Paris, Copenhagen, Dunedin and Hamilton

A letter in the Dominion Post last week said that Jews are like the canary in the mine. Their fate and acceptance is an indication of the well-being of society. Just in the last few weeks we had the attack on Charlie Hesbo in Paris, accompanied by the attack on a kosher supermarket, an attack on a meeting about free speech in Copenhagen accompanied by an attack on the synagogue in which an unarmed Jewish security guard and two policemen were killed. Don't imagine that New Zealand is immune to such manifestations of hatred of Jews. Recently Jewish graves were desecrated in Dunedin and the war memorial in Hamilton was defaces with swastikas. If there is anti-Jewish hatred around in the world someone in New Zealand would buy into it. What does this say about French, Danish and New Zealand societies? Hatred of cartoons and cartoonists, hatred of libertarian politics and politicians goes hand in hand with the hatred of Jews, though there is no obvious connection of these issues with Jews. Now New Zealand has signed up to a nominal military force to fight ISIS. I think we can expect further attacks on Jewish targets. Hatred of Jews is the only sentiment that disengaged young, and sometimes not so young people can find to express their general resentment of society. But we have to put this into perspective. The hatred of Jews has a very long history. We might have thought after the Holocaust, that it would go away, but like an insidious latent virus it survived and in recent years came to the fore again. As long as this does not enjoy institutional support, as it did in the 1930s, we should put it down to the misguided ideology of crazies. We must not walk in fear again, ever.

Jews of Munkacs

I became responsible for selecting books to buy for the Holocaust Centre library. We have a fair selection of books, and some irreplaceable old books published soon after the Second World War, but our library is under used. We should make these books available through the library system to readers and scholars wherever they are in New Zealand, but the challenge of doing this proved so far too hard. Now Yad Vashem published a new book, Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkacs during the Holocaust, by Raz Segal. Would we be justified in getting it? The story of the fate of the Jews of Munkacs sheds interesting light on the understanding of the Holocaust. Though Munkacs was an isolated town in the Sub-Carpathian border region between Ukraine, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, where the borders kept shifting, the its hasidic Jewish community was renowned throughout the orthodox Jewish world. Jews were materially poor in an impoverished backward, underdeveloped part of Europe, but they had an amazingly rich Hasidic cultural tradition that made a great impact on current hasidism. Munkacs was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War. After that it was incorporated into the newly established Czechoslovakia. In 1938 it was annexed by Hungary. Had this not happened the Jews of Munkacs, part of Slovakia after the Czechoslovakia was dismembered, would have been among the first victims of the Holocaust. As it was, as part of Hungary, they were safe until the German occupation in 1944. At first they welcomed their incorporation in Hungary, but they faced increasing antisemitic legislation and restrictions on their livelihood. Jewish men were conscripted into the Jewish unarmed military labour force, but this in many cases saved them from deportation and enabled them to survive. Some could take the opportunity to emigrate. Thus the Munkacs hasidic court survived in Brooklyn, New York. To understand the Holocaust, it is important to consider the shifting borders of Eastern Europe and the accident of being on one side or the other of these borders. If we bought the book on the Jews of Munkacs who would read it? Who would care? On the other hand ours might be the only copy of the book in New Zealand. Perhaps there is someone out there interested in this remote border land of Europe who might want to read about it. Would it shed light on the conflicts in the region?

Jews of Hungary 

A talk delivered at the Kia Torah series of lectures in Wellington, New Zealand

The story of the Jews of Hungary is my story. It is the story that shaped my life, formed my views of the world, my opinions and prejudices, my love of music, gypsy music, sentimental coffee house music and classical music.

Hungary had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, but in the environment I grew up in, the Yiddish-speaking world of the Eastern European shtetl was quite alien, yet so was the German and American Reform Jewish world that updated Jewish practices. My family kept a kosher home. My grandfather davened shachrit and put on t’fillin every day. The peculiar character of Hungarian Jewry grew out of the compromise that the Hungarian Jewish communities arrived at with the rulers of Hungary towards the end of the eighteenth century; if the Jews would adopt the Magyar [Hungarian] language they would be given equal rights with other Hungarian citizens.

