February 9, 1997

When I was seven years old, everything changed. My father lost his job. The company he worked for was owned by a Jewish family but they were allowed to employ only a few Jews as part of their workforce. With the help of a loan, my parents bought a few more sewing machines and they started a small manufacturing concern at home which turned out luxury lingerie. My mother was the designer and ran the production and my father comprised the sales force selling to small shops.

The enterprise was successful and soon enough, with the employment of more seamstresses, there was cutting, sewing, embroidering, ironing, packing and bookkeeping taking place in every inch of our apartment. My father started to travel, taking their unique and beautiful lingerie on the road and getting orders from the stores in various cities. Rare were the Sundays we spent together. He no longer had time for me and I missed him.

The second big event in my life was the birth of my younger brother. He was a cute baby and A BOY! Obviously, everybody’s attention shifted away from me to little George. I was mildly interested but what can you do with a baby? Besides, I hated taking his smelly diapers to the bathroom.

One day we took George out for some fresh air on the Gellert Hill. For a brief moment my attention was pulled away from holding George’s stroller and I instead focused on a ladybug. I allowed the stroller to roll down the hill and into the traffic at the bottom. My little brother could have been killed by an oncoming car or bus. The maid rewarded me with a slap and I deserved it, too.

The third event making my seventh year a turning point was that, in 1937, I started the first grade. Previously I had been enrolled in a German language kindergarten, and didn’t like it much. I devised a plan of escape. The Freulein in charge asked us every day which park we wanted to go to for our daily walk and since I always asked

“Please take us to the University Park.” So, this was the one we went to. After a couple of weeks of our daily visits to the same park, I declared to my parents

“I don’t want to go to kindergarten anymore because the Freulein always takes us to University Park and there is construction going on and falling bricks everywhere! I am scared!” Poor Freulein was the victim of my first successful lie. It worked, too. After this I put in a brief stint in a public kindergarten where I picked up head lice. That was the end of that.

My parents enrolled me in a Jewish elementary school. They were good Jews, although only moderately religious, and they wanted me to have a Jewish education. They also wanted to protect me from anti-Semitism. The school was old, ugly, cold and smelled of urine. The outside walls provided one of the favorite pissing places for the growing number of Hungarian anti-Semites.

My first grade teacher was Aunt Ferike, definitely a drop-out from charm school. Strict and neurotic, she scared me. I spent my days gazing out of the window, a practice I kept up for the next seventeen years. I didn’t want to get up in the morning and instead of breakfast I had a stomachache. The school was about a twenty minute walk from our apartment and our unfortunate maid had to get me up, help me to get dressed (over my vigorous protestations) and finally deliver me to Aunt Ferike.

To add insult to injury, a daughter of one of my mother’s schoolmates was in my class. Aranka was perfection reincarnate with tightly braided hair and an immaculate sense of fashion. She was always on time and received perfect grades and praises from Aunt Ferike. I have a photograph of myself from this time and I don’t look well at all. Gone was the curly-headed smiling little girl. I didn’t know why I was unhappy but obviously it must have been my fault since I was frequently scolded and criticized by my mother.

After one of these dressing downs I sneaked out to the kitchen in the middle of the night. The Mid-European winters are harsh and the stone was icy under my bare feet. I lay down on the floor in my pajamas determined to freeze to death or at least catch pneumonia and perish. This would show them! I was so cold I eventually gave up on my suicide attempt and crawled back to my bed without even catching a cold.

I had recurring dreams. In one dream I saw my mother dressed in her blue flannel house dress patterned with colorful beans. She was lying lifelessly with her head pointing at a crooked angle down into our dirty, smelly, dark spiral staircase leading from the kitchen. In another dream I saw lines going vertically and horizontally. They were in perpetual motion. Maybe they looked like empty escalators or an airport luggage transport. There was no sign of life in either dream. Some nights I was afraid to go to sleep, afraid of these dreams and afraid of the shadows in the dark.

Even though I was in a Jewish private school, I always felt inadequate. Some of the other girls were so sure of themselves, so well dressed and busy with private lessons and extracurricular activities. They came from orderly middle class homes which were not full of seamstresses and ironing boards. I was ashamed to invite them to our apartment and once in a while when I was invited to a birthday party where a uniformed maid was serving the cocoa, I felt very uncomfortable. There was a caste system very much in existence in my school. Students from poor families attended too but I would not dream of making friends with them.

One of my classmates died of tuberculosis and our teacher took the entire class to her funeral. This was my first encounter with death and it left a lasting impression. Another time Ilse who, we were told was a refugee from Germany, joined my class. I do not think I understood the meaning of this, refugee from what?

My best friend in school was Sofi, a pretty girl with a ready smile and heavy blond braids. We had a lot in common, her mother was also running a shop in their apartment manufacturing children’s clothing. Sofi’s mother was very strict with her and the time we could spend together outside of school was limited.

Sofi’s father brought a small rubber doll in the form of a naked woman back from Paris. We tried to manipulate the doll, throwing her shadow by candlelight against the wall where it looked like a full-sized woman dancing naked. Just a little healthy curiosity about sex. We got caught which was too bad because we needed a lot more practice to do this well. Actually we were planning a little presentation for our friends.

