So they employed my father at the Jewish community with a modest salary. He became one of the leaders of this action. He gave up canvassing, because the two things weren’t compatible.
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Istvan Domonkos
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From 1942 I was in the forced labor camp, and the first thing I did was that I got in touch with my father through letters, telling him what we needed. And we made this regular, so in my company we formed a Care Committee. There was such a thing at other places, too, but ours was so official that we had a stamp made ‘Care Committee 12/3.’ In the beginning I was the president of this. Later on I handed it over to another boy. The point is that we sent an application, which was sealed and signed by the commander, to the Committee of Ex-Servicemen of the Jewish community, and then after a while we got what we had asked for.
From then on my father was at the Jewish community throughout, only they changed his function time by time. After 19th March 1944 [21] they immediately put him into a position where he had to make use of his command of German in the communication with the German authorities, and he could hold his ground especially in economical and technical matters. Namely on 19th March 1944 these hordes came in, and the first thing they did was that they collected all the Jewish fortune they could. But this wasn’t enough, they also raised a demand.
My father had an office on Sip Street where he worked as the administrator of the Jewish Council. Then, when they decreed the setting up of the ghetto, he was the security officer of the ghetto, too. Because in the ghetto there was a ghetto police made up of Jews. There were many things to do. It was a small country that had to be organized. There were districts, medical offices, and institutional food. They had to organize some kind of administration. They appointed leaders for every block or part, possibly intelligent men, teachers or someone like that, whose task was to draw up a list of names. They had to provide medical care, so that a doctor would get everywhere as fast as possible.
As a matter of fact my father was like a mayor. The Jewish Council could be compared to the general assembly, which takes decisions, which the secretary general, who can be compared to the mayor, enforces. My father was an engineer, and he was knowledgeable about public health, administration and security issues, so they could safely rely on him.
In the meantime, we saved my sister, too. When they put my mother on the barge, which sank, they assigned my sister to a death march, and sent them off to the West. This was already at the beginning of the cruelest Szalasi regime. Somehow my father managed to find out that the death march stopped in Borgondpuszta for a while. [Borgondpuszta is on the outskirts of Szekesfehervar.] My father had a couple of skillful men, and one of them, he was also a Jew, had very good contacts with the police from before. This young man was called Ronai.
My sister was in an awful shape, famished and lethargic. Ronai took her into the ghetto. What could we do with her? My father and I took her in the middle, I was also wearing a military uniform as a simple soldier, and we walked out the ghetto with her. We had an apartment on Katona Jozsef Street, which we had got from the Swedish embassy, and we took her there. We handed her over to my stepmother, who fed her with bean soup. My stepmother wasn’t in the ghetto; she was in the protected house [31].
My father got married for the first time right after World War I. When the front folded up at Piave, in Italy in 1918, my father managed to escape from being taken as a prisoner. He came home and married my mother, Gabriella Rozsa, immediately.
By that time the marriage had gotten bad, and they divorced. I sometimes heard my father saying that my grandmother always set the heather on fire between him and the young woman. That’s why their marriage might have got ruined.
I remember that he was called in several times. In 1935 he obtained his captaincy from Miklos Horthy. So by the time anti-Semitism broke out he was relieved of all kinds of measures, because he had such prestigious decorations, and had this promotion from Horthy. So he was on the list, which was called Horthy exemption [3] at that time. But this didn’t apply to his children. So regardless of that we had to go in for forced labor.
After they divorced, my mother worked at the factory owned by the family, she did the paperwork.
My sister Anna worked at some paper factory, where she glued bags or did some kind of primitive work like this. She was there until in 1944 they started to gather the Jewish women from Budapest, too [5]. Then she was deported together with my mother. But maybe it was her luck that they were separated. As far as I know my mother wasn’t appointed to the death march [6], but she was put on a barge, which was going to take them up the Danube. Allegedly this barge sank. I don’t know whether that was on purpose or it was hit. All the women on it perished.
When they got married my stepmother still had some assets, she had an apartment house on O Street. Most likely it was her who put an ad in the paper, and that attracted the attention of my father, they got to know each other, and my father saw her wealth. The first story of the house on O Street was my stepmother’s, she rented out the rest. This was a four or five-bedroom apartment with beautiful chandeliers. I remember the chandeliers, because my father took the two of us by the hand to introduce us to our mother-to-be, to see what her opinion was. We had to be very orderly.
At that time my father hadn’t gotten another commission from the Caterpillar company, but he worked at an oil trader company as an engineer, for quite a small salary.
My grandmother already raised him alone at that time; I don’t know what they lived off. I know that they lived among moderate means, and that my grandmother managed a kosher household. She was religious, too. My father wasn’t religious at all.
I found a Christian company called Galambos, I worked there until October 1942. I got along very well with Galambos, too. That was a different world, because I had to work in Buda and its environs. He could give me work during the winter, too, probably because he had better connections. There were a couple buildings in course of construction, some villas in the Buda Mountains, which I remember because at that time I rode a bicycle. All the wires were hung on the side, and at the back there were the tools. Up on Budakeszi Street I pushed the bicycle, and on the way back I didn’t even need to pedal, I just flew along. At that time there weren’t many cars, and there weren’t any buses at all.
