Ferenc Also

This is a photo of my dear grandfather Ferenc Also. The photo was taken in Debrecen, sometime in the 1930s. Maybe it was part of some ID card, but I am not quite sure. This is the only photo I have of him. I lost all my family memories, among others, my photos, during the Holocaust.

According to the family the entire maternal side was Transylvanian, and apparently my grandfather was adopted by a Transylvanian noble family. His name, Also, was not a Magyarized one but the one he was originally given. He was for forty years a company prison warden, of the highest rank, in a military prison. I don't know when they came to Debrecen -- as they came from Transylvania to Debrecen -, and I believe he did the same in Debrecen.  He was very popular and never used a weapon. As far as I know there were Italian prisoners after World War I, and all sorts of nationalities there, and when there was an uprising he went down among them unarmed, and could always make peace. My grandfather had a medal from Franz Joseph, of which he was very proud. He was a religious Jew. For me that meant that he never breakfasted without praying first in tallit and with tefillin. My grandfather observed the holidays. He was I suppose brought up that way, and I heard from my mother that he had always done so, even during military service. So he did not eat breakfast without praying first. We also observed the holidays to the extent that on Yom Kippur we did not sit down to dinner until grandfather came home. He was gassed in 1944, he was deported. Although we had beseeched him, as he had papers [false papers, that is] and because of the way he looked - he didn't look Jewish at all - they could have come up to Pest, and perhaps there would have been a way of hiding them. He was not willing to, he always asked what his life would be worth if he couldn't follow what happened to us.