Jews had lived in Hungary since Roman times. Inscriptions, references to Jews, date back to the time of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 175 AD. There were numerous Jewish settlements in the Roman province of Pannonia.

Some Jews held high offices and in the Middle Ages¹, Jews fleeing from persecution in Bohemia and other parts of Europe found shelter in Hungary. Over the years Jews were alternately welcomed and driven out. Jews were found to be useful and were at times accorded privileges, but were always at the whim of the local ruler or magnate. Edicts against Jews were sometimes enforced only halfheartedly because the value of having Jews around with commercial and financial skills was all too clear. But even where Jews were tolerated they were subject to special and often excessive taxes and various restrictions.

Then in 1790-91, during the enlightened reign of the Emperor Joseph II, all edicts against Jews were suspended. There were conditions however. All legal documents had to be written in Latin, German or Hungarian, the languages of the empire, and documents written in Hebrew or Yiddish were deemed invalid. Jews had to give up their distinctive garb, shave their beards and had to assume German surnames. Jews were also required to establish schools, which had to follow the same curriculum as other schools. Granting Jews equal rights was one of the touchstones that defined humanism in the 18^th century and subsequently. These rights accorded to Jews were withdrawn again after the return to clerical absolutism, a reaction to the French Revolution. But the idea that Jews should be granted the rights of citizens lingered, and in 1839 – 40 the law De Judaeis of Joseph II, promulgated in 1791 was reaffirmed.

Jews took to being Hungarian with great enthusiasm². Within a generation some of the most popular Hungarian playwrights, journalists, humorists, poets and novelists were Jewish.

However, the greatest of Hungarian rabbis, the great halachic authority of the first half of the 19^th century, Moses Sofer, known as the Chatam Sofer, chief rabbi of Pressburg, later known as Pozsony, and today’s Bratislava, foresaw the problems of assimilation and 

Opposed to Reform and the influence of Moses Mendelssohn in Germany, for him the only acceptable form of Judaism was Judaism as previously practiced. In his view, the rules and tenets of Judaism had never changed — and cannot ever change. This became the defining idea for the opponents to Reform, and in some form, it has continued to influence the Orthodox response to innovation in Jewish doctrine and practice³.

The majority of the Jews of Hungary, however, embraced the Neologue form of Judaism, which didn't depart much in practice from tradition, but conformed to the role of churches in Hungarian society. Jews were Hungarians in every respect, but they happened to worship in synagogues rather than churches⁴.

That the Jews identified as Hungarians, became important in defining Hungary as a country of Hungarians in a land where Hungarians were scarcely a majority among the many ethnic groups. Jews held the ethnic balance. During the 1848 uprising against Hapsburg rule, Jews played a prominent part and suffered a disproportionate number of casualties. The Hapsburg rulers imposed, as punishment, special and particularly onerous taxes on the Jewish community, and these were only rescinded when a new era of compromise and liberalism swept through the Hapsburg Empire in the wake of its defeat in Italy.

Yet the decade of absolutism in Hungary (1849–1859) was in a way beneficial to the Jews. It forced them to establish schools, most of which were in charge of trained teachers who taught the Hungarian school curriculum. With secular education the doors were open to Jews to enter the mainstream of Hungarian society. But as they became more Hungarian they became less distinctively Jewish. They dressed like Hungarians, they cooked food, even if kosher, with a Hungarian flavour, their musical tastes blended with Hungarian gypsy music, and they expected their rabbis to preach in Hungarian.

My great-grandfather, as a prominent shopkeeper of his suburb, the then 9^th district, was one of the founders of the synagogue in Pava Street, which is now the Budapest Holocaust museum.

