Testimonies
Here is a selection of testimonies submitted to us via e-mail or Facebook, and originally published on our Hungarian-language website. These testimonies were selected and, unless stated otherwise, translated into English by Gwen Jones. To submit a story, please write to bertalan@ceu.edu.
2014. February 19., Wednesday
Akácfa Street 43 was also a yellow-star house. I moved in here together with my mother in in June 1944, because this is where my grandparents lived, Rezső and Rózsa Tannenbaum, and their daughter Margit. Later, my mother’s two older sisters, one with her husband, also moved in. There were 8 of us at my aunt and uncle’s, in a small apartment with 2.5 rooms, and we hardly had anything to eat. It was from here I attended the Madách high school wearing my yellow star, as long it was still possible to attend school.
On October 13 my father, István Weisz, received 2 or 3 days’ release from the forced labor camp and came home, and when he left us to return on October 15, the day of the Arrow Cross putsch, he was caught by the Arrow Cross and, half beaten to death, staggered home into the house. Two days later he was caught by them again, and taken to Buchenwald, from where he never returned. Today, the house’s façade has been restored, but inside it is exactly the same as it was before. The house later fell within the territory of the ghetto.
When we received the news that they intended to set the closed Pest ghetto on fire, a group of resistance activists dressed as the Arrow Cross came in November to rescue us from Akácfa Street 43. They escorted 8 of us to the protected house at Szent István Park 25. I was 13 years old at the time. My older sister was already waiting for us there, and so nine of us occupied a corner of one room in a first-floor apartment. There were at least 4 other families living in the apartment, the windows had been smashed and it was often -15C outside. We burned almost all the furniture to keep warm, and hardly had enough to eat. The plumbing only worked in the basement. The Arrow Cross gathered us together in front of the house on two occasions, with the clear intention to shoot us at the Danube, which was barely 80 steps away. Both times, we referred to the Arrow Cross leader living in the next-door house, and both times they let us go. On January 15, the Russians occupied the house, but for a long time we had nowhere to go, and stayed there starving until at least February or March 1945.
My family and me were in the “Csillagos ház,” Wessélenyi Street 61 in 1944. We were cramped in a small apartment on the second floor with two other families. We were five of us, I was only 10 years old and it was very difficult and full of suffering for all of us. My father was only able to work on selected days and we just hardly made it. On October 19th, the Arrow Cross thugs took my father, and that was the day when I saw my beloved father the last time. He was killed by the Arrow Cross. On November 1st with the help of my late uncle who worked in the Swedish Embassy, we were able to escape and my younger brother and I were placed in a “safe house” in Lónyay Street 9, which had Swedish protection. My mother and older sister were placed in a Catholic Convent which was also “protected” by the Swedish Embassy. Raoul Wallenberg was the hero and I vividly recall that one day in November, Raoul Wallenberg personally came to save us from the Arrow Cross thugs. Mid-December 1944 we had to escape from the “safe house” because the most horrible Arrow Cross thugs wanted to take us. My mother felt that we should walk to the Ghetto. While we walked in the city the Arrow Cross members stopped us and transported us to one of their “Terror Houses” which was on Andrassy Road 47 (near the Octogon). The Arrow Cross Thugs were the most primitive murderers and as a 10-year-old I saw just killing, blood and the worst human suffering. After almost 70 years I’m still suffering from that unbelievable experience!
From Andrassy Road 61 in early January, 1945, the Arrow Cross were taking us to the Danube for execution but the leading Arrow Cross member was drunk and the older people in the group convinced the Arrow Cross guy (Nyilas) to walk us into the Ghetto. January 18, 1945 the Russians liberated the Ghetto and we were the few lucky survivors. During the Holocaust (vészkorszak) I lost 17 of my immediate family, my father, older brothers, aunts, uncles and several cousins. I told this sad story to several young and older people, both Jews and Gentiles. The entire world must forever remember for the Holocaust in the memory of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis. (Although “New Nazis,” the “New Arrow Cross” in Hungary, Iran and other Thugs are claiming that the “Holocaust is a myth”... This is the main reason that Israel must be very important for every Jewish person and for Gentiles as well.
2014. February 18., Tuesday
I grew up in this house, and lived here during the Holocaust too. My father was taken away from here on forced labor service and he never returned.
