Laszlo Nussbaum and his future wife, Silvia Brull

There was a [gentile] photographer in the main square of Kolozsvar, where this picture of me and my wife-to-be, Silvia Brull, was taken in 1947. I was a university student already then, my wife, Silvia, was only a 16-year-old girl; she came from Torda to Kolozsvar to study, to play the violin, with her music professor twice or three times a week. This was before her graduation. We met each other on such occasions, when she had time, and once we went to a photographer and had our photograph taken very proudly. One can see in the picture that my wife's seriousness makes her look older. I attended the same elementary school as my wife, in Torda, before the war, but I didn't remember her. I left Torda very early, at the age of about ten, and I went back in 1944. Only a few months separated me from the concentration camp and I needed only one thing: great-great silence. I was a young boy, 16 years old and I started to court a Jewish girl, but she could have been Turkish or Tartar, I didn't care. The whole courtship consisted of me going to her in the early afternoon and listening to her as she practiced on the violin. Maybe in other circumstances this wouldn't have been the way to feel good, but at that moment I needed exactly that: being together with this girl who was silent and just played the violin. I regained my interest in life step by step. I know that I can't use words of pathos, but one has to understand how it was to come back from the camp at the age of 15 or 16, without parents, alone, to have all my connections with the past broken, from one moment to another. I went to Kolozsvar and my wife went there as well as a student at the conservatory. I was 17-18 years old when I went to the university. She came later. We got married in 1952.