My grandfather survived the Holocaust in Hungary and went to Germany. All this was a family secret. A nonagenarian now told me the back story. She is the second person I talked to in my entire life who told my about my grandfather.
Members of Kibbutz Mahapecha of the Dror Habonim youth movement in the Indersdorf DP camp, November 1946. Credit: Ghetto Fighters House.
In my previous blog post on my grandfather, Károly Weisz, I detailed my relentless – if not desperate – attempts at figuring out how he survived the Holocaust in Hungary, while his mother and sisters were killed in Auschwitz, and how he ended up in Germany after the war. She did not my mother tell anything about either, and died before I was born.
Although I did not get any closer to unearthing his survival story, I did find out that Károly must have joined a group of Hungarian Zionist youth trying to make aliyah via Germany in the wake of the war. This tallied with the only thing she told my mother about these years: that he (and later probably him and my grandmother) tried to make aliyah but failed – due to his TB, and upon another attempt due to being caught by border guards.
I initially learned of Károly’s stint at the UNRRA-run Indersdorf camp for displaced children and at UNRRA’s Gauting TB Sanatorium from two letters, both written in May 1946 and signed “Mommy Arányi” (‘Arányi mama’ in Hungarian). The writer kept addressing Károly as “my son,” “my dear son,” “my little son.” I knew Károly’s birth mother had been killed and did not find any family relationship to Arányis on his family tree.
The envelope of a letter sent to Károly to the Gauting TB Sanatorium
However, I did recall that my mother used to mention the name of Asher (István) Arányi, a prominent Zionist activist who helped numerous Hungarian Jewish youth and children make aliyah. (We may have even met him when our family first spent a year in Israel in 1993-1994.)
With the help of Indersdorf expert Shoshan Porat, documents on Yad Vashem’s and the Arolsen Archives’ website, as well as thanks to Asher Arányi’s memoirs, I was able to establish that Asher Arányi’s wife and mother both spent time at the Holzhausen DP camp near Buchloe, where the letters sent to my grandfather were stamped. Shoshan even identified two people mentioned in the letters as madrichim of the Hungarian Dror Habonim group in Holzhausen.
At this point, events took an incredible turn. Shoshan discovered that Asher Arányi’s wife – Chaviva (Éva) born in 1928, now aged 96 – was apparently still alive and was even using Facebook. In a maze, I wrote her on Facebook, but suspected that she might not see the message, so also wrote the hotel at her kibbutz (no contact was available to the kibbutz itself) asking for her phone number. Then, I tracked down Chaviva’s daughter and her contact information.
Dizzy with excitement, I first called Chaviva’s daughter, explained her why I need to talk to her mother, and she gave me Chaviva’s phone number. I had already watched an interview with Chaviva on YouTube, which she gave in 2021, at the tender age of 93, but talking to her exceeded any expectations.
Interview with Chaviva Arányi (in Hebrew)
Chaviva was sharp as a tack, and vividly remembered my grandfather from 78 years ago. As she explained, Károly, the tall, thin, sickly orphan boy somehow became soulmates with Asher Arányi’s likewise sickly, overweight mother, whom Arányi brought along to Germany along with Chaviva and droves of Jewish children and youth. She also confirmed what my grandfather did tell my mother: that Károly – after he left the TB Sanatorium and returned to Hungary – made another attempt at making aliyah but was arrested on the Hungarian border.
Apart from my parents (or, rather, my mother) I have never spoken to anyone who knew my grandfather, much less reveal snippets of his life story. Although I may never learn how Károly survived the Holocaust, this small miracle more than makes up for that void.
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