Zigmund Donath and his wife Maria Donathova at a gathering

On this photo you can see some sort of gathering, I'm assuming that it was taken at the factory in Budapest where my paternal grandfather worked. Grandpa Zigmund Donath is the first on the right, and sitting beside him is my grandmother Maria Donathova, nee Polacsek. I don't know when the photo was taken, but I'm assuming that it could have been at the beginning of the 20th century.

My paternal grandparents lived in Zilina. My grandfather was a master electrician in the Ganz factory in Budapest. He found a wife in Budapest, my grandma, who he brought back to Zilina. Grandma came from a family of eleven children. Her family lived in very, very modest circumstances. This I can judge, because grandma even worked as a servant for one family in Budapest. About her siblings I only know that one of her brothers was a 'kalauz' [conductor] on a streetcar. They were very proud of him, that he had made it that far.

Both of my grandparents were born in the same year, 1873. Grandma came from Pokafa, a village near Zalaegerszeg, Hungary, and my grandpa from Varin. My father, Jozef Donath, was born in 1901, still in Budapest, but his younger brother Ludovit was born in Tatranska Kotlina. My grandfather came there as an electrician. At that time electricity was being brought to the Tatras. So at first they lived in Tatranska Kotlina, and after a time they decided that they would live in Zilina. In Zilina they founded a dispatch service named the United Dispatch Company. We had it until World War II. Later my father and his younger brother also began to work for the family business. Though Ludovit did begin studies as an electrical engineer in Prague, he didn't finish school because he was, how would I describe it...he liked to enjoy life. My father had to work hard on his account, so that's why my grandfather called Ludovit back home.