I love water and every form of it that gives me an opportunity to engage in outdoor activities. I love to swim in a pool, a lake, a river, or the ocean. I like sailing, kayaking, and rowing. I used to ice skate until a few years ago when I had spine surgery. I still like skiing, and I am proud that I can keep up with my grown daughters, at my advanced age.
My love of outdoor activities is probably in my DNA and something I inherited from my parents. The few family pictures that survived the Holocaust show them hiking, camping, skiing, and kayaking. Unfortunately, they could not instill these skills in me when I grew up. My father perished during the Holocaust. My mom and I barely survived, and the postwar years were not very conducive for skiing or kayaking.
My love for water did not manifest itself until my teenage years. There is a note in my mother’s diary she kept during the Holocaust saying, “Peter screams every time when we are at the pool and I try to get him in the water.” I was about two years old at that time. After the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944, there were no swimming opportunities for Jews. They were forbidden from using public pools.
After the war was over, I remember I was frightened for a long time to cross the bridge over the Danube River, connecting Pest and Buda. It was before I learned to swim and with hindsight, I was scared as much of the bridge as I was of the water. This bridge was a temporary one because the retreating Nazi army blew up all the permanent ones. This was a pontoon bridge moving in every direction depending on the weather and the level of the river. Even later on when the bridges were rebuilt, I was scared to death when the streetcar traveled on a bridge.
After the war was over in 1945, the swimming pools remained bombed out and for many years, we could only swim during the summer in natural waters, e.g. Lake Balaton or the Danube River. I had not learned to swim until age 11. It did not happen at a pool but at Lake Balaton in western Hungary. It was my stepfather, a survivor of Auschwitz, who gave me my first swimming lesson. I still owe him a much belated “thank you” for this and the many other outdoor skills he taught me, among them kayaking, canoeing, and rowing.
What I liked about swimming when I first started was the feeling of being free in the water. I liked to float on my back and watch the birds fly over me. My fear of water completely disappeared when I started competitive kayaking at age 13. I really got into swimming in high school when I started playing water polo, which was and still is as popular in Hungary as baseball is in the United States.
When I defected to the United States in 1980, outdoor activities helped me to keep busy on weekends. I bought my very first bicycle at age 40, and I ventured out every weekend, weather permitting, on my bike to discover my new country. Well, not the whole country, but at least Baltimore, its suburbs, and later DC and the Eastern Shore.
After only one month in the United States, I got a free pass to the Baltimore Jewish Community Center where I used the pool regularly. At the beginning of my first winter in the United States, I bought my skis and boots at a garage sale very cheaply. Unfortunately, DC is not ideal for skiing but later I skied in West Virginia, Vermont, the Rockies, and British Columbia. After a few years I bought my first kayak and I used it mostly on the Potomac. I was a member of the NASA sailing club and I even owned a 28-foot sailboat for a couple of years.
With hindsight I believe that these outdoor activities helped me to settle in the United States and ultimately were instrumental in my assimilation into my adopted country. During these activities, I came into contact with many people and some of them became my lifelong friends. It just happened that my best man at my wedding was someone with whom I bonded with during a canoe trip to Boundary Waters in Minnesota.
I started swimming regularly when my advanced arthritis prevented me from jogging. Bicycle riding and swimming took over my regular physical exercises. My cardiologist told me they are good for my heart and lungs, and I also discovered that they are good for my mind and soul.
The moment I jump into the pool, I forget all of the troubles of this world, as if the pool water could flush out all the dark thoughts and disturbing world events. Swimming is always a good time for making life and travel plans and dreaming about projects. During swimming, I frequently think about my next topic for the Echoes of Memory writing class and practice in my head my next presentation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I love being alone as it is just the water and me. It is like having the world shut out completely, and it is the rhythm of each stroke that makes me feel elated. My body wants to give up after ten minutes, but my mind tells me that I must not give up. My father’s postcards from the forced labor battalion are the living testament that he never gave up, even under the most horrific circumstances. I am here today because my mom was determined to survive the horror. I swim for them, too.
Recently, the Museum started a new project called Next Chapter. The idea behind the project is to inform the public that the survivors have a life beyond their Holocaust experience and that we have passions, hobbies, and experiences that show a more complete view of who we are as people, as individuals. I had listed many outdoor activities as my passions and the project organizers selected swimming. I assume it was for practical reasons; filming skiing or kayaking would have been technically quite complicated.
I am grateful that I had an opportunity to share my passion for swimming. Until now, the only thing the public could hear or see about the life of the survivors were the horrors we and our families experienced during the Holocaust and only a little bit about how our life turned out after we came to the United States. It is good that now we have an opportunity to share what makes our life enjoyable today, 75 years after the horrors ended. We were robbed of our childhood, but we never gave up. We will live out our remaining years surrounded by loving family and friends and doing what gives us pleasure and satisfaction.
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