In Nyiregyhaza I didn't find anyone. My brothers had not come home yet at that time, and there was no news of them. The journey from Pest to Nyiregyhaza lasted for six days on the top of the train. When I arrived home I went to the neighbors' immediately. Of course they weren't waiting for me, they didn't know I was going to arrive. My mother's towels and dishtowels with initials were hung up in the kitchen, our dishes that we used for Pesach, because then we always used porcelain dishes, our Pesach wine jug, a typical pink Czech jug, were all on the table. They didn't say anything, but I wouldn't have asked them to return anything anyway.
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magdolna palmai
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The Russians were mongoloid, dirty, full with gunpowder. They dragged me away to the barricade, which was perhaps at the Pest bridgehead of the Margit Bridge. Two soldiers lagged behind, and the other one kept pushing me and telling me to wait, the Germans were 'kaputt' [German for finished, knocked out]. At the beginning of Pozsonyi Street there were small shops, they started to shoot in Buda, and the Russian threw me into one of the shops, stood in front of me and shot back from there. I was scared about what he might have wanted. We walked round the barricade and went to the place where the terminus of tram no. 2 is today. There were stairs there, and one had to go downstairs to their headquarters. He told me and tried to explain to me with signs to stand there because he would come back immediately.
Then on 18th January 1945 we were liberated. The fence was at the synagogue and everyone went there. I said that I would kiss the first Russian soldier I saw. So the first soldier was a small man with a sooty face.
We had to leave from the Harris Passage, because someone hid in the next shop too, and a nun took the Germans there. So because we didn't have any other choice, we went back to the ghetto. There were so many dead persons in the ghetto, so that they didn't have room for the bodies. They piled up the bodies in one part of the cellar. There was a pharmacy on the corner of Dob Street and Kaluzal Square, which had been emptied, its windows and doors had been shot out... I saw there for the first time bodies piled up like a woodpile. The room was full with bodies: hundreds, thousands, men and women put on top of each other. It was horrible...
There is an ad that they are looking for a domestic help, go there.' She sent me to Fehervari Street. It was the one- bedroom apartment of an Arrow Cross man who lay in bed, he didn't only want a domestic help, of course, but... While we were talking someone rang and he told me to answer the door. He asked me where I was from. I told him that I was from Nyiregyhaza. Nyiregyhaza was already under occupation at that time. In the meantime I opened the door and a woman came in, the Arrow Cross man measured her with his eyes and told her that the job had been taken. The woman left, and the man told me, 'I won't employ a Jew.' So he employed me. Of course, I didn't go to work for him, but I was so stupid and honest that I sent him a card in which I wrote to him not to wait for me, because I wouldn't come. I was ready to give notice even to such a man.
From the ghetto we ran away to my sister's former boss, whose salon called Style Dress Salon was in the Harris Passage. Jolan worked there at the beginning of the 1940s. The owner told us to come back at 5 in the afternoon, after hours. There was a fitting room surrounded by curtains, there they put down the dog's pillow, and we could sleep there. They told us to watch out, to not let the 'water' out, to hold everything back, because the air raid shelter was under us, people hid there during the night. She was a lady, a charming woman, otherwise she would have never opened the salon, but while we were there she always came to open up.
So we got to the ghetto on Akacfa Street. There was bombing at Klauzal Square, so we couldn't go there, there were so many ruins on the street. It was dangerous too, the proof shots were continuous. An 18-year-old girlfriend of mine had lived there. Once she went upstairs to get water, and she died because of a proof shot.
I'd rather not say anything about the brickworks, because it was horrible...Very many of us were up in the dryer, I remember round holes, everyone relieved herself there...I said that I would leave that place, I would rather want to be killed. But we didn't have to run away from here, because they said that those who had a free-pass could just leave. This happened in December 1944, before Christmas, Budapest was already besieged.
While we were in forced labor a friend of mine from Nyiregyhaza, who wasn't Jewish, sent me a Swiss free-pass, a Schutzpass [12], by mail, issued in my name, to my address on Eotvos Street. After the anti-Jewish laws this man became a Strohmann [13] in a big shoe factory. He was a good man, he helped many of us. Of course, I only found this out after the liberation, when we met, because he visited me. I found the free-pass when I demobilized from forced labor and went to Eotvos Street 32. From then on I kept it on me all the time, I got out of the brickworks in Obuda with that in a day. We typed my sister's name on it, too, so Jolan could stay with me.