The founders agreed that like all the large prestigious synagogues in Budapest, it should be a Neologue synagogue. It was built in an oriental style with a dome and stars on the blue ceiling. The divisive issues in the planning were: whether to have an organ in the synagogue and to require the Rabbi who was appointed to deliver his sermons in Hungarian. Though a Neologue synagogue, they came down on the side of traditional practices, the bimah in the middle of the synagogue, no organ, no musical instruments used in the services. The synagogue had a male voice choir, conducted in my time by the fearsome Mr. Gottschall, a gnome like angry looking little man, an uncle of Rabbi Gotschall who was the rabbi of Wellington for some years in the 1950s. Mr. Gottschall conducted with a tuning fork like the choirmasters of old, and for a few weeks I had the privilege of joining his choir. I was issued with a cassock, like a good choirboy, but was told on no account to sing, just pretend, until I became familiar with the tunes and words and could blend in with the other boys. The choir had four professional male singers, and the synagogue had a cantor, a Mr. Tennenbaum, a large rotund man with a powerful voice, who spoke with a broad Yiddish accent, which we children, with our pristine Hungarian, found hilarious. But if he didn’t sound Hungarian, he was certainly Hungarian enough to serve with the Hungarian cavalry in the First World War. My career as a chorister was cut short when the Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, and it became too dangerous to go out to choir practices.

The rabbi, Rabbi Farkas, Wolf in Hungarian, like the cantor Tennenbaum, spoke with a Yiddish accent. His Hungarian was not good, and members of the congregation laughed at his mistakes , but nevertheless he was much loved and respected, and served the congregation from 1923, when the synagogue was built until 1944when he was murdered, shot on the bank of the Danube by a defrocked Catholic priest⁵,

The Hungarian roots of my family can only be traced back to the 18^th century⁶. My distant ancestors were listed as tax payers of Gyönk in Tolna County in 1730, the time when the Gyönk Jewish community was founded.

At the beginning of the 18^th century, when the Grosz and Lorschy families settled in Tolna County, Hungary was, a depopulated backward province of the Hapsburg Empire century. There was a great need for more people to settle the land, and in particular, for people with skills. Jews, among them my ancestors, saw opportunities in Hungary. The owners of the vast estates of Tolna County, a rich wine-growing region, in Transdanubia, south of lake Balaton, brought in people from Schwabia and Moravia, and among these a number of Jews, including my distant ancestors⁷. The owners of the huge estates needed not only people to work the land, but also some to process and market its produce. My great grandfather, Salamon Grosz, was a wine wholesaler⁸.

With the large numbers of Germans, Gyönk was a German-speaking town, and my grandfather could quote large chunks of poetry by Goethe, Schiller and Heine in German well into his eighties. But he also spoke Hungarian, He was well versed in Hungarian literature, and speaking good idiomatic educated Hungarian mattered to him and to my grandmother, a woman of little formal education, but renowned for her perception and wisdom, who wanted her daughters to be familiar with the classics, and in particular, the complete works of Jokai, the Hungarian Dickens.

At the end of the 19^th century Hungary was a land of opportunities, a prosperous country, even though there was great poverty, the peasants lived in virtually serf-like conditions and the urban workers lived in overcrowded slums. Budapest, the capital, was the fastest growing city in Europe and the splendid buildings in the inner city date largely from that period. Jews prospered and built large, lavish synagogues.

Jews migrated from the countryside to Budapest for better lives. All four of my grandparents were born in country towns and moved to Budapest when they were young, my maternal grandfather moved there to attend the elite Presbyterian Gimnazium, where his older brother preceded him, and one of the teachers came from his home town, a huge honour for the town of Gyönk. My paternal grandfather walked to Budapest from Cegléd before he was Bar Mitzvah⁹. He was apprenticed to an ironmonger. His father, my great-grandfather was a cobbler who found it hard to provide for his 13 children and all the boys left home young, my great-uncle walking all the way to Munich before he was 13, where my great-grandfather’s brother was not just a humble cobbler, but the boot maker to the Elector of Bavaria. This great-uncle became a successful plumbing contractor. When Hitler came to power he moved back to Hungary.

Jews had an important role in developing Hungary, changing it from an agricultural backwater into an industrial state. The forty years before the first world war, from the 1870s, was a golden age for Hungarian Jews. Jews immersed themselves in every aspect of Hungarian life, science, education, art and literature, and sport.

There was, however, a dark side to this golden age. With large numbers of workers moving to the newly industrialized Budapest, many lived in great poverty. The urban poor included many Jews fleeing to or just moving to Budapest from Galitzia, then part of Russia. Us, established Jews of Budapest had little to do with them. They had their own shtiebl, and their synagogue was the one our family didn't go to.

