Nobody ever mentioned the danger for the Jews to stay! We left on July 16, in carts. There was a lot of bombing across the Dneiper, in Darnitsa. A 6-year-old girl was killed in front of my own eyes - I can still see it vividly. I was 15. I was riding with my mother and her elder brother, Itsik. By horse, we reached Kremenchug, where we were put into railway cars and taken to the Urals. The journey took two months. It was very crowded; we did not always have something to eat; the good thing was that we still had some money.
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Lilya Finberg
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My Jewishness never touched my childhood consciousness. The first time I was called a "kike" was only after the war. Before the war, my sister was the best student of Ukrainian school Number 32, which we both attended.
, Ukraine
My mother was a real lady, and my father was a stately man. They were a beautiful couple. At home, we spoke Russian; Mother and Father would speak Yiddish when they wanted my sister and I to remain ignorant of what they were saying. Neither my sister nor I wanted to learn Yiddish - at the time, it was out of fashion.
I can't comprehend this - after the tragedy in Babi Yar, the attitude toward Jews in Kiev was much worse than before it. This became especially obvious during the period of the "Doctors' Trial." It seemed that traditional anti-Semitism was supported by anti-Semitism "from above" - people simply would not go to Jewish doctors who worked in Kiev.
laszlo spiegler
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My wife was excellent at making Jewish dishes. She cooked very well; I had such a good wife! She was clean and thorough. I have been going to the Jewish old age home since my wife died.
Both my wife and I paid taxes to the Jewish community. I go to the synagogue every week, I only miss it when I'm sick. I feel very much Jewish. If I could pray according to my feelings it would be nice. I like Jewish holidays. I like going to the synagogue; I'm always there. And I like our rabbi, too. I go to Obuda, to the Jewish cemetery, to visit my wife every week.
When I worked at the co-operative I went to the synagogue during holidays. The personnel director and the party secretary came because of a worker. I came out of the synagogue and asked, 'Are you looking for me?' 'No', they said, 'but we were.' They asked me where I had been. 'In the synagogue,' I replied. This was around 1953. I didn't deny it. And I wasn't a party member either. I hated the whole thing.
I had a shop of my own here in Kemeny Street for four and a half years. Then they [the authorities] started to pick at me in 1952. If somebody entered the shop, they asked me what they sold, what they bought. There was a revenue officer and I asked him what it was all for. He said I had to join the co-operative; they hassled me about it. Then I joined the co-operative in July 1952. I left the shop. I had bought it for 300 grams of gold and I had to leave it. There was no one to buy it. And then I worked in the co-operative. My wife learned to be a typist and shorthand secretary. She worked at a company.
She didn't have anything, not underwear, nothing. Then I started to work. This was quite an episode of my life too, that I came home one day and the next day I went to Egyesult Izzo because I used to work there and they reported my departure when they deported the Jews from Ujpest. When I came back I applied for work. They said they couldn't re-engage me; the factory was closed. They gave me financial aid, but that was it.
When we arrived back home, we saw that we'd been looted, the house didn't have anything, not even a glass. Only the walls remained of the house where my wife had lived with her parents before the terror. When she came back, she couldn't enter her own house. She had to lodge an appeal against it, and then she got back one room. Those who lived upstairs were Arrow Cross people, and they moved downstairs. As soon as they moved downstairs the owner of the neighboring house claimed that it was his furniture. And so we got this apartment completely empty. We had no furniture at all, not a single chair or couch. We didn't have kitchen furniture or anything. Only one trashy ice-box. We found the pictures in the cellar. My wife was lying ill with a fever of 41 degrees [106 degrees Fahrenheit], and we had only one bed and a pillow. She had vitamin deficiency, was full of abscesses and they mistreated her. I put a cold compress on her night and day. I managed to save her. We didn't eat meat when we came back, only around September; her sister brought us chicken. Until then we just ate split peas and paprika potatoes. Then, when I could buy them, I bought a goose and cheap goose-fat. I also bought a sack of flour.
They deported my parents, my family, to Auschwitz and killed them there.
She was in Worlitz. She got there from Auschwitz; she got into the workers group and escaped the gas chambers. The poor soul had been beaten so many times, she couldn't stand the factory, and they made her work at night; they made shell cases, and she fell asleep and they struck her down.
We arrived in Sopron. I went to the Red Cross and they gave me some financial support. I went to the town hall; they gave me some financial support, too. In Sopron the train became full in a flash. How could I get to Budapest? On the top of the train; that's how I came home in 1945. We arrived at Kelenfold. I didn't have the patience to wait at Kelenfold, I walked across the Manci Bridge - this was its name, it was a pontoon bridge - I entered Nyugati station and slept there until morning. In the morning three women came. One told me, 'Your wife is at home.' I found out then. She had come home a month earlier. It was absolute bliss for me. But we had suffered very much.
In Gunskirchen there was no drinking water, there was no water for washing, and we were sentenced to death. Peopled starved to death there. There was no crematory. There was nothing else but wood. Our guards were very evil. What the SS soldiers did with children was that they threw the bread down, sat in a circle, and the children snatched it from the ground. That place was for gathering us in order to be executed. We were to starve to death, and those who didn't would be burnt along with the entire forest. It was a Friday when we were liberated.
