My husband went to school in Bethlen; he was studying a lot using electric light, until he went blind. All this happened when he was some fifteen-sixteen years old; so they took him to Kolozsvar, and he was operated. They told him he must stop learning. Thus he learnt to work in leather, but I don’t know where.
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Displaying 46681 - 46710 of 50826 results
Berta Grunstein
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All I know about Mihaly, my husband’s little brother is that he died during deportation somewhere in Germany. My husband tried to arrange that Mihaly would get enlisted in 1943, though he wasn’t of the proper age yet. They took him, and he wrote from the army that he intended to escape. My husband answered him not to do so, because his fellow-soldiers would get punished. Nevertheless later he was taken to Auschwitz, and he died somewhere in Germany.
I don’t know what education Marton had; however, he worked at the food-supply administration as a bookkeeper. He established a family here, in Marosvasarhely – I don’t know the name of his first wife –, and he had a daughter. They were deported from Marosvasarhely, his daughter was four years old. My brother-in-law was a very miserly person. My husband, when he came here to work [before the war], didn’t stay at them, just ate at them, and he told me his brother had taken the money for the meals. His second wife was Piri Grunstein, nee Rosenfeld; she was the little sister of my mother. They had a son, he’s called Andras. My brother-in-law divorced her, thus in 1958 my aunt and the boy, who was eight years old then, emigrated to Israel, and there she changed her name into Peled. When we visited them in 1969, her son was in the army. I don’t remember where he lived and what he did for a living. Both my husband and I loved very much this aunt of mine. I don’t know what the name of my brother-in-law’s third wife was; she wasn’t Jewish, and my brother-in-law divorced my aunt because of her. Marton died in Marosvasarhely in 1992.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
My husband, Jozsef Grunstein was born in Chiuza [in Hungarian Kozepfalva], in Beszterce county, in 1914. His father was called Mendel Grunstein. They lived in Bethlen, in Romanian Beclean, which is a village near Des; I don’t know what the occupation of his father was, or where his family came from. He had two brothers, the oldest was Marton. Marton was born in 1909, Joska, my husband in 1913, Mihaly, his little brother in the 1920s. His parents were religious. I don’t know whether they were Orthodox or Neolog, but they were religious like us. They had the animals cut by the shochet, they used separate dishes for milky and for meat.
Before I got married, I went to the baths [that is to the mikveh] in Beszterce, otherwise they wouldn’t have marry me. We got married on December 1st 1946, on the same day as my uncle Adolf. The wedding was organized in Beszterce, in the courtyard of the Jewish restaurant, under a chupa. First they married the other couple, because they were older, then us. I don’t know whether there was a rabbi or only a shochet, but I think it was the shochet from Beszterce. It was a great snow; I was wearing a fur-coat and a white dress. There were a lot of people at the wedding, the room was hardly enough at the restaurant; half of the country knew my father, so people came. It was a kosher restaurant. They didn’t serve up any special meal, just the usual: we had starter, meat, soup too, we had garnishing, cakes, drinks. We were given smaller gifts. After the wedding we moved to Marosvasarhely; we lived in the Lajos Kossuth street, it was a hired apartment. We were there from December until June or July, and we moved later into this house.
Nussbacher told me he would commit suicide if I didn’t marry him. I didn’t take him for serious. Many people said that I was a very pretty girl. I wasn’t money-oriented, so I chose my husband, because if I had been selfish, I would have chosen the other. Nussbacher went to Kolozsvar, and committed suicide in his brother’s bathroom. I was visiting my aunt, and my father came and told my aunt what had happened, and they didn’t dare to tell me… Finally my aunt told me. I was struck dumb. They had to take me to a doctor.
I knew my husband before the war already; he was the cousin of my mother. He already had had a family. Once I visited Piri, my mother’s sister in Marosvasarhely; she was the wife of my future brother-in-law. They lived in the Kossuth street. We came from the concentration camp, we didn’t have any clothes. We had to have shoes, coats, everything made, so I went to buy materials with my aunt. My husband and I met at Piri’s. My mother’s little brother, Adolf was about to get married for the second time. All these people were relatives, we all got married with relatives in those times. She told Joska: ‘Well, you should get married...’, and she kept on praising me and telling how good housewife I was and how decent a girl I was. My husband lost his family in the concentration camp, and he was much grieved about it. But he started to think about us… For me, who I had lost my mother and siblings, he meant compensation. I was eighteen, and he was thirty-two years old. He was such a warm-hearted and kind man, there are just a few husbands like him. I became fond of him not as of a man, but because he was so kind-hearted. So finally I decided to marry Grunstein.
