From Darkness into Light. Robert Ratonyi
travel immediately. Fortunately, her best friend from our neighborhood was with her during their captivity and she looked after my mother.
Manci néni,22 as I called her, was clever, tough as nails, and projected a great deal of self-confidence, many of the qualities my mother lacked. She became one of the servants of the camp commandant so had access to food that she stole, which kept my mother alive.
Following the liberation of their camp, she stayed with my mother until she was strong enough to travel. She somewhat miraculously managed to get transportation, usually horse-drawn wagons, for my mother to return to Budapest since walking even a few yards, much less many miles, was out of the question for my mother. My mother was immediately taken to a hospital where they more or less brought her back to life before letting her go.
I was elated to see my mother again. I was anxiously waiting at the door when Uncle Béla arrived, pulling a cart that consisted of just a flat platform attached to the axle between two large wheels, and announced, “Look, Robi, here is your mother.” I saw what vaguely resembled a human form lying on top of the cart. She resembled a skeleton, covered with tight skin and a pair of large eyes, staring at me out of a skull with no hair on top. No words came from this strange creature, and I despondently uttered, “This is not my mother.” I turned around and ran inside, crying.
The sight of my mother lying on that cart is forever burned into my memory. Even now, more than seventy-five years later, the image of my mother’s emaciated body and the devastating effect that my unrecognition had on her brings out the most intense emotional reaction of all my Holocaust experiences.
This reunion with my mother evokes an indescribably painful memory in me even now. It is one of hurt, frustration, and anger at all those who caused her to be an unrecognizable skeleton near death. At the same time, I feel ashamed that at the moment when she needed me most, I was not there for her. It took my mother a long time to fully recover, and we stayed at my grandparents’ place in the meantime.
Meanwhile, word must have reached my grandparents that three of their sons, Uncle Jenő, Uncle Feri, and Uncle Jóska, with his wife and four-year-old son, all perished. My grandmother’s looks had worsened from a few months earlier when we left the ghetto, and my grandfather, who was not a talkative man to begin with, rarely spoke.
Finally, the time came for us to go home, and Uncle Béla accompanied us. When we arrived at 7 Fűzér Street, we discovered that a Christian family had moved into our tiny apartment. No matter how low we were on the economic scale, there were always people below us. Our tiny and cheap apartment without indoor plumbing must have seemed luxurious to a poor family. By day’s end, the family had vacated the premises without any confrontation that I can remember, and we were once again in our own home. I spent the next eleven years in this two-room apartment.
Liberation was still not over for us as we waited to hear the fate of my father. Months went by and there was still no word from him. Unlike my mother, liberation came too late for my father. He died on January 14, 1945, in Donnerskirchen, Austria, in his brother’s arms. My mother finally told me one day that my father would not be coming home. She had known for some time but kept postponing telling me.
The actual sense of loss of my father, whom I barely knew as a child, did not register with me until years later. It wasn’t until later as a growing boy and teenager that I was able to comprehend the consequences of being fatherless, of missing the normal father-son relationship. It was then that I began to mourn his loss.
As I grew older, I discovered that the grieving never stops. In fact, as I learned of the circumstances surrounding my father’s death decades later from my Uncle Elek, who was with him at the time, I grieved even more. In addition, as I discovered the larger historical context of the Holocaust following my escape from communist Hungary in 1956, my feelings of loss, anger, and resentment further intensified. Sadly, now I understand that “liberation” from the Holocaust and the healing of emotional wounds will always be unattainable.
Liberation effected the survival of approximately 200,000 Hungarian Jews out of 750,000 (including Jews in the annexed territories). Of the 180,000 Jews of Budapest, 130,000 survived—70,000 in the Big Ghetto, 25,000 in the International Ghetto, 25,000 in hiding (most of them with Christian families), and 10,000 returned from deportation and labor camps. There were about 70,000 survivors outside Budapest.
Postscript
The impact of the Holocaust on my mother’s family, the Spitzers, was devastating. Eleven members of my grandparents’ family perished, including three sons, five grandchildren, two daughters-in-law, and two sons-in-law, including my father. In addition, three of the daughters, including my mother, and two of the brothers were deported but survived.
My grandmother died in 1947, never having fully recovered from this tragedy. My mother declared that she died of a broken heart. I don’t know what exactly caused my grandmother’s death, but the loss of her three boys must have exacerbated whatever ailed her. The Reichmanns, on my father’s side, were more fortunate. Out of the nine children, only one daughter, Lena, one son, my father, and one son-in-law did not survive.
Our family was typical of many of the survivors of the Holocaust. Everyone was traumatized. On average, every surviving Jew lost three members of his or her family. All illusions about being assimilated into the “Magyar”23 society and being different only due to practicing one of the minor religions in a Christian country had vanished.
Postwar Hungary didn’t pay much attention to the six hundred thousand Jewish victims and their surviving families. Hungarians were too busy trying to recover from the disastrous effects of the war, including the ruined economy and infrastructure, the political and socioeconomic impact of once again being on the losing side with their German allies as in World War I, and the looming prospect of Soviet domination that was a clear precursor of establishing state communism in Hungary.
There were no trauma centers, no psychological assistance, nor counseling for the survivors. Every Jew, young and old, was left to their own devices to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust. In my family this meant total silence. Discussing the experiences of the survivors was taboo; we just did not broach the subject.
I didn’t learn about the circumstances of my father’s death until Uncle Elek, in whose arms he died, was himself on his deathbed, dying of cancer in Toronto in 1985—forty years after. I gathered enough courage to ask him about my father’s death, and he told me a few details in a low whisper, looking exhausted and in pain.
My mother—who lived to be eighty-seven and died on April 17, 2002, in Budapest—never spoke a word about her experiences of marching on foot to Austria and her stay in Lichtenwörth, Austria. Whatever bits of information I gathered came from Manci néni, her best friend, who was with her in the camp and primarily responsible for my mother’s survival. I don’t recall ever discussing my ghetto experiences with my mother.
One time my curiosity overcame my caution about discussing the Holocaust with my family, which I later regretted. Sometime in the 1980s, I invited my mother’s brother, my Uncle Laci, and his second wife, Magda, to visit us in Atlanta. I was quite close to Uncle Laci, who was something of a father figure when I was growing up. I took the two of them to Hilton Head, South Carolina, for a relaxing oceanside vacation.
One afternoon, while sitting under the umbrella and watching the ocean as his wife was sleeping inside the condominium, I asked my uncle to tell me of his experiences while he was in a forced labor camp. Within a minute of talking, he choked up and began to sob uncontrollably. In his poor, tortured mind, he could never get past the first humiliating experience of being slapped in the face by an uneducated peasant soldier.
He was a good-looking, proud, and vain man, and I am convinced that the physical hardships he had to endure in order to survive were nothing compared to the emotional humiliation he suffered. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he realized that regardless of his high school education (a major accomplishment in those days), his good looks, and his previous standing in society, he was just another Jew exposed to humiliation and abuse. I got a very serious scolding from my uncle’s wife later that afternoon. She made me promise that I would never bring this subject up with