My grandfather on my father’s side, Illes Pap, wasn’t religious at all. He needed no father, no religion, nothing. As a teenager he was sick and tired of the environment at home and he went to Budapest, and from that time on he was completely non-religious.
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Displaying 17791 - 17820 of 50826 results
Ferenc Pap
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My great-grandfather had eleven children; my grandfather was the youngest of all. One of his brothers was called Artur; he was a doctor somewhere in Transdanubia. And I think that he had another brother, called Guido, who was also a doctor.
My great-grandfather was appointed in Bekescsaba after that, where he soon became a Chief Rabbi again. [This happened] at the time of the so-called Congress, when the denominations came into being: orthodox, neolog and statusquo [conservative]. My great-grandfather became a neolog; he was probably more liberal. He also wrote sermons. I still have one of his sermons, printed in 1881. I think that he wrote out his sermon himself in Hungarian and printed it, probably in Bekescsaba. It is not very long; I only remember that he strongly praises Francis Joseph. Great-grandfather died in 1907.
Eliezer Kohn, my great-grandfather, was born in Dunafoldvar in 1837. He became a Chief Rabbi there. In 1875, when my grandfather was born – he was the youngest child – the family was still living in Dunafoldvar.
Gavril Marcuson
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One Sunday morning, while I was at a conference held at the cultural center on Popa Soare St., we were all given some applications to fill. This is how we became members of the Association of the Romanian Zionists, which was recreated after it had been banned for several decades. When the winter holidays came, I received a greeting card from the Zionists, who have their headquarters close from here, on Kogalniceanu Blvd., where the Sohnut located is too.
Before 1989 (I forgot the exact year), someone from the [Jewish] Community came to me and asked me if I wanted to be a member. I said yes on the spot, paid my first fee, and I can say I’m an old member of the community.
I welcomed the Revolution of 1989 [20], because I had become fed up with Ceausescu. I was in Bucharest when it happened. I walked in the streets, but I wasn’t in that crowd whom Ceausescu addressed – I kept away from crowds. What happened was inevitable. We simply had to enter Europe. I later realized that this wouldn’t have been possible with Ceausescu in power. Being part of Europe is a matter of life and death for us – our peace and prosperity are at stake. I feel frustrated because we are still so far behind, and our integration may be put off. But I hoe we’ll make it [in 2007]. My life improved after 1989. I was able to read the foreign press and a series of authors that had been unavailable before, and I could travel abroad – which I did almost every year, to the East and to the West.
We now live in a country which guarantees the freedom of opinion, so I’m going to exercise this right. The Communists built the largest palace in Europe and second largest in the world. [Ed. note: The Palace of Parliament, or ‘The People’s House’, the second largest building in the world, after the Pentagon, was erected on Ceausescu’s order. It currently houses the Romanian Parliament, an international conference center, and numerous museums.] The current regime would be unable to build such a thing or to furnish a palace that is singular in Europe. It’s emblematic of Bucharest, just like the Eiffel Tower is emblematic of Paris, the Kremlin of Moscow, and the Coliseum of Rome. A huge number of things were built. They don’t build anymore nowadays, and they’re not capable of finishing what was started and is almost done. Had Ceausescu lived another year, we would now have a new National Library, and some hundreds of extra apartment houses, nice apartment houses, with balconies and carefully designed curves. I ride in the bus 104 for kilometers and kilometers, and I see what was built by Ceausescu’s regime; and I also see the cranes from the deserted construction site of the National Library-to-be. They want to turn it into something else – apparently, these people don’t need a library, they don’t need books. However, I am moderately optimistic. We are, undoubtedly, on the right track. Of course, we may stumble from time to time, but it is on the right way that we stumble. I’ll vote for the social democrats [PSD – The Social Democratic Party] in the presidential elections; and I’ll vote for the Menorah [the sign of the candidate of the Jewish Community] in the legislative elections!
I didn’t keep any Jewish traditions.
Romania
Daily life wasn’t great from a political point of view; economically speaking, we had our problems too – there was a lot of queuing to do and all sorts of shortages. Stores didn’t look like they do now: they were shabby, and the shop assistants weren’t trained; it wasn’t easy to shop for things.
