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CHAPTER 1

September 10, 1943, my birth day. It was bad year to be born, especially if you were Jewish and happened to live anywhere in Europe. This is the story of how we survived, my mother and I. I am writing this because I want to have a record of the events that took place, for my children and grandchildren to come, God willing. I have never been able to talk much to my children, or most people, about the war and its impact upon me. To this day I'm not even sure of what its effects upon me have been. I don't remember the actual war itself, and I'm not supposed to have suffered from it.

As I was growing up, my mother talked to me about our experiences during and after the war, some of which I remember. She described her family, her house, her adventures, and the losses and hardships we suffered. She would recount her memories and experiences in an episodic fashion; a flash of remembrance, a vignette, something brought to mind, but it wasn't coherent or in order. These reminiscences left me confused. I like order, I need it to keep some sort of control over my environment. Finally, after many years of talking and planning and cajoling, I insisted that we sit down and tape an oral recounting of what happened, as she, and to a lesser extent, I, remembered it. Based upon our conversations and tapes, I am writing a narrative account of those difficult years.

September 8, 1985, my mother Irene Zachar, speaking on tape, "I didn't sleep too well."

"I knew you were going to find a reason."

"And I wanted to call you."

"And I wasn't going to give you an out this time. No more. I'm sorry. You're not well, I'm sorry, but--"

"But I'll be sleepy and I'll be tired."

"So you're sleepy and tired. That's all. So you'll talk while you're sleepy and tired. No. It had to be sometime, and there's always going to be an excuse, and I feel now you're going to get busy when Chaim comes, and Esther comes. You're going to be very busy, and there won't be a chance. I figure this is it. 'Me halten yetzt bei N'ilah' (we are now at the end. N'ilah is the last prayer said on Yom Kippur). I want it done once and for all. And you'll see, it'll be better for you too."

"I guess so."

"And just think of your grandchildren. I never talk to Meir, and Moshe, and Yonatan. They don't know anything, they're too young. But they're going to grow up. Shouldn't they know something?"

"And even for history."

"That's right. They keep records in Israel of all these things. Eventually we'll give it to them."

"Yad VaShem asked me to give them- so we'll give one [copy] to Yad VaShem. If we put it in Yad VaShem then it's from our family a history. My mother's name, my father's name- because this is the only memorial- because they didn't make no names from Kiralyhaza. It's a little village, there's no 'landsleite' (groups formed by survivors of various towns in Europe)."

"At least there should be a record. Yeah, I was thinking of that. All these people. That's why I took everybody's name down. All these people, they should at least be remembered, that they existed. Except for you and me there's no one to remember them."

"Very few people get it down. And I'm really proud that I was able to do that. I was so young. I was so young, and so inexperienced, and so unworldly, and so uneducated. A simple little country girl."

"You used common sense, courage and common sense. You had the courage and you had the common sense."

"And whatever I did I used good judgment most of the time."

"That's right. That's right. So you have a right to be proud. And I'm proud of you. And I want my children to know."

What gave my mother the courage to do what she did, to save herself from possible, and me from certain death in the concentration camps? Many things probably; the will of God, personality, luck, intelligence, courage, optimism, the will to live, the desire to save my life, and who knows what else.

My mother points out that we suffered many hardships but that we didn't experience the real horrors that the people in the concentration camps suffered. Had we been deported, we would certainly have gone to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Babies and children, and their mothers, were taken straight to the death camps and murdered. The mothers weren't taken to labor camps because the Germans figured they wouldn't be of much use after their children were taken away from them. Only strong looking teenagers, young people, and middle aged men were taken to labor camps. Because she escaped deportation, she didn't suffer from starvation, or see her loved ones torn away from her before her very eyes. For that she is very grateful. What we suffered most is loss; loss of family, loss of home, loss of a way of life.

My mother, my grandmother, and I were born in the same town, in the same house, and were delivered by the same midwife. My mother was born in Czechoslovakia, my grandmother was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and I was born in Hungary. Today it is Russia.

My mother was born Sura Malka Vogel, on August 31, 1923, in Kralove Na Tisza, in an area known as Ruthenia. The town lies south of the Carpathian Mountains, on the river Tisza, in Eastern Europe. To the north, above the mountain range, is Poland; to the east is Russia; to the south Rumania; to the southwest Hungary; to the west Czechoslovakia. Like many other territories in that area, it was like a football, and was passed around to all of the above countries except Poland and Rumania. Before World War I, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and after that war, it became part of Czechoslovakia. Later, in 1939, after the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, it became part of Hungary and was called Kiralyhaza. Today it is part of the USSR. I don't know the name of the town in Russian. I have never found it on any of the maps I have looked at.

