At that time there was a Public Supply Government Office, and the local government official designated the bakeries which were able to work, where there were enough people and there was equipment, too, and he allocated us flour and wood. And we got all this for free, because we could prove how much wood and how many truckloads of flour they had taken in 1944. My father had to find a new apprentice, because the old one died in Auschwitz unfortunately. He was in the same Lager with me. We needed a domestic servant, too, so they recruited the personnel, but first they employed cleaning ladies, who washed everything off, because the Russians were nice people, but cleanliness wasn't their virtue, and they started to bake sometime in the middle of October. From then on the bakery prospered, because we had our customers.
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Ferenc Leicht
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My 80 kilogram mother weighed 35 kilograms when she came home. Because she had almost died of petechial typhus. They could hardly heal her from the petechial typhus, she could hardly walk. Aunt Bozsi and her first worked in Birkenau, but all her sisters and their children were gassed immediately. The Krupp had a subsidiary company near Auschwitz. Everyone who worked there wore a badge. My mother brought her badge home, but unfortunately it got lost. They made the outer shell of the bullets, not the igniter, but the shell. And they worked there until the 18th January, until Auschwitz was evacuated. But while I was still there I had no idea about this. All of my mother's other sisters were deported to Birkenau, none of them came home, they were gassed at once with their children, even my nephew, who was taller than me. Out of the sisters only my mother and her sister Bozsi survived. They were together throughout, they were liberated together and they also came home together. Only my father found her wife, the others didn't. We were the only family in Dunantul which survived all this with no loss.
Sometime at the end of September the relatives from Budapest phoned and said that my father should go after my mother, because she was there, but she couldn't come home. My father went to Budapest, there was normal train traffic, and with my mother and my aunt Bozsi [Erzsebet], who also survived, they came home to Nagykanizsa somehow. Aunt Bozsi was lucky, because she lived in a house with a garden in a nice neighborhood, they didn't rob her apartment, and she could simply move in. Everything she had was untouched, because some boss moved there, and when the Russians came he ran away. Then her house was sealed, so all the furniture, her underwear, her sheets, everything she needed was there in the apartment. But she didn't have a husband, unfortunately, I knew that he had died. I told her that while we were together I tried to save him from the selection, but when I got to the hospital I couldn't do it anymore. She cried on my shoulders.
In the meantime one of my father's sisters, Juliska arrived, who had been deported. Juliska was in the group of 70 women from Nagykanizsa, who had been assigned to a group of 400 women and first they were taken to Gelsenkirchen [today Austria] to work, and when Gelsenkirchen was bombed they were taken to Sommerda. [Editor’s note: Both Gelsenkirchen and Sömmerda were auxiliary camps of Buchenwald. In Gelsenkirchen they made the prisoners work at the Gelsenberg Benzin AG, in Sömmerda at the Rheinmetall-Borsig AG.]. And their lagerführer [German for camp director], their commandant took care about them so well that during deportation only 2 of the 400 women died: one during and air-raid because of some shrapnel, and the other one of some illness. 398 of them returned, among them my aunt Juliska and many of my young friends from school, and all 70 women from Nagykanizsa returned. Their SS commander was granted later the Yad Vashem decoration in Jerusalem because of this. So when Juliska came back, she moved back to her own apartment next to the small synagogue where we had been in the ghetto. Juliska already knew at that time that her husband and two children had died. She wasn't happy. Then we thanked the neighbors for their help and moved to Juliska's with my father, because she had her own apartment where there weren't any Russians or anyone else.
I went to our apartment, where the bakery used to be, and it turned out that it wasn’t possible to go in because the Soviet soldiers had moved into the apartment, they used it as storage, because they weren’t interested in the apartment but the bakery where they baked bread for themselves. They made square bread in tin pans, which stunk so bad that I almost fainted, because as it turned out they put waste oil on it so that it wouldn't burn. They didn’t let us in, and for a couple more months, until the unit, which was stationed there left, we couldn't go neither into the house nor into the bakery. My father lived at the neighbor's, they received me in, too, and I moved there. The neighbor woman who lived across from our house came crying, she was happy to see us, she loved us. She asked me if I wanted her to cook chicken for me. I said ' Aunt Kati, I would like some noodles with peach jam.' I craved for something sweet. Then she made noodles out of half a kilogram of flour, she boiled them and gave them to me with some peach jam. I ate them all in a minute. She cooked for us, and my father and I lived at the other neighbor's. One of the apprentices ran the bakery, a Christian baker called Szabo, who said when my father arrived that as soon as the Russians left he would give everything back to us. Nothing was missing from the bakery, because they started to use it immediately, and the Russians didn't take anything either, but the apartment was emptied from wall-to-wall, even by the nice Hungarian neighbors. Nothing was left there, nothing at all. When the Russians left at the beginning of the fall Szabo let my father back. Until then we lived off Joint aid. The Joint gave us money or something, and we gave that to the neighbors who cooked for us. Though I could cook, they didn't let me close to the stove. Because they thought it wasn't appropriate for a 16-year-old boy to cook, when the housewife was there.
