Vera, Fercenc, Andras and Laszlo Pap

[In the photo from the left: Vera Pap, the mother, Andras Pap, Ferenc Pap, Laszlo Pap, the father] This picture was taken in Kolozsvar. In 1960 we lived in a street on the way to the railway station; it was called Kalvin Street, now it's Campeni Street. I know that our parents had the opportunity, after the liberation of Kolozsvar in October 1944, to choose [a place where to live]. There were 17,000 Jews in Kolozsvar before the deportation and these people's houses all became free in 1944. My parents chose the flat which though relatively quiet, wasn't far from downtown. Our flat was on the upper floor. It was a three-room flat. My grandmother had a separate room until 1965; when she died we children got a room each and my parents had the other one. There was also a bathroom, a kitchen and a dog, Pajtas [Buddy]. [When this picture was taken] none of us were married. My brother was more than 22; I was 25 years old. At first [after the WWII.] my father was an official of a newly created Jewish organization which ran under communist guiding-principles. It was called the Democratic Union of Jews. For a while, my mother was the secretary of a retraining centre for Jews. In 1945 or 1946 they both got into their respective professions; my father became an official, a bookkeeper in a factory in Kolozsvar, then he got a position somewhere else. My mother became the teacher of the ballet class at the Pioneer Centre in Kolozsvar. The abdication or deposal of the king was at the end of 1947. During 1948 the communist government increasingly seized everything, step by step.The nationalisation was concurrent with this. In 1948 my mother got into the Ballet High school of Kolozsvar where she was a teacher and a deputy-headmaster. At the same time, sometime in 1949 she got into the newly-made so-called Kolozsvar Conservatoire. At that time it was mainly a Hungarian institution, actually, it was Hungarian and mixed. She taught the discipline called the bases of moving on stage. Then she remained here, also in the new united conservatoire, even after her retirement in 1965. [In 1959, when the Hungarian Bolyai University was amalgamated with the Romanian Babes University, and today's Babes-Bolyai University came into being, something similar also happened at the conservatoire]