Testimonies

Even today, I still blush when I think of the expression on my face when looking at the Arrow Cross: begging for mercy, full of endeavor. The price of my escape was pain and shame because since the age of 17, I have been a survivor. At the end of 1945 and during the summer of 1946, I had to acknowledge my parents' deaths. I parted from them at the end of November 1944 and went into hiding: I was free. Of course, this was illusory, but still, I went where I was not allowed to go, along the streets of Pest until I came to the front gate of the house where I had abandoned them.

Szent István Park 10 was under Swedish protection, and leaving the house was absolutely forbidden. Every morning on the square at 10 am, the police and Arrow Cross would close ranks in thick black lines. The square was full of them. We watched them numbly from the windows: where are they going? If it was our turn—I recall the average was every three days—they would occupy the entrance, and the stairwell would clatter with their boots. In the apartments, four to six men in Arrow Cross armbands would select people with lightning speed. We didn't know on what basis. The group of "others" would be led down to the street within minutes, and from then, once they had finished in the rest of the houses, taken away. The sidewalk filled up with yellow stars. Where were they taking them? To the Óbuda brick factory or a railway station, with or without deadly detours en route to death? To concentration camps or labor camps? We hoped for the latter, because one might return home alive from a labor camp. One day my mother was shoved in the direction of the "others," and I remember my father’s cry of despair: Szilárdka! He rushed down to the street. Did he show the policeman papers (both my parents were doctors), or give him money? I couldn’t see exactly what was going on. Or did he make an appeal to conscience? But it was impossible to imagine my father begging, and in any case, what good would begging have done? Perhaps he made something up, but what? Wracked with fear, I watched, pressing my head to the window. Later, I learned what had happened: my father returned, and came up the stairs with my mother on his arm. Both of them were ashen, and my mother was crying. I don’t remember whether anyone else made it out of the line of people. I know that many people often risked their own lives for others, but for me, the measure of human decency and bravery will always be my father, for as long as I live. The second-floor apartment where we were packed in on top of one another had, within a few weeks, become a comfortable place to live for its inhabitants. The apparatus worked fast. But we were still together.

An earlier memory: in the yellow-star house, it must have been June, someone phoned my father from the hospital, as one of his old patients had fallen ill. Without the yellow star, in an overcoat or jacket (it was summer), he went to the hospital. We waited, alarmed, for him to come back. And then we were pleased to see him back, and proud of him.

That desperate cry from deep within: Szilárdka! And how he ran after her and brought her back, he saved my mother. I have never forgotten this.

Of the two of them, perhaps he was the braver one, the stronger one. At the time, it was definitely him. Because in those days and months, in her last years, my mother was completely broken. Earlier, when she was young, she was tireless and would work from early morning until late at night. She was a beautiful and sensitive young woman. In the mornings, it was her who put my hair in a ponytail, prepared the mid-morning snack, sewed and cooked. She loved and looked after all of us. The whole family turned to her with their problems, for advice and emotional help, because she was a doctor, a psychologist. In the afternoons, her patients came to see her. I remember ugly old ladies whom my sister and I dearly hated because they took our mother away from us, and in any case we had to be quiet while they were there; we weren’t allowed to argue or make noise. That’s when my sister and I learned to fight in silence. We satisfied ourselves with cakes our mother had baked, which sat on the dining room sideboard. When she was finished working, she checked our homework, she loved and consoled us, or scolded us, but there was concern in the scolding, since she wanted our lives to be easier than hers. She wanted us to be successful, to get on better than she had. And so we had to study, which was the most important thing. We knew that she had completed trade middle school and grammar school in Arad [today in Transylvania]. Our grandmother (whom we'd only heard about but never met) in Semlac had insisted on trade school, but Mom had wanted to be a doctor since childhood, and university entrance required a high-school leaving certificate and knowledge of Latin. I know from her diary that she always excelled at middle school, and when she came to Pest to become a medical student, she still passed with flying colors, and her doctorate was awarded summa cum laude. But in her time, before the First World War, girls didn't have an easy time at university. Far from home and her mother, she must have been very much on her own. I know this from her diary, and also that she could only go home very rarely, for holidays. She didn't have money for the train.

The last lines in her diary were written in 1914. The songs of cheerful infantrymen setting off for the front could be heard from the streets. Poor soldiers, wrote my mother in her diary with an exclamation mark, twice, and underlined: Poor soldiers! And with that, the little green book, her diary, comes to an end.

And then, once she was already married and had a career, children and a home, perhaps she was happy; then, fifteen years after the First World War from the mid-1930s, the world around them grew darker and darker. She grew increasingly afraid. I remember she listened to the BBC every night, ta-ta-ta-da went Beethoven's 5th, and my mother worried and hoped that the world would have enough of Nazism, that Churchill would defeat Hitler, and that the British would finally open the second front.

After the 1942 siege of Stalingrad which lasted for many months, the Russians finally beat the Germans back. It was as if the war had turned around. But my mother fell ill and lost a great deal weight. And then we had to acknowledge that she had grown frighteningly old. And when the Germans occupied Hungary, after March 19, 1944, while very carefully sewing on us the yellow stars made—God knows why—from some fine material, perhaps silk or velvet, using tiny stitches, she cried a frightening amount. And when all of us had to move into the "protected" house after October 15, she wept uncontrollably. Our jet black kitten had to stay behind in the old yellow-star apartment—of all of us the cat loved my mother the best—what will happen to her now she's on her own?

