LIBERATION
(15th January 1945)
Father and I spent a restless night in our tiny room. We were used to the sound of the cannons and Stalin organs bombarding us, but more and more small arm fire was heard. This could mean only that the front line was approaching us. The weather was freezing cold and we felt it more than ever in our state of constant hunger. It was a relief, when dawn came and we could get up and start to move about in the flat.
As soon as we woke up on the morning of 15th January, we were interested to see some activity on the streets through the windows. German soldiers and officers rushed around on motorcycles, stopped then moved off again. It was some time since we last saw German soldiers and seeing them suggested that something is happening on that miserably cold morning.
At about 7 a.m., I was brushing my teeth in Mrs Eidam's bathroom, when I saw a number of people in a group on the street. Father came to shave himself and he pointed out to me that one of the people in the group wore a similar cap to the one he saw the previous day. I became interested and after a while realised, that there were two men in strange fur caps, wearing strange quilted jackets and having machine pistols with strange circular magazines slung on the backs. The other people around them were Hungarians, talking to them in sign language.
There was no doubt about it, they were Russian soldiers. We are alive, we made it. It's all over. Or is it? Remember the Russians who advanced past Kecskemét, only to retreat and hand it back to the Germans, with tragic results for the liberated Jews?
I wish I could say that we started to jump from joy or that we sung a hymn or that we rushed down to kiss our liberators. We probably were too exhausted to be jubilant and too blasé to become anything other than cautious in accepting that there might be a change in our circumstances. In fact, we were so doubtful, that the occupation of our area was permanent, that we told no one in the flat of our sighting Russian soldiers 15 meters away from our window.
However, soon we had a knock on our door and it was our Jewish-Communist-Russian speaking neighbour, wearing a red dress and red scarf, who came to tell us that she was one of the people in the group speaking with the Russians, who are here in force.
We started to believe, when our two Russians started to walk away from the group and proceeded to saunter towards Russia, - towards the East. However, before we had time to start worrying, that the Russians are retreating, we realised that our building was surrounded by lots of Russian soldiers.
Our building was on the corner of two streets and we could overlook both streets from different rooms of the flat. The bathroom gave us a good view of the street leading to the north, where we first saw the Russians and also towards the east. Our room gave us a good view of both east and west (where we could see the Danube, at the end of a street), always provided that we leant out of the window.
Frau Eidam's room was at the other side of the house, from which one could see all four streets, having a bay window facing the corner. From that window you could see towards the west, right down that street that led to the Danube, while we could see towards the south if we stood at the far end of the bay window and squinted towards the left. That was the direction the City was, that was the place where the Germans set up their barricade.
That barricade with its machine guns and cannons was strangely quiet. We decided to investigate and went to Frau Eidam's room to peep. Yes, the barricade was still there, but deserted. I decided to stick my head out of the window and have a closer look. As I did so, the barricade came alive. A burst of machine gun fire directed towards my head made me decide that I should pull my head in, while I still have it.
Of course the Germans weren't shooting at me. This became obvious when in the middle of the cross roads in front of us, we saw the dead bodies of four Russians, who minutes earlier walked around just as freely as did the two Russians, who were surrounded by the people.
There were lots of Russians in the street with the West to North axis. They were quite safe, being sheltered by the buildings. However, without any orders or fuss, the soldiers moved to both corners of the two buildings that gave them cover and laid down a small arms barrage of fire, that enabled some of the other Russians to rush to the middle of the exposed street and drag their dead comrades back.
They then carried the bodies a little while, put them down and became disinterested in the war. Instead they found bicycles and had great fun riding them and having races in the safety of the buildings between them and the Germans behind the barricades. One lot of Russians even found a Volkswagen and drove it forward and backwards, stopping just short of reaching the cross road where the Germans could have had a shot at the car and the drivers, who had too much fun to die.
Suddenly, a mobile field gun arrived, being pulled by a large number of Russian soldiers, two of whom were women. This we have never seen before, we watched them leaning out through our room's window, when out of nowhere, a number of Hungarian soldiers arrived, with their arms held above their heads. They must have been bailed up in a neighbouring house, in a flat or in a cellar and decided to surrender.
