Escape from Munkacs, Part IV. From Auschwitz to Brooklyn: my grandmother’s story

1. Why for the first time is this so painful?

The passage of time plays its tricks. As I start this essay, it is 25 May 2024. Why do I think back to the progress of the cattle train at this precise time 80 years ago, as it took my grandparents, great grandfather, great uncle and many other relatives along the tracks from Munkacs via Kassa [Kosice], where members of the SS took over the train from the Hungarians and then to the ramp at Auschwitz? Why now, when I have never been on this journey of the mind in all these years?

There is little point in attempting to think about, still less to recount, the likely events when the transport reached Auschwitz. Descriptions of the deportation process have been such regular features of interviews with survivors that they have become hackneyed. They are a staple of projects such as Stephen Spielberg’s 50,000 plus recordings of interviews with Holocaust survivors, held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

The only notable feature of my close relatives’ journey is that they arrived in Auschwitz on 26 May. This was the day after the only existing set of photographs were taken of Jews from a town near Munkacs, waiting to be selected for death or for slavery. In one photograph, women wait after their selection with their children in a wooded area. We know what they did not – that they were waiting for the gas chambers. In another, we see a procession of women, by now with shaven heads and wearing prison clothes, the lucky ones chosen for at least a short period of life as branded working animals.

Yet my grandfather, great grandfather and other relatives died when I was just 11 months. My grandmother – the central figure in this article — died when I was 3 years old, without my Mother or me ever seeing her again. I, and then my Mother, had been smuggled out of the Munkacs ghetto [see Parts II and III] very shortly beforehand. And my Mother herself had only a secondary role in my upbringing after I arrived in London aged nearly 5 and was raised by my beloved Auntie – my paternal great uncle’s English widow.

I cannot rationally explain the urge to reclaim that lost, unmemorialised past at this stage of my life. However, it is not only a personal quest. It is evident that too much of the public history of the time remains insufficiently verified and, in some parts, subject to continued controversy.

We witnessed the loose ends of Holocaust history and still differing approaches to it a few days ago, when Lord Pickles published a report on deaths relating to the Nazi occupation of the small Channel Island of Alderney. There was an unlikely, indirect but relevant connection between my grandmother’s time in a sub-camp of the Hamburg-based concentration camp of Neuengamme at Beendorf and another sub-camp of Neuengamme, the one situated on Alderney.

2. The final days in Munkacs

On 26 May, the members of my Mother’s family arrived in Auschwitz. My grandmother – the only one who survived long enough to write what had happened — later recorded that her husband and her father, my grandfather and great grandfather, were murdered following the standard SS selection process on their day of arrival.

Assuming the dates recorded by my Mother were correct, that day was exactly one week after she had been rescued from the ghetto and exactly three weeks after I had been successfully extracted and taken to Budapest, 240 miles away.

My grandmother and her brother Moshe were selected for slave labour, Moshe as a locksmith. Only my grandmother survived until the end of the War. In 1946 she too had died. Clearly, this was largely from the after-effects of her multiple ordeals.

My job of piecing together those last days in Munkacs remains incomplete. There are a few family records and letters still to be examined and in some cases to be translated from Hungarian. In addition, I have not yet read thoroughly all of the published literature on the Munkacs ghetto and of recorded interviews with survivors who were not relatives. There may also be accounts left by relatives who lived elsewhere in the ghetto and who survived.

One relative, Aryeh Sole, wrote an important English-language study of the Hebrew-Zionist gymnasium in the town. He had played a senior role in it, but had been conscripted as a forced labourer for the Hungarian army for a considerable period before the Nazi entry into Hungary in March 1944. When Munkacs Jews were forced into the ghetto following the Passover, Sole gives the date as 16 April, when the academic year was nearing its end. For the first time, there would be no yearbook, previously an important feature of the school for its 350 pupils. Students of the graduating class still had to complete a matriculating dissertation. It was decided that they would write these in the home in the ghetto of the Principal, J. Morvay. They “looked forward to oral examinations that never came”.