Mom was a village girl, and perhaps that's the reason why we kept pets in the Lipótváros apartment, once we even had a peacock-tailed young dove, who gazed gently at my father while he shaved. Later, the little kitten arrived in my father's pocket; he'd brought her home from the Jewish hospital.

I adored my father. Everything about him made me happy. When I was very small, he would give us (either me or my sister) a sugar cube soaked in black coffee. On Sundays, if he didn't have to go into the hospital, I would sit on his knee after lunch, and he would read Toldi aloud. Every Sunday, there was a song. Later, on Sundays, my sister and I would go to collect him at the hospital. I was proud of his white coat too. Everyone knew we were his daughters. It was written on his face what a great doctor he was, how decent and clever, and how much he loved us. On our way home we sometimes went to a coffee house on the banks of the Danube, and before lunch he would drink a glass of beer, while we had salt bread rolls with anchovies. The mornings were sunny.

It was in 1944 when Jews wearing stars were in the yellow-star houses, couldn’t walk out on the street, and only go shopping in the afternoon, except those who could prove that they were carrying out physical labor somewhere. A girl the same age as me, one of our neighbors, found a florist in Budakeszi that hired Jews. I was pleased to be able to leave the yellow-star house, even if only during the day. The work was difficult, I was tired and hungry by the time I arrived home in the evening. My father would greet me, ask if I was hungry, and then cook me some French toast with real eggs.

He often recited poems, and loved to sing. He sang in the bathroom while shaving, which of course could be heard perfectly from our children's bedroom. I heard Ady's Reinitz poem for the first time from him: "Seaside, dusk, small hotel room." And the Two Grenadiers, too: "Nach Frankreich zogen zwei Grenadier…" But later, after the second anti-Jewish law, not even he was so jolly any more. And we didn't hear him sing either. The silence in the bathroom and around the dining table was overwhelming.

At that point, we didn't believe and couldn't even imagine what was in store for us. But we already had the numerus clausus. I still remember the young blond woman of Austrian origin who wrote a little poem in German—“Mein Nam’ ist Adi Rauch, ich habe keinen Bauch” [My name is Adi Rauch, I have no belly]—and who had to return home around the time of the Anschluss, unfortunately she voted for Austria joining the German Reich, maybe because she was afraid, and she wouldn’t be able to return to us, Jews. In Slovakia, Jews had already been transported to concentration camps, and at home, we lost more and more friends and acquaintances to forced labor service. In 1942—I’m not sure of the date—my father was also called up for forced labor service, and had to report in Jászberény [about 100 miles east of Budapest], and there was such happiness when he came home three months later with his large backpack; he had been demobilized as the group was over its quota of members.

During the Kállay administration, there was a little breathing room and the atmosphere at home became more hopeful, a “perhaps” was in the air. Perhaps the war would be over for Hungary. One evening, our parents had gone to the theater—they went to the theater very rarely—to see a Lajos Zilahy play “Wooden Towers,” and the next day at lunch, we discussed what Zilahy too had written: perhaps.

Early in the morning of March 19, we all learned that the “perhaps” was over: the Germans occupied Hungary. I had a meeting in the morning at the Pest side of the Chain Bridge with one of my first great loves. He was Tibi, and I’m grateful to the oath we took with him and my girl friend, as both of us liked him, and in order to get in to university, we read József Eötvös’s awfully long and boring novel Carthusian. Since Tibi was an outstanding student and also had connections, for one reason or another, he was admitted to the Economics University, despite the numerus clausus.

My father didn’t allow us to go up to the Castle—this was our original plan—instead, we had to return to our apartment. We returned. By noon the news had already spread that Horthy had reached an agreement with the Germans, and the Kállay government had resigned.

One of the first among many nasty decrees was the forced relocation. Jews were not allowed to mix with Christians, and could only live in houses marked with a six-pointed star. Our apartment was also in a house marked with a star. Our relatives moved in with us. Not everyone: three of the men were on forced labor service in Ukraine. That's where one of my cousins, and my other cousin's husband died. My older brother was killed here in Hungary.
I remember when my aunt and cousin eagerly learned the catechism at Teleki Pál Street 13, simply because they hoped that the certificate of baptism might save them from further affronts, deportation, and the ghetto. (It didn’t save any of them.) Neither my father, mother, nor any of us took part in this religious study, which had become rather widespread. They weren’t religious, but would have found it humiliating to deny the religion into which they were born. They stood in solidarity with the persecuted, the rest of the Jews. They were Jews, and they were Hungarians: both were natural, and self-evident.

After the Szálasi putsch, we all had to move out of our old apartment in the yellow-star house, in early November. That’s when we moved to Szent István Park. The Swiss protected house, and the Swiss Schutzpass [protection passport], didn’t offer us any protection.

One day a girl friend and classmate of mine from the Jewish Grammar School came to the house, with two real-false registration documents for my younger sister and me. There was room for us in Zugló, in a house on Fráter György Square evacuated by a lieutenant who left for the West. My father decided: Vera and I should go. The city was grim, but waiting for death, locked up, was even more grim. I had seen Jewish transports too. They’re taking the Jews to the Danube banks—did I hear about it, or just know it? I probably heard about it too. If they found us, they’d make us present our ID papers, and with one single registration document in my bag, they’d shove me in line. But I avoided the raids, and removed myself from the ring of those forced to show papers: I was free.

