Dunaföldvár

 

 

I was born in Dunaföldvár on October 26, 1922, into a Jewish family.

 

My mother came from an Orthodox family, they kept a kosher household: they separated meat and milk, which my mother didn't like when she was a girl. She once mixed them up accidentally. The family was outraged but that was the end of their kosher household.

 

My father was from a very poor family. At the age of nine, he had to stop going to school because my grandfather died, leaving a widow and seven children. Their youngest child was only seven months old, the eldest thirteen. My grandmother's brother had a shop. He offered to help raise the seven children, provided that their eldest son would leave school to enter the business. He wanted to make sure that someone would take over the shop when he grew old. At age nine, my father had to leave school as he was the oldest child. He tried to give us, his daughters, tenfold what he had lacked in childhood. No sooner than I thought of something, it was already there.

 

My father wasn't too religious, he only observed the two highest holidays: Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana. He would close his shop then. His favourite cake was flódni, he liked matzah balls too, but our household wasn't kosher.

 

Though I began attending a Jewish elementary school, I later attended secular schools. Middle school was the highest level of education available in Dunaföldvár during those days. When I was fourteen, my father asked if I wanted to be a private student in Pest at the Baár Madas - I was to take exams only without attending school every day– or if I would rather study languages in Vienna and other European cities later on. I chose the latter, but fate – or rather Hitler – intervened: I could only study in Vienna for one year.

 

Being Jewish was natural at home. We had mixed company and it made no difference whether friends were Jews or non-Jews. It was only the friendship that mattered.

On holidays, children were invited either to Sándor Scheiber's – the Rabbi of Dunaföldvár back then – or to the cantor. Jewish families stayed together.

 

After finishing Jewish elementary school, I attended four years of middle school in Dunaföldvár. My father used to say: „Nothing matters my child - not religion, nor the fact that you're white, black or Chinese. The only thing is to stay a man in all circumstances.”

I still remember that saying, it stayed with me all throughout hell. It helped me live through a lot. My friends were both Jews and Christians alike. We never felt any difference at all.

 

 

Vienna

 

 

I spent the 1936-37 school year in Vienna , but my parents wouldn't let me return for the next one. News of the Nazis had arrived by then. I had attended a private school in Vienna . There were twenty-four of us altogether. It was great: international classmates, two Hungarians total, the rest were from Germany , Switzerland , Czechoslovakia , from all over.

We had good lives back then, there, I wasn't homesick, didn't miss my parents. Of course we went home for Christmas, and my parents also came to visit. Vienna is not too far.

 

 

Marriage - Divorce

 

 

Reluctantly, I accepted that my parents would not let me go back to Vienna for the 1937/38 school-year. My father had a shop and I had to spend my days there so that I knew something about business at least. I was sorry I could not go back to Vienna , but I didn't blame my parents for that: it was no fault of theirs after all.

 

So, I worked at the shop after returning from Vienna and then married a Catholic boy at the age of 19. It was a great love, we met in a dance class. I was 10 and he 21 when we first met.

 

In 1941 the Anti-Jewish Laws were issued: anyone with a permit for a mixed marriage could marry until the end of October. After that, mixed marriages were forbidden. My fiancée begged my father to get an exemption through his lawyer friends in Pest so we could get married. My father paid ten thousand Pengős for the exemption. We were married in secret. I was 19 then, and had been in love since I was 10.

 

By sending me to Vienna , my parents had hoped that the distance would sever our friendship. But love knows no boundaries: letters arrived, airplanes brought bouquets, and he himself came to visit. Despite my mothers' warnings, our friendship lasted.

 

My in-laws did all they could to separate us. They hated me for being Jewish, and their conniving finally overcame us. My father-in-law was the head magistrate of Baracs. They wagered on a bottle of champagne they could tear us apart. My in-laws took an unsalaried three-month vacation to torment my husband and break us apart.

 

Our marriage was utterly private, nobody but the parents knew about it in Dunaföldvár. Even after our wedding we continued living separately to keep it a secret. He came over every day, and went home at dawn. This went on for a year. Hard to believe, but that's how it happened. We thought that later, perhaps we could move away from Dunaföldvár and live together. But my husband wasn't strong enough in character to stay with me, they finally managed to break his will.

 

Initially, my father-in-law tried to get close to me: he wanted me to divorce my husband formally so as not to set back his career. He promised to try to get a job for his son somewhere else, so we could move away and get married again after the war. My parents objected: once I was married, I should not be divorced, they said.

 

We were divorced finally in 1942. I don't know what it was that finally made him leave me. I moved away from Dunaföldvár immediately, the emotional burden after the divorce was too much for me to stay there.

