Lea Merenyi on a trip

This picture was taken on an excursion in 1928, I was still a teenager at that time. There is a huge wilderness in Germany, not far from Hanover. It is very much like a part of the Hungarian plain, but this one was full with heath-bells. So it was a huge purple field. It was very beautiful. Unfortunately the picture is not a color picture, but you can see the small flowers. Life in Hanover was quite cloudless, because I was a child there, I had my friends there, I went to school there. My mother packed up the family every Sunday morning, equipped with a can of milk and coffee, a thermos and a ring cake, and there is this nice place in Hanover, a small forest, a little bit like the City Park, and there was a garden restaurant there. So she packed up the ring cake, and in the restaurant we ordered that good German watery coffee. They couldn't make a good coffee, but it didn't matter, it was good with the ring cake. Then we played until noon, and at noon we went home. The positive aspect of living in Hanover was that thanks to my grandparents we had no money worries. I inherited very many clothes from my grandmother, she liked to dress very much, she had enough money, and if she got bored of a dress I got it. In Hanover I had school-mates, friends, we celebrated the birthdays, we lived a completely normal civil life, and that time nobody made us feel that there was a problem. My mother didn't let us read newspapers. Now I think she obviously did it because people said nasty things about Jews at that time already. But this is just a guess. 'Politics is not for you,' my mother said. Politics wasn't a topic in our family at all. So we didn't even know what was about to happen. I don't know whether my father was fired or didn't want to expose the family to any insults. It couldn't be seen on my brother that he was Jewish, but on me it could be seen very well. At that time my sister was very small. Afterwards I reconstructed things, assuming that perhaps my father lost his job because of his Jewish origin, and that's why the family left Hanover. But that's only my idea, they never spoke about it.

Photos from this interviewee