During the First World War Jews served in the army in large numbers along with all Hungarians. One of my grandfather's closest friends was a general, in command of a Hungarian regiment¹⁰. My wife's, Judy's, uncles served as officers on the front. My grandfather was luckier, he served as a sergeant in the palace guards. In what other country would a Jew have served in such an elite unit. There was no discrimination.

During the First World War a large proportion of the Hungarian army ended up in Russian prisoner of war camps. There they absorbed Bolshevik ideas. The leader of the Hungarian Bolsheviks was Bela Kun, a journalist and rebel rouser, whose father was Jewish. Many of the other prominent communists were also Jewish. After the war the communists ousted the democratically elected government and in 1919 set up a brutal Bolshevik regime, the second in Europe after Russia. The communist government lasted only 133 days, but accounted for a lot of deaths, expropriation and damage. It was driven out by a rabid nationalist militia lead by Admiral Horthy, which blamed the disaster of the Communist rule on the Jews. Horthy and his men came to power on an extreme nationalist and antisemitic platform. On their way to the capital they attacked Jews wherever they went. When they marched through the 9^th district my grandfather's friend, the district police commander, warned my grandfather to stay indoors and lock the doors, because the approaching thugs were killing Jews, throwing them off balconies. Such was the beginning of the Horthy era.

At the peace treaty after the First World War two-thirds of the land area of Hungary and a third of its Hungarian population ended up outside the Hungarian borders; in Rumania and in the new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. For the next generation the driving policy of Hungarian governments was to regain these territories.

When the Austro-Hungarian empire was carved up the ethnic balance that ensured stability was destroyed. Each ethnic group had its own role in the empire. The Germans were the craftsmen, Serbs the market gardeners, the Hungarian peasantry tilled the soil, the Hungarian gentry and middle class were the administrators of the empire and the Jews were responsible for commerce and entrepreneurship. With the empire destroyed, other ethnic minorities were largely incorporated in the newly established states, Jews were the most visible remaining ethnic minority, and they were very visible indeed. In 1921 the majority, perhaps 90% of Hungarian industry was owned or operated by a few closely related banking families. Members of the stock exchange and currency brokers were predominantly Jewish. Jews represented a quarter of all university students, 43% at the Budapest Technological University, 60% of the doctors, 51% of lawyers and 39% of privately employed engineers and chemists, 34% of journalists and editors and 29% of musicians were Jewish. To combat this imbalance the nationalist regime of Horthy introduced legislation, the first anywhere in Europe, limiting the number of Jews in higher education to 5%, their percentage in the population at large. To further discourage Jewish students, chauvinist Hungarian students aligned with right wing politics attacked and beat up Jewish students at universities. One of my childhood heroes was the brother of a friend of my parents, who took a knuckle duster with him to class and when he was attacked he floored his attacker with the knuckle duster and killed him. He was on the train to Austria and then on the way to South America before people realized what had happened. As a result of limiting Jews in higher education, some of the greatest Jewish scientists and scholars were driven out of the country. The smartest went abroad to study. My uncle, a research chemist, went to Brno in Czechoslovakia to study, his sister, equally brilliant, to Germany.

Gradually the more extreme supporters of Horthy were replaced by more levelheaded politicians, many drawn from the old aristocracy, with strong sense of public duty and integrity. Stability returned. Budapest became again a beautiful city renowned for good food, music and beautiful women. It was one of the favorite cities of Edward, Prince of Wales, later Duke of Windsor. Jews hoped that the upheavals in other parts of Europe would pass them by. They continued to play a prominent role in business and commerce, in the arts and literature, and even in sports. Five Olympic champions in the Hungarian team at Hitler's Berlin Olympics in 1936 were Jewish

With the aim of regaining the lost territories of 'Greater Hungary' the Horthy government aligned itself, albeit warily, with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to gain support for Hungarian claims. This was reflected in the emergence and rise of new fascist groups within the country. The influence of the German Nazis fostered the deep-seated antisemitism that was never far from the surface. Jews were not persecuted until late in the 1930s, but it became harder for Jews to get jobs or get a licence to trade. My father lost his position with a major car dealership during the depression, and could not find another job. He was fortunate to get a licence to trade and so could run a very modest wholesale business.

