LIBERATION

(15th January 1945)

Father and I spent a restless night in our tiny room. We were used to the sound of the cannons and Stalin organs bombarding us, but more and more small arm fire was heard. This could mean only that the front line was approaching us. The weather was freezing cold and we felt it more than ever in our state of constant hunger. It was a relief, when dawn came and we could get up and start to move about in the flat.

As soon as we woke up on the morning of 15th January, we were interested to see some activity on the streets through the windows. German soldiers and officers rushed around on motorcycles, stopped then moved off again. It was some time since we last saw German soldiers and seeing them suggested that something is happening on that miserably cold morning.

At about 7 a.m., I was brushing my teeth in Mrs Eidam's bathroom, when I saw a number of people in a group on the street. Father came to shave himself and he pointed out to me that one of the people in the group wore a similar cap to the one he saw the previous day. I became interested and after a while realised, that there were two men in strange fur caps, wearing strange quilted jackets and having machine pistols with strange circular magazines slung on the backs. The other people around them were Hungarians, talking to them in sign language.

There was no doubt about it, they were Russian soldiers. We are alive, we made it. It's all over. Or is it? Remember the Russians who advanced past Kecskemét, only to retreat and hand it back to the Germans, with tragic results for the liberated Jews?

I wish I could say that we started to jump from joy or that we sung a hymn or that we rushed down to kiss our liberators. We probably were too exhausted to be jubilant and too blase to become anything other than cautious in accepting that there might be a change in our circumstances. In fact, we were so doubtful, that the occupation of our area was permanent, that we told no one in the flat of our sighting Russian soldiers 15 meters away from our window.

However, soon we had a knock on our door and it was our Jewish-Communist-Russian speaking neighbour, wearing a red dress and red scarf, who came to tell us that she was one of the people in the group speaking with the Russians, who are here in force.

We started to believe, when our two Russians started to walk away from the group and proceeded to saunter towards Russia, - towards the East. However, before we had time to start worrying, that the Russians are retreating, we realised that our building was surrounded by lots of Russian soldiers.

Our building was on the corner of two streets and we could overlook both streets from different rooms of the flat. The bathroom gave us a good view of the street leading to the north, where we first saw the Russians and also towards the east. Our room gave us a good view of both east and west (where we could see the Danube, at the end of a street), always provided that we leant out of the window.

Frau Eidam's room was at the other side of the house, from which one could see all four streets, having a bay window facing the corner. From that window you could see towards the west, right down that street that led to the Danube, while we could see towards the south if we stood at the far end of the bay window and squinted towards the left. That was the direction the City was, that was the place where the Germans set up their barricade.

That barricade with its machine guns and cannons, was strangely quiet. We decided to investigate and went to Frau Eidam's room to peep. Yes, the barricade was still there, but deserted. I decided to stick my head out of the window and have a closer look. As I did so, the barricade came alive. A burst of machine gun fire directed towards my head made me decide that I should pull my head in, while I still have it.

Of course the Germans weren't shooting at me. This became obvious when in the middle of the cross roads in front of us, we saw the dead bodies of four Russians, who minutes earlier walked around just as freely as did the two Russians, who were surrounded by the people.

There were lots of Russians in the street with the West to North axis. They were quite safe, being sheltered by the buildings. However, without any orders or fuss, the soldiers moved to both corners of the two buildings that gave them cover and laid down a small arms barrage of fire, that enabled some of the other Russians to rush to the middle of the exposed street and drag their dead comrades back.

They then carried the bodies a little while, put them down and became disinterested in the war. Instead they found bicycles and had great fun riding them and having races in the safety of the buildings between them and the Germans behind the barricades. One lot of Russians even found a Volkswagen and drove it forward and backwards, stopping just short of reaching the cross road where the Germans could have had a shot at the car and the drivers, who had too much fun to die.

Suddenly, a mobile field gun arrived, being pulled by a large number of Russian soldiers, two of whom were women. This we have never seen before, we watched them leaning out through our room's window, when out of nowhere, a number of Hungarian soldiers arrived, with their arms held above their heads. They must have been bailed up in a neighbouring house, in a flat or in a cellar and decided to surrender.

We were interested in the reception they got: to start with nobody took the slightest bit of interest in them and after a while they lowered their arms. The Russians were setting up their field gun, taking off the tarpaulin, pushing it to the corner of our building, then pulling it back and all this time the Hungarian soldiers were in their way. Finally, the reluctant captors got fed up with the Hungarians and pushed them until they understood and went across the street, away from the Russians, who just wanted to get on with their preparations for continuing the war.

Obviously the Russians were waiting for something, probably ammunition, because they were bored with their cannon and with the war in general. Almost from boredom, they went across the street, where the Hungarians were sitting and started to look at their boots and if they found something better than their own, they exchanged them. Also they had a look at the wrist watches of the Hungarians and took those away. There was absolutely no hostility shown by the Russians, if anything there was a form of cameradie which so surprised the Hungarian soldiers, who were given to understand by the German and Hungarian propaganda, that if they surrender they will be shot, that they wanted to kiss and hug their captors.

It suddenly dawned on me, that I was still in my Army uniform and it was time that I became a civilian. I took off my army jacket and put on a suit I had for just such an occasion. The trousers of the suit were used to cover my officers riding boots. Later they were tried on by a Russian, but he found it impossible to put them on and I wore them for many months as my only piece of footwear.

I took my army uniform up to the roof of the building and left it beside a chimney. At the same time I had to get rid of my automatic pistol too. I decided to throw it down a ventilating shaft. Before I did so, I decided to fire it at least once, before I throw it away. I carefully cocked it, held it towards the sky and pulled the trigger. Click, it misfired. I checked it out, pulled the trigger again with the same result. I changed the magazines, fired again but to no avail. Obviously my pistol was a dud one. It was just as well that the Arrow Cross did not come into our room, when I was waiting for them with my pistol, I would have died and not just from embarrassment.

Finally, the Russians must have received their supplies and decided to get on with the war. They shooed the Hungarian soldiers off, without any guards towards the rear, positioned their cannon so that the body of it was in one street, but it was pointing towards the barricade. Father and I were most interested and we were rushing around from one room to the other to see what is going on. In Frau Eidam's room we had the better view of the barricade which we were hoping to see pulverised soon and we could also see the preparations being made to let off the gun.

There was a big picture window in that room right above the field gun and it occurred to me that when the gun is fired, the window might break. I told Father and tried to get him away from the window as I felt that they will fire it any second. We both retired to the far end of the room, and we were waiting for the sound of the gun, but there was nothing happening. Father decided to investigate and stepped back to the window.

I saw the window lift out of its frame, floating up towards the ceiling and then come down, seemingly in one piece, landing and breaking into little pieces on Father's bold head. Then only did the deafening sound of the cannon register. I rushed to Father, who was standing at the empty window, stunned from the noise and from shock. I expected him to keel over and be cut in to slivers or at least have his jugular cut. On the contrary, there was not a solitary sign of blood or bruise. Another one of those miracles, but this one has a perfectly good explanation: contrary to what I believed I saw, the glass has already disintegrated by the time it came down on his head.

The barricade had a lot more damage. After the first shot of the cannon, there was nothing more emanating from the German side, but to make sure the Russians let off a few more, before withdrawing the cannon from its position, covering it with tarpaulin and calling it a day.

It was an exiting day and the night was promising to be just as eventful. As soon as it became known to the Russians that part of the cellar was used as a warehouse for a wine wholesaler, they broke it open and started to drink. Before long they were going from flat to flat searching for women and raping them wherever they were found. Young or old, as long as they were women, were thrown to the ground, held by one and raped by the other one or two or dozens.

The screams of the raped was going on half the night until the women decided that no one, including their husbands, is going to help them or else the Russians became sated. At the time, the victims did not have our sympathies. We felt that it is a welcome change for the others to be on the receiving end and the Russian soldiers probably felt that a bit of raping is what is their right, after what has happened in Poland and Russia[1].

Jewish women were also taken, but they never complained, - they must have been ashamed of their liberators or maybe they felt that this is the least they can do for the people who liberated them.

Next morning we woke up early. We decided to make some enquiries to see if all is clear for us to walk across half of Budapest to the centre, where Mother was. We did not need to make any enquiries, our Romanian friend arrived back from the Hotel Bristol with sad news. His fiancee was killed in the shelter of the hotel, she was incinerated with all her belongings. Only her jewellery was left because he was carrying it for her. The whole hotel burned down, he survived only because he was not in the shelter, when a direct hit of the shelter occurred. The Russians are in full control of the whole city, all German troops having been either killed or they surrendered.

Hearing this Father and I took off immediately. On our way we called in at my Aunt Irma and Paul's cellar. They, including my Grandmother survived. We told them that they are liberated, warned them to hide the girls from the Russians and continued our rush towards the City, where we were hoping to find Mother alive.

There was no need to hurry. We could only go another 150 meters before a kind old bearded Russian did not allow us to go any further. He was trying to tell us about the nemetski, i.e. the Germans, who he pointed out were only across the street. He obviously did not know that the Russians were in control of the whole City. We left him and went ahead, until we came to the Comic Theatre where we had to cross the wide boulevard of St. Stephen.

There was so much firing going on, that we started to look for snipers, but all we could see was a German armoured car shooting at our side. For an army that was non existent, they made a lot of noise. We decided that our Romanian friend was either less than truthful or else he was misinformed and we returned towards our lodgings at Frau Eidam. As we started to run towards the rear, we saw our kind old muzhik, - half his head was missing, he must have been the target of an armour piercing cannon or something.

Getting back to Frau Eidam's flat, we were keen to tell our Romanian friend that he was wrong, but he was not there. While we were away he collected some if not all of his belongings and with his fiancee's jewellery simply disappeared from our life. We often wondered who he really was. There was something mysterious about him: always well dressed, clean, charming, yet he must have been a fraud, like we were. Father actually made inquiries about him, wanting to thank him for saving our life, but neither the Rumanians, nor the Hotel Bristol has ever heard of him. The hotel he told us has burned down was in good shape until demolished 25 years later. We were doubtful as to the shape and condition of his fiance.

Next day, we were off again on the same errand. Our dead Russian friend was still lying unburied on the street and where we were warned by him a day earlier not to cross, on this day we were stopped by Russians who made us work for them, by carrying out telephones from a telephone warehouse and loading them into a truck. Beginning that day and for the next 3 months whatever was not nailed down, was loaded into Russian trucks and trains and transported to Russia.

Only a very small proportion of what they took could have been ever used. For instance the un-boxed telephone handsets were piled up in a corner of the truck and over these we loaded first some cable and then some sort of powder in sacks. Whatever it was it was inedible. We certainly tested it.

When we were finished we were allowed to go on and we wanted to pass in front of the house we used to live in and where our belongings, or what was not pinched, still were. We couldn't, instead of the street there was rubble about two stories high. The school opposite our house had 10 tonnes of explosives in its cellar, which went off with sufficient force to destroy not only the school but also the houses opposite it. One of these houses had our flat on its fourth floor while another of these houses had a street level office which Father had in partnership with an engineer, who was building concrete silos.

We had no desire to waste time and so we bypassed the rubble towards Kálmán Street, where we had just a glance at Father's office and warehouse, which seemed to be almost completely unmarked.

During our trip across town the cannons were just as busy as ever. Father and I played our usual game of identifying each bang with a "This was an outshot" or "This sounded like an inshot" meaning that we were the shooters or that we were the targets. It depended on being a pessimist or an optimist as to what you thought happened.

There was another game we could play: depending on what we thought was the direction from where the shot was coming from, you walked on the side nearest to the assumed source of the shot, believing that side to be the safest. Thus it came about that as we approached a building of which one sixth was owned by Father, we couldn't agree as to which side we should walk on and Father walked on the side of the building which he part owned and I walked on the opposite side.

Suddenly a cannon or rocket landed above Father and heavy chunks of stone fell, missing him by what seemed a few inches only. He couldn't have moved faster to join me on my side and we stood there for a few seconds gazing at the huge gaping hole.

"Damn it," Father said, "my one sixth of that building was just shot away." His statement and sense of humour in those circumstances deserves immortality.

It was snowing heavily and visibility was not very good, but even from that distance we could see that there are a number of people outside the building Mother lived. It seemed that they were congregating outside the gate as if to welcome some Russians. We hurried along, wondering if Mother is alright and if she is amongst the people outside on the street.

Just then a cannon shot landed amongst the people. We could see it lifting the people and dropping them as if they would have been rag dolls. Some of the people seemed to be unhurt and they dragged the injured towards the gate, but left some on the snow believing them to be dead.

We started to run and as we got there saw the blood stained snow, but the bodies left behind were all male. We rushed into the yard, where there was a milling crowd of about 60 people trying to tend to the injured. We asked around: "Where is Csöpi?", "Do you know Csöpi?" believing that Csöpi is the one everybody would know. The second or third person we asked, was a black faced dirty old woman, who recognised us even if we did not recognise Mother.

