In those days my father had a social circle who really loved – what they called at the time – ‘mulatni’ [Hungarian: having fun]. They went with their friends to small pubs. We were still in Bakats Street, and there was a little pub in Liliom Street, probably called the ‘Liliom’. Mother went with them to have fun. My father couldn’t dance, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke but he was a ‘mokamester’ [Hungarian: life of the party, master of ceremonies]. That he didn’t play cards was natural, because my grandmother made her children vow never to take cards in their hands. He was a born ‘mokamester’, who radiated joviality. He was a terribly popular person in the group. My grandmother disapproved of this kind of fun. Her puritanicalism was in that. Aside from that, she was extremely intelligent – she read a lot, but only what was extremely conservative. It’s likely she never knew love, the loving joy of a being in a marriage, the kind of love my parents had, and that’s why these kinds of life’s pleasures were untouchable to her.
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Displaying 47971 - 48000 of 50575 results
Zsuzsanna G.
There was no summer vacation. Our vacation was that my sister and I got season passes to the Szecsenyi beach [on the city park lake] I was about 12-13 years old when they let me go by myself. I learned to swim from the age of eight in the Rudas swimming pool. Neither my mother, nor my father knew how to swim, but they took me at the age of eight to the Rudas for swimming lessons. Neither of my parents could speak any other language, but I was learning German at the age of six. The same for my older sister. These were the kind of people my parents were. They never taught us to ride a bicycle because my mother fell off a bicycle in her childhood, and she didn’t want her children to have such a bad experience. Same thing with ice skating.
My mother was at home the whole time, she was a housewife. We could live from a window dresser’s pay so that we always had a maid. In the Filleres Department Store, my father earned good money, his salary was 560 pengos. Our rent, when we took that out was 100 pengo a month, which the new owner raised to 110 a month. Why did a family like this have a maid? Because at that time, house work was heavy physical work. Nothing was automated. The iron was heavy, it was a coal [heated] iron. Washing was heavy physical work, then there was cleaning, washing up, heating, bringing the kindling up, taking out the ashes. It was quite natural in that society that a family had a maid. This didn’t mean that the lady was a useless, red-nailed Madame, but that they worked together. My mother did the shopping and cooking.
We had theater passes from the age of ten. There were youth performances, for which you could buy tickets in school. That was a completely great thing. We sat in the cheapest seats, but we were always there.
I graduated in 1946, and I went to the Hungarian-English department in the college of Humanities. I had studied English earlier, but I didn’t know it really well. There was a very big social life at the university, politics first entered my life then.
I joined the Communist Party in 1947. My father and my older sister had already joined in 1945.
I was already working in January of 1949. And then came a period when I saw something here. I went here to work at the time, when I saw something here I took it, something there then I took that but meanwhile I got it a third job. I thought about it later, and for a long time I thought that it was only about an over-extended teenage period. But no. I realized that this was the Holocaust. It knocked me, like a pendulum [demolition ball], the kind they demolish houses with, out of the well-defined life, well-circumscribed around the Holocaust. I didn’t know where I was. It took me a long time before I figured it out. But then I found my place, I chose a great trade, and with a grown-up mind I graduated from the Economics University. I was always good in languages, so I had a successful professional life. I look back a my life and see it was successful. I earned, and earned, I left what wasn’t good behind, I dare to decide, I dared to change.
I got married in 1951. We met at work. He wasn’t Jewish, but that didn’t cause any problems. All my Jewish girlfriends married non-Jewish boys. Not because, like a lot of people say, that we didn’t want to be Jewish. We didn’t convert, we didn’t deny our Jewish past, but we thought that we should be just like anybody else, the non-Jews.
In the 1950s, we lived quite poorly, but somehow we didn’t feel it. We were young. We filled our free time with family programs, attended the theater a lot, and the symphony.
In the meantime, we finished university at night school. We helped each other a lot. There was a big cultural difference between my husband and I, because since he didn’t get so much out of his family as I did mine, but he was an outstanding talent, had a brilliant mind, he took in everything. He only knew one language, German, but he spoke it quite well. Not like I did, but he made himself understood, he could watch films [in German]. And he was very endearing, enormously helpful person.
I don’t want to talk in anymore detail about my life after 1945. What I think I had to say, that is, that I became a Party member in an extremely naïve and idealistic way.
We were all happy about the establishment of the Israeli state. This didn’t even bother my communism, because the Soviet Union even voted for it. But the thought of emigrating never came up.
