Concerning religious life, I do believe in God. This is somewhat of a problem for me, since I believe in Spinoza’s God [20]. I want to know whom I believe in. Some things appear to me to be outdated, but in my soul I have a strong faith in God.
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Displaying 47221 - 47250 of 50826 results
Alexandru Kohn
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I am also somewhat involved in community life because I want Judaism to have continuity. I am strongly convinced that Bolshevists are part of a mafia organization that does no good for humanity. By its very definition it renders humanity rootless through atheism, and I would like to see the Jewish communities get rid of all communist habits. That’s why I have gotten involved.
At present, though I am officially retired, I have a lot of occupations. I started to work again, and I am currently operating as the Romanian representative of a firm called Baltic Wood. I gather information regarding the purchase of wood for their factory in Poland. For this purpose I travel a lot all across the country as well as internationally, to places like Moldova [19] and Serbia.
1989 brought a change., After I retired from the factory, I bought myself a print shop and established a cotton wool factory. I was very successful initially because I was the only one to do something like this in Romania. The customers literally queued up at my store, although eventually I had some competition after a similar place opened in Constanta.
I wouldn’t want to praise myself, but I worked a lot in the years prior to the revolution. I worked very long shifts during the evening and during the day. What’s more, it was very hard in the department where I worked. People weren’t competent at all, and those in the Party weren’t interested in the work either. When something got misadjusted or broke down, they would come for me at two or three o’clock in the morning to bring me to the factory and set things right. So I worked a lot. And I got less money than those who didn’t do anything, causing me much frustration.
In 1989, during the revolution [17], I was actually on the barricades here in Arad. In fact, I helped disarm a troop of Securitate [18] men who were shooting about in the streets. I was with a man called C. P. and one called G. I felt such a strong hate for the Securitate men that I broke down the door to their place of residence and walked right in. Until that moment I didn’t feel any fear because I was very impetuous. When I got there, face to face with them, and I saw them armed with pistols, I started to get anxious. I remember precisely that there were various kinds of license plates on a stand as well as telephones and some boxes with munitions and field beds strewn across the room. There were four of them, all armed. When they told us they stood by the revolution, I asked them why they were shooting. I suggested they call Voicila, who was in the committee of the local Council. They called him, and an army car soon came and took them away. I remember that there was a sergeant in the car, and I suspected that something wasn’t quite right. I’m afraid to say that this event, in many respects, was a microcosm for the revolution. The whole thing was a spectacle. The revolutionaries capitalized on the public’s hatred and distrust of the Communists, but it was actually the Communists themselves who were orchestrating the whole thing!
He works as a software developer.
He graduated from the Technion University, the Israel Institute of Technology, and subsequently took postgraduate courses in Haifa.
He took part in Talmud lessons, and in 1994 he left for Israel.
We have never celebrated any of the Christian holidays within the family, but we have always observed all of the Jewish traditions, even though my wife isn’t Jewish. As I was already 40 at the time of our marriage, I found it difficult to change my habits and wished to continue celebrating the Jewish holidays.
I met her in the factory, as she had been placed in Arad after graduation. We got married on 12th August 1971.
She studied at the Textile Faculty in Iasi, and she is now an engineer.
I wanted to become a party member because I felt humiliated. I was getting bad, low paid jobs because those who weren’t party members were placed where it was worse. In order to become a party member, you had to be taken into the basic organization first and then approved by the County Committee. A party member had to recommend you. Unfortunately, Tibi, whom my mother had helped financially, wrote that my mother was a speculator who was engaged in trade. As a result, the County Committee said I couldn’t be a member because I didn’t fit in. I tried to obtain membership again in 1958, after my spell in prison, but then they said I didn’t have the proper moral qualities.
My wife too had problems for not being a party member. She was the only engineer who had to work three shifts, for example.
At the workplace I also experienced discrimination as a result of my political leanings. I didn’t have problems on account of being Jewish, but because I wasn’t a party member.
When I got back, I wanted to leave for Israel. But when I went to ask for my papers, the authorities told me that I could never leave because I was an enemy of the Communists. They feared that I was going to make anti-communist propaganda abroad. I tried many times to obtain a passport, but I didn’t succeed. I intended to flee across the border, but I never did.
I didn’t leave for Israel because I was unfortunate or perhaps lucky to have tried to enroll in a university in Romania in 1956. I even became famous in the process, as everybody was astonished that I went to the secretariat and said, ‘Sir, there is a mistake. I’m not on that list.’ I was told I didn’t have the right to be on the inscription list because I didn’t have a good social background given that my father had been a merchant. In the Nazi era I had suffered because I was a Jew, and now the Communists made me suffer because my father was a merchant. I was told that these were the laws, and I answered that most of the Jews were and always had been merchants and that the policy amounted to discrimination against Jews, just as there had been under the Nazis. The secretary asked me how I could compare socialism to Nazism, and I answered that these were the same and walked out. Shortly thereafter I was arrested, and I got sentenced in 1956 to hard labor on the Danube-Black Sea Canal. I was there for two years, between 1956 and 1958, before they let me free.
