Emanuel Gruber

This is my father Emanuel Gruber. The photo was taken in Gyulafehervar in 1938. Just before World War I my father was accepted to the Medical Faculty, even though he was a Jew, and he finished two years. He should have become a military doctor in the KuK, the Kaiserlich und Koniglich, army, that is, the Austro-Hungarian army, but World War I broke out in the meantime. He went to the front as a voluntary sanitary officer and spent almost four years there, from 1914 to 1918. He came home in 1918 and got involved in politics and promoted Zionism. I think that he received his first impulse at the front, mainly from a colleague of his, who had studied in Vienna. There was a doctor called Ritter there, who was one of the heralds of Zionism and my father came into contact with the Zionist movement through him. After World War I, he didn't graduate from Medical Faculty, yet he was still drafted as a military doctor and sanitary officer to Gyulafehervar in 1938. The photo was taken there. You can see the royal crown on his cap, which was there on all caps. There is a snake on the badge as well, which means that he was a sanitary officer and doctor. There are to letter F-s above the crown (one is the reflection of the other, so it's inverse), which means that he served in the regiment of King Ferdinand I. If I?m not mistaken, he was in regiment No. 79.

Photos from this interviewee