 

This terrible emotional trauma made its imprint on my whole life.

Right from the start, they had tried to interfere. When we had our wedding –in secret, in Pest – my father-in-law sent a telegram to the hotel saying my fiancée's mother had committed suicide, and he should return home at once. Of course, it wasn't true. They did all this to prevent our marriage. There was a huge scandal, and our wedding had to be cancelled. In the end, we were married in complete secrecy, with only two witnesses present, nobody else.

 

At that time, alimony still existed: I was to be awarded 200 Pengős a month. When I divorced, my brother-in-law called my father. He stated that unless we produced a document renouncing his family name and the alimony, he would take revenge within 24 hours. He warned my father what this would mean to Jews in 1942.

 

 

My father followed me to Pest and begged me to renounce everything. After the way they had acted, I refused to do so.

 

 

 

 

 

Photography - Budapest

 

 

I went to Budapest to learn a trade. I walked along the streets wondering about what I could do. At first, I wanted to study pottery with Margit Kovács, but she would not take me. I also considered working at Teván's as a goldsmith, but this did not succeed either. I wanted to study some craft from a master. I was asked, „Your faith?” at most places. It was 1943. I had a friend, a theatre photographer, who took me to József Forrai, where I could study photography as an apprentice. I had to pay to be accepted.

 

Forrai himself was Jewish. When he was taken to forced labour, his assistant and I carried on managing the shop. When there was a curfew, we slept in the workshop so that we could work. I worked hard to outweigh my past failures: I buried myself in work.

 

In Pest I rented a room. I wasn't completely alone, I had friends. Most of my friends were Jews. I kept away from male friends, I had no desire to be attached to anyone after the divorce. I lived alone.

 

I attended the theatre and the cinema with my friends. We went hiking, to social events, and parties. The restrictions towards Jews made our lives hard, but our circle of friends held together.

 

 

1944-45

 

 

I was at the wedding of a friend in the Bethlen Square Synagogue on March 19, 1944. My mother also came to the wedding. We were already in the synagogue when we learned that the Germans had occupied Hungary . My mother knew the immediate consequence of the borders being closed. She went home the same day. My sister and I wanted to stay in Pest .

 

When my father was taken, we wanted to bring our mother to Pest too, but like many others she too was worried about the house, our home, everything. She stayed and it cost her her life.

 

I am the only member of our family who returned from deportation. My sister escaped along the way, she remained in Budapest the whole time.

 

When Szálasi seized power in October, a poster appeared directing us to the KISOK field. My sister and I were taken to Gödöllő, then to Isaszeg, where we dug trenches under Arrow Cross supervision. Then we were marched all the way to Zürndorf.

 

Gendarmes and Arrow Cross men took turns escorting us, they were always being replaced. We spent the nights on football fields. I have no idea what gave us the strength to survive. We had no idea to where we were being taken. We had to focus so much on gathering our strength to survive that we did not care about anything else- just staying alive.

 

People from the countryside had been already been deported in June. My father was taken in May. I only learned after liberation where he died: in a stone mine at Ebensee. The last time I saw my mother was in the synagogue at the wedding.

 

In Budapest , we had heard about the gas chambers but I refused to believe it. It was unbelievable that people could do such a thing. I was so naive, I could not imagine it. After living through the deportation, there was nothing too horrible to imagine, I realized that people are capable of even the most horrendous atrocities.

 

 

I met Edit Kiss, who later became a close friend, at the entrance to the KISOK field. I had known her already, had met her three or four times before. She lived in the flat next to my sister's when we were forced to move. When we met again at the KISOK field, I was very happy to see a familiar face. Her backpack was stolen on the very first day, we found it later- her blanket was missing. We knew that we would have to sleep in football fields at night and that anyone without a blanket would freeze, catch cold, or die. I told her: „As long as I have a blanket, you do as well.” That was the beginning of our friendship.

 

My sister came along with us all the way to Süttő. She would sit down on the road every day saying that she'd rather be shot, that she can't go on. We pleaded with her to come. It would have been too much to bear had she been shot there by the side of the road. Before we got to Süttő, where all of us were exhausted, a two-horse carriage stopped and the driver called to the Arrow Cross men that he would take a few people along if they told him where to take them. We rushed to the carriage, so many of us that the horses couldn't walk. Then I told my sister that I could go on walking, and she should stay on board the carriage and take my backpack with her only. When we reached Süttő I found my pack abandoned by the road and my sister gone. I knew she had escaped. I didn't dare to look for her, I feared for her life.

