Tag #133651 - Interview #100685 (Jozsef Farkas)

I entered the Romanian kindergarten, and parallel to that I went to the Jewish confessional kindergarten, as well. There was a confessional elementary school there, and this had an office, then there was the cheder, where we learned only Judaism. I attended that, too.I finished elementary school in the confessional school, where we learned everything in Romanian. The teacher was a Jewish man: Uncle Grossman. He was our teacher in all the four grades. He was also the headmaster.I finished elementary school there, in good circumstances. This happened exactly in 1940. Then I took the exams for the commercial high school in Torda, I was in the top four. One of my classmates, the son of a printer, was better than me, and we knew that he had graduated with nine marks. There were four of us with 8.66. But there were two pupils, one of them was the son of a general, and the other the son of a colonel, and they jumped ahead of us with 9.66 and 9.33, respectively. And when they posted the results, there was my result of 8.66, but they didn’t admit me because in the meantime the anti-Jewish laws [5] had been adopted.

Then they extended the Jewish confessional school to seven grades. If one wasn’t admitted to high school, he/she could continue the studies there.A new teacher came, she taught the fifth, sixth and seventh grades.Her name was Magda Frenkel, and she was Jewish. She was a small, short, crippled woman, and a spinster.But she was very smart, and taught all the disciplines.I attended the confessional school for three more years, between 1940 and 1943, so I finished the seven grades. A few parents gathered then, and in 1943 we took the exams for a confessional high school in Temesvar.