Zsuzsi: There were also good people. I had an employee in Lipova, her name was Mariska néni, a very decent woman who worked for my grandparents. She was everything to me. During the war, Jews were not allowed to use radios or to own them. The radio had to be handed over. She removed the device from the house and took it somewhere in the backyard and hid it. The gendarmes arrived and, when she saw that they were entering the house, afraid that they might find the radio and Grandpa would get hurt, she went and shattered the radio with an axe.
She was a person who cared a lot about you, even though it was dangerous to have Jewish friends back then.
She was an exceptional person, a fantastic woman. Later, when we were no longer permitted to keep her, because Jews were not allowed to hire non-Jews, she went to some relatives of hers, in a village named Secean, in the mountains of Banat. When we had to flee from Timişoara because the Germans were coming, Mariska néni welcomed us into her family, in that village.
[...] We stayed there for quite a while. That's where I learned what polenta with milk is and what it's like to live in the countryside without any comfort. I really enjoyed it, we felt great. After the war, my mother helped them and their family to leave the mountains. They arrived in Dumbrăviţa, near Timişoara. I had good relationships with them; however, people vanished over time even there: some passed away, others moved to Hungary.
