There were anti-Jewish laws [8] in Budapest however, Jewish children couldn’t sign up for university, only I don’t know how many, one percent, could [9]. Jews were allowed to shop only in certain stores, at certain hours in the morning and in the afternoon. We weren’t allowed to go out. And we already wore the yellow star, it was of about ten centimeters on the left side, it had to be visible, if you didn’t wear it, some ill-willed person could denounce you and you could get into trouble with the authorities. My father was also affected as far as his job was concerned, the factory where he worked closed down in 1944 because of the air raids.
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Displaying 28531 - 28560 of 50826 results
Mariana Farkas
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When I was released from hospital it was already Christmas, it was on 24th December, when the Jews were gathered and taken to the banks of the Danube [16] and shot there. We were very lucky to make it. On Christmas Eve at about 6 o’clock in the evening, my mother was away, because she was allowed to go shopping. I was at home, in bed, I was still wearing the plaster, I hadn’t taken it off, I had to wait six more weeks for that; we had no electricity as the city didn’t have electricity anymore, we used candles. After some time, two German officers and some Hungarians came into my room – the doors were open, but they weren’t policemen, they were civilians, and asked me what I was doing in bed. I told them that I had been shot in the leg and I had to wear a plaster, and then they saw my earrings, they were gold child earrings, and told me to take them off. They also took a small ring and my watch, and then left. They didn’t say anything; they didn’t take me because they saw that transporting me was a bit of a hassle.
At the beginning of October 1944, my father was taken to forced labor camps around Budapest from that yellow star house; they couldn’t get him out of the city because Budapest was almost surrounded by the American and English armies and by the Russians.
The first thing at hand was to hide under the bed. And as I was on my all fours, trying to hide under the bed, I think my behind and my legs were still outside, the door opened and one of the Hungarian gendarmes shot at me, without asking, he probably thought I was a man. And I felt a blow in my knee. And when I got out from under the bed, both my legs were full of blood. I was lucky that the bullet came out, it was found under the bed, but my right knee had already been wounded. I came down from the fourth floor alone, because that’s where we lived, and a private car took me to the hospital, where I was hospitalized. After that the gendarme said that he fired his gun in self-defense, that was unbelievable, how is that, self-defense in front of a 14-year-old child? Could I attack him? That’s something I haven’t understood to this day.
For as long as we were in the ghetto, my mother had passports for us, issued by Count Wallenberg [18], but I never saw them, I think those who had those passports weren’t deported. I don’t know how my mother got them, but she did, my father wasn’t with us, he had already been taken away for forced labor. My mother probably went to the Swedish embassy; Jews were allowed to enter there. There were many Jews who actually lived on the precincts of the embassy to escape. That’s what this man, Wallenberg, did; he was a remarkable man. And such a fate, my dear God! No one knows to this day where he died, when he died, and how.
It wasn’t until then that the wall around the ghetto started to be built, and those still alive after that raid were taken there, and we went there as well, it was sort of compulsory to go to the ghetto. The ghetto was set up near the big synagogue, where the Jewish hospital was; it was fenced and guarded by soldiers and the police. We weren’t allowed to go out, we were brought food there once a day, our bread portion, but the hunger we endured then was terrible. We stayed in the ghetto for about a month and a half, that was all.
The first time I came across anti-Semitism was in 1943. I was in the youth organization in school, the scouts’ organization. We wore a green uniform, and large green hats, and we took hikes in the woods, gathered the litter when that was the case, and that was very rarely, because the Austrian civilization made its presence felt in Hungary. That’s when I felt the first slap, when I was 13, when the Jewish children were thrown out of the organization, and we had to leave our uniforms there.
It was then, when I was 15 years old, that I met the man I loved all my life, and I still do: his name was Tibi Gusita, he was a lot older than me, he was about 24 years old, and he was a student in Bucharest. He wasn’t a Jew, he was a Romanian and he came from a well-off family. I saw him for the first time on 23rd August 1945, it was the first celebration [of this date] [20] like that since the war was over; he was the most handsome man there, he had the most extraordinary blue eyes and brown hair, but I didn’t talk to him then. And I think I was also striking, I was a bit peculiar, I didn’t speak Romanian at all, and I was dressed in a different way, not like it was in the countryside.
Uncle Emil ran from Budapest to Czechoslovakia, he left with his wife so that they wouldn’t be taken to a concentration camp, but he didn’t know that Jews were taken away from there even sooner than they were from Hungary. He left at the beginning of 1944, and when they started to gather the Jews from Prague, he and his wife killed themselves. They killed themselves because they didn’t want to be taken to a concentration camp.
