Ivan Szamosi and his wife Mariann

In this one, I?m with my second husband, Ivan Szamosi, early in our marriage. The fact of our happiness about finding each other shows on our faces. This was taken two or three years after our wedding, around 1967-68. Somewhere on the Balaton lakeside, probably near Balatonlelle. Sometime's we?d go to a company resort, the vacation complex of the Ministry of the Cultural Affairs. Generally, Zsuzsi was also with us, my husband's daughter from his first marriage. She was here, too. We were married in 1965, and lived more than 30 years for better, for worse, in love. With thousands of problems, a lot of difficulties. Unfortunately, he died six years ago, and I miss him a lot. In actuality, he's the real father of my daughters, they?ve also recognized this, my youngest girl Julia still views him as her father to this day. It caused a couple of difficulties that my husband had an ex-wife and a child, Zsuzsi. I think of her as my daughter, and her children as my grandchildren. I met my husband through a mutual acquaintance. Only his mother and grandmother were alive when we got together. His father died of tuberculosis in 1945. His mother loved him, as he did her, she took good care of him. It was a Jewish family at heart, though they weren?t especially religious, but the grandmother and my mother-in-law kept every Sabbath, on Friday evening they lit candles, and they celebrated Yom Kippur. How my mother-in-law made it through the war, during that particular march, they took her all the way to Hegyeshalom, where a nephew ? who was some member of the Jewish Council ? stepped in, and got her out of that march to Germany, and then they came home. This is how they lived through the liberation. My husband was in a labor battalion and[taken] to Bor. He was liberated there. My husband first worked as a blue-collar worker. Next as a technician, then later found a position where he could do engineering work. My husband was a very kind, good-natured, funny, diligent, agile man, he was a qualified mechanic, but the first thing he did after we married was get a degree at the Kando Kalman College. [An electro-technical college in Budapest] Like all qualified mechanics then, he was also very poorly paid. We also had to pay his child support. So our life was pretty hard, and I had a way to make a little extra at the Gondolat Publishers. He also always tried to give our life a boost, by getting work abroad, so that for two or three years, he was in Syria and Iraq for a long time. The apartment on Szabadsag hill, where I lived during my first marriage, wasn?t really a comfortable place. It didn't have regular heating, or a normal kitchen. We exchanged it for a three-room apartment in Kobanya. I moved here with my first husband, but I was living here with Ivan soon after. We took an acquaintance of ours with us to help out with the kids, Terez Kovacs, to this three-room place. We lived together for many years, she got married in the meantime, and her husband lived here, too. Then they moved out and we stayed here, where we?re still living. I?ve been living in this apartment for close to forty years.