Both the Hungarian and Czech names of the town mean , 'the king's house, or castle' and reflect the presence of the ruins of a king's castle that were there. The children of the town used to play at the ruins, and for many generations, the Jewish children, including my mother, used to play there especially on 'Shabbos' afternoons. They called the king who used to live there 'Dobje, Dobje' (goody, goody), which probably means he was a saint somebody or other.

Kiralyhaza was a small town, with a population of at most three or four thousand people, which included a few hundred Jewish families. There were many even smaller towns and villages all around. The area was not industrialized and was fairly backward compared to the Bohemian part of Czechoslovakia.

Lucy Davidowicz, in The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945", describes the area as follows: "Slovakia was poorer and far less industrialized than the historic crown provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, and so were its Jews. They were engaged mostly in retail trade and handicrafts, servicing the peasantry.

The small segment of well-to-do Jews spoke Hungarian and were assimilated, maintaining religious congregations of a somewhat lukewarm character. Most other Jews were highly traditional, among whom Hasidic rebbes enjoyed huge followings.

During the life of the Czechoslovak Republic, Jews enjoyed full civic and religious rights, even though anti-Semitism, particularly among the predominantly peasant population, was widespread."*(page 378)

Since Kiralyhaza was a railroad junction, many railroad workers and officials came down from Czechoslovakia when it became part of their territory. They were quite well educated, while the rest of the population consisted of peasants and small landowners of the various nationalities in that area. Agriculture was the main occupation of the general population, but the Jews were mainly engaged in business and trade. Not all the Jews were prosperous and quite a few were very poor. There were two doctors in town, one Czech and one Jewish, and they were the only people who had cars. The rest of the people traveled by horse and wagon, or by train for longer trips. The one banker in town was Jewish.

There was one main street running down the center of town

and it was the only street in town with a sidewalk. There were stores on both sides of the street and one of those stores was the one owned by our family. Many of the stores were owned by Jews, but there was also a large government store, something like a PX or company store, that had lower prices for food for the many Czech railroad workers and officials who lived there.

My grandparents were Shiya [Yehoshua] and Mariam Vogel [nee Drummer]. They were very Orthodox, Chassidic Jews, as were many of the orthodox Jews in Hungary and Slovakia. Shiya Vogel had studied at the Yeshiva of the Satmarer Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, before he married his first wife, Malka Vogel. Malka gave birth to two children, Mendel Wolf, a boy, in 1920, and Rivka, a girl, in 1921. Malka died giving birth to Rivka, and Shiya then married Mariam, Malka's youngest sister, in 1922. The following year, my mother Sura Malka, Mariam's first child, was born.

As my mother recalls, "Malka. I'm named after her. I'm Sura Malka. They added my great grandmother's name because she was a 91 year old lady [when she died], and it was a custom to give another name [when the person had died young]."

Mariam gave birth to six more children in the following years. A boy, David, was born about 1925, and died at the age of five after an operation for a neurological disorder. There followed Feigi, a girl, in 1927, Esther, a girl, about 1929, Chaya, a girl, about 1930, who died at a few months of age, Chana, a girl, born about 1932, and Yitele, a girl, born about 1934.

"There was in between Chana and Esther, was a little girl, Chaya, I can't recall exactly. She was an infant, she died a few months old.

Which one was the one that was very sick? JUDY

Chanele.

When did she die? JUDY

She lived, but she was affected by the sickness. I'm not sure what it was. It was something like that little boy Dovid. I can't recall. They did surgery on Duvid and he didn't survive the surgery. It was something in the head. He didn't hold his head straight. Neurological impairment.

"They did surgery on her?"

"No. They did surgery on Dovid and he didn't survive. He didn't hold his head straight. And Chanele started out with very similar symptoms, but she survived, but she was left impaired like him. She was reading sideways, holding books like this, and she was cross eyed. But otherwise she was normal."

Also living with the Vogel family were Mariam's parents, Avrohom and Yenta Gitel Drummer. "My great grandparents were born in Satmar from my mother's side. My father's side was born in Poland, Rachov, over the Carpathian border. And he was, my father was learning with the 'Satmarer Rav'in Tarna, and that's how he got to Kiralyhaza and my aunt." The Rebbe had a Yeshiva in the town of Tarna, Rumania, about halfway between Kiralyhaza and Satmar.