After we had been liberated in January 1945 we returned to the yellow star house, because there was nothing left from the other house after the bombing, where we had lived; we could go inside, but the house had no windows, no doors, no furniture. I remember that after we had been liberated, people went out into the street and took dead horses from the street and ate horsemeat, those were the horses that had died in the air raids, they weren’t sick, of course. But maybe even if they had been, people would have eaten them anyway, as they were so starved and mad. I ate horsemeat as well, my mother made some meatballs and they were very good, after all that famine.
He was much older than my father, and he told my father, ‘Mr. Bozoky, come to Miercurea Ciuc, I’ll find a place for you to live, you’ll have a job, you’ll work as a chief accountant in my factory!’ He had a timber factory and a mill in Miercurea Ciuc, and he dumbfounded my father. To cut a long story short, that’s how we got from Budapest to Miercurea Ciuc.
and when I came back, and I found out that he was courting another girl, who was wealthy. I was so hurt, but soon we left for Miercurea Ciuc, that I never confronted him. However, I did find out that he married that girl, and I remember I cried my eyes out in Miercurea Ciuc, so forcefully that my mother didn’t know what to do with me, she even beat me, because I couldn’t snap out of it. I cried and I said that he would never be happy with her, or I with somebody else, and I was right in both cases.
My father worked as a chief accountant at the timber factory there. We lived in the center of town, it was an old house that we rented, there were no apartment blocks then in Miercurea Ciuc, but it was a disaster. We had two rooms, a kitchen and that was it. We lived on the first floor, and there was no running water, we had to carry water in a bucket from the well in the street. We had electricity, but the toilet was at the end of the corridor, and it was made of wood, like it is in the countryside, and in winter when you had to go your buttocks would freeze until you took off your pants and sat on the toilet. It was terrible.
Both [my grandparents] spoke Hungarian, and I know that my grandfather was a clerk, and my grandmother a housewife.
I don’t go more often to the synagogue now, we, the women, only go on the high holidays, but I still light the candles on Friday evenings and I say the blessing. The community helps me, I receive assistance and packages, a sum of money, not much, but it helps; in the winter I receive help for heating, otherwise I wouldn’t pull through. It’s all right here, but it’s a house that is hard to maintain, and it’s cold. I had plenty of problems, I repaired the terrace I don’t remember how many times, the last time was two years ago [in 2002], with the help of my nephew, because there was no way I could have paid 20 million from my pension. I benefited after my husband from the decree 116, because he was taken to forced labor camps, I don’t pay for television, phone and radio subscription, I have free bus and train tickets, I can get free tickets during summer at a spa if I want to go.
I listened to Free Europe Radio [27] ever since it started, which was in 1970 or 1975, I think. I listened to it in an undertone, at home, but I always knew what was going on everywhere. We told jokes at home, there were plenty of jokes about Ceausescu [28], but we told them only among very close friends, not out loud, in the street. My husband also listened to the radio. He was a party member because he had no choice, if you weren’t a party member you wouldn’t get a house, you wouldn’t get a good job, nothing at all. You were some sort of an outcast. Most of the people who were in the Party didn’t have opinions against communists; very few were convinced communists.
We went on holidays during communism all the time, we went to the seaside every year, and we could afford it. I couldn’t go abroad for a long time, I didn’t get a passport because my husband was an officer; I could leave only in the 1970s.
I don’t think things got better after 1989, for me at least everything is harder. The money isn’t enough, even with the help I get from the community: gas is very expensive, and I had a lot to fix around the house. It’s true that there was no freedom of speech during communism, but I shut up, what was I to do, I couldn’t get my family in trouble.
For as long as I worked, I have never had problems at work because I was Jewish, never. In the design department, when I got employed, we had a boss, the architect Andor, who was Jewish. He was a very special man. The two of us were the only Jews there.
When the revolution in 1989 took place, it was Chanukkah. And Barbara was in the choir, and she stayed with me, it was during the Christmas holidays. Eva phoned me and asked me to send her home to do her hair, so that she would look beautiful in the choir. And we settled that the girl would come for the choir; Eva lived in Bartolomeu passage [the distance between Bartolomeu neighborhood and the synagogue is approximately 3km], so Barbara, all made up, had to take the bus number 16 to the synagogue. My husband worked in the canteen, he was the administrator, and he had already left home, and when I left for the synagogue, I met a lady in Poarta Schei [Poarta Schei, monument built between 1927-1928 in the old center of Brasov] who asked me what was going on in Prund [region located also in the old center of Brasov, made up mostly of old houses], because there were shots fired in the center. I answered that I had no idea what was going on; I hadn’t heard anything until then, on television or on the radio. And I was terrified when I found out that there were shots fired in the center, and I ran for the synagogue. It felt like forever to cover that short distance, I thought I would never get there.
