Agnes Heller

we're rolling this is an interview with agnes heller conducted by claudia stevens on august let me switch this microphone [Music] this is an interview with agnes heller conducted by claudia stevens in blacksburg virginia on august 4th 2003 for the holocaust museum of virginia richmond virginia mrs heller could you please start out by stating your name and place of birth my name is agnes middle initial s for sekhali my maiden name heller and i was born in budapest hungary and uh how old are you now oh my you should have done this a about a week ago i just turned 70 my birthday is july 16th i was born in 1933 and how many languages do you speak i speak german hungarian i understand some french and some spanish but i'm fluent in german and hungarian and english do you feel that english is the language you're most comfortable with yes okay and we're going to begin by talking about the period before the holocaust began and can you tell us where you were then living and describe your your town and uh as much as you can remember about the particulars of your of your life at that time well as you realize i was pretty young i was 10 years old when the germans invaded hungary prior to we lived in budapest on the second floor of a town apartment in a very nice neighborhood and there was a school on the floor below us and i would always go for classes there my father was quite a prominent attorney and he had his office in the same apartment one wing of the apartment was his office and we generally had a lot of fun carefree carefree people so you lived in budapest and not in another town it was in the middle of budapest do you remember the street that it was on yes it was holland utsa killands that the street is holland translated into english number nine and was that in central budapest or one of the it's parallel to the danube um part and it's maybe one block from the saint stephen's um kurut you know budapest has these rings going round and round in the middle and downtown section and this is about one block from the kuru it's quite modern nice neighborhood so your memories are essentially happy of that period yes i didn't have any reason not to be were you in school yes yes i went to the school i went to the evangelical the i guess that's translated even evangelic i don't know how you translated what the equivalent not really because that sort of describes um maybe what the baptists are in this country no i would think it was it was more a church school but except for the fact that they did have classes for christians it was really non-sectarian and i had a lot of friends in that school some of them jewish friends yeah so there were jewish and non-jewish children all together yes yes and did you have religious instruction at that time excuse me did you have religious uh instruction too well it must have been that we had it but and we were probably excused from it but frankly i don't remember i just don't remember that too well i don't remember anything good about it if there was or anything bad about it but you were a little girl at the time yes and so you studied typical subjects in that school yes mathematics languages latin geometry i didn't have but i had algebra quite advanced and sports as well i don't recall if we had any sports i was a good gymnast i know i went to gymnastics class all the time as a private instruction for me and i skated but i don't remember that we had outdoor activities at all in the school and with your family do you remember taking trips uh in the countryside or doing particular things that you enjoyed having to do with travel or or the outdoors well you know in those days i think middle class and well-to-do families left their children at home with maids and servants and i had a german fry line who took care of me and my sister only traveling i remember having done was to go summers to my grandparents place in junius which is a small town about 80 kilometers northeast from budapest so this was a family home in before you your family came to budapest had they lived in that town my mother grew up there yes my father was from deer which is a fairly large town between budapest and vienna and i really didn't know his family very well i knew maybe one or two of his siblings we were very close with my mother's family and so you have memories of going to the grandparents yes yes now i understand that they they also had vineyards there yes can you tell about that well my grandfather from what i understand from stories had been a rag merchant at one time and couldn't make enough of a living and he started buying up land with a friend of his and to learn about growing grapes and his friend got a little scared about a venture that he really wasn't acquainted with from his own family's background and my grandfather just went ahead bought him out and kept increasing his holdings he became one of the largest wine merchants and winters of that county and was very well known he the whole family was actually in the business except for one uncle and he had price winning white wines that he exhibited at the paris fair now this is mostly hearsay of course when you were child did you go through the vineyards did you have a chance to to see the the operation yes not wanting to jump ahead but one of my favorite times was when jews could not go to school anymore then i was down there at my grandparents place it was september which is the harvest of the grapes and i was allowed to go to the vineyards and in fact i was allowed to hold the horses and ride back with the wagon and then go into the winemaking part of the house which was in the back in a separate building and tread the grapes so i do remember very well those times so a happy period of time yes and this was um during the period before 1944 we're talking about well this must have been i suppose very close to 1944 i guess 1943 september i don't really remember when it was that we weren't allowed to go to school anymore that's what i'm asking yeah must have been before because the nazi era really started the germans came march 19 1944 and after that we went had other things to do yes but before the nazis actually came there was also a period during which there were restrictions against the jews in place do you remember any anything of that touching you personally or that you saw this is the only thing i recall really okay do you remember you mentioned that you had friends who were not jewish and that you came from a prosperous family what did you have any experiences of