Zsuzsa Kobstein and Judit Kutas

This is me and my sister, Judit, on my husband's motorcycle. My husband, Odon Kobstein, was a mechanic and he put together this machine from pieces. He loved it dearly and took me on trips on it. We went to Vienna twice on this machine, in 1957 and 1959, to visit his brother. I met Odon during the war when he and some other Jewish boys who were in forced labor units were put up for the night in our building. During the day they worked in a factory near Budapest. We married in 1947. We did not have a religious wedding, only a civil ceremony. We moved into a small flat in Budapest and we found a small place to set up a mechanics workshop. It was never nationalized because it was small and we had no employees. My husband repaired only three things: motorbikes, bicycles and sewing machines. I had been a dressmaker and, at first, I wanted to go back to dressmaking. But my husband asked me to help in the shop. I could never have any children because of the illness I had as a child. But my dear husband told me that he loved me all the same. Until the German occupation of Hungary, Judit and I worked at the Berta Neumann salon in the center of Pest. We made dresses for countesses and famous artists. When the Hungarian fascists took power in October 1944, we young people were marched to one of the train stations, crammed into wagons and sent off to Ravensbruck. Then those who were in condition to work were taken to the Messerschmitt factory. Judit and I worked in the turnery until the middle of April. Then we were deported, weak and ill with typhoid, to Mauthausen. One day, somebody came running and shouting, 'Hey, Hungarians, we are liberated!' After liberation, we spent three months in a hospital in Guzen. We left the hospital when the Russians took it over from the Americans.