Tag #138203 - Interview #77963 (laszlo nussbaum)

That was, in principle, one of the best high schools. The anti-Jewish laws referred to teachers as well: they were fired from universities and everywhere. When he got the authorization, he could choose between university professors as he saw fit. Lots of my teachers were university professors. It was a problem for example that once Mark Antal came in to inspect, because he was the headmaster, and he was surprised to see that nobody had received any grades. They forgot to question pupils because they held university lectures. I was a child wearing shorts, and the professor would come in: 'Please, Gentlemen.' They weren't accustomed to it, a few months earlier they'd still been teaching at the university. They held quite interesting lectures; we didn't understand everything, but they never questioned their pupils. Later they had to test the whole class in a week. Then they became used to it, for example to homework, lessons.

The teaching staff consisted of a dozen university lecturers from Budapest. From the second year it started to become a high school. The school had a Jewish character as well. They taught Modern Hebrew for six to eight hours, every week. There was a different teacher who taught this. There was a proper textbook; we learned to speak. In a few weeks one could learn to speak rather well. And there was Religion as well. These had no religious character, they taught religion: when and what to pray, the importance of holidays. Actually we discussed the rituals of Jewish holidays. The whole thing had some theosophical/religious philosophy connections, but we didn't learn prayers. The religious character consisted only of the fact that on certain holidays the whole school, in corpora, went to the synagogue. There were quite a lot of us in the school; we would have occupied the whole synagogue, but they held speeches and prayers an hour earlier or later than the actual service time and we participated in these.