Escape from Munkacs, Part II: My exit from the ghetto

1: Factual memories, emotional legacies

Victims of unspeakable atrocities, whether during the Holocaust or other horrors, occasionally have shown notable resilience after their encounters with death, starvation, torture and systematic humiliation.

I only once met my Mother’s relative, Alexander Kahan. Surviving Auschwitz, from which he was transported for slave labour, Bergen-Belsen and escaping from a death march, he soon enrolled at university in Hannover, emigrated to America in 1947 and then obtained a job as a steward for the US airline TWA. His weekly flights to France gave him good opportunities to buy art in Paris and sell it in New York. By the time we met, he owned one of the premier art galleries in Manhattan, Palm Beach and Toronto. He had received L’Ordre National du Merite from General de Gaulle for his contribution to French culture. For good measure, he had also been a tennis champion.

Samuel Pisar, the stepfather of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, had an even more remarkable post-Holocaust career.

For other high-achieving and famous Holocaust survivors, including Bruno Bettelheim, Jean Améry and, possibly, Primo Levi, their fame came alongside anguish. Their earlier sufferings cast long, ultimately fatal shadows.

There are less famous men and women who lived the rest of their lives haunted by decisions they made during the Holocaust which led to the deaths of their children.

How could my eldest [paternal] uncle and his wife cope with the memory of their two young daughters, my first cousins?

They had placed them in the care of a trusted woman who, they hoped, would keep them safe in a Christian rural setting, away from Budapest. The plan failed. One story was that his wife dressed them too smartly for their new surroundings. They were identified as Jews-on-the-run and despatched to Auschwitz in one of the final transports in July 1944.

On 6 July 1944, Hungary’s “Regent”, Admiral Horthy, belatedly ordered an end to the deportations to Auschwitz. He felt under threat from the Allies that they would bomb Budapest if he allowed the procession of death trains to continue. Against this instruction, Eichmann managed to complete deportations already proceeding from two camps in the suburbs of Budapest [in one of which I was a prisoner] and then intrigued to allow two more, smaller transports to Auschwitz from other entrainment camps. It was in one of these that my young cousins Eva and Amalia travelled without their parents.

My uncle lived a very long and active life in Tel Aviv. His wife very obviously remained deeply affected. For my uncle the trauma was less evident but, as I was to realise only much later, was equally if not more severe. It took the form of displacing his sense of guilt onto others, including my Mother.

Holocaust memories and interpretations cannot help being shaped by emotions. This does not justify the view of a school of thought among Holocaust historians that they are unreliable. But certain things may remain concealed, even — or especially — from close family members who remained alive. In a meticulously researched study, Anthony Rudolf has told of his young cousin Jerzyk, who died in a town not far from Munkacs. He recounts how differently Jerzyk’s parents reacted when he later visited them in Israel. Jerzyk’s father did not wish to talk. His mother arranged to speak with Anthony in secret from her husband about the terrible night of their son’s apparently unnecessary suicide, biting on the cyanide pill one of them had provided for him in the event their hiding place in Nazi-occupied Ukraine was discovered.

Survivor testimony has a unique value which historians are unwise to downgrade or to ignore. But subsequent generations need to be aware of the feelings as well as the facts which they express.

2: Hazi Maria, my rescuer

For my Mother, the great risk she took on 5 May 1944 was the key event which — with total justification — she was so anxious that I recognise, amid rival claims by others to have saved my life in the subsequent weeks.

My Mother was certain she had handed me over on a Friday since that was Hazi Maria’s day off work. Maria was a Christian woman, 20-25 years old, who had been recruited by Roszi to travel from Budapest with false papers and to bring me and anyone else in the immediate family from the Munkacs ghetto to Budapest, where conditions for Jews remained better.

My Mother later recorded that after the ghetto was enclosed on 18 April 1944, the mostly negative rumours in that “congested, squalid place” — the Munkacs ghetto — had been “hard to take”. Among them was “that the diapers of the babies are removed on the train to see if they are circumcised because no non-Jewish babies were circumcised at that time”.

Maria, with the baby sleeping on her shoulder, made it safely out of the entrance to the ghetto. My Mother and grandmother followed at a distance to see if Maria and I exited safely. Just beforehand, they had taken me to my grandfather and great grandfather, who had been housed elsewhere in the overstuffed ghetto, to make their farewells. My Mother hardly recognised her father because he had shaved his beard as a precautionary measure — an extreme act for a Hasidic Jew indicating awareness of the extreme conditions ahead.

