AT the beginning of 1944, the Jews of Pupa were rounded up and transferred to a ghetto and my parents had to run again. They made it to Budapest, but there they were caught. Their fake papers were scrutinized, and they were identified as Jews. Hungarian Polizei, collaborating with the Nazis, threw them into jail. Fortunately, the police decided that they didn’t need a one-and-a-half-year-old child on their hands, so my parents were allowed to call a relative to come and get me. I was picked up by a cousin.

My mother separated from me with heartache and dread. She bentshed me at length, and cried bitterly, saying she had a terrible feeling that she would never see me again.

While there at the police station, my mother noticed a sign in one of the offices calling for the mobilization of a certain battalion of Hungarian soldiers to the Miskolc area. She had an idea. “Say you are one of those soldiers and want to join your regiment,” she urged my father. “They’ll let you out of here, and then you can get me out.”

My father had some military experience because he’d been conscripted to the Slovakian army before his marriage. But this was the Hungarian army, an entirely different country. Could he fake it? He followed my mother’s advice.

“I belong to that military company; I didn’t get my call up papers, but now I see we are being mobilized. I need to go and join my company in Miskolc,” he bluffed.

It worked. The Polizei believed they had to let him go, and the gendarmes started to argue about whose job it was to accompany the Jew to the army base. Whoever it was would have to pay the fare to Miskolc, so in the end it was decided that they’d let the Jew go himself. My parents parted in the Budapest jail, and my father walked free.

It was the last time he saw my mother.

MY cousin brought me to my father’s mother, who was in hiding as well. My grandmother was 57 at the time, and now had to take care of a one-and-a-half-year-old. We were taken to a city called Sárvár when we were caught and exposed as being Jews. In Av of 1944, Adolf Eichmann, yemach shemo, decided he needed more Jews brought to Auschwitz, and the remaining Jews in the area of Sárvár were rounded up, and thrown into an unused factory next to the train stain. My grandmother and I were among them, and for three days, we were imprisoned there, until there were 1,600 Jews of all ages.

There we waited for the trains to arrive. On the day after Tishah B’Av, the cattle cars pulled up, and the Jews were ordered to leave the factory and walk in a column to the train station, a distance of about 150 meters, surrounded by guards.

As my grandmother walked with me in her arms, a Hungarian gendarme approached her. “Do you know where they are taking you? They are taking you to Auschwitz. Old people and children will be gassed immediately. Give me the child. Why should he die? I would want such a child.”

He was sure that she would agree to his offer. After all, it made so much sense.

My grandmother felt like her hands were being held closed, locked, from Above. She would never have given me away, in any circumstance. But at that moment, she couldn’t move her arms; they seemed paralyzed. They moved the line forward, and she was propelled away from the man and his offer.

The column moved along — 1,600 people condemned to Auschwitz herded to the cattle cars by guards with guns drawn. With tiny, baby steps, my grandmother started to move away. She kept facing forward to the cattle cars. No one saw her move as she inched backward, step after tiny step, away from the trains towards the station house, which was about 30 meters away. The guards seemed blind as a grandmother and a 22-month-old toddler entered the building and went down the old wooden steps into the cellar. She stepped into the cellar and found herself knee-deep in water, but she stood there silently.

The guards seemed to be struck with blindness, but other Yidden saw my grandmother moving. In the column, Yitzchok Donath, a 16-year-old, saw that my grandmother had stepped away unnoticed. He turned to his father and whispered. “That lady is not going to Auschwitz. I’m also going to hide.”

His father was adamant that running away was far too risky. “She is meshugeh. They are going to shoot her on the spot. It’s pikuach nefesh. I don’t let you move out of the column. You are going with me to Auschwitz.”

The train left. My grandmother stood still in the flooded cellar, holding me in her arms, unable to put me down anywhere. She remained that way until night fell and all was quiet. When she thought it was all clear, she emerged. She was wrong. A lone Hungarian policeman was still there on the platform. He was taken aback at seeing that someone had escaped, and beat her on her back with his gun. “Where were you?!”

