First Person with Manny Mandel
 |
mp3 – 59.86 MB » |
Download Full Program »
View Transcript »
Listen to Podcast »
Learn more about Manny Mandel »
Learn more about Hungary before the German occupation »
Learn more about Hungary after the German occupation »
Learn more about World War II in Eastern Europe, 1942–1945 »
WILL MEINECKE:
So, I guess we can start. Welcome. Good afternoon. Welcome to First Person. Welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Dr. Will Meinecke. I’m a historian here in the National Institute for Holocaust Education at the Holocaust Museum here in Washington. I thank you for joining us today. It’s a very special program. It’s our tenth year of First Person and our guest today is Manny Mandel, and I have the privilege of introducing him a little bit later.
Today’s program is First Person, one of a series of conversations with Holocaust survivors held each week here at the Holocaust Museum. This 2009 season of First Person is the tenth of First Person and is made possible through the generosity of the Louis and Doris Smith Foundation to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring this program. I think Mr. Louis Smith is here in the audience today, if you’d stand sir.
[Applause]
Each of the survivors who participate in First Person is a volunteer here at the Holocaust Museum and you’ll find a calendar of upcoming First Person guests on the Museum’s web site, www.ushmm.org. Excerpts from First Person are available on our web site also as podcasts and also from iTunes. I have some housekeeping to get out of the way, and then we can get started on today’s program. Please turn off all cell phones and pagers and please remain in your seats during today’s program. We want to minimize any kind of distraction or disruption. If you have passes for the exhibit today, don’t worry about it. They’re good for the remainder of the day.
For the next 45 minutes or so, you’ll see a conversation with Mr. Mandel. If we have time for questions, towards the end, please stand, state your question as simply as possible. I’ll repeat your question so that everyone can hear it, and then Mr. Mandel will try to answer it.
We’re talking about the Holocaust, so I want to make sure we’re all on the same page. The Holocaust was the state sponsored systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and it’s collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims-s ix million were killed; men, women and children. The Roma, commonly known as Gypsies, and disabled persons, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet Prisoners of War and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.
It’s been, now, more than 60 years after the Holocaust and hatred, antisemitism and genocide still threaten our world. The life stories of Holocaust survivors are important because they transcend the decades and remind all of us, each of us, of the constant need to be vigilant citizens and to stop injustice, prejudice and hatred wherever the occur.
Today’s guest is Manny Mandel. He will recount an individual’s story in the Holocaust. Just remember that the Holocaust impacted millions of ordinary people across German occupied Europe with a wide variety of backgrounds. We’ve prepared a brief slide presentation to provide some historical context for the personal experiences of Manny.
Here is Manny as a young boy. He was born to a religious Jewish family on May 8th, 1936. So Manny was just three when World War II started. Although he was born in Riga, Latvia, Manny’s family were Hungarian Jews. They had just moved briefly to Latvia because of his father’s work. Here you see a baby Manny with his parents, Yehuda and Ella Mandel.
Shortly after Manny’s birth, his father accepted a post as Chief Cantor in Budapest and the family returned to Hungary. Here is Europe in 1933. You see Hungary as a state in south central Europe and they lived in the capital of Hungary, indicated here by, in yellow, Budapest. So you have a sense of the spatial, where they are. And here is Manny and his father on the streets in Budapest. Manny’s father was based in the renowned Rombach synagogue. And the Hungarian government passed anti-Jewish laws starting in 1938. In 1940, Hungary joined the Axis alliance with Nazi Germany and Hungarian forces participated in the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The war and the increasing restrictions made life difficult for Hungarian Jews. Manny’s father, for example, was periodically drafted for conscript by the Hungarian Labor Service. On the left is Manny on his first day of school outside his family’s apartment in Budapest. On the right is Manny as an adult revisiting his family home in the same apartment.
German forces occupied Hungary in March 1944, really rather late in the war. By then Germany was clearly losing the war, and the Nazis agreed to pursue a proposal communicated by Rezo Kastner for the community to exchange or trade people for trucks and other goods. As a gesture of good faith, the Nazis accepted exit requests for some 1,700 people to Palestine. Although the full program never materialized, Manny and his mother were fortunate enough to be included in what became known as the Kastner Train.
Within months, they were transported by the Nazis to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hanover, Germany, in preparation for their eventual departure from Europe. Meanwhile, back in Hungary the Nazis deported nearly 440,000 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in German occupied Poland where overwhelmingly they perished. Negotiations for the transport of the Kastner Train, people on the Kastner Train to Palestine broke down and in December 1944, just a few months before the end of the war, Manny and his mother were released from Bergen-Belsen and transported to Switzerland. There they stayed in a children’s home where Ella, his mother, worked as a teacher, and this is her right here. The arrow indicates it, and Manny is the, here on the lower left.
After the war, Manny and his mother immigrated to Palestine and his father soon followed. In 1949, the whole family immigrated to the United States. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor and privilege to introduce to you Manny Mandel.
[Applause]
WILL MEINECKE:
I think Manny would like to start by introducing his family. He’s very proud.
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, in that you just saw me and my background. My mother and father are not with us anymore. My wife is here, Adrienne. My grandson is here, Zachary. My daughter is here, Lisa. And a very good friend of mine who’s known me probably longer than anybody in this room, Sy Cohen, who is a local resident. Just wanted to let you know that some of the people are my cheering section.
[Applause]
WILL MEINECKE:
So, born in Latvia? What language did you speak? Did you speak Russian or Latvian?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, Will, this might sound strange, but at the age of six weeks, I didn’t.
[Laughter]
MANNY MANDEL:
Riga was a place, as you mentioned in the introduction, was a place that well, my father had a job, and that’s why he went there. And you have to be born where you mother is, and I was born in Riga. And I….They were waiting for me to arrive in May, and they already had big plans to go to Budapest. My father, in fact, left in July. My mother followed him a little bit later in August, because in those days, I guess kids had to be a couple of weeks old before you transport them by train.
Riga, interestingly, without major digression—it was a very Russian community, because the Russian community wished Riga to be available to them all the time for military and other purposes. It’s the only port Russia has that isn’t frozen nine months out of the year, with the exception of the Black Sea. So, Riga was important but the Russian influence there then and subsequent to that time was very significant.