It was customary for Chassidic parents to go to a Yeshiva and ask the Rebbe's advice about picking a husband for their daughter from one of the better students. The richer the family, the better choice they had. This may sound crass, but circumstances were such that it was practical. Jews were restricted in many ways from earning a living and it was very important for a girl to have a dowry in the form of money or a family business. Those families that had one or the other, or both, had the pick of the better students.

This was a normal Jewish family living in a small town in Eastern Europe. The life of the family revolved around their business, a general store with an emphasis on textiles. The store had been started by Mariam's parents Avrohom and Yenta Gitel. While my mother was growing up, her mother ran the store, but the whole family worked there whenever they were available. Her father studied Talmud as much a possible, but he also did the bookkeeping for the store, and helped out when necessary. The children, when not in school, and the grandparents when well, also helped. The children went to school till eighth grade, as that was compulsory, but school was just half a day, and the rest of the day the children who were old enough worked in the store.

When my mother began attending school, the town was Czech, and she learned the Czech language and Czech history. However, her first grade was spent in a Ukrainian school because at first the Jewish children weren't allowed in the Czech schools. They had separate schools for Jewish and non Jewish children. That changed after the first grade and she finished the eighth grade in a Czech school that had both Jewish and non-Jewish children. So she spoke some Ukrainian, fluent Czech and fluent Hungarian. Yiddish was spoken at home.

"When did you go to Russian school?"

"First grade. And then we had Russian customers, and we had Russian girls who were our maids, and we had Russian neighbors, and we went to Russians for milk. They were a population, a Russian population."

"So you were speaking the language. First grade you learnt Ukrainian.

"Read and write."

Then in second grade you went to Czech [school]. You never went to Hungarian school."

"No. With the Hungarians I wasn't going to school."

"But you knew Hungarian?"

"Yes. I started to read and write Hungarian because, books, magazines, that's all we had already. So I wrote, and read, and movies, everything was Hungarian."

"In Kosice what did they speak, Czech?"

"Slovakian and Hungarian."

"Slovakian, what kind of language is that?"

"It's a part of- a different Czech."

"A Czech dialect."

"A peasant Czech. In Carpathia we had Czechs came down. They occupied, the Czechs, they brought down from Czechen, from Sudeten, they brought down to Carpathia a lot of Czechs, officials, and teachers, and railroad workers."

"So you spoke Czech also."

"In school. And I had friends, Czech. I went to Czech schools."

"So you spoke all those languages."

"All my classes in school, you know, I went to school, was Czech. So my best language was Czech at the time. I spoke a perfect Czech, without an accent. Jewish children, some of them, they never mastered it. It's a difficult language. I spoke a perfect Czech, without any accent- Hungarian also very well but Czech even better. I had a richer vocabulary in Czech."

Mariam, my grandmother, was a very good business woman, and she had greatly expanded the textile portion of the business. Originally, the store had been a general store selling food, textiles, and other goods. They sold or bartered, not just with the townspeople, but with customers from Rumania and Hungary as well. Their town was on the border of the three countries and they did a flourishing trade with the peasants and country folk of that whole area.

Their store was on the main street and was at the front of the house. In the back were the living quarters, which consisted of a large kitchen - family room, and two bed rooms. My mother's parents slept in one bedroom, and everyone else, including her grandparents, slept in the second bedroom, sharing beds when necessary. The maids slept in the kitchen.

The house had electricity but no running water. There was an outhouse in the back yard, and a well with a pump in the next back yard. The yard in back was very large, about a half an acre, and had fruit trees and a big vegetable garden. My mother remembers tearing out fresh radishes from the garden, and eating them with fresh bread, butter, and salt, or picking fresh corn to be eaten right away. She had a very healthy appetite and disliked the cats that were kept around the house to dispose of mice, because they were always getting into the pantry and eating up the food stored there, even if it was covered with heavy covers.

A brook ran down the length of one side of the yard, past the house and under the main street, where it was covered over with a bridge. In winter when it froze over, my mother and her friends used to tie pieces of wood on their shoes and go ice skating on the brook. On the other side of the yard were a series of tall storage sheds facing another line of sheds on the next property. Between the sheds was a narrow alley.