We were interested in the reception they got: to start with nobody took the slightest bit of interest in them and after a while they lowered their arms. The Russians were setting up their field gun, taking off the tarpaulin, pushing it to the corner of our building, then pulling it back and all this time the Hungarian soldiers were in their way. Finally, the reluctant captors got fed up with the Hungarians and pushed them until they understood and went across the street, away from the Russians, who just wanted to get on with their preparations for continuing the war.
Obviously the Russians were waiting for something, probably ammunition, because they were bored with their cannon and with the war in general. Almost from boredom, they went across the street, where the Hungarians were sitting and started to look at their boots and if they found something better than their own, they exchanged them. Also they had a look at the wrist watches of the Hungarians and took those away. There was absolutely no hostility shown by the Russians, if anything there was a form of cameradie which so surprised the Hungarian soldiers, who were given to understand by the German and Hungarian propaganda, that if they surrender they will be shot, that they wanted to kiss and hug their captors.
It suddenly dawned on me, that I was still in my Army uniform and it was time that I became a civilian. I took off my army jacket and put on a suit I had for just such an occasion. The trousers of the suit were used to cover my officers riding boots. Later they were tried on by a Russian, but he found it impossible to put them on and I wore them for many months as my only piece of footwear.
I took my army uniform up to the roof of the building and left it beside a chimney. At the same time I had to get rid of my automatic pistol too. I decided to throw it down a ventilating shaft. Before I did so, I decided to fire it at least once, before I throw it away. I carefully cocked it, held it towards the sky and pulled the trigger. Click, it misfired. I checked it out, pulled the trigger again with the same result. I changed the magazines, fired again but to no avail. Obviously my pistol was a dud one. It was just as well that the Arrow Cross did not come into our room, when I was waiting for them with my pistol, I would have died and not just from embarrassment.
Finally, the Russians must have received their supplies and decided to get on with the war. They shooed the Hungarian soldiers off, without any guards towards the rear, positioned their cannon so that the body of it was in one street, but it was pointing towards the barricade. Father and I were most interested and we were rushing around from one room to the other to see what is going on. In Frau Eidam's room we had the better view of the barricade which we were hoping to see pulverised soon and we could also see the preparations being made to let off the gun.
There was a big picture window in that room right above the field gun and it occurred to me that when the gun is fired, the window might break. I told Father and tried to get him away from the window as I felt that they will fire it any second. We both retired to the far end of the room, and we were waiting for the sound of the gun, but there was nothing happening. Father decided to investigate and stepped back to the window.
I saw the window lift out of its frame, floating up towards the ceiling and then come down, seemingly in one piece, landing and breaking into little pieces on Father's bold head. Then only did the deafening sound of the cannon register. I rushed to Father, who was standing at the empty window, stunned from the noise and from shock. I expected him to keel over and be cut in to slivers or at least have his jugular cut. On the contrary, there was not a solitary sign of blood or bruise. Another one of those miracles, but this one has a perfectly good explanation: contrary to what I believed I saw, the glass has already disintegrated by the time it came down on his head.
The barricade had a lot more damage. After the first shot of the cannon, there was nothing more emanating from the German side, but to make sure the Russians let off a few more, before withdrawing the cannon from its position, covering it with tarpaulin and calling it a day.
It was an exiting day and the night was promising to be just as eventful. As soon as it became known to the Russians that part of the cellar was used as a warehouse for a wine wholesaler, they broke it open and started to drink. Before long they were going from flat to flat searching for women and raping them wherever they were found. Young or old, as long as they were women, were thrown to the ground, held by one and raped by the other one or two or dozens.
The screams of the raped was going on half the night until the women decided that no one, including their husbands, is going to help them or else the Russians became sated. At the time, the victims did not have our sympathies. We felt that it is a welcome change for the others to be on the receiving end and the Russian soldiers probably felt that a bit of raping is what is their right, after what has happened in Poland and Russia.
