Emery Gregus

Occupation and Liberation 1944-1945
Aftermath: The Postwar Years
Remembrances

 

Chapter 3

For us, from that fateful March day onwards, each and every day brought some new restrictions, new worries and some very unpleasant surprises for the Jewish population. The more prominent Jews of the town were taken as hostages in an attempt to stem the flow of the hostages’ families and prevent them, as well as, the Jewish population at large from trying to escape. The gendarmes and detectives came in the middle of the night and rounded up the men, who were permitted to take only a few personal belongings. The men were then taken to a building on the outskirts of the town, which up until then had been an institution for delinquent youngsters.

Among those initially taken under the "prominent Jew" category was my brother-in-law Bandi (the husband of my sister Vali and with whom I had been apprenticed in the optical shop). What must have been the criterion for "prominent Jew," I suppose, was someone who owned a business on the main streets of the town. In desperation, my sister Vali ran for help to the president of the local Jewish community to see whether he could help. " Don’t worry", he reassured her;" the porridge isn’t eaten as hot as it is cooked". He most likely had no inkling of what was coming, and even if he had, he probably couldn’t have helped her anyway. A few weeks later, these hostages were freed to rejoin their families in order to be taken to the brick factory from where they were eventually deported to the concentration camps.

My father fell into a state of panic. He didn’t belong, per se, to the "prominent Jew" category according to the above definition, whatever that was. The Hungarians arrived in November 1938 and three months later, in February l939, his license for producing spirits and alcoholic beverages was revoked. From this time onwards, Jews were no longer permitted to engage in any business of this kind. How my father supported his family over the next five years is still a mystery to me. I never noticed any change in our lifestyle. In the beginning, I presume, he must have sold his remaining inventory and what he couldn’t sell, he later sent home, as for example, the sugar from the distillery. Later, he sold the factory building and then the adjoining smaller building where his office was located. Before he sold this smaller building, a few "Chalutzim" lived in a small part of it. These were Jews from Galicia, who were making their way to Palestine. I imagine that they never paid any rent. In this way, without my father being aware of it, he was making his contribution to the establishment of the future State of Israel. The contents left from the office which could not be sold, he brought home and stored in one of the upstairs rooms. We used to call the room the "Small Monopol," because "Monopol" was the original name of the factory, and we spent countless days and nights endlessly playing cards there.

I remember one day clearly. When the initial roundup of the Jews began, my father, who could no longer endure the tension, got dressed around midnight, and with my mother, went over to my sister’s brother-in- law, Jeno, with whom he had served in the First World War. Jeno lived close by, and the presumption was, that should the gendarmes come to take Jeno, they wouldn’t then think to search for my father there, but from my parent’s home he would have surely been taken away. Poor Jeno! When he heard the doorbell in the middle of the night, he awoke supposing that they had come to arrest him. He quickly pulled up his boots, which had been prepared in anticipation of such an event. When he discovered that it was only my parents, he graciously offered them his divan for the night and returned to his bed. Unfortunately, a few days later, when the doorbell rang again, there was no going back to bed for Jeno. The gendarmes had come to take him as a "hostage," first to the building that had previously been used for delinquents; then to the brick factory, and finally, a few weeks later, to be deported.

Each and every day, we awoke to new edicts, which filled us with anxiety and fear as to what the future might bring. In order not be at home, should the gendarmes come to fetch me in the middle of the night, I sometimes went to my brother-in-law’s optical store and slept on the floor in a small storage room at the back. It was a great risk for a young man, who was known in the town as a Jew, to be seen on the streets, leaving a shop in the morning and returning at night. A few days later, I abandoned this futile plan.

