Grandmother Szidi kept a kosher home. I know that she was a good cook.
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Révész Gáborné
Grandfather Gábor had lots of siblings, eleven brothers and sisters. They all died in concentration camp. They were taken to Auschwitz and were sent to the gas chamber immediately – all the older generation, and most of the young ones, too, because they were all older than my mother. They were well over fifty, so they were sent to that side [during the selection]. The younger ones were mostly with little children. They didn’t survive either. A couple of the women survived, though. I met one in Bergen-Belsen, but then she died, too.
There was also an Aunt Malvin and an Aunt Giza, and I remember them both. They also lived from farming in Csáktornya and died in Auschwitz.
Also, two of my grandfather’s siblings lived in Vinyica, I think. I also stayed with them. It was a real farm with all sorts of animals. They worked the land. Their children also worked on the farm. I don’t know whether they were observant [Jews]. I don’t know anything about that, because we never talked about it in the family. Then in 1944 we lost track of them. We knew that they had been deported.
Aranka Gyenizse had two small children. One was born right after they were married, the other a year later. In the spring of 1944, when her husband was called up again, she stayed with her parents. Her mother-in-law lived in Szabadka – it was also part of Hungary then – and when she heard about the deportations, that they were taking away the Jews, she boarded a train, went to Csáktornya, and gathered up her daughter-in-law and the two small children, and took them with her to Szabadka. She got them out of the ghetto. She probably bribed someone. They were the only ones to survive.
He worked at the Cotton Fabric Plant, which was a big textile factory. He was in charge of its warehouse in Sas utca and he represented the factory. In short, he was employed in sales. Two or three others worked with him. He knew a great deal about textiles, but he didn’t say any more about it because I was a small child when he died, and later, my mother didn’t tell me too much about it either. Sometimes when we went for a walk with my mother, we dropped in on him. I remember that it was a big dark shop with a long counter, and there were mostly samples – not materials or bolts like in a textile shop, just a collection of samples attached to cardboard. They sold them mostly to merchants, so it wasn’t a retail place. He was away a lot. He left in the morning or at dawn and came back home late at night.
My mother had four brothers and sisters. Of the five of them, three survived – my mother’s younger sister, Sarolta Ziegler, who was two years younger than she, my mother, Aranka Ziegler, and Sándor Ziegler. The fourth, József Ziegler, who lived to be a grownup, turned eighteen during the last years of the First World War, and right away died at the Italian front in 1918.
It’s evident from the family history that the family were not educated. They were tradesmen. Józsi, who fell in the war, was a fancy leather goods maker. Sanyi was a gas fitter and plumber, Sári was an assistant in a stationery shop, then had her own shop, and my grandfather was a carpenter. In short, they mostly learned some trade. Even those of their Csáktornya relatives who abandoned farming all wanted to be tradesmen and learned a trade. My mother and all her brothers and sisters finished the sixth grade. They attended six years of elementary school.
When my mother finished the six years of elementary school, her teacher went to her parents and said that she’s not only an excellent student, but she has such thirst for knowledge, she must be allowed to continue her education. My grandfather was relatively poor – he had brought up four children, he wasn’t a rich man, not even comfortably off. But this teacher accomplished one thing: my mother took a supplementary exam and went to higher elementary school [the higher elementary school for girls in Dohány utca. – The Ed.] She finished the four years of higher elementary school, and then she attended a course in commerce. She learned the basics of office work and by the time she was fifteen, she had a job. The portion of her salary that she had to give to the family she did – I presume that she must have come to an agreement with grandmother, because she wore the pants in the family and she managed the household – and with the portion she was allowed to keep, she attended German classes and learned German, which she couldn’t do at home. She must have learned some German in higher elementary school, but two years meant a lot.9 She learned German quite well. She spent all her holidays in places where they spoke German so she could practice. She went with a colleague of hers to Germany or more like Austria, so they could practice. In this way my mother advanced up the ladder and became a German correspondent at the office.