We kissed and hugged and laughed and cried. Three out of three alive. Is John alive to make it the perfect score?

Mother's black face was due to the fact that she was one of those outside the gate and she was so close to the explosion that her face was blackened by the explosion. We went upstairs into the Reszeli's flat and Father met Zanyu and Csöpi for the first time. We stayed for a while upstairs, but the Germans were bombarding Pest from Buda, which they were still holding. We soon went downstairs into the safety of the courtyard and it was then that Mother saw her first Russian soldier.

Mother just about attacked that Russian, hugging and kissing him on the face and his hands. The poor man didn't know what hit him and he was trying to escape Mother's administrations, while Father and I were trying to hold her back, because of the rape situation, which we did not earlier explain to her. She came to no harm, but for the sake of her chastity decided not to wash her face for a few days.

Father and I left Mother behind and went back to Frau Eidam's place. On the way, we had another look at the heap of rubble that was our flat. It was impossible to know where you are. The whole area was just a huge heap of bricks, timber, broken furniture and plaster, all of it covered by snow. Somewhere under it all were our belongings and Father's office for concrete silos.

In that office was my winter coat and as I stood on top of the rubble I tried to find the location of the office by taking bearings on various landmarks. After moving a few steps I was satisfied that area might be where I should look for and started to shift a few bricks. Suddenly the gray of my winter coat could be seen and Father and I started to throw the rubbish to the side, until my winter coat was free and I was delighted to wear it once again.

Going back we decided to go towards the ghetto and make enquiries about friends and try to find some of them and some members of our families. Outside most of the houses the dead were stacked waiting for the hand carts to collect them. People were still dying in their hundreds of illness and starvation.

Frau Eidam let us in and followed us into our room. She wanted to talk to us about one of her ex-girls and her young man who want to move into the room left vacant by the Romanian. What would our reaction be, she asked us. We didn't understand, until she told us that the young couple were living at an Arrow Cross House until a few days ago.

Father and I had a discussion in private and we decided that we had our lives given to us many times by others and therefore we should this time and only this time give a murderer his chance. We promised Frau Eidam that we shall not report them, but we asked her to make sure that we do not meet them. Next morning, Frau Eidam had a big piece of ham and two eggs each for us. She admitted that it is from "them" and neither of us would eat it, even 'though we were starving.

On another day when we returned to our room at Frau Eidam, we found the bed to have been used in our absence. Frau Eidam very proudly told us that a couple of Russian came looking for women and she took them both on. So satisfied were they with the service provided that they sent two more of their comrades along and she received tobacco and food for her trouble. However, Father was not too keen on his bed being used and in any case it was time for us to become a family unit again.

LIBERATED

Every day we were visiting Mother and at the same time searching for friends and relations. When ever you met somebody even remotely familiar, you stopped and asked about people. It was surprising how fruitful this method was in locating people. It was this way that we found some friends who had a spare room available in their flat for us and we moved in within a week of liberation.

Our room was our home for the next 6 months. We only had one double bed and all three of us slept in it. It was bitterly cold and we slept in our overcoats. We shared the bathroom with the other three families in the flat, but not the kitchen. We all cooked in the courtyard on open fires, until later when we all had our own little wood fired stoves in our rooms.

Our new home was opposite the house where my grandmother lived with her daughter and Paul, Bözsi and Susan. This was handy because we could help each other with food and other exiting things, such as packaging paper, which was given to us, so that we could "glaze" our window with the paper or Father finding a hand grinder when his brother-in-law located some bird seed, that could be ground to be used as flour.

A month ago the Germans were camping in the house where our room was and under a heap of rubbish I found some bread hard as nails and green here and there. Mother cooked it again and again until it could be chewed and we thought it a most satisfying soup.

Every morning I went off to find food or whatever else. It wasn't easy, because the Germans in the hills of Buda were capable of overlooking all the streets that were at right angles to the Danube. To cross those streets was quite dangerous, because the Germans used to position sharp shooters to shoot across the Danube at every person who was to be seen. Thus you either had to walk many extra kilometres to get from one place to the other or else you had to take a great risk and rush across the endangered streets.

The streets were still covered in snow and one day I went out scavenging with one of Father's employees who had a club foot and who could not run. Somehow I had a sledge for the purpose of pulling along the large quantity of loot I was hoping to find. However, realising that Robert will never make it across the street which was being strafed by some German sharp-shooter, I rushed across with a long piece of rope and with the help of some other people pulled him across the street on the sledge. The German must have been so surprised that he omitted to shoot.

Another danger was being sent by some GPU man to Siberia. The GPU or NKDV or the Soviet Security Organisation was charged by Stalin or Beria to get a certain number of prisoners of War's to man the Gulag camps in Siberia. The green capped NKDV officers positioned themselves in empty shops and as a likely candidate for POW-ship came along, they reached out and dragged them in. No amount of explanation helped, you had only two choices: to go Siberia or to escape. I choose the latter a total of three times, the last time I was 25 kilometres out of Budapest and it took me 2 days to get back to Budapest.

These food scavenging trips were sometimes most rewarding. On one occasion I went to a landowner friend of Father's, who refused to give me anything, which I would not have minded, but he and his wife were most offensive. They were still living in the shelter, so after they refused to give me anything I returned upstairs to their flat, found some food in their pantry and pinched a few of their things, such as a fountain-pen and an alarm clock and promptly gave his goodies to a Russian who gave me a rucksack full of carrots, an absolute lifesaver those days.

I was reduced to a weight of 42 kilograms, against my normal weight of about 65 or more and most other people were also reduced to walking skeletons. Perhaps Mother was in the best condition of all of us. At the time she was 51 years old and Father was 53. They appeared to me as rather old and weak people, who needed all the help I could provide. The streets were full of people going round scavenging and we could see people, wearing expensive pieces of clothing, carrying knives, sacks and hand basins, following the starving horses, waiting for them to fall and then cutting them up and carrying the horse meat home for their own families. Although we were hungry too, I never once participated in a horse meat collecting exercise.

A few days after liberation we located the wife of Mother's stepbrother. She was without news of her husband who was later reported to have been executed by the Arrow Cross after a mock trial. Juci was with her two children, Ági who was about 3 and Peter who was less than 6 months old. Agi weathered her deprivation pretty well, but Peter, who was being breast fed by a starving woman, was suffering from being undernourished and obviously in a bad shape.

We searched for a doctor and found our old lady paediatrician, who was reputed to have saved my life when I had diphtheria the second time. She went to see Peter and told everybody that it is most unlikely that he will live, especially as he vomited everything and was too weak even to cry. I understand that he was the same weight at 6 months as when he was born.

One day my find was some brown powder which I found on the ground outside a chocolate factory. Mother recognised it as soy powder and with some water made biscuits from it. We ate some and it was quite good, so we took some biscuits and also some soy powder along to Juci in the hope that she and little Agi can benefit from it. While we were there I gave Peter some biscuit, which was more like a piece of bread than a cake and Peter seemed to swallow it. Seeing this Juci mixed some powder with water and fed it to the baby and surprisingly he did not throw up.

According to our lady doctor, Rella Beck, this was the turning point for my step-cousin Peter, who to-day is a well known research doctor specialising in cancer.

All this time the shooting was going on. The Russians were shooting at the Germans in Buda and they were shooting at everybody they could see. The Germans were fed by air drops and we could see the Junkers 52's making their run and dropping the parcels, some of which actually reached the soldiers in Buda.

On an occasion I saw the Russians shooting down one of the JU 52's. It caught fire and slowly commenced to fall like an autumn leaf. After what seemed ages a parachute appeared, than a second, third and so on. One of the parachutes caught fire and without his parachute the man fell rapidly. Some of the Russian soldiers looked on without much interest, but some got their rifles and machine pistols and started to shoot at the defenceless parachutists.

Early February the Germans decided to break out of encircled Buda and try and reach Germany. The battle went on for quite a few days and those Germans who were not killed, were taken prisoner. Thus within the months of our first being liberated on the outskirts of Pest, the whole of Budapest was occupied and liberated.

We started to reclaim our belongings from the people who were hiding them for us. Some people held on to property by claiming that they never received them for safe keeping, some blamed a Russian for pinching it while the majority delivered the goodies without any problem. My Leica camera, an almost priceless commodity during the war was never returned and Mother lost some of her jewellery through friends who blamed the Russians for pinching them.

I remember that when we asked for it to be returned, the farm manager of Hungary's largest landowner told us that he buried Mother's solitaire under a tree in the country and he cannot return it until they can travel there. Seeing that we gave him the ring after the farm was occupied by the Russians, his excuse was quite fishy. However, after a month of worrying about the bona fide of the man, he returned the ring.

Within our old flat we had our clothing and furniture and they were removed by my latin teacher who took over our flat. It was an easy matter to reclaim these, all we had to do was to visit him, he was surrounded by all our things, furniture, porcelain, paintings, even my dinner jacket. The only thing he didn't take were the family photographs.

Mother's silver cutlery used to be housed in a most elaborate wooden case, which seemed to be more expensive than the cutlery it housed. This also disappeared and my teacher insisted that he never took it. On one occasion when I was sifting through the rubble of our old flat I noticed something gleaming in the sunshine. It turned out to be a fork or knife and I started to shift the dirt to get nearer to where the case was. I found lots of cutlery, but not the box.

It was an unwritten law of the time that one should not be without a rucksack or hold-all to carry whatever food or clothing one finds and on this occasion too I had a rucksack available to load my find of cutlery into. I put them all into the rucksack and found it almost impossible to lift it in my run down state. I managed somehow and carted it back to our room. Mother took stock and almost unbelievably not one item was missing.

We were most grateful to the Russians to have liberated us, but at the same time we were getting fed up with being caught by the NKDV or having our wrist watches taken by the watch crazy Russians and being constantly stopped on the street to labour for them in loading trucks, etc.

Thus I jumped at the opportunity to go 250 kilometres behind the lines, towards the East, where my cousin Bözsi's husband was after returning from Russia and a Labour Battalion. He made it in spite of terrible experience, that cost him one of his eyes, and he arranged for his wife and her daughter to come to him to Nyiregyháza. I was ready to go by next day and had no doubt that my parents will be able to get bye without me.

The truck that was to take Bözsi, Susan and I towards the East, where we heard there was ample food and peace and quiet and safety was an American Studebaker, supplied to the Russians, who in turn gave it to the new Hungarian Government being formed in Debrecen, some 80 kilometres from the place we were going. The driver and an armed guard were from the new Hungarian army and the passengers, in addition to us three were an illustrious mob.

One of them was a priest, who wasn't, and he turned out to be the son of Miklós Kállay, the last Prime Minister prior to the German occupation. Another was the Secretary of State for the Foreign Ministry, whom I met later in London, where he became a travel agent. A third fellow was dressed in civilian, but in actual fact he was a priest. There were others also, all of them involved or about to be involved in the new Government being set up under Russian patronage.

We travelled most of the day and all night and on the outskirts of Debrecen, we were again stopped by a Russian road block. We thought that they are also looking for POW material and therefore I put a scarf over my head, pulled out a few locks of hair and decided to look lady like. However I nearly came to grief because this particular bunch of Russians were looking for female company and decided that I am just what they would like. However, after they asked me to step down from the truck and had a closer look in better lighting their desire cooled and I was allowed to get back on to the truck and we carried on.

Nyiregyháza was a small town where Sanyi Simkovits' family came from. When he was in Russia, he got across the lines and then moved towards Hungary behind the Russian lines, finally arriving in the town of his birth and childhood. He was a man who was capable of living by his wits and demonstrated this quality by surviving, getting back to Nyiregyháza and becoming quite well off while waiting for Budapest to fall. He had lots of brothers and sisters, most of them deported to Auschwitz, and his family had a better than usual rate of survival. One of his brothers was a butcher and thus we were never short of good food.

I lived with Sanyi, Bözsi and Susan for quite a few weeks and while there I kidnapped Sanyi's illegitimate child from his grandparents who were bringing him up. I also had my teeth fixed up by our friend and neighbour for whom I worked as a helper in his dental technician practice.

One day in the main square of the Town a few people were talking to a man who was wearing striped pyjamas. I joined them and heard the man telling his experiences in a place called Auschwitz. He was talking about gas chambers, crematoriums that were working day and night, beatings, hangings and medical experiments. I can honestly say that I believed that he must be exaggerating. I could believe everything about the Hungarian Arrow Cross, but that the Germans who had Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven and Bach should be accused of systematically gassing people I could not believe, - even after seeing and experiencing what I went through.

It wasn't until some others, including Sanyi's sister returned from Auschwitz, that we started to piece things together and started to believe the unbelievable. Not that we were outraged at hearing what happened in the camps of the SS, we all had our own horror stories and were absolutely saturated with horror, thus we got more and more blase about it.