I had no contact with that as an infant and neither did my parents, who spoke no Latvian, who spoke no Russian. The language of the street for them was probably German in the Jewish community and the language in the house was Hungarian, but as I said before, my language was none.
WILL MEINECKE:
But your identity was Hungarian?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, I don’t know how they viewed us, but I was, if anything a Czech citizen on my father’s papers. I did not have citizenship of any sort until I became a citizen in 1954 in the United States. Prior to that, I was a citizen on my father’s papers and he was a Czech citizen, because he was born in Austro-Hungary, served in the Czech army, therefore the citizenship that is now in the Ukraine. The village did not move. The borders did.
WILL MEINECKE:
So, Hungary lost the war and they had to give up territory that included your father’s birthplace. So, that, that’s rather confusing.
MANNY MANDEL:
It is.
WILL MEINECKE:
So, but your parents identified themselves as Hungarian Jews?
MANNY MANDEL:
My parents identified themselves throughout their lives as ethnically Hungarian Jews; my mother from Eastern Hungary, I’m sorry, my mother from Southern Hungary, Yugoslavia. My father from Eastern Hungary which is where Dracula used to be, in Ruthenia, in Transylvania. That’s where his village was. But that was all part of Austro-Hungary, and ethnically it’s Hungarian.
WILL MEINECKE:
So, you were an only child?
MANNY MANDEL:
Mmhmm.
WILL MEINECKE:
What are, what were your, was your family’s circumstances? Did you—did you have a big extended family? Did you talk to them all the time?
MANNY MANDEL:
No. You need to understand that we’re talking about a period of time when I think many people make conscious decisions to not have children. In those years that my parents would have been in a childbearing age, before the war separated them completely, there were two issues. One, they were separated. And secondly, I think they decided this is not the time and the place into which you bring an infant. I was born in ’36, before the war. But in ’39, ’40, or ’41, which would have been the time for them to have other children, I think they, I don’t know this to be a fact, but my guess is that’s what they did.
Let me also underline that my mother comes from a family of six. She had three brothers and two sisters. In the aggregate, they produced five children. The times were not conducive to propagation. The times were not conducive for many reasons; separation and circumstances. It was never economics. It was not even political. I think they just decided consciously, and I think wisely, this was not the place to bring children.
WILL MEINECKE:
Well you mentioned you were a child and you were extraordinarily young when the war started. What are some of the earliest memories that you have? What do you remember about the family?
MANNY MANDEL:
I remember a great deal about home. Let me recount for you the first experience I can tell you about that I remember very clearly. I remember it. I remember it all my life. I didn’t understand it until many years later. And that’s the participation as a participant, not by choice in a razia which is the Hungarian word for a pogrom. This is how it went.
WILL MEINECKE:
The pogrom is?
MANNY MANDEL:
I’ll tell you. We’re visiting my mother’s home town, to visit my grandparents, about four hours south of Budapest by train, city called Novi Sad. Just to tell you how confusing things are, Novi Sad is the Serbian name of a community known as Ujvidek in Hungarian and Neustadt in German. Many places had three names, at least three names, depending on who happened to be ruling the particular government at the time. We’re visiting my grandparents, and we’re staying at my aunt’s house, my mother’s younger sister. And, uh, one morning, this is winter time, Christmas time. One morning, the maid comes in, and maids were absolutely routine, because the maid, the maid of my mother or the maid of my aunt were in fact the washing machine, the dishwasher, and all of the those for which we now have equipment. But the maid comes in and says, “There’s something going on outside. They’ll be up here to tell you about it.”
Few minutes later, the police come up, knock in the door, very politely and say, “Please put on warm clothing. There needs to be a census taken of all residents.” Okay. Come out to the street. We stand for about a minute. We’re told turn, we’re told to turn left, and we march, walk, saunter, for some time, until we wind up in a place that I didn’t recognize really, but my parents did, along a stockade fence to our left, which was in fact the stockade fence that blocked the Danube River beach that was used in summer time. It was winter time. Everything was frozen. And we are there, and eventually my other aunt, my aunt came down. My grandparents came down by truck. Some other people showed up and were kind of huddled together, this long line of people along this stockade fence and we’re kind of inching forward. We had no idea, and nobody had any idea why. The fact that I didn’t know at the age of five was understood. My parents didn’t know either. At this point there probably is a, we were taken out of the apartment probably at 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning. This is probably noon or 1 o’clock. Several hours of walking, several hours of standing, several hours of inching, and as we come towards kind of an opening, which is the big gate that opened up to the beach, to our left, there’s a policeman standing to the right, who says to my father, “Mr. What are you doing here?” My father says, “I’m visiting my in-laws. I’m here on vacation.” He says, “Yes, but you’re not from Novi Sad. Stand aside.” The policeman was brought in from Budapest, as were others, and he knew my father. The congregation where my father served, had a capacity of 3,000 people, so when they emptied on Saturday morning, there was some police traffic direction. He was one of the police. He recognized my father and he says, “You don’t belong here.”
Now, remember that when the Germans or Hungarians conduct a census, it has to be precise. So, you can’t count Budapest Jews in the Novi Sad count. “Stand aside.” It saved our lives.
As it happens, within minutes of this particular incident of maybe 2, 3 o’clock in the afternoon, a staff car came down and stopped the program. And I say “program” not “pogrom” for the moment. The pogrom comes in from the fact that everybody who turned left in the big gates of the beach was marched down about 150 yards to the water level, to the ice which was chopped open, they were shot, and they were found next spring. That’s a pogrom. A pogrom is a senseless, useless, unknown reason for doing mayhem to people, and they were very good at it.
In our case, obviously, we were not taken. None of our family was, but let me give you two other tiny pieces of this. After this, this pogrom/program ended, we were told to go back to the gymnasium of a school, we were given something to drink, and back to the apartment. The next morning at six in the morning my father ordered the cab. We’re back to the train, back to Budapest. Somehow you want to be home when bad things happen. But two things happened on this day.