So she ended up as a German and French correspondent. The fact that her German was very good – her French less so – is apparent from the fact that she eventually got a job with a German company. She was the German correspondent for the manager of the Domestic Combed Yarn and Textile Works.10 She was still in her teens when she started working there. Then during the war she was transferred to Textile Headquarters [the Hungarian Textile Centre Shareholding Company], which had been turned into a centre for wartime economy. I don’t know where it was, but I do know that my father also worked there during the war [i.e., the First World War], and that’s where they met. They were colleagues. They got married after the war, in 1921, I think.11 I don’t know if she got married in a synagogue but I would think so, because my mother wouldn’t have wanted to offend my grandmother. At the time, people got wed in a synagogue.
When my father died, they’d stopped buying books regularly, but we always got a book for Christmas, usually poetry. My mother went to the library and read. While my father lived, they went to the theatre, and also attended concerts. I think they usually went to the Vígszínház, and they took us, too, because they had children’s performances. On Sunday morning they took us regularly to Uncle Lakner’s Children’s Theatre.12 I remember one play, “My Sweet Step-mother”.13
We got the papers, but we didn’t have a radio. We always subscribed to the papers, a German language paper at that, the “Pester Lloyd”. My father and as a result my mother, too, held liberal middle-class views.
We got the papers, but we didn’t have a radio. We always subscribed to the papers, a German language paper at that, the “Pester Lloyd”. My father and as a result my mother, too, held liberal middle-class views.
After the liberation, when I came home from deportation, I immediately enrolled in the gymnasium for workers, and graduated in 1950. My mother was over the moon. Then I applied to ELTE [Eötvös Lóránd University] to study pedagogy and philosophy, and I was admitted. I was an excellent student both at the gymnasium and the university. Meanwhile, I also had a job. And when I got my teacher’s diploma, my mother was as happy as if she’d won the grand prize in the lottery, that’s how proud of me she was.
I also want to say about my mother that not always, but sometimes it would happen that she’d light a candle on Friday night, maybe even every Friday. But except for Passover, we didn’t observe the holidays.
When I was a child, we lived in the fifth district. The house was on the first side street that opens from Nádor utca, it’s called Garibaldi utca now, but back then it was Géza utca. One of my aunts, my father’s older sister, lived with us. Her name was Janka, but my sister and I called her Koki. I don’t know why. She was a tiny, slender woman with weak nerves, which prevented her from performing in public although she had studied the piano and was the pupil of a very important person. She was a Thomán pupil.17 She was a very talented pianist but she couldn’t perform in public because she suffered from stage fright, and so she became a piano teacher. She had a big Bösendorfer piano.18 We had a three-room apartment, and one of the rooms was hers. One of the other rooms was the dining room, and there was a bedroom where four of us slept. There was a bathroom, and the bedroom had a double bed and there was a bed at the foot of the bed, where my sister slept, and my small bed was against the wall by the bathroom door. While my father was alive and we lived in this three-room apartment, I slept on that cot.
We also had a maid with whom we kept in touch until she died. She was also from Zala [County]. I even remember her name, Ilona. The name of the village from where she came was Zalagalsa. She came to work for us when she was sixteen. She was with us for many years. I don’t know how my mother found her. We loved her very much and we were very close. My mother was like a mother to her, which shows how much she cared for her. My mother got her married off and gave her a dowry. After she got married, she lived in Horn Ede utca, but until then she lived with us. Her room opened from the kitchen. How she found a husband is an interesting story. A grocer’s apprentice started courting her. He worked at the grocer’s where she and my mother did their shopping. My mother and Ilonka always went shopping together. They did their shopping at the Hold street market, and there were shops by the front of the building. There was a grocery and delicatessen shop, and that’s where they shopped. This apprentice was there and they became such good friends that Ilonka got pregnant and told my mother. When she heard this, my mother sprang into action. She went to the young man and his boss and made a fuss saying, kindly marry Ilonka or else! And so it happened. Their wedding was in the Basilica. My sister and I were the flower girls. This is why her family didn’t attend. She had an older brother in Pest. He was a shoemaker whom we called Suszti.19 We were on very good terms with him, too. The baby was born. The two of us, my sister and I, were the godmother, and Suszti the godfather. They lived at Horn Ede utca 4 in a one room apartment with a kitchen and we used to visit them a lot.