From the fifth grade on she attended another school and I saw her even less.

When she was seventeen Sofi found out that her mother was not her real mother but really her father’s second wife. The marriage took place when Sofi was just a baby. To escape her restrictive home like Sofi married an older man, jilting her young boyfriend who adored her. After her marriage we lost touch and although I tried during my infrequent visits to Hungary, I was never able to find her again.

Once we had a housekeeper taking instructions to become a Seventh Day Adventist. Twice a week a minister arrived in the evening to teach her but the trouble was that I was put down to sleep in the same room and as this intense indoctrination was taking place, I was inadvertently receiving instruction. This was heavy stuff about sin and Satan and Hell and brimstone so it is no wonder I could not fall off to sleep. Considering the big dose of Jewish teaching I was receiving daily in school, I truly did not need Seventh Day Adventist wisdom at night. By the minute I became more and more confused and scared out of my wits.

I used to walk home from school with Susan, a schoolmate, who lived close by. We entertained each other during the long walk telling outrageous lies about what kind of terrific toys we had waiting for us at home. She told me she had miniature dolls that could walk and talk just like real people, comparable to the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels. I half-way believed her and this was a hard one to top. Considering my imagination I am sure I came up with something impressive but it was just easier to find another schoolmate to walk home with since Susan had become too much of a challenge.

One day I was walking home from school reading my report card when a raindrop splashed right on to the “Fail” mark I had next to the subject of “Handicrafts”. This class was taught by the Amazon-like Aunt Rosa who instituted a reign of terror instead of allowing embroidery, knitting and crocheting to be the fun hobbies they were.

By this time I could expertly run a sewing machine and at home, I was often drafted to hand finish the slips and nightgowns. Aunt Rosa did not know this and she did not care as she was eminently dissatisfied with my crocheted collar which we all had to produce. All right, mine was a little too tightly crocheted, out of shape and a little dirty. I had also missed the date when we were supposed to turn it in washed, starched, ironed and pinned on tissue paper. I tried my best and if the truth be told, even our maid, one or two of the seamstresses, and perhaps even Mother and Aunt Kato had also worked on it a bit to try to rescue me. I could not help it if they were not really good at crocheting.

Aunt Rosa failed me and I knew there was going to be big trouble at home. So, in the crucial moment when the raindrop happened to fall on my disgraceful grade, I had a great idea. I rubbed it just a little and then a little more and it turned into an ugly gray smudge but it was certainly not readable.

Well, this turned out to be the crime of the century. The principal called me in with my parents in tow then dressed me down good and said

“We are going to expel you!”

It would have been fine with me because I hated the school anyway. I would have been home free but at the last minute, the principal decided to have mercy on me and to give me one last chance so they kept me.

Aunt Rosa, the real blackguard in the story, continued to torment generations of little girls. What was the woman thinking? This was 1941, World War II was roaring and the world, as we knew it, was coming to an end. I think she took her handicrafts a little too seriously. As an adult I became quite adept, knitting many sweaters. Once I knitted a green dress for nine months and when I put it on, it was a disaster to remember. But in needlepoint I certainly found my forte.

The world had changed all around us. World War II was in full swing. Hungary was allied with Germmany. Hitler barked on the radio promising “ausradiren” (erase) the Jews and as my parents and I listened to him, fear settled in our bones. I think my mother and father were torn. Through my father’s old connections, they were still able to obtain silks, satins and laces to produce and sell their fancy lingerie and so their business was successful. For their first time in their lives they made money.

But on the other hand, Jews were leaving Hungary in great numbers. My Uncle Adi left with his family. Uncle Jerry emigrated with his wife and many of our friends also left. My father tried to obtain visas for our family to emigrate to Holland. This is the story: The Dutch royal family offered a Golden Layette to a child who was born on the same day as the Dutch Queen’s baby, Juliana. As it happened, my brother was born on the same day but when the Dutch royals found out that little George was a Jew, they immediately changed the rules and the Golden Layette went to another child else who was born the next day. I guess my father thought they owed us a little something so he bombarded the Dutch royalty with letters and photographs requesting emigration for his family but it would all be to no avail.

My mother was very busy supervising the shop and doing all the cutting the business required. She charmed customers into becoming even bigger customers. At the same time, she still did some of the marketing and cooking for our family. Although we had no privacy at all since the shop and the showroom were in our living quarters, there was still a lot of laughter, teasing and gossiping going on and all that busy activity surrounding me was sometimes fun. At times as many as twenty women worked in our apartment.

George had asthma and he was ill a great deal of the time. Once his windpipe had to be opened by a doctor at home because he couldn’t breathe and his life was in grave danger. Because there was no effective medication to control asthma in the 1940’s, my parents were very concerned for his welfare.

Because of his illness and maybe because he was also seven years younger than me and he was a sweet, obedient little boy, George and I were treated very differently. George often refused to eat so methods were devised to feed him. Sometimes even the neighbors were invited in to help. The poor kid spent most of his mealtimes locked in the bathroom so as to avoid forced feedings. He is in good shape now, although he could stand to lose twenty pounds or so.