anti-semitism from that time at all that you recall i really don't recall any of that happening at all most of my friends i think were jewish in the school but we did have other members in this class who were not jewish was was judaism part of your life as a girl or were you assimilated to a considerable degree well i really did not have a jewish education my mother's father my grandparents and genders were very devout and my grandfather in fact for many years was president of his synagogue he helped build the rebuild the temple after a tremendous fire that took place in the town many years prior but my parents did not practice going to temple no were you affiliated with the congregation not that i recall at all so you don't remember going on high holidays we did not so there was no religious sense that you had associated with being a jew no nothing we'll move ahead now to the period when the nazis when the germans came and can you tell us you've already told us when that occurred in march of 1944 and um you were then at that time how old well i was still 10 because my birthday was in july yes and where were you living at that time still in budapest the very same street yes and at that time do you remember any sudden occurrences or just describe in your own words what happened well i had been i had been to the beauty parlor for the first time of my life as i later risk discovered it couldn't have been on the very day that the nazis came because that was a sunday i found that out recently but i remember that we were in the beauty parlor and the plains roared into our capital and of course everything stopped they sent me home i couldn't have my very first hairdo finished and that's the most memorable thing about that very day and did you know it was happening oh yeah oh yes oh yes we knew well people talked about it you know panicking was there a sense of panic well i can't safely say that i remember that part but they did send me home and after that my parents did a lot of planning as to what they should be doing tell about that well my father having been so well known had a lot of friends among the lawyers and i suspect it was eventually i suspect it was dr harmony who saved my life that told him about the fact that he was on the shortlist for deportation among the attorneys of the town why was there a short list and how did your father's name get there do you think well anybody who was a prominent person was supposed to have been sent away so that they couldn't practice their profession and i don't think it was anything that he had done except that he was jewish and we heard about it from a friend and what happened was that um this friend recommended that since he always had ulcers and was never very well with his um digestion that he should check into a hospital and maybe avoid being sent away and that is exactly what he did and the crisis this particular crisis then passed and shortly after people had to start wearing the yellow stars our house was declared a safe house by raul wallenberg it became a swedish protection home and do you think that that was for a particular reason because of your father's connections oh no no it was they randomly picked houses so it was random yes we did not have papers from the swedish consulate i know my parents debated whether we should get any in which case we could stay in the apartment if we didn't get papers to protect us we had to move but they decided that my father was a pretty smart man and he decided that this wouldn't protect us enough and he decided we should go into hiding would you excuse me i have to get a sip of water my mouth is so dry it's very interesting stuff just you know tell whatever you want to do this is okay all right can we go on all right so do you have any recollection of seeing german invading forces or hungarian sympathetic forces to the nazis coming into your neighborhood or into your home or having any encounter with your family at that point i don't think i ever did don't forget this was probably as early as april and things were pretty open and not anything very drastic was happening except wearing the jewish star i mean we could go about our lives i suppose as well as possible probably they were curfews but i don't recall anything of the type you're asking were any friends of the family uh being moved into the ghetto at that point or did you did you hear about occurrences that affected neighbors or family friends or relatives well we we did about that time we did find out that some of the relatives in the country were being uh deported or sent to ghettos first and then deported and there were relatives in the outskirts of budapest who had been taken to the ghetto the ghetto in budapest yes ghetto in budapest which is very near the dohany it's a temple the biggest synagogue in budapest some of my distant relatives on my mother's side were there and others who were in the country did you hear rumors or anything factual about them being taken to camps at that point in 1944 well i i did later in my search for information among my mother's papers i did later find a letter that my grandfather wrote to my mother being very concerned about the the future and about the prospect of being deported unfortunately i have searched high and low i just cannot find this letter i know i saved it but i didn't know at the time my parents didn't really discuss any of this with us do you think that they were aware that deportation meant being sent to a concentration camp to a death camp was that in their consciousness i doubt that very much because in retrospect i heard stories about the fact that since my grandfather was such a very well-known respected and loved person and my grandmother too that the head helper in the vineyards was offering to hide him and anybody that he wished in the family and he's always came back with a comment that he's a good person and god would not let him be hurt at that time do you remember because things were becoming difficult do you remember there being scarcity of essential essential things food or clothing or heat at this particular time you were still in your own home i don't remember any hardships honestly and you know my father had arranged for us to go into hiding um if you'd like i could elaborate on that um i never knew the people that he took us took me to i didn't know where he or my sister were going i was on an estate in the buddha part of budapest a very big estate and the gamekeepers house is where i was with other children and i was there essentially