April 21, 2020

Editor’s note: This story was originally published April 14, 2015. It has been reformatted for Yom HaShoah.

I interviewed Ann Axelrod in 2000 at the request of her adult children and grandchildren who wanted the details of her family and personal history preserved. Though it was painful for her to talk about her experiences during World War II, she knew that her family wanted those stories recorded.  In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, here is an excerpt from Ann’s memories of surviving the Holocaust.  She is now 85 years old.  As Ann said,  “From the fire and the ashes, we came out.”  

“It was a beautiful life for us in Hungary until 1938 and 1939, when they started passing laws against the Jews.

In the beginning of 1941, our relatives came from Slovakia and they were telling us that Jewish people were being taken out of their houses and were deported to Poland—and they never were heard of again.  We just couldn’t believe that these things were happening.

Even though in other countries Jewish people were already deported and killed, in Hungary things were not terrible for most people, until 1944.  The life was pretty normal before that.  Some men were taken away, but the men were taken away from the non-Jewish people too, because they had to go to the Army.  But the Jewish men, they didn’t take to the Army, they took them to the forced labor camp and they gave them a very rough time.  We were lucky, because my brothers were too young at the time and my father was too old so they weren’t taken right away.

Until the Germans came in 1944, our family was intact.

Imagine my father.  He was in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I.  He served his years.  He was a prisoner of war in Russia.  He was defending the country for seven years and he came home with all kinds of medals.  He was so sure of himself.  He was a Hungarian citizen.  He did his duty.  Who was going to take this away from him?  There was no question about it.  We thought, ‘We belong here.  We are like everybody else.’  We went to Hungarian schools.  We spoke the language perfectly, just as you speak English.  My generation hadn’t even picked up Yiddish because it wasn’t considered the right thing to do.  You didn’t want to speak other than Hungarian, or maybe German, since that was the mandatory language in school.

On March 19, 1944, suddenly there were German tanks and German soldiers everywhere.  And that was the occupation of Hungary.

The day they came in, it was the end of our world.

They first came to the houses and they took the Jews out.  The next morning, we all had to walk out of the house with our hands up—they just made us walk from one block to the other, back and forth, to see how many Jews there were in each building.  And then we went back to our houses.

A week later, came the law that Jews had to wear the yellow star.  We were told that it had to be a yellow cloth.  They told us how big it had to be, and that it had to be on the left chest, so it would be very visible.  There were other changes, and soon, there was no work for the Jews.

We never thought such things were going to happen in Budapest.  I don’t know why we were so naïve.  But how do you imagine that?  On the same streets that we grew up?  Where we went to work and school every day.  All of a sudden you would be killed just because you’re Jewish?  That you had to wear a star?  That they’re allowed to take a person and string them up on a lamppost, and there’d be a sign on him: JEW.  They were allowed to do this.

By then, there was no place to run.  Where could you go?  Nobody allowed us to go anywhere.  The doors were closed.

We were trapped.  Absolutely.  Absolutely.

In October of 1944, everyone 16 to 40 years old had to go to a kind of football field.  They all met there, and they were all deported.  They didn’t go to Poland, because the Russians were so close, so they deported them towards Germany.  They had to walk.  They didn’t even have a train.

My older brother was 21, the age Jewish men had to go to the Labor camps.  My sister and my cousins were sent to a concentration camp.  My younger brother was taken to a different concentration camp with two male cousins.

I was 14 years old, so I wasn’t sent away.  I had just finished what would be called junior high school here.  That was the end of my schooling.

The Hungarian newspapers wrote about other places, ‘This town is Judenrein,’ which meant, ‘This town is free of Jews.’  So we knew that they had to have done something terrible with the Jewish people.  But either they did not have enough time to do that in Budapest, or there were too many people there.  Maybe 150,000 or more Jews were already in Budapest.

In November, they created the Budapest Ghetto and all the Jews had to go there.

A Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg came to Budapest and he gave out Swedish papers that placed some Jews under the Swedish government’s control and said they were Swedish citizens.  There was a home for children younger than 16 under the Swedish flag, and I went there.

When I left my parents, my mother said if she could, she would be hiding because she did not want to go to the ghetto in the worst way.  My father couldn’t hide because he was already very sick.  He said, ‘I will go to the ghetto, and you both try to save yourselves wherever you can.’

You could cry day and night, but you still had to have some thoughts how to save yourself.  If you just stuck together and didn’t try anything, then there was no way you could survive.  That’s why my father told us to do whatever we could to survive.

The children were supposed to be saved by the Swedish Embassy. But, when people heard that you may be able to survive there, they came from everywhere. Instead of only children 16 and under, there were 3000 people of every age.

So, the authorities came with guns and took us all to the train station. Everyone from 15-40 years old was taken onto trains. They said they were taking them to working camps. The people weren’t happy to go, but they went with the idea that they would be able to survive. They were led at gunpoint. The mothers had their small children, and they decided to leave them there, hoping the children would survive in the Budapest Ghetto.

A group of eight or ten of us girls said we would take the children to the ghetto.  One mother was screaming out from the train.  There were 80 people in a car and she screamed out from a little window, ‘Please don’t give her spinach.  She’s allergic to spinach!’  We had spinach?  We had no food.  If the child got a little piece of bread, she was lucky.  Where would we get spinach?

Those who went on the train were not taken to work; they were taken to Bergen-Belsen and none came home.  None.

We each took two or three kids by the hands, and we walked to the ghetto, which was in the middle of Budapest, about 15 miles from the train station.  We walked for hours and hours and hours with these kids.  This was in November and it was icy, snowy, cold, windy – it was absolutely indescribable.

