But how I became part of the Jewish community is also funny: when my father came to see Paul, he said nothing to me, but he talked to my wife and asked her to sign me up without my knowledge and then try to involve me in their activities. My wife did this, and I only found out when the Jewish newspaper was delivered to my home. I also receive help from them now; they pay for my medication.
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Isac Tinichigiu
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I didn’t raise Paul to be a Jew. He knew that I was a Jew and his mother a Christian. But when he was in high school he studied informatics, and it happened that the Jewish community in Brasov received a computer lab. They didn’t know how to operate it, but they knew my son studied informatics, so they asked him to help them. After that, he became involved in their projects, especially the choir.
I myself didn’t have serious problems with the system because I was a Jew, but I had one problem with the Securitate once. It was an incident that can be considered both funny and tragic, that involved my stepson, Alexandru and me, back then in 1979. He is now married and has three daughters. When he was in high school, he had a class about the Iron Guard system that existed in Romania. I had at home the book written by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu [17], Carticica Sefului de Cuib [18]. It was put away in a drawer where I thought nobody would find it. But he did and he took it and showed it to his teacher. She announced it to the Securitate. So one day I received a phone call from a colonel, who invited me to pay a visit to them that day at their headquarters and to bring along all other Iron Guard books I might have. My wife was pregnant with our son Paul. I didn’t tell her anything, but I told Alexandru to let her know if I wasn’t back by 8 o’clock.
When I got there, the colonel took me to a cell, the last one in a row of cells, where a civilian waited for me. We shook hands and he invited me to sit down. Then he immediately lit a strong light right in my eyes. I said: ‘Comrade, I don’t know what your name is, because from your mumbling I couldn’t make it out, but if you don’t put that light out, I’m not uttering one word, and you can do what you want to me.’ He put the light out. He was a colonel who had come all the way from Bucharest to investigate whether my son, who was 17, was organizing an Iron Guard movement. I saw red. ‘How can you, idiot colonel, imagine that a Jew could ever organize an Iron Guard movement?!! Go to hell!’ That was the last thing I said, I would say no more. So we went to see the general, who laughed at the whole affair and let me go.
When I got there, the colonel took me to a cell, the last one in a row of cells, where a civilian waited for me. We shook hands and he invited me to sit down. Then he immediately lit a strong light right in my eyes. I said: ‘Comrade, I don’t know what your name is, because from your mumbling I couldn’t make it out, but if you don’t put that light out, I’m not uttering one word, and you can do what you want to me.’ He put the light out. He was a colonel who had come all the way from Bucharest to investigate whether my son, who was 17, was organizing an Iron Guard movement. I saw red. ‘How can you, idiot colonel, imagine that a Jew could ever organize an Iron Guard movement?!! Go to hell!’ That was the last thing I said, I would say no more. So we went to see the general, who laughed at the whole affair and let me go.
We never celebrated any religious holidays in our home.
At first we lived with my wife’s parents – until 1986, when we got our own house: I was sick and I wasn’t allowed to make efforts, and their house was up a hill.
We got married in 1978, but not in a church or a synagogue, and we had a child, Paul Isac, in 1979.
I wanted to move to Suceava, in Gura Humorului; I had no relatives there, but I liked the mountains. But in 1975 I had to go to Brasov for some studies about the market development here and that’s how I came to work with my wife, Borbala Szakacs.
I dictated her a study about the local market and she made some observations concerning my study. I was amazed by her memory and intelligence and I started to come to Brasov more often. Finally I gave up the idea of moving to Suceava and I came to live in Brasov, officially for medical reasons – I had ulcer. My future wife worked for me as a typist, but she also worked in a hospital, doing secretarial work and medical statistics.
I dictated her a study about the local market and she made some observations concerning my study. I was amazed by her memory and intelligence and I started to come to Brasov more often. Finally I gave up the idea of moving to Suceava and I came to live in Brasov, officially for medical reasons – I had ulcer. My future wife worked for me as a typist, but she also worked in a hospital, doing secretarial work and medical statistics.