Once Maria had taken me through the ghetto gate, my Mother could know nothing more of the outcome. Fears kept her and my grandmother “awake for a number of days and nights”. As she saw me leaving the ghetto, my Mother was one day short of her 24th birthday.

Maria was not the first person whom Aunt Roszi had despatched from Budapest on a rescue mission. First, a Mr Kovacs had come into the ghetto asking for Roszi’s daughters, Sori and Ruthie, living once again illegally with the Seidmans under regulations introduced following the Nazi entry into Hungary. When Mr Kovacs came into the ghetto asking where to find the two young girls, Jews whom he approached for the information suspected he was an official on the lookout for illegals. To evade repeated searches, the girls had taken to climbing onto the roofs of the adjoining houses.

When Mr Kovacs failed to locate the girls, he went back alone to Budapest. Sori later wrote in a memoir that he had been obliged to make two further visits from Budapest before his bona fides were accepted. My Mother’s notes say the rescuer came at least twice and perhaps three times and that Sori and her sister were taken out of the ghetto on 28 April, ten days after Jews were forced into the makeshift ghetto.

Why does this timing matter?

3: Escape networks

There is an historical problem.

I was saved from the Munkacs ghetto seventeen days after Jews had been forced into it. Including the prior visits of Mr Kovacs, Maria was making what either was the third rescue trip from Budapest or the fourth. It is a long train journey of 240 miles each way.

To achieve this outcome, Aunt Roszi, herself an illegal living in a basement in Budapest, would have needed:

• First, to find out that Munkacs Jews had been forced into a ghetto  and that her daughters therefore were in severe danger. In order to isolate them, Jews had been forbidden to own radios.
• Second, how easy was it and how safe to recruit willing Jews or, more likely, non-Jews willing to undertake the dangerous job of rescue? And how costly was it?
• Third, was it that easy to obtain rail bookings?
• Fourth, since those to be rescued would require false, non-Jewish identification papers, how could these be obtained? How could they be made in good time?
• Fifth, unless Jewish organisations could undertake the job, money was needed to reward the couriers.
• Sixth, those rescued — both her daughters and I — would need a safe place to hide if we escaped successfully.

It is reasonable to speculate that Aunt Roszi must have had some organisational help and a considerable amount of money to do all this so rapidly.

For all the shades of religious observance among my Mother’s family, the Seidmans, they were predominantly ultra-Orthodox Hasidim.  Though Munkacs was the main family base, there had also been a strong Slovak connection.

There are traces of an ultra-Orthodox resistance network based in Slovakia’s capital, Bratislava, with connections in Budapest and in Carpathian towns such as Munkacs.

One intriguing trace concerns the celebrated ultra-Orthodox resistance leader, originally from Debrecen in Hungary but during the Second World War a rabbi in Slovakia: Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl.

Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl

As described in the first part of this series [22 April 2024, Escape from Munkacs],  Slovakia in 1942 had been far more dangerous for Jews than in Hungary. In 1944, the situation was the reverse. The deportations of 1942 from Slovakia to Auschwitz and elsewhere stopped later that year. Life temporarily was relatively safe for the remnant of its Jews. It was even possible for them to use public communications, such as telegrams.

On 25 May 1944, the day after the final deportation train had departed from Munkacs bound via Kassa [Kosice] for Auschwitz, Weissmandl sent a despairing, well-informed telegram from Slovakia to Yitzhak Sternbuch in Montreux. Sternbuch, a businessman, and his indefatigable wife Recha were at the centre of Jewish ultra-Orthodox rescue operations in Switzerland. Together with Turkey, Switzerland was the neutral country with the best access to Nazi-dominated parts of Europe. Both countries served as important bases both for American and British intelligence agencies and for Jewish organisations.

Though permitted to send telegrams, Weissmandl had to assume that they might not remain confidential. He therefore resorted to an informal code using references which fellow Jews would easily understand but would make less sense to others. Sternbuch hastened to translate the meaning of names and other references into ordinary English and hastened to deliver the product with great haste to the representative at the US Embassy in Bern of the recently-created American War Refugee Board, Roswell Mc Clelland. For most historians, the telegram’s greatest significance is that it was an early appeal for US bombing not of Auschwitz but of sections of the rail lines transporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The delay in securing action is a separate issue of major importance.