Towards the end of the 1930s my father could see the danger looming for Jews and planned to get away. My uncle, a successful electrical contractor, was advised to convert, because as a Jew he was unlikely to get any further major contracts. One of the newspapers ran a column about countries Jews might choose to go to. My father was taken with the account of New Zealand. A new Labour government had just been elected, with a programme of welfare, and social justice. In the country described in the newspaper, there were neither very rich, nor very poor. People lived in villas on quarter acre sections. No one starved. It was paradise, the place where my father wanted to live. He and my uncle applied for visas. My uncle's was granted his, because, being an electrical engineer, his skills were useful for rigging up the lights in Oriental Bay for the 1940 Centennial celebrations. My father had no special skills in demand, his visa application remained in the Labour department's pending file.

On March 12, 1938, German troops occupied Austria and Austria was incorporated in the Reich. The Nazis judged the loyalty of their allies by their treatment of Jews. On May 28 1938, two months after the Anschluss, Hungary introduced the first anti-Jewish law, which restricted the number of Jews in the professions. Then they agonized over the implementation of the other provisions of the Nuremberg laws, too many of the ruling elite had Jewish grandparents. It took another year, May 1939, after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, before the second-Jewish law was passed, defining Jews as anyone with at least two Jewish grandparents. The third anti-Jewish law was passed two years later, August 1941, prohibiting intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews.

Shortly before then almost 20,000 Jews, who could not prove that their families had lived in Hungary since 1850, mostly Polish and Russian Jews who had settled in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine under Hungarian control, were transferred to Southern Poland, and were murdered soon after by a detachment of Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units in Kaminets-Poldinskyi, the first large-scale mass murder in pursuit of the Final Solution. This is described in Elie Wiesel's fictional account, Night, where the beadle, the shammes of the community witnesses the massacre, returns to the village and tries to warn people of what is in store for them, but nobody would believe him.

My grandfather's sister, Paola, came back to Budapest from Vienna, after the German occupation of Austria, when her husband was beaten so badly that he died soon after that from his injuries. She stayed with my grandparents until all German citizens, including Austrians, were required to report to the German embassy. My great-aunt knew what that meant and was reluctant to go, but my grandfather assured her that this was Hungary, where the rules of law prevailed. With great reluctance, Paola went to the German embassy and was never seen or heard of again.

But Hungarian Jews were safe for the time being. The Hungarian government, despite insistence on the part of the Nazis, refused to hand over its Jews, and even provided a haven for Jews fleeing to Hungary from Slovakia and other German occupied lands. This all changed on a beautiful spring Sunday, March 19, 1944, when the Germans invaded Hungary. There was no jubilation, as there was in Austria or the Sudetenland. It was not a surprise, but more like something that people feared and accepted as inevitable. Immediately a new puppet government was installed with an Nazi and extreme antisemitic agenda. Adolf Eichmann arrived with the first occupying troops together with his team of experts on the annihilation of Jewish communities. The willing cooperation of the Hungarian authorities surprised even these experienced officers. Within three weeks the decision was made to deport all Jews, and laws were passed making the wearing of yellow stars mandatory and the decree to relocate in designated ghettos all Jews who lived outside Budapest. The destruction of the last remaining Jewish community in Europe was a matter of high priority for the Nazis.

The plan was to use 45 cattle cars per train, 4 trains a day, to deport 12,000 Jews to Auschwitz every day from the countryside from mid-May, and this was to be followed on 15 July with the deportation of Jews from Budapest. The large number of Jews, some 200,000, in Budapest presented special logistic problems.

The first train went through Kassa, now Kosice, Slovakia, on its way to Auschwitz on May 15, eight weeks after the German occupation, the 138^th train, with the 400,426^th victim, on July 20. According to German official records, a total of 437,402 Jews had been deported by July 9.

Jews awaiting deportaion

People didn't know the destination of these trains, but on 28 April the Vrba – Wetzler report, the account of two inmates who escaped from Auschwitz, reached Hungary. Jews were kept in ignorance of this report, but it did help to bring pressure on Horthy to stop the deportation.