My aunt, with whom we stayed, her in-laws had a home a little bit further outside of Novi Sad. They came to the house and for reasons that we don’t know to this day, they were shot and killed. Maybe it was a robbery attempt. On the other hand, my mother’s other sister; the sister we stayed with was youngest. My mother was the oldest. The middle sister calls us that evening on the phone, says “I’ve been looking for you all day. Where have you been?” And we told her. At which she said, “Well, that’s interesting. About 8 o’clock in the morning, the police came to the apartment. I invited them for cake and coffee. They ate cake, coffee and they left. That was her experience with the pogrom. In other words, not, no experience. She, her husband, and her daughter were in the apartment. The police came. They enjoyed her cake, and I can understand why, and they left. So, the range of experiences on the same day in the same community went from death to coffee and cake.
WILL MEINECKE:
And it was the Hungarians not the Germans—
MANNY MANDEL:
These were Hungarians. This was…There was no occupation of the Germans at this point in Yugoslavia or in Hungary. Remember the Germans don’t come into Hungary until March of 1944. Now for chronology, June of ’44 is D-day. The war ends in May of ’45, very, very late, which probably for us was a major good thing, because we were not under the thumb of the Germans and the deportations for several years. The ghetto in Budapest opened, I think, in August of ’44 and ended in September, October of ’44. We were never in it.
WILL MEINECKE:
As a small child, what did you understand, really, about the war?
MANNY MANDEL:
Nothing.
WILL MEINECKE:
Did you know the war was happening?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, I knew the war was happening, because there were soldiers everywhere and guns in places, Hungarians. But, I had a very peculiar understanding of what was going on, because after all, my parents didn’t seem to be—we had a, we had a radio, and the BBC broadcast in Hungarian. And I think we had that radio through 1942, maybe even ’43, I don’t know. We had the radio afterwards, but the broadcast stopped. They would listen to the BBC, and they heard certain kinds of Allied victories in North Africa, certain things in Italy, preparations for D-day. They were pleased, and I didn’t understand that as a six and a seven year old, because why should they be pleased when our local constabulary, the Hungarian army, kind of, is the enemy? Not all of you are Washingtonians, but those of you who are know, that in this city, we don’t root for Dallas.
[Laughter]
And in Hungary, why should they root for the enemy? Well, I didn’t know that the enemy was on the street. It was our constabulary that was the enemy, at least as we found out. The Nyilas, which was the Arrow Cross symbol of the Hungarian Nazi Party was as viscous, just not as powerful, as the swastika bearing German Nazis.
WILL MEINECKE:
Did you know that they were dangerous?
MANNY MANDEL:
At the time, no. I was puzzled by it. I was…I knew it kind of by inference. Example: I don’t know for sure whether it was the middle of first grade or so, but at some point, going to the same school number—we lived at number 13 of the street, Wesselenyi Street in Budapest. My school was the number 44. So, you could imagine it’s only about four or five blocks down the street. We lived in a fifth floor apartment on the corner, and you could see Wesselenyi Street from upstairs, my parent’s bedroom. You could see the school, you know, four or five blocks down the street.
But at that point in time, the certain Numerus Clausus which were the Hungarian laws that were passed insisted every Jew wear a yellow star. You see yellow stars like that in this museum at various displays. Unfortunately, I saved the yellow star after the war, but it got lost in transit and I’m sad for it, but I wore a yellow star. To me, that was terrific. Here I am, just like all the adults. They had yellow stars, and I have a yellow star. That was made me kind of a big kid in a small pond. I didn’t know that this was demeaning. I did not know what this meant. What I also didn’t know is in certain days, maybe every day at certain times, somebody would follow me to school to make sure I made that four block walk. I didn’t know. Somebody from our side, as it were, maybe somebody from the underground areas or somebody from the family, or somebody, because it would not be uncommon for a kid with the yellow star to be hit in the head, dumped in a gutter, and left alone for no reason at all.
Secondly, one of the things I wanted as a child was a bicycle. Not such an enormous…You know I wanted it without a motor, and I didn’t want it to have air conditioning, but I wanted a bicycle. And my father could have well afforded a bicycle, but he says, “I’m not gonna buy you one.” And he gave me some explanation which was not particularly cogent at the time. Bottom line to me, no bicycle. What he said to me really is that you can’t ride in the park, dada, dada, so forth and so on. The bottom line on that issue from his side is that if you ride a bicycle, you ride it in a park. You don’t ride in an apartment. You take it on the elevator from the fifth floor, and if the elevator doesn’t work you truck it down physically. The elevator often didn’t work, because of a part that went bad, and this was a 50 year old elevator. And the machinists and the factories were not manufacturing elevator parts. They were manufacturing guns and cannons. But my father said that we have to go the park to ride the bike. And to ride the bike in the park with a yellow star was very dangerous, because the same folks who might have hit me on the way to school for no reason might hit me on the head on the way riding a bike, and take the bike, leave me there. He wasn’t gonna take that risk.
Now, the understanding of what that meant and the kind of symbolic measure that the star gave, I didn’t understand until sometime later, probably when I was eight or so. And from that time on, of course, I’ve learned more and more about it. But at the time that it happened, I had no understanding of what that really means.
WILL MEINECKE:
So you thought it was curious. That it was something peculiar to your parents. They were really keeping a very close watch?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, having been a parent since, I know that we do that sometimes. And I thought it was just kind of a little overzealousness, but nothing, it had no political overtones. I mean, I wish I’d understood, but I didn’t.
WILL MEINECKE:
Did you have friends who weren’t Jewish?
MANNY MANDEL:
Sure. Sure.
WILL MEINECKE:
And how did they treat you once you started wearing the yellow star?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, first of all, they were my friends, and they had no concern about the yellow star. There were two kids right next door to our apartment, I mean if you look at the picture you saw before, the apartment building ends to the right. To the left is another apartment and those two kids were my friends, but in the house you don’t wear a star. You wear a star on the street. And it’s strangers you’re concerned about. I had a friend who lived around the corner. A boy who later on—he was with me in concentration camp later on, and later on I…he has passed away since—was a professor at Michigan State University. But I visited with him and some others. Outside the star was an issue, but then again I was never alone. I went ice skating, 'cause I was an ice skater when I was about four, with my father. And later on, I went with the yellow star, but he was there, and that made it safe.
