So I got into the hospital at age sixteen, as the kind of a child whose only obligation to that point had been to study well. At home, the most I ever did was dry the already washed dishes. I wound up in a forty-bed ward, where there were sacks of hay and cots. The school gym had been converted. I ended up with the kind of nurse, who sat down to teach me what a hospital is and how to work. I experienced so unbelievably much benevolence in the hospital. My work was a difficult as it possibly could be, I hauled cauldrons, distributed food, collected dishes, washed them, emptied bedpans. But there was an atmosphere to the whole thing, a totally positive atmosphere. People were good to each other. Like sometime in July the nurse called me over, that the gentleman doctor L. needs to go to Elemer Street to look at patients, I should go with him, and take the blood pressure meter. I thought to myself, is the gentleman doctor’s hand going to break if he carries it? But I didn’t dare talk back, I took it. It later turned out that she sent me because an old man was dying in the ward, and they wanted to preserve me from when a person dies. In the middle of 1944. In the middle of the bombings and everything. It was important that I shouldn’t see somebody die.
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Zsuzsanna G.
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. As soon as the retreat started, my father escaped. He skipped out about the same way as Laszlo Tabi with the bucket. [Refers to the humorist Laszlo Tabi’s sketch in which he describes that he escaped from the work service with two buckets, and if they asked him for ID, he said he was just going to the well for water.] He got a small hand car somewhere, on top of that was an old stove, as if he were taking it to a blacksmith, and he came to Pest. His clothes were quite acceptable as a worker’s clothes, and he even grew a mustache. He tried to find some place in Pest. I don’t know where he talked to Anna, probably at the tobacco stand, it suffices to say that Anna hid him in her room. He lived for about three months there and they never noticed. He wasn’t even allowed to go piss in the day time. Then in January, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he went to the hospital. And there, we were all liberated together on the 14th of January [Liberation of Budapest][20].
We looked for friends, and they looked for us. When my father first went home to the apartment, he told the Arrow Cross couple to leave because the owner came home. They immediately disappeared. Then my father and I brought home the beds one at a time from Rakoczi Road. Life started.
And now comes the thing that even now, sixty years later I can’t find an answer for: we didn’t talk about what happened. Not with each other, not with other Jews.
Something else happened in 1945. We Magyarized our name from Kauders to ‘H-‘. To this day, it is still difficult for me to say that I’m Jewish. I could never go back to the religion. Not because I was afraid, indeed, I even escorted my mother to temple. In 1949, when I was already working, a colleague of mine good-naturedly told me that I shouldn’t go to temple because it’s incompatible with party membership. And when I told my mother that, she said, ‘look at his stinking Jew, he must have also been there in the synagogue, otherwise where else would he have known that you were there?’ Still in 1948 I had a bad feeling when I got on a tram with a friend on Saturday [the Sabbath] to go somewhere. But I had already lost my faith by then.
My grandfather played cards. So he made a lot of money, yet still they lived in very great poverty, because he had six children [they had seven children, though one died in infancy], and little money made it home. My grandmother was understandably a housewife. When they came up to Pest, sometime around 1914, then my grandfather got a scene-painting position at the Hungarian Theatre [The Hungarian Theatre in Erzsebet Town was owned by Laszlo Beothy, and mainly performed dramas.] I don’t really know why they came up to [Buda-] Pest, I’ve got a foggy notion that it was a period of great bustle, people came en masse from the countryside. I’d guess that they found better job opportunities in Pest, in the positions of those people called up as soldiers to go to war. The children had to be taught some trade, obviously there were more possibilities here.
My father was sent to be a merchant assistant, because he was a very puny kid. My father was an apprentice, the merchant took him on to train him in the fashion merchant trade – he had no concurrent schooling. He worked in the shop, cleaned, took merchandise home, packed, he did everything, but they trained him to dress and groom himself like a merchant’s assistant.