Jewish women were also taken, but they never complained, - they must have been ashamed of their liberators or maybe they felt that this is the least they can do for the people who liberated them.
Next morning we woke up early. We decided to make some enquiries to see if all is clear for us to walk across half of Budapest to the centre, where Mother was. We did not need to make any enquiries, our Romanian friend arrived back from the Hotel Bristol with sad news. His fiancé was killed in the shelter of the hotel, she was incinerated with all her belongings. Only her jewellery was left because he was carrying it for her. The whole hotel burned down, he survived only because he was not in the shelter, when a direct hit of the shelter occurred. The Russians are in full control of the whole city, all German troops having been either killed or they surrendered.
Hearing this Father and I took off immediately. On our way we called in at my Aunt Irma and Paul's cellar. They, including my Grandmother survived. We told them that they are liberated, warned them to hide the girls from the Russians and continued our rush towards the City, where we were hoping to find Mother alive.
There was no need to hurry. We could only go another 150 meters before a kind old bearded Russian did not allow us to go any further. He was trying to tell us about the nemetski, i.e. the Germans, who he pointed out were only across the street. He obviously did not know that the Russians were in control of the whole City. We left him and went ahead, until we came to the Comic Theatre where we had to cross the wide boulevard of St. Stephen.
There was so much firing going on, that we started to look for snipers, but all we could see was a German armoured car shooting at our side. For an army that was non existent, they made a lot of noise. We decided that our Romanian friend was either less than truthful or else he was misinformed and we returned towards our lodgings at Frau Eidam. As we started to run towards the rear, we saw our kind old muzhik, - half his head was missing, he must have been the target of an armour piercing cannon or something.
Getting back to Frau Eidam's flat, we were keen to tell our Romanian friend that he was wrong, but he was not there. While we were away he collected some if not all of his belongings and with his fiancé’s jewellery simply disappeared from our life. We often wondered who he really was. There was something mysterious about him: always well dressed, clean, charming, yet he must have been a fraud, like we were. Father actually made inquiries about him, wanting to thank him for saving our life, but neither the Rumanians, nor the Hotel Bristol has ever heard of him. The hotel he told us has burned down was in good shape until demolished 25 years later. We were doubtful as to the shape and condition of his fiancé, if indeed there as one.
Next day, we were off again on the same errand. Our dead Russian friend was still lying unburied on the street and where we were warned by him a day earlier not to cross, on this day we were stopped by Russians who made us work for them, by carrying out telephones from a telephone warehouse and loading them into a truck. Beginning that day and for the next 3 months whatever was not nailed down, was loaded into Russian trucks and trains and transported to Russia.
Only a very small proportion of what they took could have been ever used. For instance the un-boxed telephone handsets were piled up in a corner of the truck and over these we loaded first some cable and then some sort of powder in sacks. Whatever it was it was inedible. We certainly tested it.
When we were finished we were allowed to go on and we wanted to pass in front of the house we used to live in and where our belongings, or what was not pinched, still were. We couldn't, instead of the street there was rubble about two stories high. The school opposite our house had 10 or more tonnes of explosives in its cellar, which went off with sufficient force to destroy not only the school but also the houses opposite it. One of these houses had our flat on its fourth floor while another of these houses had a street level office which Father had in partnership with an engineer, who was building concrete silos.
We had no desire to waste time and so we bypassed the rubble towards Kálmán Street, where we had just a glance at Father's office and warehouse, which seemed to be almost completely unmarked.
During our trip across town the cannons were just as busy as ever. Father and I played our usual game of identifying each bang with a "This was an outshot" or "This sounded like an inshot" meaning that we were the shooters or that we were the targets. It depended on being a pessimist or an optimist as to what you thought happened.
There was another game we could play: depending on what we thought was the direction from where the shot was coming from, you walked on the side nearest to the assumed source of the shot, believing that side to be the safest. Thus it came about that as we approached a building of which one sixth was owned by Father, we couldn't agree as to which side we should walk on and Father walked on the side of the building which he part owned and I walked on the opposite side.