So I calmed down and I reckoned that by doing my job as an economist for UNCAP I could help people. I knew the state was cheating on the farms through the prices: the prices were fix and didn’t cover all the peasants’ hard work. They were forced to accept the fix prices, and sell a share of their products to the state for those fix prices. What was left to them was barely enough to make a living, and my only purpose became to work for the peasants and against the state. This gave me a great deal of satisfaction, until the ministry I was working in became strictly political, with no other economic functions. Then I thought to move somewhere in the province, because I had never liked Bucharest.
Between 1964 and 1965 I experienced a sort of awakening. But emigrating was out of the question, because I used to work with top-secret documents, and I would have had to stay another four years in the country. But if it had been possible, I would have done it.
What’s more: the husband of one of my employees was a cultural attache in London. His name was Gabor Gavril and he was an English teacher, and an old communist too. He came back because he was in conflict with his colleagues, most of them Securitate officers and not diplomats, who always messed things up. Here he found only with great difficulty a job as an English teacher. I made friends with him and I asked him openly: ‘Tell me your truth’. I knew whom I was dealing with and I told him what I knew about Patrascanu. In return he told me the truth about the Soviet Union and all the crimes Stalin committed.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
The elementary school I went to, the cheder, had been built and was supported by the Jewish community, and so was the apprentice school Cultura, where we, the Jewish kids, would learn different jobs. In school I took religion classes. I enjoyed geography, Romanian literature and mathematics. One class I didn’t like and didn’t take for long was Hebrew.
Romania
When I would go out and play football, she made for me shoes out of rags and thick felt, because otherwise I would have ruined the only pair I had to go to school with.
I did go to cheder but I never had a bar mitzvah; my father was in the concentration camp [Caracal] at the time and I no longer believed in religion.
Romania
We celebrated Pesach at home: we didn’t eat bread, and my mother boiled all cutlery, so that it was kosher. We also ate matzah, pies and so on.
My parents were members of the Jewish community, and even though they went to the synagogue only during the high holidays, my mother lit a candle and then said the blessing over it every Friday evening. We also fasted on Yom Kippur. She tried to make a special dinner when it was possible, but usually there was no money for that. My father worked on Sabbath and the high holidays sometimes, if it was necessary; he couldn’t afford not to. On the high holidays I would accompany my father to the synagogue. We also ate kosher, that is no pork, except for Saturdays, when my father would come home with some money and we, kids, would have some meat.
After that, I started to talk with my colleagues in the apprentice school about ethnic issues. They talked me into joining an organization, Dror [3], which prepared young Jews for immigrating to Israel. It was while I was in Dror that I first found out some things about Jewish history: the scattering of Jews all over Europe, about the atrocities that were taking place in Germany and about the existence of the Soviet Union, where everyone worked for themselves and where there was no bourgeoisie. Then I remembered how hard my father worked and how, despite that, some winters we barely had food on the table, and I became aware for the first time of class differences. I was old enough to remember the invasion of Poland [4], the Anschluss [5] of Austria, the occupation of Czechoslovakia [see Munich Pact] [6]. We talked about these things in the organization. And I witnessed, back then, the flight of Poles through Moldavia to Constanta; they were trying to leave Europe. [Constanta is a Romanian port at the Black Sea.] And I remember discussions among Jews that stated that we would share their fate if Hitler took over Romania as well. I was afraid, and so were my parents.
Our close neighbors were all Christian, but they were very kind and I got along with all the children there. They were like me; they also had poor parents, and until 1938 I never heard anyone calling me a ‘stinking Jew’. I first became aware of the fact that I was a Jew in 1937-1938, when I was about ten years old. I used to play with all children, be their names Ghita or Ion. [These are typical Romanian names.] I never knew I was different just because I was named Isac. Our neighbors were very nice and never treated us in a different manner. But then, right after the Goga-Cuza government [2] came to power, when my friends and I were sleighing, a hooligan who lived near our neighborhood grabbed me and wanted to hit me. Fortunately, the neighbors came to my help and beat him.
