In 1961 she received compensation because she had been an experiment subject. She was a star witness. A delegation came from Geneva, because I said that my wife had already been through great hardships and had had enough of Germany once. I insisted that if they wanted her to be a witness then they had to come here. And that's just how it happened.
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Displaying 18991 - 19020 of 50826 results
Ferenc Deutsch
During our marriage she never spoke about Mengele experimenting on her. She could get pregnant, but not deliver.
She and I got married in 1947 in the synagogue on Csaky Street. She was a hairdresser, but studied further. She graduated from college as a technical designer. She worked on the Nepstadion.
The doctor told my wife that she had to leave the hospital during the night and take the transport the next day as Mengele would recognise her as one of the experiment subjects. They dressed her as a nurse and she was able to run away from the hospital and get to the barracks her aunt was in. There was a transport leaving for Horisov and my wife and her aunt made it there.
I met my second wife on St. Nicholas’s Day at a dance party. First I thought that she was a Gypsy girl. Later I asked her what kind of church she went to. This was the basis of our friendship. She told me that she had no denomination, but she was a Jew and had been deported.
The Director at the Csemege Company, a Socialist food store chain, was a very good friend of mine.We had trudged through the mud together during the forced labour period. He asked me how much my wages were. I told him and he said that he would give me double that if I went to work for him. I moved to the Csemege Company in 1953 as a group leader, where I had to supervise all the shops in Budapest.
I worked there until 1950-51. Then there was a problem again with my being Jewish. The company was taken into state ownership and I got a beautiful note from Vajna and a good recommendation. I handed in a CV to the Kozert, but I put in that I was a Jew, and they did not hire me. The next week I went there, handed in nothing, just made a fuss that I wanted to get in. They hired me to pack candies.
At the end of 1946 I met my second wife. I would have liked to get married, but had no money. I went to my boss, Gyorgy Vajna, and told him that I wanted to get married and could buy a house for 25,000 forints in Pest. He said that it was a big sum. I told him that I could pay it back monthly from my wages, because I had good wages then. $10 or 10 kilos of sugar or 10 grams of gold was the agreement then, as the forint was good for nothing.
Peter started directing on Broadway, but could not make a career for himself there. His father-in-law had a medical-instruments factory and said to him: “Come to the factory and learn this trade.” He learned it so well that from 50 employees the factory expanded to 200. Later they sold the factory and bought a smaller one. He now has two daughters and they are very well-off.
Peter met an American girl at the university who also wanted to become an actress. I managed to get to their wedding and I gave them our grandmother’s candelabra, which is 150 years old now, and has been passed from family to family. His wife lights candles in it on Fridays. He and his wife are very, very religious, but they are already living according to the modern religion.
In 1956 the family crossed the border into Austria. There the Jewish community asked them where would they like to go. My sister said that they wanted to go somewhere her son could learn to be an actor. They were sent to Syracuse, where the largest academy was. As they told it, a three room flat was waiting for them there, with a big refridgerator full of food, and a piano for the child to be able to practice.
My sisters Juliska, Irenke and Klarika never came back from Auschwitz. My brother Zoltan was taken together with his wife and three daughters. Our father was taken in the first transport directly to the gas chambers.
Then I went to my sister’s place. Thank God, I found my sister and stayed with her for a week. They had been liberated in Godollo, where they were at the house of an acquaintance of theirs, hiding in the cellar. They had false papers. Her son Peter, who was six at the time, remembers that even though they were hiding all the time, my sister lit a candle every Friday evening, even there in the cellar.
I stayed in Prague for some days on those 800 crowns to fortify myself a bit, then I left for Hungary. I got to Rakospalota in July, 1945. I went to the house we had lived in, but did not find anybody there.
I was liberated on the 8th of May, 1945. They wanted to take me from Theresienstadt to Sweden. All day long the loudspeaker said in all languages: “Don't go back to those countries which expelled you.” Very many went away, but I wanted to go home, because I did not know at the time what had happened to my wife, and I wanted to help the family.
Every morning at five we were taken in closed train cars from Sachsenhausen to Oragenburg, to an aeroplane factory which belonged to a company called Henkel. I was lucky, as I got into the engineers. I had to perforate plates, on what was called a vollmachine, but I had no clue about it.
When I found out that the ones from Ujpest were being taken away, I wanted to go with the family, so I jumped over the fence. I was caught and tried by military tribunal. One member was very kind; when I told him that my wife was pregnant and I wanted to join her, he was lenient.
Ferenc Szabados
The four years of school in Ilk, I attended at the Calvinist school. There wasn’t a Jewish cheder in the village, surely because there weren’t enough Jewish children for one. We studied together with the peasant children. They learned the Calvinist catechism, but, honestly speaking, it only got through their heads really slowly. The truth is, we learned it faster than they did, and we weren’t even required to learn it. We even went to church sometimes, for fun. We even joined the choir. We got along well with the minister there. If there was going to be a wedding, that meant a lot of fun for all of us.
