Tomi Honig

The boy in this photo is Tomi Honig, my cousin. He was the son of my father Iuliu Guth's sister, Bella Honig (nee Guth). She married a Jew named Miklos Honig. Miklos was the administrator of the restaurant of the fanciest hotel in Oradea, Pallas, and Bella was a housewife. She had two sons, Otto and Tomi Honig. In this photo, Tomi was around five years old I think. I'm pretty sure that it was his father, Miklos Honig, who took the picture because he was a passionate photographer.

We couldn't keep in touch with them as much as we would have liked because the distance between Oradea and Brasov was huge back then [398 km]; but my father was very fond of his sister and whenever he went to Oradea, he would stay in her house. I really don?t have many memories of Tomi; because of the distance we never really had time to establish a relationship.

It was probably at the beginning of World War II when my paternal grandmother and my father's sister and her family were deported to Auschwitz. [Editor's note: The deportation in Oradea took place in May and June 1944; 27,215 Jews were deported.] My father was very fond of his sister Bella, and when the war broke out, he waited for them to come to Brasov. But he waited and waited and nobody showed up. And after a while the news that Jews from Transylvania had been deported to several camps by the Hungarians started to spread. So my father, after all the waiting, was somewhat expecting to hear the worst. That was the case, unfortunately; the only one who came back was Miklos Honig's brother, Bella's brother-in-law, who had also been deported to Auschwitz. He survived, and he brought the news that all the others were dead. Their names are mentioned in a book, The Jews from Oradea, a book about the horrors of the Holocaust. [Terez Mozes: Varadi zsidok, Ed. Literator, Oradea, 1995.]