A Failed Revolution — and a Miraculous Redemption
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.”
Rations and Frame-ups
Having missed that window of opportunity to leave, the Katzes resumed life in Paitch. During that time (1948-49), the Communists had begun the process of nationalizing all industries. “They could just come in and seize a company,” Mr. Katz says, clearly still galled by those events. “They would walk in and tell the owner, ‘Pack up your personal effects and get out of here.’ We ourselves had bought some corn for our family, which we had stored in the attic, but they searched our house and took it all away.”
“We were afraid to go out on the street,” Mrs. Katz says. “Nobody was allowed to own any private property. They would give us coupons for food: two people could get a coupon for only one kilo of flour a week. Sugar and eggs were rationed. Once a week we had a little chicken for Shabbos from our own coop in the backyard.”
The family initially survived thanks to the local farm economy. Mr. Katz bartered for eggs, which he would then bring to Budapest to sell. His family had sold medicinal roots and herbal teas before the war, and he began to dry linden tree leaves in his attic to make teas to sell.
The Katzes vividly remember the fear that permeated those years. “People didn’t know whether or not to join the Communist party,” Mr. Katz relates. “Schoolchildren were brainwashed to snitch on their families. The non-Jews liked nothing better than to get Jews into trouble.”
Miriam says, “There was a secret police organization, the Hungarian equivalent of the KGB, called the AVO, and everyone was terrified of being reported to them. Once someone even tried to frame my parents by leaving a gun in our attic, which was illegal to own.”
“I had gone up to the attic to bring down the laundry — we used to hang it there to dry — and I tripped over it!” Mrs. Katz says, still incredulous. “My husband took it straight to the police!”
Yosef HaTzaddik in the Flesh
The Katzes were similarly terrified one afternoon in 1952 when an official-looking jeep pulled up in front of their house. What could they possibly be accused of? But the jeep’s occupant was an official from the Ministry of Labor: “We want you to come work for us,” the man told Mr. Katz.
“I can’t,” he told them, resisting. “I’m a Jew, I’m religious — I wouldn’t be able to work on Saturdays.”
“Then he told me it would be okay to work on Sundays instead,” Mr. Katz recalls. “After that I received an official letter from the government, and then I no longer had any choice in the matter — I had to go.”
The government wanted him to serve as a buyer for the army and factory kitchens, locating produce among Hungary’s farms and orchards. He was to circulate among 106 towns in Feher County. Proving himself hardworking and adept, he was promoted from position to position until he found himself third from the top at the Ministry of Commerce of Feher County. “I felt like Yosef HaTzaddik,” Mr. Katz grins, “in charge of distributing an entire county’s produce to the workers. I was given a curtained car with a chauffeur in order to drive around searching for merchandise. Of course, in my private life, I rode a bicycle!”
The area around Paitch was known for its sour cherry orchards, which had been taken over by a Communist collective. Many laborers were involved in the cultivation and canning, and the canned cherries were exported to Austria and Germany. Mr. Katz, who spoke German, was frequently called upon to negotiate export deals.
“The senior people in the Communist party at the time were non-religious Jews. The ones I worked with respected my religion,” he says. “They knew I couldn’t travel to our office in the next town on Shabbos, so they used to come to my house to have meetings when necessary.”
“My mother used to set a beautiful Shabbos table, and they would sit down and eat cholent with us,” Miriam interjects. “They enjoyed meeting in a place that wasn’t bugged!”
“Those people became my friends,” Mr. Katz says. “They always did whatever they could to help and protect me.”
“They admired my father,” Miriam says proudly. “Once a year, the ministry would hold a convention in Budapest, and one year they asked him to speak, introducing him jokingly as ‘our only shomer Shabbos employee!’ When my father had to attend official government dinners, his secretary would make sure to smuggle a roll onto his tray so he could pretend to be eating with them.”
Three Steps Back
By 1951, word was circulating that some Jews were managing to escape the country using forged Romanian passports (the Romanian border is about three hours by train from Budapest). Relatives of the Katzes in the U.S. contacted HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) to procure false passports for them. By then Miriam was four years old, her sister three, and her brother a five-month-old baby.
