyiklod, he was approximately 60 years old. His second wife, Malka, perished in Auschwitz.
My father had five brothers and sisters: Izidor, Rozsi, Ida, Frida and Zseni. He had half-brothers and half-sisters as well: Bertus, Hani, the two twins, Mendel and Moshe, and Chaja – this means life – and the smallest, Boske or Bozsi [Erzsebet]. But the family ties were so strong that it never was any discrimination among the children.
Rozsi married a well-known clerk, called Perlmutter, in Bucharest. She died in Bucharest after World War II. She had very good children. One of her children died not long ago in Israel. Ida married in Nagyiklod a man called Fisher.
They were deported and only her husband came back, she moved to Szek and got married again. Frida also got married in Nagyiklod, but her husband died already before World War II. She was deported to Auschwitz and she perished there.
Mendel Rosenfeld, Zseni's husband, was stiller in the distillery in Iklod. This Rosenfeld was originally from Szaszregen. He had three brothers: Lajos Rosenfeld, Karoly Rosenfeld and Jozsef Rosenfeld, or as we called him, Puju.
They had a sister who was married in Petrozseny. Jozsef Rosenfeld married a sister of my mother, called Jolan. Karoly Rosenfeld was employed in Kolozsvar, he had driver's license also. He was summoned to forced labor, but he didn't join up.
He had an acquaintance who hid him, but somebody turned him in. They found him – he was hidden in a cellar –, he was court-martialed and executed in Kolozsvar. Mendel Rosenfeld had three children. His son, Viktor Rosenfeld, was a very skillful boy, he was colonel Reviczky’s 2 driver during World War II.
I read Adam Reviczky' book he wrote about his father, and he mentioned Viktor Rosenfeld there. I know personally Reviczky' son, Adam Reviczky, he needed information and photos about Nagybanya for his book, I was at his house with a friend of mine then. [Editor's note: Mihaly Eisikovits referred here to Adam Reviczky' book: 'Victorious Battles – Lost Wars'.]
Viktor emigrated to West, from there to Canada, but I don't know how. I came home in July-August 1948 from captivity, and as soon as he found out I came back, he sent me 100 dollars. One of Viktor's sisters, Edit, or Mucus, perished in Auschwitz.
The other sister, Zsofi, survived in Auschwitz and got to Stockholm. But she was very weak already and she died in Stockholm. I visited her grave in Stockholm. When I visited my younger brother – he lives in Stockholm – he took me to the Jewish cemetery. There were no tombstones, they have no such traditions.
There is a concrete plate on the ground surface, on this plate there is a small, slightly raise marble plate with the data. I saw there the name and data of Zsofi Rosenfeld. And there are those who managed to get there from Auschwitz, because many people got to Sweden from Auschwitz, because the Swedes took them there after the war, but many were in such shape they couldn't pull through.
Bertuska was my father’s only sister who survived World War II. Because she was at her sister in Bucharest, she survived. After the war she got married in Balazsfalva, her husband, Naftali, was a lawyer and musician.
He studied law in Italy, he came home, but because they lived in welfare in Balazsfalva, after the change of regime they were considered kulaks 1. His parents had a store, but everything they had was confiscated. They came to Nagybanya, and they had nothing, but a suitcase. He died in Nagybanya in 1974.
Hani was a beautiful, clever, nice girl, she was deported to Auschwitz. She was set free together with her sister, Boske. But they drank from a fountain which was supposedly poisoned by the Germans, and both of them died. Moshe (Moricz) was a forced laborer, his wife was deported, but both of them came home and emigrated to Israel. He died in Beer Sheva. Mendel and Chaja perished in Auschwitz.
My father Dezso Eisikovits was born in Nagyiklod in 1895. As I mentioned, he grew up in Balazsfalva after his mother died. When I was a child, I always thought he and Max Eisikovits were brothers, because they grew up together and they were together even as adults.
My poor father use to go to Balazsfalva as if it was his home while the elderly still lived. My father went to cheder, he finished four or five grades of the elementary school and four grades of middle school in Balazsfalva. He didn't finished high school because he was the eldest child and they involved him in trading while they sent the younger children to school.
He served in the Austro-Hungarian army from 1914, and he was in Russian captivity. But there were other ways then, there were no camps, but they were put to work in the villages. He came home in 1918, I think, and shortly after he married my mother.
My maternal grandfather, David Weisz, was born around 1865, I don't know where. My great-grandfather was a cobbler, and if I am not mistaken, he came from Poland – many people ran away from the pogroms then. His eldest brother was uncle Hil, Jechil Weisz.
He was a Talmudist, he studied and studied all the time. He had a share in the estate managed by my grandfather, and he received some share from there and he lived on that. He had a quite nice house in Szamosujvar, he lived there with his family. He had three daughters, one more beautiful like the other.
After they took the lands away, living became difficult, therefore around 1927 the girls emigrated to America. There was a mass emigration to America then, people emigrated in large numbers. [There was an emigration vawe from Romanan between 1919–1923.] 3.
They were three clever, beautiful girls, all of them got married and became wealthy in America. They also had a brother, he remained in Ormany, he lived there and he became mad because one night the flood took his wife and children away. I don't know any other things about him. He broke away from the family.
My grandfather had another younger brother, who lived in Marosvasarhely for a while, then he moved to Szamosujvar. He was a merchant, but a very misfortunate one, he got cleaned out twice, my grandfather aided him, then once again, and then he gave up trading when his children grew up. He had many intelligent children, one better then the other: Andor, Ilonka, Bella, Rezsin, Bela, the twins, Lipot and Sanyi, and Baba.
Andor was a clerk in Kolozsvar, a good-looking, well-mannered, elegant gentleman. He was a pleasant person, he came home often so the girls welcomed him every time. Ilonka was a beautiful, well-looking woman, she married a Schonthal, the one who gave me a tallit for my bar mitzvah.
This Schonthal family was a very wealthy family in Szamosujvar. Bella was a very skilled dressmaker and sewer, she married a farmer called Salamon in Kekes. They had land and sheep. Bela emigrated to Israel already before Word War II.
He was a glass-engraver, he was engaged in glass processing. Then he moved to Canada, when Lipot was already there, in order to be together with his brother, and he died there.
Rezsinke married in Marosvasarhely a man called Diamantstein. Lipot was a German furrier. The German furriers were those who weren’t making 'kozsoks' [this is originally a Romanian word, written in Hungarian spelling, the 'cojoc' means fur-coat, sheepskin.], they only made fine fur-coats, which, even though were large, weighed only three and half kilograms. 'Lelea Florica' [auntie Florica in Romanian popular terms] didn’t hurt her waist with these heavy skins.
He sewed subtly fashioned, elegant fur-coats. He became a very, very skilled and ultra-rich man. He was a forced laborer, he survived, but he buzzed off because the situation wasn’t for his liking. He ended up in Canada after World War II. Sanyi died young. Baba was still a girl when she perished in Auschwitz.
My grandfather, David Weisz, was a very skilled farmer and a wealthy man. I was his eldest grandson, the most valuable one, the most dear, intelligent and gifted for him. He took me several times by carriage to the estate for me to see and learn. He had an estate near Nagyiklod, in Ormany.
In 1920 they took away the lands, and he received some other ones instead somewhere else, and also some money. [Editor’s note: This was probably in 1921, when a new agrarian reform took place in Romania.] 4 But my grandfather didn't like these small lands, 3 acres here, 6 acres there, he sold them all and took up trading, specifically he exported cattle.
They bought and fattened cattle, they exported them to Vienna and Prague – they had an agreement on the quantity they had to deliver weekly.
Around 1928-1930 a crash happened. They worked with a bank called Banca Marmaros Blank. They carried out all the transactions through this bank, they paid through the bank, they collected the money through the bank, took money out of the bank for buying cattle. This bank went bankrupt and they lost most of their wealth.
[Editor's note: This case was probably related to the world-wide economic crisis from 1929.] 5
My grandfather’s luck was that everybody knew him as an honest man, so they got paid in advance by the Senker company – or Henkel, I don't remember exactly, but it was in Vienna – they were delivering cattle for, and they worked for them for a while. My grandfather was involved in smaller scale trades then, he traded skins and I don't know what else.
I would like to tell a story that happened and I found it interesting for me, for us. When my grandfather moved to Szamosujvar, he choose a house he liked and he wanted to buy it. The owner was an Armenian.
They bargained. He asked too much money, and my grandfather wasn’t willing to give that much, and in the end the Armenian said, 'David, I won't sell it to you – David was my grandfather – I won't sell it to you.' My grandfather sent his wife to the owner then.
She went to the Armenian, who didn't know she was my grandfather’s wife. They discussed, bargained and she bought the house. After that my grandfather met the Armenian in a coffee house. He said: 'David, I want you to know that I sold the house. But I sold it to a Jewish woman.' 'You did, and what is her name?' 'Some Aranka Weisz.' 'Very well then, since she is my wife...!'
It was a quite big, U shaped house, with the gate and the main entrance in the center. In one part, to the right from the main entrance, there lived my grandfather with his family – there were seven or eight rooms there.
There was a piano in the drawing room, a palm tree, a big mirror and a small rococo-style table with chairs. In the other part of the house, to the left from the entrance, the girls got an apartment when they got married, until the next girl's marriage, in order to keep the young wife from cooking and dish-washing from the first moment, but one step at a time.
There was a long garden on the right side of the house. There was a large yard, and in the back there was the barn and two warehouses. There were horses, carriages and some oxen, four or five of them. There were two carriages, both of them tall, open and with back-board seats, both in front and in the back.
The wheels had no tire, there was no such wheel in Szamosujvar, they only had an iron rim. The carriage had brakes, the brake-screw was on the left side, so the coachman could reach it from the front seat, I remember it had to be rotated.
The grandparents knew Yiddish, and I mentioned that when my grandfather didn't want the children to understand him or he wanted to express himself correctly, he talked in Yiddish to his wife. He was a tall, slight, intelligent man, a Talmud follower.
On Saturday afternoon he retired to his room – he had some kind of an office there –, and he used to browse his books. He shaved, he had no beard or payes. He had tallit, because that was mandatory. He used to go to the synagogue every Friday evening and on Saturdays.
It wasn't possible to avoid this, because Szamosujvar is a small town and he would have been disinherited otherwise. He was a well-known, honest man, everybody respected him. The poor and the beggars always could find a home at his place.
My grandfather was a great Zionist, he was a member of the Barisia. 6 The meetings always took place at my grandfather's house, they felt good there because it was a pleasant atmosphere there.
As far as I remember, they had uniform caps, made of red velvet, with a golden border, this was their uniform cap. When they assembled, they put on these caps and began to sing the song that is the march of Israel today [the Hatikvah] 7.
But they sang it with Hungarian and Hebrew text. The Hungarian text sounded approximately like this: ‘Kezet fol az eghez, / ki ferfi, ki bator, / kit meg nem ijeszt a jovo, / hogyha lat. / Hadd zugja, sikoltsa, / viharzza a tabor .... / ... / ifjuk eskudalat.’ [Reach up for the skies, / men and brave, / undeterred by the future / you see. / Let it roar and wail, / and welter the camp .... / ... / the youth’s song of vow.] I remember this, I was 5 or 6 then.
His wife, my grandmother, was called Aranka Weisz. Her maiden name was Swartz, she was born in Bethlen in the 1870s, I think. She came from a religious family, she had a brother who was some kind of a rabbi in Bethlen, and he had several children.
They used to come from time to time to Szamosujvar, to visit their aunt and uncle. They were all Hasids, they strictly observed the holidays and the Jewish rules. They were Talmud scholars [he probably meant Talmud followers in this context].
My grandmother was a medium height, not too large woman – because she was quite agile –, but she most certainly wasn't skinny. She was the only one who had short hair and wore a wig in the family.
As far as I remember, she wore a wig all the time, but sometimes she also wore a shawl. When the Jewish women prayed, they put a shawl on their head. Her dressing depended on the occasion.
Her home dress was modest and clean. But on [festive] occasions, for example, she put up her necklace and a small gold watch – that was the fashion then, my other grandmother also had one – there was a small pocket on the dress for this.
The men had usually wore a watch, but so did the women. My grandfather had two watches, one for everyday and one for the holidays, both of them of the same brand, Doxa. The everyday one was a big watch, probably weighed quarter of a kilogram, it was larger than an onion.
It was made of nickel, with white zifferblatt – clock-face – and the lace was made at best of silver. He used to put on the gold watch on holidays, when he used to go to the synagogue. He kept the gold watch in the same pocket and he used to hang it out through the same buttonhole of his vest, but this had a golden lace, of course.
There were only orthodox Jews in the town. Szamosujvar wasn’t large enough to give place for Neolog Jews. Otherwise orthodoxy didn't mean wearing beard, but only that they observed certain rules, better said they had kosher meals, at least at home they only had such food.
My grandma also cooked, she had a kosher household, but she always had somebody to help her. It was a large family! They observed the holidays without fail. They observed the Sabbath and the high holidays, as well. It was a tradition for the family to gather on Friday evening or on holidays at their place.
At Sukkot they even raised a canopy. There was a place paved with flagstone in the right corner of the yard, the canopy was right there. It was lined with white canvas, usually with sheets.
It had a roof made of thatch, with different ornaments hanging down, mainly paper cut-outs and bronzed nuts and apples, with some clove stuck in them in order to give them a fine smell. The family used to eat there on these occasions.
The Seder eve went on simply, it wasn't long: they recited the appropriate sentences and prayers for the holiday, then came the supper that always began with fish, let’s say, there was soup, vegetable dish, one dish of meat – roasted or boiled – and some dessert. But there was no bread on Pesach, of course, just matzah.
The religion rules forbid the eating of meals that ferment [with chametz]. Because what is in fact the symbol of matzah? The Jews were always on the road, they mixed flour with water, they put it on a hot stone heated up by the sun, and they ate the matzah baked this way. They ate the matzah in memory of all this.
The orthodox families observed this. At my grandfather’s and in our house Seder eve was celebrated according to the prescribed rite. They related what we must do and why, why they ate horse-radish etc.
They hid the afikoymen from the children – but always just to allow us to find them, of course – everybody tried his luck. Because the one who found it could ask for something, for example a football or whatever he wished.
My grandfather's greatest holiday was Purim, he used to get drunk then. He had more rooms, there were sliding doors between the rooms. A very long table was laid for Purim, everybody had his own small braid, but my grandfather's was huge. It wasn't round, it was elliptical.
Everybody knew then it was Purim at David Weisz’s, and they used to come over. They came fancy dressed, because that was the characteristic of Purim. I will never forget Feri Frenkel, a very handsome Jewish boy, who once put on the uniform of a Romanian officer who lived in the neighborhood, and he made a nice moustache, and then came to us in Romanian officer uniform.
It was interesting. Feri Frenkel was a Zionist leader, he was engaged in teaching young people. Then came the masked children, some of the masks were made of simple pasteboard, and children representing different trends, Hasid and non-Hasid, came and said some phrases, the older ones said a longer text, and they asked for money.
They always got some. There were others who had no masks, they only prinked themselves a little bit. They served the dinner for everybody. There was stuffed cabbage or some roast. Purim was a great holiday.
My grandfather used to say a prayer then, thanking God that He created bread from the ground for us. ‘Baruch Ata Adonai, Elohaynu Melekh Haolam, hamotzi lekhem min ha'aretz.’
[Editor's note: This is the blessing people say for the Saturday's challah.]
When he finished the prayer, he cut slices from the bread, and gave a slice from the blessed bread to everybody. The bread wasn't enough, that's why everybody had his own small braid.
Wealth is usual in the Jewish houses at Purim. There is a custom to give some of the different cookies to the friends. They made 6, 8 or 10 sorts of cookies, they put the cookies on a platter, a few pieces from each sort: more of the kiss, less macaroon. But not only for Jews, but for all their friends, the rule imposed it.
[Editor's note: 'Lerehu' means 'for his friend' but its traditional meaning refers to Jews. The mitzvah (the religious obligation) refers to Jews in this case, as well. But helping of the poor at holidays refers to Jews, but others as well. Moreover, this was a good occasion for the Jewish Community to express its friendship and loyalty to other people, but the law does not state this is mandatory.]
My grandfather died in 1935 in Szamosujvar, while my grandmother perished in Auschwitz.
Their eldest child was uncle Adolf, then my mother, after that Karoly, Lora, Resi, Jolan and Bozsi [Erzsebet]. Adolf and Karoly were merchants, they worked together with their father.
Adolf's wife was Pepi Farkas, they had three daughters: Mucus, Aliz and Evike. Aliz probably is still alive in Israel, the other two daughters perished in Auschwitz together with their parents. Karoly was single, he died around 1934-1935. Lora's husband was Jeno Samson, he was a very good farmer, they had lands in Apahida.
The whole family lived there, they ran the farm, they were doing agriculture. I think they also had sheep. Then they came to Kolozsvar, and they were deported to Auschwitz from Kolozsvar. She tried to flee to Romania through Torda, together with her husband and her younger son, but they were unlucky because the Hungarian gendarmes caught them.
