Vasile Grunea and Judit Grunberger

This photo was taken around 1929 in Brasso. This little boy is me, dressed in short trousers. There is a kind of Punchinello near me in the grass and my sister Judit Grunberger (nee Gruber) is next to me. This picture must have been taken in the garden of our second flat in Hosszu Street [Strada Lunga] in Brasso, where we lived at that time. This was a very pleasant wild garden full of flowers. I don't remember ever eating any fruit or vegetable grown in this garden, so there were probably no fruit trees or vegetables there. As I remember from my childhood, there was a big yard beside this garden and a lot of cars passed there. I think that there may have been a warehouse in the yard of the house. We lived in this quite big single-story house for three years, where we had three rooms, I think. Then we moved to Mihaly Vajsz Street, which was about ten minutes walk from this street. My sister is one year older than I, she was born in 1925, and I was born in 1926. Looking back now, I can see that she could always think more maturely than I, although there's only a very small age difference between us. She helped me a lot in my studies both in elementary and secondary school. When she was in first grade, I was still in kindergarten, and when I went to first grade, she was already in second grade. But when I went to first grade, I could read and write well already, because I learnt it from her and my mother also taught me a little. This both had advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage was that I was extremely undisciplined because I was bored. When the teacher started teaching the alphabet to the others and told them to draw a line, I was obviously bored. I tried to talk with my neighbor and I remember that the teacher put me in a separate bench alone for a while so that I wouldn't have anyone to talk to.