In 1950 Andor got into to the Ministry of Defense and became a Russian interpreter there. And when the problems started in 1956 they called him in too and he couldn’t come home for a long time. My daughter was 5-years-old at that time. It was rather hard, and I would have liked to leave.
- Traditions 11756
- Language spoken 3019
- Identity 7808
- Description of town 2440
- Education, school 8506
- Economics 8772
- Work 11672
- Love & romance 4929
- Leisure/Social life 4159
- Antisemitism 4822
-
Major events (political and historical)
4256
- Armenian genocide 2
- Doctor's Plot (1953) 178
- Soviet invasion of Poland 31
- Siege of Leningrad 86
- The Six Day War 4
- Yom Kippur War 2
- Ataturk's death 5
- Balkan Wars (1912-1913) 35
- First Soviet-Finnish War 37
- Occupation of Czechoslovakia 1938 83
- Invasion of France 9
- Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 65
- Varlik Vergisi (Wealth Tax) 36
- First World War (1914-1918) 216
- Spanish flu (1918-1920) 14
- Latvian War of Independence (1918-1920) 4
- The Great Depression (1929-1933) 20
- Hitler comes to power (1933) 127
- 151 Hospital 1
- Fire of Thessaloniki (1917) 9
- Greek Civil War (1946-49) 12
- Thessaloniki International Trade Fair 5
- Annexation of Bukovina to Romania (1918) 7
- Annexation of Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union (1940) 19
- The German invasion of Poland (1939) 94
- Kishinev Pogrom (1903) 7
- Romanian Annexation of Bessarabia (1918) 25
- Returning of the Hungarian rule in Transylvania (1940-1944) 43
- Soviet Occupation of Bessarabia (1940) 59
- Second Vienna Dictate 27
- Estonian war of independence 3
- Warsaw Uprising 2
- Soviet occupation of the Balitc states (1940) 147
- Austrian Civil War (1934) 9
- Anschluss (1938) 71
- Collapse of Habsburg empire 3
- Dollfuß Regime 3
- Emigration to Vienna before WWII 36
- Kolkhoz 131
- KuK - Königlich und Kaiserlich 40
- Mineriade 1
- Post War Allied occupation 7
- Waldheim affair 5
- Trianon Peace Treaty 12
- NEP 56
- Russian Revolution 351
- Ukrainian Famine 199
- The Great Terror 283
- Perestroika 233
- 22nd June 1941 468
- Molotov's radio speech 115
- Victory Day 147
- Stalin's death 365
- Khrushchev's speech at 20th Congress 148
- KGB 62
- NKVD 153
- German occupation of Hungary (18-19 March 1944) 45
- Józef Pilsudski (until 1935) 33
- 1956 revolution 84
- Prague Spring (1968) 73
- 1989 change of regime 174
- Gomulka campaign (1968) 81
-
Holocaust
9685
- Holocaust (in general) 2789
- Concentration camp / Work camp 1235
- Mass shooting operations 337
- Ghetto 1183
- Death / extermination camp 647
- Deportation 1063
- Forced labor 791
- Flight 1410
- Hiding 594
- Resistance 121
- 1941 evacuations 866
- Novemberpogrom / Kristallnacht 34
- Eleftherias Square 10
- Kasztner group 1
- Pogrom in Iasi and the Death Train 21
- Sammelwohnungen 9
- Strohmann system 11
- Struma ship 17
- Life under occupation 803
- Yellow star house 72
- Protected house 15
- Arrow Cross ("nyilasok") 42
- Danube bank shots 6
- Kindertransport 26
- Schutzpass / false papers 95
- Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) 24
- Warsaw Uprising (1944) 23
- Helpers 521
- Righteous Gentiles 269
- Returning home 1090
- Holocaust compensation 112
- Restitution 109
- Property (loss of property) 595
- Loss of loved ones 1724
- Trauma 1029
- Talking about what happened 1807
- Liberation 558
- Military 3322
- Politics 2640
-
Communism
4468
- Life in the Soviet Union/under Communism (in general) 2592
- Anti-communist resistance in general 63
- Nationalization under Communism 221
- Illegal communist movements 98
- Systematic demolitions under communism 45
- Communist holidays 311
- Sentiments about the communist rule 930
- Collectivization 94
- Experiences with state police 349
- Prison/Forced labor under communist/socialist rule 449
- Lack or violation of human and citizen rights 483
- Life after the change of the regime (1989) 493
- Israel / Palestine 2190
- Zionism 847
- Jewish Organizations 1200
Displaying 19081 - 19110 of 50826 results
Heni Szepesi
My girlfriends kept asking me, “Why don’t you join the (communist) party, that's where you belong!” – they said this again and again. “All right”, I said, “I’ll go there once and I’ll see.” I knew exactly which building the headquarters of the HCP was – the Hungarian Communist Party was its name at that time. “Well,” I said, “I’ll make the effort once and I’ll go up.” And I entered this room and found myself face to face with the biggest Arrow Cross (Hungarian Fascists) man from Sopron. I took one look at him turned on my heels and slammed the door after myself. After that I never went back.
