Tag #139614 - Interview #101729 (Bella Steinmetz)

After all they had done to us, there were some among the Hungarians who didn’t feel ashamed to reveal that they were happy. Everybody gained from it [from the deportation], that’s the truth. For example a few Romanian families were left here, they didn’t go away [Editor’s note: in 1940, after Northern-Transylvania became an area under the jurisdiction of Hungary]. People treated them so badly. The hospital was on Szent Gyorgy square. When the Hungarian army was retreating, they wanted to take with them the radiographs, they wanted to bring to the motherland all the movable values. And a Romanian doctor tells them in a perfect Hungarian (as he took his diploma in Pest): ‘I won’t let you take it, we have patients here!’ He put up resistance, and he didn’t let them take out even a chair. They kicked him out. In 1940, we were still home, so we saw this. When the war ended, he was kicked out from his flat too, because he had a nice, marvelous apartment, he built it next to the hospital. [Editor’s note: This could have happened due to the nationalization [10] in the communist regime.] He had a good salary, so he could have a house built of it. Not mentioning that he came from a wealthy family. They put him out in a room, somewhere near the Russian market.