Faded photos behind Dracula's fangs

Béla Lugosi’s iconic Dracula role hides a deeper past. A journey through war, survival, and family shaped the man behind the vampire. My grandmother, Babi, was the only child of lawyer Lajos Szmik and Ilona Voight, born in Buda’s Vizíváros neighborhood on June 24th, 1898, after 17 years of ever more hopeless waiting. Her parents’ happiness knew no bounds. She was given everything a well-to-do bourgeois family could give their daughter: a young German nanny, French governess, vacations on the Adriatic, visits to dear Transylvanian relatives, her own estate near Budapest where she could run about with her cousins under the plentiful fruit trees, pots of jams and tomatoes simmering throughout the summer. For winter it was ice skating, piano and singing lessons, opera, theater, balls. Great-grandfather twirled his legendary moustache and grumbling, smiling, paid the bills of the seamstress and the milliner. All that mattered was that he see this girl, the only one, happy.