I attended a Romanian middle school. There was no independent Jewish school in Des. There was a school for boys and one for girls, with well-trained teachers. In the school they didn’t make us feel different because we were Jewish, although there were many Jews in the school. I didn’t feel I was despised or treated like an alien. My favorite subject was mathematics, and I was only interested in what was related to mathematics: physics, chemistry and logic. We used to go to the theater, concerts and movies with the school. On several occasions they took us to the Romanian theater in Kolozsvar. The first opera I saw was Carmen. I was 14 then. I couldn’t understand a word they sang, but it was all new to me and I liked it.
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Displaying 19981 - 20010 of 50826 results
Katalin Kallos Havas
My older brother, Gyorgy, read everything that fell into his hands. He took piano lessons from a private teacher who used to come to our house. Gyorgy’s closet looked like a little girl’s; everything was in place. He was the ‘golden haired child’ in the family because he was tidy. My parents always nagged me because even though I was a girl, I was very untidy. I was on bad terms with my brother for quite a long time. I was around 15 when we became very good friends. We had no secrets from each other. He enlightened me on many subjects. Our close relationship remained very strong even after he got married. His wife was really annoyed about this; she was jealous of me. Gyorgy used to tell me more than he told her. His wife, Rozsi, was a Jewish girl, originally from Maramaros, and they got married in 1943. She was still a medical student then. Their marriage was a simple civil one, without any religious ceremony. They didn’t even organize a party afterwards.
Romania
We spoke Hungarian in the family. Our mother tongue and culture was Hungarian. Neither of our parents spoke Yiddish. We had a large library at home. My parents read a lot, but it wasn’t them who led me to read. I just had the bookshelf there, so I read. We didn’t have any religious books, but literature. I learned German when I was three from the Fraulein, who was a Saxon girl from the Brasso region, and I knew Gothic characters at the age of seven. Now I know only a few of them. At the age of seven I could already read and write in Hungarian. From the age of 11 I read regularly, and at 13 I was already reading Zola.
My parents weren’t religious. We didn’t light a candle on Fridays and didn’t keep a kosher household either. On Pesach we used to spend the seder at my aunt Szerena’s place.
I was already a good swimmer by the age of five. My father taught me to swim by throwing me into the deep waters of the Szamos in Des, at a spot where even he couldn’t touch the bottom. Then he said, ‘Now come out’, and I did. I discovered that the water kept me afloat, and I learnt to swim. I was a tomboy and I had quite a lot of fights. That’s why the family called me ‘Fiupista’ [boy Pista].
My parents weren’t strict. They never forbade my older brother or me anything. We lived in a very beautiful house on the bank of the Szamos River in Des. A large household lived in the family house, which had plumbing and electricity. We all had our own rooms. The laundry and the kitchen were in the basement, and the food was brought to the dining-room with an elevator. We had a housemaid, a cook and a Fraulein, that is, a governess. The servants were all Christians and they lived in our house. It was my mother’s principle that everybody must work for their bread, therefore we children had some duties around the house; even though there were people who could have done it for us, we had to do them. We cleaned up, helped out around the house and had to keep our closets tidy.
When I was a child, my parents were amongst the wealthy middle-class. They dressed according to the middle-class fashion of that period; they used to go to get-togethers, and had an active social life. Their circle of friends was very diverse; it didn’t matter whether someone was Jewish or Christian. As far as I remember they were both very good-looking.
My parents never talked about how they met, nor about their marriage. They got married in 1916, and my oldest brother Gyorgy was born a year later. I was born in 1922.
Around 1930 there were 3,000 Jews living in Des. There were more Neolog than Orthodox Jews, they had their own synagogue and several places of worship, but I don’t remember the ratios. In Des there was a Jewish area around the Neolog synagogue, where the poorer Jews, who rented their homes, used to live. The wealthier Jews lived spread out in different areas of the town, and had their own houses. We never had a house of our own, and I don’t really know why, but it wasn’t too important to have a house of one’s own. We only had a vineyard, jointly with my father’s sister and his younger brother, in Bungur, where the ghetto was in 1944. Bungur was in fact a forest in the outskirts of Des. The arable lands and vineyard nearby were named after it. The ghetto though was set up in the forest, in the open air.