I don't even remember when the Germans came in. I was in Buda, and the lorries were going up [to the Castle District], full of German soldiers. And then the sirens started to howl. The Germans were bombing. I didn't have anywhere to go. And this is when the deportations started.
When we were in forced labor service we were in Keleti Karoly Street [in Budapest] and everybody was buzzing that they would convert to Catholicism because then they wouldn't be deported. It never occurred to me. It was then that they started to learn Catholic religion and cross themselves. It made me feel sick. 196 people out of 200 presented themselves, and all of them died. What I got was that I survived, and my wife, too, but my family was taken away. No one was left, they killed everybody.
And when we came home we had our religious marriage in the synagogue of Ujpest. I had lived in Istvan Square before the war - I joined up from there -with my wife. But she was deported in May. Her brother was deported, too.
When I was demobilized in 1938, I learned to dance and we used to go dancing. At that time there was a café right here at the corner, it was called Pannonia café, and there I met my wife.
Then I came home again for a short time, until I was called in again. I joined up in Szentendre; from there we went to a camp at Esztergom, we constructed a shooting-range for tanks. Then they brought us to the Ministry of Defense in Budapest, and we did unskilled work at a construction site. I did everything, but I didn't know how to put up a wall. We didn't have a bad time of it, especially me, because I worked hard.
Before the war I worked at Egyesult Izzo and then I was drafted into the army.
We ran a kosher household. We used to have a servant. The kashrut was something she was charged with very seriously. There was a sink for utensils used for milk products and a separate one for utensils used for meat. She couldn't ever get them mixed up. And there was also a separate cupboard for utensils for milk products and for meat. It would never occur to us to mix the milk products and meat. We kept the Pesach utensils separately, and every year they were made kosher and after that we couldn't eat bread in the house any more. They took the utensils out and put them away. I even remember that at the first dinner after Pesach there was bread with Liptauer [spiced ewe cheese mixed with butter]. There used to be a kosher slaughterhouse, there was 'Orthodox kosher', 'Neolog kosher', and there was a shochet. We went to the Neolog one because we were Neolog. Keeping the kashrut lasted until I stepped out into life.
When I had my bar mitzvah, a tight family circle of 75 people gathered.
As a child my head was always covered, I wore a cap all the time. We wore the cap at home, but later in school we didn't any more. My father for example, wouldn't eat without a cap. It happened that they went to one of his brother's and they offered him meat fried in breadcrumbs, but he didn't know it was rabbit, which isn't kosher. He put on his cap and we all ate wearing our caps. We prayed before and after eating and then it turned out that what we had eaten wasn't kosher.
The wealthy Jews used to go to the big synagogue; we were the middle-class. Many Jewish tycoons got into the big synagogue. But later my father got in there too. My uncle made seats for the synagogue and got a seat un return on the side, near the Torah; that's where he used to sit, and the seat is still there today.
Every Friday evening at home we lit the the candle very rigorously. We used to go to synagogue every Sabbath. It was obligatory at school. My parents' shop was open until 7pm on Saturdays. And they had to stay open all the time everywhere. But if there was a holiday and a Jew didn't close he was denigrated. Shops were scarcely open on Jewish holidays. Moreover, 75% of the shops were closed in Ujpest; there were so many Jewish shops. They did everything properly for the holidays; my father said a blessing over each child on Yom Kippur. We took the rules very seriously at that time. Once we went to a football match during Pesach. And I was thirsty and drank a glass of water. I felt such remorse after that because on Pesach you can't just drink something somewhere, everything has its rules.
We observed every Jewish holiday very strictly, the fasting, too. My father went to the synagogue in the morning and didn't come out until the evening. There used to be a synagogue in Bocskai Street - it was ruined during the war - and we used to go and pray there. And I also went to the Orthodox synagogue. I don't know how to pray very well, but my friends, the Lichtensteins, were Orthodox too, they lived here in the neighboring house. I was always ahead with the prayers; I can still follow the cantor.
Before the war there was cultural life for the youth in Ujpest, they gathered every Tuesday. There was a cultural center that was full every Tuesday. The oldest of us must have been about 25. There were only young people. There was culture there, Hungarian, Hebrew... They sang and recited poetry. There was no food. It happened, back when the Jewish school still existed, that we popped in there to get a slice of bread and butter. This was before the war in 1936, 1937, and 1938. There was always good company. They went in for sports there. In the old times [before WWII], for example, the cultural center used to have a choral union, a Jewish choral union. They won prizes too. They used to sing Hungarian songs as well.
My father always said that when he was young they worked very hard and had fun for a few coins. We had fun, too. Later, when we didn't have the shop anymore, we went to have a good time on the banks of the Danube, I would drink a glass of beer and dance. We went to Margaret Island, and danced there as well.
I never went anywhere for the summer holidays as a child. I was 18 years old when I saw Lake Balaton for the first time. There were cheap trains to Siofok; that was when I first saw Balaton.
I have worked since I was ten years old. I had no time to go and play on the plot. I came home from school, studied for a while, and then if I had any free time, I went to the shop. There were the three girls; they went to the swimming pool, while I was in the shop. I had to keep things in order.