Holocaust Survivor Cathy Vermes - Arrow Cross takeover in Hungary
Cathy Vermes was born to an assimilated Jewish family in 1924 in Budapest, Hungary. The war started for them with the German occupation of Hungary. Cathy went into hiding with her husband in the cellar of their maid’s house until liberation. In this excerpt she describes the day the Arrow-Cross Party took over the power in Hungary. Source: MHMC, 1997.
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Cathy Vermes est née dans une famille juive assimilée en 1924 à Budapest en Hongrie. La guerre a commencé pour eux quand les Allemands ont occupé la Hongrie. Cathy s’est cachée avec son mari dans la cave de la maison de leur bonne jusqu’à la libération. Dans cet extrait, elle décrit le jour où le Parti des Croix fléchées a pris le pouvoir en Hongrie. Source: CCHM, 1997
Cleaning Out the Cellar
‘Two sides of the Cellar’ is a story told by personal accounts from opposing sides about one place— the Shoah Cellar museum in Budapest. It wasn’t like any other of its kind— its story was unique, different and made up.
Star In My Shadow (Jane Haining, 1897-1944)
Star In My Shadow was inspired by Jane Haining, who was born in Dunscore, near Dumfries, Scotland, in 1897. She won a scholarship to Dumfries Academy in 1909. She worked in Paisley as a secretary for J & P Coats threadmakers for ten years, and lived in Forth Street, Pollokshields, Glasgow. Her local church was the Queens Park West United Free Church.
She then worked as a matron at the Scottish Mission School for girls in Budapest from 1932 to April 1944. She was arrested by the Gestapo after the school housekeeper’s Nazi son-in-law reported her to them; Jane had admonished him for stealing from the pupils’ food rations. She died in Auschwitz in July 1944.
I searched for accounts from Hungarians who remember that first bombardment of Budapest. One of them, a young girl at the time, described how she saw these little silver crosses trailing long white ribbons in the sky, higher than the sun. She thought they were beautiful at first, but then their roar got louder and louder. The alarm in Budapest was sounded at 10.35am on Monday 3rd April 1944, so it probably cut the girls' playtime short. The routine was that the Americans would bomb during the day, and the RAF at night.
The chorus quotes Jane. When directed by the Church of Scotland not to return to Budapest from her holiday in the UK in September 1939, she is reported to have replied, “If the girls needed me in days of sunshine, how much more will they need me in days of darkness”.
The star in the song’s title symbolises Jane’s spirit, which has shone through days of sunshine... and darkness for those who remember her.
Here’s Jane's Wiki page:
The film about Jane by the BBC, presented by Sally Magnusson, includes contributions from surviving pupils and was broadcast in 2014:
There is also a very informative five-minute segment about Jane from a special edition of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow:
There was a major exhibition about Jane's life at the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest in 2017, opened by the UK ambassador to Hungary, Iain Lindsay, who is highly regarded there as he learned to speak Hungarian very well.
Jane Haining was commemorated in Budapest on April 14th, 2019 during this year's March of the Living, which was led by Ambassador Iain Lindsay and Secretary of State for Scotland, David Mundell.
The school is now a state run primary school but the church, St Columba’s, is still maintained by the Church of Scotland.
Karine Polwart wrote a beautiful song about Jane Haining, Balearie Baloo, recorded for her 2009 album Scribbled In Chalk:
Strings arranged for Innotet by Innes Watson
Innotet are:
Seonaid Aitken: First Violin
Innes Watson: Second Violin
Patsy Reid: Viola
Alice Allen: Cello
Additional Vocals: Seonaid Aitken
Recorded, mixed and mastered at GloWorm Recording and Carrier Waves, Glasgow, by Andrea Gobbi
Available for download from Bandcamp:
as well as CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon and all other major digital platforms including Tidal.
Photo Acknowledgements:
B24 Liberator bombers over Budapest: Fortepan.hu - Hungarian National Archive
Air raid on Budapest: Fortepan.hu - Ákos Schermann
Propaganda posters, ‘We don’t recognise mercy’, ‘Am I also a military target?’: Fortepan.hu - Tivadar Lissák
Photographs of Jane Haining with pupils: Budapest Holocaust Memorial Centre.