From the start of the siege, once again I could hardly leave the basement in Zugló where we lived. But this was another form of imprisonment. We sat and falsified papers, waiting for news. The last news from Szent István Park came at Christmas, My mother sent us cakes. I don’t know how she made them.

On January 18, Pest was liberated. Zugló, where we were in hiding, had been liberated earlier. We went looking for our parents. They weren't in Szent István Park. Then we went to the Jewish Hospital because we’d already spoken about all of us meeting up there. The hospital was no longer on Szabolcs Street but on Wesselényi, right outside the ghetto. And although we might have feared the opposite, almost everyone who had been in the Wesselényi Street hospital had fled. But I didn’t find my parents there. (Many people died in the ghetto, looting and mass murders took place every day. The Germans and Arrow Cross had plans to destroy the entire ghetto, but the Russian troops liberated it two days before the planned destruction.)

The next road lead to our old apartment, our home. The city was nothing but ruins. Cannon fire and machine gun rounds from Buda accompanied us. I saw the courtyard of the Dohány Street synagogue. A hill had formed from corpses thrown on top of one another. The walls of the house we lived in were still standing. In the apartment, the windows were broken, there were remnants of a fire have been laid on the floor, with burned strips of the parquet, books torn apart, and human excrement in the middle of my father’s room. I spoke to acquaintances, my parents’ colleagues and friends, and fellow tenants. All I finally learned was that a few days before the liberation of Pest, after January 10, my father and mother had been taken to Buda. I heard first that it was somewhere near the Lukács baths, and later in the Maros Street hospital, that they had been murdered.

I don’t know how I grappled with the knowledge that my parents had been killed. The burden was unbearable, the pain and the self-recrimination, I couldn’t bear it. Every day I awoke to the same merciless, repeating blow: they aren’t here any more. My sister cried loudly through the nights. During the day I tried again and again to follow the disintegrating scraps of threads I’d found the day or week before: someone saw them, someone heard that somebody had seen them. I could hear coughing coming up from the courtyard, coughing would have meant my mother coming home, she smoked an enormous amount and was always coughing. But it wasn’t her.

My sister and I survived that which killed 600,000 Hungarian Jews. My parents, my dear, clever parents, had been murdered somewhere. I don’t know precisely where, we never learned how. I felt no desire for revenge, or hatred, only terror. I could not and cannot forgive anyone who took part in these atrocities. And most of all, I can’t ever forgive myself. I survived those I loved the most, those I have most to thank for, and those who loved us even more than their own lives.

I first wrote about this in the Bibó Festscrift in 1980, with the title “In Place of Thanks,” and in which I reflected on one of Bibó’s most profound studies, The Jewish Question in Hungary after 1944. István Bibó was the first to face the tragedy in Hungary and its consequences. I thank him now again for his study.

Although the clothing basket no longer served its original function, I kept it as a memento until the 1970s. Every day, my Mother went shopping with the rather flimsy typed certificate in her pocket (the address is where I was born), which was not at all without its dangers. She recalled that if she was stopped, she would show the letter and say that she was either going to the address or returning from it. It’s almost a miracle that it worked. The fact that it meant that all three of us survived. My father came home a few months after my first birthday, weighing 39 kilos and with typhus, returning from Mauthausen and Gunskirchen. According to family legend, I was so frightened at the sight of this emaciated, bearded stranger, that I burst into tears … which I still regret.

After a long time, when I first managed to travel to Israel in 1984, anyone who learned where and when I was born, clapped their hands in surprise that I am still alive …

Apart from the concierge, it was only Jews who lived in the house. One night, when we heard that people were being picked up on the street, we decided that we wouldn’t follow them like sheep. We hid behind the front gate and armed ourselves with all sorts of tools. I had a hammer. We decided to defend ourselves; whatever will be, will be. We stood there behind the gate in silence for the whole night, waiting for them to come, but they didn’t. At least not then. A few days later at dawn, they did come into our apartment, and took my Mother with her brother. I learned later that they’d been taken on foot towards Germany. When the Arrow Cross entered the apartment, I was sleeping next to my mother. She threw the eiderdown over me and said, be quiet and don’t move! So I did, and they didn’t notice me. I was 14 at the time.

But 2-3 weeks later, they came once again and took us to the Ghetto. Seeing the impossible “life” there, I escaped. I crawled from the Synagogue roof over the Ghetto wall to the roof of the building opposite, which was outside the Ghetto. I didn’t know what to do, so went back to our old house at Kazár Street 10. The only resident left was the concierge. I knocked, he was very surprised to see me but opened the front gate and gave me something to eat. We decided I could spend a night there, but “tomorrow you must leave.” In his apartment, I spotted my concertina and violin, my grandmother’s sewing machine, and a vast amount of other items collected from the other apartments. But I didn’t care. I’d had some food and that was the most important thing.

All I want to say about the house is that I went back after the liberation to take a look, but there was nothing left in our apartment. It wasn’t even easy to get in, because the stairwell had been bombed between the second and third floors. I found a ladder and climbed up it into our apartment, which had been completely plundered. The remaining family pictures were strewn all over the floor, and now I regret not gathering them up, because I have nothing left from my childhood. But I found a whole loaf of bread! That was so good. It was so hard that I couldn’t even take a bite without moistening it, but it was fantastic.

40 years later, in 1989, I took my wife to show her the house and the apartment. An elderly lady was living in the apartment, and when I told her I had spent my childhood there, she let us in. I remember that the rusty enamel washing machine from our kitchen was still there! Of course, the stairwell had been renovated, but the distempering, for example, was still there. It was difficult to show this house off.