After about 3 weeks I returned to Budapest. The trip took 3 days and I had to hang on to freight trains, getting lifts from Russians on their trucks and even walk. I found Mother and Father well, but having delivered all the food I could carry I set out again to go back to Nyiregyháza. The population in Budapest was still deprived of such luxuries as bread and food and there was still an air of uncertainty due to the political situation. Thus there was no point in my staying and I travelled East once again. This time it took me 5 days to make the trip.

After a month or so, I had news that Mother was sick and so I stocked up with food and arrived back to Budapest to find that by the time I got home Mother was well again. Matters started to settle down in Budapest, so it was time for me to settle also and I returned to Budapest. There was still very little to do there and people were busy trying to forage enough food and fuel to survive.

Father looked around in his warehouse and found a circular saw and a small engine. With the help of Peter Agocs, who started to come into the business as circumstances, such as transport allowed, the saw and engine was mounted on a small cart to be pulled by me and my assistant along the streets. This was the first business venture my father arranged for me and would have been the closest to having been a monopoly.

The idea was that once we saw a bombed out area, we pulled the cart towards it, started up the engine and commenced to cut up the timber lying around. The people heard the whine of the saw from miles and came to either buy the cut up wood or else invite us to come to their neighbourhood and cut their timber into manageable logs for them to use it as fuel. When evening came, we were tired, dirty and full of money. Soon Father had three teams going and I became the manager of the teams, rushing around from site to site and making bookings.

All went well until one of my labourers was recognised as an Arrow Cross guard, accused to have been a murderer and he was arrested on a site between two jobs. While I was arranging for a replacement his partner absconded with the day's takings, and for good measure taking with him the petrol can and the mobile circular saw. We still had other outfits, but the next day the young man who started with me in the early days of my being a sawing contractor made a small mistake and cut off two of his fingers. I rushed with him to a hospital with him insisting that I wrap his fingers in a handkerchief so that he may keep them until they may be buried with him when eventually he dies.

After these misfortunes Father decided that we should give up this line of business while I still had all 10 fingers and he sold the carts and saws and I worked for him in his business during the day and during the night we all stayed together with Father and Mother in our one room home. We still had our posh home up the hill, but of course it was quite impossible to live up there, due to the total absence of transport and also because all bridges between Buda and Pest were destroyed by the Germans when they retreated to Buda in January.

It was only in May that Father and I took two days off to visit our old home on the hill. We walked to the bank of the Danube, negotiated with a man who was to row us across to Buda and having got to the other side we climbed up the hill to Father's dream house. Every bridge was blown up by the Germans. The photo shows what used to be the first suspension bridge in Europe.

It ceased to be a dream it was more like a nightmare!

After the opera singer moved out of the house, it was let to Herr Diener, a business friend with whom Father established a Vitamin Laboratory for the production of Vitamin D for animals. He was German and Father thought that he will help us in case of need. To reinforce his contacts, the German business friend moved into the house with his friend, who happened to be a General in the Gendarmes. With a combination like this, we could not fail in having a privileged position, Father thought. He was disappointed. Herr Diener considered Father a liability from the day the Germans occupied Hungary and ceased to know him. The partnership automatically became his only, the rent was unpaid and that was that.

Neither the General nor Diener waited for the Russians. They disappeared in the direction of Germany never to be heard of again. The house was occupied by a company of soldiers, who used to be university students and they were stationed in the house amongst the African curios that Diener collected and the enormous classical paintings by old masters, that the General pinched from the houses of Jews after their deportation. Some of these paintings were quite valuable and it must have been disappointing for the General not to have been able to enjoy them peacefully for the rest of his life.

After the university students it was the turn of the German Army to move in and they gave way to the Russians, who moved in with their horses and campfires.

We had a nice garden front and rear, but the house was built to be lived in. Downstairs we had three very large rooms, two of which were separated by a folding door arrangement. Beside these two rooms was the third, with a dining table which could be opened to allow something like twenty four people to sit around the table. Also downstairs was the kitchen, a pantry, a toilet and an enclosed verandah. Upstairs we had two bed rooms only, bathroom, a maid's room, a third toilet and a very large laundry, which housed a boiler, a bathtub, various sinks, enough space for ironing. There was also a cellar where the coal and the central heating was kept and there was a flat, i.e. a room for the Janitor, his wife and child in the same cellar, but with a separate entrance.

We had large quantities of staff to run the household when we lived there: Irma, our sick domestic, a chambermaid or two, a cook, the cleaning lady, who was usually the janitors wife, the janitor who was also the chauffeur. When we were small we also had a governess and additionally the washing was done by the washer woman, the ironing by the ironing lady and the mending by the sewing lady. There was a part time gardener too. All this was not really extraordinary, people used to be real cheap in prewar Hungary.

The past was hard to believe, when we went into the house. The fine parquet floors, which were taken up twice, because they were not good enough for the architect, were still there, but after housing horses the place was high with horse manure. It was only when we cleaned it out that we realised that to keep warm, the various armies living there built campfires in the rooms, which did not improve the standard of the floor.

The toilets were all blocked up and full of excreta, the walls were filthy with messages in three languages and there were the paintings! Being from a period when painters liked to draw cherubic people with large breasts and genitals being hidden by thighs and flowing materials, the occupiers of our house decided to make up for the missing detail. When they had done so, they must have discovered that these areas will be a suitable target to aim for and used Herr Diener's arrows and spears from Africa to practice with.

Upstairs was not much better, but being more exposed to the wind, it was less objectionable as regards stink and we moved a bed far away from the toilet into what used to be the children's bedroom and Father and I went to sleep on the same bed. However, it was impossible to sleep. After weeks and weeks of inactivity the bedbugs and fleas suddenly had food again and they attacked us. We lit a candle and could not believe our eyes, there were millions of bedbugs poring forth from everywhere. We sat up all night and waited for the morning, so that we may go back to Pest. It was not until Father could engage some people to clean the house, that we ever saw it again, and once it was cleaned other people wanted to move in and did.

Father soon became active in his business again. Although the land was given to the peasants, they still needed his bits and pieces for their machinery. Because of the rampaging inflation, they usually bartered with food and soon Father ran out of people to give the food to and starts to sell his bags of flour, sides of pork, etc.

News of this got to the Mayor of Budapest, Vas Zoltán, a well known Communist, who just returned from Russia with the rank of General. He calls for Father and puts him to work making barter deals for food. Father's idea is to send out trucks full of spades, hand hoes and hay forks into the country and accept food in return. Soon 20 trucks are plying their way in the country and bringing back the farm produce to feed Budapest. Eventually these trucks carry other commodities into the country.

Father is constantly asked for blow-lamps to heat up tractors prior to starting them. In 1936 a Hungarian tractor was copied by the Soviets and every Russian peasant soldier recognises the kerosene lamps as being identical to the one they use back home. They pinch every one they see and while the tractors stay in Hungary, in the absence of the lamps, no one can start them. Father arranges for a Swedish sample to be cut in half and manufactured for him. He orders 5000 and sells them in the first week. He is a rich man once again.

When the Mayor hears of this he orders another 20,000 lamps from Father and thus Father becomes a well-to-do capitalist once again. In view of the fact that at time there were only 12,000 tractors in Hungary, it is possible that to this day the City of Budapest has ample stocks of kerosene lamps, tractor starting, for the use of.

Seeing that inflation by then is devastating, - we count not in millions, but in million millions, I have to carry his money to the Stock Exchange every evening and buy Pound Sterling bank notes. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly John is in England and if we will go anywhere it will be to England, but also because 5 and 10 pound notes are printed on fine rice paper they can be folded and hidden easier.

One evening I bicycle to the Exchange too late to get Pound Sterling notes and our broker buys me 55 Egyptian Pounds. Father just about murders me, when he is told. He calls me an absolute idiot, who has no other aim in life but to drive his father crazy. When later, he sends all his pound notes to England, they are all found to have been forged by the Germans, only the Egyptian notes are genuine.

The Mayor of Budapest in the mean time gives the greatest accolade to his unpaid helper: he is given a three wheeler utility truck with a driver. A greater praise no communist can give. However the car is not available, when a message arrives to our office for him to go to the offices of the Red Cross. I recognise the message as something extraordinary and run about 6 to 7 kilometres to the office to receive a 25 word message from John from England. The message is cautiously addressed to either Kálmán József or Kálmán Ilona or Kálmán István or Balázs Imre or Balázs Lili or Vadász Andor or Vadász Margit or Vadász Eva and says that he is well, anxious to hear from us and sends his love and gives his address.

So John is alive and well! I am electrified into running back the large distance. Luckily I met Father in his car. He also becomes delirious from the news and sends me in his car to Mother to tell her the news.

I bound up the stairs and find a hairless stranger in our room, wearing an overall, but half naked drying himself. Who is he? He throws his arm around me, cries and kisses me. Thin as he is I am surprised to see that he has breasts. "He"; is Klári, my Mother's cousin, my favourite aunt, just arrived from Auschwitz. Where is Mother? I find her in the next house doing some washing. I tell her both news items and she can hardly come home to meet Klári, she is that much overwrought.

Tauszig Klári is the only one of our relations who returns from Auschwitz. Two more cousins with their daughters come back from Bergen Belsen, where they were in a demonstration camp, kept in good shape for inspection by the Red Cross.

All the others who were deported stay away for ever.

PROLOGUE (continued)

I got to the hotel, rang the bell, and after a lot of questions by the porter, who came down from his bed in his underwear, I was admitted into the hotel. Yes, George was still in the hotel, so were his other friends. Yes, he had a bed for me, Mr Shillinger had arranged it. It was on the first floor, room 11, next to Mr Shillinger's room.

I went upstairs alone, dropped my luggage in my room and knocked on George's door. "Enter" and I did. George was in bed, smiling. His other two friends were also in their bed, they were also smiling. There was a man sitting at the table and he introduced himself as the member of the political police. He was also smiling. I cannot now remember for sure, but I think I was the only one who was devoid of all smiles.

At that stage how was I to know that being arrested was all that funny?

Shillinger and the others had to be lunatics to play such a stupid practical joke on me. But it was not a joke, although even I had to agree afterwards that it was funny. Two days earlier George and his mates had been raided by the police and they were searched for currency. It was obvious that their reason for being in a border town was to sneak across the border, but even in Hungary intentions were difficult to prove. The police found nothing, but my friends were arrested just the same and taken to the lockup.

However there was insufficient space in the jail and they were sent back to the hotel under escort and under arrest. The poor little sleepy cop, for whom they bought food in the dining room guarded them during the night, while another detective was guarding them during the day.

When I arrived I was immediately searched in my room, but held my actual US dollar greenbacks folded up in my hand, while the detective was going through my belongings. Afterwards the detective went back to the larger room and sat at the table guarding the three who were enjoying the sleep of the innocent.

Next day the detectives were withdrawn but we were told to stay in the hotel under house arrest. We did, but then suddenly more detectives descended on us and searched us for currency and gold, - two commodities we were not supposed to have. Nothing was found on us, we were getting cleverer and luckier all the time. Just the same, we were ordered to report in the afternoon at Police HQ, and as we approached it, I saw a person I knew and he was wearing the uniform of a high ranking police office. He was the son of Father's agent in Szombathely and I did not realise that he was in the police when Father gave me his address.

I told him our story, hoping that he can help and he told me that while he is in charge of the Police for the whole town, he has no connection with the political police. However, he told me that we should not worry, the worse that could happen to us was 3 months in the cooler.

That evening I collected all the gold and the currency we possessed and took them to my Police Captain mate, who offered to mind them for us. I also enjoyed a very good dinner cooked by his maid, who used to be the maid in the sanatorium where I was in 1943. Small world!

(Photo shows window I climbed out.)Next day we were approached by a local contact who told us that if we could be at a certain place at 11 p.m. we would be taken across the border for $20 each. So I climbed the first floor window of our hotel-prison, climbed down the pipes and went back to my Captain for our valuables and, with my pocket full of goodies such as sovereigns, jewels and dollar notes, set off for the meeting place, to which my friends would also come with our luggage. They arrived in the darkness, clattering along with the push cart they had pinched from the hotel. The noise, in the quiet of the curfew was deafening.

Suddenly, there were shouts and shots to be heard. Our contact came running and told us to scatter, because Russian Military Police had shot at the Russians, who were to take us across the border. We ran back to the safety of the hotel, where we were greeted by several of our detective friends, who once again went through all our belongings and had us stripped to locate our goodies. How we managed to hide them? With sleight of hand, but as we had everything we possessed on us, things were rather more difficult this time round.

The detectives told us that next day we were to be sent back to Budapest, because the police in Szombathely were fed up with us. Indeed they came to collect us at about 5 p.m. next day, walked us to the station and kept watch over us while we waited for the train to depart for Budapest. While they were watching some of us, the others were unloading our luggage on the other side of the train and hiding it. When the train finally left, we waved to the cops and before the train could gather speed, jumped off on the other side and hid until a decent interval had elapsed; then we walked out of the station.