George got a lot of attention. Sometimes a Mademoiselle was hired to take him to the park. I took advantage of the Mademoiselle and learned to count to ten and a dozen other sentences in French. George was taken to the mountains for extra vacations. Special tidbits were bought to tempt his appetite. Needless to say, I was acutely aware of all this.

I don’t remember my mother hugging me and kissing me except when I was sick. If I was running a temperature, she became everything I ever dreamed my mother would be; warm, affectionate, concerned, offering me sweets and fruits. No wonder I used to stick the thermometer into my hot tea to produce a ‘high’ fever and more loving attention.

Perhaps Cecilia loved me when I was a little girl. I have a beautiful photograph of my mother nursing me lovingly by her sewing machine. But by the time I was seven, it was my little brother she attached herself to with a monkey-like adoration. Of course, it is quite possible that my brother was simply more lovable than I. He was certainly more pliable than I was. My mother was a great beauty and possessed a quick repartee but she was also an immature woman full of fears and very self centered.

In 1942, my father was conscripted to serve in a Forced Labor unit. This was the alternative to the army for Jews. Jews were not entrusted with a weapon. Miklos was a slight man and he was equipped to the hilt with doctor’s certificates testifying to his ill health. He had a naive faith that he would be found ineligible and sent safely home.

The morning he left my father wore heavy mountain shoes, a padded waterproof jacket, a yellow armband on the left sleeve and carried a knapsack staggering under it’s weight. He stepped up to my brother’s crib to say goodbye when my mother said,

“Don’t wake him.” He obeyed my mother and this was to be the last time Miklos laid eyes on his son. He kissed me and he told me to be a good girl, promising me he would be back by nightfall. Of course, they found him eligible to serve in the Forced Labor Service--every Jew was eligible. Even the ones who had tuberculosis or were crippled were taken, so were those in the hospitals fresh out of surgery. My father was shipped by the Hungarians to Russia to dig trenches for the soldiers. I think I saw him at the railroad station as his unit crossed Budapest but my memory is hazy.

We continued our drastically altered life without my father. The awareness that we were at war penetrated every moment of our lives. At noon the church bells started ringing and at school we had to stand up, put our hands together and pray for our fighting heroes who took up arms in self-defense....

After that we got a news bulletin about the incredible victories our armies were racking up in Russia and the coming of a decisive battle soon to be fought using miracle weapons. This would finally deliver us the final victory over our hated enemies. All of this news was liberally sprinkled with idolatries and praise for our wonderful German allies. This bullshit was delivered in a Jewish school, no doubt following strict orders, but it was still confusing.

There was a shortage of fuel and the Christmas school vacations lasted as long as three months. Hitler’s power grew and although I sensed fear in the adults around me, I was only eleven years old so I had a limited capacity to understand what was going on. There were increasing shortages. Coupons were allocated for the purchases of meat, sugar, milk, lard, and various other food and clothing items. The anti-Semitism increased in the press and radio. On the streets hoodlums beat up on Jews and smashed the windows of the stores owned by Jews. Cruel caricatures of Jews filled the newspapers. People stood in long lines to get visas, but it was too late. Even those who had visas couldn’t get passage on a boat.

A family we had been close friends with left the country and gifted me with three dozen books which had been the library of their thirteen year old son. This was a wonderful present to an avid reader which I was by the age of eight.

It was one of the best presents ever.

The books were more suited to a boy with titles by Jules Verne, James Fennimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Carl May among others. I loved them with a passion, read them incessantly and handled them tenderly. Those books opened my window to the world and my thoughts became populated by the extraordinary characters I met in their pages. I was not to be lonely any longer...ever again.

As Michael Strogoff took off on the Trans-Asian Railroad across the tundra of Russia, I was with him on that train and not a little infatuated with the handsome bearded adventurer. And when young and presumably orphaned Aurora found her real parents after much heartbreak and cruelty in the hands of impostors, I was certain the same thing had happened to me. I ended up in the wrong family and this was all a mistake. There was hope yet for my real parents, noble by birth, were sure to reclaim me.

While my joyous reading continued, my grades in school, never outstanding, had slipped to an unacceptable level. My teacher alerted my mother and my mother certainly alerted me. Not that it did much good as I still read every afternoon and late into the night, and I spent all my time in school staring out of the window daydreaming, joining forces with brave Indians on wild horses and resourceful hobos defiantly riding the freight trains. They were my true friends and companions so who needed dorky girlfriends like prissy Aranka?

One day I could not find my book titled ‘Nobody’s Son’, a heart wrenching story. I had looked everywhere, searched all the rooms, peeked behind wardrobes and crawled under beds but to no avail. A few days later another book was missing. I questioned every member of our household many times to see if any of them knew of the whereabouts of my books but with no results. I had an immensely painful sense of loss but the craziness of it was more frightening.

The books kept disappearing one by one. George was still a baby so he was never seriously considered to be a suspect. I did not think our maid could read much. Of course, we had all those seamstresses populating our apartment but they were my friends and I was like a mascot to them. I truly did not suspect anybody which only made the vanishing of the books even more of a mystery. I felt as though I was being pursued and punished by some unknown omnipotent power.

