Gerson and Antonia Oblath with their children

This picture was taken in Ovar, sometime in the 1900s. At the front-left, is my grandfather on my mother's side, Gerson Oblath, next to him is his wife, Antonia Kohn. In the upper-left is my natural mother, Jozefin Schultz. On the other side, at the top, that must be her twin sister, Aunty Netka. The two boys are probably their younger sons, the upper one is Jozsef Oblath and the one lower one is Miska Oblath. My grandfather committed suicide sometime around the second half of the 1910's. He was born in 1850, but I don't know where. I don't know whether he was from Ovar, or if he arrived there from somewhere else. He worked in a pub in Ovar. I suppose, he had his own pub, but I am not sure. He was a bearded old man. His beard was not that long, if I remember correctly. I only remember meeting him on one occasion. I must have been about five or six years old, it was in Balassagyarmat, and he had probably come to visit us. He had come from Ovar, and was on the way to Dregelypalank. His oldest son was on holiday in Dregelypalank, and he went there to visit, but he never came back. He was pulled out of the Danube in Szod. I have no idea if he is buried in a Jewish cemetery. I learned from documents, that my grandmother was born in Nagypeszek in 1856. As a child, I met her many times, because, after we moved to Budapest in 1920, we spent our Christmas, Easter and Summer Holidays in Balassagyarmat. Grandma used to live with my mother's twin sister. She lived with them until the end, first in Balassagyarmat, and later, when they moved to Budapest, then there, too. She was in Budapest during the war, but I don't know where. She must have been in the ghetto. She was old when she died- she was over 80, I know that. She had breathing problems, I remember; by that great age, she was lying down almost all the time. She is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Budapest. About Aunty Netka I know the most, because we spent every summer at their place. Her husband, Sandor Weinberger was a merchant. They lived in Balassagyarmat for a long time, and they owned a textile shop there: a draperers and haberdashery. Sometimes Aunty Netka was in the shop, if she had to help something, or because uncle Sandor had to go somewhere, but mostly, her husband was there. It was not a big shop, they didn't have any employees. In Balassagyarmat, they had their own house, but before that they lived in a rented flat. There were three rooms in the house: grandmother lived in one room, the parents in another one, and in the third one, the five children. When we went there in my childhood, this was how it was. They had a beautiful dining room, very nicely furnished; it had a really dark color, maybe even black, with a glass show-case. They didn't have a garden, just a little courtyard. Jozsef, or Joska, was a doctor. He graduated from university. Before the war, he was the local doctor for Szentendre and its neighborhood. He married a Goldberger girl. She was a very rich, but really ugly woman. He had two sons. They were younger than me. Uncle Joska didn't marry very young. His wife was also much older than me. They lived in Szentendre, in their own house. They had lots of nice pieces of furniture, pictures, they had everything. They were not show-off people. Let's just say his wife wasn't a very nice lady, and uncle Joska was very busy -he had a big practice. They visited us once in Matyasfold; they had a very good time there, and we also visited them once. They were all deported; nobody from that family came back. After his wife, there were some houses we could have requested, but in the meantime they had been nationalized and renovated and we would have had to pay so much in exchange for the renovation, that nobody in the family could afford it. After the war, we were happy to be alive at all. One of the houses was turned into a maternity home after the war. A hardly know anything about uncle Miska. I don't even know, what sort of school he finished, I only know, that he took over his brother?s, uncle Feri's shop. This was a small grocery shop. I don't think they had any employees. They sold cheese, cold cuts, and some spices. If I remember rightly, when you entered the shop, the counter was on the left hand side. But what sort of cash register they had - I don't remember at all. The shop had a back area; my uncle kept the cheese there. They must have had it until about the middle of 1930s. Uncle Miska married very late, around 1940, and I think he must have married a well-off woman, because when he was already married, he wasn't in the shop anymore, but in their candy shop on Erzsebet Avenue, next to the Hirado cinema. And very late in life, he had a little boy. He committed suicide before the war, sometime around 1943 or '44.