Mendu Kahan with his wife Herminka

This is my oldest brother, Mendu, who used to call himself Ubul, and his wife Herminka. This photograph was probably taken in Uzhgorod, perhaps on some outing, I don't know, around 1936 or 1937. It's from quite a bit before the war.

Today my brother would be over 100 years old. I was born in 1923, and he was definitely around 30 years older than I. He must have been born sometime at the end of the 19th century. He was a journalist. He definitely had some sort of education, probably high school, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to do that. Or maybe he only had talent. His mother tongue was Hungarian.

His wife was a clever, educated lady, who worked as a clerk. She spoke German well, and then thanks to this in the concentration camp she helped us, because thanks to her German she was working in the office there. But she didn't have it easy either. In 1944 she gave birth to a son, but then she and her husband went straight to Auschwitz. Thanks to Grandma she didn't have to carry the baby around with her, so she survived and then lived in Budapest. Neither her child nor her husband, my brother, survived. He probably died sometime in 1944 or 1945.