I graduated from secondary school in 1945, and went to the Medical Faculty in Marosvasarhely in 1946 and 1947, but I didn't like it there, so I transferred to the Faculty of History in Kolozsvar. I started journalism in 1948 and I've been doing it ever since.
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Displaying 20731 - 20760 of 50826 results
Vasile Grunea
For a long time he worked as a clerk at a big construction company, the Solel Boneh in Haifa. My mother also liked it in Israel. When my parents, my sister and her family and other friends put down their names on the list for emigration, I didn't. I was the black sheep of the family; I stayed here for family and other reasons.
As soon as it became possible to emigrate after the war, my father and mother emigrated to Israel in 1950. My father was 58 years old then. When my father made aliyah, he was already fluent in Hebrew [Ivrit], so he didn't need to take ulpan classes. He adored Hebrew [Ivrit], and he constantly perfected himself. When he arrived there, he bought a tape recorder from his first economies and he recorded everybody who spoke a nice Hebrew and he listened to their pronunciation on tape. His dictionary was always at hand. Sometimes he was listening to something on the radio and if he didn't understand a word, he would jump up and look it up in the dictionary.
My father was fluent in Hebrew [Ivrit] and Yiddish; he corresponded with my grandfather in Yiddish, for example.
Romania
After finishing Medical Faculty, my sister worked as a pediatrician and my brother-in-law as a radiologist in Maramarossziget. They have a son, Dan, who was born here in Romania and was about 7 years old when they left for Israel in 1966. Their daughter Yael was already born there, she is a sabra. Today Dan is an officer in the Israeli army, his wife is called Judit Roved, she is a professor of Arab language and literature, and they have three sons. Jael graduated in biology but works in a bank, her husband is also a biologist and they have two sons. My sister and her husband went to Tel Aviv first, and then they moved to Tiberias, where my brother-in-law was a chief radiologist in a hospital and my sister was a pediatrician in a policlinic. Later they moved to Jerusalem, where my brother-in-law was head of various doctor's offices. Sadly, my brother-in-law died two years ago in 2001. We talk on the phone with my sister from time to time, and we also correspond.
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After WW2
See text in interview
My sister got married quite soon, already in 1948; they were married by Rabbi Dr Deutsch in the Neolog synagogue in Brasso. They moved in with Pali and went to university together. They also put their name on the list for emigration to Israel in 1949 and my sister's husband's parents also put down their name on that list. By the way, Pali Grunberger's father was one of the leaders of the Romanian Zionist organization. My parents left but unfortunately my sister and my brother-in-law were kept here for another 15 years without any explanation. They filed 25 memorandums until they were finally allowed to go to Israel.
My sister took the private exams in a lyceum for girls in Bucharest. The Cultura had a lyceum for girls and she went there. She met my brother-in-law, Pali Grunberger, in the train; he was from Szeben and he was a radiologist and going from Brasso to Bucharest to take an exam, and my sister was also going to Bucharest. The Medical Faculty moved from Kolozsvar to Szeben during the war and my brother-in-law finished the first year there in 1945. The Faculty moved back from Szeben to Kolozsvar in 1945 but because of lack of wood or for some other reason, teaching only started in the spring of 1946. Having graduated, my sister took an entrance exam in Kolozsvar in 1946. She was going to university when my parents put down their name on the list of people waiting for permission to emigrate to Israel.
According to the educational law of the time, which was called Voitec Law [25], after the Minister of Education at the time, there were permanent open private examinations, so one could finish several grades in one year and one could take an exam every month. I finished four grades in 1945. We took many exams but we had been studying the material for years as private pupils and we just did revisions for a month before the exams. That's how I managed to graduate from four classes in one year, so to speak; however, the exam didn't take place in the Jewish school but there was a graduation committee. As far as I remember, I took the exam in the Spiru Haret Lyceum, where the president of the committee was university professor of philosophy and poet Alexandru Clausian. We all passed the graduation exam although not with very high grades.
In 1945 I enrolled into the Jewish lyceum called Cultura in Bucharest – this school was the equivalent of the Tarbut in Kolozsvar. It was a very famous school, where famous Jewish teachers, who had been expelled from university education in 1940, taught. Among the teachers was Graur, who became one of the most famous linguistics professors in Romania, Professor Bick, teacher of Romanian language, Sufrin, the history teacher, and Mihail Sebastian, who was one of the best dramatists of the interwar period, whose memoirs, which appeared three years ago [in 2000], kicked up dust.
I joined the Party, its League of Communist Youth, very young, back in 1945, so I'm a good old soldier in this respect. I had two good Jewish friends, Izso Smit and Feri Ganz – they were a little older than I – who played quite a prominent role in 1944-1945, since they had already participated in the illegal League of Communist Youth, and I joined the Party under their influence. I don't know anything concrete about their illegal communist activities, all I know is that they were tried and were in prison during World War II.