We were fed up about our sojourn in Szombathely and we were becoming desperate. We have decided that this time we would simply engage a taxi, ask the driver to drive us to the border and walk across. To hell with all the rumours and the dangers of crossing a well guarded border. However as we left the station, a fellow walked up to us and asked us if we want to go to Austria for $20. We said yes and expected him to disclose that he was a detective and arrest us. Instead he led us into the yard of a nearby house where stood a Russian truck and around it some 30 people waiting to be driven to Austria.

Eventually enough people assembled and we paid $10 each to the driver and another $10 each to one of our own representatives. The man organising the whole affair, told us that he is a courier, who goes across the border two or three times every week and that it is all very simple, yet he asked us solemnly that under no circumstance should we move or cry out, even if we were shot at. We got into the truck, were covered by tarpaulin, then hay was loaded on top and we were soon off.

The trip was less than comfortable. There were over 30 people in the truck, together with their luggage and the way they could fit us in would have been cramped for sardines. There was no air under the tarpaulin and the hay and we were exhausted by the time the truck started on its shaking journey.

Half an hour later we stopped. We must have been at the border, because we heard our Russian driver speak in Russian and we also heard the Austrian Guards speak in German. After another 15 - 20 minutes the truck halted again and we disembarked. We were jubilant, there were people who kissed the ground and others who were hugging each other. Our courier received the second half of the $800, warned us to be quiet until we saw the light come on in the peasant house, he pointed out in the distance and suggested that some German speakers approach the peasant for directions.

We waited till 4 a.m. and then decided to awaken the farmer. We had a woman with us who was ready to have her baby any minute, and she started to have pains, so we wanted to move off quickly. George Shillinger and I started off towards the house practicing in German what we shall say. In answer to our knocking the farmer came to the window and didn't understand a word of our German. How could he, we were still in Hungary! We had been taken for a ride and had paid for a round trip from Hungary to Hungary.

When Shillinger and I returned to the group they were not amused. We told them that we were about 5 kilometres away from the border so we decided to walk towards it, whatever the risks. We set out and walked and walked. The pregnant lady did not. She was carried.

After a while we approached a farmer working in a field. Leaning on his hand hoe, he told us that we were still in Hungary but we should follow him. We did and he walked us across the first of the ten borders we had to cross and handed us over to his colleague in Austria. They were both from the Hagannah, the underground Jewish army of Palestine, who were stationed all round that area to lead the people across the border. Not just their people either, - they helped anyone who was trying to cross the border.

From then on we were in their hands. We were taken into a farm shed, fed, given false papers to legalise our being in the Soviet Zone of Austria, put on a bus and sent into Vienna (Border No. 2). There we were fed, given a different set of false papers, put on a special tram and sent into the US Zone of Vienna (3), where we were billeted in the Rothchild Hospital, the famous assembly point for refugees from the East.

For the next three days we enjoyed the sights of the US Zone of Vienna. The signs of war, the devastation and the great shortage of almost anything was all round us, but so was the famous spirit of the Viennese. The coffee houses were full with people, yet there was no coffee to be bought, the biergardens resounded with Strauss in spite of the fact that their beer was less intoxicating than the Danube.

Early one morning about 400 people from the Rothchild Hospital boarded specially rented trams and we were taken in to the Soviet Zone of Vienna (4), to a station where the train was waiting for us. It was back to cattle trucks, but we knew that at the end of the trip freedom and fortune awaits us. We made ourselves comfortable in the trucks in case we will be travelling for weeks. We also made the interesting discovery that the US Army personnel guarding the train and us, all spoke Jiddish and Hebrew much more fluently than English, suggesting that perhaps they were sent from Palestine rather than from the USA, to look after the Jews of Eastern Europe on their way to freedom.

Our train crossed from Vienna into the Russian Zone of Austria (5), then the US Zone of Austria (6), at which time the Russians checked the papers of every person on the train and interrogated some. Next we stopped for a night just outside the former concentration camp at Mauthausen, and next day we arrived to be billeted in a former SS Barracks in Salzburg. We were allowed to visit the sights and our train left next day to cross into the French Zone of Austria (7), the French Zone of Germany (8), the British Zone (9) and finally the American Zone of Germany.

It was not the most direct route, but the organisation needed to overcome the problems caused by the Russians and the many Occupational Zone regulations and the fact that the British were trying to keep prospective Jewish infiltration of illegal migrants away from Palestine, was most impressive.

We wanted to go to Munich, where three of my relations were already in the Funk Kaserne. When our train arrived to Augsburg, we jumped train and travelled to Munich under our own steam. At the Railway Station of Munich we engaged a porter to take our luggage and lead us to a public bath-house for a long needed bath. We asked the porter if we should pay him with money or if he would prefer some cigarettes. He choose the latter, so we gave him a box of 100 Hungarian cigarettes, which pleased him. Later we found out that in the crazy, cigarette based German values our tip to him was equivalent to 3 months' wages.

After our bath, we decided to eat. We sold some cigarettes to a member of the milling black marketeers outside the Hauptbahnhof, parked our luggage and walked towards the center of the city, through the bomb damaged streets. 13 months after the war finished, the pavements and roadways were cleared, but few were the houses which were not damaged and the badly damaged buildings were just heaps of rubble.

There were some shops open, but almost nothing useful to buy. Some of the food shops had long queues outside and we finally found one shop which we could enter without waiting in a long line. It was obvious that this food shop had little to offer. We noticed that they had a few withered black bread rolls and wanted to buy some. However, to our surprise, we should have had food ration cards even for a single one of those little dried out dumplings.

Seeing our disbelief, which turned into terror at the thought that we will starve in Munich, the shop keeper gave us a roll each and sold us a little portion of some indescribable muck, masquerading under the highfalutin name of "Lebensmittel Marken Freie Brot Schmiermittel" (i.e. Food Ration Card Free Bread Spread), which, in spite of its exciting sounding name was ground soya beans, made spreadable with the use of some chemical. Certainly not very nourishing, but we were most grateful for the kindness we experienced from this member of the hated Master Race.

Lets make no mistakes, we despised and hated the Germans at this stage of our lives, for what they have done to us and the rest of the World. We noticed that there were almost no Germans who admitted that they were nazis, there were no Germans who admitted that they screamed themselves hoarse at the Nazi Rallies before and during the war. We made no difference between one German and another, in our view they were all guilty. It has taken us quite a few weeks living in Germany before we realised that some were innocent and many months before we realised that some were actually disapproving what Hitler and the nazis stood for but had as little chance to influence events as we had in Hungary.

After our repast we got on a tram, which meant hanging onto the handles on the steps of the speeding tram and working your way into the inside as people disembarked along the way. We had a long trip to the outskirts of München to the Funk Kaserne, once occupied by the Radio and Radar specialists of the German Wehrmacht, now the home of some 10,000 DP's.

The gates were guarded by uniformed DP's from Yugoslavia and we were not admitted. After some delay and with considerable difficulty we sent word to our relations inside and they managed to smuggle us in. As we walked through the main square of the camp, we recognised some people we knew. They were from the train we had left in Augsburg, and had we stayed with them we would have arrived there hours ago with a great deal less effort and would have made it into the Kaserne legitimately. It would have meant DP Status, ration cards, pocket money from US charities, etc. and a palliace to sleep on in a dormitory.

Anyway, we arrived to the US Zone of Germany.

The next task was to get out of there as quickly as possible.

 

 

WEST GERMANY

In June 1946 Germany was a very undesirable place to live in. If you had to be in Germany it was advisable not be a German. Our situation, with or without official Displaced Person status was much better than if we would have been Germans, but it was still pretty difficult. There was a scarcity of food and even when we obtained our food ration cards, the food allocated for us was the same as for the local population and was completely insufficient. Although almost everything was rationed, there were some items which were available only on permit.

If you needed a pair of shoes, that need had to be proved and demonstrated to a bureaucrat, whose job was to issue shoe purchase permits. If you finally received a permit, you could then order the merchandise, wait 2 or 3 months and collect it from the shoe shop, when available. Having crossed the borders in my knee high riding boots and having carried one pair of shoes, which were soon in need of repair, I spent days in trying to get a permit to buy a new pair or at least get a permit for a new artificial leather sole. (Photo from 1946.)

There was a shortage of everything and you could buy absolutely nothing. Even the black market was hopeless, there being almost no production of consumer goods and if there was, it certainly did not find its way to the towns, where shops remained empty until 1948.

If being hungry would not have been enough, the winter of 1946/47 was the worst for decades. The freezing weather was not relieved by warmth either in homes or in public places. Some restaurants, schools and movies simply closed for the winter. On the streets people could be seen carting home pieces of timber they found in the bombed ruins of buildings and during the weekends families went into the countryside to forage for some branches off trees for their heater at home. Gas in the homes was rationed and your supply cut off if you used too much. There were regular pre-determined power cuts, dependent on the various districts of Munich, but ad hoc cuts also occurred without any warning.

Prices were controlled and they were the same as during or prewar. The average monthly wage of 150-180 Reichsmarks may have been sufficient to purchase all of the meagre food rations allocated, but was totally inadequate for survival, which had to be purchased on the alternative, i.e. black market. Here people sold their belongings to buy food and the resultant barter system caused the cigarette to become the de facto currency of Occupied Germany, with the providers of the cigarettes, the American Army personal to become the ruling and rich.

A pair of non-black-market shoes might cost only RM 15.00, - provided one had the necessary permits from the authorities to buy one, while the black market price of a cigarette was RM 5.00, thus three cigarettes bought a pair of shoes.

The same crazy values applied to restaurants and generally service industries. During our stay in Germany we could afford to eat in the best restaurants, albeit we had to have the required ration cards, which were presented to the waiter, who cut off little coupons for 50 grams of meat, 50 grams of bread, 5 grams of butter or fat etc. The menu showed exactly how many grams of what coupons were to be presented for the meal. The price was also shown, but was of no real importance, provided you had ways and means to obtain cigarettes.

Everybody was doing his or her best to get hold of cigarettes. There was an official ration of 15 or 20 German cigarettes and non-smokers sold them to German smokers. However, the armies occupying Germany provided most of the rest of the cigarettes, required for the functioning of the German economy of 1946-48. Every American soldier received 200 cigarettes per week free and he could buy further packets for 7 cents in the US Army PX store.

Equate the cost of 7 cents for 20 cigarettes available to the GI's to the German average monthly wage, which was the equivalent to 30-35 cigarettes and no explanation is needed to understand why women were waiting knee-high outside any US Army barracks or office. Many were the middle class Germans who asked their wives to do the right thing by their families and find themselves an "Ami" friend.

Suddenly, middle class morality changed in direct proportion to the needs of the family. The ideas of racial superiority expounded by the nazis were also forgotten as it became obvious that the blacker the skin, the more generous its owner becomes to his blond fraulein.

Those who could not get cigarettes by other means sold their valuables. In this fashion priceless Leica cameras and jewellery were traded for cigarettes and craftsmen like silversmiths, wanted only silver coins to melt down and cigarettes for their labour in exchange for beautiful brooches and silver ornaments. Even cars, which were of little value due to the unavailability of petrol, found their way into the hands of US soldiers, who bought priceless Mercedes tourers, previously owned by high ranking Nazis, with a few weeks' cigarette rations.

In 1947, one of my Father's acquaintances, who was the owner of a not insignificant agricultural machinery factory, suggested to me that maybe I would like to buy his company for 100 cartons of cigarettes. This would have cost an American soldier US$ 140 at the time, yet to the German it was equivalent to over US$ 1 million in 1985 terms. No wonder the Americans became somewhat mixed up and bewildered in a Europe they could not understand.

DP's had less access to cigarettes, yet we were not short of them. Most of us worked for the Military Government, UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Aid), Jewish organisations like HIAS or JOINT, Christian aid like CWS, etc., all of whom came to the realisation that paying out cigarettes was more cost effective than spending US Dollars.

Thus most DP's like me had ample cigarettes especially if they did not smoke. This allowed us to be somewhat better off than the locals, who had less opportunities and more commitments. In spite of the fact that we DP's made no secret of the fact that we considered ourselves a rung above the local population, they were surprisingly placid about this and allowed a lot of freedom to those they once conquered and regarded or at least were told to regard a sub-human species.

As far as the Allied powers were concerned, their main intent was to punish the Germans and not to re-educate them or help them in their economic plight. The de-nazification courts were sitting in all the main cities and everybody was supposed to have had a Nazi past unless it could be proven that he was not an active Nazi. Every German was classified and of those who were thought to be involved in the Party, thousands were locked up in camps waiting to be "de-nazified".

Germany was broken up into 4 Zones, the American, British, French and the Russian, with Berlin also being parceled up in spite of being within the Russian Zone. Additionally, each Zone was further divided into historical principalities, governed separately. The Allied allowed France to take back from Germany areas which they claimed belonged to them, restored Czechoslovakia and Poland and gave large chunks of Germany to these countries also. This applied especially to Poland, whose Eastern areas were appropriated by the USSR and who were given parts of Prussia in the West as a consolation price.

