Testimonies

The house supervisor, “brother” Sándor Szalai, watched over us. In the beginning, for a few weeks, we were allowed out for a short time to the greengrocer’s on the corner of Wesselényi Street and Rózsa Street to buy meager rations of groceries. The grocer wrote down everything we bought into the purchasing book. This opportunity did not last long. After that, we were not allowed to leave the house.

I remember that every Friday evening, we prayed in one of the apartments. Every afternoon the ladies sat together to make predictions.

There was a large piece cardboard with the letters of the alphabet on it, and in the middle they placed an upturned glass which every lady placed a finger on, and the glass started to slide from letter to letter. Sentences were formed from the letters, for example, “the war will be over soon,” “the Russians are drawing closer”…

It’s more than likely that the lady who led the game was moving the glass, unnoticed.

After a time, we were not allowed to leave the yellow-star house. Brother Szalai took great care to ensure that the gate was permanently closed.

One morning, my mother whispered to me that we would be escaping from here today. I remember that she had a small bag in her hand. We didn’t meet anyone in the stairwell. The front gate was closed. There was a small peep-hole window in the gate. My mother opened the window, put her hand through, and rang the bell from outside. She then grabbed my hand and we ran to hide behind the lift. Hearing the bell, brother Szalai went out onto the street to see who had rung the bell, but saw nobody there. He said it must have been those stinking kids having fun again. As the house was on the end of a block, he went to street corner to see where the kids were. When she saw that Szalai had left the house and left the gate open, my mother said, “Quick, let’s run.” With all our strength, we ran in the direction of the Boulevard.

My parents had already spoken to a Christian couple they knew, who said they would take us in any time if there was a problem. We turned onto Rákóczi Road and then into Szentkirályi Street. The Gyurácz family lived at no. 26. This is where we lived until January 16, 1945, when we were liberated. We owe our lives to this family.

My father managed to escape from forced labor. He also came to the Gyurácz family, since he knew the address, and we lived through liberation together with him.

My parents kept in touch with the Gyurácz family until the end of their lives. They are dead now, and I have tried for years to find a trace of their children, but unfortunately without success.

I was a child when it happened, but it has been present for the whole of my life.

András Szász

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.