Tag #115879 - Interview #78642 (Ferenc Leicht)

But I was still very Jewish. I don’t know if you can imagine how confused a 16 year old boy can be, who had had such experiences. I simply didn’t know what to do. At the beginning of 1946 a young man called Frici Lusztig (he is now the director of the Safed Hungarian Museum in Israel) came to Nagykanizsa. This Frici Lusztig was the organizer of a leftist Zionist movement, who called together all the Jews he could in Nagykanizsa and explained that not those were the Zionists who wore a badge, but those who  were willing to risk their lives so that the Jewish state would be built. At that time it was called the ‘national home’. Because in the original ‘Zionist Declaration’ it is written ‘a national home guaranteed by international law’ [Editor’s note: The interviewee refers to the Balfour declaration.] They didn’t speak about a state at all. And he explained that if someone was Jewish and felt Jewish should take part in this and help. This was like an irradiation for me, and right there and then I joined one of the youth Zionist organizations of social democrat character called Habonim Dror. They told me in this movement that it wasn’t enough if one kept talking and stood at home, but that we should move in and declass ourselves deliberately. Namely to learn manual labor and practice it, because they did not need as many intellectuals as there were among Jews. I joined the movement, I said good-bye to my mother and said that from then on I would act according to my convictions.