From Darkness into Light. Robert Ratonyi
1940, which most likely delayed the execution of the Final Solution there until 1944.
The conclusive chapter of the European Holocaust commenced on January 20, 1942, when Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command of the SS,5 convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin. As a result, fifteen top Nazi bureaucrats officially approved the coordination of the Final Solution, under which the Nazis aimed to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. The whole meeting took no more than an hour, and the translation of the minutes is no different from that of a board of directors meeting of a large corporation taking care of ordinary business matters.6 The records and minutes of the meeting were found intact by the Allies at the end of WWII and were used during the Nuremberg Trials. Heydrich personally edited the minutes of the meeting, utilizing the following code words and expressions when describing the actions to be taken against the Jews:
“…eliminated by natural causes” refers to death due to a combination of hard labor and starvation, the cause of my father’s death.
“…transported to the east” refers to mass deportations to the planned gas chamber complexes such as Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.7
“…treated accordingly” or “special treatment” or “special action” refers to execution by SS firing squads or death by gassing.
At the time of the Wannsee Conference, I had just turned four years old, but my, and my family’s fate were sealed according to those minutes. The potential difficulty the Germans were facing with the liquidation of the Hungarian Jews (742,800 listed in the minutes of the Wannsee report) is all mentioned within the minutes. It was agreed that in order to deal with the Hungarians, “it will be soon necessary to force an advisor for Jewish questions onto the Hungarian government.” The special handling was necessary because of Hungary’s status as an ally.
The process of isolating the Jews and stripping them of most civic, political, social, and economic rights did not begin in Hungary until 1938. Under pressure from Germany, as well as from internal anti-Semitic forces, the Hungarian parliament began passing anti-Jewish laws in the spring of 1938, similar to those passed in Germany five years earlier. A detailed chronology of the most important events of the Hungarian Holocaust is included in Appendix B.
By April 1942, the Hungarian government promised the “resettlement” of close to eight hundred thousand Jews but not until after the war. Doubts about the outcome of the war and the consequences for Hungary began to emerge within Hungarian ruling circles. In my opinion, Hungary’s reluctance to execute Hitler’s Final Solution was not so much due to the moral dilemma of killing its Jewish population but more to the cynical and self-serving concerns about losing a highly educated, creative, and productive segment of society, together with the anticipated postwar retributions.
By 1942, the Hungarian government had doubts about a Nazi victory, and Hungarian Jews were hopeful until 1944 to escape the fate of their European brethren. Indeed, had it not been for Adolf Eichmann’s8 personal intervention in Hungary and the installation of a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic government on March 22, 1944, Hungarian Jewry might have survived the Holocaust. As it turned out, close to one of every ten Jews killed during the Holocaust was an ethnic Hungarian Jew.
The gross statistics and many dates shown in Appendices A and B can be overwhelming and also overshadow the individual and personal tragedies they depict. Therefore, I compiled six pictures shown on page 9 with the caption “Pictures from Auschwitz” to focus on the individual tragedies. These pictures illustrate the fate of 400,000 of the nearly 440,000 Hungarian Jews, including many in our family, who died in Auschwitz. Reading the statistics and the chronology of events in Appendices A and B and looking at these pictures from Auschwitz may be a shocking and mind-blowing experience for my children, grandchildren, and future generations. However, it is necessary to endure the pain of learning the history of their ancestors in order to keep these memories alive. The lessons of history are clear, and I invoke the warning of George Santayana9: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
I was born on January 11, 1938, just a few months before the Hungarian parliament ratified the First Anti-Jewish Act. The Soviet Army liberated the Budapest Ghetto,10 where I survived the last few weeks of the war, on January 18, 1945, exactly one week after my seventh birthday. Therefore, my first seven years on this earth coincided with the Hungarian Holocaust period. Most adults have childhood memories that extend back before the age of seven. Strangely, my memories of those childhood years with my family and friends are mostly gone, except for memories associated with the Holocaust.
1. Pictures from Auschwitz.
The Yellow Star
2. I remember practicing my alphabet in this last family picture—circa 1943.
On January 11, 1944, I turned six years old, and soon after I first felt the profound impact of the Holocaust, even though this term was not in my vocabulary until decades later.
When I was four and five years old, I was not aware that my father’s absence was due to the anti-Jewish laws forcing him into special Jewish military units first and labor battalions later, where visitation rights to one’s family were rare. After Hungary became an ally of Germany in June 1940, a decree was passed in the Hungarian parliament on December 2, 1940, ordering Jewish men to enroll in special Jewish labor battalions. My father was twenty-nine years old. It is not clear when exactly my father joined a labor battalion, but it was probably between 1941 and 1943. I accepted that my father, unlike the fathers of Christian children around me, was absent without ever knowing where he was or why. This explains why even as I was growing up after the war, I could hardly recollect his face, much less remember a warm embrace, a bedside story, a smile, or a kiss.
I often wondered as I grew up why I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. After all, both of my parents came from very large families. My mother was the youngest of ten while my father was the second oldest of nine children. Only decades later when I had children of my own did I learn that my parents decided it was too dangerous to bring another Jewish child into their world.
I was already a father myself when I learned that the reason for my lack of siblings was directly attributable to the general condition of Jews in 1938 Hungary. My mother confessed that she did get pregnant at least once when I was two or three years old. According to my mother, my father told her, “I don’t want to bring another child into this world. If you don’t get an abortion, I will divorce you.” When my mother told me this, she was already an elderly woman, but there was unmistakable resentment and hurt in her voice when she told me that if it had been her choice, she would have had more children.
Subsequent events proved my father right. Based on my personal experiences during the critical period of May 1944 through the spring of 1945, I have little doubt that the chances of survival of a younger sibling would have been negligible at best. However, this is not an excuse or an apology for my father’s ultimatum to my mother. It is hard for me to believe that there was not a more delicate or sensitive way of conveying his convictions. On the other hand, it is also possible that my mother was a bit melodramatic in describing these events. Therefore, the first victims of my Holocaust were my unborn brothers or sisters. Consequently, I remained a single child, which has always been a regret of mine. This is why the beginning of the Holocaust was Kristallnacht for me.
Sadly, it seemed that my parents must not have had a warm and loving relationship. Since the disastrous times started just when I was born, it is possible that they didn’t have the chance to develop one given their short-lived marriage that began on December 4, 1936. In passing judgment, I have to bear in mind that back in those times marriages between children of very large families were not necessarily based on love but were more of an economic or socially driven necessity. My suspicion is supported by the fact that my mother had never divulged any romantic memories about my father. In fact, she hardly mentioned him as I was growing up other than to say that he was a good dancer, loved me very much, and was a strict father.