From Darkness into Light. Robert Ratonyi
regret that it is just now sixty years later, almost too late, since hardly any survivors are still alive, that I have tried to research the facts surrounding the deaths of many of my relatives during the Holocaust. I feel ashamed that I hadn’t tried to memorialize the names, ages, and places of death of some of my extended family that died in the concentration camps. During all those years when I still had the chance to find out who perished where, I failed to do so because “we just didn’t go there.” Now that my mother, aunts, and uncles are gone, I have no one to ask.
Hungary’s reconciliation with its crimes against its Jewish population in the Holocaust didn’t begin until after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, when Hungary became a democratic country following free elections in 1991. Memorials were erected to honor the victims24 and those who aided the Jews.
In the late 1980s, the well-known American actor Tony Curtis25 donated $1 million to the Emanuel Foundation to finance the design and erection of a memorial, the Tree of Life, to the Holocaust victims of Hungary. The memorial is appropriately located behind the synagogue where all the dead bodies were piled up in the ghetto. As one of the “founding donors,” I donated $250 to have my father’s name, “Zoltán Reichmann,” etched into one of the thousands of the tree’s leaves, each of them representing one victim. Uncle Laci made sure that his brother’s names, Feri, Jenő, and Jóska Spitzer, are also memorialized.26
The memories of my father and his sister Lena are also preserved on a beautiful memorial erected to honor all the victims of the families of Kibbutz Maabarot in northern Israel. My Aunt Rutka Reichmann left Hungary in 1933 when she was nineteen years old and ended up in Palestine. She married and settled down in Kibbutz Maabarot, where two of her daughters and their families still live today. I visited this kibbutz for the first time in 2000, where I saw this beautiful memorial that has a list of approximately 150 Holocaust victims.
In Budapest, there are several memorials honoring Raoul Wallenberg, as well as a street named after him. It was only a few years ago that we learned the Russians had put him in the infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was probably tortured because they believed him to be a German spy due to his fluency in the German language. My personal theory is that the Russians could not believe that a Swede from a well-to-do family would risk his life and come to Hungary just to save Jewish lives. They executed him in 1947 when he was thirty-seven years old.
There are at least two memorials to honor the Jewish victims who were shot and dumped into the Danube River in late 1944 and early 1945. I was fortunate to have the honor of participating in building one of these monuments in a small park at the end of Pozsonyi Road in 1994, when I was working in Hungary as an American consultant. My office was on the same street, and I often walked north toward the Helia Hotel, where I went swimming most evenings.
One night I suddenly heard Israeli music coming from a park right next to the river and decided to further explore this unusual happenstance. Upon arriving, a long line of what I presumed to be mostly Jews were lined up, silently waiting their turn to pick up a stone from a large pile next to a concrete square base that was set into the grass, since putting a small stone on a grave is a sign of mourning in Judaism.
A stonemason was standing by, and as each person placed a stone on the monument, he cemented the stone in place. Within an hour the monument reached the desired height and a memorial plaque was secured to the side of the monument. I too placed my stone there, shed some tears, and went on my way without waiting to hear any speeches.
I have been back to Hungary many times since I left in 1956. In fact, I was working there in 1994 when the Hungarian parliament held a special session on the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust. I listened to the speeches denouncing Hungary’s crimes and pleading to eliminate anti-Semitism, in addition to racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry. Touched by the sincerity and compassion shown by democratically elected members of this legislative body, I listened through tears in my eyes. I allowed myself for just a few moments to be deluded with the idea that change is possible and the hope that history will not repeat itself.
However, I soon recovered my emotional ambivalence. In a part of my heart and soul I feel a sense of being Hungarian, no matter what history taught me. I feel proud when I see a Hungarian athlete win a medal at the Olympics, and when I think of the scientific and artistic contributions made by so many from our nation. I love the food and the theater in Budapest, and I tend to get emotional when I listen to sorrowful gypsy music or Brahms’ Hungarian dances. Yet at the same time I know I don’t belong there. Hungary had forsaken my family, all its Jewry, and me at the time of our greatest need for help, and I cannot forgive and forget that.
There is some hope that Hungary will become a more tolerant place someday. Reuters reported not long ago that a state-sponsored Hungarian museum launched a campaign on October 1, 2004, to identify people who had helped save lives during the Holocaust.
“Sixty years have passed and we have not said thanks to those who have given [good] example to society,” Maria Schmidt, managing director of the Terror House Museum,27 told Reuters. She called on people who knew of those who helped Hungarian Jews escape to contact the museum, which is promising. There were many, probably hundreds or even thousands of Christian families, who risked their own lives and the lives of their families to save Jews from being deported and killed. Unfortunately, these people were the exception and not the norm.
Reuters also reported that the Simon Wiesenthal Center launched its “Operation Last Chance” campaign in Hungary in July 2004, declaring it the last chance to find war criminals responsible for the Holocaust in Hungary.
Having grown up in Hungary, I silently dealt with my personal experiences over the years like everyone else I knew around me, trying not to think about it. Perhaps the loss of my father became more tolerable as I was maturing since not a single Jewish friend of mine in our neighborhood had a father.
As I grew older and began to ponder the impact the Holocaust had on me, I concluded that those early childhood experiences left a festering wound in my heart and on my soul, which has never completely healed. I also realized how emotionally vulnerable I became to anything I heard, saw, or experienced that reminded me of the past.
There are days, weeks, and sometimes even months when I don’t think about it, but those feelings of hurt, remorse, and anger are never far below the surface. When provoked, they can erupt with an intensity and force as if I were still a seven-year-old child and the events of more than seventy-five years ago just took place yesterday.
Stifling these feelings when they surface has always been futile. Perhaps it is time to concede that I will never rid myself of this “emotional baggage” and that it will stay with me to the very end of my life.
The Holocaust undoubtedly shaped my views on prejudice, fairness, and discrimination, whether based on religion, ethnicity, or skin color. I abhor all ideologies and political systems that don’t provide equal protection to all, especially to those in the minority.
Clearly, I was lucky to survive. A bomb didn’t fall on me. I didn’t get sick. I didn’t freeze to death. I didn’t starve to death, even though I came close. But most importantly, I owe many thanks to all my heroes who helped me survive.
In Memoriam
To my close family members who perished during the Holocaust.
The Reichmann family:
My father, Zoltán Reichmann, 33; Donnerskirchen,28 Austria; January 14, 1945
Aunt Lena Reichmann, 23; Bergen-Belsen, Germany; May 17, 1945
Uncle György Huszár, 29 (husband of Aunt Éva Reichmann); Wels, Austria; December 15, 1945
The Spitzer family:
Uncle József Spitzer, 30; Auschwitz, Poland; 1945
Aunt Lili, 26 (wife of Uncle József); Auschwitz, Poland; 1944
Cousin Tamás Spitzer, 4 (son of Uncle József); Auschwitz, Poland; 1944
Uncle Jenő Spitzer, 23; Don River Bend, Soviet Union; 1942
Uncle Ferenc Spitzer,