Ilonka did everything with my mother except for the wash, because we had a washing woman. But she did the ironing alone. Mrs. Jakab came once a month, and I remember that on these occasions we always had something for our midday meal that she especially liked. We had chicken soup and noodles with cottage cheese, or some other dish with noodles, because that’s what Mrs. Jakab liked. I don’t know where she was from. All I remember is that when she was there, we weren’t allowed into the kitchen because that’s where she set up the tub, and the clothes and bed linen were boiling in a big pot. Back then the beds were changed once a month. There was a laundry room in the building, but we didn’t use it. I don’t remember where we hung the laundry out to dry. Probably up in the attic. The house had four storeys, and we lived on the fourth.
Ilonka did everything with my mother except for the wash, because we had a washing woman. But she did the ironing alone. Mrs. Jakab came once a month, and I remember that on these occasions we always had something for our midday meal that she especially liked. We had chicken soup and noodles with cottage cheese, or some other dish with noodles, because that’s what Mrs. Jakab liked. I don’t know where she was from. All I remember is that when she was there, we weren’t allowed into the kitchen because that’s where she set up the tub, and the clothes and bed linen were boiling in a big pot. Back then the beds were changed once a month. There was a laundry room in the building, but we didn’t use it. I don’t remember where we hung the laundry out to dry. Probably up in the attic. The house had four storeys, and we lived on the fourth.
While my father lived, we attended the Szemere utca elementary school in the fifth district and then to the school in Szív utca for another two years. That’s where I finished the third and fourth grades. We were both very good students. My mother wanted to send us to gymnasium, to a state school, of course, but we weren’t admitted. My sister should have started gymnasium in 1936, but she couldn’t attend a state school because of the numerus clausus. Those few who were admitted had patronage.20 We didn’t know any people who could pull strings for us. This upset my mother very much, because she had great hopes for us and she wanted us to get an education, which she had been unable to do, and so she enrolled us, meaning first my sister and then me, in a fully licensed private gymnasium. The school was on Andrássy Road.21 It was rather expensive, but she managed to get us a “half-prize ticket” by pleading that we’re half-orphaned. These schools were bound by law to provide lower tuition for a certain number of students, and we fit the quota. My sister attended for four years, and I for two. My sister stopped attending when she chose the industrial drafting school where she applied, and after taking her entrance exam, she was admitted. She was admitted on the strength of the work she did for her exam. After two years of gymnasium, I had to be taken out of school because my mother couldn’t afford the tuition any more.
My teacher was an avid Zionist and he kept telling us that one day we must all go to Palestine. And I thought to myself, go, if that’s what you want, but I’m staying put. I couldn’t have cared less.
After I finished my fourth year, I came back home to Budapest. This was in the summer of 1942. My mother’s life was turned upside-down because due to the second Jewish law, she lost her job. She couldn’t support herself or keep up the apartment. The question was, what should become of me? I need to study something from which I could make a living. The situation was pretty hopeless by then, so the idea that I should go to gymnasium didn’t even come up. And then the Jewish Gymnasium started a new faculty called the industrial faculty, the equivalent of today’s vocational secondary school structure. It was in the building of the Jewish Gymnasium in Abonyi utca, which is today’s Radnóti Gymnasium. It didn’t cost anything and offered a reduced syllabus. But it came with a diploma and had perspective. I learned sewing. This was a four-year school, or would have been, but of course, I couldn’t finish. I went there for about two weeks, more or less, then they took the building away and moved us into another building in Wesselényi utca that belonged to an industrial and trade school. At the Jewish Gymnasium there was teaching every other Sunday, because of course, there was no school on Saturday.
The next year was the 1943-44 school year, which lasted only until March 19 [because of the German occupation of Hungary]. We were occupied by Germany, and the school year came to an abrupt halt. Any Jew that went out on the street was in danger.
