New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Intertwining tragedies
A murder opens the door to a deeper story for Trumbull author
Peter Vadas found the wooden crate in a crawl space beneath the Canadian lakefront cottage in 2010. It was nailed tightly shut.
Inside were the dismembered remains of a young woman.
Peter called his sister, Deborah Vadas Levison of Trumbull, to tell her what had happened — he’d stumbled upon a murder.
“We were freaked out,” Levison says of her reaction, worried about the impact on her young children and elderly parents, Pista and Vera Vadas, who owned the vacation house a few hours north of their hometown of Toronto.
Levison says her parents “were traumatized. They had survived the Holocaust, found a sanctuary in Canada, and here was this evil right at their doorstep.” Her parents came from Hungary, separately surviving World War II and the Holocaust. In 1956, they escaped Communism together to freedom in the West. The police arrived at the cottage, turning it into a major crime scene. Canadian media quickly followed, taking photos and seeking interviews.
Levison’s brother was an initial suspect because he’d found the body. The dead woman was a mother of two children. And the Vadas family would know the man eventually arrested for the murder. “Every part of the story was a violation,” she says.
Levison, a former journalist who now works in public relations, has published “The Crate: A Story of War, a Murder and Justice,” about the murder and her parents’ lives.
The book goes back and forth between the two stories and how, as an adult child of Holocaust survivors, she learned the horror of what had happened to her parents in Hungary.
“The crate is literal as well as metaphorical,” says Levison, 54. “We opened this lid and all this horror came out.”
The police investigation lasted a year. Peter Vadas had to testify as a witness at the trial. “He’d call me every night and fill me in on the details,” she says.
When writing the book, she reached out to the victim’s family and interacted with the victim’s mother and sister. Levison wanted to tell the story of the young woman, who came from a family with limited means. “I thought I could be her voice,” she says.
Levison says the book’s overall themes include fate — whether things that happen are truly random — and similarities between the murder and her parents’ survival and journey. There are “so many parallels in the extreme violence that happened to the victim and my parents,” she says.
She communicated with the murder case lead detective, Dave Allen, when researching the book, and credits police with doing a good job. Now retired, Allen has praised the book. “Levison captured the accuracy of this real-life horror,” Allen wrote in a review.
Levison’s parents were both young when the Nazis occupied Hungary toward the end of World War II. Her mother survived in the Budapest ghetto. Her father was in a rural ghetto, used as forced labor and taken by cattle car to a transit camp, where Jews waited to be moved to concentration camps. Many of their older relatives were killed. “My parents never talked about this,” Levison says. “They seemed so fragile and I never wanted to ask something that would be painful to them.”
Later, her parents lived through more than a decade of communism, escaping to Austria by train, foot and hitching rides. “A series of miracles kept them from being caught,” Levison says. They arrived in Canada with no money or English-speaking skills, but through hard work and frugality built a new life and raised a family. They built the lakefront cottage as a refuge, partly from their haunted memories, and it’s where Levison spent her childhood summers. “It was very solitary,” she says.
Her father died in 2013 and her mother is now 88. Both shared their Holocaust experiences in videotaped interviews with the Spielberg Project.
“This is clearly close to my heart,” Levison says. “I feel a real sense of responsibility.”
“The crate is literal as well as metaphorical. We opened this lid and all this horror came out.”