Retrospect 1913 – 1968

I dedicate these lines and remembrances to the Jewish community in Olaszliszka, the village of my birth, for eternal memory.

"I can see you, Kóbi, I can see you," we heard the shout, and the weary labour service crew - each of them holding twelve bricks - dragged and heaved themselves past the podium. It was a ramshackle affair, boarding hastily nailed together, and perched on it was a wiry Hussar sergeant major, o-legged and dark-faced as a gipsy, probably in his early fifties, flicking us every now and then with the riding crop he held. He did it when he saw the march getting too slow, or if anyone carried one brick less, or a broken one.

My whole life has been affected. Every day, I am grateful to the Lord for not becoming embittered or discouraged. For I could start a new life.

The first time I went back to Ravensbrück was some fifty years after. I was terribly afraid, but felt that I had to. And now I am glad that I did it, I received a lot of love from young people out there and that gave me new strength. I am not discontent.

Why do we need such writings when there is a Holocaust Memorial Day?

Why do we need them when the democratic states of the world regularly remember the horrors of the middle of the 20 th century?

Why do we need them when books like the monumental work of Randolph L. Braham about the tragedy of the Hungarian Jewry on more than 1300 pages: The Politics of Genocide - The Holocaust in Hungary are published?

We need these writing because authentic historical works focus on the extermination of the people and they never mention that eighty-year-old uncle Keller was taken by the beard and pulled all along between the benches of the Nagyfuvaros Street Synagogue

*Zsuzsanna Ozsvath: The Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies, School of Arts and Humanities, The University of Texas at Dallas, Box 830688, Richardson, TX 75083-0688

I’d always talked to my children about my lager life, and taken them to see Auschwitz at an early age. So they would be inured. So in another, figurative Auschwitz they could stand their ground. For a long time they couldn’t forgive me. They said they live in a different world, that I’d spoiled their youth for them. And I think anyone who withholds or discards these experiences is really embittering the future. I know there will be no other Auschwitzes; there can’t be. But inhumanity, indifference, impassiveness – these can recur. They do. Let us talk about our memories!

After the war we didn’t talk about what happened, not even with my own children. I know it was a mistake, but these things simply couldn’t be told. Many just wrote and thought about them. If someone had asked me 40 years ago, I could not have spoken about it.

„In Paris, behind the Notre-Dame, in the middle of the Monument to the Deportations there is a flame with an inscription around it: They left and never returned. While on the exit it is written: Forgive but do not forget! Let it be so. ”

I lived in a village called Seregélyes near Székesfehérvár with my parents, my twin brother Endre (Bandi) and my sister Ági until 1944. My father, Mihály Kis had a tailor shop with his twin brother, Nándor (uncle Nándi). It was founded in 1852 by their grandfather - that is my great-grandfather. There were three children in uncle Nándor's family too: István, Zsuzsa and Hugó (Pubi).

"I want to ask you to get rid of prejudice. (...) Tell your future children what hatred is capable to cause. You must never forget that!"