Tag #156739 - Interview #78355 (Mrs. Gábor Révész)

After I finished my fourth year, I came back home to Budapest. This was in the summer of 1942. My mother’s life was turned upside-down because due to the second Jewish law, she lost her job. She couldn’t support herself or keep up the apartment. The question was, what should become of me? I need to study something from which I could make a living. The situation was pretty hopeless by then, so the idea that I should go to gymnasium didn’t even come up. And then the Jewish Gymnasium started a new faculty called the industrial faculty, the equivalent of today’s vocational secondary school structure. It was in the building of the Jewish Gymnasium in Abonyi utca, which is today’s Radnóti Gymnasium. It didn’t cost anything and offered a reduced syllabus. But it came with a diploma and had perspective. I learned sewing. This was a four-year school, or would have been, but of course, I couldn’t finish. I went there for about two weeks, more or less, then they took the building away and moved us into another building in Wesselényi utca that belonged to an industrial and trade school.  At the Jewish Gymnasium there was teaching every other Sunday, because of course, there was no school on Saturday.