When Communism fell in 1989, that did not touch us really. I had already retired by 1980, though I did work afterwards. If socialism hadn’t failed, then we’d be much farther along. And I dare say, that Hungarians are good workers. There was never a better time in my life than that time. You could vacation for pennies. My wife worked as a typist and shorthand secretary in the Ministry of Finance. It wasn’t a lot of status, but it was good work and sufficient money came out of it. We went on vacation with our relatives from France for a summer. With the four relatives and the four of us, we still only paid pennies. We could sit down in elegant places numerous times. So, life was good for a worker. After 1956 [revolution] [18], they even left us, the self-employed, alone. After 1956, you didn’t have to be afraid if you were a private businessman or self-employed. After 1956, the situation changed. It was a pretty good life. These people are lying about everything, which wasn’t true then.
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Displaying 19021 - 19050 of 50826 results
Ferenc Szabados
We have two grandchildren. Eszter is seventeen, while Robi is eighteen years old. They attend the Lauder Javne School [Jewish school]. They’re good students and good kids. Religion is a big part of their lives. Robi is always hiding in Moses’ five books. He won two Bible competitions, and even went to Israel for a competition. Only once, we didn’t let him go. We didn’t want him to go because there was bombing going on. The relatives there even wrote that it would be better if he didn’t go then. He went once, and the other time, he didn’t. He always placed in the Judaism competitions, first or second. Of course, he brought every prize home from school, that he could. He really likes religion. Now he’s counting the letters in the Tora. He bought a book, “The Biblical Code”. He’s always busy with that.
Our daughter, Zsuzsi, attended the College of Foreign Trade. She learned two languages. She has an advanced accreditation in Russian and English. Zsuzsi married a Jew. Her husband, Gabor Gemesi finished college. He studied vehicle electricity [in Hungary, auto mechanics are seperated into three vocations. One for body work, one for engine work, and one for electricity]. He works here in the courtyard, he opened a workshop here. He’s a tradesman and an entrepreneur. Zsuzsi usually comes to temple [synagogue] with me. It’s the most natural thing for her to come to temple with us, despite the fact that we didn’t really teach her religion. She heard us talk about this and that at home, but we never explicitly taught her religion. She must have heard something from my older and younger brothers. It was also natural for her to marry a Jew.
Once we went to Israel in 1990. As soon as the connections opened up more [1989 Political Changes in Hungary] [17], we went.
Our house looks the same as it did then. It was always two and a half bedrooms. We had to rearrange it, so there wouldn’t be a third bedroom, because then there was another problem, they’d nationalize it. Some order came out, that for a certain amount of residents only a certain number of rooms could be in the family name. Those who had apartments bigger than the ordinance, moved to smaller apartments. My mother-in-law still lived with us then. The house here in the eighth district [of Budapest] was hers. A detached house with a courtyard. After the war, we worked a lot. We saved everything we could. Then later things got going, and I could even buy a car.
There wasn’t any Jewish instruction, but she heard about religious things at home. In spite of the fact, that we didn’t keep too religious a household. Sometimes we’d light candles for the Sabbath, but not too often. We mostly celebrated just the bigger holidays, instead. We didn’t keep a kosher house, and still don’t. I went to temple during Pesach, the tent holiday[sic-Sukkot] and Yom Kippur. During Pesach, for example, I bought matzah, but we ate bread, too. We deliberately didn’t have Christmas, we were at least that Jewish.
I met my wife, Gabriella Miklos, who was born in Budapest in 1928, in May of 1945, not long after we’d returned home. I had a relative in a neighboring house. Since I was totally alone, I went to see her, and as I was on the way up, I met her. That’s how we met. We were already engaged when her father died, and were married one or two months later. Our marriage was just a civil one, we didn’t make a big thing of it. We didn’t have a religious ceremony, because we would have had to wait until the mourning period was over. It wasn’t proper, and we were too scared, also.
One of the butchers was also a high-ranking Arrow Cross, and he took my father-in-law off to the side. That’s how he got away. The rest were taken to Kiserdo [little forest] and shot to death. They organized mass-murders there, but I never heard anything about it, or that somebody had found mass graves. My father-in-law hid in the forest till the end of the war.
At the beginning of the war, they lived in a star house [15]. My father-in-law hid in the cellar. My mother-in-law had Aryan [sic - falsified] documents. There were really poor people living in this house.
