This is my mother, Margareta Popper. The photo was taken in Arad in 1914.
My mother was born in Simand, on 11th April 1890. When she was about two, she moved with her parents to Arad. As there was no high school for girls in Arad at that time, my mother was sent to Timisoara, to the Higher School for Girls. She was a housewife. Just like my father, she wasn't too religious.
How did my parents meet? Arad wasn't a very big city. My father was a Law student and my mother had gone to school in Timisoara. I think they met after they came back home. They got married in July 1914. They also had a religious ceremony at the synagogue. The next day after they returned from their honeymoon in Austria, World War I broke out and my father was drafted. He became an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. All my grandfather's employees had been exempted from their military duties and my father could have enjoyed that status too, but he wouldn't stay home as long as there was a war going on. He served in the Northern Carpathians, in Poland. He found a stone there, which he sent to my mother; she had a silver plate added to it, with the place and the date: Komarno, 8th September 1914.