 

 

Later I learned what happened. Two Arrow Cross men got on the carriage with them. They got there soon, and the guards were invited to the pub for a drink while waiting for the rest of the group. The barman was a Volksbundist. He had a 16-year-old daughter who asked my sister why she was crying. My sister replied she was too tired and can't go on. The girl offered to help her escape. She hid her that night in their loft, inside a storage basket they used to haul market goods. The next day, she gave my sister her own documents and walked her to the train back to Budapest . That girl saved her life.

 

I was scared for her life, praying that she would make it. That's why I didn't dare go looking for her. Had I looked, I'm sure they would have found her and it would have been all over.

 

Edit was 18 years older than me. During deportation, we had a strong need to feel that we have someone by our side, that we could help each other. If it got to be too much for one of us, the other would be strong and keep her spirits up, and vice versa. First, I saved her life by providing her with a blanket, and at the end, after the liberation, she saved me.

 

 

We were packed into wagons at Zürndorf and the group arrived at Ravensbrück on November 22.

 

The makeshift tent in Ravensbrück was the hell of all hells. No water, no toilet, we lay on the ground. The stench was vile. That night, Edit told me she wouldn't share the blanket with me, she'd brought poison for herself. She had promised her doctor she would only take it when she could not carry on with her life. This was the moment when she felt that it was not a life any longer. I told her in vain that I couldn't go on alone, asking her not to leave me there, or to give me poison too. She refused and took the poison.

 

I watched her all night long to see if she was still breathing. At dawn, she started throwing up. She lived. Interestingly enough, we never ever spoke about this instance again. It happened and it was over, but cannot be forgotten.

 

They took all our clothes and gave us rags. Looking at each other, we laughed in frustration. Edit was lucky, she still had her ski boots. I have no idea how. I received thin-soled shoes that later tore completely. I fixed up a piece of nylon or rag in their place. By the end, I could barely walk.

 

Yet fate was always on our side. They came from the Daimler works to pick workers. Edit and I were on our way to the kitchen for dinner. They couldn't find enough men for the job, so we were stuck in the Appel. We hadn't been in the camp very long, so we were still better looking than the others. The first person they picked was a 17-year-old girl from Budapest . I was picked second. I approached the SS officer and the German engineer and said that my cousin was there with me and asked them to let her come too. They were so astonished at a prisoner daring to address them that they asked me where my cousin was. I waved to Edit, but she looked horrible. She looked sickly, and had been reduced to skin and bones. They waved a no. But Edit was inventive too: she told them she knew she did not look too good, but asked them to let her show how much strength she felt in herself so that she could work for Germany . She was picked too.

 

That's how we stayed together, which was very important. Nobody would have made it alone.

 

They couldn't resist making us do appalling tasks, tormenting us. Every day in the morning and evening there was the Appel, where we had to stand in rows motionless for hours. If someone collapsed we were forbidden to help them. Everyone had diarrhoea, so they would lock the barrack door and laugh outside at our agony that we couldn't get out. In the baths and showers in winter, when we would lather up, they would open the windows and turn the water off, and there we stood in the cold. That was their fun.

 

Eight Hungarians worked at Daimler. We were appointed to a little room, which was a huge privilege: everyone had their own bunk instead of two or three people having to sleep together on one. There was a table and a bench in the room too. Table, bench and one's own bunk: this all seems natural now, but it wasn't so then.

 

The foremen were civilian engineers, with one exception they were humane and helped us when they could. Sometimes they'd throw a piece of food in the rubbish and tell us to go pick it up. They even told us to persevere, that the front line was drawing closer.

 

I once broke a screw and told the foreman. He said I should not tell anybody and that he would take it during his lunch break. This counted as sabotage; for such misconduct, people were shot dead.

 

Everyone was near exhaustion when Edit and I conspired to do something to lift our spirits. We decided to hold a small celebration at Easter, to feel human. We made each other gifts and everyone saved a slice of bread from their daily ration for a whole week. I made bread cake using the slices and black coffee. Our foreman gave us little Christmas candles, this was when Edit made her first picture series Lager Life in Pictures : was the title. We received paper and colored pencils from our foreman, and I got some rags from the trash. We were given scissors and cardboard paper as well. I made a rabbit, and handkerchiefs out of rags, and I cut out paper plates. All this work just to stay human, to have the strength to hold on.

 

The lagerälteste was presented with a bound book of Lager Life in Pictures . She broke out in tears. She said that she wanted to show it to one of the SS women. We asked her not to, that there would be trouble. But she insisted that this one was really nice and will understand.

 

The first question the SS woman had was:

- Who made this?

- My Hungarians.

- They have it too good.

 

And in five minutes they threw us out of that little room. Yet it was worth it, it made us feel a little bit human.