WILL MEINECKE:
We heard in the overview that your father was drafted for the Hungarian Labor Service. I mean, did that bother you or did that concern you at all?
MANNY MANDEL:
When that began, I was probs…less than four years old. I’m not sure I understood that, and in a sense I began to view it much as you might view somebody who’s parents, or whoever, is a travelling salesman; who’s home today, gone tomorrow, gone for week, gone for month, back from Hong Kong. He would have that kind of frequency. There was nothing unusual about my father receiving information by phone or by mail that says, “Please come to a certain point.” Not “please,” “Do come at a certain point to this particular train station. You will be, in fact, going somewhere.” All of these trips were in continental Hungary. He never left the country. He gone for, I shouldn’t say a day, because I think it was always longer than that, but sometimes no more than a week. And he’d be home for a week. It depended what needed to be done, because the work they were doing was the work that couldn’t be done by Hungarian men who had been conscripted into the army. So the Jews who were not conscripted into the army were conscripted into the labor forces to fix pot holes, to fix railroad lines, to do some mining, to do road repair, to do airport repair, airfield repair from bombings that the Russians were doing daily, almost. So, he was at these various kinds of places and they were organized into platoons, companies, whatever. So, when his company was needed, he was told that he needed to appear with them, and he did. For the, let’s say a week or two, nothing unusual. He was, in fact, in such a labor camp when we were deported from Hungary, and he could not leave that labor camp at will to join us. We would have space for him in that 1,700 that Dr. Meinecke talked about, but he could not do that for many reasons.
Now by contrast, my father’s youngest brother was living with us for a while. He was finishing his work at the university, and as a university student, he was able to, in a sense, be deferred from the labor camp, from the labor battalions. When he was finished with the university, when he received his degree with the yellow star and people in the audience, to protect him should anybody want to hit him on the head as the only Jew with a yellow star graduating from the university in Budapest. When he was first told that he needed to appear someplace for the labor battalions and his friends came to get him to go to the train station with them, I threw a fit. My grandmother, who lived with us, fainted. That was an event. That was not routine. He was able to then come back, and he was with us all through Bergen-Belsen; my mother, my mother, my uncle and I.
WILL MEINECKE:
Well, how did your family explain to you that your uncle had to go?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, they just said, “He went just like your father did.” I said, “How come?” But the concept of going to labor camp was something that was difficult to explain, in one sense difficult that he was gone, another sense it made perfectly good sense to say, “There’s a war going on.” I knew that. I saw planes bombing us. He had to go and repair ditches and stuff like that. None of the overlay of danger, none of the overlay of being able to be shot at will came to me at that time yet. He was going away because he had to go, and they gave him garrison caps and he looked like kind of quasi soldiers, and he had to go work in the army. For a four year old, that’s okay. Even for a five year old.
WILL MEINECKE:
Would you say your family was able to provide you a relatively normal life under the Hungarians?
MANNY MANDEL:
Incredibly so.
WILL MEINECKE:
How did that change when the Nazis took over?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, then when the Nazis took over, it was a very short time from March to May when we, in fact, left Hungary. So the kind of concerns that we had that I’m aware of, and I understand that I can’t tell you whether I understood it at the moment or a few months later, was that this group that was formed. Dr. Meinecke talked about the fact that it was a proposal for a million Jews for 10,000 trucks. It never happened. As a test case, 1,700 and some people were selected and put on this train to be taken to, as he said, to one of three ports for passage to Palestine, because we all claimed that we’re displaced persons, because of the war.
That’s a whole other story that we can get into should you ask at this time. But we were on this group. In this group we were able to secure—I don’t mean we, but I was among them—four spaces; a space for my mother, a space for me, a space for my uncle, and a space for my first cousin: my father’s other brother’s child. This child was Serbian or lived in a certain part of Hungary, did not speak Hungarian, lived in a city called Vukovar, which is now in Croatia, not far from Zagreb, the capital. The kid came to Budapest to be with us. Now, my mother could speak to…She spoke Serb. My uncle could speak to him. He spoke some Serb and Czech. I couldn’t. We’re very concerned that the kind of oversight that the Nazis brought would make the superintendent of the building even more tightly controlling than he had been before. If he sees this kid, who doesn’t belong here, who doesn’t speak Hungarian, he might report him. At which point the kid will be taken. You never see him again.
This is something that happened because the Germans came and some of the people that we knew each other, for example, my father and the police knew each other. That kind of familiarity ceased when the Germans came. They knew nobody. We sent the young man back. He was a year younger than I was. Two years younger than I was—back to Vukovar on the assumption that when we know that we’re going to be leaving, we’ll have a days notice or so, he can take the train and be brought up. He was deported to Auschwitz while he was waiting, and a distant relative—I mean I don’t want you to remember this, but this youngster’s mother’s brother’s son—is delivered by his mother to our house and the mother says to my mother, “Ella somehow I’ve a feeling maybe you’ll have better luck than I will. Take the kid. You have space, right?” We did. He was my brother for several years. His mother and his father survived the war. They were reunited in Israel, and he lives to this day as a grandfather in a city in Beersheva, but that’s another part of the story again.
WILL MEINECKE:
Well, how did your parents explain to you the fact that you were leaving Hungary? That you were going on this trip? Did they say, “You’re going?” You were eight years old at the time, right?
MANNY MANDEL:
I began to understand that displacement of people was not uncommon, because, for example, I no longer visited with my aunts. The one I stayed with at the pogrom. My grandparents were gone. They were deported to Auschwitz before we were. The aunt who served coffee and her husband was in labor camp and died there. The aunt and her daughter—year younger than I, my cousin—and the other aunt whose apartment we stayed and my other grandparents were taken to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz the grandparents and the child were told to go this way. Never to be seen again. The two aunts were told to go this way. They were women in their thirties, hail hardy. They were put to work. They survived the war.