My daughter left for Germany at the beginning of 1990, with all her family: her husband and her daughter. I didn’t agree with Eva leaving for Germany, but what could I do, I couldn’t separate a family. I didn’t like this marriage from the beginning, but there’s no way to talk to the young people today, it’s in vain. When I went to visit my daughter in Germany I had to wait three months for the visa; that was in 1992. I waited three months for the visa, exactly like it was during communism.
I didn’t join the Party because in school I dodged the UTC [Uniunea Tineretului Comunist - Union of Communist Youth]; those who were UTC members automatically joined the Party when they turned 18. But because I got around it somehow, to this day I don’t know how it happened, I was never a party member. My husband never suggested that I become a party member. His sisters were party members, and so were my brothers-in-law, but I wasn’t in the Party, and neither were my mother or my father. I participated in marches, we were all sent on 1st May, on 23rd August, we had meetings after meetings, where I would keep my mouth shut, I wasn’t into politics at all, I would just shut up and listen.
After 1960, after my husband left the army, I wanted to leave for Israel, but he didn’t want to. I couldn’t tell why, as a matter of fact he never wanted anything, he was a man content with whatever he had; he was pretty lazy, he just wanted good food and peace, he was a very crotchety man, that’s the truth. So we didn’t file for it. And in the first years after he left the army, we wouldn’t have received the approval to leave anyway. After he retired, my husband worked for the community for four years as the administrator of the villa the community has in Cristian [commune in Brasov county, approximately 12km away from Brasov], and as the canteen administrator, but I had no connections with the community.
The letters got there, it’s now, after the revolution [26] that I have lost dozens of letters, with photos in them, those which were a bit thicker – someone from the post office probably imagined that there was money in it, and in 1993/4 my daughter sent me a package weighing one kilo which never got here; they were stolen at the post office, it was a big scandal back then, it was on television as well.
My mother used to come from Transylvania to Budapest many times, and she stayed at her cousin’s, she also had other relatives there, my father visited his brother, and that’s how they met. But it was a love marriage, it wasn’t arranged. They married religiously in 1927, in the synagogue, they probably had a ketubbah as well, but I don’t remember ever seeing it.
I was born in Budapest, in 1930; it was a splendid city, as it still is now. The Jewish community in Budapest was very big, I don’t know how many Jews there were, I was too young, but there were many. There were several synagogues, one is the largest and most beautiful in south-eastern Europe, it’s the one with the silver tree in the courtyard, it’s a splendor.
Jews lived everywhere in Budapest, but many religious Jews lived on Dohany Street, near the big synagogue; that’s where the ghetto was also built in 1944.
The financial situation of our family was rather good, because my father earned very well. My father was an accountant, he was the chief-accountant at a food factory that belonged to a Jew, something with import-export, and he had about 20 people subordinated to him. My father didn’t work with his brother since his brother’s factory went bankrupt in 1933 or 1934. My mother was a housewife and she looked after the house.
Our house in Budapest was rented; it was actually an apartment in a four-story building on 33 Csaky Street. It was very beautiful and spacious, and we had running water, electricity, and gas heating. The house had three rooms: there was my room, a living room and my parents’ room, plus the bathroom, the kitchen and a hallway. The furniture in the house was rather modern for those times. We had a refrigerator back then, not like refrigerators are now, with electric power, but it worked all the same: there was a cart with ice that came twice a week, and my mother bought ice and put it in the fridge, below, in an ice box; it lasted for a few days. We had a small garden in the back, but we shared it with several families. The garden was for leisure, the neighbors would gather there during summers, but no one grew anything in it.
I know that my grandmother always bought kosher meat from Hateg, once a week. The animals were slaughtered there, because there were many Jews in Hateg during that time and animals could be slaughtered the kosher way. There were no other Jews in the village; they were the only Jewish family in Rau de Mori. The grocery and the inn were closed on Saturdays. There was no synagogue in the village, only in Hateg. I’m not sure, but I think that my grandfather, for as long as he was healthy, went to Hateg every Saturday with the coach, and of course with all the family on the high holidays.