In the years after World War II, many Jews found themselves trapped in the increasingly hostile Communist regime in Hungary, once a bastion of Yiddishkeit. Yosef and Suri Katz recount their years under Communist rule and their daring escape, on foot, to neighboring Yugoslavia, before eventually arriving in Boro Park.

Name: Yosef and Suri Strasser

Country of Origin: Hungary

Date of Escape: January 1957

A Lasting Message: Gratitude for their new life

Is Suri Katz began walking home last Motzaei Yom Kippur, she paused to look at the Bobover shul’s three massive doors as they opened to disgorge streams of be-shtreimeled worshippers. As the throngs of the faithful spilled onto the sidewalks, joining the crowds hurrying home to break the fast, she felt deeply moved. If only my parents could have seen this, she thought. If only they could have known that Hashem would give Am Yisrael the koach and means to rebuild Yiddishkeit so magnificently after the war!

Mrs. Katz and her husband, originally from Hungary, lost their parents and most of their siblings during the war. The two of them survived one merciless regime only to find themselves trapped by a Communist one almost equally as evil. Determined to afford their children a Jewish life, they knew their only solution was to get out — even though it meant risking everything they had.

Their daughter, Miriam Strasser, is insistent that the story of their perilous escape be captured on paper: “Nobody has ever written much about the flight of the Hungarian Jews before. And you know, my parents aren’t getting any younger. Time is of the essence!”

A Meeting with the Past

Determined that we follow through with an interview, Mrs. Strasser offers to pick me up by car; she lives in Teaneck but visits her parents regularly in Boro Park. A mother of five and grandmother of many more, Miriam Strasser is well attired and smiling, a strong but settled presence. “I worry that my parents may start to forget things,” she says in precise but lightly accented English, steering the car into the honking traffic of Boro Park. “They went through so much. My mother still has fears left over from that time.” Miriam herself was also born in Hungary, a child of only ten when they left.

We have the good fortune to find parking across the street from the brick three-family house where her parents live, on a street of similar brick houses. We climb the stairs to the top, where Miriam pushes open the door to her parents’ home, calling to her mother.

Mrs. Suri Kaff Katz is diminutive, almost doll-like, with wide china-blue eyes, large round earrings, and a bouffant blonde wig. She looks thrilled and flattered to have a journalist come and listen to her story and sits me down at the dining-room table while she goes to the kitchen to set up coffee and snacks on flowered china. While Miriam goes to fetch her father from another room, I glance around the apartment. It is spotlessly clean and furnished in a sort of Old World elegance, from the carved dining room set to the Oriental rug to the button-tufted pink silk couch.

Mr. Yosef Katz now comes in to join us. He is dark-haired in contrast to his wife’s fairness; he has an iron-colored beard, Magyar-style narrow eyes over high cheekbones, and one senses the intelligence and shrewdness that helped him steer his family through dangerous times. Mr. Katz spent “1,860 days” — each one obviously painfully counted — in a work camp, Munkatabor, run by the Hungarians during the war. He was one of eight siblings, some of them already married with children of their own when the war began. But by the time it ended, only he and his two brothers remained. Mrs. Katz, originally from the city of Pest — her grandfather was a dayan there — was sent along with her parents and six siblings to Auschwitz. Only the four oldest children survived that horror.

Both Yosef and Suri returned to Hungary after the war, marrying in 1946. Miriam was born in 1947, her sister a year and a half later, then a brother in 1951. “Our town was called Paitch,” Miriam recalls as we settle around the dining room table. “It was a two and a half hours’ trip from Budapest. There had been about eighty Jewish families there before the war, but afterwards only ten.” Despite the small numbers, she waxes nostalgic over the loving efforts that created the Jewish memories of her childhood: “My father used to go to other towns to get fish for Shabbos,” she says. “My mother saved up penny by penny to be able to buy a lechter — they were hard to buy in those days — and when we left Hungary, I made sure to smuggle it into my satchel.

“On Succos, we used to hang starched, ironed sheets on the walls of the succah. My father would cut blue wildflowers and strew them on top for schach.” To give me a flavor of this lost world, she shows me a book entitled Bonyhad: A Destroyed Community, about a small town that neighbored Paitch. The photos show small stone synagogues, rustic cottages, little boys in caps, girls in sailor dresses, and rabbis in black toques. The group photos of school classes and local organizations suggest a strong community unity.

Early Escape Opportunities

Miriam remembers Pesach in Hungary with special affection. “Today I simply open my Pesach kitchen and go to the supermarket, but back then we had to kasher everything and make everything ourselves! We had only one set of pots and dishes; I remember soaking glasses for three days, and pouring boiling water followed by cold water over silverware and pots in the yard. My father and uncle would work together — their houses shared a yard — and they would come through yelling, ‘Get out of the way! Hot water!’ We kids thought it was loads of fun.”

But preparation began much earlier, even during the winter, when Mrs. Katz would preserve apricots especially for the holiday, and a non-Jewish woman would force- feed ducks for them that would be later used to make kosher l’Pesach schmaltz. “We had no refrigeration, so our Pesach meals were all made fresh,” Miriam recalls. “Our matzoh came from Budapest — all we could get was machine matzoh, which was probably imported from Israel.” A special treat was chremsel, a “dessert” made of sweetened cooked potatoes and eggs, as well as a sort of cream made by whipping eggs with sugar and wine.

Yet it was not easy to be a frumme Yid in post-World War II Hungary. “The non-Jews weren’t so happy to see the Jews come back,” Miriam explains. “They had to give back the Jewish houses they had been occupying. The Russians had come and occupied Hungary starting in 1945, right after the war, and the country found itself passed from Nazi control to Communist control — almost equally evil.” The Russians continued taking over the Eastern bloc countries one by one, and by late 1949, began closing the Hungarian border.

Most of the Jews who were able to leave Hungary did so in the early years after the war, before it became illegal. The Katzes would have liked to have left but were held up by a health problem: toward the end of 1948, Mrs. Katz found herself suffering from constant, severe pain in her right hand, a consequence of a blow by a stick from a Nazi soldier during her days in Auschwitz. “The bone had become infected,” she explains. “I had to go see a doctor — a Jewish doctor — in Budapest.” (Speaking in English is not so easy for Mrs. Katz, or her husband for that matter, but Miriam helps them over the rough spots.)

“She saw him in a hospital,” Miriam clarifies, “like a Joint Disease Hospital place. The doctors they had seen were unable to diagnose the problem, so they went to a famous orthopedic hospital to see a prestigious specialist.”

“They had to operate on my arm and put it in a cast,” Mrs. Katz tells me. “My girls were babies then, a year and a half and six months. The doctor told me I had to spend a few weeks recuperating.”