As I think back, my life paralleled what was happening in the distraught world around me. My country was caught in the web of fascism and most of its citizens did not understand what was happening. The ominous and threatening voice of a power mad house painter was constantly yelling at us from the radio. Hitler has come to claim his payment for helping the Hungarians to take back Ruthenia and Czechoslovakian and Ukrainian lands.

I despaired as I continued my daily hunt for my books and my grades bottomed out but I was depressed and I did not care. Any day now I was going to run away from home and join forces with Michael Strogoff as I was clearly in need of his worthy advice, bold actions and, who knows, maybe his warm embrace. Somebody was out to get me! And how right I was. Forces a lot more sinister than the ones Jules Verne could dream up were after my hide. It was lucky that I was trained with the best of the deer slayers and was guided by Winnetou, the wisest of the Indian chiefs, otherwise I might not be here to tell the tale of the disappearing books.

Well, what happened was that June came and the school year ended. By this time, ‘The Secret Garden’ was gone, “The Heart”, about a grandmother who sacrificed her life to save her beloved grandchild and so was pure and innocent “Aurora lost. I was certainly ready for my first Valium.

As summer vacation started my mother finally fessed up. She had hidden my books in the ice box which we used only in the summer. Cecilia thought that if she held my books hostage, I would concentrate on my studies, get good grades and then finally she could be proud of me but it did not work out, did it? I felt betrayed and angry but at the same time I was overjoyed to be reunited with Michael, Aurora, Winnettou and the rest of my friends. The villainess in the story, my mother, does not remember this sad and far reaching episode.

Many years later a therapist remarked,

“How clever of you to become a librarian..........” She might even have had tears in her eyes.

1943 was my last visit with my grandparents in Ujfeherto. They had had four sons drafted into service in the Forced Labor units. My father was writing yellow regulation postcards until 1943. My mother sent him food packages and once in a while, soldiers came by and brought us news of him. He asked for cigarettes, food and warm clothes. Once his vest was stolen, but what has hurt him even more, all his family pictures had been in the stolen vest.

The conditions in the Forced Labor units were abominable. The work consisted of digging trenches for the forever moving Hungarian Army. The men were suffering from the extremes of the Ukrainian weather, suffocating heat in the summer and freezing snow in the winter. The food consisted of ersatz coffee, bread, thin soup and little else. Few of the Jewish men were used to physical work and they were forced to lift muddy shovels full of heavy earth and throw the dirt as far from the narrow holes as they could, it was more than they could manage, they slipped and fell in the wet freezing earth. The soldiers assigned to urge them on were rude and abusive, seething with anti-Semitism. Letters from home arrived few and far between. They rapidly lost weight and were constantly sick with colds and runny bowels and infested with lice. We frequently heard heartbreaking news about the Forced Labor units. The men were forced to pick up mines with their bare hands. They were used like horses, forced to pull lorries and carts. As a punishment for some minor offense they were doused with water and forced to climb the trees where they had to cackle like roosters. To imagine my father under these circumstances broke my heart. At the end of the War only seven or eight people per hundred came back from Russia.

In January of 1943, there was a big Russian offensive and the postcards stopped coming. My father was dead or a prisoner of war. I missed him terribly so I wrote him letters and spoke to him in my diary.

In 1944, the bombings became daily events. We spent a great deal of time in our dark, smelly, non-enforced cellar. Sometimes we played cards by candlelight. The sirens went on and off several times a day, signaling the beginning and the end of air raids. Budapest suffered heavy casualties from the bombings and we learned to fear the air attacks from the Allies who were supposed to be our friends and would-be liberators.

In March my mother decided to take George to Ujfeherto and leave him with our grandparents so he would be safe from the air raids. She also took along a large trunk filled with my father’s clothes - among them, his new fur-lined winter coat - for safekeeping until his return from Russia. The trunk got run over by the train when they unloaded it at Ujfeherto. Bad omen.

A few days later on March 19th 1944, German troops occupied Hungary. When mother returned from Ujfeherto, in a dragnet at the railway station. The gendarmes were asking for documents and arresting all the Jews. I was waiting for her at the station with our maid but we missed each other. Frightened by the presence of so many policemen, Arrow Cross Party members (Hungarian Nazis), and German soldiers, my mother rushed home.

There were posters pasted on the buildings and billboards everyday, “New Laws for Jews.” On April 5, 1944 we were all ordered to wear a Star of David, yellow in color and ten centimeters in diameter sewn securely to the garment covering the left side of our chests. After that I did not want to go out on the street for a long time. We were ordered to turn over all our precious metals to the State. I wore a little gold star on a chain around my neck, and I had to turn that in. My mother hid the rest of her precious possessions in a small bag and hung it outside the pantry window, which overlooked a dimly lit shaft. This was very dangerous as they searched all the houses and any contraband discovered would have brought to the guilty deportation or even death as a punishment We were allowed to leave our apartments only for a few previously prescribed hours to try to buy food. They changed our food coupons to yellow “Z’s”” and our allocations were drastically reduced. Jews were allowed to travel only on the back landing of the last car of the streetcars.

