My father finished middle school [2], then he became a merchant. I don't know when he opened his store. I think it was when he got married to my mother; he had a wholesale haberdashery downtown - buttons, pullovers, hosiery, tights, it had everything like that.
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Displaying 1741 - 1770 of 50826 results
Ibi Krausz
They were definitely Neolog [1]. My grandmother used to light candles on Friday, but after that one could turn on the lights. My grandfather didn't pray at home, except on seder.
I go out from time to time, I have three friends and we play cards every Saturday, always at someone else's place. I love this very much. Of course, all three of them are Jewish and we also talk a lot about things.
My poor husband desperately longed for Israel but he never got to go there. I longed for Israel too, but I never thought that I would live there more than two years. I became really used to it, and I liked it, but there was always some fear in me.
He visited me, then we got together somehow, in the spring of 1984. We met again that same year, and from that time on we lived together as partners for nine years. He wanted to marry me, but I wouldn't marry him. I said I wouldn't leave my family here; he would have liked me to go to Israel permanently. He was here for, let's say, eight months of the year, then we traveled for a month, I was in Israel for two months, and for a month we were apart from each other. It was a very pleasant relationship because he was a well-traveled person, and I had traveled before, but with him, I visited many places in Israel. However, I always longed for home.
I regret that I didn't bring up my children to be religious, to have some religiousness inside them. They are very good Jews, but they aren't religious. They always considered themselves Jews; both of them are worried about Israel, both of them have been there. Their wives are Jewish. Thank God they met these girls, but none of them are really religious. But both Andras and Peter are very self-conscious Jews. Their daughters aren't religious either.
We observed the high holidays, the Yom Kippur, when we went to the synagogue and made a dinner as well. My poor husband observed the fast all day long; I observed it only until the maskir. My sons acknowledged that. We always observed the seder.
The boys are called Krausz, their children too; none of them changed their name. My poor husband and I would have liked very much for them to have Magyarized their names before graduation, but no. They said that if the name Krausz was good enough for father, then it was good enough for them, too. Both of them were raised as Jews. At that time it was very fashionable that the parents kept this a secret, because they thought it would be better that way, but this wasn't for us; they knew it from the first moment we could tell them. They frequented religious instruction for a while in Gyor, but then it stopped. So, they knew they were Jews, but they weren't religious; neither were we, which I still regret, thinking that I should have been a little bit more religious.
We didn't join any party. This caused us no problems; my husband was a leftist, I'm a leftist myself, and since he held a leading post they tried to persuade us many times to join the Communist Party, but he didn't do it.
During the Revolution in 1956 [8] we thought a lot about leaving Hungary, we almost started, too, but my husband didn't want to; he said he was old and wouldn't start a new life. The children were little. I don't know if we did the right thing or not. We didn't go. Gyor was a passageway, many of our acquaintances left; they got on the bus in Gyor and got off in Vienna. The chief rabbi, with whom we were on very good terms, was already there, and he sent us a message telling us to come, that he would arrange everything. I needed only a push, but I didn't have the courage to take my chances because there were the two little children.
In September 1952 I felt that I needed to leave the house. We had a domestic help. We were on very good terms with the deputy manager of the local OTP Bank [the Hungarian National Savings Bank], we were old friends, and he invited me to work three months at the OTP. And the three months turned into 25 years, and I retired to my pension from there. This was my only serious job: I was an internal auditor.
We got married in 1947. It was a civil marriage. We were on very good terms with the chief rabbi of Gyor, who later became chief rabbi in Vienna. I was 8-months pregnant and he often came to us. Once he came and I made some dinner - however, he ate only kosher, and we had no kosher food, but he ate it; he was religious, but he set little store by this - and then two couples who were friends of ours were there, and he held the marriage ceremony. So, we were blessed by a rabbi too, though at his request, because neither of us insisted on it.
So, we started life again, together. I had never liked Gyor, and after that I particularly disliked it, because so many horrible things had happened to us, yet we remained stuck there. My second husband finished higher commercial school as well, and after the war he was the chief accountant at a big county company, and before the war he had been a manager in a relatively well- known mill, the Back mill, which belonged to a baron.
