he died during the war in 1945. He was hiding in a garage, and a bomb hit him.
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Displaying 17671 - 17700 of 50826 results
Thomas Molnar
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Janos Rona didn’t survive the war. He fled from the work service [1], he hid, and he died during an assault in 1945, a bomb killed him. When we found out that the garage where he had been hiding was hit, my father, Bandi Rona and I went to the Kerepesi cemetery with a pushcart to take him. They carried the dead there. The bodies lay in an open grave, my father climbed down into the grave, he looked for him, and he noticed his socks. He recognized him that way. On the way home Bandi stepped on a mine, which exploded. He got seriously injured, we didn’t.
In the shop, Margit was the accountant; she managed the office and the warehouse. True, that she had only finished four grades of middle school, but she was an intelligent woman.
My mother didn’t play cards. But they went to the theater, to the operetta or opera together. Sometimes they took me along, too. My biggest experience, which I remember, was that we went to the cinema or to the theater, and afterwards they took me for dinner to the Savoy or the Emke. Lantos and Karady performed there, they were the big stars of that time. It was a huge experience for a teenage boy to see them.
He had very many friends, but only three to four who were his very close friends. One of them was Vilmos Anesini, who hid us, then Oszkar Koves and Jancsi Reich. These were all in the candy business, in retail or in wholesale. Besides Anesini all were Jewish. My father liked to go to the café where he talked with his friends. And he also used to go and play tennis, and they went to soccer games every weekend. My father was a big MTK supporter. When he was young he also played soccer in some confectioner’s team, later he was a referee at games between craftsmen teams.
And we shouldn’t forget the fact that he was already a capitalist at that time. I think he had been a trade union member only when he worked as a confectioner, but later as a shop owner he wasn’t anymore. But there wasn’t a trade union for shop owners anyway.
Otherwise my father wasn’t involved in politics actively, he was only leftist. He wasn’t a member of any party, but in his soul he was a social democrat, he voted for them.
Despite of the fact that my father had only completed middle school, he was a cultured man. He educated himself. His spelling was always perfect. He never made any mistakes. He had more than a thousand books, all kinds, but especially literature.
He was such a big Hungarian that in 1938 he wrote an article, which was published in the sweets trade professional newspaper. I don’t remember it exactly, but he wrote about how Jews should love the country, and that they should be rather Hungarians than Jews.
He was a soldier during World War I. He was a patriotic Hungarian, and he was very proud of being a soldier.
He went to elementary and middle school. After middle school they made him a confectioner’s apprentice. Later he became a confectioner master. He took his confectioner’s master exam on 18th December 1939 in front of the examining committee.
The business prospered, and later they opened another shop on Thokoly Street no. 8, too. It was worth opening a second shop relatively close, because this is a very busy place. It was opposite Keleti railway station, it was a very good place, a great place. They opened the wholesale section in the courtyard of Thokoly Street no. 14, and as a matter of fact that was the big business, which made them prosperous, not the two shops. My uncle traveled to the country, and my father was on good terms with the people in Pest. They mainly traded lollypops and candy. There were all kinds of other things too, but these were the big things.
They had the small shop on Vorosmarty Street for quite a long time and at the beginning of the 1930s or perhaps already at the end of the 1920s, I don’t know exactly when, they opened the shop ‘Vilmos Molnar and Co.’ on Thokoly Street. The sign read ‘MOLNAR SWEET-SHOP CANDY.’ The associates were my father and my father’s brother-in-law, Janos Rona.
It seems that the situation in Hungary must have been very bad; he didn’t have a job, so in 1901 he immigrated to New York. I have found the money-orders with which he sent home sometimes 5, sometimes 10 dollars from New York, which was a big amount at that time. He was there for two years.
Before her marriage my grandmother had probably been a maid, too, because her employment card was issued by the Papa trade authorities on 25th August 1896, based on the maid’s card, also issued in Papa in 1892.
In 1896 he magyarized his name to Farkas Vilmos Molnar.
He got married in 1897, and at that time he already lived in Budapest. According to the marriage certificate he was a baker’s apprentice.
Then he served in the Hungarian Royal 17-infantry regiment as a soldier for twelve years and three months, and because he served ‘fairly,’ he was entitled to wear the ‘jubilee medallion.
