From Darkness into Light. Robert Ratonyi
unbeknownst to me, the Holocaust had a significant impact on my life before the age of six. Had it not been for the terrible times already on the horizon, I probably would have had some sisters and brothers. For the rest of my life, I felt envious of those who had siblings.
My naiveté regarding the consequences of being Jewish was shattered in early 1944, when Germany invaded Hungary in March. On the thirty-first, Eichmann personally traveled to Hungary to plan the deportation of Hungarian Jews. An order was issued for Jews six years and older to wear a six-pointed bright canary-yellow star that measured ten by ten centimeters (four by four inches) on the top left side of their clothing in public. I had just turned six in January and therefore had to wear a yellow star every time I went outside to play or go on an errand with my mother.
My mother didn’t observe any of the daily Jewish rituals, but she made sure that during the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, and Hanukkah, we went to my grandparents’ home to celebrate. In other words, it was clear that I was Jewish and different from most of our neighbors who were Christians, but I didn’t know exactly what those differences were aside from celebrating different holidays. Other than a few well-to-do Jewish families in our building, most of our neighbors were Christians.
Right next door to us lived the Gyura family, a married couple and their daughter, Juci, who was about my age. We got along well with them, and I recall being invited over to their place to see their Christmas tree with all the decorations. Mr. and Mrs. Gyura made sure that I also had a present. Their tree was decorated with all the colorful bulbs, angel hair, and candy hanging from the branches. Their tiny apartment was a mirror image of ours with their kitchen adjoining our own. The Gyuras were Protestants, not Roman Catholics. Protestants, who represented about 15 percent of Hungary’s population, were perceived as being more tolerant of Jews as opposed to their Catholic brethren.
One day, before the anti-Jewish laws concerning the Star of David and other restrictions were pronounced, my mother arranged a meeting through the Gyura family to meet their local pastor and discuss the possibility of converting me into the Protestant faith. Clearly, the news about the Hungarian Jews’ fate in other parts of the country had spread to the city. This was my mother’s last desperate attempt to provide protection for me. I do remember going into the small Protestant church at the corner of Fűzér and Kápolna Streets and the meeting with the minister, but nothing ever happened afterward. There were strict laws against converting Jews, and the penalties were severe: deportation and almost certain death. In addition, as I later learned, the authorities disregarded all such conversions. Escaping the Nazis was only possible through having money and/or connections to forge the proper papers and to pay off those willing to take the risk of being caught hiding a Jew, for which the penalty was death. My mother had neither money nor connections, so we waited for the inevitable.
Bearing the Jewish star in public raised my awareness of being Jewish to a new level. My mother and I had often recalled the bittersweet story of my Jewish friend Bandi Fleishmann, who was a few months younger than I. When Bandi saw me with my yellow star, he, too, wanted one. He cried bitterly and couldn’t be consoled by his mother’s explanation that he was too young to wear it. We children didn’t know that wearing the yellow star or not could mean the difference between life and death in the months ahead.
The year 1944 turned into an apocalyptic year for the Jews of Hungary. Due to my young age, I was spared the mental and physical agony and deprivation that were yet to come to the Jews of Budapest. Moreover, I had no inkling of the fate of Hungarian Jewry outside the capital of Budapest, where several of my aunts, uncles, and cousins lived. I’m not sure how much my mother knew either.
I learned that there was something unusual and dangerous going on in the world that the grown-ups called war. I had no idea of what this meant exactly except that my mother was visibly shaken and more and more anxious as time went on. Since March of 1944, when the Germans took control, Jews were exposed to arbitrary arrests and deportation.
It was in the late spring and early summer of 1944 when phase 1 of the Hungarian Final Solution was implemented. With lightning speed and great efficiency, approximately five hundred thousand—roughly two-thirds of Hungarian Jewish men, women, and children who lived outside Budapest—were dragged from their homes, jammed into cattle cars, and deported. Members on both sides of my family, which consisted of uncles, aunts, and cousins, were included.
Ninety percent of these Jews from the Hungarian provinces and smaller cities were sent to Auschwitz, and of those only 10 percent survived. It took less than sixty days to accomplish this. The deportations were enthusiastically supported by the local government officials, police officers, soldiers, and local population. Historic evidence revealed that even the Germans were surprised by how enthusiastically and ruthlessly the Hungarians supported and aided in this tragedy. My mother and my family who lived in Budapest, including my grandparents, knew that many in our family were deported. However, my mother kept me in the dark.
There were also nightly and daily air raids on Budapest, starting in the spring of 1944. The bombing of Budapest started on April 2, when the Americans bombed the industrial sites in the city during the day and the British by night. On July 2, the Allies delivered the greatest air raid against the city, this time including the residential areas. I do recall the air raid sirens going off in the middle of the night. My mother hurriedly dressed me to cross our courtyard and go into the cellar that ran underneath the length of the apartments facing ours.
Meeting some of our neighbors in the cellar during air raids was actually fascinating. I rarely, if ever, had the opportunity to socialize with those neighbors who lived in the beautiful and spacious apartments across the courtyard, except with the Lesko family, where I often hung out with Tibi, who was four years older than I. The courtyard separated the well-to-do middle-class families from the poorer, working-class families on our side of the building. A good example of this social divide was an older Jewish couple, Mr. and Mrs. Gergely, who lived right across the courtyard from us with their dog.
I rarely saw Mr. Gergely, who owned a retail store on the main road in our neighborhood. He came home every afternoon to take a nap. I was under strict orders, which I frequently violated, not to play outside and to avoid making any noise that might disturb his sleep. My mother and I were never invited to the Gergelys for a social visit that I can recall. However, Mrs. Gergely occasionally invited me in and showed me to their spájz, or “pantry” in English, to offer me a candy or a cookie that she stored in glass jars lined up on one of the shelves.
These social barriers miraculously disappeared in the cellar during the air raids. My mother chitchatted with the Gergelys and others as if they were part of her social circle. In addition, I received attention from people who under normal circumstances would barely acknowledge me. Everyone huddled in the darkness around the flickering candles. The whispers of the grown-ups were occasionally punctuated by the whistling noise of falling bombs followed by large muffled explosions.
In late June 1944, phase 2 of the Hungarian Final Solution was implemented. The Jews of Budapest were forced into approximately two thousand selected Yellow Star buildings in the city, which included ours. All the Christians living in those buildings had to move out unless they had special permission to stay so that Jewish families could move in. All I remember is that some of my Jewish friends and their mothers now lived in our building.
One Christian family who stayed in our building was Mr. and Mrs. Lesko with their son Tibi. Although we were neighbors, we lived a world apart. I loved hanging out at Tibi’s place. Mr. Lesko was an architect, whom I had rarely seen at home. Mrs. Lesko, a very tall woman, was always busy in her kitchen with her apron on. She was very nice to me and often invited me to join Tibi for lunch or a snack. Most importantly, I enjoyed spending time with Tibi whenever he would tolerate me. If Tibi was not home when I knocked on their door, I asked if I could look at their leather-bound collection of American comics that contained the original drawings and was translated into Hungarian. Thus, my first exposure to American culture came at a very early age.
It was in the early fall of 1944 that my mother had a chilling encounter with Mr. Lesko, an ardent Nazi. They accidentally met at the entrance of our house one day where Mr. Lesko warned my mother, “The day will soon come, Mrs. Reichmann, when you will be happy to be