for a summer holiday my father had always thought that i was a very good student in mathematics he gave me a million well quite a few problems to solve so i shouldn't be bored while i'm there and essentially we just played all summer and had fun i had no idea where they were i had no idea where my sister was until one evening when i couldn't sleep very well i went to the kitchen for milk and found my parents there on the middle of the night it turned out that there was a big pantry where um they were hiding during the day because there were other kids there and it wasn't something that the gamekeeper wanted to advertise that he had adults there too i suppose he must have had like a little camp there for children and my parents were in that pantry during the day there was a coat rack kind of wall that they pushed there during the day and then rolled away at night and they happened to have come out that evening how long had they been there well they must have been there probably like me from april or maybe beginning of may until i discovered them sometime i guess it was end of august so they were there all that time and you didn't even know it no i had no idea but your your father thought this was essential in order to survive to hide in that way yes he he considered it the most important thing and i don't remember if we ever had any papers i really don't so what were the conditions like then other than the fact that your parents were hiding in the pantry and you were doing math problems the conditions on the estate they were very nice a lot of greenery and a lot of outdoor activity i don't remember having any bad feelings about being there but the interesting thing to me and having gone over this whole story a couple of times recently i cannot even remember their name i don't remember their faces i think that there is a photograph in my mom's album my mother's passed away so i can't ask her but i think that that is them from very very far back in my mind i think that that one picture is them but i i do not recollect it's it's not i wasn't close to them let's put it that way or else i would know but there was no imminent danger that you could feel or no not until horti was deposed and when that happened and the aerocross party became powerful and budapest it was sometime in september they gave us exactly 24 hours to get out now how was this issued via radio or how are you how did people know that this the situation had changed in such a manner i only know it from now having read history books at the time all i knew is we had to leave yes and um there were there were i think incidents of of the aerocross party coming on the grounds and poking around things like that but my father had decided right away that he had to go to find me and themselves some other place where he could be hiding and he left during the day and then did not come back until very very late at night there had been some air raids and we had absolutely no idea if he even was alive he arrived somewhere in the middle of the night telling us that he had to walk over quite a long distance to get back because the bridges were some of the bridges were bombed and that he found that the wonderful family his very good friend who was a gentile attorney was very ready to have me come and stay with them and they took me there the next day and that was july and louisiana who eventually saved my life let's have a look at their photographs okay i just got too sentimental earlier i'm sorry i try not to and this this is louisiana and this is juliharmee he is a very well known was a very well known attorney in budapest and these pictures are from the year 1950 on a christmas note to my mother i found them the reason i went to search for it is because i as you well know had recommended them for an award of the righteous to yad vashem and they had asked me for photographs from the war at which i really had to laugh who had time or effort or energy or interest to take pictures but anyway as close to the war 1950 photographs both of them have deceased by now so you came to live in their home yes and where was that located it was on this elizabeth ring um not near to where we had lived but right across from the saint stephen's basilica the biggest church in budapest um the name of the street by chizilinski these ancillars are i still remember that and how under what circumstances were you able to live with them and be protected from danger well they treated me as a relative from the country they told people in the building that i just came to spend time with them because it was a little bit um better for me they didn't say anything about me being in hiding at all and i went about daily things daily chores so you had no papers to prove you were another person i don't think i had any papers i don't recall any papers especially since there were was an incident if you would like to hear about that that proved that i had a lot of nerve going without papers louise was baking a cake and she had no sugar in the house not enough for what she was doing she had the ration cards but she couldn't leave everything in the middle of the kitchen so she sent me to the store most of the time i went with them everywhere but i went down to the store by myself and there were very long lines as usual and i had heard that there were some women young women who would put pillows into their dresses so that they would look pregnant and get weighted on very quickly but of course that was only 10 years old so that wasn't a good option for me and i just do it in line with the ss soldiers right among them not saying a word got weighted on very quickly and got home with the sugar and luisi was furious with me but you know she said how could you do such a thing i would never trust you again well i told her that i spoke fluent german and i thought if anybody was gonna question me i would just say i belonged with them that's all i would speak german to them so that was one of the things that i did and of course after that they never let me out of their side except one more occasion when they had to go somewhere and i was home alone that was rather dramatic because the ss came to their apartment and banged on the door and rang the bell and i was scared to death being home alone by myself i climbed under the linens in the bed and i thought i would pretend to be asleep because it sounded like they were going to break down the entire door eventually they went away and they came back the next day and it turned out i remembered that