In the building where my father previously had had his office, there lived a tenant, who was a warden in a jail. One day, his wife approached us, and offered to hide me in the garden shed next to her house in the outskirts of town for some future financial compensation. I desperately accepted the offer, but it wasn’t without risks. She had asked me to come to her place in the evening without wearing my yellow star. In those days, all Jews were obliged to wear the Star of David and it was dangerous to be found on the streets without it. However, it was a risk that I was willing to undertake. I slept on some kind of lawn chair in the tool shed and I wasn’t permitted to go outside or make any noise, lest the neighbours notice that they were hiding someone there. She kept me there for four or five days and in the evenings she brought me my dinner. After a few days, though, the warden’s wife must have realized that the persecution of the Jews was going to last a lot longer than the period of time she was prepared to hide me. Consequently, late one night in the dead of the darkness, and overcome by fear so as not to be caught on the streets without my yellow star, I returned home to my mother, who by then was living alone with the maid.

One day while I was gone, my father began to spit up blood. My father, who had inactive tuberculosis from childhood, was in contact with a specialist, who had come in with the Hungarians and was now Chief of Pulmonary Medicine at the hospital in Kassa. My father now approached him and asked the doctor to have him admitted to the chest hospital for observation. The doctor understood what it was all about, and permission to enter the shelter of his ward would offer my father some protection from being taken as a hostage. The idea was that, if one could survive the first few days or weeks of Jewish hostage taking, then extra time could be gained to prepare for the future. It was always the immediate and present danger which needed to be overcome.

I, in the meantime waited at home with my mother, and visited my father in the hospital. My father again approached the doctor and asked him whether he would admit me as well to the hospital as a patient "under observation". The doctor agreed to hospitalize me under some transparent, but in spite of everything, somewhat believable diagnosis of "enlarged hyluses." This rather insignificant finding could have been taken as a serious one as well, for this same doctor once saved me from being sent to the labour camps under this very same medical diagnosis.

The doctor admitted me to the same room as my father, and he and the nursing nuns were prepared to regard us as sick, or at least, as patients under medical observation. We were not alone on this physician’s hospital floor. A fellow classmate of mine, Urbach Gyuri was there with bone fide tuberculosis. The fourth "patient" was a Jewish girl, Guttman Lotti, who was a few years younger than myself and who had previously, like my father, been a patient of this same doctor.

How little we knew of what the future held in store for us—now, in retrospect, it seems almost tragic-comical! Lotti was preparing for her school exams and she was writing an essay on the Hungarian counter-reformation. She asked me if I would help her and I willingly obliged. To a certain extent, I was glad to be pre-occupied with other issues other than my survival, and partly, I suppose, I was pleased to be playing the role of an intellectual to a young girl on a subject I was quite a bit more familiar with then than now. I had written more than one composition on this subject before. How well our paper would have fared I never found out. Lotti never went back to her school, but was taken to the brick factory directly from the hospital and later deported to the concentration camps from where she never returned.

In the hospital, my father and I filled most of our time by reading. The title of the novel my father took along with him was the work of a German author, whose name I no longer recall, but the book consisted of three large volumes and was called " The Fall of the Two-Headed Eagle". The novel described the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and covered the time period just before and after the First World War. I remember distinctly finding some consolation in reading this book. Oh yes, there had been similar times of war and great upheaval and somehow people had managed to survive the chaos. We must be living in similar times. Perhaps there was hope for our survival as well? About a year later, after liberation, I went back to Kosice and the hospital (from where my father was eventually taken to the brick factory when I was no longer there), to collect any personal belongings he may have left behind. The Sisters gave me back a couple of his books, among them " The Fall of the Two Headed Eagle", but not before charging me a small fee for their keeping. If I remember correctly, I was so taken aback by their request, that I paid them the sum, and later I misplaced these books somewhere.

After a short while, I was discharged from the hospital. There weren’t enough medical grounds to warrant my stay there. Dejected, I headed home to my mother. My mother’s niece, Farkas Edith was spending the nights in the house with her to spare my mother having to spend the nights alone. Edith was my mother’s favourite niece and she admired and respected Edith’s ambition---which she certainly had. As a rule, our extended family was not very large and we were not very close to the aunts, cousins, and nieces, most of whom lived fairly nearby. Outside of our immediate family, which was very devoted, the extended family was not very cohesive.

