Whether my grandfather was religious, I don’t know, but the two of them, my grandfather and grandmother, observed holidays, I think; at least, they kept the fast [on Yom Kippur]. Perhaps they even went to the synagogue, but I’m not sure about that. They didn’t tell me about it because my father had converted to Christianity. It’s certain that my father was already non-religious.
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Displaying 18421 - 18450 of 50826 results
Maria Eva Feheri
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My grandmother kept the fasts even after the war, and there were those kinds of meals at holidays. As far as I know, I knew matzah balls from there. When I grew older, after the war, I fasted with her in solidarity, despite the fact that we had already converted. And I think she was kosher at first, because it seemed as if she cooked things separately, but then she may have put up with the fact that it was not like that in our house.
My maternal grandfather was Rezso Rasko. He died about the time I was born, and he must have been around 60 or 70 years old, because they said he died young here in Budapest, after having a tooth extracted. I think he was from Budapest, and I know he was a wood-agent.
My grandmother had five children. The first daughter was my mother, Erzsebet Rasko, born in 1904. Two years later Margit was born. She worked for my grandfather’s wood agency and she was a businesswoman until the end of her life. She got married to a man named Lajos Biro, who died in the war, in forced labor, I think.
In 1956 she went first to Austria, then she lived in London, and decided that from then on, they would keep it a secret that they were Jews.
Next was Laszlo, he was born in 1909. I believe he was employed in the wood trade. He had a wife and a daughter. Laszlo died in the war. He tried to run away from forced labor and was shot by an Arrow Cross man.
The last one was Katalin, or Kato, she was born in 1915 or 1916. She had a high school diploma, then after the war, she worked at the Red Cross and she made aliyah in 1949.
It was a terrible thing that her husband, who was half Jewish, was shot dead by the Arrow Cross 1 men because he was ‘disguised’ in military uniform.
My father Pal Antal was born in Budapest in 1898. First he was an internal specialist, and when they began to dismiss or displace Jewish doctors he learnt pathology, and he was a pathologist until he died. My mother graduated from the Szilagyi high school, and then she studied something to do with horticulture, and she worked in that field. She learnt to tailor and to sew just as a hobby. But she didn’t really have a profession; she was a housewife, and was at home.
Later, after the war, she worked in public health as a hospital caretaker, and she completed courses. So she was skilled in hospital management. First she was in the Rokus hospital, then she was the manager of the Bakats Square hospital.
My parents had their wedding in 1929, but it was only a civil ceremony.
During my childhood we lived in Klotild Street. The apartment was very nice, with three rooms and a hall, and it had a servant’s room; I got the servant’s room later, so that I could have a separate room. We had a very pretty maidservant, named Ami, she did everything: cleaned, washed, cooked and served. Then in 1938, when dad was dismissed, my mother let her go. Then mum cooked and served. We had a big library at home. Dad was very serious, and he let me read everything. He had all kinds of books, including the classics.
My father was on night duty in the old Madach theatre, and he took me there sometimes, and it was free. Mother didn’t go because my brother was small then. They took us to the children’s theatre – Uncle Lakner’s Children’s theatre – once or twice, and to the cinema, once or twice. My parents’ friends were mostly doctors and doctors who played music, and sometimes, in the evening, they performed chamber music at our place.
My father worked as a pharmaceutical advertiser for a German company for a while in 1938. In the 1930s one could foresee that Jews weren’t going to be allowed to stay. That was a very good position. That was one point. The other one was that he used to go out to the counties to tell the medical officers which medicine was good for what.
I think he had converted to Christianity earlier, before my birth. Still, as my mother is Jewish, at the time of my birth I was registered as an Israelite. And in 1937 he had me convert. My brother was already born a Christian, and he wasn’t circumcised.
I went to elementary school in Szemere Street. I knew I was of Jewish origin and that we wanted to go to America because of this, and perhaps the schoolmistress knew as well, because when it was a Jewish holiday she said to me, ‘You can also stay at home if you want’. She didn’t understand that my father didn’t insist on me being half-Jewish. The schoolmistress took it that we were doing it to save our lives, but that we surely wanted to keep the holidays.
I think I made friends mostly with Jewish girls in school. But it wasn’t just because they were Jews, but because the social classes were very sharply divided: most of the Christian girls were wretched little proles. I had a very good girlfriend who was Christian; her family was very decent and they even made friends with my parents.