Sole himself, having been wounded in fighting in Ukraine, had been discharged from his military work company. He returned to Munkacs, he wrote, on the day the Jews entered the ghetto: “I managed to speak with the parents of students, mostly of girl students, and advised them to escape the ghetto but they would not listen to me.”

He notes that the Zionist chalutz [left-wing pioneer] underground gave him forged papers and he then went to Budapest together with his wife, baby daughter and two girl students whose parents allowed them to come to Budapest. He does not detail the mechanics of their journey and of their subsequent survival after they arrived.

The local Jewish attitudes to escape recorded by Sole, typically complacent, highlight the contrast with the attitudes of my grandmother and of her sister, my Great Aunt Roszi, from her Budapest hiding place. These widespread attitudes of ordinary Hungarian Jews in 1944 will also form a background to parts of my fifth essay, due at the end of June 2024, concerning the much discussed matter of “Kasztner’s Train”.

A passage in one of my Mother’s writings about the day of my rescue from the ghetto on 5 May 1944 again reflected my grandmother’s activism. My [and later my Mother’s] Christian rescuer, Hazi Maria, arrived in the ghetto at around 5 in the afternoon on the eve of Shabbat. At that time, writes my Mother about her mother: “[She] as usual was somewhere searching for a person who could smuggle us out of that horrible congested place and save us from the torture and death that by now was imminent. Hazi Maria was a godsend.”

Assuming my Mother correctly gave the date she was able to exit from the ghetto using a false Christian identity as 19 May, only four to five more days were to pass before her family had to walk from the central ghetto to the Sajovitz brickyard at the edge of the town, the point of entrainment to Auschwitz. There are photographs of groups of Jews in transit and vivid descriptions of cruelties committed against Jews waiting in the brickyard in brutal attempts to force them to reveal hidden jewels and valuables. But I have no knowledge of the particular treatment of my ancestors.

What strikes me is how short the time was between the time my Mother managed to leave the ghetto and the time her family were already on the cattle train to Auschwitz. Until then, she had no way of knowing when or whether her Christian rescuer would return bearing forged papers for her. During the two weeks following my departure, she could not have known how rapidly the ghetto would be emptied and whether she would be able to find a way out of the ghetto before that happened. It must have been terrifying. A photograph marked 17 May shows a procession of Jews seemingly from the central ghetto walking to the brickyard ghetto. If that is accurate, it implies that my Mother would already have been aware that her and her family’s time was running out when Hazi Maria providentially arrived back from Budapest to collect her.

3. The excruciating wait for news

An entry in one of her memoirs, written many years later, indicates that it had not taken long for news of the liquidation of the Munkacs ghetto to reach my Mother in Budapest. I have no idea whether it became relatively general knowledge, or whether it had come through a grapevine of girlfriends in hiding such as the well-connected Vali Mermelstein, perhaps through her relative, Tibor Rosenbaum. Nor is it easy to establish the speed and detail of reports about Auschwitz.

By early 1945, when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on 27 January and when around the same time another Soviet army occupied Budapest, there could have been few remaining illusions about the meaning of transport to that place. This is clear from a letter in my possession which reached my Aunt in London early in 1945 from a relative who had worked in Budapest for the Jewish Agency [the Zionist Sochnut] and who had reached Switzerland on “Kasztner’s Train”. Such dread news left severe doubts about the survival of loved ones known to have been deported.

Even after the surrender of the Nazis on 7 May 1945 – VE Day – the breakdown of normal postal services in Europe was so severe that it could be impossible for a period of months for Jews to find out about the fate of their relatives. In August 1945, my Mother ventured back to Munkacs to discover the situation there. It was deeply discouraging. Not only were Soviet troops in possession of her family home, but the Soviet Union had claimed possession of the territory in which it was situated [Munkacs was renamed Mukachevo and now forms part of Western Ukraine]. Moreover, the atmosphere for Jews returning from the dead was creepy. One lady with whom my grandmother had left some clothes returned them to my Mother, but with the plea that she should not let neighbours witness her act of friendship.