Suddenly a cannon or rocket landed above Father and heavy chunks of stone fell followed by some snow, missing him by what seemed a few inches only. He couldn't have moved faster to join me on my side and we stood there for a few seconds gazing at the huge gaping hole.
"Damn it," Father said, "my one sixth of that building was just shot away." His statement and sense of humour in those circumstances deserves immortality.
It was snowing heavily and visibility was not very good, but even from that distance we could see that there are a number of people outside the building Mother lived. It seemed that they were congregating outside the gate as if to welcome some Russians. We hurried along, wondering if Mother is alright and if she is amongst the people outside on the street.
Just then a cannon shot landed amongst the people. We could see it lifting the people and dropping them as if they would have been rag dolls. Some of the people seemed to be unhurt and they dragged the injured towards the gate, but left some on the snow believing them to be dead.
We started to run and as we got there saw the blood stained snow, but the bodies left behind were all male. We rushed into the yard, where there was a milling crowd of about 60 people trying to tend to the injured. We asked around: "Where is Csöpi?", "Do you know Csöpi?" believing that Csöpi is the one everybody would know. The second or third person we asked, was a black faced dirty old woman, who recognised us even if we did not recognise Mother.
We kissed and hugged and laughed and cried. Three out of three alive. Is John alive to make it the perfect score?
Mother's black face was due to the fact that she was one of those outside the gate and she was so close to the explosion that her face was blackened by the explosion. We went upstairs into the Reszeli's flat and Father met Zanyu and Csöpi for the first time. We stayed for a while upstairs, but the Germans were bombarding Pest from Buda, which they were still holding. We soon went downstairs into the safety of the courtyard and it was then that Mother saw her first Russian soldier.
Mother just about attacked that Russian, hugging and kissing him on the face and his hands. The poor man didn't know what hit him and he was trying to escape Mother's administrations, while Father and I were trying to hold her back, because of the rape situation, which we did not earlier explain to her. She came to no harm, but for the sake of her chastity decided not to wash her face for a few days.
Father and I left Mother behind and went back to Frau Eidam's place. On the way, we had another look at the heap of rubble that was our flat. It was impossible to know where you are. The whole area was just a huge heap of bricks, timber, broken furniture and plaster, all of it covered by snow. Somewhere under it all were our belongings and Father's office for concrete silos.
In that office was my winter coat and as I stood on top of the rubble I tried to find the location of the office by taking bearings on various landmarks. After moving a few steps I was satisfied that area might be where I should look for and started to shift a few bricks. Suddenly the gray of my winter coat could be seen and Father and I started to throw the rubbish to the side, until my winter coat was free and I was delighted to wear it once again.
Going back we decided to go towards the International ghetto and make enquiries about friends and try to find some of them and some members of our families. Outside most of the houses the dead were stacked waiting for the hand carts to collect them. People were still dying in their hundreds of illness and starvation.
Frau Eidam let us in and followed us into our room. She wanted to talk to us about one of her ex-girls and her young man who want to move into the room left vacant by the Romanian. What would our reaction be, she asked us. We didn't understand, until she told us that the young couple were living at an Arrow Cross House until a few days ago.
Father and I had a discussion in private and we decided that we had our lives given to us many times by others and therefore we should this time and only this time give a murderer his chance. We promised Frau Eidam that we shall not report them, but we asked her to make sure that we do not meet them. Next morning, Frau Eidam had a big piece of ham and two eggs each for us. She admitted that it is from "them" and neither of us would eat it, even 'though we were starving.
On another day when we returned to our room at Frau Eidam, we found the bed to have been used in our absence. Frau Eidam very proudly told us that a couple of Russian came looking for women and she took them both on. So satisfied were they with the service provided that they sent two more of their comrades along and she received tobacco and food for her trouble. However, Father was not too keen on his bed being used and in any case it was time for us to become a family unit again.
