My maternal grandfather never told my mother how he survived the Holocaust. After years of research and a fortuitous find among my maternal branch’s cache of family documents, I am publishing what I know – so that others may benefit from my archival experience, and in the hopes of a remote possibility to find out more from anyone who happens upon this blog post.
My grandfather might have been an outlier in that he kept his survival story from my mother, his only child, and brought the secret to his grave. However, the silence of the generation of Holocaust survivors and the resulting patchy knowledge of the second and third generations was quite common in East-Central Europe in general and in Hungary in particular.
In 2014, on the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary, a Facebook group called “A holokauszt és a családom” (“The Holocaust and my Family”) provided an outlet for thousands of survivors and their descendants to share their stories and try and fill in the gaps. Eventually, about 160 of these stories were published in an eponymous volume, with an introduction by my late father.
Following my mother’s passing in 2018, one of the ways for me to honor her memory was to embark upon a genealogical quest and build up her family tree. At the same time, my primary objective has been to piece together the story of her father’s wartime and immediate postwar years.
Károly Weisz, cca. 1946-1947
My grandfather, Károly Weisz, was born in Győr, on February 12, 1927, the youngest in a family of seven – he had two older brothers and two older sisters. He had a difficult life: after surviving the Holocaust in Hungary, he married my grandmother, Klára Wolf, in 1949. My mother was born in 1953, the same year Károly graduated from medical school in Budapest. Within the first five years of my mother’s life, Károly lost both his legs to vasoconstriction. In 1965, his wife died, and Károly moved permanently to the hospital he worked at, leaving my mother in the full-time care of his late wife’s parents – my mother’s maternal grandparents. Károly passed away in 1980, four years before I was born.
On Yad Vashem’s website, I found Károly’s registration card with the National Committee for Attending Deportees (DEGOB) from May 1945. Therein, he indicated that he was residing in Simontornya, with his previous residence indicated to be Aszód. He declared his profession to be a plumber. The same year, he appeared as a witness on a divorce document held at the Budapest City Archives, as a plumber residing in Budapest. According to his DEGOB card, he was provided aid at the Jewish Charity Hospital in Budapest, in July 1946.
Győr-Simontornya-Aszód
However, based on two documents identified at the Arolsen Archives, sometime between May 6-11, 1946 Károly was admitted to a TBC sanatorium – in Germany, to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s (UNRRA’s) TBC Sanatorium for DPs in Gauting, outside of Munich. Further, another Arolsen document shows him registered at Kloster Indersdorf, about 20 miles north of Gauting. In addition, I found two letters to Károly in the family archive. Penned by an unidentified author and sent on April 16 and May 15, 1946, the letters place him to Germany and specifically to Gauting, respectively.
Based on his DEGOB card, Károly must have spent no more than two months at the Gauting Sanatorium, between May-July 1946. In early 1947, he enrolled to at Budapest’s Péter Pázmány University (at present: Loránd Eötvös University), using a counterfeit high school diploma he forged for this purpose – as he later told my mother. Aged just 17 at the time of the ghettoization and eventual deportation of Győr Jewry, he must have not completed the last year of high school – in case he ever actually attended one.
Indersdorf-Gauting
Although I exhausted numerous avenues to make sense of this flurry of locations, my findings are at best partial. I started with attempting to identify potential relatives in the two Hungarian localities mentioned, but to no avail.
Aszód
What Károly did tell my mother was that in his youth he worked as an apprentice, stole from his master, and was caught. Based on this tidbit, I posited that Károly might have spent time at the Aszód Reformatory, perhaps the premiere juvenile correctional facility in Hungary at the time. I contacted a local historian with extensive experience in researching and publishing on the Reformatory’s archive as well as the Reformatory itself. However, he informed me the Reformatory’s archive was destroyed almost entirely during the war. Although I liaised with the director of the Reformatory who, in turn, had an archivist look at the material available, no records of Károly were to be found.
