Then I transferred to clerk work to a spare parts factory, where I got 5 pounds. That was in the city, the transportation was easier. The biscuit factory was way out, I had to travel a long distance. I was at the spare parts factory for about six months, and then I met Laci Adler, who had been my classmate at high school, on the street. He told me, ‘don’t be stupid, tell them that you are 21 years old, and they will be happy to get a worker.’ Fact is that there was an enormous manpower shortage in Australia, and they didn’t ask for any papers. I could tell them what I wanted. Laci Adler was packing merchandise at a company, which made tools for sheep-shearing. This was a huge business, because there was a lot of sheep. I went to work there and I got an adult’s salary, 8 pounds and 9 shillings. That was a lot of money. I was there for a few months.
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Displaying 17701 - 17730 of 50826 results
Thomas Molnar
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I got a job at once. I went to a biscuit factory, where I pushed the ready biscuits on a pushcart to the oven. I thought that I knew English, but I didn’t understand a word, and they didn’t understand me either. The Australian accent was entirely different from what I had learned. But in a few months I got into it. I worked at the biscuit factory for three to four months, and my salary was 4 pounds and 4 shillings. I could pay the rent from this and just enough was left for me to not die of hunger. It turned out that this was a child’s salary, because if I had been past 18, I would have gotten double for the same work. I lived in lodgings in the district of Sydney where the other Hungarians and the Jews lived.
The ship was entering port in Perth; it was a long way by train to Sydney from there. I arrived in Sydney on a Sunday morning, and I went to live at Laci Reich’s.
So, I got to Vienna, I lived at the Rotschild Hospital. The Jewish refugees gathered there, it was enormously packed, it was a hovel. I had money, because I had got some from the Joint [17], and my father had also sent me money with a smuggler, who lived off this.
We were there for three to four weeks, then my parents set off. They already had the ship ticket, which Tamas had sent, but I didn’t have my papers yet. I went to the Australian embassy and I asked for a permission to reside in Australia, and I got it within a week. I got on a ship in Genoa, because the Suez Canal wasn’t open at that time, and we had to sail round Africa.
In 1956 my parents and my brother had their passport and a visa for Australia. I didn’t have anything, because I was of military age. We didn’t even hand in a request, because that would have harmed the others. But I was a representative ice hockey player, and I had been abroad a couple times before too. It had been arranged that the team would go to play in Vienna in the winter of 1956. We planned that when the team was going to be in Vienna, my parents would come out, and I would stay there. In the meantime the revolution [16] broke out, and in November one of my mother’s cousins, Zoli Gyenes, came to say goodbye. At this time the border was open, there was absolute chaos. Zoli asked my father why Peter wasn’t going to go with them. Then my father told me that Peter should go with them.
He had a close friend called Gyuri Berger, who was a manager at a candy shop on Kiraly Street. My father started to make coconut bars and grillage in the kitchen at home, and I took this to the candy shop on Kiraly Street at night, Gyuri Berger let me in, and he put it among the state merchandise. He sold it, and they split the profits. In fact we lived off this and not the salary. This went on for a while, then again with Onodi’s help my father got a small booth behind the EMKE [café] on Rakoczi Street, where he sold coconut bars and grillage. He did the same here, he partly sold the state merchandise, and partly his own.
In the meantime my brother Jancsi [Janos] got to the Jewish orphanage, which was on the Buda side of the Arpad Bridge. It really pissed me off that I had a brother whose mother and father were alive and he had to be at a place like this. I went to visit him every Sunday. I will never forget that once in the winter I took him on a walk, because they let him out for an hour. It was terribly cold, and I asked him what he wanted. He told me to buy him an ice cream. I bought him the ice-cream and I saw that, as we were walking on the street, tears were running down his cheeks. I asked why he was crying. He told me to buy him another ice-cream. I told him, ‘My dear Jancsi, I only have enough money to go home by streetcar.’ The kid was crying and crying. So I said that I would buy him the ice cream. I bought him the ice cream, then I took him back to the orphanage. He looked like a shabby mouse. I only had enough money left to buy one line ticket, there wasn’t any money left to change lines, so I had to go back on foot on the Arpad Bridge. I remember that I cried all the way home, because my brother was at the orphanage, my parents in prison, and because we were living in such a fucked-up world.
One day a covered truck came, there were 15-16 people on it, and we set off. Davidovics’ family was up there, too. This was an AVO [14] truck with fake papers. Outside the town Davidovics changed into a uniform and we went towards the border. On the way they stopped us several times, but we went through all the identity checks. The children got a sleeping pill, so that there would be silence. We arrived at the border, and there was an identity check there, and we went through that, too, and we went on towards no man’s land. Two border guards with machine guns noticed the truck from somewhere, and they wanted to stand in front of it. Davidovics didn’t stop, and they started to shoot. Davidovics stepped on the gas and he almost hit the two border guards, but there was mud on no man’s land, and the car stood in the same place, because its tires were spinning round, as he gave too much gas. Davidovics got frightened, jumped off the truck and they shot him dead at once. There was silence for a while, then cars came and took us to Rajka where there was a very small police station. They separated the adults and the children there. Then they took us to Csorna.