With the eastern areas of Germany being taken over by the Poles and Czechs and some areas becoming part of the USSR, millions of Germans were given just a few hours to take to the road towards Germany or else were entrained in cattle trucks to be sent there. History repeated itself, but these deportees were not gassed, but arrived in the Western Zones of Germany and given refugee status.

Most of them arrived penniless and started work almost the day of their arrival. Their will to succeed and their successful absorption into post-war Germany was one of the reasons for the so-called Economic Miracle which commenced in 1948. It was in this year that the tenuous friendship between the Western Democracies and the Communists went sour and the Western Powers decided to aid the Germans to rebuild their country and clean up the economic mess. They realised that Germany will be useful in containing the Russian and that the Germans will not become enthusiastic partners while they are being punished for their past sins by the Allied military for whose economic judgment they had no respect.

As a first step the Western Powers decided on a currency reform and in spite of Russian protests, issued minimal amounts of the new Deutsch Marks currency in exchange for the old Reichs Marks, which were becoming more and more valueless. In answer, the Russian Zone was closed off and a different currency was introduced in Eastern Germany. As Churchill said: "an Iron Curtain descended upon Europe".

Soon the roads between the Western Zones and Berlin were cut and to feed and fuel the inhabitants of the Western Zones of Berlin, the Berlin Airlift commenced.

In the Western Zones, as soon as the currency reform occurred, every thing became available once again and not against barter, but for money, which was a very scarce commodity. Irrespective of how much Reichs Marks you deposited, you could only receive a very limited amount of Deutsch Marks.

Cigarettes became what they once were and were used for the purpose of being lit and inhaled by those addicted to the habit. They became almost as useless as the old Reichs Mark. Manufacture of consumer goods commenced and efficient output of all products was aided by the fact that most if not all capital equipment having been destroyed in the war, the factories had new technologies and higher productivity. Additionally, German thoroughness and quality was now joined by the limitless energy and the will to work of the German worker, aided by American capital flowing into the country with the active encouragement of the US Government. The Marshall Aid scheme has further helped Europe and especially West Germany, sovereign once again and headed by Herr Adenauer, whose major concern was that the country be re-built and be prosperous.

This was the Germany I left in 1948 to go to England, a Germany which was well on the way to becoming the leading industrial power of Europe once again. However when we arrived in 1946 we could not imagine that defeated, humiliated, bombed out, starving, freezing Germany will ever again be prosperous and happy.

In 1946 we went to Germany not to live there or even to enjoy it, but only as a very temporary measure prior to emigrating to the West. Soon we realised that our next move may take months to organise and we had better find permanent living quarters. Having missed out on official Funk Kaserne status, we obtained visitors passes on a daily basis so that we may return to the well guarded Displaced Persons Camp in the evening to obtain a meal. Late at night we found ourselves an unoccupied bed in a dormitory or an empty palliasse in a washroom and in the morning joined a queue for breakfast.

Obviously this was not the best of arrangements. As luck would have it Robert Tábori[2] and I got to know a Hungarian guy, who was on the next transport to go to Bremenhaven, the port from where lucky migrants left for the USA. He offered to us his room in the third floor flat of Mrs. Aumuller, widow of a doctor and their 32 years old daughter. The flat was in one of the few houses which escaped almost unscathed the destruction of Munich and we were to have the use of one room for our bedroom, shared kitchen, bathroom and the sitting room and we were told that the lease also included the use of a typewriter and the daughter.

Robert and I moved in the day after the room was vacated and indeed the arrangement with the flat was first class, with the exception of Hildegard who thought that having two tenants will be twice the pleasure and as soon as we went to bed on our first evening, arrived in our room and sat at the foot of either one bed or another telling risque stories to us and hoping to be invited under the covers. Being unsuccessful in her endeavours she came to the conclusion that we must be shy while together and so presented herself at times when we were on our own. When Robert and I became inseparable, she used to walk in on us while either of us was having a bath, until we found a key which fitted the bathroom door.

At that point it dawned on her that Robert and I must be homosexuals and when she did indicate her sympathies for our tendencies, we decided to encourage her beliefs. However, she became completely confused when we were visited by girls who were obviously our girl friends. Poor old Hildegard, she never really forgave us, yet she looked after both her mother and us to the best of her capabilities.

With some of our original eight, who crossed the Hungarian border now living in Augsburg, the four people left in München kept together while we were in Germany, except Peter Kardos, who got homesick and returned to Hungary. This left George Shillinger[3], who decided to stay in the Funk Kaserne as an ambulance driver, Robert and myself, busy resisting the charms of Hildegard.

We made some friends in the Funk Kaserne, who were as much a mixed lot as "we" were. I also had a lot of relations in Munich and being early arrivals they had quite a comfortable and influential existence in the Funk Kaserne[4]. There was Dr Frank Györi and Agnes[5], my father's cousin's daughter. Another family was Paul and Clare Kellner[6], the first UNRRA Officer amongst us, with their 5 years old son George[7]. Another one of my relations was Andrew Pór[8], who had a lovely Serbian girlfriend Vera[9]. She shared a room with her sister Raca[10], her 4 years old nephew Dankmar[11] and two other girls from Poland, one of whom was a countess. They adopted us and we and many other camp dwellers could always rely on a cup of coffee visiting them.

Raca was 28 and was married early to a young lawyer in Belgrad, who after the war became Yugoslav ambassador in Brazil. In 1940 she left her husband for a Yugoslav of German extraction and they lived together in Belgrad until in 1941 when the Germans defeated Yugoslavia and her boyfriend turned out to be a German Major, who has been working for the Abwehr. She herself received some death threats because the man she lived with started to wear his German uniform, once the German war machine conquered the Yugoslavs and although she was a proud Serbian, she realised that sooner or later she will have to pay for her love to a "traitor". Her boyfriend was transfered to Berlin and Raca and the child went with him. Soon she got herself a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she became a senior Private Secretary in the Yugoslav section.

When her flat was bombed, she needed accommodation and with the help of Foreign Minister Ribbentrop she was allocated two rooms in the Adlon Hotel, which was then the best hotel in Berlin. While she was living in relative luxury, her mother and two sisters were slaughtered in Croatia. The description is quite fitting because they had their throats cut while sheltering in an Orthodox (Serbian) church. Luckily, the youngest sister, Vera was away from their home in Croatia and thus survived. Eventually, Raca arranged a work permit for her to come to Berlin as her maid.

Two of her brother-in-laws and one of her brothers died fighting as partisans against the Germans and when her only remaining brother was arrested and kept as a hostage in Belgrad, to be shot whenever the next anti-German action was demanding revenge, Raca was given a letter from SS-Chief Himmler, flew in Ribbentrop's plane to Belgrad and brought her brother from certain death to the Adlon Hotel. Within a few weeks she heard that her estranged husband was in a German POW camp and she obtained permission to get him to Berlin, where she found a flat for him and her brother to live in. The two men returned to Belgrad a few months before Yugoslavia was liberated and distinguished themselves fighting with Tito's Partisans.

Raca's boyfriend in the mean time became a prisoner of the Russians, but he escaped and masquerading as a Yugoslav, hid in Poland. After the hostilities he made it back to Berlin, only to find that Raca and Vera became refugees before the Red Army conquered Berlin. Somehow he travelled into the Western Zone of Germany and found Raca living in a Bavarian village. They lived together for a while when he decided to return to Berlin. He did not know for years that he left her pregnant and that she gave birth to a second son. This child, still a baby in 1946, was fostered in a village near Munich.

One of the Polish ladies, the Countess of Baranowska was a very quiet (and quaint) little person. Like all the others in the room, she was a chain smoker, like the others she rolled her own and like the others she would have killed for a tin of Nescafe, which was then a rarity and regarded to be much more upmarket than ground coffee beans. She was very private and her departure to one of the South American countries was hardly noticed.

The other Polish woman used to be a well known acrobatic dancer and came from a theatrical family. Her brother was a famous adagio dancer who danced a snake dance with his wife in the nightclubs of New York. He sent lots of parcels and finally a ticket for his sister, who made it to the USA in late 1946.

It was at their room that I met Maie, an UNRRA officer of Estonian origin and looks, (blond, big and busty) and her uniform and constant laughter impressed me. She was pretty and a well known big shot in the Funk Kaserne and I was frightened to approach her, especially as she was married. However, one day she suggested that I may like to come horse riding with her and some other UNRRA officers. I tried to be excused, saying that I will be busy and I even said that I cannot ride, but she declared that to be unlikely as I was a Hungarian and was wearing riding boots. She left me no choice when she told me that her driver will pick me up at the appointed hour in her jeep.

This was a first class set back to my dreams of paying court to her. I did not know one end of a horse from the other and undoubtedly I would be found out if I ventured to sit on a horse in her presence.

There was nothing else but having a condensed riding course and next day I set out to find a riding school. I paid my few Marks and got a book of 10 tickets. The instructor asked me if I have ever been riding and on being given my truthful answer he allocated to me a docile white horse.

After the first hour of instruction I did not dismount, but handed over my second ticket and carried on. After I finished my third uninterrupted lesson, the riding instructor suggested that I may like to take a breather, but I insisted on carrying on. I should have known better, after all my Father often told me about the agonies he suffered while being a Hussar!

I could hardly get on the tram to get home. I just peeled the underwear off my raw behind and wished for death to come swiftly. Next morning I had a fever and it was impossible for me to move about, so I sent a message to Maie cancelling the arrangements about being picked up next Sunday for riding in Munich's famous English Park with her and her officer friends.

As soon as I could, I resumed my riding lessons and in the event became a reasonable rider of docile horses. I was ready for the invitation to go riding in the Park to be repeated and I did not need to wait too long, at our next accidental meeting in Funk Kaserne, she told me that I will be picked up next Sunday morning.

On the appointed day it was raining, but the jeep and the Russian driver arrived. He spoke no German and conversation was impossible especially as we were busy keeping ourselves dry in a canvas covered jeep driven by a maniac in a downpour. I realised that we will not be riding in the Park, but I did not expect to be driven through the gates of my Riding School. There was nothing I could do, but was hoping to quickly explain to the instructor that he should act as if he would not know me.

I first saw her sitting astride my usual docile white horse. Beside her was standing my instructor, who seeing me called out:

"Guten Tag Herr Kalman, if only I knew you are coming, I would have reserved for you the horse you learned riding on."

Maie burst out laughing at my discomfiture. The fact that she continued seeing me shows that she had a good sense of humour in spite of the fact that once I got to know her, I realised that she did not have an easy life.

She was married at age 16 to the headmaster of her school, who was 26 years her senior. When the Russians were attacking the Germans in the Baltic States in 1944 she was 24 and by that time she was separated from her husband for some time. Just before the Russians annexed Estonia, her mother and Maie decided to escape to the West by boat and her husband joined them. In Germany Maie and her man gave their marriage another chance and as a result a girl was born. Within the next year they moved into the Funk Kaserne, Maie became an UNRRA Officer, the little girl died and their marriage broke up again. However, they and her mother, who was younger than the husband, continued to live in the small flat which they had due to Maie's exalted position in the camp as the Supply Officer[12].

In September 1946 I got myself accepted as a student at the Technical University, and in addition to my studies, assisted in the rebuilding of the Technische Hochschule (University of Engineering) in München. Some of the lecture rooms were devoid of walls, some had no roofs and professors and students alike worked hard as common labourers to rebuild the University to be weatherproof by the onset of winter.

Being left to my own devices instead of being assisted by my Father in the passing of exams, did not improve my scholastic capabilities and I soon found it very difficult to keep up with my studies, particularly because of having had to understand engineering terms in German. Even George Shillinger, who later became Professor in Mathematics found it almost impossible.

At the same time I also had to have a job and so I worked for UNRRA, which gave me sufficient food to live in a fairly comfortable way. Some of my friends became 2nd Class Officers and had certain privileges. Instead I had a paper which stated:

"Mr. Steve Kalman is employed by UNRRA in the capacity of Assistant Personnel Officer and therefore he is entitled to all the rights and priviledges to which he is entitled."

Amazingly that piece of paper was accepted by all and sundry and did a great job in gaining me all the privileges to which I was entitled until such time that I too became a 2nd Class Officer.

Not that I ever became anything that was approaching the greatness of an Allied soldier. The pecking order in Germany was very clearly defined: there was the American Officer, then the G.I., then came the British, then nothing and then the US negro soldier. Following them were those Allied soldiers, who had their country occupied during World War II, such as the French, the Dutch, etc. Next the Military Government and UNRRA Officers followed by a huge gap after which came, 2nd Class Officers, D.P.'s and miles later the Germans, who were being humiliated, insulted and broken by the conscious effort of the Occupying Powers, until the Berlin Airlift and the hostility between East and West commenced.

