My parents’ relationship to religion didn’t change after 1945 either. My father went to the synagogue on the High Holidays and at maskir, in the later years to a prayer house near-by. On the Day of Atonement he fasted even in those years when he worked at the ministry. Observing Sabbath wasn’t a topic. He clung to Jewish religion in some conservative, formal way. My friend and I once had a Christmas tree, or as it was officially called at that time, a pine-tree, of course not in any relation with religion, only because of its beauty, the atmosphere. My father didn’t talk with me for a week after that.
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Displaying 22321 - 22350 of 50826 results
Erika Izsak
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My father didn’t have a professional space to expand. We didn’t go back, we remained in the apartment on Nagymezo Street. He dealt with sowing seed foreign trade for a while, and from 1951 he worked at the Ministry of Agriculture, from where he retired.
The three of us, along with my mother’s sister, got into the march of those who were supposed to be deported. From Nagymezo Street we immediately turned, to O Street, as far as I remember, and we marched towards what was Vilmos Csaszar Street then, either on that street or maybe on another, parallel street. I only remember that I felt very humiliated, and I was very much ashamed of being driven along the street this way. It occurred during the eight-day march that they spit on us, but also that they threw apples and fresh loaves of bread from the windows. When we were marching in Magyarovar, someone shouted our name from the side of the road. Some from the HICAA shouted, my father’s students. They were forced laborers there; they were looking to see if there was anyone they knew in the march, even the evening before. They gave us bread, a lot of bacon and lard.
After a while my aunt [Klara Biro, nee Torok] completely lost her power, not only physically, but also her power of will. Her organism couldn’t fight one of the contagious diseases, dysentery, and she died of it. My mother had a completely different temper, she couldn’t imagine that we wouldn’t get home: ‘we must, because Grandma, and especially Dad is waiting for us. We would get a beating from him, if we didn’t go home…’ She probably managed to fight off petechial typhus and the very high temperature she had and which lasted for several days, partly because of this. For me the most difficult to endure physically was the latrine, and the lice. We could prevent our head from becoming lousy, there was a hairdresser in the Lager [German for camp], who took on cutting our hair off for two to three day’s bread portion. But it was impossible to rid our clothes from them.
In the second half of December they took us by train to the Austrian Lichtenwörth, which wasn’t far from the border. We were in the halls of a former textile factory, about 3000 of us, our place was on the straw put on the floor, tightly next to each other. We didn’t even see tables or chairs for about three and a half months. At first we went to dig trenches there, too, a couple times; on the way we picked cattle-turnip and hips at least, this provided our vitamin supply for a while. We got very little food: thin soup, sticky bread, small, frozen potatoes, but I don’t remember being hungry, I rather remember that we listed what we were going to eat at home, swallowing hard. For example I wanted salami and poppy seed roll, not sliced, but biting the bar…. Not hunger was the problem, but extenuation.
In the fall of 1945 they admitted me to the Communist Party as a person younger than 18, with special permission.
Since I walked down Andrassy Avenue, the first place on my way was the shoe store. As I expected, the old shoemaker, the new owner was there. I found out from him that my grandmother had died and that my father was at home!
The Soviet troops arrived on 2nd April 1945. I fell ill of typhus at that time, so we remained in the camp for a couple more days in order for me to get stronger, and then we set off towards home. On the first evening the two of us sat in front of the fence of a country courtyard, an old woman came out of the house, she showed us inside, she barely said anything, she washed us in a place, which looked like a shed, in a big cauldron of warm water and with soap, she gave us warm soup, and in the end we could lay in a bed, in clean and fresh bedding…On the next day we got breakfast. I am still ashamed that I didn’t ask her name and address. We walked on foot for more than a week on Austrian territory. Where we asked, they mostly accommodated us for the night, they gave us food, and we also slept in vacated houses, from where the inhabitants had run away, but left food behind.
