There were a lot of Hungarians who were gradually laid off from important positions. There were some excellent sculpting teachers at the institute, for instance Szervaciusz, who was mainly teaching painting techniques: carving, casting and things like that, but he never made it any further than lecturer. My art history teacher was a Jewish man, Nandor Balaska, who grew up in Hungarian culture and later emigrated to the West. There were subjects that were taught in both Hungarian and Romanian, so the teachers were required to speak both. I became an assistant teacher in anatomy in 1950 and was registered in the teaching staff. I was a student in the morning and an assistant teacher in the afternoon. I graduated from the institute in sculpture in 1953 but I stayed in the institute and climbed up the ‘academic ladder’. As soon as I graduated I became an assistant, seven years from then a lecturer and finally a university professor. I was teaching the main courses – drawing, sculpting, and composition.
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Displaying 19381 - 19410 of 50826 results
Egon Lovith
I attended a course at the art school in 1947. It was kind of a party-organized class where some painters set up a workshop and taught us. I was there for a year and I even received a certificate. When I was accepted to the Hungarian Institute of Arts in 1948, I was put into the second year because they accepted my previous year from the art school. The institute had a mainly Hungarian management and at the time Zoltan Kovacs was the rector. In the morning I was an art student, and in the afternoon I was a high school student. I hadn’t finished high school and needed to graduate because before that I couldn’t have graduated from the Institute of Art. In 1949, they introduced dual language education, Romanian and Hungarian, the institute became the Ion Andreescu Institute of Art and Aurel Ciupe its rector. Then the institute got a building with an exhibition space in the Central Park.
Margo and I hung out with DJYO guys. The DJYO people – and people who had some previous education from the Jewish Lyceum – went to university. The rest of us went to vocational training courses for workers where we could do two years of training in one. For instance, Margo went to evening classes for two years while she was a seamstress. That’s how her five years of Hungarian high school education was accepted because in Romania they didn’t accept any schooling other than Romanian.
I had a theory after the war that workers had to play a different role with a more serious voice. Communism was in opposition to the system that had taken us away to concentration camps. The communists said they had a vision of the future. So, we believed them and did what they wanted us to do, and after a while we adopted their thinking. For a while I supported their ideas – I joined the party – until I realized that the proletariat itself as a leading class cannot be possible.
Some of the educated and middle class Jewish people left and later on the religious Jews also gradually decided to leave. For instance, there were two brothers in the Fritsch family: the older one, Marton Fritsch, was a passionate communist, he was also one of the leaders of the DJYO and later joined the Securitate [24]. His younger brother was an officer in the army where he came to oppose the communist attitude and eventually emigrated to Israel. In the end there was a solid stratum of Jewish people who stayed: the workers who had learned their vocation here. After 1945 the DJYO operated for three or four years. Subsequently, it became the Jewish Party that later merged with the UTC [Young Communist Party]. Obviously many members left and their positions changed as well. Many people became party activists.
We disagreed within my family as well when Evi, Margo’s sister, became a Zionist. While we were still living in the Peter-Pal villa she came to see us and told us to emigrate to Israel. She was really upset and angry to hear that I didn’t want to emigrate and that I wouldn’t let Margo either. We had been married already and I said, ‘We are going to stay here for a while’. After that Evi never wanted to talk to me again and we departed on bad terms and she never wrote from Israel where she emigrated to with her brother. I personally didn’t want to leave Romania because I had just started my artistic career and at the time was thinking of going to art college. Back then I had no clue about what Israel was like and later, after I had been to Israel, I could honestly say Israel just wasn’t for me. I didn’t really want to go and work there or get drafted into the Israeli army.
The main program of the DJYO, similarly to the communists, was to stay in the country and build up our homes. There was an educational purpose to teach people a profession. Most of the DJYO members who returned after the war didn’t have any parents left and they lived in an apprentice hostel that was founded by the Democratic Jewish Association. [Editor’s note: The Democratic Jewish Association was a Jewish institution, founded after the war that helped the returning Jewish youth.] We directed lots of kids into work in factories, we held them together. We were in opposition with the Zionist organizations, for instance the Gordonia [23], which were for emigration. The Gordonia was made up mostly of middle class kids. They accepted vocational training from us, but still they had a separate organization and promoted emigration to the end.