Jancsi was eleven years old in 1956. He went to school here in Australia. He didn’t really like school, he wasn’t a good pupil, he wanted to work instead. He came to work for me at the clothing shop in Parramatta, he was there for a while, then he went to work at one of Kaufmann’s shops. And when Peter bought his first shop he worked there for about two years. Then he left the shop and bought an independent jewelry shop. When the lease agreement expired, he bought another shop at a very busy place, where he became specialized in watches. This one still exists and it prospers. They live off this.
In the meantime I joined in a Hungarian restaurant, and later I opened one on my own, and here I did something I had wanted to do all my life: I set up a cabaret like place with music. I brought to Australia for the first time Judit Hernadi, Gabor Maros, Antal Szalai the gipsy musician, and Bori Kallai. I like to do this very much, I earn some money with it, too. I have been doing it for five years now.
When they came to Australia Peter was 16 years old. First he worked for six months on a plane at a big factory called Spurway, where he earned 23 pounds, with overtime 26 pounds. He was pretty well off with this for a while. Then in the environs where we lived, there was a milk bar, this is almost like an espresso, owned by a Jewish gentleman, called Mauthner, and my father joined. My mother took part in this, too: she cooked Hungarian food. In the milk bar there wasn’t a kitchen, so my mother cooked the food at home, and Peter took it there in kettles.
My mother could get along with these unschooled people much better, she could handle this situation better. She was very good tempered.
My parents’ story is a sad one. Especially my father’s. My father wasn’t happy even for one minute in Australia. He was like a fish taken out of water. My father is a café gentleman. There aren’t such people today anymore. He was a man of the city, a cultured man. In Australia first of all there wasn’t a café. Secondly, it was awfully hot. He was always hot. He hated this humid air. Then he got into a void, because everyone was busy, everyone was working. He could only meet even Jancsi Reich once a week at most. Here in Hungary, he had been someone, a wealthy gentleman. He immigrated to Australia and he became a nobody there. He didn’t speak the language, he didn’t have money, and he had a job, which he didn’t like. Besides that he didn’t have company.
In 1987 I decided to leave Sydney. I had had enough of this life. My wife and I set off to find a place to settle. We got to a small village called Woodburn. This is in the eastern part of [New] South Wales. We bought a house there on the riverbank, and I started to work there as a lawyer. It went very well, we lived off it comfortably.
In 1979 I went to Sir Peter Abeles’ huge multinational transport company, the TNT. I became the in-house lawyer, this is a kind of managing company lawyer. This was a very high position, with a huge salary. I had to deal with million dollar affairs every day.
I didn’t have many friends in Australia either. I have mentioned Ervin Katz, he is the one with whom we came together from Vienna. We’ve been on very good terms ever since. We used to get together with the families as well. And there was another one, Andris Nagy, whom I have also mentioned. I often got together with him, too, while he lived in Australia.
I don’t remember where Sandra and I got to know each other, we met at some party. My wife was a very skillful secretary.
In the meantime our marriage got ruined mainly because of my wife’s parents, and from 1967 we didn’t live together. From then on I lived with my present wife, Sandra. But Zsuzsi and I only divorced in 1970. I married Sandra in 1975, but we had been together for eight years by then. Zsuzsi remarried too, but they had no children. We didn’t have any children in my second marriage either. While we were married Zsuzsi was a housewife, she only cared for the children. Much later, after we divorced, she graduated from the evening university and she became a social worker.
I worked at Kaufmann’s but I wasn’t very happy, there was a big cultural difference between us. Kaufmann was an unschooled person from Mateszalka, who made a lot of money and he couldn’t behave himself. In 1961 I parted with him for good and I left. I opened a clothing shop in Parramatta. This is a district of Sydney. I opened the shop on credit. The owner of the house also helped with not asking for rent for the premises for a while. I did this for one and a half years, but the shop didn’t go well.
I worked there and in the meantime I went out with a girl who was Yvette’s friend. I was madly in love with her, we dated for two years, her name was Julika Horvath. She was Jewish, but they converted. When that was over, I met my first wife, Zsuzsi [Susan] Kaufmann.