We were in Birkenau. Birkenau was huge, 2 square kilometers. Next to the camp there was a huge factory of the IG Farben in the process. [Editor‘s note: The IG Farbenindustrie-concern. They built the Buna-Werke Synthetic Tire and Petrol Factory near Auschwitz, where many prisoners worked.] They only assigned a third of the approximately 4000 people who arrived with the train I also came with to work, they gassed the rest immediately. Which was an ‘excellent rate’, so to speak, because later there were transports 100 percent of which were gassed. There wasn’t enough room in the Lager [German for camp], and they gassed them. Usually only 4-5 percent went to work, and the 95-96 percent went to the gas chambers immediately. But our company seemed suitable for work. And they put us, 400 or 450 of us, I don’t remember exactly, on trucks, and took us to the camp, which was 5 kilometers away and belonged to the IG. They called the main road in the middle of the Lager Lager Strasse [German for Camp Street], and lined us up there five by five, and we took off to the other end of the camp across the gate, where the disinfecting room was.
On the 2nd May we arrived to a huge plane territory. Before the train stopped we could see through the holes that people in striped clothes were disassembling the wrecks of airplanes, but we had no idea that we would ever have to do anything with that. Then they opened the cars and gentlemen in striped clothes started shouting, that everyone should leave everything in the cars, the women should leave their purses, too, and immediately get off the train. And they got on the train to make us hurry. One of them asked me in Yiddish how old I was. I understood this, because it is very similar to German. I said 15, then he told me: ‘say that you’re 17’. I didn’t know Yiddish, but fortunately I understood this. Then they got us off the train, and we had to line up five by five. I held my mother’s hand from one side, my aunt’s hand from the other, and on that side was my aunt’s husband, and someone else, but I don’t remember who anymore. I know that we went in rows of five. We walked along nice and slowly. They didn’t really make us hurry, but there were wolf-dogs, SS, so it was a threatening situation, but nobody said a loud word. They didn’t yell, didn’t threaten us. And then we arrived in front of an elegant German officer.
As it turned out later, that was Mengele. Interestingly he was very polite with us. He told my mother very politely: „Gnädige Frau, können Sie laufen?” [German: Dear lady, can you run?]. My mother didn’t understand a word in German, I used to pull her leg by saying that if Hungarian language didn’t exist, she would have to bark like puppies. And of course she didn’t understand the question. She told me: ‘What is he saying, what is he saying, what did he ask?’ I translated it to her that he asked where he should run. Then he said that we had to part temporarily. ‘Ladies please step to the left, men please to the right.’ They separated us, and I never saw my mother and my grandmother again until they came back from the deportation. I went with my aunt’s husband, with that certain stationer Eisinger, and they assigned us both to work. As I later found out, they assigned my mother and her sister to work, too.