That visit back to Munkacs had, however, one overwhelming consequence. A Jewish man recognised her in the street. He had dramatic news. He directed her to a Red Cross list of survivors. Gizi Seidman, my grandmother, was named.

The first, deliriously happy messages between my Mother and grandmother, who by August 1945 was in Landskrona, Sweden, are as affecting now as they must have been then. Grandmother Gizi had been rescued in the final days of the War from a concentration camp in a deep German salt mine. It was her third place of incarceration: first Auschwitz, then the camp for women at Ravensbruck, then the Beendorf sub-camp of Neuengamme. From there, dangerous weeks of transport to Denmark, before crossing on 5 May 1945 to Sweden under the auspices of Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross.

The deals during the final stages of the War between Heinrich Himmler’s masseur, Himmler himself, and Bernadotte constituted a cynical attempt by Himmler to evade the hangman’s noose following his unparalleled crimes. According to another interpretation, Himmler’s main concern was to fall into British or American hands, thereby saving himself from Stalin’s tender mercies. On Bernadotte’s side, the primary beneficiaries were to be Scandinavian concentration camp prisoners. Later, thousands of Jews also became beneficiaries. In order to identify the Swedish vehicles as humanitarian, thereby lessening the chances of air attack by mainly British aircraft against the remnants of the Nazi forces, those being saved by the Swedish Red Cross were transported in what became known as the White Trucks. These trucks, plus rail transport, were to bring the freed prisoners from different camps in Germany to sea ports from which they could be ferried to safety in Sweden.

Even in August 1945, months after VE Day, there was no easy way in which my Mother, then in Hungary, could notify my grandmother Gizi in Sweden that she and I were still alive. To send a cable to the Red Cross in Sweden, she had to travel to Czechoslovakia. It reached the Red Cross on 1 September and was read over the telephone to the home in Sweden where she had gathered with other Jewish survivors. Coming as it did at the end of Shabbat, the message brought Gizi an explosion of joy. She knew already that her sister Roszi, her husband and two daughters were alive and well in Switzerland after their months’ long journey on the Kasztner transport. By then, the chances that Gizi’s husband, brother and father had survived Auschwitz were increasingly remote.

Gizi’s first letters both to Roszi and to my Mother showed remarkable gratitude, selflessness and positivity. She stated that she did not seek revenge:

“My one and only dearest child,

God is really good that he let me live to see the day when I can write to you. I do not want to speak about the past and I do not even want to think about it. I hope … that He will give me strength and health and will help to build a new life in Erez Israel [the Land of Israel] where we all belong.”

Gizi was full of gratitude to a cousin, Susan Kahan, whom she had encountered in September 1944 in Auschwitz. As a 19 year old, I was to meet her in Allentown, Pennsylvania at the end of my freshman year in Oxford. I discovered later that her husband had lost his first wife and child before marrying Susan. They had a daughter slightly younger than me. I’ll always remember his gesture in giving me a dollar bill of some denomination so that I could take Annette, their daughter, to the Pennsylvania State Fair.

In the letter to my Mother in which she lauded Susan, Gizi went on to express her gratitude to my Mother’s friend Elizabeth, who had been as kind to her in Auschwitz as my Mother – her own daughter – would have been.

Gizi placed great emphasis on my Mother’s being able to recover the valuables she had buried just before she and the Seidman family were forced into the Munkacs ghetto. She told Susan when they met in Auschwitz where the objects had been hidden, asking her to tell my Mother in the event that Susan survived and Gizi did not. She hoped that these possessions, plus the sale of the family home, would help the family to re-establish their lives.

My Mother’s renewed attempt to carry out this mission by another visit to Munkacs ended in failure.

