Tag #141529 - Interview #102477 (Zsuzsanna G. )

We both went to the Prater Street Ilona Zrinyi [High School] which was a municipal gymnasium. To get a Jewish child enrolled in gymnasium in 1935, you had to get some seriously heavy ‘protekcio’ [slang - inside influence, sometimes favors from friends or simply paid for] on your side. A state school was out of the question, there wasn’t enough money, and a social democrat[-ic Party] representative was able to get my older sister into a capitol city school. At the time, the rule was that those whose older sibling was already enrolled there, they were automatically accepted. So my parents didn’t think about a Jewish school. My father got the ‘protekcio’. He’d been a member of the Social Democratic Party since 1921 [MSZDP] [8]. He wasn’t that active as Uncle Imre. My mother wasn’t as interested in the worker’s movement, as much as being part of the ‘middle-class’, so she was capable of holding my father back a bit, and giving him more prosaic tasks.