As it turned out later, that was Mengele. Interestingly he was very polite with us. He told my mother very politely: „Gnädige Frau, können Sie laufen?” [German: Dear lady, can you run?]. My mother didn’t understand a word in German, I used to pull her leg by saying that if Hungarian language didn’t exist, she would have to bark like puppies. And of course she didn’t understand the question. She told me: ‘What is he saying, what is he saying, what did he ask?’ I translated it to her that he asked where he should run. Then he said that we had to part temporarily. ‘Ladies please step to the left, men please to the right.’ They separated us, and I never saw my mother and my grandmother again until they came back from the deportation. I went with my aunt’s husband, with that certain stationer Eisinger, and they assigned us both to work. As I later found out, they assigned my mother and her sister to work, too.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
In Nagykanizsa there was an internment camp in the former coffee factory. There were leftists there, too, and all kinds of people, and a lot of Jews. But because the internment camp was small, there were only a couple truckload of Jews, they came to the small synagogue and the big synagogue and selected men and women between the age of 15 and 65. Among others, they selected me, my mother, my Aunt Bozsi [Erzsebet] and her husband, but they didn’t select the neighbor girl for example. They didn’t deport those either who had small children, even if they were of this age. They lined up those who fit into this category on the 29th in the afternoon, escorted them to the coffee factory near the railway station, and the train came. But we didn’t know that at the front of the train there were a lot of cars full with the people from the coffee factory, nobody told us. They put about 80 of us on the train. Then they filled that long train with who knows how many Jews from Nagykanizsa, Csaktornya and Murakoz, relatively not old men and women. I got into the same car with my mother, my Aunt Bozsi, her husband, and quite a few of my schoolmates. I had never seen the policemen who put us on the car before, I only found it out about 10 years ago that they were from Szombathely.
And on the 29th the train set off, but nobody told us where we were going. But since it was the first train, everyone was optimistic, nobody thought that there might be a problem.
And on the 29th the train set off, but nobody told us where we were going. But since it was the first train, everyone was optimistic, nobody thought that there might be a problem.
Then we first went to the courtyard of the small synagogue with my mother. The big synagogue was built in 1826, it was a huge, internally arched monument. On the outside it had a roof, on the inside it was domed. The synagogue was the so-called big synagogue, there was an organ in it, too. [Editor’s note: Otherwise first at a synagogue in Hungary, in 1845!] Besides that there was a small synagogue, too. The small synagogue was in a huge building complex, in which there was the Jewish elementary school, the commercial school, because that had been a Jewish commercial school originally, but the town took it, but many Jewish teachers and young people went there, the Jewish rest-home, an apartment house, where there were apartments in which besides the people from Nagykanizsa the employees of the Jewish community lived, and the small synagogue. Since we lived in the outskirts of the town, by the time they got to us with the gathering, the big synagogue had become full, and then they started to cram the Jews into the small synagogue. My mother’s other sisters, all 5 of them were already in the big synagogue. Even my father’s sister, Juliska, who lived in Nagykanizsa was there, only Olga remained in Somogycsurgo, and Frida had moved to Pest with her husband before. And on the 28th in the morning they put me in the apartment of my aunt Juliska, who lived in the apartment house near the small synagogue, and she paid rent to the Jewish community, and who had been taken to the big synagogue by then, We were there for a night with my mother and about 10 other families were jammed there, there was about 30 of us. And the subject of my adoration, the neighbor girl, the daughter of the grocer was also there, and we were very happy that we could be together. And on top of this my uncle’s angora rabbits were also there. Because my Aunt Juliska’s husband, Imre Hirschler, who was a clerk, had been fired because of the anti-Jewish laws, and because he had to make a living he started to deal with angora rabbits. At that time it was in fashion, because its fur could be sold for good money. And as they were taken to the big synagogue, nobody fed the rabbits, even though the Lucerne had been put next to them. When they took us there I started feeding the rabbits, and once a young SS came next to me, because the ghetto was already guarded by the SS, and we fed the rabbits peacefully next to each other. I didn’t have any bad experiences in the ghetto. And when they brought the Jews from Csaktornya and Murakoz, they transferred us to a room of the rest home.
In Nagykanizsa there was an internment camp in the former coffee factory. There were leftists there, too, and all kinds of people, and a lot of Jews.
In Nagykanizsa there was an internment camp in the former coffee factory. There were leftists there, too, and all kinds of people, and a lot of Jews.
One day they placarded that the Jews weren’t allowed to leave their apartment. This was on the 26th April. By then they had taken everything from us. The bakery functioned throughout, because my father was an independent tradesman, so he couldn’t fire himself. And they couldn’t withdraw his trade license, because part of Nagykanizsa would have been left without bread. At that time only my mother was still at home. My father was a forced laborer, he was a forced laborer at many places, in 1943 for example he was near Csaktornya, then in Godollo, in 1944 in Veszprem, he was a baker at the Veszprem Railroad Building Company. During the war he was on forced labor for periods of 3-4 months, they let him home, and drafted him again later. They let him home again, and drafted him again. On the 26th of April we still baked with my mother and on the 27th we still sold bread before they came to deport us. Between the 26th and 28th they gathered all the Jews from Nagykanizsa. 2-3 policemen came and told us that we could take with us as much as we could hold, except precious metal, cash and weapons. They made a list of these, but in general terms, for example, the usual furniture of a kitchen, a common bedroom with the usual bedding. Everything, everything was ‘usual’. A bakery with the usual appliances. They wrote in the list in detail the things that they made us surrender.
