The Ghetto

Chapter 2

The Brick Factory

On the morning after Passover ended, Sunday, April 16, 1944, the Hungarian police arrived in Nowosielica together with the head of the town.¹ The holiday had closed only the night before, and the special dishes had barely been carried up to the attic when the gendarmes came. Yeast had been ordered so that the family could bake ordinary bread again, and my great-grandmother had been getting ready to do so because the village had no bakery. The household was therefore caught halfway between the holiday and the ordinary week. Lanka had counted her stack of pengő the evening before and left it on the table, and in the confusion of the morning she gathered it up and kept it on her person.

The family was told to take whatever they could carry and to leave at once. The announcement had been made throughout the district in advance, and many of the Gentile villagers came out to watch the Jews being collected. The head of the town, who had come with the police, remarked to the family that Herschel had been fortunate to die when he did, since he lay buried in his own village. Her mother wanted to set fire to the house before they left, so that nothing in it would pass to anyone else, but Lanka talked her out of it, reasoning that they might yet come back. Her mother answered that they never would. Lanka had no way of knowing it then, but her mother had judged the situation more accurately than she had.

The Jews of Nowosielica were marched on foot to the next town, Dubranich, with a horse-drawn cart provided for those who could not walk.² They were assembled in a school building, where the guards searched everyone and confiscated jewelry, money, and anything else of value. Margaret had a small silver ring that her brother had given her, and she begged the searchers to let her keep it, though it was nearly worthless. It was taken from her, and she cried harder over it than over anything else that day. Lanka had been more fortunate with her money. A Gentile woman from a neighboring village, the mother of a friend, was permitted to bring in hot coffee for the prisoners in bottles, and Lanka rolled her pengő in newspaper and pushed it down into one of the empty bottles under the stopper. When the Jews were moved out, she carried the bottle with her, and the money stayed hidden until the journey was over.³

It was in the school at Dubranich that the family was offered a way out. A dressmaker, a Gentile woman with whom Margaret had been apprenticed, told them that if they could slip out during the night she would hide them in her house. Lanka thought of herself as someone who could have survived outside, since she was blonde, young, and strong, and had grown up on a farm and could work in the fields. Hiding was in any case nearly impossible in a region where the villages were small, every household was known, and Jews were registered by name.⁴ Her mother, who understood what was being asked, reproached her for being willing to leave her parents and her younger brother behind, and Lanka, who was ashamed, abandoned the idea. She would also say later that she had never really wanted to go without them. The people of the region, in her words, were very close to their parents, and they could not imagine surviving apart. It was not the first such offer. Some time earlier the Swiss teacher, who had always been fond of the family, took Lanka aside and told her that she and Margaret could be saved. Both of them were blonde, Lanka with reddish hair and Margaret with hair so fair it was almost white, and he said that he would take them to his parents, who would send them on to a place where they could live as Christians and no one would bother them. Boys could not hide, he said, but girls could. Lanka had been brought up to honor her parents too deeply to consider it.

After a few days in the school, which the family remembered as two or three, the Jews of the district were loaded onto an ordinary passenger train and taken to Ungvár. It was not a cattle train, and so it did not alarm them. Everyone assumed they were being taken to work, and the families stayed close together. On the platform Lanka saw a wealthy man named Steiger, from a household that had kept maids, standing and eating a plate of beans with a spoon. He gave her the beans, and she passed them to her little brother. Steiger told her that all of them were equal now, and he urged her to run away if she could. She did not. He was a bank director from Berezny, and his son Zvi, whom Lanka would come to regard as a brother, was away in a labor battalion at the time; he escaped it later that year and went on to become a doctor. He never saw his parents again.