Margit never got married, she lived with her mother, and she took care of her. Imre, the printer was my favorite uncle. He worked in the University Printing House, and that was such a prestigious thing in my childhood. Even before the war, he was a well-known person in the trade union movement, but after the war he remained a printer, didn’t become an independent functionary, but to the end he was a dedicated left-wing person. His wife, Mariska was a peasant girl from Bugac, who wasn’t Jewish, and with whom he lived in a very happy marriage.
My grandpa, David Kauders, paid absolutely no attention to religion. My father, as he told us, was in the third or fourth grade in a Jewish grammar [school] when the teacher smacked him, and he split with religion for the rest of his life. Except, naturally, for his death bed, when he asked a religious friend to write down the words to the father’s blessing for him, because then it was important to him, that he bless his children. Concerning my mother, keep in mind that the Jews from the Alfold were totally assimilated. So the Jew who stayed religious, did so in such a very neolog way [Neolog Jewry] [7], that is, they kept the high holidays, my grandma even lit candles on Friday evening, my mother also, but for example, they never kept the Sabbath. It never came up. There was school, you had to work. We didn’t work on High Holidays, of course. The candle-lighting and dinner on Friday wore us out. The point I’d like to stress is that my family thought of itself as Jewish Hungarians. Hungarians of the Israelite religion. The stress was on the Hungarian. Starting with the fairy tales, folk songs, the culture that I soaked up from when I was tiny was Hungarian culture. There’s a scene in the ‘Sunshine’ film [by Istvan Szabo] when the Jewish family are singing ‘The Spring Wind Sows Rain” at the dinner table. That reminded me of how much we sang together during my entire childhood, and what we sang: folk songs, so-called ‘Hungarian tunes’, popular operetta songs.
My parents were married in 1924. They met when once they passed one another on the street and both of them looked back.
We moved into the VII. District [of Budapest], to Garay Street in 1936 and then I wound up in the Bethlen Square Jewish school. That only happened because when we moved there in May, they had enrolled me in Muranyi Street, in the local grammar [school] where I learned very ugly words in less than a minute, so that my parents immediately decided that this wasn’t the atmosphere [for me].
My mother had prepared everything beforehand, there was matzah balls, charoset, celery greens, horseradish, eggs. But she made them before, it didn’t cause me any conflict. I have to add to that, that my parents were totally assimilated believers, and for example, after the fourth year of grammar school, it was never even considered that we be enrolled in the Jewish gymnasium.
The other thing that makes me think that my maternal grandparents were poor: the daughters were married off badly. Gizella and Antonia both married widowers. I don’t think they had dowries. My aunt Giza lived in a very good marriage to Samuel Klein, who had two sons from his first marriage, Andor and Bela, and they had a daughter, Erzsi [Erzsebet = Elizabeth]. They were so poor that my Aunt Giza cut up bed linens, to sew shirts and dresses for the children. Samuel Klein was a factory worker in the Ujpest [An industrial suburb north of Pest] tanning factory of Wolfner [Wolfner Family] [1]. His son Bela was also a factory worker there, and stayed a worker to the end of his life, by the end becoming a kind of shift boss.
We both went to the Prater Street Ilona Zrinyi [High School] which was a municipal gymnasium. To get a Jewish child enrolled in gymnasium in 1935, you had to get some seriously heavy ‘protekcio’ [slang - inside influence, sometimes favors from friends or simply paid for] on your side. A state school was out of the question, there wasn’t enough money, and a social democrat[-ic Party] representative was able to get my older sister into a capitol city school. At the time, the rule was that those whose older sibling was already enrolled there, they were automatically accepted. So my parents didn’t think about a Jewish school. My father got the ‘protekcio’. He’d been a member of the Social Democratic Party since 1921 [MSZDP] [8]. He wasn’t that active as Uncle Imre. My mother wasn’t as interested in the worker’s movement, as much as being part of the ‘middle-class’, so she was capable of holding my father back a bit, and giving him more prosaic tasks.