Forgetting about the nervous strain of not knowing when I will get out of Germany and shortages of food, fuel and clothing, I had little to complain about my life in Germany. I could have holidays in good hotels in Berchtesgaden, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bad Tölz and eat in good restaurants, although far from well. However, we could never relax, because all of our lives revolved around that elusive visa or that passport. It became a mania for us to get out of there and to do so we became capable of anything bar murder.

Almost all of us assumed false identities and made applications to the Americans for visa, using different names, with different assumed backgrounds in different towns. To live in this fashion required good nerves and a lot of time, because we had to live several lives all at once in different places.

Thus cousin Andrew and I had a room in Stuttgart, where we were registered and one of us always had to be there to ensure that we can be contacted. Even when we had a third and fourth person registered in the same flat in Stuttgart, the pressure was quite hectic, because we all lived in Munich and we also were registered for another application in Frankfurt. Those days these places were an overnight 3rd Class train trip away with the passenger feeling quite elated if he got a wooden bench to sit on.

One day Andrew was holding forth in Stuttgart while I was in Frankfurt. By the time I got back to Munich, Andrew's second telegram arrived, urging me to immediately return to Stuttgart, because "the police wants to interview you". I knew that this meant that my application for a visa was now in the hands of the American CIC and I will have to return to Stuttgart to be questioned by them about my political background.

However, before I could travel to Stuttgart I needed at least one night's rest in a bed and I decided to sleep in Munich in my own bed. At 4.30 a.m. I was wakened by Hildegard who was followed into the bedroom by two burly American Military Policemen decked out with sufficient armour to fight a small country. I was allowed to dress, before being handcuffed and taken by jeep to the Military Police HQ and locked up.

About 9 a.m. office hours began and I was taken to an American officer who spoke perfect German. He asked me what vile crimes have I committed and to confess before he allows his men to have some fun beating the truth out of me. I was not quite clear which of my crimes I was to confess and asked him, why he believes that I committed any. He told me to stop lying and gave me a last chance of 3 minutes before the third degree was to start.

While I was counting the minutes, he received a phone call and he left the room, leaving a guard to watch me. I stood up as a mark of respect and while standing I saw on his desk the copy of the telegram in which Andrew was advising me that the police wishes to interview me. It was obvious that this was the reason why the Americans thought that I was being traced by the police for some crime.

When my officer returned I told him, that much as I would like to help him I cannot, because the biggest crime I have ever committed was my seducing the wife of a German police man and than leaving her to face her husband in Stuttgart. He listened in astonishment, found the telegram, read it, realised that I read it too and asked me who Andrew was. I told him. How does Andrew know that the police are after me? I suggested that maybe the stupid woman told her husband and now he wants to beat me up or kill me. I begged him not to send me back to Stuttgart for such a terrible fate, - after all he was a man himself.

He told me that he did not believe a word I was saying, but he will hand me over to the German police, who would get the truth out of me. He rang for a detective who walked with me across the street to the German police station and on hearing that I had nothing to eat, gave me half his lunch. He than checked if the police in Munich wished to interview me and kept me in his room all afternoon, while waiting for an answer. That day I learned more about crime and detective work than before or since as he was dealing with criminals as varied as wife beaters and bank robbers, not to mention people like me.

There was no answer from Police HQ when evening was approaching and he had to make a decision if he should send me to the German prison in the suburbs or send me home. He discussed the alternatives with me and I suggested to him that I was not a very dangerous criminal and giving me a pass to allow me exit from the Police Station, would be the preferred alternative. He agreed with me and I soon left for home never to hear from the police again.

We were disappointed to realise that nobody really wanted DP's for migrants. The Canadians were only taking expert lumber-jacks, New Zealand wanted telegraph and telephone pole men, Australia was looking for bootmakers. The Americans didn't really wanted anybody, and certainly nobody who was born in Hungary. According to the US immigration laws, promulgated before WW I, took no notice of the prospective migrants nationality or background and all what mattered was the country in which the person was born. Thus the annual number of Hungarian born, who could be approved to go to the States was 896. This was the total of all Hungarian born from whichever country they applied from. Since a lot of Hungarian born Hungarians were applying for a visa in Hungary, the quota for Hungarian born people resident in Germany was correspondingly reduced. The quota for people born in Germany was 28,000, from Yugoslavia 8,000.

So I wrote to my parents in Hungary and they arranged to obtain a birth certificate from Yugoslavia. Eventually the forged birth certificate arrived to me via England and I obtained background documents regarding my imaginary life in Germany since the war. For the purpose of applying for a US visa I assumed the name of Ivan Kalman, while for everyday purposes I continued to be Stefan Kalman. Unfortunately, some 10,000 others had the same idea and the Yugoslav quota was filled. Even some of my relations sailed to the USA sporting "made in Yugoslavia" birth certificates.

When we realised that even the Yugoslav quota was too small to ensure a speedy trip to the USA, most of us cast our eyes towards becoming eligible for the German quota of migrants. I searched for a German registry office that was destroyed during the war and I invented the person of Walter Kalmann from Hungary, who most fortuitously happened to have been born in Königsberg, a German Town with a burned down Registry Office and annexed by Russia. To create a plausible background I became an accomplished forger of interesting documents.

To create Walter, the first thing to do was to find a printer who still had gothic typesetting slugs and the next was to talk him into printing an obviously illegal birth certificate form. Neither jobs were easy, because the use of gothic letters ceased with the demise of the Nazi rule in Germany. However, with the help of cigarettes and a plausible story for the printer to believe that he has not been acting in a criminal fashion, we had the required form. The next problem was the stamp, which in accordance with practice during the war, had to show a swastika. Not even cigarettes were going to convince the makers of rubber stamps that they should manufacture stamps with the nazi swastika, so we had to look towards our own craftsmanship.

When in Hungary I watched others making false papers for me, I saw how they made a sealing-wax cast off the Hungarian emblem of a coin. They poured wax into that and they could then make one or two impressions, which looked as if it would have been made by a rubber stamp.

We started experimenting and after a while our forgeries became quite acceptable. To start with we made one birth certificate extract from Königsberg for Walter Kalmann and another one from another town for Robert Tábori's assumed name (which he is still using). To check the quality we showed our works of art to others, who were most impressed. We had lots of commercial offers, but refused to set ourselves up as counterfeiters for financial gain, - being involved for no gain could have been bad enough, had we been discovered.

The only other document we forged was the birth certificate extract from a small village near Munich for Cousin Andrew. He presented it to the American authorities who checked it and accepted it as genuine. He was given a visa in the name of Andrew Pick and eventually emigrated to the United States. Twenty years later he applied for a real estate licence and his secret of not having been born at the place where his birth certificate said he was, was uncovered. In spite of having fathered 6 American boys, he was almost deported, but he was saved by President Eisenhower's presidential pardon.

For Walter's identity I collected all my own documents, real and unreal, and applied for a US visa as a German born Hungarian. My excellent birth certificate forgery gave me some confidence but also a lot of sleepless nights. Not until the news filtered through from the US Embassy that my birth certificate was cleared and I was placed on to the "German quota" did I rest easy. I passed the politics oriented investigation of the CIC also and it seemed that before long I should be asked for an interview with a US consular official at the Embassy.

Soon I received an invitation to present myself at the US Embassy with a prescribed list of documents and all spruced up, I did so. All went well with my interview, until I handed in my old prewar Hungarian passport which was doctored to read Königsberg instead of Budapest as my place of birth. The changes were made by me months ago, and at the time seemed to be satisfactory, but where the ink remover was used on the passport, the colour changed after a while. I have not checked the alteration, since it was made and my chances of being accepted as a prospective citizen of the United States of America dissolved as I watched the American official's face as he and I simultaneously discovered the crude forgery.

After his initial astonished look, he continued with the interview as if nothing happened and concluded it with a promise to be in touch with me. I have not heard from them to this day and I feel certain that my old passport with its many hues and colours is now used by some US school for CIA agents, showing how not to make alterations.

After this fiasco I have given up all efforts to emigrate to the USA. It was obvious that I was not meant to go there or else I was not as clever with my subterfuge as my success in surviving in 1944/45 might have suggested. The miracles which allowed me to survive until then came to an end in the US Embassy that afternoon. Whatever the case, from then on I concentrated on being me, - I have given up my life of crime.

However good my intentions were, I still found it very difficult to get myself organised. I was unable to get any visa to any country and was getting myself into a real nervous pickle, so much so that at one stage of 1948 I had to go into hospital. I was suspected of having jaundice or hepatitis, but I knew that all I had was a nervous breakdown. The hospital was run by nuns and I once again I was impressed by their kindness and hard work. I also admired their patience while trying to push a rubber tube down my throat to take a sample of my gastric juices.

Soon afterwards my brother John became a British subject and he came to visit me in Germany. It was the first time that we met since January 1939 and because the intervening nine and a half years were quite eventful, we never stopped talking for the 5 days we were together. My brother and I in Germany.

We travelled to Frankfurt together and it was in a tram that he told me that after almost 10 years in England his accent is still detectable European, - something I could hardly understand. To prove that one could learn German, and speak it without an accent, I spoke to my neighbour in the tram in my best Bavarian accent complaining about the cramped carriage. He asked me if it is better in Bavaria, to which (in my Prussian accent) I answered: "How would I know, I come from Berlin."

In my Frankfurt digs we were nearly lynched by the landlady, who found some of the chicken and ham Mother sent me from England and who ate everything, while John and I were out for the day. When we returned in the evening, she was desperately sick and accused us of leaving poisoned food around. The same day that John left, she accused me of stealing her silver thimble and kicked me out of her flat at 10 p.m. That night I had an opportunity to see not just a Germany, but a World I have never noticed before.

It was impossible to obtain a hotel room in Frankfurt and I made it to the Main Railway Station, where inside and outside dozens of girls were plying their trade. I approached some men to ask if they would know where I find shelter for the night and they suggested that I can have their bed together with their wives for the night, as soon as they return from entertaining a client, but bed and wife was not available independently.

I tried to find a place in the station's waiting room, but it was crowded with other derelicts and I felt unhappy to lie down on the filthy stone floor. I went to a former air raid shelter, where there were dormitories one could enter and find a bed or a chair to rest on. There was a door man who took a few pennies and allowed you to pass into, what I could only compare to Dante's Inferno, with the blue smoke of cigarette buts added to the flames. I stayed only a few seconds and emerged up the stairs to the darkness of the street, which I roamed for a while, until tiredness and the rain made me seek a dry place within the ruins of a building. There I slept fitfully for a while and when I awoke found that the ruins were crawling with similar dredges of humanity. I hastened to return to my landlady, where within minutes I found her missing thimble underneath her kitchen table.

Soon after John returned to England, he was successful in getting me a Labour Permit to work in Scotland. To get a visa I had to present the Labour Permit at the British Consulate at Frankfurt and I also had to get a passport so that the visa can be stamped onto some valid document. My next problem was getting a passport, but not until I had a visa. It was a Catch 22 situation. I knew that one of my friends moved from Munich to Wiesbaden and it turned out that he could help in getting a Stateless Travel Identity Card for me provided the British Consulate states that they will give me a visa provided I have a Carte d'Identity.

I moved from Frankfurt's British Consulate to Wiesbaden in double quick time and soon I felt elated that after two years of struggle I had a passport, albeit a Stateless one. I rushed back to Frankfurt and arrived ten minutes before the British Consulate was to close for the weekend. The lady consul was friendly, helpful and efficient and within a few minutes I was the proud owner of a visa and a passport and the hope that one day I will again belong to a country. The feeling can only be understood by others who had the experience of being stateless and hopeless. The British accepted me because I was stateless and I have never forgotten their magnanimity.

As soon as I could, I booked my flight from Frankfurt to London. In view of my illegalities with my applications for US visas I felt unsafe until I got to Frankfurt Airport and my ticket, passport and luggage were checked in. A few minutes before we were to board the plane, the loudspeakers were asking Mr Kalman to report to the US Military Police. I felt certain that they wanted to question me about one or the other of my misdeeds against their immigration procedures. The tension was unbearable and I did not relax until I found that they wanted me only to return to me my raincoat which I left at the ticket counter.

I boarded the DC4 plane for my flight to London. The plane was going to New York, via London and Shannon and Gander and was full of GI brides, - German girls going to be married to US soldiers. I was not envious of others flying to the US, at this stage I was disinterested in migrating to the US, I was thrilled to go to England.

My parents were there since 1947, although after their initial visit in 1946 they returned to Hungary and nearly got caught there. As they got to the Hungarian border, the policeman looked up their names and took away their passports. Without these they were lost, so as soon as they got home they tried to regain their passport.

They engaged a crook solicitor who fleeced them of a lot money, but to no avail. In the end Father went to the Passport Office within Police HQ where he was unsuccessful. Dejectedly he was walking down the stairs when a girl spoke to him and asked him about me. Father realised that the girl was a friend of mine and when the girl asked him why he was visiting the Police HQ, he told her about the passports. She suggested that he should wait and within a few minutes she returned with the two passports. They left Hungary next day.