Most of the house’s residents were Jewish, and even before that time too. I’ll try to mention them by name, so that a trace of them remains in the wider world. We lived on the first floor in no. 1, and although I don’t remember the name of the tenants in no. 2 next door, after the war, the actress Margit Dajka moved in there and stayed for many years. At no. 3 on the first floor lived the Somlai family, whose earlier family name was Sreier. The husband (Uncle Rudi) worked in some office, while his wife, Auntie Zsóka, was a seamstress, and the apartment also contained her salon and workshop.
At no. 1 on the second floor lived the Fekete family, who somehow survived the Holocaust. Auntie Fekete had three sons: György went off to somewhere in South America, from where his letters arrived, and there was always some big celebration. The middle son János went to Austria, and the third, István, stayed at home with his mother. The mother and youngest son both died at home some years after the war. On the second floor also lived the Paszternák family, who left in 1956. They had two sons, Róbert and Detre. The Meizl family also lived on the second floor, the mother survived the Holocaust, and Rózsika, in her twenties, died during deportation.
The Bánáti family lived on the third floor, the husband worked in the textile industry, and they also survived the war. On the same floor lived the Dános family, and they too survived somehow. I don't know how many there were in the family, or who survived, but I do know that their son Tamás defected to America. The owner lived on the fourth floor, we called him Uncle Bíró, I don't know his first name. After he died, Egon Lázár moved into the apartment, I think he was the finance director of the Opera or the Comedy Theater, so he was a relative. Otherwise the Sinkovics-Gombos couple also lived in the house for a while, with their children. I don't remember anyone else, but perhaps that's enough about the house.
As children, it was horrifying to see older wealthy men loafing around in the house, who were once someone (wholesalers, landlords, etc.), and who had discovered they had suddenly become stinking Jews.
In under a few weeks, the older children made up their own cheerful performance, which they performed in the stairwell as a charitable deed for the residents of the house.
The house was built around 1940. The house today has one extra floor compared to then. With the exception of the ground floor, the apartments were not particularly large: there were 3 apartments per floor. The house’s owner, Mór Kardos, also lived in the house, and in 1944 he was seriously ill. The tenants were mostly middle-class and intellectual, with the exception of a few wealthy individuals. Most of the tenants were forced to wear the yellow star.
When it was a yellow-star house, most of the apartments housed groups of relatives and acquaintances. Each family had one room. In many place, the apartment front door was picked out too. The number of residents who practiced the Jewish faith was smaller than the number of those who had converted to Christianity. There were more women than men, as the men were on forced labor service. The older children and younger adults spent the days together inside the apartments, the stairwell, but mostly in the large garden.
In order to keep themselves occupied, the younger residents held something like a cabaret, with musical numbers they had written themselves, which portrayed life in the house. Had it been preserved, it would be a document of the era. Tickets for the performance in the stairwell were sold at a discounted price to raise money for the Hungarian National Association to Assist Jews (OMZSA). Among the residents was the incredible pianist Ervin László, who later founded the Club of Budapest. Representing the authorities in the house was the concierge, Mrs. Henk, who “secured” and disciplined the residents with her Volksbundist son, who frequently visited.
From 1928 until nationalization, the house was owned by the Hungarian Trade Bank of Pest. Today there are no residents left who were here when it was a yellow-star house; the last was our mother, Mrs. Ervin Rojkó, née Erzsébet Jutkovics, who died in 2012. At the age of five, she was taken in November 1944 to the brick factory in Óbuda, and then to the Lichtenwörth camp in Austria, from where she came home at the end of April 1945, weakened and emaciated. She was so weak that she couldn’t make it to the family’s fifth-floor apartment. The lift had been out of order for a long time because of all the shooting. Our grandmother and our mother’s 15-year-old younger brother had spent the winter of 1944 in the ghetto, during which time the authorities moved refugees into the apartment. By the time our mother returned, our grandmother and uncle had returned to the run-down apartment, whose walls had also collapsed.
The concierge, Sándor Malischka, seated our mother, who was skeletally thin, in an armchair and carried her up to the fifth floor. It was from the same apartment that they had taken our grandfather, Albert Jutkovics, to Buchenwald, and he never came back. (Our grandfather had been producing false identity papers and baptism certificates at the neighboring Jutkovics zincographers at Sas Street 21 with his nephew - is there anyone who knows what kind of printing process this was?). Our mother thinks someone must have denounced him because they came looking for him personally in the yellow-star house, and took him away. At that point, the extended family was still together in the apartment: two adolescent cousins (Tibi and Karcsi Grünberg, who had escaped from Slovakia hiding in a hearse), our grandmother’s older sister and her family, her husband, Béla Braun, who ran a bicycle shop at Arany János Street 10, their son Jancsi who was around ten years old, and their daughter Ági who was expecting a baby from Péter Kallós, who had arrived in Hungary from Palestine with Hanna Szenes, as a British paratrooper.