My father was deported to Fertorakos at the beginning of the winter of 1944, and his forced labor formation was soon taken to Austria. A couple of his toes froze, and he arranged it somehow to not have to go any farther because of that. Almost everyone from his company perished.
,
1944
See text in interview
From the fall of 1939 I went to high school, to the Girls’ High School of the Pest Jewish Community, namely to the Jewish High School. I was very anxious to see if they would enroll me, because they had way too many applications already. That was the first year when they didn’t accept Jews in public high schools [Editor’s note: The numerus clausus [15] affected the newly enrolled, the Jewish students in higher classes could remain in their school.].
The closest school, the Maglodi Street elementary school, was right at the tram station. As a 1st grader I was a private student in the Bezeredi Street elementary school, where one of the 1st grade teachers was a relative: she was the wife of one of my father’s cousins. In the 2nd and 3rd grade I went to Maglodi Street, with pleasure in fact, though the environment was quite strange for me. The manager of the HICAA had a daughter of my age, she only lived at the grounds for a little while, back then we spent a lot of time together, of course. As far as I remember there wasn’t anyone Jewish in our class besides us, a Jewish girl only got there towards the end of the 3rd grade, and there were only a few of us in the entire school. There was a separate religion class for us, but not only for us, but also for the few others, who were of ‘different religion,’ namely the ones who weren’t Roman Catholic. I never experienced that they would have looked at me differently because I was Jewish.
Even though I lived in a Jewish institute and went to a Jewish high school, I barely had any Jewish identity, and religion didn’t really touch me emotionally. The Saturday morning service was compulsory at high school, but only for those, of course, who lived close and could walk there. In the five years I attended it only once, one Friday when I slept at my aunt’s, so that I could see the synagogue, which was famous for its beauty. There was a small prayer house on the HICAA grounds; there was a Friday evening prayer there every week for the students. A rabbi came only for the High Holidays, there was a worship service, which lasted all day on those occasions. My mother and I were also there.
Because of this my parents could very rarely go to the theater, to the opera, even though they would have liked to go, and they couldn’t make any programs for the evenings, because my father had to be at home and had to get up at dawn. He respected the other regulations related to his job rigorously. He also got several kinds of payment in kind as part of his salary, such as potatoes, vegetables and poultry feed, to his ‘own household.’ In the summer some of the relatives often spent a week at our place. At these times my father always paid an amount of money to the pay-office of the HICAA, because the food for relatives didn’t count as our ‘own household.
The most important though were the books, starting with the small, folding picture-books. I got books from my parents and the relatives for every occasion: my birthday, the Jewish New Year, Christian Easter, from Santa Claus and at Chanukkah.
Her main occupation though was little me: absolutely until I went to school, and still quite intensively until I turned ten, but I became independent as a high school student. I didn’t go to nursery school, of course, I very rarely met other children until the age of six.
My mother partly continued her activities from her maidenhood: she read a lot, clipped and organized the more interesting articles from the newspapers according to their genre and topic: fiction, short stories, criminal reports… She gathered these in a huge case in the hall, made for this purpose. She multiplied her cactus collection: the shelves and baskets on the veranda were full with pots of them. She sometimes played the piano, and sometimes embroidered: Goblin tapestry, pillows, later she knitted me pullovers, shawls. And she wrote a diary. Several pages every day. Hardly anything happened to her, but she lived that little so intensively that she had enough to write down.
Since my father, Karoly Izsak, was the chief gardener of the HICAA, his wedding was a big event in the Jewish community. They held it in January 1928, at the Dohany Street Synagogue [13], Dr. Simon Hevesi, the chief rabbi, the honorary president of the HICAA, led the ceremony and many leaders from the Jewish community attended the wedding.
Her uncle and aunt didn’t have any children, but they had several elegant shoe stores. That’s where Jeanette learned the shoe merchant trade. This was really a trade at that time. Grandma, even when she was old, knew exactly the different kinds of leather for shoes, the heel shapes, she could take measure for the shoes made on order. So she lived in Vienna until the age of 30 to 31, and then she came home to get married.