Romania
After August 1944, the communist youth began to get seriously organized. It's not true that Jews brought communism to Romania. Considering that out of 700,000 Jews 200,000 died and 400,000 fled communism and left the country, that's simply not the case. But this was the only party that ensured theoretically the equality of all the national minorities on the one hand, and its fight against Hitlerism meant survival for the Jews on the other hand, so that's why it had many Jewish members at the beginning.
Romania
All of us thought back then that communism would solve the Jewish question as well, and things would be fine, and everybody would kiss everybody else on the forehead on an international basis and everybody would be happy, and it wouldn't matter any more who was Hungarian and who was Jewish. We thought, as we were told, that communism would bring paradise to earth for the working class. People believed it but gradually they all became disillusioned – some sooner, some later. Later on some went to Israel, others to Western countries to find a better living. I stayed for family and other reasons.
Romania
We went to Bucharest determined to head further on to Israel. As far as I know, we were supposed to leave on board of the ship called Mefkure, but at that time there were quite a lot of Jews in Bucharest who had escaped from Hungary. It was to be feared that Hungarian citizens would be arrested, so we were told that we couldn't leave for the time being but should wait for another ship, as they had to secure places on the ship for the Hungarian Jews. [Editor's note: the Mefkure was sunk in August 1944.] We were waiting for another ship but 23rd August 1944 [24] came and none of us went to Israel after that.
I also worked for the railways and did street sweeping too, and with three friends – Weintraub, Dan and Eropataki – I deserted from forced labor in June 1944.
I also worked, for example, at the end of 1943 and in 1944. We stayed in town, we slept at home but we didn't get any food, money, clothes, boots or anything, and were forced to carry out whatever tasks we were given from six in the morning until six in the evening. There was a time when one could buy his way out of forced labor. My father managed to do this and he didn't work in forced labor for long. After 1944, he kept on working in the lottery office but later lottery was banned and he became a petty clerk at the municipal people's council.
During the war my father was drafted into forced labor and he worked for the railways, sometimes in Brasso and sometimes in Predeal. There was external forced labor outside the town of Iasi, Bessarabia [23], and there was internal forced labor [in the town or in its vicinity]. The authorities didn't profit much from Jewish labor because the Jews, especially those who were in internal and not external forced labor, didn't kill themselves over work.
We moved into a smaller two-bedroom apartment, which we rented. My parents lived in one room and my sister and I in the other; we had a bathroom, a hall and a kitchen. We struggled through the war in that apartment. During the war, Jews weren't allowed to hire servants. For a few months in the last year of the war we had a Jewish servant from Maramarossziget, if I remember well. Before the war, our servants were usually Hungarian girls from the villages around Brasso, but later the law forbade us Jews to have servants and house them in our apartment, as was the custom then. The place where the servant lived couldn't be called a room, a small part of the kitchen, where a bed and a small table could fit in, was divided off and she slept there.
After 1940, when the legionaries came into power in Romania, a legionary woman came into my mother's workshop one day and behaved as if she was the owner. She expropriated my mother's workshop and wanted to have everything. She took hold of the two Singer sewing machines in the workshop, the materials that were there – linen and rubber for the corsets – and simply occupied the shop. After the clash between Antonescu and the legionaries, in which Antonescu suppressed the legionaries' coup, the woman walked out of the shop. But it would have been useless to open the shop, because she took the sewing machines, the materials, the counter, she took everything and left the shop completely empty. We committed only one stupid mistake, namely that we didn't claim these things back from this woman after the war when it was possible. But we were so happy at the time to have survived the war that my mother said, ‘She can go to hell, let her run away!'.
My father was sorely tried by this mentally because he was a very conscientious person and always stressed that Jews as a people weren't inferior in any respect to any other people. But he could more or less ensure a financial stability for the family. He worked as a broker at the stock exchange at that time and he also ran a lottery business. In the 1940s, Jews usually had strohmans – which literally means straw man – to work with. Strohmans were [non-Jews], and the business was under their name but in reality it still remained one's [the Jew's] own business. He lent his name to the business and one had to pay him a certain amount of money for it. That's how my family could ensure a living at that time.
According to the anti-Jewish laws in Romania [22], Jews were only allowed to go to the market around noon, that is, at the time when the market-women had already sold the goods. Or, for example, when bread was rationed, Jews didn't get a ration card for bread. So, if you needed bread, you had to buy it from the baker or, to get it cheaper, you would do what we did: my mother kneaded dough once a week and we took it in a bowl to Var Street; there was a Hungarian baker there whose family name was Denes and he baked it for us. A point of interest was that when the bread was baked, he would strike off its thick crust and then we could take the bread home. At the same time, Jews weren't entitled to get sugar and flour, which were also rationed, so we had to buy these during the war. Rationed food could be bought cheaper with a ration card, which ensured that one had the minimum amount of bread and sugar, oil and flour every day. And Jews didn't get these. People were usually given the ration cards at their workplaces or at the town hall and they knew, of course, that Jews weren't entitled to get them. There was quite a vigorous black market during the war; everything was sold at a black market price, that is, at a much higher price.