Béla Braun had a serious heart condition, and could no longer make it down to the air-raid shelter. He died there in the apartment, and was taken to the Kozma Street cemetery, although his family were not allowed to accompany his body.
Middle-class families lived in the house in Lipótváros, mostly industrialists, artists and lawyers. Among them was István Thomán, the virtuoso pianist who taught at the Music Academy, who had taught Bartók and Dohnányi, and in whose apartment great musicians from all around the world gave recitals. The maestro died in 1940 at the age of 77, but his family and daughters lived in the house during the war. One of his daughters, Kati, married a Christian bank clerk, and their son Tamás Gallia also trained as a pianist. His hands were ruined by forced labor, and he later became a sound engineer and, after emigrating, a music publisher.
Among the house residents, we also knew Dr. Sára Nagy (née Schwarz), a physician, and we know that her 13-year-old daughter Kati was placed in a convent, but someone denounced the nuns, and the head of the convent and the children she had hidden were all shot at the Danube.
We also knew Mrs. Gyula Weisz, Auntie Maca, but this was her name by her second husband. We don’t know the name of her first husband who died in forced labor; their son Robi died in one of the death camps.
There was another family called Weisz who lived in the house during the war. Their son Tibi trained as a silversmith, and was in love with our mother. On her birthday, he ordered her flowers. By the time the flowers arrived in September 1944, Tibi had been shot into a grave he had to dig himself, at Balf.
Also in the house on the fifth floor was Mrs. István Ritscher, Böske, a tennis champion and her engineer husband. As far as we know, her husband died somewhere in forced labor, and she emigrated.
We must also mention Sándor Malischka and his wife Magda (whom we called Uncle Sanyi and Auntie Magdus), who did an enormous amount for the residents of the house. They safeguarded the valuables entrusted to them by the residents, and returned every last item to those coming back from the ghetto or camps, and would not accept a penny in return. More importantly, and for which they subsequently deserved the “Righteous Among the Nations” honorific, was that they took in the daughter of a young married Jewish couple called Forrai. The girl, Marika, was only a couple of months old, and they looked after her as if she was their own daughter right up until liberation, when her parents who had hidden “peacefully” came back for their baby.
On March 19, 1944, “the Germans arrived,” they occupied Hungary, and we had to wear the yellow star.
In the book about the history of the Goldberger factory, Dr. Ödön Geszler writes about what happened to the Goldberger management: on March 19, 1944, the Gestapo took Leó Goldberger away on the very first day, and arrested the factory’s management. For us, this was disastrous, because while they ran the factory, they supported my mother financially.
“On September 18, 1944, the factory suffered another massive bomb attack, which caused huge explosions, and there were no attempts to reconstruct the building. The airplanes were trying to bomb the railway bridge over the Danube, but fell on the area which contained the Goldberger factory, the Bulgarian nursery garden, and the bay of the winter port.” (p. 164)
When the family had to move into a yellow-star house, my mother and aunt “hid” their valuables in a big chest in one of the Goldberger factory’s storerooms. This is how their valuables (silver goods, jewelry, fur coats and other things in the chest, but I don’t know what they were) were destroyed in the bombing and subsequent fire. (Our father, György Kis, worked in the Goldberger factory in Kelenföld as a textile engineer, as did my older brother András Kollin, as well as my aunt’s brother, and this is how the chest ended up at the mill, which burned down.) One more sad thing: Leó Goldberger was taken to Mauthausen where, after 14 months’ imprisonment, he died on May 5, 1945.
[…]
The family moved into the apartment of Kati Hoffman (Pesti grandmother’s sister and daughter) and her husband Jenő Stern. The various documents show that they (in total 12 people) probably moved into a mezzanine-floor, three-room apartment at Károly Boulevard 26. There were certainly others there too, because I remember lots and lots of people. There were huge arguments and fights between the adults who shouted at one another, my mother lost her temper and suddenly became angry and outspoken.
