Tag #140864 - Interview #78456 (Ferenc Szabados)

My name is Ferenc Szabados and I was born in Ilk in 1920. Ilk was a pretty poor, backward village in Szabolcs. There couldn’t have been more than a thousand residents. Of these, fourteen or fifteen families there were Jewish. Some families, like ours, had a lot of children, but you might stumble on Jewish families without children, too. My guess would be that about fifty Jews lived in the village. The village Jews were very poor, there were even hoeing peasants [day laborers] among them. One or two families were merchants. But none of them got rich. Any one of their businesses might have fit into a plastic bag. Some eeked out a living door-to-door. They sold potatoes, or milk. And there were Jews who went from one village to the other. They sold lime, and onions. One came with a nag, one horse pulling a wagon, and he would yell, “Onions, lime!”. Anyway, they were very poor. The merchants, they sold everything. The horse dealers mocked the Jews, but there wasn’t much difference between the two.