this old man had been at hal mitchulla's apartment who was also having an office right there in his apartment as well as an official office somewhere else and this old man had been there a couple of days earlier and apparently the homies gave this jewish client of there some money and the ss had captured him and beat it out of him that he got the money from the harm is so they came to um give him a little bit of a problem by questioning him and hopefully we were hoping they wouldn't do anything to him and they didn't the homies were fairly devout catholics they took me to church with them too a couple of times and how did you feel about that i don't think i had any bad feelings about it i just went naturally with them everywhere they took me they had a lot of love for me and i felt very secure but at any rate the end of it was that the esses went away and they did not bother them at all after that how long did you stay with the homies in their home and what was going on with other members of your family as you now know during that period well i i came to them in september and in january we were liberated but in in december actually christmas eve there was a bombing and that hit the building in fact their apartment was almost completely demolished and we had to move down to the bunker and at that time they were pretty worried about me being so close with other people in the building and maybe having them question me about things i think maybe they had already told me at that time but i certainly know now that my sister was hiding with another family just a man and his wife they didn't have children and that they took my parents in at the time we had to leave the estate in september did you know that your parents were safe while you were with the homies did you have any way of communicating no i did not have any word from them until maybe february or so when it was a little safer to come out and walk the streets again do you remember being worried for the safety of other family members then probably i don't think i had extreme anguish i think the fact that the homies said that they were all right was enough and i don't know if they had any i don't think they could have had any communication because anytime you looked out on the street or you saw and in these days you certainly saw a lot of soldiers with guns pushing people around kicking them and being abusive so it was better for them to stay where they were rather than worry about me and i suppose they were not worried about me at all because i was well taken care of they knew the i had not known the homies before so i i never saw them before were you aware that you were passing as a non-jew and did this create any kind of stress for you or awareness i think i think i was at the time i think i was my father in fact suggested at one time that we take catechism classes and i remember that he bought me a necklace with a cross on it too i think i wore that and did you feel that that was sufficient or did you feel that you had to change your behavior or your appearance in other ways i don't i'm not asking if you felt you looked jewish but some people did you know feel very conscious of having a particular jewish appearance and has made them nervous and so on well you know when i think back on it i don't think i knew anything about this or worried anything about it the fact that i didn't have very very strict religious training except in school i mean i knew i was jewish and i didn't go to the christian religion classes but other than that it didn't hit my life much whether i was jewish or not so that when you were posing as a non-jew this didn't seem like a particularly big stretch for you i don't know if i would use the word posing the question never came up the fact that i wore a cross is the only thing i suppose but other people who came to see the homies or neighbors never asked me a question i'm not sure that they ever entertained they may have had some family member come and visit but i honestly do not remember them having people in or going much for visits they were not the kind of times when people did a lot of i'm socializing to go now to the the period of the liberation if you like of budapest and how you then left the homies and were able to re-contact your family members tell about that well my parents came to them um i think it was around the middle of february but i don't think they took me back with them yet it wasn't so very safe there were still a lot of dead horses in the street that people were carving up for food they themselves didn't think there was anything to eat and they didn't ask them to release me to their care until sometime in march i think when we could get back into our original apartment which was also bombed there was only one room and a kitchen available the rest was in shambles and so that's when we reunited they picked me up and i went back to to them i don't recall it being traumatic or anything and we just said so long we didn't say goodbye to each other the homies and us stayed friends and we visited often even since that time and when you went back into your own apartment with your with your parents and your sister what were the conditions like then and did you try and find other family members and learn about their fate well my parents told me that my sister didn't fear as well as i did while we were in hiding she had walked away from the people that she lived with and got lost and they found her starving and eating cigarette butts off the street and that that was unfortunate but otherwise she was okay and came also to live with us then we had nothing to eat except the preserves that my mom had put away in the pantry and i remember having the most unbelievable amount of melons and fruits that she still had there that nobody else wanted we were dining and breakfasting on that for many days now my father decided um to go and gather some wood from the daniel banks so that we could have some heat because there was of course not nothing to eat with and also to go to the country where my grandparents had lived because rumor had it that the people in the country stashed away some food and that he would purchase some of that so he did that which was also dangerous because people got shot for very small um provocation you know if you had two or three watches the russian soldiers who came to liberate us were not always very kind and they would shoot people if they didn't surrender their watches promptly enough so we were worried about him but he did go to genjis and