Once a former opera singer called Erzsi started to sing the 'Yiddishe Mame.' The echo of that in the hall was something miraculous. Once the door opened and there stood the gendarme, a first lieutenant, and he was crying. He said, 'How can this be done to women? How?' And he asked us what we needed. And that night he had so much food brought with a truck, we hadn't seen that much food in our life before - bread, bacon, marmalade and margarine. The gendarmes gave everyone as much as one wanted. He asked how he could help each of us. I told him that I wanted to wash in warm water, because it was awful that one couldn't wash. So he told the guards that those who wanted could go and wash in turns. We could only wash in the presence of the guards, of course, but I can't tell you what that meant for us. Everyone got a demobilization paper from him, so that we would be allowed to go back to our apartments. This gendarme officer told us already in Alag, 'Look, I can't help you, I can only say that they are changing the cadre. Our men will take you from here to Budapest - I think the Petofi Bridge was still standing at that time, we crossed that - after the bridge the Arrow Cross men take over the company.' He told us to watch out, and that those who could should run away, and that we should be careful and use back roads because the Germans were still at the Royal. He told us not to take main roads, but walk on secondary roads.
In Maglod we dug trenches and roadblocks. You can imagine what those roadblocks were like. Our accommodation on the farm was a bigger stable with straw on the ground, where we lay in four rows. There was a little woman there, who once said, 'Don't cry, we will tell our grandchildren: one upon a time when grandmother was a soldier...
When in 1944 the Germans came in, after the Arrow Cross takeover in October, they gathered Jewish women from age 15 to 45 and deported everyone for forced labor. We had to leave quickly, so the neighbors gave clothes to one of us, some food to the other, whatever we needed, and there was one from whom we got a backpack. On the KISOK estate they assigned everyone to companies, I was assigned to company no. 45. We went on foot from there to the Fay farm in Maglod. We got a shovel and a spade, which we took with us on the road.
At that time I lived alone on Eotvos Street 32. My sister lived on Kertesz Street, in a room with a family. We had to join up for forced labor after 15th October.
From the summer of 1944 until the fall we cleared away the ruins [10], for which we got a little salary. We couldn't buy many things from our salary, but we could buy bread and a couple of small things. At that time they had imposed a curfew on Jews, but we could walk in the town this way. And of course any money came in handy, because we had no income. At that time we lived like this. The center for the clearing away of ruins was on Andrassy Street 105; before the building was bombed nuns had lived there.
My 70-year-old Uncle Marton's trousers got damaged, because the policemen beat him at the interrogatory. I gave him the packages and I left. I met him for the last time then, after this he disappeared.
I had an uncle, my father's cousin, Marton Fischer, who had a Readymade Factory with 20 employees on Kiraly Street 34. My uncle found out somehow that one of his workers sympathized with the partisans and gave him a piece of material. This happened already in 1944, after the Arrow Cross takeover [9]. They took my uncle, who was 70 years old at that time, to Svabhegy, to the Majestic Hotel, which didn't function as a hotel but as a lock-up, where they interrogated and kept people. Of course we didn't know where Uncle Marton had disappeared to. One of our acquaintances brought us a card from him, in which he asked us to bring him a pair of trousers, because the one he had been wearing got damaged. Nobody dared to go up, at that time we had to wear a yellow star already, but in the end I took on the task. They sent him bread and bacon, and the trousers he had asked for.
Perhaps he didn't want to hurt my feelings, but make me stronger this way, but from then on it was as if my tears had dried up forever; I couldn't cry about anything. Simply not even a tear came out of my eyes for many years. When I was in Auschwitz in 1965 and through the big glass wall I saw the hair, the suitcases, the shoes, the showcase in which they had put the children's wooden shoes and children's shirts, the lamp, which they had made out of human skin, I got a crying fit. We were coming home from Zakopane [today Poland] after a two- week holiday. Everyone was shocked, and those who were more closely affected cried, but I couldn't stop. I haven't been to Auschwitz since then and I will not go anymore. Those pictures are still alive in me.
That's how I also found out that my parents had been deported. And from the fact that my sister and I wrote a letter and sent it to Nyiregyhaza, and we didn't get an answer. So I wrote to one of my acquaintances there, to see about this thing...I cried very much when I found out that they had been deported.