His oldest brother, Jozsef, whom we all called Jasszi, lived in Des with his family for a while. He was an illegal communist already, as early as 1933, and was imprisoned for quite a while. During those periods his wife, Edit, and their children lived at our house in Des because they had no other source of income. His wife was originally from a landlord’s family from Kapjon. Kapjon is a couple of kilometers away from Kolozsvar. His daughter’s name was Zsuzsi. Since my father was a lawyer, he helped out Jasszi many times, getting him out of prison. At the end of the 1930s they moved to Galac, and then, after World War II, to Bucharest. As a member of the Communist Party since 1933, he was expelled from the Party in 1945. Only after he died, in the 1960s, was his name cleared, thanks to his daughter’s intercession.
Romania
Out of all them, only my father graduated from college. He became a lawyer, whereas the others only graduated high-school and all worked in the transportation business, without exception.
My father, Jeno Havas, was born in 1892. He and one of his brothers, Marci, were the ones who took the surname Havas. They both served in the Austro-Hungarian army and they probably Magyarized their names there. However, I don’t know exactly when and why. The sister and the other brothers kept the name Selig.
My father’s parents were born and lived in Des. All I know about them is that they were observant and had a furniture transporting business, but I don’t even remember their first names. Their last name was Selig.
My mother’s third sister, Sari, got married to a Yugoslav man, from a place that was then Southern Hungary [Voivodina] [3]. I only know that they were amongst those shot into the Danube by the Hungarians [during the Novi Sad massacre] [4]. They had two daughters. The younger one, Lili, got married and moved to Italy, before World War II, and that’s how she escaped deportation. The older one, Edit, was deported to Auschwitz, but she came home. She married a Yugoslav Jew called Rosenberg and emigrated to South Africa at the end of the 1940s. Then they moved to Israel, then to Holland. Edit’s husband was a construction engineer, and specialized in building sugar factories. My mother, Vilma, was the fourth daughter. She was born in 1896. Etus was my mother’s youngest sister. She married in Des, and emigrated to America in 1918 or 1919.
Romania
My mother’s eldest sister, Elvira, got married and moved to Budapest. She had one child, Denes, who killed himself at a young age. Elvira perished in Auschwitz. The next oldest sister was Iren, who got married and moved to Brasso, which was then part of Hungary [following the Trianon Peace Treaty] [2]. Iren and her husband, Grosz, were wealthy. A baron called Grodl had a lumber mill and a sawmill near Brasso, in Kommando. Uncle Grosz was the foreman for the baron and they stayed there all summer, and spent the rest of the year in Brasso. As a child I spent all my summer holidays at Aunt Iren’s in Kommando, and those were the happiest days of my life. They didn’t observe the religious holidays either. Nobody in the family was religious. They had two sons, Laci and Geza. Aunt Iren emigrated to Israel with Laci and her daughter-in-law after World War II. Laci now lives in Nazareth. Geza remained in Brasso and started a family there. Iren died at the age of 94 in the early 1970s.
Romania
After her husband died she became a businesswoman, which was quite unusual in those days. She had a lumber warehouse, opposite to where the courthouse was at the time. The workers she employed were Christians. She brought up and married off her daughters using the revenues of this business. Of course, they had to marry suitors who were content with a smaller dowry. The girls got betrothed through a matchmaker, and their marriages were arranged by their parents. My mother and her little sister were the youngest ones, and their marriages were love matches.
My maternal grandparents were Neologs; they observed the high holidays and used to go to the synagogue, but weren’t religious. They didn’t keep a kosher household either. They had modern ideas about life.
