Being a hsitory teacher during the period of the communist dictatorship
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Ilona (Staller) Péterfalviné teacher his father was a shoemaker She remembers the German occupation, the soldiers seemed ostentatious. Her Jewish origin classmates were deported in 1944. One of them, a boy who was the best student in the class has never come home. One airstrike hit very close to their house, but luckily no one has injured. The first wawe of the Soviet Red Army acted like real liberators. They threw food to the locals. But in the second wawe the real occupiers have arrived. They took off his father’s boot and seeked for hand watches. She remembers that she was 16 years old and deeply scared of the Russian soldiers because they raped thousands of Hungarian girls and woman throughtout the country. Russian officers moved into one room of their house, but they pretended to be friendly. One girl from her school was deported to forced labour to the USSR at her age of 16 - only because her family name sounded German. She has returned to Hungary after long years in a condition of a human wreck. In the 50s when Stalin’s or Rákosi’s name was said people had to clap for minutes. No one braved to stop clapping, and others watched who has not clapped.