Czechoslovakia was established as a democracy under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Its population was made up of four ethnic groups: the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians, and the Sudeten Germans. The official languages were Czech and Slovak, but each ethno-regional group spoke its own language (including German or Hungarian in some regions). We lived in the eastern part of the country and spoke Hungarian at home and Slovak at school. We revered Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the president of Czechoslovakia from 1919 to 1935. When he died in 1937, an era died with him. In particular, the Jewish people lost a president under whose leadership they’d flourished for seventeen golden years.
Not long after Masaryk’s death, civil disobedience erupted in the Sudeten part of the country, which shared a border with Nazi Germany. Hitler capitalized on this civil strife and used it to wrest the Sudetenland away from Czechoslovakia. In 1938, he summoned the leaders of Britain, France, and Italy to the Munich Conference to make the German annexation of the Sudetenland a reality. Our own president, Edvard Beneš, was excluded from the meeting, so the fate of the territory was decided without his input and in contravention of the Versailles Treaty, which said that Great Britain, France, and Italy would come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if its neighbours threatened it. But Hitler had threatened war unless they agreed to allow Germany to annex the region, and so they acquiesced. It was ironic that two democracies, Britain and France, signed away a fellow democratic country to appease a dictator. The country’s fate was decided by the stroke of a pen. Not a single bullet was fired during the partition, yet it opened the floodgates to the Second World War.
Upon his arrival back in Britain, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved the agreement he had signed with Hitler and the other leaders and declared it to be a guarantee of “peace for our time.” He wrote in his diary that he had no intention of going to war for a faraway country whose name he could not even pronounce. The French did not realize that they had signed away their eastern defences, and there was champagne flowing in Paris to celebrate peace with Nazi Germany. Six months later, on March 15, 1939, German troops crossed the Czechoslovakian border and took control of Prague. Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, and the country was partitioned into three regions: Bohemia and Moravia became the protectorate of the German Reich, overseen by Hitler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich; the fascist autonomous state of Slovakia was created under the leadership of a Roman Catholic priest, Dr. Jozef Tiso; and the eastern part of the country, inhabited by Hungarian-speaking people, was given to Hungary under the fascist leadership of Regent Miklós Horthy. The Czechoslovakian Jewish population was left with a deep sense of dread.
One day in 1938, about ten of my father’s friends came to our home to listen to a major speech by Adolf Hitler on my father’s crystal radio. All of us understood basic German, and I heard Hitler’s poisonous words pouring out of the box. At one point he said, “Wir werden die Juden ausradieren” (We are going to eradicate all the Jews of Europe). My father and his friends appeared shocked by this statement, and I felt in my gut that something terrible was going to happen.
Indeed, life as we knew it was about to change in ways we could not have imagined. In March 1939, when I was ten, the Slovak bureaucracy in our town was dismantled and the Hungarian fascists took over. We were taught to sing the Hungarian national anthem in readiness for the new regime. There was no school to attend because the Slovakian teachers had left, and the people of the town prepared to greet the new authority by erecting a large victory gate with a sign that read “Welcome, our Hungarian liberators.” The flag of Hungary and ribbons of red, white, and green were displayed throughout the streets and on homes. We Jews could not foresee what these changes meant for us, and as a child, I was unaware of the deeper dangers until some days after the Hungarian troops arrived, bringing with them an overt ideology of anti-Semitism.
For Jews like us, allegiance to this new regime meant that we had to succumb to a fascist ideology that was alien and unfriendly. Yet we had to find ways to ingratiate ourselves to this change. My grandfather, for example, took me up to the attic, where he stored his old officer’s cavalry uniform from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We cleaned the clothes, brushed and polished the boots, and attached all his medals. He presented quite a figure to me in this uniform. All Jewish veterans who’d fought in the First World War on the side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gathered in their uniforms in front of the welcoming gate to show their old Hungarian stance. I was too young at the time to understand the significance of what was going on. I saw the Jewish adults in our town trying to adapt themselves to the new reality, but they hid their deepest fears as they suddenly found themselves thrust into a hostile fascist system, knowing their vulnerability as Jews.
After several hours of waiting in the centre of town, we received word of the arrival of the Hungarian troops. In the distance, we observed a column of soldiers, led by an officer on his horse, slowly marching toward us. I looked at the soldiers as they passed and was not impressed by their appearance. Their uniforms were dirty and full of patches—no comparison to the Czechoslovakian army, which was always so well outfitted. A cry went up from the crowd, and everyone sang the Hungarian anthem as the military column marched into the town square. There, the welcoming committee officially handed over our town from Czechoslovakia to the new Hungarian administration. The ceremony ended, and the soldiers were dismissed and allowed to wander throughout the town. They headed to the pubs, where townspeople gave them food and other provisions. My father’s establishment, the Cellar, had a big sign that read “Free drinks to our liberators.” In a span of approximately two days, my father’s inventory was exhausted and he could not afford to continue with this largesse.
Hungarian soldiers were posted as guards on several roads coming into the town as if we lived in a war zone. I experienced my first encounter with Jew-hatred under Hungarian rule when I crossed into town over the railway tracks and was stopped by a guard who recognized my cap as Jewish. He yelled at me, “You dirty Jew, where are you going? You should take off your cap when you see me!” When I told my father of this encounter, he prepared little bottles of schnapps for me to give to guards as I entered their posts, which allowed me to reach my destinations unharassed from that point forward.
With the new administration, our town was suddenly flooded by shoppers from Hungary. They came on bicycles, by horse and buggy, or on foot to buy yard goods, hardware, shoes, and anything else that they had not seen in a long period of time. I felt overwhelmed by all these strangers buying up everything they could find. Soon after, the gendarmes (police) arrived, along with new teachers and bureaucrats, and our town became the seat of the province of Abaúj-Szántó. The new currency was the Hungarian pengö, which replaced the Czech corona.
School started and we met our new Hungarian teachers. They taught us in Hungarian, and Slovak was no longer officially spoken in our region. Jewish businesses and stores operated as best they could, but the shopkeepers could not replace goods that sold out because the sources were now across the border in the Nazi protectorate. Amid all these changes, we suddenly realized that my mother’s family now lived in fascist Slovakia and we were in fascist Hungary. We could communicate by post, but we could not travel across the border, which meant my summer holidays with my grandmother, uncles, and cousins were now only a memory.
With all these changes, we Jews felt ostracized, and ugly Jew-hatred started to surface in many ways: name-calling, fights with other kids, and newspapers filled with propaganda about Jews coming to Hungary from the east (Ukraine). Eastern Jews were depicted as having hooked noses and beards, wearing dirty black garb, and coming in hordes to endanger the lives of local populations. One story, entitled “Tarnopolbol Indult El” (He started out from Tarnopol), was meant to convince the Hungarian population that Jews were threats to be wary of. Repeated enough times, lies become a “truth” that people believe. Even I was confused and ashamed by the characterization because it was so oppressive, one-sided, and dehumanizing. I did not want to be singled out in such a negative way. I tried to insulate myself from the horrible, hurtful rhetoric, but it was a constant daily burden.
In hindsight, I see how negative pressures were continually assaulting us in our daily lives, and we had to get accustomed to living with this adversity. The Jewish community tried to maintain hope that this persecution would pass with time, and we came together to make life bearable in spite of the hardships. It was the parents who dealt with many of the new stresses, but at least our family was still intact. It was still only 1939, and we had many unknown and unthinkable obstacles ahead of us. But we could live only one day at a time, and each of those days carried more than its share of hardship.