I met my husband, Mircea Gora Moldovan, in my society circles, at the end of 1950, when we were having birthday parties an so on. It didn’t matter to me that he wasn’t a Jew, but my mother wasn’t very thrilled, at least at first. She gave in when she saw that he was a good man. I never met my mother-in-law, she had died before I got to know my husband, but I knew his father, Isidor Gora Moldovan.
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Displaying 46171 - 46200 of 50826 results
Eva Gora Moldovan
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Nobody at home was involved in politics in any way, but I was a member of a Zionist organization, Hashomer Hatzair [8], for a short while, in 1948. I didn’t participate much in any activities, but I remember one time I went to a camp in Sangeorz [town in the Northern extremity of Romania in Bistrita-Nasaud county, situated upstream the river Somesu]. The idea of making aliyah got into my head somehow, and I was so stubborn, and I nagged my parents so much, being the spoiled child and them being old and all, that they finally filed for emigration. We were refused, and we filed again, and so on. And after my father died in 1950, we gave up the idea of emigrating: my mother had no qualification whatsoever, she didn’t know the language, and I was just out of high school and sitting on a fence, so to speak, as far as my future profession was concerned, so we didn’t file the papers once more. And from then on, I never mentioned in any CV during communism the word Zionism again; it wasn’t well seen.
Romania
My father had a work accident, a severe burn, and shortly after, he died of a heart attack. Of course, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Resita, and someone from the community recited the Kaddish because there was nobody from the family who could have said it. After my father’s death, I sat shivah with my mother. Because of my father’s death, when I finished high school, I had to go and look for a job –I was the only one who could support the family. My mother didn’t speak Romanian very well, she mostly spoke Yiddish. It was difficult to find a job, however, because my origin wasn’t ‘healthy’: we had owned a shop and I was what was called a petty bourgeois. I finally got a job at the designing department of a plant. Once I got there, I had no problems with my colleagues because of being Jewish.
My parents tried to observe the kashrut: they could buy kosher meat, but they no longer kept separate pots for dairy and meat products. When we were on vacations we ate in somebody’s home. They weren’t Jews, however, so the food we ate wasn’t kosher – but my father made arrangements not to eat pork at least. I always went on vacations with my parents; they had nobody to look after me, so I went to spas like Bazna [Bazna spa, located in Sibiu county, 18 km from Medias], Buzias [spa located in Western Romania, 37 km from Timisoara and at 25 km from Lugoj], and so on, for one or two weeks.
I spent the high holidays at home with my parents and we observed them, ate and drank mostly, like all people do. My mother was an expert when it came to puff pastries, pies and the like, so holidays were always a feast. My father used to make egg liqueur with vanilla; one third of it he blended with coffee, one third with cocoa, and one third remained plain. It was delicious, and I was allowed to drink it as well, on special occasions, like the high holidays or when we had guests. I wasn’t so young anymore; I was a teenager and the liqueur wasn’t very strong. During communism we only observed the high holidays, but we did go to the synagogue. Sabbath wasn’t observed entirely because my parents had to work, but my mother continued to light the candles and say the blessing on Friday evening.
I had some private lessons, but I wasn’t a constant pupil: first I wanted to know German, so I studied German. Then I wanted to know English, so I studied English, with an old lady who spent a lot of time in the USA and tutored little girls in American English. I went to her with another girl. Then I switched to music. I wanted to take accordion lessons, so I did. And then I took Gothic-writing lessons as well for two or three years. My gift was for languages, however, and I’m sorry I wasn’t more diligent as a child! My parents probably couldn’t afford it easily, but they thought my education was important, and so were my whims, as the only child!
I didn’t suffer from anti-Semitism from my teachers or colleagues. I made friends in school with everybody, but my circle of Jewish friends was more like the nucleus, unintentionally, probably because we had more in common. There was Evi Klein, a Jewish girl and a good friend of mine to this day, even though she lives in Resita nowadays. I met her after school as well, we went to the theater or the cinema, and when our friends and we grew up, we started having parties on our birthdays and so on. I can’t remember titles of plays or films; it was too long ago.
When we came back to Resita, I continued school – I was in the 5th or 6th grade – and after elementary school I went to high school. Luckily, the certificates I had from the Jewish high school were recognized. We had to have religious classes, and everybody went to study their own religion: Catholics went to their church, and we, the Jewish kids, went to the synagogue. We studied religion until it was banned from schools in 1948, I think, with the reform of the teaching system. [Editor’s note: the reform in the teaching system banned religion from schools, imposed Russian as a foreign language, and started the sovietization of all high school and university curricula.