I went to Professor Ferenc Merei with my friends from the university. Since they had been excluded from the university because of the numerus clausus, they continued their studies this way. Professor Merei lived on Klotild Street 10, in the 1940s, and we went to his place for cramming courses. [Ferenc Merei (1909-1986) graduated from the University of Sorbonne, then he returned to Hungary where he mainly worked as a pedagogue and clinical psychologist.] Literature, psychology, politics - we talked about everything. Professor Geza Hegedus [Hungarian writer] was there, too. I can still remember the way we sat at Merei's, Geza Hegedus put up a blackboard and said, that if the police came we had to say that we were learning graphology, the letter 'g' in graphology - and he wrote a 'g' - and showed us how, for example, a criminal would write the letter. So this was the conspiracy. It was a wonderful period. We had to leave the apartment one by one, first we looked outside if there was a policeman there or someone else. There were 10-15 of us at these meetings. The lectures went on for two to three years, until 1942 or 1943, but in 1944 we didn't meet at Merei's anymore, that's for sure.
I became a member of the youth department of the Social Democratic Party here. They organized literary evenings, as well as matinees for the workers, where they invited leftist actors to hold cultural performances. I heard Hilda Gobbi and Tamas Major [both famous Hungarian actors] there, who recited poems written by Attila Jozsef and Ady.
She was deported to Auschwitz at that time with my other family members. She told me later that at the forced labor camp they repaired rails, worked at the railway and they didn't have any food. She ate raw beets, and everything they found on the fields. She told me that she wasn't that hungry, but she rather wanted to sleep all the time. Once she asked the guard to let her sleep for ten minutes to gather some strength, and the guard was nice and let her rest for ten minutes. Then she continued to work. I am sure that Fanni was cheerful at that time, too, and she could raise people's spirits.
I had friends in Pest who had been excluded from the university because of the anti-Jewish laws. In order to earn money many of them went to the baker's and delivered the croissants and rolls in big baskets on their back, because they didn't get another job. They were excluded because only a certain percent of the students could be Jewish. So these former students made a living this way. How humiliating it was, and they had to be happy to get a little change this way.
Later I went to Pest. Because in former times they usually taught the apprentices, and in the meantime they took advantage of them for free, and when they would have had to pay them they let them go to try their luck. So I came to Pest in 1940. At first I worked at different dressmaker's shops as a seamstress. But because I was young, one of my brothers and sisters was always there with me, I was never alone. Once my younger brother was in Pest, but he was drafted into forced labor, then my older sister Fanni, who immigrated to the USA later.
At the end of the 1930s I had to learn a civil trade. I said at home that in our family everyone sewed and I hated it and didn't want to become a seamstress. My father told me, 'Why not, you could even become a dental technician. That is very good, though it's a trade for men, you would be the first woman, it's not sure that they would admit you.' They didn't admit me. So I went to learn the milliner trade, but I was a milliner's apprentice only for half a day.
We were going to middle school when one of my friends told me, 'Let's go to swing!' I asked where. 'On the beard of the Jew,' she answered. This was my first encounter with anti-Semitism, but at that time I felt differently about this, of course.
I spent my free time at home or we danced and talked at my friends'. But I liked to read very much.
In Nyiregyhaza there were Orthodox and Neolog Jews. The elementary school functioned in the courtyard of the Neolog synagogue. We had brilliant teachers. The old teachers went to teach because they had a calling, and they had the children perform at their full potential. That was a different world. Aunt Szabin was the teacher; we learned German with her starting from the 1st grade of elementary school. Formerly churches supported the elementary schools, I don't remember any public schools in town. Our institution was very strict. By the time I completed the four classes of elementary school, I could read very well, and not only I but everyone...; we knew the multiplication table so well, that we could say it even if they woke us up from sleep, and we had to learn calligraphy, too. Nowadays children can't read and write in the eight-grade secondary school like we could after the four classes of elementary school.
We observed Pesach and the high holidays. At these times, at Rosh Hashanah and before the Day of Atonement [Yom Kippur] my father took us to the other room one by one and blessed us. These blessings remained in me the most strongly; these are my nicest religious memories.
At home we had a prayer book, I don't remember any other religious books. At elementary school I learned Hebrew already, to read and to write, too, we also learned to read the Bible [Old Testament], but unfortunately nothing of this stayed with me. And of course at secondary school we also had religious classes, because at that time every denomination had religious classes at school. Because the Jewish community supported the elementary school, only Jews went to my class.
We read near a kerosene lamp, but we played chess more often, because my father loved to play, so I also learned how to play in my childhood. My poor father kept telling me, 'Don't be hasty, think twice where to step, because you will be in life just like in chess, if you're hasty.' My dear father was such a special man. Father, friend, confidant, all together, which is really rare, and besides this he also had a sense of humor.