There were public announcements on walls regarding the date the Jews would be taken to the brick-yard, and what they could bring along. After one or two days, on 3rd May, the gendarmes came. When they showed up at our house, everybody’s bundles were already packed up. We left everything in the house as it was: furniture, pots, everything we owned. All we were allowed to take with us – food, some clothes and valuables – was packed in our bundles. They put my family – my parents, my brother and myself – on a truck, along with the other Jewish inhabitants of the house, and took us to the ghetto set up in the brick-yard. Many Christian citizens were happy they took us away, because we left many things behind, and everybody could have their share of them.
The brick-yard is still there, near the Irisz housing estate, close to the railroad. We spent three weeks in the ghetto, in terrible conditions. I don’t remember us cooking anything, since we had nothing we could cook in or on, and we had no electricity. I don’t remember whether we had a communal kitchen. I don’t even remember whether we had the possibility to clean up, there were no toilets. They gathered quite a lot of people there, the entire Jewish community of Kolozsvar. Every family had some three or four square meters of space, regardless of how many members they had. There were no chairs there to sit on; we couldn’t do anything. There were things to lie on, which we could take up and sit on. We were kept in the brick-yard.
The brick-yard is still there, near the Irisz housing estate, close to the railroad. We spent three weeks in the ghetto, in terrible conditions. I don’t remember us cooking anything, since we had nothing we could cook in or on, and we had no electricity. I don’t remember whether we had a communal kitchen. I don’t even remember whether we had the possibility to clean up, there were no toilets. They gathered quite a lot of people there, the entire Jewish community of Kolozsvar. Every family had some three or four square meters of space, regardless of how many members they had. There were no chairs there to sit on; we couldn’t do anything. There were things to lie on, which we could take up and sit on. We were kept in the brick-yard.
We heard nothing about the deportations. Even those who went to the Jewish community regularly didn’t know anything. Only a very small group, the leadership, found out about it, just before people were put into ghettos, from the Polish Jewish refugees who came to Kolozsvar. They brought the news, but nobody believed what they said. Even though some of them had escaped from Treblinka. We knew the Arrow-Cross men [13] were dangerous. We were getting news about people being beaten, killed, shot into the Danube, but the people at the Jewish community calmed us down.
The period following March 1944 was very difficult for us due to the restrictions, which we had to acknowledge because there was nothing we could do about them. We weren’t allowed to buy things in Christian stores and we were only allowed to walk on the streets within specific hours. I don’t remember exactly when we had to start wearing the yellow star [12], but it was probably in the spring of 1944, when the Germans came.
During the war my father worked as legal adviser at a bank, I think it was the Agricultural Bank. Its headquarters were above the then EMKE pharmacy. I don’t know what EMKE stood for, but the citizens still call the building that. Back then we called it the sinking house, because its front became cracked and started to sink. I think my father was dismissed in 1944, but I don’t know where he worked afterwards. My mother then worked as a stocking ladder-repairer. There was a Jewish store with a workshop. My mother rented a small place there; she installed her machine there and worked on her own account. The owner had a very nice employee, and the owner transferred the store and the workshop to him by deed – I think it was in 1944 – after the Jews weren’t allowed to have stores anymore. Since my mother wasn’t employed there, but only rented the place, she wasn’t thrown out and could work there until her deportation.
At the beginning of 1941 my job was terminated. When the Hungarians came in 1940, my boss’ husband was appointed mayor of Des, and the workshop was relocated there. Due to the anti-Jewish laws I couldn’t take any other job, so I worked illegally here and there. It paid off for the owners to employ people illegally, because that way they didn’t have to pay the corresponding taxes and health insurance. And the inspections weren’t severe.