When the state of Israel was established, I felt an indescribable joy. Anti-Semites often said Jews were a parasitic nation, incapable of living by themselves and not needing a country to call their own. And even if they had one, so the saying went, Jews wouldn’t know their way about because they were nothing more than parasites living on the backs of others. Israel has proven exactly the opposite. It can be taken as a model country. Look at how much they have created from nothing! I must also add that we were always being told in my childhood that we were from Palestine and that we should go to Palestine. I think and I feel it now too that Israel is the land and the root of all Jews. Jewry as a nation has, in my mind, three pillars – one being Israel, the other consisting of the Jews from the United States, and the last consisting of the Jews of the Diaspora.
My mother died in Arad on 12th July 1977, and my father passed away in Arad on 27th December 1982. My brother died on 19th May 2002. My parents are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Arad. Rabbi Neumann came to all three funerals from Timisoara. I paid him to come. I sat shivah for my brother, and also for my father and mother.
My mother never had a job. As I have said, she was primarily a housewife. Before 1960, however, while we were living in Arad, my mother did sew bed covers and sold them on the open market. [Editor’s note: it is very probable that Mr. Kohn means that his mother was sewing bed covers between 1946 and 1960, given that his parents moved to Arad around 1946-7.] She earned quite a bit because people needed linen right after the war. The money helped her support a cousin from her maternal grandfather’s side of the family, a woman who is now married to Iosif Conta.
They didn’t open a shop in Arad, instead choosing to sell at the local Serbian market. My father had a booth there. He sold textiles again, acquiring the goods from factories or wholesalers. As all this was after 1948, there weren’t private shops anymore, and my father instead got regular employment in a textile shop in the town center, opposite to the Red Church. He sold remains – pieces that were left from exports. He was paid according to how much he sold. Eventually my father moved to another textile shop on Andrei Saguna Street. The shop went so well there that people were queuing up. My father knew exactly what to bring, and many people came from the countryside to purchase goods from him. My father retired after his work at this shop.
After they got back the house in Arad, my parents also moved there. Later we sold the house.
My father got in touch again with traders from Arad, and he would come to Arad for merchandise. Acquisition was extremely troublesome – he had to come to Arad by train and then carry all the goods to Beliu. As such, he didn’t purchase too much merchandise. As it was, he didn’t have much money, and besides, the acquisition of goods was also becoming dangerous. I recall that once he had all of his merchandise stolen.
As I mentioned before, we had originally lived in a rented house before the war.
They lived with some Jews while in Beliu because they didn’t have a house there after the war.
After they came back to Beliu, my parents once again engaged in commerce. They ultimately ran their shop until 1946/7.
I still have the merchant license of my father. It is dated 1939, and the text is as follows: ‘Kohn, Eugen, born on 10th August 1896 in Sebis village, is authorized to run a mixed grocery on his own account, under the firm name of ‘Kohn Eugen,’ having its headquarters in Beliu village.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t have much of a career because he was not a Communist Party member. And it was obvious that if you didn’t join, you couldn’t be a successor professional. This was simply reality. A lot of work and low salaries were the norm for non-party members. Exactly the opposite was true for party members.
So I told him to do whatever possible to go to university, as life in the army wasn’t for him. He eventually did graduate from the University of Technology in Timisoara, and he became a good engineer.
I did my army service in Bucharest – in the air defense – between 1951 and 1954. I liked the military and the outdoors, and I wanted to make a career as an officer. Unfortunately, I couldn’t become an officer because of my origins. They told me: ‘Mister, you don’t have a good background, and you can’t become an officer.’
Life was very hard in the army. Indeed, it was miserable. We wore deplorable clothing, with equipment from World War II that had been mended because of the bullets. On top of that the food was awful – we ate only barley water. Sometimes when we were free we bought bread together with the privates. It was a ‘brick’ type of bread, ‘Stalin’s bread,’ as they called it. Despite its horrible taste, I often ate two kilos of bread at once.
Life was very hard in the army. Indeed, it was miserable. We wore deplorable clothing, with equipment from World War II that had been mended because of the bullets. On top of that the food was awful – we ate only barley water. Sometimes when we were free we bought bread together with the privates. It was a ‘brick’ type of bread, ‘Stalin’s bread,’ as they called it. Despite its horrible taste, I often ate two kilos of bread at once.