The story of Grupul Petry, told by Endre Petry

Our interview with Katalin for this book takes place in the Petry Museum, a small room set between a Petry shop and the Petry restaurant in the centre of Târgu Mureș, like a heart joining two worlds.

The walls are covered with photographs, documents, old objects. A family tree takes up almost the entire wall on the right: ten generations of butchers, craftsmen, men of the town. Three faces set side by side, the first painted, the second caught in a black-and-white photograph, the third in colour but with a black-and-white effect, so it would match the portraits of the other two. In the silence of the room, history is so alive that it seems real enough to touch.

And, standing there among my ancestors, I found myself going back to childhood. Before there were Petry shops, before the restaurants, before the cold storage rooms, before I went to Vienna in the '90s. Before everything.

I went back to the moment when everything was taken from us.

The communists came one day like any other and told us we had to leave. They confiscated the factory, the buildings, the house, the land, everything my family had built over hundreds of years. They asked nothing. They gave no explanations. They left us no time to take in what was happening.

They only told us this: "You have two hours to get ready."

When there are generations before you who built something, you have the impression that tradition is everlasting. But in a single afternoon, they broke that continuity. Everything that had been ours, trade, reputation, property, standing, evaporated as if it had never existed.

Poverty followed. Real poverty, not metaphorical. Four people in a single room. A small stove. Cold water. Want upon want. I was a child, but I understood. In my father's eyes you could read it all: the unjust shame, the accumulated anger, the helplessness. And above all that dull pain that is passed on through looks, not through words: "I have lost everything I had."

That sentence haunted me for many years in childhood. It became, without my realizing it, my inner fuel. It was not a diffuse revolt, but a quiet, constant desire to repair something that I had not destroyed.

I believe poverty shapes you differently. It makes you want more, not to forget, not to rest on your laurels, to have an inner engine that does not stop even when others give up. Resilience does not come from books or conferences, it comes from that twelve-square-metre room, with four souls learning to survive together.

When the Revolution of '89 came, I already had every reason not to want to lose another day. So, in the spring of 1990, I decided that I had to learn the trade again, our trade, the family trade, which communism had managed to destroy in Romania.

After the Revolution I felt for the first time that we could build again what had been ours. Not alone. There is no "lone wolf" story in the Petry family. We are the sons and grandsons of people who never set out alone. In the spring of 1990, I left for Vienna together with my father and my brother. I can only speak of what I felt, but I know for certain that in their hearts there was the same mixture of pain and determination. We would walk into the Austrians' butcher shops and I had the impression I was looking at a future that should have been ours too, if history had not gone off the rails. I watched everything: the way they arranged the display, the way they spoke to customers, the impeccable cleanliness, the technique, the respect for the product. The two of them watched in silence, with the same thirst to recover an old right of the family. It was a journey of initiation, not just of learning.

It was a journey of reconnecting with our roots. It was as if we had recovered a part of our soul.