Victor Haar z"l An Obituary

My childhood friend Viky (Victor Adam Haar) was born in 1944 in the Budapest ghetto under German occupation. In 1957 his parents Zsigmond and Aliz emigrated to Argentina, with Viky and his sister. My parents found a job for Aliz in Laboratorios Szabo Hnos., Kessler and Cia. in Buenos Aires (the Szabo are our relatives) and we became good friends with Viky. He played the contrabajo (double bass) and built an electronic lab in his room, with an oscilloscope. He dropped from school and menaced his father with a gun, who sent him to a correctional institution. At 18 he bought a motorcycle and drove to Cordoba (800 km) and brought a criolla to Buenos Aires. My déclassé friend worked 20 hrs a day as a taxi driver and bought a small house in Pilar (or Caseros), a rural suburb, two hours colectivo ride from Buenos Aires. They had a boy Sergio and then twins (with cognitive issues). Viky worked in a factory, then started building and became a dollar millionaire. Her sister was killed at 15 in a traffic accident. He never drank nor did drugs, and saved money. He retired to Budapest with a woman of her Mother's age, then found a Colombian young woman. In the frontier, he had to legally marry her to bring her into Argentina, and days after arriving suffered CVI and died. Ana, suddenly a wealthy widow, described as "ignorant" by Sergio, brought in from Colombia her simpleton son. The sons, proudly, sent me a pic of Viky's tomb. To me, it seems like a public cemetery for indigents. I (and others) tried to channel him to a normal, middle-class Jewish life, but in vain. His son Sergio has two daughters by different women and runs some kind of "cultural" nightclub-cum-restaurant. Life goes on.