Now, we knew of these displacements. We knew that people were moving. We knew that certain people weren’t there anymore. So it was not unusual to understand that people moved. My other grandmother, my father’s mother, was living with us in Budapest. My father decided to send her back to her small town, because she was having difficulties with the lack of elevator and two or three air raids a night, and five stories and all this. She is a woman, her early sixties. She had had about a dozen children. She had some problems with her feet and a little bit of sugar. He thought it would be safer for her to at least be in the village. It wasn’t. She was deported.
WILL MEINECKE:
Because she had to go down all the steps to the bomb shelter?
MANNY MANDEL:
Yes, of course.
WILL MEINECKE:
And the village would be less of a target?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, the village would be no target. And even if it is, there’s no five stories. When the elevator ran, it was okay. But then again, you’re told when the eleva…in times when the sirens are on, the elevators don’t work. But even if they could work, they often didn’t. And there’s five stories down, and five stories up. And it was very difficult for her. It wasn’t three times a night. Don’t misunderstand. But I would say to you that it was certainly once a night, the Russians and then later on the Allies, because this was Hungary and they were allied to the Germans. So my aunt, my grandmother was deported, and I couldn’t see her anymore.
So I knew that there was movement. So when we were to be moved, I thought it’s one of those movements. I did not know, nor did my mother perhaps, at the time, that the movement might be to Auschwitz. There was much noise about people being moved, because this has been going on for years in Poland; for relocation purposes, for labor camp purposes, and other kinds of things. So I had some sense of that movement, and that was not seen as unusual. There’s also the notion that when a military advances or moves back, there’s changes in territory and people are moved. Well, those, all of those things amalgamated into movement. I thought there was an element of adventure, even at the age of eight. My mother said to me, a horse and buggy came to the house, to the apartment outside, we had two suitcases each, I think, and we were told to get on the, on the buggy, and we’d be taken to the train station. And thinking that there’s something exciting about this, I was not used to horses and buggies. I was used to taxi cabs in the winter drawn by horses and sleds, in addition to cars, and trolleys, and subways, and everything else. But she said to me that apparently I had a kind of a smile on my face, like I was happy to do this, and she said, kind of like, “Wipe the smile off your face. I don’t want the people around you to see that you‘re pleased at what’s happening.” How do you react when your mother says, “Don’t be happy,” and you don’t know exactly why? I discovered why day by day.
WILL MEINECKE:
What was the trip from Hungary like?
MANNY MANDEL:
We were placed—those of you have been through the museum should recognize my conveyance—the box car. That’s exactly where I was. Not that one, but something like it. There were 80 of us in the box car. The box car was sealed. The trip was only three nights and actually four days out, from Budapest through Germany into Bergen-Belsen. We didn’t know the destination. We were disembarked from the train, about 20 of us from Bergen-Belsen. We were marched or trucked to this camp and we were told that this is an R & R, rest and recuperation spot before we go by ship to Palestine.
The trip itself was certainly not pleasant, but you need to understand that after you’ve had certain kinds of experiences of, “You can’t do this and you can’t do that, you must do this, you must do that,” it wasn’t an unbearable thing for three days. Every night the doors were opened. We had food, because we brought some food with us, and they brought some food to us. I don’t remember what it was, but I’m sure it was sufficient to sustain life. Nobody dies of starvation in three days. The major problem we had really was having no bathroom facilities. You can obviously not bathe for three days, but you need to have toilets, and the only toilets available were around the train, around the cars, in the woods. You couldn’t go into the woods, because that was under guard. So that was the most difficult part. So if you’re talking about an inconvenience to a child, “Where do I make?” And I guess my mother told me where, and that’s what I must have done, and that was unpleasant. I also wasn’t used to making in public, and I don’t want to make this kind of logical, but part of the issue is that those are the problems one faces in public place. I learned what to do about that in Bergen-Belsen, which only had public toilets, and we used to use them.
We got to Bergen-Belsen, to these barracks, and we thought we would be there for three to five days. Six months later we were bartered out.
WILL MEINECKE:
So, I mean, were there women, just women and children on the train?
MANNY MANDEL:
Oh no. Men, women and children.
WILL MEINECKE:
So whole families. All age groups? From the very young and the very old?
MANNY MANDEL:
Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh yes. I know, again I know this. I don’t know the people who were there really personally, but having seen the lists of those people with the birthdays and the countries of origin, I know there were people there who were born before 1900. So, they had to be old people, over 40 or 50. Some my grandparents age, 60s. And the youngest was probably younger than I. The boy with us, my distant cousin, was four years younger than I. He was four. Was he the youngest? I don’t know, but he was one of the youngest for sure. All ages, 1,700 people. Families could, children could stay with their mother. Men and women were separated into the same, the same compound, but different barracks within the compound. There were barracks. I don’t remember exactly, there were probably four or five, maybe even six barracks in the compound where we were, known as the Hungarian camp.
It was under special observation and protection, because we were bartered. Money was collected in enormous sums for this test group to go through, because the 10,000 trucks didn’t pay for the million people. So the 1,700 hundred were bartered for a much smaller version called money. And if you think about it, the worst offenders of the Nazi regime that survived the war and were captured were captured in South America; Argentina, Paraguay. Eichmann was there. Mengele was there. And the way they got there was through the monies, not just ours, and the art treasures, and the lootings that took place. That paid for their villas. Part of what we, in fact collected. My parents were comfortable. They could take all of their jewelry and all of this and that and the other thing, and so could others, and some monies and some investments and some negotiable securities that were worth something. They could put them all together and essentially, that was part of the collection that paid for these 1,700 people that Eichmann demanded.
So that, you know, we uh, the life at camp, the life at camp was not as difficult as it could have been had we been turned out to labor every day, which we were not.
WILL MEINECKE:
But because you were bartered, you were to be exchanged abroad; they knew that other powers would see your condition. They wanted to make sure you were in good enough condition not to raise suspicions.
MANNY MANDEL:
And also if they didn’t release us, they couldn’t barter further. If you lose the merchandise, you can’t sell it.
WILL MEINECKE:
So what did you wind up doing in Bergen-Belsen if you weren’t drafted for forced labor as an eight year old?