The gendarmes beat them so bad that they were taken back to Kolozsvar half dead, with a carriage. The deportations took place then, they put them on a cattle-truck, but by the time they arrived to Auschwitz they were more dead than alive.
They had two sons, the younger, Slomi, died in Auschwitz, the other one, Elek, emigrated to Israel. He was a fisherman on the lake of Tiberias, he still lives there.
Resi married Hermann Farkas, aunt Pepi's younger brother, who died later of tuberculosis. Her husband died earlier, but Resi died also of tuberculosis approximately in 1939. They left behind two children, Tibi and Karoly.
The children were born in Retteg (near Des). Both of them ended up in the orphanage in Varad, and because my grandmother grew poor, so did my father, there was no other solution. They had a distant relation in Varad, who arranged for them to be accepted in the orphanage.
I had the opportunity to meet them for the last time in 1942, because I was taken to forced labor to [Buda]Pest then. Because we were in Nagybanya for a while then, and the sapper battalion from there requested a group of forced laborers, we were some 40-50 men, we had to go to [Buda]Pest and to load from the central warehouse I don't know how many freight cars with heavy boots for the army in Nagybanya.
But we had to wait a couple of hours in Varad for the train that took us to [Buda]Pest and I asked the sentinel to let me go and try to find them. The sentinel said: 'All right, I let you go! But so help you God, if you’re late!' I promised him I would not be late.
I walked away, I found the orphanage with difficulty and I found the two children. I didn't know then that the deportation would took place. There was no such perspective yet. This happened in 1942, the elder son was probably in the third grade and the younger in the first grade. They were taken to Auschwitz and they perished there.
Jolan married Jozsef Rosenfeld, the younger brother of Mendel Rosenfeld, the stiller. Jozsef was a mechanic, but he was also a good driver. They lived in Kolozsvar and had no children. Uncle Jozsi ended up in Ukraine as a forced laborer, he was almost 50 when they took him away. He came back half-dead as highest grade invalid [disabled] from there.
Because at that time they sent the Jews to mine-fields, as well. He was in a such a group, but not in the middle of the group, because those who were in the middle, were made shreds.
He was at the side of the group, his half body paralyzed, he became mute, he heard almost nothing, he became lame, and he walked with a stick. But by a fortunate accident he came back. He died around 1950, he is buried in the Jewish Cemetery from Kolozsvar. I have a prayer-book, he brought it back from forced labor.
His wife gave it to him when he was summoned, and she wrote the following on the front page: 'When you praye to God, please remember that there is a woman who always thinks about you.
As a souvenir, with love, Jolan. 19th July 1943.' His wife, Jolan, was the only one from the siblings who survived. I don’t know exactly how, but she was helped to escape from the ghetto of Kolozsvar and was hidden. She died in 1993-94, she is buried in the Jewish Cemetery from Kolozsvar as well.
Bozsi [Erzsebet] married Dezso Kremer, a corn-trader from Nagysarmas. They lived in Kolozsvar. They had two children, a son, Andris, and a daughter. The boy was around 5, the daughter one and half, maybe two years when they have been deported. The whole family perished in Auschwitz.
Growing up
My mother was born in 1900 in Ormany. She finished elementary and middle school. She went to school in Szamosujvar, so she moved earlier to the town than her parents. She lived at her uncle, because there were just girls there. My parents got acquainted in Szamosujvar.
My father, as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, had the accommodation there. My late paternal grandfather lived already in Szamosujvar then. They knew the Eisikovits family from Nagyiklod, so when my father got to Szamosujvar, he wasn't a stranger to them.
Thus he ended up at the Weisz family, he got acquainted with one of the girls, with the eldest one, with my late mother, and here I am. They married approximately in 1919. They didn't relate about the wedding, but surely it was a religious marriage, there was no other possibility then, and my grandfather was well off then.
My mother was a beautiful woman and a very, very kind soul and a good housekeeper. She took part in the Jewish Zionist organization, she was a leader of the WIZO group from Szamosujvar.
Beside this we had a blue-white money box at home in the 1920s and 1930s, the KKL [Keren Kayemeth Leisrael] 8 money box. At different occasions my parents used to put a sum in this money box.
When the Jewish state didn't exist yet, they bought lands [in Palestine] from these sums, and they developed especially the forestry, because they knew this had to be the first measure in order to improve the lands, and it took time.
Beside the Aviva 9 and Barisia Zionist organizations, which were organizations for adults, there were other organizations, as well. For example the Habonim, which was a social democratic youth organization I was a member of in my childhood.
The organization pleaded for the necessity to create the Jewish state, and the regime had to be a social democratic regime. Its main activity was to propagate the Zionism, the necessity for the re-creation of the Jewish state, as it was once, to protect the Jews against one's will and pleasure in the dispersion, and to prevent the Jews from being the scapegoat every time.
Just like the poem [folk speech] says: 'Haboru volt, ehseg volt, pestis, / en okoztam ezt is, azt is.' [War, famine or plagues may be / all of them are caused by me.] There always had to be someone people could point with one's finger: these are the reasons of their misery, there is no welfare because the Jews are sucking your blood.
There were presentations, monthly or weekly papers were edited, there was the Uj Kelet [New East] 10 and the Mult es Jovo [Past and Future] – I remember the cover of the latter, it was a lithography, black figures on pink background, some oriental pattern and two or three palm-trees. There were programs on each Chanukkah and Purim. The Purims were especially nice.
My mother wore shawl only when she went, very rarely, to the synagogue, mainly on high holidays. My father's dressing was very orderly, but he wasn't a gentry type, he was far from it.
He had very elegant shirts, I have stolen many times shirts from him, and when he saw me, he used to ask: 'So, where is this shirt from?' He knew where from. He taught me to tie a tie. I was fourteen and half, fifteen years then. I have many nice memories of my poor late father, because he was an example.
After the wedding my grandfather took my father into his business. His sons, Adolf and Karoly, also worked with him, but he liked my father best. My father was a skilful and richtig [accurate] man.
They kept the cattle usually near the distilleries – I was in Nagyiklod, Szamosujvar and Szentgothard, my father used to take me sometimes with him when he went there, because the stillage, granulated corn that remained after they distilled the spirit, was there, and they fed the cattle with this because it was very fattening.
It was still hot when it flowed into the feedbox, and the cattle ate it with pleasure. There was a large piece of salt hanged beyond each cattle, because the cattle licked the salt, ate the stillage and then, of course, they had to drink water.
The cholesterol didn't exist [as a problem] then. The cattle had to be large and heavy. I had a photo that proves there were oxen up to one thousand kilograms. I remember my father said it had a thousand and fifty kilograms.
After my grandfather went bankrupt, my father partnered Samu Teleki and they continued trading cattle. Teleki provided the financial part, while my father was the expert.
Teleki was originally Herskovits, but he had a problem with a member of the Teleki family and he said: 'Just you wait, I’ll show you I will be a Teleki too!' And so he became Teleki.
At least I heard so. He was a great landowner. He was famous for his philanthropy. On holidays he prepared meat – pork meat – flour, sugar, oil and grease for his employees, and he also gave some to the poor of the town.
He had three sons, they have been summoned to forced labor to Ukraine, and three daughters. One of his sons, Jeno Teleki, was a good friend of my father. Jeno's son, who was a very, very good dermatologist in Ramnicu Valcea, was named Samu after his grandfather. I still keep in touch with him.
My younger brother, Jeno Eisikovits, was born in 1921 in Szamosujvar. He finished middle and high school, and he also studied in the cheder. After that he had to work. He worked for the same company where I worked for a while, where they repaired and sold ironworks and small machines.
He worked there from the age of 17 until 21. In 1942 he became forced laborer. As forced laborer he got to Bohemia, and from there to Germany. After the war he was employed at the Joint. He came back in 1945, and he found out that his girlfriend, a Fisher girl from Szamosujvar, Baba Fisher, got to Sweden from Auschwitz. He dropped everything and went to Sweden. They met and got married there.
My younger brother specialized himself, he worked for a company that made jewelry and trinkets [everything not made from precious metals]. They pressed and colored rust-proof metals and they made various trinkets from it. They appreciated my brother, but he set up for himself, they made and also sold the products.
He sang in the choir of the synagogue from Stockholm. I want to say that they even perform religious songs based on Max Eisikovits' music. They released albums, they have the proper equipment there, there is a rich community in Stockholm.
He had two children, they were born around 1950. The son, David, is a full professor, he teaches religion science in Stockholm. He has a sister, Mary, who is a psychologist, I think she lives in Malmo.
My sister, Hermina, was born in 1927, her Jewish name is Chaja. She graduated middle school in Szamosujvar, and then they took her to Auschwitz. When she came home, she got married. If I was at home, I would have made her continue to study because she learnt very well. Her husband, Mauriciu Leb Mose, was a farmer, his father had an estate in Nagyiklod, and he inherited approximately 70 acres.
They emigrated to Israel in 1951. He had to go, because he was declared kulak, and they persecuted those who owned estates. My sister worked at a hotel in Haifa, she did some administration work there.
She had two daughters, Miriam – she was born in Romania and was very small when they emigrated – and Gila. Gila had three children, one of them is an army officer, the other one is a police officer, the third is still in school, in Israel, of course. My sister died in 2001, her husband is alive, but he is very old, around 86-87.
I, Mihaly Eisikovits, was born in Szamosujvar, on 11 January 1920 in an orthodox Jewish family. When I was 4, I already knew the morning prayers we had to say as we wake up. I finished elementary school in Szamosujvar, in the Romanian Jewish school. I learnt Yiddish and other disciplines they taught us step by step, beginning with the most elementary things.
In the morning we went to the teacher, his name was uncle Izrael, he was Romanian. There were seven grades in the Jewish elementary school, I finished four and then I entered the Petru Maior high school. I finished a few grades there, but with difficulty, because there was a teacher, called Sigheartau, who didn't like Jewish pupils at all.
For example he told me: 'Cum te cheama? [What's your name?] Eitico...' – he couldn't read my name properly. 'Eitico..., mai, Itic ii mai simplu, hai, Itic la harta!' [Eitico…, hey, Itzik is easier, come on Itzik, to the map!] Talking of that I like to say that I wasn't the only Jew who couldn't take anymore the Romanian high school from Szamosujvar. It was the atmosphere.
The headmaster himself, Precup, wasn’t really digging the Jewish pupils. When they needed money, they sent the Jewish pupils home to bring the school fees, because we had to pay for school then. And they established the school fees in accordance with the income.
The Jews always had to have money, they surely had money even under their skin – this was the idea – so they established high, hard school fees for us. The other children had to pay as well, everybody had, but there were pupils who paid in other forms, they found other methods.
The pupils from the villages paid very small fees, they brought instead food for the house: potatoes, onions, this and that. I know that some pupils paid the fee this way. We paid it otherwise...
We used to go often to the grandparents from Nagyiklod. For example, as soon as we got the vacation, we immediately went to Nagyiklod. We could take out our shoes there, we could go barefoot. We could go to the Szamos riverbank and we could steal sunflower and corn, we roasted it, and we came home looking like devils, smudged with coal.
I was together with my sibling, my cousins from Iklod and some Romanian boys from the neighborhood, we were on good terms with them. Iklod was separated in two parts: Nagyiklod and Kisiklod.
The Romanians lived in Nagyiklod, the Hungarians in Kisiklod. Kisiklod is on the right side of the Szamos, on a slope, it is a very good fruiting county. Nagyiklod is on the plain, there were long, large melon beds.
Iklod had the most delicious melons! Well, we also went into the melon beds. Because one of my uncles, Mendel Rosenfeld, had melon beds, as well – my poor late father was also an expert in melons.
This uncle loved doves very much. He made a one and half floor high dove cot in front of his house. He had doves by the hundreds. When he came out to feed them, he carried the corn with a bowl, and the doves rushed at him. He was expert, he separated them, there were hen birds, and he knew the breeds. I can still see it even now! I was a child, around 5 or 7.
My father demanded from us to be tidy, to wash down to the waist every morning after we woke up, and we had to clean our shoes, as well. We had a maid at home, a Romanian maidservant.
I was in the third grade of high school or older, I don’t know exactly, I did an essay at home and I said to the maid: 'Lenuta, ada-mi un pahar cu apa.' ['Lenuta, gimme a glass of water.' in Romanian] My father was in the other room and he overheard this.
He stood up and said [in Romanian]: 'Lenuta, mind your own business, mind your own business! If the young man is thirsty, he knows where the water is, where the cup is, let him drink!'
He came to me: 'Listen – he told me in Hungarian – I don't want to hear that you put the girl to serve you!' After that, before going out, I had to brush my brother's coat, my brother had to brush my coat, he came and looked at us: 'How do you look? Let me see. And your shoes? And the heel?'
I’m not boasting, I just want to tell you how a Jewish family looked like, what fairness, honesty and respect they had for the society. For example, we, the children, were allowed to take to school only a piece of bread and dripping with a few slices of radish. It was out of the question to take a cake [cookies]! If mom baked some cookies, we had to eat it at home.
'As long as there are children who don’t even have bread, I won't let my child eat cake in front of them.' I remember what my poor late father taught me: 'When you meet an elder person, incline your head, and if he gives his hand, only then you will give yours.'
It shows bad manner when you, as a child, give your hand to an older person, as you see today. There is a kid, a young man, he just graduated the university, he came to me and gave his hand. They don't know [the good manners], no one taught them.
There were two synagogues in Szamosujvar: a great synagogue and a smaller one, the school called Talmud Torah was near this. There was a chief rabbi and another rabbi in the town who fled Poland from the pogroms.
We called him 'the rabbi from Kolomyya', [Editor’s note: Kolomyya is under Ukrainian authority today, the period mentioned refers to the Galitia before the World War I with an area of 78.5 square km, (1910), populated by Polish and Ruthenians.
According to the census, the Jews appeared as Polish or Ukrainians. In this province there are 871.9 thousand Jews, 10.9% of the population. 76.2% of the population of the eastern provinces of Galitia (Drohobycz, Kolomyya, Sambor, Stanislau, Stryy, Tarnow, Tarnopol) are Jews.] and everybody supported him because he was an old man.
He was a Hasid rabbi – by Hasid I mean the strict observance of the religious rules. His look and clothes were quite different. He wore beard and payes, a long caftan, which wasn't black, but faint blue with roses – otherwise this was the clothing of the Polish rabbis.
I never saw him with hat, instead he wore that small cap [kippah] and apart from this he had a cap with marten, usually worn by Hasid Jews. He had his own yard, followers and he had a separate prayer-house. I don’t know exactly, but some of his followers also came from Poland.
Because there were so many pogroms! I don't know anything else about them, my younger brother was here in the summer, I heard from him that this rabbi from Kolomyya had daughters, but I didn’t know them.
I celebrated my thirteenth birthday, my bar mitzvah, in the great synagogue from Szamosujvar. How does such a celebration takes place? First of all they call up the young boy to the bima, in front of the crowd, and the rabbi announces that from today this young boy is an adult, and he tells an address [speech] in Yiddish – there are some places where he tells the speech in Romanian or Hungarian – in order to arise your consciousness and sense of duty. And then, you, as a young man, have to prepare yourself.
You have to deliver a speech, in which you thank your parents that they raised you, and thank your teachers that they taught you. They call up you, they read part of the weekly pericope in your presence.
The Torah is divided into 54 parts, there is one section for each week, and according to the law, the first part of the section must be read in the presence of a Kohanite, the second part in the presence of a levite, and the third, fourth, fifth and sixth parts in the presence of a Jewish man.
On these occasions they say a blessing, and next the one who lead the whole praying reads out the adequate part (Not the mentioned persons read it out, they only said the blessings beforehand, because not everybody could read.)
[Editor's note: Generally the people called up are not only praying, but reading out, as well. For reading out the first part a kohanite is called up, for the second part a levite, while a yisrael does the others, that is a Jew who is not kohanite or levite. They call up 7 people altogether and the maftir, they read out a small part from the last section for the Maftir, who then reads out the haftara from the Books of Prophets or from the so called Holy Scriptures.]
On this Saturday you are the first Jew for whom they read out the part for the Jews. [Editor's note: They coach the boys who had the bar mitzvah for the weekly section, and theoretically they can read it.
Furthermore, according to the general custom, the boys are called up as maftir, that is, last, and they read out the haftara, and there are places where he reads out the section from the Torah as well.
This became a custom because some of the boys would like to celebrate the bar mitzvah on the Saturday before their 13th birthday, and they can't be called up for the other sections because those can only be read out by adults (who have turned 13) and who are full members of the community.
At the same time it is possible that in the interviewee’s community there were other traditions.] Then they invite those present in a hall, where they serve diverse drinks for the adults and cookies for the children. After that the family and the friends continue the celebration at home.
Beginning with that day you have a tefillin what you have to fix on the forehead and your left arm during the prayer – to keep it facing your heart. In addition you get a tallit, this wasn't mandatory, but the parents who have money usually buy it. I got one from a man called Schonthal, a good acquaintance of ours.
He used it in his childhood, but he had no children, he was an adult, and adults wore a larger tallit. Today, some modern adults use a very small, collar-like tallit, but that is not a genuine tallit.