We arrived in the ghetto, which was really just bombed out houses.  There was no heat, no food.  There was a little community kitchen where they gave you a little bit of soup.  There were old Jewish ladies working there, doing whatever they could – using whatever they had to feed people.  And that’s where we left these kids. I don’t know if any survived.

We had nothing from home with us.  Whatever clothes we had were on our backs.  I was very sick when we first got to the ghetto.  I had terrible dysentery and could not get off the toilet.

I finally found my father in the ghetto.  He was very, very sick. He asked me to find him some cigarettes and aspirins.  It just so happened that there was a drugstore that was all bombed out, and someone told me that there were some things that you could salvage.  Under the rubble I found a few aspirins and even some cigarettes to bring him.  He told me again to do what I could to survive.

I remembered that we had friends in my old apartment that could maybe help me.  They were Jehovah’s Witnesses.  I had a postcard with me, so I wrote a message to this neighbor telling where I was and asking for some help. Non-Jewish people could go in and out of the ghetto, and someone delivered the note.

It turned out that my mother was hiding with this neighbor and she saw the card from me. I’m sure my mother was paying them to hide her. But if money was enough, a lot of people could have saved themselves.  People did not want to take the risk to save Jews.  If they caught you hiding Jews, your life was in danger. But this friend was hiding my mother.

Our friend sent her brother to the ghetto, along with her own birth certificate which showed that she was a Jehovah’s Witness. I walked out with her brother as if I were her, with these papers.  We went to their apartment and I found my mother there.

Someone told my mother there was an old bombed-out hotel near the train station where it was easy to hide. My mother and I just picked ourselves up and left. We walked and walked, and found this cellar.  There were all kinds of people hiding there.  There were some Hungarian soldiers who wanted to defect; they didn’t want to go back to the front line anymore.  And there were some refugee people from other places — odds and ends kind of people.

Sometimes for two or three days, we had no food at all. We ate snow.  If somebody had something, sometimes they shared with you. There was a Hungarian soldier who felt sorry for us, and he had some rations from his soldiering days. He gave us some things.  Had it lasted one more week, we would not have survived.

We knew that the Russians were nearby, because they were shooting back and forth, from door to door  nearby.  So we knew that the end was near.  If you could survive those two or three months, you had a chance.  We arrived at this place in November and finally, in January, the Russians came in. Even after the Russians came, we had to be very careful, because the Hungarian fascists were killing many Jews.

We found out a few days later that my father had died in the ghetto.  We absolutely had no idea what happened to my brothers and my sister.

Slowly, we came back to our apartment.  It had been bombed, so we found one little room that we could stay in, it was very cold and uncomfortable but sufficient. The only relatives that came back at first were one aunt and an uncle. That’s it.

A month later we heard that my sister was alive but very, very sick. She had been with my cousins in a horrible concentration camp in Lichtenberg, in Austria. They had no work, no food.  They were just waiting to die.  When the Russians came in, they opened up the camp, and they said, “Go.”  They didn’t give them anything—no help, no food–not like when the Americans came in. The Russians were poor themselves, so they couldn’t help.

My sister and cousins walked back from Austria to Hungary.  Sometimes a peasant gave them a ride in a horse and buggy.  Sometimes soldiers gave them a ride in a big truck.  They were afraid to get in with the Russian soldiers, because they were well known for raping young girls.  I think it took my sister and cousins three or four weeks to get back to Budapest. They found us there.

When my uncle came back, he told us we should go to a smaller town, because we would have more opportunity to get food.  We went by train to this town that was about a hundred miles from Budapest.

We eventually heard that my older brother had died and every day, we were hoping that my other brother was going to just walk in—and that’s what happened.  You had no mail or contact of any kind.  If they came, they came.  He went to Budapest and someone told him where we were staying.  He had been in a camp with two cousins.  Soon after they arrived, my brother just said, ‘I’m not staying here because we’re not going to survive this,’ and he walked away.  He had an identification paper that didn’t identify him as Jewish.  He was lucky they didn’t capture him.  He went to a town and he said that he was a Hungarian boy.  He didn’t look Jewish and he spoke Hungarian perfectly, so he had no problem.  He got a job in a bakery and he was there until the Russians came in.  He was just lucky. My two cousins that stayed in this camp were both killed.  There were 180 young Jewish boys there, and a couple of days before the Russians came in, some German soldiers took them all out and shot everyone.

What happened cannot be described.  Ever.  No matter how much you read, or see in the movies—they all make sense, but you can’t really imagine or describe it.  Whatever you see is not enough.  They still cannot show you the truth.  It’s too painful for many people to talk about, but I’m doing it for my children.

We lost so many family members, many of them young.  I can’t even picture them having grown up into adults.  What would they do and become?  I have no idea.  Probably would have been successful.  Our family was very hardworking people and everyone had to look out for himself or herself.  Who knows what the future would have been for all these people had they not been killed?  So many cousins and second cousins and uncles and aunts — hundreds of people, just in our family.

For the first few years we rarely talked about how and where we survived.

There was a time when I thought I would never have a life: a husband and children — something to leave behind.

Once, we went to a Holocaust Memorial and one of the speakers said that we are the people that are not supposed to be here, we are the generation that was not supposed to have survived.  But we have beautiful families: children who are very upright, hardworking, good people, who are sure of their heritage as Jews.  They know how much we went through to survive and keep on being Jewish, and they know where they come from.  And I think that’s the legacy I left for them, and I hope it will continue, for generations to come.”

 Ellie Kahn is an oral historian who saves family stories. She can be reached at ekzmail@gmail.com and here.