“Late in 1951, we told everyone we were going to visit relatives in Budapest,” Mr. Katz says. “We packed our suitcases, and asked a good friend to take them to the border for us. The next day we boarded a train headed for the Romanian border. But as we sat there in our compartment, another train pulled up returning from the opposite direction, and we saw a friend of ours through the window. He motioned that he wanted to tell me something, so we opened the window and he called to me, ‘Katz! Oseh shalom!’ ”
“The Jews would use Hebrew phrases to code their messages,” Miriam explains. “Since we take three steps backwards at the end of the Amidah when we say ‘oseh shalom,’ this was his way of saying, ‘Go back, it’s too dangerous!’ ”
The family heeded the warning. They stayed on their train until Budapest, but once there, Mrs. Katz immediately went home with the children, while Mr. Katz went to the hospital to get a paper that would excuse his absence from work on account of illness. Contacts from HIAS advised the family to lay low for the time being.
Potatoes for the Hungarians
Months became years; by 1953 following the death of Josef Stalin, the atmosphere in Hungary relaxed somewhat. While there was no regular minyan in Paitch, sometimes elderly men would be brought in from the nursing home in the next town, along with a few guests, for a Shabbos minyan. A couple of times a week the men in the town would take turns milking local cows to provide families with chalav Yisrael. “But they still made me go to school on Shabbos,” Miriam remembers.
Mr. Katz continued in his “Yosef-the-viceroy” position, garnering provisions for the state apparatus. “In 1954, the Russians were conducting a major, seven-county maneuver,” he recalls. “The army needed food for thousands of soldiers. There was a meeting of thirteen generals that the ministry wanted me to attend as well. ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘as long as you send me a car to get me home in time for Shabbos.’
“I was given an order to collect food for the Russians. But when I went to the Hungarian officials with my order, they said, ‘Our own people have nothing to eat, how can you take all our produce for the Russian army?’ The Russians wanted us to give them four hundred pounds of potatoes. We went and gathered them, but then we went to the Russians and declared they were diseased and unusable. Then, behind their backs, we smuggled them back to the Hungarian people!”
His eyes twinkle at the thought. But his wife has never managed to shake the fears imprinted by those years on her psyche. “No, no, don’t write about the potatoes,” she implores me. “I’m afraid. Nobody needs to know.”
“Mommy, Mommy,” Miriam chides. “It was many years ago, nobody cares about those potatoes anymore and nobody over there is ever going to hear about it!”
Mr. Katz is still chuckling. He’s not worried, and he’s glad he was able to pull it off.
A Failed Attempt Across the Border
“That incident is a good illustration of one of the reasons the Hungarians revolted shortly afterwards,” Miriam points out. “The Russians used to bleed Hungary of its produce and natural resources, like uranium, while the people were left with nothing to eat. The Hungarians were tired of being exploited and oppressed.”
On October 23, 1956, encouraged by promises of assistance from American forces, crowds of students and supporters in Budapest staged a massive revolt against the Communist government. “But the promised help never came,” Miriam says. “The U.S. was too occupied with the Suez Canal crisis.
“When the Russians saw that the U.S. had not gotten involved, they rolled in with thousands of tanks to suppress the uprising. It was a very chaotic time — thousands people were killed between the explosives, the shooting, and even hand-to-hand fighting. In the end, nothing was accomplished at all, but the turmoil meant that the army and police were too busy in Budapest to watch the borders as closely as they usually did.” Within a week or two, as the Jews realized it had become easier to leave, they rushed to send telegrams to each other in Hebrew, saying, “Flee! Grab the opportunity!”
During those weeks, 200,000 Hungarians managed to flee the country. Of those, some 50,000 were Jews and about half of those religious. A bus was organized in the Katzes’ area to drive people to the border. The Katzes planned to take it, but then it failed to show up in their town.
Their next hope was a non-Jewish friend, a dentist, who also wanted to leave the country. He was supposed to rent a van and take all of them. But then he cancelled at the last minute, saying his children had gotten sick — perhaps he himself had gotten cold feet.
The Katz family finally decided to attempt to cross the border into Austria on December 23rd. The country was still in disorder, but the borders were under surveillance again. The Jews passed advice among each other on how to get out, recommending non-Jewish guides who were paid good money to help people cross over.
The week before they left was terrifying for the family. Each moment was lived in fear of being denounced to the AVO, the Hungarian secret police. “One night we even went to sleep with the children in their room at the back of the house, instead of in our room at the front, because we were so scared,” Mr. Katz remembers. “In the middle of the night we heard tapping against the door, over and over. We were petrified! Finally I gathered my courage and got up to investigate, and what was it? Just our faithful dog wagging his tail against the door!”