Our concierge, Mrs. Remenyi, and her son were members of the Arrow Cross Party and she made sure that we obeyed these rules to the t. I remember her strolling through our set of rooms and pointing out the objects she was going to take for “safekeeping”.

“I take the drapes, the typewriter and your fur coat” - she ordered my mother.” The items she extracted from us, the other Jewish tenants, Mrs. Remenyi hoarded away in a room-sized cavity hidden under her office. Once she tried to insert a pencil under my yellow star to see if it was secured tightly with close stitches.

After the War, Mrs. Remenyi was tried and sentenced to death because she was held personally responsible for the deportation and eventual demise of an elderly couple. I was a spectator at her trial but I don’t think her sentence was carried out.

One day we received a telegram from my Grandparents:

“Immediately send documentation to prove that George is a war orphan. Otherwise they are taking him with us...” We had no idea of what this telegram referred to.

I remember I had my period for the first time when I went with my mother to obtain the “War Orphan” document. By this time my father had been officially declared dead, although we held on to the hope that he was a prisoner of war somewhere in the Soviet Union.

The wife and young daughter of a family friend were also staying with my Grandparents in the country. Her husband, Mr. Bornemissza, took the train to Ujfeherto to retrieve his family, and he rescued my brother George from certain death in a concentration camp by bringing him back with his wife and daughter. He was a gentile and he risked his own life and the lives of his family members for a little Jewish boy. Needless to say, he earned our lifelong gratitude, and George has always been very generous to his widow.

My Grandparents were taken to Auschwitz in one of the infamous cattle cars and were murdered in the gas chambers. They were both in their seventies at the time of their deaths. My Grandfather, Ferenc Breuer, had been a citizen of the United States. He had emigrated to America in the eighteen-nineties to escape the draft because the Hungarian Army didn’t serve kosher meals. It is also possible that he looked to America for his fame and fortune.

He worked as a waiter or as a gentleman’s gentleman, but this was carefully hidden from his children. Ferenc had the bearing of an aristocrat, and admitting to working in a lowly, subservient position would have been shameful to him. I do remember seeing his framed United States Citizenship Document hanging over his rolltop desk. When he returned to Hungary he took steps to repatriate. But in any case, he did not keep in touch with the U.S. Embassy, his American citizenship did not help my Grandparents when the gendarmes came and loaded them into the trains destined for Auschwitz.

I imagined my grandparents, Amalia and Ferenc, in Auschwitz when they were selected to die. They were ordered to take off their clothes and they were told they were going to take a shower. They were locked into the gas chamber, the gas hissing as it filled the air and killed them. I could imagine the stink from the fires of the furnaces which burned their poor broken bodies. Where was their God, the God of Israel they loved, respected, trusted and obeyed?

How did I live my life with these images? I built extraordinary defenses. I lost my father, my Grandparents, four uncles, two first cousins, many other relatives, neighbors and wonderful friends of my own age to the Holocaust. And I had lost my God because any God who permitted such horrible crimes against innocent people was no God of mine.

There were one hundred and seven anti-Jewish decrees issued between March and December of 1944. Among those were marking the Jews for purposes of differentiation (yellow star), termination of the employment of Jews in public service, termination of the membership of Jews in the chambers of the press, theatrical arts and film arts, prohibition of the employment of non-Jews in Jewish households.

Serena, our housekeeper who had been with us for many years and was treated as a member of our family, finally took her leave with much crying, hugging and kissing. The Jews had to give up owning automobiles, listening to foreign radio stations, eventually having to turn in our radios. There existed regulations of food supplies for Jews, registration of the Jewish apartments and living spaces, restrictions on travel and no hiring and employment of Jews was permitted in white-collar positions.

The streets were full of hungry, frightened and neglected refugees from Slovakia where the deportations had begun earlier. Most of them were picked up by the Hungarian police and put on trains to the concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Frequently we stood for hours in our courtyard while the police scrutinized our papers. They were searching for refugees from neighboring countries as Hungary was the final stop and there was no place left to run. They were hunting down deserters from the Forced Labor units and Army. Hungary was decimated by the War and only women, old people and children remained.

Toward the end of the War they took young Jewish women to the Forced Labor units. Two sisters lived in our apartment house. The older one was married and exempt from the draft but the sixteen year old, Eva, who was my friend, was eligible and promptly drafted. Her married sister refused to let her go alone so they left together with their knapsacks on their backs. They never returned from the concentration camp. After the War I often saw their parents as they reopened their small shop where they sold threads, buttons, zippers and other sewing supplies. I suspect I know what they were thinking every time they saw me.

“There is Agi Breuer. She is alive and our daughters are dead. I knew because this was exactly what I was thinking, too.

Then the even more humiliating decrees came into being; prohibition on the attendance in public baths by Jews, prohibition of the wearing of school uniforms by Jewish students, revocation of pharmacy licenses, restrictions on visiting restaurants, prohibition on attendance of public entertainment places and restriction on the shopping by Jews to specific periods of the day, usually a couple of hours in the afternoon when the meager bread, milk and meat supply was already gone. The only coupons we could redeem were for sugar.

