THE EXPLANATION..

 

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Click on small pictures to enlarge.

BEFORE THE WAR

I WAS BORN

I was born the younger of two sons, a matter I was never allowed to forget. My brother John was 5 years, 2 months and 12 days older, and the age difference has always been slightly exaggerated, until it became six years. This falsification of our age difference was a major cause for the constant disagreements between my brother and me. Click here for picture of John and Steve in 1928.

 

I also had a cousin, Eva, 3 years older than me, who could have been a sister, because she lived with us during school periods and we holidayed at her village home when we were not together in Budapest. She and John used to lord it over the little bloke, who made up in ferocity, what he lacked in age. In spite of lots of verbal and physical fights, the three of us were reasonable friends, even though adults must have had some difficulty in enjoying us. Click for picture of Eva with my Mother and me in 1935.

On one occasion my Aunt Margit, Eva's mother, became quite hysterical while my brother and I had one of our not infrequent physical confrontations. The poor lady feared that we will be inflicting permanent damage on each other and she burst out crying. She was assured by her sister that her sons usually survive these bouts and will once again be the best of friends until the next fight.

My earliest memory is of my Mother being taken away in an ambulance from the huge block of flats we lived in. The combination of her being in pain and on a stretcher, watched by dozens of people from the building, caused this incident to stay in vivid memory. I can also remember visiting her in hospital, and how I ate her pudding in spite of the all prevailing stink of the ether, which was still making her throw up and retch, days after her operation. She was lucky to have survived an ectopic pregnancy, and was operated on in the nick of time.[1]

She can recall how in the middle of the night my father awoke to her screaming in pain and suggested that she take some pain killers. When her subsequent screams woke him again, all he wanted to know why the stupid maid hadn't telephoned for the doctor, and promptly carried on snoring.

My father was undoubtedly the all-time prototype of male chauvinists, in a country and in an era when such achievement was not easy. At the same time, he was a loving, caring person who tried to get everyone to love him. In this he was not quite successful.

His wife must have adored him, but was not known to say a nice word about him or to him during the 63 years of marriage, which was never softened by the utterance from either side of a friendly word. If they were not arguing or shouting at each other, they were not on speaking terms. They were quite ingenious in finding new grounds to fight about. Yet they were devoted to each other's well being, and were quite friendly to each other when parted. Under these circumstances it was not surprising that they were apart a lot. They hardly ever went on holidays together, nor did they take their children with them.

Father went off on his trips to the watering places in Hungary, and abroad to places like Karlsbad, Abbazia, the Semmering in Austria and to resorts in Switzerland. Mother went to visit her relations or her children who were sent off to have their holidays abroad, so they may learn foreign languages, or were sent to relations, to be out of the way.

During their absences they became very fond of each other. Mother complained about how she was missing him, while he wrote long letters, begging her to mend her ways, and not criticise and not hurt him, and if possible become even more subservient.

The minute they got together, all was forgotten and they were off on the usual shouting match. There are a few classic examples of this happening and they must not go unrecorded.

On one occasion Mother went off with some relations to Felden in Austria, and having been on his own for two weeks, Father decided to travel there and spend a week with her and us children, then 2 and 7 years old. Photo from Felden.[2]

Mother and the rest of the family and relations picked him up at Felden station and on the walk back to the hotel, he put his arm round Mother, who complained that her hair would be ruined. Father turned round, walked back to the station, bought a ticket and travelled back to Hungary, without as much as saying "Wiedersehen".

Another time Father returned from Karlsbad with an expensive bracelet for Mother. It was handed over and Mother, far from the tactful little downtrodden girl Father would have liked her to be, said: "this is so beautiful that it must have been one of your girlfriends who picked it" at which Father picked up the bracelet, flung it against the wall, and most of the expensive carved gem stones disintegrated.

Eventually the bracelet was returned to Czechoslovakia and was repaired, and Mother still maintains that if it wasn't picked by a woman, it was given to her because Father either got two of them cheaper and gave one to the other lady, or else because he had a bad conscience. Probably both of her assumptions were correct.

It was not really surprising that the children grew up to be rather frightened of our parents. Mother lashed into us with her critical tongue, Father bellowed at Mother, employees, and us - every one. It was not a particularly happy childhood, - but we could not compare, because we hardly had any friends.

The problem was that we were rich. Not terribly rich when measured by the standards of the Western world, but excruciatingly so when compared with the rest of the population around us. We had everything: from a refrigerator to a radio, from central heating to a car. Come to think of it we had more than just one car. We had a number of cars during the weekends, when the chauffeurs of the travelling salesmen had to deliver the cars to stand outside our home, until 5 a.m. on Monday morning, when Father's chauffeur-driven salesmen were off again to get orders for agricultural machinery and farm equipment. My father with his Austin in 1939.

Hungary in the 1930's was in the throws of the depression, just as the rest of Europe. People were unemployed and hungry, while a minority survived with the minimum of inconvenience. We belonged to this minority. Father's business was to supply equipment and specialised machinery and other requisites to the huge farming estates of the aristocracy and church and it was a time when drought animals were being replaced by tractors and farm labourers were replaced by machinery, causing even greater unemployment in the rural areas. In spite of his being most sympathetic to the hardship which farm labourers had to endure, I doubt if this caused any pangs of conscience for my Father, - why should it? Was he to refuse assisting the mechanisation of Hungarian agriculture? Certainly not, his job was to give himself and his family the best of everything, especially as regards the education of his sons. They should have the best education he never had, they should have the best education money can buy.

In any case there was only a limited amount one could do to help the unfortunates who felt the misfortune of the depression. I well remember the beggars on the street and the hungry children, who came to stand outside the footpath tables of the coffee shops, asking to be given a piece of bread by the patrons, until chased away by the waiters.

On one occasion a man was found semi-conscious outside our home and the maid called the police, believing the man to be drunk. In due course a sweating policeman arrived, having had to walk up the hill in the summer heat, and being more experienced in these matters than the maid, pronounced that the man is starving. Indeed the man, having been given some food and milk revived sufficiently to be helped by the policeman to walk downhill.

This particular occurrence was instrumental in my realising that we must have been more privileged than others. It was literally the first time that problems from outside the iron fence surrounding our garden were penetrating to the rather insular society which we, family and the staff were.

The problems of "wealth" were manifold. We lived in those hills of Buda, where those with money congregated, yet we went to school elsewhere. Our school mates lived in the City and had no intention of being bothered with the likes of us, who had to go home after school. At home, we were not encouraged to play on the streets - on the hill there weren't any level streets to play on anyway. There were some unused blocks of land, and we played football with some other kids sometimes, but something was always wrong with those other kids. Mostly they were not supposed to be good enough for us.

We were supposed to find our friends amongst our relatives, with whom we were thrown together, whenever Mother visited her many distant relations or they were invited to visit us. The invitations depended on the scholastic capabilities of the offspring of the particular relation and we were instructed to become friends of those relations who were studious, in the hope that their example will rub off. There was nothing wrong with the idea, except that neither John nor I had any contemporaries amongst our relations.

It was not understood by our parents that we missed having friends. Not having the same mobility as they had, we could not be where our school mates were. We were envious that they were able to meet each other and get to know girls, visit other kids, go to movies, etc. We had to get up earlier than our classmates to get to school on time from the "villa" on Rózsadomb (Rose Hill). When school was over, we had to hotfoot it back to our house on the Hill; the sweet excitement of watching the girls parading up and down the Boulevards of Budapest was not for us. Poor little rich boys!

At the same time we were always told that we were poor. We had less pocket money than the others, because we were not allowed to know that we were better off. Our good clothing could only be worn at family parties, but when we went visiting poor relations, we were not allowed our best suits. We only had toys and belongings if they helped us in our school work. We could have gold nibbed fountain pens, but no cowboy outfits. We had a Bechstein piano, but no football. We could not play the piano and we weren't that good at playing soccer either.

We had cars going from the house to Father's office next door to the school, but we had to catch the bus. If by some miracle we got a lift, the chauffeur was instructed to drop us off some distance away from the school, so our class mates would not realise that we were not as poor as they were; or as poor as their parents told them that they are.

We had no family life as such. My father visited the "Club" with his friend Julius, a solicitor, every afternoon and had dinner there or where ever. There is no doubt that he had affairs and probably always had a "steady" but conducted his affairs as discreetly as he could, and was satisfied that as long as he was discreet and provided the family with a lovely home and the trappings of well being, his responsibility ended.

He has certainly looked after his family well, or at least he was convinced that he had. He got a famous architect to design the house on the Hill for himself and the family. The architect was famous because he built a row of buildings on the shores of the Danube for thousands of people to live in flats, - he could not have been famous for designing practical homes for families. Click to view house on the Hill.

We had a two story house, where we had two large rooms for sitting with and entertaining visitors, a dining room which was the same size as the two lounge rooms, - combined. To get into either of the lounges you either had to go out to the entrance hall, i.e. the staircase or else walk through the dining room, which was also the only way to get to the enclosed verandah, supposed to be the place for family togetherness. There was no way to approach the kitchen without passing the downstairs toilet, outside of which was the only place in the house, where an icebox and later the electric refrigerator could be placed.

It must be pointed out that the downstairs toilet was usually in use before meals by one of the six people entitled to use it and when being used by my father it's door was always open during and after. Thus the smell of the food, the kitchen and the toilet blended into a smell which I can still recall.

There were further examples of architectural stupidities upstairs. The largest room there was the laundry. Every single item laundered had to be carried downstairs, through the kitchen and hung in the backyard and then carried back to the laundry to be ironed. There was no shower, but that was in accordance with contemporary practice in Hungary. The bathroom had no hot water supplied to the bathtub, thus summer or winter the chip heater had to be lit if anybody wanted to have a bath. In the mean time in the cellar the fire was kept going all the year round to supply hot water to the bathroom faucets, including the bidet, and even to the tiny circular basin installed especially for washing one's teeth. However no hot water was available in either the kitchen or the laundry.

The house was quite large and thus it was ingenious to design it in such a way that it contained two bedrooms only. Thus my parents lived in one bedroom and, with an interconnecting door between the two bedrooms, my brother, cousin Eva and I lived in the other. And we actually lived in that bedroom, because that was the place where we three had to do our home work, play, sleep and conduct our fights. When in 1939, John left Hungary and vacated our shared bedroom, he was a month off 18, Eva was 16 and I was approaching 13. Quite extraordinary, especially because of our home being used filming movies, as being one of the outstanding homes of that era!

Admittedly, the upstairs area also had a room for the maids, the size of which allowed for two beds and nothing else. Their wardrobe had to be kept in the laundry but their skirts were stored under their beds. Hungarian peasant women wear up to 15 skirts (simultaneously) and therefore none of them would have had less than 50 skirts, hence the need for permanent under-bed-storage facilities.

I WAS A BOY.

After I became eight years old, it was thought that we were old enough not to have governesses, which helped with the catering and sleeping arrangements. Our governesses were Austrian ladies who forced us to speak German to them and thus we were supposed to become proficient in the language. The Governess slept in our bedroom, making it a very cosy foursome. Poor little rich children.

Mostly we had more maids than beds and therefore one of them had to sleep on the settee in the downstairs lounge. At the time I could not understand why my 17 year old brother had to go downstairs to fetch himself glasses of water, but by the time I became the same age I not only understood, but envied his opportunities.

It requires no great imagination to realise the disturbance which the occasional overnight visit of my Aunt Margit caused. Who shall camp where became an exciting game of guessing and by the time we settled the matter of musical beds, it seemed that everybody had a change. Usually she finished sleeping in our parent's bedroom on a sofa, since the sitting room settee was usually occupied by a maid. However, much greater were the problems when one or the other of the children contracted a contagious disease, such as mumps, chicken pox or some other illness, which required Government decreed isolation, such as whooping cough, scarlet fever and the dreaded diphtheria.

With three children in three different schools we all managed to have our major illnesses at separate times and the required major isolation was indeed a major affair. Everybody moved out of the first floor and beds were made in the sitting and dining rooms downstairs. The maids made their beds in the kitchen and the upstairs laundry and food was cooked and transported upstairs for the sick child and Mother, who were locked up for the duration upstairs. Outside the house a large red sign declared it off limits to all except doctors and warned that any who came in contact with the inhabitants will have to be isolated also. The isolation lasted until doctors announced the sick to be cured and the Health Department's lorry and employees arrived to wash down the walls and take away everything else to be disinfected.

Scarlet fever lasts 6 weeks, as does whooping cough, while diphtheria is usually over in 3 weeks, (provided the child survives). We all had all these illnesses, except that I escaped whooping cough, (until the age of 40), but instead I was one of three children in the Hungarian medical history of the day, who contracted diphtheria for a second time.

The first time I had diphtheria I managed to finish up with a heart ailment. The second time I became ill on the day my Mother left for a conducted tour of Italy. We waved her off at the station and visited my grandparents on the way home, when I became sick and started to shake from the fever that suddenly erupted. My father contacted our lady doctor who specialised in children's diseases, who came immediately and suspected diphtheria, which the assorted visiting professors who were ferried up to the house at great expense eventually confirmed.

There was some question of recalling Mother, who at this stage was still on the train towards Italy, and another possible alternative was that I should be taken to a hospital. In the end it was decided that I should remain at home and our "Aunt Doctor" Miss Rella Beck moved in to live with me for the duration of my diphtheria. Also, my Father's Uncle's widow, Sari Kellner, who was almost totally deaf, came to become my nurse. Her self-sacrifice in allowing herself to be incarcerated was greatly appreciated, but as far as I was concerned it became an additional hazard to my survival. I was constantly exhausted from having to shout to make myself understood and additionally she was such a tremendously high spirited and good humoured person that she made me convulse with her stories and I had constant laughing fits, - not to be encouraged for a dying child.

On the evening when we were expecting Mother to return from her Italian holiday, she kept me laughing by telling me about her daughter-in-law who used to chew the nail varnish off her fingers whenever she was nervous. The practical demonstration my Aunt Sari gave was allowing me to concentrate on laughing instead of being preoccupied with Dr Beck's effort in keeping my heart going with injections, while I was having one heart attack after another.

Mother arrived that evening and over night my condition deteriorated sufficiently to be declared an intensive care case and at 5 a.m. Mother and I were picked up by an ambulance and taken to a hospital where my condition immediately improved. Nevertheless, I still had to stay in hospital for some 4 weeks recuperating and even when I could return home, I had to stay another 4 months in bed, receiving daily injections to keep my heart going at the required speed. I spent 3 months in bed after my diphtheria..

Our routine at home had to change, because Mother became my nurse and could not leave home. Instead her relations and friends made the pilgrimage to our house. I spent my days in the children's room upstairs, or else the maids set up a deck chair in the garden and I was carried by one or two of them to lay in the deck chair all day. In the end I had to re-learn to walk again and over a period I was allowed a few minutes longer every day to be up and walking slowly in the garden.