“But this shows you how much we lived in a constant state of fear,” Miriam says. “Now we laugh about it, but back then we were terrified, and with good reason. There was one terrible incident in which the Communists demanded that an askan from Budapest denounce fellow Jews, insisting that he give them a list. The man knew that they would torture him if he didn’t cooperate. He was found the next morning in his shul, hanging from a rope — he preferred to kill himself than to endanger his fellow Jews.”
“Where Are My Parents?”
Miriam was then about nine years old herself. She still has vivid recollections of the terrifying night they tried to leave Hungary:
“We took the train from Budapest; the idea was that everyone would be hidden in a dark locomotive and wait there until everybody left the last station. Then our guide would walk us to the border; it was a distance of only a couple of blocks.
“In the locomotive, there was a compartment for the coal. They cleared out space and hid people there. Each time the train made a stop, they would take one family out of the regular railway cars and go hide them in the locomotive. When it was our turn, my father pushed us children up onto the car. The train started pulling out of the station, picking up speed; my father jumped onto the step of the car, grabbing my mother’s wrist. The other people pulled my parents into the car. My mother banged her foot badly on a rail in the process, but I didn’t see them. I started screaming, ‘Where are my parents?’ The other people shushed me in a panic. Finally I saw them, and calmed down.” By the time the train reached the end of the line, there were close to fifty people hidden in the locomotive, which continued several miles past the station to the point where it would later be turned around for the return trip.
Miriam remembers that it was snowing hard, with big drifts on the ground, and the passengers could see the lights of Vienna twinkling in the distance. The guide showed them the Austrian border, and their group began to walk toward it.
Alas, that glimmering vision of Austrian freedom was destined to melt faster than snowdrifts in rain. Russian soldiers shooting up flares caught sight of their group. They immediately halted and arrested the refugees, depositing them in the police station for the night and herding them summarily onto the first train back to Budapest the next morning.
The following evening, the family slept at the home of friends in Budapest, resolving to make a second attempt the next day. This time they didn’t even get as far as the border; soldiers patrolling the trains decided the family looked too much like people trying to escape, and sent them back early into their trip.
Back in Budapest, Mr. Katz paid a visit to the Department of Agriculture where a supportive boss gave him a suggestion: why don’t you try escaping through Yugoslavia? His boss provided him with the necessary papers to authorize a “buying trip” for eggs and other supplies in Szeged, a town right on the border (known to many as the hometown of Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis and her family). As it was the end of December, holiday time in Hungary, Mr. Katz was also given papers attesting that he was bringing his family along to enjoy a few days of vacation.
Over the Border to Yugoslavia
The Katz family took a train out of Budapest one Thursday in January 1957, arriving in Szeged late at night. “I went to the rabbi’s house and knocked on his door,” Mr. Katz says. “He turned white with fear! He knew he could be arrested for helping us leave the country.
“I told him, ‘Just give me the key to the shul and let us sleep there — you don’t have to know about this.’ ” The next day, Friday morning, the rabbi advised him to seek out a certain sympathetic priest, who introduced them to a tree cutter willing to drive them to the border. “The tree cutter had us lie in a wagon, covered with straw. We had been told that the best time to cross would be when the guards would take a lunch break and change shifts, between noon and one o’clock — then there would be nobody in the guard tower.”
The man took them as far as he could, then pointed into the distance. “You see that white sand, where the ground has been raked? That’s the border,” he said.
But as the family began walking, they inadvertently trespassed on the property of a farmer, whose wife’s sharp eyes spotted them. “Look, there are people escaping through our property!” she cried to her husband. “Get the axe!”
“This was a real neis,” Mr. Katz says. “I pretended to reach for my gun. I put my hand in my pocket and made it look like I had a pistol, and by a miracle, they fell for it! I told them, ‘We didn’t mean to trespass. Just tell us where your property ends, and we’ll get off it. Nobody will find our footsteps.’ ”
The farmer’s family desisted, and finally, unbelievably, the Katzes succeeded in crossing out of Hungary, wandering into Yugoslavian territory. Yugoslavian soldiers on horseback, patrolling the area, picked them up and brought them to a local detention center at the police station, where they found themselves among a group of another sixty-odd refugees who had fled in similar fashion.
“Before we left, we had debated whether or not to throw away our identity books,” Mr. Katz says. “Everybody in Hungary had to have a little red book, called a kadar in honor of the Hungarian president [whose name was Kadar]. Each book included a person’s photo and information. In the end, we decided to keep them.”
“I remember hearing my parents arguing what to do,” Miriam says.
“The Yugoslavians knew about them and confiscated them as soon as we arrived,” Mr. Katz continues. “They wondered why I hadn’t left right away after the revolution in October, and they saw that I had had a high position in the government, so they suspected me of being a spy!” At that time, he adds, the Yugoslavian and Hungarian leaders hated each other.
