Tag #139610 - Interview #101729 (Bella Steinmetz)

I don’t know, maybe after one year, there was a Jewish boy who first courted me, he wanted to marry me, he implored me each day, he filled my head with this. Once he finds me crying, and I say: ‘Leave me alone! I don’t want to get married, you see, I have nothing to eat tomorrow. This captain told me he had given my jewels to these people, I could do something if I had those.’ ‘Well then – he says –, come with me.’ It was dark already, it was about eight o’clock. I tell him: ‘What do you intend to do, dressed in civil clothes?’ We visited that girl’s father, and he said: ‘Mister, I’m here officially. Either you give me the jewels, silver objects of Mrs. Almasi, either you come with me to the police.’ And he shows his badge, as every ‘szekus’ [Editor’s note: member of the Securitate, that is the Romanian secret police] had a certificate. It [the badge] was a brooch of course, he was a cunning fellow. The lawyer was in a blue funk when the boy did this. He went at once to his big cash desk, took out a small box, like mine, which I had given [to the captain], mainly my mother’s small jewels were in it. ‘I was here a few months ago, and you told me you had nothing.’ His daughter was there too: ‘How should I have known which one belongs to Mrs. Almasi?’ ‘You gave me straightaway, as you opened it – I say –, you found it at once. How could that be possible?’ I slapped that man in the face, and I spat him on face. In such a case one looses his good sense and self-command. I say: ‘Let’s go, because I will faint in a minute. It’s worthless, I lost my mother, I lost my husband, and now should I fight for jewels?’ Then he [Duci’s father] gave me back some things and said: ‘Believe me or not, that was it, because we took some when we were escaping [with Frici], but when we came home, we couldn’t carry them, and we threw them on the street.’ I had big silver platters, silver cutlery. He gave me back a set for fish and a set for ice-cream, with eighteen teaspoons. This young man left for Israel later, at quite a young age.