The DJYO – Demokrata Zsido Ifjak Szovetsege, Democratic Jewish Youth Organization – was a completely separate organization. A couple of younger guys organized it, who had previously come back from Buchenwald. One of them was Dr. Hersko, who later Romanianized his name to Petru Muresan. He became a party activist and later worked in the Ministry. Vilmos Schwartz, a dentist, was also a member of the DJYO. Emil Lobl, another organizer, was an architect, became a professor at the Polytechnic University and changed his name to Szava. He got in an ideological conflict with Docsi, another DJYO leader, who was a doctor. Andor Havas was also in the leadership and supported Docsi. Then there was Lajko Rot, who remained a communist and became the director of the Romanian department of the local radio. I got into conflict with him because I disagreed with him over the fact that it was forbidden to marry a person with kulak [22] background. I was the secretary of the DJYO for a while. The DJYO collaborated with the Jewish Committee. The Jewish community had nothing to do with these organizations.
I hammered two big nails into the wall and that’s where we hung our clothes, and that was all of our furniture. For a while we ate in the Peter-Pal villa because a Jewish organization set up a canteen there. The organization was called Comitetul Deportat Evreiesc, Committee of Deported Jews and was run by secular Jewish lawyers, doctors and architects. These democratic Jews, headed by Hillel Kohn, seized the villa as Jewish property during the post-war requisition. I sculpted the first DJYO monument, a plaster relief of a group of people carrying a flag, which was later cast into bronze. It was put in the yard of the Peter-Pal villa where people who had been deported lived straight after the war. But after the nationalization [21], when the state rented out the flats for tenants, they finally pulled the relief down because they didn’t like it. Many people asked me what happened to it, but I don’t know what happened to it after it was taken down. Perhaps there is a picture of it somewhere.
The room where we lived was empty and as small as a maid’s room. There were about 10-15 of us, with the other deported boys, living in the villa. They got us a big old sofa and even brought it up into the room and we slept on it for ten years.
After we arrived in Kolozsvar, as all people who had been deported, we were given a room in the Peter-Pal villa [20]. Once, out of the blue, the police showed up and wanted to take Margo away, to expel her from the country. Therefore, we had to get married officially right away. We got married in November. In Kolozsvar nobody wanted to conduct the ceremony because my sweetheart was a Hungarian citizen. My friends arranged a legal marriage for us in Hidalmas [a small place nearby, where administrative things could be done more easily]. We got married there.
At the end of the 1950s, it happened that Jeno, I don’t exactly remember where or how, got into some financial difficulties. Then somebody said he knew an older Jewish woman and people convinced Jeno to marry her because she had money. She wasn’t doing any work because she was living off her money and jewelry. Jeno didn’t have a choice so he married Szeren. Jeno was over sixty years old when he got married and he was already on pension. Szeren was a wasted, gloomy old spinster who was also reserved and not at all friendly. Jeno, on the other hand, was a good-humored and funny guy, who also loved huge meals and was getting pretty fat. He was very generous and one of his bad habits was that whenever he had some money he would buy something expensive. This led to constant conflict because Szeren was very tight with money while Jeno liked living freely. They didn’t get divorced because it wasn’t a custom among Jews. I remember, Margo and I visited them in their apartment, in Hajnal [in Romanian Zorilor] district, where they lived. Whenever we went there, we were always upset because we couldn’t even chat. Szeren didn’t even sit down and then Jeno started to get pissed off as he saw red and told Szeren angrily, ‘Put something on the table.’ She envied us every bite we ate. Jeno wasn’t tight with money at all even though he didn’t always make money. When he was out he was always greatly jovial, but he had pretty lay-about craftsmen friends.
By the time I came back from the deportation Jeno had been back from forced labor, too and he was working. He got hired by the Armatura factory, which was a metal appliance factory. As a skilled man, Jeno was hired quickly and worked in the storage department; he didn’t need any vocational schooling there. Since he loved to travel, he took the buyer position, and a lot of times he even paid the bus fares out of his own pocket. He came with the parcels, bringing the products, and he also organized their transportation. Back then he traveled on the train between Kolozsvar and Bucharest all the time because the factory sent him as part of a delegation. Although Jeno had a terrible limp because he had bone tuberculosis and his operation failed, at times he still walked as much as 40 kilometers [during his buying trips].
Margo didn’t stay in Hungary, we came to Kolozsvar straight away. We came back in September 1945, and our friends, who had been in other concentration camps, I don’t know where, had been waiting for us. Margo came here when she was 20. Everybody loved her. Because I was married to her, all doors opened for me. [People were nicer to Egon because of Margo’s friendly personality.] She wasn’t a talkative person but when she spoke, she spoke wisely. She didn’t laugh out loud a lot but she always had a smile on her face. Margo was comfortable among my friends and liked the places I went to.
