Tag #156750 - Interview #78355 (Mrs. Gábor Révész)

The decree ordering Jews to wear a yellow star was followed a couple of weeks later by the decree making the Jews move into so-called yellow star houses. At Fillér utca 21, where we lived, there were five or six other Jewish families. They all moved to the same house in Dohány utca 16-18, because one of the families had relatives there. The apartments in Dohány utca were all spacious four and five room flats. We moved into a room in one of the four-room apartments. The four rooms were each occupied by a whole family. I lived in one of these with my mother. It wasn’t so bad, except for the kitchen, because four households had to share it. It wasn’t so bad for me at all because there were a lot of young people in the house and we got to know each other down in the bomb shelter [basement]. We had fun, we played cards and parlour games. In the apartment next to ours, right next door to us, lived three sisters who weren’t Jewish. We were on very good terms with them. They had a fancy leather goods shop in the Inner City. After the liberation, when I came home, I visited them in the shop a couple of times. They were three exceptionally nice women, three old maids. Every morning they came over and asked us if we needed anything or if we needed anything done, because we weren’t allowed out on the street except for between eleven and one in the afternoon, since there was a curfew on Jews.34 They had taken away our radios by then, and also our bicycles, for the army. The cars, provided anyone owned one, had been taken away earlier. Still, we got news because some people listened to Moscow and London.35 We were also informed about certain things through our Catholic connections, for example, about the state of the front. Also, we received news from the Hungarian newspapers. We were hoping that the Soviet troops would reach us in time, because we knew by then that they had taken away all the Jews from the countryside, and we also knew that Horthy had worked out some agreement that they wouldn’t take away the Jews from Budapest. Anyway, that’s the kind of news that was spreading around. I don’t know how much of it was true, but during the summer we got a more liberal government.36 After the German occupation, a staunchly Germany-oriented, fascist-type government led by Döme Sztójay came to power, but sometime during the summer this government was replaced by the so-called Lakatos government, which was a lot more liberal. This brought a favourable change. The Soviet troops were already on Hungarian soil and we could be pretty sure that we were out of danger. In September 1944 my mother married again, which indicates how optimistic we were.