Tag #139613 - Interview #101729 (Bella Steinmetz)

I came only after two weeks to see my house. I regretted it however, because I got so upset. Two families were staying in my apartment, because I had five rooms: a family, husband and wife, in the other family there were three children, the eldest was seventeen years old, then a fifteen and a twelve years old. I was shouting on them, like a jackal, when I entered the house: ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my house?’ Imagine that you go home now, and you find strangers in your room, and everything is unfamiliar. And I could see there was nothing. I didn’t even have a glass. One of them was very impertinent. He had broken through the wall between two rooms, so he made a kitchen-and-room apartment. I gave him three days to remake it as it used to be. He will whitewash it and disappear in three days, upon this he will show a clean pair of heels. I left there the other. He had three children. He apologized. He says: ‘Well, we came in…’ I don’t know from where he was, Csik [region] maybe, a Hungarian teacher. They had come here to Marosvasarhely. I don’t know in fact how they had got precisely in my apartment. They had wanted to move to the town, and there had been many [empty] Jewish apartments. Everybody was happy, because a lot of apartments became available. The merchant was happy, because competition ceased. There were nice apartments, and one could ‘zabral’ [scrounge]. We learnt this from the Russians, it means to steal, to filch, to loot.