I got my first taste of politics when my sister took active interest in it. I was still a child when she was already an adolescent, and she was among people for whom these things were important. She was still a student herself, but in her circle of friends the boy she was seeing, for example, was a gardener, and he held strong leftist sentiments. My first politics-related memory concerns the János Vajda Society. I went there with her to attend a political-type event. This was a literary circle, which means that there were artists with pronounced leftist leanings, and the performers were leftist artists and Jewish artists who’d been fired from the theatres. These were literary matinées with strongly political content. I heard poems with strong political overtones. That’s when I started collecting books. I bought Attila József, Ady, the poets of the Nyugat, Kosztolányi, Babits. In short, I got involved.
Still, I’d like to mention the name of the girl from whom I heard my first anti-Semitic remark. She said, “dirty, filthy Jew”. This was in Szentendre. But that was the only time. I never had any other similar experiences.
Of course, that changed after the German occupation. I never experienced anti-Semitism at all. Prior to 1944 I knew nothing about it. Needless to say, I knew that Hitler existed and that he was dangerous and all that. But I wasn’t concerned. The entire Hungarian Jewry didn’t take him seriously. I think this was because we somehow felt that what had happened, first in Germany and then in Poland, couldn’t happen in Hungary, because in Hungary the Jews were completely assimilated, and they were Hungarian. In short, there was no sense of danger until the German occupation. There really wasn’t.
From the time my father died, we found it difficult to make ends meet. We now knew that we were poor. While my father was alive, we took it for granted that we lived normal, well-tempered middle-class lives. But afterward my mother made it clear, again and again, but we felt it too, of course, that everything had to be carefully portioned out. For instance, when she made stew, we were each given three cubes of meat to go with the potatoes, because she bought a quarter kilogram of meat, and it had to serve the three of us. She was a very economizing and thrifty person till the day she died. When there was no need for us to be so thrifty any more because we were living better, even then it was in her blood. It went back to her childhood, when there were four of them children to be cared for. We had to live very frugally, and it became part of her essence to always think about tomorrow.
After she had us, my mother didn’t work. But then the Domestic Combed Yarn and Textile Works where she’d worked as a young woman took her back. She had earlier worked in their city office, but then, in 1936, she had to go all the way out to Soroksári út, where the factory was located. She was what we’d call today the secretary of the German manager. She wrote his letters and kept everything in order around him. I remember that her monthly salary was two hundred pengős, which didn’t half cover our expenses, so we moved from our three-room apartment to a two-room apartment. First we moved to Szív utca in the sixth district, then a couple of years later to Szondi utca, because my mother’s younger brother lived there. Meanwhile my grandmother died and grandfather moved in with his son. My mother rented a two-room apartment two blocks down the street, at Szondi utca 46/c. I think she was hoping that this way there’d always be someone looking after us. We had lunch at my mother’s sister-in-law, who was a dental technician, and who worked at home. She fed the whole family, her father-in-law as well as us. She cooked every day because she worked at home. I don’t know whether my mother paid her for it, but at least we had something warm to eat every day around noon, and in the evening my mother cooked for us.
When the Jewish laws were passed, the first Jewish law did not pertain to my mother and her job, because she was just a low-paid clerk. They were after the big fish. They fired company managers and others with big salaries. They were the first to go. But then the second Jewish law, in 1942, I think, pertained to my mother as well, and she was fired.29 She then got work with an undergarment salon as an outworker. She brought home the sewing. She hemmed the bottoms of slips and nightgowns, and we helped her. They paid her by the piece, so when we had time and we didn’t have to be in school, my sister and I chipped in. These were very difficult years.
My mother got married for the second time in 1944. Her second husband was an interesting fellow. I know a lot more about him. His name was Antal Schiller. He was a Jewish man from Győr. He was a complete atheist, he never bothered with stuff [religion], and he knew how to make the best of things. He was easy-going and a bit rash, but very talented, a so-called self-made man. He also came from an unschooled family, and he didn’t achieve what he achieved because of his schooling, but because he was interested in things. He was appraiser and auctioneer for the Ernst Museum.30 I can’t tell you how highly respect he was in his profession. And he acquired his knowledge of carpets, porcelain and furniture on his own, without any schooling. He even went to Brazil to learn about merchandising art.