Then, in October 1942 I had to go in for forced labor. First they took me to Bereck [today Romania], it is in Transylvania [37], in Haromszek county, near Sepsiszentgyorgy [today Romania] and Kezdivasarhely [today Romania], close to the Ojtoz defile [today Romania].
,
1942
See text in interview
This was a very good deal, because among the Jewish families in Sepsiszentgyorgy I found myself a suitable place. There were even one or two girls I could court. Then they were deported, too. This job was also important for me, because there was a typewriter there, and I liked to type my letters. I had learned to typewrite at home, we always had a typewriter at home.
Our first job was to clean the sewer of that huge territory. There was quite a strict military order, we couldn’t really move around, and they didn’t like us very much either. The thing is, that in the first days of April, perhaps on the 5th was the first big air-attack on Budapest.
The order was that in case of an air-attack Jews should hide wherever they could. The real air-raid shelters could only be used by the soldiers and the officers. There was a huge hall, in which a sawing-machine functioned, and the best shelter for soldiers was under its concrete base. A couple days passed and other air-attacks came, and we squat in that lousy trench and we survived.
We had to work very hard, and once the liberators appeared. They knew very well that the new factory, which was very close to the Danube, was there, and they started to bomb it. There wasn’t any shelter, everyone hid wherever he could. I discovered a monitor on the river bank, and I always hid in that. I even hid my food supply there. At that time the alimentation was very bad, and my friend Miklos Hajdu smuggled in sausage and bacon for me.
I met my future wife, Katalin Schwartz here. She was from Miskolc and she ran away from the ghetto in Miskolc with young Zionists. She went through many things, she ran away several times. For the last time she hid at the Technological University with Zionist kids. It was in the summer, it might have been July or August. There was a very nice assistant and he made room for them in the attic. There weren’t many of them, there were five to ten young people, and they hid there. But the darkness, the deprivation, and the fact of being locked up was very nerve-wrecking, and she ran away from there.
At that time she still had some fake papers; she got hold of a room and lived there under the name of Maria Toth. The police was looking for a child kidnapper with the same name. She was registered, and the policemen thought that it was her. Luckily she wasn’t at home when the detectives went there, and her resettler, who suspected who she was, waited for her at the entrance and warned her that the cops were there. So she cleared off from there only with the clothes she had on her. An elderly cook, Uncle Zoli Strausz, saw her browsing about, took her in and gave her room in a closet. Since there weren’t other young people there, it was my task to take care of her a little bit.
I mainly did physical labor, I had to pick up sacks, take them into the warehouse, take them home. The heaviest bag of flour weighed around 80 kilos, which I could carry at that time. But it also happened that I accompanied my father to meetings at the city hall, or I got a special task.
My father was on good terms with Wallenberg, so the entire family got a Schutzpass [32].
In one of the houses on Katona Jozsef Street, which was under the protection of the Swedish Embassy, there was a sign on the entrance; my father got an apartment, too. This was before the Arrow Cross times. Immediately next to it and above it lived the leaders of the Jewish Council. This meant that they didn’t have to go to a yellow star house. As far as I remember, this was a regular two-bedroom apartment where only my father, my stepmother, and later my sister Anna and I lived. We even managed to take furniture there from the old apartment on Lovolde Square. We had special alimentation, too. The Stocklers had Swedish connections that brought good quality food from the cannery. I explicitly remember when a man gave us big tin cans.
After the liberation my father remained at the Jewish community and he became the secretary general of the Jewish community. The general assembly elected him correctly.
In 1950 my father retired. He got a nice dismissal wage, he bought this house in Rakospalota from that. This is a three-bedroom apartment with a hall, a big kitchen, a big pantry, and two bathrooms. There is an attic story, too, there is a bathroom there, too, and a small room. The house has 90 square meters; the plot is 100 square feet.
Despite of this on 7th April 1953, so after Stalin’s death, the AVO [36] caught him. They kept him in for more than half a year, and on 13th November 1953 they took him to the Istvan Hospital. When they took him, he was a well-built man, weighing some 100 kilograms, and they took him to the hospital a wreck of 45 kilograms. They took him to the hospital during the night, and they didn’t want to tell them who it was. When the physician in attendance told them that he would not take him over, they phoned their headquarters, and finally they told him his name. But they interdicted them to notify the family, and they called us on the next morning from the AVO.
Pal Szalai was taken to the AVO in the summer of 1952 from in front of his house. With all kinds of tortures they made him confess that he had seen that the Jewish leaders, Miksa Domonkos among them, killed Raul Wallenberg for his money. When they had this confession they arrested the Jewish leaders, Stockler, too, who came out just as miserable. This happened after Stalin’s death, so it didn’t have to do anything with the Zionist matters which had been stopped in the meantime. It turned out that this wasn’t a Hungarian initiative, but a Russian crew was controlling the entire action. They could not account for Wallenberg towards the West, and they devised to blame it on the Jews.