We went many places [together]: England, East Germany, Italy, Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Turkey.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
Kim Il Sung invited us to North Korea twice. Each time, we stayed there for a month, and we lived where Ceausescu [19] had been accommodated before us. North Korea is a very beautiful country. Pyongyang had been bombed by the Americans and the South-Koreans, so they had had to rebuild it and everything looked new. They made theaters, conference halls. All that was left of the old city was an entrance gate. We walked the streets of Pyongyang, with an interpreter with us, of course. We made the way from Bucharest to North Korea in the Transsiberian [special train]. We saw the entire Siberia, and all the cities North Korea and China. Siberia is huge and confines fabulous riches that are yet to be discovered. It’s splendid – from Moscow to the Chinese border, all you can see is birch trees. The first time we went, we took the Transsiberian to and from North Korea. [Ed. note: A one-way trip lasted for about eight days.] The second time, we took the Transsiberian to get there, but we took the plane from Beijing to get back. Today, China looks different from what it looked like when we went there, because they started building.
As a physician, she attended the Korean War [Ed. note: 25th June 1950-27th July 1953] against the Americans and was the personal physician of Kim Il Sung [Ed. note: (1912-1994), president of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from 1948]. There were doctors from all the other socialist countries there – East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, China. One day Kim Il Sung got sick and he asked who the best doctor was. So my wife treated him, and Kim Il Sung invited us to North Korea twice.
Cornelia went to the Medical School in Bucharest. She was a scientist and she lectured at over thirty international conventions. She was the only Romanian docent with a PhD in pediatric otolaryngology – that was her specialty.
Romania
We got married in Bucharest, in 1957. There was only an official ceremony at the 3rd District Town hall – neither her, nor I was religious. Both my family and hers agreed to this marriage. I wasn’t a child anymore, I was confident I could choose what was right for me, and it turned out I made the best choice.
I went to talk to her, and it was on that occasion that I met her daughter. She told me, in her turn, some of her memories of the social democratic movement. It was ‘love at first sight’. And we got married. We were both middle-aged by then, in our forties.
My wife, Cornelia Paunescu, was the daughter of some veteran social democratic militants. I wanted to talk to her parents, to ask them about their memories of the old, pre-World War I social democratic movement, the way I’m telling you things from my past right now. Her parents were well-known people; both her mother and her father had their picture in Atanasiu’s ‘Istoria socialismului’ [‘History of Socialism’]. Her father, Paunescu-Paltin, was already dead. There’s a street in Bucharest named after him – a small, pretty street, in the neighborhood where we used to live. They almost gave this name to the very street we lived on, but, eventually, another street, parallel to ours, got to be called Paunescu-Paltin. Her mother was a militant of the socialist women’s group.
After the war, I became a regular employee. I first worked for the Communist Party – they called us instructors, but I actually did documenting for the propaganda section. I was a reference professional. I worked there for a long time, from 1945 until the 1950’s, when they fired me because of a trial in my family [which made Mr. Marcuson’s personnel file look bad]. Then I worked at the ‘Univers’ Publishing House, still in the 1950’s. I also taught French at the Foreign Languages Institute, but only for a few years. The institute was dissolved, but I don’t remember when – in the 1950’s or 1960’s. I was a researcher at the Party History Institute. I had some books and articles published. I retired while I was working for the Scientific and Encyclopedic Publishing House, in 1973.
I only held a job after 23rd August 1944. Before that, I lived from tutoring in English and French. I didn’t tutor as much as I could have, because I wanted to have time to read and go for a walk. I used to think and I still think that man’s greatest fortune is what the Romans called ‘otium’, that is spare time intelligently used.
In 1949 or so, I went to Poland and [East] Germany. We were four Romanians sent [Ed. note: by the Romanian State, in an official exchange with Poland and East Germany] to spend our vacations. Poles and Germans came in our place, to spend their vacations in Romania. On that occasion, I traveled across Poland, from one end to the other, and I visited a lot of towns and villages; and this is what I did in East Germany too. Warsaw was all in ruins as far as the eye could see. One couldn’t tell where the streets used to be. They couldn’t find a single house that was standing in order to accommodate us. Do you know where we stayed? Warsaw is crossed by the Vistula River. There was a small ship lying at anchor – it was probably destined for short cruises. Well, we slept in the cabins of that ship. They couldn’t find a room in all Warsaw. And when I say ruins, I mean that there was hardly a wall standing here and there. Things looked the same in Berlin. We were accommodated in a suburban commune, 10-12 kilometers away from the city. It had a few houses intact, and we also got a car. I didn’t see one single man my age in Poland and Germany – I was in my thirties. There were only women, children and elderly people. There weren’t any men. Hitler made the Germans who were my age disappear more than he had done with the Jews. I lived in Poland for a month, but I never saw a man my age. I saw one in Germany, but he was legless – he had lost his legs on the front. Let me tell you about the women’s attitude towards us, the men. The eyes of the Polish and German women begged for a little attention. Their behavior was decorous though. Few of them were aggressive and put their arms around our neck. Most of them were happy if we looked at them and said something to them.