I had just finished the 1st grade, when the Germans marched in on the 19th March 1944. By the 31st March all schools had to be closed, they closed all the schools. And from the end of March one order came after the other. From the 5th April we had to wear a yellow star [see Yellow star in Hungary][8], bicycles had to be surrendered.
After middle school, from 1943 I went to a commercial college for a year in Nagykanizsa. I didn’t have to take any entrance exams, because I was such a good student that there was no need for it. The schools published a year book every year with the list of all the pupils and their grades for each subject. The names of those who graduated with distinction was printed with italics, and the names of those who were excellent with bold letters. I knew the general subjects better, I was first at school in Mathematics, but for example I was never good at drawing, handcrafts, physical exercise and singing. I always had a problem with arts and crafts, and these spoilt my grade average. I was a good student at the commercial school, too. I never studied at home, I read very much, but at home I never did the homework, which I couldn’t do at school. I had just finished the 1st grade, when the Germans marched in on the 19th March 1944.
During the Yugoslav war I became the air-raid warden in our district. [Editor’s note: The German army attacked Yugoslavia together with the Hungarians in 1941]. All the men were already soldiers in 1941 and all the Jews were forced laborers. In Nagykanizsa there wasn’t regular bombing at that time [see Air-attacks against Hungary][6], the Yugoslav bombers only flew once or twice, but air defense had to be taken seriously, and since it was completely unorganized centrally, the inhabitants from the district asked me to be the warden.[Editor’s note: Nagykanizsa was bombed 3 times during the war.] In that neighborhood I was the oldest boy. We agreed about a cellar, which was big enough, and the inhabitants of 5 or 6 houses went there, and it was my task, as a Jewish child, to escort the neighbors from half the street and my mother to the cellar. I also had to check if everyone had their papers, their valuables, and whether they had flash-lights and food. I had everyone pack a suitcase or a bag, an air-raid pack, as they called it, and I always checked if they had it on them. My mother and I also went there. It was a joke, because this was in 1941, well after the third anti-Jewish law. But it didn’t affect me, I kept going to middle school, and my father kept baking bread when he wasn’t on forced labor.
’ Despite of this there wasn’t anyone at school who was more Hungarian and irredentist than I was. I was convinced that Trianon was terribly unjust, and we should get ‘everything back’. [see Trianon peace treaty][5]. My parents were on the same opinion, they also lived their lives as Hungarian, they weren’t mindful of the fact that they were of Jewish origin, and thought that their ancestor had arrived with Arpad, but I surpassed them by far in irredentism and Hungarian patriotism. [Editor’s Note: Prince Arpad led the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin where the Hungarians settled.] The fact that I was Jewish only meant for me that on Fridays and Saturdays I had to go to the synagogue. I hated the rabbi, dr. Erno Winkler, the poor thing, he was also killed unfortunately. He taught religion from the 1st class of elementary school until middle school, but I could never stand him. It happened that he slapped me in the face, I don’t know anymore why, perhaps I was wrong in something. And what is unforgettable: he taught us to be Hungarian irredentists. He was, too. But he didn’t teach us the Jewish religious laws, he didn’t teach us what was allowed and what wasn’t. He kept together with the rightists and the leaders of the Jewish community were corrupt. They assimilated the entire town completely. People say that there used to be three kinds of Jews in Hungary: Orthodox, Neolog and Nagykanizsa Jews. They also said that in Nagykanizsa not even the water was kosher, because the Jews from there were not religious at all. There weren’t any kind of Jewish organization or youth movement, except the women’s association, which the wealthier Jews made for themselves, but nobody from our family used to go there. My mother’s family with her 6 sisters was a women’s association in itself.
