Henry Friedman

While the occupation was underway, the whole Jewish “question” came under SS military rule and the world caved in for Hungary’s Jews. The first set of rules came out just weeks later. All Jews had to wear a yellow star so that they could be identified from a distance. Then came the curfew, ownership restrictions and other anti-Jewish laws. It was enough to put everyone into a state of shock. After a month, during the holiday of Passover, the authorities decided that all Jews had to move into a ghetto. My brother Erno decided that he would not go with us and would instead use false identity papers. My father and mother were happy about this — at least Pubi (Erno’s nickname) would escape from this mess. The next day, he was gone. Unfortunately, to this day, no one knows what happened to him during 1944; he disappeared without a trace.

Everyone was given forty-eight hours to get ready to move into the ghetto, to prepare food and pack whatever they could carry. My mother started to make dry cookies; they were made with oil and would not spoil for six to twelve months. The cookies were for emergencies only and I was in charge of carrying and protecting them. Forty-eight hours passed and a wagon showed up at our yard. The wagon was loaded quickly and, within minutes, we were moved to the synagogue on Síp utca and from there we were sent to a house in the ghetto. When we got to the house, we found about twenty families already there. We were allocated a ten-by-twenty-foot area in a room with others. The sanitary conditions were very bad, so the first thing the men had to do was dig trenches for outhouses for men and women. It was our new place to live and it was beyond our imagination and so humiliating. We couldn’t even leave the ghetto without a permit.

All this took place within an eight-week period and in such a way that no one could be in touch with one another to learn what was happening. No one was allowed to visit anywhere, there were no phones in the houses and if there was a phone, it was disconnected or, worse, listened in on. Everything had happened very quickly. We assumed that all our relatives were having the same experiences as we were. It was a chaotic nightmare.

I was still hoping that my father had been left behind. All the way to my bunk, I was thinking of how I could find out what happened to him. I figured that on Saturday I would go to the camp office; the head counters there might know. In the meantime, my tears did not stop until I fell asleep that night.

Saturday came and I got myself ready to go to the camp office to see if they could answer my questions. I went to see a young and sympathetic fellow inmate. He said that he had no record and that he didn’t know what happened to my father either. And so, my doubts hung on with my hopes that maybe someday I would see my father again.

My father, Adolf Abraham Friedman, was most likely killed the next day. He must have known he was heading back to Birkenau, to the gas chamber, with hundreds of others and that there was nothing he or anyone could do. I presume he knew that the end was near for him and that he made peace with his conscience and was ready to die. But how can one feel, knowing that he is being taken to be killed like an animal in a slaughterhouse? No one in the camp had a pencil or paper, so my father was not able to leave me a few chosen words. Fifty years later, I still wonder what he would have said to me in those chosen words: Would he have apologized for not getting us all out of Europe to America or the Land of Israel? Would he have said that he was sorry that he had sired children into such a crazy, mixed-up world? Would he have blamed God for all this misery we had to endure simply because of our religion? Or would he have left a few instructions for me on how to try to survive and endure the misery yet to come before liberation?

My father was a man who would not kill a worm or step on an ant on the ground — he would go around them because they were God’s creations. Would my father have been praying to God, who had forsaken him? Did he pray to God that his children might survive? Was he still hoping that something might change and he would somehow survive? Was he glad that he didn’t have to say goodbye face to face to his youngest son, whom he loved dearly? Was he cursing God for misguiding him and the whole Jewish people, for that matter the whole human race, permitting men to commit the most unimaginable crimes in all of history? Or was he just carrying the subconscious guilt and burden that Jews have carried with them for centuries — the guilt that so many Jewish people have taken for granted — that he was to pay the price at the cremation? I shall never know what he was thinking or doing but one thing is sure — I felt uncomfortable then and still do today. When I think about it, I feel uncomfortable. Probably, I shall carry this anguish with me until my last breath on this earth.

I pray that my father’s soul may rest in peace.

I felt I should see to those people on the floor so I went over to one of them; he was half-naked, with no blanket or jacket. I pushed him a little and realized that he was dead. I went over to the next man and found the same thing; he was dead too. I figured I better get the heck out of there.

I started to wonder what had happened to me, how I had slept through the whole day. Why did the SS guards let me sleep? Perhaps they tried to wake me and thought that I was dead too. Even today, seventy years later, I have no answers. I may have been in a coma.

One thing that has stayed with me ever since that night is that I cannot cry. I cannot cry for anyone’s death or for any pain that I may feel; however, I did have tears in my eyes when my brother died many years later. In plain language, I stopped crying that night. I always wondered why that feeling dried up in my brain and body — was it to fight back God’s will as I understood it? Was it a psychological deficiency that happened during that sleep? Did I mature overnight to the point that crying was a child’s custom, a useless custom? I have wondered about this for seventy years and have not been able to come to any conclusion and will probably never be able to fathom the reason for something like that to happen. Thankfully, I am able to cry tears of joy — which I did at my wedding, my children’s births, my son’s wedding and my grandchildren’s births.

In time, I was able to get to the door but, before I opened the door, I thought to take an inventory; my blanket was on top of me, my angora scarf was on my neck, my spoon and tin dish were still with me — my whole fortune.

I started to walk slowly, trying not to be noisy with my wooden shoes. Besides the SS guards, there were no people around. As I walked, I passed a table with salami and a table that was half-full of twenty unsliced rolls. I thought to myself, how could I get one of them? The guard was busy setting things up so I walked up to the table, stopped and looked at the food. The SS guard was looking sideways and without fanfare I asked him, “Kann ich ein Stück haben? (Can I have a piece?)” He did not chase me away nor did he reach for his gun. I walked a little closer to the table so that the blanket that covered me was also on the table to the left of me and the SS guard was to the right of me. I put my hand on a whole double-sized salami or wurst and, in a split second, I tucked it under my blanket, walked back a few steps and then I put the salami under my jacket so that it would not fall out. I walked two more steps, stopped and turned around to thank him with my eyes and I saw him looking at me sideways as if to say, “Smart boy, enjoy it.” I must have looked awful; perhaps he felt sorry for me and he could not figure out where the heck I had come from or how I had made it this far. I turned away and I walked about ten metres farther where I noticed a similar table with bread. I felt I must have bread with the salami so I tried the same thing as before and quickly secured the bread. I could not believe it, but it worked too. It was a miracle that this should happen to me. I felt like I had hit the jackpot!

The SS guards could have reached for their weapons and there would have been one less to feed but they chose to act honourably toward me, a mere child. We can learn from this story: It is wise to hate ill-guided systems of government, but it is counterproductive to hate individual people for being part of dictatorial groups like fascists, communists or some religious groups or races. For anyone who hates individual people, without mercy, becomes himself an unhappy human being.