“I told them, ‘We’re not spies, we’re frum Jews!’” Mrs. Katz says indignantly. “But they didn’t believe us.”
The Katz family was held for a month while the Yugoslavians interrogated Mr. Katz and debated what to do with them. Mr. Katz was able to get word out to local Jews that a religious family was being detained, and the local community sent sardines and other food for their Shabbosos.
Mrs. Katz courageously undertook to send a letter to her brother in New York to inform him of their whereabouts and ask if he could procure help for them. “We weren’t allowed to write letters, but I wrote one anyway,” she says. “Then I pretended I had a toothache and had to see a dentist. While in town, I bribed a non-Jewish woman to go to the post office and send two letters for me. I had a very beautiful silk scarf that my brother had sent me from America, and I gave it to her in payment for that favor.” She sighs. She can still picture that beloved scarf.
Of the two letters, one of them was censored and caught. The Katzes were rudely awakened by the police in the middle of the night and sternly warned to abandon such efforts — or else! But the second letter got through. HIAS was informed, and the Yugoslavians were finally forced to release their prisoners. “I remember they came for us on a Friday night, to put us on a train to Belgrade,” Miriam remembers. “My mother packed me a little knapsack with extra tights, sweaters, and underwear — and I put in my mother’s lechter. My parents cried, because it was Shabbos; after all our mesirus nefesh to be frum, they forced us to go on Shabbos!”
“Chicken Katz”
In Belgrade, HIAS was waiting and, from there, sent them to Italy. “I remember there was a kosher restaurant, and HIAS gave us tours,” Miriam says. “They put us in a beautiful hotel.
“The HIAS people tried to convince us to go to Israel,” she continues. “But my parents weren’t interested. Israel in the 1950s was still a struggling, endangered country, and my parents had lived through enough hardship during the war and afterwards. Also, they had family already living in the U.S. They had some money of their own, so they bought their own tickets, and we continued to Austria.”
There they came to an absorption center in Austria they had heard about in a huge hotel called the Continental. “Many of the Jews who escaped from Hungary were there,” Miriam says, “about 250 families. We were overjoyed to find several of our second cousins staying there as well. Later on, we were housed in a former barracks in a town called Asten while we waited for our turn in the immigration quota.” There the family would spend an entire year and a half. “It became like a small town,” Miriam says. “They even set up a school. I still remember my Yiddish teacher, Rachel Schiff, and my English classes. People set up stores: one man sold fish, another milk.”
“I managed to open a sort of grocery for chicken and eggs,” Mr. Katz relates. “I found a shochet, and we supplied people with poultry.” His eyes twinkle. “They used to call me ‘Chicken Katz,’ ” he says.
Rabbi Mendel Miller, a”h, a chassid of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe, heard that the Rebbe (the Imrei Chaim) was visiting Vienna as part of a world tour to raise funds to build Shikkun Vizhnitz. He invited the Rebbe to visit the Jews in the Asten D.P. camp, about two hours away, to give them words of chizuk. “It was a Shabbos to remember,” Miriam says. “This was the first time any of us were introduced to Chassidus, hearing the Rebbe’s Kiddush. The singing and dancing went on all night!”
The World of Williamsburg
Slowly, two or three families at a time, people were permitted to emigrate. When the Katzes finally received papers and passage to America in October of 1958, they went directly to Williamsburg, where they were taken in by Mrs. Katz’s brothers. Miriam remembers that Williamsburg in those days was “flooded with Hungarians.” She was enrolled in the Pupa Beis Yaakov school, where she and her siblings initially struggled with their scant Yiddish and English.
“My parents arrived with no English, no parnassah,” she says. “My mother was about 33 years old, my father 40. Fortunately, my father had a cousin in Boro Park who was well off and taught him a trade: since my father was very good with his hands, he learned to cut leather for jackets. It was the late 1960s, and coats that combined leather and fur were coming into style in all sorts of interesting designs. Eventually, this led him into a business of his own in the fur district.”
From then on, the family began to prosper. They had moved to Boro Park, and the children advanced through school and yeshivah. “We didn’t have so much in those days, but my mother always managed to make our home look so nice and cook such wonderful food,” Miriam says with admiration. “My friends always wanted to come to my house after school because of it.”
