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Second Interview Insert Key
Indented text represents the follow-up
interview conducted on May 6, 2003.
Introduction of Interviewers
Hello.
My name is Whitney , I'm Jonny, and I'm Katie Rose. The date
is May 16th, 2002. We are interviewing Gloria Lyon in San
Francisco, California.
My
name is Whitney, my name is Evie, my name is Matt and we're here to
interview Gloria Lyon. It's May 6th, 2003 and we're in San Francisco.
Can you tell us about some of your earliest memories?
My earliest memories were in my birthplace, Czechoslovakia. I remember just
having fun in life, going to school and helping my parents with some
duties
since we had a farm. The men folk, my brothers and my dad, attended the animals.
I would collect the eggs from the chicken baskets and walk into the house
with
a basket full of eggs. That was my favorite occupation outside
of school. And getting together with my friends and relatives. We had
a big
family. Birthday celebrations, weddings, the normal activities under normal
- if there is such a thing as normal - life.
Who were the people in your family?
My dad, and my mother, grandma lived with us until two years before we were
taken away to the Holocaust. I had four older brothers: József,
whom we called
Józsi, Michael, whom we called Miksa, Sándor and
Viktor. Viktor was three years older than I was. I was the fifth child and
nearly two years
later
my
sister
was born, Annuska. That was the immediate family.
Can you tell us about your family dynamics, how
did you get along with the other people in your family?
How did we get along? Well, we really - it's amazing how the positive things
stand out mostly. We enjoyed singing a lot, all of us except for Viktor
who
didn't have a voice. And couldn't carry a tune. But my brothers, they
worked in the city, they went to school in the city, only 8 kilometers
away,
the length of our bay bridge, approximately. They would come home with new
songs, which, new songs that appeared and this happened often they would
come and teach
my sister and me these new songs. I remember one image that sort of stands
out in my mind. My mother was kneading the dough so it must have been
on a Thursday
evening and my brothers would come home and they would compete. Each wanted
to teach us a different song that came to their mind. I remember them
putting
their arms around us on either side, and as mother was kneading the dough they
would teach us the songs, well one at a time of course. So we were pretty
much
up to date with these songs. In fact, this type of activity with my brothers
was embedded in my mind so much that after the Holocaust I just had the
need
to write them down. And I wrote it down in a little blue book that we used
in college you know to write our essays and what not. And I have them
recorded;
of course, not the music for it, but much of it sounds very much like the Béla
Bartók type of music from the farm-the sounds of birds and
animals, and their importance in our society. And they're very melodious types
of songs.
In
addition to this, I remember my mother would sit down with me. We didn't
have electric light until I was seven years old, and we
were the first
ones
in the city to have electricity in my house because my oldest brother Józsi,
was an electrical engineer. He wired our entire house, so outside the city
hall
and the school in our town, we were the only ones who had electricity at
that particular point. He even wired our barn, and the people from the town
came
and lined up to see this magic, this electricity. And it was totally different
than what we have here; there was always-the wires would run along the edges
of the rooms and in the center there was a cord that you pulled to turn it
on
or off-so this sort of thing was quite a thing. So after that mother would
sit down with me and help me with my homework to help to understand. This
was much
in the elementary years yet.
Because
it was a little troublesome for the younger children, my sister and me, because
we became a part of Hungary when I was eight years old, and there was a lot
of pressure on my parents to put us into Hungarian schools. Until then we were
in Czech schools; even though I was seven, I started school at five, and so
I needed help with the Czech language, but it came eventually-when you're young,
you're like a sponge and you absorb the new language very easily. Before that,
we had to use, in every room there were lights with, I don't know what that
fluid is called in English that we used to light the wick, so it didn't yield
much light.
Can you tell us about your friends?
My friends were mainly my cousins. And there were a couple of other friends
from school. I've known them since elementary school. Several of them
were non
Jews and we lived among them. There was no ghetto in our area; there was no
Jewish section or any other section that was specifically for a particular
group.
Jews and everyone lived, intermingled with all other residents in our town
of Nagy Bereg. And so, my cousins would come over and help me celebrate-mother
would say, "You may invite two or three of your friends." Mother
would make my very special foods for that day, and it's usually not cakes
either, but my very favorite foods. That was every child's prerogative to request
a favorite food on his or her birthday.
We also were very close to our first cousins and some of them lived across
the street from us. Particularly when my uncle by marriage was taken away
into the
military service. He never came back and so my dad was very concerned about
her [his] sister—my cousin's mother, Sarolta neni was her name. He did everything to help them during this crucial period. Little did we know how much worse it will get in the future,
a few years down the road.
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