There was a mandate for the removal of works by Jewish authors from public circulation. Since many writers were Jewish, the selection of books available for reading was further compromised. Marriages between Jews and non-Jews were forbidden. People who had converted many decades earlier or had married non-Jews were treated as Jews. The names of streets, roads and squares named after Jews were changed.

The most important and most numerous orders concerned the declaration and sequestration of the wealth of the Jews, requisitioning equipment and stocks, real estate and objects of art belonging to Jews. Managers were appointed to run the factories and businesses owned by Jews and their rightful owners could not set foot on their own property. By this time my mother’s garment workers had long since scattered, most of them leaving with a sewing machine. Some of them even returned the machines to us after the War. Business could not be run by anyone of impure blood.

There was a Central Jewish Council formed by order of the government but its members appealed to the Hungarian Jewry for obedience and calm. All these proclamations demeaning the Jewish citizens and stripping them of their human rights came not only from Nazi Germany, although the pressure was already on, but from the official Hungarian government. I always thought the Hungarians out-Nazied the Nazis.

My mother’s younger brother, Martin, was deported and died in a concentration camp along with his wife and two young children. I did not know them well since they lived far from my home in another town, but my uncle used to visit us during his business trips. It disturbs me that I do not even know the names of his wife and children.

While I was writing this book my thoughts were filled with images of the Holocaust and I talked a lot about it. I was sitting next to Jerry, a friend and husband to my cousin, one night when he told me how the Camp Commander kept them standing for three days in the snow because he discovered a father and son living together in the barracks. I have known Jerry for forty years. How is it possible that this is the first time we have talked about the Holocaust? I do not think he was ready to discuss his experiences in the camp but I know that I was not ready to ask the questions or hear the answers and this fills me with shame.

Over five million pengos (Hungarian currency) were handed over to the SS to rescue the Hungarian Jews and about three thousand Jews reached Switzerland in two transports. Hungary had eight hundred thousand Jewish inhabitants including the refugees from the neighboring countries. Only two hundred thousand survived in Budapest or returned from the concentrations camps or from the Soviet Union.

While the deportations completely stripped the entire countryside of its Jewish population, Jews living in Budapest were ordered first to repair to designated Yellow Star houses which were all over the City on the theory that the Allies would not want to bomb the Jews. Therefore, having the buildings interspersed everywhere provided some protection to the neighborhood. This was, of course, nonsense. The Allies could not have cared less that Jews were also killed by their bombs.

These apartments were over-crowded and the people living in them were only able to bring along a fraction of their possessions. In five days one hundred and fifty thousand Jews had to find new places to live. Women and the aged were pulling their carts in the pouring rain to relocate in the designated all Jewish buildings while within the Yellow Star buildings hysterical fights broke out in the kitchens while toilets overflowed. In a few months all Jews were ordered to move inside the ghetto.

We were forced to move since our apartment was in a Yellow Star building outside of the ghetto’s borders. The ghetto was about half a square mile. In addition to the people already living there, they forced in another fifty thousand. The entire ghetto was surrounded with a wood fence and the neighborhood was old with narrow streets and ancient buildings in desperate need of repair. In the courtyards trash collected in high mountains and stunk to high heaven.

The people walking in the streets of the ghetto were emaciated, old and they were already smelling foul because of the lack of available amenities.

Some foreign countries tried to help by obtaining apartment houses and declaring them extensions of their Embassies which provided some degree of diplomatic immunity to those residing within these houses. These buildings sheltered as many Jews as they could squeeze in and even provided them with fake visas. Switzerland and Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg were in the forefront of these rescue attempts.

We had relatives in Spain but they had already been kicked out of the country by the fascist Franco. Fortunately we had enough correspondence to forge a thin line supporting our story that we were about to emigrate to Spain to join our family and we were just waiting for our documents to come through.

I went to the Spanish Embassy with these letters from our relatives and after spending twelve hours there, I was able to obtain documents for my mother, brother and myself stating that we had applied for visas to emigrate to Spain.

While awaiting the arrival of the proper documents, we were under the protection of the Spanish government but since Spain was very friendly with the Nazis, in reality this offered us little protection. I was thirteen years old and my actions very likely saved the lives of my family but I don’t recall ever being acknowledged for my resourcefulness and courage. I walked home from the Spanish Embassy alone in the dark night, hours past the curfew. Jews arrested after the curfew were often shot right on the spot.

We had moved into an apartment in Legrady Karoly Street 44 which was under Spanish protection. While we were moving, my mother, who had been pulling the wagon transporting our meager possessions, was accosted by some thugs dressed in the uniforms of Arrow Cross henchmen. They tried to drag her into their headquarters but my mother, frightened out of her wits knowing that this would mean death or deportation for her, made such a fuss that people on the street came to her rescue. In the face of public protest, rare in Hungary, the Arrow Cross let her go.