When the Hungarian armed forces marched into Kolozsvar in fall 1940, my father was very happy at first. He had waited for Hungarian rule to return, because he had fought in World War I for the army of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy [the KuK army] [11], and he even received a decoration. Even though we knew that there were anti-Jewish laws in effect in Hungary, we wanted to live there because our culture and mother tongue was Hungarian. But they quickly made us feel unhappy that they’d come, even more than the Romanians had before. My brother felt it for the first time, when in 1940 law students attacked him with sticks at university. He was studying to become a chemist and was preparing for his doctorate. He came out of the laboratory holding vitriol in his hands, when they surrounded him and beat him. When he came home his face was so swollen up, he looked like a horse ‑ that’s how hard they beat him. From then on they made us feel we were Jewish.
There were cells in Kolozsvar, but I didn’t know who their leaders were. [Editor’s note: the communists were organized in small groups called cells.] We only knew one person, who gave us instructions. Everybody had such a contact person, and we called them ‘the contacts.’ My brother’s contact was a Christian boy called Zoltan Kiraly, who was taken to forced labor in 1941, to the Russian front. My contact was a boy from Des who lived in Kolozsvar. I knew him as ‘the Hollender boy’. I didn’t know anything else about him. He was caught by the police in 1942 or 1943. He was imprisoned in Szamosfalva – the prison for communists –, then he was beaten to death. Laci Farkas was also imprisoned there. He was of Jewish origin. I met him at the end of the 1930s. He was originally from Kolozsvar but operated in Des. The illegal communist organization from Kolozsvar sent him there to help in organizing the communists.
Before 1940 I raised money for the underground organization Voros Segely [Red Aid] from its sympathizers. There were many wealthy young people who wouldn’t dare to become communists, but sympathized with the movement and backed it financially. This all went on in secret. Communism was spreading, especially within the student circles. After the Hungarians came [in 1940] I even took part in distributing leaflets. We encouraged people not to let the others exploit them, and to put up some resistance at work.
My brother and I were atheists already from a very early age, we believed in communism and that someday all citizens would be equal. We believed in the progress of mankind, and we didn’t leave our sorrow and difficulties for God to solve. We had to resolve them ourselves. Regardless of religion, we had a Jewish identity and were proud of it. We knew about the Zionist movement. There were many different factions, including a left-wing one. My brother had an eye on such a left-wing Zionist organization, the Hashomer Hatzair [10], but this was liquidated in 1938.
Romania
I came in contact with the communist movement in the trade school on Pap Street, where the communists often gave lectures. They usually didn’t talk about their ideology, but the practical part of socialism, about how it should be implemented. My brother Gyorgy brought me to one of these lectures, and later I went there by myself. One of the speakers was a Jewish medical student, Odi Neumann. I attended these lectures each week, and that’s how I learnt about communism. Thus I never had any contacts with Hungarian communists because I only moved in Jewish circles.
Romania
The Jewish youth from Kolozsvar was seriously involved in the leftist underground movement. My older brother, for example, was an illegal communist as a student from 1938, but he already had connections with the communists from 1936. He was a regular member, he had no special position in the communist organization. The Communist Party was banned by the Romanian authorities already in the 1920s. From then on it operated in secret, illegally. That’s why its members were called ‘illegalists’.
I had a Jewish boyfriend called Dery, whose parents were furriers. They had a house at the end of Donat Street, on the banks of the Szamos, and every summer we went there to bathe. Their garden gave onto the Szamos, so we weren't bothered by anybody while bathing.
Romania
My friends were from the Hagibor. One of our friends, Marcell Roth, whose father was a wealthy pharmacist, had a phonograph. He had beautiful classical music and opera records. One afternoon every week, we gathered to listen to music. There were people among us who were connoisseurs of music, and talked about the piece we were listening to. We knew all the great composers, symphonies and operas. In another circle of friends we used to talk about books, and everybody talked about what they had read most recently. Due to the limited possibilities we had after the Hungarians came, that’s how we lived. We used to go on trips with our friends, but not very long ones. For example one day we went camping at Lake Cege with tents and returned home the next day.