My mother was taken to Dachau, but luckily she survived the war and came home afterwards. Our family returned to the yellow-star house, since that was where our apartment was. My father also returned from Ukraine, even though we’d already received a corpse-ticket saying he had passed away. One evening, about half a year after the liberation, someone knocked at the door, and my Father stepped into our Kazár Street apartment. He was so thin we barely recognized him, but it was an unforgettable joy to see him.

My mother’s family lived at the end of the corridor on the second floor, in a two-room apartment. In 1939, my Mother got married and not long after was when the horror started. The Krammer family lived next door to them. On the first floor underneath us was the Gellér family, and one of my Mother’s best friends, Erzsi. Two doors down from them was the Schwartz family and next to them lived Andor Breitner and his wife Klári, in the most elegant apartment in the house. Auntie Klári was also a good friend of my Mother’s, and it is to her that my Mother and my older brother owe their lives. On the ground floor was the Luger family, and Auntie Luger was the concierge.

I lived in that house until I was 26, and heard many stories about the Jewish families who lived there during the war. When it became a yellow-star house, all material differences between the residents somehow melted away. Everyone had a space marked out for them in the basement, but somehow the Jews were always together and tried to help one another. The men were taken on forced labor service and could come home every 2-3 months, and the women basically had to take care of everything themselves. In September 1944, my mother fell pregnant with my older brother. Klári Breitner got food and drink to her. Klári was taken to Auschwitz in the last weeks of 1944.

In the first days of January 1945, the Arrow Cross came to take the Jews away. My mother’s family had just enough time to run from the basement, and everyone fled as fast as they could. My mother went up to the third floor, and when she reached the floor (while 5 months pregnant), she heard that the Arrow Cross had already entered the house. She lay down on the corridor, put her belly to the wall and waited for the end. Nobody knows why, but the Arrow Cross ran the length of the first floor, but didn’t go up to the second. After this, my mother didn’t return to the basement with my grandmother, but somehow they made their way to Pozsonyi Road and to another yellow-star house, where some acquaintances were living.

How they escaped the Arrow Cross from there is another story. By the time my brother was born in late May, my mother already knew that her husband had been liberated, but he died of starvation a few days later in a hospital. Auntie Luger’s oldest daughter left home at 15 and, in hazardous circumstances, managed to get on the EXODUS ship to Israel. She spent the rest of her life there.

My father married my mother in 1952, and adopted my older brother. My mother lived until the age of 60.

On March 19, 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary.

My mother had just arrived home from the countryside.

We lived in the capital, and our summer house was in Felsőgöd [about 15 miles north of Budapest]. Since it was difficult to get good quality milk in the capital, she would travel to Felsőgöd a few times a week on the morning train, where a local peasant would give her the 4-5 liters of mile that our family of four would need until her next journey.

On March 19, on her way home, she described in horror what could be seen from the train: the highway, where soldiers in green uniform—probably Germans—were marching along the road, and there was no end in sight to the column. “What could it have been?,” she asked anxiously. The answer to her question was provided by leading article in the next day’s papers.

My father was a lawyer, and he was 55 years old at the time. Our family enjoyed the average Jewish middle class living standards: my sister and I—who was six years older than me—had everything we wanted, as my father’s office secured all our material needs right up until the point that he was informed that as a consequence of one of the “Jewish laws,” he had been excluded from the Chamber of Lawyers, and that accordingly, he could no longer continue his practice. It was perhaps around the same time that a little hardback book arrived in the post—it could have been his military identity papers—and on the cover was stamped diagonally in purple (and I can still see it before my very eyes) the massive letter “ZS” [for “zsidó,”, i.e. “J” for “Jew”], which meant that he had been deprived of his military rank as lieutenant, because he was of the Israelite faith.

Even if my father had been prepared for this, this step was still a major blow for him, and he spent the whole day brooding over it, ruminating to himself quietly that he didn’t deserve this for his dedication to defending the homeland.

The final scene from my memories of the Teréz Boulevard apartment was Hitler’s speech. In the evenings, after supper, we would sit by the radio, my mother would hold me tight in her lap, my father leaning in close to the wireless, and both of them listened with ashen faces to the threatening, bellowed speech, of which I only understood the word “Jude,” and the crowd’s glorifying chorus of “Heil” at the end of his sentences.

After the Germans entered our country, they brought with them countless measures affecting us, the Jews. I was a pupil at the Scottish School on Vörösmarty Street (the Scottish Civic Girl’s School of the Budapest Calvinist Church). Its headmistress was Jane Haining, the Scottish teacher. I must have known that during those bloody times, many persecuted children were given shelter in the boarding school, because the Germans caught Haining and deported her to Auschwitz, from where she never returned. The yellow star sewn onto our upper clothing was aimed only at marking us out as different, and was followed in September when we went back to our class at the start of term, with the teacher telling us very kindly that we should go home, since we didn’t have to attend school any more.

In September 1944 (when we were already living in the Ó Street house), on the first day of the school year, I turned up wearing my yellow star at the local civic (higher) school to continue my studies. I was sitting in the classroom when the teacher appeared and said that all those wearing the yellow star should go home, and didn’t have to attend school any more.

I did as I was told and went home, and that is when my connection with school came to an end.