Most of the teachers at middle school were very anti-Semite, respect to the rare exceptions. For example I was by far the best in national defense class, I had 1, at that time grading was inversely. [Editor’s note: 1 was the best, 5 was failure. From the 1950-1951 school year the mark 5 was the best in the 5 mark scale.] I could recount all the imbecility that was in that book, and there was a lot of bullshit in it. The teacher told the others: ‘Shame on you, this Jewish child, who doesn’t have anything to do with this knows it, and why don’t you learn it?
My homeroom teacher at the Zrinyi Miklos boys’ middle school was Gizella Arato, may she be healthy if she is still alive, or may her memory be blessed if she has already died – she was an antique teenage girl, they considered a 26 year old single woman an old maid, she was the strictest teacher in the school. She was incredibly strict, she taught Hungarian and German, and took both very seriously, with grammar, spelling, reading and everything. At that time it was a recommended pedagogical method at school to beat the children. With cane or hazel switch, which was as thick as my thumb. And despite the fact that I was one of the best students in Hungarian and German, at the Jewish school we had learned German from the 2nd grade of elementary school, she spanked me regularly if I was wrong. Otherwise she wasn’t anti-Semite, if someone made a mistake, she spanked everyone indiscriminately.
The middle school was quite far from our apartment. In winter there was always a lot of snow, and I had to beat a path every morning in the huge snow, and sometimes I was absent, because I couldn’t beat my way to school. At that time there wasn’t coeducation, the boys and girls were strictly separated, and I had a permit from the headmaster of the girls’ school to walk the neighbor girl, the daughter of the grocer who was of my age, to school and home. We were 10 years old, and in the mornings we beat the path to school together. She was a small, delicate girl, and she was afraid of the other boys, because they said nasty things about her being a Jew. At that time people said very nasty things about Jews. The children shouted ‘dirty Jew’ and they fought, and the adults, the teachers did it as people do it today, in a covert way, but it was obvious. Especially at middle school, where mostly non-Jewish children went. Most of our customers were also very anti-Semite, but they bought bread from us, because it was good. Two corners away there was another baker, a certain Gyozo Ferenczi, who painted an arrow cross on his gate at the end of the 1930s, and he asked the people around him why they supported the Jew, and didn’t buy bread from him, because it wasn’t far away, but they still didn’t buy rolls from him. They told him, that because the Jewish bread was better than his, and that he should have made better bread, and then they would have supported him.
In middle school the children already went to the ‘Levente’, and we had to wear a ‘Levente’ uniform with yellow stripes. [see ‘Levente’ movement][4]. The ‘Levente’ activity was a compulsory extra curricular activity, twice a week, but only for Christians. They didn’t admit Jews, even though we worked as much as the ‘Levente’ members exercised, we were called ‘auxiliary training youth’. They prepared us for the forced labor. In the center of the town people laughed at us when we shoveled trash, swept and did other things. But it didn’t really bother me, because I was the son of the baker from the end of the town, and who knew me besides our customers?! And those who knew me, let’s say those to whom I delivered the rolls every morning – never thought of laughing at me. But there were a lot of Jewish children from wealthy families there with me, for example the son of the wealthiest lawyer in town, and people made fun of them with great pleasure. Being a scout wasn’t obligatory, but they never admitted any Jews into the scout troops. I would have done that with greater pleasure.
In this year my mother’s sisters and their husbands got together. I was the only child who was there, partly because it was at our place, and partly because I was the oldest one, who could understand the events more or less. They discussed whether they should stay or go. At that time the only country which would have accepted the Jews from Hungary was Uganda. [Editor’s note: In 1903 British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain came up with the idea of establishing a Jewish state on the territory of Uganda. By this time the efforts of Herzl regarding Palestine had failed, and he accepted the proposal, but he soon abandoned the Uganda plan because of the strong opposition that it raised. After Herzl’s death in 1904 the Zionist leadership dropped the Uganda plan.] My father said that he could bake bread in any language. Istvan Lusztig, Aunt Irma’s husband, who was as big as a wardrobe and an incredibly strong man, said that there wasn’t any work which he couldn’t do, because he was incredibly strong. The third one, Ferenc Schnitzer Sarlos, Etel’s husband, who was a goldsmith, said that there wasn’t any place in the world where he couldn’t make a living as a goldsmith, The others, Vilma’s husband, Gyula Sternberger, who was a paint merchant, Gizella’s husband, Jeno Berger, who was a bartender, Ilona’s husband, Feri Vermes Wortmann, who was a clerk, and Erzsebet’s husband, Jeno Eisinger, who was a bookseller, said, that they wouldn’t leave, that something will happen, something always happens to solve things. Because the majority decided that we should stay, we stayed. And the saddest thing is, that those 3 survived who wanted to live. Out of those who wanted to stay nobody survived the Shoah.