There were only a hundred people in all of Hungary with Spanish protection papers. The apartment we were assigned to had two rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. It was home to about 20-25 people. I slept on a desk. The windows were covered with black paper as blackouts were strictly observed. Since the bombings were almost continuous, we spent a good deal of time in the cellar. We were also under enemy fire from the Russians who were approaching from the East. One day when I was sleeping on my desk, the apartment beneath me received a mortar hit and was completely wiped out. I don’t remember being particularly scared so I guess one can get used to anything, even war.

On the Sunday afternoon of October 15, 1944, Governor Horthy made an announcement on the radio that he was breaking Hungary’s pact with the Germans and he asked for a separate peace agreement with the Allies. This move was past the realm of possibilities and within hours of his announcement, Horthy disappeared from the scene and Ferenc Szalasy, the leader of the Arrow Cross Party, became the head of the government. From then on the deportations and the atrocities against the Jews escalated.

Sometimes I walked the streets running my bartering errands and did not wear the Star of David. This drove my mother crazy as it was very dangerous. With my curly red hair and upturned nose, I did not look Jewish, but I did not have the right documents to provide me with a gentile background. I don’t remember being very hungry because my mother was very good at exchanging whatever she had for potatoes and such. An older man, a friend of my parents, kissed me expertly on the mouth. I didn’t like it and I tried to avoid him, luckily, there were always people around. We played cards, listened to the rumors, argued about the use of the kitchen and the bathroom.

The Red Army had surrounded Budapest thus the deportations came to a complete halt. The deportation trains ran until the very last minute and when the trains could not get out any longer, the Arrow Cross thugs took many Jews to the Danube, lined them up and shot them letting their bodies fall into the river. Sometimes they tied three people together and shot the middle one to save ammunition. The river ran red. A friend of my father’s was among those shot but he managed to swim to shore, find shelter and lived to tell about this inhuman massacre.

My mother’s half-sister, Eva, was among those lined up by the river facing execution. At the last moment one of the Arrow Cross Party members who was her colleague at the Technical University pulled her out of the line and let her go.

Eva, the oldest of two children from my Grandfather, Samuel’s, second marriage, was a very bright and diligent student pushed by her mother Gisela who was a great believer in education.

Initiated in 1920, the so-called Numerus Clausus Act limited the admission of Jews to institutions of higher learning to five percent but in reality, the percentage of Jews admitted was even lower. Miraculously my Aunt Eva was one of those admitted to the Technical University even though she was a Jew and a woman. She performed brilliantly and in 1941 was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in Physics. She was the last Jew allowed a Ph.D., although no opportunity to teach or do research was offered to her. Eva was also the first woman in our family who attended college and I was the second.

After surviving the War, Eva left Hungary at the first opportune moment bound for Israel where she eventually became a faculty member in the world renowned Technion. She raised her family in the Holy Land and later was sent to Michigan to earn a Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering. After that Eva went on to different teaching positions at several institutes of higher learning.

The houses protected by the foreign embassies were systematically emptied by the Arrow Cross soldiers as they yelled “Hang the Jews! You are getting what you deserve!” These young thugs with whips formed long lines and marched the Jews into the already over-crowded ghetto where people started dying like flies from hunger and disease. Thousands were buried in the courtyards attached to the synagogues.

One morning I peeked out from behind the blackout paper and saw a Russian soldier with a red star on his fur hat. We had been liberated during the night: The date was January 5th, 1945. I was thirteen years old, George was seven and Cecilia thirty-eight. The three of us had survived the War and the Holocaust. George had spent his early childhood being sick with colds and asthma but he managed to come through this ordeal in good health.

I got a knife and cut the yellow star off of my jacket. The Russians were looting the stores and soon enough the Hungarians joined in. Soldiers of the Red Army adored watches and many of them sported a dozen on both arms. Everybody understood the yell

“Davaj chasi!”

which meant “Hand over your watch!” They were raping the women. The Russians were the conquerors and we Hungarians, as the hated enemy, were beaten. Soon after this they changed their tune and they became our ”liberators”.

One day I brought home a young Russian soldier who wanted to barter goods. I thought my mother would have been happy to exchange a length of cotton for some flour but I was wrong. She was furious with me for showing the Red Army soldier where we lived and I cannot say I blame her. Once I joined some young people to explore the warehouses where the Germans hoarded what they had stolen and stockpiled until they could ship everything to Germany. I came home with a couple of porcelain bonbonniers and some sugar. My mother disapproved of my looting and I felt ashamed of myself.

Other people were living in our old apartment where we wanted to return as soon as possible. Eventually we managed to get them out from two of our rooms and moved back to Tobacco Street from the Spanish protected apartment house where we survived the last months of the War. We piled our beat-up belongings onto the top of a pull-cart and we started for home. A young woman dying of cancer lived in our third room. Soon thereafter my mother’s sister, Sari, and her two children moved in with us. They were homeless and had no place else to turn. We tried to get along but I did not care for them.

Skeletal men and women began to straggle back from the concentration camps. We listened to their heartbreaking stories of terrible suffering and their accounts of those who had been murdered. These sad concentration camp survivors were thin, sick, had shaved heads, dead eyes and had blue numbers tattooed into their arms.