He was furious, but stuck. If his superiors discovered that two Jews had gotten away on his watch, he’d be blamed and penalized. On the other hand, if he killed us, what would he do with the bodies?

He hit my grandmother viciously until her back was black with bruises, and then cursed her in Hungarian, “Get out of here, I never want to see you again!”

My grandmother said that the blows didn’t even hurt, because she knew she’d saved me. She also said that had she not been holding me, she wouldn’t have thought of moving away from the transport.

Meanwhile, when the transport from Sárvár reached Auschwitz, Mengele, yemach shemo, was on hand to greet them.

He spoke to Yitzchok’s mother, “Gnädige Frau, wie alt sind sie?” [Madam, how old are you?]

“Neunundfünfzig.” [Fifty-nine.]

“Oh… da müssen sie aber sehr müde sein, gehen sie bitte auf diese Seite….” [You must certainly be very tired. Please, I ask you, go onto this side.] And he waved her to the side.

You could say Kaddish for both Yitzchok’s parents just a few hours later.

Yitzchok was 16, and selected for work. Years later, he told me how he had watched my grandmother escape with me and what had happened to his parents that day.

I don’t know where my grandmother hid after that, but it was my uncle who brought me to Stampfen, the next place I was hidden. Stampfen [today Stupava] was in Slovakia, a small town 11 kilometers from Pressburg, where my mother’s sister and her husband lived. My uncle was a food wholesaler, who dealt in flour and sugar, and because he was considered an essential worker, they were never rounded up. They had a Slovakian servant, whose husband was a chimney sweep, and Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl suggested they bribe her to hide me. For a handsome sum, she agreed.

I was a little over two years old by that time, but I understood when it was impressed on me that I must never cry aloud. I obeyed. I would cry with tears, but with no sound. And when the doorbell rang, I knew that I must hide under the thick dochene [feather quilt], and stay there until they told me to come out.

Boys were not allowed to go out — as I noted earlier, it was easy to check if they were Jewish. Once, my 17-year-old aunt came to see me. I had never seen her before, but somehow, I sensed she was “one of ours,” and I ran to her and held on to her. When my aunt had to leave, I wouldn’t let go, so the gentile woman had to walk with us to the train station, where she separated us forcefully as I screamed uncontrollably. The aunt was terrified that the scene I was making would endanger us, but I simply couldn’t stop, I couldn’t hold myself back.

After the war was over in 1945, my father came for me. He’d suffered as a wanted fugitive in Budapest, but he was alive. My mother, Bella Schiffer née Bernfeld Hy”d, who had saved him through her chochmah, was murdered by the Germans.

I was a strangely silent child. Initially, due to my months of enforced silence, I couldn’t cry aloud, and my father feared I was mentally affected by what I’d gone through. It took two weeks for me to be able to make a sound, to cry aloud, and he was tremendously happy and relieved when I did.

A lot of our family had survived, but my mother was gone. We lived in Pressburg for a while, then in Budapest, and in 1948, my father remarried in Prague. I wasn’t invited to the wedding, but I was warmly embraced in his new home for a lifetime.

Years later, I went back to Sárvár to see the factory, the train station, and the cellar where Hashem saved my life. He locked my grandmother’s hands, He blinded the eyes of the guards, and He prevented the watchman from killing us.

There is a plaque hanging at the train station with an image of cattle cars, and of Jews holding out their hands. I saw the station building which my grandmother took me to — today it’s a restaurant, and down the old wooden steps, in the cellar, they store bottles of Coca Cola. There, I say the brachah of “She’asah li neis.” I spoke to the mayor and local historians, and explained that I am the only one who survived from all the Jews who were gathered there the day after Tishah B’Av.

Every Seder night, I tell my family how I was saved twice. I could have been left in Sárvár, living as a Hungarian sheigetz. Hashem saved me from death in Auschwitz, and He saved me from living as a goy. Had I been raised as a non-Jew in Sárvár, I could have perhaps become a police officer, or a garbage collector. I know that many, many Yiddishe kinder were lost this way.

This article is my fulfilment of besoch rabbim ahallelenu — I will praise Hashem in public for saving my life and my soul.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1024)