The camp that awaited them was a brick factory on the edge of the city, which the authorities had converted into the ghetto for Ung county.⁵ Barbed wire enclosed the grounds, and Hungarian gendarmes stood at the gates. Leaving the camp without permission was punishable by death. The Jews of the surrounding villages were crowded together in the drying sheds with almost no preparation, and there was no bedding of any kind. April that year brought unusually heavy snow, and the nights were bitterly cold. People lay on the bare ground and froze. Whatever scraps of cloth or blanket anyone still owned were shared without argument, and Lanka remembered that willingness to share as one of the few kindnesses of the place. A friend from the next town, one of a set of triplet brothers, was so cold one night that he came to her mother and asked whether he might lie down near Lanka for warmth, and her mother told him he could lie beside her instead. He told that story for the rest of his life, and from his home in Los Angeles he was still teasing Lanka with it decades later. About once a week, the authorities took groups of people out of the camp, and they took the wealthy first. Steiger was among the early ones, and his wife was lost without him. The prisoners understood these removals as transports, though the first deportations from the region would not begin until mid-May, and the wealthy were often taken to be interrogated about hidden valuables.⁶

She worked in the kitchen whenever she could. She had always loved to cook, and the kitchen was a way to feed her family and to be useful, and she brought food to her parents, her sister, her little brother, and her uncles, including the bearded uncle who had once served as shammas in a synagogue and had taught children. Many of the religious men refused to eat the thin soup the camp kitchen produced, since it was not kosher.⁷ She stole onions and garlic, and she hid dough from the kitchen under her clothes and carried it out to them. She cooked with nothing but margarine and oil, so that what she prepared would be kosher, and she took the dough to families with many children so that they could cook for themselves on two bricks set over a small fire. The men made noodles and the families cooked in whatever pots they had kept. Many of those she fed remembered what she had done long afterward.

Her mother said repeatedly that as long as the family stayed together they would never be hungry, and Lanka believed it. She also volunteered for the work details that sorted the clothing taken from Jews who had already been dispossessed. In a large warehouse the garments were separated by size and type, and money or gold was sometimes found sewn into the linings, so the guards searched the workers on their way back to the camp.⁸ A police guard escorted the detail through the city, and he let her go into a well-known Jewish delicatessen in Ungvár. She bought herring and put it aside for the journey, and on other occasions she brought in other food, some of it taken past the gate and some passed over the fence to people who had none. Not everything got through, because the guards at the gate sometimes confiscated what the workers carried.

Her father found a use for her cleverness. A case of whiskey was delivered to the camp for a man who was selling it on the black market, and Lanka changed the label so that it carried her father’s name, Meyer Moskovitz. He was called to claim it, and he shared the bottles with the religious Jews in the camp. Some of the bottles went to the Steiger family, whose mother Lanka had always liked, and they told her they would never forget it. The ghetto had its black market, its petty favors, and its small acts of defiance, and the family used them as everyone did.

The camp included many Hasidic families from Berezny, who wore the fur hats the pious wore on festivals and Shabbat, and whose beards and sidelocks the Hungarians had shaved off. Lanka could still see the rabbi of Berezny, stripped of his beard, in front of her eyes decades later. Among them a belief took hold that salvation was close. She remembered that a wedding, a funeral, and a circumcision were held on the same day in the ghetto, because the devout held that when these three events came together the Messiah would arrive.⁹ He did not come. Lanka, who was in her mother’s tradition a believer, thought afterward that she had begun to doubt him that day.

She never accepted that she should have run. She was surrounded by her parents, her sister and her little brother, her uncles and aunts, and most of the people she had known since childhood, and it would have been unthinkable to leave them. She also had no idea what the Hungarians intended. The authorities said that the Jews were being sent to work, and the work details in the ghetto seemed to confirm it.¹⁰ She had never seen a German since the occupation began. They were in Budapest, she understood, and the people who had taken her family from their home and put them in a brick factory were Hungarian. In later years she thought that this had been a mistake, since the few who did run away lived.

