Andras Molnar, Alice Kosa and Anna Czitrom

Here are the three orphans: in the center it’s me, Alice Kosa [nee Molnar] at the age of five, my brother, Bandika [Andras Molnar] is three and a half, and my sister, Annus [Anna Czitrom, nee Molnar] is two and a half years old.

My mother died when she was 23. A nice family, as one might call it, disintegrated within hours.

We lived in a village, in Nagyborosnyo, and my mother came in with the three children [to Sepsiszentgyorgy, to grandma] and with the domestic - of course we had a domestic, as there were three children.

She died in two or three days. She must have had appendicitis, because they dissected her, and she was full of pus inside, I suppose they couldn't discover it then.

I met many people during my long life, whose parents died in a similar way.

Well, appendicitis wasn't known, and due to poultices it turned into peritonitis.

She left behind three little children. When she died, I was 3 years old, my brother one and a half and my sister six months old.

But I recall clearly some things from the age of three: a Christmas, that there was a Christmas tree on the table, and a chocolate roll big like this, it must have been of chocolate, because it was covered with silver, and I liked that.

What I still remember, and I could cry of it even now, and I was crying for years, though I was only three years old, when my mother died, I remember clearly that an auntie was holding my hand at the grave, she asked me something bent down to me, I only remember that I told her: 'She will come home by the evening.'

I suppose she must have told me: 'Your mother is gone.' I might have answered to this: 'She will come home by the evening.'

I tell you as it was, this sentence haunted me for years, and if it came to my mind, I cried, that I had been waiting for her to come in the evening, that...

I was sent to my maternal grandmother [to Franciska Feder].

My grandmother lived of moderated means, but my father paid my grandmother for my clothing, so my father provided for all the three children. He never married again.

My maternal grandmother lived here in Sepsiszentgyorgy, the other grandmother, at whom my brother was, in Nagyborosnyo, and my aunt [who took my sister] in Nagyborosnyo too.

But my brother lived at my grandmother [from Nagyborosnyo] just for a very short time, because some people came to us and said: 'Aunt Fanni, you ought to bring here that child!

How was that child taken care of with her mother? And there are those two girls - the two daughters of my paternal grandmother -, those two lazy girls, and the boy is dirty all the time.

Don't let it be so.' And indeed, my poor [maternal] grandmother went to Nagyborosnyo, and she told me that she had scolded them [my aunts] for finding that one and a half years old child so untidy.

So she undertook him too. She was a very clever woman. It seems that I inherited from my grandmother, that I was always concerned about earning something more for my family.

Well, my grandmother was the same. She was engaged in many things, I don't remember quite precisely, I know that she was selling sweets, she bought delicious sweets, and she put it in a glass chest on a table - its top, its side, everything was made of glass, only that thing holding it was made of timber - in front of the entrance door.

But I told you, my father gave [money] anyway.