We didn’t raise my daughter as a Jew, not at all; she attended the Honved kindergarten, you know, because of her father. Of course, she knew she was a Jew.
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Displaying 19051 - 19080 of 50826 results
Heni Szepesi
Agi graduated the college of foreign trade, she passed her English language exam and she turned to the textile profession by coincidence. And now she has a few shops, retail-wholesale, and she had the opportunity to buy that downtown shop in which I used to work. That’s pure nostalgia.
On high holidays the synagogue was full. The Neolog temple was bigger, and it was full as well. You can say that there were about 2,000 Jews in Sopron. The Orthodox Jews went to the synagogue twice a day. And I also remember that my father wore tennis shoes at Yom Kippur. He used to pray in tallith and and teffilin every day. Sometimes even at home.
On Friday evenings my father usually went to the synagogue with my brother. There was gefillte fish, usually immediately after they came home. Women didn’t go to the synagogue. We didn’t work on Sabbath. I couldn’t carry my schoolbag on Sabbath but I had to go to school, to high school.
I had a brother who was four years older than me. He was called Alex, Sandor, after my grandfather: Alex Frischmann or Sandor Frischmann. We had a rather beautiful childhood; our parents sent us to very good schools. Maybe that was the reason why it was even more difficult to accept Sandor’s death. I can’t even talk about it.
I was born in Sopron, a town close to the frontier. My father made a very good living there; he was a wheat wholesaler and he had a filling station as well. We used to live a very normal middle-class life. This means that we used to have a family house (but we didn’t live there but in another rented house) and in that family house lived my father’s brothers and sisters and his mother until she died. And there were different storerooms, a barn and a huge garden. Sometimes there were employees too who lived there but I think that most of the work was done by the family members. I know that when I was 14 years old they sent me too to go to the company office to decant petrol. So that was rather a family business.
My grandfather was a merchant and he led a Neolog life [he was a Conservative]. His mother tongue was German. He didn’t speak Hungarian. He pronounced hens as “hean” . We spoke only German at home.
She graduated high school in Vienna, and I don’t know where she learned it but I’ve never seen such housekeeping in my life. She cooked wonderfully, and kept everything very spick and span. I still remember that the bed sheets in the sleeping-room wardrobe were put in pink tissue paper. So, she was a real wife and mother.
My father’s family was Orthodox. I mean really Orthodox, with kosher kitchen and everything. At Pesach the shel Pesach dishes were brought down from the attic, there was the cleaning of the chometz. Well, everything was so what-do-you-call-it; the thing you do with a hen, whirling it around [this is the custom called kaparot, which is done at Yom Kippur1]. And there was Rosh Hashanah, and the candle-lighting on Friday evenings, and observing the Sabbath.
Then there was Margit Frischmann. She was the factotum, a very clever woman. She was a typist and shorthand secretary and a very big help to my father. She came to Budapest, she worked for the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee and after the liberation she was very old when she got married to a fellow named Miklos Sziklai. She was hiding in Budapest during the war.
The next brother was Jeno Frischmann. There was some trouble with him, I think because he got married to a Christian woman and I-don’t-know-what else; so he went to Budapest and he later died of natural causes here, that’s for sure, but the family didn’t really want to know about him. We didn’t maintain relations with him at all.
He graduated high school, then he was called up to serve in the army. He came home with decorations; he was in the 18th Honved (Hungarian Army) infantry. And on Sundays, throughout my whole childhood, we had to go to Ojtozi Avenue in Sopron, where there is a statue, a monument to the 18th infantry. My father was a real local patriot and was also very proud of his country. All the time I heard about the Ojtozi Pass in Serbia and what kind of battle they had fought.
Between 1945 and 1949, I lived in Sopron. At first my friends supported me there because I had nobody and I had a camp-mate (the poor soul died since then), who ran a textile-shop and I helped there. In the end I remained in that profession entirely, with pretty good results. I was told that I had good taste and the clients listened to me, though I was young.
The foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 meant a lot to me. We betarniki couldn’t get away from ourselves, you know: at last the Jewish state was founded! I know many people who went there.
Needless to say, that there was nothing: our house had been destroyed by bombs, our flat had been destroyed by bombs. Not a single person survived from the whole large family, not an aunt, not an uncle. A cousin lived who had hidden in Budapest but that was all. Done!
Then, one fine day, they came and said that a train was coming and they would take us home. But they didn’t bring us home, but took us to Berdichev, to dilapidated barracks in the Ukraine, where the conditions were much like those we had “enjoyed” in the concentration camp and we were kept here for six months. Of course, there were plank-beds there too, they were big barracks, it was a terrible place. You can imagine, there were so many people. And there were also some SS-soldiers as well, who had a tattoo on their armpit. We went up to ask how it was possible that we were there and we told them what we thought of it. And they told us that it was the Hungarians’ distribution-camp and from there everybody would be sent home to receive their just punishment, or go home, or whatever. So from June, 1945 I didn't get home until the 22nd of October, 1945, I spent such a long time there.
