JUDY CASSAB

Dianes

1995

THESE DIARIES BEGIN in April 1944, when Judy Cassab (née Judith Kaszab) had unpinned the yellow star from her clothing and was living under cover in Budapest, then in the hands of the Gestapo and the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazis. Back from two years of forced labor in a Soviet camp, her husband Jansci turns up occasionally, still wearing his yellow star. Sheltering during the siege of Budapest, fifty of the most savage days in the war, Judy could nevertheless write, “I am still longing for my painting.” She and Jansci emigrated in 1951 to Australia and in no time at all Judy was exhibiting and receiving commissions to paint the portraits of eminent men and women. The diaries develop into a cheerful social almanac.

Agi Yoeli (née Agnes Izak), an internationally recognized ceramicist and sculptress, put me in touch with Judy when I was in Australia. Both of them had grown up in a town in Slovakia known as Beregszasz to Hungarians and Berehovo to everyone else. Judy’s father ran a brick factory; Agi’s father ran a shoe-making business. In Agi’s apartment in Tel Aviv hangs a portrait in pencil and charcoal of her mother. Done by Judy at the age of sixteen, it is as beautiful and finished as an old master drawing. Except for this one drawing, everything they had possessed at Berehovo had been stolen or smashed.

In 1944, Agi and her family were among thousands from Berehovo mustered in the yard of the Kaszab brick factory and then deported to Auschwitz. Agi was put to assembling fuses in the Birkenau factory within the camp. Her father and mother, her husband Laczy and her newborn child were murdered. At a station waiting for a train in the aftermath of the war, Agi recognized the SS woman who had killed this baby and was now passing herself off as a victim. Instead of having the woman arrested, Agi picked a bunch of flowers in the station master’s garden.