We lived our ‘Jewishness’ like a person brushes one’s teeth. For example, in school religion classes were mandatory. We went to our classes, the Christian girls went to their own. We went to the Friday afternoon youth service, the Christian girls went to mass. It was part of a person’s lifestyle, that a person has a religion. There was nobody who didn’t have a religion. It was a system of habits, it was part of social acceptance. That part which says, ‘I’m a proper, respectable family’ and the part that says, ‘We belong to a religion and practice it to some degree.’ But this is never about faith.
In connection to anti-Semitism, I have one memory, from back in the Bakats Square grammar school. More precisely, not my own, but rather my older sister’s, well I only heard this much. She was in fourth grade, the class was about Ferenc Rakosi II., and miss teacher said, ‘You all see Klari Klauders, but she’s a Jew?’. It was the ‘but’.
Later in gymnasium – I was in the sixth grade in 1944 – there was a teacher woman, who came in with an Arrow Cross [Arrow Cross Party] [9] armband, she taught us economics. I was an ‘A’ student for this “Mrs. Sir Dr. Karoly S”[Husband’s title]. In her own classes, she sat the Jews and the non-Jews separately, but in our class for some reason she didn’t. When in April 1944 the school year ended sooner, and we went with our yellow stars to get our report cards, the Hungarian teacher woman, who wasn’t our homeroom teacher anyway, she came in, embraced us, kissed us and bid us farewell in tears. I knew there were kids in our class who were cheering for German victory, but there was never anything like that in class.
In Bakats Street, we had a three-room apartment on the second floor in a huge corner house. The last apartment on the second floor corridor, was on the courtyard, half looked out on this courtyard, and half on the other, but it had a bathroom and a tiled stove. We lived with grandma. I had a very happy childhood. In that social strata, in which I grew up, the children didn’t have separate rooms. The bedroom was a big room, we slept in there with our parents. Grandma slept in the other room. There was a salon with a vitrine, a round table and chairs, where the guests could be seated. There weren’t any armchairs, and there wasn’t a piano, because we didn’t learn music, we learned languages. If I remember well, there wasn’t a separate dining room, we ate in the kitchen. In that apartment, there wasn’t a maid’s room. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we always lived well. Every week they bought a goose. My mother always said, that we’ll be able to make this last, we’re going to eat for a week. We usually ate it in three days, because if something tasted good to us, then my mother would tell us to have some more.
By the way, the reason we moved to Garay Street was because my father got work on Baross Square. He was a window dresser, and a passionate one at that, who was an artist in his work. Window dressers considered their work to be art. They organized competitions, gave out awards. When we looked at window displays during family walks, it wasn’t just to see how much things cost. It was to see what the other window dressers were doing. In the 1930s, my father somehow arranged to get a German trade paper [subscription]. Part of it he saved for and part was contributed by those he worked for.
Laszlo Galla
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Then I was sent to Pest to a post-diploma course. The course was eight months, and there they taught sales management – in today’s terms.
I graduated from high school in 1934. After that, it didn’t even occur to me to go to university. Partly because I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I knew one thing, that I didn’t want to be what my father was, a country ironmonger. For a while I was forced to, anyway. I believe my father took it with mild resignation. He would have liked the business to go on forever and grow. My father, who was one of the most known people in his profession in the country, had been asked by the Weiss Manfred factory for 15 years to come to Pest and be the factory’s iron merchandise director.
Even though my parents didn’t go on holiday, we went to Szabadka, and Kolozsvar; they could somehow take a couple days off, they found someone to substitute them. In Szabadka, my lawyer uncle had a villa in Palics – a pretty summer vacation place near Szabadka. I was there too.