I divorced from Andor after a long time in 1975.
And when he came back – he returned in the summer of 1948 – then we met again. And then he came to Budapest and he told me already that his intentions were serious and I was preparing to leave to Budapest because I had had enough of Sopron. We got married in 1950. We just had a civil wedding, mostly because my husband was an important man in the party.
This is how we met each other: in Sopron, when the Jewish youth hardly had the opportunity for any kind of entertainment, we had a huge house, with a piano and everything and my mother said that it was not possible after all that Jewish boys and girls had no place to go. There was a big room, and somebody played the piano and we could dance there. And my mother made all kinds of little tea biscuits and refreshments and we spent very pleasant afternoons there.
And then, when I came to Budapest I applied to a company, which was called Valasztek at that time. There was a textile trade center and I went there (my fiancé was already in Budapest at that time) and I told them that I would like to find employment (and that I came from Sopron.) It didn't matter if it was as a salesperson or as a cashier, whatever they needed. They told me to come back two weeks later and they would see about it then. I told them, “look, I’m a poor girl, I lost everything I had, I don’t have the funds to live two weeks on such promises.
Isac Tinichigiu
But another incident that pushed me away from communism was that in 1962 I received a phone call from a former director of mine, who was a mentor to me, Dan Emeric: he had graduated from Economics in Hong Kong and from the Conservatory in Vienna. All his Sunday mornings were busy; he never came to work like others would, because he used to have some friends over and play chamber music. [Sunday was not a working day but what Isac refers to is that people in high positions occasionally went to work Sunday mornings to finish their work.] But that day he asked me to come see him in his office on Sunday morning.
He told me he was summoned for the next day to be questioned about the Patrascanu [14] case and that he wasn’t sure he would ever come back. Patrascanu had been sentenced to death under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej [15] and executed. And all that happened because Dan Emeric used to be friends with a former lady-friend of Patrascanu. The Securitate [16] didn’t believe that the woman told him nothing of what Patrascanu was up to. So Dan first explained to me that what happened to Patrascanu was in fact a horrible murder, which took place because Dej was afraid of the competition. Patrascanu was a great intellectual who could have replaced him. He was accused of nationalism on the basis of one declaration he once made – ‘I am a Romanian first, and then a communist’ – and of many other false things, and sentenced to death. Dan asked me to reveal all this when the times would allow it, or at least to tell his children when they would be old enough to understand it, in case he never came back.
He told me he was summoned for the next day to be questioned about the Patrascanu [14] case and that he wasn’t sure he would ever come back. Patrascanu had been sentenced to death under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej [15] and executed. And all that happened because Dan Emeric used to be friends with a former lady-friend of Patrascanu. The Securitate [16] didn’t believe that the woman told him nothing of what Patrascanu was up to. So Dan first explained to me that what happened to Patrascanu was in fact a horrible murder, which took place because Dej was afraid of the competition. Patrascanu was a great intellectual who could have replaced him. He was accused of nationalism on the basis of one declaration he once made – ‘I am a Romanian first, and then a communist’ – and of many other false things, and sentenced to death. Dan asked me to reveal all this when the times would allow it, or at least to tell his children when they would be old enough to understand it, in case he never came back.
By the 1960s I had long left behind communism and I no longer believed in it, because I had found out some terrible things. For example, I was never told clearly that having a sister in Israel wasn’t approved by my bosses. One day I was summoned and questioned about it; I told the truth, said that she, Sabina, came to visit, but that was all, that we weren’t very close. They said they didn’t want Jews in high positions who had relatives in Israel, and I replied: ‘Fine! Fire me!’ And I slammed the door behind me. But they didn’t fire me because my work was very hard and they couldn’t replace me. I was in charge of contracts between co-operative farms and the state. You had to know a lot about the real state of farms, you had to know the law, and to be firm at the same time.
My father settled in the same town with them, Haifa, and he continued working as a tinsmith. My father’s new wife wanted to go to Israel, where she had all her family, but my father hesitated, because I was in Bucharest, had a position: I was an economist for UNCC, so he came up to see me and talk. I told him: ‘if Romanian communists needed me back in 1941, they must need me now as well. If somebody has a problem with that, I will deal with it’. So my father emigrated in 1958 and I only saw him again in 1979, when my son Paul was born; my father came back here to see his grandchild.