My grandfather was originally called David Turteltaub and he learned to become a shoe merchant in Nagyvarad [today Oradea, Romania]. He magyarized his name to Torok already as a young man, and from the time he got married he used the name Dezso instead of David. He probably changed his name because he wanted to open a shoe store and wanted to live as a ‘Pest citizen,’ which he managed in the end.
The Torok girls socialized, went to dancing school, on excursions, to the theater, and especially to the cinema: to the Palace across the road from the apartment and to the Apollo on Erzsebet Boulevard. My mother liked to stay at home the most, aside from going to the cinema. She solved crossword puzzles, arranged her postcard, bill and other collections, read, though quite superficially, many things, from Greek mythology to German-language Goethe, from art history to thrillers, which were hidden in her father’s drawer. And she wrote: a diary, notes about her readings, stories and letters to her child to be. The first one at the age of 13, then regularly, but unfortunately rarely. Although it is still good to read them.
After the four classes of elementary school he attended the Tavaszmezo Street high school. In the 4th grade some trouble happened: he talked back to the geography teacher impolitely because of some presumed injustice and he was expelled from that high school because of this. I couldn’t make him or his siblings tell me the exact reason. Considering the fact that I knew my father as someone who respected authority way too much, sometimes was even almost servile, I especially liked this story.
My father was terribly – and I mean, terribly – conscientious, orderly and dutiful. The most important for him was the family, but in everyday life work and duty came before everything else. Our house was in the center of the colony, and about 50 meters from there, in a bigger building there was the chief gardener’s office. My father went there early in the morning, even before 7am in the summer; he started the daily work, and came to eat breakfast at around half past 8 or 9. My mother always ate breakfast with him, and I did, too, before I started school and, later, when I wasn’t at school.
Dezso Torok was a more cheerful person, he took things less seriously. He liked company. He regularly went to the Circle, they only referred to it this way in the family, perhaps its real name was Erzsebetvaros Circle, and they regularly met in a cafe – or perhaps in a club – to play cards and to talk. My grandfather liked thrillers and science fiction stories, he told stories about devilish and friendly ghosts to his daughters and decades later to his grandchildren. Grandma’s rare and serious tales were about ‘real’ countesses.
Aunt Hermina moved soon, but she often came to our place for shorter or longer periods of time, and she taught me to pray already when I was small, she showed me the nice prayer books. My mother often reminded me of the fact that to the question ‘what do you want to do when you grow up?’, I always said I wanted to become ‘religious,’ stressing the word because I liked the way it sounded. My mother grew alarmed. She thought that I could decide if I wanted to be religious – though she hoped I wouldn’t want to be – when I grew up, but I shouldn’t be influenced by the bigot aunt. From then on Aunt Hermina came much more rarely to our place.
In everyday life, in culture, Jewry meant very little in the Torok family. But it never occurred to anyone, as far as I know, in the extended family neither, at home or abroad, to convert. They weren’t kosher, they didn’t observe Sabbath, they perhaps observed Pesach – Dezso liked matzah coffee – and the High Holidays [Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot]. On these days the shop was closed, and they fasted on Yom Kippur, Grandma fasted even in her old age, against the doctor’s advice, almost all day.
My group of friends, my direct ‘private milieu’ was mixed. Jews and Christians, but those, who didn’t believe in ‘either god.’ I never got married, those who were my partners for longer or shorter periods were Christian. This way I could see Jewry, as a group of people from the outside, too, as a philosophical and ethical system, as culture, as individual character. Generally speaking: my Jewish identity became stronger through my non-Jewish friends.
At that time I didn’t really argue, I rather wrote. I became the contributor of the central newspaper of the Hungarian Democratic Youth Association, the Ifjusag [Youth]; this is how my career as a journalist began. In the fall of 1947 I was a trainee at the Szabad Nep [Free Nation], the central newspaper of the Communist Party, then I edited the paper of the Chemist Union. From the fall of 1948 I worked at the Hungarian News Agency, at the beginning of 1953 already as a copy editor.