The Axis powers were rapidly losing the war, Rome was liberated on June 4, and the Allied landing in Normandy occurred soon after, but still, on June 15, the Mayor of Budapest designated 2000 houses for Jews to move to, a preliminary step towards deportation.

On July 6, 1944, Horthy ordered the suspension of all deportations. Jews were comparatively safe, until the overthrow of the Horthy government on October 15 by the extreme fascist Arrow Cross group. After that, deportation resumed immediately. My mother was marched off to Lichtenwőrth, a small women's camp near the Austrian border, my father, who was serving with an unarmed labour unit, was marched to Mauthausen, and from there to the Gűnzkirchen subcamp. We, my brother and I, were with our grandparents, in the Budapest ghetto, at first in the smaller international ghetto, later in the main ghetto. The ghetto was liberated by Russian troops early on the morning of 18th January. I can still see the Russian soldier in a white fur cape, leaning on his rifle in the doorway of our building. We were saved. I remember discussing with my brother which of our parents would have a better chance of surviving. The addresses of my aunts in New Zealand and in America were firmly drummed into us so that should neither of our parents survive we would be able to get in touch with them. I can still remember, 68 years later, their addresses. Miraculously, against great odds, both our parents survived. My mother returned from camp some time late in April, my father on the first day of school in September four months after he was liberated. He had been picked up by an American army jeep, almost dead with typhus and malnutrition, and was nursed back to life in an American hospital. From the time we were reunited my father planned our move to New Zealand, where my uncle Paul Novak, and my aunt, Claire, Klari, were already established. My grandmother moved here first, in 1947, to join her daughter, then we arrived on 18 November 1948.

Out of close to 800,000 Hungarian people of Jewish descent about 190,000 were left alive after the war. Of these only a very small number described themselves as Jews. Under communism most would say that they were atheists, including the prominent leaders of the country, Matyas Rakosi, born Rosenfeld, Erno Gero, born Singer, and Peter Gabor, head of the secret police. Since the fall of communism there has been a modest Jewish spiritual revival.

My feelings towards Hungary have been very ambivalent. I value the Hungarian culture, and in particular, the Hungarian Jewish culture, I supported the Hungarian football team when Hungarians could still play football, but I was also aware of the pogroms in wake of the 1956 uprising, and the current right-wing, neo-nazi Hungarian politicians who want to reintroduce the registration of all Jews. By and large, I think of Hungary, the remnant of a once great kingdom, as a sick and corrupt society, that refused to learn the lessons of its brutal and tragic past. I also remember the glorious achievements of Hungarian Jews as well as the dark days of persecution.

1 King Béla IV (1235–1270) appointed a Jewish man named Henul to the office of court chamberlain – the Jewish Teka had filled this office under Andrew II); and Wölfel and his sons Altmann and Nickel held the castle at Komárom with its domains in pawn. Béla also entrusted the Jews with the mint; and Hebrew coins of this period are still found in Hungary. In 1251 a privilegium was granted by Béla to his Jewish subjects which was essentially the same as that granted by Duke Frederick II the Quarrelsome to the Austrian Jews in 1244, but which Béla modified to suit the conditions of Hungary. This privilegiumremained in force down to the Battle of Mohács (1526).

http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Hungary#Early_history_.281100.E2.80.931300.9

2Moritz Bloch, who changed his name to the Hungarian “Balagi” translated the Tanach into Hungarian, Moritz Rosenthal translated the Psalms and Pirkei Avot. Various communities founded Hungarian reading-circles. Jews relished the opportunities of secular learning, and the mastery of the Hungarian language mattered greatly to them

3His students at the Pressburg Yeshiva, which he founded, had a great influence on modern Orthodox Judaism to this day. My son, Rabbi David, studied at the Pressburg Yeshivah in Jerusalem.

4Both the chief rabbi of the Neologue community, the majority, and the chief rabbi of the orthodox community, were members as of right of the Upper House of the legislature.

There were also Jews for whom both the Neologue and the Orthodox form of worship unacceptable, and formed yet a third community known as Status Quo, which ultimately merged with the Neologue community.