Our garden was looked after by gardeners and Father who attempted to drown the plants by watering. In the front we had a rather unkempt lawn (these were pre-lawnmower days) in the middle of which was a flower-bed full with rose bushes. Another flower-bed, also overrun with rosebushes, was surrounded with a pedestrian path, and another one, intended but never used for cars, both of which were covered with red gravel.

We used these paths to ride our bicycle against the stopwatch and on falling off, collected the most awful gravel rashes in the process. Anti tetanus injections were handed our rather freely by our Aunt Doctor, causing John to react by fainting fits and being in much greater danger from his injection than from tetanus.

Planted in the front garden, just inside the 2 meter high wrought iron fence were two poplar trees. One of these was struck by lighting and grew up to be shorter than the other. Because of the size difference they were popularly referred to as Jancsi and Pista, my brother's and my nicknames.

Immediately in front of the house and in fact partly covering the window of the children's room was a magnificent wild-almond tree. Two stories high, it survived the building of the house, which was the first house in the as yet unnamed street. When the builder asked Father if he has any suggestions as to what name he should apply for the street, Father remembered the almond tree on the site and suggested "Almond Street" and thus "Mandula utca" was born, named after our "mandula" or almond tree.

The garden in the rear was used to provide us with fresh fruit off the trees and bushes. We had wonderful cherries, including a white variety, strawberries, blackcurrants and all types of berries, which we enjoyed eating, before or after they ripened.

There was also a very small area grassed on which we were supposed to play football, but being too small it was seldom utilised. We preferred using the empty block next door, even though it was not very level. The backyard also had some drying lines erected between trees and on the back wall of the house there was a "klopfer" e.g. two hefty wooden rollers mounted away from the wall onto which the persian carpets could be hung and beaten by cane carpet beaters. Another use for these carpet beaters was that, while we were small, we were constantly threatened that they will be used on our backsides.

The whole property was surrounded by high fences, ornamental in front, wire fences on the sides and in the rear, topped up by lines of barbed wire to keep unwelcome visitors out. In the front, affixed to the ornamental fence was an engraved marble plaque, telling the admiring public passing by that the house was designed by Mr Emil Vidor, Architect. When somebody pinched the marble, Father received a letter from the solicitor of the architect reminding him that the contract stipulated that a marble plaque will commemorate for ever the art of Mr Emil Vidor. Mr Vidor's pride in our house was not entirely misplaced, because it looked quite acceptable from the outside, it was only the inside which was so utterly messed up.

We usually had dogs, sometimes more than one. These were not pets, but trained guard dogs, and were kept on the chain all day and allowed to roam in the garden during the night only. Unfortunately, our dogs did not last very long, they were either too vicious or too friendly. One of them was in the latter category and therefore was sentenced to be banished into the country where a kind farm manager was prepared to accept him for re-schooling in the art of scaring off burglars.

The dog, (named Hacsek after the more comic member of a Laurel and Hardy type of cabaret act), was duly taken by one of Father's country salesmen deep into the country and poor old Hacsek was replaced and forgotten, until months later a bedraggled and thin Hacsek arrived at our door step. Of course we had to keep him and his successor, a St. Bernard monster, was renamed to become "Sajo" in honour of the other member of the comedy duo. The two dogs became inseparable and both were guard dogs in name only. Hacsek and Sajo were the closest we came to having pets.

There were two cellars under our house. One of them contained the coal and the heaters, which were coal fired. The other contained the janitor and his wife and usually a child. The janitor's "flat" contained just one basement room with a toilet outside and a wash hand basin which was open to the weather. All this was underground for the most part, although there was a high level window strip along the uppermost portion of the wall, which allowed some air to enter.

The janitor, who also doubled as the driver and his wife, who was one of the cleaning ladies, were responsible to keep the fire going in the cellar. To get to the stove, which was about a yard from where they were living, they had to leave their room, go upstairs into the backyard, enter the house through the kitchen, get into the area where the icebox was, pass the toilet, enter the entrance hall, go under the staircase, open the cellar door and walk down the steps. Imagine this performance two or three times a day, in rain, snow and sludge, allowing the heat to escape and carrying in the mud.

The congestion in the kitchen was amazing and unceasing. The cook was cooking, the janitor's wife was carrying carpets from upstairs to be beaten in the back yard, the maid was cleaning silver, Irma was cooking her dietary food, the children were eating bread with goose liver and the janitor was slaughtering some chooks.

The only persons, who except for meal times, were not to be seen in the kitchen, were the gardener (who only came twice a week), the washerwoman and the ironing lady, (who both came once a week). We also had a lady who came for two days at least once a month to sew shirts, pyjamas and underwear for the children and Father. The Singer sewing machine was kept in a corner of the stair case and traffic to upstairs was thus impeded when the monthly sew-in was in progress; yet another monument to architectural ingenuity.

Mother did not spend much time in the kitchen and if she did, it was not for cooking or preparing something. She usually got up for breakfast and then returned to bed. The cook and Irma came along to sit at the end of her bed around 9 and they had a conference about the day's menu. With the exception of the meat, which was ordered in Town for delivery by Mother, the chicken, eggs and the geese were delivered on a regular basis by some peasant women, and our cook was responsible to buy the ingredients, such as rice, flour and salt from the travelling grocer.

Through Father's connections in the country we were given a lot of game. Thus we ate a lot of pheasants, venison and rabbit and also quite a lot of fish. Thus shopping for food was not an important part of Mother's life, although visiting shops was an all consuming passion for her.

On the other hand Mother spent a lot of time in fashionable coffee shops. After delivering Father to the Lukács all-year-round open-air swimming pool for his daily swim and then driving him to work, the chauffeur usually returned and drove Mother into Town, where she either met her friends over coffee or visited members of her family. She became a charitable and thus beloved lady of her family which, having started well off, became more impoverished as time went on, while my Father was doing better than ever. Not so my Mother, who was kept on a very tight rein, and had to ask his permission before spending any money outside her housekeeping allowance.

They were genuinely and quietly charitable. For instance we had Irma, a young peasant girl from the country as a junior maid, who developed some illness, which necessitated hospitalisation, soon after she joined us. Poor Irma spent 5 years in hospital and my Mother visited her every week, kept her in clothing and pocket money, and even sent sums of money to her father. When she was ready to leave hospital, she returned to us to be a semi-invalid in our home for another 4 or 5 years, being looked after by Mother and the other maids and the cook.

In 1944, when anti-jewish regulations forbade her continuing to be a "servant" with us, she had to leave, thus becoming unemployed and she returned to her village and her drunkard father. After the end of the war she could hardly wait to hear that we are prepared to take her back. She returned to us as soon as she could. Soon she was very sick again and I remember my Mother and I, in the snow, pushing her on a toboggan to Mother's doctor, waiting while she had surgery under local anaesthetic, taking her back home and carrying her upstairs to her bed.

She never recovered fully and she never left us. We left her when we left Hungary, but not until she had been taken over by a relation, in whose home she died after a life of being looked after by and working for our family. She was 39 when she died. See photo of Irma and note the pinafore indicating her status!

We children were brought up by a large number of nurses, maids, cooks, chauffeurs, and teachers. We were both shockingly bad at school, a luxury we could afford, since our own teachers from school secretly coached us in the afternoon, and we knew that their fees for that were higher than their salaries from the State. So we didn't need to bother much, knowing that in spite of what Father was preaching, we could not fail our school exams.

In addition to being coached by our teachers other experiments were tried, including sending us to do our homework with relations whose children were doing well in school, without being nagged by their parents or having the teachers bribed. This method was not very successful either.

As soon as the school holidays started we children were away on learning a language. John was sent to summer camps in Austria first and later to St Gallen in Switzerland. I was first sent to the German speaking part of Czechoslovakia and when that part of the country become Germany I had to spend my summer holidays in Austria. Luckily for me, Austria was taken over by Hitler in 1938 also and thus at the age of 12 I was allowed to have a holiday without the ulterior motive of learning German.

From then on I was sent to spend time with my cousin Eva and her parents in the small village of Szölösgyörök, 7 kilometres from Lake Balaton. I must say, that I enjoyed being there. I was getting on well with Eva and her parents were delightful. Her mother, Aunt Margit was my mother's younger sister and she was a quiet, helpful and gentle woman who lived very happily with her husband Uncle Bandi. He had excellent humour and he was a lot of fun. He had all the time for us children, taught us card games and beat us at chess and told us stories of his youth and his relations and played the cimbalom for us.[3]

My uncle had one of the two shops in the village, and we visitors were allowed to help serving the customers, all of whom were peasants or farm labourers and their families. If the Vadász shop did not stock something it was only because it wasn't made or grown and nobody but him knew where to find the rare treasures he had put away for the unlikely event that somebody might ask for it. He sold everything from groceries, such as bulk sugar and flour to underwear and fabrics, kerosene and homemade soap, not to mention farming tools and building materials. The only thing he did not stock were electrical appliances, because there was no electricity in the village.

The "laird" i.e. Count Jankovits, who owned half the village and almost all of the land around it, was of the opinion that electric light is bad for your eyes and therefore did not allow it to be connected. And that was that. He also had a stone fence, with glass embedded on top of it, right round his 30 acre park and when he visited the village church once a year, the side where his pew was had to be kept free of people, as he did not wish anybody to sit behind him. In spite of it all he was revered by the village people. I doubt if he reciprocated their feelings and must have regarded the people of the village as his serfs.

My Uncle Bandi was also loved by the inhabitants of the village but for a different reason. The peasants and farm labourers of the village were always broke and Uncle Bandi had the most elastic slate ever. No one was ever refused credit or a handout of some flour or sugar by Uncle Bandi. Often a sick person sent a child for some food and he used to send more than they asked for.

Uncle also had a small amount of land which was bearing maize and grains. He hated cattle and kept no cow, but fattened pigs and had geese (which were force fed by hand to produce the famous goose liver) and poultry, which was picking away for feed in the yard or outside on the road. There was little danger for the chicken to be run over, the traffic on the road consisted of the once daily arrival of a large car, which was the "bus" and maybe twenty horse or oxen drawn carts per day.

There was also the picturesque departure in the mornings of the various herds, first the cattle, then the goats and sheep, followed by the pigs and finally the geese. They were herded along by kids, whose job it was to lead the animals from the peasant houses along the main road to the various communal grazing areas and then bring them back in the evening into their sheds and stalls. It was amazing to see these animals hearing the bells of the lead steer and setting out to join the herd and in the evening, when unerringly they found their way back to their own cow shed. The same applied to the pigs and the geese, except they required no bells and supplied their own sound effects.

Aunt Margit and Uncle Bandi always had at least two horses which were used on the field and to take grain to and from the mill, and most importantly to be harnessed by the coachman in front of the sulky and transport us in luxury to the Lake for our days on the "beach".

Lake Balaton is Europe's largest lake (about 75 by 14 kilometres) and became the "Riviera" of Hungary. All around it holiday resorts were built, with hotels, casinos, health resorts, etc. The lake was used for swimming and all types of water sports, especially small yachting in the summer, while in the winter ice yachting was possible on the frozen lake.

Through Eva I made lots of friends and our days at lake side were always happy. One of our friends was allowed to use his parent's sailing boat and we had long and exciting sails, darting in and out of small bays where fish was just asking to be caught.

Back in the village I had many other friends who were different from what we were meeting back in Budapest. There was the blacksmith, who allowed me to pump the bellows and tried to teach me how to shoe a horse. Then there was Uncle Geleta, the little coachman who looked after the horses and who allowed me to drive the cart and sulky. I also knew the some years older son of the count's farm manager, who was quite friendly to me, - no doubt instructed by his father to look after me, due to the fact that the farm was a customer of my fathers firm.

This boy, whose father was quite high in the village pecking order, took his duties of looking after me quite seriously and thus on one occasion made me an offer which I did not have since. One late afternoon I was in his company in the count's park when sex entered our conversation. I did not dare to admit that at the age of 15 I still had no practical experience in these matters and when he suggested that he will get me a partner, I was too petrified to refuse his offer.

He took me near the path where the farm labourers or their children were approaching the count's dairy for their daily ration of milk and suggested that I pick any girl. When I did not, he stopped two young girls, told one of them to go with me beyond the bushes and disappeared with the other. I followed the girl, who lay down on the grass, lifted her skirt and waited for me to do the expected.

I made her promise not to tell my refusal to consummate with her my friend's kind offer and sent her away after a decent interval to fetch her milk. Eventually my friend returned from his escapade and I thanked him for the wonderful time I had with my little girl friend, who must have been about 14 years old.

The village was run by petty officials, who received their orders from the Count and the officials of the shire. Nevertheless they were approachable and appeared to be benevolent. On the other hand, the two gendarmes, who were in charge of public security in the village were regarded and acting as semi-gods. Just to sight them was sufficient for grown up and innocent men to become silent and frightened. The most raucous revelry in the pub ceased when they arrived to have a drink, for which they did not even offer to pay. At the slightest pretence they chained up people and beat them into confessing, whatever crime they wanted to solve. I remember them walking into Uncle Bandi's store, selecting whatever they fancied and suggesting that he puts the debt on their never-to-be-paid slate.

While John and I were on our various holidays, Mother and Father had a chance to be on their own, but of course our absence was used for them to go their separate ways. Mother some times went to Oradea-Mare in Romania to visit her Aunt Szidonia or just stayed at home, while Father went to places abroad, - on his own. Wherever they went, the important thing seemed to be that the children went somewhere else. But even then, my brother and I were never sent to the same foreign place together, - in case we were to speak Hungarian to each other.

From the age of eight, I cannot remember ever spending a holiday with my parents, although in December 1937 I was taken along a business trip by my Father, after which we stayed two days in a big hotel at Balatonfüred. On the second morning, just before we were to leave the hotel I decided to test the emergency light arrangement, which consisted of a candle and match. It worked and the staff, with the help of the resident fire brigade saved the hotel, even though the room, together with our luggage was burned to cinders.

My Father paid up for the curtain, carpet and furniture and we travelled back home without a single word being said during the 4 hour trip. The road was covered by ice, but the mood inside the car was a great deal icier. On arriving home the day before Christmas Eve, my Father immediately blamed Mother on my becoming an arsonist, they had a fight and in this fashion Christmas 1937 was as much a write off as many other occasions became due to the bickering of my parents.

There is no doubt that our parents meant well. Just the same, even in a community which was peculiar, and deserved to be subjected to violent change, our parents were special. They lived the sort of life which cannot be described. They were both larger-than-life characters, and they continued to be just that until they were approaching 90 and in a strange country, where they continued to enrich and unnerve and disturb and amuse all who came in contact with them. Their "little" boys, well into their fifties still found it difficult to communicate with them and they still felt endangered by their constant criticism. They continued to fight, worry and care for each other right up till they were parted by the death of my father, in his 90th year.

