Ruth Greif

This here is me in 1935, in Sibiu, in front of our house there. I?m with my dog, Leo; poor dog, he was run over by a car. I was very fond of him. I was born in Vienna in 1932 and I stayed there until I was three years old. My parents got married in 1929 and left for Vienna together. My father was an associate with a friend of his in the bicycle business - I don't remember his name - and they stayed there for a few years. But they eventually went bankrupt, and thank God, my parents returned to Romania because the war started a few years after they had left Vienna and Austria was occupied by Germany. I don't remember anything from those years in Vienna, I was too little. My mother tongue, the language my parents taught me, was German, but my parents spoke Hungarian with each other, and I learned Hungarian like this, by listening to my parents talking to each other, and in the end I could speak it very well. We came directly to Sibiu, where my parents had a tobacco shop. When we were in Sibiu, our financial situation was rather good, medium; there was no poverty. I remember I fell ill with scarlet fever in the 1st grade and had to stay at home. I couldn't be admitted to hospital because it was a contagious disease. Back then there was no penicillin, that was only invented after the war, so my parents treated me with tangerines and oranges. I remember the kitchen was full of fruit baskets; vitamin C helped. When I was little, my mother always put me to bed at 8 o'clock in the evening, and woke me up at 8 in the morning. So I used to think that the day stops at 8 in the evening, the clock as well, and it starts again the next day at 8 in the morning!