Margo had five years of high school. They studied Hebrew at the boarding school because they had to be able to read the prayers. She also spoke English. She completed the apprentice school [she learned to become a seamstress] and became an apprentice at an elite men’s underwear store in Budapest. If they had their own income the girls could still stay in the boarding school if they were only apprentices. After the age of 14 there were only two girls to a room. Margo lived there spending her apprentice years there until she was 16 when she moved in with one of her wealthy aunts. Her aunt came from Margo’s mother’s side and she used to be poor, too, but she was lucky to get married to a rich man, who was the director of a company. So, Margo moved into a tiled four-bedroom apartment with central heating. But she definitely had to help out.
Margo and I went to see who of her family had survived the war. [They visited Margo’s aunt with whom Margo had been living straight before the deportation. At the time, Margo had still not seen, but she knew Evi was alive because the girls from the boarding school didn’t get deported and Evi lived there during the war.] We went to see the director of the school and we also met the girls Margo had been with. It was a very nice building. The rooms were very nice and tidy and they weren’t like in most other institutionalized places. In the dining hall my jaw dropped when I saw that they were not sitting on benches like birds but there were tables with four chairs at each. I know that blessing the food was mandatory before the meals. The girls set the table and also collected the plates and took them back to the kitchen. Otherwise the boarding school had personnel who did the laundry and the ironing but the girls still had to learn these tasks. There was a dressmaking shop where the girls had their own sewing machines. That’s where Margo learned to sew. I also saw a room with a stage and a piano and they also learned to sing. They had a choir that performed, they even had a little synagogue and performed there. Margo was a soloist in the choir. There was also a gym. In the boarding school they observed the Jewish holidays but they were, after all, a progressive institution. They didn’t work on Saturdays. The girls must have also walked around because there was a beautiful garden and there was even a gardener. They could also take books out of the library. The institution had a bank account and girls received tram and opera passes. I believe that they got allowances until they left the boarding school.
The widowed woman put her two younger daughters into a Jewish boarding school for girls in Budapest. Margo was ten to twelve years old by then and Evi was five or six, and they were living there until the time of the deportation. Wealthy Jewish women ran the Jewish boarding school for girls and they gave everything to the girls. The girls all had to dress up nicely and had high heels. It was like a Swiss boarding school except that the girls received vocational education. Rozsi wasn’t an educated woman. She was a washwoman going from house to house and later on she worked in a hotel. She married a Jewish man who managed a transportation business with horse carriages but who was so religious that he wore tzitzit. Rozsi was also very religious but she wasn’t happy with her husband. They had two children. Rozsi and her mother were deported to Austria. Her mother got sick and died there. Rozsi came back to Budapest.
Margo was originally from Debrecen, born in 1925 into a proletarian family. Her mother was a poor and very religious woman and judging from a photo, she was very pretty. Her father died in Margo’s childhood of lung disease and the family slid into destitution. Margo had two brothers and the younger of them, Sanyi, was taken to a concentration camp and never came back. Her older brother, Erno, became a shoemaker in Budapest. He never got married. He was so clever that he was wandering around in Budapest during the deportations in a Hungarian army uniform and thus wasn’t deported. I ended up meeting him in Israel much later. Margo also had two sisters: Rozsi, the elder, and Evi, the youngest child in the family.
Hungary
The train was staying in Budapest for 15-16 hours. I told Margo we should find out who was still alive in her family and then we would come back and go to Kolozsvar and then she could decide where we would settle. Back then Margo and I hadn’t decided where we were going to live. As soon as we stepped off the train there came a small officer with soutache decoration and golden buttons on his black uniform. I was wearing SS trousers and Wehrmacht boots just like a Hungarian soldier during the war. The officer said to me, ‘You are under arrest because you are wearing clothes that are government property, you must follow me!’ Immediately about 14 people, with whom I had come on the train from Turkheim and from other German places, gathered around and I said to them, ‘Look at Miki Horthy’s soldier. He wants to arrest me because he says I’m wearing the property of the Hungarian government.’ For that the people started to get pissed off and looked at the little officer with such threatening eyes that he got scared. He jumped onto a tram and shouted from there, ‘All of you are under arrest!’ Then I said to Margo, ‘Well my dear, nothing has changed here in the mentality. I’m coming from a concentration camp and yet they still want to take me away. They are still thinking in terms of the numerus clausus. Let’s see who is alive in your family and go to Kolozsvar afterwards.
