Bela Goldstein

This is Bela Goldstein, my father; I think the photo was taken in 1941/2 in Brasov, but I don?t recall a special occasion. My father was born in Sibiu in 1906; his mother tongue was Hungarian, and he graduated from high school. He married my mother, Paraschiva Goldstein, nee Goldsmann, in 1929, and he had a tobacco shop in Sibiu for a while, until 1940, in a rented house. It had one room and a little storage room in the back. My parents served the customers; they had no employees. They sold cigarettes, stamps, cigars, pipes, and tobacco in small carton boxes. My father didn't smoke, but my mother, especially after we moved to Brasov, used to smoke a cigarette every now and then. The shop was only two blocks away from the house where we lived in. I don't know why we moved to Brasov in 1940. My father set up a dental material depot there, with a Hungarian associate, Juhasz Iosif. On paper, this associate was the owner of the depot, and he was the one doing all the traveling, because Jews weren?t allowed to travel by train [because of the anti-Jewish laws]. During the war, we lived in fear, I remember; one time, a convoy of legionaries passed by our house, with a lot of noise, in cars and motorcycles, and my mother looked out the window, saw their uniforms - all legionaries were dressed in black leather jackets and green shirts - and she immediately turned all lights off and we hid; legionaries usually knew where Jews in Brasov lived, and she didn't want to risk anything, they would just force their way into one's house. There was no direct incident concerning our family, however.