[Editor's note: As a matter of fact tallit refers to these, but the orthodox Jews don't consider it adequate. The traditional tallit is more like a prayer veil, because it covers almost the whole upper body.]
In the meantime, my parents who were wealthy, were reduced to poverty. This affected me as well, because when I was 15, I was already working. There was a hardware dealer in Szamosujvar who had a workshop beside the store where they repaired sewing machines, bicycles and other things like this – I worked there, mainly during the holiday. I earned some money, which came in useful then.
Later it went bankrupt and then I got to Marosvasarhely. I was an employee at a firm called Diamantstein and Company there, and I was living alone. This company was a great building material and hardware warehouse.
I was assigned to the bookkeeping department because I was able to hold a pencil. Suffice it to say that I worked there, I worked hard and they proved they were pleased with me.
The craftsmen from Marosvasarhely were famous. I remember there was one called Oroszlan, he had a tinsmith workshop, and there was another, Brambir, and Goth, who was plumber. Everyone had his own watch, a gold watch with lace.
They were very elegant on Sunday, sometimes they went to the synagogue, and after the mass they went to the 'zona'. They called 'zona' the fact that they went to the restaurant, ate some odds and ends like neat liver with onion and they drank a bottle of beer.
This was their hobby. It was famous among the craftsmen who thought of well of themselves – not among the hedge craftsmen and botchers. There were nice restaurants in Marosvasarhely, one of them was the Surlott Gradics [Scrubbed Doorstep], where they used to go.
[Editor’s note: The building is situated in Mihai Viteazul street no. 3, which was Klastrom street then. The citizens of the town considered the shingle-roofed cook-shop an elite place, which got its name from its doorstep that was scrubbed every day.]
There was this Meszaros alley, and this was the restaurant of the butchers' union, which was famous for the good meal people could eat there. [Editor's note: The butchers' union built up in part the ground between the Main square (Rozsak square) and the Iskola street, the 'Butcher green' in 1897, and created the Meszaros alley.
They built their center in new baroque style in 1888, and they built flats and workshops in the alley. On the ground-floor of the two-storied center (Rozsak square 13) they opened their common store, which sold fresh meat and was called Nagymeszarszek [Big butchery]. This functioned until 1948, until the nationalization. The restaurant mentioned by Mihaly Eisikovits was probably in the neighborhood.]
In the meantime I got into a very good circle, dominated by the progressive [communist] conception. I was a kid and a beginner, but through my Eisikovits relatives from Marosvasarhely, I won their trust. I was all eyes and ears.
There was a Jew called Simon Fuchs among them, he was the manager of the Revesz library. He was a self-educated, very intelligent man. I remember the first time I went to the library, I asked him to give me this and that.
He didn't, but put some other books in front of me and told me: 'You should read this instead!' The first book he gave me was Egon Ervin Kisch's book entitled 'No Admittance'. I will never forget this.
This Simi Fuchs got married. Before the great [state] holidays, let's say with a couple of days before 1st of May, they jugged them, I don't know in which prison, not to make some movement or something like this, but they release them immediately after the event. He met a girl there. That girl, Magda Simon, was the daughter of a bank manager from Marosvasarhely, but she was a communist.
When Simon, the manager, found out that his daughter married this Fuchs, he disinherited her. He was a capitalist, his daughter a communist, so they couldn't get along. And Magda Simon reconciled to her destiny. I was at their place, they lived in a small, modest flat with two rooms and kitchen.
So Simi worked in the library and Magda sewed at home. What kind of clothes did she sew? She gathered the scraps [of cloth] from the factories and made children's wear from them. And they sold these clothes. But they said: 'No matter how hard life is, the parents will always spend money on children.' So this was what they were doing, they did this for a living.
In this circle I learnt many things in terms of world view, I saw the life of the Jews there, they informed me. They spoke about Hitlerism, Stalinism, but I found out afterwards that Stalinism was more concealed, people didn't know quite everything about it.
Because Hitler said: 'I'll kill them, I'll destroy them! The future of the German nation depends on the elimination of the Jews!' and other things like this. So this [hatred] was evident. The Stalinist propaganda said 'Come, we will save you.'
I was listening on a Saturday afternoon to the cultural broadcast in Yiddish on the Soviet radio, and the announcer said 'Jews, take notice that the Messiah will come, but not the dead Messiah, but the red Messiah!'
Thus it is natural that no matter whether you are Hungarian, French or anything, if one says he would kill you and the other that he'd save you, you don't have to be an ideologist, you to whom says he'd save you. Those who fled to Russia didn't know the Stalinist attitude towards Jews.
They only took notice of what they trumpeted. Those who fled there were put in camps, and many, many of them never came back from there, although the Jews didn't got to Russia as enemies.
I was in Marosvasarhely from 1937 until 1941 when I was summoned for forced labor. I had to join up in September 1941. I received the summon for September by accident, because the everyone who was born in 1920 received it for October.
The company where I worked had to lay off a Jew, because the law [numerus clausus in Hungary] 11 said that each month they had to lay off a Jew and employ a non-Jew. I received the summon approximately in July, so I was already aware I had to join up, and so was my company.
Thus, if I had to join up in September, I was already free from August, and I moved to Szamosujvar, to my parents.
At the beginning of 1942 they enrolled my younger brother in that marching company that was taken to Ukraine. In this company there were the Telekis, the Lajters, the Blums... There were many decent Hungarians as well, so was my brother.
The sergeant was called Karcsi [Karoly] Kristof, he respected very much my father, he liked him and my father knew Karcsi Kristof, too. As a civilian he had the same occupation as my father, I think he was a butcher.
Anyway, when he was there and he saw my brother is in the group, he stopped him: 'Hey, come here! Now beat it, go home and don't leave the house!' So he survived with the Karcsi Kristof's knowledge.
My father continued the cattle trading until the Hungarians came in [Editor's note: Mihaly Eisikovits refers here to the so-called 'Hungarian era' that began in 1940] 12. They withdrew the licenses from the Jews. It wasn't allowed for Jews to work as merchants, craftsmen or lawyer [due to the different anti-Jewish laws]. At the beginning of 1942 they took my poor father to forced labor.
Although it wasn't necessary, but there were people in Szamosujvar who took him in. I met him once as forced laborer, here, in Nagybanya, and later in Bekas [Becas in Romanian, 30 km far to the North from Szekelyudvarhely].
They put them to make terrible things! And only to take them away from home and not to let them stay at home. For example their activity in Nagybanya looked like this: they were taken to the creek, and everybody had to carry two stones for some 5 km.
They were, let’s say, two hundred people. Each of them had to bring two stones, because the barrack from Nagybanya was already built, but there wasn’t any plumbing there. Not to mention the roads, if it rained, there was ankle-deep mud. So they had to do this to bank up the roads, and they made old people do this, these kind of nonsense things! It was fascism then, hatred.
When I was in Bekas, a forced laborer company of old men arrived once. And guess who was there? My poor father. And interestingly, they were quartered in the same village as we were. Because the village was along the border, they took away the Romanians, so the village was empty.
Thus, I wanted to say that their sergeant in charge was also Karcsi Kristof. In one part of the village there was our company, in the another part my father's. Even though it was restriction, Karcsi Kristof came and took me there and thus I could meet my poor father.
I don’t know how he managed it, but he always had a half or a quarter of a bread, he probably didn't eat it so he could give it to me. I will never forget, we ate always cabbage there, and my late father said once: 'My son, if I escape from here, I will never plant cabbage, well maybe in a small place, for stuffed cabbadge, but not more!'
After a few months they released him because he was old, but he was quite weak then. After he came home they lived in misery, because Jews were given any possibility then, and in the end they even threw my parents out from their house.
In Szamosujvar we lived in an acceptable apartment – three large rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom – we had a yard, too. In 1942, when the soldiers came in, some six motorbikes with these side-cars came into our yard, and they brought their equipment as well.
Then an officer came to see how his soldiers were accommodated. My poor father come out from the apartment, he saw the officer and he invited him into the house. Because he thought this is normal.
The officer came in and took a look around: 'Wow, what a nice apartment, this will be just fine for the officer's mess!' My father said nothing. After three days they got a notice to leave the house within two days.
My father went to the mayor with this notice: 'Sir, I'm here, this and that, I was also in the Austro-Hungarian army, I was a prisoner of war, etc., etc.' 'Were you? Alright then, you have three days instead of two.' And they got an apartment with one room and a kitchen, and a small vestibule.
We never regained our apartment. My brother came back, but he emigrated to Sweden, he lives there even today – I came home only at the end of 1948. When I went there, the house was sold, although my father bought it.
But they made a big mistake, my father bought it from his friend, an Armenian called Kiraly. Everything was paid, they didn't make an effort to write a contract, the word meant more than a contract. But after a while there were no registrations made for Jews.
Normally, when someone buys a house, one goes to the notary, he make the transfer, and based on that in the land registry the new owner of the house from the given address is recorded, so the house is registered under a new name.
At that time some people adopted Hitler's attitude, other winds were blowing then, even the Romanians didn't make registrations for Jews [Editor's note: Mihaly Eisikovits refers here to the Iron Guard] 13 and the Hungarians did the same, of course.
In the Hungarian era they weren’t even allowed to buy bread! They weren’t even allowed to buy boot-sole! The Jews had such restrictions they were only allowed to get out from the house between 11am and 13pm.
If they caught someone after 13pm, they took them to the police and after that to Kistarcsa or other similar camps. The Jews from Szamosujvar were lucky, because Szamosujvar was a small town, they knew very well the people from the countryside, and the peasants brought some food for sale or on credit.
Otherwise they couldn't obtain it officially. I don’t know, but if officially the allocation for a coupon was half a kilogram of sugar, the Jews got only one hundred grams. So there were laws like this.
After that, in March-April 1944, they took the whole family to the ghetto from Szamosujvar. About ghettoizing, I want to draw attention to the following: if somebody watched the groups which were driven to the ghetto, he could observe that the majority were old men, old women and young women with children.
The men between 25 and 40 were missing. Why was this? Because those were taken to forced labor from the early 1940s. There was nobody to revolt against them, to slap a German soldier, although those were shot instantly.
They took away the Jews, but no one made them feel that this was an organized thing, and they took care about the elimination of the Jewish power in time. The ghetto from Szamosujvar was actually in the brickyard, which was in the outskirts of the town, they got them into the drying rooms.
The drying rooms had wood pillars at two, two and a half meters from each other. On these pillars there were cross beams with a roof built on them, in order to allow only the wind and hot air to touch the bricks, and not the rain, by any means. They put the Jews from Szamosujvar in these places.
I can say that when the ghettoizing took place, the citizens from Szamosujvar dragged out the Torah scrolls from the large synagogue to the road, they tore them to pieces and they threw pig waste on. I think they set on fire the Hasid prayer house, perhaps some people burned in.
I want to mention that there were people who were very nice to the Jews in the period of restrictions and ghettoizing. They brought some food, curd, eggs.
My sister related for example, because she was there, that there was a man called Ioan Roman from Szamosujvarnemeti [Mintiu Gherlii in Romanian, approximately 3 km far from Szamosujvar] who came to the cattle-truck and said to my father: 'Dezso, leave your daughter here with me, and I will guarantee you that when you come back, everything will be alright.'
Well, my poor father didn't know then, they didn't presume that this kind of things could happen in the 20th century, and he answered: 'Thank you, but we want to stay together. Everywhere we are.' There were such people, who faced the risk. Because if the gendarme noticed he was hanging about there, he surely would take him and put him into the cattle-truck.
At the end of April they moved them to Kolozsvar, where they were entrained immediately and taken to Auschwitz. [Editor's note: There were six entrainings in Kolozsvar: on 25th, 29th and 31st of May, and on 2nd, 8th and 9th of June.]
A very interesting thing happened in Auschwitz. A very interesting, extremely interesting thing. My mother – may she rest in peace – was together with my sister. My sister was around 15, but she was well developed, so they suggested her to say she is 17, because then they could arrange for her to work.
All those under 17 were put in the children's group, that is exterminated. So my sister remained with my mother. Once my sister got sick. My poor late mother felt miserable because she knew that those who got sick and discovered would be killed.
After work she came out, she stopped near the barrack and she was all in tears. And a German prisoner came by [Editor's note: Mihaly Eisikovits repeatedly says German prisoner, although the person was Austrian] – because for example there were German communist prisoners as well – who went frequently over to the other camp, and he saw my mother crying.
He said in German: 'Warum weinen Sie?' Why are you crying? My mother answered: 'Don't I have a reason to cry?' The German told her: 'Now then stop crying, because this will not help you, on the contrary, etc., etc.' And the German took his toolbox and walked away.
He was a political prisoner who was taken to Auschwitz because he was Austrian. But these prisoners had some advantage over the Jews. Mostly they were in diverse maintenance groups, for example he was put to check the wiring.
When he came back, he found my mother in the same place. He stopped and said to my mother: 'Don't cry, it makes no sense. Otherwise, where are you from?' 'I'm from Romania.' 'Romania, but where from?' My mother said from Szamosujvar.
Then the German said to my mother: 'From Szamosujvar? I have a very good friend there.' 'Who is your friend?' – my mother asked.
'A man called Dezso Eisikovits.' My mother looked up: 'He is my husband!' The doctor said then – because he was a veterinarian: 'Tell me, lady, your husband had a brick-red leader beaufort [morning coat]?'
This is a kind of a waistcoat, with leather front, knitted back and arms. And indeed, my late father had a morning coat like this, it had four pockets, two on the top and two at the bottom, the front was made of deerskin, with buttons, and had knitted arms. It wasn't very thick, but very delicate.
The German proved with this that he knew my father. And when he said he had a friend in Szamosujvar, called Dezso Eisikovits, I can imagine that my mother gasped for a moment.
My mother said: 'Yes, he had.' 'I'm that veterinarian who received the cattle from Dezso Esikovits for the Henkel company.' The Henkel or Senkel company, I don't know exactly, but in any case they functioned in Vienna, was the partner of my father, for which he delivered cattle, and this man was the veterinarian who received the cattle and verified them hygienically.
He asked: 'And where is your husband?' 'I don't know, they separated us.' My mother told him then that her daughter is sick, she caught a cold. Then the German walked away, and when he came back, he brought some aspirin, a piece of bacon and bread.
They were getting packages from home, this was allowed for the Germans. And with that aspirin and bacon my sister got well and survived. My sister related this to me.
My father was shot in the head in Auschwitz. They were emptying the camp, and they took them to another place. My father was around 50, he weakened and he couldn't stand the pace, so he fell down.
As soon as he fell, an SS shot him in the back of the head. I know this from eyewitnesses, among others from Samu Leb from Nagyiklod, he was the brother of my former brother-in-law, who near my father. He came home sick, and he died shortly after. He is buried in Nagyiklod
I joined up in September [1941] and I ended up in Nagybanya, because the battalion of the forced laborers was there. We were transferred from there after a short while near Kolozsvar, to Szamosfalva.
[Editor's note: Szamosfalva, Someseni in Romanian, is almost integrated with the north-eastern part of Kolozsvar.] We walked from there on foot to Kolozsvar every morning and we were there all day long, and in the evening we went back. We cut slabs in a high-school yard.
In Kolozsvar the walls of the police building are not plastered, it is paved with slabs – we cut out these slabs. We did this for a while, and then they moved our company close to the Romanian border, to Bekas.
There was no telephone line connecting with the [Romanian] border, we had to lay down cable and we had to dig a ditch near the road for laying cable. It was a very hard work, because we had to dig a 60 cm deep ditch and mostly we had to draw apart stones.
From Bekas they took us to Monosfalu, to the railway construction between Deda and Szeretfalva. [Szeretfalva is situated in north-western direction from Deda, the distance between the two places is 45 km.]
At that time, [in 1940] when the Hungarians received [Northern] Transylvania [following the Second Vienna Dictate] there was no railway between Deda and Marosvasarhely.
[Deda is situated in south-western direction from Marosvasarhely, the distance between the two places is 56 km,] because the territory near Szekelykocsard [today Razboieni in Romanian] belonged to Romania, so between Beszterce and Deda the people could circulate only by car. And then we had to build this railway, where we worked in hard conditions, 12-13 hours daily, even in cold whether.
Our company commander was a man called Kalman Mordenyi, who as civilian was the warden of the prison in Vac. Now, when there was a war, he was also summoned and he tried to be a very severe leader. His second in command was lieutenant Alsopatyi, who ordered us to assemble on 1st January 1942, while being drunk.
As we were standing there, he noticed I wore a muffler. ‘What’s this?’ he asked me, then grabbed it and ripped it off me: ‘No Hungarian honved [soldier] wears a muffler!’ And the next minute - he had enormous hands and large leather gloves - he smacked me in the nose with such power my blood began to flow and my two front teeth moved.
After working for approximately one year, our company was reassigned to Sepsibukszad, a village near Sepsiszentgyorgy [32 km far from Sepsiszentgyorgy]. There was the largest stone-quarry in Transylvania. It’s still there, but there are different conditions now, everything is mechanized.
