Judita Haikis with her family

This is our family. From left to right, sitting: my mother Szerena Edelmann, my daughter Ludmila Haikis, my niece, my sister's daughter Yulia Levenberg, my father David Edelmann. Standing: my sister's husband Leopold Levenberg, my sister Katerina Levenberg (nee Edelmann), me and my husband Adolf Haikis. This is our family gathering on my mother's birthday. This photo was taken in Uzhgorod in 1958.

In 1947 Adolf entered the residency department and specialized in neuropathology. After finishing the residency he returned to the army and became a military doctor, neuropathologist in the Uzhgorod hospital. Returned to Uzhgorod in 1956 after finishing my college and we got married. We registered our marriage in a registry office and had a wedding dinner for our relatives and friends. We lived with my parents. I went to work as a French schoolteacher. In 1955 our only daughter Ludmila was born. My father loved her dearly. He called her 'the last love of his life'. At that time my parents lived in Velikaya Dobron [30 km from Uzhgorod, 680 km from Kiev] village, but they often came to Uzhgorod: my mother visited us more often than my father. My sister married Leopold Lowenberg, a Jew from Mukachevo [40 km from Uzhgorod, 650 km from Kiev]. She moved to Mukachevo with her husband. She finished higher accounting courses and worked as an accountant and then chief accountant in a big store. Her husband was a shop superintendent at a factory. In 1953 their only daughter Julia was born. We didn't celebrate any Jewish holidays in our family even in my childhood. Since 1945 our family always celebrated Soviet holidays: 1 May, 7 November, Soviet army day, Victory Day and the New Year, of course. We always had guests and lots of fun.

It was difficult for my father to work as director of the plant. Workers liked him very much, but the pressure of party authorities was hard for him. When in 1954 General Secretary of the CC CPSU Nikita Khrushchev appealed to communists to go to villages to improve the kolkhoses, my father was among the first ones to respond to this appeal. He went to Velikaya Dobron village in Uzhgorod district and became chairman of the kolkhoz. My mother followed him, of course. This was remote village, with no polyclinic or public baths. In one year my father turned this kolkhoz into a successful enterprises. Velikaya Dobron residents adored him for becoming wealthy. A school, a polyclinic, a public bath were built and villagers had new houses with all comforts. The villagers called my father ‘our father’. However, not everything was well with his work. At that time local authorities demanded to show higher quantities in documents to pretend there were more successes than in reality and there was much pressure on my father in this regard. My father was an honest man and convinced communist and refused to do any falsifications. One day in June 1963 he was invited to another bureau of the district party committee. When he came home, he had an infarction. He survived, but he could work no longer. My parents returned to Uzhgorod. My father became a free lance correspondent for the ‘Karpati Igaz Szo’ newspaper. [Carpathian True Word, Hungarian language Soviet newspaper, issued in Uzhgorod.] My father suffered much than neither his daughters nor their husbands were members of the party.