MANNY MANDEL:
I can’t tell you what all the parents and adults did except for two things. As an eight year old, I went to school part time. I got sick full time. I did all these exciting things that were only secondary to the most important thing that I did, that was being bored. We had nothing to do. I was sick for several weeks. I had some kind of multiple pneumonia. There was a doctor in the group who had nothing with which he could treat. Penicillin had been invented, but it was not available to us in Bergen-Belsen. My mother’s gravest fear was that the Germans would take me into their dispensary with the absolute concern that if they do that, I may never come back. They don’t have to worry about an eight year old kid. Who’s going to miss him? But they didn’t, so my treatment was quiet, bed rest, with mustard plasters on my chest to keep me warm. If any of you are either old enough or know about it, mustard plasters are made of mustard that is soaked in water and burlap and it keeps you kind of warm. It’s like the Bengay of its time. I took books with me which I read to some degree. I wasn’t that good a reader yet. Well, I guess I was, and my mother read to me when I wasn’t reading. There were two books in Hungarian. One was The Adventure of Robinson Crusoe and the other one was Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
WILL MEINECKE:
…Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
MANNY MANDEL:
…Which was very popular in those days, in Hungarian. I have both of those books in my house. They survived the war. Other than that, there was very little to do.
WILL MEINECKE:
Did you play at all?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, when I wasn’t sick, and it wasn’t so muddy that you could sink up to your knees, I did, but then I had a problem. When we arrived, for the first while I can’t tell you exactly how long. Well, I shouldn’t say that. Every day we had to turn out for census and a German constabulary would come by. The lieutenant would count people and they would make sure nobody escaped and everybody was there. Everybody had to be outside if they could stand. When I got sick, I was permitted to be inside and another low level functionary would come by, open the door and holler into the, into the bunk, into the cabin and into all the barracks "is everything..." ““Ist alles in Ordnung?” in German. And if somebody said to him, “Alles ist in Ordnung”, he would go on. We called him “Popeye.” He had a pipe and he looked like an old sailor. By this time, the German constabulary was scraping the bottom for people. There were 14 year old soldiers with guns, and there were 65 year old guys with pipes in their mouths who could hardly walk, but they had uniforms on.
So, I was either in bed sick or outside waiting for the census to come. This is winter in Germany. It’s a wet winter. The mud is to your knees. Until one day one of the lieutenants, officers in charge said to our leadership, “Look, I don’t care when you get out here, but I’m gonna be here at 8:00. Be here.” Well, being here at 8:00 meant we could come out at a quarter of eight. Not at dawn, at four, and wait until he came or somebody came. After being outside for all these weeks in the mud, my shoes gave out. I don’t know if you folks know too much about cobble, cobblerying, but when you make shoes in Europe…My parents had shoes made for me before we left. They thought it would be a good idea. I had, kind of like hiking boots, and the soles are sewn, and then you put dowels in the bottom, and that’s instead of nails, because dowels will expand if get wet in your hiking and they keep the sole together. But after that much wet, the dowels fell out, and the soles and the shoes separated. Well that was a problem.
I said the adults did several things. One of the things they did was opened up businesses. They traded things. They had two tin cans they brought from home. They made earrings out of it which they traded for 3 matches and 2 cigarettes and something else. The desire to maintain the normalcy of life under these conditions was overwhelming. So having something to do, having some kind of involvement…They opened up a school. They opened up a synagogue. They were teaching us French, 'cause they thought if maybe the war ends the French will conquer the area, we better speak French. My uncle was able to trade with a cobbler who had some tools with him, and don’t ask why people brought tools, they did. The doctor brought his bag. The cobbler brought his hammer. He was able to trade for whatever he traded with the cobbler to fix the shoes. So, now the soles and the shoes were together again with those dowels. At which point he says to me, “Yes, son, but the problem is you can’t run around, because the dowels will fall out.”
So the few things that a kid eight could do was kind of play, you know, various versions and various generations of hide and seek with some other kids, but had to do it very slowly so the dowels don’t fall out.
[Laughter]
WILL MEINECKE:
Did you worry about your father back in Hungary at all?
MANNY MANDEL:
Worry? Yes, no, concern, yes. Worry, no.
WILL MEINECKE:
What’s the difference?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, I was wondering what was happening to him, but not worried in a sense, because I had no concept of what was going on. By this time my father is out of Hungary in the Ukraine, under very severe conditions from which he and a number of his company essentially towards the end of the war just escaped. Now remember, the Germans are moving north and the Russians are coming south. As that became a very short span, they escaped or they left.
They walked away, and the Germans, at that point were too busy doing many things, couldn’t watch everybody, and they walked back to Budapest. They hid in the day, they walked at night. They stole potatoes. They cooked them with the steam exhaust of locomotives, and they survived. I didn’t know that was happening. I didn’t know they was in danger. I didn’t know that he could have been shot at any point for no reason whatsoever, because somebody had a gun and aimed it at him. So, I was concerned in that I wished my father was around, but I wasn’t worried, because I didn’t know what to worry about.
WILL MEINECKE:
So you and your mother, you wind up in Switzerland. What do you remember about how that happened? Do you remember riding in Switzerland?
MANNY MANDEL:
Oh yes.
WILL MEINECKE:
What was that like?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well first of all, you need to know, well, you should know, you don’t need to know, that in the group of 1,700, 300 and some—I don’t know exactly—were exchanged out of Bergen-Belsen after about 6 weeks, in August. I wasn’t part of that group. They were taken to Switzerland. Further negotiations then released us in December. We came into Bergen-Belsen by box cars. We left Bergen-Belsen by very messy, kind of half bombed out troop trains, but they had seats in them. If any of you know about European travel, there are classes in trains. There’s first, second and third. This is fourth, but it was something you could sit. You could lie down. You could sleep. There were no 80 people to a car. You kind of had a seat.
WILL MEINECKE:
And it would look normal to the Swiss?
MANNY MANDEL:
It would look…Well, no not to the Swiss. To the Swiss, this would look like a dirty old train. Swiss are the Swiss.
WILL MEINECKE:
Yea.
