“We two old people,” approaching but not quite fifty, celebrated
their silver wedding anniversary in July 1943. The years had
not left them totally unmarked: they had grown stouter, their
hair was turning grayer, and both now wore glasses, though
Mathilda seldom let herself be photographed with them on. (In
photos, when not taken by surprise, the elder Ehrlichs almost
always struck formal Old World poses—standing very straight,
hands folded, a pleasant but moderately restrained smile on each
face.)
Joseph was fortunate to have fairly sedentary work where he
could set his own pace and his own hours. He had developed
arthritic back problems in the 1930s, and had to have George oil
the fur shop machines when he could no longer get down and reach
under them himself. Later on he would need to wear a corsetlike
steel back brace. Diabetes was diagnosed in the 1940s; every
morning Mathilda would take insulin from the refrigerator, load
a syringe, and give Joseph his shot. (He always spoke very
respectfully of Banting and Best, the discoverers of insulin.)
And Joseph’s hands began to tremble slightly, just enough to
make it difficult for him to write. This seemed to be another
one of those inevitable, unavoidable things associated with
aging, and in this case was another good excuse to leave all the
correspondence to Mathilda.
When Martha and George left home, their parents were left on
their own for the first time since 1919 and their first year of
marriage. With the children’s departure came the first chance
for each generation to be independent of the other: a chance
that turned into certainty as the younger Ehrlichs got caught
up, like everyone else their age, in the Second World War. But
the older European-born generation was on the other side now, in
more ways than one. Eight thousand miles and an ocean away from
home, they were steadfastly loyal to their adopted country and
proud of their children’s military service to the same; yet they
were separated from this World War as they had not been from the
first one. And, despite their interest in global politics, they
were dealing at a remove from reality.
In Chicago the Ehrlichs got letters from their family in
Kolozsvár/Cluj, letters which often made Mathilda cry.
Then, abruptly, the letters stopped coming.
For twenty years after World War I, the Jews of Hungary had been
subjected to varying degrees of economic boycott and social
ostracism. They had always hoped it would be a fleeting
phenomenon, even when laws were passed
that defined “Jew” on an explicitly racial basis and restricted
the number of Jews in Hungarian commerce and professions to
twenty percent, then to five percent. Through it all they
insistently proclaimed their undying patriotism, urging Hungary
not to blindly emulate Hitler’s Third Reich.
The Hungarian government was in fact trying to placate the Nazis
just enough to keep them at arm’s length. It was a perilous
balancing act, not made any easier during World War II by
Hungary’s own geographic greed. In 1940 they demanded
Transylvania back from the Romanians, who were isolated and
demoralized by the collapse of their ally France. Romania
asked for German mediation, and Germany offered some “friendly
advice”—to cede northern Transylvania, including Cluj/Kolozsvár,
back to Hungary. The Romanian Foreign Minister took one look at
the redrawn map and promptly fainted; yet his country had no
choice but to swallow this especially bitter pill.
Transylvania’s Jews welcomed the return to Hungary, the nation
to which they had retained strong cultural and emotional ties,
particularly the older folk who remembered the Golden Age. But
new anti-Semitic measures were immediately introduced: Jewish
children were prohibited from attending public schools, and only
ten Jewish students (with special connections, which did not
save them from being continually baited) remained at the
University of Kolozsvár in 1940-41. Eight years earlier there
had been 443 enrolled there.
By this time the Nazis had come up with their own solution to
the Jewish Question—the Final Solution, in fact: they
systematically rounded up millions of European Jews, put them on
deportation trains, and sent them to death camps established in
Poland. Rumors of this disturbed Miklós Kállay, the Hungarian
Prime Minister. He pledged to “resettle” Hungary’s 800,000
Jews, but not until the Nazis provided a satisfactory answer as
to where they were to be resettled. In the meantime
Kállay’s government jealously upheld Magyar independence, held
firm against German pressure, and refused to deport a single
Hungarian Jew.
