Ruth Greif and friends

This is a photo of me and some friends in our gym class: starting from left, you can see Beata Farkas, me, Mia Feiler and Piri (Paraschiva) Hubert. One of my hobbies back then, when I was in elementary school, was gymnastics. My teacher was Borbala Farkas, a Jew. She had studied rhythmic gymnastics in Budapest, and she was very talented. She held the classes in her house, and several girls went. These girls you see here are just some of them. At that time I studied at a normal state school in town, on Agriselor Street. After the anti-Jewish laws were passed, on my way to school I had to pass by a German high school for boys, and whenever I and another friend of mine, Judita Graunfelds, passed by, they came down and started to beat us, or called us 'stinking Jews'. The German boys thrashed us both several times. They knew we were Jewish, they probably saw where we were going; we were elementary school girls, and they were in high school, but that never stopped them. The teachers didn't intervene. My parents knew about the beatings, but they couldn't do anything, in those times you were happy you got away only with that. Then the legionaries came to power in 1940, and I was thrown out of the school: the teacher came into the classroom, read my name out loud in front of the class room and I had to pack and leave. So eventually I had to go to the Jewish industrial high school, which had four elementary grades and eight grades of high school, and which was located in a private house. After a while we had to move from there as well, to another private house.