Katie Preston's Journey Through the Holocaust- Part 2 of 3

Did the woman who hid you survive?

“Yes, they had found out I was not in the ghetto and they were looking for me.  She was okay, but if they had found me, she would have died, too.  “My father’s family were all taken to Auschwitz.   The Jews that were rounded up - first they were taken to the ghetto in the town and then the ghetto was emptied and they were taken by train to Auschwitz.  My mother was allowed to live.  My father was killed.  We were convinced that he would come back because he was a big strong man.  Of course, he wouldn’t leave me.  We found out [what happened to him] because the ‘deportees’ started coming back– the few that survived. 

“He wanted to come and say goodbye to me before they took him from the ghetto.  My mother managed to smuggle him out.  She bribed some people and smuggled him out. He was going to walk across the border to Romania which wasn’t far and escape,  and he said to my mother, “I’m going to see the child before I leave.”  You know I was very close to him.  I wanted to say good-bye and he wanted to explain that “I don’t just disappear.  I’m going to come back, but it might be a long time because of the war.”  My mother insisted, “Don’t!  It’s dangerous!”  He said, “It’s okay.  I’ll walk there at night.”  It’s a long way but he managed to walk all night.  Towards dawn, he got to the farm … and they were waiting for him.   They were all waiting for him.  They caught him and took him back to the ghetto.   The next day he was put on the train.

“My mother was devastated.  Before her conversion, she had been a church attending Catholic, and now she felt the need to seek her God.  She walked into a church during a sermon. The priest was preaching to the congregation telling them, “You must root out the Jews among you, every man, woman, and child.  It is your Christian duty.”  My mother stands up, approaches the pulpit, spits on the floor.  She never entered a church again for the rest of her life.

“We found out what happened when we went to the railway station when people started coming back.  A man came up to my mother.  You didn’t recognize any of these people. They looked like ghosts.   They had no hair; you couldn’t tell if they were men or women.  They were shuffling, and they smelled bad.  They had sores.  This man came up to my mother and said, “Don’t wait for him, he’s dead.”  She says, “What do you mean he’s dead- anyway, who are you?”  Turns out he was a friend of the family but she didn’t recognize him.   He told me later how he died.  He didn’t want my mother to know.  My father and another man from town stole a piece of bread because they were starving.   The camp commander decided to make an example of them, so they took the two men, stripped them naked, beat them half to death.  They put each of them into a dog kennel in this big field where everybody had to line up in the morning to be counted.  It was early spring. It was so cold.   It took him two days and a night to die.  And when I heard this as a child, I became so full of anger.  All I wanted was revenge.  I was almost obsessed with cruelty, you know I wanted to flay them alive, to skin them, to cut them into little pieces.  I was constantly talking and thinking about revenge.  My father’s family, all 28 of them, were killed.  There were 9 brothers and sisters, and wives and husbands and families.   A lot of people.   I remember they used to come to dinner, the table used to be four times as long as this and they were all around the table.  You know how families are.  This one isn’t talking to that one…and there was a lot of noise….   They’re all gone.  Every single one of them.

“I was hidden in that barn for three months.  Then the war broke out where we were and the Russians came.  Three months is a long time when you’re five.   When they came, I was able to leave the barn and go home to mother.  All the Jews were gone, and gleeful strangers had moved into their houses. It was strange not to see [my friend], Istvanka, or that old lady down the street walking her dog.  I was 5 when the world collapsed. 

“When the Russians came and we were under communism for a while, that wasn’t much fun either.  My mother was delighted when they came because they thought, oh well, they were liberators.  Yes, but they were raping all the women and so on.  They were not warm and fuzzy.  

“My mother was very resourceful.  She was a dressmaker, a very successful one before the war.  When the Russians came, she made a false wall in the bathroom in our house and all the women were hiding there and they were terrified because they were raping everybody.   So, my mother decided to take things in her hands and she decided to dress herself as an old woman because she was afraid of getting raped.  So, she blackened her teeth, drew lines on her face, and she put a pillow under the back of her dress, put on a long gray dress.  She put chalk in her hair, wore a scarf, took a cane and pretended to be a very old woman.   And put on gloves so her hands wouldn’t look too young and she walked to the local commander’s office.  And to her surprise the local commander was a young woman.  By this time, the Russians lost so many people that they were advancing young people and women to high positions.  And she said to this woman, through an interpreter, “Listen, come to my house, I’m a dressmaker I’ll make you look really beautiful. 

And so she came and my mother took one of the drapes that was still there and made her a dress and the woman was delighted.   And suddenly we had food -because we had been starving.  And there was food and everything but we still couldn’t go out. So, she got us guards  to look after us, two guards.  They were fine but they were drunk all the time.  My god did they drink!  They were always drunk, but they were happy drunks. And I liked them a lot because they taught me Russian dances and singing. The whole house was like a mad house.  It was fun.

“After the war, our part of Hungary became Romania.  I went to Romanian school.  The man who came to tell my mother that my father died, was a friend of the family who had a wife and child as well who perished.  He stayed with us and eventually we cobbled together a family out of the two broken families.  He became my stepfather - never my father, and I was never his daughter.”