I know very little of my father’s history because he hardly ever talked about it. He was born on the second last day, on the 30th of December, of 1889 in Budapest. I think he had one brother and all I know is that at one stage his father left his family and went to America. Many years later he was informed that his father had died and left him one dollar in his will. So apparently he must have remarried there and wanted to make sure that the estate goes to his new family.

My grandfather (on my father’s side) with the two sons that went to USA

My mother was born in 1892 one of nine children and they all lived on a big country estate in Moravia. They were a very well respected family in the area and must have done fairly well for themselves because I remember my mother telling me that they didn’t go to school, they had the teachers come to them. And each of the children was taught personally by personal tutors. As she grew older, one by one her brothers and sisters slowly left home either to get married or go to college. And then one day when my mother was on a holiday in Vienna she met my father and they fell in love. After a lengthy courtship they got married and settled down in Vienna and that was where I was born on the 14th of February in 1924.

Kurt age 1

I lived in a rented flat close to the city, walking distance from the big park and close to the ring road that surrounds the city. Our kitchen window overlooked the railway line. It was a commuter line and I never rode on the train. The flat was very much like a railway carriage. As you came in, you went into the hall, and to the left of the hall was the kitchen , and from then on the other rooms joined one another, so you had to go through one room to get to the next. My room was the last one, so to get to it I had to walk right through the flat; there was no corridor.

I stayed at home with my mother and I had a nanny until I was about five. She took me to the park and everywhere, while my mother was at home. She seemed to spend most of her time cooking. We had two hot meals a day, so after breakfast she had to start cooking lunch, and when that was cleared away she started cooking dinner. Then there was the shopping which she did inbetween, and the occasional bridge game which she went out to. This was a fairly typical lifestyle then. We were a very middle class family. There were lots of people better off than us, and we were not as well off as lots of other people.

I played either in the local park, which was only five minutes’ walk away, or at the home of one of my friends. There was Hans Korbliz, “der Hansi”, who lived around the corner. His bedroom window was across the courtyard from our flat, even though he lived in the next street. In summer, we used to make a little funicular railway on a rope from his window to my window, and we used to send each other messages. Hans and I were in primary school together, from the start of school at six, but went to different schools when we went to secondary school after four years.

Kurti just turned into a Scout from Cubs.

Cousin Ivan, Kurti (me) and Karci son of my mother’s sister Ilka. Karci and his brother Egon finished up going to Israel on a Kibutz. Ilka did not survive the Holocaust.

My father was away most of the time travelling, so it was mostly my mother and I. The strange thing was, with my mother and father both being Hungarian, they always spoke Hungarian to one another, but not to me. I never spoke a word of Hungarian, but I heard it through most of my childhood. When I came to Australia and got involved in the rag trade, there were lots of Hungarians and soon I was speaking it too.

It was a State school, and a very good one. I still remember my teacher; I had the same one throughout primary. She was enormous. She had breasts big enough to rest a breakfast tray on. Her name was Frau Unterich, which means “lesson”. That was her real name.

In the school holidays I went to camp with the Cubs, and later the Scouts, so that took care of part of the summer holidays. For the rest of the holidays, my parents took me to either my Auntie in Czechoslovakia or later on down to the Adriatic coast in Yugoslavia; Dubrovnic and all that area which of course is virtually non-existent now. We went to Novivinodol with friends of my parents from Zagreb. There was a little island about two hundred metres off the coast and I actually swam right across to the island and back.

Up until the age of 14 I led a normal healthy life like any other child. One highlight was the time I got caught having a spitting contest with my friend Karli, who lived around the corner. Their house was the only house that had a balcony overlooking the street. We were watching people go past, and out of boredom, we bet one another who could spit out of the window and hit somebody. Eventually we did hit somebody. We ran inside and started playing with the electric train as if nothing had happened, and sure enough, five minutes later a man came screaming to the door. Karli’s father called us and said “Did you spit from the balcony?” and we both denied it. He said it was a strange thing, since this was the only house with a balcony. He said we’d hear more about this, and scared the hell out of us, but when nothing had happened for a week or so we thought it was all over. Then one day we were called to the headmaster’s office, because the man had made a complaint, and we really got a rousing.

I was very keen on building models. I had a big Meccano set with gears and things, and I made model planes out of balsa wood. One day my father and I saw someone flying a plane powered by a rubber band. It was made from balsa and tissue paper, and my father was so intrigued by it that we both ended up making planes like it together.

A studio photo for my Oma.

My father was once the manager, “Herr Direktor”, of a shoe shop, for a man called Salamonavich, who years later gave me a job in a metal factory in Sydney. He had a chain of shoe shops called Salamander, which still exist in Vienna. Then my father became a traveller, representing a Swiss firm who made embroidered ribbons. I remember seeing embroidered pictures of beautiful holiday resorts which were sold as bookmarks. Most of his customers were tailors and small manufacturers who had embroidered labels with their names on it. He went all over Germany and Switzerland selling these by the yard.

My parents were not very religious, We observed Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, and Rosh Hashana, the New Year. Other than that, we rarely went to synagogue, for a bar-mitzvah or something. My mother was more of a believer but my father was virtually an agnostic. The only religious education I had was preparation for my bar-mitzvah. I can’t remember much about my bar- mitzvah, because the year before I suddenly had a gland under my jaw get bigger and bigger. The doctors couldn’t work out what was wrong. It got so swollen that I couldn’t open my mouth properly to chew, and my parents nearly went out of their mind trying to find a doctor who knew something. None of them knew why it kept growing. It wasn’t infected, it wasn’t sore, and the doctors were really worried. Finally I went to a doctor who gave me x-ray treatment, and after a week it was going down and I could eat again. It disappeared after two weeks, and I was never told what it was, but seeing as x-rays killed it, I assume it could have been a malignant growth. It was pretty scary, but it never recurred. This happened in the six months before my bar-mitzvah.