So Hungary and northern Transylvania became an oasis in the
wasteland Hitler was making of Europe. Eliminated from public
life, segregated from the rest of Hungarian society, the Jews
agreed that certainly these were unpleasant times; but whatever
might be happening in other countries—and as the months went by,
there was an uneasy awareness of what was going on—it could
never take place in their civilized homeland. It could
never happen to them. Despite the harshness of their
lives, they did continue to live; and if Kállay could continue
parrying the Third Reich they would remain comparatively well
off. Surely it was best, then, to adopt the attitude of
megusszuk: “We’ll get by.”
In March 1944 Hitler summoned old Regent Horthy to a meeting and
there gave him an ultimatum: dismiss the Kállay government,
or Germany would move in and occupy his country. Horthy agreed
to Hitler’s demands, but that scarcely mattered; German troops
were already marching across the Hungarian border. Kállay fled
to Turkey and a new government was appointed, one that produced
a landslide of anti-Semitic legislation. Jews were banned from
most Hungarian stores, restaurants, and theaters; forbidden to
use telephones or radios; required to stay indoors except for
three hours each day; and ordered to wear the yellow star badge.
Adolf Eichmann came to Budapest and met with frightened Jewish
leaders. He told them that any opposition would be mercilessly
dealt with, but nothing would happen to the Jews if they
“behaved” themselves. Any atrocities should be reported at once
to Eichmann himself; he promised that immediate action would be
taken, even against German officers. And he expressed polite
interest in visiting the Budapest Jewish Museum and Library.
His promises were half-believed; the Jewish leaders wanted
to believe them. Maybe they would be safe if they cooperated,
or at least played for time, since Nazi Germany’s defeat seemed
imminent.
As for Eichmann, he was delighted with this “fantastic
opportunity.”
From SS veterans throughout Europe he had assembled a
Sondereinsatzkommando: his Special Operations Unit. Its
members’s work elsewhere was pretty much completed; now all
their attention and experience could be brought to bear on
Hungary. They were ordered to proceed with caution—the Nazis
wanted to avoid another Warsaw ghetto rebellion—but they would
have to hurry, especially in the east, for the Soviet army had
almost reached the same Carpathian passes that the Cossacks had
nearly pushed through thirty years before.
On May 2, 1944, the Kolozsvár police chief posted local
ghettoization instructions. Then followed the banging on doors,
the rounding up conducted by the Gestapo and the greenshirted
Arrow Cross, Hungary’s own homegrown Nazis. Everything went
smoothly, since few of the intimidated Jews dared resist.
Some of their Christian neighbors helped hide them; some
denounced Jews in hiding; many feared being threatened with the
same fate. And many others cheered as 12,000 Jews were herded
into Kolozsvár’s Iris Brickyard by May 10th. Two weeks later
another 4,000 joined them there.
This miserably overcrowded brickyard was exposed to wind and
rain. A single pipe with fifteen faucets (frequently out of
order) served as the ghetto’s water supply; there was hardly
enough water for drinking or cooking, let alone washing. Food
was doled out once a day. Four ditches were dug to be latrines
for the entire brickyard. In one building—the “mint” or
“massage room”—people were beaten into confessing where their
valuables might be hidden.
Kolozsvár’s was a typical Hungarian ghetto.
On May 18th the Catholic Bishop of Transylvania, Áron Márton,
gave a sermon in Kolozsvár at the Church of St. Michael, in
front of which stood the bronze statue of Matthias Corvinus.
And with the courage of Mátyás, Bishop Márton condemned the
ghettoization, imploring Hungary not to abandon its Jews to
annihilation. But articles appeared in local newspapers
claiming that despite exaggerated rumors, all was well at “the
brickyard where people play football and rummy and nobody wants
to work.” There was no hunger or disease or want for
anything—and even if the Jews were not particularly comfortable
in their ghetto, remember the brave Magyar soldiers fighting
for us and
because of them!
Life in the ghetto in fact grew so intolerable that its inmates
were glad to leave it, feeling relief when trains came to take
them away. Seventy to ninety people were crowded into each
freight car; all had to stand throughout the trip. There was no
food, no water, no sanitation other than two buckets per car,
and those who happened to die en route were not removed till the
journey’s end. Upon arrival at their destination, the freight
cars were emptied and columns were formed: one of men, the other
of women and children. An SS doctor on sight-inspection divided
each column into two groups.