The political situation got funny at one point after the war, I remember, because our shop was right next to the police station and we were good neighbors. When all the issues with Tito [5] in Yugoslavia began, nobody knew what to think, the news was so confusing: one day he was our friend, one day he was an executioner. My father had a picture of Tito and tried to keep up with the political preferences of the time because he didn’t want any more trouble from the state. So he would put that picture up on the wall or take it off, depending on the political situation. And one of those days, my father lost track of what Tito was to us on that particular day, until the policemen came to him in a hurry and told him to hide the picture because Tito was an executioner again! But soon after my father got his shop back, communism forbade private commerce, nationalization [6] followed, he lost his shop, and he was destroyed: he wasn’t a young man anymore, and he had to support his family somehow. So he went back to working as a laborer, but he did that only for a short period of time.
We got our shop back, which was empty of course, so my parents struggled again to reopen it.
When the Russians came, it was truly a liberation, no matter what others say, even if it was short-lived: we could go back to Resita and reopen our shop. Of course we saw pretty soon what communism was all about, but its first effects were good for us. My father never joined the Communist Party, but many Jews did and I wasn’t surprised.
Only after we came back from Lugoj to Oravita we found out what had happened while we were gone. Across the street from us lived a woman, who was a big Hitler fan – we had no idea – and when the Germans came with the trucks in Oravita, she started screaming, ‘Heil Hitler!’ and other crap like that. She climbed on the trucks and started to scream that in that house – our house – there were Jews. The Germans came looking for us, but the owner told them that we weren’t there, which was true, and when they wanted to come in, he told them that we were poor and that they would find nothing to take.
Dezideriu had a sister in Lugoj, Irma Weiss was her name, and we all went there until the bombings were over. We stayed in his sister’s house. We were ten people crowded in just one house. The Germans were still bombing with their Stukas; it was dangerous to stay out in the courtyard – an old man was killed that way. One time, my mother was at the market with my cousin, when the alarm went off, and the bombing began. She told me there was total panic, people were running, falling off the bridge. While we were in Lugoj, the Germans bombed the railway station. We didn’t live far from it, and when a bomb fell, the milk pot, which was on the windowsill to cool, flew all the way right into the middle of the room. We stayed in Lugoj for a few weeks, until the Germans were defeated, and then we moved back to Oravita.
Immediately after 23rd August 1944 [4], the Germans came to bomb with their Stukas [JU87 Stuka model airplanes, the dive bombers used by the German Luftwaffe during WW II]. That in-law cousin of mine, Dezideriu Lowinger – he was the husband of my aunt’s daughter, Etus, who had been a fervent communist for a short period of time, just like many Jews during that period – realized that the Germans would come looking for communists. It was known that all communists and their families had to suffer repercussions from the Germans, had they been caught, so Dezideriu wanted the whole family to go to Lugoj [town 70 km from Oravita] immediately. I don’ know if we needed or got any special approval to go there.
Another time, we were in Timisoara, in the Jewish high school, taking an exam, and the Americans came in to bomb the city [the American raids occurred on 4th April 1944]. The teachers took us out of the classroom and brought us to some trenches dug in the courtyard: I remember seeing human bones there. The place had probably been a graveyard. You can probably imagine that we were scared to death.
The Jews deported to Oravita organized some sort of school there, so that the Jewish kids wouldn’t miss out on years: an accountant taught arithmetic, a lady dentist taught Romanian literature , and so on. We also had some religion classes, where we learnt some Hebrew; a chazzan taught us. All the classes were held in a building that belonged to the synagogue in Oravita. Moreover, we were allowed to take exams at the Jewish high school in Timisoara, so we, the Jewish kids, went there periodically by train, accompanied by an adult.
The unfair thing was: my father wasn’t even supposed to be taken to forced labor because there was an age limit, and he was above it. From what I understood, another Jew from Resita was supposed to go, but he had high connections, so he got out of it and my father was taken instead. All the Jews from Resita were taken to forced labor, except the rofim and the lawyers; I don’t know why, they were probably needed. Life was hard in those three years. We barely saw my father: he came home and then he was sent to another workplace again. There wasn’t much of a family life.
In Oravita, we rented a small place with a courtyard; we lived in only one room that had a kitchen and a bathroom, and we had electricity and running water. We didn’t breed any animals or grow vegetables in the garden, but my mother was busy all the same with the chores around the house. Moreover, we had no income: my mother was a housewife, and my father wasn’t paid for his work. We had to manage with our savings.
