Tag #134367 - Interview #101223 (Anna Eva Gaspar)

I didn’t feel anti-Semitism in the Jewish school, although we had Romanian teachers also. We didn’t feel anti-Semitism there. On the other hand, terribly hurt my feelings what happened when I got in the Ursuline. The Ursuline was a Hungarian Catholic order. There were many girls from Bucharest, and I didn’t understand how the girls from Bucharest ended up in Nagyvarad. But I never found out. I was 15 and I went together with my girlfriend. We sat down in the classroom where we could. We were four in a desk, a blond girl sat near me. On the first day Klotilda Mater came in – she was the headmistress – and she asked us where we came from, from which school, what marks we had in the school, with what mark we passed the entrance examination and other such kind of things. So she questioned us. When she asked me, I answered that I finished ‘Gimnaziul Evreiesc’ (Jewish middle school [in Romanian]) – this happened in the Romanian era [before 1940] – and the girl who sat near me, (her name was Ionescu) got up. She got up from beside me and she moved from there. This reaction was like a slap in the face for me. This was the first slap in the face what I got. Later we got acquainted with the classmates, among others with her also, and she apologized for her reaction. She thought that the Jews are like the blacks or aboriginals, who knew what was in her mind. We were 35 girls in the class, and 12 girls were Jewish. They never let us felt that we were Jewish. For example on 1st of March everyone found a ”martisor” on her desk. [Editor’s note: This is a Romanian folk custom, on 1st of March the boys used to give a ‘martisor’ to the girls, and the men used to give that to their older and younger lady friends. This is usually a small, metallic object, which had a white-red strip, and the girls wore it on their collar.] I didn’t know about this custom. And every girl got this present. We were on very good terms. I finished the first two grades of the high school in the Ursuline, this means the ninth and tenth grades now We had to pay school fees there, because it was a private high school and it belonged to the Catholic Church. It wasn’t a public high school. But they were very, very nice indeed. I finished two grades there.