Holocaust Rememberance Day
Beth Ezekiel Synagogue, Owen Sound
Sunday April 16, 2023

Recollections: Judith

My name is Judith, and I was born in Hungary in the mid-fifties.
 
It's hard to talk about what happened to my family, not just because so many died in the Holocaust, but because the ones who survived didn't talk about what they lived through, or the horrors they witnessed.
 
The Holocaust in Hungary was the forceable displacement, deportation, and systematic murder of the Hungarian Jews. This was the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Hungary". Between mid-April and late-May of 1944, almost the entire Jewish population of the country were sent to the Ghettos or    the labour camps for the German war effort.
 
The Ghettos were where the Jews were made to stay until their deportation or death. They created a central ghetto in Pest (now a part of Budapest), into whose cramped quarters the Germans forced nearly 100,000 Jews, into an approximate 0,26 square kilometre zone, 1% the size of OS.
 
The area was completely cut off from the outside world: no food was allowed in, rubbish and waste were not collected, the dead lay on the streets and were piled up in bombed-out store fronts. The buildings were overcrowded, and the spread of diseases such as typhoid was rampant.
 
My Mother and Grandmother were housed in the Pest Ghetto; somehow, they managed to survive. My Grandfather, with his Sister, his Brother and his brother's family, were sent to Aushwitz, the largest Nazi extermination camp. Only my Grandfather and his Brother came home. My Mother's Aunt, with her husband and daughter, managed to evade the Ghetto with forged papers that showed they had converted to Christianity.
 
My Father was 1 of 5 children. He was the only sibling to survive, working in the labour camp. My Grandmother, his mother, was shot in the head and left for dead; miraculously, she survived.
 
In the largest deportation operation in the history of the Holocaust, between May 15th and July 9th,1944,  (54 days), roughly 450,000 people had been transported to Auschwitz, over 8000 each day. Almost all of them were murdered, 80% of the Jews in Hungary.
 
At midnight, on June 21st 1944, police forcibly expelled Budapest's Jews, (those not yet living in the ghettos), from their homes, and placed them in Yellow Star Houses, (so named for the stars marked on each front door identifying them as Jewish). Many were crammed into builldings already housing other Jewish families.
 
By late November 1944, many Jews had been moved among different ghettos, multiple times. Many were shot and killed during these moves, some sent to Auschwitz (and the ensuing death marches); many were forced to march towards Austria. Most did not survive any of these journeys.
 
My husband's Mother, Lili, with her family, were also housed in the Pest Ghetto, and from there were sent to Aushwitz. Her parents and sister died in Aushwitz, leaving her the sole survivor. In 1945, she was part of a Death March when Liberation arrived with the Allies, and the Germans abandoned their prisoners. She was one of 9 surviving women who stuck together for safety, and started making their way “home”; starved, sick, and sleep-deprived. En route, they met 7 Italian men doing the same thing, so they teamed up and continued walking, unsure where they were going.

They came upon an abandoned house, where they found food alongside shelter. Within a few hours of their arrival, a few Russian soldiers also arrived; they got drunk and demanded women. The 7 Italian men each chose one of the girls (including Lili), claiming they were married, so the Russians took the 2 women who were left without a partner; the women survived, but were both raped and badly beaten. Eventually, Lili made her way back to Hungary, then to Israel (where she met her husband, my father-in-law), and later, on to Canada.
 
My husband's Father was Polish, and was the only survivor of the family of 4 children. He spent 6 years held in 9 different camps. How did he survive? He was a tailor, and thus useful to the Germans. He was also very resourceful.
 
You may have heard of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat and architect.
Using his staff to prepare Protective Passports under the authority of the Swedish Legation, he saved tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary between July and December of 1944. In March 1945, he disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

Budapest named Wallenberg as an honorary citizen in 2003. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem, recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations in November 1963.
 
By the end of the Holocaust, close to 900,000 Hungarian Jews had died.
 
One of the most well-known memorials in Budapest is the “Shoes on the Danube”, erected April 16, 2005. The sculpture consists of 60 pairs of iron shoes attached along 40 metres of the stone embankment. It stands as a heartbreaking reminder of the winter of 1944-45, when 20,000 Jews were taken from the Pest Ghetto, shot along the banks of the Danube, and thrown into the river.
 
When my parents married in Hungary in the early fifties, only a few years after the end of the War, there was already a resurgence of anti-semitism in the country. So, a few years later, we left Hungary for Canada, with only a blanket for me and some jewelry my Grandmother had buried (to hide from the Germans).
 
Holocaust education and remembrance gives us an opportunity to reflect on the lessons of history and our shared responsibility to counter Holocaust denial and seek justice for the survivors and their families.

Holocaust Rememberance Day
Beth Ezekiel Synagogue, Owen Sound
Sunday April 16, 2023

Closing Remarks
There are only about 15 million of us left now worldwide, according to statistics compiled by Wikipedia. The Jewish population hasn’t recovered from the attempt to exterminate it three generations ago. Fifteen million. That’s out of eight billion people. What threat do we pose?

Jews represent less than one per cent of the Canadian population, yet according to Statistics Canada, Jewish Canadians are the number one targeted religious minority. We are the second most targeted group for hate crimes overall in Canada. We are mystified by it all.

But we aren’t the only victims of hate today. Our LGBT brothers and sisters regularly suffer discrimination and abuse, as do our indigenous communities, and visible minorities.

Hate is an insidious thing. We can’t get the haters to unhate. All we can do is to force it back into the shadows and back into the fringes of society where it belongs. Because as soon as we allow it to become normalized, we become complicit in what happens.

Holocaust Rememberance Day
Beth Ezekiel Synagogue, Owen Sound
Sunday April 16, 2023

Opening Remarks
Jews have been a part of this community for more than 130 years, and for just as long, we have enjoyed peace and warm relations from our neighbours and friends. But things have been taking a dark turn – locally, nationally and worldwide – and we believe that now is the time for us to come together and stand up against hate, not only directed against Jews, but any targeted group, whether because of their ethnicity, their colour, their sexuality, or their religion.

We Jews are in a unique position to facilitate this kind of discourse because we have been the object of persecution for thousands of years. We know, intuitively, how it starts. And, sadly, we know how it ends.

Long before the war, the founders of this synagogue were forced from their land. Their villages were burned. They were subject to brutal persecution and fled their homelands with only what they could carry. They ended up here in Owen Sound where they found peace, raised families, and enjoyed the freedom to observe their faith without fear.

But they were the lucky ones. The Rabovskys, the Fishmans, the Gorbets, the Cadeskys. By time hate took hold in Hitler’s Europe, there were few avenues of escape for the Jews. Many Western countries, including Canada, turned them away.

Bernie Fishman’s father, Sam, risked his life in 1938 and went over to try to convince his extended family to leave, but they asked, “how bad could it get?” Only his brother and his family took up the offer. The rest perished.

Today we’re going to take you on a personal journey – one that will use the words of victims, the survivors, and the children of survivors, to give voice to the anguish that results when hate is allowed to go unchecked.

Our intent is not to air grievances or assign blame. This isn’t about us. It’s about all of us. Our children. Our parents. Our neighbours. Our teachers. That guy spouting off on social media. The dog whistlers. And that loudmouthed uncle at Thanksgiving dinner.

 The Holocaust didn’t happen all of a sudden. And it didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because people let it happen. The Jews couldn’t accept that there was such hateful evil in the world. And much of the non-Jewish citizenry felt it wasn’t their business. Willful ignorance caused the holocaust, in my opinion.

Edmund Burk famously wrote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” I believe that you are all here today because you are good people. And I want to thank you for sharing in this moment with us.