Before then, the wealthier families had been moved into a separate barrack to await their turn on the trains, and Lanka’s closest cousin was among them. When she learned that they were to be taken to wherever the others were going, she went to the authorities and asked that her own family be sent with them, so that they would not be separated, and the request was granted. The brickyard was emptied in the last week of May.¹¹ The Jews were marched to the rail siding, where the gendarmes loaded them into freight cars, and the doors were closed and fastened from the outside. They were told they were going to a place where they would work, and most people had brought whatever food they had, which in Lanka’s case was the bread she had been saving and the herring. The cars were packed with far more people than they could hold, and there was a pot in each one for a toilet. Later someone cut a hole in the wall, and everyone used it in front of everyone else. Lanka remembered the humiliation of people who had once lived comfortably relieving themselves before their neighbors, and the women tried to shield one another with whatever cloth they had left.

One man, Zwi Kalstein, cut a hole in the side of the car while the train was standing in a station and escaped. He reached Romania, and from there he made his way to Palestine, where he lived for the rest of his life.¹² No one went with him. Lanka said that she would not have left her little brother or her sister under any circumstances, and she believed that most of the others felt the same way, since people were afraid of reprisals and could not imagine where they would go. The train ran for several days through Hungary and then through Poland, and at one stop she asked a Gentile railway worker where they were. He told her that the trains went to Auschwitz every day, and the name meant nothing to her.

Her little brother, who was eleven and not yet old enough for his bar mitzvah, grew hungrier by the hour. He asked her repeatedly for bread, and she gave him a small piece each day but held back the rest, telling him that they should save it for when they arrived and that there would be a treat then. She believed they would be coming back that way, and she did not forgive herself for the decision afterward.

The train stopped in daylight on the second day of Shavuot, May 29, 1944.¹³ When the doors were pulled open, the first sight was a group of prisoners in striped uniforms moving along the train, and some of the arrivals were taken in groups to waiting trucks. Lanka understood at that moment that something was terribly wrong, though she still thought they were being brought to a labor camp. She asked one of the prisoners where they were, and he answered with the slogan she would later come to know, Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free. He told the young women to try for the right, to give their children to the older women if they could, and to ask no questions, since he was forbidden to speak. He also told them to leave their belongings, and the women set their bundles down neatly where they stood, thinking that they would be given back. The guards formed everyone into lines of five. There was a smell that Lanka and her mother both noticed, and her mother, who had understood it before her daughter, said that people were being burned. Lanka refused to believe that one human being could do such a thing to another.

At the head of the lines stood an SS officer whom Lanka later named as Josef Mengele, an unusually handsome man who stood directing the arrivals to the left or right with a wave of his hand.¹⁴ The family came before him together, all five of them. Her father, who was forty-five and still strong enough to work, asked permission to kiss his children, and the officer allowed it. He blessed them and said that he hoped they would see one another again. Her little brother clung to Lanka and cried out for her and begged to stay, and her father took the boy by the hand and walked him away. He could have gone to the right and worked, and instead he chose to go with his son.

Lanka, her mother, and her sister were sent to the right. It was the last time she saw her father and her brother.

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Footnotes

¹ Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, and the Hungarian government under Prime Minister Döme Sztójay agreed to the anti-Jewish program that followed. The deportations were carried out almost entirely by Hungarian officials, especially the gendarmerie and local police, under the direction of the Interior Ministry undersecretaries László Endre and László Baky, with a small German unit led by Adolf Eichmann in an advisory and coordinating role. Subcarpathian Rus’ and northeastern Hungary, the first region to be cleared, began ghettoization on April 16, which falls on the day after Passover ended in 1944, as she remembered.

² The Hungarian authorities concentrated the Jews of small villages in two stages. They were first gathered in a nearby town, usually the seat of a district, where they were searched and held for several days, and then moved to larger ghettos in cities such as Ungvár, Munkács, and Kassa. Dubranich was one such first-stage point.