But then the drilled a hole on the stone, placed some bauxite in the hole and detonated it. Then we wedged them apart with iron bars, carried the blocks with a wheel barrow to a certain place where we had to smash them to plate-size pieces using a five kilo hammer, then to one kilo pieces to be used for the railways.
This Kalman Mordenyi established such work loads for us we were unable to comply with under no circumstances. Moreover, there were people from the surrounding villages working there, who were already doing this for years and had some experience, and they were able to exploit some one cubic meter per day.
Kalman Mordenyi wanted us to produce two cubic meters, and, moreover, to weigh and load it on the trucks! This was impossible. We were working15-16 hours. Then Mordenyi decided not to give us any meal, the so called coffee and a piece of bread, in the morning, until we didn’t do at least part of our work load.
Only then we got the first portion of meal. That meant a piece of bread, some marmalade and this wash. Then, in order to increase the productivity and to enable us to work in the dark, he brought carbide lamps. But not some of these hand lamps, but of the size of a barrel.
There was no regress until the work load was not completed. So we were just hitting the stones for them to believe we were working, but there was no way we could work, and what they were demanding was inhuman.
Later he realized this whole thing is nonsense, they couldn’t ask for something like that and the situation turned somewhat normal then, so we were able to somehow produce the one cubic meter and even load it. We were dressed in our own civil clothes, we were forbidden to wear uniforms, we only had that military cap on, but the [honved, Hungarian soldier] emblem was removed from them.
Then in the fall of 1943 we got back to Nagybanya, and from then they transferred us to Czech territory. First we went to Aknaszlatina. Aknaszlatina is on the other side of the Tisza, now it belongs to Ukraine.
There we had to unload and load rails. Many accidents happened there because we had to load very large rail sections on freight cars. I don’t know where they brought the rails, and we had to load them from trucks to freight cars or from one freight car to another one, which were sent then to Germany.
From there they took us to the Polish border, but I don’t know exactly what town. They gathered us there and then destination Ukraine. This was already at the end of 1943. So in early 1944 we were already in Ukraine, following the route Shumsk-Shepetovka-Dubno.
There we had to build roads, do lumbering and things like that, they made us do it. The army needed roads because some parts of the roads were destroyed with bombs and they needed them fixed.
But it was very hard and due to two reasons: we had no proper cloths and didn’t get enough food. Those who managed to trade some potatoes from the locals for a needle or anything, they were able to stand it.
Once, after these and similar kind of works the Ukrainian partisans beat us up and we scattered. We were some 240, but when we dispersed I ended up with one of my mates. And we were hiding because we didn’t even know where we were.
We were afraid to go deeper into the forest because we would get lost, so we went through the forest having the road in sight, without drifting too far. We only knew we were going towards the Czech Republic [that is, west-about]. And slowly we regrouped.
Once we saw two people coming. One was helping the other one. As they came closer, we recognized them, they were in our company. On another occasion, after a few days, we saw two people coming with two horses. As they approached we recognized them.
One of them was a coachman, he unharnessed the horses and they used them to carry their backpacks. So we regrouped, we were six or seven from the company. We had to be very careful whom we were contacting, because there were Ukrainian partisans who didn’t like the Germans and the Russians, and also hated Jews. We knew that and we were hiding.
But it was impossible to be outdoors all the time because it was cold, the nights were particularly cold. It was winter and heavy snow. So how could we find our way around? Because when the snow is white and everything’s white, that’s very hard. We waited until it got dark and for people to light the lamps in their houses, and when they did, we went in that direction.
On several occasions we got to creeks we didn’t know we would encounter, so we crossed them or went along them until we found a footbridge or something. And we went in the direction of the houses.
I will tell you a story now, but there were several such situations. I learned somewhat better Russian than the others, I had a gift for languages. I told the other ones to wait for me at a certain distance and I went to the house.
We usually spotted the houses that weren’t in the center of the village, but at the edge of it. So I went to the house. I knocked on the window and suddenly a face showed up and asked me: ‘Kto tam?’ - Who’s there? I told them ‘Dobriye lyudy’ - kind people.
I continued with we would like to ask for a place to sleep. This was an old man, and while I was talking to him through the window, the door of the house opened and someone ran away.
The old man said: ‘You can’t sleep here, partisan...’ ‘I want to sleep here anyway!’ Then he came out and I told him I’m not alone and we would leave at dawn. So I signaled the others, we went into the house, the old man went out and brought two large trusses of straw, put them on the floor, and we fell asleep instantly, including me.
Suddenly the old man [it was still at night] came and woke us up. As I woke up, it was already light. He told me the neighboring house is on fire. But I was so tired, honestly, that I told him I couldn’t wake up, as long as the straw I’m sleeping on it’s not on fire, I wouldn’t move.
So I laid down and fell asleep. We woke up early in the morning. The old man went away and brought us a loaf and some white milk in a black cup.
We tore the loaf apart, split it among us and drank from the milk until we consumed it. In the meantime the old man’s daughter got down from the top of the stove - the Russians used to build the stoves so they made a place to sleep.
We didn’t see her before, but we presumed the man who ran away from the house the evening before was visiting her. Then we set off. We walked about this way for a few days and we had similar conditions in the evening.
One time we got to a place, and we asked them to look after the horses too. In the morning, when we woke up, the horses already disappeared. The household saw that we didn't need horses. Now, walking in the forest, all at once we came upon, perhaps they saw us too, some Hungarian front guards. 'Who are you?' 'We are forced laborers' 'And what are you doing here?'
'Our company was routed...' and we told them our story. 'So come with us!' We went with them, they had some kind of a barrack, built from wood and beams. The leader [chief] of the barrack was a Swabian corner-man, a lieutenant: 'Jews? Damn bastards! Put them in a separate place!' They put us in a separate place.
Later the soldiers brought some kind of pasta with jam or something like this, God knows, and they gave it to us. But in the morning, though, they put us on a [local] train, on a platform, and took us to a railway station, where there was a regular train service.
A freight train arrived, which was going to Germany, and they put us on it, with an escort, of course, and they took us to Debrecen. In Debrecen they took us off and got into the hussar barrack from there. We were in good hands there also! First they put us into a cellar.
An officer come down to us, who said the following: 'Hah, Jews in the cellar? Is to hot there. Took them back! Up to the loft!' They took us to the loft. But there were straw trusses, so we wrapped ourselves in straw, it was good after all...
We ate what remained – there always remained some scraps. But they ordered us about: we had to jump on one's hunkers, covered a distance, got back from there and jumped over obstacles. The soldiers had to complete these tasks gradually, but we had to jump over the highest obstacles [straightaway]. And we jumped over them, we pushed ourselves over them. I got injured then, I probably split my bone, because I couldn't step on my heel for three months. From there we were taken back to Ukraine, to a disciplinary battalion in Kalush, they regrouped the remains of our company there, and we became a company again. We were not 240 people, but around 180.
In the meantime here in Nagybanya, where there was a Jew exterminative company, that's why Mordenyi and a lieutenant called Alsopatyi could behave as they did, a new colonel has arrived. The new colonel put an end to the on-going mistreatment.
This colonel was called Revitzky [Imre]. He was very humane! He got to the point where he sent an investigation committee comprised by three officers to Ukraine, to see what’s up with us: how were we treated and supplied?
When the investigating committee arrived, there was an arm banded sergeant from Szamosujvar among them, called Bela Racz, who was a former employee of my grandfather David Weiss.
He came to me: 'Mr. Mihaly, how are you?' 'Well, I said, what should I do?' I was ragged, covered with lice, but I surely wasn't the only one in this situation. 'Well, I said, I manage.' 'How are you getting on?' 'Well, I said, if at least they would give food every day, it would be bearable.'
'Why, don't they give you food?' 'No, they don't.' 'Who is in charge with your supply?' I said a private fist class called Farkas, a guy from Budapest, I know about him that he was collector on a streetcar.
'Where is he?' 'He must be around somewhere. If he is sober...' In a word, I want to say briefly that they found him [the individual], and after that we were treated differently. While the Jewry glorifies Reviczky, our company commander, Karoly Mordenyi was executed in Hungary after the war.
Reviczky put himself at risk, he didn't take care and stopped certain wretched treatments used until then. Reviczky was the standard-bearer of the kindness, honesty, courage and humane feelings.
He saved many people, including myself, because if this change never happened, I thought we wouldn't survive the war. And such terrible things happened with other forced laborers! In the swamps of Pripet
[Editor's note: It is the largest swamp in Europe, covering Southern Byelorussia and Northern Ukraine. On 12th August 1941 6,526 Jews accused of theft were shot there. They wanted to sink the women and children into the swamp, but it turned out it wasn't swampy enough. www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Pripet.] and at the execution place from Dorosics for example.
Dorosics was a locality where the Hungarians gathered the typhoid patients from the forced labor companies. They put them into hangars, into different buildings, next to each other, they nailed the doors on them, they poured gasoline around and set them on fire.
There were people with 42 degrees fever, those burnt, who had only 39 degrees were able to get away. But outside machine guns awaited those who got out. [Editor's note: the interviewee refers here to the Ukrainian locality Doroshits.
On 30th April 1943 many forced laborers were massacred there.] So this happened with the forced laborers who were taken to Ukraine. I had an acquaintance from Szamosujvar who managed to escape from there. His name is Bernath Blum, we called him Beri Blum.
He lives in Israel, we still keep in touch because we spent together four years as prisoners of war. This man, Blum, was healthy enough to get away from the burning building and he ran away. And there were others as well. But I know him.
In 1942 they took him to the swamps of Pripet, later to the Don bend, where most of them froze to death because they went there in summer rags and tatters, and they didn't get other suits.
But neither did the Hungarian soldiers, and many of them froze to death, because they were sent there to die as heroes. And other similar things happened.
We were lucky because our then company commander was a guy from Budapest, called Szanto, who came in the same period, and first lieutenant Szanto seemed to be a pro-Jew after all.
And why? Because his father worked in a board warehouse in Budapest, owned by a Jew. And when Szanto finished high school, his father went to his Jewish boss: 'I have a son, I don't know what to do with him...' 'Bring him here!' The boss employed him, but he didn't put him to work because he saw the boy could hold a pencil, they taught him to measure up.
So Szanto saw the Jews are not so bad after all, how people said. He allowed us to provide for ourselves. Before that there were two-three day periods when they didn't give us anything.
From time to time they drew our rations, that is they brought the food from a place, from the ELMO, the food-supply warehouse, and the skeleton crew sold our supplies to the Ukrainian people for tzuika [Romanian kind of spirit] and for other goods.
They didn't give us the feedstock [from which the forced laborers could cook] because they would have to give us pasta or lentil or bean to feed us when we came back from work. But they didn't give us anything. They weren’t concerned. They didn't care. All this ended after that.
Even Jews were allowed to get their ration. The soldiers, the army got it [the food] from there. The Jews got as well, but lesser quantities. But at least they gave that ladle of soup or the half ladle of meal. This went on for a while.
There was an organization in Hungary during the war, called OMZSA [Orszagos Magyar Zsido Segito Akcio - National Hungarian Jew Aiding Organization]. This OMZSA helped the Jews in need, sometimes packages from OMZSA even got to Ukraine. And if the Jews were very, very lucky, they even got them. But very often and many times they were confiscated.
The war became harder and harder for the German troops from Ukraine. The Russians dropped bombs on the main roads, they couldn't retreat through there, so they had to search for secondary roads to retreat.
They used the old forest-paths. But they couldn't use them for cars and tanks, so we had to enlarge them, and build a road paved with wood. We had to cut the trees to a four and half meters wide road, so that some of them had to have 20 cm in diameter on one end and 12-15 cm in diameter on the other end, and we had to put them next to each other.
The engineers worked also, but we had to bring quickly the lumber. I got injured there. But others were injured as well. I was injured when we cut down a tree. A branch cut my arm and my face in four places, it is still visible.
There wasn't any bandage, there was nothing, but there was a doctor among us, called Herskovits from Kolozsvar, otherwise he was an X-ray specialist. He told me: 'Mihaly, my friend, only God can help you here. I don’t have anything.
I have some medicine against scabies, it contains alcohol, I’ll try this and we’ll see.' They gave me some bandage made of paper, it was like toilet paper. But not fine toilet paper! And I survived.
We had to go to the workplace! Well, I went out to the workplace: when I had no boots, I went barefoot, I trod the mud and snow between my toes. There were such periods, but fortunately only for a short while.
The Hungarian soldiers took care of us, but there were also some German guards, and the Germans were interested in the building the road because they had to use it to retreat.
The spring came, and they took us to a new place, Ozeryany, to build roads there, too. The distance between Kolomyya and this place could be 50-60 km. We worked there in different groups and one day, sometime in June 1944, the Russian pressure became very strong.
The Russians blocked a large territory with an offensive, and our company was caught there, too. And the different parts of the company fled to different places.
After a while I managed to get back to the village we were accommodated, in a barn. And I waited. I went every morning to the forest, the forest was some one and half kilometer away from there, not more, and I went back in the evening just to spend the night outside the forest.
The Germans already withdrew their troops from there, those who were captured were captured, those who were not left, but the Russians didn't occupy the territory yet.
One morning, when I went out, I had to pass through a potato plantation, actually some bushes, but nicely aligned, I heard from a distance that: ta-ta-ta-ta ta-ta-ta. They tried to shoot me with a machine gun, I didn't know who they thought I was, but I swear the bullets hit the ground 10 cm from my foot.
If the shooter held the machine gun one centimeter higher, he would have shot me down, considering the distance. I threw myself to the ground and I crept until I reached the forest. In the evening I came back.
The next dawn the Russians came in. I thought this meant I escaped. But it wasn't that easy! I didn't know Russian, they didn't know either, they were all Kirghiz and Uzbek soldiers. They had a sergeant who knew Russian (I didn't know his rank but I learnt it afterwards). He pulled out his gun..., but fortunately the housekeeper saw this and she ran out and told the Russian what I was.
He told me to go back into the house and stay there! But I didn't want to remain there, because this officer allowed me to stay there, but if another one came, he could shot me first and then ask who I was. I was alone.
On the next day, when I went to the forest, very slowly, I didn't know exactly where I was, I saw two Hungarian soldiers together with a Russian soldier, and they were talking in Ruthenian. And I told them: 'Hungarians!' The Russian soldier was an old soldier. The Hungarians have realized I was a ragged forced laborer and they tried to explain to him.
'Now, come with me!' and he took me to a temporary prison camp, where there were approximately twenty thousand people. I didn't see other forced laborers. There were Hungarians, Romanians, Germans and Italians, as well. All kinds of people were coming all the time, and later some forced laborers arrive there, too.
Once, I will never forget, when I was searching the forced laborers, I saw one approximately 200 meters from me. Right next to the wire fence. It was raining and he was standing there in the rain. I went to him to see who he was.
When I got closer I saw he was a man from my town, called Bumi Waldman. He was in such a shape, that if he remained there alone, he would have gone mad. He was older than me, and he was totally demoralized.
A had a few cigarettes, and I bought from the newly arrived soldiers and prisoners who had a place inside the building, because it was a school within the camp, but not everybody had a place inside, two tent flaps for three or five cigarettes. They only had to give their gun and waist-belt, they kept the rest of the equipment, and they didn't need the tent flap.
I made a tent from the two flaps in the yard, because I was only able to find a place there. For tree cigarettes they gave me a blanket, I put it on the mud, I took my friend and pushed him inside. We spent there seven days, and he slept all the time.
I woke him up only to drink the soup, because the Russians were giving us two rations of soup and a small piece of bread every day, but after that he lied down again and continued to sleep. After seven days he recovered. I am positive I saved his life.
We walked for 21 days on foot from there. We passed through the town of Kolomyya and we ended up in some locality. We were quite lucky we took with us a tent flap, because it kept us warm during the night and we could sleep. But by then there were many forced laborers there.
There were forced laborers who were brought there in 1941-1942. They were so ragged that when the Russian officers saw them they said: 'Now, you will go home immediately.
You will be liberated.' We were in such bad shape, and our facial expression reflected our condition. [But they couldn't come home though, but they continued the march.] After 21 days they put us on freight cars.
We continued to walk for six more days, and then we got to Zaporozhe. This town is situated on the banks of the Dnepr river, it is a large industrial town. We were almost ten thousand people in the 1st camp.
There we worked together with German, Hungarian and Romanian prisoners of war, and they made no discrimination among us. When they saw who we were and how we looked, they promised they would liberate us, let us go home, but they completely forgot what they promised.
From the end of July 1944, it was summer anyway, we worked in Zaporozhe in construction until 1946. They always told us 'skoro damoy' [home soon], which meant they would let us come home soon.
My master engineer was a from Kolozsvar, his name was Polifka. There was a large aircraft factory, the Russians blew it up when they retreated to prevent it from being taken over by the Germans, and we had to rebuild that.
We also went to work to a quarry, where we had to extract stones from the rock, mainly with an iron bar, we put it in the cracks and forced it open. We had to put these stones in mine cars, and the mine cars carried the stones to the stone-mill.
In Sepsibukszad we broke the stones into small pieces with hammers, here we had to work on the larger stones. But it was very hard. Especially pulling the mine car was very, very difficult, it was very inefficient. There was a Russian master, but he wasn't an expert, more of an outsider, he only saw that the work is progressing very slowly.