In 1949 or so, I went to Poland and [East] Germany. We were four Romanians sent [Ed. note: by the Romanian State, in an official exchange with Poland and East Germany] to spend our vacations. Poles and Germans came in our place, to spend their vacations in Romania. On that occasion, I traveled across Poland, from one end to the other, and I visited a lot of towns and villages; and this is what I did in East Germany too. Warsaw was all in ruins as far as the eye could see. One couldn’t tell where the streets used to be. They couldn’t find a single house that was standing in order to accommodate us. Do you know where we stayed? Warsaw is crossed by the Vistula River. There was a small ship lying at anchor – it was probably destined for short cruises. Well, we slept in the cabins of that ship. They couldn’t find a room in all Warsaw. And when I say ruins, I mean that there was hardly a wall standing here and there. Things looked the same in Berlin. We were accommodated in a suburban commune, 10-12 kilometers away from the city. It had a few houses intact, and we also got a car. I didn’t see one single man my age in Poland and Germany – I was in my thirties. There were only women, children and elderly people. There weren’t any men. Hitler made the Germans who were my age disappear more than he had done with the Jews. I lived in Poland for a month, but I never saw a man my age. I saw one in Germany, but he was legless – he had lost his legs on the front. Let me tell you about the women’s attitude towards us, the men. The eyes of the Polish and German women begged for a little attention. Their behavior was decorous though. Few of them were aggressive and put their arms around our neck. Most of them were happy if we looked at them and said something to them.
I thought of leaving for Paris in high school. Had I done it after I graduated, it would have been a mistake. In 1940, the Germans entered France – they would have caught me and gassed me. At least I’m alive now. I should have left after 23rd August 1944, and the fact that I didn’t was another mistake.
France
I thought of going to Israel, but I couldn’t speak the language. I would have found it difficult to live there. Imagine someone living in Romania and not knowing Romanian – how hard would things be for that person? I couldn’t practice an intellectual profession there either. I couldn’t do what I did in Romania, where I worked as an editor for a publishing house.
My mother made aliyah in the 1960’s. My brother and other relatives were already living in Israel.
How did I find out about the creation of the State of Israel? I was at the State Central Library, in the Periodicals hall. I was reading ‘L’Humanite’, the daily newspaper of the French communist party, the only French paper that was available in Romania [in 1948]. So I was reading it, and I suddenly came across the map of Israel. I was utterly amazed. I spent hours and hours looking at the map of the new Israel and I couldn’t believe my eyes; we finally had our own country. I felt as if a miracle had happened – something that I never thought it would be possible. Think about it: from 70 A.D. until 1948, Jews from all around the world yearned for, hankered after and dreamt at night of Jerusalem. When two Jews parted, they didn’t say ‘Good-bye’, they said ‘Next year in Jerusalem!
I nurtured Zionist feelings, was a fan of the Zionist idea, had read Herzl, but I never thought it could actually happen. I thought it was a utopia, for I knew there wasn’t one single islet or one single piece of land on this Planet that didn’t belong to someone. How could I have foreseen someone would give the Jews 20,000 square kilometers?
Romania
After the war, our house on Uranus St. was returned to us, and we moved back.
I became a Party member before 1944, while the movement was underground, because this was the only party that wasn’t anti-Semitic. When the Communists came to power, I was glad, because we had got rid of Hitler. Our only choices were Hitler and Stalin – there was no third option, and this is why I believe that thinking in black-and-white was not only permissible, but also unavoidable. I saw in the Soviet Union not the Good, but an evil that was lesser than Hitler’s Germany. There are many things that we found out after 23rd August 1944, and some are still to be found out. Can’t you see that Holocaust is being denied? I won’t be surprised if some historian shows up one of these days and claims that World War II is an invention of the Jews! The way they’re saying that the Holocaust is our invention. How did 6 million Jews disappear? They simply evaporated? Most of the people don’t know that the Jews are the only people in the world with fewer members than before the war. They haven’t managed to compensate for the 6 million victims through population growth. How did the 3 million Polish Jews disappear? There are now in Poland fewer Jews than in Romania… This was the largest murder in history! Never have the peoples known at any other time in history such an industry of assassinations!