he found the helpers and the people my grandfather was associated with who told us that they had all been taken away and they knew that my grandparents and my grand uncle and my mother's sister and her husband all were taken to auschwitz my mother's two brothers were in forced labor camp this much we knew but we had no idea if anyone was coming back can you now show some photographs yes members of the show and perhaps describe the well the picture that i like an awful lot of my grandparents is this one i i don't know how well it will come out it's very very poor in its original to begin with but this is my grandmother and this is my grandfather and this was my grandfather's brother now my grandfather's brother lived in the same building as my grandparents enjoying this and i'll show you the building right now which has since been declared a national treasure because it was designed and built by a very famous architect called medya soy and my grandfather and his family lived on this side and my grand uncle lived in a small apartment on this side i don't want to digress too much but this became the headquarters for the nazis during the occupation then it was the headquarters of the russians and it's currently an ear nose and throat hospital now my great-uncle who lived in this apartment never allowed another person into his apartment who was my age except me i was his darling and was this the building that the the uh the wine making was associated with yes it was it was the uh my husband and i had gone back there after the russian communists left budapest in 89 we happened to have been living in vienna and we took a trip after december when they got liberated and we went back to the building and um the caskets i'm sorry i always make this mistake the casks the wine casks are still there in the cellar they're built in their floor to ceiling so they cannot be removed one of the buildings in the back where the yard they don't call it the yard udvar it's a it's a big enclosure really the houses goes around the block where the wine making equipment was is being used for machinery and now i had this upside down didn't i and most of the building is not the way it was originally planned the stone is still there but the beautification is gone they had frescoes between the windows hand-painted frescoes they had a very beautiful stone balustrade that went around the building that got all taken away and hand carved wood ceilings they're all gone they plastered over them but they consider it still a national monument i thought i found that very interesting you know after they ruined half of it you see then it became a nation now the grandparents and the great uncle then were deported yes from there and this was my uncle who my mother's brother who was in forced labor camp and he came back eventually this is his son who was eight years old at the time and his wife who both died in auschwitz they lived in the same town but he did not live in this building he had another house of his own he was the only one in the family who wasn't a wine do you know what maker to your grandparents and your great uncle where they were taken well my grandmother had diabetes from the time that i knew her she was the world's most wonderful cook she never tasted any of her pastries but she i understand had died in the cattle car i think he was probably sent to the gas chamber he was my grandfather was a little bit more healthy now my cousin and his mother were also gassed the people on the bottom okay this is my aunt and uncle her husband who were in auschwitz they came back but i'll probably have to tell you how we found out that she was back and this is my other uncle he also came back from forced labor camp my aunt so anyway this this my father found out since you asked me when he went to genders and he came back with all these sad tales we knew nothing about this this brother or the father of my little cousin because they were in forced labor camp and we heard nothing and we knew nothing about my aunt's aunt and her husband so one day um someone rang the bell in budapest at our apartment and a lady in regs and very very emaciated skin and bones asked to come in and my mother opened the door and said that she would be happy to give her whatever we had but we did not have a whole lot ourselves and did she need any money and she started crying because it was my mother's sister and she had not recognized her own sister yeah and so the sister had been the sister was told by the red cross that we all perished and she did not believe it so she came to the apartment and that's how we found her and then slowly she found out that her husband returned and that the two brothers returned but um the biggest amazement in my life is how this woman my aunt who was very close to me we were like really she was my second mother in a way how she was able to survive this whole terrible experience because she herself had diabetes it may be that she developed that afterwards i'm not sure but she was very much spoiled you know she was the youngest in the family she was 4 foot 11 and never had to do much hard work and the details she was asked to do in auschwitz was in a in a stone quarry where she had to carry the heavy stones back to wherever they commanded her to take them so she survived that and both she and her husband had never gotten rid of the markings in their forum and they were at auschwitz for several months oh yes yes well i don't know exactly when they were deported but you know she came back i suppose it was april of 44. it was you know hungarian jews fared a little better than jews of other countries because they did not deport people quite as far back in the in the number of years or less so i suppose we have to be grateful for that and then in all of the immediate family how many family members would you say were lost to the camps to force lane five in my mother's family her parents her sister-in-law and nephew and my great-uncle oh well and then there was there were several other uncles of hers but i don't think they had all perished there was a cousin of my mothers who was on my grandfather's side a bro a sister of hers had a son who was shot into the danube he was a champion chess player and they hauled him out of a chess tournament and shot him [Music] i think he must have been about 30 years old in budapest and my father's side they all died all his brothers and his sisters died in in the camps yeah how many brothers were there on my father's side he had um two brothers one