Tibor and Armin Silberstein and family

This is my father, Tibor Silberstein, as a toddler with his father, Armin, and his mother, Margita, and his sister. My father was born in Kremnica in 1914. He was a businessman. In World War II, he was in the anti-fascist resistance. He died in Kosice in 1976. My mother, Edita Weissova Silberstein, was born in Prievidza in 1918. She was one of seven children. Her father, Adolf Weiss, died in a traffic accident in a horse carriage when she was 2. She died in Kosice in 1995. My parents moved to Kosice after the war, when my father found a job in this town. By that time, they already had my brother, Peter. He is five years older than me. I was born in 1949 in Kosice. I learned I was Jewish when I was 6 and at school for the first time. A girl mocked me for being a Jew. I had no idea what it meant and why she was making fun of me. I only understood that it was some mockery. I reacted very simply and physically attacked her, not driven by the meaning of an insult at all. I probably beat her and she complained at home. When the case was examined, since her parents came to school complaining that I had hurt their daughter, the teacher had to examine the origin of the conflict. I told her exactly how it all had started. I learned for the first time that there is something called Jewry and Jew. There was no expression of the Jewish religion in our family. I married a Jewish girl, but not because she was Jewish. I did not even know at first. I found out about her origin later, when we were dating. Actually, she is Jewish because her mother is Jewish; her father was not Jewish. As I married a Jewish woman from a family where this tradition was much stronger, I learned much more about the Jewish religion than in my own. Our daughter, Linda, was born in 1977.