 

HISTORY

The Czechs and the Hungarians had some problems in 1916. Twenty years later I found out that I was Hungarian, when at the age of 9 I was pushed into a stream by some Czech kids while attending a holiday camp at Spindlermühle in the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia. When, desperately unhappy, I wrote to my parents wanting to go home, I received encouraging letters and finally a visit from Father, who was on his way to take the cure at Karlsbad. He explained to me that if I wanted to become a "Weltreisender" and his assistant, I must learn German and I therefore had to stay.

I became wet once again, when a year later, while in a holiday camp in Gars-am-Kamp in Austria, I found out that I was Jewish. This time I was thrown fully clothed into a lake by an Austrian Nazi, who was one of the teachers there.

I was quite surprised and disappointed at this as I did not regard myself in any way different from other people or kids. In fact, while I was thus "enjoying" my holiday in Austria, the 1936 Olympics were celebrated in Berlin. The radios were blaring forth about the fabulous German organisation, Hitler's pride in the victories of the German athletes, etc... I was also enthusiastic and proud and most impressed with the achievements of Germany and even Herr Hitler. Being 10 years old, it never occurred to me that I have a problem with the rulers of Germany or vica versa.

I was especially excited listening to the Olympic broadcasts since the Hungarians were doing very well. Ten Gold medals and scores of silver and bronze medals placed the Hungarians third in the Olympics, being beaten only by Germany and USA. Little did I know that one of the Gold Medal winners will die while serving in the same battalion as I and the brother of another will be rescued by me from a concentration camp.

At the age of 10 I was not really interested in religion, but I suppose that being thrown into a freezing lake, when unable to swim made me interested in the reasons for receiving special treatment and also I commenced reading newspapers, where almost daily there was some reference to some government decree limiting the Jews of Hungary. Nothing as serious as was the case in Germany, but it was obvious that the traditional anti-semitism of the Hungarian population would be nurtured as the official policy of the Hungarian government.

On the other hand, Mother was religious. When she was only 10 years old she lost her own Mother[4], whose parents she thereafter lived with. Mother was the eldest of two girls, Ilonka and Margit, and two boys, Jenö and Imre. Her father remarried after being a widower for some 6 years, an action which was considered hasty and thus he was never forgiven by the family of my late grandmother.

The new stepmother was not a particularly lovable or happy person. Emilia, daughter of a Baron, known as Anyika was a shy, quiet old lady all her life. The second marriage produced one son, Zoltán, who was ignored by everybody including his own father, but excepting Mother who was always very good to her Stepmother and Stepbrother. So was Father who, on my Grandfather death in 1925 insisted that Mother and her brother and sister should renounce their inheritance in favour of the Stepmother, who was left almost intestate by my Grandfather. This in turn made Father less than popular with some of those who thus lost their inheritance. Not that there was a great deal left by my maternal Grandfather and my parents had to help his widow and son during the 19 years she survived my Grandfather.

Mother's life on the farm of her grandparents wasn't easy. Her grandmother was running the show and let every body know it. She looked after the four Tauszig orphans and additionally three little Pick girls: Tusi, Lenke and Lili. Mother was the eldest and had to take an active part in bringing up the others.

When later she met and fell in love with my Father, she found that everybody was against her choice. To allow a Bank Director's daughter to marry the son of a Blacksmith/Tailor/Shopkeeper /Publican, whose major asset was that he was handsome in his hussar uniform, was a catastrophe too bad to contemplate. Permission to marry was refused, and this decision was re-considered only when my Mother was found unconscious with her head in the gas oven.

Those days there was a tremendous emphasis to ensure that the classes were kept apart and inter marriage between the rich and the poor was not encouraged and was just as unheard as marriage between a Jew and a Gentile or a White and a Negro. Luckily, due to the absence of Negroes, there was no colour problem in Hungary.

My maternal grandfather was a well educated gentlemen. He worked in a Bank all his life and became the Manager of the Branch in Szekszárd, a medium sized town, known for its excellent wine. His official title was "Bank Igazgato Ur" (Mr Bank Director) suggesting a grandeur not easily understood these days. Additionally, he had a vineyard and thus he was a Property Owner. Had he not been Jewish, he could have been one of the "landed gentry". Click for my maternal grandparents.

If that would not be impressive enough, my Mother's maternal grandparents, the Pick's of Szilasbalhás were big-time land owners. They were also against this mismatch and were sure that Father is a fortune hunter who was only interested in the sizeable dowry, which used to be part of the marriage settlement those days.

Father's parents were not too keen either. They must have felt totally outclassed by Mother's Bank Director father and the landed grandparents. They could see nothing but trouble and in any case they disliked their future daughter-in-law, who was pretty, well dressed and educated, could not cook or sew and was more interested in playing tennis than in becoming a shop keeper.

That they got married against such odds was due to the wilfulness of Ilonka, who must have believed to have found the dreams of her life in Józsi. She fought for the right to make her own decision and it was finally one of her uncles, Uncle Dezsö, the only person who trusted Father and who believed that he will make it, who became her supporter in her wish to marry Father. Luckily for them, Uncle Dezsö[5] was the favourite and most successful son of my Mother's grandmother. This rotund and bossy matriarch finally gave her blessing to the wedding and that was that, - my Mother got what she wanted.

Ten days before her wedding, her eldest brother, Jenö (Eugene) Balázs (formerly Tauszig) died in the Spanish Flu epidemic and she herself was so sick that doctors wondered if she would survive. She did and the wedding took place. The same week revolution broke out and communism was declared in Hungary.

Four years earlier, at the outbreak of the war in 1914 my father was 22 and to his horror, when mobilised, became a recruit of the famous 10th Hussars. They wore black boots, red pants, sky-blue and red jackets with heavy gold braiding and a fur lined jacket with fur collar on their left shoulder, to leave their right hand free to wield their sabres. They never went anywhere without their spurs, which could be heard from a distance and caused the girls to look for their idols. They were the elite of the elite, and were the pin-ups of all the Hungarian girls, a welcome compensation my father never failed to fully exploit during his 4 years as a 10th Hussar.

They certainly needed some compensation because they had a hard life. While other soldiers had to rise at 4.30 a.m. the hussars had to start earlier and look after their horses. Their training was inhuman, they rode for hours and hours, with and without saddle, with arms crossed in front of their chest to acquire a perfect balance. Their behinds were bleeding and their pants had to be soaked off once the blood congealed. At least one peasant boy used his pistol to blow his brains out, - he just could not take any more and Father too contemplated to get out of it by self-mutilation.

In addition to being the best dressed Hussars in the Austro-Hungarian Army, they were also expected to charge on horseback with nothing but their colourful uniforms and shining sabres against the Russians who had the sense to use machine guns. Two out of three Hussars died in that first attack, four fifths in a subsequent attack. As luck had it Father stayed behind due to a combination of knowing the right people, illness and bribery. He survived while many of his comrades did not.

Neither did his favourite uncle, Jenö (Eugene) Kellner, who became the first Hungarian officer to die in the Great War of 1914-18, during an attempt to save one of his injured soldiers. He left a widow and three small sons to be compensated by a small pension and a gold medal, which allowed them to be relatively free from prosecution during WWII.

It is not correct to say that Father was penniless. When he joined the army he was a salesman with a plumbing supply company, who had such high regard for this 22 year old, that they paid him a retainer throughout the war, on the understanding that he would carry on with them after the war finished. It was ironic that at the outbreak of communism in 1918 the firm was closed down and Father could not rejoin them, although he kept their catalogue as a memento all his life.

His parents had nothing[6]. Originally they lived in the village of Nagyperkáta (and on the outskirts of that, called "Gypsy Town" to suggest that it was the worst area), in a house which had no glass windows. During the summer the "windows" were open, but during winter they were filled up with similar mud from which the whole house was built.

Grandfather had very little education, but my Grandmother came from a "better" family and was better educated. He was a big, good looking man, commonly known in the village as "Beautiful Paul". Click for Beautiful Paul.She was small and totally devoted to her children and her spendthrift husband, who was more interested in being beautiful than in providing for his family. They had four children, but only two survived more than babyhood, in spite of the fact that contrary to the practice of those days, my grandmother refused to give her babies brandy as a pacifier to stop them crying!

There is no doubt about their son being their favourite child. On one occasion Grandfather bought a new horse (he was forever trading-in his horses) and young Józsi happened to be sick in bed. He nagged his parents, wanting to see the new horse and wanted to get up to visit the stable. To save arguments and to ensure that their son will be satisfied, his father brought the horse into the house. Spoiling children is obviously not a new fad.

My grandmother was reputed to be a very resourceful and intelligent woman. Click to see my parental grandmother. She was also long suffering and hard working. She must have realised that her husband cannot be relied upon to keep the family going and has set herself up in business. She purchased apricot and plum brandy in bulk from some of the illicit backyard distilleries, refilled them into tiny bottles and sold them to the peasants between 3 and 4 in the morning, as they went off to work in the fields. They banged on her door, she gave them the bottle, which they knocked back in one gulp with the result that the burning taste wakened them and made their daily tribulations easier. She waited for them to finish, reclaimed her bottles and refilled them again in time for next morning.

A famous story about Beautiful Paul is his visiting his 20 years old son (my Father) in Budapest, who wanted to make the old man's visit to the big city memorable by taking him to the cabaret. When he noticed the "risque" pictures outside the restaurant-cabaret, Grandfather was reluctant to enter the place. Eventually my Father-to-be and his friends won the argument and the group of 7 or 8 sat down at their reserved table close to the stage.

t wasn't until the second half of the performance that one of the dancers called down to Grandfather: "Hi, Uncle Paul, how are you, we haven't seen you for months!"

My grandparents were actually called Kellner Pál and Katalin, nee Deutsch. As it happened, grandfather's name was really Bernát, but obviously he did not like it and called himself Pál. Thus three generations of men were Kellner, Kálmán and Colman respectively.

With the exception of the boys of the late First Lieutenant Jenö Kellner, who retained their name all their life, we knew of no relations who were called Kellner and thus it was quite a surprise to my brother and I to read in 1981 that Sir Alexander Korda was born a Kellner, in a village not 100 kilometres away from Nagyperkáta where my grandparents lived and my father was born. It turned out that while my father knew that family as being related, not until we showed him the book about the Korda brothers, that we worked out our connection and a distant relationship with them.

Father received only the minimal education the law prescribed. He left school at the age of 14 and earned his keep from then on. He read everything he could lay his hands on, and became extremely well informed on all matters: technical, engineering, agriculture, accountancy, politics, you name it. At the same time he was never a know-all, on the contrary, he invited people to explain things to him.

He was interested in everything that furthered his knowledge and kept learning and enquiring to the age of 89. In spite of a deficiency in spelling he developed a calligraphic handwriting style which stood him in good stead later. By the time he was 24 the army picked him to become a telegraphist and sent him to be trained to Vienna. In today's terminology he would be called a Telecommunications Specialist, - not bad for someone with almost no education.

After their wedding and a one day honeymoon in revolutionary communist Budapest, Mr and Mrs Joseph Kálmán moved into a flat into which, they and other families were sent by the authorities. Eventually it became their flat, (with only Father's parents moving in with them), but in the meantime they were lucky to share it with others. They had no income, the only thing they had was the dowry which Father received, after signing an approximately 30-page agreement prepared by my maternal Grandfather's solicitor.

The dowry was supposed to have been quite considerable, but in fact was insufficient to start a business and thus Father had to borrow money from his brother-in-law to buy some bankrupt stock of hand tools. His decision to buy these, without permission, so upset his father-in-law that, in accordance with the agreement, my Grandfather insisted that the dowry be repaid. While the arguments went on, the business became viable and Father could borrow from his Bank to repay the dowry. Inflation then set in and while Father eventually repaid his debt to the Bank at a time when the whole loan could be equated with the cost of a box of matches, the repaid dowry in Grandfather's hands was invested badly and lost its value.

To house the stock of hand tools, Father opened shop in a basement and commenced to sell his hammers, spanners and nail punches. Paul László, his sister's husband, who was in a similar hardware supply business, left his job and joined him. They were partners and they remained so for twenty years, when due mainly to family intrigues, they decided to part. In spite of the bitterness accompanying the breaking up of a very successful business and partnership, there was never any recrimination between the two ex-partners, and I never heard Father speak of his brother-in-law and ex-partner in a way which could be construed as not complimentary. In spite of this, for years they did not speak to each other and competed in business with the intention of driving each other out of same.

While partners, they complemented each other so well, that this must have been the major ingredient of their success. Paul, according to my Father, was the hardest working person ever; totally honest and reliable, while requiring the initiative and push that my Father supplied with great gusto and a lot of noise. It was usually Father who had the ideas and closed the deals, which Paul carried out. While Father flitted all over the place, Paul worked and worked. While Father travelled abroad on company business and on his frequent trips to relax, Paul stayed home and slaved away. This did not go unnoticed by Father's sister, who constantly told Paul that he was being exploited. In this she was aided by Paul's children, who further resented my Father's interference into their lives. One could only sympathise with the "children," who at that time were either married or have graduated as doctors of law.

There was also the competition between the two wives, - my Mother and Aunt. If one bought a new hat, the other had to have one bigger and brighter. When we built a house on the "Hill" the other family had to buy a house there and move into it earlier than us. Thus it was not surprising that the partnership was being undermined by the two wives and the children. (My brother and I are innocent. We were too young, but had we been older, we could not have remained uninvolved.)

During the duration of the partnership Kálmán & László flourished. They specialised in supplying all types of hardware to agriculture, and eventually became the largest in their field. Initially they imported spare parts for agricultural machinery, and later commenced importing specialised agricultural machinery mainly from Germany. Eventually, they commenced manufacturing machinery, such as hammer mills, which were designed on their instructions by young engineers, who eventually became leading academics in the agricultural machinery engineering field. Although originally copied from a German machine, with various improvements their hammer mill became the most advanced in any country and is still being manufactured in both Hungary and elsewhere, with very little change in design.

In partnership with Ohrenstein & Koppel they established a manufacturing organisation in Czechoslovakia and had a selling organisation in Romania, while their machine was manufactured under licence in Germany by O&K, who are now the largest makers of escalators and roadmaking machinery in the world

In 1938, to the delight of solicitors they parted. All their employees went to either one or the other partners, usually after a lot of intrigue and at increased salaries. The two new organisations, with Father alone running his, and Paul, with his son and daughter and future son-in-law working in the other firm, competed against each other and were successful in enlarging their share of business. Their new businesses were established not 150 yards from each other, in a city of one and a half million, and it became a rule of the two families not to pass in front of the other's business, in case using the neighbouring streets might be regarded as an act of spying.

