Tag #133623 - Interview #100685 (Jozsef Farkas)

My brother, Imre Farkas,was born on 14thNovember 1931. My brother was a little bit unruly, like our mother. And he was also incredibly witty.He didn’t have too much education, but he wrote more beautifully than me: he had beautiful handwriting.He finished four elementary grades in the confessional school, and four grades in the Romanian middle school. That was after 23rdAugust [1944].But he never wanted to study, and became a tractorist, and later he studied the art of a locksmith, and welding.He had just turned 18 when he got married. His wife Ibi [Ibolya] Fisher was two years older than him, she was my age. She was born in 1929.She was 16 when she was freed from Auschwitz, and she came back to Torda.

I know that when my brother went home and told my mother he had gotten married–my mother threw him out of the house.Then they went away and I think they lived for a while in Kolozsvar near the Tranzit house [on the banks of the Szamos River] in a room of a poorly built house.Then, after a while, my mother accepted them in the family house and they moved back to Torda.My brother worked in the fire-brick factory called Proletarul. It was near the cement factory.He worked in the maintenance department. He was a locksmith-welder until 1966, when he immigrated to Israel.They had three children, but unfortunately two of them died.The first child was a girl called Vera. She died when she was four years old. I don’t know the cause of her death, she died in the hospital.Then came a boy, who died when he was three weeks old, I know that he got dehydrated, although a famous pediatrician from Kolozsvar treated him.Only the third child, Palika, managed to live.He was born in 1952, he is exactly ten years older than my daughter, and they are the only cousins in the family who keep in touch. Pali has two children: a son and daughter.