The reason for citing it here is different: namely to give evidence of the ultra-Orthodox network which may well have assisted Aunt Roszi in arranging for three successive family rescues from the Munkacs ghetto.

In his telegram, Weissmandl mentions several towns where he appeals for US action. The code word for each is the surname of a prominent Jewish family living there. Sternbuch interprets the surnames of each dignitary as the president of the town’s Jewish community. The surname is code for the related town. In the case of Munkacs this is not precisely accurate. One of the appeals made by Weissmandl is to send airletters to Seidman. “Airletters” denotes bombs, while “Seidmann” [given a double “n” in the telegram] is interpreted by Sternbuch as Munkacs. The register of names of Holocaust victims at Yad Vashem includes very few named Seidman[n]. Given that Aunt Roszi lived after her marriage in Bratislava alongside Weissmandl and given my Hasidic grandfather’s and great grandfather’s relative prosperity and generosity, it is reasonable to suppose that the Seidman[n]s and thus Aunt Roszi were known to Weissmandl. In addition, her husband was descended from Bratislava’s most famous rabbi, the Chatam Sofer.

Coming to links between Weissmandl and Orthodox Jewish organisation in Budapest and Aunt Roszi’s associated links, the most obvious name is Fulop von Freudiger. He acted as the formal head of the Hungarian Jewish community during five months after the Nazi entry into Hungary in March 1944. He was a member of a family which had become rich from the manufacture of textiles and had for this reason been ennobled. Several weeks after the rescues from Munkacs, Freudiger was to be instrumental in securing a number of places for Orthodox Jews on the well-known train containing nearly 1700 privileged Jews who were to be released from the danger of deportation to Auschwitz. This left Budapest on 30 June 1944. Known later as “Kasztner’s Train”, its role in the survival of members of both my Mother’s and Father’s family will be covered in the fifth part of this series.

Of possible relevance here is that late in June, Aunt Roszi, her husband and daughters Sori and Ruthie were to depart with prized, almost certainly expensively purchased places on the train. My Mother told me that before the train left, Roszi was commissioned to make payments of watches to Freudiger’s deputy Gyula Link. My Mother was in hiding at the time.

So there was a connection between Roszi and the Freudiger team. Freudiger also had known associations with Weissmandl in Bratislava, relating to their dealings with Eichmann’s associate Dieter Wisliceny [yet another matter]. What is unclear is whether Freudiger or persons working with him helped to organise false papers and ghetto rescues. He had a high level position as Orthodox representative on Budapest’s Jewish Council, which was in generally compliant contact with Eichmann’s extermination apparatus.

To the best of my knowledge, Roszi left no later account of how she organised her and her husband’s escape from Slovakia to Budapest and how she obtained long term accommodation in a basement [or “bunker”]. I doubt whether this information will ever emerge. Nevertheless, I am uncertain whether a man as involved in April and May 1944 in high level dealings as Freudiger would have been the most likely person to assist Aunt Roszi.

An alternative or supplementary possibility was that she was in contact with a Zionist youth organisation, such as the Orthodox Zionist Bnei Akiva. We know from a number of studies, mainly published in Hebrew, that different Zionist youth bodies cooperated in Budapest in schemes to facilitate the rescue and escape of those individuals and families who — unfortunately exceptionally — appreciated the dangers they faced after 19 March 1944.

A good, albeit promotional English language source about their activities in forging documents and in other forms of resistance may be found here.

4: Uncertainties and tragedies yet to come

When they witnessed Hazi Maria’s and my safe exit out of the ghetto, this was only one step in a hazardous process. Even if my Jewish identity remained undiscovered during the journey to the Hungarian capital, who could look after me safely once I was delivered? Maria had three addresses. When would she return to fetch my Mother? Could she do that before Jews were deported from the ghetto as had happened in Slovakia? Would Soviet forces be able to overrun Hungary in time to save its Jews?

The third part of this series, to appear later this month, will discuss a mystery concerning my Mother’s escape from the Munkacs ghetto, supposedly on 19 May 1944, and her subsequent struggle for survival in Budapest.

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