Relations inviting one or the other family soon got used to the idea of not inviting both families at the same time, and in view of the fact that my paternal grandparents by then lived in Budapest and were visited by my Father every day without fail, a routine was worked out to ensure that brother and sister, and especially the two sister-in-laws never met. I used to visit my grandparents for many years at least 3 times a week, and cannot remember ever meeting my two cousins, who were probably visiting them just as often.

My grandfather had gout and sat in an armchair most of the time. He could hardly walk and had to be pulled up from his chair. This was done by my Grandmother, who was almost half his size, but who was determined to look after him, in spite of him being bossy and rude to her.

Both my grandparents were intimidated by my father. He always hated smoking and he must have been the pioneer anti-smoke campaigner. For health reasons doctors suggested that Grandfather cuts down his cigars to 2 a day, but Father went one better and simply forbade him to smoke.

My grandparents knew when their son will arrive for his daily visit and thus a great effort was made to ventilate and perfume the flat prior to his arrival in order to get rid of the incriminating smells. They didn't fool him and in fact, realising how much the cigars meant to his old man, Father used to give me money to buy some cigars for him, on the understanding that I do not divulge where the finances for my generosity came.

Even in her late seventies Grandmother Kellner was a very hard working intelligent lady, while my grandfather was and remained a lovable rogue. Everybody loved him in the neighbourhood, in spite of his immobility. Their flat was on the ground floor and he used to sit at the open bay window and make friends. No good looking girl between the ages of 19 and 40 could pass by without speaking to him and they seemed to enjoy his company as much as he enjoyed chatting them up. Right up to his death at 82 years of age he had an eye for the girls. The window where my grandfather used to flirt.

He must have been a chip off the old block because his father, Mátyás, or Matthias lived to be 94, which was particularly remarkable due to the fact that at the age of 91 he fell out of a window, which happened to be on the fourth floor.

This great-grand-father of mine lived with his daughter on the 4th floor of a building of flats and one day locked himself into the toilet. When he could not open the door, he tried the window and succeeded to fall into the ventilating shaft. On arrival to ground level, he must have fallen on to the rubbish accumulated over the years and this must have cushioned his landing.

After a while the toilet door was demolished to find the window open and that the old gentleman disappeared. They rushed downstairs fearing the worst, but he was not there either. Finally they found him in the nearby park where he was being entertained by the maids and governesses walking the dogs and the children. It was only some weeks later that they found out that he broke an arm in this escapade.

By the time I was born in 1926 my great-grandfather was not alive and thus I missed out meeting him. However, I did meet my maternal great-grandmother, whom I remember being as frightening as her reputation. As far as grandparents, I knew my mother's stepmother only and of course, I knew my father's parents well. Grandfather Paul died in 1942, while Grandmother lived till she was 87 and died in Hungary in 1949, by which time my Father, who absolutely adored her, lived in London.

She lived for the last 4 years of her life with her daughter and son-in-law, Father's ex-partner, in Budapest. At the time contact between England and communist Hungary behind the Iron Curtain was extremely difficult, yet my Father found some ways to send them money towards his Mother's upkeep, which did not cease when she died. Not until both his brother-in-law and then his sister passed away, did the regular financial assistance stop, although Father and his sister were never close. Photo shows my grandmother around 1945.

My Kellner grandparents were interesting people and coped quite well with their two children, who were less than friendly with each other, yet shared the cost of their parents' upkeep. There was never any remark on their part as to the family feud, nor did they attempt to interfere. This is quite atypical of Hungarian parents, although having a family feud is anything but.

Around 1940 my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and in view of my grandfather's immobility a big luncheon was organised in their flat, at which all the factions of the two warring families actually shared a meal. Great care was exercised in the seating arrangements, so that they did not require to speak to each other.

It was not until 1941 when my cousin George died at the age of 29 after a short illness (meningitis), that a sort of a relationship was re-established and contact between the two families approached normality.

 

HUNGARIAN HISTORY

Between the two wars, Europe was busily re-organising itself. Hungary was a Kingdom without a King, run by Admiral Nicholas Horthy. The fact that Hungary had neither a Navy nor a sea, and that its non-existing Navy could sport a solitary Admiral only, was typical of a country, which in its over 1000 years of history, invented and tried a variety of political ideas. Thus Hungary had communism almost before the Russians, fascism almost before Mussolini, and they certainly had anti-jewish legislation before Germany.

To be fair to the only Admiral landlocked Hungary ever had: until 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had access to the Mediterranean Sea, had a viable Navy and that Navy was commanded by neither a Prince nor an Arch Duke, but Admiral Horthy a Hungarian nobleman without even a title. Whatever his other mistakes, we must accept that he must have been quite outstanding to become the first and last Hungarian Commander of the Austro-Hungarian Navy during the latter part of the war.

While the Great War of 1914-18 was fought, Hungary was the junior partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were allied to Germany and Turkey against the might of England, France, Russia and the United States. They lost the war and the Allies commenced to dismantle the power and territory of their enemy, whom they regarded as the guilty party in the whole affair.

Germany had to forgo the right to have an army and Kaiser William went into exile. Heavy repatriations were crippling the German economy and soon inflation on a previously unheard scale finished off ruining Germany. At the time Germany had a democratic Government, but being made completely bankrupt, was readied for the extremes of Teutonic and Nazi ideology. Dictatorships usually arise on the economic ruins of the country and Germany was not to be an exception.

The Versailles Peace Treaty was supposed to bring peace with Germany, while the Treaty of Trianon dealt with Hungary. It was certainly intended to deal a death blow to Hungary. In fact these Allied dictated treaties caused most, if not all of the problems in Europe, which in 1939 resulted in the next war.

Austria and Hungary had to give up territories to newly founded countries. Most of Poland and Romania, all of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (with the exception of Serbia) used to belong to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now they became independent and hostile to the truncated Hungary, which they encircled. Austria became a small landlocked country as did Hungary. There were no harbours left for them to ship produce from, nor to have a navy.

Hungary was treated in a particularly harsh manner losing well over 50 % of its prewar territory. The leaders of the allies and especially President Wilson had no interest in finding out about Hungary and how that small country bled in the interest of the West over the centuries guarding Europe against the Moslem Empire or how Hungary itself was subjugated by the Austrians. The allies were more interested in creating new allies for themselves by rewarding the newly established countries that encircled Hungary in anticipation of providing "peace for ever" in Europe.

The Hungarians were not only hard done by, but felt betrayed. No wonder that almost immediately after the war, an "irredentist" movement swept Hungary, which was later used to unify the country under Horthy's rule.

Austria became a Republic, while Hungary remained a Kingdom, with the ex-Emperor of Austria as its King. However, even before the Habsburg King Charles could take up residence in Hungary a bolshevik revolution led by Béla Kun brought communist rule for Hungary. The Communist Peoples Republic of Hungary was short lived and the leaders of the revolution fled to Lenin's Russia.

The communists were in a minority and could not consolidate their rule, before it was opposed from both outside and within the country. It was the Allied powers who were not too enthusiastic about Bolshevism in Hungary and therefore they allowed and encouraged the Rumanians to occupy Hungary. Finally it was Admiral Nicholas von Horthy de Nagybánya, who came to power in 1919, when with the help of the French and English and the Rumanians, he arranged communism in Hungary to come to a bloody end.

People disappeared at the time, many were summarily executed, other were simply murdered. Horthy's regime was called the "White Terror" which took over from the "Red Terror" of the Communists. Because some of the Reds and Béla Kun were Jewish socialists, when Horthy took over, thousands of the victims of the White Terror were Jewish, whether they were Communists or not.

Even after the wide spread pogroms in which hundreds of Jews lost their lives, have ceased, the Horthy Government had an official anti-jewish policy, whereby anti-semitism was tolerated and encouraged. No Jew was allowed to hold a position in the public service or become a politician and Hungary's Parliament enacted the first anti-jewish legislation in Europe, according to which University entrances were restricted to Jewish students on the basis of their own and parent's religion.

Horthy's rule was not unwelcome. The Communists made a mess of running the country, they tried to change too many things too fast. Horthy seemed to bring a stability to Hungary which was most welcome after the Great War and the subsequent troubled times. He organised elections and although these were neither secret (in the country areas) nor free (only certain parties were allowed), the resulting Government of Count Stephen Bethlen was attempting to be conciliatory and has been instrumental in re-building the countries economy.

Horthy became a king-like father-figure, who appeared to be the arbitrator, who was benevolently overseeing the country's re-emergence as an important nation in Middle Europe. In actual fact he was always in control and his will was carried out by his friends and colleagues in the ministries.

He established a new order, based on medieval knights, and called "vitéz". Any person who fought in the war and received certain standards of decorations could apply to become a member of the "vitéz" and if accepted, he could use the "vitéz" prior to and as part of his name. Before a person was accepted, he was investigated by police and the army as to the racial purity of his forebears and his political past and present and only if absolutely non-Jewish and 100% reliable to the Government, was he allowed to take a solemn oath pledging his loyalty to the person of Admiral Horthy.

The orphan or the eldest son of the "vitéz" on attaining the age of 21 could apply to become a member of the order in his own right, and if he could show the same political reliability as his father before him, he would also join the elite. Officially, there was no material advantage in becoming "vitéz" but in actual fact introducing one self with the prefix of "vitéz" ensured an advantage, since belonging to the order demonstrated to everybody that the person enjoys the patronage of Horthy and vica versa. In this way, Horthy was getting a large number of loyal followers, who have all pledged themselves to support him and his regime.

In later years, the White Terror gave way to a more peaceful situation, where even if democracy wasn't actually practiced, there was an opportunity to live without fear. It was still not possible to speak without fear, but at least internment camps (invented by the British in South Africa, used by the Hungarians, but eventually improved by the Germans, whose camps like Dachau were to become infamous later) were kept going only for the so-called enemies of the Nation and also some unemployed gipsies, whose music was the favourite and official music of Hungary. However, chief amongst those interned were the communists, who could be kept there for 10 - 15 years without trial, in 'protective' custody.

While there was a quota system in Universities to restrict Jews from becoming students, nevertheless Jews were allowed and encouraged to work, make money, give employment opportunities, export their produce and talents, and pay taxes, bribes and offer contributions to the Government parties. They were referred to as Hungarians if they were famous musicians, industrialists, painters or film makers. If they were not, they were tolerated, but if they were poor, they were referred to as bloody Jids.

As Admiral Horthy said to my Father in my presence in 1943: "We should be proud of our Hungarian Jews. (He actually said: Hungarian Jids, i.e. "magyar zsidajaink".) Do you realise that they built the film industry throughout the World?"

My Father respectfully agreed with the great man, who omitted to mention that only the previous week he signed a regulation that made any Jewish man who has or continued to have sexual relationship with a gentile female liable to life imprisonment or that he ordered the decimation i.e. the execution of every tenth sailor on a ship he commanded in 1917.

Hitler came into power in 1933, some years after Mussolini. The first foreign visitor he had was Colonel Gyula Gömbös, the Prime Minister of Hungary, who started to talk about an Axis between Berlin and Rome. This was eventually established and Hungary became an important ally of the two Fascist powers, who arranged the return of some of the territories which were taken from Hungary after the 1914/18 war. In exchange Hungary gave the Germans and Italians their undiminishing loyalty, which included more and more anti-jewish legislation from May 1938 onwards.

The first of these limited employment of Jews in businesses to 20%. Further anti-jewish laws included defining the status of Jews, forbidding them leading positions in the media, prohibiting the issuing of new trade licenses or the renewal of old ones. Further admission of Jews to the professions was forbidden, as was their right to acquire citizenship by naturalisation, marriage or even if born in Hungary of non-Hungarian parents. Voting rights of non-native Jews was cancelled and to be able to prove that you were a Hungarian Jew you had to show that all your forebears, if Jewish, were permanently resident before 1868, i.e. for the previous 70 years!

To find your forebears, and where they lived and died, became quite a business, in more ways than one. In our case, Father engaged a "genealogical investigator" who found that all of our forebears had the decency of having been born in the right place. It was all very satisfactory except for one rather shameful forebear, whose gravestone was found to be outside the cemetery walls and with an inscription disclosing that under that stone lies the ex-Roman Catholic vicar and his wife, with an obviously Jewish maiden name. It appears that our forebear was a priest who fell in love with a Jewess, married her and must have been excommunicated for having broken his vows of celibacy. Little did he know what problems he caused to us five or six generations later!

It became pretty obvious to anybody but the blind, that being a Jew would be more and more a hazard to enjoying a normal life, although no one could dream of the holocaust that was to follow. Nevertheless, every Jew was trying to find ways and means to ensure that whatever may happen, he and his family would get by with the minimum of trouble from the authorities.

Some decided that assimilation was the answer and became Christians. It was thought at the time that all you needed to do was to register as a member of a non-israelite religion and all would be well. My Father was of this opinion, and we became members of the Roman Catholic religion sometime in 1937.

It is easy to say so many years later that this was a cowards' way to deal with the situation and nothing, but nothing could be further from the truth. For a Jew to become a Christian, in the hope that he and his family may survive with less persecution, was a greater sacrifice, than to do nothing. No one but a Jew can understand the anguish of the Jew who gives up the religion, which while he may not practice it or he may not even believe in, was the faith of his forebears.

Only someone who experienced it can understand the anguish of my Mother who had to get the signature of her Rabbi and his permission to 'desert' her faith by becoming a Catholic. He did not make it easy for her when he asked her how, after her betrayal of her ancestors, will her conscience allow her to visit her parents' grave.

We became members of the Roman Catholic Church but it did not give us any benefit in the years to come. Nor did the conversion of my parents make any difference to them, - my Mother continued to read her Miriam, her prayer book (now in my possession), light candles on Friday night and to visit her Synagogue, while my Father continued to send money to the Jewish congregation, which was his way of keeping up religion. At the same time he insisted that he believed in God but not in religion.

I was the only member of the family, who really became and acted as a Roman Catholic, by going to a Catholic School, attending Mass and becoming an Altar Boy. For a short while I was a believer, but this stage of my life was very brief and I reacted with a life long suspicion of religion of any kind, yet I always believed that if only the teachings of all the churches could be followed, without the trappings of religion and without some of its practices, the world would be a better place.

 

QUO VADIS ?

By 1938 every forward thinking Jew who could afford the train and boat fare and the bribe that had to be paid to receive a passport and the permission to emigrate, had either emigrated, or was preparing to do so. My family obtained visas for Uruguay or Colombia or Honduras, or was it Venezuela? In any event, we didn't go. Within a few weeks of this photo, we were sent away from our home.