He was together with us all day long, and he called us Fritz, the Germans used to be called Fritz, and he said we didn't want to work and other things like this. One day he picked on me, and he started with Fritz this and Fritz that.
By then I was a wrongful prisoner of war for two years already. I told him in Russian: 'Firstly I am not a Fritz, I am a Jew. And don't you swear at me, don't you swear at my mother, because I will kill you instantly.' I didn't think about what rubbish I just said, but I said it.
After that he walked away, and I considered the affair closed. On the next day a colonel from NKVD came and asked 'Who is Misa?' Because they addressed me as Misa. 'I am.' Than he told me: 'What happened yesterday here, why did you threaten the master?'
I remembered and told him there were no proper conditions for work, and we couldn't fulfill the work load, and how hard this work was. I asked him to take a look to the rails, to see there were no bolts, we had to bind the rails with wires, and the hammers were in such condition we couldn't use them.
The hammer had to be sharp and had to be maintained, the handle of the hammer must not break the worker's hand. I said I worked already in a quarry and I knew how the work had to be done. In such conditions [circumstances] and with that meal it was impossible to produce [perform].
He looked at me and said: 'You know what? We take away the master, you take charge and I guarantee you will get one more portion from the canteen.'
The quarry had some kind of a canteen there, where the workers and clerks could eat, but it wasn't very distinguished The Russians lived very, very hard after the war, and this was the situation all over Russia, especially in the parts affected by the war. I said: ‘What do you mean? Giving me one more portion?
We can only perform if everyone gets food, only then we can make arrangements, create a forge, because there are skilled people and possibilities. We can't do hard work with the meal we are getting.’ After a long bargain, he came back after three days and said: 'How many are you here?'
'We are about one hundred people.' 'Well, you will all get half a portion more.' Well, I thought to myself, the food we were getting from the camp and this half portion was enough to do something. And they began to bring us bolts.
At the end we achieved the maximum performance, 126%, instead of the daily 40-45% before. Everybody fulfilled one's duty, there was a carpenter who took a man to help him, they made the handles, there were two blacksmiths, a German and a Hungarian, in a word the work started to progress.
In the camp, where they recorded the results of the different work-groups, was striking that in the quarry, where the production was usually 40-45%, achieved 70-80% and later even 126%.
The group leader from the Russian part, because always Russian soldiers received us, they escorted us to the workplace and they brought us back, was a boy called Szajnuro.
I will never forget, he was a boy from Siberia and his face was scarred by smallpox, but he was a very, very affectionate, a very kind guy who never shouted at us, and if he wanted to say something, he called me: 'Misa, idi suda.' [Misa, come here.] He told me to tell to the others not to hang around there, because there was a limit we were allowed to leave the workplace.
On time, when we started off to the workplace, Szajnuro said to me: 'Misa, you have to remain in the camp. The 'upravlenya', that is the management of the camp gave order [instruction] to leave you in the camp.' I didn't understand the reason.
We were simple minded, we got there from here [Transylvania], we feared only the Arrow-Cross 14 men then, that is the wretches. When everybody got out [from the prison camp], they called me to the management and asked me if I spoke Russian.
I said yes, I learned. 'Where did you learn?' 'I learned here, at the workplace.' They said this was impossible: 'Nye mozhno [it is not possible] You had such a good accent, that...' I said to them: 'Sirs, I came from Transylvania, from beside Kolozsvar, from Szamosujvar.
I have never seen a Russian in my entire life, I never heard any Russian word, there are no Russians in our county.' 'Well, if this is true, you are skillful, >>molodyets, molodyets<<.' He told me: 'Now hear us out why we called you.
Here we allocate the food to the prisoners in accordance with the Geneva Convention. [Editor's note: The treatment of the prisoners of war at the turn of the century was regulated at the First and Second Peace Conferences at The Hague (1899, 1907).
The provisions of the two conferences was reformulated at the 1929 Geneva Convention. The convention included detailed rules concerning the transportation of POWs, the POW camps, the provision of the sanitary conditions, the work of POWs, their payment and supply.
The convention was enacted in Hungary through the Law no. 30/1936. The regulation was in force until 1949, when a new Geneva Convention created new provisions.] We have a suspicion that the allocated food ends up somewhere else, at least not the whole allocated quantity gets into the boilers.
We thought we will send you to the kitchen, to be there and check whether they are cooking the allocated food and they distribute it?' I remained silent. It was alright. I couldn't say thanks for the job, I didn’t know Russian that well, and I realized afterwards that it would have been nicer that way, but I didn’t think about it then.
Already on the next morning, after 5am, I had to go to the pavilion that accommodated the kitchens. It was so much steam there, I was only able to see a yard far. They just changed the utensils then after distributing the morning soup, and they began washing the boilers with hot water.
At least 90% of the cooks were Germans, and suddenly I heard the snappy voice of the commander [their leader] speaking in German. I told myself: ‘Well, just what I needed. I wish I wasn’t here.’ It was still early in the morning, my group was just going out, so I sneaked in between them and I went with them to the workplace.
At least there I wasn’t surrounded by wire, the air was fresher and time passed by differently. This suited me. First of all I was amongst the people I spent so much time together with. On the other hand we were getting the camp meal and another half a meal there. So I remained at the quarry and I have forgotten that I was sent to the kitchen.
One day, it was after work, one of the officers of the political department of the camp came to me, who spoke very good Hungarian. It was a large camp, there were almost 10 thousand people there, mostly Germans, but many Hungarians, as well, and also some 100 Jews.
I saw her, greeted her and she greeted me, as well. ‘How are you?’ ‘Well - I said -, fine, thank you. Now that we achieve 126% each day, and have a decent meal and...’ ‘And where do you work?’ I told her in the quarry.
‘Wait! Are you working in the quarry? Weren’t you assigned to the kitchen?’ ‘Well, I was - I said -, I was there for one and a half hour, but I don’t liked that, I’ll rather go to the workplace outside.’
She was surprised because other would have ceased the opportunity, but I didn’t want to fatten up like the men from the kitchen - they were all looking like prize-fighters.
By the way, after World War I there was an exchange of prisoners between Hungary and Russia, and some officers of Bela Kun have been set free, who were in the prisons of the Hungarian Government, and the Russians liberated in exchange some Hungarian officers who have been taken prisoners by the Russians in World War I.
[When in July 1920 the so-called commissar lawsuit began in Hungary, the Soviet Union suspended the transport of Hungarian prisoners of war home, and some 1000 Hungarian officers were interned.
In exchange for the officers they considered hostages they requested the commissars to be handed over. After long negotiations, the two governments agreed on the 'prisoner exchange' on 28th July 1921 through the Riga Agreement.
Hungary contributed to the emigration of 400 political prisoners, and officially suspended any legal action taken against them, but deprived them of their citizenship. In exchange, the Russians allowed the interned officers and another several tens of thousands of Hungarian prisoners of war to go home.
(Katalin Petrak, Magyarok a Szovjetunioban 1922-1945, Budapest, Napvilag, 2000, 21-56.)] She was the daughter of one of these officers, so she went to Russia as a child, and she spoke very good Hungarian, and this is how she ended up in a camp where there were some 2000 Hungarian prisoners.
But there were other officers at the political department who were Germans, German communists, and they were in charge of the German prisoners, because there was some propaganda going on in the camps.
I got weak and I was taken to a prisoner hospital. There was a person called Kremer and another one called Lori Rosenfeld, who was a corpsman. These two, in order to keep me away from the crowd, put me into a small room with two guard-beds - two beds patched up from board -, on one of theme there was a German moribund, and they put me in the other one.
They gave me two thin horse blankets. This hospital was built so that the windows were 60 cm from the floor, in order to keep warm. It was full of rats. As soon as the night fell, rats began to stroll around , so covered my head with the blanket.
But one rat bit my toe, and I felt that pain for quite long. Lori Rosenfeld brought me some rice in a bowl [pot], quite a lot of it. I tasted the rice, and I thought I was dreaming because it contained butter, sugar, vanilla, everything nice. I fell to it and finished ate it up in three minutes.
Then I licked the platter for I don't know how long, until Lori came and brought me half a liter of tea, with sugar. I never even imagined it existed in the whole of Russia. And he also brought a piece of bread, white as paper, and a piece, it had to be half of the size of a matchbox, of butter on it.
So, I ate that too. So they stuffed me, because there was always something left in the kitchen and they gave me some of it.
When I recovered and strengthened up, because the meal was very, very good, they hid me for a while, as much as they could. Because selections took place once in a while, and those who recovered somewhat was sent back to the labor camp to work.
After a while they assigned me to the kitchen to clean up and help out. But what happened? There were some one hundred patients, but each night 5-8 of them died. The bread and butter ration, and generally the meal was for the headcount reported on the previous evening, so there always were rations left.
One time I saw a small, bulky limping boy, he was hospitalized, too, because he was weakened, but he was quite a character. And since there was some soup and bread left, I gave him some. And he helped me, I helped the distributor and he helped me, that is logrolling.
Then I saw another one, a tall, slim, lost weight, with a more gentle face, but seeing his features I realized he was a different class. When he came for his ration, I asked him: 'Who are you? What's your name?' I clearly remember his honved jacket.
He told me his name was Laszlo Csillag. 'Wherew are you from?' 'From Budapest.' 'How did you end up here?' 'I was a forced laborer.' 'Are you Jewish?' 'Yes, I am a Jew.' So I gave him some of the meal, bread and marmalade, butter that was left.
Dr. Laszlo Csillag, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy, who still lives in Budapest, became my spiritual friend. We were thrown out from the hospital together. Well, we couldn't stay there for ever. We both ended up in an oil factory and marched together to work.
He loved chemistry, and he became a chemist. I became attached to his whole being, he was very neat, he always tried to keep himself tidy. This Laszlo Csillag, as I later found out, made friends with this officer lady from the political department.
If the leaders of the camp found out about this, they both would have ended up in Siberia. But they didn't. Laci [Laszlo] came home and later this lady arranged so that she also got to Budapest.
They met, but Laci was already married by then, but they remained good friends, and he always talked about her with great respect. She remained in Budapest and died there. This I know from Laci Csillag, whom I looked up in Budapest, and we still write letters to each other. He even wrote to me on the internet.
When I came out of the hospital, we had to eat again this bad meal, and it all started in the spring with nettle soup. We had nettle soup in the morning, nettle soup for lunch – this was a bit thicker - and nettle soup in the evening.
Those who were working got an extra 200 grams of barley-water, boiled in water, and I think they put in it some oil. When the nettle became like birch [very thready], they began to give us cucumber.
But the soup wasn't made of small cucumber, but large yellow ones, and they also made dish from it. This went on until cabbage began to grow. From then on we ate cabbage, right until nettle began to grow again. Bean or something similar was out of the question.
There were people who arrived there way before me. If someone weakened so much it was impossible for them to be used for work anymore, they sent them home. It didn't matter whether they were Germans, Hungarians or Romanians. I have a story related to this.
A group was formed from these patients. There was a Jew among them, his name was Bumi Meister. He was originally from [Nagy]Varad, and he was the oldest of us, he was 51 or 52. In the last minute he was taken out of the group. He came to me. He was terrified, and he came to me because I had a gift for languages.
I was a prisoner of war for almost two years then, and I pattered in Russian. So he came to me: 'My dear Eisikovits, I beg of you...' He asked me to go to the camp management and ask them why weren't they sending him home. I said what could I lose, so I went to them and tried to do my best.
So I went there. But there was no free access into and out of the camp! I went to the guard in the post and told him I wanted to see the camp director. He looked at me. 'Yes, I want to see the camp director!' When he saw I was serious about it and told him in Russian, he let me pass.
I went to the management and told them: 'Gospodin. Gospodin nachalnik [Director sir, chief sir.] – I couldn't say 'tovarish' [comrade], because we were not comrades, we could only say 'sir'. Why don't you let this man go home? He is the oldest of us.
He is ill. Is it because he is Jewish? Well, let me say that this man never fought against you!' He looked at me, I don't remember what he said, but Bumi Meister was put back into the group and he went home. This was sometime at the end of 1945. We were still in Zaporozhe then.
After two years they entrained us. We were hoping we would go home. But instead of going towards West, they took us towards north-east, via Moscow, to the area of Kalinin (Tver in Russian), and from then they took us to a place called Novistroy [Novostroyka], that is new construction.
There we worked on disforestation and construction. There, around Kalinin, we were some 1500-2000 people, some 300 of them Jews. We organized a strike there. We said they were treating us unfairly and immorally.
I was together with those [Germans] who persecuted me and ruined my youth. And the Russians were treating us the same way they were treating them, who fought against them, massacred etc.
Because the German SS was there, and the Wehrmacht was and the German officers were there, as well. We were hunger-striking for 5-6 days, at least those who could endure it, but some of us collapsed on the third or fourth day.
The outcome [of this protest] was what I expected - 200-300 Jews are no match for Russia -, they dispersed us and sent us to different places to work, in gourps of ten or twenty people, and some of us even have been imprisoned.
In the end, in July 1948, they finally gathered the prisoners of war. Before they sent us home, the Russians gave us clean shirts, in some cases white shirts, and a jacket, as well. There were Russian and German jackets, anything they had. But they were all clean, disinfected and even washed, I think.
They gave us a coat, I got a Russian one, to keep us warm and prevent us from getting sick. At the end of August we were already at home. So we had to endure four years [in Russia]. I was a prisoner of war for a total of four years and some one and a half month. All in all I was away for seven years, I was a forced laborer for three years and another four in captivity in Russia.
From our group who as forced laborers were held captive by the Russians only three of us are alive. One of us is Laszlo Steiner, in [Nagy]Varad, he was in other camps, he was taken with another group, but we came home together.
The other one is Bernat Sauber in Marosvasarhely, and he is the president of the Jewish Community there. [Editor’s note: Centropa also made interview with Bernat Sauber.] I was with him as forced laborer until the Russians smashed us.
Then he ended up in Odessa, while I was in Zaporozhe, but he too came back when I did. We didn't really keep in touch, and I last met him in Des, when they commemorated 60 years from the Holocaust.
First I went to Nagyiklod, because I knew I had a sister there. But she got married in the meantime. So I came to Kolozsvar, I had an aunt there, my mother's younger sister Jolan, who survived. Her husband, Jozsef Rosenfeld, was taken to Ukraine and came home with the highest grade invalid.
That was in 1948, around September, when I came to Kolozsvar. In Kolozsvar, in the main square, on the left side of the statue of King Matyas, I met with Bumi Meister. 'Eisikovits, my dear Eisikovits, this and that, how grateful he is etc.'
He opened his wallet and wanted to give me ten thousand lei. I said to him: 'Bumi, don't do that. I don't need it. I can't...' 'But are you aware of what you did to me?' 'Of course I know. But that was my duty.'
I didn't accept a dime, I was happy to see him, and I asked him what was he doing for a living and what was he doing in Kolozsvar. He said: 'I have a small workshop where I repair syringes.
Because they have a plastic tube and after sterilization these get spoiled, but their metallic part remain and I restore them. And I just brought my order for I don't know what hospital in Kolozsvar.' That's why he was in Kolozsvar. Otherwise he was living in [Nagy]Varad. I don't think he is alive.
Also in Kolozsvar I met one of my friends from childhood, Sanyi [Sandor] Nemes, who was originally from Magyarlapos. Previously I met him as forced laborer in the Ukraine. I was barefoot then. When he saw I was alive in 1948 [he was very surprised]!
Because they buried me long before, because one who didn't come back in 1945-1946 or 1947, and showed up only in August 1948, it was just like they were coming from a different planet. 'So what brings you here?' And I told them I just came home. 'And whereto? What's on your mind?' I said I didn't know.
'Come to Des, because I was appointed commercial manager at a company and I will hire you.' Thus I ended up in Des, and I worked as clerk for about one and a half year, when I was transferred to Moldova [Eastern part of Romania is called this way by the Romanians].
The first thing when I came home was to learn and to finish school. In the end I finished high school in Iasi, and I got married while I was studying. I met my wife Bianca in Iasi. Her maiden name was Pitaru.
This means baker, her great-grandparents were bakers once. She was born in 1933 in Iasi. She was the only daughter of a Jewish family. She was very pretty. They were in a quite miserable situation when I got acquainted with them, because her father had some land, and a house in Iasi, but they have been nationalized.
She entered medicine school, but she was thrown out shortly after because her social origins weren't adequate – 'origine sociala necorespunzatoare' in Romanian. She had a brother who emigrated to Israel very early on and studied electro-mechanics. He became a famous expert in the field of plant energy supply. In Israel he changed his name to Paz Amnon.
I even visited him once in Rishon Le Zion. He had a workshop and materials warehouse as large as one of the waiting rooms of the railway station in Kolozsvar. Unfortunately he died around 1999-2000.
My wife was a very skilled woman in her profession. She was an accountant. I had an acquaintance I helped a lot once, and he became the principal of the school for deaf-mutes.
