Erasing hate and replacing it with love
More than 350 people listen to Sarkany’s story of survival, success
At age 7, Endre “Andy” Sarkany watched as the SS, wearing black boots and black uniforms with swastikas on their arms, marched in Hungary in 1944.
They screamed “Heil Hitler” as people cheered by the thousands.
More than seven decades later, Sarkany says he has not forgotten the horror.
Sarkany, an 83-year-old Holocaust survivor who now lives in New Haven, told his story to an audience of more than 350 people Tuesday evening at the University of Connecticut’s Avery Point campus in Groton.
Sarkany, who immigrated to the United States in 1956, recalled his shock in 2017 when he watched the news on TV of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Va. He saw the same swastika and heard the same words he witnessed when he was 7 years old in Hungary, he said.
He further cited incidents of anti-Semitism over the past two years, including in Pittsburgh, Pa., Monsey, N.Y., and California.
“The word hate causes all the evils,” Sarkany said. “It did in the past, it is doing today, and it will do in the future.”
He recommended people erase the word permanently from their vocabulary and replace it “with another four-letter word called love.”
He said love, kindness, caring, stability, honor and respect have real meaning, and he tells the students he speaks to about the Holocaust that if they look up those words in the dictionary and understand their meaning, they will have a wonderful life and be successful.
Sarkany, who was born in Budapest, showed photos to the audience and recounted stories, such as when he was called a “dirty Jew” while walking to school at age 7. His father disappeared after a Nazi came into the family’s apartment and dragged him away to go to a forced labor camp, he said.
He showed the audience a photo of his mother and father happily standing side by side in a village in 1940, contrasted with one of his father holding his hands up in a line in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944.
Jews were rounded up systematically in Hungary. After their information was processed at a collection area, they were shoved into cattle cars “like sardines,” with no food or water, and shipped to various death camps, with most Hungarians ending up at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sarkany said.
He showed how the Hungarian government required every Jewish person to wear a yellow star so they were always identified.
In September 1944, Sarkany said he was playing outside with other kids in the Jewish ghetto in Budapest where he lived, when he fell down and his head started to bleed. His kindergarten teacher, Rose, told his mother she would take
“The word hate causes all the evils. It did in the past, it is doing today, and it will do in the future.” ENDRE ‘ANDY’ SARKANY, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
care of him. Rose, a Catholic woman who never married, removed the yellow star from Sarkany’s jacket and told him to hold her hand and walk with her.
When they arrived at the gate of the Jewish ghetto, a guard yelled to Rose to show her identification and asked what she was doing there as a non-Jewish person, Sarkany said. Rose very calmly replied that her husband died and she is a single mother with no other place to go. The guard let them through the gate, and Rose walked him to the hospital for care, and they safely returned.
“I cannot be more grateful, and the first time I went back to Hungary, the first person I visited was Rose,” Sarkany said. “I hugged her. I kissed her, and I said, ‘Rose, there are no words or no deeds can thank you for saving my life.’”
In 1945, Sarkany’s father returned from the camp. Sarkany ran and hugged and kissed him, but couldn’t recognize his own father: he weighed about 70 pounds, all skin and bones, and was physically, mentally and emotionally destroyed, Sarkany said. Many nights, Sarkany was woken up by his father’s screaming. Sarkany’s mother nursed her husband back to health, and his father eventually was able to rebuild his business.
Sarkany further told the story of living through the brutality of Soviet communism.
He said when the communists took over, his father lost his license and was told he had to go work for the government.
Sarkany wanted to go to university after high school but was rejected and ended up going to trade school. He said a letter from the government referenced an “undesirable element of society.” Sarkany said his father was labeled a capitalist. The second strike against him was that everybody knew he was Jewish, and the third strike was that his parents were poor.
When Soviets returned with tanks and troops in November 1956, after the Hungarian Revolution, Sarkany decided to leave the country, he said.
He traveled from Budapest to Vienna, Austria, where he reached the American Embassy
and was declared a Hungarian refugee and obtained documents to come to the United States of America, he said.
Sarkany said that when he glimpsed, on a cloudy, snowy day, the Statue of Liberty as the ship approached the United States, he started to cry because it represents freedom.
He pointed to the quote from Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
“I am working in this country for 63 years and contributing, and we’re all contributing, so cherish all the immigrants who are coming and doing their best to build this country to higher levels,” Sarkany said.
Sarkany is married and has two children and five grandchildren. He graduated from Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tenn., in 1961 and became a triathlon competitor from 2015 to 2017.
Sarkany said he is talking about the Holocaust to educate both the young and old, at a time when anti-Semitism is growing. He said there are many Holocaust deniers both in the United States and around the world, those who call the Holocaust “a hoax,” even though millions of pieces of documents in archives around the world prove it happened.
“It’s true what the Nazis did, so we cannot deny it,” he said.
In 2019, he spoke to more than 80 schools and groups. Tuesday’s event was sponsored by Mystic Oil Co. and Mystic and Noank Library, along with UConn-Avery Point and the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut, said Erik Caswell, adult services librarian at Mystic and Noank Library. Mystic Oil President Peter Zelken approached the library about holding the event, which eventually was moved to Avery Point to accommodate a larger crowd.
During the event, Sarkany shared the quote from Elie Wiesel: “Whoever listens to a witness, becomes a witness.”
“I am a witness and I am talking to you, so you became a witness,” he told the audience.