My mother and my father went to the market every Sunday morning, and near our house there was a Jewish grocery, where I went every day to buy bread. We could buy on credit, which my father would pay back weekly. The merchant trusted us and sold us groceries even if my father didn’t have money to pay that week.
Our house had two rooms and a wooden summer kitchen, and a courtyard of 100 square meters. We had no running water or electricity. We had seven trees there, three sour-cherry trees that, we, the children, were not supposed to eat from. The fruits were saved for cherry brandy the family would need for the holidays and for the winter. We also had four apple trees and from their apples my mother would make stewed fruit for the winter. We also planted parsley, horseradish and early radish.
My father worked at construction sites, he was a skilled tinsmith. But even so, the financial situation of the family was precarious: in the summer we had food, in the fall mother would make canned fruit or vegetables, but during the winter we rarely saw meat because there was no money for it, just for bread. I’ll never forget one woman, Marita, who gave us milk even if we had no money to pay; she would wait for that money until spring.
He was illiterate; he couldn’t read, but he could sign his name and he knew basic arithmetic.
Iasi, the town I grew up in, was a beautiful and modern town, but we lived more on what one would call the outskirts, in a neighborhood called Ticau. It is famous in Romanian literature because this is where Creanga was born. [Ion Creanga (1839-1889): famous Romanian writer] There were no ghettos, but there were neighborhoods where Jews were very numerous, such as Cucului. The Jewish community in Iasi was big and powerful; it must have been more than a third of the town’s population, maybe about 30,000 Jews. There were a lot of synagogues and prayer houses, with rabbis, chazzanim, shochetim and all other functionaries. Since the community was so big, of course we had mikves, cheders and yeshivot. About half of the Jews in Iasi worked in factories or in different shops. A lot of them had their own workshops, because many were skilled woodworkers, watchmakers, shoemakers and so on.
Stefan Guth
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I think my parents had an exclusive circle of friends: they were entirely Jewish. My mother was a very open person, and very sociable, she was well known in Brasov, at least in the Jewish circles. My father was a good friend of Feiler Dezideriu, who had been with him in Ivria and later became the president of the Jewish community in Brasov during World War II. He also knew Citrom Molnar, who became the president of the community under communism.
My father was never in a political party, but we had the Keren Kayemet [6] box in our house, and anybody who came to our house had to put something into it.
My father had been a member of Ivria [7], one of the first Jewish organizations in Brasov, which became Zionist only later. I don’t know for sure, but I think he was a key person there. He never talked much to me about it, except that they used to play football.
My father had been a member of Ivria [7], one of the first Jewish organizations in Brasov, which became Zionist only later. I don’t know for sure, but I think he was a key person there. He never talked much to me about it, except that they used to play football.
I remember that my mother had a ketubbah, and that my father kept a violet velvet sack with a magen David embroidered on it, with the clothes for his funeral, his tallit and his siddur.
My father worked on Sabbath and didn’t observe the kashrut, but he did observe all high holidays. He was a Neolog [5], but he strongly identified himself as a Jew and he was a fervent Zionist.
But we didn’t dress up for Purim; that was something the Orthodox Jews were doing.
My father led the seder, and said the prayers, and I think before Pesach there was a big cleaning.
My parents weren’t very religious at all. My mother wasn’t religious, but she always lit the candles on Friday evenings and said the blessing, something she had learnt from her mother. But there was no challah in our house, and the food wasn’t kosher.
My father worked as a proxy for the Romanian Banking Society in Brasov, which was actually a branch of a German bank. It was an important position; he had the authority from the general managers of the bank to take decisions in their name.