Instead, on the 14th January 1939 John and Father went to England, and a fortnight later I was sent to Switzerland. A lady, who made a living as a minder of travelling children, accompanied and delivered me and a number of other children to the various schools in Switzerland. The idea was, that my Father would arrange our immigration to England, return for Mother, come and collect me in Switzerland and we would all finish up in England. This is not what actually happened.

I was 12 and my brother John 18 when we left Hungary. He went to live with an Anglican Rector, in Maulden Rectory, who later served in both the RAF and in prison, the latter for interfering with little boys. (Never with John, he assured me.)

I went to the French-speaking part of Switzerland, to Champery, where I lived in the Ecole Alpine, in great luxury, and learned French and skiing, and how to use knife and fork the Swiss way. I hated it considerably less than my other educational excursions in German speaking territories, but than no one minded my being Hungarian or Jewish, especially because I was a Roman Catholic. As such, on Sundays I attended Mass in the picturesque church of Champery and in May 1939, I was confirmed in the catacombs of St. Maurice by a charming Bishop, who could talk a few words of Hungarian.

While I was in Switzerland my Mother came to see me and also to bring with her some of her jewels and omit to take them back to Hungary. This was one of the ways my parents arranged for their valuables and money to be smuggled out of Hungary. Thus she and I parceled up a diamond brooch of hers and posted it at the post office of the small Swiss village, well insured, to John in England, who instead of the parcel received a note from H.M. Customs and Excise, assessing the diamonds in the brooch for duty at something like 400 pounds sterling (of the 1939 kind). John had heard of some extremely rich people, but never of anyone who had that much money.

John wrote to our parents with great care, so that the censor who might read the letter would not understand his problem. My Father rang me in Switzerland and, shouting loud enough that I could hear him without the phone, explained the situation as best as he could without giving away too much and advised me that the parcel I had helped Mother to wrap would be coming back and that I should hold on to it, until he gives me other instructions. Our conversation or shouting match, had to be rather circumspect, because Hungarian censors were listening in on all foreign telephone conversations, and one was often interrogated afterwards, and had to explain what certain statements meant. We must have done well, because I got the message and the censor did not.

The diamonds returned from London and I asked Herr Honegger, the Head Master to keep it for me. Eventually I had a letter from Father saying that I should not forget to send a birthday card to Mr. Walders, the Managing Director of the Swiss subsidiary of Ohrenstein & Koppel, the German Company who were manufacturing Father's Medicago hammer mill in Berlin. I re-addressed the parcel and sent it off to Zurich.

The rest of the story races ahead of time:

All during the war, every now and than every member of the family had to recite the name and address of Herr Walders, so that whoever survives can claim the diamonds. In 1947 my Parents left Hungary for London via Zurich, hoping to do just that.

They wrote to Walders several letters, hoping that one will arrive safely. On arrival to Zurich, they found a car awaiting them from the hotel, but no news of Walders. After a sleepless night, worrying that Walders might do the type of: "What diamonds?" deal which became quite common place in Hungary amongst some people who accepted valuables for safekeeping and were so disappointed that the Jewish owner survived that they suffered a lapse of memory as regards the goodies.

Next morning Father rushed to Herr Walders' office, where he was greeted politely by Walders, whom he never met and who spent the next hour offering Father his sympathy on his terrible war experiences and cups of coffee. Finally, after about an hour, during which Father became more and more nervous and irritated, Walders asked the reason for the visit. Father said: "I came for the diamonds" to which Walders replied: "What diamonds?" and thus confirmed Father's worst fears.

Father, mustering all the calmness he never knew he possessed, and using his atrocious German knowledge, explained that he is after the diamond brooch that was sent before the war for safekeeping from Champery by his son, but Walders simply could not recall ever having received any diamond jewellery from a young boy he never knew on behalf of a Hungarian he never knew either. Finally, more for the purpose of proving the truth of his statements, he called in his long serving secretary, who could not recall things either, but suggested, that maybe it might be worth having a look at a small parcel that has been in the company safe for a number of years and which she sees sometimes, but never knew what it was.

Walders, the secretary and Father went to the other office, where the safe was standing, wide open and for everyone to use and there was the unopened small parcel, with my childish handwriting and the original postage stamps still on it. When it arrived seven years ago, Walders, who only knew from my letter that he should keep the parcel for my Father, put it into the safe and promptly forgot it. Had the secretary not been there, the diamond brooch would still be in an unlocked safe in Zurich to-day.

After Mother's 1939 visit to me was over she returned from Switzerland to Budapest and in July of that year Father travelled to London to see John and finalise our visa to England. He was not successful in arranging permission for us to go there, so he decided to return to Budapest, after leaving strict instructions to John, that if he asks or even instructs him to return to Hungary, John should regard this as having been done under duress and therefore under no circumstances should he return. At that time war was still unimaginable and Mr Chamberlain was still making agreements with Herr Hitler in Munich. There was to be peace in our time, but my Father knew better.

Before he left London, Father also wrote to me, telling me that we shall probably emigrate to Brazil. Hearing this, I decided that if I have to go to Brazil, I may as well spend the summer in Hungary first, and asked the headmaster of Ecole Alpine for my ticket, which he had, and took off for Budapest. I changed trains in Monthey, Montreux and Lausanne, got to Zurich at 12 midnight, walked the streets all night and walked across the City for another station, from where the Orient Express was going to Budapest. I was 13 years old and while in a toilet in Zurich received the first and only homosexual offer of my life. Not having been subjected to gay liberation propaganda, I am afraid I threatened the poor little man with the police, who disappeared immediately.

Boarding the train, I felt very lonely and rather frightened of the prospect of travelling alone through Nazi Germany. I did remember that on my way out of Hungary the wife and 14 year old daughter of Mr Pick, who was Mr Hungarian Salami, were taken off at the border and returned in tears after a humiliating body search for non existing jewels. Now I was to travel all alone through the same area.

Ostmark, formerly Austria and now part of Nazi-Germany, was full of soldiers, SS people, swastikas, guns and policemen. If there was anything else there, I certainly did not see it. I was tired from my night of walking the streets and would have loved to sleep my way across the German portion of my trip, but could not as I was frightened out my wits and also I had the sorest chapped lips I ever had before or since.

I was all alone in the train compartment until at the German border an SS officer and his wife joined me. They realised my plight, produced some cream for my sore lips and looked after me until Vienna, when we said a friendly good bye. They were the only nice Nazis I ever met, but in spite of this I am glad I did not meet him again, when his solution to curing a sick boy could have been to put him out of misery with methods other than the cream his wife provided for me, a very frightened 13 year old.

After a very long train trip I arrived to Budapest, engaged a taxi and just about caused my Mother to collapse from surprise when I bowled in asking for my taxi to be paid. My Father was to arrive from England next day, but he had more sense than to travel via Germany, and after crossing the Channel he went from France to Italy, then Yugoslavia and finally Hungary. I travelled next morning to a railway station some 30 kilometres from Budapest, awaited the train from Yugoslavia, boarded it and went through the various sleeping carriages until I found him shaving. After 6 months he was happy to see me.

To his credit he did not throttle me then, although he has probably never forgave me to spoil all his plans by uniliterarily leaving Switzerland and returning. Had I stayed in Switzerland, he and Mother would most certainly have left Hungary before war broke out two months later, but my unscheduled return has caused plans to be thrown out of gear. There was another attempt to get me out of Hungary, but that was also frustrated, and I never made it.

My stay in Switzerland lasted only five months but I believe it to have been a very important portion of my upbringing and subsequent development. The atmosphere at the college was extremely free and easy and without knowing what democracy is, I was part of it. The teachers were our friends and the pupils of the college responded. There was a co-operation between the staff and the pupils, which was all very new and very impressive to me.

Our teachers worked and played with us. One of them was an excellent ice skater and he competed in the 1936 Winter Olympics. In spite of his fame he could be seen fooling around with us boys on the ice and yet he had the respect of all the kids in the class room.

We had a lot of opportunities to ski. Near the Ecole Alpine were several fields ideal for skiing and we had our run every day right up to May, when the snow disappeared and the green grass became speckled with the millions of flowers, a vision which will never leave me.

During our holidays, pupils either went home or we were taken away from the college for a change of scene. Thus Easter was celebrated on the mountain in a ski hut, while in June we were taken to Zurich to see a large Expo type exhibition.

Our Easter holiday was unforgettable for more than one reason. We climbed up to Planachaux, a walk which took us 9 hours in 1939, but which would take 10 minutes some 30 years later, by which time the "teleferique" cable cars were in operation.

Our getting to Planachaux was "le grande aventure" in itself. We had to pack up a bag, which was to be taken to Planachaux by the cable on which an open platform hung. Our luggage, food and other supplies were tied onto this primitive platform, set up to take building materials to the site where the cable car towers and the stations were built.

We were carrying a rucksack and our skis and stocks and the skins which were tied onto our skis. The skins were strips of cow skin and fur stretched onto the underside of skis. The long hair of the skin allowed the skis to slide downhill, but if pointed uphill those same hairs grabbed the snow and stopped us from going the same number of steps forward as back. It certainly helped us to get to our destination which was a one room hut and which was all of Planachaux!

There was also a lean-to shed in which our straw palliasses were stored during the day. At night they came out and were laid out on the floor and the thirty or so people bedded down on them. One wall of the hut was where cooking took place and the oven was kept going day and night, using the wood we collected during our skiing expeditions.

One night a spooky thing happened. We were all asleep when almost all of us heard a cry for help. The kerosene lamp was turned up and many of us got dressed and went outside. It may have been 1 a.m. and while we were shouting about and hoping for an answer, we were not allowed to go on a search with some of our teachers, who got their ski and torches and went off to find the man or men who were in trouble.

Most of those who were left behind went back to sleep, but once again, around 5 a.m. we were wakened by cries of help. We all heard clearly the man shouting that he needs help, that he has money and that this money is of no value to him. We discussed amongst ourselves what the shouts about the money meant and came to no conclusion. We certainly heard it correctly, because later, when our teachers returned from their unsuccessful search, they confirmed that they also heard what was said. Later in the day, two French border guards (Planachaux was right on the French-Swiss border) arrived and they also heard those same cries.

We could not find the lost man and it wasn't until we returned to Champery after the holiday, that we read in a paper, that the bodies of smugglers, who were carrying large amounts of money, was found. The date when they disappeared was the same day we heard their cries of help. There was no doubt about it, these were the same people. The unbelievable and spooky part is that the smugglers were found on the border of Italy, some 150 kms east of Planachaux!

 

 

I WAS HAVING A HOLIDAY

Instead of enjoying my summer in Budapest, as I imagined and hoped I would, I had to commence studying for exams in respect of the year I lost at school. My studies in Switzerland were not acceptable and I was to sit an exam for all my subjects in September just a few days before the regular school year was to commence.

While in England, Father arranged for an English exchange student to come to Hungary. He was supposed to stay with some of our relations who had two sons keen to learn English. However, due to my unexpected return to Hungary plans were changed as Father decided that my needs to learn English were greater. So John Bell, a 19 year old student from Oxford, who was reading history and was planning to become a diplomat as his father and grandfather before him, came to us for his 1939 summer holidays.

We were all supposed to learn English from him, but his Hungarian improved much more rapidly. I did pick up a few words which I subsequently forgot and the main thing I learned from John Bell was his method of making his bacon and eggs and spooning the hot lard from the bacon over the eggs. His method of using the back of the fork to put the semi-liquid egg into his mouth was fascinating and impractical. It was also considered by us quite hazardous.

He spent a lot of time with some of our relations who were the same age as he was and whose interest he shared. They took him out often and obviously he enjoyed their company much more than the turmoil of our family. His presence at the dining table did not stop the arguments which were conducted in a language strange to him and at a sound level, that must have been even stranger. It must have been quite embarrassing for him to sit in at the shouting matches conducted between my parents. I am sure that he never heard anything like it in his sheltered life.

He came from a "good family" yet his one and only pair of pyjamas were full of holes. My mother was quite shocked. How can a young English Gentleman, (those days all Englishmen were "Gentleman") possess just one wreck of a pair of pyjamas. She bought him two pairs and while she was at it she bought some socks and arranged the darning of his pants and the jacket, which already had leather batches at the elbows. Father was furious and accused Mother of having fallen in love with John Bell, some 26 years younger than her.

When in the first week of September the British Embassy suggested to John Bell that owing to the political situation he should return to England, he must have been quite relieved to leave Central Europe and the crazy family he had the misfortune to encounter. He has probably tried to explain to his family where he spent the last summer of peace and his experiences, but no doubt, seeing that no-one believed him, he gave up.[7]

During that summer, every afternoon one or another of my teachers from my school appeared at our house and attempted to teach me the subjects I was to sit in exam. They travelled up the hill in the chauffeur driven car Father sent for them and they came, taught me, enjoyed the afternoon coffee and cakes and than returned to their homes.

Needless to say that under the circumstances I was not interested in acquiring such skills as reciting German poems, in the language, which I spoke very well indeed, or to learn about Hungarian history or geography, when the teacher in charge of the subject was being fed and paid by my Father. You did not need to be Einstein (who was then still alive) to know that the teachers were being paid not just to teach me, but also to ensure that they are going to assist in passing exams. The mentality of those days and that part of the World was, that everybody was on the take from waiters and bellboys right up to the teachers and of course almost all the politicians and the civil servants.

 

DURING THE WAR

I WAS AN UNHAPPY SCHOOLBOY.

A few days before my exams the war broke out. I listened to the radio with my Father and one of my teachers as Hitler screamed his threats to the World. My Father suggested that he was afraid that his son will get involved in the forthcoming war. Mr Árpád Bölcsházi thought that he is a pessimist, after all the war will be over before the English will want to call up foreigners into the army. He thought Father was talking about 18 year old John in England, but Father explained that he was worried about his 13 year old. He was not a pessimist, but a realist in some respects. Not so in other respects.

In spite of all my teachers being on the payroll, the exams were conducted by strange examiners and it seems that my teachers were not sharing the fees they received with these people. I failed three subjects, which happened to be two more than I could fail if I was not to repeat the whole year.

Father thought that the discipline of a college would do me good and I was sent to a Catholic College[8]. It was ironic, that whereas before I had to travel some 65 minutes from our house on the Hill to my school, the college I was sent to live in, was only about 5 minutes from my home. Not that it mattered, because we were only allowed to leave the college once a week and than only if we deserved it.

The college was very glamorous. We had a smart military cadet looking uniform and on special occasions some of us even had sabres. This was the limit of the glamour. The rest was sheer agony. I was beaten by teachers, pupils, priests, punished by these people and the nuns, at times it must have seemed that I was the star attraction at the Sadists Convention.

My first beating came about three days after school commenced. My "house" was under a priest, with a German sounding name and who during study hour asked me to come and see him after dinner. I did so, was asked to sit down in his study and he asked me a lot of questions about Switzerland, about my Parents, wanted to discuss with me matters concerning politics, matters concerning my racial origins, asked me to volunteer being an altar boy, gave me a book to learn all about it, then asked me to take my pants off, bend over and with his cane gave me 12 of his best. He then suggested that I sleep on my stomach and bid me good night.

