Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
The Kindness of Strangers: The Refugees in Budapest, and my Father's World
War II Refugee Story
Zoltán Grossman
:
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Portside
Hungary is becoming the Arizona of Europe. It is the main country where war
refugees and other immigrants first set foot in the North -- in this case the
contiguous states of the European Union. Just like in the American Southwest,
immigrants are dying in sweltering trucks, officials are erecting border walls
and detention camps, and far-right hate groups are targeting the immigrants as
a threat to national identity.
Yet also like in the Southwest, many individual Hungarian citizens have
stepped forward, providing water, food, medical aid, and encouragement to the
Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan, and other refugees who are fleeing repression and war.
Despite their right-wing government's opposition to immigration (at least by
brown, Muslim immigrants), some Hungarians understand that any refugees who are
returned home face violence or even death. A few even compare the Syrians to
the refugees who fled across the Austrian border after their own failed 1956
revolution.
Just ask László Sipos, who was a child refugee in 1956 and raised in New
Jersey. He has spent the past month at the Keleti (Eastern) train station in
Budapest, the scene of dramatic confrontations between Hungarian police and war
refugees. He has been among the hundreds of volunteers who have set up a small
refugee camp next to the station, and provided needed supplies for refugees'
westward journey to asylum. As the refugees at the station encounter police
checking their IDs, and turning or pushing them and their kids away from the
westbound trains, they have also encountered the kindness of strangers.
When visiting the station last week, I saw volunteers from local and
international human rights groups sorting donated clothes, shoes, and food,
providing phone charging and wi-fi, and escorting refugees to and from trains.
Volunteers arrived in cars stuffed with schoolkids' gift bags, some with Disney
princesses on them. Homeless communities, taxi drivers, and Roma (Gypsies) have
been active in the solidarity work. A sign at the station read, "All we
have here is given out of love from the Hungarian people -- *not* its
government."
On September 12, as part of the European Day of Action for Refugees, hundreds
gathered at Keleti station to listen to speeches and music by Hungarian
citizens, the city's small existing immigrant communities, and recent refugees.
They held signs saying "Refugees Welcome," "No One is
Illegal," "Not in My Name," "We Are All Human," and
"Jesus was a Migrant." A Jewish youth organization afterwards hosted
a fundraiser for the Muslim refugees at the nearby Auróra community center.
This pro-refugee solidarity has gone largely unreported in the western
media, which focuses entirely on the intransigence of the Hungarian government.
Now the government has implemented a state of emergency along the Serbian
border, enforced with razor wire and tear gas, along with a new law
criminalizing both border-crossers and Hungarian citizens who offer them aid.
Veronika Kozma, a co-founder of the MigSzol Csoport (Migrant Solidarity Group
of Hungary), reiterated that "many, many Hungarians do not agree with the
government's actions and policies, which violate the rights of both refugees
and citizens."
The refugee influx struck a strong emotional chord with me, as a
Hungarian-American visiting my parents' homeland. I had arrived in Hungary on
August 25 with my wife Debi, to visit my late Catholic mother's relatives, and
retrace the stories of my Jewish father who had survived the genocide of World
War II. I found to my amazement that the building where my refugee father (as a
six-year-old boy) and his parents were interned near the end of war, was only a
block away from the Keleti train station where the current refugee drama is
unfolding.
I visited Poltár, a town across the border in Slovakia where my father was
born on May 31, 1938. He was actually a U.S. citizen, because his father had
been born in New York (his mother was a Hungarian citizen). When the Germans
set up a fascist puppet state later in 1938, my grandfather was enslaved with
other Jews in a local labor camp. He wrote the U.S. State Department asking for
a new passport, but an official letter replied that he would have to travel to
the U.S. Embassy to acquire it, at a time when Jews were no longer permitted to
travel - a bureaucratic "Catch 22."
When my grandfather escaped the labor camp, my family fled across the
border into Hungary, where they stayed with relatives in *Mezo*túr. My family
kept my father out of sight until he learned fluent Hungarian, because if he
spoke with a Slovak accent they would be reported to police as refugees. Their
situation became desperate in March 1944, when Hitler invaded Hungary to
replace its pro-Mussolini regime with rule by the Nyilas (Arrow Cross) Nazis.
Most of my family members were deported to Auschwitz, but my grandparents
and father were instead treated as enemy nationals. They were moved to a
Budapest internment camp, which the Allied Air Force hit in its July 1944
carpet-bombing of the city. A man pulled my family out of the rubble; my father
still has shrapnel marks on his back from that attack.
The survivors of the bombing were moved to a former school for the deaf and
mute on Festetics Street, in what is today the Frigyes Schulek School. The
building, located one block from Keleti station, today looks exactly like it
did in prewar photographs.
It was from that school that my grandfather was taken by German-speaking
troops in the early morning hours of January 1, 1945, as Soviet forces were
closing in on Budapest. The troops had planned to kill all the Jews, but a
German Wehrmacht (Army) officer passing by the school ordered them -with little
authority-- to spare the women and children.
My grandfather and many other Jews were marched to the Danube, and executed
by the icy river. Many were ordered to remove their shoes before being shot. On
the river embankment today, a line of bronzed shoes memorializes this New
Year's Eve massacre.
After the massacre, my father and grandmother were moved into the Jewish
Ghetto, west of the train station, where Jews were living in crowded, squalid
conditions awaiting starvation or deportation. After about a week, my
grandmother escaped the Ghetto with her son, by pretending to be the widow of a
corpse being taken to a mass grave. They ducked into a hospital, and were hidden
in the basement by a sympathetic doctor. A woman from the underground
resistance later brought them false identity papers that enabled them to rejoin
their relatives.
My father and grandmother had survived only because strangers had helped
them at critical moments: the man who pulled them from the rubble, the doctor
who hid them, the woman from the underground who gave them papers, and even the
German officer who intervened to save them. None of them knew my family, but I
never would have been born without them.
My father's stories of these events have echoed loudly these past few
weeks, even though Europe's treatment of Jews in 1944 and Muslim refugees in
2015 are hardly comparable in their scale of brutality. I remember his stories
because they resemble the stories of the Muslim refugees who are now seeking
shelter from extreme violence in their countries, with little support from
western bureaucracies.
Volunteers with donated clothes, shoes, and food, phone charging and wi-fi,
and escorting refugees to and from trains. Photo by Zoltán Grossman
I hope that when the refugees who have fled the horrors of Syria, Iraq, or
Afghanistan share their stories with their kids and grandkids, that they
mention the Hungarians who defied their own government to offer a helping hand
in a time of need. The lines of donated shoes at Keleti station carry the
opposite meaning of the line of bronzed shoes by the Danube. Whether in the
20th or 21st centuries, surviving war and repression is only made possible
through the kindness of strangers.
Zoltán Grossman is a professor of Geography and Native Studies at The
Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. His website is http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz
[1] and email is grossmaz@evergreen.edu
[2]
- See more at: https://portside.org/print/node/9725#sthash.e2hlyhDT.dpuf
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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