“Are you crazy?” was the most frequently heard question by my parents from those who learned that my mother was pregnant with me. Under normal circumstances, no one should pose this question when a new child is about to be born. But, those were not normal circumstances, and neither was the time nor the place. The time was fall 1940; the place was Budapest, Hungary; and my parents were Jewish. In defense of those who questioned the sanity of my parents, here are some reasons why this question was not completely out of place.
By the fall of 1940, World War II was already under way, more than half of Europe was under German occupation, and the remaining countries—with very few exceptions—were allies of Nazi Germany. The deportation and systematic extermination of European Jewry had already started, first in Germany and later in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany.
Among Germany’s staunchest allies was Hungary, where the first anti-Jewish law was enacted in 1920, way before Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. This was the infamous “Numerus Clausus” law restricting Jewish enrollment at universities to 5 percent or less in order to reflect the percentage of Jews in the population. My father was one of the many victims of this law; his series of applications were all rejected because of the Numerus Clausus.
Starting in 1938, Hungary passed a series of anti-Jewish measures similar to Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. The first was passed on May 29, 1938, and it restricted the number of Jews in commercial enterprises, in the press, and among stockbrokers, physicians, engineers, and lawyers to 20 percent. The devastating effect of this law cannot be fathomed, given that Jewish participation in these professions was anywhere between 40 and 85 percent.
The second anti-Jewish law—enacted May 5, 1939—defined Jews racially: people with two or more Jewish-born grandparents were declared Jewish, even if those grandparents converted to Christianity and their children and grandchildren were baptized. Their employment in government was forbidden, they could not be editors at newspapers, and their numbers were restricted among actors, physicians, lawyers, and engineers. No more than 12 percent of the workforce at private companies could be Jewish.
The third anti-Jewish law, passed August 8, 1941, prohibited intermarriage and penalized sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews.
If these “laws” were not enough to deter a young Jewish couple from even dreaming about conceiving a child, there was yet another Hungarian institution to make them think twice. It was the so-called Labor Service (munkaszolgálat in Hungarian), which required the “politically unreliable” (i.e., Communists or labor union activists) and all Jewish men of a certain age to serve in labor battalions. These were an alternative to military service, but in reality it was slave labor, plain and simple.
The forced labor camps where my father had to serve, even before I was born, were not killing centers like Auschwitz, but members of the labor battalions were treated with extreme cruelty, abuse, and brutality. The badly fed and poorly clothed units were initially assigned to perform heavy construction work within Hungary. After Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union (today Russia), Hungarian officials sent most of these units to Ukraine to do the menial work for the fighting troops. They were subjected to atrocities such as marching into minefields to clear the area so that the regular troops could advance, and officers tortured them to death. Some units were entirely wiped out; others had as few as 5 percent of their members survive the war. My father was not among the “lucky” 5 percent!
Under these circumstances, was it reasonable for two young Jewish people even to contemplate starting a family? Fortunately for me, my parents did not ask this question—or if they did, they answered it with a resounding yes! They were married in 1936, and I was born March 10, 1941. Were my parents crazy? Yes, they were crazy about each other, and they were born optimists. How do I know? I know it because my mother said so, and I have her diary and a video interview with her to prove it. I know it because my mother saved all the postcards my father sent from the various labor camps he was taken to. Once you read the diary and the postcards or see the video, you, too, might agree with my parents that they made the most rational decision—as did all Jewish parents in Europe whose children were born during the Holocaust.
©2017, Peter Gorog. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this website are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.