To this day I do not know why I was beaten by him, nor could any of my class mates and fellow inmates explain to me what has happened. Surprisingly, I never had any more problems with him, but then I often served him at the altar and always made sure that he had two refills as regards the altar wine.

About a fortnight afterwards, we were studying in the study room, when someone came in to ask for a boy to go to the recreation room. He came back crying. Another boy was asked to go out. He also came back somewhat worse for wear. Eventually my turn came. In the recreation room it was pitch darkness. I was grabbed, something was tied around my eyes, the light was switched on and my face was slapped and I was beaten by at least half a dozen 17-18 year olds wielding canes, brooms and wet towels. Being blindfolded added to the terror. When they decided that I have had enough I was admonished to keep my mouth shut and was told to respect my elders and obey them without any questioning their authority. Then it was time for me to go back to the study room where the supervising priest continued to ignore what was going on.

During the next two years the number of organised beatings that I would have enjoyed had I been a masochist could not be counted on hands and feet. The amazing thing in retrospect is that these beatings were known and could not go unnoticed by the priests and the Reverend Head Master, yet they never said anything about it nor did they try and stop it, in spite of the fact that some kids were beaten so badly that they had to be nursed in the college hospital by the nuns. It was quite obvious that our priests approved of these sadistic and cruel beatings which were premeditated and had been arranged for no reason other than to satisfy the sadistic tendencies of some of the older pupils.

Additionally, there were the unorganised beatings. There was one 18 year old who could kick your behind with such force and artistry, that the pain made you sick and another one specialised in slapping faces. They did it in pairs, one kicked you and the other slapped you and their attention could come at any place any time, on the corridor of the school, on the way to chapel or in the bathroom. One of these fellows joined the army soon after and within a week or two died a hero's death, having been run over by a tank or truck. His memorial service in the church of the school was a happy occasion, all my fellow pupils having been his victims.

Interestingly, I never complained about the beatings to my parents. I must have been going through a heroic part of my life or else I realised that they would not believe me. It was a time, when you heard of the great sufferings which our soldiers endured while subjugating the Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs and Rumanians[9] and it would have been completely unpatriotic to complain about such minor matters. Some of my own class mates, while discussing the nastiness of our elder schoolmates, did not think of revenging it on our torturers, but were looking forward to beating the next generation of victims. With Father in 1940.

Being beaten was not the only unpleasant part of the college, although it certainly made other discomforts pale in comparison. Our day started with having to attend mass. Some of us even had to get up earlier so that we can serve as altar boys. It seemed to us as if most of the priests would have received their daily alcoholic fix from the wine they used while celebrating mass, but that was unfair. After all it was before breakfast and they were looking forward to more wine and even stronger alcoholic fortification during the day.

We were not religious. Neither were most of the priests. They were chosen by their parents to become priests and thus have a life without the problems which peasants, clerks, labourers etc may have. Most of them were sent to become junior brothers at the age of 12, most of them became fat, overeating, drinking and who knows what else they were indulging in. They were supposed to be celibate, but we knew of some of our teachers who were seen in strip joints, - I myself saw one of the younger ones in a cabaret, wearing a bright tie, over which he was putting his dog collar. I must say that the nuns were religious, kind and helpful.

We also had to attend litany in the evening. Once the bell sounded for evensong we had to observe absolute silence until after breakfast next morning and this silence had to be observed even if being kicked by older pupils. If not, the noisy one was punished, not the kicker.

Once a year the whole school went into "retreat". Four days were spent in absolute silence, without any school work or study, other than studying religious matters. Usually we were allowed onto the playground of the school to kick a ball around on the asphalt grounds, but not during retreat, when physical exercise was sacrificed to aid our religious fervour. We spent the whole morning and afternoon in church listening to the ravings of our priestly elders, without any change in our daily attendance of the morning mass or the evenings litany. Why these people imagined that we need that much religion I cannot say, - their example was certainly no help in our becoming religious.

However, we enjoyed our retreats for the amusement these priests gave us. One of them, the Bishop Tihamér Tóth stands out in memory as having a loud booming voice which he used at full blast to paint for us the dangers of masturbation. Quite apart from the loud noise he made from the pulpit, which made sleeping almost impossible, most of us were too interested in the subject to miss a single word of his. He went on and on, which we did not enjoy, but described not only the extreme dangers, but also the action in great detail, which we enjoyed hearing. His lectures were full of worthwhile subjects and it is from the Bishop Tóth that I received my first sex education.

The good bishop also wrote several books on the subject, which were compulsory reading for us. Unfortunately, they were not illustrated, but they were, just the same, the best porn available to us in college and if those books made the Bishop a wealthy man, his success was deserved.

The other priests, who came to talk to us were not into masturbation as much and specialised in other subjects, such as heaven and hell. Mostly hell and the fire and the terrifying eternal suffering and pain and more hell and fire. The question occurred to us, as to how these people could know about these terrible happenings which will befall us, when they have never been on the other side themselves and must have been obvious to the most primitive of priests that the "retreats" were successful in sowing the seeds of disbelief in little boys like us. I can say without exaggerating that not one of my class mates emerged after the days of brain washing believing more or becoming more religious.

We slept in dormitories. There must have been 60 beds in each. In the middle there was a horse trough type of concrete tub with some 10 taps and shower rose above and on each side, for 20 kids simultaneously. This was all highly inconvenient as the taps were so high that some of the smaller could not even reach it and to wet one's toothbrush without being soaked was absolutely impossible. There was no other way to have a was, no way to use warm water, except in the showers, to which we had access in rotation, once a week. I must confess, that I went through my two years without once having a shower, - I was petrified of somebody discovering that I was circumcised.

Luckily for me I was suffering a great deal from dermatitis (I wonder why?) and the doctor prescribed salt bath's. The only bath was in the sick bay or hospital, where the nuns were ruling the roost and here I was quite safe even in the nude.

In our dormitories we were inspected by the priests throughout the night who came and walked through shining their torches and checking on us. Beside our beds we each had a cabinet which contained our slippers and all of our personal belongings we were allowed to keep close to us. This excluded our underwear and clothing, which were kept in a different building by the nuns. We were allowed to have two uniforms, one to wear during the week and the other to parade in on Sundays and while out of the college.

Click for me in uniform.The method of changing over from one uniform to the other was as antiquated and designed to cause the most inconvenience as all other portions of our regimented life. The night before our having to wear our best uniform, we had to go to the building where the nuns lived and where our clothing was kept. Long queues formed to pick up the uniforms, collarless shirts and the hard celluloid military collar together with our hat and white pigskin gloves. In winter our overcoat was handed to us also.

Having picked up our dress uniforms, we had to store them in predetermined order on the foot of our beds and next morning we had to dress and deliver the school uniform and our dirty washing to the nuns. This took up to 45 minutes again and sometimes we got soaking wet while running across to the building where we had to queue to be dealt with by the nuns.

We were not allowed out of the building unless we were picked up by a parent on a Sunday morning. If we were not deserving this privilege, we found out that we cannot go at the time when our parents were ready to sign us out. There was no reason why we could not have been told days earlier, except that this method was more cruel and allowed us all to be terrorised right up to the time when we got out of the building.

When my cousin died, my Father rung the College Principal, and the saintly gentleman immediately agreed that I should be allowed to attend the funeral. I was called into his office, but it was his secretary who advised me that a cousin of mine died and that I should get dressed in my uniform and be ready to go to the funeral. I was not told which cousin died and I was neither consolled nor counselled. I could have been advised to go to a party with the same tact as I was told to go to my cousins funeral.

By the time our chauffeur arrived to pick me up I was ready, except that I was not allowed to go with the chauffeur, it was only parents who could pick up their sons. I could not contact my Father because I wasn't allowed to make a telephone call and I was not allowed an audience with the Reverend Principal, because he was resting. Finally, after telling me that George died, our chauffeur had the good sense of driving back for my Father, who had to drop everything a few hours before the funeral, get to the school and sign me out. During this period I sat on a chair on my own at the gate mourning my third cousin and friend, George Graf. Not until we were at the cemetery did I find out that it was my cousin George László who passed away.

My Mother went through my two years without once visiting the school or the college. She absolutely refused to have anything to do with it. On the other hand my Father came to collect me every Sunday morning and sat in the Chapel on the balcony through Mass. On more than one occasion he signalled to me what the war situation really was and I well remember the Sunday in June 1941 when the Germans invaded Russia. Looking down at the congregation and his uniformed son, Father went through the motions of wringing the neck of a chicken and I knew that something unpleasant is happening to the Germans. I did not realise that it is the Russians who were at the receiving end, whereas my father immediately saw that the involvement of the USSR means the hastening of Germany's defeat. The entry of USA into the war, following Pearl Harbour was signalled by Father in the same fashion some months later.

Even though the Germans and Japanese were attacking and winning and the Russians and Americans were retreating, for Father everything including all territories being occupied by the Germans and Japanese meant just a step towards the inevitable victory of the Allies, or us. At no time during the war was there any question where our total loyalties were, the Allies certainly included us.

It was quite interesting for me to be in both camps every week. On Sunday I was in the camp of the Allied and very secretly listening to the BBC. The rest of the week I was bombarded by the news from the Hungarian Radio, which was more pro-German at that time than Radio Berlin. The priests and almost all the pupils were intoxicated with the German and thus Hungarian victories and since quite a lot of the kids were either relations or even children of Generals and Ministers and MP's it was advisable not to barrack for an allied victory while at the college.

Due to the fact that not all the priests teaching me were being paid to look after my marks, I did poorly and thus it was no surprise that I was going to fail a few subjects at the end of my second year in that institution. I was called in to see the priest who was responsible for my class and told that I will fail that year. I said that I was planning to leave school that year, an offer which my teacher could not refuse.

When later that year I received my results and found that I had not failed, I had to stand by my agreement and thus called a taxi, got some mates to help me carry out my mattress and linen and arrived home. Mother knew that this will cause drama and indeed it did. Father was having a nervous breakdown when he realised that once again I arranged things without consultation with him. There was no way in which he could make the school take me back, especially as I have even disposed of my school uniforms, having sold them to the small tailor opposite the school, who made a living buying up the uniforms of the outgoing students and recycling them.

That summer holiday I was to spend working in the factory, where Father's Medicago hammer mills were being manufactured. The factory was two and a half hours away from our luxurious home on the hill, I had to get up at 4 a.m. to get there. I got home around 7 p.m. After a while even Father saw that his 15 years old son deserved better and allowed me to quit.

The rest of the holiday I had to spend with an escaped French Prisoner of War, who was spending the days with me and was supposed to return to the internment camp in the evening. The idea was that I should practice my French, but he found the maids in the neighbourhood to be better pupils, so they saw more of him, day or night.

Father had no difficulty in finding the right contacts to get me back into the same school where I spent 3 years before I went to Switzerland. In fact the living standard of the teachers must have dropped considerably during the years I was not there and Father did not pay for their assistance in getting me through exams without giving me an education.

The method of education was shocking, even for those who were interested. At the end of class the teachers advised us which portion of the book has to be learned and then next time they called up one of the pupils, who had to recite what he learned, his marks were noted and when the class was nearly over, our teacher again advised us what we need to learn for next class and that was education in most of the subjects. It was surprising therefore, when a good teacher, could get a bad pupil to do well. I had one teacher who taught mathematics and algebra and he was interested in getting me to understand things. Thus I became quite interested in mathematics, - probably in the top 3 in our class. In latin, history, even German, which I spoke almost perfectly, I was an utter failure and refused to learn my poems or dates or vocabulary.

In all fairness, the method of teaching could not be entirely at fault as regards I am concerned. Sitting with me in the same class listening to the same teachers were pupils who have done better than I did and became scientists, doctors, musicians, etc. One person in particular should be mentioned here as having benefited from the education I regarded and still regard as being wrong for someone like me.

John Kemeny was a classmate of mine and I clearly remember him as being outstanding in all the subjects we were supposed to learn. He left for the United States in 1939 and after the war we heard that he was involved in the development of the atom bomb as a mathematician, - at the age of 17. Later he became Albert Einstein's assistant and in 1962 as Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth, he and another Professor devised the BASIC language for computers. Because of this he is regarded as the father of micro computing as the development of the BASIC language enabled microcomputers to become a popular reality.

Thus he and I shared the same basic education, - we just used it in differing fashion.

 

 

LULL BEFORE THE STORM

These were war years and the Hungarian Army had started to get involved in the war. To their surprise they found that there was more to war than harassing the population in occupied territories. Having marched through Poland and into Russia behind the all-conquering German Army, the poorly equipped Hungarians could only act as occupational forces and to guard POW's. They were also great in terrorising the population and torturing the Hungarian Jews, who were called up into the Army, given a yellow armband and a soldier's cap (with the Hungarian emblem taken off it) and sent to Russia, with even less clothing and supplies than the regular Army.

The lives of these Jewish men in the labour battalions was sheer hell. They were starved, overworked, tortured, mistreated, and they froze and died in their thousands. The Army officers and privates who were in charge of them were either cruel to them, or were punished by being sent into the line as being unsuitable for the work they were given. In some cases, members of these labour battalions were sprayed with water in minus 25 temperatures, freezing instantly. In at least one case, some German soldiers fought and shot some Hungarian army people trying to save the Jews from being mistreated. These Hungarian soldiers were there to get the most out of the Jewish labourers and were nothing short of being sadistic guards. No soldier was ever court martialled for causing the maiming or death of a fellow Hungarian, if he happened to be a Jew.

No wonder that whenever a Jew could get away and join a Partisan group he did so. Not many could. The Russian underground did not recruit its partisans amongst starving Hungarian Jews and they were kept in areas where contact with the population was almost impossible.

When the Russian winter offensives started to take their toll on the Germans, they realised that they needed all the gun fodder they could muster. Therefore they decided to allow the Hungarians, Rumanians and the other hangers-on to fight in the front line. Being badly clothed, and equipped even worse, they were an ineffective fighting force, and within days of joining in the defence of occupied Russia, the Hungarian force was almost completely wiped out. The Hungarian Army was destroyed on the banks of the Don river, while the Rumanians found their nemesis in Stalingrad.

It was thought that as long as our Admiral headed our Hungary, we Jews would be safe. Sure, there were some who were in labour battalions in Russia, but after all weren't the Hungarian soldiers in Russia also? At least no one shoots at the Jew. How would we have known what was happening to those forced labourers in Russia? There was no communication between the inhabitants of the labour camps of Russia and their relations in Hungary, except rare messages brought illegally by the soldier-guards, who were bribed to call on the wives and parents, and who were not about to explain the terrible times their victims were having in faraway frozen Russia.