In 1939, at the age of 10 I applied to the Piarist high school in Nagykanizsa. They enrolled 5 Jewish children, but they didn’t enroll me as the 6th. This was overzealous from their part, because the anti-Jewish laws only limited the number of those who could be enrolled at universities, and I never forgave them for this.
We weren’t religious at all, not even my grandparents. They also assimilated completely. They told me, that my grandfather, who was a shammash, was always angry on Sundays, because he wasn’t allowed to smoke, he had to give good example. Saturdays were a hell for them, because my grandfather was nervous and he nagged his children all day long. Not even my great-grandmothers were religious, because if they had been, they wouldn’t have had natural children. And my parents not only dressed like the locals, they also used to kill a pig. They didn’t observe the holidays at all. But in the bakery it wasn’t really possible to observe the holidays, because most of the customers were not Jewish. We couldn’t observe the Sabbath or the Pesach, because the leaven was always there in the bakery. Perhaps they went to the synagogue by turns on the biggest holidays, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. At the high holidays they fasted, but this was a completely incidental thing. Being a Jew in my childhood only meant for me that I went to a Jewish elementary school, and then it was obligatory for me to go to the synagogue on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. Because if someone failed the religion class had to repeat the year. Then I learned to be a prayer leader, I knew ho to conduct the Friday evening service. When I went to middle school we left the class when the others had religion class, and the rabbi held religion class for us.
As far as I remember in my childhood we were on holiday twice. Once in Balatonfenyves and once in Balatonmariafurdo. Both times we were in someone’s summer cottage. We went with my mother only, my father never came, because both of them couldn’t leave the bakery there at the same time. There were 36 bakers in the town, and they would have taken our customers, so that none would have remained. My parents never closed the bakery. They entertained themselves so that they played cards with the neighbors, it didn’t matter whether they were Jewish or not. There were big card parties at weekends, and I was a big card player in my childhood, too. They seldom went to the theatre, because theatre was quite expensive under the circumstances of that time, and also because they were exhausted. My parents worked very much. And always at night, that was very tiresome for them. But they adored each other. They were very sweet. My father was never rude, but they always entertained themselves with quarreling and fighting for fun, and then they ran away from each other. They had a game, which they still played a lot in the 1950s. My wife laughed at them, because I had been married for a long time, I had a son, we lived with my parents and they still kept doing this.
The house on Tavasz Street, in which we lived, wasn’t ours, but my father rented it for 140 pengoes a month. This was a lot of money, 20 pengoes were a good day-wages, a loaf of bread cost 36 filler, an egg cost 4 filler. At that time the girls weren’t with us anymore, because Vilma took the two small ones, and Ilona and Irma had got married by that time. On that housing estate for public servants 3 Jewish families lived: a baker family, that was ours, a grocer, and a very old Jew, Uncle Dukasz, who was a private citizen, and his son, Miki Dukasz was a bachelor. But he couldn’t have much money, because he was a private citizen among miserable conditions. The other family was Istvan Burger, his wife and their daughter, Iren Burger, they were the grocers. The girl was my friend in my childhood and I adored her. Unfortunately she was killed in Birkenau. I will never forget her, I can still see her, an ugly little girl, a skinny Jewish girl, but her eyes and intelligence! She would turn 75 on the 16th November, I know that, too.
We had a bakery on the housing estate, just like at the previous place. There wasn’t a well, but a drinking-fountain on the corner, about 100 meters from the bakery, and the man-servant had to carry the water from there with buckets. This was a big problem. My father was obsessed with having enough flour and wood, so he had about 240-270 cubic meters of wood, the yard was full with this wood, so that we couldn't see the top. The flour was in the corner of the kneading workshop, usually about a truckload of flour. If there wasn’t enough room for it, we put it in the shop.
