Jeno Pardesz and Margo Lovith

This is my wife Margo Lovith, nee Breuer, with Jeno Pardesz, the younger brother of my mother. The photo was taken in Kolozsvar in 1946. After the war, there were many ingenious, not professional street photographers who had a good camera and earned money by taking photograps of the people in the street. Then they sent the photos to their homes and the people payed for them. This is such a photo. I met my wife Margo during deportation. Margo didn't stay in Hungary, we came to Kolozsvar straight away. We came back in September 1945, and our friends, who had been in other concentration camps, I don't know where, had been waiting for us. Margo came here when she was 20. Everybody loved her. Because I was married to her, all doors opened for me. [People were nicer to Egon because of Margo's friendly personality.] She wasn't a talkative person but when she spoke, she spoke wisely. She didn't laugh out loud a lot but she always had a smile on her face. Margo was comfortable among my friends and liked the places I went to. Everybody liked Margo and Jeno was particularly fond of her. Jeno used to take her everywhere and he also used to go shopping and help her with administrative stuff, because Margo had a difficult time not speaking Romanian. Jeno was a good-humored cheerful man with the biggest heart. By the time I came back from the deportation Jeno had been back from forced labor, too and he was working. He got hired by the Armatura factory, which was a metal appliance factory. As a skilled man, Jeno was hired quickly and worked in the storage department; he didn't need any vocational schooling there. Since he loved to travel, he took the buyer position, and a lot of times he even paid the bus fares out of his own pocket. He came with the parcels, bringing the products, and he also organized their transportation. Back then he traveled on the train between Kolozsvar and Bucharest all the time because the factory sent him as part of a delegation. Although Jeno had a terrible limp because he had bone tuberculosis and his operation failed, at times he still walked as much as 40 kilometers [during his buying trips].