However, when the yellow star appeared on certain houses, that had already had more serious consequences, or rather, all those individuals who were considered Jewish and who were not living in a place not marked with a yellow star had to leave their apartment and move into a “yellow-star house.” Arrangements were left up to the individual, the most important thing was to move within the deadline, which was strictly supervised and there were legal consequences for any transgressions.

Our house was at Teréz Boulevard 38, which was not marked with a yellow star. But one of my mother’s siblings lived in the nearby house at Ó Street 48, where there was a yellow Star of David above the front gate, and the family reached the conclusion that we would have to move over there.

In an apartment on the ground floor of this house lived a lawyer, Dr. Dezső Kohlmann, who was willing to swap his two-room apartment for our four-room place on Teréz Boulevard. At the age of twelve, I couldn't have known whose material benefit this agreement favored, but one thing’s for sure, Dr. Kohlmann didn’t do badly in any respect. Just as we didn’t do badly either, because the impending deadline was dangerously close.

My father brought the chests with lockable lids down from the attic, with our possible move in mind, and once they had been filled with all sorts of things we thought necessary, he sat outside in the corridor, where the chests were lined up for the next morning’s journey, and began sealing them with nails and a hammer.

Because this took place late in the evening, the hammer blows resounded loudly around the house, which had fallen quiet for the night. I stood next to my father anxiously, and almost commanded him to “shush,” because you weren’t allowed to make any noise at that time of night. He paid no attention to my law-abiding remonstrations, and each blow of the hammer was stronger and louder than the one before. It was as if he wanted to satisfy all his bitterness and revenge with these blows, which were intended for somewhere else. Of course, I only understood this much later, as an adult.

Looking back:
In those happy days of peace, which appeared to be coming to an end in 1938, and the winds of war started to blow, my father would tell an anecdote whenever his colleagues occasionally came round to visit us:
“That war, that madness, which demanded the lives of an impossible number of young, healthy victims, would have been solved so much easier like this: sit the leaders of the respective countries down in one room, and let them work out among themselves the questions for discussion, without bringing anyone else in. Do you know what the result would be?”—and here my father got ready for the punch-line—“in half an hour’s time, they’d be playing cards!” He found this funny, but it was in fact the bloody truth, and we must have heard it many times (although later only among family, when Jews’ freedom of movement was severely restricted), and the emphasis still rings in my ears, and I can see his gesture of slapping a card down on the table, as my father would perform in those days.

And this is how we moved, with the chests nailed shut and heavy hearts, into one of the ground-floor apartments of the Ó Street ghetto house.

Yes, but my mother’s sister also lived in the sort of house where the family could no longer stay, because it wasn’t marked with a star (Lónyay Street 36). They were four: Lina, my mother’s sister, and her three children (her husband was subjected to the bitter and uncertain fate of forced laborers somewhere among the hills of Bor). There was only one solution available to them to, and that was in the Ó Street house.

On the first floor of the house in a two-room apartment lived my aunt (who also owned the house), and she was willing to take in her sister Ilona with her three children, but on one condition: she would provide somewhere to sleep for every family member, but all of us had to spend the rest of the day, and cook, on the ground floor.

Of course, we all accepted her offer, because it was better to go through this exigency with family members than with complete strangers.

Putting the solution in place went relatively smoothly, with the exception of a few minor squabbles, what with four adolescents and one tiny scrap of a thing locked up together (because the law prevented us from leaving our places of residence apart from three hours a day), we had to reckon with the pettiest of "hen-house" squabbles, and when the adults would intervene—each coming to the defense of their own little creature—that only aggravated the forced cohabitation situation we were in.

Most of the apartments in the Ó Street house were occupied by Jewish individuals, most of whom had already been living there before. The small number of non-Jews who had been living in the house before didn’t make a great fuss over this turn of events, they put on a good face for the whole thing, after all, the arrival of the Jews didn’t change their lives at all.

Thus Sándor Rigó, who lived on the second floor, and who turned out to be a very honorable and well-meaning person, took on the role of the house representative, and we could definitely count on him in most respects. In certain difficult situations he even defended those who were in need.

The first-floor resident Jakab Katzer spent the best part of the day in his furrier’s workshop on the street, and he didn’t rock the boat much. He greeted all of us politely, and would even stop for a couple of minutes to exchange a few words. Jewish compatriots appreciated this respect during those days when it had been withdrawn, in fact one could expect a direct spit in the face from almost every direction.

The woman who was the concierge, Mrs. Klinger? Well… in her case, it’s true to say that she was the sort who, with a minimal (?) amount of power in their hands, would sooner or later misuse it and, in the best case, would only exaggerate their role, and not resort to unjust measures based on trumped-up charges, motivated only by their antipathy towards us, the outcome of which could be fatal. As the consequences in war become distorted and extreme, so was the role of the house supervisor: during those times, they were the lords over life and death.

In one of the ground-floor apartments lived another recent forced arrival, in the person of Ernő Gondos, a well-known left-winger. Interestingly, despite the fact that he was a fairly young Jewish guy (around 30 years old), he didn’t share the fate of Jewish boys compelled to do forced labor service, and this was rare during that period; you didn’t really see men of that age in the yellow-star houses. I vaguely remember his pretty roommate called Hilda, and the presence of these two young people was like a drop of joy—or hope in the future?—for the many despondent and troubled Israelite residents.

