The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘The pain was physical. And unspeakable’
FROM THE BEGINNING, all my brothers and sisters looked up to me. I liked being in charge, taking responsibility. And later, that helped us all.
In December 1923, when I was born, one in eight of the population of Bonyhád in Western Hungary (nearly 7,000), was Jewish. When my great-great-grandparents were growing up there a century earlier, before all faiths had equal rights in Hungary, a third of the town were Jews.
My father died when I was 18 and my mother Anyuka (Hungarian for mummy) depended on me. My brother Imi was nearly a year younger and my next sister, René, was two years younger. After her came Piri, born in 1929, then Bela, our other brother, and Berta was still a babe-in-arms.
We weren’t the wealthiest family, and there was nothing grand about our house, but we wanted for nothing. The wide, treelined streets held no dangers: there were few strangers and only one car in the whole town, a taxi service that took people to Bonyhád’s own small railway station. Otherwise it was all horses and donkeys, carriages or carts, and sleighs.
On the most special days of all – birthdays and holy days – I was allowed to wear my golden angel necklace. The pendant was simple: a golden disc with a tiny thoughtful cherub hanging from a chain, chin cupped in hand, eyes raised wistfully. I discovered recently that my cherub was copied from an Italian painting – one of the baby angels in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. My mother kept my pendant in a box in her wardrobe. Wearing it was a great treat that made me feel special.
MARCH 1944
It started with a curfew. We couldn’t leave our house between six in the evening and seven the next morning. Two days later we were sewing yellow stars on to our clothing, and my brother and sisters started to hear the word yidlach at school. Yids. Some of the boys began to pick fights with Jewish children.
When the order came to leave our house for the ghetto, we had maybe an hour’s notice. There was fear but not much panic, because we understood so little of what was happening. Imi ran to our mother’s bedroom and rescued a few pieces of jewellery, including my treasured cherub necklace.
He had the good sense to bring a few tools with him [and] as soon as we were in our quarto ters [in the ghetto], he carefully prised off the hard layer of leather on the heel of our mother’s shoe, and chiselled away at the next layer to make a tiny hiding place. Then he pushed the jewellery inside, completely out of sight.
I don’t think Imi ever intended this as an insurance policy. [The necklace wasn’t expensive.] He simply knew I loved the pendant, that I wouldn’t want it to fall into the hands of any stranger.
MAY 1944
Imi and 21 other teenage boys were handed over to a local paramilitary commander. We had no idea where they were taken. ‘Don’t worry,’ they told us as we left Bonyhád. ‘It’s temporary. You’ll be back.’ How gullible we were.
Our first train journey took all night. They let us out at Pécs and we were marched to a transit camp, already heaving with thousands of people, wretched and degraded, sleeping on straw in filthy stables, like animals. The experience was bewildering.
The guards told us that the young people would work and the old people would stay at home and look after the children. We believed their lies. Three-quarters or more of the Jews in Hungary had already been exterminated. But we knew nothing of this.
JULY 1944
With every change in our situation, the pretence slipped a little further. It became less and less worth hiding what lay ahead. Or maybe the cruelty was deliberate, designed start the process of dehumanisation.
We were taken, in huge numbers, towards the freight yard at Pécs station, not to trains but windowless goods wagons. Ours was already crammed with people. We were pushed in, crushed into the bodies. There was no air [and we were] overwhelmed by the smell. Human excrement, sweat and terror and vomit, fresh and stale at once. You had to fight for each breath. I had never felt such panic. I held on tightly to René’s and Piri’s hands.
Anyuka gave nothing away about her own fears but she must have had some kind of premonition, because she suddenly said, ‘Lily, maybe we should change shoes.’ She was already untying her laces. I didn’t ask questions. I remembered that my brother Imi had hidden our jewellery in the heel but I was in too much shock from the journey to think about the significance of the exchange.
The truth is that if they had told us exactly where we were going, we would never have believed it. Even up to the very last moment when the door of the goods wagon opened for the last time, we could not contemplate the idea that we could be taken anywhere other than to work. There are some things the human mind cannot take in. You cannot fear the worst if you cannot imagine it.
On 9 July, the train suddenly slowed and stopped. [Outside was] an enormous colourless place with huge fences. You could see things moving but they didn’t seem human. Figures without hair, moving rocks. It looked like a madhouse. Suddenly a man [wearing] white gloves and a peaked hat gestured [at us] with his stick. My mother and Bela and Berta were sent left. I was sent right, René and Piri too. So fast we couldn’t exchange a single word. That was it. Over.
I couldn’t tell you exactly when I knew for certain that I would never see my mother again. That Bela and Berta were lost to us forever. I never spoke of it with René or Piri. It was a slow and painful realisation. The pain was physical. And unspeakable.