MANNY MANDEL:
We pull off from Germany, and I am told—I’m not sure this so, and if any of you know railroading you might be able to correct me—but, they gauge of the railroad in Germany and Switzerland is not the same. I’ve been advised—if it’s true or apocryphal, I don’t know—that that’s so you can’t drive German trains into Switzerland. Or Swiss trains into Germany, but Switzerland hasn’t invaded anybody in 600 years. Others have. So, we drive up to one side of the platform in the German train, and it has to stop, of course. This dirty, unlit, decrepit piece of equipment, but it got us there. Across the platform is this lit, warm, gorgeous, clean Swiss train, with which we were very pleased to get into, which took us from the border to St. Gallen, which is the city in the German part of Switzerland, fairly short ride, and it put it into again into a gymnasium, into the gymnasium of a school, and you’ll never guess what’s the first thing the Swiss did to us. I’ll tell you. They fumigated us, fumigated us.
WILL MEINECKE:
What was that process like?
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, it was spray, and they fumigated the suitcases and we were on straw. Before we could enter Switzerland, we had to be debugged. Now that wasn’t totally stupid, but it was substantially so. Much of what unpleasantries took place in Bergen-Belsen had to do with people keeping themselves clean and debugged. I told you I had a problem—not a problem, but a new experience—with public bathrooms. In the public bathrooms in Bergen-Belsen, and I had to go to the men’s public bathroom. People were making sure that they cleaned themselves of various hair, places, and each other, and so forth and so on. And they looked like apes cleaning each other out. Not pleasant, but there was reason, but we kept very, very healthy. My mother insisted on washing herself down in the end bunk of our, in the end part of our, of our barrack, which had running water—cold, but running water. She said, “I will keep myself clean. I will keep you clean as well as I possibly can. That may keep you healthier.” Now maybe that’s how I got pneumonia, but I recovered from that.
So, we get to Switzerland, and we’re fumigated and we were fed, and we’re taken to a French part of Switzerland by Montreux. Above Montreux, the Red Cross had taken over a beautiful, large hotel in the city of Caux, C-A-U-X, up the mountain, and we’re there for about three weeks, eating potatoes to kind of fatten us up. Now remember we were not quite the skeletons that you see in some of the pictures, but we could use a few pounds, and we spent some time there. And from there, I was taken by train back to the German part to the children’s home that you saw pictured here.
WILL MEINECKE:
Um, maybe we can take some questions? So if you have a question for Manny? All the way in the back. Yes sir?
[Inaudible]
WILL MEINECKE:
So, before your deportation from Hungary did the community as a whole have a general sense about what was going on in the, in the Holocaust?
MANNY MANDEL:
Here again, I need to separate things. The community as a whole may have. The community as a child did not. I think there were significant things—if you look at material about things a couple of…
Excuse me.
…Polish Jews escaped from Auschwitz and come back to Hungary—and there’s been documenters about it—sometimes were misrepresenting what happened. But news was going on that the Warsaw Uprising had taken place. There was information that was communicated. How reliable it was, how accurate it was, we don’t know. But we knew. Again understand that Hungary…The Germans made Europe, the object is to make Europe Juden rein.
WILL MEINECKE:
Free—
MANNY MANDEL:
Clean of Jews.
WILL MEINECKE:
Yea, clean.
MANNY MANDEL:
…pristine of Jews. If you take a look in the Museum, there’s a display here of what is called the Wannsee Conference. Wannsee is the cap—is a palace or a castle, as people call it—out side of Berlin where they got together, appointed Eichmann as the person in charge of the Final Solution of the Jewish problem, and these people decided what should happen to make Europe Juden rein. As an anecdotal comment I would say if you look at the list of people, they were all military officers or doctors, and I’m not gonna ask you what doctors do or I’ll tell you. They were all lawyers. The law degree in German University system is a doctorate. If you think about after the war, Dr. Adenauer, Dr. Schmidt, Dr. Braun, these are all lawyers. Interesting it is the lawyers who did this kind of arrangements, but the point is the decision is made to make Europe Juden rein. And it happens beginning in Germany, in Poland, moves to places. The last place they clean up is Hungary. As an ally, as Dr. Meinecke told you, Hungary is not under German supervision directly until March of ’44. Now, information was being bandied about, not verified. Kastner, the man who was involved in negations with Eichmann for our group, went to Switzerland several times as part of the negotiations. So did a man by the name of Joel Brand, who was his partner. So did others. So there was communication. It wasn’t quite CNN, but there was communication. So, people knew. The precision of that knowledge was limited.
WILL MEINECKE:
[Be]cause the problem was always distinguishing rumors from information.
MANNY MANDEL:
Right.
WILL MEINECKE:
Yes sir? In the front?
[Inaudible]
WILL MEINECKE:
So the question is what happened to people who either escaped or tried to escape?
MANNY MANDEL:
From where?
[Inaudible]
WILL MEINECKE:
From the concentration camp? Did you witness any event like that?
MANNY MANDEL:
No, no, no. Bergen-Belsen was a fairly small camp about 25,000 people. It was constructed specifically for purpose of holding people as a slave labor camp. We were an anomaly that we didn’t go to work, others did. We saw [them] march out every day and come back, when there was work to be done, in fields, in ditches, in irrigation systems and so. If anybody escaped, or tried to escape from the other sections, I don’t know. I don’t think any of us know. On one side—if you think about this rectangular quadrant in which we were this compound—on the one side of us was open field. Behind us was a forest. On the front of us was the main road, and on the left of us was a Polish camp. There were Poles there from Poland with whom we basically couldn’t speak. Hungarian is a language that is mutual to no one.
WILL MEINECKE:
Except maybe the Finns.
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, but you see, I’ve had, I’ve been in the company of Finns, listening to them talk, and could not understand a syllable, not a word, not a syllable.
[Laughter]
English speakers understand more German than Hungarians speakers understand Finnish. And then a Finnish scholar told me there are only two words that are the same in both languages; word for butter, word for blood. Where are you going to go with that? So we could not, I’m not saying nobody could speak to the Poles, because there is similarity in Slavic languages. Yugoslav, Czechs, Slovakian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Ukrainian, have some connections. I’m not saying they’re mutually understood, but there is some connection. So my point is that we could not, we didn’t know who escaped.
