Iuliu Guth

In this photo you can see my father, Iuliu Guth. The photo was taken by Miklos Honig, his brother-in-law. Miklos was married to my father's sister, Bella Honig. They lived in Oradea, but the picture was taken during one of the times they came to visit us, in Brasov. I don?t remember exactly when that was, my father was in his 40s then. My father was born in Belgrade, where his father worked, in 1902. After he died, he moved with his mother and her second husband, Schwartz, to Oradea. He graduated from commercial high school in Oradea, where he studied in Hungarian. He met my mother, Estera Guth, in Fagaras, and after they married they came to live in Brasov. They got married at the synagogue in Fagaras in 1930. My father worked as a proxy for the Romanian Banking Society in Brasov, which was actually a branch of a German bank. It was an important position; he had the authority from the general managers of the bank to take decisions in their name. My father worked on Sabbath and didn't observe the kashrut, but he did observe all high holidays. He was a Neolog, but he strongly identified himself as a Jew and he was a fervent Zionist. My father had been a member of Ivria, one of the first Jewish organizations in Brasov, which became Zionist only later. I don't know for sure, but I think he was a key person there. He never talked much to me about it, except that they used to play football. I think my parents had an exclusive circle of friends: they were entirely Jewish. During the war, my father eventually lost his job at the bank because of the anti-Jewish laws, the bank was German and of course all anti-Semitic decisions taken in Germany were implemented here as well. He had to work at the black market, doing some bookkeeping for different companies so that we could make a living.