Father waited for me at London's Northolt Airport. I was exuberant at the thought of being with my family and in England. When Father engaged a porter to carry my luggage to a taxi, I couldn't allow him to carry it. After all he was an Englishman and I was just a DP.

8th August 1948. It has been nearly 10 years, but on the 8th August 1948 all four of us shared once again the same table and a paprika chicken in my parents' small flat in Lichfield Court, Richmond, Surrey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                        THE EXPLANATION...              

 

 

 

               Whenever I left our flat for either the school or Father's office I had to pass in front of the Markó street prison.

    

          The day after he was sentenced to death, ex-Major Ferenc Szálasi, head of the Arrow Cross Party, Leader of Hungary, whose official proclaimed policy was the final extermination of all the Jews in Hungary, asked the President of Hungary for clemency. This was refused and his execution was set for the afternoon.

    

          I was passing the prison and seeing the crowds realised that Szálasi is going to be executed. I became part of the crowd wishing to be admitted.

 

          As he was walking to the gallows people were shouting: S-L-O-W-L-Y. An American soldier broke through towards him and asked him: "Where is my Mother? What have you done to my Mother?"

    

          The hangman grabbed him and lifted him up. They broke his neck in a second or two. He did not suffer. He had it easier than his victims.

    

          I am sorry to say and it must sound terrible here and now, but I am pleased to have been there.

 

          I tried to explain why.

 

 

 

Steve Colman

N.S.W. Australia

September 1983

 

 

 

---

 

 

         

         

 

TAKING STOCK

 

It is of interest to follow the fortunes of certain people and certain things that are mentioned in my story. First the people and then the belongings:

Peter Agocs and his wife lived in their small house on the outskirts of Budapest. Peter had a spinal problem and spent his last years in a wheelchair. My parents visited them after 1963.

Julius Baskay was persecuted almost immediately after the war. Having been a large land owner and a member of the Upper House, he was a marked man. On the first occasion that he was summonsed to the infamous Political Police HQ at 60 Andrássy Street, he was accompanied by both Father and myself and we insisted in making a statement in his favour. He was released after spending some two or three days in a cell. They returned to their home in the country and lost their land, which was distributed to the peasants. Eventually they returned to live in Budapest and died there. Their daughter married a University Lecturer, visited us in England and was assisted by Mother until they did not need help. Their son, a professional Army officer lives in South America and used to correspond with Father.

General Gábor Gerloczy, second from right, became Father's employee. He and his wife, a Baroness, translated business letters into English and German for Father. He stayed employed by the business even after Father left for the West. Eventually, he and the Baroness were collected by the police in the middle of the night and deported from Budapest into a small village, where the General worked as a labourer pushing a wheel barrow on some earth moving project. Father and Mother kept sending them parcels until about 1960 when they were allowed to return to Budapest. Around that time they lost contact and Father could not locate them on his subsequent visits to Hungary. They probably left Hungary.

Zsuzska and Karolina (Csöpi) Reszeli[13] live in Budapest in the same circumstances as ever. They are still happy and content with the little they have. Csöpi keeps up her correspondence with Mother and advises her of the problems they have with Zsuzska's health. Mother helps them financially and with hand-me-downs since 1945.

Some time after the war Csöpi became an actress and together with other midgets, gave enormous pleasure to thousands and thousands of children in a production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarf, until a newspaper wanted to show its socialistic conscience and protested at midgets exhibiting themselves in such demeaning fashion. The theatre company was then disbanded and all the midgets lost their livelihood. There is no unemployment benefit in Hungary and Csöpi and her mother had a very difficult time until finally they received work in the form of putting on the gum on to envelopes on a piece rate that allowed them almost no income for 14 hours of work.

When I visited them in 1966 Csöpi was the only person in Hungary who recognised me as she watched from the landing John, his wife Clare and me walking up the staircase. Their little flat was absolutely spotless and consisted of a kitchen, which was Csöpi's bedroom and their bathroom also, and a bedsitter, in which Zsuzska lived with her boyfriend. He was a very sick man who died within a few weeks of my visit.

(Csöpi's photo from around 1990.) According to Clare, meeting Csöpi and her mother in 1966 was the highlight of her visit to Hungary. On leaving them, Clare broke down and cried and a similar effect was experienced by my daughter and her husband also.

 

Update. Zsuzska died around 1987, some time before Joy and I visited Csopi in her little home. Csöpi got a phone and I used to ring her now and then after my Mother passed away and I started to assist her financially. In 2005 her phone did not answer and I was convinced that she also passed away. Nevertheless when in 2006 with my second wife, Valentina we visited Hungary we drove to her house and after nobody was responding to our knocking on her front door we were just about to leave when a neighbouring lady rushed out in her nightgown to tell us that Csöpi can be found in a nearby hospital where she was permanently cared for since her stroke.

 

That afternoon we visited her with my grandchildren and once again on entering her ward she immediately recognized me and we had a happy reunion and while she was permanently bedridden she was full of life and as bright as ever.

 

In 2007 I made representations with the New York based Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and in October 2008 I traveled to Budapest, where her mother’s and her action in hiding my mother and giving me space was lauded and she was being decorated in the presence of various representatives of the diplomatic corps and religious representatives and my friends and relations.

 

Subsequently the Wallenberg Foundation arranged for stamps to be issued with their pictures by the Israel Post Office and steps were taken  to have them declared Righteous Gentiles, now called Righteous of the Nations, which was approved by Yad Washem in Jerusalem in December 2009.

 

As I am writing this update, I am looking forward to visiting Budapest in October 2010 and seeing Csöpi again.

Vilmos Thiringer escaped to Germany and came to visit us in London and eventually emigrated to America, where he became a male nurse. I met him in London and again in America where I spent an evening with him in San Francisco. He insisted that he cannot remember giving me hay, but if he did, so what? He was a gentleman in both the Olde World-Hungarian and real sense of the word.

George Kelemen I never heard of again, - being a great survivor I am sure he left Hungary and is alive and well.

George Schusztek the third George from my Army days is a well to do businessman in Vienna. He married Bársony Rózsi, who was a star of Budapest, Vienna and Berlin and a Jewess too. She was the only actress I know who on her first return engagement after 20 years has sold out every seat in a sport stadium with 100,000 seats and came back to two repeat performances in the same venue, all sold out. I met both of them in Vienna in 1966. She died around 1976, but I I have had no news of George.[14].

Thomas Lorand[15] the officers' cook who made a fish dish for his sick comrade has a restaurant in London and became a good friend of mine, Joy and my family. He is married to Enid, an English lady and they have no children. I meet them whenever I visit London.  He passed away in 1991.

Uncle Imre Balázs survived the War with his wife. He was hidden in a house in the country and after his experiences in the Arrow Cross occupied school, had the good sense of keeping off the streets until he was liberated. Soon after the end of the war, he saw one of the Arrow Cross guards passing the house he lived in. He followed him along Andrássy Street and when the Arrow Cross man was passing in front of No. 60, housing the Political Police, Uncle started to shout and had the man arrested. He confessed to all sorts of crimes and it was him who told about the killing of 15 years old Susan Kádár.

Subsequently, Uncle Imre became interested in politics and tried to convert all his capitalist relations, including his nephews to socialism. He died at the age of 73 and his wife Lili, a charming gentle lady, followed him some years later. They had no child, in fact Lili had a miscarriage on the day the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944.

Frau Eidam and our family - in spite of our being very grateful and all that, did not keep up the friendship after Liberation. However, one day in 1946 or 1947 she traced Father and arrived in his office and asked for financial help. She did it without demanding it and with such charm, that my parents were pleased to help her.

The three ladies living next door to the brothel were ecstatic at being liberated. Within a month two of them were dead. The Jewish woman, who was hiding there continued to live there after liberation and some two weeks later drunk Russians attacked her. To get away she jumped from the first floor window into the snow, broke her neck and died instantly. A few days later the owner of the flat, the gentile lady, who had an acute heart ailment had a heart attack and died.

My mate from Kecskemét, George Kennedy got back to Budapest riding my bicycle all the way. His father, who was not Jewish, hid him in a day & night bed from October until liberation in January. Within an hour after being liberated he was taken to work for the Russians and after he loaded the truck he was made a POW by the green capped NKDV and sent to Russia. He returned from POW camp in mid 1946 after spending some year and a half in Siberia.

George Schillinger went to the US and became a mathematician. When I last saw him in 1963, he was Senior Lecturer at one of the New York Universities. Update.  I searched for George while in Canada in 2008 and found him mentioned on the Web as a well known New York University professor. We had some exciting ‘phone conversations, but sadly,  his daughter advised that he had multiple strokes and lost his speech and movement. (2010)

Of the others who left Hungary with me: Peter Kardos returned to Hungary after 3 months in Germany. He took a letter from me to my ex girl friend and nearly married her, or so she said.. Update. He became an engineer but worked for United Nations in India and elsewhere.  Sadly, his wife passed away at 41 and his second wife also died young. His partner also died tragically. He only has one daughter but his stepchildren and grandchildren are all caring about him as he loves them all.  In 2008, while visiting Hungary we met and renewed our friendship which is still going strong. (2010)

Robert Tábori who shared a flat with me in Munich married there and went to live in Paris with his wife and daughter. I visited them there in 1951. Update. Roby became a mathematician studying on the Sorbonne, was employed by IBM and eventually transferred to USA. We corresponded from 2008 onwards. (2010)

27 Mandula utca, our house on Rose Hill is still there, although in very bad repair. I visited it in 1966, when 2 families lived upstairs and 5 separate families lived in the downstairs area. The basement, where (I am ashamed to recall) lived the janitor, his wife and their daughter, housed in 1966, a women, (who turned out to be the aforementioned little girl) her husband and child and the old lady, who was once our janitor's wife and now his widow. Socialism has not improved their life. The house was taken from Father and Mother and although we could now claim it back from the State, provided we can show that we intend to live in it, the occupiers of the house may live there in undisturbed peace. I contacted one of the three families who now live in the converted to 3 flats. It seemed that this particular tenant in the building will be pleased to welcome a visit from my wife and me with 2 of our grandchilren in 2006. However he suddenly cut the contact with me, no doubt he realised that he does not wish to act in a friendly manner to someone like me!. (2010)

Third Floor, 17 Szemere utca, our flat in Town was a home unit and was rebuilt at our expense after the war. I always thought that it was our property, but in fact it was not. Nevertheless, the State took it, lock, stock, barrell and contents and no compensation was paid either for this or the one sixth share of the building which Father and I saw being damaged by cannon fire.

The business was left in charge of my Uncle Imre and Márton Farkas, who was employed by Father for twenty years or more and who returned from the death camps of Germany. However, soon after my parents left Hungary the second time, Farkas and Uncle Imre were summonsed to the Police and interrogated about Father and the business confiscated. Farkas died of a heart attack soon afterwards, his wife blaming the shock of being questioned by the police. The interesting side line to all this is that Father's best known product is still being sold with its original name given to it by Father in about 1937 and also the fact that when Father first visited Budapest in 1962, after an absence of 15 years, the sign outside the old business still proudly displayed the name "KÁLMÁN JÓZSEF". It is worth mentioning here that business was in Kálmán Street, which has connection only with a long gone king of Hungary called Kálmán and not with my Father.

Finally, what happened to the gold? Around 1942 my Uncle Bandi, Eva's father and I carried a big round tin containing 1002 "Napoleon's" i.e. 20 Francs, the equivalents to Sovereigns, together with another round tin containing various gold jewellery with a total weight of over 4 kilograms to Szölösgyörök, a village where his home was, with a view of burying it there for safe keeping.

In the middle of the night Uncle Bandi got up and dug his hole and next night we buried the gold in his back yard, amongst the vegetables. So that the place where it was buried could be described, the spot was at the closest coordinate of the corn silo and the water well. Indeed it was so easy to describe where the gold was, that some weeks later Father unerringly pointed out the spot to Uncle Bandi.

Somehow, we sent message to John that there is a fortune buried at Uncle Bandi's home and of course we and also Eva's family knew where the gold is. Somebody was sure to survive from the six of us.

While we in Pest were liberated in mid-January 1945, the whole of Budapest was not occupied by the Russians until February and the areas west of Budapest not until March. Thus it was some time before we could consider how to get to Szölösgyörök and how to bring back the loot. There was no transport and there were marauding Russians and even Hungarians who were armed and helped themselves to whatever they fancied. Travelling with gold was positively unwise those days.

It was not until about July or August that we could rent a car with an armed guard and off we went with Father and Uncle Imre. He came to see what could be done about his brother-in-law's property, in case Eva or her parents survived and return from where ever they were. We left very early in the morning, not because we wanted to spend a lot of time there, but because Father thought it might be nice to have a swim in Lake Balaton on the way.

