When we were kids in Satoraljaujhely, the total population was about 11 thousand, more than 5000 of them were Jews.
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Displaying 21181 - 21210 of 50826 results
Jenő Dick
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There was a big Neolog [Neolog Jewry] [3] community, an Orthodox community and a Hassid one. There were three big temples: the Neolog temple, not far away was an Orthodox one and on the other side of the city was where the Sephardic Jews went in white stockings, kaftans, and in ‘shtreyml’ [Hasidim]. There were prayer-houses as well. I mainly went to one of them to pray. The rich leather merchant family who lived nearby, the Schonfelds, had their own prayer house, with the Tora. They prayed everyday. We belonged to the Orthodox religious community.
From the age of four I had to study in the cheder. I learned Hebrew a lot sooner than Hungarian. They didn’t want to start me on reading Hungarian, they said, because they didn’t want me to get ahead of the rest of the school.
My father had a permanent seat in the synagogue, and I had my place next to him at every prayer service every day, but every Saturday and on holidays, too. I was raised in this kind of family, I couldn’t have imagined that any other kind of family existed. Independent of this, in one of the buildings where we lived, there weren’t only Jews. We made friends there, also, because in Satoraljaujhely, the Jews then were highly-esteemed people.
My bar mitzvah was very elegant. The instructors prepared us, the Jewish teachers. I got a beautiful present with my name on it: a book, with a Hungarian translation and a small gold ring, too. It was very thin, but it made me happy because it was so pretty, and I showed it proudly to everyone. It’s such a beautiful experience to think back on my Jewish past like this, that I can’t imagine something more beautiful.
Every year they sent us poor Jewish relatives a sack of flour and a sack of potatoes. They sent delicious Nyirbaja Gulbaba potatoes, and that was a very big help.
The house we lived in was a three-room house. The owner lived in one part, we got two rooms. We had electricity and running water. In our big kitchen, we had a drain too, and next to the drain was a lead-coated bathtub, seperated by a curtain. Well, you could bath quite often, they heated up water, there was a stove, and a ‘sparhelt’ [pot-bellied stove], of course. My parents warmed up the water in big tin pans. Occasionally, two or three of the girls would bath one after another, with the appropriate kosher soap.
The American relative sent packages one or two times every year, worn out clothes and things they didn’t use anymore. We had to apply for customs exemption for the package at the customs office. Three of my siblings could sew – they sewed things for themselves from the packages, and pants for me and a little vest. So we had these kind of clothing opportunities, because poverty didn’t allow them to buy us any other clothing items.
We knew well that many times my father was unable to pay. At such times, he would get stock on consignment so he could go to the markets, because he couldn’t pay for the stock from his own money. Occasionally, he took me with him. I didn’t go to school that day, and if he felt bad, I even accompanied him to the market.
In 1930, the whole family moved to Miskolc because of the poverty. They hoped that from there, my father could earn more, market better, and this way making a living would be easier. We were able to stay in our first apartment for only six months, we couldn’t pay the rent once in six months. During the six months, we just put it off, and put it off, and in the end, they let us go on the whole thing. Then we went to a much cheaper apartment. That also had two rooms, and there was veranda, the girls worked there. There was a proper courtyard, where the children could play, and we held get-togethers. Once my parents were cooking jam and we stirred the jam all night long. We held every holiday longer, and we went to the Kazinczy Street orthodox synagogue there.
Hitler’s rise to power touched me in Miskolc. I already felt the troubled times in Miskolc.
I was working as a free young assistant then, first in the shop of a Jewish couple named Salgo, then for the Quitt Lipot textile company. My father didn’t have enough money to teach me a trade. I most would have liked to be an automechanic or dental technician, I looked into these two trades for myself. In the end, I went off to be a men’s wear student in Miskolc [commerce schools], at one of the most elegant shops, where you could really learn intelligent commercial services.
In May of 1936, the whole family had moved up to Budapest, to Paulay Ede Street to a rented apartment. My brother and my sister also came up to Pest, and settled here. The girls were seamstresses, my brother was a commerce assistant [Most likely this was his youngest older brother, Miklos]. They were the predecessors, and that’s how I got from Miskolc to Pest also. In Pest, we continued to attend synagogue, we belonged to the one in Vasvari Pal Street.
When they collected the Poles [Kamenetz-Podolsk Massacre] [6], my father was taken in by the authorities as a Polish Jew. Somebody reported his address to them, perhaps a neighbor or somehow they got his address. Because of that, I had to make a lot of arrangements to get a birth certificate approved by the rabbis for my father, and proof that he was a Hungarian citizen. Then we went back and forth to the KEOKH [National Central Alien Control Office] [7] until everything got settled. The KEOKH then was in the present day Economics university building. I had very big help in Budapest from Dr. Ferenc Godmar, who was the Budapest Vice-chief of Police. That’s how come they didn’t take my father away.
In Pest, as well as Miskolc, I always got out to the cinema.
I was a workserviceman two times. In 1939, they called me in to be a real soldier, but the Jewish laws at that time said I wasn’t allowed to be. They deployed me in Szentendre [15 miles north of Budapest].
I did some work, and lived with my parents. I couldn’t do anything else, because I was at work day after day, I went to 16-20 places one after the other. I went by bicycle, to make it easier, because there weren’t many buses then. I did my work in the Pest area and outlying regions. Every filler was needed to maintain the family, because my parents were elderly, and they lived truly quite greviously. I gave my parents almost all my entire pay, except for a little pocket money, My other siblings and I had decided this. I had two older brothers and two older sisters who did the same thing. Everybody gave my parents an amount, and then my poor mother could keep her religious kosher household for the upkeep of the family. My father couldn’t work, he was old, often sick. If he ever went to a market, he took me with him.
