This is my mother, Olga Kovac. The photo was taken in Novi Sad in 1910.
Her maiden name was Olga Berger. She had no brother or sisters. My mother was religious. She regularly lit candles on Fridays. She went to the synagogue on holidays. Also, she didn't allow us, my brother and me, to eat pork; we had kosher food. When we ate bacon with my father, Arpad Kovac, in his office sometimes she pretended she didn't see us. My father wasn't religious, although we celebrated Jewish holidays together. My mother was a housewife.
My parents probably met, like others at that time, through a shadkhan - a matchmaker. They got married on 10th December 1912 in Slavonski Brod [in Croatia, called Brod in 1912]. I know that the wedding took place in the synagogue. Besides they also had a civil marriage.
Hardly more than four month after German troops entered Banat, there were no more Jews. They had all been deported. Men were killed soon after deportation and women were in Sajmiste in Belgrade. If they didn't die of the cold of winter, they were murdered in gas trucks. The gas was released into trucks, which women were locked in. They suffocated. My parents were also killed quite quickly. No one survived. I don't know if my mother was taken to Sajmiste, whether she died in winter, either froze to death or died from a disease, or if she had survived only to be suffocated later; I don't know.