Viola Rozalia Fischerova
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After the war, my brother Juraj and I settled in Prague. Before the war we spoke Hungarian, and so our parents had named him Gyula, familiarly Gyuszika. In Czech he changed his name to Jiri, and in Slovakia they called him Juraj. After the war both of us wanted to study. I applied for medicine, and got in, too, but fell ill. At that time Joint [19] was working. We were getting a terribly small amount of support. They didn’t even put us up in a dormitory, we had to rent from someone. One support payment went right for rent, and we hadn’t even eaten yet. It was necessary to decide who’d study, I or my brother. We decided for my brother. I said to myself that I’d get married. My future husband, Juraj Fischer, was already courting me. So I got married. We supported my brother, and he also graduated.
My husband, Juraj Fischer, was from Lucenec, from a prominent Jewish family. They owned a wholesale business that sold steel, paints, stoves and gasoline. His parents were named Gyula Fischer and Sara Fischer, née Sacher. Sara died very young, when my husband was still a small child. My husband had another two brothers; Zigmund [Zsigmond] and Juraj [Gyula]. One of the brothers, who was a lawyer, had his little daughter die on him. He lost his mind as a result. He used to go to her grave every Sunday. Once the Nyilasites caught him. They said to him that they were going to take him in. He answered them: ‘Don’t take me in yet, I don’t have an umbrella! I’ll go home for an umbrella, and I’ll return, on my honor.’ He returned.
My husband left the country as a nineteen-year-old when the persecution of Jews [20] was just beginning. In later years, he gave only one longer interview, in 2004, to the weekly Domino forum [a weekly Slovak magazine featuring political and social issues]. In it he described his life story. The story of the escape of a Jewish boy at the start of the war from his hometown of Lucenec, the story of a journey filled with hardships through the Balkans and the Middle East to France, where he took part in Operation Dynamo by the French harbor town of Dunkerque [21]. From there he went to England, where he joined the Czechoslovak Army. After the landing at Normandy, on 6th June 1944 he took part in Operation Overlord. [Operation Overlord: the name of the landing in Normandy on 6th June 1944. It was one of the largest military operations of World War II.
My husband, Juraj Fischer, was from Lucenec, from a prominent Jewish family. They owned a wholesale business that sold steel, paints, stoves and gasoline. His parents were named Gyula Fischer and Sara Fischer, née Sacher. Sara died very young, when my husband was still a small child. My husband had another two brothers; Zigmund [Zsigmond] and Juraj [Gyula]. One of the brothers, who was a lawyer, had his little daughter die on him. He lost his mind as a result. He used to go to her grave every Sunday. Once the Nyilasites caught him. They said to him that they were going to take him in. He answered them: ‘Don’t take me in yet, I don’t have an umbrella! I’ll go home for an umbrella, and I’ll return, on my honor.’ He returned.
My husband left the country as a nineteen-year-old when the persecution of Jews [20] was just beginning. In later years, he gave only one longer interview, in 2004, to the weekly Domino forum [a weekly Slovak magazine featuring political and social issues]. In it he described his life story. The story of the escape of a Jewish boy at the start of the war from his hometown of Lucenec, the story of a journey filled with hardships through the Balkans and the Middle East to France, where he took part in Operation Dynamo by the French harbor town of Dunkerque [21]. From there he went to England, where he joined the Czechoslovak Army. After the landing at Normandy, on 6th June 1944 he took part in Operation Overlord. [Operation Overlord: the name of the landing in Normandy on 6th June 1944. It was one of the largest military operations of World War II.
Slovakia
During the war we were at home until 1944. In 1944 the deportations began [17]. In Lucenec they created a ghetto; they allocated several streets for it. They kept us there for a certain time. Then they deported us to Auschwitz. That’s how my story began. I got off the wagon, and right away there was a selection. The left side was the side of death, and the other side was the side of life. During the selection I stayed by my mother’s side. But they sent my mother to the side of death. They pushed her so hard that she fell down. She went to the side of death, and I to the side of life. It was a horrible life I had. I can’t any more...
