Tag #133776 - Interview #78503 (Katalin Andai)

My mother’s whole family lived in Oberland [today in Slovakia]. I don’t know anything about them, they all died, nobody survived. My grandparents lived in Kassa [today: Kosice]. Grandfather was a sportsman, he was tall and neat. He swam splendidly. He had a little moustache. They were not orthodox (nobody was in our family), no, they weren’t religious at all. They didn’t observe Sabbath nor were they kosher. They didn’t go to synagogue, not even at festivals. Grandfather came from a large family. He said that when he was seven years old, his parents told him: “Well, we have kept you for a long enough time, from now on you shall keep yourself; so off you go!” And he went to work at a near-by shop. He was completely uneducated, but he educated himself. He was a very curious man, he read a great deal; he spoke Hungarian, German, Slovakian impeccably. He also wrote in these languages. He had a beautiful handwriting – he wrote with Gothic letters. I think the family’s mother-tongue was German. My opinion is that they spoke German more easily than Hungarian. They talked to me in Hungarian, but not to my mother. My mother knew German like a native speaker, and she wrote letters in German. My grandfather always wrote to her in German.