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Emery Gregus
Occupation and
Liberation 1944-1945
Aftermath: The Postwar Years
Remembrances
Chapter 1
At
seven o’clock in the morning the phone rang. It was my eldest brother
Gyuri calling from Pecs where he was studying law. Pecs lay at the outermost
western frontier of Hungary and was one of the first towns the Germans
marched through when they occupied Hungary. "Our friends have arrived.
I am going to try to catch the first train to Budapest," he said,
correctly supposing that in the first hours of the occupation the authorities
would not yet check the identity papers at the railway stations. He
was right.
The
day was the l9th of March 1944.
The
fact that my brother found himself studying law in Pecs, which he initially
began in Prague many years previously (when we were still part of Czechoslovakia),
was typical of the odd circumstances which governed the lives of the
Jewish population in Hungary at that time. And it was only now, when
the majority of Jewish youth were herded into the labour camps to perform
the most dangerous tasks such as clearing mines or digging ditches at
the front line for the Hungarian army or dying by the tens of thousands
at the Don River in Russia, it was only now, that my brother, to his
greatest surprise, was accepted to a faculty of law and was studying
for his final exams in Pecs.
Six
years previously, in 1938, Czechoslovakia fell apart and we became part
of Hungary. As a consequence, Jewish students were not allowed to continue
their studies and it was only in the rarest of cases, and usually only
through influential connections, that they were permitted to continue
their studies.
My brother Gyuri was exempt for medical reasons from any military or labour camp service due to past tubercular illness. Gyuri was more than pleased to be admitted to the law faculty in Pecs to complete his studies there. After many lost and wasted years, it finally appeared that he would be permitted to graduate and practice a profession.
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