5András Kun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Kun

6 Grosz Marton and Lorschy Bernát are both listed in the Hungarian Jewish Lexicon as tax payers of Gyönk in Tolna County in 1730, the time when the Gyönk Jewish community was founded. They were my distant ancestors, whose descendants, Grosz Salamon, and Lorschy Suzanna, my great-grandparents, married a few generations later.

7Grosz (spelt with sz, not the German ß (ss), which suggests that they came from Moravia, and Lorschy (Ysroel spelt backwards).

8He was remembered, for his great strength, and his exploit; wrestling a raging bull to the ground in the market place. Baron Jozsef Eotvos described this incident in one of his novels, one of the Hungarian classics. I might as well boast about this modicum of fame.

9My father's mother moved from Bujak, an isolated little village in Nograd County in North Hungary to Budapest when she was only seven. Her father died before she was born in some accident, her mother ran the family business, the local inn and general store, and my grandmother was sent to her oldest sister in Budapest, My mother's mother came from Torokszentmiklos in the Northern Great Plain region of central Hungary to help in the inn of relatives in Rackeve, on Csepel Island.

10General Bauer fancied himself as a singer. He had a nice baritone voice and came to my grandparents'' home where my father accompanied him on the piano in Schubert songs

War averted for now

'This is a glimmer of hope, no more no less' Angela Merkel said about the ceasefire in Ukraine agreed to in Minsk. Both the Germans and the Russians know the cost of war, and did what they could to diffuse a confrontation that had deep historical roots. Ukrainians are haunted by the memory of Stalin's collectivisation which lead to starvation that killed seven million people, while Russians remembered the Ukrainians who sided with the Germans during the Great Patriotic War. Stalin placed millions of Russians in the industrial Eastern region of Ukraine to replace the native Ukrainian workforce that was killed or deported to Siberia. For these Russians Russia remained their homeland, and their loyalty is to this day to Russia not to Ukraine. They don't trust the bankrupt Ukrainian government, noted for its corruption, in which the pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovych, was driven from power by forces that wanted Ukraine to join the EU and distance itself from Russia. To Putin, whose aim is to reassert Russia as a great world power, the defection of Ukraine was an attack on Russian hegemony. To exacerbate things, Ukraine is a divided country, in which Ukrainian of the West look down on, despise the Ukrainians of the East, a relic of the division of the country between the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empires. All this made for a dangerous mixture that could have erupted into a major conflict between East and West, and if the ceasefire doesn't hold, and the differences that simmer on the ground are not resolved, may yet erupt. But for the time being the sides, under great pressure from Angela Merkel, helped by Francois Hollande, agreed to talk rather than fight.  

Einat Wilf and the long view of history

Sometimes on a beautiful sunny warm day it is so much easier to do nothing than to do something I had to push myself to go to Einat Wilf's talk, sponsored by the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, but I did make the effort and was rewarded by one of the most lucid, well constructed, thought provoking lectures I ever attended. Einat Wilf is a smart woman, academic, politician, businesswoman. The subject of her talk was 'The Unravelling of the Post-Ottoman Order'. It was hard to know what to expect. In the event she took a very broad view of history to gain an insight into into the current events in the Middle East. She talked about the 'Arab Spring', which she thought should have happened after the First World War, when the Arab world was in turmoil. It didn't happen, because the European powers carved up the Middle East, taking no cognisance of reality in the region. They imposed artificial borders on lands that were made up of tribal groups with no common sense of nationhood. She likened the Arab Spring to Europe in 1848, when all kinds of disparate liberation movements with human rights agendas swept Europe. These movements were put down by despotic conservative forces, much like the democratic liberal Arab protests were suppressed by conservative despots and Islamic fundamentalists. It took most of Europe a hundred years to attain the objectives of 1840, with Eastern Europe taking a further fifty years. We can expect the Arab Spring to take a hundred years to bear fruit. This places Israel in a uniquely difficult position. Israel's objective is to establish a Jewish state in the Biblical land of Israel, in the midst of an Arab region. The single dominant objective of the Arab countries is to prevent this, stop the hitherto despised Jews having their own country. For this reason Arafat turned down the chance to have a Palestinian state because the price would have been the acknowledgement that the Jews, the Jewish state, was here to stay. Arabs view Israel as a Crusader state that will vanish, like Medieval Crusader states, over time. To the question from the floor about the prospect of peace in the region, Einat Wilf replied that this will happen when the surrounding Arab states will embrace democracy, human rights to minorities and women, and tolerance of different beliefs. The Arab Spring held out such a hope, but for the time being with the ideals that brought protesters to the squares suppressed, the immediate likelihood of peace is remote. The worst people, the great powers and the UN can do is to hold out false hopes and foment the sense that with further bloodshed peace can be achieved. The differences between Arabs and Israel are irreconcilable. They are differences of existence or non-existence. Once this is acknowledged, and the continuing existence of Israel is accepted there may be a prospect of peace.  

