Gyorgy Preisz with his mother

This is a picture of me and my mother, Margit Preisz, nee Blum, taken in Budapest in 1931. After World War I, the housing conditions were bad. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Tisza Street in Budapest. In 1931 my parents managed to get a comfortable two-bedroom apartment in Visegrad Street. My mother lived there until the time of the yellow star houses. My father died there, I went into forced labor service from there. My mother didn't work because, back then, my father maintained us easily with his bookkeeper's salary. We also had a servant, who lived in the servant's room. She did everything. My mother shopped at the market - there was the Lehel market - and at the grocery. The servant cooked, cleaned the house and did needlework. She was a country-girl whom my grandmother had sent to us and she worked for us until she got married. Most of the time my parents were satisfied with the servants, so every servant of ours spent a few years at our place. We had a servant not only there in Visegrad Street, but even when we had that one-bedroom apartment in Tisza Street. It was natural that there was a servant in a middle-class family because in the Horthy era the husband could earn enough money so that his wife wouldn't have to go work; they wouldn't have let her work anyway because people would speak badly of a man who couldn't maintain his wife and children. In middle-class families women stayed at home. I don't know what my mother did, besides going to the hairdresser, to the dressmaker, and to her girlfriends. She went out for walks, went to drink coffee. I went with her many times. I still know where the dressmaker's was, where the milliner's was, where the hairdresser's was. My mother was an elegant woman and she was beautiful, too. I also had a fraulein [governess]; we could even afford that, too. I went for walks with her many times, and we talked in German.

Photos from this interviewee