We came home on cattle-trucks, we had nothing besides the few things we had got from that Mexican soldier. Coming home was very adventurous. We came upon a group from Maramaros, about ten to twelve people who, besides being filthy, fought and beat each other. There were about 20 of us in one wagon. There was no straw in the wagon so we put blankets on the floor and slept on the luggage. We stopped in certain cities and at a few places people gave us some warm food. They pulled our train off the main track where they gave us some water and let us wash. We were in constant conflict with the personnel at the train station because when they put water in the engine, we would jump off and climb into the water barrels and let the cold water on us because it was so hot and dry in the wagons that we almost went mad. The train brought us all the way to Budapest.
In May the Americans gave us certificates for free movement, put us on trucks and transported us to Feldafing. They didn’t separate me from Margo. We were in quarantine for over two months. Of course, they fed us and gave us some clothes that they got in the German barracks. We also got a blanket each. Margo and I got a place in the attic of the barrack, which was very dusty, and we didn’t even have straw. The attic had a very low ceiling and it was really hot since it was already summer. We were allowed to go to Munich for a day where we could walk around but we had to come back at night. Once, when I had got some money, I asked a German to take me to the city and I bought some paint. Then we were told that Auschwitz had been liberated and we had to get a pass from the Russians because if we were going to Hungary we needed something to prove where we came from. The Americans gave us deportation IDs – I think it was an ID with a picture – that we could go home with.
In exchange for some cigarettes I managed to get engagement rings and we got engaged in front of everybody. People arranged a separate little bungalow for us by the forest. It was beautifully painted white and I decorated it with figures of Indians. Margo and I lived there together and everybody looked at us as a married couple. We even put together some sort of a bed. There was a small Mexican guy in the American army and we found out about each other; we both spoke Spanish. He really liked the painted walls of my house and whenever he had time he came to visit me. He saw that I didn’t have any proper clothes and he was the first person to buy me a green T-shirt and brought me underwear, hankies and things like that.
The former male laborers also started to return to the camp. Sandor came back from somewhere, too, and he told me that he had been taken in by a German as well. We stayed in the SS barracks and at night we even had some blankets. If I’m right we stayed in Turkheim for another three weeks. By then the guys had got together – there were some guys from Maramaros who were all very handy – and we supported the girls and did all kinds of things. The Americans didn’t pay attention to us, they kept moving forward since the war wasn’t over yet.
Margo had undergone a horrible treatment in Ravensbruck: they sterilized her. The women were stripped naked and their hair was shaved. When it was Margo’s turn she went up to the barber but the SS woman suddenly told the barber, ‘Nein, dieser nicht die Haare schneiden!’, don’t shave the hair off this one. Margo later told me, ‘I was almost on my knees begging her to cut my hair because I couldn’t stand to have lice. The SS woman couldn’t be convinced. [She probably didn’t let Margo’s hair be cut because she wanted it so badly.] Margo stood in line and went to the shower. After being liberated it was a great surprise to see Margo with long thick black hair among all the women who had short hair. I didn’t see it at first when I saw Margo in the kitchen because she was wearing a kerchief. But all of a sudden she took the kerchief off and shook her head and all her long black hair fell down. ‘Oh my Lord, why do you have so much hair? What happened?’ and so she told me.
We didn’t leave the town until the Americans arrived. Afterwards I went back to Turckheim to the camp. The barracks of the German soldiers and prisoners were empty. I only realized then that while we, men, had been in Dachau, the camp had got female workers, but by the time the Fuehrer brought us back, the women had been taken away somewhere else. However, some of them escaped and came back to Turckheim. Margo, my future wife, was one of the women who had escaped and came back. The women who came back slept somewhere in the barracks. There was some food left in the kitchen; some potatoes and such, and the women were trying to make themselves something to eat. I met Margo when I saw smoke coming out of the kitchen and I went to see it. I saw two girls and an old man making some food in a great cauldron. I went in and yelled at them, ‘Don’t you know the war is over? Leave this place right now!’ Margo explained to me in a few words that the Germans had wanted to take them away but they escaped, and they were hungry and rather cooked something than leave. Later I found out that these two girls could have gone to the town and their hunger wasn’t the only reason they stayed in the camp. After a few sentences I knew that they were cooking for 20-27 ill people.
