My parents had survived the Holocaust, but Communism in Hungary was a noose around our necks. Would that small crack during the uprising be the window for our escape?

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As told to Riki Goldstein by Rebbetzin Judith Israel

I

was born into captivity. Postwar Budapest may have been free of Nazis, but because it was liberated by the Soviets and then ruled by the Hungarian Communist party, Hungary of my childhood was a giant prison. There were no passports and no travel agents, because if you were born there, you were there for life.

I was born a year after my parents and older brother survived the Holocaust by hiding in Budapest. The terror they endured, and the tragedy of losing my grandparents, who were discovered and murdered on the last day of the German occupation, was always in the background, but my parents never spoke of it — they wanted to spare us the pain and give us happiness. Instead of the past, they looked ahead to the future they wanted us to build. Yet the Jewish future in Hungary was very bleak at the time.

Officially, religion didn’t exist in the Hungarian People’s Republic. We went to a non-Jewish school, and after school, which ran from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m., my parents quietly arranged for me to learn from a Bais Yaakov teacher. I don’t remember her name, but she was a Hungarian girl who had trained at Sarah Schenirer’s Bais Yaakov Seminary in Krakow before the Holocaust. She might have been the only Bais Yaakov teacher in Hungary at the time. Having survived the war, she lived with her mother in Budapest, and a small group of young girls learned with her every afternoon.

Our shul was tiny, with maybe 20 regulars. We had a very erlicher rav, Rav Moshe Dov Wolner, who later immigrated to Eretz Yisrael and became the chief rabbi of Ashkelon. My father was a prominent member of the shul.

While school was compulsory on Shabbos, I didn’t go — we made up different excuses every week. The one time I had to go — we were out of excuses and something important was scheduled — my mother bandaged my hand so I couldn’t write.