From Darkness into Light. Robert Ratonyi
Georgia Commission on the Holocaust.
Since then, I have spoken to over ten thousand middle and high school students as well as adults in Atlanta and other towns in Georgia on behalf of these organizations. In addition, as word spread around the Atlanta community, I was invited to speak to several civic organizations, such as the YMCA Leadership, Rotary Clubs, World War II Round Table, the Winston Churchill Society, and several academic institutions (Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Georgia, University of Georgia).
The feedback I got from my audiences during the Q&A period made me realize that not only were they interested in hearing my Holocaust story, but they also wanted to know what happened to me after the Holocaust. Typical questions following my presentation ranged from how I grew up under a communist regime and managed to escape Hungary, to when and how I ended up in the United States, got an MIT education, and came to Atlanta. There were also other questions that had no relevance to the Holocaust. I was often asked if my stories were published, and the answer was always no. Therefore, I decided to integrate my stand-alone stories seamlessly into a chronologically ordered book.
There are many Hungarian names in this book because the first three, and most of the fourth story, take place in Hungary. I kept the original Hungarian spelling for the sake of authenticity. The only concession I made to English custom is that I put the first names followed by the last names, in reverse to the Hungarian custom. Most of the first names are nicknames, the way I learned to address family and friends. A complete guide to these nicknames, their formal Hungarian version, and their English equivalent is provided in Appendix C.
Journey 1: A Holocaust Childhood
There are two objectives in telling the Holocaust story. First, I wanted to write about my own experiences as a seven-year-old child. Second, I wanted to use this opportunity to provide insight into the larger scope and context of the European, specifically the Hungarian, history of the Holocaust in order to put my own family experiences into the proper perspective. In fact, I feel that the “big picture” may be even more important than my own experiences. What happened to our family of Hungarian Jews living in the center of Europe during what was considered an enlightened era of the twentieth century was nothing unusual or exceptional. If anything, the fact that I am alive to write this story is the exception.
My family’s situation in 1944 was an inevitable result of the downward spiral that started as far back as January 30, 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. It culminated in the annihilation of close to six hundred thousand Hungarian Jews, starting in early 1944 and ending with the liberation of Hungary in April 1945.
The Holocaust consists of the vast scale of Nazi eliminationist anti-Semitism in Europe that encompassed more than twenty countries, from the Mediterranean in the north to the Baltic Sea in the south, from France in the west to close to Moscow in the east. It begs the question of how this predominantly Christian region of about 500 million people could stand by and at best ignore and at worst actively collaborate in and support such a murderous empire. Six million men, women, and children, more than half of the European Jewry, perished during the Holocaust.
Even though Germany lost the war before completing its Final Solution,1 Hitler came close to eliminating Jews from Europe. Following the end of the war, three of every four, around three million, of the surviving Jews left Europe for North America, Palestine (now Israel), South America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. Jews used to represent a significant percentage of the population of Europe (Poland, 10 percent; Hungary, 6–8 percent; depending on which borders are used). Today, Jews represent a miniscule percentage (less than 1 percent) of each country’s population. The largest population by percentage is in France due to the circumstances of the German occupation of France.2
When I think of the flight of the Jewish intelligentsia in the 1920s and the 1930s, followed by the obliteration of six million Jews through 1944, then the mass exodus of the survivors from Europe, I have to believe that Europe will never again be a hospitable place for Jews. Sadly, many of the European impulses that led to the Holocaust still exist today. Anti-Semitism is rampant in Europe, and it shows its ugly side not only in the ordinary street crimes committed by its perpetrators but also in the political and social expressions of some of its popularly elected leaders.
I tried to develop a statistical summary of the Jewish population by country prior to the Holocaust, immediately after it in 1950, as well as in 2017, in order to provide a more succinct and visual view of the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish people. The best I was able to do is located in Appendix A.
According to Yad Vashem,3 the Holocaust started in 1933 when Hitler came to power. The killings did not just happen suddenly, by one single maniac or by any of the governments involved. Instead, the killings were the result of a legalized process of singling out the Jews and denying their civil rights. Laws were passed that gradually denied the Jews their freedom of occupation and education, of movement, of their ownership rights and their participation in any form of labor, and of civic or cultural organizations. The writer Daniel Jonah Goldhagen4 correctly identified the deliberate effort by the Nazis to dehumanize and demonize Jews (and the Roma people) to make it legally, morally, and emotionally acceptable to murder them.
Jews were fairly well assimilated into Hungarian society in the early 1900s. They were accepted as citizens in all professions, including academia and the Hungarian armed services. This moderate view of accepting Hungarian Jews as ordinary citizens who practiced a different religion from the Christian majority changed drastically in the 1930s. At the end of the decade, the Jews were portrayed as a dangerous “race” whose members committed unpardonable crimes against Christianity, and whose very presence in society had endangered the economic, social, and political well-being as well as the morality of the Christian population.
Discrimination against Hungarian Jews in the twentieth century started with the Numerus Clausus law, Latin for “limited number,” enacted on September 20, 1920. It declared that from the 1920–21 academic year onward, only those would be admitted to universities and colleges “who were trustworthy from the point of view of morals and loyalty to the country, and even those only in limited numbers [the maximum percentage was fixed at 6 percent], so that thorough education of each student could be ensured.”
The term “Jew” was deliberately omitted, and there is no trace of anti-Semitism in the law, yet it closed the gates of the universities to many Jews. Instead of abilities, it was “loyalty to the country,” i.e., birth and background, that determined who may attend university. In today’s lingo, this was a “politically correct” way of discriminating against the Jews. Soon after Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, discrimination, isolation, deportation, and the eventual liquidation of Jews spread from Germany to the occupied lands and eventually to Germany’s allies, including Hungary.
The year 1938 was an important year for me, for my parents, and for the Jews of the Third Reich. I was born in January of that year. Subsequently, two historic events took place. On March 13, 1938, Germany invaded and annexed Austria into the Third Reich in what was called the Anschluss in German. Some 97 percent of Austrians voted for the Anschluss, and Hitler was cheered by hundreds of thousands of Viennese when he entered the city following the annexation.
Furthermore, the second historic event took place in November 1938. The official start of the Holocaust is recognized as the year 1933 when Hitler came to power. However, for me personally, it was Kristallnacht, referred to in English as “The Night of the Broken Glass,” that occurred on November 9 and 10. This was a massive coordinated attack on Jews carried out by Nazi storm troopers who were aided by local police and citizens. Gangs of Nazi youth roamed through the Jewish neighborhoods of both Berlin and Vienna, capitals of Germany and Austria, respectively, in addition to hundreds of other cities in the Third Reich. During the two days of riots, about twenty-five thousand Jewish men were sent to concentration camps where they were brutalized by SS guards, and some of them beaten to death. The Nazis recorded 7,500 businesses destroyed, 267 synagogues burned, and 91 Jews murdered. Part of my family and I lived in Budapest, less than 175 miles from Vienna, where the news of Kristallnacht was known within days if not hours.
In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland,