Tag #135902 - Interview #78511 (Vasile Grunea)

We were among the first people in Brasso at the end of the 1920s that had a radio. At the beginning one had to crank the telephone, a woman picked up at the other end, you told her what number you wanted and she connected you. The radio was a novelty to the operators as well and they asked my father from time to time to put the receiver close to the radio so that they could listen to it, too. If I remember well, the first model was a mark called Nora, which was a tall circular model. Unfortunately we had to hand it in in 1942 when Jews were no longer allowed to own a radio, even though this radio remained with us only as an antique and we already had another big radio, a Standard. When the war started, the authorities forbade the Jews to have radios to make sure that they wouldn’t make propaganda. We took one of the radios, the Nora, to the police station, but we knew that one had to plug something into a specific place in order to make the radio work. They came to us saying that we gave them a bad radio because it didn’t work. Then I went back and plug this thing in so that it would work. My father didn’t want to hand in the Standard, as well, so he arranged with a Saxon bank clerk to take and hide it. The situation changed and since most of the Saxons supported Hitler during World War II, the Romanian authorities confiscated their radios after 1944. Then it was my turn to go to this Saxon in a carriage and took his two radios to hide.