When he and my mother met, we lived in Fillér utca. The apartment in Fillér utca, as I’ve mentioned before, had a room-and-a-half with a hall that my mother bought from her compensation when she was fired from the Domestic Combed Yarn and Textile Works after the second Jewish law was passed. She lived there until, in wake of the German occupation, she had to move into a yellow-star house at Dohány utca 16-18.
t was Sunday when the German occupation began. I was just heading home from school across Margaret Bridge. Traffic stopped in the middle of the bridge to make room for the armoured vehicles and motorcycles crossing it. Anyway, they got into an altercation with the tram driver, and two German officers and a Hungarian gendarme got on the tram that I was on and asked for our IDs. I only had my student’s tram pass with me, so I showed them. They asked where I go to school. I said I was going to the Reformed gymnasium, because I knew by then what was going on. So I made it home. They let us go from school telling us that we must go straight home, because the Germans have occupied Hungary.
The next day they caught my sister on the street, and we never saw her again. We later found out that she had been taken to the internment camp at Kistarcsa, because a Hungarian policeman brought us a letter from her. I even remember the circumstances. My mother and I were sitting at the table for our Sunday midday meal when the bell rang and I opened the door. I saw a policeman standing there. I got terribly frightened, but he said to let him in because he’d brought a letter from my sister. We had him sit down and I remember that my mother asked him to join us, but he declined. He was a very nice man. My sister wrote this letter on a tiny piece of paper in minuscule handwriting. She used such a small piece of paper so the policeman shouldn’t get into trouble. She was first taken to the central transit prison in Mosonyi utca.32 From there she was taken to the Margit körút prison, and from there to Kistarcsa. Because of the Jewish laws she wasn’t allowed to design clothing any more, so she went to work in a textile factory on the Újpest Quai. She was paid twenty-five pengős a week, which helped contribute to our daily budget, though not much. They were hiding partisans who had come over from Slovakia in the basement of the factory. I know this from her. That’s when I first heard about that certain Auschwitz Protocol. We’re not sure, but my sister was taken away from there, or else, from that area. Maybe this had something to do with it. My second husband, Gábor Révész’s aunt, Margit Révész, who was a well-known child psychiatrist and had a children’s sanatorium in Zugliget, was friends with the doctor of the prison on Margit körút, and she found out that my sister is being held there. By the way, Margit Révész’s sanatorium catered to the retarded children of well-to-do bourgeois families.33 Once we were able to send a package through her, but then we lost track of what happened to my sister, except that we later learned that she had been deported to Auschwitz. We got a postcard from her, written in German. It contained a stereotyped text in her own handwriting, in German. It said that she’s fine and everything is OK. The stamp on the envelope said Waldsee, which was the cover-name for Auschwitz. In 1944, they made people who were taken there to write these letters to calm everyone. Later, when they took the Jews from the countryside there by the tens of thousands, they didn’t place so much emphasis any more on letting people know. Of course, there was no one to write to, anyway, because they were all taken away. Needless to say, my mother searched for us through the Hungarian Red Cross. Once she received a letter from a woman doctor, who described what had happened to my sister. They were on a forced march from Auschwitz towards Hannover. My sister was not in a bad physical state, but her spirit was broken and she gave up the struggle. When they reached Malchow, my sister didn’t want to go on. Those that stayed behind were shot. This is how we found out that she died in May 1945.