brother escaped to paris but we found out from the holocaust museum that he was deported from there and uh so me passed on to and he had two sisters now one sister his youngest sister committed suicide just as about the time the germans came and the older sister was also taken away my father is the only one who survived from his family they had no children it's amazing you know if i think about it how few people in the family had children my one uncle you know he lost his eight-year-old but he never had any kids after that and my aunt never had children so now let's move on to the period where the the russians the communists have taken hungary and um life was not necessarily easy then either for you i'm assuming and can you tell about a little of that and how it was that you made your way to america well like i told you my father had a lot of foresight about how to plan his future he was very smart and he loved america he actually had been in the united states prior to the war trying to arrange for passage for his family and for visas my mother did not want to live with two small children and her family back home she was very close to them and after the war my father was in america again to try to make our way to america smooth when i contracted polio and i was supposed to leave for this was in 1946 i think yeah and i was supposed to leave for england to boarding school that year and of course having gotten ill the whole thing got postponed and by the time 47 came around things were really bad and when the first russian uh inscription was put on a hungarian monument of koshut-layoshu was the most famous hungarian hero he said we're leaving and so not having had been permitted to say goodbye to anybody we just packed our bags he actually got his furniture and his belongings out because of the type of visa we had i really don't know how he arranged that because they had um a two-story building size van or sea voyage carton to load things into and i'm maybe he told people he was going to have a smaller place to live in how they wouldn't know that that was going abroad i don't know but we were not allowed to say goodbye to anybody because he was afraid that someone would tell the police and they wouldn't let us leave and so we came in 1948 november or end of october i think because i remember it was halloween and i couldn't believe that this rich america has beggars in the street and where did you come initially to new york new york yes my father had gotten um affidavit from another lawyer friend who was hungarian and that's how we came and tell how that started what what life was like for you in america i'm assuming you spoke some english oh yeah i was fluent in english and german and hungarian actually i learned german before i learned hungarian where did you learn english why when when i think my father just had us take english lessons maybe it wasn't until after the war but i think it must have been quite early on in 45 because i spoke i spoke british not american english so when we came here and i started school i had a lot of trouble understanding some of the idioms like you are nuts that threw me when the kids would say things like that was it a good culture shock for you a shock culture shock oh i enjoyed myself i don't think i had a problem with anything except that my parents were pretty strict i couldn't wear lipstick even though all the girls did and having had polio uh and still i wasn't a hundred percent i should have gone for a lot more physical therapy they told me which i discontinued much too early we had a hard life my father having been an attorney his law knowledge was totally useless because you have a different law here different legal system and he became a salesman for insurance and my mother on the other hand had become the owner of a very well going cooking school here is her picture she started out just making cakes for a famous caterer in 57th street which i delivered prior to going to school at five in the morning tell us about the cakes well they're right here on this picture i also have an article she was in the new york times craig claiborne used to review her work she was fantastic she could do things that i never could duplicate i mean i can cook and bake but nothing like what she did she had a diploma it's called indian smash that i really don't know how to translate that but it was a diploma from gerbeau the most famous hungarian bakery and my father i believe had had an idea that she better have something in her background that was other than going through a couple of years of finishing school like the girls in those days and so he prepared for the eventuality that she would have to do this and so she bake cakes in the morning then i delivered them to the manhattan we lived in jackson heights at the time we i delivered them to this delicatessen old denmark i think was the name and then i went out to school to jack well first i went to school at julia richmond in in manhattan which was sort of a sister school to hunter college and then i had gone back to jackson heights and i had the job selling clothes and then i studied at night and this went on and on and on and on and on and you met your husband in new york well this at the time that i did all this i hadn't known him yet i was still in high school my father meanwhile had gone on to study law at the brooklyn law school he just wasn't happy not being a lawyer and was also freemason and on after i graduated high school i was then already in city college of new york for the first year when there was a dance at his freemasons lodge and hungarian freemasons and that's where i met my husband he came with his parents and i came with my parents and you were at that time how old when i met him was 54 so i was 19 yeah and were you already i'm sorry 52 i was 19 but i said the wrong age were you already about to enter college i skipped high school i skipped a year in high school i was so advanced in latin and in mathematics that i finished at the age of 17 and that was my second year in college when i met my husband now i'm going to move on because i know that you obtained several degrees in i think in engineering and mathematics well i first had a degree in business administration but under the influence of my husband took a lot of extra math classes and when i graduated that's when we got married in 1954 we married in august i graduated in june of that year and i believe a few months before that i got my citizenship he he encouraged me to go on for a advanced degree