I went o him and told him: 'Dear Mr. Barbu..., dear Mr. Barbu... – this was his name –, look, I want to help my wife in getting a job. Can you help me?' 'Domnu' Eisikovits..., Mr. Eisikovits, of course I can help you. please send her over, and...' So she became a chief accountant there.
My work wasn't appreciated at its true value, so I don't like to talk about it. I started working at the local council of Iasi, but then I was appointed manager of the commercial department of the region.
[There was a territorial reorganization in 1952 when Romania was divided to administrative regions.] 15
I wanted to turn it down because I knew what commerce was, I learnt it in Marosvasarhely before. But here it was built on a very different foundation, everything was turned upside down, like an inverted pyramid. [Normally] market determines the course of industry, but in the past regime the industry determined the market.
So they manufactured products for which there was no demand. Or they made so much, and so primitively, none needed them. People were very unhappy then.
Those who worked in commerce were previously evaluated [by the official authorities], and they all were speculators. And I wasn't willing to be a manager in such circumstances.
But I couldn't tell them this, instead I told the president of the local council, some guy called Constantin Nistor: 'Mr. president, this is too difficult for me, I will not be able to live up to the expectations.
And I don't want to compromise myself and to make you angry with me.' 'What are you talking about? Don't you think we know you?' 'Please, allow me some more time to think about it.' I already made up my mind, but I couldn't tell them 'I won't.'
So I had to explain somehow that I couldn't do it. I knew, however, the structure of the Jewish families. There were still some Jews left in commerce. In the Jewish families the husband used to maintain the family, while the wife used to stay at home and look after the children, educated them etc. But in the past [the communist] regime it wasn't like this. Everyone had to work to be able to sustain themselves.
In 1957 I became the manager of the city management company. But there were some Jewish employees there, engineers, building engineers and accountants, who submitted a request to the police so they could emigrate to Israel. Normally I should have removed them from their positions.
But I didn't, I wouldn't know about it. They used to come to me and tell me discretely: 'Comrade manager, I submitted the documents for emigration, because my family...' 'Have you told this anyone else?' 'No.' 'Then just do your job.' After a while this came out and I had to move here to Transylvania.
I wasn't a member of the party from the beginning. When I was appointed head of department at the local council, the vice president came to me – I will never forget this episode -, and said: 'Comrade Eisikovits, aren't you a member of the party?' I told him I wasn't.
So he told me to go quickly and have my documents made and join the party. I did, and then I told the party secretary – who incidentally was a Jew – that I was sent by Balaban, the vice president, and I asked him to draw up my file so they could accept me into the party.
I swear on my mother's grave it happened so! And I was a member of the party, of course, when I was the manager of the commercial department of the region. But no matter whether you were a member of the party, or anyone, when they wanted to fire you, they did.
A trend for replacing any minority from the leading positions already began to appear in the 1960s. First they excluded all the Jews from the Central Committee [Comitetul Central in Romanian].
Then they threw out the Hungarians and Serbs, saying that they were Tito's followers.Then they excluded the Jews from the army, the secret services, the ministries, and it wasn't allowed to have Jews in the leading position at certain departments or sectors 16.
But I had another episode. One time I went to Bucharest, together with my driver. In the morning someone knocked on my hotel room door. 'Sunt capitanul cutare cutare, caut pe tovarasul Eisikovits. Dumneavoastra sunteti?' ['I'm captain This or That, and I'm looking for comrade Eisokivits. Are you comrade Eisikovits?' in Romanian] 'Yes.'
This was a captain in the secret service. He said: 'What are you doing here, in Bucharest?' 'What am I doing here? I have some business here, because I'm the manager of a company and we have some problems here.'
He said: 'Well, let's forget these problems. We spoke with the party secretary in Iasi and we told him we need you, and he told us we can use you.' He told me to go with him, because we had to go to a certain office.
When I was leaving, I told my driver – Anti Endes, a very nice Hungarian guy from Iasi – 'Anti, I will have to go now, but wait for me here, because I will come back.' So we got into a large, black Volga. There was the driver, this captain sat next to him and two more officers sat beside me.
They were wearing civilian clothes. I was sitting in the middle. So we started off. I asked them where we were going. He told me 'not too far.' Suddenly an iron gate opened and we went in. They took me to an office and told me to wait there.
There was only a desk and two chairs in this room. I had to sit on one of them, while a certain guy on the other one. After a while, when I saw no one was coming, I left the room. An officer saw me. He told me to go back because a comrade major was supposed to come there in a few minutes. In deed, after a few minutes, a major came in. He asked me whom I have connections with.
I told him the name of the company, the Ministry, and I told them everything. But then he asked me what connections do I have with the bank. I told him I don't have any. 'But nevertheless, you went to the bank.'
Then I remembered that I was at the bank after all. one of the bank managers was a guy called Noti, who was the uncle of the wife of my uncle Moshe Eisikovits. He asked me what I was doing there.
It happened right after I arrived in Bucharest, and I went there because there were no vacancies in the hotels due to the congress. So I went to Noti because the bank had some kind of a boarding house and I asked him to allow me to stay there.
'Anything else?' I replied 'Nothing else.' 'But there is, you were at the bank several times.' I told him 'Yes, I think I was there twice.' 'And what have you discussed with comrade Noti?' 'We had no discussion.'
'But where do you know each other from?' I told him from Des. How come? I told him he is the uncle of my uncle's wife. 'Alright then, and what kind of people are they?' I said they are honest people.
'Honest people!' I said 'Yes, I know they are.' Next he said: 'Well, he's not that honest after all.' I told him 'I only know he was an illegalist communist, and nothing else.' 'But still, think about it!' 'Sir, I don't have anything to think about.'
Then he told me: 'Well, the pure fact that you are a Jew and he is a Jew...' I replied 'comrade major, I don't know who could teach the other in this matter!' God is my witness I told him this! I had nothing to be afraid of, because he was nothing compared to me. I was a manager for ten years and did my job honestly, and there came this man with this nonsense.
'He didn't do a too nice job at the bank.' I said: 'If he didn't do a good job, I'm not surprised.' 'What do you mean?' 'Do you know he is a tailor? And you made him bank manager. The man who assigned him there is to blame. Comrade major, if you put him in charge of a co-operative or the Ucecom, he would have done a good job.'
[Editor's note: Ucecom is the abbreviation of Uniunea Cooperativelor Comerciale, that is the Association of Commercial Co-operatives]. 'But the man who put him in charge of money issue, he is to blame. I'm positive he didn't do anything wrong on purpose.'
Suddenly the door opened and a lieutenant-colonel came in. 'So, how is all going on?' 'Pai, nu coopereaza' ['Well, he does not cooperate.' in Romanian] Then I said 'What do you mean I'm not cooperating? What kind of cooperation do you expect, comrade? I can only say I saw some classic Marxist and Leninist works.
I'm positive he wasn't able to use them because he wasn't competent enough. But he kept them there, because...' He wrote this last part down. Anything nice I said he omitted. This I only found out later.
Later I thought this non cooperation was one of the reasons I was fired in 1968, after a period of 12 yeasr as manager. But it fair to say that my other mistake in their opinion was that I didn't fire the Jews, and did not cooperate, and my friends told my I should leave [Iasi].
I had a former classmate called Laci [Laszlo] Fisher, who changed his name to Florian after moving to Kolozsvar, and became the manager of the economic department of the secret service. I met him, as well, and told him 'Look what happened to me.'
He told me 'Leave there, man! You'll never know what these bastards could come up with. And you'll wake up at the channel [the interviewee refers to the Danube channel, where the political prisoners were taken to forced labor.] as Zionist leader.'
I wasn't able to move right away, but I was appointed in a new position as amnager of a constructions company – Cooperativa de constructii [Construction Co-operative] –, but I wanted to leave because I wanted to be in a more calm situation.
I chose Nagybanya because my aunt Bertuska, one of my father's sisters, was living here. Here they asked me why I came. I told them I'm from Transylvania and I wanted to return to Transylvania.
From 1971 I worked here in Nagybanya, and my work was appreciated. I got an appartment from the start and a decent salary. I took over the management of a construction company and worked there until 1975, when I retired.
In 1986 I moved to Kolozsvar. I inherited a house there with a garden of two hundred ten square meters, a yard of eighty square meters, including the building. I should have repaired the house, but I had no money so I sold it for 27 million. In 1998 I came back to Nagybanya and bought my present home for 16 million, and I spent another million on repairs.
I have two daughters, the elder one is Livia and she was born in 1953, while the other, Rodica, was born in 1959. Both of them are certified English teachers. In the meantime I divorced my wife, because back then a problem has arisen because I had different thoughts about my daughters' future, while she insisted on emigrating to Israel.
Then I haven't thought it was the momewnt for such an action, because the girls were still in school, one of them was in ninth grade, while the other was in the second year at the university, and both of them had very good results.
I didn't want to pull them out, because who knows where we would have ended up? Who could guarantee me I would have been able to afford to pay for their studies? Because school in Israel costs. She emigrated anyway with her whole family. And she thought I would hurry for her.
I told her I was not able to go, because of the situation. 'you'll see, you'll come too. I have to go. My mother is very sick, Iunica is very sick and someone had to go with them.' I told her: 'But you have a family, honey.
You have a family here, and children, as well.' 'But the children are healthy and...' She emigrated in the 1960s, I don't know exactly when. It doesn't matter anyway. She is retired now. She was an accountant all her life in Qiryat Ata, where she lives now. We are on good terms, we spoke on the phone yesterday.
So I remained here with my daughters. The elder was already a bride, the groom's father was a doctor in Iasi. Both girls graduated university in Iasi and became English teachers. The younger emigrated to Israel in 1974-1975, while the elder emigrated to America a year before that.
It happened that she and her husband managed to get some tickets to Yugoslavia for a summer vacation, and they just walked over the border to Italy, it was a one-day or two-day trip. They went there and forgot to come back. They remained there and worked.
My son-in-law worked at a garage, while my daughter washed the dishes in a restaurant. But no one knew English, so when they had English speaking guests she was asked to talk to them. One time, when they had such a group there, she spoke with a lady who asked her who she was and what was she doing there, and she told her the whole story.
Then this lady said: 'Listen, when you arrive in New York, look me up!', and gave my daughter her card. And in deed, when they go there, she looked this lady up and she was hired right away in the Tiffany jewelry store. Now she's working at another company, on the computer. Her husband, Silviu Salamon, is a construction engineer. [They don't have children.]
My younger daughter's husband is Eduard Matis, an architect. He is originally from Romania, as well. They were already married when they emigrated. They have two children. Roni, the elder one, was born in 1981, while the other, Eden, in 1995, and she is in third grade. Roni lives in Qiryat Bialik, this is almost part of Haifa now, but he works in Haifa and sells cosmetics.
Before 1989 the Jews who were members of the party were not usually allowed to have contacts with foreigners, even with their relatives. But the relatives from Israel were an exception because the party considered they survived Auschwitz.
So if my younger brother was in Sweden, I had an indirect contact with him, through my younger sister from Israel. I had information about my elder daughter through her husband's father, who was a doctor in Iasi.
In 1968 I decided I would go to Sweden. My brother sent me an invitation, because this was the only way. I went to the police and submitted a request for visiting my brother, who was living in Sweden.
Well, after 10 days I got the answer: 'Nu se aproba.' ['Request rejected.'] As soon as I received this notification, I took a sheet of paper and wrote the following on it [in Romanian]: 'Comrade commander, Hitler and Horthy destroyed my family.
Miraculously me and my brother survived. He is living in Sweden. I think the Socialist Republic of Romania is compelled to help me meet my brother after 26-27 years, and not to stop me. I sign this in hope of a favorable solution to the above.' No yours sincerely or something similar [as an ending to the letter].
After one week they called me and gave me my passport. Why do I know it was in 1968? Because I started off and when I arrived in Budapest, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. [The interviewee refers to the Prague Spring.] 17 The train stopped and no more trains were going anywhere.
I had nothing to do, so I met one of my friends in [Buda]Pest, called Tibor Frank. We were prisoners of war together. He came to the station and I went to his place, and on the next day there was a train coming to Romania, I took it and came back. When things calmed down, I went to the police again to request a permission to go.
'But you already were there, weren't you, comrade?' 'Yes, I was, but look how far I've got! Considering the events, I thought my place is with my family.' They approved it in the end and I managed to go to Sweden.
To tell you the truth, I was offered to emigrate to Israel already in 1948, shortly after I came home. another friend of mine, Bumi Waldmann, the one I saved his life, called me to emigrate to America.
He did and became a very wealthy man. But I thought I would not emigrate. I was very tired, I walked about for so long, and they told us here that if you work honestly, you would be appreciated.
Well, I didn't think I was dishonest or lazy, so I have no reason to leave, to run away. I would stay here. I was born here, this was my mother tongue, I finished school here, here I was feeling at home. This was my opinion then, so I stayed.
Then I got married, worked at a state enterprise, then I had children, I was able to educate them without money [Editor's note: they went to public schools, which was free], and I wanted to provide them a diploma and a decent living.
I wasn't sure I could do if I emigrated to Israel. Because Israel a capitalist country, at least that's what I thought, and everything had to be paid for. And I could only work honestly, and I didn't know if that was enough there. This is what I thought then. I was wrong.
Moreover, it takes more than just honesty and hard work. I was managing a company that was growing and had some concrete results, a fact they appreciated because I was always getting bonuses. I received bonuses a rector was getting, and only a very few had such luck every three months. I was.
I visited Israel for the first time in the 1960s. What do I think about it? Well, to be honest, everything I've seen was beautiful. But most of all I saw the beauty in having a place Jews could call their own. I didn't have this opinion at first.
Back then there was no radio, TV, they showed us nothing, they wrote what they wrote – everyone from their own perspective or according to their interest –, there were very few objective journalists.
I almost believed that the problem of the Jews would be settled by international law. Then I realized we were very far, as far as Mars. And I also realized that peoples had to have their own home and each of them should organize their home according to their best interests.
They should take into consideration the world that surrounds them! I can't say we can become independent, and I don't care, everybody should do as they please, and I'm doing just that. Interdependence (and not independence) should prevail, but, of course, as naturally as possible. But if you think this is not important, cut it.
When I saw how the construction works was carried out there and what vigor they had in every field! They showed me places that were a desert before, and by now they made banana fields and date fields there.
They have such forests, such beautiful things! People breed turkey by thousands here, while there, a man called Klein, originally from Szamosujvar, had 70 cows and told me the cow that does not give at least 35 l of milk is not a cow anymore, they don't use it on the dairy farm.
When I saw how they milked them! In other words the people others [Nazis] said are no good, built homes and agriculture. When I saw the food market and how it looked, that abundance!
This is done by a Jew with payes, that by a haberdasher, another one by, say, a wheeler. Then I thought to myself this has its magic, after all. And apart from that most of the people learned something after World War II.
Because that's the key to it! For us, including me, the important thing is not to cry and make you pity us. Don't pity us, don't! Take not of what happened and they should never happen again!
This should be told to Feri, Pista, Vasile, Lenuta, Marika [fictional Hungarian and Romanian names], and everyone should understand we should live in different circumstances, without any prejudice, but in mutual respect.
But I don't want to seem biased, because even though Israel has its beauty, but they have their wretches, as well. I know, I'm sure of it. Because even among the Jews there are, and unfortunately not in small numbers, people whom I would surely whip, and I would not stop after 25 lashes!
Because Jews are just like any other people. There are honest, talented people, but villains, as well. Therefore if one says Jew, but one doesn't see the human being behind the tag, one has already made a mistake.
I visited a beautiful little kibbutz, not too far from Haifa, called Dalia, as the flower. Once it was an agricultural kibbutz, but it became one of the largest chemical factories, and they make different chemicals, such as the best detergents and materials required for painting.
Joska Heisikovits [our paternal grandfathers were brothers], one of the founders of the kibbutz, told me once: 'Do you see this forest?' 'I do.' 'When we came here, it was a desert, full of rocks.
We gathered the rocks.' - and he showed me how they gathered the rocks in a pile, and then they made a long, almost endless fence from it. 'Back then we lived in wooden barracks.
Now imagine living in wooden barracks in this hot weather. There were scorpions and snakes everywhere. Now, as you can see, there's forest everywhere.' We walked towards the forest, and before we got it there was a beautiful large building. 'What's that?', I asked. 'That's a concert hall.' 'A concert hall?' 'Yes. From time to time the different philharmonic orchestras play here.
On those occasions we inform the surrounding kibbutzim and they come to the concert.' And then I saw their apartment, and how a kibbutz apartment looks like. The dimensions of the house depends on how large the family is. There are even four-room apartments there.
The smallest are the two-room apartments with a vestibule and a bathroom. Then he showed me the daycare and the elementary school. I saw the gymnasium. It is so big it can accommodate international competitions.
After I've seen all these things, we went to have lunch. It was a large restaurant-like building. There were different types of menus, and people from the kibbutz are assigned each day to serve and to do different things. Since then I was four or five times in Israel. I was there this year, as well.
The thought of emigrating to Israel came to me very late, only after I retired. In the meantime different things happened, such as family problems that prevented me from thinking about it earlier. Moreover, I even have the permission to settle there.
