Classmates at Zichy Street
There was a family called Andauer. It is said that Jewish people are really wealthy. In this family the mother worked at the Goldberger factory and on top of that, she did other people’s laundry in order to provide for her children. Their daughter, Edit was my classmate. Rózsi Andauer was in the class above us. They survived. Rózsi was the head of a chemical firm until her death. Then there was a girl called Marika Kohn, her family lived in the gas factory in Óbuda, they went to Israel. I haven’t heard about them since. Magda Hirschler also went to Israel, nor her parents, nor anybody from her family came back. Life is interesting: I was going to meet up with an old friend from Budapest, who told me that our meeting depended on the arrival of an Israeli friend of hers. She happened to mention that it was Magda Hirschler, who was coming. I hadn’t heard anything of her since 1947 and now we managed to meet. Magda Hirschler’s cousin, Kati Baron’s parents also perished. She was an only child, she was quite lost, and she died. Ani Szamek’s parents had a big fashion shop opposite the Flórián cinema. She was a beautiful girl. She died of heart failure at the age of twenty. Her parents were sick with pain. Her older brother, who was in the class two or three grades higher than ours, was a solicitor by the name of György Szamosi and died a few years ago. I had a classmate called Polacsek, then there was Steiner Bandi and Steiner József, who by the name of József Sugár still lives in Óbuda. Bandi Steiner lives in Australia and makes statues out of wood, which is a couple hundred years old.
I had a very clever and handsome classmate called Miki Wózner, he was the brain of the class. He was from Csillaghegy and the people from Csillaghegy were deported as were the people from the countryside, he never came back either. Then there was Gyuri Roth, as far as I know he was also deported, and there was Péter Vándor, the son of the teacher Vándor, he was in the class below us and now he lives abroad, in America. There was one called Schleien, who sometimes comes back home to Hungary from Israel. I also remember Ibolya Fröhlich, I don’t know what happened to her. Unfortunately, by the time the questions occur to us, there is no one to answer them…
School subjects, religious education, P.E .teacher
Mr. Neumann was the rabbi in Óbuda. He was a beardy, nice fellow, we liked him. There was a P.E. teacher, the wife of the dentist, who was a substitute teacher at our school. She was called auntie Ancsi Boér, we adored her. One time she put on non-matching socks, we laughed at her, but she also laughed with us, which made her popularity grow. She wasn’t pretty, but had a tall, lean figure with small buckteeth. Her husband, who was the dentist at Flórián Square, never came back. Auntie Ancsi met a childhood love of hers, a lawyer, who was also widowed, they got married. They lived happily. Auntie Jolán [Gyenes], who didn’t come back, was very strict, didn’t really smile much and couldn’t make jokes.
Synagogue
In the synagogue the women sat in the upstairs gallery, and covered their heads with a scarf. The synagogue in Óbuda was a neolog synagogue. Our family was tolerant, if someone married a Christian person, we accepted that. But to make this work the other party also needs to be tolerant.
Stumbling memories
Then and again I recall a scene from my childhood and there is no one to share it with.
Emigration
From 1946 to 1956 people were continuously emigrating. It wasn’t easy, they were often arrested, and they had to try again. Most of them probably left in the spring of ’49, and went to work as farmers in Israel to do peasant work.
Peace between Swabians (German minority in Hungary) and the Jewish
We used to go to Swabians’ shops the same. There was total respect and love both ways.
Shops
[While listing shops the storyteller only differentiates between Jewish and Christian owners when prompted, in the storyteller’s memory the names have been stored next to each other. E.G.]
At the Kolosy Square the following shops were lined up: Bilik hatter, Zsigmond Rosenberg’s household supplies shop, where the man was Jewish and the woman was Christian, Géza Weisz’s pub. On the Bécsi Road was the Klein draper’s, opposite the Újlaki Cinema was the Hoffmann bakery, whose owner was Swabian, then there was the Fried horologist, who was Jewish, and maybe the only one who re-opened after the war. There was a Rosenberg sweetshop next to the cinema. In the family the man was killed, so the wife and her sister managed the shop until the nationalisation. (See also under the name of Edit Klein.) Then there was the Ulmer milk shop, which was managed by two unmarried women until the nationalisation, and, of course, they were also the ones working in it. Next to them was another, the Wiesz pub, where the dad died during labour service. I can’t recall his first name. Hochfelder ironmongery, Zsigmond Schmiedek ironmongery in the same house at the cinema, they were also the owners. The Unger pub at the corner of Galagonya Street, where the wife was also Christian. Their son was the president of the Chefs and Confectioners Association for decades, and wrote technical books under the name of Károly Unger. At the Kolosy Square was Mr. Szeitz’s spice shop and Mr. Vilmos Pelz’s on the Bécsi Road, they were both Swabians, good and honest tradesmen, on really good terms with each other.
Fatherless generation
I don’t know whether I had a single childhood classmate, whose father survived. The men were taken away for labour service, from there to concentration camps, and then they never turned up again. This age group technically had no father. There were ten of us cousins, born between 1930 and 1935, and I am the only one, who survived. From my mother’s side only one of my cousins survived, who was 9 years older than me. She escaped from a work camp. We had a nice big family, the visiting relatives followed one-another, an open door awaited everyone, and suddenly, I was left alone. The relatives from the countryside all died. The children had also all been taken to gas chambers.
My father escaped from labour service, and then he was hiding under a pseudonym. My mother was taken from the yellow-star house to the brick factory in Óbuda. For a while, they went together with a Nyilas (Hungarian Nazi) called Illés, who was the father of one of my classmates from Kolosy Square. Mum offered him her wedding ring and something else, she mentioned that the children had been classmates, they knew each other, but Illés did not accept the ring, and was quite rough. As far as I know, regardless of my mother this Illés had done so many cruel things that in the end he was hung. Later I met his daughter, we were on good terms. I never held the child responsible for her father’s deeds. I had another classmate at Kolosy Square, whose father owned a food store in the Lajos Street, he was the first one to have the sign, “no Jews and dogs”. He was called Menzer. I am still on good terms with her daughter. Towards the end of his life, Uncle Menzer was a doorman at a restaurant at Fő Square.
Apology?
Why would they have apologised? This was their conviction. The Swabians, however, weren’t worse than the Hungarians. This is a matter of upbringing, moreover, they tried to profit from the Jewish sector, a lot of Jewish had their stuff taken away from them. It happened that they looked at a flat and they requested to have it, along with the furniture. My poor mother told me, that when they were taken to the ghetto, they were only left with a fragment of a fragment of their stuff after the yellow-star house and the protected house. People were standing around and watching the procession in the street, and said: “Brother, give me a pack!” It happened that the very last bundle was torn out of the hand of a Jewish old man and given to a spectator who wanted it. These things are unbelievable, and they weren’t needy people. They moved into the Jewish flats instantly. There were also relatively well-off Jewish people, those flats were the ones they aimed for. The bigger Nazi a person was the bigger chance they had to get the flat. Our flat remained, but then it was taken, so for a while, we had to live in the neighbouring flat with just one room and a kitchen, and later we bought a flat in a house built by a relative of ours, and moved there. The protected houses were only protected in theory. The Nyilas people dragged the people out from there also, out to the bank of the Danube and shot them.
9 Zichy Street after the war
After the siege there was also an orphanage in the Zichy Street building. At weekends we also took children home. We fed them, spoiled them, my dad gave them presents and money.