Gyula Foldes and Julia Foldesne Altman

This is a picture of my mother, Julia Foldesne Altman, and me, and I think that this was our third car, a red Fiat 850. The photo was taken on a one-day trip we took to the Matra mountains in 1965-66. Our first car was a Moskvits in 1963, the second was a Wartburg. [Both makes are socialist car makes, one is Soviet and the other is East-German.] We hated this second one and my mother kept telling me that we should sell it. Not because it was German but because it had a two-stroke engine. We bought all our cars new. At the time there were waiting lists to get a car but for a Moskvits you didn't have to wait for so long. Plus doctors got their cars before other people, that's one thing. The other is that I got acquainted with the party secretary of the Merkur Company and he recommended me and I got a car fast. [The Merkur company was the only car distributor company in socialist Hungary.] My mother was already a pensioner as she had suffered a stroke earlier but her interest in everday life and activities was the same as ever. Because of her stroke, she couldn't grip so well with her right hand, so she couldn't continue as a dentist. Before retiring she worked in a dental clinic in Budapest. She loved going on excursions and this photo was also made on such a trip. We went on trips abroad as well on several occasions. We lived in the same flat at this time as I was already divorced from my first wife, Anna Vidor. Anna's grandfather, Dr Odon Kalman, was the chief rabbi of Kobanya. [This is a working class district of Budapest.] Her father, Dr. Pal Vidor, was a rabbi at the Zsigmond Square synagogue. Her father had been killed in Mauthausen, her mother was a Hungarian-French teacher at Trefort. I met Annuska, as I called my wife, when we were 18, in 1951. After seven years of courtship we married in 1957. We met at the Sport swimming pool through friends. But we couldn't have got married while at university, neither her family nor mine were rich. Annuska was also a teacher at Kolcsey high school, she taught Hungarian. She is now retired. After three years of marriage we had a bitter divorce as she fell in love with a colleague, who divorced his wife and married her. I was very hurt.