The family also owned the house right next door, on the side of the storage sheds. This house also had a store, on the side, and two additional rooms. It was a more modern house, and it was rented out till my mother was about twelve years old, when the family needed larger quarters. Part of the family moved in to the two rooms of the second house, while they continued to rent out the store to two sisters, Shari and Serena Speigel. Shari Spiegel was a very good cook, and when my mother became interested in learning how to cook, she used to run in to Shari to ask her how to do this, and how to cook that. The sisters sold hats and trimmings in that store until 1939 when they left for America. After they left, their older sister Roszie took over the store for a year, but she was forced by the authorities to return to her home in a nearby town. When she left, my mother took over the hat store and ran it for about a year and a half, till she got married. We met Serena [now known as Shirley] again in America, many years later, in about 1952.

Kiralyhaza had a fairly large Jewish community, and the Vogel family was prosperous and well respected in the town, by Jews and non-Jews alike. They lived very simply, even though they were well off financially. Perhaps they felt they would need a lot of money for dowries for the six girls in the family. My mother has very fond memories of life there. She says it was a small town, where everybody knew everybody, and everybody cared for everybody. It was like a 'shtetel', and "Even friends and family were extended family. You were never bored or lonely". She tells me that she misses it to this day.

My grandfather Shiya was a very well liked and respected man in the community. He had a very nice voice and often 'davened' (prayed) before the congregation. My mother told me that once some cousins were on their way to the nearby town of Tarna for 'shabbos', but they got stuck in Kiralyhaza because it was too late to get there before sundown. So they stayed at my grandparent's house for 'shabbos'. Afterwards, they said it had been worth spending 'shabbos' in Kiralyhaza in order to hear my grandfather 'daven'.

He was also trusted and very much liked by the customers of the store, most of whom were non-Jewish. He did all the bookkeeping and helped out in the store when they were very busy. They sold a lot on credit and often when their customers couldn't pay their bills right away, either because they were short in money, or because of mortgage payments for land or houses they had acquired, he would extend credit to them for five or six months. When he finally presented them with a bill, they would pay it without checking, because they trusted him so completely. Because of his kindness and wisdom, his advice was sought by Jews and non-Jews alike, even though he was not a Rebbe.

My mother describes my grandmother Mariam as a slim, erect, and very charming woman. She was very astute in business matters, but not very interested in the domestic side of running a house. She didn't spend much time with the young children, or in cleaning or cooking. She left the rearing of the children to her mother, Yenta Gitel, and the housekeeping to the maids. As a child, my mother's greatest wish was to get her mother's love and attention. She didn't really achieve that till she was in her teens, when she became very close to her mother.

One time my mother, who rarely got sick, saw a friend of her's being pampered by her mother because she said she had a headache, or she wasn't feeling well. My mother decided to pretend that she was sick, so maybe her mother would take some notice of her. It didn't work. As long as she was well, the 'babbe' (grandmother), Yenta Gitel, was the one who took care of the babies. She was the one who got up in the middle of the night with the crying babies and rocked the cradles.

Unfortunately, when my mother was about nine or ten years old, the 'Babbe' slowly began to become senile. From the description of her symptoms, it may be that she had Alzheimer's Disease, but of course it's hard to know at this point. At the end, she became quite demented and among other things, she used to run out naked into the street. It was sad to see such a kind, charitable woman come to such a sad end. Till she became ill, every Thursday night she used to send the children to poor families, to give them flour, candles, and sugar, for Shabbos, and she used to send 'nepht' to light the lamp of a poor old man who sat and learned. The family never considered sending her away, and Avrohom, her husband, used to take care of her, dress her, and feed her, till the very end. Unfortunately, he lived into his eighties and was deported with the rest of the family. She died shortly before I was born and I was named after her.

My mother was a bit of a tomboy in her childhood. She liked to climb trees and roofs, and ride bicycles. She had a large German shepherd dog that lived in the back yard. She had that dog until she was about fifteen years old, when she had to give it up, because boys would stop and talk to her about the dog, and her father felt that wasn't proper for a religious girl. She also liked to read a lot, and in order to get privacy and read undisturbed, she used to go to the alley behind the house and shimmy up the walls between the storage sheds with her hands and feet, to get up on the roof. She showed her friends and sisters this place but the grownups never knew about it. She was independent, sturdy, and rarely sick.