The party decision pertained to us. Both of us protected ourselves from having to make a statement about it anywhere. I don’t consider it an heroic thing, but my husband for example was invited to hold party meetings all over the place. He was a very dynamic, very talented person with a good stage presence. In those times, he didn’t accept anything [any speaking engagements]. He told everyone, that he doesn’t have time. It wasn’t an intelligent thing in those days to provoke the Party discipline. But both of us were cheering for Israel with all our hearts.
I was in Israel for the first time in 1995. We have no relatives, my sister and I went as tourists. I got a list of Israeli hotels, sat on the telephone, wrote faxes, and we took a completely independently arranged tour.
We went to the [Ferenc Liszt] Music Academy, and the Vigado for concerts. I was so bored I counted the seats. But in the end I can be very thankful for that. Although somehow that clearly defines a lot about our value system, about what you could ignore and what you couldn’t. And I think that’s what is precisely the interesting thing: the intellectuality of a very everyday, lower-middle class Jewish family.
Like when it came up about whether we should emigrate or not. Us, as children had a full right to vote, and I, the zealous Hungarian national sympathizer objected to the most, but my parents would have been hard pressed to do it themselves. But we looked at the map thoroughly, and New Zealand looked the most enticing, but we didn’t have any connections to anywhere in the world. Our only acquaintance was the owner of the Filleres Department Store, Erno Ungar, a rich, clever and good man who had gone to America while there was still time. My father turned to him for a letter of sponsorship, which arrived at the end of 1945. By then, though we thought we didn’t have any need for it. So we followed what was happening in the world with total precision.
The constantly called my father up for work service [forced labor]. I can’t recall the exact date of his first conscription, probably in 1940. At the time they said, three months, and they took him to Diosjeno. Somehow, we lived through that, that it has to be this way because they’d called up the so-called ‘age group exception’.
. And after the funeral, we came back on Becsi Road, and a lot of German soldiers on motorcycles roared passed us. We went home, not on foot, by trolleybus. That was the first trolley-bus in Budapest. The others were all started on Stalin’s birthday. We got home, my father and Klari deathly pale, informed us in a tragic tone that the Germans had invaded us. [German Occupation of Hungary] [16]. The horror of it was enormous. My father was at home when during the occupation, when the regulation for wearing the yellow star came out, but when we had to move to the [yellow] star houses he wasn’t at home, so sometime between the two [regulations] he was called up again.
Well, the yellow star came, the school year ended, limitations on going out, we were ordered into the star house. My mother and I looked at lots of apartments, but couldn’t find one place, until somebody from the building across the street, from 4 Garay Street, which was a star house, told my mother that they recognized my mother from sight and they’d offer us a room. We moved there. It was horrible. We had to throw everything together, and make an inventory of what we could bring with us, and it was a very short list. We took our beds and our personal things over. Cabinets, table, armchairs, no, but well the apartment there had furnishings. Even before that we had to hand in our radios, carpets as gifts from the Hungarian people to the Germans.
So I got into the hospital at age sixteen, as the kind of a child whose only obligation to that point had been to study well. At home, the most I ever did was dry the already washed dishes. I wound up in a forty-bed ward, where there were sacks of hay and cots. The school gym had been converted. I ended up with the kind of nurse, who sat down to teach me what a hospital is and how to work. I experienced so unbelievably much benevolence in the hospital. My work was a difficult as it possibly could be, I hauled cauldrons, distributed food, collected dishes, washed them, emptied bedpans. But there was an atmosphere to the whole thing, a totally positive atmosphere. People were good to each other. Like sometime in July the nurse called me over, that the gentleman doctor L. needs to go to Elemer Street to look at patients, I should go with him, and take the blood pressure meter. I thought to myself, is the gentleman doctor’s hand going to break if he carries it? But I didn’t dare talk back, I took it. It later turned out that she sent me because an old man was dying in the ward, and they wanted to preserve me from when a person dies. In the middle of 1944. In the middle of the bombings and everything. It was important that I shouldn’t see somebody die.
. As soon as the retreat started, my father escaped. He skipped out about the same way as Laszlo Tabi with the bucket. [Refers to the humorist Laszlo Tabi’s sketch in which he describes that he escaped from the work service with two buckets, and if they asked him for ID, he said he was just going to the well for water.] He got a small hand car somewhere, on top of that was an old stove, as if he were taking it to a blacksmith, and he came to Pest. His clothes were quite acceptable as a worker’s clothes, and he even grew a mustache. He tried to find some place in Pest. I don’t know where he talked to Anna, probably at the tobacco stand, it suffices to say that Anna hid him in her room. He lived for about three months there and they never noticed. He wasn’t even allowed to go piss in the day time. Then in January, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he went to the hospital. And there, we were all liberated together on the 14th of January [Liberation of Budapest][20].
