Janos and Csilla Laszlo

This is a picture of my mother's older brother, Janos Laszlo, and his wife, Csilla Laszlo, nee Weisz. They were very nice people. The picture was taken in Marosvasarhely by Erzsike Szilagyi, the daughter of a doctor . She wasn?t Jewish, she was a very nice and charming woman. She lived on Bolyai Street and had a room there where she took photos. I went to her studio once. It was a nice place, neatly furnished.

Uncle Janos was an accountant and did bookkeeping for Uncle Simi, Samuel Deutsch, the husband of Aunt Margit. Janos was a prisoner of war for a very long time [in World War I], but one could learn other languages there. He spoke Russian, German, French and Italian. The scene when he arrived at our house is still very vivid in my memory. He knew to whom my mom was married and where they lived, but had no idea where his parents lived. One morning he arrived, I was just coming out of the bathroom, and there they were sitting at the table in the children's room, Janos and another soldier, and they were talking to my mom. They had just arrived back from captivity.

Janos' family lived on Kossuth Lajos Street for a while, then they moved to Arad, and later to Temesvar. He got married in 1921. His wife, Csilla Weisz was a housewife. They have a daughter, Eva Laszlo, born in Marosvasarhely in 1922, who became a fashion designer. In 1950 she married Istvan Donath, a textile engineer, who lives in Germany and Australia. She has a granddaughter, Ingrid, who was a talented violinist, and they entered her in the Bucharest Academy of Music. In the meantime, in 1972, she married an engineer, Ervin Arden, and they emigrated to Israel, where she finished her studies. Then they divorced, and Ervin remained in Israel, while she moved to America. She always wanted to live in America. She first played in the philharmonic orchestra from Tel-Aviv, then in the one from New York. She was a very talented violinist. She divorced her first husband in 1979, and in 1996 got married again, to Siegfried Becker, a German physical instructor. Today she is a dentist in San Francisco.