 

In the factory, once a foreman tried to approach me, but I wouldn't let him.

- Is it because I'm German? – he asked.

- Yes, first of all because of that.

 

He then left me alone.

 

After the liberation, on the way home, Edit and I were sitting by ourselves beside the highway at night. The first two Russian soldiers... one of them grabbed Edit... the other one, me. Later we heard that American soldiers did the same, only they would maybe give you a chocolate bar in return. They were young soldiers, on the front for years perhaps. Afterwards one tries to find excuses.

 

In mid-April, the factory was evacuated for lack of work. It wasn't only work that mattered. Earlier, when there wasn't enough material, they'd throw us out to the yard and make us pick up the frozen irons, pry them up literally, haul them from one place to another and back again the next day. It was all just to destroy people even without the gas chamber.

 

When the factory was evacuated, they took us back to Saksenhausen. There, we were warned that Jews were being taken to Ravensbrück, where the gas was still running and we were to be executed. They advised us to flee.

 

Escape was impossible, we were being shipped onward in sealed wagons. Our survival depended on the single rail track in operation, which was used for military shipments, and our wagon was sidetracked. We arrived three days late to Ravensbrück, its gas chamber had been blown up the day before. By that time, Ravensbrück was in such a state of chaos that storage rooms were broken into and goods confiscated: blankets and clothes were strewn on the street. We wrapped a blanket each under our clothes and pullovers, we were so thin that they didn't show at all. When we passed the gates, everyone was handed a three-kilo package of biscuits, vitamins, powdered coffee, powdered milk and a can of cholent. Those who ate the canned cholent died. Weakened bodies couldn't handle sudden eating.

 

We headed out. About 15 kilometers outside Ravensbrück, I found it difficult to walk. There was a terrible mess, the villagers were also fleeing. They took their belongings on bicycles, baby carriages and carts out to the forest. Edit pulled me behind the last house and we waited for them to go. It was late and dark, so we had to find a place to hide. Edit found two wooden cabins close to each other. One was a wood shed, the other – we later found – was a beehive. G-d was watching over us when we did not go into the beehive because we would have been terribly stung. I am not religious, but I am a believer. We went into the wood shed. We had biscuits, vitamin tablets, nescafé, powdered milk. At night, we brought water from the river in a tin. It was a bit weedy but water anyway. The next day, Edit wanted to drink hot coffee. We had everything in the shed save matches. Edit looked out the little window: there were soldiers everywhere. She went out, and marched up to a soldier, saying that she was in the woods with her sick child and couldn't make any warm tea for him because she had no matches. I'll never forget, she got a broken box with seven matches inside.

And then we made ourselves some coffee.

 

All of a sudden, there were shots coming from both the right and left. I smelled smoke, something nearby was burning. Edit looked: the other wood cabin had burned to the ground.

We got out of the shed and ran to a nearby stable, where the animals were screaming. When things quietened down, we came out of the stable and into the neighbouring house. As we entered the kitchen, we saw the table lay with a white tablecloth, the oven still warm, snow white bread and roast meat, pickles, black coffee on the stove. We started to eat. White bread... when had we last seen that? And suddenly the stable was hit, and its roof collapsed with all the animals inside suffocating from the smoke. Had we not gotten out in time, we surely would have died there too.

 

We were scared that the house would be hit, so we went outside to the big field beside it. We took some food with us and waited.

 

Then we heard some voices: soldiers were coming. The first two vehicles were American, then came the Russians. Then it happened... The first two Russians... raped us. It was dawn, we went inside the house, there was still warm water on the stove. We washed ourselves, I soaped myself up and collapsed. My strength lasted that long.

 

Fate is strange: once you lose the feeling of having the butt of a rifle behind you, you relax. I had a high fever and was unconscious. Edit thought it was nervous fever. Eventually it turned out to be multiple arthritis.

 

We spent six weeks there until I could stand up again. I spent three weeks laying in fever, then I could get up and about again. After six weeks, Edit burned our striped clothes saying: “that part of our lives is over”. We started making plans. In the camp, we thought we'd never be able to laugh again in our lives. And miraculously we started laughing.

 

We were very naive. We thought we'd go to Berlin , to the Hungarian Embassy and right away we'd be given our passports. Edit would then call her husband and friends in Pest , and they'd come and pick us up. Or perhaps we'll buy the train tickets to get back. That's what we thought.

 

There was no transportation, it was hard to reach even Berlin .

 

The Russian captaincy issued a document for us saying that military vehicles may pick us up on the way home, and they should be to our assistance getting home.

 

So we got to Berlin , where we were taken up to the Brandenburg Gate.