Those who looked strong enough to work were sent to the right;
there they were stripped, deloused, dressed in uniforms, and put
to hard labor.
Those who looked old or sick or weak, children not yet in their
teens, mothers who would not leave their children—these were
sent to the left. There they were gassed and their bodies
burned.
The ovens and gas chambers of Auschwitz were operating day and
night.
Over 16,000 Jews were deported from the Kolozsvár ghetto;
150,000 from northern Transylvania; 437,000 Hungarian Jews in
all. Most were sent to Auschwitz, where nearly 400,000 perished
in a conveyor-belt blaze from mid-May to July 1944. Nothing was
concealed; the Nazis operated openly, in full view of the world,
and still brought off the most methodical and concentrated
extermination in the history of the Holocaust.
“It went like a dream,” boasted Eichmann.
The Allies, as in Béla Kun’s time, pretty much sat on their
hands. They rejected a demand to bomb Auschwitz, defining it as
a civilian target. Raoul Wallenberg, who would heroically
rescue thousands from Budapest over the next six months, would
himself be arrested by the baffled Russians—why should a Swedish
diplomat risk his life to save Jews?—and never released;
his fate remains a mystery.
Some efforts were made. Pope Pius XII and King Gustav of Sweden
appealed to Horthy on behalf of the persecuted. The United
States Congress called on the Hungarian people to “stem the tide
of inhumanity.” On June 17th a rally in New York was sponsored
by the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe.
And in one of history’s less piquant ironies, about 2,000
Hungarian Jews escaped across the Transylvanian border to a safe
haven in Romania—despised Romania, so notorious for its
anti-Semitic excesses through the past.
Ultimately northern Transylvania would be returned to the
Romanians, and Kolozsvár would again become Cluj, which it
remains to this day.
A vast number of people had disappeared, vanishing into nameless
night and fog, not to be heard from again. Their whispered fate
was so dreadful that for a long while it was dismissed as
wartime propaganda. Some, for good or ill, have never accepted
or believed it.
A vast number of Mathilda and Joseph’s relatives had
disappeared, and in later years they were seldom or never to be
talked of. “I really don’t know what my parents knew about the
Holocaust,” George was to say. “The grim reality of what in
fact was happening to the relatives left in Europe… it was never
really discussed. How could it be?”
The Ehrlichs and their extended family were never ones for open
mourning or public displays of grief. “When the end for someone
came, there was no great family outpouring; each seemed to deal
with it privately.” This was equally true whether the death was
of someone in the fullness of his years, like Sam Kohn, or in
his prime like Margaret Temmer’s younger son Alex. When Jeni
Kohn died in 1944, and again when Patsy the shepherd in sick old
age “simply vanished,”
George was not told about it for a long time “so I wouldn’t feel
hurt.”
Joseph and Mathilda would often fend off “feeling hurt” in this
manner. No candles were lit; if memories proved too painful,
they went unmentioned. In later years Mathilda might recall her
brother Náthán’s disappearance and her mother’s death; but “even
now it makes me cry to think of that,” so the elder Ehrlichs
resolutely put the past behind them.
Yet it could not be forgotten. On one occasion (and one only)
forty years after her family was lost, Mathilda admitted that
she still dreamed of them, and wept for them. “We were almost a
city of our own, all related,” she would say. “And they were
all killed.”
Surely it was best, then, to adopt the attitude of look to
the survivors. Despite everything a few were left in the
Old World: some of the Ladners
and Mathilda’s youngest sister Ily lived on in Paris, while
brother Jenő and his family eventually made it to Israel.
Meanwhile in America—there by the grace of God, or Fate, or a
Vice-Consul’s rubber stamp—there were Martha and George. The
children, raised as best Joseph and Mathilda could under the
circumstances, were about to embark upon independent adult lives
of their own. Their parents had always wanted a Better Life for
them; now whether they were to enjoy it remained to be seen.
Notes