In the other ground-floor apartment lived Mrs. Emil Baumel, a long-term resident, with her daughter Veronika, who was about eighteen months old. She was a sweet little thing, happy to be in everyone’s arms and play with their earlobes; she constantly wanted this soft contact, who knows what today’s psychological explanations for that would be. The point is that when her father, Emil Baumel, returned from forced labor service for a short break, she never left his arms. There was no ear-fiddling, as both her hands were locked around her father’s neck. After his brief stay, Veronika’s embraces ceased forever. No news of him ever arrived.

On the other side of our kitchen wall must have been the neighbors’ bedroom, because at around half one in the morning, an elderly man—another long-term resident—would ring at the door, because our tap was dripping and keeping him awake. (I call them long-term residents because they were actually residents of the house before it became a yellow-star house.) Uncle Kiss and Auntie Hevesi next door both attributed their lack of sleep to the sound of the dripping tap, and even in their dreams (if they had any), it never occurred to them that it was the exceptional circumstances that provided the onerous reasons for them tossing and turning in bed at night. In any case, the appearance of the old man ensured that it wasn’t just them who had a sleepless night.

Opposite our apartment lived the Fehér family, nomen est omen: they where white, in other words, they were free of all things Jewish. They kept their distance from us, but I didn’t see the reason for this as presumed antisemitism, but because perhaps they too were long-term residents, and may have felt themselves superior to us.

In November of that year, and the only one from my family, I was marched together with around 300 other people with yellow stars in a column along Jókai Street, escorted by two young men with rifles and Arrow Cross armbands. When we reached the corner of Ó Street, there was already a big crowd of people staring, and among them was the Fehér family’s tenant, the unmemorable Mrs. D. (perhaps this is why I forgot her name), who looked at the marchers with pity, her compassion was visible as she spotted me in the crowd among those condemned to who knows what fate.

On the first floor lived another long-term resident, the self-confidently Jewish Mr. Steiner, with his German wife. As a part of an “Aryan couple,” he probably enjoyed concessions regarding his situation and, clearly aware of this, he barely mingled with us and didn’t exchange any words with the newcomers, perhaps so that they wouldn’t regard him as pro-Jewish. Of course, I might be wrong, perhaps the confidence of being a long-term resident dominated for him. And yet he may have had his fingers burned by that era, because after the war he Hungarianized his name and also that of his wife from Steiner to Sós.

Mrs. Vadász also lived on the first floor, with her flame red-haired beautiful seven-year-old daughter. Zsuzsika was forever playing on the corridor and always alone, under the tight supervision of her mother. Her father, (to me) Uncle Vadász, would come home at around the same time as Emil Baumel, and also enjoyed a few days’ break from his forced labor group, and he too would carry his little Zsuzsika around on his neck with every step he took, since he was only on leave for a short period. He knew this, but not that it would be the last time he would be able to cuddle his freckled daughter. Who knows where and in what circumstances he could have summoned up his last memory of being together with his little girl?

Mrs. Berecz was another first-floor long-term resident, and there was no Jewish blood in her. Perhaps this is why she was so quiet and withdrawn, perhaps even a little horrified that the house was so full of Jews. I am comfortable using the term “horrified”: over the course of my long life, I’ve had countless opportunities to draw the conclusion that behind hatred of Jews lies fear which, once felt, then becomes hatred and then, in the form of a reaction, is transformed into the desire to attack. Where does this fear spring from? The answer to this is simple: the unknown always arouses fear in people. Well how could such a group not be unknown, one that views Saturday as Sunday, that enters church with covered heads, and even sits at the table in a hat, who mumbles their prayers in an incomprehensible language, whose writing is an unreadable mess that goes from right to left, and who starts flicking through a book at the end … isn’t this witchcraft?

At Easter, they don’t celebrate with “kalács” cake but with flat breads, which is compulsory for them, because they are forbidden from eating baked goods with flour. They cut the ends off newborn boys’ willies, which bleeds (fffff, and what if they need the blood??? Perhaps they drink it, or at least mix it into their flat breads?). What sort of thing is this? It’s not human! Perhaps they’re not even people, but the devil’s brood?

This is how the fantasy of the “everyday mortal” functions, and then fear of all this unknown becomes loathing and hatred.

Maybe in her lonely widowhood, Mrs. Berecz’s mind also traversed all these stations, the result of which was that she only rarely, and fearfully, appeared on the first-floor corridor.

Mrs. Székely, another long-term resident, also lived on the first floor. She was a rather anxious, bullying woman from whose apartment was often heard shouting, but then there’s a saying about the Jews: “if others don’t maltreat us, we’ll do it to ourselves.” I always react to this with an indemnity: if a group is nothing but condemned, pestered, maltreated and hounded its whole life, be it on religious, national, or ideological etc. grounds, and against which self-defense is impossible, then the individual reaches a degree of hyper-sensitivity whereby even without external pressure, s/he will seek in the individuals and events of their own kind the path that leads down to easing their own mental state.

Mrs. Székely was also standing there in the courtyard on October 23, 1944, by herself, with a rucksack with three days’ food, so that two snotty Arrow Cross boys could escort them to the brick factory, in line with the decree. I saw them too, as I’d gone out to see the fate of my 17-year-old sister, who belonged to the group of women aged 16-45 condemned by the decree to being herded together and then taken away, and I also witnessed how the house supervisor, Sándor Rígó, pulled my sister out of the line and pushed her aside, while informing the snotty Arrow Cross boy who went over to them that she was a “crazy one,” and it wasn’t worth bothering with her, just leave it…

Miraculously, Mrs. Székely came back very soon, and not from the brick factory, but from the road leading there, where she’d been brave enough to escape. And I always remember this completely clearly, not just because of my appreciation [for her escape].