In Auschwitz they performed medical experiments on me. They ruined my red blood cells. After the war I was being treated in Prague at a hematological clinic. As a result of the experiments, my medical results gradually got worse. It deteriorated to the point that they had to remove everything in my gynecological area. Luckily I managed to give birth to two daughters [prior to that]. In the concentration camp they beat me with a stick so hard that I’m deaf. When I take off my hearing aid, I don’t hear a thing. I don’t hear anything at all. We had a hard life. There were days when I had to kneel the whole day. Other times they gave us bricks to hold, and let us stand there with them until we fell down from exhaustion.
They then transported us away from Auschwitz. For some time I worked in a factory for the Siemens company. When there was an air raid, they’d herd us into the cellar. We had to sit there in water. I suffer the consequences of that to this day. Liberation arrived in the Ravensbrück concentration camp [18].
In Auschwitz they performed medical experiments on me. They ruined my red blood cells. After the war I was being treated in Prague at a hematological clinic. As a result of the experiments, my medical results gradually got worse. It deteriorated to the point that they had to remove everything in my gynecological area. Luckily I managed to give birth to two daughters [prior to that]. In the concentration camp they beat me with a stick so hard that I’m deaf. When I take off my hearing aid, I don’t hear a thing. I don’t hear anything at all. We had a hard life. There were days when I had to kneel the whole day. Other times they gave us bricks to hold, and let us stand there with them until we fell down from exhaustion.
They then transported us away from Auschwitz. For some time I worked in a factory for the Siemens company. When there was an air raid, they’d herd us into the cellar. We had to sit there in water. I suffer the consequences of that to this day. Liberation arrived in the Ravensbrück concentration camp [18].
Slovakia
I had three brothers. My oldest brother was born sometime in 1917, but died at birth. My second brother was born on 17th May 1919. His name was Sandor [Alexander, Sanyi] Stern. After high school, he began studying medicine in Prague. Sanyi was studying medicine, but when the anti-Jewish laws [15] were enacted, they expelled him. At one school they said that they’d take him for law, but I don’t know how much money would have had to been paid, and my parents didn’t have the money for that. When he returned home, he apprenticed as an auto mechanic. But soon the Hungarians took him away for ‘munkaszolgalat’ [forced labor] [16]. He died very early on, even before they deported us. He was injured, and they had to amputate his leg. He got some sort of mental illness from that. We didn’t even tell my mother about it, she wouldn’t have been able to bear it. We learned what had happened from the brother of a girlfriend of mine. Her name was Kleinova. Her oldest brother, Zoli Klein, was with him on ‘munkaszolgalat.’ After they amputated his leg, his friends were carrying him around on a stretcher. But he didn’t want to let them do that, so in the winter he sat down on the ground and said that he’d die there. He died, too, he froze to death.
My other brother, Jiri Stern, or Juraj Stern, was born in 1921. He died in 1999. After the war he graduated as a mechanical engineer. He was an excellent student. Back then the Letnany airport in Prague had announced a competition, because they needed a mechanical engineer, who they’d then put through aeronautical engineering school. My brother applied and they took him, too. He devoted himself only to math and some calculations. He wrote books and had all sorts of professional articles published. His wife worked as a secretary at CKD Sokolov. They were childless.
My other brother, Jiri Stern, or Juraj Stern, was born in 1921. He died in 1999. After the war he graduated as a mechanical engineer. He was an excellent student. Back then the Letnany airport in Prague had announced a competition, because they needed a mechanical engineer, who they’d then put through aeronautical engineering school. My brother applied and they took him, too. He devoted himself only to math and some calculations. He wrote books and had all sorts of professional articles published. His wife worked as a secretary at CKD Sokolov. They were childless.
Slovakia