There was a poorer Jewish stratum, mostly coming from Maramaros, the so-called shnorrers [Yiddish for beggar], who had an elegant way of begging. They played a very important role in Jewish society because few people had a telephone or radio at the time and these shnorrers went from village to village, from house to house and brought news from other places. When they went to a town, they went to the Jewish community and were told there who they could go to, who would give them something. Families gave them a place to sleep, gave them food for a day or two and wealthier people also gave them some money. They came to us, too, as to all petty bourgeois Jewish families – the stratum that I belonged to, too. Sometimes one or two came a year and they stayed with us for a day or two, but they didn’t come very often. Then, during World War II, relatives came to stay with us – I don’t remember their names – and this is when I got to know about them. They were drafted into Moldova or wherever they were to go to forced labor and they went via Brasso. On their way, one or two of them dropped in and stayed with us for one or two days. I remember that my father always gave them some boots and clothing to help them.
Romania
During World War II voluntary defense organizations sprang up, partly organized and partly unorganized, especially after the incident when some young Hitlerjugend [20] boys stabbed two or three young Jewish boys in the back with a dagger on Var Street and they died, so a form of defense was created against such incidents. During the Jewish holidays guards were standing around the synagogue to make sure that elderly people and children weren’t attacked.
Jewish graduates of secondary school, who were good at arithmetic and grammar but couldn’t go to university, also gave private lessons. But we had to take an exam every year. A law was passed at that time, according to which the examination period was open and one could even pass all the exams for four grades in one year. There were exams each month. I finished the 4th grade as a private student in Brasso.
Romania
During World War I the boys were drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army.
Before she got married she lived in Retteg, which is near Szaszregen, and there were Germans [Saxons] there. I think that only the boys went to cheder. At that time girls were taught by private teachers. My grandmother read Hebrew fluently. She wore a wig, prayed and went to the synagogue every Sabbath and on high holidays. My grandparents spoke Yiddish beside Hungarian, although this perhaps was more so in the case of my grandparents on my father’s side. My grandfather and grandmother spoke Yiddish at home but their children’s mother tongue was already Hungarian.
My grandmother was very religious; I’m sure that her wedding was conducted by a rabbi. She led a kosher household, but she couldn’t have done otherwise, as she came from the rabbinic family of the Paneths. Her family could probably afford to hire private teachers to teach her because she could read Hebrew fluently, and she was fluent in German and read a lot of German literature.
I don’t know how my grandparents met, I only know that at some point they lived in Gerend; grandmother came from Retteg but married and lived in Gerend. My maternal grandfather was called Lajos Sporn, his Jewish name was Leb. He was the manager of a big estate and a distillery in Gerend. Before World War I, when things weren’t going that well there, he went to Noszoly and rented the rather big estate of a landowner called Szasz. He worked in agriculture and livestock breeding. He bred cows and piglets and then sold them. It might seem strange that a Jew bred piglets but Noszoly was close to Szamosujvar and there were many Armenian merchants there, and he sold the piglets to them. He also grew wheat. At the end of July, beginning of August during the threshing season, the threshing machine worked for a week without stopping, they were threshing the grains.
My grandmother on my mother’s side was very religious. She lived with us in Brasso for more than a year, and I had to accompany her to the synagogue every Saturday. She was so strictly religious that she didn’t carry anything, not even her prayer book, so I accompanied her to the entrance of the women’s gallery in the synagogue, gave her the prayer book and waited for her at the end of the service. My poor grandmother never learnt that after I went with her to the synagogue, I played football – there was a small plot not far from the synagogue – while she was inside, praying.
My maternal grandmother, Sara Paneth, came from a rabbinic family. Her grandfather, Yecheskel Paneth, was the chief rabbi of Transylvania and lived in Gyulafehervar. Rabbi Paneth had six children. There were many rabbis in Des and around who came from the Paneth family, it was a big rabbinic dynasty. The synagogue in Des was also built by a rabbi Paneth, and he gave most of the money to purchase the plot for the synagogue out of his own pocket. My grandmother came from the family of the third son of the chief rabbi. Hermann Paneth, my grandmother’s older brother, graduated from the Rabbinical Seminary in Frankfurt in Germany, but he didn’t work as a rabbi; he was involved in agriculture and Zionism instead.
I think that my father knew my mother’s older brother Simon from the Zionist organization in Kolozsvar and my parents met through him. I know that Lea, whom everybody called Lotte, was about a year and a half older than my mother. My father told me that at first my mother’s family, especially my grandmother, wanted him to marry Lotte, as it was the custom to marry off the oldest daughter of a family first. But my father didn’t really like her, he liked my mother, so he married her. It wasn’t the parents who agreed on this but my father and mother.