I wrote the following in 2006 for a community portal, and couldn’t improve it today.
“What does an eight-year-old girl know? What does she observe, and what does she feel about those events and atmosphere of Sunday October 15, 1944? Perhaps only that on this day, heaven opened up around us (“Finally! It’s over, we’re saved …” said the adults, beaming), and then, around 6 pm, we slid down into hell. It was a beautiful sunny day, we were in the yellow-star house at Károly Boulevard 26, three families crammed into one apartment. They sent us children to Erzsébet Square for a walk. I kicked the fall leaves about. It was good weather for a walk, but we were wearing the yellow star. My brother was two-and-a-half years old, with shiny, curly blond hair, and was running about with the others wearing a blue velvet suit. A soldier was watching us (it turned out later he was a German officer), and asked the adults with us (not our mother, someone else), how it was possible for this beautiful blond boy to be wearing a yellow star. I understood, because I’d already been learning German for three years. I don’t know who answered, or what. I just enjoyed the sunshine, kicking the leaves, and some unspoken feeling of liberation. Towards evening it clouded over, the wind was blowing the leaves around in a frightening fashion, the ones I’d kicked around so happily in the morning. Everyone was outside on the corridor, down in the courtyard a man was shouting, but I didn’t understand him. They entered the apartments and forced the adults, including those in our apartment, to go downstairs to the ground floor. An older lady I hardly knew took my younger brother and me by the hand and put us into a taxi, but I don’t know how this happened. It turned out later that it was my father’s brother’s Christian wife, Auntie Irma, who saved us, and look us to an apartment on Hajós Street. I was scared and crying, but Auntie Irma firmly told me to stop crying right away, to teach my brother his new name, and to say we were refugees from Transylvania. She was shaking with fear that the neighbors would find out what was going on. Although she was shaking, she was a hero, but still shaking (like many Hungarians were). I just cried, and I can’t say how terrible I felt. Only this hopeless, terrible fear and loneliness remain as memories, and some sort of anger towards our mother. As if she, poor thing, were responsible for us being taken away.
So I had to teach Ádám that his name was Ádám Fehér. It wasn’t easy. I remember a kitchen opening on to the outside corridor, but nothing else, not even Auntie Irma, although we should never forget the name of Irma, Mrs. Ferenc Kis. My mother reappeared in early November, having miraculously escaped from the ship factory using a copied rescue letter in someone else’s name. (There were lots of miracles at the time, and we really needed them, because only miracles could save us, those who had finally escaped.) Then one day Auntie Irma took us to Pozsonyi Road 23, which I now know today was the international ghetto. Both there, and in the “Hungarian” ghetto, lots of miracles happened. But I never had such a feeling of being abandoned as I did then, when we reunited with my mother.
What fate would have awaited our mother, if a miracle had not occurred?
[…]
My mother spent three-four days in the camp. A few people were rescued from the camp. (According to Braham, Wallenberg, Carl Lutz, and two or three doctors struggled to bring out a few hundred people.)
My mother often told the story, especially when she wanted me to believe in miracles. This happened quite a lot. There were lots of queues when they inspected the rescue letters. Anika got hold of a copy of a woman’s rescue letter in the camp. She was at the back of the queue, which was moving slowly. The neighboring queue was moving much faster because a uniformed policewoman was inspecting the rescue letters. They then moved some people over to the end of the policewoman’s queue, and this was how my mother became 3rd or 4th in line in the policewoman’s queue. The policewoman examined the rescue letter, looked at my mother, then back at the letter, then at my mother again, who held her gaze. She knew that the description in the letter didn’t fit her at all, but forced herself to keep looking at the policewoman. And the policewoman let her go. This is how the story ended; as for how she returned from the brick factory to the city center, and how she found us, I don’t really know.
The owner of Király Street 54 was my grandfather, Emil Weisz, who lived with his family on the side facing the street, in a five-room second-floor apartment. At that time, the family consisted of Emil Weisz (aged 75), his wife (born Teréz Bielitz, aged 62), and their three grown-up children (Leonore, aged 29; Edith Marie, aged 28; and Franz Karl, aged 26).