Every day we were visiting Mother and at the same time searching for friends and relations. When ever you met somebody even remotely familiar, you stopped and asked about people. It was surprising how fruitful this method was in locating people. It was this way that we found some friends who had a spare room available in their flat for us and we moved in within a week of liberation.
Our room was our home for the next 6 months. We only had one double bed and all three of us slept in it. It was bitterly cold and we slept in our overcoats. We shared the bathroom with the other three families in the flat, but not the kitchen. We all cooked in the courtyard on open fires, until later when we all had our own little wood fired stoves in our rooms.
Our new home was opposite the house where my grandmother lived with her daughter and Paul László, Bözsi and Susan. This was handy because we could help each other with food and other exiting things, such as packaging paper, which was given to us, so that we could "glaze" our window with the paper or Father finding a hand grinder when his brother-in-law located some bird seed, that could be ground to be used as flour.
A month ago the Germans were camping in the house where our room was and under a heap of rubbish I found some bread hard as nails and green here and there. Mother cooked it again and again until it could be chewed and we thought it a most satisfying soup.
Every morning I went off to find food or whatever else. It wasn't easy, because the Germans in the hills of Buda were capable of overlooking all the streets that were at right angles to the Danube. To cross those streets was quite dangerous, because the Germans used to position sharp shooters to shoot across the Danube at every person who was to be seen. Thus you either had to walk many extra kilometers to get from one place to the other or else you had to take a great risk and rush across the endangered streets.
The streets were still covered in snow and one day I went out scavenging with one of Father's employees who had a club foot and who could not run. Somehow I had a sledge for the purpose of pulling along the large quantity of loot I was hoping to find. However, realising that Robert will never make it across the street which was being straffed by some German sharp-shooter, I rushed across with a long piece of rope and with the help of some other people pulled him across the street on the sledge. The Germans must have been so surprised that they omitted to shoot.
Another danger was being sent by some GPU man to Siberia. The GPU or NKDV or the Soviet Security Organisation was charged by Stalin or Beria to get a certain number of prisoners of War's to man the Gulag camps in Siberia. The green capped NKDV officers positioned themselves in empty shops and as a likely candidate for POW-ship came along, they reached out and dragged them in. No amount of explanation helped, you had only two choices: to go Siberia or to escape. I choose the latter a total of three times, the last time I was 25 kilometres out of Budapest and it took me 2 days to get back to Budapest.
These food scavenging trips were sometimes most rewarding. On one occasion I went to a landowner friend of Father's, who refused to give me anything, which I would not have minded, but he and his wife were most offensive. They were still living in the shelter, so after they refused to give me anything I returned upstairs to their flat, found some food in their pantry and pinched a few of their things, such as a fountain-pen and an alarm clock and promptly gave his goodies to a Russian who gave me a rucksack full of carrots, an absolute lifesaver those days.
I was reduced to a weight of 42 kilograms, against my normal weight of about 65 or more and most other people were also reduced to walking skeletons. Perhaps Mother was in the best condition of all of us. At the time she was 51 years old and Father was 53. They appeared to me as rather old and weak people, who needed all the help I could provide. The streets were full of people going round scavenging and we could see people, wearing expensive pieces of clothing, carrying knives, sacks and hand basins, following the starving horses, waiting for them to fall and then cutting them up and carrying the horse meat home for their own families. Although we were hungry too, I never once participated in a horse meat collecting exercise.
A few days after liberation we located the wife of Mother's stepbrother. She was without news of her husband who was later reported to have been executed by the Arrow Cross, maybe because he was a comunist. Juci was with her two children, Ági who was about 3 and Peter who was less than 6 months old. Agi weathered her deprivation pretty well, but Peter, who was being breast fed by a starving woman, was suffering from being undernourished and obviously in a bad shape.
We searched for a doctor and found our old lady pediatrician, who was reputed to have saved my life when I had diphtheria the second time. She went to see Peter and told everybody that it is most unlikely that he will live, especially as he vomited everything and was too weak even to cry. I understand that he was the same weight at 6 months as when he was born.
