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Emery Gregus Occupation and
Liberation 1944-1945
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alcoholic beverages was revoked.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. 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. 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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