The majority of the house residents were Jewish, who were obliged to wear the yellow star from April 5, 1944 (directive no. 1240/1944. M. E.). Like 2,680 other houses in Budapest, the house was classified as a “yellow-star house” according to the Budapest mayoral decree 523.928/1944. XXI. Residents who were classified as non-Jewish had to move out, and their places were taken by Jewish families forced out from other houses, as well as the re-annexed territories, primarily Transylvania. Four members of our family (the ageing parents and two daughters) had to squeeze into one room of our apartment, and the four remaining rooms were designated as residences for four other Jewish families, and all five families were to jointly use the kitchen and bathroom.
My mother, Edith, secured a place in the house where a Communist group led by Zoltán Schönherz could meet, most of whose members were Jewish anti-Fascists. The group met regularly in my grandparents’ apartment. The group failed: on July 6, 1942, Schönherz was arrested and tortured by the Horthy police interrogators, confronted with my mother and other group members, but Schönherz did not break or betray his colleagues. The VKF (staff leader) special court arrested all 13 members of the group, Schönherz was sentenced to death, and on October 9, he was executed in the courtyard of the Margit Boulevard penitentiary. My mother was sentenced to 8 months’ internment which she spent in Nagykanizsa (but that’s another story...).
The youngest son, Franz Karl, went to Switzerland before the war, where he studied chemical engineering at Zurich university. He escaped the war, and only spent a few months in a Swiss prison for anti-Fascist, left-wing activities. (In 1950, however, he was executed under a show trial, and later rehabilitated, but that’s another story ...).
On October 15, governor Miklós Horthy announced his proclamation on the radio: Hungary was attempting to leave the war. At first, people believed that the war was over in Hungary, but the two girls in our family (Lili and Edith) were afraid that the German occupiers would obstruct Hungary’s attempt to leave the war, and that even greater trouble was in store for people, especially the Jews. This is why they cut the yellow stars off their coats, and went out onto the street (which then counted as a capital offense), and went to Lili’s husband, László Virág, a dentist on forced labor service, at his surgery on Szervita Square, while the two elderly parents, Emil and Terus, remained in the apartment at Király Street 54. The two sisters’ concerns very quickly proved to be true, when the Germans helped Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross military putsch to take power. The two sisters hid every night in the dentist’s surgery at Szervita Square, which today is a parking garage. In exchange for the family’s jewelry, the concierge Mihály Tóth risked his life to give them food, but again this is another story ...
The concierge at Király Street 54 was Mrs. Hartmann, a German in a house mostly inhabited by Jews, and who was a committed Arrow Cross informer. She lived on the ground floor opposite the front gate and made a note of who arrived or left and when, who had visitors, and so on. My mother and her sister decided that they would help their parents escape from Király Street 54 which, given their age, the ban on Jews going out onto the street, and Mrs. Hartmann, was not straightforward. The sisters’ younger brother, Franz Karl, had a Budapest doctor friend who helped them to escape. One evening, an ambulance parked in front of the house, and nurses took my grandfather on a stretcher downstairs and into the ambulance, accompanied by my grandmother. Mrs. Hartmann rushed out onto the street and started shouting that they couldn’t take my grandfather away, since he wasn’t even ill, and in any case, Jews were under a curfew. But the ambulance doctor, who was also Jewish, was adamant. Mrs. Hartmann finally allowed them to take my grandfather “to hospital,” but would not agree to letting my grandmother accompany him. Finally the ambulance doctor said that “she’ll be back in the morning, she’s just accompanying him now.” The ambulance took my grandparents straight to Szervita Square where, by something like a miracle, they survived the Arrow Cross raids and were eventually liberated (but this is another eventful story...). When the Russian soldiers arrived in the basement and found the Jews hiding there, they took out a knife and cut the yellow stars from their coats, and gave food to my liberated relations.
Back to Király Street, during the Arrow Cross terror... After my grandparents’ departure, all the Jews in the house were driven into the courtyard and force-marched to some holding place (probably on Csepel island), where they were put onto wagons and taken to a German death camp. I’ve heard it said about the Ruttkai couple who lived in the ground-floor corner apartment, that because the ageing husband was ill, one of his legs wouldn’t support him and so he wasn’t taken into forced labor. When they drove the Jews into the courtyard and he couldn’t go with the others, the Arrow Cross beat him to death in front of the other residents with a rifle butt.