The fact that Edith spent the nights with my mother was very decent indeed, especially during these days when it was dangerous for a Jew to be caught walking on the streets. Each and every Jew had to be accounted for, and after a certain hour, was obliged to stay inside their homes. The authorities had detailed lists on each person and precise records as to where they lived. When the gendarmes were sent to round up a particular Jew or a particular Jewish family, the police would have exact information as to where that Jew was staying. According to the registration customs of the day, it was not too difficult to keep track of people. Now, not only was each Jew personally accountable to the authorities, but in addition, each individual household had a responsibility to be familiar with the exact whereabouts of every other family member who should have been living there. We thought that grave consequences awaited anyone if someone was missing, who was supposed to live there. However, in the end, this turned out not to be true, but one couldn’t know that before hand.

This now leads us to the question of escape. After the war, many people asked (and among them there were those who should have known better), "Why didn’t you try every avenue for escape?" "What did you have to loose?" What these individuals fail to take into consideration and do not realize or perhaps conveniently chose to forget, was that each and every attempt to escape may have put your loved ones in considerable danger. How many of us could truly envision the unimaginable fate that awaited the Jews? Should the gendarmes come to look for me at our home, my mother is left to explain to them why I am not there. It was a kind of spontaneous reaction on my part that I did eventually escape to Budapest. I could have thought that this would put my mother at some risk. Naturally, she didn’t mind my leaving, but even today, so many years later, the fact that I left her behind, still haunts me.

In the following weeks, the noose tightened even more. Each and every day brought newer and newer restrictions. What to do? Where to go? My friend, Sas Pista, and I discussed escaping to Slovakia, where the deportations had been concluded and the risk of being caught seemed less. We eventually dropped this plan because neither of us had anyone we knew to stay with.

Escaping to Slovakia, however, was precisely what my mother’s niece Edith did. While staying with my mother, Edith must have been making plans and preparing her connections for her future safety. When the majority of Kassa had been rounded up and herded off to the brick factory, Edith, with someone’s assistance, (I never found out who helped her) managed to escape to Slovakia where she survived the remaining months of the war. It was obviously an asset that she was an attractive and sexy woman and she found someone to take her under his wings.

When Edith and I met after the war, I never asked her how she managed to survive or who helped her. However, I do recall an interesting incident in connection with my cousin, which occurred very soon after the war ended. In l945, I returned to Kassa, disheartened and alone, and went back to my parents’ apartment, only to find the bare walls. All our furnishings had been stolen. I did find an old armchair in the shabby home of a former maid. In an effort, to retrieve the armchair, I engaged the services of a Jewish detective, who had recently arrived in Kosice from Slovakia, where he had survived the war years in some capacity, unknown to me. Edith kindly offered to accompany me to the maid’s apartment where the detective and I had arrangements to meet. When Edith and the detective saw each other, they were shocked and speechless. " Is she a cousin of yours?" he asked, and we retrieved the armchair. It was very clear, even in the naiveté of my 23 years, that their common past was something that they both preferred to forget. We lived in times of war and one’s survival took precedence over any moral issues. Moral rectitude could not play a part in the day- to- day struggle in the face of the Nazi’s plan to eradicate us.

My suspicions concerning Edith were not unfounded as I was later to find out. Her husband had fallen prisoner of war in Russia, but had returned as an officer of the Czech battalion of the liberating Russian Army. The news of wife’s transgressions must have filtered back to him when he returned home. Even as a young newlywed he was notoriously jealous. In the final days of the conflict, when it took very little to avoid being sent to the front lines, he must have exhibited exceptional valour and probably perished needlessly. It is only my guess, but I am supposing that his final and futile courage might have been the result of discovering the infidelities of his wife. Edith mourned him deeply and took on the role of a war widow. She wore black for quite awhile, a custom that was fairly rare in those days. The black suited her well and emphasized her shapely legs. She was always very kind to me in those difficult days after the war and she was truly fond of me, although not completely in the way I would have liked.