³ Searches for valuables at the collection points were systematic throughout the region and were often violent. Gendarmes were convinced, with little evidence, that Jews had hidden wealth, and they beat people they suspected of concealing it. Occasional acts of kindness by Gentile neighbors, such as bringing food or drink to the prisoners, are described in many testimonies from the region.

⁴ Rescue was rare in Subcarpathian Rus’. The villages were small, the countryside was heavily policed, and Jews were identified by name in the registers the authorities used. A person who hid Jews risked punishment, and those who were willing were not easily found. Most of the Jews of the region stayed with their families, and the reasons Lanka and her mother gave are the commonest ones survivors offer.

⁵ The Hungarian authorities typically placed ghettos in brickyards, mills, and other industrial sites on the edges of towns, close to railway lines. The sheds had roofs but no walls or floors, and offered little protection from the weather. A Jewish council appointed by the authorities handled the kitchens and internal order, while the gendarmes controlled the gates. The barbed wire, the Hungarian guards, and the death penalty for leaving are all recorded in her German restitution statement. The Ungvár ghetto was held in the Moskovits brickworks, which is, by coincidence, her own maiden name.

⁶ No deportations from the northeastern ghettos began until mid-May, when the first trains left Hungary for Auschwitz. Before that, the wealthy and prominent Jews in many ghettos were taken out for interrogation, often under torture, about hidden property. Prisoners who saw these removals could easily take them for transports.

⁷ Orthodox Jews in the ghettos frequently refused to eat communal food that was not certified kosher, and families who could do so cooked their own. A shammas is the attendant of a synagogue, who looks after the building and its services.

⁸ The authorities had the clothing and household goods of deported Jews sorted by ghetto inmates and distributed or sold. Money and gold found in the linings was confiscated.

⁹ Jewish tradition holds that the Messiah will be preceded by a period of suffering called the birth pangs of the Messiah, and in some communities it was held that events of unusual convergence signaled his coming. The belief persisted among pious Jews in the ghettos even as the deportations approached. The fur hat worn by Hasidic men on Shabbat and holidays is called a streimel.

¹⁰ The Hungarian authorities told the Jews they were being taken to work, and the Germans and Hungarians together went to some length to prevent resistance and escape. Reports of the mass killings at Auschwitz had reached Jewish leaders in Slovakia and Budapest by late April, but they did not spread to the villages.

¹¹ The first trains left Hungary for Auschwitz in mid-May 1944. Between then and early July roughly 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, in about 147 trains. Subcarpathian Rus’ and northeastern Hungary were emptied first.

¹² Transports from the northeast ran through Hungary to Kassa, where German police took over the guarding of the trains, and then north through Slovakia and into Poland. Escapes were most likely during the early Hungarian leg of the journey. Romania, whose government had not yet been overthrown, did not deport the Jews of its old territories to the Germans, and some Jews who crossed into it reached Palestine.

¹³ In 1944 the first day of Shavuot, the festival of Weeks, fell on May 28, and the second day, observed in the Diaspora, fell on May 29. Lanka observed the anniversary of her father’s and brother’s deaths on the second day of Shavuot throughout her life. Trains from Hungary arrived at Birkenau around the clock from mid-May to early July, and in May a new railway spur brought them directly onto a ramp inside the camp. Trucks were used for people who were unable to walk. The photographs of the Auschwitz Album, taken by SS photographers in late May 1944 during the arrival of a transport from Carpathian Ruthenia, show the ramp, the lines, and the selection much as she remembered them. The slogan Arbeit macht frei hung over the gate of the main camp, Auschwitz I, and was familiar to prisoners as the symbol of the whole complex.

¹⁴ Josef Mengele was one of the SS physicians who carried out selections on the ramp during the summer of 1944. As a rule, the SS sent women with small children, the elderly, and the sick to the left, toward the gas chambers, and those who looked able to work, between about sixteen and forty-five, to the right. During this period most of the arrivals from Hungary, roughly three out of four, were killed within hours. A father who chose to go with a child was a common story at the ramp.