The next day they caught my sister on the street, and we never saw her again. We later found out that she had been taken to the internment camp at Kistarcsa, because a Hungarian policeman brought us a letter from her. I even remember the circumstances. My mother and I were sitting at the table for our Sunday midday meal when the bell rang and I opened the door. I saw a policeman standing there. I got terribly frightened, but he said to let him in because he’d brought a letter from my sister. We had him sit down and I remember that my mother asked him to join us, but he declined. He was a very nice man. My sister wrote this letter on a tiny piece of paper in minuscule handwriting. She used such a small piece of paper so the policeman shouldn’t get into trouble. She was first taken to the central transit prison in Mosonyi utca.32 From there she was taken to the Margit körút prison, and from there to Kistarcsa. Because of the Jewish laws she wasn’t allowed to design clothing any more, so she went to work in a textile factory on the Újpest Quai. She was paid twenty-five pengős a week, which helped contribute to our daily budget, though not much. They were hiding partisans who had come over from Slovakia in the basement of the factory. I know this from her. That’s when I first heard about that certain Auschwitz Protocol. We’re not sure, but my sister was taken away from there, or else, from that area. Maybe this had something to do with it. My second husband, Gábor Révész’s aunt, Margit Révész, who was a well-known child psychiatrist and had a children’s sanatorium in Zugliget, was friends with the doctor of the prison on Margit körút, and she found out that my sister is being held there. By the way, Margit Révész’s sanatorium catered to the retarded children of well-to-do bourgeois families.33 Once we were able to send a package through her, but then we lost track of what happened to my sister, except that we later learned that she had been deported to Auschwitz. We got a postcard from her, written in German. It contained a stereotyped text in her own handwriting, in German. It said that she’s fine and everything is OK. The stamp on the envelope said Waldsee, which was the cover-name for Auschwitz. In 1944, they made people who were taken there to write these letters to calm everyone. Later, when they took the Jews from the countryside there by the tens of thousands, they didn’t place so much emphasis any more on letting people know. Of course, there was no one to write to, anyway, because they were all taken away. Needless to say, my mother searched for us through the Hungarian Red Cross. Once she received a letter from a woman doctor, who described what had happened to my sister. They were on a forced march from Auschwitz towards Hannover. My sister was not in a bad physical state, but her spirit was broken and she gave up the struggle. When they reached Malchow, my sister didn’t want to go on. Those that stayed behind were shot. This is how we found out that she died in May 1945.
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.
Then came October 15. That was the day of the Horthy Proclamation, when the Governor wanted to negotiate a separate peace in that absolutely dilettante political way of his. He thought that the Germans would be kind enough and leave, as if that were only to be expected from Hitler and the Germans in general. The next day Horthy was no longer the regent, and that same day, October 15, the Arrow Cross Party, which had been waiting in the wings, took over the government, and Szálasi sprang into action. That’s when the deportation of Budapest’s Jews began.37 The camp at Auschwitz had been liberated sometime in January 1944, so we couldn’t be taken there.38 There weren’t enough wagons by then. The Jews from the countryside were transported by cattle cars, but we walked on foot all the way to Austria. We had to walk twenty to twenty-five kilometres a day. Those who couldn’t make it were shot. I survived because I was young and had warm clothes and sturdy boots. About fifty of us left together from the same house, and I know that only six of us made it back.
The Arrow Cross took over on October 15, and by the next day there were various limiting degrees issued, for example, that every Jewish who in the spirit of the Nürenberg laws is considered Jewish must show up for labour service, including women between the ages of sixteen and fifty. I had just turned sixteen, so the law applied to me, too.39 . Luckily, my mother was older. Men had to go into labour service if they were between sixteen and sixty years of age. My stepfather was also exempt, because he was working in a German ammunitions factory.40 They ended up going from Dohány utca to the Ernst Museum, where the superintendent hid them, but they later ended up back in the ghetto, from where they were then liberated.
The Arrow Cross took over on October 15, and by the next day there were various limiting degrees issued, for example, that every Jewish who in the spirit of the Nürenberg laws is considered Jewish must show up for labour service, including women between the ages of sixteen and fifty. I had just turned sixteen, so the law applied to me, too.39 . Luckily, my mother was older. Men had to go into labour service if they were between sixteen and sixty years of age. My stepfather was also exempt, because he was working in a German ammunitions factory.40 They ended up going from Dohány utca to the Ernst Museum, where the superintendent hid them, but they later ended up back in the ghetto, from where they were then liberated.