All this time Budapest was almost untouched by war. People ate well and often; the restaurants with their gipsy music continued to attract the inhabitants of Budapest who had plenty of money. Even the Jews of Budapest enjoyed the quiet before the storm and if there were some stifling regulations against them, these were regarded as the Hungarian Government's way of satisfying the Germans.

I continued to holiday with my Aunt and Uncle in the village of Szölösgyörök and with Eva, we spent a lot of time yachting and sunbaking on the beaches of Lake Balaton.

As far as the situation in Hungary was concerned, it was realised that in comparison with some other areas in Europe we in Hungary didn't have it too bad. Sure, there were regulations about the percentage of Jewish employees any company could employ, but you could always employ a Jew and pay him in cash. No Hungarian Jew needed to be hungry, and all the news about Jews being shot in Poland and Russia were just rumours, - or were they?

Whatever our problems, they were an acceptable portion of living in a war. It is the extras, which only some people experienced that made us feel insecure. For instance in the summer of 1942 some acquaintances in their early twenties organised a summer holiday camp for some 18 or 20 young people. Our ages were between 12 and 17, and we went by train to a small village not far from Budapest where a peasant's house was rented for us. We were happily enjoying the fresh air and long walks when on the 2nd day of our stay 4 gendarmes arrived and asked what we were doing there and what our religion was.

After hearing the answers, they gave us one hour to pack, made us pick up our luggage and with bayonets fixed and the four of them surrounding us, marched us through the village to the station, waited till the train arrived and sent us back to Budapest. There was no regulation or law which did not allow a bunch of teenagers to have a holiday in the country, but seeing that the gendarmes told us to leave our prepaid holiday meant that we had to go. There was just no argument, nor would we have dared to make one.

My mother's cousin, Andrew Pór, came back from Russia, where he was in the Army, not as a labourer but as a sergeant. Due to an administrative error, he was not recognised as being racially inferior, and he wasn't about to argue about being a sergeant instead of being mistreated as a forced labourer. He showed us photographs of Polish Jews floating in the Vistula; he told us about seeing thousands of Jews being driven into the forests, hearing the shooting and no one returning, even told us about the mass graves. We did not believe it, Cousin Andrew Pór was always a bit of a lad for making an impression[10].

It could have been uncomfortable to realise what was going on around us. It was so much easier to believe, that it couldn't happen to us. In any case even the pessimists had to agree that things in Budapest could not have been better. It was rumoured that Polish born Jews and those who escaped from Poland were rounded up and sent back to Poland to stay in camps, but however much this may be regretted, it was understandable, and in any case, what was the difference between being in a camp or in the ghetto or in hiding. It would not last long, the Germans were going to lose soon.

It was in the summer of 1943 that having worked during my school vacations in a ball bearing factory, (where I was actually paid a wage,) that I had my first holiday on my very own. I was 17, going on 25 and looked older than my age and was not only trying to act older, but succeeding at it. I joined Leslie Pór, a second cousin of mine at a holiday resort on Lake Balaton and when I was not mucking about with girls or playing poker I was getting high on red wine.

Balatonlelle, where we stayed, was full of young fellows like me and the not so young wives of the men who were being mistreated in labour battalions in Russia. Not that we knew what was going on 3000 kilometres to the east. The fact was that we were there, and we were available, and all of us were in a hurry to live our lives. It might end sooner than we thought.

Soon after I returned to Budapest, where I had to serve in the Fire brigade, Father was asked to supply a silage chopper to the Royal Farm.

Forever the PR man, he suggested that maybe Admiral Horthy. the Regent of Hungary might like to see a demonstration of this machine. To every one's astonishment the outrageously cheeky suggestion was accepted, and the demonstration became an official happening. The Kálmán lot consisted of Father, myself and Agocs, who started with us as a chauffeur, became a spare parts packer, then a demonstrator, storeman, chief of the warehouse, and in 1944 I arranged for him to be appointed Managing Director of my Father's Company.

Arriving at the Gödöllö Royal Farm, with the assistance of a large number of farm labourers and with the help of a number of farm overseers, the three of us set up the chopper, driven by a large tractor and as soon as that was ready we were briefed by the various officers on how we should line up on the arrival of His High Excellence Admiral Horthy and his wife. About an hour before the appointed time, some more dignitaries arrived and finally, preceded by motorcycle escorts, riding in a majestic Horch car arrived the Regent, with his wife, two Aide-de-Camps, both Generals, and followed by a car load of police. In fact the police outnumbered all the others on this visit he was making not in enemy territory, but on his farm. The Regent and the Generals and other officers were in their best uniforms, only Peter Agocs and I were in working overalls, but we had no speaking parts.

It was at this demonstration of the Robur, later to be manufactured in England and renamed Robust, that Admiral Horthy explained his pride in Hungarian Jews. He seemed very interested in the machine and in the silage making process and was only concerned that the cattle which were consolidating the silage by walking over it should not contaminate it.

When it was time for him to go, he came over to us and shook our dirty hands and thanked us very politely for the demonstration[11]. He also spoke to the farm labourers, who happened to be Croatians, addressing them in their own language.

While saying good bye to Father he instructed his farm manager to get another machine for his private farm at Kenderes, and invited Father to come and be present when it was installed. In fact three weeks later, another meeting took place between Horthy and Father, at which not only his wife, but also the young widow of his late son, were also present[12].

Horthy's son died on the Russian front piloting a fighter aircraft. He was the Deputy Regent of Hungary and groomed to take over from his father. It was immediately rumoured that his aircraft was "doctored" to crash, since the Germans were not enthusiastic about Horthy's attempts to establish a dynasty. After the war Father had dinner with his widow in England, where she lived, married to an English officer.

A few days after the excitement of rubbing shoulders with the Regent of Hungary, I developed a nasty cold; it became pneumonia, pleurisy and finally a lung ailment. As I had a heart problem as a child, it was thought that I was lucky that no further heart troubles developed, but I was sick enough to have had to retire for a three months period into a Sanatorium on a mountain just outside Budapest. It was one of the happiest periods of my formative years.

There was peace and quiet and a purpose in my life. All I had to do was to put on weight, and in this I was assisted by daily injections and very good food. I was also enjoying the attention of all the many friends I made on my holiday at Lake Balaton, and I became good friends with my Mother's stepbrother, who by that time was a communist and had spent some time in prison, due to some literary effort which was less than popular with the authorities.

Luckily, he was prosecuted instead of put into an internment camp and forgotten and after being convicted, he was sent to prison. Due to influence by my father and also due to his lung problems he served his time in the prison hospital. When not in prison he was a clerk and a contributor to literary magazines but he also spent long periods in hospital. He thus understood my worries about my own illness, which we feared might develop into tuberculosis. He was a very gentle fellow with a high intellect, who had always been interested in me and who was always interesting to talk to. He treated me an equal and I appreciated it.

My step-uncle Zoltán was probably the only member of our family with a real interest in politics and with a political conscience. He was also very knowledgeable as regards history and thus it was no surprise that in August 1939 on hearing that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed a non-aggression pact he forecast that the next step will be a war between Germany and Russia. We had to wait almost 3 years, but his forecast became a fact.

His visits to me in the sanatorium were always most informative because he could explain matters to me in terms which I could understand and learn from. That he was guiding me towards socialistic ideas was obvious and as all 17 years old I was quite ready for such ideas, even if I was not ready to go to prison for my beliefs.

Also in the same sanatorium was a well known poet, Gábor Devecseri. Although he was an "old" man of 28, we became quite friendly and I enjoyed his company, his poems and his stories. I was busy writing poetry, which he criticised cruelly. After the war he became really famous and he died in his early forties suffering from lung cancer.

By February 1944 I put on sufficient weight and was well enough to return to the fray by rejoining my parents in Town and returning to school. Since 1941 we lived in a flat on the Pest side of the City, having let our home on the hill to Kálmán Pataky, a famous opera singer, who paid his rent seldom, but when he did we had to pick it up in person from the ticket office of the Royal Opera House, where the rent was awaiting us together with 2-3 first row tickets.

Pataky lived in our house with his wife, various maids and butlers and his father-in-law, Oszkár Beregi, a well known classical actor, who happened to be Jewish. In the stair case of our old home hung some of the wreath' the famous tenor collected throughout his travels and amongst them was one from a certain Herr Adolf Hitler, with a large swastika on its ribbon. Little did Hitler know that the main aim and object of hanging his wreath was for the purpose of allowing an elderly Jewish Shakespearian actor sleep more peacefully, believing that Hitler's name on the ribbon will save him.

Pataky managed to leave Hungary even before the war ended and the family travelled to Argentina where he was as famous as in Hungary and Germany. Eventually he and his family settled in Holywood and it was from there that his wife brought her husband's and father's ashes back to Hungary in 1983 to be buried in graves donated by the Hungarian Government.

 

 

OCCUPATION

It was on the morning of Sunday, March 19th, 1944 that I answered the telephone. The strange man introduced himself as Uncle Gábor and told me to get in touch with my Father immediately, and tell him that what he discussed last week had now happened. Click. The telephone went dead.

I rang Father, who was at the same swimming pool he visited every day for some 30 years and told him the cryptic message from the strange man. He told me that both Mother and I should stay at home until he got back. Within 20 minutes he was back home and told us that the man was General Gábor Gerloczy, the senior ADC to Horthy, and that the message meant that the Germans had either occupied Hungary or were in the course of occupying it now.

So that was that, the Germans have occupied Hungary. What's next?

What really happened was that Horthy was invited to another visit to Hitler. When he arrived at Hitler's HQ in his Admiral's outfit with a small silver dagger on his belt, the first ominous sign was the invitation of the SS Officer that he should take off his belt and leave it in the cloak room. Hitler was at first quite friendly, but eventually he started to shout at Horthy about how Hungary wasn't pulling its weight in the sacred war against the Russians. Finally he advised Horthy that the German army had occupied strategic places in Hungary and the action will continue until the whole of Hungary is secured. Horthy decided to leave and asked for a car to go to his train, but Göring arranged for a make belief air raid, and thus immobilised Horthy's train until such time that they could check how the occupation of Hungary was going.

It went well, and without a bullet being fired, they took over the country. Some days earlier a lot of German students came for their holiday to Hungary, also a lot of German soldiers happened to be travelling through Hungary to Russia and occupied Yugoslavia. There were also a lot of other soldiers seemingly returning to Germany, who were also in transit through Hungary on this March Sunday. All these Germans who were accidentally in Hungary on that day, suddenly acted and occupied predetermined points throughout the country and mainly in Budapest. Simultaneously plane loads of SS arrived at various airports in Hungary, and of course the Hungarians did not fire on their allies.

In the city, German patrols took up their positions. Some occupied the radio station and transmitter, others guarded the railway stations, while the ministries and army offices were all surrounded by SS tanks. By midday the country had been taken over completely. By the time Horthy returned next day, he had nothing else to do except to accept the resignation by phone of Prime Minister Kállay, who has taken up refuge in the Turkish Embassy and appoint a new one, who happened to be the appointee of Hitler.

For us there was nothing to do but to wait and we did not have to wait long.

In less than a week regulations were gazetted in the papers and stuck on the walls of buildings. Jews must not leave their home between the hours of 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., must not travel in cars, must travel in the rear of trams, must not go further than 5 kilometres from their home, must not shop at times other than between 3 - 4 p.m., etc. All cameras and radios owned by Jews had to be delivered to the nearest police station, (where police made a list of all those radios, which were capable of being tuned to the BBC). All jewellery, gold or silver and all pocket and wrist watches owned by Jews had to be delivered to the nearest bank, where receipts were given.

Of course not all regulations were carried out by the Jews. Some had already hidden their valuables, some began handing their valuables to gentile friends, who were to keep them until "it's over". In our case, we already had a very large cache of gold (1002 sovereigns and about 4 kg of gold) buried in the courtyard of my uncle's house, where there should be no danger of bombs or other risks associated with possible fighting, (or so we thought). Various gentile friends, customers, employees, etc were now approached by Father to hold in custody various other valuables. Some (certainly not all) actually returned these to us after the war.

There were many more regulations, but none as insidious than that which ensured that every one knew, who was who, and ordered Jews to wear at all times a 10 cm large yellow star, which must be sewn firmly onto the left side of every jacket, overcoat, pullover, etc. In case there might be any doubt, the population was encouraged to report any people, who while wearing their "mark of shame" did not act in accordance with the regulations.

The newspapers and special magazines began their campaign of anti-semitism by feeding unbelievable rubbish to their readers. Jews were described as monsters who killed gentile children to use their blood in the unleavened bread of their Passover. It was printed in papers that Jews raped blond Aryan girls and murdered them as part of their religious dogma and also because it is their favourite pastime, and because they had exploited the population difficult conditions resulted. The war, the shortages of materials and food was all due to the misdeeds of International Jewry, directed by the Churchill and Roosevelt, both of whom were described as Jewish.

Thousands of prominent Jews disappeared as soon as the Germans take over Hungary; hundreds were tortured by the Gestapo. One of the most notorious places in Budapest, where Adolf Eichmann and other SS organisations operated was the same Sanatorium, where some weeks ago I recuperated. Some of the Jews in German hands disappeared without a trace; some reappeared in internment camps run by the Hungarians, some were made to pay huge sums of money for safe passages, only to find themselves in Bergen Belsen instead of the Switzerland they were promised.

Some prominent Hungarian Jews were sent to Turkey to negotiate with the Allies for the supply of 1000 American trucks in exchange for all the Hungarian Jews, an offer which at 1 truck per 900 Jews was considered too high a price to pay. In any case, who the heck wanted 900,000 Jews? The offer made was rejected by the Allies and the delegates who were sent to Turkey, returned to Hungary, to face Eichmann's fury.

A few days after the initial lot of regulations, more are published: All Jews, who were not permanent residents of Budapest were required to return to their homes, while certain areas in Budapest were declared Ghettoes, where all the Jewish population had to move.

My cousin Eva was faced with having to travel to her village to join her parents. Mother thought she should stay with us, while Father was too frightened to suggest anything other than what the regulations dictated. Mother later accused him of causing Eva's death in Auschwitz. The picture shows Eva on her 21st birthday. She died the day before her 22nd.

Almost daily new regulations were announced. The food rations of Jews were reduced. No Jew was allowed his own business. All Jewish-owned businesses had to be managed by an Aryan. No Jew was allowed to work in other than manual jobs, and than only if they did not hold a superior position to a Gentile.

We happened to have lived in an area and in a house where Jews had to congregate. Within a few days we had to take in as many as 11 additional people into a flat which had 3 rooms in all, including the bedroom. By that time Father was in prison, and soon after I was to be mobilised into the army.

