THE MILK, CHEESE AND BUTTER SHOP / János Vajda
The history of our family can step by step be pieced together from small objects. There is a photo from 1918 which I saw in one of the family albums, but which was used as a postcard. The inscription on the back tells us who sent it to whom and when (in 1918) from the Nasici sawmill in Galgócás. A few months ago one of my younger relatives found a photo in the Fortepan collection on the internet: it shows a shopfront bearing the inscription “Pauncz”. This is exciting, because the story has a beginning and an end, but it is not complete yet, since I do not know which of our five shops this was. I know the addresses, but I will have to find out where this particular shop was.
My grandfather was born in 1900 in Tiszabura. His name was Dezső Pauncz. When the photo found in the album was taken and sent to one of his relatives, he was working as a trainee at the Nasici sawmill. Nasici was a timber bank, with its headquarters in Nádor Street, where the seat of OTP Bank is today. In fact, that building was constructed for the Nasici Company. A timber bank is a company that deals with everything related to timber, it not only buys and sells, but is also deals with timber as a raw material and as an item traded on the stock exchange. My grandfather worked there as a trainee to learn the trade, I suppose. He worked there until 1938. In 1938 the Anti-Jewish laws were further modified to limit the percentage of Jewish employees also in private companies. So Nasici took account of their employees of Jewish descent, and they told my grandfather: “Mr Pauncz, your mother-in-law owns a milk, cheese and butter shop in the market hall in Fővám Square.” (This shop had been in the family for a long time. It was founded in the 1910s by my great-grandfather, Gyula Pauncz, and my widowed great-grandmother raised her five children with the income from the little shop.) So my grandfather was told in 1938 that “you have a mother-in-law who owns this shop, you have somewhere to go, so we will dismiss you now, and you try to make something of this situation”. Using what he learnt at the company, my grandfather turned that shop into a Pauncz milk, cheese and butter chain, here in Budapest in a relatively short time, in three or four years. There were five shops, my grandmother and her four siblings were each responsible for one of them. When I was a child and the arcades were built in József Attila Street, I still saw the marks on the wall, left by the letters of the name Pauncz. My grandfather wanted his shops to be beautiful, you can see it in the photo that they tried to make them look decorative. I do not wish to go into details about which family member went to which concentration camp, suffice it to say that the shops were nationalized in the fifties. My grandfather and the entire family lost their livelihood, but in spite of losing everything, they never allowed anyone in the family to complain about the Russians or about the system. They all thought that this regime had saved their lives.
