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So when they left we moved here, but at that time there was an ordinance that 2 persons were allowed live in a one-bedroom apartment at the most, and this was a two and a half bedroom apartment. Then I talked with my parents on the phone and asked that at least one of them should come to Pest. Both of them came, because my mother and my father were party members, my mother was also a lay judge and they had a lot of hen thieves and others imprisoned. And those vowed vengeance against her, that if they came out of the prison they would slay my mother or do I don’t know what to her. And really, in 1956 the criminals were also released from prison. My mother was frightened and they left the apartment in Nagykanizsa together with my father and came to live with us. So there was enough of us in the apartment. They allocated it to us, we got the paper on my wife’s birthday, on the 22nd February 1957. My parents lived here until their death, until my mother’s death I mean, which happened in 1970. My father died in 1974, but he lived with us until 1972 because he remarried.
Not long after my parents had come here with two truckloads of furniture, and a piano, which they brought for someone as a favor and it stood in the middle of the room, and we didn’t have enough room to move because of it until it was taken, both my mother and my father got a job. My father was 52 years old, my mother was 51. They couldn’t be bakers anymore because the doctor had forbidden it, but my father went to work at the Chinoin [Factory of Medicines and Chemical Products], as a warehouseman, and my mother went to the Vasedeny [hardware store chain] as a inventory maker, because its chief accountant was the second husband of my father’s sister. My parents were physically extremely strong, my father knocked me down so at the age of 56, when I was 32 that I thought the floor would break in. And my mother was very good at counting, but she only knew the four sums. At that time there wasn’t a calculator to make the inventory, so what they did was that they looked at how much an item costs and how many items were left and multiplied the number of items with the price. If they took an inventory in one of the shops there was an entire group of inventory makers, my mother among them, who was by far the best. She added up four digit numbers amazingly fast, and later when the Holerit, the punchcard computer was introduced they kept her in her job for another year so that she could check if the Holerit functioned well. She usually finished before the Holerit. She could have become a mathematician if she had studied it. Otherwise they were fine here. Juliska and Olga [Editor’s note: The sisters of Ferenc Leicht’s father.] still lived at that time, and they used to get together. Budapest was full with people from Nagykanizsa whom they knew. They went to play cards, and people came to play cards at our house. So they had a good time. Only my mother was already ill at that time. We had to take her to the hospital for a control every 2-3 years. She had organic heart trouble and she had a lot of illnesses, aortic stenosis and other things. But if she was healthy she was the most pleasant person in the world.
Not long after my parents had come here with two truckloads of furniture, and a piano, which they brought for someone as a favor and it stood in the middle of the room, and we didn’t have enough room to move because of it until it was taken, both my mother and my father got a job. My father was 52 years old, my mother was 51. They couldn’t be bakers anymore because the doctor had forbidden it, but my father went to work at the Chinoin [Factory of Medicines and Chemical Products], as a warehouseman, and my mother went to the Vasedeny [hardware store chain] as a inventory maker, because its chief accountant was the second husband of my father’s sister. My parents were physically extremely strong, my father knocked me down so at the age of 56, when I was 32 that I thought the floor would break in. And my mother was very good at counting, but she only knew the four sums. At that time there wasn’t a calculator to make the inventory, so what they did was that they looked at how much an item costs and how many items were left and multiplied the number of items with the price. If they took an inventory in one of the shops there was an entire group of inventory makers, my mother among them, who was by far the best. She added up four digit numbers amazingly fast, and later when the Holerit, the punchcard computer was introduced they kept her in her job for another year so that she could check if the Holerit functioned well. She usually finished before the Holerit. She could have become a mathematician if she had studied it. Otherwise they were fine here. Juliska and Olga [Editor’s note: The sisters of Ferenc Leicht’s father.] still lived at that time, and they used to get together. Budapest was full with people from Nagykanizsa whom they knew. They went to play cards, and people came to play cards at our house. So they had a good time. Only my mother was already ill at that time. We had to take her to the hospital for a control every 2-3 years. She had organic heart trouble and she had a lot of illnesses, aortic stenosis and other things. But if she was healthy she was the most pleasant person in the world.
Period
Location
Budapest
Hungary
Interview
Ferenc Leicht