 

 

GROWING UP FAST

In early April 1944 I was still at school, supposed to matriculate in June. However, by mid-April Jews were forbidden to go to school, which was the first and last of the anti-jewish measures which had my wholehearted support.

Rumours abounded, and one of these suggested that females who were married need not go to forced labour camps. Thus the greengrocer in our block of flats approached Mother and asked for my hand in marriage, - to his daughter. Without inspecting my bride to be, whom I never met, I declined the honour.

Another rumour was that as long as you were an apprentice you'll be allowed to finish your course. It was decided that I should become an apprentice lathe turner and Father and I went to the appropriate Government department to obtain their permit.

That was the first day when we had to wear our yellow star and obviously we were apprehensive about the reception we shall get from people on the street. The reaction was not easy to perceive as it was almost non-existent. People looked at us with some curiosity, but we were ignored and every body kept away from us. We were relieved to note that there was no hostile reaction to us, although we heard later that in some other places there were attacks on Jews by extremists. However, on that first day even we, who mercifully were ignored, definitely noticed a distinctive gulf between us who were marked with the Star of David and "they" who used to be our co-patriots and who suddenly regarded us as lepers.

I become an apprentice turner in a small factory. Mother sewed on another yellow star onto my overalls, we found a canvas satchel to hang across my left shoulder to carry my lunch in and I was ready to become a turner. My job on the first day was to stand beside the lathe and watch the foreman turner turning and listen to his verbal diarrhoea about matters concerning the bloody Jews.

Just before evening I was instructed to warm some water and pour it into a basin. My boss washed his hands and face and invited the other four working for him to do likewise. When they had all finished he spat into the water and advised me that the water was now mine to wash myself in. Instead of water I washed my hand in kerosene.

The next day was just as instructive and the water was being spat into just before it was my turn to wash myself.

The third day my boss didn't realise that I spat into the water before he washed himself in it. Just the same he delivered his spit before my turn came and thus I continued to use kerosene to clean my hand, which caused a severe case of dermatitis.

One evening as I returned from work I found Mother hysterical. Earlier that day two gendarmes came to collect Father and took him away to a small village, where he had "de-centralised" some of his agricultural machinery stock. In spite of the fact that the gendarmes assured Mother that he was not being arrested, the reputation of the fascist gendarmes was such that they struck terror in even the innocent.

After he had spent three days in a village lock up the gendarmes brought Father home. Without them he could not have travelled on a train.

He explained to us the reason for his problems. Many months ago the Ministry of Industries circularised all agricultural machinery manufacturers and importers and instructed them to store all important, difficult-to-replace components away from Budapest, to protect them from bombing raids. Father took lorry loads of ball bearings, plough shares and all sorts of other materials to several farms, and in one case stored some ball bearings in the disused cellars of a vineyard.

Everything was above board, but someone saw the lorry arrive, and remembered it after the German occupation, when people were encouraged to report anything which seemed secret, unpatriotic or strange. The gendarmes investigated, and deduced that they had unmasked a huge judeo-capitalist-communist conspiracy and were in any case interested to visit Budapest, hence their taking of Father into custody. They were quite hostile when the magistrate accepted his explanation and refused to prosecute him.

However they must have received new advice and a few days later they returned, and this time they arrested Father and took him to the prison in the township of Eger. He was housed in solitary confinement, and it was only a couple of days after his arrival in prison that he could send a message to us as to his whereabouts. By that time I was spending money and engaging the help of non-Jewish connections in trying to find him and getting things moving to free him from jail and was working on how we can send him food.

Just as Father was arrested, the latest regulations prescribed that all Jewish businesses must be taken over by a non-jewish business or person. Action had to be taken fast, because a number of Father's competitors had put themselves forward to the authorities as being the best people to take over Father's business, including its assets, all of it for nothing. I myself had discussions with 3 or 4 competitors, who came looking for Father, but found that he was in prison and an 18 year old boy is in charge. They seemed sympathetic, but really all they were interested in taking advantage of the situation.

I realised that I had to find somebody to take over Father's Company, who was on our side and could be trusted. Somebody suggested Peter Agocs, our erstwhile chauffeur, who was then a corporal in the Army. I contacted his wife, somehow we contacted him, and he came home on compassionate leave. I explained that I would like him to "take over" the firm and he agreed. The next thing was to get him out of the Army, and Father's kind patron General Gerloczy obliged by pulling the necessary strings. Next Agocs put in a bid to become the owner on behalf of the State of the firm of Kálmán József, which was successful as I gave him the money to bribe the person whose responsibility was to appoint the new Managing Directors of Jewish enterprises.

He came back into the office, sat down at Father's desk and told me that he was successful and he also told me that things would be different from now on and would I please keep out of the office in the future. This was somewhat disappointing, coming as it did from somebody who was supposed to have been in the Kálmán family's service most of his life and who knew the dire straits we were in, but we were used to that sort of disloyalty.

However, Agocs was more cunning than I gave him credit for. Later that day he appeared at our home and told me that he would do everything for us, but we must appear to be remote from the business, so as to keep him out of trouble. He kept his word and was a true friend throughout this period.

Just the same, having been thrown out of Father's office earlier that day without the opportunity to remove some valuables and money, which were hidden in the cellar of the office amongst some agricultural spare parts and not being absolutely sure of Agocs' loyalty next day, I sneaked out of our flat and ran all the way to the office.

It was dark on the streets, there was a blackout and it was in the middle of the curfew imposed on Jews. I did not wear the yellow star, and if I would have been stopped, I would have had no excuse. I got to the office and let myself in. There, in total darkness, I descended into the cellar by climbing through the lift well, found some of the valuables, but not the money, and returned back to our block of flats, where once more I hid them, this time tied onto the lid of the toilet cistern. Over the next few days I sold some, while the rest were picked up for safe keeping by some Gentile acquaintances.

If Father being a jailbird was not enough, one morning at 5 a.m. two policemen armed with machine-guns, came for me and I too was arrested. Mother was out of her mind, and of course neither I nor the policemen knew why I had been arrested. We all thought that my arrest is connected with Father's "crime". I was taken to a police station and from there to the school where I was no longer allowed to continue being a schoolboy.

It turned out that I had been arrested because I did not attend the pre-Army youth training. I explained that because of my racial inferiority I was not a member of the youth army (levente, i.e. similar to the Hitler Youth organisation), and in any case I was a member of the Fire Brigade, which was a substitute. They agreed that bringing me in was a mistake, but did not release me until a few minutes before curfew. In the meantime, Mother packed my clothing, blankets, food, etc, went to the police station and finally traced me to the school, where I found the food that she brought me very welcome.

Being in the Fire Brigade was not particularly pleasant. We had to serve the same way as the professional firemen, except that we did not get the same equipment, and for us it was a side line. I spent lots of nights waiting for a good fire and some of the times my patience was rewarded. One night we were involved in putting out some fires after an air raid. It was quite dangerous, and while our face and body were guarded by clothing, being left out our ears were cooked in the heat.

We were also confronted with the victims of the air raid and while I always felt happy when Budapest was bombed, I could not help but be sorry for the dead and injured and in spite of my pleasure of being bombed I was frightened when the bombs were falling. Any action by any of the allies against the fascists was welcome by us, even if it endangered our lives. We were much rather at the receiving end than noticing no action at all.

The town of Eger, were Father was incarcerated, was some 150 km north of Budapest. My Father's connection with Eger was that he was the supplier of most if not all the machinery requirements of the huge farm owned by the Roman Catholic Bishopric, which was the single biggest industry of Eger. After a few days in prison, Father was able to send a message to the chief farm manager, who in turn advised the Bishop of the illustrious prisoner, albeit racially inferior, in the local prison.

The Bishop, who may or may not have met Father, but who must have been a man of compassion and courage, then arranged for their solicitor to visit the prison, and Father engaged this kind, old and rather sleepy gentleman to defend him concerning whatever crime he would be charged with. The Bishop also instructed his staff to ensure that Mr Kálmán received food from the kitchens of the local hotel.

With all this attention, the prison authorities realised that they had an important guest and while they could not move Father from his solitary cell, they gave him a day-time servant in the shape of a young gipsy, who happened to be in prison for armed robbery. They also allowed Agocs, when he arrived in his Army uniform, to visit Father and spend a day with him in his cell.

After a while the prosecutor started to ask questions, and the official written charges were formulated and given to him. They were quite simple, Father was accused of sabotage, because he had hidden ball bearings and other material required for Hungary's war production. His defence, that he was instructed to remove the materials was not accepted, because it referred to agricultural machinery parts only and in any case he did not report the location of the material he removed from Budapest, where it was endangered.

Sabotage in time of war carried the death penalty, and you did not have to be Jewish to get the rope in Hungary.

Back in Budapest, I was busy in trying to amass a lot of cash which we felt might be required for bribes. I knew that somewhere in the cellar of the office there was a large amount of money hidden, which I failed to find on an earlier expedition. I was worried to ask Peter Agocs to try and find it and bring it to me. However well he behaved towards us, - you never knew. Finally, one night after curfew, I sneaked out once again, and using our old keys, I "broke" into our business and having had a torch on me, found and "stole" our money, which then had to be re-hidden in the flat.

With the help of General Gerloczy an agreement was reached with the Prosecutor in Eger, that he would ask for a life sentence only. The cost of the bribe was to be an amount equivalent to approximately $3-4,000 at a time when the annual salary of that Prosecutor may have been all of $1,000. The problem was how to advise Father that the Prosecutor had been bribed and would co-operate.

The solicitor from Eger wrote to us putting our mind at rest as to Father's physical well-being, but could give us little hope as regards his chances of being acquitted. However, he assured us that he would do his best at the forthcoming preliminary hearing which should take place 5 weeks after his arrest. Father's solicitor did not know of General Gerloczy's arrangement with the prosecutor either. It was getting very complicated and very worrying.

We arranged for Agocs to visit Eger again, to tell Father about the arrangements and to take some good clothing to Father for his court appearance and to stay in the town during the court hearing, which was to last two days.

The day before the Court sat, the German Gestapo arrived at the prison and asked for all Jews to be handed over. The prison authorities did so, but advised Eichmann's Gestapo assistants to come back for Father later, as he could not be handed over to them until he had attended the court next day.

It was at this time that all Jews outside Budapest were first concentrated in the confined space of local Ghettos and then, as rail trucks became available, were deported to Auschwitz for gassing and the crematorium, or work and probable death by starvation. The Gestapo in Eger, with the active and enthusiastic help of the Hungarian gendarme and other authorities, came for the Jews in the prison to concentrate them in the Ghetto prior to loading them into the cattle trucks, which were ready to roll.

Had the court in Eger not required the appearance of Father next day, they would have taken him to in Auschwitz. Two days later they were not interested, for the transports had left and the organisers of the death transports were off to another town to arrange the deportation of some other Jews.

Because of delays in reaching Eger, Peter Agocs could not visit Father before his court appearance, although his suit and shirt reached him. The message that the Prosecutor had been bought could not be passed on to him and he was brought into court believing that he was fighting for his life. During the hearing he decided that the kind old solicitor was too polite and mealy-mouthed for him, and so Father sacked him, took over his own defence and to the surprise of the solicitor, the prosecutor and himself, proved his innocence, so that the judge declared him not guilty of all charges and set him free.

His next problem was how to travel back to Budapest, especially because by the time he was released the last train left. He finds that he was not allowed to stay in a hotel overnight, because no Jew was allowed the privilege of being a hotel guest. In any case he was the only Jew in the town of Eger, all the others having been deported.

To overcome their dilemma, Father and Agocs returned to the prison, where the kindly prison warden allowed him to sleep in his old cell, and even placed a second bunk in there for Agocs. Next morning, Agocs, who travelled in his Army uniform brought him back to Budapest as his "prisoner". His return to his family after 5 weeks of solitary imprisonment was regarded as an absolute miracle. But then those days were full of miracles and it seemed that every day alive was another miracle.

The day after Father returned regulations were posted, calling up all Jews, including those who were part Jewish or converted, from 18 to 50 to join as members of the infamous Labour Battalions. I was to leave on 5th June and travel to Felsöhangony, a place near the Slovakian border.

With the help of my cousin Bözsi, whose husband was in Russia and thus regarded an expert, I bought the equipment required to become a slave labourer. The place supplying such outfits was believed to be the Scout Shop and after waiting in a queue of hundreds, we left with sufficient camping gear to make an assault on Mount Everest.

The night before my leaving, Father, who was convinced that he would be re-arrested, came to my room, woke me and told me that he and Mother had a discussion in their room, and they had reached the conclusion that the best way out would be suicide. I was told that Mother has sufficient poison for all of us.

I sat up and refused to do it. I explained that at least one of us should come through it all, and there should be somebody to tell John what happened. Father was crying, but he was listening. I wanted his promise that they would not do it without me, come what may. He went back to Mother and I could hear them talking. Finally, he came back to my room and gave me their solemn promise. He sat on my bed until I fell asleep and we never again discussed this topic with each other, although other people have informed me that he told them about the night when I talked them out of our suicide pact.

Next day I had my last breakfast, then my last lunch. It was like the hours before execution. Finally,in the afternoon, it was time to get dressed. I put on my knickerbockers, steel studded boots, and my brand new camping attire. I checked once again to make sure that I had my photographs showing me with Admiral Horthy. They might come handy. I said my good byes to Mother, put on my huge rucksack which had my two blankets rolled on top of it. On my side hung a smaller side bag, and I had a small suitcase in each hand. The only thing I did not need to take was a hat. That would be the one of two items of equipment that my country would provide for me. A soldier's cap, with the Hungarian emblem removed from its peak and an armband, which will not be yellow, but white, to show that I am racially Jewish, but not of the Jewish faith. That is all the equipment I was to receive to go to war!

Father was planning to accompany me as far as the tram stop, so as to give me last minute instructions on how best to survive. I gave and received a final hug from my sobbing Mother and I left for hell knew what. Actually, hell came sooner than I had imagined. Loaded up like a mule, I stepped out on to the marble floor of the staircase outside the flat. My steel studs skidded and my feet went from under me. The huge weight of my rucksack brought me down backwards, and my head just about knocked the bricks out of the wall. However, it was only me who was knocked out cold for a few minutes.

When I come to I find my Mother crying even more, and being joined by Father. I went into a laughing fit or hysterics, call it what you wish. I was reminded of the gipsy who on being taken to his execution on a Monday morning remarks that his week was starting all wrong.

Nursing a huge bump I boarded the tram for the station. It was full with my future comrades who were going to the same station. When we got there, it became obvious that the Allies have nothing to fear from a Hungarian Army, provided it was transported by train. It seemed that nobody in charge had worked out that the 20,000 or so men called to go to the same Army camp, would require more than one train. After spending 4 hours waiting, about 18,000 of us were told to go home and come back tomorrow.

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