and i worked for a couple of years first but decided i would try the graduate degree and so i went into columbia graduate school and i got a master's degree in mathematical statistics and had two children at the same time so here was impossibly hard work yet again do you feel that the experiences you had during the war and the aftermath of the war do you feel that these help to make you stronger and more able to confront the challenges of being a student and a mother and being in a new country and all of these things and must have it must have i think we grew up a lot faster we weren't cuddled or protected that much and actually i should have at that time already done something about trying to get an award for the homies who saved me i was going to get to that yeah by way of asking when you began to look back because when you were doing so many new things and getting educated having children moving into professions this was a time a very busy time for you were you looking back or thinking back or talking about things then or when did that begin to happen well it's very interesting that you asked me that i became a much more observant jew because my husband and his family were so and i never i never fasted on yom kippur before but i did once we met and i don't know if i really looked back on those days at all very much because somehow they were painful when we lived in new york we didn't belong to a temple that we only did once we moved down to this area but um i think every time i heard german spoken i had goose bumps on my back i and i didn't dwell on the past much i don't think i was too busy so um when we moved down to to this area i had several opportunities for for a career job and when we lived in roanoke at the time they worked for babcock wilcox in lynchburg they sent me to germany several times on a business trip and my older boy said mom i can't believe you went and i told them you know after all these years you just have to give a little bit and not feel so passionate about disliking people for what they had done did you feel that it was the germans or that it was just particular germans well it's interesting the younger germans i didn't have any problem with interacting with them or anything the the professor not professor the manager who invited me to work with them for three months and eventually then after that for a whole year we went there my husband took sabbatical we lived there a whole year i didn't have any problem with the younger people but his parents who were you know in their 70s at the time this was in 1972 i couldn't feel comfortable with and then sometimes the austrian people we met who were wonderful to us you know would come out with comments which they still believe that oh we did not welcome hitler which you know very well from history is a big lie that he forced us to to be on their side the hungarians to this day i don't really feel any empathy i like the music i like the food we went several times to visit the most the very first time in 64 when we cried our hearts out because we never knew if we'd see our relatives again they were still under communism we went a lot but now most of them are gone my husband still has relatives i don't so we don't go that often and i suppose deep down i will never feel that it was my home america is my home but nevertheless you went to some effort to have the homies recognized for what they did yes of course yes until about that now and we'll get a chance to see uh we'll get a chance to see uh some documentation from okay from that why don't we take a two minute break questions i should ask too although i phrase them in my own way really but um tell me when we're ready to roll jody hurt my face too much i know no we are rolling mrs heller when you started to talk about your experience that you had gone through in hungary and what the homies had done for your family at what point were you in your own life when when you began to look back and to tell others well in 1964 we went to visit the homies i told you it was a fairly momentous visit and then in 1972 we went and the two children were with us then our two boys but miss dr homie had passed away by then and i never really thought to review all the things that happened and frankly to tell you the truth when i think about it until i started the application for them to become righteous among nations i hardly ever could talk about these things and i didn't start that until the year 2000 at someone's suggestion someone at the holocaust museum suggested it and after i got into it more and and developed a review of all the things that happened i felt that the best thing i can do with my life is let other people know how there were wonderful people like the homies who very unselfishly without ever accepting one penny for their good act had gone on to save people because the people we stayed with on the estate i know got paid plenty by my father they still turned us out the lady who they then later lived with who kept my sister and my parents eventually i think also got some renumer remuneration homies never they never accepted anything i only remember my mother opening her jewel case afterwards and asking luisi to pick out something and she picked the bracelet and that was it they would never accept anything they were wonderful and i think the fact that they had no children made such a big difference to them that i was their little girl and so in 2000 i put in the application to yad vashem at the suggestion of the archivist at the holocaust museum in washington and heard nothing for two years well actually at the time of the application they kept telling me you need to know when they were born you need to know where they were born you need to know maiden names you need to know mother's names well my head was swirling i knew nothing so and they weren't alive anymore so i turned to the hungarian red cross who were absolutely fantastic they turned over uh documents they they wrote to the the authorities in several towns mrs harmony luisi was from the same town as my father as i found out later on she knew my father's whole family so that was one link to them and then you know he was my my father's colleague but i still could not unearth every information i only knew the pertinent things and for two years after handing in the documents i heard nothing and we had been away for the end of december holiday season to california to visit people and when we came back there was a letter and an email that they had gotten the award of the