[Mr. Marcuson describes the war period and his involvement in the underground activity of the Communist Party in the article ‘Amintiri din ilegalitate’ [‘Memories from my underground days’], published in ‘Cadran’ [‘Dial’], the literary notebook of the ‘George Bacovia’ cenacle, Bucharest, August 1971, p.6-7.] « In 1942, I found myself drafted for ‘compulsory labor’ at the printing house of the Central Institute for Statistics in Bucharest. This was the perfect occasion to come across poet Stefan Popescu, who was the head of that printing house back then, a man I had first met one decade ago, while a student at the Faculty of Letters. This was also the perfect occasion for the two of us to use the cover of our official activity in order to broaden our underground work in the service of… the Romanian Communist Party. So, the printing house was turned into a nucleus of antifascist resistance. There, in a backroom, we planed our actions: multiplying in hundreds of copies (only using a typewriter at first) some propaganda brochures; some of them had a literary character and were sometimes spotted in other places than Bucharest. (A clerk from the Statistics Institute who returned from Galati presented us one of our own brochures, which he had found down there.); setting up a fund of literary and science books which we sent to the political inmates, by means of their families; monthly collecting – from a group of well-to-do supporters – relatively large amounts of money for the Red Aid [15]. Comrade Stefan – my superior – had exempted me from any professional obligations, so I could focus exclusively on these actions; I used my spare time to translate Soviet prose writer M. Ilin’s book ‘The World Is Changing’, which spread in 10,000 typewritten copies bound in cloth – immediately after 23rd August 1944 [16], the book was officially published by the newly-found ‘Forum’ publishing house, thanks to the support Lucretiu Patrascanu [17].
There was no way we could use that printing house to print some of our own things. The fact that one of the employees lived with his family in the very building of the company was an obstacle impossible to overcome. I used to look with envy at the automatic typesetters and the printing presses and thought how much faster and better our work could have been done if we had used those machines instead of my typewriter. In the spring of 1944, my comrade told me, in an enthusiastic but worried voice, that he the Party’s Central Committee had assigned him to design a plan to print brochures and leaflets that were to be distributed to the population and the army, and asked me whether I knew a place where he could print a brochure. Knowing what the situation was at the printing house, I had to think of another place. I soon remembered I had once met – about three years ago, in a forced labor camp – one of the co-owners of the ‘Taranul’ [‘Peasant’] printing house in Bucharest. His name was Alfred Rainer, and he was one of my major contributors; thanks to him, an important share of the printing house’s income was directed to the purse of the Red Aid. I paid him a visit and I told him directly what I wanted from him. Rainer gladly accepted: he agreed to put his workshops and paper to our disposal, so that we could print whatever we liked. All we needed was a typesetter and a ‘puitoare’ [Ed. note: operator who inserted the blank paper into the printing press]. We found them in typesetter Sigol and ‘puitoarea’ Stefania Barbulescu. This is how our printing plan began, in the workshop of the ‘Taranul’ printing house, located at the heart of our country’s capital, not far away from Sfantul Gheorghe Sq.
The first manuscript that Stefan Popescu entrusted me with had twenty pages and was entitled ‘The Red Army Is Coming’. The cover bore the mention ‘The Publishing House of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party’ (and I was informed that that was the first printed material to see the light of day with that mention on it in Romania), and it had to be multiplied in 2,000 of copies. At the second floor of the workshop, where the typesetting section was, I prepared a room where the typesetter was to work at night, when the place was deserted. We had get rid of the guard – he had been allowed to take a few days off. In the evening, Sigol entered the workshop, carefully camouflaged the window and, after making sure everything was all right, he began to work. Even today, I remember what he told me when I asked him if he enjoyed the text: ‘Every word is like a bullet!’
Typesetting was done manually, using small letters and crowded lines to save paper. It lasted three of four nights. Then we moved to the printing process. This was done in a Sunday, using a ‘flat’ machine in order to avoid making noise and being heard from the street – we didn’t use the motor, but we manually operated the wheel of the machine. We crammed the copies into a large suitcase which we placed in a previously designated location, from where Stefan was supposed to pick it up. We left the workshop one by one, making sure we weren’t followed, after burning the galley proofs, and removing all the traces of our action. We left the doors unlocked – Stefan was supposed to come in, collect the suitcase with brochures, lock the door, and place the key in the mailbox. In order to avoid the detection of the printing shop by the type that had been used, we asked Rainer to sacrifice the entire set of types: all the led blocks were put in a pouch which was thrown in the Dambovita River.