After a while the neighbors accepted that I was there and others also received into their houses some concentration camp fugitives; this wasn’t anything unusual. I spent two weeks there. I went to the small town to see what the situation was like and it was a big mess there. French prisoners who had also been freed from the concentration camp, went in to the city and broke into all the stores and shops. One of them saw me just standing and staring at them, and said, ‘Viens avec nous!’ [Come with us]. It turned out they had broken into a shoe store, too and plundered it. It was full of Dermata shoes and boots from Kolozsvar. They grabbed about twelve pairs of shoes and put them on my shoulders and I thought I was going to collapse. And I took all the shoes back to the German’s house and gave him all of them. One of the French people saw that I needed some clothes too, and there were also some Romanian fabrics – brand new with the trademark of a famous Romanian textile manufacturer – and he ripped off about 3 meters and put it on my shoulders, too.
I don’t know how long I had slept for but I woke up from the dawning light and realized that I was in a basement. I felt very hot. It turned out they put me in some kind of bed and they put an eiderdown blanket on me. They came down and took me upstairs to the kitchen, they tidied me up again, and gave me some clothes. I immediately got a latte and some bread, they started to feed me. I slept in the basement and once in a while they would come and wake me up and bring me up to the kitchen. Once, while I was up in the kitchen, we heard somebody banging on the door. They looked out: the German soldiers were retreating and they just wanted to come in to get warm. There was no time for the master of the house to hide me so we agreed that I was going to be an Italian prisoner whom they had let in. The Germans came inside with their guns, as they were. There was a great discussion. I told them something like, ‘Ich bin Italiener, io sono italiano.’ They also tried to talk to me in Italian but they couldn’t. But they weren’t too curious to find out more about me either and they were in pretty bad shape themselves; thin, with beards. Soon they left.
The German and me set off. When I stared at his back with the black uniform, I started wondering, why I was at his back, and him in front of me. The guards were always at the back so they couldn’t be attacked from the back. But I had no strength to run away with my clogs, he would have caught me easily. ‘Schnell, schnell!’, and the man was saying something else to me in German. He turned out to be a railway worker in his black uniform. He took me to his place on some back paths. His house was a little further away from the village. We entered through the garden. A woman came out and said immediately: ‘Nein, nein! Du bist verrueckt!’ [‚No, no! You are completely crazy’ – She was referring to Egon coming from a concentration camp]. ‘I know, shut up!’ He took my clothes off and threw the clothes out of the window into the garden. Meanwhile, the woman brought some warm soapy water, they made me lay down, naked as I was, and washed me. I don’t know more because then I lost consciousness.
There was a small town with pretty houses on the other side of the forest. I was too scared to start my way; where was I going to go? Right then I spotted a big covered furniture transporting truck. It looked dodgy because it had a broken axle. The truck had straw hanging out of the back, one door open and seemed empty. I was terribly weakened and my first thought was to climb into the back of the truck and sleep. Suddenly, I heard a voice behind me, saying ‘Jude’. The voice belonged to a German. I saw a man in black uniform of about 40 and I thought I was done for. Then he said to me ‘Schnell, schnell, komm!’ [Quick, quick, come]. It hadn’t clicked with me when I heard ‘Komm’. In such a situation they would usually push me while saying, ‘Go’, and we would keep on marching.
The guards weren’t there anymore and perhaps the light was out as well. There was a slightly uneasy silence in the concentration camp and we didn’t see the others so we decided to escape. We were very run-down but at least we were over our illness. We knew that we were caged in by wires. We decided to dig ourselves out below the wires, and that’s how we escaped because, naturally, we couldn’t have just walked out through the gates. It was a little foggy and there were some clouds in the sky. We crawled by the garbage – because they collected the garbage and leftovers from the kitchen there – until we felt that the ground was softer. We tried to figure out whether the wires were electrically charged but we thought they were just plain wires because there were usually tunnels between the electric ones. We scraped out a hole and crawled through. The forest was about 15-20 kilometers away from us and we wanted to get there in one run, when the spotlights weren’t on that part. There was a muddy village road. We got up and started running. We ran into the forest but we were so tired that we just fell down there and were gasping on the ground. But we had to get up straight away and walked all night. I think it was my idea to suggest that we continued separately because we only had one chance to escape if we remained together, but two if we separated. Sandor agreed and then we departed. It was extremely cold and dark in the Bavarian forest. This was at the end of April.