I met my wife in Budapest. She was thirteen years old, when I would tease her on her way to school with a big bag on her back. We lived in the same house in Budapest, 16 Paulay Ede Street. They lived on the third floor, we lived on the first floor. I flew up the steps everyday just to ask her what she’s doing. She was studying to be a seamstress. She accepted me when she had to take a dress home before it got dark: You’re walking me home, right? These are the kind of memories, I can’t forget. We lived a peaceful life for sixty years.
She grew up in a very poor family, as an only child. The family were Neolog Jews, so less religious than my parents, but it was agreeable because they likewise, had come to Budapest for financial reasons. Her father was a watchmaker and jeweller, he’d learned his trade somewhat. Her mother was at home at first, then during the war my mother-in-law also went into hiding, but somewhere else, than my parents. Her husband never came back from Auschwitz, we soon found out that they’d killed my father-in-law.
Our civil marriage was on February 10, 1943 on a simple workday.
A few days later we went to the Hosok Temple next to the Dohany temple [synagogue]. They said, the same thing as at the Dohany Temple only more elegantly. The synagogue was packed full for our wedding. Rabbi Hevesi married us. They played the organ and the most famous, baritone cantor sang. It was wonderful. They performed everything according to proper Jewish tradition in the Neolog Dohany [Street] temple.
Once during the war, two people came out of the house and approached me. They whispered something to a gun-toting Arrow Cross [Arrow Cross Party] [9], who was making a raid on the street. This happened on January 8, 1945 at about ten in the morning. They came straight over to me, that I’m surely a Jew, and what am I doing there. I begged their pardon. I said, I’m not a Jewish, and I took out my papers, which said I was Jeno Dioszegi, born in Debrecen. I’d bought the papers from an acquaintence for a fortune, who mostly sold them to Slovak Jewish refugees. The identification was in order with all the official stamps. They didn’t accept it anyway, and took me away by car. I was forced to obey the two men armed with machine pistols. They shoved me in the cellar, and interrogated me until five in the evening. I said that I was a Protestant, and a soldier. I had a fake letter that said I came out of the hospital from the military. We came up out of the cellar at exactly five in the evening, five or six of us, so we could go to the toilet, for the first time since the morning. When they took us up, we went through a dark basement space, where I slipped into a really hidden corner.
Then afterwards, I got myself together, and I went to the place that I’d hidden my parents in previously. They were in 41 Lonyay Street, with my wife and child. I rented the apartment with fake papers. My parents had been in the ghetto [Budapest Ghetto] [10] for a while, in some downtown street, probably Akacfa Street or in Suto [Street]. After a short time, I secretly got them out of there, and took them over to Lonyay Street [dressed] in peasant clothes.
Karoly Ersok was one of my helpers. My parents used his dead parents’ birth certificates. The years weren’t right, but they could go into hiding with them. I really ran out of money, it cost me a lot to get all the papers and an apartment. But I was happy because all the money was worth the fact that my parents were alive and didn’t have to go to the ghetto. Later my wife and daughter also went over there.
We stayed there exactly until the Soviet army arrive around noon on January 15, 1945. We saw the German soldiers fleeing from our window, and then the Russian soldiers came. The Russians had already captured the area around our house, and I even went out to greet them. They were very nice, I coaxed them into see my parents who lived there on the first floor. They could speak Tot with my parents a little.
When the situation normalized a tiny bit, the ghetto was also liberated. We were anticipating that in Lonyay Street. On January 18th, I packed up my parents and we wandered home on foot. We had a pretty tough time, but the child had a sled. We bundled everything into a shawl and in the driving snow and cold, we reclaimed our apartment.
A man from around Pest, from Pesterzsebet, and his family were living in my elderly parents’s apartment. I heard he’d had a really pretty house in Pesterzsebet. We had two rooms, a bigger one and a smaller one. When we could finally go home, I said on behalf of my parents that they should kindly vacate the apartment because we came home. That little man with his mustache looked like a little Hitler, and his attitude was the same. He didn’t want to leave. During the war, he’d thrown all the prayer books into the courtyard, and burned them there. All my father’s books were burned. I didn’t have to do any more than just grab him by the collar, his neck, and lift him up a bit. We lived on the first floor [above the ground floor], and I lifted him by his collar: “My boy, if you don’t get out of here in less than an hour, I’m going to throw you out of this apartment to hell!” So I got rid of them quickly.
We lived up on the third floor, there a family occupied the apartment, who handed over the keys without a word. The custodian’s wife’s son-in-law had moved in to our place. The custodian’s wife was very decent, she’d hid Jews there, and she was always decent to me, and her son was, too. He was a firebrigade commander, he accompanied me in his uniform when I got my disguised parents out of the ghetto into hiding. He helped a lot when we arrived. Nothing was missing from there. True, I hadn’t left much. They’d taken a whole lot of everything from my parents’ apartment. They’d hauled off carpets, mattrasses and pictures, but whatever they couldn’t haul off was still there.
In 1962 I was in Vienna at a match, and then an acquaintence said that there I would get reparations, they’d compensate me for what was taken, everything, and they’d put me on a pension. I couldn’t do it, I had two children in 1962. I couldn’t have left my wife either.
In the 1940s, I was a so-called ‘light’ socialist party believer with the Social Democrats. My older brother quite active politically and later together with Sandor Ronai [Ronai, Sandor (1892-1965) – was head of various ministries from 1945-1950, then became Presidential Counsel from 1950-1952, from 1952-1962 he was the national congress president.] My brother was one of the party secretaries for the Social Democratic Party in the woodworking factory, Ronai was the representative there.