Miksa Domonkos at the age of 20

This is my father, Miksa Domonkos, when he was 20. The photo was taken in Budapest in 1910. My father went to a Jewish elementary school, and then he graduated from middle school, and then the Commercial Academy. The Commercial Academy was a school of high standard, it gave a high school diploma, they taught several languages, and they put the emphasis on practice. So the smart Jewish parents sent their children to study there with pleasure. I think my father got a scholarship from some kind of a Jewish organization. I suspect this from the fact that he got very valuable books on Jewish topics and an 11-volume Goethe series in Gothic type. Besides that he also got a 5-6 volume Heine in Gothic type. After my father graduated from the Commercial Academy he spent two years in Germany at a technical college. That's how he became entitled to be an artificer officer and to get a civil job. He spoke German perfectly, he was absolutely fluent and he was handsome, perhaps this also played a role in the fact that the Caterpillar made an arrangement with him to introduce the caterpillar tractors in Middle Europe, which was a great novelty at that time. And my father played an important role in the entire Middle European propagation. He magyarized his name to Domonkos at this time, sometime around 1910, because the name Fleischmann bothered him.

Photos from this interviewee