My father died there and then; who knows to what extent the sight of his 16-year-old daughter lined up with a rucksack may have contributed to his heart failure. After his death my mother, according to our traditions, sat shiva for seven days next to her husband. The recently returned Mrs. Székely came down one day from the first floor and, according to the custom, kept the young widow company, naturally telling her about what she'd been through recently.

The Déry family lived on the second floor. Déry was in the theater, he was already quite old and I don't remember what happened to him. He died at home under normal circumstances, and his widow then continued living for a long time in the apartment with her sibling. It's worth mentioning something that happened after the war, once relations were consolidated.

The Party's representative lived in the house next door (Ó Street 46). Mrs. Buxbaum, who later Hungarianized her name to Mrs. Bence, would hold a meeting every year to report on the Party's opinions and decisions. She also conveyed the residents' requests and appreciation to the Party. I took part once in such a meeting—I was at college at the time—when the house supervisor complained that the Arrow Cross residents living next to the courtyard were always shaking their dust rag into the courtyard, and this was against the hygiene rules. Mrs. Bagi the concierge said she knew that nobody was shaking out their dust rags after ten in the morning—the Déry family had protested that this was only allowed until ten—but that in fact it shouldn't be done before ten either, because then there was no point in her trying to abide by the cleanliness requirements. Mrs. Bence responded by turning to Mrs. Déry and asking: "So tell me, isn't it possible to soak the dusty rag in water and wash it out?" I'll never forget it, as Mrs. Déry was well-known for her cleanliness, and her response combined indignation and mocking: "well THAT is certainly not possible... we're not THAT CLEAN that we need to wash the rag after shaking it out..." In a well-meaning way, I brooded over how anyone could presume that the rag had to be washed daily...? How could the Party's representative have given such stupid advice?

In the nicest apartment on the second floor lived Emil Szobl with his pretty, blond wife, and their daughter Kati. They didn't communicate much with the other residents of the house. Especially the wife, after her brother Csupi was forced to moved into the yellow-star house, thus increasing the size of their family. The head of the family was an easy-going, sober man, and if anyone had a personal problem, he always willingly tried to provide useful advice, and this meant a lot during those times. He was present when the pettiest disputes broke out and successfully played the role of peacemaker.

The elderly Uncle Dunajetz and Mrs. Székely also lived together on the second floor. We all knew that they hadn't got married so that he could keep his pension, and although they had both been widowed, they had lived together for many years. The old man was in charge of tenants' behavior during the air raids, but I can't remember what this duty was called. I do remember that one night, when the air raid siren went off, he had a metal military helmet on his head and some sort of stick in his hand that he used to direct people down into the basement which, for want of anything better, was designated a hiding place. On one of the cellar walls was painted a square in whitewash, where you'd have to break through in the event that the exit had been blocked up; is it possible that was what the stick was for? Pointing at the square, old Dunajetz explained that the children would go through first, then the elderly and the sick, and then the "normal" adults.

But this never happened - thank heavens! Ó Street 48 suffered shrapnel damage from the heavy shooting outside; this damage remained right up until 2012, and I am not exaggerating. When I was last there, maybe in 2000, the house still looked like it did in the winter of 1944. It's true that while Mrs. Bence announced at every residents' meeting that it was part of the general renovation plan, because there were other more important architectural tasks to be carried out, it would only be completed at some other time (and she always came up with a new deadline). I think it likely that there was serious shrapnel damage around our windows which allowed free passage to the whims of weather, all I know is how many decades passed before there were no other residential buildings in the city that still bore the gunfire marks of 1944. I left the country in 1973, and on my frequent return visits, could establish that the house's renovation had still not been taken care of. I went back there the last time in 2007, and still nothing had been done. Two years ago, in 2012, someone told me that the house at Ó Street 48 had finally been restored to its 1943 state.

Despite the iron jaws of time, the fact that the house sat there in semi-ruins for 68 years underscores the level of all-round professional perfectionism used in construction back then. The person who commissioned the construction, and who was also the owner, was my aunt, Mrs. Sándor Márkus.

Among the residents there's probably nobody left, but I can mention a few descendants in the house. Since I too am a descendant, moreover the niece of the house's original owner, allow me to make the following definitive testimony, for as long as I can still be called a survivor.

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FROM THE DISTANT PAST TO THE YELLOW-STAR ENTRANCE GATE
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On the first floor, in the nicest apartment of the house, lived my aunt Mrs. Sándor Márkus, and she owned the entire building. Whoever is interested can learn the history of this lifeless (?) house.

I put a question mark after lifeless because I believe in the concept of "sunt lacrimae rerum" [there are tears for things].

My aunt was born in Drohobych, Poland, at the end of the 1880s. After one of the pogroms (of which there were of course many there), she fled with my grandparents and six siblings to Hungary, where my grandfather supported the family as a rag-and-bone man. Mrs. Márkus—Rózsi—was very talented and good at sewing, and had soon opened a women's clothing salon employing two seamstresses. Next, of course, she began thinking about finding a partner, preferably one of the highest social standing possible, but which wouldn't be easy given her Galician origins.