This was around May-June, and I came home in the middle of October. I came home because the brother of one of my girlfriends came for her, and he said, 'I'll get you home, too.' As he was with my first husband, and they had been liberated, he told me, 'By the time we arrive your husband will be at home.' Well, we got home, but my husband had disappeared. After the liberation the Russians took them for a little forced labor, 'malenky robot' [6], and he was never found.
And at dawn, when they woke us up, we had to pull out the dead, but one couldn't tell who was dead and who wasn't because we all looked like living dead. We were liberated on 15th April 1945 by the English. Though they liberated us, they didn't have any understanding, any consideration at all. Looking back at those times I understand them because they were soldiers at war, but they treated us, at the beginning, as if we were enemies too; those few living dead who were there.
We were there for two weeks, and then we were liberated. But during those two weeks many people died around me, we were in poor health, and during the last couple of days I could hardly get on my feet, myself.
When the Americans got close to Bremen, they evacuated us to Bergen-Belsen, which was the horror of horrors, and I never get tired of saying that Auschwitz was a health resort compared to Bergen-Belsen. In Auschwitz there was order and organization, while here was chaos, and the Germans were frightfully evil at that time because they knew they were lost. We got there in relatively good shape, although we had walked a lot on the road, and there was an SS woman who drove us into a barn and wanted to set it on fire, but a Wehrmacht guard didn't let her do it. So we got there in terrible circumstances but in relatively good physical condition.
We spent six weeks in Auschwitz. There was no one else with us from the family. Supposedly they took my father to some mine - distant acquaintances told me this, but I don't know for sure. They separated us at the wagon, and he disappeared. Mengele sentenced me to 'life', but they took my poor mother - who, although quite young at 42, had grey hair and was plump - immediately to the gas.
They drove us forward; there was no chance to give them anything, and then there was the well-known 'bath', one section gas, one section bath, the shaving, completely naked, our things thrown together. It's interesting that our shoes were the only things we found [after the procedure]. They threw us each a dress; I got one that didn't fit me. It was lucky that my first husband's daughter, Panni, was a very well developed, tall and pretty girl, and she got a big dress. We exchanged clothes immediately.
In Gyor there were the so-called barracks, which consisted of wooden houses, where the dregs of society lived, the disreputable moochers. And they took them from there, and moved them into the empty Jewish houses, and they took us there from the ghetto. They took us across town group by group, the policemen and the gendarmes driving us along. And naturally the people were standing on the sidewalk, and there were some who felt pity for us, and there were some that clapped their hands with joy, saying, 'At least they take the stinking Jews to a suitable place.' And then we were there in horrible circumstances. But I wish we could have stayed there until the end, because at least the family was together there.
We went to the house of my father's grandparents about the end of April, if I remember correctly. We spent about two weeks in that house. We had to go to the ghetto at the beginning of May.
And that's how Panni was deported with me. She survived, because she was lucky enough to be a very well developed child, and they didn't gas her. They took us to Auschwitz, and when they separated us for different tasks they assigned me, being very thin, to the hardest work, while she went to the factory. But my best friend, who is now in Brazil, went to the factory with her, and she stayed at that factory, as well.
They also designated the building where my father's parents lived, as a place where people [Jews] could go, and we went there, too. They deported my husband, but his daughter, Panni, moved there with us.
He was called to forced labor service in Ersekujvar. I was only able to visit him once, on exactly the same day that the Germans came to Hungary: 19th March 1944 [5]. And I never saw him again after that. He wrote a few letters, and then they took him somewhere, while here the whole deportation story began.
We got married in February 1944 and lived together for three weeks. The wedding was in Gyor, in the synagogue, but it was winter, and the beautiful great temple wasn't open. There was a little synagogue near it, and we held it there - in modest circumstances, according to today's standards because we decided to get married very suddenly.
I learned to be a milliner after school. Jewish girls had to learn some trade as well. At that time, the fact that young Jews couldn't hold serious jobs began to cast its shadow on us.