The state of Israel provides a free airplane ticket to anyone willing to emigrate. As soon as you arrive there, you are given the citizenship or you get a certain amount of money until they figure out what category they should assign you as retired. It's difficult for me to move there, though.
I was very afraid of the heat, I can't stand the heat. I don't know where would I move to, but I would have liked to be close to my daughter and sister. I saw the home for the older immigrants. Take my ex mother-in-law, for instance.
I visited her, he got a one-room apartment with vestibule and a bathroom in a hotel-like home not far from Naharyya, and she has a free meal, of course. There is a common dining hall where they eat in groups, the Hungarians, the Romanians or the French. Because Jews from 81 countries came there.
I had a discussion with a lady who came back from Israel. She was visiting her sons. Her husband was a chemist here and they are doing well there. She said: 'You know, there is something I don't like there: people are divided into Hungarian Jews, Romanian Jews, Russian Jews, or, for that matter, German Jews.'
'Look, dear lady, you are right if you don't like it, but you have to understand that a nation cannot reborn overnight, even if they are living in the same home. Because some come with a Spanish experience, customs, meals, while those who came from Hungary tend to favor the Hungarian taste, don't they?
Those who came from Ethiopia eat different meals and have different habits than those coming from Morocco, who are half-Arabs, and have Arab customs, clothing, are speaking a different language and eating habits.
But their children, the children of the Romanian Jews, the Hungarian Jews and any other Jews will attend the same school. They become friends, they can even fall in love, and they too can have children who will only speak Hebrew or English. And this is how the new nation will form and born again.'
In the past everyone used to celebrate at home, with their family. But now, my brother related me, because there are many old people's homes, they used to organize common dinners, as well.
And here in [Nagy]Banya there are common dinners organized at the Community. And what can I do at home [by myself] on a holiday [like Pesach]? Nothing. And there are others into he same situation, some twenty people. So we gather – guided and covered by the Center [the Association from Bucharest], and we all eat at the Community for seven days.
On Pesach there are eight free meals, the first one is in the first evening, and on the following seven days. And occasionally, on Saturdays, we have a snack after we come out from the Synagogue.
What does it include? There is a place at the table for each of us, and a glass of palinka, and some sandwiches, this and that. Then we have the traditional Jewish meal, the egg with onion - but not only eggs and onion, but with some oil and spiced up - and bread, then a glass of wine or beer, a cup of black coffee and some cookies.
This happens almost every Saturday. For example, two weeks ago I gave [on my own account] this to the people gathered there [the other members of the community]. It's not mandatory, but anyone who wishes to will announce the community in due time.
By the way, I introduced this custom here. And others are joining in, as well. On these occasions, if there is a leader who knows parts from the Talmud or [Jewish] history, and anything applying to the current situation, he may talk about it. But unfortunately we don't have such a person, they all died.
But they are happy if they receive the blessing called Kiddush. I'm doing this [common meal] at least four times a year. This costs at least five-six hundred thousand lei [13-15 Euro]. Because we are not many. In my case there is a very charming, nice lady, our warehouseman's wife, and she knows I live alone and offered to do all these things.
I just give her the money, bring the palinka, sugar, coffee, and sometimes even bread. But I'm buying caviar and prepare a slice or two of bread with it for everyone, and I also bring some processed cheese. So everyone gets around four slices of bread after the palinka. Anyway my intention is not to fatten people, but to create a nice atmosphere.
Here in Nagybanya there is a religious organization called Pro Iudaica. Its leader is a Hungarian man who graduated the theological college. His wife is Romanian. He is a very charming man.
Since they are Pro Iudaica followers, they sympathize and are familiar with the Jewish religion, and they organized a very, very nice performance based on the Esther story, and they once had the idea to invite the community to celebrate Purim.
They came to the president of the community, Shalik Nachman, but he was reluctant. But incidentally he asked my opinion. I said: 'Look here, Mr. Nachman, if nowadays someone reaches out a hand, you should grab it with both hands.'
They invited us to such a celebration – we don't have the means to organize such things, because we are lacking young people. So we had a reason more to go. And it was very nice. It was such a lovely performance that, I swear, I was moved to tears when I saw those little or bigger children in the choir singing Jewish songs.
How could it be? How could something like this happen? Because children were inoculated with anti-Semitism from birth, and here we had people doing the exact opposite, acknowledging these people.
Two weeks ago [around mid October 2004], on a Sunday, I heard that on the wall of the catholic church located at the entrance of the 'Nagyvarad park', they put a memorial tablet dedicated to the deeds of colonel Reviczky. That church was built by Jewish forced laborers.
Reviczky, in order to prevent them from being sent to the Ukraine, he tried to put people to work. I held once a photo in my hands, on which there were some forced laborers digging the foundation and removing the stones.
Reviczky saved lives! In the true meaning of the word. Therefore it should have been a street named after him here in Nagybanya, or at least a memorial tablet put on the house he was living in long ago. But they wouldn't do it.
I feel I have to say that it's a mistake to condemn the entire population. During World War II there were people like Reviczky, for example a man called Bela Racz, and many others.
And there are the anonymous heroes noone knows about because they were just villagers like that man from Szamosujvarnemeti. In 1946, after those Jews who were under his command as forced laborers came back, began to look for Reviczky.
They found out he was in [Buda]Pest and works on a coal-depot as worker, because as former officer his rank and rights weren't recognized. When these people found out this fact, they went straight to the Hungarian Communist Party, I don't know who was their leader then.
They considered this situation abnormal, and explained them this was an unfair treatment, because this man behaved entirely differently [during World War II]. Then he got back his rank as colonel and his apartment.
First they brought him here to Nagybanya, Nagyvarad and Kolozsvar, and celebrated him. In Israel, in the so-called 'Garden of the Righteous' [Yad Vashem] they even planted a beautiful tree as a homage to him. In addition, he received a monthly salary from the state of Israel.
He is not the only one. Naturally, anyone they know helped the Jews receives an allowance and appears in the records at the Yad Vashem, and in the 'Garden of the Righteous' there are pathways where trees were planted in their memory, and they received a monthly allowance so they could live decently.
So there were these kind of people, and one has to distinguish between them and those who were hitting, beating up or shooting Jews without any reason. Jews and non-Jew both must know that. One has to understand them and appreciate these deeds!
1 Kulak (Chiabur in Romanian):. Between 1949-1959 peasants in Romania, who had 10-50 hectares of land were called kulaks, those who owned more than 50 exploiters. Their land was confiscated.
They were either expelled from their houses and deported to the Baragan Steppes and the Danube Delta, where they had to work under inhuman conditions, or they were discriminated in every possible way (by forcing them to pay impossibly high taxes, preventing their children from entering higher education, etc.).
2 Imre Reviczky (has to be translated from Hungarian):
3 Emigration vawe from Romanan between 1919–1923 (has to be translated from Hungarian)
4 Agrarian reform in Romania (1921): Specific laws were implemented by the Romanian agrarian reform for each region.
In Transylvania the corporate bodies serving public interests (congregations, foundations, universities, convents) as well as the absentees (those living in Hungary who owned Transylvanian lands) were dispossessed according to the 6th paragraph of the Transylvanian law.
In addition all the estates over 50 and 100 Hungarian acres (1 Hungarian acre is 0, 57 hectares) in mountainous and hilly districts, and over 200 acre in flatlands were expropriated as well.
5 1929 World Financial Crisis Financial Crisis: At the end of October 1929, there were worrying signs on the New York Stock Exchange in the securities market. On the 24th of October ("Black Thursday"), people began selling off stocks in a panic from the price drops of the previous days – the number of shares usually sold in a half year exchanged hands in one hour.
The banks could not supply the amount of liquid assets required, so people didn’t receive money from their sales. Five days later, on "Black Tuesday", 16.4 million shares were put up for sale, prices dropped steeply, and the hoarded properties suddenly became worthless.
The collapse of the Stock Exchange was followed by economic crisis. Banks called in their outstanding loans, causing immediate closings of factories and businesses, leading to higher unemployment, and a decline in the standard of living.
By January of 1930, the American money market got back on it’s feet, but during this year newer bank crises unfolded: in one month, 325 banks went under.
Toward the end of 1930, the crisis spread to Europe: in May of 1931, the Viennese Creditanstalt collapsed (and with it’s recall of outstanding loans, took Austrian heavy industry with it). In July, a bank crisis erupted in Germany, by September in England, as well.
In Germany, in 1931, more than 19,000 firms closed down. Though in France the banking system withstood the confusion, industrial production and volume of exports tapered off seriously. The agricultural countries of Central Europe, were primarily shaken up by the decrease of export revenues, which was followed by a serious agricultural crisis.
Romanian export revenues dropped by 73 percent, Poland’s by 56 percent. In 1933 in Hungary, debts in the agricultural sphere reached 2.2 billion Pengo. Compared to the industrial production of 1929, it fell 76 percent in 1932 and 88 percent in 1933.
Agricultural unemployment levels, already causing serious concerns, swelled immensely to levels, estimated at the time to be in the hundreds of thousands. In industry the scale of unemployment was 30 percent (about 250,000 people). (from Zoltan Kaposi, The History of 20thCentury Agriculture, Budapest, Dialog-Campus, 2004).
6 Barisia: Zionist youth organization under the rule of the Erdelyi Zsido Nemzeti Szovetseg (Transylvanian Jewish National Federation), which organized the Jewish youth without taking into consideration any ideological differences.
The Aviva girl-organization, the fellow organization of Barisia operated in the same way. Following the Transylvanian and Romanian example, other European countries founded their own Aviva and Barisia groups.
In 1939 the Transylvanian Barisia had 23 local organizations and 1,564 active members. Unlike other Zionist youth organizations, based on the idea of chaluc-training (chaluc means emigrant), Barisia emphasized the cultural and social aspect.
7 Hatikvah: Anthem of the Zionist movement, and national anthem of the State of Israel. The word ‘ha-tikvah’ means ‘the hope’. The anthem was written by Naftali Herz Imber (1856-1909), who moved to Palestine from Galicia in 1882.
The melody was arranged by Samuel Cohen, an immigrant from Moldavia, from a musical theme of Smetana’s Moldau (Vltava), which is based on an Eastern European folk song.
8 Keren Kayemet Leisrael (K.K.L.) in Romania: Jewish National Fund (JNF) founded in 1901 at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel. From its inception, the JNF was charged with the task of fundraising in Jewish communities for the purpose of purchasing land in the Land of Israel to create a homeland for the Jewish people. After 1948 the fund was used to improve and afforest the territories gained.
Every Jewish family that wished to help the cause had a JNF money box, called the ‘blue box’. They threw in at least one lei each day, while on Sabbath and high holidays they threw in as many lei as candles they lit for that holiday. This is how they partly used to collect the necessary funds. Now these boxes are known worldwide as a symbol of Zionism.
9 Aviva: Zionist youth organization under the rule of the Erdelyi Zsido Nemzeti Szovetseg (Transylvanian Jewish National Federation), which organized the Jewish girls without taking in consideration any ideological differences.
The Barisia-organization, the fellow organization of Aviva operated in the same way. Following the Transylvanian and Romanian example, other European countries founded their own Aviva and Barisia groups.
In 1926 the Transylvanian Aviva had 62 local organizations and 740 active members. Unlike other Zionist youth organizations, based on the idea of chaluc-training (chaluc means emigrant), Aviva emphasized the cultural and social aspect.
10 Uj Kelet (New East): Transylvanian Jewish political daily in the period between 1918-1940. The paper was published under the direction of Erdelyi Zsido Nemzeti Szovetseg (Transylvanian Jewish National Federation), and promoted Jewish nationalism, Zionism, culture and interests. It has been published in Tel-Aviv since 1948.
11 Numerus clausus in Hungary: The general meaning of the term is restriction of admission to secondary school or university for economic and/or political reasons. The Numerus Clausus Act passed in Hungary in 1920 was the first anti-Jewish law in Europe.
It regulated the admission of students to higher educational institutions by stating that aside from the applicants’ national loyalty and moral reliability, their origin had to be taken into account as well.
The number of students of the various ethnic and national minorities had to correspond to their proportion in the population of Hungary. After the introduction of this act the number of students of Jewish origin at Hungarian universities declined dramatically.
12 Hungarian era (1940-1944): The expression Hungarian era refers to the period between 30 August 1940 - 15 October 1944 in Transylvania. As a result of the Trianon peace treaties in 1920 the eastern part of Hungary (Maramures, Crisana, Banat, Transylvania) was annexed to Romania.
Two million inhabitants of Hungarian nationality came under Romanian rule. In the summer of 1940, under pressure from Berlin and Rome, the Romanian government agreed to return Northern Transylvania, where the majority of the Hungarians lived, to Hungary. The anti-Jewish laws introduced in 1938 and 1939 in Hungary were also applied in Northern Transylvania.
Following the German occupation of Hungary on 19th March 1944, Jews from Northern Transylvania were deported to and killed in concentration camps along with Jews from all over Hungary except for Budapest.
Northern Transylvania belonged to Hungary until the fall of 1944, when the Soviet troops entered and introduced a regime of military administration that sustained local autonomy. The military administration ended on 9th March 1945 when the Romanian administration was reintroduced in all the Western territories lost in 1940.
13 Iron Guard: Extreme right wing political organization in Romania between 1930 and 1941, led by C. Z. Codreanu. The Iron Guard propagated nationalist, Christian-mystical and anti-Semitic views.
It was banned for its terrorist activities (e.g. the murder of Romanian Prime Minister I. Gh. Duca) in 1933. In 1935 it was re-established as a party named Totul pentru Tara, ‘Everything for the Fatherland’, but it was banned again in 1938.
It was part of the government in the first period of the Antonescu regime, but it was then banned and dissolved as a result of the unsuccessful coup d’état of January 1941. Its leaders escaped abroad to the Third Reich.
14 Arrow Cross Party: The most extreme of the Hungarian fascist movements in the mid-1930s. The party consisted of several groups, though the name is now commonly associated with the faction organized by Ferenc Szalasi and Kalman Hubay in 1938. Following the Nazi pattern, the party promised not only the establishment of a fascist-type system including social reforms, but also the ‘solution of the Jewish question’.
The party’s uniform consisted of a green shirt and a badge with a set of crossed arrows, a Hungarian version of the swastika, on it. On October 15, 1944, when Governor Horthy announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the war, the Arrow Cross seized power with military help from the Germans.
The Arrow Cross government ordered general mobilization and enforced a regime of terror which, though directed chiefly against the Jews, also inflicted heavy suffering on the Hungarians. It was responsible for the deportation and death of tens of thousands of Jews.
After the Soviet army liberated the whole of Hungary by early April 1945, Szalasi and his Arrow Cross ministers were brought to trial and executed.
15 Territorial reorganization in 1952: The new constitution adopted in 1952 declared Romania a country, which started to build up communism. The old administrative system was abolished, and the new one followed the Soviet pattern: the administrative partition of the country consisted of 18 regions (‘regiune’), each of them subdivided into so called ‘raions’.
In the same year the so-called Hungarian Autonomous Region was founded, a third of which was made up by the Hungarian inhabitants living in Romania.
The administrative center of this region was Targu Mures/Marosvasarhely, and it was subdivided into ten ‘raions’: Csik, Erdoszentgyorgy, Gyergyoszentmiklos, Kezdivasarhely, Marosheviz, Marosvasarhely, Regen, Sepsiszentgyorgy, Szekelyudvarhely.
16 Party clean-up in Romania (new, is not written yet)
17 Prague Spring: Designates the liberalization period in communist ruled Czechoslovakia between 1967-1969. In 1967 Alexander Dubcek became the head of the Czech Communist Party and promoted ideas of ‘socialism with a human face', i.e. with more personal freedom and freedom of the press, and the rehabilitation of victims of Stalinism.
In August 1968 Soviet troops, along with contingents from Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria, occupied Prague and put an end to the reforms.
Sofija Zoric-Demajo
Serbia
Interviewer: Ida Labudovic
Date of interview: January 2002
Family Background
I am Sofija Simha Zoric-Demajo. I was named Simha because I was born on Simhat Torah (October 17) and, because of this, was given the nickname. My official name is Sofija.
When I was young, about five or six years old, I went with my mother to Pirot [where my grandfather lived]. My grandfather had a big white beard, big strands of amber rosaries. He sat on the second-floor porch, terrace, playing with the rosaries, and all around there were grapes and green grass. I did not know my grandmother; she must have died before I was born. My maternal uncle, who at that time was in gymnasium, studied in Zagreb and went on to become a pharmacist. My other maternal uncle, Zak, was a merchant and had two shops in Nis. I remember one [maternal] aunt named Ester but I do not remember the rest of them. They were not married. They were beautiful and my uncle was handsome. My [third] uncle was a haham in Pristina. My uncle's wife wore a velvet and silk hat, a special Jewish hat which is still considered modern today. We called her aunt Bulisa. They had three children. The boy was called Majer and lived in Skopje. He was most likely killed by the Germans or was taken to a camp in Germany, Austria, or Poland.
