From Darkness into Light. Robert Ratonyi
37 (husband of Aunt Piri Spitzer); Hungary; 1944
Aunt Szidóra, 34 (wife of Uncle Béla); Auschwitz, Poland; 1944
Cousin Jutka Spitzer, 15 (daughter of Uncle Béla); Auschwitz; Poland; 1944
Cousin László Spitzer, 6 months (son of Uncle Béla); Auschwitz, Poland; 1944
Cousin Imre Groszman, 13 (son of Aunt Lili Spitzer); Auschwitz, Poland; 1944
Cousin György Groszman, 10 (son of Aunt Lili Spitzer); Auschwitz, Poland; 1944
The Weisz family (my wife was born as Éva Weisz):
Uncle György Weisz, 26; disappeared with labor battalion in Soviet Union; 1944
Grandfather Zsigmond Weisz, 56; Auschwitz, Poland; 1944
Grandmother Jolán Weisz, 51; Auschwitz, Poland; 1944
The Blum family (my wife’s grandparents on her mother’s side):
Grandfather Jenő Blum, 57; disappeared; presumed shot into the Danube in Budapest; 1944
1 The official name the German Nazis gave to eliminating 11 million Jews of Europe is The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
2 Of the 350,000 Jews in France in 1940, almost half were Jews from Eastern Europe. Almost all the 83,000 who died were “foreign” Jews without French passports. Both the Nazis and the French knew that it would be impossible to deport all the Jews without the collaboration of the French authorities. To save their “own” Jews, the French decided to hand over the “foreign” Jews to placate the Nazi warlords. History will judge whether this was a cynical act or not. On the other hand, France has the third-highest number of Righteous Among the Nations (according to the Yad Vashem museum, 2009). This award is given to “non-Jews who acted according to the most noble principles of humanity by risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.”
3 The National Authority for the Remembrance of the Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust, established in 1953 by act of the Israeli parliament to commemorate the six million Jewish men, women, and children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Yad Vashem is literal translation of “a monument and a name” from Isaiah 56:5: “I will give them, in my house and in my walls, a monument and a name, better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall never be effaced.”
4 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: United States Public Affairs, 2009), 331.
5 Schutz Staffel (one word in German), or SS, means “Protection Squad.” Originally, the SS was Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, and then it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror.
6 A translation of the minutes of the meeting, edited by Heydrich, can be found on the internet at http://prorev.com/wannsee.htm.
7 The largest of the German concentration camps, Auschwitz, was a network of concentration camps built and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany. Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Up to 1.1 million people died there, around 90 percent of them Jews.
8 Adolf Eichmann was the head of a Gestapo section that was responsible for implementation of Nazi policy toward the Jews in Germany and all occupied territories, eventually totaling sixteen countries.
9 Jorge Agustin Nicolás de Santayana (1863–1952). Spanish-American philosopher, poet, and humanist, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in classical American philosophy.
10 The Budapest Ghetto is often referred to as the “Central Ghetto” or the “Big Ghetto” in Holocaust literature. They all refer to the ghetto where most of Budapest’s Jews (mostly old people, women, and children) were held until liberation in January 1945.
11 He isn’t to be confused with my uncle, my mother’s older brother, also named Laci Spitzer.
12 The Arrow Cross, legalized in March 1944, was a brutal, viciously anti-Semitic, national socialist pro-Nazi party, which ruled Hungary from October 15, 1944, to January 1945. During its short rule, ten thousand to fifteen thousand Jews were murdered outright, and eighty thousand Jews, including women, children, and the elderly, were deported to their deaths in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Most of the leaders and the head of the party, Ferenc Szálasi, were executed for war crimes by the Soviet courts following the liberation of Hungary.
13 Organizing death marches was nothing new to the Nazis. In January 1940, they marched eight hundred Polish Jewish prisoners of war ninety-five kilometers from Lublin to Biala Podlaska. In January 1945, they marched sixty-five thousand “fit” Auschwitz inmates from the camp toward Germany. The biggest march of eighty thousand Jews was the one in Hungary in October and November 1944.
14 Aunt Bözske ended up in Auschwitz but survived.
15 A can of Campbell’s condensed soup is 10 and ¾ ounces.
16 Very much of an ethnic Jewish meal mostly made of beans and typically served as a Sabbath dinner on Friday nights.
17 A volunteer organization that included some of the leadership in the Jewish community.
18 Nuncio Angelo Rotta of the Vatican; Ambassador Carl Ivan Danielsson of Sweden; Ambassador Harald Feller of Switzerland; Count Ferenc Pongrácz, the chargé d’affaires of the Portuguese Embassy; and Giorgio Perlasca, the self-made chargé d’affaires of Spain, signed the joint memorandum.
19 Aunt Bözske’s sons.
20 A Nazi concentration camp located in northwestern Germany. About thirty-eight thousand prisoners died in Bergen-Belsen between May 1943 and April 15, 1945. About sixty thousand prisoners in the camp were found following liberation, most of them seriously ill. More than thirteen thousand of them, too ill to recover, died after liberation.
21 The Castle of Eger is well-known to every schoolchild in Hungary. This is where a famous battle against the Turkish Army took place in 1552. A small garrison under the leadership of István Dobó (c. 1500–1572), a wealthy landowner, held out heroically for thirty-eight days against the much larger Turkish Army.
22 A child or a younger person would normally address older persons by their first name and adding néni (pronounced “neighni”) if female, or bácsi (the letter á is pronounced as the a in art, and the cs is pronounced as the ch in child) if male, after their first name. This