We had Christmas, but without keeping any of the Christian rites, such as presents, surprises, or a Christmas tree. You could see that my mother wanted to assimilate in this respect. She wasn’t religious either. We didn’t keep any other holidays as far as I know. I don’t remember any Easter, and we didn’t celebrate name days, only birthdays and Christmas. There was never a word about religion, right up until I was admitted to the state high school. Then I was taken to the nuns because the Catholic school admitted Jewish children, even if both parents weren’t Catholics, and the state school didn’t.
Once, just as a joke, in order to make the others believe I wasn’t a Jew, I said, ‘Look, this girl has a nose like a Jew’, and to this, the girl said that she would tell Ms. Eva about it. I thought that would be such a scandal. But eventually it came out, after I won a school swimming competition, and the physical education instructor said that I should go along and join KISOP, which was a youth sports club. My mother told me that I shouldn’t go because they ask for the certificate of baptism of four grandparents – because that was in 1943 – and then I had to go to Ms. Emi and tell her that I couldn’t go because not all four of my grandparents were Christian. I was very nervous and I couldn’t sleep at night, for fear of what Ms. Emi was going to say about it. She said, ‘Antal, are you Jewish?’ And that was that. But I couldn’t go swimming any more.
My father taught me to do sports and not be afraid; he let me swim in the cold Danube and took me walking in the forest. We went on hikes with friends on Sundays. There was a steady group of friends. And I know that before we were broke, my father had a motor boat and we went to Szentendre [holiday village in the Curb of the Danube].
When the yellow star [yellow star in Hungary] 2 came, I decided that I shouldn’t go any more because you couldn’t go to school wearing it. It was March and I didn’t go any more.
During the war my father was fired from his German company, then from the university hospital, then from Janos hospital – there, too, he was a pathologist, but he worked for free. And then he stopped going in when a decree was issued that Jewish doctors couldn’t enter the hospital area [which was part of the anti-Jewish laws in Hungary] 3. In 1944 he was taken to forced labor. He was in Pocsmegyer for a short while. The Russian troops were already close then and they brought them back home to Pest [Budapest] and took them to the ghetto.
The house that we lived in on Klotild Street became a yellow-star house 4 because there were a lot of Jews there. In October 1944, when the Jews had already been deported from the countryside, the Arrow Cross men went into the yellow-star houses and said that everybody had to come out and they would take us to work. First the men, then a few weeks later the women were taken. And when they wanted to take my mother, too, she lay down on the bed as if she was sick and couldn’t go. A policeman, who looked like he was the father of a family himself, came and told her to get up right then. And she started pretending that she was sick, she couldn’t breathe, so the policeman brought a glass of water. But when she said that she couldn’t get up, he held up his gun and said, ‘Get up or I’ll shoot you right now!’ And at that very moment my grandmother entered and started screaming, ‘My daughter Bozsi what’s happening to you here?’ In the meantime the Arrow Cross man shouted to the policeman to come and he said, ‘This one here is having convulsions’. To this the Arrow Cross man said, ‘Leave her to hell, let’s go!’ And he left with the group. At that very moment my mother got up, she grabbed my brother and me and said that we wouldn’t stay here. She ran away with us.
A few days later my mother found a Swedish protected hospital and children’s home at 26 Erzsebet Boulevard and she took us there. It was a two-bedroom apartment, where about sixty children slept and we got along quite well. She said that she was a nurse and her husband was a doctor, and that she worked there on the ground floor with the sick old Jews. She placed us children there.
I was fourteen years old then, and I had a report book from the nuns. I said that I would find out about dad –
see whether he had gone home. The caretaker was a very decent man and he said that dad had been there and left a message that he was at 30 Akacfa Street, in the ghetto. I did all this without a yellow star. I went in, as at the time, the entrance to the ghetto was still open. I went up and dad was lying on a straw mattress with fifteen others. My father said, ‘Come on in, let’s stay together. I’m a doctor and I’ll get a servant’s room for the four of us’. And then we were there in the ghetto in a small servant’s room that faced the courtyard, and we didn’t even go down to the cellar – right up until the Soviet troops came in.
I was fourteen years old then, and I had a report book from the nuns. I said that I would find out about dad –
see whether he had gone home. The caretaker was a very decent man and he said that dad had been there and left a message that he was at 30 Akacfa Street, in the ghetto. I did all this without a yellow star. I went in, as at the time, the entrance to the ghetto was still open. I went up and dad was lying on a straw mattress with fifteen others. My father said, ‘Come on in, let’s stay together. I’m a doctor and I’ll get a servant’s room for the four of us’. And then we were there in the ghetto in a small servant’s room that faced the courtyard, and we didn’t even go down to the cellar – right up until the Soviet troops came in.
