Just 13 years old, she escaped war-torn Hungary

As told to Riki Goldstein by Suzie Graus

Budapest, August 1946

I was a native of Budapest, and my parents had grown up there too. My childhood hadn’t been idyllic; my mother died when I was three, my father remarried when I was five, and World War II broke out when I was eight.

The Nazis only invaded Hungary in 1944, but when they did, the annihilation of Hungarian Jewry was carried out with great efficiency. My family had survived by going into hiding, moving around from place to place in the large city. During the final three months of the war, I was taken in by a non-Jewish family in the Buda section of the city. I try not to think about those awful years.

After a prolonged siege, our city was liberated from the Nazi grip by the Soviet army. Budapest was free of the Germans, but our liberators, the Russians, were a violent mob who ran amok in the city.

As the victorious army, they could do anything they wanted and not be held accountable, for they were the de facto rulers of the region. They could loot and plunder people’s homes; they could — and did — attack women. The Russian soldiers were often low-class peasants armed with guns. They drank any alcohol they could find, including perfume. There were no police besides the military, so the city became lawless.

I remember the fear I felt as a 13-year-old girl. I slept under a window, and I could hear the drunken swearing and plundering and violence which went on at night. Occasionally, a Russian drunkard would throw someone out of a window. During the day I saw officers swaggering around the streets wearing stolen watches up to their elbows.

I begged my parents to get me out of the Soviet mess which Budapest had become. My stepmother had a brother in London who kept advising us to come there, but my father didn’t want to leave Hungary. His family had been in the timber business for generations, and he was able to continue trading after the war, so he was doing well financially. There was still a Jewish community remaining in Budapest after the war, although nothing like it had been previously. We davened in the Orthodox shul.

Eventually, I managed to persuade my parents to let me go to my stepuncle in London. We’d heard that the orphans from the Jewish orphanage would be traveling to England in a post-war Kindertransport organized by Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld of London, and for some money, I was allowed to join the group.

There was no space on the trucks which would transport the orphans, so I and three other girls who had paid to join were to travel in Captain Mozes’s car. Mr. M., as we called him, was a young man at the time, a Schonfeld emissary. He wore the UNWRA uniform and was officially a chaplain attached to the British army. Unofficially, his purpose was to rescue as many Jewish children as possible from the ruins of Europe and take them to safety and freedom wherever it could be found He was kindhearted and generous to a fault.

Before I left Hungary, my grandfather took me along with him to my mother’s matzeivah to say farewell. It was the first time I’d ever been there.

Then it was time to go. Early one August afternoon, on a shaded street outside the Jewish orphanage, I met up with the three girls I’d be traveling with. There was a girl named Clemmy and sisters Irene and Baba, who were all aged 15 to 17. As we waited, girls and boys of all ages piled out of the orphanage, carrying their coats and small packages containing their possessions. I was the only child who had parents; none of them had anything, or anyone, to leave behind. They climbed aboard the trucks, with brave smiles and some tears, and drove away.

The four of us climbed shyly into the back of Mr. M.’s car and he drove off too, through the familiar streets of our hometown and then out to the countryside. The plan was to stop the car at dusk, just before we reached the frontier. We girls would walk 400 paces through the fields, then come back onto the road, having bypassed customs.