One day, a fire broke out at the Párisi department store on Andrássy Avenue. The firefighters tried to save people jumping out of the windows with a massive "canvas blanket." One of the people jumping out took her daughter with her, in her arms. They miscalculated the jump and left the son, Sanyi, by himself. He was getting ready for a career as a bank clerk, but the tragedy shattered him. Rózsika consoled him until their relationship ended in marriage, which benefited both of them: Sanyi became a bank manager and Rózsika's salon secured such a good income that they started thinking of investments in the form of buying a house.

Although it is almost in the heart of the capital (between the Grand Boulevard, Jókai Street and Vilmos Császár Road), Ó Street was not known for being distinguished. A small, single-story house on the corner of Nagymező Street was home and premises to many streetwalkers. When I was tiny, I would often come across heavily made-up, strikingly dressed women on the way to my aunt's house, and sometimes they would smile at me as they strolled up and down; after a number of years, I even recognized a few of them. Because this profession was not PUBLIC, the nearby house prices reflected that.

And this is how the house came into the possession of Rózsika Márkus, who had to rebuild it completely. My energetic aunt enthusiastically oversaw the work personally. She turned up every day and with her opinions, instructions and frequent arguments, to ensure that by the 1920s (?), the house was finally a lovely, two-story building containing 12 apartments, including the most beautiful one on the first floor, into which the family moved. Anyone who doubted my aunt's engineering and construction skills should go to the Ó Street 48 house now, and take a look at the exterior and interior, two years after renovation, to see exactly how the house looked originally.

Meanwhile, with the arrival of their son, both my aunt's family and the rest of the residents were completely content living there. Only the house supervisors changed frequently, but this is understandable given my aunt's strong-willed, passionate and perfectionist nature. The little boy's name was Richárd, but his nickname for the whole of his life was "Chi-pu," from the hero of a Chinese-themed novel, and I called him Chipu on the rare occasions when he picked me up.

The center of the apartment was taken up with a huge grand piano. Although Chipu didn't like to practice, my willful aunt say next to him and practically forced him with a stick to practice regularly. Although some of her acquaintances condemned her bullying, she didn't listen to anyone, as usual, and only followed her heart. In this case, the positive outcome was that her son, who later went to Switzerland (he found refuge there), and wrote his mother a letter in which he told her that his piano-playing skills had opened up the doors of the best families, from where, as a successful chemist, he had been able to find himself a suitable wife.

And this is where the life of Ó Street 48 had led to, when the diabolical anti-Jewish laws interrupted Life/Lives.

On the subject of the Jewish laws: when the first discriminatory law appeared, Uncle Sanyi and Auntie Rózsa put their 12-year-old son on a train and accompanied him to Zurich, where they not only chose an apartment for the "child," but also deposited money in the bank for his future. When the couple returned home, once again, their acquaintances only greeted them with condemnation, "how could you push a 12-year-old child out into the big wide world..." They didn't know that Sanyi and Rózsi had wept for the entire journey home. Their son, however, had escaped, and ensured the survival of the family name when he had his own children.

The Márkus couple remained in Pest, in their Ó Street 48 apartment, and lived the everyday life of the middle-class, right up until when my mother returned from Felsőgöd for the last time, with the last delivery of milk.

I've left out my aunt from the list of residents above and would now supplement what I've written with their "adventures" in the ghetto house. On October 23, 1944, among the women lined up in the courtyard was Aunt Rózsi: she set off along with the others, as she said, and the forced march ended up at the Brick Factory.

She knew that there was no return from where they were going.

Using her "senno del poi" [with the wisdom of hindsight], she was right, because Márton Ickovics and his wife, who took over as Ó Street house supervisor in 1949, spent the whole time I lived there waiting for their daughter Editke to return. She had been taken from another house at the age of 16, with a rucksack somewhere, from where... and if Auntie Ickovics was still alive today, she'd still be waiting for her daughter to return...
Rózsika returned to the house just three days after she'd left. How her husband, Uncle Sanyi, could stand the loneliness and what he felt then, I don't know. I only heard shouting, and on October 26, 1944, on the ground floor, I ran out to witness the "Great Meeting." My uncle was running down the stairs with open arms, repeating "my Rózsika, my Rózsika," while my aunt ran up the stairs with open arms. "My Sanyi, my Sanyi..."
I could finish the story of the Ó Street house residents here...

But unfortunately, there can't not be a "to be continued."

I can't leave it to anyone's imagination to finish the story. Quite enough written, film and verbal testaments exist about how these saddest of stories continued.

It is very difficult to read, watch and listen to these stories.

Yet it is not with our minds, but with our hearts that we learn about them.

And every year, this information puts ever great weight on our breast.

How much can we bear?

I don't know. But I feel that: WE MUST!!!

Behind the large windows on the ground floor, they sold their own products in the shop. My mother served from behind the counter. At the back was the workshop. The workers sat around a massive work-table. What I remember: making ornaments from shining sheets of brass, which they decorated with “markazi” stones and polished. On the first floor was an office and maybe a storeroom. They also made inexpensive plastic (“trolitur”) ornaments, pressed in series. As far as I recall, they tried to make Walt Disney figures as well (e.g. Bambi, the Seven Dwarves, etc.), but were never refunded the large investment for a special press because of the large rights payments demanded by the Disney company. When I wasn’t at school, I often went to the workshop. When I ended up in the countryside, I didn’t go there for a year. When I visited my parents again, I was happy to meet the surviving workers whom I knew well. There were some who never came back, but most of the workers there were old friends.