SIMON Erzsébet (Böske)
aka LINHARDT Antalné [3]
aka LINHARDT Elizabeth
aka MOHOS Elizabeth

Boske LINHARDT with her son Antal and daughter Eva on Tony's 13th birthday (24-Aug-1943).

BOSKE'S STORY (video interview from 1997)

Böske recalls how in WWI, there were shortages of all foods: butter, tea, milk, meat, bread. Everything was rationed. She was a very thin and sickly little girl. For breakfast, she ate cumin seed soup which she hated. She hated the cornbread that was so dry it would crumble to pieces. She used eggs to make whip-cream with sugar, because there was no milk for coffee. She remembers big rains where the souls of their shoes were so thin that the cold water got into their shoes. Böske's family was anti-war, against the imperialistic wars. Although a Jew in Hungary. In those times she felt no anti-semetism. Her family was not very religious and did not eat kosher food.

Böske lived in a very nice home in Budapest. Jakab's trade union bought a number of housing units in Bekeletenin(sp?) in Kispest around 1909 or 1910. Her father took her to see the new housing unit and she was playing with a watering can there. She liked the place so much that Jakab moved the whole family there. Böske was the spoiled baby of the family and everything she wanted her father gave her.

Böske meet her husband Antal in the housing unit. He was the secretary of the Social Democrat party in Kispest at the time and a member of the city council. Böske was also a party member. There was an election and Böske volunteered to help the party secretary do typing and anything else to help, so that's how she met Antal. The engagement party was December 24th (Christmas). They were engaged for 1 1/2 years.

Böske & Antal were married on April 6th, 1927 on a Sunday at City Hall because Antal didn't want any publicity. The mayor officiated on a Sunday. The rode the street car on the way back & didn't stay in a hotel. Their wedding night must have been passionate as the planks of the bed broke.

Antal was a very serious man. Very particular. Very clean. Very organized. Perfectionist. He taught Böske to love reading books. He would give Böske a book and then afterwards asked her what she liked in the book. HG Wells was the first book he gave her.

Böske was a chairman of the party representatives of various counties. At a party meeting, the speaker asked the audience to express their opinions and Böske was the only one to speak. Afterwards, the speaker congradulated Antal on his fine wife.

The Social Democrat Party was a small party. The Communist Party was illegal, so many communists changed to the Social Democrat party. He was elected to the parliament. But he resigned and gave his post to another in order to give the peasants representation. Also, he was member of city council and the legislative body of the county. He got in an argument with the head of the county who was a Nazi. The end result was that he was taken to an extermination camp. They were trying to say the Social Democrats were communists, but he insisted that Social Democrats were against totalitarian rule including Communists and Nazis.

Things were getting worse, there were quotas for how many Jews could be in various positions. Böske didn't consider herself as a Jew as she was married to a Christian. He became the editor of a polical paper called "The Voice of the People". Because of the anti-Nazi stance of the paper, Antal was drafted to the army in 1942 even though he was over age and he had a hernia. The draft was to a work brigade taken out to the front with the idea that the people in this brigade would never come back. In 3 May 1942, they loaded them up in cattle wagons and took them out to the front. Böske asked her husband if she should take the two children to see him in camp before he was taken away, but Antal didn't want his children to see in in such an undignified state. Large percentage of this "extermination brigade" died. Antal supposed survived when the Russians liberated Hungary and was in a hospital. The newspapers said that some people heard him talking on Radio Moscow. According to some information, he came back to Hungary, and the KGB liquidated him because he wasn't willing to sanction the unification of the Communist and Social Democrat parties.

During the war, Böske lived underground w/ forged papers. The Nazi's put her in prison for a month for being the wife of a socialist politician.

After the war from 1944 to 1950, there was a relative democracy in Hungary. Antal was considered to be a martyr of the movement. They named the main street in Kispest after Antal. Böske received a pension equivalent to that of an Undersecretary of the government and was living comfortable. But in 1950 when the Communist took over, Antal was considered a traitor to the movement and the pension was revoked. In the meantime, Böske became a manager of a company, but later was removed because she was the window of a traitor. In 1957, at the urging of her son and daughter-in-law, Böske came to the US.

Böske met her second husband Imre MOHOS in 1957 in Vienna on the plane to New York. On August 8th, she left for Los Angeles.

Magda's Farewell

Sources:
[1] Böske MOHOS (oral) + 1997 video
[2] SIMON family registry (from Magda Kellner)
[3] Tony LINHARDT (oral)
[4] Baptism document.

5 April 2003; pml