From Darkness into Light. Robert Ratonyi

      4. Canadian stamp honoring Raoul Wallenberg.

      Swedish Schutz-Passes were issued by Raoul Wallenberg, the third secretary of the Royal Swedish Embassy, who was sent to Budapest in July 1944 to save as many Jews as he could. He is credited with saving the lives of thousands of Budapest Jews. The Canadian post office issued a stamp in his honor in 2003. The question mark at the end, “1947?” indicates that in 2003 we still didn’t know the fate of Raoul Wallenberg after the liberation of Budapest by the Red Army in 1945.

      The advantage of being almost seven years old was that I didn’t quite understand the seriousness of the situation we faced. I was unable to comprehend that we faced a far more sinister danger than the possibility of a bomb directly hitting our building. However, the immediacy of being hit by a bomb became quite clear one day while in our cellar during a daytime air raid.

      A very loud whistling noise was followed by a great thud, which was then followed by silence. When the “clear” siren was sounded, we scrambled up the stairs to see what had happened. A massive unexploded bomb fell right through the roof of the building and lodged in the floor of the second-story apartment. The top half of the bomb was inside the second-floor apartment, and the bottom half, with a pointed conical end, hung from the ceiling of the first floor. Had the bomb exploded, we might not have survived that attack.

      In September 1944, I was eager to start first grade, but I was forced to stay mostly indoors, much of the time spent in our cellar. By this time, the world had been at war for years already, and millions of people, adults and children alike, had died in the killing fields of faraway places as well as in the Nazi concentration camps.

      Having completed phase 1 of the Final Solution for Hungary at the end of July 1944, phase 2 was implemented for the remaining two hundred thousand or more Jews in Budapest, where my mother, grandparents, and I lived.

      In order to accomplish the ultimate deportation of the Budapest Jews, orders were issued to herd all of us into a walled prison referred to as the Big Ghetto, located in the middle of Budapest, which was the destination for my mother and me.

      There were very few options available to stay out of the ghetto. One was to pass yourself off as a Christian with false identification papers. Another possibility was to be hidden by a Christian family, and a third option was to obtain a Schutz-Pass.

      Then, on October 10, 1944, we were awakened at dawn by someone banging on our door and yelling, “Everybody get out!” I was scared because I knew this was not a typical air raid since no sirens were heard. We quickly got dressed and joined the other Jewish mothers, children, and some of the older couples who lived in our building. There were several soldiers with guns on their back ordering the Jews to line up in the middle of the courtyard.

      We stood in one line, my mother on my left holding my hand, when someone shouted, “All grown-ups, two steps forward!” I could feel my mother’s hand slipping from mine as she started crying, let my hand go, and stepped forward. As a result of the confusion and seeing my mother cry, I joined the weeping chorus of the other children. Then someone shouted, “Turn left and march!” and the row of women began to move toward our gate.

      This all happened so quickly that I couldn’t comprehend what was going on. A soldier standing near me put his hand on my head and said, “Don’t cry, little boy, your mother will return.” However, his words, although prophetic, didn’t console me. I continued to cry and tried to hold my mother’s image in my mind through tearful, blurry eyes long after the last of the grown-ups had disappeared through our gate. This was the last time I saw my mother until the summer of 1945.

      Survival

      A friend of my mother’s, Julia, an elderly Jewish woman who moved into our Yellow Star house, had not been taken away with the other women. Julia decided to take care of me after my mother was taken away. Perhaps it was prearranged between my mother and her, or she simply took the initiative, but that very same morning Julia told me that she was going to take me to my grandparents’ apartment house in the city. I knew my mother’s parents well. My mother and I had visited Nagymama and Nagypapa, or “grandmother” and “grandfather” in English, every other week, so the idea of being with them was comforting.

      As soon as the curfew was lifted, Julia packed up some of my belongings and took my hand to begin the long walk into the city to my grandparents’ house. I made sure that Julia packed my new white long pants, which children didn’t usually wear back then, most of us sporting shorts and knee-length pants. For me, my striking long white slacks were a testament to my being a grown boy and not a baby anymore.

      Trips to my grandparents’ place were something I always looked forward to. My mother and I used to take three different streetcars to Lövölde Square, and then walk a short distance to 106 Király Street, located in a Jewish neighborhood in the central part of the city. Kneeling on the bench in the streetcar, I watched the houses go by along with the retail shops that had fancy colorful signs hung above the shops. I always tried to read the signs, having already known some of the letters of the alphabet that my mother had taught me. The streetcars hurtling in the opposite direction thrilled me as the faces in the windows whizzed by at what seemed an incredibly high speed.

      Nevertheless, this trip with Julia on October 10, 1944, was very different. The damage to Budapest was significant. Buildings had disappeared where the bombs fell, only rubble remaining. Walls stood without roofs and buildings without facades, exposing floors with furniture and whatever evidence of previous occupants remained. The streetcars weren’t running at that time, and we had to make the long journey on foot, by far the longest I had ever taken in my short life.

      I recollect fragments of our trip and remember having been fascinated by what I saw. The two of us, an old lady who could have been my grandmother and I with yellow stars on our coats, walked through rubble, torn pavement, pieces of fallen airplanes, and broken vehicles left on the streets in the aftermath of the heavy bombardment on the city. It must have taken several hours for us to get to my grandparents’ place given our respective ages.

      Distracted by the excitement generated by the strange sights around me, I forgot to think about my mother’s strange disappearance earlier that morning. I felt safe with Julia holding my hand and knowing that soon I would be with my grandparents, who loved me and always welcomed me in their home.

      Another