Garami Erika et al.: Budapest–Bergen-Belsen–Svájc. A Kasztner-vonat fővárosi utasai (Budapest, 2020)
Annie Szamosi: Utazásom a múltba
and interview some of her mother’s friends who were still alive, and do further research in the Székesfehérvár archives, we could discover a great many interesting facts about her family. And that is what happened. We arrived in Hungary and after a doing a few interviews, we began to understand her family’s story. It turned out that Julia’s grandparents (her grandfather was a well-known poet and representative of the local Jewish community), had been taken to Auschwitz, where both they and Julia’s step-sister, her mother’s first child, were murdered. Julia had known nothing of this. Her mother survived, and after the war went to England, where she married a Christian, with whom she had a number of children. None of the children had ever been told of this terrible past. While I was poring through Julia’s grandfather’s papers in the Székesfehérvár archives, a local Hungarian historian (whose name I unfortunately do not remember) walked in the door. In less than half and hour, she recounted, in terse, descriptive, and indelibly powerful phrases, the story of the destruction of Hungary’s Jews. I had never heard this story told like this before and I sat there listening, with tears running down my face. That evening, we returned to Budapest and, walking to our hotel, passed by a number of swastikas painted on some walls. It was chilling. When we arrived at our hotel, I had a message waiting for me from a relative visiting from Israel who asked me to go meet with her at her hotel downtown. As I entered the hotel lobby, a man sitting in the corner came up to me. He asked me who my mother was, and when I told him, he introduced himself. Extending his hand to me he said, “I buried your grandfather.” I asked the man whose name was Guszti Mayer where he had buried my grandfather and he replied, “In Switzerland, in Montreux. He had walked so long in the snow from Bergen-Belsen to the train, he was a sick man, he just couldn’t make it.” I had spent that day researching the past of my friend's family, her grandfather’s story, and now I was confronted with mine. How was it that I knew nothing about my grandfather? I knew that my grandparents had been on the Kasztner train. I knew that my uncle was attempting to sue the Swiss government for their refusal of a hospital bed for my ill grandfather after he arrived there from Bergen-Belsen. I remembered vaguely, that as a little girl in Israel I read some heated prose in the local Hungarian paper about a man named Kasztner. But it wasn’t until that meeting in Hungary, at a time when I was ready and open to hear it, that the story first began to loom for me as a question that needed answering. When I returned to Toronto, I handed in my thesis proposal. It was accepted. And the following years were taken up with research that I conducted in Budapest, Israel and elsewhere. I interviewed a great number of people, including my parents. Among other facts, I learned that despite the fact that many people nowadays consider the Kasztner train as an escape route, back in 1944 that was not clear at all. My grandparents “escaped” (after six months spent in Bergen-Belsen in conditions of deprivation, hunger and cold, which no doubt led to my grandfather’s untimely death). My parents, who had the opportunity to get on the same train, refused to go on it, thinking it was nothing but a German trick. And who knows, if the war had lasted longer, and some Germans had not been so keen to produce a good “report card” for after the war, perhaps my parents would have been right in their suspicions. I also learned that while the Kasztner train is known as the train for “prominent” members of the Hungarian Jewish community, that was not true either. A number of very ordinary simple people, a great number of children, and people who were not even Hungarian were on that train. Let me recount a brief story which ties in with my family’s. During my research I cam across the testimony of two orphan boys from Cracow who were rescued by their aunt. Having hid her little nephews in the forests of Poland for several months, she escaped with them to Hungary, thinking it a safer place for Jews. Realizing however that the situation of Jews in Hungary was becoming ever more precarious, and having heard somewhere of this Kasztner train, she managed to toss the two little orphans onto the train once it started moving. They arrived in Bergen-Belsen. I will continue in the words of one of the boys, Yizthak Weinberg: 13