We lived in Ilk at home according to orthodox rules. Our small community came to the prayerhouse my father built not just on weekends, but during the week, too. The Sabbath was celebrated strictly. Even though my father was a heavy smoker, he never took his tobacco out on the Sabbath. He liked the holidays, when you were allowed to smoke. It somehow connected to a good general atmosphere. My mother kept a kosher household. She cooked before the Sabbath. There would be a delicious chulent bubbling in the oven.
The house we lived in had a room and a kitchen. There wasn’t a bathroom, nor pipes or running water. We heated with an iron stove, for the Sabbath and weekend, we’d fire the oven, too. Wagons were seen here and there, don’t even mention automobiles. Our village was such a small place that it didn’t even have a market. Residents just exchanged whatever goods they could with each other.
My father worked as a tailor, and this insured him a fairly narrow means for us. Mother directed the household. We had a cow and about 50-60 geese, but we didn’t make money from them. We ate them. My mother stuffed a goose for four weeks, and the liver swelled so much from that, that the neighbors came to gawk. My mother would have the kosher butcher slaughter one or two a week. My parents spoke Jewish [sic – Yiddish] with one another. We also understood what they said. If there were Christians in our company, they would flip over to Hungarian, because they didn’t want people to think they were saying something bad about them.
My father didn’t dress in traditional clothes, but he always wore a kippah or a hat. I remember they made a photograph of him, and he was bare-headed in the picture. It annoyed him so much, that he drew a hat on his head. My father was a talker, but he wasn’t soft-spoken. He had a commanding demeanor. He had authority, because he whatever he said, he never changed his mind. The community respected him. It’s not surprising then, that he built the village’s only prayerhouse. My father was never political. He fought through the First World War in the Royal Hungarian Army [2], and was even held in Italian detention [Italian front] [3].
From my father’s side, my uncles, Herman, Samuel, Abris and Sandor left for America, because at that time there was incredible poverty in Hungary, especially in Szabolcs. This was before the First World War. They left in 1920, but two of them (Herman and Samuel) later returned, because they weren’t happy there either. They didn’t know the ways there, and didn’t learn the language. Here they somehow made it by, although they were very poor.
When he began building the prayerhouse, everybody contributed a little something, even the peasants helped him with this or that, or some came to work. My father was the voice of the Jews, that kind of a superior, without official status or title. There was no rabbi, cantor or kosher butcher in the village. Once a week, the butcher came from the neighbor village, Gyure, to do the kosher butchering.
My father, Jozsef Schwartz built the only orthodox prayerhouse [bes medresh] in the village.
Or I’ll tell you this one example: the schoolmaster wasn’t an anti-Semite. He’d come over to talk. My younger brother was a very good student. But it didn’t matter anyway, because he always just got a satisfactory grade. Compared to the Hungarian children, who were worse students, they still got better grades.
The peasants harassed the Jews, the Jews harassed the peasants, but it never came to violence there. In spite of this, the relations between them weren’t bad, they weren’t poisoned. My father, for example, would come home from another village with material, to make clothes – he worked for another Jew. When the peasants came by in a wagon, they’d stop and ask why he’s walking, then pick him up. They brought him home, and didn’t pass him by. There were some who did, but that’s what he’d expected from them.
My name is Ferenc Szabados and I was born in Ilk in 1920. Ilk was a pretty poor, backward village in Szabolcs. There couldn’t have been more than a thousand residents. Of these, fourteen or fifteen families there were Jewish. Some families, like ours, had a lot of children, but you might stumble on Jewish families without children, too. My guess would be that about fifty Jews lived in the village. The village Jews were very poor, there were even hoeing peasants [day laborers] among them. One or two families were merchants. But none of them got rich. Any one of their businesses might have fit into a plastic bag. Some eeked out a living door-to-door. They sold potatoes, or milk. And there were Jews who went from one village to the other. They sold lime, and onions. One came with a nag, one horse pulling a wagon, and he would yell, “Onions, lime!”. Anyway, they were very poor. The merchants, they sold everything. The horse dealers mocked the Jews, but there wasn’t much difference between the two.
I go to Nagyfuvaros street to pray. If I don’t show up, they call here and ask where I am.
Reparations got me terribly agitated. I always told my wife, they can leave me alone, I don’t want them, I don’t want to profit from that. I just received a half million [forints, about six months average salary] because of my parents. There’s no way I’ll buy myself even another crumb with that! It gets me so upset. And now that I’m older, even more so. I gave it to the children, instead.