The shop operated until the nationalization [11]. The nationalization happened in 1948, they didn’t even allow my father to go back to get his hat.
My fathered opened the shop. There wasn’t any merchandise of course, because the shop had been robbed. Among the stolen merchandise there was licorice, which was wrapped in bay leaves so that it wouldn’t go bad. They took the licorice, but they didn’t take the bay leaves, a sack full of bay leaves was left there. My father packed the bay leaves in small bags and he sold that. It’s amazing how many people wanted to buy bay leaves. A long queue stood in front of the shop.
Despite this my father gave his vote for the communists at the first elections. He said that a Jew always had to give his vote to the left. But later he was also of the opinion that one couldn’t live in this country.
Liberation came. I had never had such a disappointment before and ever since than when the Russians came in. I was waiting for them like for the Messiah. And when these…I don’t want to say, animals, because animals don’t behave like this. They were terrible people. My poor mother was standing there, seven months pregnant with Jancsi. A Russian idiot came in; he pointed a submachine gun at my mother, because she was wearing a blazer with gilded buttons. Bourgeois, bourgeois, he said, and wanted to shoot her. I stood in front of him, and then they wanted to fuck me, because they thought I was a girl. Then my father took my dick out, and showed it to them.
On 3rd January 1945 he set off for Zuglo on foot, to come to us. He knew where we were. And as he was coming, a mine shrapnel killed him. My father found him there somehow, I don’t know how. Oh, yes, they found his wallet and his documents were there.
In 1944 my grandfather was also hiding. He didn’t come to Zuglo [residential district on the Pest side] with us, I don’t know why. He was somewhere in the 7th district, maybe some woman hid him.
After the liberation they took everything from him [9]. When they took his factory, he got hold of some job. At the horse races there is a man who measures the horses. This was his job.
From October 1944 until the liberation, which happened in Zuglo on 4th January [1945], they hid 13 persons, my father, my mother, me, my brother Peter, my Aunt Margit, Aunt Gyongyi [Janos Rona’s sister] among them, in the cellar of their house. In the cellar there was a separate toilet.
Then when in October of 1944 the tzores [Yiddish for troubles] started [7], Vilmos Anesini offered us to go to their place, and that he would hide us. Moreover my mother was pregnant with Jancsi at that time. They were so nice that his wife Bozsi [Erzsebet] registered my mother in her name, so that when she would need to go to the hospital, she would give birth as Mrs. Vilmos Anesini. Not many people did something like this at that time. Vilmos Anesini was my father’s best friend. He was a real gentleman. He was wealthy, he liked to live, he was a kind of a bon vivant, and he had racehorses. He and his wife were Catholics.
When the 2nd anti-Jewish law [5] took effect, they didn’t take the shop, and we didn’t need a Strohmann [6] either. Maybe because my father had been a soldier. This candy thing was a fantastic business: in 1942 my parents could even buy a house. My father had never been drafted into forced labor, and when he was first drafted to Nagykata he ran away at once. From then on he was in hiding.
We went on holiday to Zebegeny twice every year. We never went to the Balaton, and we never went abroad either.
I loved to go to the cinema and to the theater. Especially to the theater. I liked to go to the cinema, too, but not as much as to the theater. I was about nine or ten years old, when I first went to the Opera. Bandi Rona took me, and then my Aunt Margit bought me an opera pass, with which we could sit on the third floor.
Then followed the Abonyi Street Jewish high school. I might be partial, but there weren’t teachers like there anywhere else. I didn’t like mathematics, though my teacher was very good, I still didn’t like it. I was better at the humanities.
Nobody in the family was religious. At Yom Kippur we fasted, we held the seder eve, I had my bar mitzvah at the Bethlen Square synagogue, but not exactly when I was 13, because the Arrow-Cross men [4] were here at that time, only after the liberation in 1946.
I started to feel fear for the first time when my father was drafted into forced labor. Of course, when the Germans came in I was afraid. I remember that once my father showed me in the cellar of our house the brick I had to take out, behind which the Napoleon coins were hidden. This was a very frightening experience for a 13-year-old child.
Ferenc Pap
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In the summer of 1945 we went back to Kolozsvar too. In those times there were enough houses. There were 17,000 Jews in Kolozsvar before the deportation and these people’s houses all became free in 1944. We children went to the all-ready house [the house had already been prepared]. Then I became a child again. I know that our parents had the opportunity to choose and they chose the flat – it was in a street towards the railway station – which though relatively quiet, wasn’t far from downtown.
We were enrolled at school in Temesvar: my brother at a Jewish elementary school’s 1st grade and I in the 4th, and we finished school there.