Twenty–three years after we were married in April, 1948, I and the "young girl with the vivid eyes and the little hat" traveled to Budapest for the first time since we had left. Edith was waiting for us at our Budapest hotel with a bouquet of flowers. By then she had made herself a successful career in politics. She had married a much older man, a well-known journalist who was the Bureau Chief of the Czechoslovakian news service in Budapest. At one time, she herself was the Hungarian broadcaster of the Czech news from Prague. Afterwards, each time we traveled to Budapest, I tried to contact her, but no one knew her whereabouts. I never did succeed in tracing her, until in 1993, when I was in Kosice I was informed by mutual acquaintances that Edith had died of heart failure four years previously while staying at a Czech resort. So ends the story of my cousin Edith, who survived, the war, but lost the peace. The character she played in that world was not her legitimate role. Obviously, there is a price to be paid for everything. In Budapest, she became friendly with many influential communists. Once, while paying a social visit to one of the minister’s wives, Edith pretended not to recognize a relative of hers who he had come by to repair the typewriter at the minister’s home.

I think that all that remains of cousin Edith is a picture of her in our wedding photo. She was also the one who reminded us that daylight savings time had kicked in that morning, and it was actually one hour later than we had thought. Had it not been for Edith, we would have missed our wedding.

But let us now return to the spring of 1944.

At the time, I wasn’t aware that my escape meant escaping from certain death. Had I been deported, I probably would never have returned. I thought that I was merely escaping from some form of forced labour or the labour camps. My incorrect assumption was that the elderly were in less danger than the younger ones, because they were less able to work. I foresaw the real danger as awaiting my age group. Up until then, I had only my brother Karcsi’s fate as an example. In November l942, he was taken in a Jewish labour battalion to the Russian front. We never heard from him again.

In the winter of l942-43, the German front at the Don River Curve collapsed and we were hoping that if the Russians took Karcsi prisoner, he would remain safe in Russian hands. He was taken prisoner, but his end was not what we had prayed for. Many of the Jewish POWs from the forced labour brigade, such as my brother, stayed behind when the Germans retreated and waited out the advancing Russian army. It was a risky move to make as the Hungarian military police might have gunned down all those whom they found in hiding. When the Russian army arrived, they lined up all the men from the labour brigades and were prepared to shoot all of them. However, in the end, the Russians didn’t carry out their threat, as I heard much later from one of the survivors. The Russians didn’t make distinctions between Hungarian soldiers and Jews—or perhaps they knew precisely the difference and wanted to shoot them all as Jews. As far as I know, members of the regular Hungarian army survived the prisoner-of-war camps in Russia in a much larger percentage than the prisoners who were members of the Jewish forced labour brigades. The Russians put all their POWs into railway cars, sixty to a wagon, and gave them one cup of flour a day. Of the sixty men in my brother’s wagon, only 5 survived. The corpses were tossed from the wagons onto the Russian countryside at Kuybishev.

After the war, I managed to contact two men from the five who survived. The first survivor I met in Budapest. The second survivor, whom I met much later in Prague after the war, confirmed this story. The first one had posted my brother’s name on the Jewish Community Bulletin Board as someone he had known, and could provide details about my brother’s fate. A family friend came running to tell me that he had seem my brother’s name posted and told me whom to contact for more information.

On a rainy spring day in l945, I walked to the outskirts of Pest to meet this survivor who claimed to have news about my brother. The fellow found my resemblance to my brother so striking, that he paled with shock when he first saw me. It sadly became apparent that his knowing about him did not mean, as I had hoped, that Karcsi was alive, but that this survivor was there when he died. All he could tell me was that he had been together in the same wagon, and that Karcsi had fallen unconscious from typhoid fever and after a few days, he died of thirst and starvation. The second survivor, whom I met in Prague after the war, confirmed this story.

When Karcsi had been sent to Russia, my mother turned to my brother’s friend Izso, who was a considerably more robust fellow than my brother, and asked him to look after Karcsi. Izso had remained true to his promise, and in a vain attempt to keep him alive, had given my brother his very last portion of flour. Sadly, Izso and Karcsi both perished in the middle of Russia from total neglect. Had the Russians paid a bit more attention and given just a little more care, they might have saved them and may have even have profited from their survival. The men who did live through this ordeal, eventually returned with the Czech legion attached to the Russian army and fought against the Germans.