After the Liberation, a few Jews returned to the house, including my maternal grandparents who had come out of hiding. Because of the British and American carpet bombing, my grandparents had to renovate the house, and took out a loan for this from the state. After the house was renovated, but before nationalization, my grandfather managed to sell the house to an optimistic buyer at a very low price. Having paid back the state from the buying price, they had enough left over for two eiderdowns... this is how much the family property was sold for. My grandmother died in 1945, she didn’t want to live any more, and refused to take her medicine. My grandfather lived another five years, and died a few months after his son was executed, although luckily he did not know that his son was the victim of a show trial. The family only learned of this in 1956. Of the Jews who returned to the house, two were mentally disturbed, a man (Mr. Sugár on the second floor) and a woman (Piroska Garas on the third floor). The house managed to dodge the revolutionary period too, but again, that would be another story.
My grandparents lived in this house on the first floor, and I spent a lot of time there since my parents' apartment was close by on Hajós Street. My grandparents had a coffee house here at Emperor Vilmos Street 24, as it was called at the time, and which is now a branch of the OTP bank. It was from here that two of my uncles were taken away—the younger of whom had just turned 20—and they never returned. The rest of the family ended up in the ghetto.
Two families lived on the first floor, called László and Krémer. Someone in the Krémer family was a dentist and their surgery was in the house. After the war they continued to live there until the entire first floor was taken over by a company and everyone had to move out. Unfortunately I don't know how many died from these families, but someone must have survived, because I remember them living there when I was a small child.
My grandparents moved in the early 1910s to Sátoraljaújhely; earlier, they had been living in Munkács [now Mukacheve in Ukraine]. My grandfather Jakab (Jenő) Weiss was a shoemaker. My grandmother Hermina had ten children, of whom only eight survived to adulthood. She ran the household, with help: my mother was the eldest daughter and looked after her younger siblings. When they started to grow up, my mother Erzsébet moved up to Pest. At that point, her brothers Ödön and Miklós already had an apartment in Pest. Both of them had followed the path of their father, the shoemaker, or rather they became successful shoe traders. My mother arrived in the capital with the older little sisters, Irénke and Ilonka. The girls supported themselves by sewing. They lived on the ground floor, apartment no. 2, at Csáky (from 1956, Hegedűs Gyula) Street 15. The five siblings rented an apartment with a maid’s room, from Aunt Molnár. The apartment was furnished according to (petty) bourgeois taste. Even I remember this too, because the original items were still there when I was born, and we didn’t really buy any new furniture for ourselves until we moved in the late sixties. Even today I can still recall the nice statuettes, the painting in dark tones of a woman pulling on stockings by lamplight, and the wispy, pale yellow tablecloth on the round table with a square base. I do not know what happened to Aunt Molnár, but she too probably fell victim to the Holocaust. As a child, I didn’t ask her about this, but after the war, there was no more Aunt Molnár, and the apartment became the rented property of my mother and her siblings…
My maternal grandparents stayed at home with their youngest children (Tibi, Editke and Évike), and in the late spring of 1944, they were taken from Sátoraljaújhely to Germany, to “work in horticulture.” We learned this from a yellow postcard in my grandfather’s handwriting, which has since been lost. The rest: silence…
Of the siblings in Pest, the boys were snatched away into forced labor service, from where they returned, after the war, more or less in one piece. On December 26, 1944, the three girls were transported in cattle wagons to Bergen-Belsen. Their fate was not substantially different from that of the others: lice, cold, cattle-turnip soup. They were able to stay together in the camp until the end, although my mother did not like to talk about what they lived through. I only remember that she mentioned Russian Jewish ladies, who were very aggressive and resourceful.
After the liberation of the camp my mother, who weighed 28 kilos, attempted to come home with her younger sisters. On the way, Soviet soldiers tried to rape them, but without success. In his fury, one of the soldiers shot three bullets at the girls. Irénke was hit in the heart by the cartridge, and she died instantly. Ilonka was shot in the stomach, and my mother in the ankle, and that foot remained thinner for the rest of her life. But the two of them survived, received medial attention, and in the summer, reached Csáky/Hegedűs Gyula Street. The two boys soon returned home from forced labor service. And so the four siblings, plus Bandi, a cousin who was also a survivor, and whom everyone called Tapsi because of his protruding ears, could be together again.
Ilonka did not want to live in Hungary any more. She married a boy she’d known for six weeks, Laci Braun, and under hazardous circumstances, via Belgium and Cyprus, they reached the promised land by boat. Having been an atheist earlier, Ilona now became a deeply religious person, and lived a happy life in her new homeland with her family and son. Tapsi also left for Palestine. He became a sailor and had a family. He died relatively young in a maritime accident.