I remember my father's family. My father's mother died during childbirth. He was born in the seventh month of her pregnancy. After a certain period, my grandfather realized that he needed to get married immediately in order to be able to take care of my father. Only when I was older did I learn that my grandmother was not my father's birth mother. But he respected her; whenever she wanted something, he did it. After my grandfather died, she always asked the eldest son (that is, my father) for help. He took care of his brothers and sisters. If they needed anything, he helped them. My aunt, Marijeta, fled with her husband to Paris. The youngest aunt married a merchant in 1941. We did not see one another, she hid and I hid. Another aunt had a shop in Obrenovac and later in Ub, with her husband. My uncle wanted to study art in Budapest, but he was young; he spent the money set aside for his studies without restraint and returned a photographer. He ended up in Obrenovac. There was an argument about this, but I was just a child and did not understand what had happened. I had an aunt who we called Branka - I cannot remember her Jewish name. I do not know what happened to my uncle's sister in Paris from '41 onwards as we never got any mail from her. The same thing is true about the cousin in Skoplje. My other aunt was named Rakila. My aunt Rakila and her husband died. My paternal uncle Mihajlo, the photographer, died. Only one daughter and one son are still alive. He lives in Ub and she in Belgrade.
My father and mother met in Belgrade when she came to visit and live with her brother. They met and got married. My father was a widower. He had three children. The eldest sister was Sol Suncica, then brother Samuilo Sima, and sister Sarina Jelena. My mother viewed herself as their birth mother and took care of them. Then my brother, Tuvi Dikica, was born. We did not know until we were older that we had two different mothers. I was named after their mother Sofija, and my mother handed over my upbringing to my elder sister, and she raised me [Sofija's mother was ill and knew that she would likely die].
My sisters were older than me but, after my mother left my upbringing to them, they did the job well. To this day, I remain faithful to that upbringing. I never use curse words, never raise my voice, not even to those younger than I, even though I am 89 years old. I was always mild natured, not a nervous person, and I did good deeds. Even though many people blackmailed me throughout the German occupation [those who knew that Sofija was a Jew], I forgave them after the war.
Growing Up
I went to Janko Veselinovic elementary school on Dusanova Street. My teacher was Estera Ruso, she also taught the Orthodox children; Veroslava Jugovic, for one, although I cannot remember all their names, but there were Jewish and Orthodox children in the same class. Her [Estera's] husband worked for the Belgrade municipality. He always visited us and brought us chocolates and pralines. Our teacher was lovely, beautiful. Instead of handiwork we learned drawing. Our drawing teacher was a Russian refugee. We had a mixed choir, and every morning the teacher gave us an egg to drink, so that our voices would be clear. She taught us honesty, discipline, and good work habits. Our rabbi, Dr. Lang, had a daughter who also studied with us. She was my friend. I think she lived in a house on Jewish Street. Even though I lived near Tasmajdan, I went to her place and we socialized. In the II Women's Gymnasium, we had religion lessons instructed by Jewish Dr. Lang. Before the war, I socialized with Reom Aserovic, Bertica Davidovic, and Greta Levi, Dr Lang's daughter.
My mother maintained religious traditions in our home. On Friday evenings, she would lay down a special tablecloth, plates, and napkins. It was Father's ritual to place a small present under each child's plate on Friday nights. The table was set, first duck eggs were cooked in onion skin, and then Father would cut an egg into four parts and divide it among us children as an appetizer. He would have a small glass of rakija [brandy], because he did not drink a lot. In general, our Jews were not alcoholics. Rather, every day, or on holidays, they would have a small glass of rakija, wine, or spritzer. Then Mother would prepare pastel with meat. It was all covered with a special cloth and when father came home from the synagogue she would pick it up and give us an egg and, eventually, some other small thing. Naturally, the food was kosher. There is no big difference between Jewish and Serbian Orthodox food; peas, potato puree, and meat, etc. are regularly eaten. Pastel was a must on Shabbat evening, Friday night. Everything I am talking about was for Shabbat evening, this is how it was for Friday night dinners. The next day, Father went to synagogue. I remember very well that, on Yom Kippur, Mother gave us a quince with cloves punched into it. This was so that we could fast and not eat until the sun set, but I do not remember if we were allowed to drink water. Then we ate again - kosher, naturally. For Pesach, my mother had a big trunk with metal handles. In there was where she kept pots, cutlery, plates, and other dishes which were used only for holidays, when she would take out those kosher plates. For Purim, we dressed up as jesters, as men. Costume parties were organized for children and adults in the Jewish community. Later, even though I married a Serbian Orthodox man, I made pastel for my children; I made ruskitas wreaths from walnuts [cookies made by Sephardic Jews for Purim]; and, after Liberation, since my sister volunteered in the women's section, a Mrs. Danon always made ruskitas and sent me some because I was burdened with three children. My children loved those holidays. We celebrated their father's holidays as well, of course, but they also respected mine.
My [parents'] house or home was spacious and we had nice rooms, nice furniture. At the beginning, when I was born, it seems to me that we lived on Jewish Street. But we moved to 45 Kralja Aleksandra soon after, where Madera restaurant is today. This is Tasmajdan. My mother was in the Jewish goodwill society. They organized various tea parties - at a different person's house each time - and they sang, danced, and collected contributions for the poor. The Jewish poor were not noticeable, because people gave them money discretely, as with the sick and those who were soon to be married. People gave what they could and what they knew to give. Contributions were given with songs: someone sang a song and gave a contribution. Wherever they went, they brought cakes and made tea and hot chocolate. And mother always participated in these acts of goodwill. At home, we spoke [not only] Hebrew [and] Ladino [but] Serbian [as well] and we spoke it correctly. We went to school and socialized. We did not think about religion; my girlfriends were Orthodox and Catholics. My friend Marija, for instance, married a Catholic priest. We did not think about what religion we were and we helped one another in school. There was no anti-Semitism at that time. Maybe there was political anti-Semitism, but not amongst friends.
My father was a merchant and he had a shop on Kralja Aleksandra Street, on Tasmajdan, near St. Mark's Church. He sold suits and various other things. My father closed his store when he felt he could no longer compete with the younger and more promising people. He closed the store and lived on the interest, I do not know exactly how. In our family, the children never knew what the parents did or how they got by. My elder brother had a furniture store on Tasmajdan, also on Kralja Aleksandra Street, across from the law faculty. [He] had the store until the Germans came to Belgrade and confiscated people's property. He was wounded during the bombings. He was treated, but the Germans captured him and sent him to forced labor in Smederevo, Belgrade, and the surrounding ruins. After that, they locked him up in Topovska Supa [camp] at Autokomanda, and later in Sajmiste [camp in Belgrade]. I heard that, on one occasion when he bent over to pick up bread, one or two Germans beat him on the head and the rest of his body with shovels. I do not know if it is true, but I never saw him again. He was probably killed at the end of 1941. My youngest brother, who was two and a half years older than me, finished secondary technical school, but like every young Belgradian he thought he needed to learn a trade as well. Father wanted him to work in the store, but he did not want to do that. He wanted to finish learning the typesetting trade and then work as a typographer, engraver, and typesetter. He worked for a man named Horovic, and then for [the newspapers] Vreme, Politika, and I do not know where else. When the Germans came to Belgrade, they captured him and sent him to slave labor until November, or December, when the whole group was taken to forced labor, either in Germany or Austria. Or else he was killed in Banjica or in a mobile gas chamber. We never found out. His wife and two kids had to register at Tasmajdan. It seems to me that this happened in November, when we were already deep into winter, and the kids were from two to three and a half years old. They confiscated their three-and-a-half-room apartment, and they locked them up in Sajmiste. What happened to them, only history knows. They blackmailed us to send packages, we sent them; whether they received them or not comes down to the humanity of those people who blackmailed us.
My eldest sister loved singing and studied with Ms. Vinaver, a professor at the Music Academy. She taught my sister both piano and singing. My sister completed her degree in the Faculty of Humanities. She knew many languages: French, English, German, Italian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Esperanto. She worked as a correspondent for a Swiss-Serbian bank until she married lieutenant colonel Gradimir Spasic. He took part, as an academic, in all the wars, and received the rank of lieutenant colonel. Passing through Albania, he was wounded and spent twenty four hours in the snow. For some time before the war he was in the military hospital in a full body cast. He spent some time in all of the sanatoriums in Kraljevica and ended up in a military hospital.
My sister Jelena Sarina finished gymnasium, married, and became a housewife. She married Jug Nikasinovic in 1922 or 1923. He was head of the Tax Board in Smederevo and it was there that they had a son, Djordje. After his birth, they moved immediately to Belgrade, where they stayed and had a girl: Sofija, Sonja. They moved to Zemun where he was also head of the Tax Board. They hid there. The NDH [Independent State of Croatia] was in control there, so it was somewhat more secure than where we were since we were under German control.
In 1934, or at the end of 1933, my brother socialized with my future husband. That is how I met him. He fell in love with me and I liked him a little bit. We dated for a month or two and, on 1 November 1934, we married [although Sofija's husband wasn't a Jew, the family easily accepted their marriage]. He was employed as Djordje Vajfert's financial director. He had a good salary. Djordje Vajfert owned the Kostolac mine, had projects in the Borski and Trepca mines, owned breweries, etc. When Djordje Vajfert died, Dr. Granberg, his nephew, inherited everything. During the occupation, Dr. Granberg helped us. Somehow, he was able to change my name and falsify my papers. He erased the name Demajo and replaced it with Dekic, so that, to some extent, I was able to save myself.
The Beginning of the War
I had my first daughter, Radmila, when we lived at 14 Francuska Street, on 10 September 1935 - my husband's birthday. I gave birth at home. In those days, you could give birth at home because the midwives and doctors who took care of me were good. My second daughter, Ruzica, was born on 24 November 1937. The same midwife and doctor helped me. I did not go to the hospital because I was delicate, but I liked that they were around me and that they made it possible for me to give birth at home. The children were born healthy, they progressed, but in 1941 the war broke out. We lived at 1 Zelena Venac, in the Serbian Doctor's Society building. When the war broke out, we moved to Zahumska Street, I think number 37. We fled as soon as Russia declared war, because it was at this time that I began to receive messages ordering me to register at Tasmajdan, because I am a Jew by origin. If they had found me I would have been killed like the rest of them. I registered, but then I regretted this - both my husband and I did - because then I began receiving calls to report for forced labor. Luckily, my brother had done a good deed for a woman who worked for the Belgrade municipality. She was responsible for registration and either had the registration files or had access to them.
My husband and I decided to commit suicide, with the children too, so that we could all die at the same time. He acquired something, I think they were cyanide capsules. We lived in the Serbian Doctor's Society building and he kept their books for free. I suppose that one of the doctors recommended or acquired those pills, or whatever they were, for him, but I do not know how. In any case, we decided to do it. In the meantime, we were visited by my eldest brother. He came to see how we were, to see if we were going to move, to escape - to find out what we were going to do. We told him that I had received the calls. He met with that woman from the Belgrade municipality for whom he had done something good. She risked her life and ripped up my file. She could not have done that for him because that would have been too much, but, in any case, my file was ripped up and I did not get any more calls. In the meanwhile, we found a small house on the periphery and hid there.
In Hiding
We fled to the periphery, the tip of Konjarnik. No one knew us there. They thought that we had fled from town to spare our two children from the bombings, the constant "Achtung!", "Achtung!". They assumed that we were rich, which meant that we then had to pay a lot of people off to get them to leave us in peace. I did not go into town, I was not permitted. My husband got all the necessary things, the neighbors and the milkman also helped us to some extent. So, we managed. We hid in a dug-out, slept a little, but, in general, managed to withdraw enough to see us to Liberation. Dr. Granberg helped us with groceries, which he provided for all the miners and staff who worked for him.
On the periphery we were to some extent secure. Some of those who knew me needed to be paid off to be quiet, so that they would not tell. My husband's colleagues and their wives all helped me survive. They visited us secretly, they sent various necessary things for me and the children. Although my husband never told me, I felt that there were some people who blackmailed us. He paid them off - how, I do not know - and somehow we got by. The Germans only knocked on our door once, that was in 1942. They were looking for a man also named Dusan, but with a different last name. Just before this visit, I had given birth to our youngest daughter, Brankica, Branislava, and I was still weak and in bed. My husband got up to open the door and I laid covered up to my head. He told them that I had just given birth and was unable to get out of bed. Seeing the chaos, they left. But we were shocked and were unable to eat for a week, nor were we able to sleep peacefully for fear that they would come back. I gave birth to Brankica with an unknown midwife, a neighbor helped me by going to get her, she knew the woman. I gave birth very quickly, without complications, as if God himself knew that he needed to help me. The child was born healthy. Before Liberation, friends found us an apartment at 72a Strahinica Bana. During the period when half of Belgrade was liberated, but the area where we lived (Konjarnik) was not, somehow we managed to cross on foot, through the gunfire, to Strahinica Bana Street. We were there until Liberation, in October.
After the War
After Liberation, there were a lot of Germans on the roofs. They were shooting, so the children and I did not go out. Only my husband did, because he had to go to the office. My sister, who was made a widow before Liberation, moved to an apartment at 2 Ohridska Street, near the military hospital. She immediately started working in the Jewish community. I think that Alkalaj was the president. My sister volunteered in the women's section and did social work. She collected food. Jews who were held captive in the Borska mines were emerging, along with a few Belgradians, some foreigners, Hungarians, and inhabitants of various parts of Vojvodina. Mr. Vegner and she were the main provisioners. In a courtyard, maybe on Cara Urosa Street, they had a large kettle. My sister collected sugar, beans, potatoes, onions, etc., while other people gathered other things. Together, they cooked the provisions in this kettle for the newcomers. All together, there were maybe a thousand Jews from different areas: Zrenjanin, Novi Sad, Sombor, Subotica, etc. But many of them were at the kitchen because they did not have anywhere to sleep, no money, no clothing. From all sides, we - as much as possible - collected contributions of clothing, groceries, etc. until the community was formed, the JOINT was established, and others sent help. They helped a lot Belgrade half-Jews, Orthodox, and Catholics. Everyone helped as much as they could and knew how. Later, when things were a little more stable, performances for the Jewish holidays were organized. My children participated in recitations, ballet, etc.
After Liberation in 1945 I was reunited with my male friends and some girlfriends. One of my friends, Amodaj, was the technical director of Filmske Novosti, and another, Isak Amar, was the director of the Terazije Theatre. They told me about their lives. From 1941 onwards, they had been imprisoned. I do not know exactly if they were in Dachau, Treblinka, or Mauthausen – but they were with my best man Colonel Jovan Teodorovic. They had a hard life in captivity, but they survived. They returned looking like skeletons. One of my relatives, Isak Aserovic, came back from captivity and came to visit me when he learned that I lived at 72a Strahinica Bana. Later, in 1950, when he went to Israel, he wrote to me for some time. But then all trace of him was lost.
When the Mining Ministry of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was set up, my husband was the head of its financial section. Until the Ministry was abolished, he visited mines, controlled the finances, and then moved to the Faculty of Economics at the commercial college, where he taught bookkeeping. Later, he taught at the college part-time and for a period was the financial director of [the enterprise] Balkan and for radio and television stations in Belgrade, until he had a heart attack during a meeting.
My eldest daughter finished secondary school and enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities where she studied English, world literature and Serbo-Croatian grammar. She graduated and got a job with the Tanjug news agency as a translator, editor, and journalist. She worked at Tanjug for 31 years before retiring. She was married to Vidojko Velickovic. They have two children: Ana, who was born in 1959, and Dusan, who was born in 1965. Ana finished her degree in social work, got a master's degree, and is currently the assistant director of the Social Work Institute in Hartford, U.S.A. Dusan holds degrees from the the Electro-Technical Faculty and a mathematics college in Hartford. He also has a job. My middle daughter finished the gymnasium, became a secretary in an agricultural bank, and then worked for eight years as a stewardess for JAT. She married Stevan Labudovic and became a housewife. She has two children: Ida and Milutin. Ida finished a degree in anthropology, and Milutin is a photoreporter. He lives with his wife in Jerusalem. Branislava, my youngest daughter, finished secondary school, then got a degree from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Film and Television, and was a leading actress at the National Theatre. She worked for 32 years until she retired. She married Velibor Vasovic, a lawyer and famous football player, who was the captain of AIAX in Holland. My granddaughter, Ana Velickovic-Wittig, who also lives in Hartford, has two children. My great-grandson, Robert-Bobi, is almost twenty years old. My granddaughter, Aleksandra, is about fifteen years old. My youngest grandson, Milutin - who lives in Israel with his wife, Masa - is expecting a son in January. Therefore, soon, I will have three great-grandchildren.
I can tell you that, in general, not as a child, nor as a young girl, nor as a married woman, did I experience in Belgrade - nor while travelling to the seaside, around Serbia, Vojvodina, Slovenia, Croatia - any anti-Semitism. I had friends in Zagreb and in Slovenia, but the majority of them were in Belgrade. We reunited with each other, those who survived the bombings; we met up with each other until I got old. Now I have to have my grandchildren drive me to see my Orthodox and Catholic friends. In general, neither my father, my mother, nor my sisters felt that someone pointed the finger, singled us out as Jews, told us we were an inferior race, or said anything insulting. We all considered ourselves Yugoslavs.
