After my mother was miraculously released from the infamous Mosonyi Street Detention Center, we could no longer stay with our host family, whose apartment was not in a building that was assigned to Jews and marked with a yellow Star of David. We could not afford to have another “good neighbor” denounce us again to the police.
The Germans had marched into Hungary on March 19, but the government was still in Hungarian hands. Then came the summer of 1944. The deportation of the Jews, with the complete cooperation of Hungarian authorities, was fully in progress, first from the countryside; Budapest would not be far behind.
The Budapest ghetto had not yet been officially established, but the majority of the Jews of Budapest had traditionally lived in the area that later became the ghetto anyway. My grandparents and two of my aunts lived in Akácfa utca (street) in the heart of this Jewish district. My mother was reluctant to move in with my grandparents because she thought that once the mass deportation of the Jews started in Budapest, we would be easy targets.
The other alternative was to move into one of the so-called “protected houses.” These were apartment buildings that had been rented by diplomats from various neutral countries. Among them were the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz of Switzerland. These buildings were considered to be “extraterritorial buildings” according to international laws, meaning that no Hungarians—including the police—could enter without the permission of the Swiss or the Swedish Embassy. Interestingly, the Hungarian government respected this one law, while violating dozens of others in order to complete the “Final Solution”—at least until October 1944 when the ultranationalist-Fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross took over the government with German help.
One of my mother’s best friends already lived in one of the houses protected by the Swiss embassy, in a three-bedroom apartment shared with another family on Katona József utca. One family per bedroom was the norm, so my mother’s friend thought we could stay in the third bedroom. By 1944, a Jewish family meant a mother and her children, and occasionally the elderly grandparents. All Jewish males between the ages of 20–48 had been conscripted into the forced-labor battalions and many of them had already perished.
My mother later told me that we went just to visit her friend, but she decided on the spot that we would not go back to the Ormos family’s apartment where we stayed before and where my mother was arrested. When she told the other woman in the apartment that we would stay there permanently, that woman was not too happy, and she was very verbal about it. She obviously did not know my mother, who told her in no uncertain terms and tone that after everything we had gone through, no one would tell her where she should or should not stay. This verbal exchange was a sad sign of the horrific time we lived in. Two Jewish women with a shared history and fate, both fighting for survival.
So there we were, three mothers and five children ages three to six, in one apartment. Being only three and a half, everything was a new “adventure” for me. I did not know anything of the horror outside of our apartment. I liked this new place where, for the first time I could remember, I had other children to play with. Another sign of the times was that we played rabló-pandúr (thief and police), where we pretended that spoons were revolvers and brooms were rifles. And we played with real weapons too, as it turned out later.
After the Arrow Cross came to power in Hungary in mid-October, our freedom to move in and out of the apartment building was curtailed. The entrance of every building was guarded by Arrow Cross members in their all-black uniforms who wore armbands featuring a cross where each arm ended in arrowheads. They made sure no one left the building, except during the couple of hours that the government allowed us to do our grocery shopping. By this time, groceries were rationed and many of the basic staples were almost never available.
These guards were young people, 16 and older, and they were surprisingly friendly to us children. They called us by our first names and let us play with their real guns, thankfully unloaded. With hindsight, I think they were mocking us when they gave us their revolver and we put them to each other’s temple and said “puff-puff”—the Hungarian sound for firing a handgun. Little boys with yellow stars on their coats shooting each other must have been very entertaining to the guards. Being young boys, we were fascinated by weapons, not knowing how they were used to eliminate our entire people!
Right after the government takeover, the Arrow Cross decided—to hell with the international law of “extraterritorial buildings” and started entering the protected houses. They rounded up the remaining Jews and marched them down to the Danube River, only a few blocks away. They lined up the Jews along the high banks of the river and shot them. Most of them fell into the river. The corpses that fell on the banks were thrown into the river, and the water washed them away.
My mother told me later that one day, there was knocking on our door, or maybe they just broke it down. Three or four of the Arrow Cross thugs, the ones I “played” with day after day, stood at the door. They were about to herd us out when one of them recognized my mother and said, “Let them stay, she is the mother of little Peter.” They left without us. A glimpse of humanity, but it did not save the people in the apartment next to us!
The same day when our allotted time came, we left the protected house for good; it was protected no more. We moved into my grandparents’ apartment in the ghetto where you could hear the guns of the approaching Soviet Army. Liberation was within hearing distance!
Updates to this essay were made in 2023 to reflect new information Peter found out about his family.
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