Of the two sons who remained here, Miklós lived in Budapest. The other brother, Ödön, set up a shoe business, also in Pest. He was a militant Communist, a member of the “Vándor” choir. When his company was nationalized and he was excluded from the Party, he’d had enough. Disillusioned and horrified, he left the country with his family in 1956. He settled in London and opened a shoe shop. His daughter married a German man, which appalled him so much, he cut off all relations with her.
And so the Csáky [Hegedűs Gyula] Street apartment became ours. My parents married in the Csáky Street synagogue in 1947. My mother was not religious but felt that, in memory of her parents, a religious wedding was appropriate. My father was also a convinced atheist, but was obliged to agree to the religious ceremony. We lived in the house until 1968 when, after my parents’ divorce, I moved into a smaller apartment with my mother.
I didn’t like the Hegedűs Gyula Street apartment because it was cold, and didn’t get any light whatsoever, only reflected light on occasion. But the community in the house was very cohesive, I remember lots of the old residents. To mention a few: the Szántó family, who always gave us must during grape harvest time; the Rácz family, whose children were always hungry, and when they came over to our apartment, they went straight to the bread bin. I tried to teach one of the older Rácz children how to read and count. The Tróber family also lived there, who sometimes gave me beautiful, textile-covered postcards as presents. And then the Lévai family, whose children only washed—a slight exaggeration—when my father projected filmstrips onto a stretched-out bed-sheet, because the entrance fee was clean neck and ears. The Rappaport family took me with them to the Margit Island company beach, or the Lauder family, where the adults went to wage ferocious card battles. The latter were the first in the house to have a refrigerator. Once I pilfered a melon from their fridge on the way home, and it turned out later that it wasn’t our melon. Then there was the Nádas family, whose daughter Jutka got married and for a while after, parcels from their London relatives arrived in their name; in the 1960s, parcels arrived from the West without customs duties.
A few more names from the old residents, in a list: Ibi Réti and Dezső, Uncle Falvi, Zsuzsi Kertész, Juliska Wolf, Ági Vajda, Ági Wiener, the Néderman family. János Szabó (a gentleman’s tailor), the Eszes family (the Schwarz girls), the Szőke family, the Szépe family, the Bugyi family (later Beleznai), the Oláh, Újvári, Tancsa, Bana, and Romhányi families too.
I must also mention one person separately: Laura Diamant, or Auntie Laura, who practically became my grandmother. My maternal grandparents had been killed in Auschwitz, my paternal grandmother was shot into the Danube, and although my grandfather later had a partner, I didn’t accept her as my grandmother. And so Auntie Laura became my grandmother; she was a skinny, lonely typist. By the time I met her, she was retired, and looked after children now and again. She was a spinster, and she kept a photo of a Red Army soldier, which she once showed me, blushing… She held great domino games at hers, and the first prize was always a liquor glass of raspberry syrup. You could also get “Füles,” “Ludas Matyi,” and “Film, Theatre, Music” magazines from her too. On Saturdays, we made real kosher sholet bean stew. She received the food from the Joint kitchen, but was sick to death of sholet, while I just adored it. In 1969, she went into hospital. With a bunch of flowers in hand, I was just setting off to visit here when the telephone rang: it was too late. Her parrot always sang: “I am Gyurika Diamant, I live Hegedűs Gyula…” But what happened to him, I don’t know.
After we moved, I didn’t visit the house again, but now I’m happy and excited to return. My childhood friend, Tibi, has just moved back there, into the apartment of his late parents. Together we’ll remember the old times, his grandmother standing on the corridor in her blue printed cloth, his asthmatic coughing grandfather, his mother who became a painter in her old age, and last but not least, the tremors of 1956, which were great adventures for us. When I recall my childhood memories, I always say: “when we still lived at home.” Often, people snort: “Why, don’t you live at home now?”
When I was a child and “star-houses” were discussed in the family, at first I thought of something really distinguished, because if something has a star on it, it must be lovely.
With my siblings’ approval, I’m sharing here what was described by our mother, Piroska Fischer, to her grandchildren, about life in the summer and early fall of 1944 in Dembinszky Street 48.