One of the stories she liked to tell me was how when she was about seven, she and her friend Blanca, who was about two years older, decided to go for a swim in the river Tisza. It was a hot summer day, and people used to go swimming in the river. But their parents wouldn't allow them to go swimming because it isn't proper for religious men and women, or girls and boys, to appear in bathing suits and to go swimming together. Therefore, they didn't know how to swim. But that didn't deter them. They decided they would go far out of town, where no one could see them, and they would go swimming. My mother's younger sister Feigi heard them talking and wanted to go along, but they didn't want to take her. However, when she threatened to tell on them, they decided to take her along also. Blanca's younger sister, who was my mother's age, also came along, and by the time they were ready to go, they consisted of a group of about seven young children, ages four to nine, going out for a swim

On the way out of town, they passed a family that knew them well, and asked them where they were going. They replied, no place in particular. But the people saw that they were going in the direction of the river, figured that they were up to no good, and ran back and told my mother's parents. The children reached a deep part of the river, near a windmill that was turning a water wheel, and they decided this was a good place to stop, "Here we're going to swim". They took off their clothes, and were ready to go into the river in their underwear. Of course no one knew how to swim! Just as they were ready to enter the water, her parents came running and stopped them. My mother said, "If we would have walked in, we wouldn't walk out again". She got a good spanking for that one. Her father took her on his knee and started to 'potch' (spank), but after a few smacks, her grandmother came to her rescue.

Another time, not long after, they decided to go on a picnic. Lots of people used to go to the mountains for a picnic, but her parents and Blanca's parents had no time for that. So the same group decided to go themselves. "I felt like to go picnicking too." There was a salt mine in the mountains, and they decided they would go there for their picnic. So they walked, very far, all the way up the mountain to the other side, to the salt mine. In order to get there, they had to cross a deep river, which had only a log over it to serve as a bridge. It was very dangerous of course. They made it there and could have returned another way, a much easier route, but they decided to go back the way they came, back over the log over the river.

By now it was getting very late, and it started to get dark, and they started to get tired, and they got lost. My mother had taken off her shoes because of the rough terrain and lost them. That was pretty serious, because you only got one pair of shoes a year, at Pesach time, and that had to last you till the next year. Their feet were scratched up, they were hungry, tired, scared. It was near midnight. They were too tired to walk any further, so they sat down and started to cry.

Finally, they heard voices calling them. A whole expedition of parents and neighbors was out looking for them. In exasperation, her father said, "Voos vet auf vacksen foon dir?" (What's going to grow up from you, or what's going to become of you?) My mother said she felt very bad about what he said. That hurt her more than the spanking she got. "Again my grandmother came to the rescue. My father never hit us strongly, or in the face, or back, just 'tsvei, drei, petch offen tuches (two, three, smacks on the behind)."

Her last major adventure took place when she was about nine. Blanca told my mother that they should go to the church fair. There were going to be a lot of booths and some of the booths were selling gingerbread cookies with icing. She said she knew how they could steal some of the cookies. So the two of them went, and filled up their school knapsacks with ill-gotten gingerbread cookies. One of the customers from my mother's store recognized them and saw what they were doing. My mother and Blanca realized that they had been seen, and they were afraid to go home. So they hid under the bridge that ran over the main street, over the brook which ran along the back of my mother's house. They could climb down there because usually, in summer, it was dry under there, though full of rocks and dirt.

It got late and everyone was looking for them. They could hear the voices of the people above them, looking for them, but they were afraid to come out. Finally they came out because it was very dark, and the rats were running around, and they decided they were more afraid of the rats than their parents. She got her usual justly deserved punishment.

As she reached adolescence my mother calmed down. She began to feel concerned that the younger children, and the house, were being neglected, because of her mother's absorption in the business. Her grandmother was getting senile, and at the age of twelve or thirteen, on her own initiative, my mother began to cook, and to bake, to clean the house, to help with the younger children, and in general, to try to improve the standard of housekeeping. Cooking and baking meant preparing meals for twelve or thirteen people every day, including baking about thirty pounds of bread and challah a week, making her own noodles, and preparing all the food from scratch. There were always one or two maids in the house to do the housework, but my mother says that they didn't do much without proper supervision.

One of her great achievements at that time was learning to braid the Challah with six plaits, by watching her grandmother. Her grandmother couldn't do it slowly to show her because she would get confused, so my mother had to pick up the skill by watching her. She was very proud of her accomplishment. We checked up on her recently, and she can still do it today.

So she grew up happily, normally, placidly, in a small town in Eastern Europe. As a child, I remember her telling me, ironically, how glad she had been at that time that she had been born in that modern day and age, when the terrible stories she had heard about the plight of the Jews in the past, couldn't happen again.