There was no Jewish elementary school in Ujpest at that time. My wife attended the Jewish school already; her father was a teacher there. I finished four years of middle school, then I went to commercial school. I finished three years, but didn't want to work in a bank. Then I went to help my father anyway, and I became an ironmonger.
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laszlo spiegler
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My parents were tired people because they ran a shop; they went to work at 7am and worked until the evening, 6pm. Later, in 1927-28, my father opened an enameling factory in order that his daughters should have dowries. At that time there was deflation as well, the crisis of overproduction, and my father wasn't a cartel member. And then the enameling factory ruined my father because the cartel ruined him. They had a contract with a big company; it was called Hutter and Stran, where they made the enamel in stoves. And they cancelled the order and there was no work, but the day and night workers had to be paid regardless. At that time the factory had been running for about six years, but it went broke. It cost us the crockery shop. It cost us our house. They auctioned off everything we had.
My father was an ironmonger, but he was also a wood- and coal dealer; I know that because it was written in my birth certificate. And when my father was taken to World War I, we already had a crockery shop. My mother ran it well during the war, while my father was on the battlefield.
My father is Gyula Jakab Spiegler. His Jewish name was Itzchok. My mother was called Lenke Markus. Her Jewish name was Leye. My father barely spoke Hungarian. At the engagement he kissed my mother, who smacked his face. He said - because he couldn't speak Hungarian properly - 'I wish I had never got this smackering'. My parents spoke Hungarian with us, children, but they spoke Yiddish to one another, moreover, they corresponded in it as well. My mum's mother tongue was Hungarian, but she spoke Yiddish. In those days Jews used to speak mostly Yiddish. So they spoke this distortion of German, [that is Yiddish] moreover, they corresponded in it, too.
She was very religious, very kosher. She didn't have a wig, but her head was covered with a shawl.
My grandmother, my father's mother, could only speak Yiddish, because she was from the Felvidek [1].
They weren't born here in Ujpest but somewhere in the provinces, but they came to Budapest. It was a Neolog [1] family, but quite religious. I had an aunt, the wife of Uncle Herman, my mother's brother, who had been Christian; she converted to Judaism and she knew how to pray in Hebrew better than any Jew.
I was in Israel on a package tour in 1988. Not with Jews, but they loved me. They knew I was a Jew. I went there because I'm a Jew. I wanted to see everything. I didn't want to see the birth of Jesus but what a Jew is like there. I was very, very happy to be there. I felt that it was my home.
We've never been abroad because we didn't know any languages. And my wife was scared of traveling; after all she went through, it doesn't surprise me. We never went to Germany either. She was scared. Very scared indeed.
fira shwartz
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She came from a poor family, was the younger daughter and had no dowry.
My grandmother died in 1932 during the famine in Ukraine [1].
They lived in a small wooden house in Gornostaypol with three small rooms and a kitchen. My mother took me there once when I was 5 years old. I have some dim memories of my grandparents' house. There were earthen floors with quilted rugs on them. It was dark in the rooms because the windows were very small, and there were trees around the house. There were two stoves in the house: one in the kitchen, which was used for cooking and heating one room, and one to heat the two other rooms. The stoves were stoked with wood because charcoal was too expensive at the time. The ceilings were low and whitewashed. I remember a big nickel-plate bed, in which my mother and I were sleeping during our visit. The letter 'E' was embroidered on the sheets, and my mother told me that my grandmother Esther did the embroidery. There were also woolen carpets on the walls embroidered by my grandmother. They had a garden and a kitchen garden near the house.
My mother's older brothers studied at cheder. They also completed seven years of the Jewish lower secondary school in Gornostaypol. My mother studied at secondary school for eight years.
My mother's parents were religious. Her father read religious books after work. He prayed in the mornings and in the evenings. I don't know for sure whether there was a synagogue in Gornostaypol, but I believe there must have been one. Uncle Samuel told me that there were quite a few Jewish families living in Gornostaypol. My mother's family celebrated Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. I know this from my mother's brother Samuel, who later replaced my parents.
Gornostaypol was a small and quiet town. All stormy events shattering the country at that time - Jewish pogroms, the Revolution of 1917 [2] and the Civil War [3] - didn't affect the town. I know that the Revolution didn't change anything in the life of my mother's family: They had been poor before and they remained poor afterwards.
Samuel became a tailor in Gornostaypol and moved to Kiev when he was 17. He got a job at a military tailor's shop where they made uniforms for soldiers and officers. He was an apprentice there at first, but he was very good at sewing and soon became one of the best tailors of the shop.
I know very little about my mother's life before I was born. She told me that she worked as a nurse in a kindergarten.
I don't know how she met my father. He was a forwarding agent at the railway post office. My parents got married soon after they met. My mother was 24; my father was four years older. They had a civil ceremony at the registry office. Weddings were considered to be a bourgeois vestige, so they had no wedding party.
My father lived in a communal apartment [4]. There were two other families living in this apartment. My father's room was small and dark. Its only window faced an entry corridor of the building. There was a wardrobe, my parent's bed, my bed, a table and a few chairs in the room. There was a big common kitchen where each family had its own Primus stove. There was a strong smell of kerosene in the kitchen due to kerosene containers that were kept there.
I don't think my parents were religious. At least, I don't remember any celebrations of Jewish holidays or Sabbath at home. At that time religion was viewed as a thing of the past. Many young people rejected religious traditions and rituals as something outdated and unnecessary.
We spoke Russian and celebrated Soviet holidays when my father was home. My mother cooked and we had my father's colleagues over as guests.
Grandfather Itzyk visited us quite often. He was living alone in Gornostaypol at the time. I remember him praying every morning and every evening. He put on his tefillin before saying his prayers. He explained to me what it was. My grandfather also had a tallit. that was like a big white scarf with black stripes and frange on edges.
My mother cooked Jewish food when my grandfather visited us: she made gefilte fish, chicken broth with dumplings and baked strudels. My mother told me that she learned how to cook Jewish food from her mother.
My grandfather wore a black velvet kippah at home and a black cap to go out. He wore a long black jacket and striped black trousers. He had a small gray beard.
My grandfather was short and very vivid. My mother and father spoke Yiddish with him, but he spoke Russian with me.
At the beginning of 1942 he was recruited to the front. He wrote us a single letter from there. A few months later we received the notification of his death. It said that he perished close to the village of Malyie Krestsy, near Leningrad. Regretfully, I have never been to the place where he was buried.
My mother and I were starving and freezing because we didn't have any winter clothes with us. I stayed inside the room for the whole winter. My mother had to go out to get some food in exchange for ration cards. She had to stand in long lines for hours and hours. I remember her buying a small fur tree on 31st December 1942. Then she went to the store. She came back with a face white as chalk and put a bag of food on the table. She went to bed saying that she was going to stay there and get warm. She never left the bed again. A week later she died of pneumonia.
I started school in Buzuluk in 1943. I have no memories about that school. I only remember that I wanted to sing in the choir, but I wasn't admitted because I was too short.
I was staying with our co-tenants. They took me to the morgue to say farewell to my mother. My mother was lying on a steel table and there was a layer of ice on her face. I could never forget this image. Even after finishing school, when I would have been admitted to Medical College without exams, I recalled my mother's face under ice and realized that I couldn't study there. I wasn't allowed to attend my mother's funeral. She was buried in a common grave. There was not even a sign with the names of those that were buried there.
In September 1944 we returned to Kiev. My uncle's apartment was occupied by a 'politzai' [expression used for former fascist menials]. We stayed with one of his acquaintances.