mi»nnn renin Claims Conference Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Claims Conference Holocaust Survivor Memoir Collection Access to the print and/or digital copies of memoirs in this collection is made possible by USHMM on behalf of, and with the support of, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library respects the copyright and intellectual property rights associated with the materials in its collection. The Library holds the rights and permissions to put this material online. If you hold an active copyright to this work and would like to have your materials removed from the web please contact the USHMM Library by phone at 202-479-9717, or by email at [email protected]. KuaJ /{/££ -21j;y/)///£/£/// I MY TURN ?? At the Museum of Tolerance, during my weekly talk about my experiences in the Holocaust, there are two questions that I am routinely asked: 1) Why don't I write a book? 2) How was my religious belief effected? The answer to No. 1 is: because everybody else already did; and to No. 2: after everything that happened to me I still believe in the basic goodness and decency of human beings and that alone if you want, is a miracle. ' The truth is that I don’t have traditional beliefs, my Jewishness is more a state of mind than a religion. Since my parents died for humanit°Uld n0t denY ^ Jewishness anY more than I could deny my As far as my story goes — maybe it’s my turn... So here it goes! > i 1 , ' / - W m PART I Where are my beginnings? Where do the first memories come from’ Certainly not the first events remembered from my early childhood* They start somewhere much, much earlier, maybe with the ancestors I never knew but are part of me. The great grandfather who tr^vf!fd from castle to castle to bind books for the Transylvanian nobility, the grandfather whose love of land was exceeded only by his love of family or the grandmother, the only grandparent I actually knew, who raised eight children (five of her own), learned to read and write' became the most insatiable reader after her children were grown and, yes she was burned in the ovens of Auschwitz at the age of 81. This was my father's side of the family rooted deeply in the hills of Transylvania. One of my uncles did some research in the nineteen forties and discovered an ancestor buried in a small rural cemetery in the 1740's and the headstone said he was born in the same village. I know much less of my mother's family, my grandmother died of typhoid fever during the first World War, my grandfather, who owned a tavern in a small sub-Carpathian town (formerly Austria-Hungary Checko Slovakia, and now the Soviet Union), died in 1923 same as • Paternal grandfather. My mother was the youngest 'of eight children (three from my grandfather's previous marriage). nterestingly, my two grandfathers who lived many miles apart and never met, were born and died in the same year, they each lost their first wife, had two boys and one girl from their first marriage and three girls and two boys from their second marriage. W3S n0t,_a ,reli<3ious man chose to give a minimum attention to the prayer book on Seder nights, that we celebrated at n m u * • . time with old family stories *1 instead. This is how I learned about the passover celebration at _ i i a on the farm, with all the married children coming m from towns and cities twenty or more people sitting around the table, fascinating to me, an only child! The grandchild who found the hidden piece of matzo was always given a calf that was subsequently raised on the farm, to be sold later by my grandfather with the proceeds going in the bank for the lucky grandchild. I always felt disadvantaged being born three vears after my grandfather's death. 2 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc. https://archive.org/details/myturn01kuna I Frequent stories were told about my Uncle Shamu, my father's half brother, a delightful charming man, the black sheep of the family. He cheerfully adopted the lifestyle of Hungarian nobility, drinking the nights away, womanizing and generally having a good time were main preoccupations. My grandfather, otherwise a real disciplinarian, had no choice but to grudgingly pay his sons debts. One of the stories about Uncle Shamu tells about the time when he went to Budapest, where he ran into a son of one of my grandfathers farm-hands, who worked as a chauffeur at some count's house, where he introduced my uncle to a pretty chambermaid. They made a late night date, but my uncle somehow climbed in through the wrong window and woke up in the morning next to the slightly overweight, middle aged but eternally grateful cook. In his later years my uncle became a devoted husband and father. Some of my father's stories had a morale, like when, as a high school senior he went to pay his tuition but on the way stopped at a cafe and lost the money at the billiard tables. He told my grandfather that as he crossed the bridge he took the money out of his pocket and the wind blew it in the river, but when his father looked straight in his eyes, he had no choice but tell the truth. Maybe this incident had something to do with the fact that my father never gambled. At the start of the first World War in 1914, my father was 18 and after a few months deferment for college he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. After a short training in officer's school (everybody with a high school diploma went to officers school) he was sent to the Russian front, where he spent uninterrupted eighteen months on the battlefield. He was always a pacifist but not doing his duty when his country called was never an option he considered. After the end of the war he worked as an accountant and when my grandfather died in 1923 and he received some money, he went to Paris for a year where he took courses in French history and literature at the Sorbonne. My father became a successful businessman in his thirties, but I always felt he would be happier writing poetry. He was exceptionally bright and I guess realistic enough to know that most poets don't make a living. He read a lot, loved the theater, loved music, was easy-going, extremely generous and mostly he had something that set him apart from his generation of businessmen: he never regarded money as a final goal in life, money was only the means to have a good life. When I think of him, dead at 48, my only very small consolation is that he had a good life. My mother was a beautiful woman! She was bright, had a good sense of humor and -,was very outgoing. She never worked in her life outside our home but the only people she envied where working 3 ■ • ,1 women. Her oldest brother was a lawyer, but small town Jewish girls of her generation just didn't go to school past ninth grade. She read a lot. I used to call her the "reading queen" when I was little. Besides playing cards with the ladies, her only other passion was housecleaning. In our part of the world you didn't have to be rich to have one live-in maid. When we were poor we had only one girl, later when we were comfortable, we had two but that did not stop my mother from cleaning house for hours every single day. Of course, we did not have today's modern appliances. My friends loved to come to our house, my mother was so funny, she kept us in stitches. On Thursdays we left the gate open, it was the beggar's day. They came all day long, our kitchen was in a half basement, there was a bowl in the window with change and whoever happened to be in the kitchen gave a certain standard amount to each beggar. My mother also always found a poor family that she sent food to every Friday. Part of the food package was always one homemade "Chalah" (kalacs in Hungarian.) They also made bread once a week and took it to the bakers to be baked in large ovens. Nothing tastes better than the end of fresh homemade bread with fresh butter or sour cream. My Aunt Bella, one of my father's older sisters, was the only one married to a farmer. They lived in a large village in Hungary (only about 20 kilometers from my hometown - Satu Mare, Romania) and they baked their own bread; she was also the best cook in this world. We visited often, taking a cab to the border, where my uncle waited for us with the horse drawn carriage. My uncle was the oldest of six brothers; all but one were farmers and lived in the same area. In wintertime, when there was hardly any work, they all congregated at my uncle's house since being the oldest he lived in the house where they all grew up. I remember the all night festivities, the gipsy musicians, the dancing. My uncle and his brothers looked and talked like any Hungarian farmer, but they observed all Jewish traditions. As a matter of fact, the only reason why my father did not like to visit on Saturdays was because he was expected to wear a hat and go to temple. After my grandfather's death, my grandmother moved into the city (Targu Mures or Marosvasarhely) and bought a nice house with a small house in the back. She lived there with her youngest daughter, my Aunt Helen, and her family; the small house was occupied by my Uncle Shamu, his wife Ida and their son Laci (Leslie.) My grandmother was dearly loved by her children and stepchildren. She was very smart, she always minded her own business. We visited grandma every year in summer vacation. I was always looking forward to these visits; the first night my cousin Ditha and I were up half the night talking about all the important events of the past year. On Sundays, my Aunt Helen went down to the basement and made chocolate and vanilla ice cream. My grandmother 4