All my experience and pre-occupation up until April 1944, was connected solely with the labour camps. That leads me to digress for a moment to describe what parents had to endure in those times. One autumn afternoon, in l943, when my brother Karcsi had been long dead, a Hungarian soldier came to our house. Only my mother and I were at home. In a somewhat incoherent and embarrassed way, the soldier proceeded to tell us that he had been with my bother at the Don River Curve. (That part must have been true, otherwise how would he have known our address?). He continued on to say that both of Karcsi’s legs had been frozen and then amputated, and it was in this condition that he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Russians. It is a mystery to me, why the soldier came to tell us this news when it wasn’t even true, and then never asked for anything in return. My mother listed to him quietly without becoming hysterical. I’m not sure whether she believed his tale or not, but her motherly instinct must have told her that this was not necessarily the worst-case scenario. How right she was! We imagined that he was a prisoner and still alive. In fact, the reality was much worse.

I remember the episode clearly. I was beside myself with despair. I loved my brother dearly, and imagining him without legs in the brutally cold Russian winter, waiting to be taken as a prisoner of war, was a horrendous thought for me. Worst scenarios than this, I could not yet imagine. As to what happens when a Jew is taken away, about Auschwitz, we were still not aware. I thought I was trying to escape from the labour camps! There was no way out. The situation appeared hopeless.

I tried another avenue for my salvation. One day I approached my friend Dezso and asked him to lend me his Christian birth certificate so I might use it to go up to Budapest. "I came to you, rather than our mutual friend Sanyi, because I know you are an enterprising person who is willing to take risks," I said. He was rather embarrassed by my request and mumbled something to the effect that he himself would go along with it, but that he couldn’t risk jeopardizing his mother to the possible consequences of such a plan, should I be discovered. I have to admit that he was right. I returned home downhearted and desperate. All roads of escape were closed. The situation for me appeared hopeless.

Each and every morning my mother and I dressed ourselves to be ready should the gendarmes come to take us. As it was decreed, on the public billboards, every Jew was required to prepare baskets of food to last 2-3 weeks and take this along with them to the brick factory. We had no idea then that this was not to be our final destination.

One day, during these hellish weeks, I took off my mandatory "yellow star of David" and went into town to visit my sister Vali and her husband Bandi. To get to my sister’s house, I cut cautiously through the park and side alleyways until I reached the corner of Bercsenyi and the Main Street. She lived across the road in an eight-story building. Just moments before I crossed over to the other side, I spotted my sister, her husband, and their two children of 9 and 5 years, in front of their house being led away by two policemen. My nephew, Janoska, was carrying his knapsack on his back. Their parents probably told the children that they were going on a picnic or an outing. That was the last time I saw any of them. Naturally, I didn’t dare cross over to greet them.

I loved my sister, and I was very fond of her husband, Bandi, who I believed liked me as well. He was a rather influential figure in my childhood. He was a soccer fan and took me several times to soccer matches when I was a youngster. We played chess together when I was 12 and 13 years old and my sister and Bandi once included me in their family holidays to the Lake Balaton. He owned a car (which was rare in those days) and on Sunday afternoons, they took me along on rides to the countryside. And after all, he was the one who offered me the opportunity to practice the optical profession after I finished my baccalaureate--when doing nothing was the alternative. And from this profession I profited in later years.

I turned back from this scene, and in front of me stood Mandel Kicsi, an old friend of the family, who, since his childhood, had been in love with my sister Vali. From that time onwards he had kept up the friendship with all of us. He, too had come to see how my sister’s family was doing and to greet my bother-in-law, who had recently been released as a hostage, so he could later be deported along with his family.

Speechlessly, we watched what was happening. Then we turned around and went quickly homeward. Mandel Kicsi and I couldn’t have imagined at the time, that a few weeks later we would meet again in Budapest, where we would both arrive with forged Christian identity papers. We met several times in Budapest and kept up contact later on.