The Katz children married and had children of their own: Miriam has five, her sister six, and their brother eleven — bli ayin hara. “My parents are seeing a fifth generation already,” Miriam says proudly. She runs to bring out a framed family photo, taken at a wedding: there must be a hundred people in it, all descendents of these modest, elderly people who risked it all to come to America. “Every time we make a simchah,” Miriam says, “the kids ask my father to speak and talk about how he outwitted the Communists.”
“The people who stayed in Hungary mostly assimilated,” she adds regretfully. “They intermarried. Only those who left have eineklach with peyos.”
Miriam and her mother witnessed this firsthand several years ago when her mother’s brother decided he would like to commemorate the seventy-fifth yahrtzeit of their grandfather by visiting his kever in Eger, along with a minyan. Miriam, her mother and two daughters, and nineteen other family members converged upon the town; in the end, all members of that minyan were grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the deceased. “My uncle and my mother showed us the house where they once lived, and the shul,” she says. “When we met up with the non-Jews of the village, we were able to tell them, ‘Look, you thought we were gone, but we’re still here!’
“But everything was in disrepair, and the town looked so poor, with no Jewish presence left at all. In Budapest, however, a yeshivah and a girls school has since been opened, and there is some revival. But years ago, anyone who wanted to remain religious simply left the country.”
Blending the Past and the Future
As one looks now at Miriam’s parents, this dignified couple in their comfortable Boro Park home, it seems a very long time ago indeed that they lived through war camps and risked their lives to flee Communism. But as we wrap up, with Mrs. Katz urging more cookies and nuts on us, it is obvious those memories are never very far off and neither is their appreciation for having been given the opportunity to replant their Jewish family on more hospitable soil.
In fact, Mr. and Mrs. Katz start to get nervous as our interview winds up: it is Election Day, and they have taken up Mayor Bloomberg’s offer to provide transportation for senior citizens to get to the polls, so they don’t want to miss their ride. “You have to understand that for my parents, after Nazism and Communism, voting is a very precious right,” Miriam says. “They don’t take it for granted one iota! They’ve always made a very big deal about going to the polls” — a sharp rebuke to those of us born on American soil who have the unfortunate tendency to be more cavalier and cynical about the whole process.
“The ‘failed revolution’ in Hungary was anything but a failure for the Jews who escaped,” Miriam says, as we say our good-byes. “For them, it was a miracle. It was a lesson that a Jew should never give up hope.
“I often think of the pasuk that says that whoever saves one person, it is as if he saved an entire world. My parents saved our world, but this resulted in the eventual birth of literally scores of precious, frum, Yiddishe neshamos who have helped reconstruct an entire community. Their mesirus nefesh for Yiddishkeit paid off in Yiddishe nachas many, many times over.”
The Hungarian Revolution
Following World War II, Hungary had become a satellite of the Soviet Union, headed by a Stalinist government. Following the lead of the USSR, the regime was highly oppressive. Thousands of people suspected of dissension were tortured, imprisoned, and sent into labor camps. Others were forcibly relocated as housing was confiscated for party members.
The unwieldy Communist economic system and resulting mismanagement resulted in hyperinflation, food shortages, and a dearth of jobs and housing. The Soviets were simultaneously bleeding the Hungarians of their own much-needed supplies. While Hungary bound itself to the USSR in 1955 in the Warsaw Pact, Austria declared itself a neutral country around the same time, and many in Hungary hoped that they would be able to follow suit. The U.S. intimated that they would provide aid should the Hungarians seek to break away from Soviet domination.
On October 23, 1956, a group of students and supporters gathered in Budapest, where Jozef Brem, the President of the Writers Union, read a manifesto declaring Hungary’s demands for change. Some 20,000 people began marching through the city to the Parliament building; one group toppled a statue of Stalin on its way. A group of students entered a radio building, intending to broadcast their demands but were detained inside; this provoked demonstrations outside, and the State Security Police (AVO) began firing on the crowd. This set off riots and many days of violence and disorder in which thousands joined militias fighting the Russians and the AVO.
For a short while, it seemed the reformers had won. A temporary new government was formed, with the Hungarian Workers Party at the helm. The new government stated its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets, seeing that the U.S. was not sending the help they had promised, reacted by invading Hungary with tanks and troops on November 4, 1956. Some 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Russians were killed in the skirmishes that followed, and close to 200,000 people fled the country, taking advantage of the neglected borders.
By January of 1957, the Soviets had suppressed all revolt, making mass arrests. Hungary remained under Communist domination for over three more decades, until 1989, when the Third Hungarian Republic was proclaimed. Since then, October 23 has been declared a national holiday.
(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 184)
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