Simontornya
According to an affidavit in the family archive, Károly’s only sibling to survive the war served as a merchant’s apprentice in Simontornya between May 1938 and May 1942, at Mrs. Ármin Winkler’s store. Indeed, I identified a newspaper ad from October 1942, in which Mrs. Ármin Winkler was looking for an apprentice to her store (paywalled source). However, she was murdered during the Holocaust (paywalled source), which makes it less likely that Károly would have found refuge at her through his brother.
Kloster Indersdorf and Gauting
The history of the UNRRA-run Indersdorf camp for displaced children has been researched quite extensively. Having thought I might have identified Károly on a photo, I first got in touch with the owner of the photograph, Cindy Drukier, whose father had spent time at Indersdorf, and of whom she made a documentary: Finding Manny. Cindy, in turn, put me in touch with Anna Andlauer, perhaps the preeminent authority on Indersdorf, the author of a 2012 monograph on the subject. She, in turn, pointed me to Israeli researcher Shoshan Porat, an expert on the Hungarian children of Indersdorf.
Thanks to Anna and Shoshan, I learned that a number of Hungarian Jewish youths – including ones not deported, who had survived the Holocaust in Hungary – passed through Indersdorf. In particular, members of the Dror Habonim Zionist youth organization were being smuggled to Palestine via German DP camps from late 1945.
At this point, some pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. The Indersdorf-Gauting story tallied with another rare snippet Károly divulged to my mother: my mother used to tell us that her father and mother attempted to make aliyah (at least) twice after the war but were caught on the border and/or could not make it due to Károly’s lung condition. It appears that Károly indeed did get as far as Indersdorf in 1946, but then ended up at the Gauting Sanatory due to TB and returned to Hungary shortly thereafter.
Breakthrough or Anticlimax?
While hitting brick walls in my research, I kept returning to the cache of family documents passed down by my mother, which I meticulously catalogued. Among them, I found a postal receipt showing that, in September 1957, Károly sent a package National Committee of Persons Persecuted by Nazism (NÜÉSZ). Suspecting that this might have been a claim for compensation, I got in touch with the legal successor of the organization, the National Organization of Persons Persecuted by Nazism (NÜB). However, I was told that the records of NÜÉSZ are not held by NÜB.
Thanks to an article by Hungarian Holocaust historian Bori Klacsmann, however, I realized that these records are likely held by the National Archives of Hungary. And indeed, based on the information provided, the archivists identified Károly’s file – as well as that of his wife, my maternal grandmother. I was ecstatic at the prospect of getting my hands on documents that might shed light on Károly survival story, which had been sitting in an archive for over 65 years.
After anxiously waiting for copies of the documents for weeks while the archive was closed for the holiday season, I finally received them in mid-January. Alas, the claim submitted by Károly contained almost no information as to his wartime years. He merely stated that while his two sisters and mother were deported to Auschwitz, he saved himself by going into hiding.
Nevertheless, silence on some matters did speak volumes. Firstly, Károly did not seek compensation on account of his own persecution – that is, he apparently did manage to survive without being captured, arrested, sent to labor service, or deported. Second, he did not mention or request compensation for his oldest brother, László. This I found surprising, since on a website dedicated to Győr Jewry László was listed as a victim of the Holocaust – albeit his date of birth did not match the one I ascertained with the kind help of the Jewish Roots in Győr Foundation. After further research in digitized periodicals, I discovered based on high school records that László actually passed away around 1929-1930, aged just 19. Finally, Károly’s did not claim compensation for his father, either, which made it clear that he had passed away prior to the Holocaust – which explains why I never found a reference to him in Holocaust-related records.
I have now made peace with the thought that I may never be able to find out anything more concrete about my grandfather’s story of survival. However, I still entertain some hope that by scouring postwar Zionist periodicals or – by the force of miracle – someone reading this post coming forward with information, I will be able to piece together some more of Károly’s life.
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