Grandmother Gizi’s happiness in the first letter gave way to deep depression. Subsequent letters even display the increasing ill-feeling between her and the survivor with whom she had to share a room in Sweden. The room-mate, traumatised by the absence of news about her husband’s and children’s fates, had proved unable to resist searching through my grandmother’s private family letters. Gizi remarked, too, that other fellow survivors were not to be trusted. The concentration camps had turned them into thieves.

Her dream of going to Israel was shattered by the harsh immigration policy of Britain’s administration of Mandate Palestine, which prevented Holocaust survivors from moving to what would soon become the State of Israel. In the end, my grandmother managed to travel to New York City. Gizi’s last hope was that she could be reunited with my Mother there.

On 11 December 1946, my Mother arrived in New York on a Cunard vessel, once again with a false passport. Her visa entitled her only to a temporary stay. After a lengthy examination on Ellis Island, she arrived at the dockside hoping to meet my grandmother. Gizi was not there. Instead, there was the Seidman cousin who had fixed her invitation to visit New York for a Jewish conference. The cousin was cagey when she asked about Gizi. It was some time before he admitted the truth. She would not be meeting her mother, but was to come immediately to Brooklyn where she would sit Shiva: that is, she would perform the ritual act of Jewish mourning. Gizi had died the previous week.

4. Why did my grandmother die so shortly after her liberation? Are ongoing differences between some German and Israeli Holocaust historians relevant?

In the very week of the 80th anniversary of my maternal family forebears’ deportation and for my grandfather and great grandfather their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, a report was issued at the Imperial War Museum on a seemingly unrelated, but actually connected topic: the likely number of deaths caused by the Nazi occupation of the Channel Island of Alderney. The UK Government Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues, Lord Pickles, made clear in his Introduction to the report of 22 May 2024 that a panel of experts had concluded that there was no basis for some exaggerated “conspiracy theories” about numbers of victims of forced and slave labour on the island.

This core conclusion remains, in my opinion, unproven because of significant methodological issues.

A relatively minor aspect of the Alderney study bears on my grandmother’s story. I therefore cannot reasonably pretend to be disinterested in the matter. But my personal stake has led to concerns about approaches to Holocaust historiography among some — but certainly not all — researchers based at universities in Germany.

It is vital to stress that this is not a collective judgement on German scholarship. But attacks from within German academe on Jewish Holocaust scholars – most notably on Daniel Goldhagen – and responses to the late Martin Broszat, director of the Munich-based German Institute of Contemporary History, by prominent Israeli historians such as Omer Bartov and Saul Friedlander, make it clear that personal background is not wholly irrelevant to studies in this tragic field.

Coming to the assessment of the gravity of conditions within the Neuengamme sub-camps and similar matters, two scholars have criticised each other. One of them, Professor Marc Buggeln of the University of Flensburg, served on the Alderney Inquiry. Daniel Blatman, then director of the Institute of Contemporary History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, offered a critical review of Buggeln’s major publication on slave labour in Nazi concentration camps. Buggeln retaliated in his review of Blatman’s magnum opus on the death marches of Nazi victims in the final months of the War.

Buggeln’s doctoral dissertation examined relative death rates in different Neuengamme sub-camps. Documents recording deaths, he argued, showed relatively low rates in many of these. According to Buggeln, Beendorf, the sub-camp where, as mentioned, my grandmother spent the final months of her slave labour, had been low risk at that time.

I need to be exceptionally careful about implying any criticism of the field of Buggeln’s specialism. I am grateful for his ready response to some of my queries. Staff at the Neuengamme KZ Memorial also have kindly offered information.

Four technical matters are outstanding. First, the completeness of the death lists is open to dispute. That is what a Neuengamme KZ Memorial archivist informed me about Beendorf during my grandmother’s incarceration there. Death lists have not survived for a chunk of that time.

Second, the SS at Neuengamme received a daily payment from the company for which the prisoners worked. So there was an incentive for the SS to under-report deaths in order to claim payments for labourers who were actually dead. Buggeln feels this factor was, at most, of limited importance.