Thinking of my mother

This week is my mother's Yahr Zeit, the anniversary of her death. She was 87 when she died. She didn't linger long. She had a major stroke, she appeared to be unconscious for a few days, though seemed to struggle to breathe, then she gave up the struggle. Those who remember her as a strong willed old lady might find it hard to visualise her as a young flapper of the 1920s. She loved to dance, she enjoyed the company of her many friends, men and women. She was one of the first generation of Jewish girls to get a solid secondary school education. She matriculated from one of the best girls' gymnasiums, an elite academic girls' secondary school, in Budapest. Her teachers included some eminent scholars. Teachers in a good gymnasium were more highly regarded than university lecturers. She was taught Latin, Greek, German, as well as Hungarian literature, and learned French from the sisters of Sacré Cœur She was fluent in four languages and had a very broad general education. It was her mother who insisted that she and her younger sister should go to a gymnasiums. A few years earlier, when her older sister went to high school it was almost unheard of for a Jewish girl to aspire to get the kind of education that smart boys from middle class homes were entitled to. My grandmother, my mother's mother, was an impoverished, orphan girl from the country who had only a spasmodic, interrupted primary school education, but all her life she tried to educate herself. Educating her daughters was important to her, and insisted on this in face her husbands mild objections. He couldn't see the point of educating girls, though later he made good use of my mother's ability to correspond in four languages. Upon leaving school, my mother wanted to train as an optician, but the 1920s were dangerous times for Jewish students at universities. If they were fortunate to be accepted they were beaten up by their brave heroic fellow students. So my mother ended up with exactly what she had hoped to avoid, running the office of my grandfather's import export business. She was 25 when she married my father, who was a young man with good prospects, but with the great depression of the 1930s, my father was made redundant, the job he managed to get didn't pay enough to cover his tram fares. With my grandfather's help, through his contacts, my father went into business on his own account, running a modestly successful wholesale business. When my father was conscripted first into the army, then into the Jewish unarmed labour unit, my mother had to take charge of this business as well as helping to run her father's office, and at one time looking after two very sick children. She was a very strong woman. She coped and was never discouraged. She was surrounded by good friends, and despite the great difficulties she faced, she had the capacity to enjoy herself, have a good time whenever the opportunity presented itself. New Year's Eve, my father's birthday, was always an occasion for exuberant celebrations. They would roll up the carpet, my father would sit at the piano and play for hours on end while his friends plied him with apricot brandy or good cognac. To my mother's regret, my father was no dancer. He was more at home in front of a piano keyboard. Emigrating to New Zealand after the war was my father's choice. My mother had to leave her father, her sister and her many friends behind. In her new country she was the one who enabled us to adapt. She could speak and write English. She spent hours with me translating the English textbooks, helping me with New Zealand history, science, English literature and grammar. She was a mother hen, who was there for us when in our bewilderment we tried to make sense of a world of a language we could not understand and customs that were quote alien. She also held down a job during the day and earned additional income with machine embroidery that she worked on at night. All this in addition to cooking, and she was a good cook, and running the household. She was also very hospitable. Her saying was 'Just drop in whenever you like' and people did. Everybody was my father's and mother's friend from all walks of life. And they retained these friendships all their lives. Think of the little plump lady that was my mother as a tower of strength, never discouraged, never dejected, always looking forward in life. The year she died she was already too frail to go to Japan on her annual visit to my brother, but she planned ahead, if she could not go that years she would go the following year. She never made it. She had a good life, despite all its hardships. Regret was not in her vocabulary.