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My husband's mother is in the picture. I never met her, I didn't know her. Her name was Henrietta Goldman, nee Grunstein. She was born in Nagybereg, in Subcarpathia in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. I went to Nagybereg only after 1945, and she didn't live at that time anymore, she didn't come back from the concentration camp, Auschwitz, where she had been deported to.
My husband was called Sandor Palmai, this is a magyarized name from Goldman, but let's stick with the Palmai. He was born in Borsova in 1922. This is Subcarpathia today, at that time it belonged to Czechoslovakia. You know that joke about Uncle Kohn, who writes his biography: 'I was born in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, I lived in Czechoslovakia, I worked in Hungary, and I retired in the Soviet Union.' They ask him: Uncle Kohn, you have been to many places, then! He says: 'Me, dear? I have never left Munkachevo.'
Sandor was liberated from Gleiwitz in February or March 1945. He worked at a carriage and wagon works where he learned to weld. He welded iron rings illegally for the German workers, and for that he got food, which he took to his father risking his life; they were in the same Lager, but worked at different places.
My husband's mother tongue was Hungarian of course, but he also spoke Czech, Ukrainian, Russian and German. He completed four classes of middle school and he was a tailor. He died in Budapest in 1995. He had a brother and two sisters. The mother and the sisters didn't return from Auschwitz, so I never met them. His brother lives in America. Otherwise it wasn't a religious family.
