From Darkness into Light. Robert Ratonyi
listened for the familiar sound of bombers flying over. However, it took me a few minutes, standing there stark naked with sweat pouring down, to realize that I was in Broomall, Pennsylvania, and not back in Budapest. It was only the next day that I learned the siren was the call signal for the volunteer firefighters to rush to their station. Fortunately, this was the only such incident.
Back in Budapest in December 1944, I must have been emotionally numb after everything that had happened during the previous months. Bombings didn’t bother me, and I was getting used to being hungry and cold all the time. My Cousin Tomi was in even worse shape, though he was three years older. A month or so earlier, a bomb exploded nearby at Légrádi Károly Street, the first place we moved to after leaving my grandparents’ place. Consequently, Tomi had become almost catatonic. He completely shut down and to this day has no recollection of anything that happened then. However, the month of December 1944 proved to be one of fateful and historic events:
December 15: The German government fled the city, and the activities of the Red Cross were banned. Armed bands of Arrow Cross soldiers began a string of systematic murders of Jews. On the same day, rail tracks were laid down up to the wall of the ghetto. It seemed that this was in preparation for deportation of the ghetto inhabitants to Auschwitz.
December 20: Several bombs hit the ghetto during the night, seriously damaging five houses where close to six hundred people lived, many of whom died.
December 22: Eichmann personally visited the ghetto and ordered the Jewish Council17 members to meet him the next morning at nine o’clock. His plan was to personally supervise the execution of the Jewish Council, followed by the massacre of the entire Jewish population of the ghetto.
December 23: Eichmann decided to leave Budapest at dawn as the news spread of the Soviet Army’s push to the outskirts of Budapest, thus averting the massacre of seventy thousand Jews.
December 23: Representatives of the neutral countries18 who had not yet left the city met and delivered a memorandum to the royal government of Hungary, protesting against transporting Jewish children found hiding elsewhere into the ghetto.
December 24: The Soviet Army surrounded the city, and the siege of Budapest began.
December 31: Corpses of the dead could no longer be taken out of the ghetto for burial. Many were lined up in the small courtyard of the synagogue on Dohány Street, today called the Hero’s Cemetery. To this day, two thousand victims rest there.
Life in the ghetto became quite perilous in December 1944. In addition to starvation, the cold, and bombs, there were bands of Arrow Cross soldiers determined to take as many Jews as they could out of the ghetto and murder them. An excerpt from the diary of a survivor, Miksa Fenyő, hiding not far from the ghetto on December 23, 1944, illustrates the dangers we faced every day:
There seems to be no end to the robbery and murder. No day goes by without a few dozen Jews dragged out of the ghetto on the slightest pretext, or on no pretext at all. At night they are shot to death along the banks of the Danube, to save the trouble of a burial.
A couple of stories my cousin recalled illustrate how pure luck played a crucial role in survival. The fear of Arrow Cross men dragging Jews away from the ghetto was so great that a decision was made to post a “guard” at the gate of our building. All grown-ups had to stand guard for two hours all day and night to alert us in case the Arrow Cross men were near. I’m not sure what we would have done if an alarm sounded, but being on guard kept the grown-ups proactive.
One evening my Aunt Piri was on guard when a man in our building volunteered to take her place and told her to go back upstairs and take care of her family. “I am a single man, but you have a family to take care of. I will take your watch,” he told her, and she came upstairs. Ten minutes later a bomb fell into the yard near the gate and instantly killed this Good Samaritan instead of my Aunt Piri.
There was another incident that involved Miklós. It was his responsibility to go to the ghetto kitchen and return with the daily soup portions for the whole family. He collected the soup in a big pot and was on his way back to our building when he heard the Soviet planes flying over with their guns blazing. He took cover on the side of a house until the planes disappeared. Upon hearing a sharp noise, he looked down into the pot and realized that the soup was gone. A bullet hole had penetrated the pot, causing all the soup to leak out.
By now, the Red Army was fighting the Germans and the Arrow Cross men city block by city block. The Soviets weakened the resistance by attacking Germans behind the front line via airplane. As we were surrounded by German troops, it was not easy to see the wooden fence boundaries of the ghetto from an airplane flying at 150 mph with guns blazing. According to Miklós, our situation looked very bleak by January 1945, and apathy and hopelessness were spreading.
Desperation for food had reached a new high when we somehow got hold of some starch. We were not sure what we could do with it until Aunt Piri suggested that we try to mix it with the very fine lubricant oil that the clock makers who used to live in the apartment used. A few books were found in the building, and the potbelly stove was fired up. Aunt Piri mixed the oil with the starch, and the fried mixture soon had the appearance of traditional latkes, a traditional Jewish side dish for Chanukah. We all ate it and thankfully nobody got sick, but I doubt that this new recipe for latkes will ever find its way into a Jewish cookbook.
On January 15, 1945, after the Soviet Army had already captured the outskirts of the city, remaining SS units and armed Arrow Cross men planned to launch an attack on the ghetto to slaughter everyone per Eichmann’s original plan. Thankfully, Raoul Wallenberg discovered the plan on January 12 and threatened the SS commander, General Schmidhuber, with severe consequences if it was carried out. The massacre of seventy thousand Jews was averted, and thus we survived.
Liberation
My last memory of the ghetto is the day of liberation. I had no idea when exactly the ghetto was liberated until I did the research for this story. Based on my impression that we lived in the ghetto for a very long time, I always thought that it was in the spring of 1945. I felt surprised, as well as dismayed, to discover that the day the Soviet Army liberated the Budapest ghetto was on January 18. Therefore, we lived in the Big Ghetto just a few weeks, not several months as I had thought. The corollary to the saying that time flies when you are having fun should be time stands still when you are miserable.
According to my Cousin Miklós, the fighting erupted literally under our windows one morning. Then suddenly there was quiet. While I don’t recall the fighting, I do remember one of my aunts taking me to the window to look. I saw uniformed men marching off in the distance, pulling what appeared to be guns on two wheels, and then disappearing at the end of the street. All these years I always thought what I saw then were German soldiers. However, according to my cousin, it is possible that these were Arrow Cross men fighting to the very end. For them, liberation meant the end of their regime and possible death. They had nothing to lose by fighting for every inch of territory.
Gunfire continued to be heard in the distance, but it was silent in front of our building. In what seemed like minutes, soldiers of the Soviet Army appeared at the opposite end of the street. They came into the ghetto through the eastern gate, moving west block by block. I then heard yelling and screaming as the Russians drew closer to our house. The Russian word for “bread,” chleba, was being shouted from the windows and by people rushing out of the houses toward the soldiers.
My grandfather, having been a prisoner of war in Russia for five years during World War I, spoke some Russian, and he was out of our building in a hurry to get some bread for us. By this time even Miklós was so weak that he could barely drag himself to the window to witness the dramatic events.
Finally, on January 18, 1945, we went from being exposed to imminent death to being free within one day. Any memories of celebration or laughter have escaped me. It is possible that everybody was still in shock and ridden with anxiety about what they had gone through and about the fate of the rest of their families.
Laci Spitzer, our guardian angel, showed up in the ghetto the day we were freed and took his parents with him. I never saw him again until we met in 1957 in Montréal, Canada. Like me, Laci escaped from