Third, and I believe highly important, is that death lists of persons working in the sub-camp omit casualties on journeys of prisoners to the camp [in my grandmother’s case, travel from her previous camp at Ravensbruck] and the journey from Helmstedt-Beendorf in the final weeks of the War from Beendorf to Denmark.

According to the Neuengamme KZ website: “On 10 April 1945, both camps were evacuated, and the women and men were loaded onto goods cars and taken via Magdeburg, Stendal and Wittenberge to the Wöbbelin ‘reception camp’, which they reached on 16 April. The men stayed there but the women continued on. Their train stopped for three days at the railway station in Sülstorf in Mecklenburg, and the many women who died there of starvation and thirst were hastily buried by the inhabitants of the village. On 20 or 21 April, the train reached Hamburg and the prisoners were distributed to the largely empty Hamburg satellite camps of Eidelstedt, Langenhorn, Sasel and Wandsbek. Most of the prisoners were able to leave Hamburg on a Swedish Red Cross train on 1 May, which took the women via Denmark to Sweden.”

This account makes clear the extreme severity of this long journey under dreadful conditions. It may be presumed that the journeys of slave labourers from the Neuengamme sub-camp on Alderney were less severe.

Measuring death rates and numbers surely also needs to take account of a fourth factor: the later deaths from exhaustion and ill-health which all too frequently was the fate of recently released prisoners. By disregarding the deaths caused by these factors, Buggeln’s methodology certainly avoided uncertainty and research problems, but it did so at the cost of underestimating slave labourer death rates.

It is a shortcoming of the Pickles Expert Inquiry into Alderney deaths that the report deals so casually, and without any attempt to estimate numbers, with deaths after removal of [often exhausted] slave labourers from Alderney. This is especially significant in view of the central importance assigned by Lord Pickles to establishing an accurate mortality total.

All that the report says is: “The ill-treatment that labourers received in Alderney also undoubtedly contributed to further deaths that occurred in the weeks and months after they arrived at camps in mainland Europe. For those who survived, long-term health problems often resulted from the treatment they received in Alderney.”

It is realistic to argue, as Blatman does, that death totals are not always subject to meaningful specification. Less acceptable is to provide what supposedly are statistically valid headline figures, while relegating to sections of a report less likely to be examined by ordinary readers the exclusions which have been made.

Against a background of only partial evidence, implausibly precise figures of deaths in particular places are potentially misleading. Estimating the overall number of Holocaust victims arguably is less subject to major error.

My tentative conclusion is that the death statistics both in the Alderney Inquiry report and in Buggeln’s figures for Neuengamme sub-camps are incomplete and, if taken as comprehensive, err on the low side.

Be that as it may, and also taking into account my Mother’s information about my grandmother’s weak heart, the most probable verdict must be that she was worked to death.

In one of her postwar letters, Gizi appeared to confuse the exceptional violence of her treatment in Auschwitz with the hardships of her months in Helmstedt-Beendorf. Between her deportation from Munkacs and her arrival in Sweden nearly a year had passed.

In what seems to be a reference to her time working in the underground salt mine, a location built to provide a facility for manufacturing air weapons free from Allied bombing, she outlines the severe routine. After being wakened at 3 a.m., there was a four kilometre walk, a twelve hour shift, a return to the barracks, subject to delay when there was an Allied bombing raid, then a bit of bread with something on it to eat, followed by a scramble, often in darkness, to battle for a blanket. Two people slept on a cot with one blanket.

The fifth part of this series will move to Budapest at the end of June 1944 and will coincide with the 80th anniversary of the departure from Budapest of “Kasztner’s Train” and my nearly simultaneous deportation from one Budapest suberb to another – from Rakospalota to Budakalasz.

The six and final part will detail how my [paternal] grandmother, aunt and cousins were saved from deportation from Budakalasz to Auschwitz following a supplementary, much smaller deal between Kasztner and Eichmann. This released fewer than one hundred of the over 11,000 deportees to a “privileged” camp in the centre of Budapest.

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