 

After the liberation, people living near the camp said they knew nothing whatsoever about what had been going on there. On hearing that I couldn't contain myself and yelled at them: how can they speak like that, they saw the striped skeletons, they could smell the smoke coming from the gas chambers, from the crematorium.

 

So the car took us as far as the Brandenburg Gate. We spent a week in Berlin . Edit went to the Mayor's Office to get the food tickets for a month, which lasted us only three days. Beer could be bought without tickets, as much as we wanted.

 

To our astonishment, the coffeehouses were open. So were the hairdressers, although you had to bring your own soap and towel. The travel agency was also in business: they didn't sell any tickets, but could point out the safest routes. We set off a week later. A German woman wanted to join us at the Czech border. She heard we were going to Prague , where she was heading too. Edit spoke to me in Hungarian, voicing her suspicion that the woman might be an SS, and she'd go get someone. Perhaps she really was, for by the time Edit came back with a police officer, the woman had disappeared.

 

We got off the train in Prague and tried to buy tickets to Budapest , but nobody would speak to us, neither in Hungarian, nor in German or English. If we spoke German they would sometimes spit at us. We finally found the Hungarian Red Cross office. I was really upset by then, I was shouting. They asked me why I was so flustered and I told them I just wanted to get home at last. You need a passport for that, they said. Well, I said, they didn't check our passport during deportation, so they shouldn't do so on the way back either. In the end, they gave us an address for a Red Cross gathering place where we spent three days. They took us for a medical check-up, then told us we'd be sent home with a group.

 

There were a lot of people at the train station, and our wagon was stopped and they couldn't tell us when we could continue on. We were fed up with them and told the leader that we would get home on our own. We signed a statement that the group leader was no longer responsible for us. That was how we got home to Budapest from Prague in a week.

 

 

Homecoming

 

 

We were asking people on the train and learned that Budapest was a shambles. We went to Markó street first, to the house where my sister and Edit had lived.

 

It was difficult to start to live. A few weeks later, I was in hospital with effusive pleurisy. I was tapped three times. Then, I reported to my boss at the photo shop and told him I had to go down to Dunaföldvár, because nobody came home apart from one brother of my father's. I knew that nobody in the world had come home. And then I stayed there for three years.

 

The first man I came across in Dunaföldvár asked me: hey, you made it back alive? You can imagine how that felt.

 

My uncle moved into a room in the family house, and so we kept the house. It was in a horrible state because the soldiers had used it as a stable. For quite a while, I lived next door until I could fix it up well enough to move in again.

 

My father and mother were very good in business matters, for which I had no affinity. I couldn't keep the shop running, so I sold the house and moved up to Pest .

 

Luckily, my ex-boss wouldn't let me leave until I passed my exam. I had no experience and was not confident, I did not believe I would pass, but he kept insisting that I would. I received my assistant's certificate in 1948 and entered the newly-founded Photographer's Association as a founding member. That was how I could get started with my life.

 

It was a long time before I wanted a relationship with a man. When my husband learned that I had returned, he came to me and apologized. I tried to find some excuse but I just couldn't. Great as my love may have been, this was beyond forgiving. After that, I had a partner for 12 years. He didn't want to marry and was a difficult person so after 12 years I said, “thank you, that was enough”. I didn't want my nerves to be wrecked all over again.

 

I met my second husband quite late in life, he was 18 years older than I. We lived together for 15 years in a very good marriage. On his deathbed, his last words were: „ Forgive me if I hurt you”. I've been living on my own again ever since. Luckily, I have many friends so I don't feel lonely.

 

 

Remembering

 

Until Helmuth came to me in 1992, I had said: don't ask me, no one would believe it. If I hadn't survived it, I wouldn't believe it myself. I always started recounting what had happened from the minute that we were liberated. Even in private with Edit we would never discuss it. We would say we have to start life anew. Maybe it would have been better to speak about all of that, because this way I kept having nightmares. I still do. One can bury memories deeply, but forgetting is impossible.

 

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.

 

I don't know what gave me the strength to survive. I always told Edit that we needed to survive so someone would speak about what had happened. And yet, when I came back, I couldn't talk about these things. For some time, we met every week with the seven people with whom I had been together. But we kept talking about the deportation. And then a girlfriend and I decided we would not keep in touch, because we couldn't go on living if that's all we're concerned with. It was Helmuth, who persuaded me that my memories had to be preserved. And now I know that he was right.

 

 

Edit

 

 

Edit and I remained friends until her death. In 1947, she and her second husband moved abroad. We kept writing letters to each other. I met her once in 1964. In 1966, she committed suicide. Her paintings were found by Helmuth, who exhibits them in Paris , Berlin ... many places.