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Emery Gregus
Occupation and
Liberation 1944-1945
Aftermath: The Postwar Years
Remembrances
Chapter 5
It
is now May 1944.
What
preoccupies us most is how to avoid being taken to the ghetto. It is
clear that only with false Christian papers is there any chance to rescue
ourselves. The fact that so many were able to survive as Jews in Budapest
was truly remarkable. That such scenarios were possible was a miraculous
occurrence and I will elaborate on this later, but for the moment we
are aware that remaining as identifiable Jews and surviving is virtually
impossible. We keenly sense that the assembling of the Jewish population
to the ghettos is not an end in itself, but the beginning of something
more sinister–what that could be, we are unable to fathom.
We
ask Bornemissza to smuggle out my mother and then my father from Kassa.
My father, still in hospital for the time being, is somewhat sheltered
in relative security. Bornemissza promises to turn back for my mother
on the very next day. We give him as payment for myself and as advance
for my mother and father, Persian pelts, which my father had purchased
previously through my brother-in-law Simon as security against the growing
inflation. Bornemissza, however, instead of returning to us after two
or three days, appears at my sister’s home 10 days later to say
that when he returned to Kassa he initially brought out a young girl,
Zsuzsa, but when he later returned to my home to fetch my mother, she
was no longer there. My father, as well, had been taken by then from
the hospital to the brick factory. In desperation, we then turned to
an old family friend from Budapest, the Schoens. On our behalf, they
engaged a detective who promises to travel to Kassa and smuggle them
out. Unfortunately, all these frantic plans amounted to nothing.
By
now my sister Nelly is at great risk if she stays any longer in her
apartment in Budapest and realizes she too must acquire some false Christian
papers to stay alive. By chance, in her neighbourhood there is a milk
store where she often bought her dairy products. The owner’s wife
offers that her husband, Szemenyei, would take Panni and my sister (pretending
to be his wife) with his wife’s papers to the countryside. For
Panni he could procure his niece’s Christian birth certificate
as his niece was about the same age as she was. Szemenyei would travel
with them to Lake Velence, a small resort under the guise that they
are seeking shelter from the bombardment of Budapest. It was customary
in those days to escape to the provinces as protection against air raids.
In actual fact, there was as yet, scarcely any bombardment of the city,
but for the Christian residents of Budapest, oblivious to anything worse,
the bombing of the city by the Allies was the main concern for them.
How desperately the Jews wished the air raids would come! The fear of
bombardment did provide a handy excuse for the Jews (with false papers)
to go to the provinces and from the provinces to Budapest so the local
residents wouldn’t recognize them.
And that is exactly how things happened. My sister, Nelly, with Szemenyei as her husband, traveled to the Lake Velence where he left her with Panni in a small pension for the summer months. Szemenyei visited his "family" every Sunday thereby justifying their pretext for being there. Szemenyei delivered our letters and through him I was able to maintain contact with my sister. Then, towards the end of the summer I did something extraordinarily foolish and to this day, I still do not understand why I undertook such a risk. It was madness. I boarded the train at Budapest and went out to visit them. Detectives were checking papers both ways. I must have had some satisfaction in exposing myself to such a danger. By then all my family had been deported from Kassa, my parents, my other sister Vali as well as her children and her husband. And in the meantime here I was," freely" roaming the streets of Budapest in relative security with false identification papers--whatever that was worth. Nonetheless I was moving around with little restraint and had avoided their fate.
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