We had no food and no longer anything with which to barter. We decided to take the train to Ujfeherto thinking that food would be more available to us in the country. My aunt Kato and her newborn baby joined us. She had given birth to twins during one of the worst bombings imaginable but only one her daughters survived. Her husband never perished in one of the concentration camps..

Some of the Jewish families living out in the country who had recently returned from the concentration camps themselves, offered to take in Jewish children from the capitol in order to care for them and fatten them up. By this time my relationship with my mother had deteriorated so that all I wanted to do was get away from her and reluctantly she agreed with me.

While my mother, George and my aunt Kato and her baby traveled on to Ujfeherto, I went to stay with a Jewish baker and his family in Nyiregyhaza a city near Ujfeherto. Another girl from Budapest also lived there. The people hosting us were kind and generous but they had lost their own children to the gas chambers so they could barely stand to look at us. We were alive and their sons and daughters were dead. While I lived with these people, I spent most of my time walking around in the Jewish cemetery. I was in a deep depression but back then I did not have a name for how I felt. I felt nothing. I was grieving the lost members of my family, friends, the six million Jews with a strange numbness.

Meanwhile I was scratching my head all the time as my hair was full of lice. I missed my family so I managed to get a ride to Ujfeherto. My mother did not waste much time with a diagnosis. She washed my hair in gasoline and bandaged my head tightly with a kerchief. It burned like the devil. The next morning she combed my hair with a fine toothed lice-comb, shampooed my head and then repeated the entire operation. It was a painful and humiliating experience but the lice were gone!

My grandparents house in Ujfeherto had been completely stripped of all their furniture and all their belongings. There was not a familiar face in sight. It was as though the ground had opened and swallowed up my family, my friends and all their possessions. My best friend and soul mate, Eva, was gone and so were my cousins. It was just not possible for me to take all this in. If it takes a village to bring up a child, I had lost my village. The war had caused me irreparable psychic damage, a lifetime of sorrow and a good dose of survivor’s guilt. A few of our relatives came home from the camps, among those my Uncle Sanyi and a few days later, his wife, Piri.

My mother lined up a tutor who was to prepare me for a year-end examination at the school in Nyiregyhaza so I would not lose a school year. I had not learned much during the years of war except the painful lessons history had taught me. Eventually when my family returned to Budapest, I stayed behind in Ujfeherto so as to finish the eighth grade with the help of my tutor, A young man, a neighbor courted me and tried to have his way with me but I remained virtuous. I was still very depressed and found another cemetery to walk around in. This was the beginning of a series of depressions which plagued me through most of my life.

During this time I joined up with some older girls in a black marketing scheme. A few times we took food to Budapest and sold it on the black market. My poor mother certainly did not want me to do anything so dangerous but I was difficult if not impossible to control. On one of these trips I have learned that if a boy scratches your palm it means he wants to make out, but fortunately nothing happened to me. I could have been raped by the Russian and Rumanian soldiers who roamed the trains and the train stations.

We were still hoping that my father would be among those returning from the Soviet Union. The prisoners of war were arriving home in a slow trickle and the newspapers published their names. There was not much hope left. I read a novel during the war entitled “The Two Prisoners” by Lajos Zilahy. In this story set in World War I, an officer learns that his young bride is being unfaithful to him while he serves in Russia. He decides not to return to her after the war but instead without saying a word, stays somewhere in Russia with another woman.

I had this fantasy for many years that my father had stayed in the Soviet Union because--well, my mother had not been unfaithful but perhaps she had not been as nice to him as she could have been. Even today I fantasize...Let’s see, he would be 93 years old now. He could be alive. When I visited Kiev, I looked at the faces of the men on the streets. I looked for my father. It is difficult for a child to accept the death of a parent when there is no grave.

Canadian Jews offered to take some war orphans and place them with families willing to adopt them. I remember going to some office and offering myself for adoption. Never mind that I was not an orphan, I was so uncomfortable at home, I tried my best to get away.

My mother never talked to me about sex but her not so subliminal message was that sex was dirty, shameful and dangerous. I always thought my mother never enjoyed sex but I could be wrong. I found information wherever I could mostly from girlfriends and books. My mother and my aunt Kato read some racy novels when I was twelve years old or so and they tried to hide them from me but I always found them.

Once when I was walking down the street a man fell in step beside me and showed me some pornographic pictures. He said

“I want to show you something.” and stepped behind the portal of an apartment building. Stupid as I was, I followed him. He took out his penis and I took one look at the ugly red thing and in a flash I broke away from him and raced home, my heart beating furiously. As usual, once I was safely home I kept my own counsel.

I received my first kiss in the summer of 1946 when my family was on vacation in the nearby mountains. This was the first time that two or three young men paid attention to me but I was not particularly fond of Jeff, the boy who kissed me, so I decided that first kiss was just a practice run. I was not very impressed and as soon as I returned to our hotel room, I brushed my teeth. Jeff kept sending messages with my brother, trying to lure me out but I was not budging. It took awhile until I finally had the hang of it or rather, it took the right chemistry.

Soon enough I was experimenting with my body and I have done my share of necking, a few times with such intensity that I almost passed out! I guarded my virginity vigorously which left my poor boyfriends frustrated. In today’s lingo, I would be called a tease.