AUGUST 1944
[Our bodies] started to shut down quickly. Not one of the three of us had a period in Auschwitz. We were too thin. Or perhaps it was shock. We ceased to see our bodies. We could never look at our own faces. Hunger took over everything, a feeling so intense I cannot describe it. Everything we wore became more ragged. My mother’s shoes were not made for so much work. When the heels began to wear, there was little I could do. My secret was falling out of its hiding space.
There was one place I knew my necklace would be safe. What did every captive guard as closely as their lives? Their piece of bread. We watched over every crumb
and we nibbled it only when absolutely necessary. You didn’t want to finish one piece until you could be absolutely sure there would be another. I always kept a small piece of bread on me, tucked into my armpit to keep it safe. After my shoes had worn out, that bread contained my necklace. Each evening, I’d push it inside the new hunk, and at last eat the old.
In October 1944, Lily and her sisters were moved to a work camp, Altenburg, where they worked in a factory, making ammunition. Then, in January, Soviet forces advanced across occupied Poland.
APRIL 1945
It was a Thursday and my sisters and I were in work [when] the factory doors suddenly flew open. ‘The Americans are too close. We’re leaving. Mach schnell! Make it quick!’ The gates were unlocked and out we marched. The sudden release was extraordinary. Our spirits lifted. Did that mean our lives might be preserved?
We didn’t know that for months already, walking corpses had been driven from place to place across the shrinking Reich. After the war these terrible journeys became known as the ‘death marches’. Up to a quarter of the [prisoners] were killed in this process, if not in massacres and executions then by exposure, exhaustion or starvation.
We had no food. No water. Our footwear was useless. I’d been binding our feet in rags for months already, trying to keep our shoes wearable. Some girls went barefoot. It soon became clear that there would be no mercy – if anyone lagged behind for a moment, they were shot. Marching, marching, marching. No thinking. Half sleeping. We were so empty. So exhausted. All the time, people dying on the road. But we had got so far. We had survived so much. We had to keep going. I refused to let my sisters stop.
Then on 13 April, four bombs exploded very close to us. The ground shook. Sirens screeched. Someone suddenly gasped: ‘They’ve gone!’ We looked around. Our guards had vanished and we were entirely alone. What had happened?
Within moments, coming out of the clouds of dust, military tanks appeared with American flags. That was one of the happiest days of our lives. We were free.
By this time only a few hundred of us remained. We stood and stared at the men. And they stared at us, just as bewildered. They didn’t have the faintest idea what had happened to us. We were unrecognisable as human beings. Emaciated creatures, filthy, hollow-eyed, half-crazed with relief and disbelief. Hands like claws. Our skin stretched over the bones of our faces, and even when we smiled, it was probably hard to distinguish from a grimace.
We had no way to communicate but we could see they all wanted to help us. I didn’t know if I wanted food or sleep more. I just wanted everything to stop.
AFTER THE LIBERATION
Lily’s liberation took place in Pfaffroda, a village in Saxony, 5km from the Czech border. American soldiers looked after the survivors for a few weeks, then Lily and her sisters were billeted with a German family, until they were transferred to Buchenwald, the former concentration camp, which was repurposed to accommodate Jewish survivors. They heard that the Swiss government had offered to give shelter to hundreds of Jewish child survivors.
There were no Nazis there now – only refugees, like us – and we entered Buchenwald freely. They called us ‘displaced persons’. For the time being, the American troops were running the camp, and there was a rabbi there, Rabbi Schacter, to look after us.
In mid-june, a nurse from the Swiss Red Cross arrived to oversee who would be allowed on transport. If she accepted you, she stamped a card and that was the ticket that would get you on to the train to Switzerland. Maybe because we three were so small, she believed it when I told her we were all under 16. We got our stamps.
That must have been when the rabbi’s assistant came to say goodbye to us. He was a young man from New York, about my age. He had a strong face, very kind eyes. ‘Well, this is it,’ he said [in Yiddish], smiling. ‘Soon you can start again.’
The American soldiers had been so kind to us. We had been with them for only a short time, but what a difference they had made. [I thanked him.] ‘You’re welcome. Now, just a minute,’ he said. He took out a pen and felt in his pockets. ‘I’m sure I’ve got some paper… Ah! Here we are!’ Then he laughed. Instead of paper, he’d pulled out a
‘We were unrecognisable as human beings. Filthy, holloweyed, half-crazed with relief’
banknote. It was special military currency: an Alliierte Militärbehörde 10-mark note. I’d never seen one before.
He wrote 10 words on it: ‘A start to a new life. Good luck and happiness.’ Then he signed it: ‘Assistant to Chaplain Schacter.’ And he tried to write his name in funny Hebrew letters. Neither of us knew Hebrew well, but it was a symbol of our shared faith and understanding.
His gift was so heartfelt and personal. It was the first spontaneous human kindness we’d experienced for a long time. I thanked him and put the banknote away carefully. This was something I knew I’d keep forever, a reminder, after all the cruelty we’d endured, that people could be compassionate. There was some hope and humanity left in the world.