From Darkness into Light. Robert Ratonyi
We approached the ghetto from the west side, where the Great Synagogue is, on Dohány Street.
Finally, as we got close enough, a small gate appeared in the middle of a very high wooden fence stretching between two walls. Men with guns surrounded the gate and people were let through the narrow opening one at a time. To the right of the gate were high piles of objects heaped on the ground. As I got closer, I realized that these piles were silver dishes and utensils, jewelry, watches, rings, and other valuables that people had to discard before entering the ghetto. The uniformed men with guns, the loud noise of shouting and crying, and the sight of all the treasures piled up on the sidewalk were so strange yet entrancing that I don’t even remember walking through the gate.
Moving into the ghetto was a shock to us all. All I remember is that we ended up uncomfortably crowded into one room. There must have been two or three other families already living in the apartment. We were so crowded that Miklós had no room on the floor and he slept on top of a dresser, the only piece of furniture left in the room. The place was dreadfully bug infested, and we all knew that our future prospects were very dim in this place.
Fortunately, Laci Spitzer found out what happened when he came to visit us at our old address and took immediate steps to rescue us. Two days after we were shepherded into the ghetto, Laci showed up fully dressed in his Arrow Cross uniform, followed by a horse and wagon pulled by a man he hired to move us. All our belongings were put into the wagon, along with Laci’s parents, and we left the ghetto and headed to our new destination. The good news, in addition to leaving the ghetto, was that I didn’t have to carry the meat grinder.
In November, it was still safer to be outside the ghetto in a protected house than to be inside. First, obtaining food was easier. Jews could leave the protected houses for a few hours every day to get food. Second, even though the ghetto was completely walled in, soldiers, who guarded its gates, often allowed Arrow Cross units to enter to commit atrocities inside. However, we soon learned that being outside the ghetto had its own perils. There were no physical barriers to keep the increasingly aggressive Arrow Cross thugs from invading the protected houses and dragging the Jews away for summary execution and then dumping them into the Danube.
The food situation had become critical for everybody in Budapest by now. Access to traditional transportation routes into and out of the city was blocked or significantly hampered by the war conditions. Most staples could only be bought on the black market at inflated prices. It was even more challenging for Jews because many shopkeepers refused to sell food to them.
Once again, under Laci Spitzer’s protection, we moved back into the International Ghetto and ended up in another Swedish protected house on 3 Kárpát Street, not too far from the places we stayed before. We were lucky and actually found some food and watches stashed away in a drawer that had been left there by the Jews who were taken away and herded into the ghetto as we were just a few days earlier.
Finding food continued to be the most difficult challenge for us. Whenever Laci came by, he always brought some food for us, but it was never enough. Laci’s parents were too old, my grandparents still didn’t have any papers, and my aunts had to care for the children. The risky job of finding or stealing food fell onto Miklós’s fourteen-year-old shoulders. To quote him, “I was not a child anymore, but I was not quite a grown-up yet.”
Why we didn’t stay at 3 Kárpát Street for more than a few days is still unknown to me. As the end of the war was getting closer, the daily risk of being exposed to the Arrow Cross thugs was obviously increasing. For whatever reason, we were on the road again and subsequently moved back to an apartment on Pozsonyi Road, where we had first stayed.
8. Arrow Cross armband.
There were dozens of other people also crammed into the apartment, and there was barely enough space for people to sleep on the floor. It was in this house that one day Miklós found an Arrow Cross armband on the staircase in our building. He picked it up, making sure nobody saw him, and pocketed it, not really knowing what he might do with it one day. It soon turned out that the armband would be a lifesaver for all of us.
We were living on Pozsonyi Street when Cousin Miklós witnessed a scene that terribly upset him. It was still difficult for him to tell me at the age of seventy-three.
One day as he went about scavenging for food, he saw about a hundred Jews being marched on the street. Guarding them were three or four teenagers with guns and the Arrow Cross armband on their arms. Miklós recalled:
They were like sheep going to the slaughterhouse. Why did a hundred people allow a few teenagers to treat them like sheep? If they attacked their guards, and even if only ten Jews would have escaped and survived, it would have been better than submitting so willingly to a few teenage thugs. To this very day I feel ashamed when I recall this scene.
Miklós was visibly shaken in recalling the incident that took place almost exactly sixty years earlier. As I listened to him, I could feel my throat tighten and my anger rising to the surface. Who was I angry at? The Arrow Cross thugs? At the Jews who allowed themselves to be treated like “sheep”? Or at all those countless people, the Hungarians, the Germans, and all the people around the world who by ignorance, indifference, prejudice, or active collaboration allowed such a scene to take place in Budapest?
I really felt my cousin’s pain as I looked in his tearful blue eyes, searching for an answer to an unanswerable dilemma. By the time Miklós was sixteen, he was fighting another war in Palestine, and I am sure the experiences in Budapest had built up a great deal of resolve in him.
Miklós had gumption, even at the early age of fourteen. As mentioned previously, it was his job to go out of our building day and night, usually without his yellow star, and scavenge and barter for food for the family. Unfortunately, by November 1944, many of the shops were bombed and destroyed, and many of those that were still open for business refused to sell food to Jews.
Miklós would go into a bombed-out building or store and look for anything that had value—a piece of jewelry, a watch, silverware, or a pack of cigarettes—and then barter that for food for the family. As he was returning one day, he saw that all the Jews of our house, including our family, were herded together in courtyard. Here is how Miklós described the scene:
There were a couple of sniveling brats and an old man in Arrow Cross uniforms selecting people from the crowd to take to the Danube. The kids were not much older than I was. The guns on their shoulders touched the ground. Everyone was just standing there scared to death and tolerating it. Suddenly, I remembered that I had an Arrow Cross band in my pocket. I put it on and walked up to the old man and said, “These are my Jews, I will take them.” The old man looked at me, saw my armband, and said, “All right, but be careful that they don’t cheat you.”
The “cheating” was in reference to the allowing of Jews to bribe their way out of certain death by giving the thugs money, jewelry, or other valuables.
Once more, we were on the move. This time we moved into one of the protected houses surrounding Szent István Park. By now, I was barely able to walk, much less carry anything as heavy as the meat grinder. I don’t remember being hungry anymore or even thinking about my mother. Perhaps I had reached the stage of malnutrition when a certain calmness and indifference take over.
From time to time, we heard bombs falling around us. I didn’t know it then, but Miklós told me that the Germans had placed eight guns along the bank of the Danube, right next to the park. One morning the guns were gone, but several Russian airplanes showed up and started bombing the riverbank where they had been. So much for timing!
While we were living at Szent István Park, my grandparents seriously questioned my cousin’s sanity. Following one of his missions to secure some bread, Miklós came home exhilarated and claimed that he saw two of our cousins. He witnessed a squadron of labor camp inmates being marched toward the Big Ghetto in the middle of the street guarded by Arrow Cross men. Marching side by side in the front row were Pisti and Gyuri, the two teenage sons of my mother’s older sister Aunt Bözske,14 and each was carrying a loaf of bread.
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