Nussbacher fell desperately in love with me. For my eighteenth birthday he brought me a manicure set and a photo of him; he was like a film star, yet I liked my husband better. I told him clearly that I loved him as my brother, but I wouldn’t prefer him to be my husband. He had a brother in Kolozsvar who owned a chocolate factory; he also had a brother in Beszterce, so he stayed at them; this brother of him had a mill. The Bussbachers were very well-to-do Jewish people, they had a horse-drawn carriage. Later he changed his name into Alex. I didn’t want to stay in the countryside. He told me: ‘No problem, Beszterce is ten kilometers far. I’ll buy you a cab, a car with driver, whenever you want, you can go to Beszterce. I’ll take you to the cinema, to the theatre, wherever you may wish to go.’ But I didn’t want to. I told him: ‘There are so many beautiful girls in Kolozsvar’, but he answered he wanted none of them, just me. He was so reticent, in turn I was chatty. He told me I was like a chirping bird. However I didn’t want to marry him.
After I came home, I spent my eighteenth birthday at home. Two men courted me at the same time. One of them was Nussbacher, whom I had met at the railway station in Kolozsvar, when we were coming home, the other was Joska Grunstein, my future husband. They were of the same age, and they were in the army together.
In 1949 my father and Lujza left for Israel with a permit to leave definitely. After my father arrived to Israel, he took out his stepson, Joszif from the kibbutz. He told him: you’re here for so many years, and you don’t even have underpants, because there people shared everything. But Joszif didn’t treat him nicely. In Israel both my father and Lujza worked, I think in a leather factory. He even bought animals and established a farm, but he threw up everything and came home in 1953; he said for him Israel was where his kid was, and so he came home. Lujza came with him, her daughters still lived here, but all in vain, they didn’t bother much for her. They settled in Saratel; there was a small shop, my father set it up, and ran it. Later they moved to Beszterce, he quitted his house and everything.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
My parents got married in 1947. Before the war Lujza worked in Torda. She learnt how to make the upper part of shoes, and she worked as a shoemaker in order to provide for her children. Poor Lujza had nothing. She had a coat she had refashioned from the coat of her ex-husband; she had only a little suitcase. Her son-in-law from Kolozsvar came to the wedding; they got married here, in Marosvasarhely, in the synagogue. According to Judaism, when parents get married for the second time, children mustn’t be present, so I prepared a dinner at home, and I invited her son-in-law and my brother-in-law’s family; otherwise there wasn’t any party organized. The next day they went to Torda and Kolozsvar to meet Lujza’s children, and from there they went home to Saratel. After my step-mother got married, she quitted her job at the canteen; what became of it later, I don’t know that.
My step-mother was called Lujza Adler after her first husband, and Lae was her Jewish name. I don’t know what his first husband’s name or occupation was. Before the war they lived in Torda. Her husband was ill, and died at a young age. Lujza wasn’t deported, because she lived in Torda; she came to Marosvasarhely after the war, and worked in the kosher canteen. [Editor’s note: Torda was part of Romania between 1940 and 1944, the Hungarian-Romanian border was some 20 kilometers far from it. Concerning Jews from Romania see 6, 7, 8.] There was a kosher canteen next to the synagogue, at its back, it served mainly Jewish students, but not only. She came to visit his brother-in-law, Arisztid Adler, who was the friend of my brother-in-law, Marton Grunstein; the later presented my mom [step-mother] to my father. She offered him cholent. When he came home, I asked him where he had been for so long. He answered: ‘I was to look for a wife.’ He added that we were supposed to pay a visit to them at five. That’s what happened, we visited them on Saturday afternoon, and I took such a liking for her, because she was a very skilful woman, a clean housewife; Lujza was also a very nice woman. I told her: ‘Listen, dear, my father needs nothing but a woman. You mustn’t bring there even a needle.’ Mom visited my father in Saratel with Arisztid’s mother. They took a look, they were pleased, the house was supplied with everything; so they agreed to get married in two weeks.
My father stayed in Saratel. After we came home from deportation, my father started farming again, and he bought horses too. When I visited him with my husband, I always used to tell him: ‘Take a look at the stable and praise his horses!’ I hired a skillful woman for my father, a Saxon woman, who did the housekeeping.
I spent one year at home, then I got married and moved to Marosvasarhely.
Everything was taken away from our house. They took everything that was made of wood, even the stairs and the well. The neighbors didn’t tell a word, and they didn’t give back what we had left there. Nobody had lived in the house, they only carried off everything. We didn’t find any photos or papers, anything. We left the valuable things, the bed-linen at a person from Saratel, but they didn’t give them back. Only my father and I survived, and we had to start again. We began to run a farm again, I even whitewashed the house, I painted patterns on the wall. Although we had the farm, one could not make a living of it, so my father started crop trading again, and he was transporting wheat to Beszterce to the same mills. The millers weren’t Jewish, I think, but I’m not sure.
My father was in Dachau, as far as I know; he didn’t tell me much about it, I don’t remember anymore. He was liberated by the Americans. Only after we came home, we found out that the other members of our family didn’t survive. We didn’t even think of staying in Germany or to go somewhere else, we came home to meet the other members of our families. We were some ten persons. They came not only from Saratel, but from the surrounding villages and Beszterce. We hired a microbus together and came back to Beszterce, from there we went home directly. Only three of the twenty-five families had members who came home.
