Please read on and imagine
yourself as a middle age Jew living in
In
1927, enjoying a short lived prosperity due to his trade - he was a purse and
luggage maker - my grandfather, Eugen Klein built a two storied family house on
a piece of land that he bought two years earlier in a public auction from the
city of Timisoara. The house, as stipulated in the sale contract, was to be a
home for his family as well as a workshop and office for his small business.
Without realizing it at that time, it turned out to be Eugen Klein’s life
climax.
Ten
years later, the eve of World War II, the situation has deteriorated for
everyone, but for my Jewish grandfather things were worse. Against all odds, he was fortunate to escape
the Holocaust and encounter the Russian “liberating” army in 1945 and move
together with the rest of the Romanian citizens into the new communist era.
In 1950, in order to
strengthen the new proletarian regime and increase the “collective property”
all houses owned by “enemies of the people” were nationalized by law and became
property of the state. The application
of the law was swift and my grandfather, grandmother and father were ordered to
move outside the house in a couple of days.
The fact that my grandfather as a small business owner was exempt by the
same law went unnoticed in all that revolutionary fervor.
Eugen
Klein, now 68 years old, moved with his family in somebody else’s apartment,
where they shared a single rented room until he died, 8 years later.
Even this brief description of a tragic life is
enough to raise compassion, but like in the case of millions of victims of the
Nazi and Red terror, nobody can reach Eugen Klein now and mend the mortal wound
in his soul. May he rest in peace!
Read on… the story of the house
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