The communist circles sustained that Israel was an imperialist country under British influence, a desert where very few Jews actually lived, but a lot of Arabs. So I never thought of emigrating, and my father never tried to convince me to.
After the war, picking up where we left off wasn’t so hard, because my father’s profession was very much in demand: he worked again as a tinsmith in Iasi. As for me, being an activist, it wasn’t hard at all. In 1948 I started my work as an economist for Centrocop [The Ministry of State Purchases] in Bucharest, then I moved on to the State Committee of Farming Products Management in 1950; later I worked as an economist for UNCC [National Union of Consumption Co–operative farms] and UNCAP [Union of Production Co–operative farms].
I didn’t agree with those who emigrated; I remember one of them, Onel Feldman, wanted to convince me in 1944 to rejoin the Zionist organization and learn to work the land before leaving for Israel. I refused him, and he asked me: ‘Aren’t you a Jew?’ And I answered: ‘I am first a worker, and then a Jew’. By then I strongly believed that the nation doesn’t matter but what matters is the bourgeoisie and working class.
More than half of my former colleagues from Cultura died in that massacre in Iasi; I know of three of them that they emigrated, and one still lives in Bucharest now.
During this time I had to provide for the family, because my father was at forced labor in a military unit. I lived with my mother and my sister Sabina, and I had to support them. I worked in a grocery for very little money, and then in a pastry factory, but the situation of the family was precarious.
My father had been taken to the concentration camp some time before this happened, from June to November 1941. At the time he was working in a village in Roman, building a church roof, his normal job, when Antonescu’s order came that all Jews near Prut should be taken to concentration camps. So that’s how my father ended up in the concentration camp in Caracal.
During the Holocaust I was in Iasi. On 28th June 1941 there was a massacre, in which 11,000 Jews were killed [the pogrom actually took place on 29th and 30th June]. The number is still under debate, some claim there were only 4,500 – which they equal to 0. On the day before we had found out that in Abator, a Jewish neighborhood, several Jews were killed in their houses by Iron Guard [13] members and hooligans. The next day – it was Sunday morning – a sergeant, Zamcanu, came into our courtyard and yelled: ‘All Jews out of their houses!’ We were taken out in the street and forced to march with our hands up. We were mainly women and children. We walked like that for five kilometers, to the police station. My mother was sick and couldn’t hold her hands up; a policeman hit her with his rifle over the shoulders, so I went by her side and held her hand up.
In the police courtyard they started giving tickets to women and children, which said ‘free’ and had been stamped, and they announced that every Jew that didn’t have that ticket would be shot. I remember somebody started saying: ‘He’s a dirty gipsy; he’s not a Jew! What is he doing here among us?’, and pointed to my mother and me. The man knew me and started talking like this because he tried to save me from a very certain death. He succeeded. I never knew who he was. That was the great trick, because many men who had gone into cover early morning came of their free will, to get their ‘free’ tickets and they never came back: some were shot down in the police courtyard – about 500 men – and the rest were taken to the railway station, and forced to get on a train, 130–140 people in each wagon. The doors and windows were closed and nailed, so there was no air. After a day and a night they stopped to get rid of the dead and bury them in mass graves. This went on and on until the town of Roman, where something very unusual happened. A lady, the president of the Red Cross Committee, imposed her will of giving water to the prisoners on the leaders of the convoy. Then the train went on from Iasi to Calarasi, were the rest of the men were forced to work on different estates. The Jewish communities, which keep an exact record in their books of the Jews in the synagogues, estimate that there were 11,000 people killed.
In the police courtyard they started giving tickets to women and children, which said ‘free’ and had been stamped, and they announced that every Jew that didn’t have that ticket would be shot. I remember somebody started saying: ‘He’s a dirty gipsy; he’s not a Jew! What is he doing here among us?’, and pointed to my mother and me. The man knew me and started talking like this because he tried to save me from a very certain death. He succeeded. I never knew who he was. That was the great trick, because many men who had gone into cover early morning came of their free will, to get their ‘free’ tickets and they never came back: some were shot down in the police courtyard – about 500 men – and the rest were taken to the railway station, and forced to get on a train, 130–140 people in each wagon. The doors and windows were closed and nailed, so there was no air. After a day and a night they stopped to get rid of the dead and bury them in mass graves. This went on and on until the town of Roman, where something very unusual happened. A lady, the president of the Red Cross Committee, imposed her will of giving water to the prisoners on the leaders of the convoy. Then the train went on from Iasi to Calarasi, were the rest of the men were forced to work on different estates. The Jewish communities, which keep an exact record in their books of the Jews in the synagogues, estimate that there were 11,000 people killed.
