Tag #154701 - Interview #94472 (Laszlo Ringel)

Our both houses in Onokovtse were occupied. The pot house became a storage house and in the house where we lived with my parents after my sister was born was inhabited by some newcomers. The door of the pot house was closed, but I knew the way to get inside. There was a manhole in the attic that was never locked. I got inside through this manhole. I took few photographs and some clothes. I stayed a little among the things that were dear to me when I was a child: a chess table with the chess board made from ivory and black stone, the table with a burnt spot when my father spilled some vodka during Havdalah. On the door of the wardrobe from the inside my mother inscribed the names of cows and calving dates. There was the memory of my family living in this house. I stayed overnight with our neighbors who were happy that I was back. On the next day I went to Uzhgorod. I was hoping to find my aunt Karolina, my mother’s sister, who might know about my family. I only found Miklos, my cousin, there. He was in a work battalion from where he was taken to a concentration camp, and Americans liberated him. Miklos was working in his father’s furniture shop. He offered me to stay with him and work in the shop. Miklos told me what happened to my mother’s sisters. Aunt Karolina and her husband perished in a concentration camp and so did my mother’s sister Rozsa and her husband living in Slovakia. Rozsa’s daughter Edit was in a labor camp where she perished. Rozsa’s son Tibor survived, but I didn’t have any information about him. Miklos’ brother Sandor escaped to England in 1938 after Hungarians came to power. During WWII he served in the Czechoslovakian Legion in the British army. After the war Sandor returned to Britain and married an English woman. They lived in London. We didn’t correspond and this is all I know about him. He might have passed away. He was older than me.