We looked for friends, and they looked for us. When my father first went home to the apartment, he told the Arrow Cross couple to leave because the owner came home. They immediately disappeared. Then my father and I brought home the beds one at a time from Rakoczi Road. Life started.
And now comes the thing that even now, sixty years later I can’t find an answer for: we didn’t talk about what happened. Not with each other, not with other Jews.
Something else happened in 1945. We Magyarized our name from Kauders to ‘H-‘. To this day, it is still difficult for me to say that I’m Jewish. I could never go back to the religion. Not because I was afraid, indeed, I even escorted my mother to temple. In 1949, when I was already working, a colleague of mine good-naturedly told me that I shouldn’t go to temple because it’s incompatible with party membership. And when I told my mother that, she said, ‘look at his stinking Jew, he must have also been there in the synagogue, otherwise where else would he have known that you were there?’ Still in 1948 I had a bad feeling when I got on a tram with a friend on Saturday [the Sabbath] to go somewhere. But I had already lost my faith by then.
My grandfather played cards. So he made a lot of money, yet still they lived in very great poverty, because he had six children [they had seven children, though one died in infancy], and little money made it home. My grandmother was understandably a housewife. When they came up to Pest, sometime around 1914, then my grandfather got a scene-painting position at the Hungarian Theatre [The Hungarian Theatre in Erzsebet Town was owned by Laszlo Beothy, and mainly performed dramas.] I don’t really know why they came up to [Buda-] Pest, I’ve got a foggy notion that it was a period of great bustle, people came en masse from the countryside. I’d guess that they found better job opportunities in Pest, in the positions of those people called up as soldiers to go to war. The children had to be taught some trade, obviously there were more possibilities here.
My father was sent to be a merchant assistant, because he was a very puny kid. My father was an apprentice, the merchant took him on to train him in the fashion merchant trade – he had no concurrent schooling. He worked in the shop, cleaned, took merchandise home, packed, he did everything, but they trained him to dress and groom himself like a merchant’s assistant.
Margit never got married, she lived with her mother, and she took care of her. Imre, the printer was my favorite uncle. He worked in the University Printing House, and that was such a prestigious thing in my childhood. Even before the war, he was a well-known person in the trade union movement, but after the war he remained a printer, didn’t become an independent functionary, but to the end he was a dedicated left-wing person. His wife, Mariska was a peasant girl from Bugac, who wasn’t Jewish, and with whom he lived in a very happy marriage.
My grandpa, David Kauders, paid absolutely no attention to religion. My father, as he told us, was in the third or fourth grade in a Jewish grammar [school] when the teacher smacked him, and he split with religion for the rest of his life. Except, naturally, for his death bed, when he asked a religious friend to write down the words to the father’s blessing for him, because then it was important to him, that he bless his children. Concerning my mother, keep in mind that the Jews from the Alfold were totally assimilated. So the Jew who stayed religious, did so in such a very neolog way [Neolog Jewry] [7], that is, they kept the high holidays, my grandma even lit candles on Friday evening, my mother also, but for example, they never kept the Sabbath. It never came up. There was school, you had to work. We didn’t work on High Holidays, of course. The candle-lighting and dinner on Friday wore us out. The point I’d like to stress is that my family thought of itself as Jewish Hungarians. Hungarians of the Israelite religion. The stress was on the Hungarian. Starting with the fairy tales, folk songs, the culture that I soaked up from when I was tiny was Hungarian culture. There’s a scene in the ‘Sunshine’ film [by Istvan Szabo] when the Jewish family are singing ‘The Spring Wind Sows Rain” at the dinner table. That reminded me of how much we sang together during my entire childhood, and what we sang: folk songs, so-called ‘Hungarian tunes’, popular operetta songs.
My parents were married in 1924. They met when once they passed one another on the street and both of them looked back.
We moved into the VII. District [of Budapest], to Garay Street in 1936 and then I wound up in the Bethlen Square Jewish school. That only happened because when we moved there in May, they had enrolled me in Muranyi Street, in the local grammar [school] where I learned very ugly words in less than a minute, so that my parents immediately decided that this wasn’t the atmosphere [for me].