As part of the flower campaign, in which Christians Standing with Israel (CSI) distribute colorful bouquets of flowers as a sign of love to Holocaust survivors in Germany, we also visit the retirement home of the Henry and Emma Budge Foundation and the retirement home of the Jewish community of Frankfurt. Once again, we hear heartbreaking life stories.
By Anemone Rüger
For Claude, accepting a bouquet of flowers is not easy. For him, it is far more important that Christians raise their voices today and do not abandon their Jewish neighbors again, as they did when he was a child and they had to flee, and his grandfather, who had fought as a great patriot for the German fatherland in the First World War, was murdered by his own soldiers.
“I don’t want pity. I just want to be human!” Claude burst out. “Go to the Christians! They need to hear your message!”
Leonid: Left alone with his brother
Leonid arrived with his walker and sat down at our table. We had to strain to understand him. Besides his Romanian accent, his advanced age was evident – he was born in 1929! His childhood, too, was marked by flight and hardship. From Romania, they went to Moldova, and when the Romanian troops allied with Nazi Germany invaded, the family of six had to leave again.
“We had official exit permits to the Soviet Union,” Leonid recounts. “That was agreed upon in the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Ethnic Germans to Germany, Jews wanting to emigrate to the Soviet Union. But in the end, that didn’t help us much. At the train station, we were crammed into cattle cars along with many others. ‘The Jews are going to the Bolsheviks,’ they had written on the outside. At the border, we were attacked. I don’t know who it was—the Romanian occupation forces or local bandits. They robbed us completely.”
Tears well up in Leonid's eyes, and we want to cry with him and ease his painful memories. "Grandpa's brothers had emigrated to America. They sent him a few dollars. He gave them to them to save our lives. They took Mom's gold wedding ring, and they stole my brother's shoes, forcing him to go barefoot." "But we were lucky," Leonid says, once he's composed himself. "The passengers in the next car tried to fight back. That's when the criminals shot five of them."
In the vast Soviet empire, the family moved from place to place. "Then Dad was drafted," Leonid continues. "But since the Soviets didn't trust Romanian Jews, they sent him to the so-called 'labor army.' These camps, where people had to work for war production, weren't much better than a concentration camp. Eventually, we arrived in Uzbekistan with Mom. But she didn't speak any of the local languages—neither Russian nor Uzbek. So she couldn't find work, and we had nothing to live on."
Then, without transition, Leonid begins to tell me about an orphanage. After a while, I ask him about it. It's such an incredibly sad story that it's hard to tell and hard to hear. "There was almost nothing to eat there. Everyone got sick—from malnutrition and the unsanitary conditions. There was no medical care whatsoever. Mom died there after just a few months. Two of my siblings died too. Only my brother and I were left. We heard there was an orphanage. So we went there. Then we learned that Dad was in a hospital in the city. He had contracted tuberculosis from the inhumane conditions in the Soviet labor camp. Then he died too. We searched desperately for relatives. Finally, we found one of Dad's sisters who had survived in Moldova."
Leonid promises to tell us what happened after the war on our next visit. We know immediately that we must return as we watch him – comforted by our visit – make his way to his room with his bouquet of flowers on the tray of his walker.
Ivett: Liberated on the way to Auschwitz
Ivett greets us in her smart blue sweater, so cheerfully that you'd never guess she'd been through anything difficult in her life. We're certainly not prepared for her story, and after just a few sentences, we're close to tears. But Ivett shakes her head. "I'm so proud of you! I'm so grateful for your interest in us! It means so much!"
Ivett's childhood began in Slovakia in 1935. The war began for her in 1938 when Hungary occupied southern Slovakia, and the family decided to move to Budapest to live with an uncle, hoping for a quieter life. For a while, the family was safe there, and her father was able to continue working as a jeweler. "Then one day, in September 1940, Hungarian police broke into our apartment and took Papa away," Ivett recounts. "They needed jewelers for the war industry. We received one last postcard from Papa. But we never saw him again."
When the war hit Hungary with full force in 1944, the family's house was transformed overnight into a ghetto shelter. Jews from the surrounding area were deported to the newly established ghetto. Ivett's family suddenly had to share their apartment with 17 other prisoners. "There was only soup and bread once a day," she recounts. "There were corpses everywhere in the streets. At the end of 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary and the deportations began. My mother and I were taken to the Ricse concentration camp in Hungary in a cattle car."
There were repeated selections, during which Ivett was first separated from her brother Roland, five years her senior, and later from her mother. Ivett, along with children her own age, was forced to cut up old carpets for firewood. Then came the next deportation, cold, hunger, and harassment. During one of the tortures, when the emaciated prisoners were forced to walk up and down the Danube with their hands raised, her uncle and his wife, who had offered the family refuge, were shot and thrown into the Danube, which soon ran blood-red – an image Ivett cannot forget to this day.
For a while, Ivett and her mother were hidden and cared for by a German soldier, but then another transport arrived, separating mother and daughter once again. "On January 27th, they sent us with the last transport from Hungary to Auschwitz," Ivett recounts. "But we didn't get the number tattooed on our arms—the Soviet army got there first. So we were saved at the last minute." Along with 400 other children destined for the extermination camp, Ivett was instead taken to a children's home in Seged. Her mother worked there as a cook. And so they were reunited.
And her brother? “No,” Ivett says sadly. “He didn’t make it. We found him seriously ill in a hospital in Seged, but he was already too sick and emaciated. He died soon after.”
But Ivett is grateful – that she survived, that she was able to start a family with Tibor, an Auschwitz survivor, that she has two sons and four grandchildren, that we came especially for her, and that she can show us the beautiful synagogue in the retirement home. Since her husband passed away, she has dedicated herself entirely to the activities of the home and is always there wherever someone is needed; and if there isn't any work to be done, she invents some. "Please come again!" Ivett says as we say goodbye, and it's not easy for us to tear ourselves away.