We were affected by the anti-Jewish laws. First I was thrown out of school, then my father was sent to forced labor in Oravita [small town in southwestern Romania, in Caras-Severin county], and we had to go with him, so our forced residence was there as well. We went to Oravita in 1941 in a cattle truck, and the soldiers guarding us told us that if we stuck out our heads, they would shoot us.
After the legionary rebellion had been defeated, they were simply allowed to go home. All of them felt pretty lucky because from what my father told us later, it was almost certain that they would have been executed, if it hadn’t been for the defeat of the legionaries.
After that, my father lost the shop, and a Nazi, a German, took it over. Soon after that, the legionaries gathered all the Jews in the house of a Jewish lawyer, Deju was his name. He was single and he had a big beautiful house. Rumors had it that they were going to be shot or deported, and my father was taken there, too.
The first time I was confronted with anti-Semitism was when I was in the 2nd grade of elementary school, in 1939 or 1940. One day my teacher came to our house, and told my parents, ‘Please don’t send your daughter to school anymore, we are not allowed to accept her. I didn’t want to tell her that in front of the other kids!’. He was a good man considering that he thought of that. I heard that the principal of another school in Resita, who was a legionary [3], told the Jewish kids in the classroom that they were stinking Jews, and that they wouldn’t set foot in that school again; and he said all that in front of the other children.
When I was little, I had a fraulein [governess], but I don’t remember if she was Hungarian or German; she stayed with me only for a little while. After that I went to the normal state school, but it was only for two years because the anti-Jewish laws in Romania [1] were introduced. I remember rather little from those two years in Resita, but I do remember I was a strajer [2].
I don’t remember dressing up for Purim, or building a sukkah on Sukkot, but all the family went to the synagogue.
On Yom Kippur my parents fasted, and I fasted, too, but when I was little, I only fasted half a day. My father never took me with him when he went to the synagogue on Sabbath, I only went on high holidays with my mother. And he never taught me religion. We never read from the siddur together, for example, but it happened that he explained things to me, like why we light candles and so on: I remember him telling me that there are two Sabbath candles because they should remind us that there were two tables of laws.
My favorite holiday was Pesach, probably because there were many presents. I received more or less what I wanted: toys, clothes and things like that. My father asked the mah nishtanah, and I answered with mah nishtanah ha-layla ha-ze [Why is this night different (from all other nights)?]. There was a big cleaning before Pesach, but we didn’t have special tableware for Pesach. My mother just boiled all the pots. Of course, nobody ate any bread on Pesach. The seder was observed in the family, and my father led it. I remember we always had as a guest an old Jewish lady – I don’t remember her name – whom I pretended to be my grandmother because I was jealous that all other children had one, and I didn’t. She always brought some dessert with her, but I don’t remember what it’s called; it’s a paste made of apple, sugar and ground nut kernels. I didn’t do anything special with this lady, I just liked to call her grandmother.
Whenever there was a high holiday, I received presents. I was a spoiled child. My parents had already lost two babies, they were rather old and I was their treasure. Heaven forbid something should have happened to me! So on Chanukkah I received Chanukkah gelt, and on Pesach, I hid matzah [the afikoman] and my father never found it, of course. You can imagine what tragedy it would have been if he had found it – no present for me!
Although we had a servant, my mother did the cooking herself, and there was never pork on the table for as long as she cooked. She had a separate pot for milk, but she didn’t observe all the kashrut laws strictly. She didn’t have separate utensils for dairy and meat products, for example. And, my father even had some salami when he didn’t eat at home. And the poultry was always cut at the ‘sakter’, that is the shochet. On Friday evenings my mother said the blessing and lit the candles and there was soup for dinner. We had challah as well. My mother made the dough and took it to the baker’s; I don’t remember if it was on Thursdays or on Fridays. On Sabbath we usually had geese and one of my mother’s puff pastry specialties. Most of our time was spent with eating and drinking, as one does on a holiday.
By the time I was born, my parents already had a small-wear shop, and from what they told me later, the business didn’t go very well until I was born. I brought them luck: after I was born, the business started to pick up. The shop was in the house we lived in; from the shop you went through a door into our living room. It was small, only one room, and thickset with all sorts of merchandise: clothes, fabrics and so on – I think you could find anything in it! My father usually went to buy merchandise at different fairs, my mother worked as a cashier in the shop and they had one employee who attended customers. We could also afford a Hungarian servant to do the chores around the house: she did the cleaning and the shopping. I don’t remember ever going to the market with my mother.
We got along well with our neighbors, with the owner, Schwartz neni, and with the Tauber family, who were also Jewish and had a daughter older than me. Her and me weren’t close friends, but we got along well.