righteous and it really touched me i i cried um it was very very moving thought that i was able to get this for them and as you know we went to the ceremony in march of this year they had a ceremony where they received the award this was a ceremony taking place in budapest the israeli ambassador had invited us to the ceremony and they get a certificate like this in english and in hebrew and then there is another piece of document here which of course if we had found relatives of theirs they could have kept but all these are being kept in the yad vashem museum in israel they will not release anything to me or to anybody else but a living relative there were 18 people who were honored on that day and this little booklet was at that time presented to everybody it gives the story every person all of the 17 people who got the award how they saved the people it gives the name of the person they save and a little synopsis they didn't give the names of all the people that were saved like one particular person saved a hundred jews you know they didn't list all of those and then if they did have uh and and my story was all so red and if they would have had descendants that we had found they would have gotten these two documents to keep for themselves and honor them it was really beautiful and i'm glad we had gone i understand there's a poem well let me yeah let me tell you um after we were notified that this would take place in budapest is honoring their heroism we decided to go to the ceremony because uh my husband thought that even though we had not found any relatives that very weak or the months before maybe we'll find some um still and he was sure that if i don't go and don't buy my ticket early enough that we would miss out i'm sorry but i i need to find the poem right now for you here it is and so what we did do is to buy our ticket and i searched for more information among my documentation i knew someone had written to me that homie louise had passed away and we didn't know what town this letter came from again i didn't save the piece of paper so the red cross couldn't track them down in the end we did find out that she had two sisters both of whom passed away and one of the sisters who was married was actually buried by the other sister so we knew that if that sister who was married had had children they would have been at least recorded in the in the books of the town you know so there was no hope for relatives we called everybody who had the same name as her maiden name and holly name and i called them in los angeles in washington in new york no no luck but i also lived through all my papers and lo and behold two weeks before we're going to the ceremony in march i happened on this lovely inscription i had a little book into which people wrote things when i was still in hungary uh from 1945 on people wrote little remembrances and this is the note that the homies wrote to me after i left their home this is from louise it just says that i don't wish anything more for you except that you should love me as much as i love you and this other one is a little story which this real serious lawyer dr harmy wrote to me and i will read it to you since you asked i will read it in hungarian and then i will tell you i translated it to english so that people should understand what it's all about and for 50 years i couldn't find this little booklet i want you to know i knew i had it well not 50 but we've been living in this house now for 12 years and i've searched for it several times couldn't figure out where i put it is and this is written october 8th 1948. i read this at the end of my interview in hungary with the press because in that little booklet that the ambassador dress spoke of me they mentioned that i came all the way from america just for this ceremony and so they were all interested in me and i read that now since i'm home i gave a little talk at our temple emanuel in roanoke at the rabbi's request and so i translated this into english and if it doesn't rhyme you'll forgive me i did as well as i could once there was a little girl smaller than a colonel landed on our doorstep leaving the inferno we became her parents with her we shared our home did not wish to leave her to danger all alone she filled our lives with sunshine and opened up her heart she earned our instant love we wished she'd never part our bittersweet existence did come to abrupt end when old home and parents for her did later send our goodbyes were painful once we had to part she bundled up and took her newfound parents heart through the years directness should you come upon these lines think of us please fondly and know you touched our lives so i meant something to them too and they meant of course a great deal to me and i am glad that they did get the award of the righteous i just really wish that they had been alive to accept it is there something else that you would like to add in closing or any any lesson that you feel all of this could impart i hate to use the word lesson because the holocaust is not there to instruct us it was a something in history that should not have happened of course but when you look back on all of this what else can you take from it that might be of use to us in this day and age well i can tell you how it affected me overall i will never deny my religion i don't care what happens in this country i will always be a jew nothing of that sort could ever humble me to the point of feeling afraid but i wonder how on earth things like this could have taken place i cannot understand it there were other incidents of brutality i remember very very well reading a book by franz verfel where the armenians and the turks had similar situations occurring and then we have bosnia and we have this and we have arab and israeli conflict and everybody fighting everybody but the brutality and the magnitude and the efficiency with which they carried all this out secretly because nobody believed this mass murder is really possible is totally unbelievably astounding and i don't know what the lesson could be i just don't know maybe one should have a little bit more togetherness in one's feelings of protection of others i i have no answer i'm afraid i just hope that with having children and grandchildren that history will not repeat itself for them thank you very much i'm the seller thank you

Channel: Virginia Holocaust Museum

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Id: sRtG6YwHIjU

Length: 77min 53sec (4673 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021