Between 1942 and 1944 I worked in a pastry factory, together with four boys and six girls. They were Christians, but we were friends and thanks to them I was able to support my mother and my sister. I was paid only one third of the regular salary, the other two thirds would go to the Military Committee so that they wouldn’t take me to forced labor like my father.
I joined the Communist Party later, in 1948, because I believed in its ideology – not in the way it was put to practice that I saw later. I also read a lot of books about social issues, and after 23rd August 1944 [12], I knew my way in life.
I tried to talk my sister Sabina into joining the UTC but she didn’t like the idea. We used to be close when I would be home, but after 1944 I became an activist. My job was to go around villages and convince peasants to join the UTC, and I would sleep at UTC headquarters often. Now I’m glad she didn’t join the UTC, because she left for Israel earlier and didn’t have to bear the communist terror.
I first became politically involved when I joined the UTC [Young Communists’ Union] on 21st January 1941, the day the fight broke out between Antonescu [10] and Horia Sima [11]. When I signed up, I was given a choice: to be just a sympathizer whose job was to raise money and food for the communists in prisons, or to become an activist, whose main job was to spread leaflets against Germany. It was dangerous to be an activist, because you could get arrested and tortured to give up your connections. I was given time to think it over – a week – but I said I didn’t need time. I chose to become an activist on the spot. So for four years I used to spread leaflets against Germany, usually at night, urging soldiers not to fight.
The owner died and his wife married a Christian for convenience, and officially her husband became the owner of the grocery. That way she could keep her grocery.
Before the war, in 1940-1941, I worked in a grocery, but with no official papers; the owner didn’t want to hire me officially because he would have had to pay taxes after me, and later it was no longer possible to hire Jews. The owner was Jewish, the other colleagues Christian, and we all got along very well.
The only vacation I had was in 1938 when I went on a camp for watchmen. [King] Carol II [8] had founded the Watchmen Guard [Strajeria] [9], which taught young boys to be patriots, how to salute the king and how to march. It was held in Barnova, near Iasi.
On holidays I would stay with my parents, but we wouldn’t go anywhere. My days were split in half: one half I would be in the library, and the other half on the football field. That was until 1938 when I started spending my time at Dror, that organization.
When I went to the apprentice school – it was a Jewish school – I had no time for hobbies or other activities: half the day we would study, and the rest of the day I had electro-mechanics workshop. But I loved gymnastics; one hour was compulsory, but I used to have two extra classes with my teacher, who was very well trained. His name was Strulovici.
Romania
When I came to school I only knew Romanian, but the melamed who taught us Hebrew only spoke in Yiddish. I couldn’t answer him and he used to beat me, because he couldn’t accept the idea of a Jewish child not knowing Yiddish. But one day he beat me with a liner over the face and when I went back home my father could see the marks. He asked where they came from and I told him the truth. Now, I must tell you, my father was a very proud man. Next day he didn’t go to work but came with me to school. He spoke to the principal about the incident and then told me I wasn’t to go to Hebrew classes again until that ‘old fool’ would be replaced. But he never was so that’s why I didn’t study Hebrew for four years.
Romania
I was glad about the Revolution. When the first riots began in Brasov in 1987 [see 1987 Workers Revolt of Brasov] [21], I was skiing with my son. When I came home in the evening, I found a friend of ours there, who told us what had happened. I started jumping from joy: ‘Finally the working class is awakened. The fool [Nicolae Ceausescu] is going down!’ So you can imagine what I felt in 1989. No matter how wicked the present system is, it is infinitely better than the old one, because you have freedom of speech. You don’t have to be afraid that for anything you say you can be arrested by some hooligan just because he is working for the Securitate.
The wars in Israel affected me, both because I was a Jew and a human being. I gave up on communism, a thing that was very difficult. I finally understood that the Marxist concept was inhuman. I also knew a lot of things about capitalism. I would like to quote Churchill: ‘Our democracy is not perfect, but there is no better system.’ I’m not thrilled about the present democratic system in the world, in which material interests prevail over moral and human principles. That’s my opinion on the European states’ attitude towards Israel. I’m familiar with the Balfour Declaration [20], with the hopes Jews had about it, with the United States resolution of 1922 and with the dirty game England played in order to maintain intact their relations with the Arab countries, which are the masters of oil resources, a game that is still going on.
I visited my sister Sabina three times after 1989 [see Romanian Revolution of 1989] [19]: in 1990, 1996 and 1998. She had already left for Israel in 1958. Before 1989 we kept in contact through some relatives of her husband, who would tell us how she was doing.
I have no Jewish friends here in Brasov, but I have acquaintances at the community whom I meet on Saturday mornings in the synagogue. I don’t participate much in other activities, but I’m in charge of the auditing committee of the Jewish community.