A couple of weeks ago I shared my and my family’s Holocaust experience with a group of high school students in the Helena Rubinstein Auditorium of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I caught myself using the adjective “lucky” one too many times.
I have spoken and written about our family’s Holocaust history many times, in many places, and I have just compiled a list of our “lucky” moments during those perilous times.
We lived in Budapest during the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, which meant that we were not among the more than 430,000 Jews who lived outside the city and were targeted for deportation to Auschwitz.
My mom and I had an opportunity to hide at the apartment of my mother’s childhood friend, which was a rare occurrence under the Nazi occupation.
After we had been denounced to the police, my mother was arrested, but she was released two days later because she claimed that she was a war widow, which she was not.
My mother and I were among the few thousand Jews who got another chance to survive by moving into one of the apartments protected by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Approximately 200,000 Jews lived in Budapest before World War II.
When the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross, began indiscriminately arresting, deporting, or killing Jews in Budapest, in October 1944, my mother and I were left behind in our apartment.
When we were ordered to move to the Budapest ghetto, we lived mostly in the basement of an apartment building. Our building escaped the relentless bombing of the Allied forces while others in the same block were demolished.
After the liberation of the ghetto, we reclaimed our apartment that survived the bombing and found everything intact, while others had lost everything.
When I realized that I overused the word “lucky,” I digressed from my story and I tried to explain to the audience that there are so many ways to interpret why so many perished during the Holocaust while others in seemingly identical situations survived.
The list above is far from being complete but it illustrates some decisions that my mother made that were relevant to our survival. I know from my mother’s diary and her personal testimony that she was determined to survive. She had specific goals for the aftermath, she was brave to risk her life just to make sure that we had something to eat, she had the chutzpah to defy authority, and she had faith in G-d. Many who perished during the Holocaust had the same or a similar story with different endings, so I assume that’s where “luck” played a role.
There is a collage of pictures in the Museum on the third floor across from the cattle car. It shows Hungarian Jews disembarking from the train, consisting of freight wagons, at the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau train station platform. In many of the pictures one can see children who were about my age in 1944. Only a few hours after these pictures were taken, those children perished in the gas chambers and were burned in the crematoria. They were among the more than one million Jewish children who were killed for one and only one reason—they were Jewish. They never had a chance to grow up—to become doctors, engineers, musicians, teachers, and nurses. They never had an opportunity to start a family, raise children, and find joy in their grandchildren. I could have been one of them, and I do not have an explanation for why I survived.
One thing I am certain of is that I am here now to preserve the memory of the six million victims, among them my father and my two uncles. This is why I share my family’s Holocaust experience as a volunteer at the Museum. I survived to be a witness for the victims, making sure that another Holocaust never happens again.
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