My wife’s father, Sandor Miklos, took this name in 1930. Before that his name was Weisz. He worked in the Ganz Mavag [major firm of heavy industry in Budapest] as head accountant, but in 1920 they fired him because he was Jewish . He couldn’t find a position, so he started a canning business. With my wife’s mother, Antonia Rakosi, they produced cabbage-cucumber-squash preserves and lived from that.
When Israel was forming, I’d say that was among one of the greatest pleasures I’ve had. First the election [UN vote]. We didn’t sleep nights, we were up, waiting for the results. I could get [Radio] Israel and [Radio] Free Europe [14] in Hungarian. In the Hungarian news, the Arabs always won.
We were our own bosses, and didn’t have to make concessions to a higher-up. But because we were self-employed, and Jews, and private people, they put such a tax on us that we couldn’t make a living, nor earn even one percent of what they took in taxes. That’s how they wanted to force us into the union. If I had joined the union they would have relieved the taxes. They even said, join the union and then we’ll drop them. You see, we had to face them down because we didn’t want to join. In those little factories, there were little workers, but they weren’t truly tradesmen. But if there was a party member among them, he was made the boss. Unfortunately, my little brother Bela had to go work for them, because the danger of them nationalizing our place was threatening. The poor guy found work in the ‘Majus 1 Ruhagyar’ [May 1st Clothes Factory], and was very bitter about working. He had to work at night, and two or three shifts. He went in at ten in the evening, came home in the morning, like somebody who was drunk. "Join the party, we’ll make you a boss, immediately", they told him. He couldn’t do it, not even for the couple of pennies more. He just worked in the factory the whole time.
The workshop was a tailor shop on Baross street, where my brother and I, together with Erno continued working. I never became political. I didn’t join the Party, despite the fact that the Communists liberated us. There were party meetings, but I never participated, because I was working with my two brothers. Erno had a small business license. I was registered as an employee of his. Two or three years after the war, between 1947 and 1949, they searched our place. They said we were bourgeois, really, and they wanted to take our courtyard. They wanted to nationalize our house, but we were able to sue for it back. So they came in, and they wanted to occupy the apartment, and everything.
Our sisters, Eva and Berta didn’t return. Berta died with her two children in the concentration camp, in Auschwitz, but her husband Samuel came back from forced labor.
They told him that I had been executed somewhere. We were very happy to see each other alive. A few people didn’t give back what they stole from the house. There were one or two, who were decent enough to give me back my clothes. These people, if they’d come from Pest, always slept at our house and always brought a fat goose. They were benevolent people. I went with Bela to Pest. We got together a sack of bacon, and sold it in Pest. I didn’t have a dirty penny. My brother Bela and I set about getting some work. I remember, we had one pair of trousers between us.
The Russians robbed us of everything they could. They took my boots off my feet. I had a friend with me, who recently died in Szeged. He had a watch. We thought we could sell it to the Russians, and buy train tickets to go home. But in the chaos, when the Russians saw the watch, they automatically just took it. We didn’t care about anything anymore. Just let somebody come, and let this be over.
I was liberated, and neither the Germans, nor the English appeared, but we saw the Russians leaving. They never came into the factory, we never went out. We dragged on that way, there were about eighty of us. When it happened, then all the leaders, mayors – who knows what status these officials had – came from the surrounding villages to this wood factory. They thought that if they were with the Jews, nothing bad could happen to them. Thanks to that, the Russians took them and the Jews prisoner. They didn’t look at who was Jewish, who wasn’t. We were so happy, nothing mattered, "Come on over!". And then we were liberated, we were in the factory for about ten days.
We did our best to avoid him. That commander had some kind of plant, furniture factory in Hitzendorf, fifteen kilometers from his house. A boy from Mako knew where this village was, where the commander lived. When we arrived in Hitzendorf, this Hungarian soldier went to him, looked for him, and told him we were here. The Arrow Cross there, that is, the SS harassed him about where his Jews are. They put you with the Jews – they told him – so where are the Jews? Well, I don’t know what he told them, what lie he said. He put us in his factory. We slept in the plant, but didn’t work, there wasn’t anything to do. But he took us to work from there, and the SS from Graz would come and ask “who are they?”. He didn’t tell them we were Jews. “They say they’re work relief from Hungary, very good workers and good German friends.” So the SS would leave.