Earlier, my mother had lived in Damjanich Street in a three-room apartment, which they were forced to leave in June 1944. The four of them were moved into a room facing the courtyard in the yellow-star house at Dembinszky 48: my mother, who was 22 at the time, her parents, and maternal grandmother. Of their belongings, they only managed to take with them the parents’ bed and wardrobe, another bed and a mattress for the grandmother, which was placed on the floor for want of anything better. There was also a middle-aged married couple of teachers in one room of the apartment, and in another room, a German family who had Hungarian citizenship: three women (grandmother, the mother and an aunt), and two sons, aged 11 and 15. This forced cohabitation turned out to be a great stroke of luck, as everyone got on very well. They conjured up lunch together out of everyone’s meager rations. The middle-aged couple survived, together with Aunt Józsa and her descendants, and our families have remained friends until this day.
What was life like in a yellow-star house? Residents could leave the house between a fixed time in the morning, maybe 9, until five in the afternoon. Our mother recalled that there were some things Jews were not allowed to buy. At 5 p.m., the front gate was shut and nobody could go in or out. Four years had passed since my mother graduated from high school with top marks, but because of the numerus clausus [restriction on the number of Jews at university], she couldn’t continue her studies. She learned how to sew undergarments and tried to earn some money this way, taking on repairs to support the family, but because they weren’t allowed to move about freely, this became harder and harder. The family shopped from their paltry reserves and sometimes sold items, for instance, they got a relatively good price for the typewriter. They led a humble existence.
There was an enormous number of people living in the yellow-star house. Lots of children and older people. The residents only saw just how many people were living there when there was an air raid, and everyone had to go down into the basement. In situations like these, people don’t behave like they normally would, but my mother remembers that there were also lots of people there who preserved their dignity.
One day it was announced that they had to take in pupils from the Jewish orphans’ home on the neighboring avenue, because for some reason it had no working kitchen. The very next day, every family received an orphan and gave them a warm welcome, doing their best to give them a good lunch. They were very nice to them and the children were also very friendly. In the boiling hot summer, all the orphan boys and girls were wearing thick baize clothes. Seeing this, the girls and young women in the house made up garments and summer clothing out of their own clothes, for the children. They took great care of the children they took in.
Everyone was pleased when forced laborers came to visit. The laborers were already in great danger, and everyone was afraid that they’d be taken to Ukraine, Serbia or a warzone. The front was moving closer and closer, and everyone in the house knew of the Normandy landings. Of course, they hadn’t had radios for a long time, because every Jewish family had had to hand these in much earlier. And then there were the terrible bombings that had already reached Pest. But they hoped that things would somehow turn out okay.
After Horthy’s proclamation in October and the Arrow Cross took over, that was when the destruction of Budapest Jews began. Everyone had to move into the central ghetto, but there were also other places outside the ghetto, different schools and offices where people were moved into, including the offices of the Bureau for the Protection of the Rights of the Jews of Hungary. In the end, everyone they found was taken to the ghetto. Our father, Dezső Gold, who was already engaged to our mother, arrived back in Pest from forced labor service in Transylvania on October 16, and never went back. Everyone else from his group was deported. He acquired what was called a Schutzpass protective passport, which could be issued by name, and was filled out for the family.
Meanwhile, in early October, our grandfather had a punctured stomach from all the stress, and had to be taken into hospital. The oldest boy from the family living with them accompanied him to the hospital. There was a Jewish hospital on Wesselényi Street; today, the building houses a Jewish foundation’s school. They sewed his stomach up there and quickly sent him home. This was when the decree came on October 20 that called up all men under the age of 60 who were not soldiers or forced laborers. This was when they took away our fellow resident, the teacher. A policeman came for our grandfather, but because of his recent stomach operation, he couldn’t get out of bed. Three days later all women under the age of 50 were also called up, including our mother. Our grandmother, who had just turned 50, accompanied her to the front gate and, without crying, watched as her only daughter was taken away. They were assembled together at the KISOK sports field where the terminus of the underground line is today at Mexikói Road. From there, they were force marched under armed Arrow Cross guard towards Pécel, east of Budapest. They slept in all sorts of barns, in the forest, and sometimes rested after digging anti-tank traps and trenches. They could take food with them from home, and were later given bread; our mother told us the bread was thrown at them. She was lucky to be able to stay with the women she knew from the yellow-star house. Later, as the front moved closer, they were marched back once again to Pest, and from Pest over to Budafok. Meanwhile there was an air raid, and one of the policemen reassured them by saying, “don’t worry girls, Uncle Joe (Stalin) won’t shoot you from the plane.”