After all, why should my grandparents be taken to their death? What did they do to deserve it? My grandfather davened every morning and evening, went regularly to the Alte Schul, observed the God-given Law, worked honestly, opened his dry-goods store for regular hours every working day and cheated no one.
When he had a free minute my grandfather would sit in the store or at home, his long beard seeming to almost sweep the floor, puffing away on his equally long pipe with deep contented puffs that produced pretty little clouds of smoke, sometimes resembling angelic halos.
And my grandmother, what did she do? She cooked and baked all day long without a helper in the house, and then came often and gladly to baby-sit for us in the evening, telling us tales of wonder.
Why should these good people, innocent of any conceivable wrongdoing, be swept out of their home by beasts in human form? It simply couldn’t be.
And so I stepped up to them and was about to say that surely we would see each other again. But before I had a chance to utter a word, my grandfather embraced me and whispered in my ear words not easily forgotten. “Ich vill leben, mein kind” (“I want to live, my child”). Then, with a light push to my shoulders, he added: “Jetzt gei shoin, gei shoin” (“Now go already, go already”).
There was nothing more to be said. Miki and I removed our yellow stars, stepped out of the house-gate, and nonchalantly walked through the square loaded with police. We took the main street, passing the City Theatre where I’d spent many entertaining hours, the library that had offered me an abundance of great adventures packed in endless pages, and the Slavia Coffee House, my father’s favorite hangout.
When we got to the Tivoli movie theatre as instructed, we took the stairs to the top floor and attic, where already more than a dozen individuals had settled down on blankets on the floor. We expected to remain there in hiding until liberation, not realizing that we would soon be betrayed.
Our many relatives and friends, along with nearly the entire Jewish population of Kassa, were kept in the brick factory under the most miserable conditions from April 25 to May 15, when the boxcars began arriving and the final journey commenced under the sadistic supervision of the Hungarian gendermerie.
* * * * *
Systematic and larger scale deportations throughout Hungary began on May 15, by which time the Jews had been forcibly moved from their homes and concentrated in ghettos like the brick factory in Kassa.
Some 116,000 Jews were taken by cattle wagons in nine days, mainly to Auschwitz. By June 30, in the space of 46 days, more than 400,000 Jews had been delivered to Auschwitz, 90 percent of whom were immediately killed.
Although the deportations were not hidden from the public eye, the neutral and Allied press only got around in early July to reporting the massive action aimed at liquidating the Jewish population of Hungary, by which time the process was nearly completed.
According to reliable estimates, had the news been reported sooner, as many as 200,000 Jews could have been saved. During those crucial weeks Himmler was ready to barter Jews for trucks, but no one was interested, and Eichmann reached an agreement with Rudolf Kastner, a leader of Hungarian Jewry, to sell the freedom of a trainload of 1,684 Jews who were allowed to make it into Switzerland for five million Swiss Francs.
An enclosed ghetto in Budapest was created on November 29. Close to 70,000 people were crammed into its 162 apartment houses. By December 24 the city was encircled and hermetically sealed by Russian forces. Jews could no longer be marched to the Austrian border but the fanatic Nyilas (Arrow Cross) Jew-haters continued marching batches of them to the Danube where they were lined up on the banks of the river and machine-gunned into the freezing waters.