I had been going to Pest since I was a small boy. We had some distant relatives there but we didn’t go because of them only, but my father used to go to get goods. Sometimes my mother and father traveled together, but only if there was a way to leave the shop. I was usually only with my mother in Pest. We stayed at the Astoria Hotel, and I loved the elevator there, and I annoyed the elevator boys, because I was always going up and down in it. Opposite the Astoria was an open air cinema, the Markus Park Cinema, and one could see everything brilliantly from the upper floors of the hotel, if we managed to get a room on the fifth floor on that side. I also liked watching the trams. I loved Budapest in general by then, and I always wondered at the great traffic, and even today I don’t understand – in Szentes few people came and went on the street, everybody did their business wherever they were, and only went to the Post Office or shopping, if they really had to. There was no bustle, and I wondered why did so many people have to be on the street and go here and there, why didn’t they sit at home and do their job.
Besides school, I studied shorthand and took fencing lessons. I always liked sports: I played football, tennis and table tennis. I even won a table tennis competition when I was a 7th or 8th-grader. I also played chess. We didn’t go on hikes – there wasn’t anything to see in Szentes. But we did go to the beach, to the pool. There was a small fifteen meter pool in Szentes surrounded by changing rooms, a side feature of the steam baths – I didn’t go the steam baths, the elderly did – and I learned to swim there. And in 1932, when I was 16, a beautiful big pool was built, with a big park around it, and from then on, ‘pool-life’ was big, and I was a participant there every day. Our social life went on there every summer.
While we lived with my paternal grandparents, we had a kosher household, and the moment my paternal grandmother died, she died later [than he], under my mother we gave up keeping kosher. This doesn’t mean that we started to cook with lard but we didn’t observe the milk-meat separation rules totally. So the whole family, as far as I know, easily bent the Jewish rules. There was religion in the attitude, in honesty, in respect for others, love, charity and empathy. These are wonderful moral characteristics which I noticed everywhere in my family. These indicated religiousness, I believe, not murmuring unknown prayers or observing all kinds of regulations.
On the high holidays, at Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, the shop was closed. Perhaps it was closed at Pesach or Shavuot, I can’t remember exactly. But on the three big holidays, we were certainly closed, and we went to synagogue. At Yom Kippur, I started with half day fasts, so I had to fast for the first time from early evening until lunch the next day. I must have been about eight then. This half-day fast lasted two to three years and from then on I had to do a whole day [Editor’s note: Children have to fast for an entire day, like the adults, only after their bar or bat mitzvah. Until then they only fast half a day.]. This was so even when we’d already given up keeping kosher.
Since my father was a community functionary, he went to synagogue every Friday night and every Saturday, too. At these times, my mother was in the shop, and when I was bigger, I was. My father said that he knew how to pray. He had a tallit, but I never saw him in a teffilin.
My parents lived a fairly busy social life, they had quite a few close and less close friends. My father was the chairman of the Jewish community, my mother was the chair-woman of the women’s association, so they were in the middle of society things. Two or three times a week, after supper, so around 8 or 8.30 in the evening, the guests came, or they went somewhere. Their friends were 100 percent Jewish, even our doctor, who was also the district doctor, was a converted Jew.
We subscribed to the ‘Ujsag’ [‘News’: a liberally-minded political daily that started in 1903, was banned during the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, then continued that fall only to be banned again by the interior minister in 1925.] which you could call a liberal paper then. Then we subscribed to ‘Mult es Jovo’ [’ Past and Future,’ a Jewish literary and artistic journal], and when I was fairly little to ‘Remeny’ [‘Hope’: Jewish literary monthly]. And we had ‘Szinhazi Elet’ [‘Theatrical Life’: A popular weekly which appeared between 1912 and 1938, printing many colorful stories about the early theater and film world, including the text of new plays. Founded by Sandor Incze and edited with Zsolt Harsanyi.], which my mother read, and ‘Uj Idok’ [‘New Times: A literary journal. Produced for and popular with the educated middle class, it came out in many more editions than other literary journals.]. My father got ‘Magyar Vaskereskedo’ [‘Hungarian Iron Merchant’] and the National Hungarian Trade Association paper, which was a professional journal.
We lived with my grandparents. The house was in the same building as the shop, a corner building. The shop and the warehouses were in the corner part of it, and the five-bedroom apartment was on the Petofi Street side.