Berta Brichta, Kati Andai's maternal grandmother

This is my maternal grandmother as a young woman. My mother's family lived in Oberland [today in Slovakia]. I don't know anything about them, they were all killed in the Holocaust; nobody survived. My grandparents lived in Kassa [today: Kosice]. They were not orthodox (nobody was in the family), no, they weren't religious at all. They didn't go to synagogue, not even at festivals. .I think their mother-tongue was German. My opinion is that they spoke German more easily than Hungarian. They talked to me in Hungarian, but not to my mother. Grandmother didn't work, she raised her three daughters, kept the house. When I was born they had a servant, and moreover she was always a Slovak, or as they used to say, a Tot. Later [in the 1930s] they had no servants any more. Grandmother wasn't jolly, she was always nervous. She was afraid of everything, and she always saw the dark side. She couldn't really show her feelings; she probably loved me as a grandchild, but I didn't really feel that. She could cook splendidly, and the house was pristine all the time. I went there for the last time when I was 15 years old, never after that. My grandparents poisoned themselves in the ghetto of Kassa, so they were not deported during the Holocaust.

Photos from this interviewee