We were regular cinema-goers and went to the theater a lot. We played tennis and went rowing. Of course, I was a good swimmer because the swimming pool in Gyor was very nice and we visited it all summer long. There was a club at which there were lots of Jews, though it wasn't a Jewish club. We attended a dance-school, and they held a dance-school ball at the end of the course. Then I was in a long white tulle dress, it was lovely. I was quite good-looking as a young girl and had many suitors. And I enjoyed these dance-parties so much. I love to dance. I went there with my girlfriends regularly.
ladislav porjes
There are three countries that I wouldn’t be able to live in. One of them is Germany. I spent four years there as a correspondent, but I wouldn’t be capable of living there permanently. After the war I was dogged by a question that I always asked myself when I met some German of my age. I could never keep from asking myself what that person had been doing during the war. Fifteen years after the war I even went to have a look at Auschwitz – Birkenau. An oppressive feeling fell upon me there, and memories surfaced. I’m not able to forget. You can’t forget the Shoah – maybe it’s possible to forgive, but you can’t forget such horrors.
During the era of ‘normalization’ I changed jobs one after the other. First I worked as a guide for Cedok, but I didn’t last long there, and they fired me. [Cedok was the largest Czechoslovak travel agency, founded in 1920 and headquartered in Prague.] Then I worked for Prague Information Services, which was in its time a kind of sanctuary for people who had been fired from everywhere else – they hired us out to companies and concerns that needed capable translators. However, when the management changed, some Gottwald political cadre arrived, who fired everyone indiscriminately.
I also worked as a game machine coin collector for the Slavia soccer club. The machines, on which some sort of games were played, were in every other pub. I made the rounds of the pubs and collected the five crown coins that people had stuffed them with. I drove around with heavy bags of five crown coins, and deposited the money at the bank into the account of the Slavia Prague club. Then I started a job as a warehouse laborer in the Office Machine Mechanics’ Association, and I secretly made money on the side translating. In the Office Machine Mechanics’ Association my boss in the warehouse was Tonda Petrina, also a persecuted journalist, with whom I had once upon a time worked in Rude Pravo. Working as a warehouseman I more or less peacefully, what with two small children and a wife also persecuted due to my political problems, made it to a very modest disability pension. I went on disability after being treated for over a year and a half for cancer of the lymph nodes, when I was quite badly off and I wanted to die. Miraculously, in the end I defeated the illness. I also struggled with heart problems and eye problems, glaucoma.
I also worked as a game machine coin collector for the Slavia soccer club. The machines, on which some sort of games were played, were in every other pub. I made the rounds of the pubs and collected the five crown coins that people had stuffed them with. I drove around with heavy bags of five crown coins, and deposited the money at the bank into the account of the Slavia Prague club. Then I started a job as a warehouse laborer in the Office Machine Mechanics’ Association, and I secretly made money on the side translating. In the Office Machine Mechanics’ Association my boss in the warehouse was Tonda Petrina, also a persecuted journalist, with whom I had once upon a time worked in Rude Pravo. Working as a warehouseman I more or less peacefully, what with two small children and a wife also persecuted due to my political problems, made it to a very modest disability pension. I went on disability after being treated for over a year and a half for cancer of the lymph nodes, when I was quite badly off and I wanted to die. Miraculously, in the end I defeated the illness. I also struggled with heart problems and eye problems, glaucoma.
They threw me out of journalism for the fourth time, and this time for good, after the occupation in 1968 – they recalled me from Germany from the position of foreign correspondent. Not long after, in the spring of 1969, they also fired me from the radio as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ – for I had returned from a trip through the Baltic countries with reportages in which local intellectuals denounced the entry of Warsaw pact troops into Czechoslovakia. This time the comrades’ patience was at an end. This time they no longer talked about preventive measures against Zionists and cosmopolitans. This time it was a final elimination of all ‘enemies of socialism,’ not only from public, but also from civilian life. My journalism career of eighteen years ended. It was only a temporary, perhaps a little longer pause between three phases of my racial or political discrimination, if there was really any difference between the two. That which now awaited me was the irrevocable end of any meaningful activity. During this time and in the following months I often heard slurs and allusions to my Jewish origin.