When a placard appeared in the streets in 1945 that said, ‘Hungarian Youth! Come on, do sports, have fun, dance!’, I said that this time I was like everyone else. And I joined MADISZ [Hungarian Democratic Youth Alliance] 5 so that I could dance and do sports. And they told me to stay: there would be work, there would be dances, and I’d see that everybody was the same from now on. And I liked it very much and I took the ideology for granted as well. I couldn’t believe what some of my other girlfriends told me about the Soviet Union. I was a believer with all my heart.
My father once talked with a friend who told him, ‘Pal you belong here, you have principles that are Marxist, join!’ And then my father joined and my mother joined, too. And when the resettlements [resettlement in Hungary] 6 came, a very decent, not-at-all-capitalist retailer-friend of ours, who had even brought food to us in the ghetto, was resettled, despite the fact that he had diabetes, and my father wrote to Rakosi [Rakosi regime] 7 about it. He was extraordinarily naive. In 1944 he had thought that if we did what the Germans wanted, there wouldn’t be any problems. And here he thought that if he wrote to Rakosi, they would bring back poor Gyula Marczis. Instead, they convened a party meeting in the Rokus hospital and he was expelled from the Party in 1952.
In 1956 [Revolution of 1956] 8 I would have liked to have left but my father said that in spite of the terrible things that had happened to him, because of his expulsion from the Party, we didn’t have to go away from here; the situation would become calmer now. And Tamas didn’t want to go because he said that he had a machine on loan to him from the Ministry of Light Industry and they would say that he was trying to steal it. Also, Gyuri, my son, was just three years old.
When I got married, I went to work at the Motion Picture Co. in the youth-organizing department where the pioneers were organized for Soviet films – in the largest possible numbers, and for Sunday mornings if possible, so that they couldn’t go to church.
In 1952 when my father was expelled from the Party I was already working at the Culture Department of the Pioneer Center as film organizer and I went in to the cadre official to say that my father had been expelled. He said he was sure that he could clear his case, but they relocated me to a district administrative position. In the meantime in the youth party school one of my girlfriends said to me, ‘Mari, we should study something, let’s go to the teacher training college’. What I had been interested in all my life was sports, physical education, but there was Hungarian language and literature here in the evening course and I graduated from that. At the time I was already known in the pioneer center in Obuda because I was an district chief secretary and I was still going to college and there was a position there. I taught in an elementary school, paid by the hour. I taught in several schools, then I got a real contract at Vorosvari Street. I worked there for many, many years.
In 1952 when my father was expelled from the Party I was already working at the Culture Department of the Pioneer Center as film organizer and I went in to the cadre official to say that my father had been expelled. He said he was sure that he could clear his case, but they relocated me to a district administrative position. In the meantime in the youth party school one of my girlfriends said to me, ‘Mari, we should study something, let’s go to the teacher training college’. What I had been interested in all my life was sports, physical education, but there was Hungarian language and literature here in the evening course and I graduated from that. At the time I was already known in the pioneer center in Obuda because I was an district chief secretary and I was still going to college and there was a position there. I taught in an elementary school, paid by the hour. I taught in several schools, then I got a real contract at Vorosvari Street. I worked there for many, many years.
The children knew that they were Jews, we didn’t hide that, but we didn’t raise them to be religious because we already didn’t believe, either. When, in 1956 my son asked about little Jesus [traditionally, Christmas presents are said to be brought by little Jesus, rather than Santa Claus], when he was three years old, my husband said to him, ‘Gyuri, there is no little Jesus, but you don’t have to tell that to others because it hurts people’. It happened once, in a shop, that somebody asked, ‘Son, what has little Jesus brought you?’ He said to the man that there was no little Jesus and that, ‘[his] father told me that one doesn’t have to talk about this’. So Gyuri knew, and Gabor knew as well. And our close friends knew. Somehow our circle of friends formed in a way that they were all Jews, with one exception.
I didn’t really read newspapers, despite the fact that, as a party member, I should have, but I wasn’t interested in them. I didn’t know anything about Israel, except that Kato, my mother’s sister, was there and that it was not advised to correspond with her because that was not taken well here, and then I wouldn’t get a passport to go to the West as a tourist. For a long time we didn’t correspond with Margit, nor with Rene, who lived in London, but then, in the 1960s, we could even go there to visit them. And then we did. But I didn’t know anything about Israel. I knew about the establishment of the State of Israel and about the problems, when I read the book entitled ‘Exodus’ in the 1960s. I thought a little bit about how good it must be to live there where everybody is Jewish. I was there for the first time in 1985 and then I saw that perhaps not everything was so good there.