Tag #154493 - Interview #94472 (Laszlo Ringel)

It’s hard to say how religious my father’s family was. My father and his sister were neologs [2]. They spoke Hungarian. My father must have finished a school well since he managed to enter the Trade Academy in Transylvania. There was no anti-Semitism and there were liberal attitudes toward Jews, but still there were some restrictions for Jews in educational institutions. [editor’s note: There were no such restrictions in the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy. The interviewee probably refers to the numerus clausus law introduced in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1920 to limit the enrollment of Jews to higher educational institutions.] My father and grandfather served in the Austro-Hungarian army [KuK army] [3] during WWI. At that time men with secondary and higher education were promoted to officers’ ranks in the army after having some short-term training, but this did not refer to Jews. The highest rank they could expect was a corporal. [editor’s note: There were no such limitations in the KuK army and Jews were equal with non Jews in theory. However, for various other reasons, the military never became a typical Jewish career path.] The only exception was granted to doctors. They were not subject to this kind of restrictions. My grandfather Manó and my father were corporals at the front. I have two letter: one of those letters my mother wrote to my father in 1915, when he served in the Hungarian army at the front during WWI, and other one my father sent to my mother from the front in 1917. My grandfather also sent us letters from the front which she used to sign as Emanuel. [Mano is short for Emanuel in Hungarian.] My grandfather Manó died in the 1930s. I don’t know where he was buried. After my father got married his younger sister Maria followed him to Subcarpathia [4] where she lived with us. Maria was a dressmaker. She didn’t marry for a long time. In the late 1920s Jonas, whose family name I do not remember, a Jewish man from Uzhgorod, proposed to Maria. They had a traditional Jewish wedding. Maria moved to Uzhgorod to live with her husband. Their only daughter Magda was born in 1930. In 1944 Maria and her husband were taken to the ghetto and from there to Auschwitz. Maria and her husband perished in the camp, but their daughter Magda survived. After WWII Magda, a young girl then, moved to Palestine with other young people. On the way there the ship they sailed on was captured by a British military ship, and all passengers were sent to a camp in Cyprus, a Greek island where Maria met her future husband, who was also kept in this camp. In 1948 they managed to move to Palestine. Magda got married in Israel. Her family name is Friedman. She lives with her family in Qiryat Yam and we correspond.