Cili, who had once been our maid, had come to our home when I was just 5-6 years old, visited us faithfully every day. She became a permanent member of our family. When we moved to the house on Jokai Street, Cili no longer served as a domestic, but moved into the basement apartment with her husband. In lieu of rent, she did the laundry and other chores for my mother. She and her husband also raised canaries, a fact that always fascinated me. Cili had met her husband at a New Year’s Party. He spoke only German and Cili spoke only Hungarian and Slovak and how they communicated remains a mystery. Maybe that was the secret of their marriage. Mind you, one day, her husband, who was a bricklayer, left for Germany to work and never came back. I don’t believe that Cili was overly upset. Her social life and entertainment consisted mainly of attending funerals. My mother, who was a quite good judge of character, claimed that this simple peasant woman had more natural intelligence than people who were far better educated. My mother completely trusted her. She now gave Cili the family silver and all the Persian carpets to safeguard. Cili carried all these valuables in a backpack to her home (by then she had moved to a basement room on Rosalia street on the outskirts of town). After the war, when I returned, she gave back everything. It was by selling these carpets that I was able to maintain myself financially for quite sometime after the war.

It was around this period of time, that news filtered in from town that various suicides had taken place. The victims included one of our family doctors and his family, along with his 20-year-old son. Then there was our family friend and physician, Dr. Lovy with his wife. His daughter, Marta, was a friend of my sister Vali. The two girls had shared an apartment in Prague when my sister had studied law there. Later my sister left her studies to marry, but Marta completed her medical degree and went on to become an accomplished ophthalmologist. Her father, Dr. Lovy, in addition to his medical practice, was a rather prominent Jewish figure in Kassa and an active member of the Jabotinsky party (later the Likud). The Doctor, along with the Rabbi, Enten Mano, of the Congregation, now approached the Catholic Bishop of Kassa and implored him to offer them some refuge, being as they were fellow religious leaders of the community. The Bishop received them politely and listened to their pleas. Then, he out-rightly refused them any assistance on the grounds that in times of danger, the place for men like themselves was with their flock. The Doctor returned home, and that night, committed suicide along with his wife. It would interest me to know whether the Bishop heeded his own pious advice when the Communists came to power after the war and persecuted the religious orders or did he seek refuge in the Vatican library?

There were others in the town who took their lives, including the parents of Gyuri’s girlfriend, Agi. Shortly afterwards, Marika came with Agi’s grandmother and asked whether my mother knew anything about Agi, who had managed to get to Budapest. We didn’t know too much, just that Gyuri and Agi were staying at my sister Nelly’s in Budapest. In our living room we all sat in silence, just shaking our heads, "Who knows who knows what will the future bring?"

Around this time, my Christian friend, Sanyi, who had just come home for the holidays, came to visit and tried to console us. He had always been very kind and comforting. Maybe, he said, things won’t turn out so badly. For safekeeping we gave him one of my father’s favorite paintings from our home, the Ivani Grunwald painting of an ox. The artist was noted for his drawing of cows and bulls, and as my father grew up in the country, he was especially fond of this painter’s works. After the war, the only items left from our home were the Persian carpets and this very painting, which today hangs among others in my living room.

By now I had resigned myself to my fate. The situation was hopeless. There was absolutely no escape. Just a few weeks previously, when two official-looking men rang our doorbell at the front garden door, I ran to the back of the house, threw open the kitchen windows and jumped out into the back garden. I ran through others’ backyards and over fences until I arrived at the house of my old school friend Leo who offered me shelter. I slept on his floor for one or two nights.

But by now, we had given up all hope of saving ourselves. We dressed every morning in sports clothes in readiness should the gendarmes come to take us to the brick factory. I even naively bought special leather protectors as wrappings for my legs in preparation for the unexpected.

One noontime, the doorbell rang. "This is it! They have come!" we thought. An unknown man stood in the doorway. "I’ve come from Budapest," he said, "My name is Bornemissza. I was sent by your brother Gyuri and I am prepared to take you to Budapest with me." (Just a few days earlier he had taken Agi, my brother’s girlfriend, to Budapest). Bornemissza would wait for me while I prepare a small suitcase. We could leave right away.

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