The following day, Stefan took care of the distribution, and hundreds of citizens found in their mailboxes the very first work published by the Publishing House of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. ‘The Romanian Communist Party’, they could read, ‘feels it is its duty to enlighten the public opinion in this difficult time, when the nation is at a crossroads, placed between life and death… The Communist Party knows this is no easy thing. It is with difficulty that its word reaches you, for it has to sidestep the barbed wire of a terror regime and – what’s more dramatic –, struggle with an entire mentality of mistrust, suspicion, fear… But, no matter how many obstacles may lie in its way, the voice of the Communist Party shall be heard and understood, because it is the voice of the national self-preservation instinct.’ But it wasn’t until the liberation day [23rd August 1944] that I found out the name of the one who had written those inspired pages: Mihail Sebastian [18]. That day, a new kind of duty awaited us, the ones at the printing house: we had to print, that very day, the first official issue of the ‘Romania Libera’ newspaper.
There was no way we could use that printing house to print some of our own things. The fact that one of the employees lived with his family in the very building of the company was an obstacle impossible to overcome. I used to look with envy at the automatic typesetters and the printing presses and thought how much faster and better our work could have been done if we had used those machines instead of my typewriter. In the spring of 1944, my comrade told me, in an enthusiastic but worried voice, that he the Party’s Central Committee had assigned him to design a plan to print brochures and leaflets that were to be distributed to the population and the army, and asked me whether I knew a place where he could print a brochure. Knowing what the situation was at the printing house, I had to think of another place. I soon remembered I had once met – about three years ago, in a forced labor camp – one of the co-owners of the ‘Taranul’ [‘Peasant’] printing house in Bucharest. His name was Alfred Rainer, and he was one of my major contributors; thanks to him, an important share of the printing house’s income was directed to the purse of the Red Aid. I paid him a visit and I told him directly what I wanted from him. Rainer gladly accepted: he agreed to put his workshops and paper to our disposal, so that we could print whatever we liked. All we needed was a typesetter and a ‘puitoare’ [Ed. note: operator who inserted the blank paper into the printing press]. We found them in typesetter Sigol and ‘puitoarea’ Stefania Barbulescu. This is how our printing plan began, in the workshop of the ‘Taranul’ printing house, located at the heart of our country’s capital, not far away from Sfantul Gheorghe Sq.
The first manuscript that Stefan Popescu entrusted me with had twenty pages and was entitled ‘The Red Army Is Coming’. The cover bore the mention ‘The Publishing House of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party’ (and I was informed that that was the first printed material to see the light of day with that mention on it in Romania), and it had to be multiplied in 2,000 of copies. At the second floor of the workshop, where the typesetting section was, I prepared a room where the typesetter was to work at night, when the place was deserted. We had get rid of the guard – he had been allowed to take a few days off. In the evening, Sigol entered the workshop, carefully camouflaged the window and, after making sure everything was all right, he began to work. Even today, I remember what he told me when I asked him if he enjoyed the text: ‘Every word is like a bullet!’
Typesetting was done manually, using small letters and crowded lines to save paper. It lasted three of four nights. Then we moved to the printing process. This was done in a Sunday, using a ‘flat’ machine in order to avoid making noise and being heard from the street – we didn’t use the motor, but we manually operated the wheel of the machine. We crammed the copies into a large suitcase which we placed in a previously designated location, from where Stefan was supposed to pick it up. We left the workshop one by one, making sure we weren’t followed, after burning the galley proofs, and removing all the traces of our action. We left the doors unlocked – Stefan was supposed to come in, collect the suitcase with brochures, lock the door, and place the key in the mailbox. In order to avoid the detection of the printing shop by the type that had been used, we asked Rainer to sacrifice the entire set of types: all the led blocks were put in a pouch which was thrown in the Dambovita River.
The following day, Stefan took care of the distribution, and hundreds of citizens found in their mailboxes the very first work published by the Publishing House of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. ‘The Romanian Communist Party’, they could read, ‘feels it is its duty to enlighten the public opinion in this difficult time, when the nation is at a crossroads, placed between life and death… The Communist Party knows this is no easy thing. It is with difficulty that its word reaches you, for it has to sidestep the barbed wire of a terror regime and – what’s more dramatic –, struggle with an entire mentality of mistrust, suspicion, fear… But, no matter how many obstacles may lie in its way, the voice of the Communist Party shall be heard and understood, because it is the voice of the national self-preservation instinct.’ But it wasn’t until the liberation day [23rd August 1944] that I found out the name of the one who had written those inspired pages: Mihail Sebastian [18]. That day, a new kind of duty awaited us, the ones at the printing house: we had to print, that very day, the first official issue of the ‘Romania Libera’ newspaper.
Onesti was a shtetl, a small town which had relatively many Jews. But they weren’t any different from the other inhabitants – they dressed in the contemporary fashion.