Nobody in our 1,700 or so escaped, try to escape, or in fact, died throughout the whole ordeal. Even though we had the towers with machine guns and the fences were electrified. Go through the Museum. You will see some of the fencing, the pictures of it, and that’s what we had. And if you take a look outside the museum, the building next door, what is called the Auditor’s Building. It’s a government building. It’s being…It’s, you can’t see it so well, because it’s got scaffolding. It’s being reappointed. It’s made of red brick. At one time I’ve heard that the Museum had some thoughts about being placed in that building, because of what it looked like.
To those of us who were in Germany in 1944, it looks like the German brick of which the ovens were created and the bathrooms and the showers and so forth. It’s very reminiscent. You couldn’t go there, because I’m told that the building couldn’t be gutted. It couldn’t support. So structurally it was inappropriate. But look at it. It’s got a tower in the corner. It looks just like a watch tower with a machine gun in Bergen-Belsen.
WILL MEINECKE:
Yes, sir, in the red shirt?
[Inaudible]
WILL MEINECKE:
Can you describe when you began to understand some of the context of the events that you described today; when that happened and how that happened?
MANNY MANDEL:
You need to think about context in terms of what impact it has on you. The history is not important in that sense, when you‘re in it. What is important is how it affects you, and some of the things that affected me were the fact that first of all, I kept experiencing separations from people, from things, from places, from houses, from apartments. I constantly separated. That’s unnerving, as I look at it now. Concurrent with that was the changes in schools and language, not only during Europe, but I mean I started school in Hungarian. We tried to continue a little bit in French, and then in German in Switzerland.
I did get to Palestine and learn Hebrew. I went to school for grades 4, 5, 6 and piece of 7th in Hebrew, and then I came to the States and tried to learn English. Now when you put four languages in seven grades, and I don’t know how many countries and different locations, that becomes unnerving. So, to me it was a series of separations that I thought were most significant. I don’t think I was impacted to a large degree, frankly by the fact that my aunt’s in-laws were shot. I mean, I was very sad to hear that, but they weren’t part of my daily life, so I didn’t miss them in my daily life. I was much more concerned that I couldn’t see my grandparents anymore. But that I didn’t know for sure until after the war when I knew that they died in Auschwitz. We survived and could have returned to Hungary. I’m sure that I thought some place that so could they if they weren’t dead.
WILL MEINECKE:
When did you feel you were an American?
MANNY MANDEL:
About ten minutes ago.
[Laughter]
WILL MEINECKE:
I think we have time for one more question. Yes, sir. Yes, you.
[Inaudible]
WILL MEINECKE:
Oh, I’m sorry, Mam. You’re in the dark, so…
[Inaudible]
WILL MEINECKE:
So, the question was, they’re about the same age, and you remember that there were refugees, they were called DPs, and that they weren’t treated very well, and she asked Manny to…
[Inaudible]
…by the other kids… to describe how you felt as a displaced person in the United States.
MANNY MANDEL:
Well, uh, for more years than I’m going to tell you, I’ve been living with my wife, who’s from New Jersey. And the only thing she survived was Irvington, New Jersey, initially. However, she treated me as a displaced person all my life, so I’m used to it.
[Laughter]
Good question. When waves of immigrants came to communities that could be identified, that was very much the case. In the general community they were displaced persons, because that was seen as the nomenclature. Among other people, they were called "Greeners." They were green. They hadn’t yet been, kind of, acculturated. I came here…First of all, I came here in 1949 from Palestine—actually it was Israel by then—by plane. Because of the nature of my father was already here, he sent for my mother and for I. It was interest…It was possible to do that. I mean travel in those days was by ship, but the two of us came together and by ourselves. So, I arrived and my arrival to New York made no impact on New York. So, I wasn’t identified as a DP in the sense, in a group of DPs.
Secondly, my first experience in school was in New York. Any New Yorkers here? Anybody know where Hudson Street is? In the Village? Right off St. Christopher and Hudson, in the Village today, there is still school called P.S. #3. I went there through seventh grade. That was such an amalgam of youngsters from all over the place, not because of the war, but for other reasons. I mean, its part of the Greenwich Village Italian community, part of the Chinese community. There was Chinatown. I mean everybody there seemed to be a DP even if they weren’t.
[Laughter]
So, I think I fit, but I’ll tell you this. So, I didn’t have that, because as I say, I wasn’t part of an identified group that arrived, you know, on a ship, or you could trace through Ellis Island. You know, 300 people came from Russia. I was not that. I also didn’t live in a community till we lived in Chicago, but Skokie for example, outside of Chicago, these groups of people identified, serviced by various organizations as a group. I can tell you though, that when I graduated from high school, by which time I had learned some English, one of the kids in my school wrote, “To the boy who couldn’t speak English.” And that was 1954.
WILL MEINECKE:
I’m sorry; we’re almost out of time. I’m sure Manny will stay after the program to meet anybody who wants to meet him. But, I want to make sure Manny has the last word today, so, what thoughts do you want to leave the audience who heard your story today Manny?
MANNY MANDEL:
If any of you were here last year in the same program with me, you heard this, but I find it important enough to repeat it. There was a well known, born in Mexico, died in Rome, born in 1860, died in ’50, a man by the name of George Santayana. Philosopher, sociologist, thinker, who coined a phrase that’s incredibly important to me, and I’ll leave it with you. He said those that do not learn the history well, live to repeat it. I’m not suggesting that we have to be concerned on a direct sense about repeating the history, but elements of it are being repeated all the time. And by your involvement here, you’re doing something about learning, so you don’t repeat it. And I’m delighted that so many kids are here, and anybody under age of 60 is a kid.
[Laughter]
MANNY MANDEL:
That they’re here so they can…
WILL MEINECKE:
I thank you for that.
MANNY MANDEL:
I know that we’re the same age, but you’ll forgive me. So that you can remember that the more you learn, the less you know what not to do. I leave you with that thought.
[Applause]
WILL MEINECKE:
So thank you for the interview. This concludes today’s First Person program with Manny Mandel. Remember that you can see today’s program as a podcast in just a few weeks on our web site or off of iTunes. So, thank you and have a great day. Thank you.