We had a bakery on the housing estate, just like at the previous place. There wasn’t a well, but a drinking-fountain on the corner, about 100 meters from the bakery, and the man-servant had to carry the water from there with buckets. This was a big problem. My father was obsessed with having enough flour and wood, so he had about 240-270 cubic meters of wood, the yard was full with this wood, so that we couldn't see the top. The flour was in the corner of the kneading workshop, usually about a truckload of flour. If there wasn’t enough room for it, we put it in the shop.
When they sold the house in 1936 we moved to the next street, to a certain housing estate for pensioner clerks. It was about 500 meters on foot. On this housing estate mostly pensioner civil servants lived: pensioner policemen, gendarmes, railway-men, mailmen, revenue officers, servicemen, who could retire after 25 years of service. There were only houses with a garden, each had a huge garden, the yard with the garden was about 200 meters long. We weren’t adepts in gardening, but our neighbors went shares in it with us, they planted strawberry, they polled the trees and they sprayed. The strawberries were very delicious, and when the neighbor picked them he divided them: ‘Mr. Lejk, this is yours and this is ours’- that’s what he said. They called my father Mr. Lejk, they couldn’t pronounce Leicht. And we had a lot of peach trees, there was ripe fruit during the entire season, because there were several kinds. And there were pears, and everything you can imagine. Besides that we had pigs, too, because we killed pigs.
Later I quit playing because of this, and I started reading very early, well before school. Perhaps one of my aunts taught me to read, I don’t remember.
My parents didn’t have time for this, but there were my four aunts who were already going to school, the youngest of them was 10 years older than me. I could already read when I was 5, at the age of 7-8 I knew the 3 Tolnai lexicons, which were at home, by heart. I didn’t learn the encyclopedias, but I read them so many times that they stuck in my head. It was the same case with the Toldi At middle school we had to learn the first chapter of the Toldi by heart, and it was enough to know excerpts from the other chapters. But I read the entire Toldi so many times that I knew all 12 chapters by heart. [The Toldi trilogy is an epic poem trilogy written by the great Hungarian poet Janos Arany.
The trilogy was inspired by the legendary strong Miklos Toldi, who served in the Hungarian King Louis I of Hungary's army in the 14th century. The interviewee refers to the first part of the trilogy.] Among our books at home I had a very nice one, Mihaly Zichy’s pictorial ‘The tragedy of man’ [The tragedy of man by Imre Madach is a dramatic poem approximately 4000 lines long, which elaborates on ideas comparable to Goethe's Faust.] which I got as a present in 1942 for my bar mitzvah. Then we had many books by Rezso Torok, which were humorous writings.
[Editor’s note: Rezso Torok (1895-1966)- exceptionally productive novelist, his humorous novels brought him success.]. I liked Wild West novels very much, too. We had a lot of these books, and then there was a series called Ten-Filler Novels, because each book cost 10 fillers. We had many books by Zoltan Thury [Editor’s note: (1870–1906) – writer, journalist], whose writings I liked very much, of course when I grew older, and I read a lot and continuously. We also had books by Rejto at that time already [Jeno Rejto (1905–1943), Hungarian writer of Jewish origin.
My parents didn’t have time for this, but there were my four aunts who were already going to school, the youngest of them was 10 years older than me. I could already read when I was 5, at the age of 7-8 I knew the 3 Tolnai lexicons, which were at home, by heart. I didn’t learn the encyclopedias, but I read them so many times that they stuck in my head. It was the same case with the Toldi At middle school we had to learn the first chapter of the Toldi by heart, and it was enough to know excerpts from the other chapters. But I read the entire Toldi so many times that I knew all 12 chapters by heart. [The Toldi trilogy is an epic poem trilogy written by the great Hungarian poet Janos Arany.
The trilogy was inspired by the legendary strong Miklos Toldi, who served in the Hungarian King Louis I of Hungary's army in the 14th century. The interviewee refers to the first part of the trilogy.] Among our books at home I had a very nice one, Mihaly Zichy’s pictorial ‘The tragedy of man’ [The tragedy of man by Imre Madach is a dramatic poem approximately 4000 lines long, which elaborates on ideas comparable to Goethe's Faust.] which I got as a present in 1942 for my bar mitzvah. Then we had many books by Rezso Torok, which were humorous writings.
