My family’s forgotten Holocaust victims
I’m mourning to remember that it can happen again
In 2008 when I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, I looked up my mother’s maiden name in its Shoah victims database.
When Hitler marched into Vienna in 1938, my mother, who was raised Catholic, fled with her parents to England, where they split up. It was safer that way. My mother was 10 years old. My grandfather, a historian, never told my mother about his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism or about her own prominent Jewish family in Hungary — the ones he left behind.
The database query returned the name Richard Engel de Jánosi, a great uncle I had never heard of, on a list of murdered persons who died in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria in 1944.
The archivist said I was the first person to ever request information about him. She told me I was responsible for him now, explaining the importance of remembering the dead in Judaism. I must remember him to honor him properly. She gave me a form to fill out and return called a Page of Testimony, so others could remember him, too.
I took the form and considered this assignment. What could be gained by digging up old history? As my mother likes to say, the past is past.
Two years later, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to teach at the university in Pécs, the Hungarian town where Richard had lived. My husband and son came, too. For five months, we embraced the culture and attempted to learn the language. Through research and interviews with those who knew him, I pieced together Richard’s life.
Richard studied and worshiped in the school and synagogue his grandfather built. He fought for Hungary in World War I, and when he came home, he fell in love with a woman named Theresia. His father would not allow them to marry because she was Catholic, so they continued to love in secret.
As new laws were announced barring Jews from stores, universities then finally work of any kind, most of my family decided to wait it out. It’s too crazy, after all. Who would listen to this ridiculous tyrant Hitler, a fool?
On March 19, 1944, SS officers arrested Richard in front of his house. They loaded him into a cattle car with hundreds of other Hungarian Jews, sending them to Mauthausen concentration camp. It was raining that day. Richard was number 64240. Reason for deportation: “Jude.” Jew.
Once at Mauthhausen, he stopped eating, and there is a line drawn through his name on a document dated April 30, 1944. He had been there five days.
Before we left Hungary, we took the train from Pécs to Mauthausen, searching for a sacred place to recite the mourner’s Kaddish for Richard. Then we realized Mauthausen, like every other death camp, is already sacred.
There is an ordinary kind of forgetting and a special kind. My grandfather never wanted his daughter to know her Jewish roots. He wanted her to assimilate and be safe. But when my grandfather buried his own heritage, he buried Richard’s memory as well.
We’re told it can’t happen again. I don’t believe that anymore. While I researched Richard, I passed Jewish cemeteries spray-painted with swastikas. I sat stunned in Richard’s synagogue in Pécs, seeing the words “boil soap out of Jews” scratched into the wood with a ball point pen.
Trump ally and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declares his aim is to preserve Hungary’s “Christian culture.” In 2012, a member of the Hungarian parliament demanded a list of Jews be drawn up, as they were a threat to national security. And last weekend, in only the latest of a string of anti-Semitic attacks, a gunman opened fire in a synagogue in a suburb of San Diego.
It can happen again. Maybe it has already started.
I mailed the Page of Testimony to Yad Vashem in Israel. Now the details of Richard’s life appear in the database of Shoah victims, among the million others, remembered and mourned in the Hall of Names.