They told us the sick would be taken to a place where Jewish doctors would take care of them. We were happy for them. Some among us were already getting weak, they couldn’t handle the rigors. They were taken the next day. My buddy reported in sick. Some guys going to work had seen, from a distance, that they were making the sick dig their own graves, then shooting them in the head.
It was the winter of 1944. It snowed, and there wasn’t a roof on the building. They locked us into a place. There wasn’t a roof and we almost froze. Then they took us to Kormend, to an underground bunker. There was a stable above us, and we had to go deep underground. You had the feeling you were entering a mausoleum. It was a mausoleum. It was full of Jewish boys. The guards tried to convince us to give them our luggage. The clothes, the good ones, we should give to the poor boys, because they’ll take them anyway. "Prayerbooks you should throw away", they said. "Hide them so nobody finds them". Someone among us, found their younger brother’s name carved in the wall. The guards wanted to take our money, too. They said, they’d be good to us, if we give them all our money. They were all villians. They only wanted money. There was a lot of despair.
One of the company commanders was an awkward, cock-eyed little insignificant man. We were in Szeged and I escaped one night. It was after curfew, we’d gone to bed, the roll call was read. Ten men were missing out of two hundred. He was so deaf, he didn’t even hear who was present and who wasn’t. My little brother came to Szeged to visit me, and laid down in my place. And he reported present a number of times. They mocked him.[the commander] When they were going to transfer him, we had a party, and then he told us what we had done to him. He knew about everything, that we went missing, and he didn’t do anything about it. It was decent of him.
We tailors, shoemakers, carpenters worked for the Armored Division, and went wherever the battalion went. It was a military supply unit, which kept the equipment and uniforms in order. We sewed uniforms, and the shoemakers fixed boots. It’s enough to say that a traincar full of flour came for the Jews and the soldiers guarding us. The car arrived, and we had to carry the sacks up to the attic, and into the storage rooms. One time rice came, and we had to carry that up to an attic where there were no steps, just a ladder leaned against the wall.
When I saw my mother for the last time, I couldn’t tear myself away from her. She held onto me so tight, I couldn’t get away from her. We never met again. We felt somewhere unconsciously, that this was the last time we’d see each other.
I was in the Libenau camp in Graz, from where they took me in April 1945 to Hitzendorf, and then in May of 1945, at the end of the war, I was liberated.
I wasn’t able to get accustomed to my new profession, because I was called up into workservice [labor battalions][8] on October 13, 1941, into the V/2 company, to Hodmezovasarhely. We got soldier’s uniforms, but they soon stuck a yellow armband on us, to differentiate that we were Jews, not fully-privileged Hungarian citizens.
We didn’t keep kosher. Mother wasn’t there to watch us. Until I went to forced labor in 1941, we regularly went on excursions, to the cinema, and to dance classes. Although most of our friends were Jews, we also made friends with Christians. It wasn’t a reason to exclude someone, because we saw everyone for the person they were. If they were respectable, we were made friends with them.
When Erno and I finished our apprentice years, there was money for a ticket waiting for us at the post office. We all joined him and worked together as brothers. We sent money home every month, so our parents and sisters wouldn’t lack for anything. I joined my two older brothers in Pest in 1937. I was astonished when I saw my brothers eating treyf. Both changed their names from Schwartz to Szabados, Jeno in 1936, Erno in 1937.
I could have gone for more than three grades, since I won a scholarship on the basis of my good scholastic results. My father couldn’t even pay the reduced tuition. That’s how I ended up a tailor. I had apprenticed the tailor profession in Nameny. My older brother, Jeno also went to school in Vasarosnameny, and learned tailoring and sewing. All three of them made that same trip that I had. They learned their father’s profession as apprentices in Vasarosnameny.
Heni Szepesi
I am sorry now, I tried since then but she doesn’t care about religion. She knows many things, and sometimes she asks, but now it’s all the same. That’s how I raised her, that’s just how it is.
And once she came home from school (she was about 12 or 13 years old), she came home and asked how it was that every child had two grandmothers and two grandfathers and she had none. I told her, “Look, you’re still too little for this. When you grow up a bit, you'll find out.” And when she was 15 years old, I took her to Auschwitz. And then I told her there, and she saw it, though there isn’t much to see; everything is idealized, you know.