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I am pictured with my wife Alice David on our wedding in Budapest in 1948.
After the war I moved up to Budapest. I got to Budapest. A very charming old Jewish couple sheltered me in their house, and then later I found a sublease. That Jewish couple had two daughters. The younger one was four or five years older than me. And she was on very good terms with a girlfriend of hers who later became my wife. An organization called MADISZ (Hungarian Democratic Youth Organization) organized an autumn harvest celebration, and they invited me to chaperone.
We started at 7 o?clock in the evening, and guess what, I had only one pair of shoes. As we walked along, I stumbled on the train tracks and the sole fell off of one shoe. There I was, with the two girls. I went back to Uncle Gottfield, who was kind of jack of all trades, and he fixed my shoe with nails. And then I was so taken with my dear wife that poor as I was, with shoes fixed with nails, I immediately asked her to marry me. She accepted, because she was alone, just like me. I had finished six years of army and forced labor service altogether. And my wife had been in Auschwitz. We came together having nothing and we were both single. We got married in 1948 in a civil ceremony, and then in the Dohany Street Synagogue. It was a fixed condition for me that my wife should be Jewish.
My wife's name is Alice David; her Hebrew name is Hanesz Orele. We were of the same age. She was born in Budapest. She finished a one-year commercial school. Her parents were originally from Gyomro. Her grandfather and grandmother lived in Gyomro and were extremely poor. Her grandfather was the shochet in Gyomro, and she worshipped her grandmother. Since they were very poor, they often ate bran bread, and they lived in a hovel, but they had a nice garden, and her grandmother slipped nuts and plums and other things to her. This was so touching, that I would call her a professed Jewish little lady ?von Haus aus? (naturally) who proudly displayed her Jewishness beside her beauty. Alice had an uncle who supported her. At that time raising Angora rabbits was very fashionable, and for a while Alice was engaged in this as well; she had a male rabbit called Samu. She kept them somewhere in Buda, not in the house.