Then we arrived to Hungary; in Budapest we wanted to find the Jewish community. In the tram they wanted us to show our tickets. Well, we said we came from Auschwitz, we didn’t have any money. We were quite a lot, who all came from there… We came together from Germany. A man stood up and asked: ‘How many are you?’, and he paid the ticket for all of us. We got some papers in Budapest too from the community, but I don’t remember the details anymore, and we came to Arad to the border. We got some papers in Arad too, and we came by train to Kolozsvar. We got down there.
On May 9th 1945 the war ended. My father was liberated by Americans, I was liberated by Russians. The Russians let us go, so you got a paper saying who you were, where you came from, what you did, and they took us to a train, these were freight-cars as well, to take us home. There were people from many countries. There were people from Bohemia, Romania, but not only Jews, there were Italians who weren’t Jewish. There were both women and men. We traveled across Poland. The Poles were very vicious: the train stopped because they always sent it to a side-track, and we stationed there for one or two days. We left the train, again to look for some food… And they said they would blow up the train for we had dared to go to the town. So we went back and stayed there for one day, one night.
The Germans wanted us to stay in that concentration camp for one night. But in the meantime the Russians arrived. The Germans gathered us to take us away. In the rear there were reeds. And a girl, who was from Borsa – that is in Maramaros – told me: ‘Come, let’s go and hide there, until the Germans leave.’ I was still a child and I was afraid to go, but all the others ran away. And whoever didn’t run away, she was taken further. So I ran there too, and we stayed hidden in the reeds until four in the morning, then we went back to the barrack. There was hay and straw on the ground. We sat down; there was gun-fight all around us, and we were waiting. Later Russians came in holding their guns ahead. They saw we weren’t Germans, so they didn’t care much, and went away. We stayed there, then we went into the town to look for some food. It was a very small town, I don’t know what it was called. The houses were empty, the Germans all fled, the whole town was empty. We entered the houses, we were looking for the larders, for food. Bread or whatever we could find in the larders, jams and things like that. We took some clothes, shoes to get dressed… We went back to the concentration camp into the barracks until things cooled down, and after two days we left.
,
1945
See text in interview
In February 1945, when the Russian tanks and the army were approaching, the Germans started to evacuate us from Glowen; in daytime they kept us in the wood, and transported us only in the night. British airplanes kept on dropping those searchlights to see what was going on.
,
1945
See text in interview
There was an old Saxon man from Nagyszeben, they were taken there to help, he was a Wehrmacht [soldier], and he used to give me stealthily apple or a piece of bread, he was nice.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
I was there from July 1944 until February 1945, for eight months. We were only women in that camp. I met there Kati, the younger sister of doctor Dengelegi. She was deported from Nagyvarad; she was very nice, we were taken to work together. We were building a railway, we were carrying heavy rails and beams, and they also ordered us to dig bunkers for the soldiers, so they could put the munitions there. I was the youngest, and Kati descended [into the mound] and helped me dig it out.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
I was quite well developed, I had got used to work, so they selected me for work, but I wasn’t together with any of my relatives. I was there for about two more days, then they took me to work. I was in several concentration camps. I was in Germany, in Glowen – this was on the other side of the Main.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
In Auschwitz there was Mengele, and they kept on saying: to the right, to the left, to the right, to the left, although nobody knew what left or right meant. One group to the crematorium, and the other was selected for work, so to life or death. I was sent to one group, my father to other. They took my mother, my little brother, Salamon and grandma Rosenfeld to the crematorium that very night. My brother was very little, he didn’t even go to school yet.
We arrived to Auschwitz at midnight. I ignore for how many days the journey lasted; however they didn’t give us anything to eat or drink. Gendarmes with cock-feathered hats escorted us until the Czech border, and there they handed us over to the Germans.
We were in the ghetto from May 3rd 1944 until June 4th, then they took us away. We traveled in the same carriage, the whole family, with grandma Rosenfeld, Marta, her daughter and grandchild and all the Jews from Herina, they separated us only in Auschwitz. Nobody knew where they were taking us, though it was a long time they had been doing this in Warsaw, from 1939. But television and such things didn’t exist yet, so we had no source of information.
Our family entered the ghetto united. It was big, Jews from Beszterce were also there. We lived under awful conditions, we lived in barracks. It was surrounded with barbed wire fence. We had an acquaintance who wasn’t Jewish, and who brought us a package; they didn’t take it from him, but didn’t let him give it to us; we ate what they gave us.
I was seventeen years old, when they gathered us, and emptied the entire village. We went to Beszterce by a horsed wagon. We had nothing to pack in, because they didn’t let us take anything, the gendarmes stood next to us until we got ready. They didn’t inform us in advance, but entered the village and drew out the Jewish families. They took us to Beszterce to the brick factory, the ghetto was there. Jews from all the surrounding villages were taken there, from Herina as well.
In 1940 men were taken to work service [5]; my father was taken somewhere across Budapest. I don’t know exactly when he was taken. We wrote to each other. Before 1944 he came home, then they deported him. David was also taken to a concentration camp; he died, because he couldn’t bear starving.
When in 1940 the Hungarians came in [4], out of a childish trick my brother David broke the window of a Hungarian army car with a stone. My parents paid it, and that was it. He didn’t have troubles.