The liberation of Kolozsvar was on the 11th of October 1944, which means that the united Romanian and Russian troops defeated the Germans. I think that after a week my parents already came home to Kolozsvar.
On the 23rd of August 1944 was the royal shift of loyalties. The king had Antonescu and a considerable part of his government arrested and taken away. The Romanian government then went over to the Soviets’ side. From that time on the military operations continued on the side of the Allies – American, English, French and Russian – against the Germans. Of course this change didn’t happen in a flash, especially in the provinces. The change consisted of the fact that at the very beginning of September, the so-called red troops came to Temesvar. Then we – just like many other people – despaired and started to seek refuge in a nearby village. On the way we met these troops and they told us to go back to the town because Hitler was “kaputt” [finished].
In Temesvar my mother was actually at home, but for us children, it was the first time we had been there. My mother knew very well where to go and what to do. We went to the house where our relatives lived: my grandmother and her sister Cecilia with her family. We hid there. It was quite a big house; controls by the authorities were completely incidental or did not exist, so we didn’t have to fear them. However, sometime in July 1944, some self-seeking person denounced us. That’s how we found ourselves at the Temesvar police department for about three days. The way we got out of there, was that a friend of ours bribed the chief constable.
On the 3rd of May 1944 a Romanian peasant from Tordaszentmihaly raised the price for a family – the Stossers – whom he wanted to evacuate to Romania. And so they were taken away – they were deported – and none of them came back. They found the price the man asked too high. My mother used to visit these Stossers, their ex-neighbours, and that’s how it was revealed to us what they wanted to do. The Romanian man came to us very angrily and told us that if these people didn’t want to save their necks he would help us flee us for nothing. It looks as if that man knew more than we did. That is how it happened that he took us for nothing. We lived in Zapolya Street at that time. We started from there. We hid in an attic until it got dark, then late night, we met this man at a given place and he took us over the border. There was my mother, my younger brother and I, and a woman from the neighbourhood who found out somehow what we were up to and pleaded to come along. The woman’s husband was in forced labor service as well; he didn’t come back but died there. They had no children.
I remember that we went through the forest a lot and it was very tiring. We went by horse and cart until the end of the Gyorgyfalvi road where we met this man and from that time on he took us on a very remote road. This whole thing made us more mature than we should have been at this age (I was just nine years old and my brother was just six). We remember quite a lot of details. For example we remember very well that before the end of the Gyorgyfalvi road they took us into a watchman’s house in order to use up some time. The landlady was the sister of the man who took us over the border. At one point she told us: “Children, hide under the bed quickly, because the wolves are coming!” in fact there was some sort of patrol, some kind of control by the gendarmerie. After they noted that everything was okay and they didn’t find us, we could come out. The lady gave us each a soup plate of “krumplipaprikas” [stewed potato with sour cream, seasoned with red pepper] with the words: “Eat, just eat, children; this may be your last supper…” To the left, at the end of the Monostor [today: Manastur] neighbourhood there is the Gorbo valley; somewhere there we got across [into Romania]. So it was not at the usual crossing-place, at the Felekteto [today: Feleacu], where they tightened control and caught many people fleeing, but we went somewhere else. This man knew the area. He took us over the border and left us before Tordaszentmihaly. Once we got there we entered a Romanian peasant house, completely at random. The man there probably guessed what it all was about. My mother asked him to take us to Torda. In Torda she had an acquaintance, we stayed there about seven or eight days then we went to Temesvar by train.
I remember that we went through the forest a lot and it was very tiring. We went by horse and cart until the end of the Gyorgyfalvi road where we met this man and from that time on he took us on a very remote road. This whole thing made us more mature than we should have been at this age (I was just nine years old and my brother was just six). We remember quite a lot of details. For example we remember very well that before the end of the Gyorgyfalvi road they took us into a watchman’s house in order to use up some time. The landlady was the sister of the man who took us over the border. At one point she told us: “Children, hide under the bed quickly, because the wolves are coming!” in fact there was some sort of patrol, some kind of control by the gendarmerie. After they noted that everything was okay and they didn’t find us, we could come out. The lady gave us each a soup plate of “krumplipaprikas” [stewed potato with sour cream, seasoned with red pepper] with the words: “Eat, just eat, children; this may be your last supper…” To the left, at the end of the Monostor [today: Manastur] neighbourhood there is the Gorbo valley; somewhere there we got across [into Romania]. So it was not at the usual crossing-place, at the Felekteto [today: Feleacu], where they tightened control and caught many people fleeing, but we went somewhere else. This man knew the area. He took us over the border and left us before Tordaszentmihaly. Once we got there we entered a Romanian peasant house, completely at random. The man there probably guessed what it all was about. My mother asked him to take us to Torda. In Torda she had an acquaintance, we stayed there about seven or eight days then we went to Temesvar by train.