November 01, 2016
BY PETER GOROG
Recently I heard someone saying that the Holocaust Museum, among many other things, is a grave for those who do not have a grave. I could immediately identify with the sentiment, because my father does not have a known grave that I am obliged to visit on his yahrzeit, the anniversary of a parent’s death in Jewish custom. As a matter of fact, we cannot even observe a proper yahrzeit because we do not know the date of his death.
My mother, Olga, was three months pregnant when my father, Árpád Grünwald, was taken to a forced labor camp in Hungary. Three years later, he was officially declared dead by the Hungarian Ministry of Defense. The place of death is marked as Ostrogorsk, Ukraine, and the only date given was the date of the certificate: June 1943. He got to Ukraine not of his own volition, but as part of a forced labor battalion whose Jewish members mostly died, but not in combat. They died because they were treated as slave laborers. They died of malnutrition, from not having proper clothes for the famously brutal Russian winters, or they were shot by Hungarian soldiers when they tried to escape. Those who could not walk anymore were left on the roadside, and we can only imagine their fate.
My father’s death certificate is not only a sad reminder of his too-short life. It later became a lifesaver for my mother and me.
Although Hungary was not invaded by Nazi Germany until March 1944, the Hungarian government “took care” of its own Jews without any outside “help.” This started in 1920 more than a decade before the Nazis came to power in Germany with Europe’s first post-World War I anti-Jewish law, which limited Jewish participation in higher education. By 1944, Hungary had as many anti-Jewish laws on the books as any other country, and then some. Jews were banned from government jobs, fired from private companies, and forced to leave their homes in Budapest and move into designated houses first, then into ghettos. They had to turn in all of their valuables—jewelry, silverware, and paintings—and could not possess radios or telephones.
When the government forced my mother to turn over our apartment to an ethnic German family, we moved to the apartment of my father’s distant relative who lived in a Christian neighborhood. We were not hiding there, after all; my mother had to wear the yellow Star of David when we went shopping during the few hours allocated by the government. My mother later told me that one day, an officer of the Hungarian Army stopped her on the street. My mother was shaking, because these officers were not known to be friends of the Jews. This was one of the proverbial exceptions. He told my mother he was sorry that she had to wear the yellow star. Then he continued: “Madam, please regard the yellow star not as a sign of inhumane discrimination, but as a badge of honor.” He saluted and went on his way.
Unfortunately, this kind of attitude was found very rarely. More typical was the attitude of one of our “good neighbors” from the apartment building where we stayed. He reported us to the Hungarian gendarmerie for not living in the designated houses, as required by law.
I still remember the morning when two gendarmes, wearing their distinctive tall hats with cockfeathers, showed up at our apartment. We were having breakfast. I was sitting on two phone books placed on a chair because I was too small to reach the table. My mother was taken away, and she later told me the rest of the story.
She was taken to the infamous Mosonyi Street Detention Center. The next morning, she started to protest loudly that she had been arrested unlawfully, because she was a “war widow.” She said she had a document to prove it. War widows enjoyed many benefits, among them pensions, medical care, and higher quotas for rationed groceries. Of course, in 1944 none of these applied to a widow of a Jewish forced labor battalion member.
Three weeks after my mother’s arrest she was taken to the jail superintendent, where she presented my father’s death certificate. The certificate did not say anything about my mother being a widow of a Hungarian soldier, which she was not. It just stated the fact that her husband had disappeared during wartime activities. The ignorant officer had no idea what the document was; he just saw the big stamp of the Hungarian Ministry of Defense and panicked. He thought he could be in big trouble if he was asked why the widow of a man who was declared dead by the Minister of Defense himself was in his custody. He immediately ordered my mother’s release.
We now know that those who could not escape from Mosonyi Street Detention Center ultimately were shipped to Auschwitz and very few, if any, survived the Holocaust. It was my mother’s bravery, chutzpah, resourcefulness, and determination to survive that saved me from being one of the nearly one and half million Jewish child victims of the Holocaust.
Updates to this essay were made in 2023 to reflect new information Peter found out about his family.
© 2016 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.
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