Then they evacuated us, or I should say, then the death-march began. They hurried us along night and day because the camp commandant wanted to be liberated by the Americans. But then the Russians came, like in the film “ Meeting at the Elba shore.” We were hanging around there until the 25th of April and then we went to the Lurzen barracks. For three days the Americans were there, then the Russians came. They took us into a town called Sagan. So I was liberated in Lurzen but the tribulations still weren't over.
And then we got to Lichtenau. There they were frightened of us because of how we looked and they tried to feed us up, because we were put into a munitions-factory, which wasn’t an easy job. At first we had our barracks in Lichtenau and the factory was in Furstenhagen, which is now called Kirschhagen. It was a gigantic, hidden munitions-factory, and we didn’t know – when we went up there along a winding road, we didn’t see anything of the factory but greenery and trees. It was completely hidden underground. It was very hard work, because grenade-making was going on there, which had different working phases. I got into the foundry, which meant that we had to stand on a platform – there were about six of us there, in a circle – imagine a gigantic boiler, in which there was yellow TNT powder, which had to be boiled. Then it had to be poked. It was horrible work, everybody was yellow, we looked terrible. And there were three shifts: day-, midday- and night-shift. There were no shoes, we walked to and fro in wooden clogs – there was a six-kilometer road from the railway-station to the factory – and we were very happy when we found a newspaper somewhere, which we could use to wrap our feet. It went on like this until the 29th of March.
They left us out on the ground for a night and later they took us into the fumigating chamber and the next day we got to Hessich-Lichtenau after a train-journey. And those who were in the other group, to which I should have belonged, those were gassed that night. I still have those screams in my ears which we heard on the ground. And they were gassed!
We were put on the trains on the 5th of June and on the 8th we arrived at Auschwitz. That was when I saw my father for the last time, he was 56 years old at that time.
At first we had a five-room flat in Sopron and then we had to leave it. The ghetto was marked out in Szent György Street, where there were a great many of us in a single flat. And we had hardly arrived in the ghetto when it was decided that we would be taken to another ghetto called Jakobi; it was a half-completed side of a cigarillo-factory, a ruined building, and everybody was brought in there from everywhere. That was a terrible place, no windows, nothing, horrible.
Then the Germans came in on the 19th of March, 1944, on the 5th of April the yellow star had to be put on. Then we heard that those who would go to Sopronpuszta to work as farm-servants, young people, wouldn’t be deported. Well, all the remaining young Jews from Sopron went to Sopronpuszta to hoe carrots. There was a Polish foreman and he used to shake his head, saying that we didn’t work well. It was no wonder that we couldn’t do it because none of us had done it before. Then we were taken into the ghetto anyway.
And then unfortunately, in November of 1942, the news came that my brother had perished. He had been taken in 1941. He was taken to Russia from Koszeg – he had to enroll in Koszeg. He was a very strapping lad. Then we lived in the times when they took away even my father’s living. I have that paper somewhere in which he officially gave up his profession because he couldn’t continue according to the rules.
After the elementary school I attended the public high school for girls in Sopron, which was really an elite school: we had to wear a uniform, hat and everything. We were girlfriends, the five Jewish girls in the class. And my father planned that I would work at our own company – there was enough to do, or there would have been enough to do. After high school he enrolled me in the commercial college where I could have learned typing and shorthand and everything needed for office-work. And in that summer, in 1938, those things were already in the air, that school had an industrial part with high-school graduation as well but with the difference that there was a greater stress on the practical courses. So my parents thought that I would surely succeed in life with this practical graduation and they transferred me. There we learned sewing and dealing with other materials. Nuns taught there, they were outstandingly kind. I finished this when I was 18 years old. Then I did sewing for a time, under the aegis of a Christian woman.
I attended the Jewish elementary school, which lasted four years.
In the summer holidays we went to the Loever swimming pool in Sopron with friends and to Ferto Lake and took excursions up to the mountains. There was no coach at that time, we went up to the hostel on foot. In winters we went skiing on Dalos Mountain. There was a tennis-ground and a skating-rink.
I was a great betarnik [member of the Betar Zionist movement], I was part of a Zionist organization. I always used to go to those kinds of activities and lectures. Zhabotinsky was the main subject and Theodore Herzl. I felt very good in the Betar. I liked Zionism as an ideology. That’s why we became Zionists.
We used to speak German at home. My mother tongue is German as well because my mother came from Zagreb but she grew up in Vienna (so I have no idea how she got together with my father) but mother hardly spoke Hungarian, only a few words after so much time.
My best girlfriend was Neolog and she had a completely different attitude. You know, my poor dear mother wasn’t religious at all, only when she married my father she promised to observe everything as he wished. And so it was. My girlfriend persuaded me to go to a wonderful shop where one could eat pork. My poor mother -- we didn’t tell my father about it -- I said to my mother, “Hey, would you believe it?, we went with Ibi to such-and-such a place to eat pork.” She looked at me and said, “You know, my child, what goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean but what comes out of his mouth, that's what makes him unclean. Remember this.” That was her point of view.
I only had Jewish friends. I don’t know why I’ve never had any Christian girlfriends, not even from school. I had a good pal in Sopron, who is the same age as me; he was always very kind and I respected his father as well. It was a very nice family. Well, he’s the only one in Sopron with whom I have a nice chat every time I go there.