A Gallery of Old Photographs
Note: The photos will load individually when you click on their titles.
The Fischer family in Kisvarda, about 1942
Ervin and Gizella Fischer, my mother's parents, with their children Endre, Klara, Susan and Tibor. This was the last photo taken of the family together. Endre (born 1920) would die in 1943, in Ukraine as a member of a forced labour battalion. In 1944, the remaining family members were deported, Ervin and Tibor to work camps and the women to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, Gizella was immediately separated from her daughters and sent to the death chamber. Klara and Susan, sent to work in a munitions factory, survived.
Elias (1850-1926) was the father of my grandfather Ervin. He married at the relatively advanced age of 37, and this picture could be from the time of his wedding. He has gray hair here, but the Fischer family (at least in later generations) is prone to going gray before 40 years of age. Elias owned a small fleet of fiacres (horse-drawn taxis), and married the daughter of a prominent rabbi from Satoraljaujhely. He is remembered by a nephew as being a short, gentlemanly person with a good singing voice, who used to be asked to sing at weddings.
In a second picture, about 1900, he is shown with his three sons. The eldest, Ervin, was born in 1890, and Miklos and Laszlo were born soon after.
Izsak (Itzig) was Elias's eldest brother, born around 1845. His name appears in the census, when he was two years old.
He was the father of Peter's paternal grandmother. He was noted most for having fathered 16 children (going through two wives). When one of his daughters was asked what his occupation was, she replied "making babies." In addition to that, he eked out a living with a small grocery store/tavern. After his second wife died, he married a third time but he had no additional children with her. She was reputed to be quite mean to the young children of her predecessor, and was sent away in consequence. Mihaly died about 1928, in Szaniszlo (now Sanislau, Romania).
Pepi was Peter's paternal grandmother (born 1881), shown here with her sister Regina in a photo taken in New York about 1900. They stayed in the United States about five years, and then returned to Hungary. The explanation for this is that one of them had an unwelcome suitor, a barber, who was harassing her. (According to some it was Regina, while according to others it was Pepi.) Pepi had six children, the eldest being born in 1906, but only two of them survived the holocaust. Pepi herself perished in Auschwitz, after having lived some 40 years on a poor farm in the tiny village of Gemzse. How different her life would have been if she had stayed in New York.
