Berta Levai and Imre Levai

This is a picture of my mother's sister Bella Levai, nee Brichta, and her husband, Imre Levai. The photo was taken in Budapest. My mother's sister Bella was sent to university in Budapest. She hated university. Bella was a very strange woman. She was married off to a bartender. She wasn't so young any more, though she was very pretty, and she was happy to get married at all. Her husband was a Jew from the country who had a high school education in commerce; he had a bar at the corner of Thokoly Road and Muranyi Street here in Budapest. They had a good financial situation. Bella didn't work as she didn't like to be among people. She went to the cinema alone and read. She couldn't even cook; her mother-in-law cooked while she was alive. They never had any children. They both survived the World War II. Her husband wasn't taken to forced labor service, but he was a member of the skeleton staff in the army, and they kept his rank of officer, because in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 he had gained distinctions. I didn't like them because they made us feel acutely that they were in a much better financial situation than we were.

Photos from this interviewee