One day my find was some brown powder which I found on the ground outside a chocolate factory. Mother recognised it as soy powder and with some water made biscuits from it. We ate some and it was quite good, although very crumbly, so we took some biscuits and also some soy powder along to Juci in the hope that she and little Agi can benefit from it. While we were there I gave Peter some of this horrible biscuit, which was more like a piece of bread than a cake and Peter seemed to swallow it. Seeing this Juci mixed some powder with water and fed it to the baby and surprisingly he did not throw up.
According to our lady doctor, Rella Beck, this was the turning point for my step-cousin Peter, who to-day is a well known research doctor specialising in cancer.
All this time the shooting was going on. The Russians were shooting at the Germans in Buda and they were shooting at everybody they could see. The Germans were fed by air drops and we could see the Junkers 52's making their run and dropping the parcels, some of which actually reached the soldiers in Buda.
On an occasion I saw the Russians shooting down one of the JU 52's. It caught fire and slowly commenced to fall like an autumn leaf. After what seemed ages a parachute appeared, than a second, third and so on. One of the parachutes caught fire and without his parachute the man fell rapidly. Some of the Russian soldiers looked on without much interest, but some got their rifles and machine pistols and started to shoot at the defenseless parachutists.
Early February the Germans decided to break out of encircled Buda and try and reach Germany. The battle went on for quite a few days and those Germans who were not killed, were taken prisoner. Thus within the months of our first being liberated on the outskirts of Pest, the whole of Budapest was occupied and liberated.
We started to reclaim our belongings from the people who were hiding them for us. Some people held on to property by claiming that they never received them for safe keeping, some blamed a Russian for pinching it while the majority delivered the goodies without any problem. My Leica camera, an almost priceless commodity during the war was never returned and Mother lost some of her jewels through friends who blamed the Russians for pinching them.
I remember that when we asked for it to be returned, the farm manager of Hungary's largest landowner told us that he buried Mother's solitaire under a tree in the country and he cannot return it until they can travel there. Seeing that we gave him the ring after the farm was occupied by the Russians, his excuse was quite fishy. However, after a month of worrying about the bona fide of the man, he returned the ring.
Within our old flat we had our clothing and furniture and they were removed by my latin teacher who took over our flat. It was an easy matter to reclaim these, all we had to do was to visit him, he was surrounded by all our things, furniture, porcelain, paintings, even my dinner jacket. The only thing he didn't take were the family photographs.
Mother's silver cutlery used to be housed in a most elaborate wooden case, which seemed to be more expensive than the cutlery it housed. This also disappeared and my teacher insisted that he never took it. On one occasion when I was sifting through the rubble of our old flat I noticed something gleaming in the sunshine. It turned out to be a fork or knife and I started to shift the dirt to get nearer to where the case was. I found lots of cutlery, but not the box.
It was an unwritten law of the time that one should not be without a rucksack or hold-all to carry whatever food or clothing one finds and on this occasion too I had a rucksack available to load my find of cutlery into. I put them all into the rucksack and found it almost impossible to lift it in my run down state. I managed somehow and carted it back to our room. Mother took stock and almost unbelievably not one item was missing.
We were most grateful to the Russians to have liberated us, but at the same time we were getting fed up with being caught by the NKDV or having our wrist watches taken by the watch crazy Russians and being constantly stopped on the street to labour for them in loading trucks, etc.
Thus I jumped at the opportunity to go 250 kilometers behind the lines, towards the East, where my cousin Bözsi's husband was after returning from Russia and a Labour Battalion. He made it in spite of terrible experience, that cost him one of his eyes, and he arranged for his wife and her daughter to come to him to Nyiregyháza. I was ready to go by next day and had no doubt that my parents will be able to get bye without me.
The truck that was to take Bözsi, Susan and I towards the East, where we heard there was ample food and peace and quiet and safety was an American Studebaker, supplied to the Russians, who in turn gave it to the new Hungarian Government being formed in Debrecen, some 80 kilometres from the place we were going. The driver and an armed guard were from the new Hungarian army and the passe