My Uncle's house was deserted. All the windows were still boarded up as they were in May 1944 over a year ago. We realised that the building and its many outhouses must have been used as the ghetto where the few Jews of the neighbourhood were rounded up prior to deportation.

We brought our shovels along from Budapest and having located the spot set to dig for the gold. We dug down deep and still there was no metallic noise to suggest that we found it. We dug a little towards the right, then a little towards the left. Nothing. Before long we had a 2 meter square hole dug deep down.

It was then that a police officer approached us. He turned out to be the son of the other Jewish family of the village, who used to be a tennis coach and what used to be termed a gigolo, because of his wealthy girl friends. He suggested that we will find nothing because all the men and women in the Ghetto were systematically tortured by the gendarmes to give up their existing or non-existing fortunes. To him it was obvious that Uncle Bandi confessed to the gold. Just the same he organised some labourers, who were digging away all that afternoon and half the night until the hole was at least 10 by 10 meters large and so deep that we struck water. We took turns to sleep in the car and it was next morning that the little old man, Uncle Geleta, who used to be looking after the horses and the carriage arrived. He told us that the last time he saw him, Uncle Bandi had a face blue and black from a beating he must have received from the gendarmes.

I only hope they stopped beating him when they found the gold.

 I visited Szölösgyörök in 1966. The house was not lived in, but the Communist Party used part of the house.

In 1989 Joy and I revisited the place. The house was rebuilt and became the one and only General Store of the village. As usual it was not open for business in spite of us having visited it during the hours when according to the sign it should have been open.

Seeing that house upset me more than any other sight during my visit to Hungary. To realise that my relations' house is unrecognisable, even if it did not disappear and thus their only remaining memento and memorial to their existence disappeared, brought back all the wretched memories of what "my country" has done to me and the likes of me.

We left Szölösgyörök depressed, after being watched by silent suspicious locals, who were old enough to guess why we photographing an unattractive village shop. We must have been regarded as ghosts, who came back to haunt the place on behalf of some people whom they could forget and don't like to remember.

I visited Szölösgyörök once more in 1999 and the story of my visit may be read on this Web site. You may get there by clicking on this footnote number. [16]

APPENDIX A

(The following is based on Appendix A (The Fate of the Jews in Hitler's Europe: By Country) from: The War against the Jews 1933-45 by Lucy Dawidowicz, published by Pelican Books / Penguin Books Ltd. 1975)

HUNGARY.

Hungary's policies before and during the war can best be understood in the light of her revangist goals. In November 1938 Hungary joined Germany in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, annexing some Slovakian districts and a part of Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In March 1939, when Slovakia declared itself an independent state, Hungary occupied the rest of Ruthenia. In August 1940 Hungary received northern Transylvania from Romania under the Vienna Award. As repayment Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact on 20 November 1940. In April Hungary occupied the Bácska basin in north-eastern Yugoslavia.

On 22 June 1941 Hungarian forces joined the Germans in invading Russia , though Hungarian military participation was less than whole hearted, with Regent Nicholas Horthy resisting German demands for Hungary's general mobilisation. In March 1942 Horthy replaced Hungary's pro-German Prime Minister László Bárdossy with Miklós Kállay, who sought to disentangle Hungary from the war. Hungarian losses on the Russian front and Hungary's preoccupation with her traditional enemy, Romania, accelerated Hungarian troop withdrawals from the front, to the extent permitted by Germany.

In early 1943, Hungary appeared, in Hitler's eyes, to be acting more like a neutral than a German ally. Consequently, in April 1943 Hitler summoned Horthy to his headquarters in Klessheim Castle near Salzburg and criticised him for Kállay's policies, both as to Hungary's obligations to Germany and as to the need to eliminate Hungary's Jews. Kállay, however, continued his policies and in August 1943 broadcast a peace speech, following the overthrow of Mussolini in Italy, Hungary's traditional ally.

In March 1944, with the war going badly for Germany, Hitler again summoned Horthy and members of his cabinet to Klessheim (Kállay refused to join them). Hitler confronted Horthy with what he regarded as Hungary's treachery, declaring that Germany had to occupy Hungary. Horthy was held incommunicado for a day; when he returned home on 19 March, the German occupation of Hungary had been completed. On 22 March a new Hungarian government was formed under Prime Minister General Döme Sztojay, formerly the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin. The real rulers in Hungary thenceforth were the SS and Reich Plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer. All political parties and trade unions, with their press, were suppressed. The Sztojay government could not, however, maintain itself because of overt opposition from the right - the Hungarian National Socialists and the Fascist Arrow Cross, under Ferenc Szálasi. Romania's surrender to Russia in August 1944 and the stunning defeat of the Germans at that time by Russian and Romanian forces shook Hungary.

Sztojay resigned on 30 August 1944 and Horthy replaced him with General Géza Lakatos in an effort to restore more Hungarian autonomy. In October 1944 Russian forces crossed into Hungary.

On 15th October Budapest radio announced that Horthy was asking the Russians for an armistice. The German SS under Veesenmayer reacted swiftly by kidnapping Horthy's son and holding him under threat. They thereby forced Horthy to appoint Arrow Cross Chief Szálasi as Prime Minister and Leader of Hungary. Szálasi cancelled the armistice, but the Hungarian commander-in-chief and his chief of staff went over to the Russians. By November 1944 the Russians had overrun two thirds of Hungary and had reached Budapest's outskirts. Budapest remained under Russian siege until February 1945, though the Hungarians had signed an armistice a month earlier. Finally, by 4 April 1945 no more Germans remained in Hungary.

JEWS IN PRE-WAR HUNGARY.

In 1930, 445,000 Jews lived in Hungary, about 5 per cent of the population. Half lived in Budapest, where they made up 20 per cent of the population, and in two other large cities. The rest of the Jewish population was dispersed; there were twenty-four communities with about 1,000 Jews each and 180 with fewer than 1,000 Jews each.

In a country with a landed aristocracy and a large peasantry, the Jews were distinctively middle class. Of gainfully employed Jews, 38 per cent were self-employed businessmen in industry (including small craftsmen), commerce and banking, and also professionals; 28 per cent were salaried (white-collar employees mainly in commerce, banking and industry); and 33 per cent were wage earners (worker), though predominantly in commercial enterprises.

Most Jews in Budapest were highly accultured, in contrast to the Jews in the small towns where Orthodoxy prevailed. There were three national religious Jewish communities: the Neologs (somewhat similar to Reform Jews), the Orthodox, and a smaller organisation called "Status Quo Ante Jewish Communities" who stood somewhere between them. Intermarriage and baptismal rates were quite high; in 1938 there were 35,000 baptised Jews in Hungary. Conversions, the declining birth rate and continuing emigration as a consequence of Hungary's anti-Semitic policies reduced the size of the Jewish population of Hungary, estimated at about 400,000 in 1939.

Hungarian Jews had been emancipated in 1867, but resentment on the part of the non-Jewish population - because of the territorial losses after the First World War, chaotic economic conditions and the abortive Communist dictatorship of Béla Kun were vented on the Jews. Horthy came to power as a blaze of pogroms raged in Hungary, particularly in the provinces.

The violence was followed by various administrative measures eliminating most Jews from public service and restricting their admission into universities. From 1924 to 1933, under the conservative regime of Count Stephen Bethlen as Prime Minister, the situation of the Jews somewhat stabilised, but in the mid-1930s, under the impact of National Socialism in Germany and its Hungarian admirers, anti-Semitism intensified.

On 24 May 1938, a month after Hitler's annexation of Austria, the Hungarian parliament, in an effort to appease Hitler and prevent seizure of power by the Hungarian Nazis, enacted its first anti-Jewish law, prepared by the Horthy government, despite the bitter opposition of the Smallholders and Socialist parties and Bethlen's conservative followers. The law limited employment of Jews in private business firms to 20 per cent. A year later, a more far-reaching anti-Jewish law was passed, defining the status of Jews, barring them from leading positions in the media, prohibiting the issuance of new trade licences to them or the renewal of old ones. The law also barred further admission of Jews to the professions until their share fell below 6 per cent.

It authorised the government to expropriate, with compensation, Jewish landed property. Jews could no longer acquire Hungarian citizenship by naturalisation, marriage or adoption. Voting rights of non-native Jews or those whose forebears were not permanently resident before 1868 were cancelled.

JEWS IN WARTIME HUNGARY

After Munich and the Vienna Awards, Hungary added another 250,000 to its Jewish population of 400,000: 75,000 Jews in former Slovakian territory, 25,000 in the Bácska basin of Yugoslavia and 150,000 in Transylvania for a total of 650,000 Jews in Greater Hungary. There were, besides, some 100,000 Christians, who were regarded as "racial" Jews and subject to anti-Jewish laws. (In August 1941 a more stringent law was enacted, defining who was a Jew.)

In August 1941 the Hungarian government rounded up some 17,000 stateless Jews in its annexed Ruthenian territory and pushed them over the border to Kamenets-Podolsk in the German-held Ukraine, but the Germans complained that the Jews disrupted their military communications. After the Hungarians drew off several thousand to be used as slave labourers, the German Einsatzkommandos massacred the remaining 11,000. Several thousand Yugoslav Jews were also massacred by the Hungarian occupying forces at Novi Sad.

No further deportations took place and when the Kállay government took over in March 1942 Jews were subject only to tightening employment restrictions, forced-labour conscription and more extensive expropriations. Some 16,000 Jews from Austria, Slovakia and Poland even found refuge in Hungary and were not handed over to the Germans. At the end of 1942, Kállay rejected German demands to introduce yellow badges for Jews and deport them to Poland. In May 1943 Kállay, in a public speech, rejected "resettlement" of the Jews as a "final solution" so long as the Germans were giving no satisfactory answer about where the Jews were being resettled.

The virtual German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 and the installation of the pro-German Sztojay government drastically transformed the situation of the Hungarian Jews. On 19 March, the very day of the German take-over, Adolf Eichmann himself came to Budapest with a battery of SS officers in charge of Jewish affairs. Eichmann ordered the Jewish community leaders to appear for a conference the next day, when they were told to establish a Judenrat which would have to carry out German orders. Meanwhile, on 29 March new anti-Jewish legislation was enacted, forcing Jews entirely out of the professions, ordering the registration of their property and arranging for its almost instant expropriation. The yellow star was introduced and the Jews were concentrated in designated places.

To carry out the deportations of the Jews, Eichmann divided Hungary into six zones:

Zone  I         =        Carpathians;

          II        =        Transylvania;

          III        =        Northern Hungary;

          IV       =        Southern Hungary east of the Danube;

          V        =        Transdanubia,

including the suburbs of Budapest;

          VI       =        Budapest.

With the participation of a Sondereinsatzkommando (special duty commando) that Eichmann had brought from Mauthausen and with the help of Hungarian police, the Germans began to round up the Jews, concentrating them within the designated zones and deporting them in rapid order.

By 7 June Zones I and II had been cleared of nearly 290,000 Jews. By June 30 over 92,000 Jews had been deported from Zones III and IV. By 7 July over 437,000 Jews, including some 50,000 from Budapest, had been deported to Auschwitz.

Meanwhile, the Jewish relief committee in Budapest, following up earlier initiatives of Slovakian Jews, began negotiations with SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny about ransoming the remaining Hungarian Jews from deportation. On behalf of the Jewish relief committee, Joel Brand was sent to Turkey to contact the Allies about the possibilities of exchanging goods for Jewish lives. Negotiations were protracted and complex, but Eichmann never halted the deportation trains. Finally, nothing substantial developed in the rescue of the Jews, except for one trainload of Hungarian Jews who were saved.

In July 1944, after news about the Hungarian deportations had been sent abroad, various high-level interventions on behalf of the Jews began to dismay the Hungarians. Horthy ordered the deportations halted.

When the pro-German government was toppled in August, the new Prime Minister Lakatos asked the Germans to remove Eichmann's Sondereinsatzkommando. Some anti-Jewish restrictions began to be lifted, but after the German "coup" in October 1944, with Arrow Cross leader Szálasi as Prime Minister, the Jews again fell into German hands for deportation. By 26 October some 35,000 Jewish men and women had been rounded up, but since Auschwitz was then being liquidated, these Jews were to be used as slave labourers. The exigencies of war rendered railway transportation almost impossible and so the Germans marched off 27,000 Jews on a terrible trek of over 100 miles to Austria. But Szálasi soon stopped these marches because of the high death rate.

Some 160,000 Jews remained in Budapest, subject to terror and murder at the hands of the Arrow Cross, suffering cold, hunger and disease in their ghetto-like quarters, under the rain of Russian bombardment. About 20,000 died that winter in Budapest.

On 14 February 1945 the Russians took Budapest.

Over 450,000 Jews, 70 per cent of the Jews of Greater Hungary, were deported, were murdered or died under German occupation. Within the boundaries of lesser (pre-1938) Hungary, about half the Jews were annihilated. Some 144,000 survived in Budapest, including 50,000 "racial" Jews, and about 50,000 to 60,000 survived in the provinces.

 

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