[Editor’s note: Rezso Torok (1895-1966)- exceptionally productive novelist, his humorous novels brought him success.]. I liked Wild West novels very much, too. We had a lot of these books, and then there was a series called Ten-Filler Novels, because each book cost 10 fillers. We had many books by Zoltan Thury [Editor’s note: (1870–1906) – writer, journalist], whose writings I liked very much, of course when I grew older, and I read a lot and continuously. We also had books by Rejto at that time already [Jeno Rejto (1905–1943), Hungarian writer of Jewish origin.
When my parents finished their work in the morning 800 kilograms of bread was baked, and there were rolls, too. But they still couldn’t go to bed, because then the baking of the dough prepared at home followed. The housewives kneaded the dough at home and took it to the bakery to have it baked. They brought it in bread-baskets put on their head. This cost 5 filler a kilogram. We weighed the baked bread, and we got as many times 5 filler as many kilograms it weighed. And a kilogram of bread cost 36 filler. I knew this very well. Nagykanizsa had 32000 inhabitants and 36 bakers. 800 people could support one bakery. And we had enough customers to get by well. My father was the best specialist in town, the best miser - this is also a German word, it means to stir or blender. He smelled the flour, looked at it, felt it, and told how much yeast, salt and water was needed. Many mills delivered flour, and each was of different quality. And the one who could tell how to make a good bread out of that, was the miser. And my father made excellent goods out of everything. The clerks, the movie theatre, the hospital, and almost all the restaurants bought the bread from us. And we supplied for the district, too. 800 kilograms of bread is a lot! 400 loaves of bread of 2 kilograms each.
My parents worked in the bakery with an apprentice, a baker’s man and a domestic servant at night. For a kilogram of bread, for the dough and the cleaning of the workshop 4 liters of water was needed. They carried the water from the yard, from the well, the domestic servant pulled up the 4 cubic meters of water from the well every day. When he didn’t pull up water or carry water, then he cut wood for the oven. The domestic servant lived at our place, in the attic above the oven and ate at our place, too. The apprentice and the baker’s man, too, everyone.
So in the fore part of our house, on the street side lived our family, and the bakery, which had two rooms, the kneading and the baking room, was built to the apartment. The two great-grandmothers lived with us, and my parents supported my mother’s four sisters, Ilona, Irma, Erzsebet and Etelka, who still went to school at that time. [Editor‘s note: Both of the mother‘s parents died in 1929] The older girls were already married. The four girls had the ‘schultz room’. It was called ‘schultz room’, because my grandparents once had a tenant with this name. I lived in the same room with my parents, which was heated with a tile stove. I never heard that something like bathroom existed. In my childhood I used to wear a pair of black shorts, and no shoes, and I looked just like a gypsy child. I was always tan, and always dirty. In the evenings my mother put me in a washbasin with water, took a cloth or something, and washed me.
Our kitchen functioned so that they cooked for 16. There were my parents and I, the four sisters, the two great-grandmothers, the maid, the baker’s apprentice and two assistants. Or an apprentice and the cook, who was our neighbor, she was a widow and her son also came to eat at our place sometimes.
Our kitchen functioned so that they cooked for 16. There were my parents and I, the four sisters, the two great-grandmothers, the maid, the baker’s apprentice and two assistants. Or an apprentice and the cook, who was our neighbor, she was a widow and her son also came to eat at our place sometimes.
In our house we were the only Jewish family. On the street, in our second neighbor there was another Jewish grocer, and on the other side of the street, quite far, at about 200 meters from our house there lived a family, the Baneth, I went to school with their son, Tibor. And these were all the Jews on the entire street. That wasn’t a Jewish neighborhood. Everyone lived where he could. To the right from our house there was an elementary school, and to the left there was the house of a teacher called Mantuana.
In our first house on Teleki Street not only we lived, because that was a very long plot, a courtyard ran along one side of it and on its other side there was a 40 meter long house, and that was divided crosswise into four apartments. These were all one-bedroom apartments with a kitchen. There was electricity in the house, but no running water. The toilet and the well in the courtyard were common, and there was no sewer, but the sewage-water simply trickled into the ditch, and that was quite smelly. The toilet was on the other end of the courtyard, about 80 meters from the house, and sometimes my great-grandmother Kadi, she used a walking stick, told me: ‘kids, I am going to Siberia’. By this she meant that she was going to the toilet. The plot was so long, that one had to go to the end of the garden by bike.