Words & Music ©2018 Robert Severin
Hiding in a cellar at end of WWII
Dorit Oliver-Wolff describes how she, her mother, her cousin, and her grandmother spent eight months in hiding in a derelict cellar in Budapest, Hungary, at the end of World War II.
Antisemitism in Budapest during WWII
Dorit Oliver-Wolff fled Belgrade when it was bombed in 1941, escaping to Budapest, Hungary. She lived their peaceably for six months before a Hungarian woman spat in her face, a traumatic introduction to the antisemitism that would shape her early life.
Holocaust study center was inaugurated at the Elie Wiesel
Romania's first Holocaust education center has opened on Sunday in the childhood home of Nobel Laureate, human rights activist, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
The Holocaust Cellar, located in the town of Sighet, will become a new feature of the Holocaust museum in the pre-war childhood home of Wiesel, which is located in the courtyard of the old Jewish Ghetto of Sighet, and will serve as a learning center dedicated to the 13,000 local Holocaust victims.
First Person with Susan Darvas, June 14, 2018
Through the First Person program, Holocaust survivors have the opportunity to share their remarkable personal stories of hope, tragedy, and survival with thousands of visitors at the Museum. This program was recorded June 14, 2018. It features Susan Darvas, who was born Susan Lakatos on April 24, 1934, in Budapest, Hungary. She grew up in a Jewish family. In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary and began forcing Jews who lived outside of Budapest to relocate to ghettos in city centers. In late 1944, through his connections with non Jews in Hungary, Susan’s father Manos was able to secure an affidavit that allowed the family to move into an area of the city under the protection of the Spanish government. In April 1945, Hungary was liberated by Soviet troops.
Shortly thereafter, a communist regime began in Hungary. Susan escaped communist Hungary with her husband in 1956 and they eventually made their way to the United States.
The Great Deportation in the Warsaw Ghetto - Abraham Lewin’s Diary
This video is part of the Holocaust Education Video Toolbox. For more videos and teaching aids, visit:
Abraham Lewin, an educator and a member of the clandestine Oyneg Shabbes (“Joy of the Sabbath”) Archive maintained a diary depicting the wartime events in the Warsaw ghetto. It is rare in that it covers in real time the Great Deportation of the summer 1942, during which some 265,000 Jews were deported to their deaths in Treblinka, and some 10,000 were murdered within the ghetto. Abraham Lewin survived the Great Deportation and continued documenting the tragic events of the ghetto until his capture by the Nazis.
More Videos about the Oyneg Shabbes Archive:
1. Emanuel Ringelblum: The Oyneg Shabbes Underground Archive in the Warsaw Ghetto -
2. Rachel Auerbach and the Public Kitchen in the Warsaw Ghetto -
3. The Jewish Letter Carrier in the Warsaw Ghetto, by Peretz Opoczynski -
4. The Oyneg Shabbes Archive Collections: The Wills of Israel Lichtenstein and Gele Sekstein. -
Archival footage and photographs:
- Yad Vashem Archives
- Ghetto Fighters' House Archives, Israel
- Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw
- Agentur Karl Höffkes
- Footage of the discovery of the Oyneg Shabbes underground archive from Mir Leben Geblibene - We the Living Remnant (Poland, 1947), courtesy of Natan and Ya'akov Gross
- Photo Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Music (Beeld en Geluid)
- Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Texts:
- Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Antony Polonsky, trans. Christopher Hutton, (New York, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). pp. 135-137, 139, 141, 151-156, 162, 166, 177, 179, 183-184, 186, 206-207.
Every effort has been made to locate the copyright holders to obtain the appropriate permissions and apply the correct attributions. If you have any information that would help us in relation to copyright, please contact us: internet.education@yadvashem.org.il
Produced by Mikooka Productions -
Heimann Barbár
Heimannék, Ágnes és a két Zoli csúcsbora, a Barbár igen jól sikerült 2016-ban. Meglátogattuk őket a Terroir Squad csapatával és megkérdeztük, mit szeretnek legjobban a Barbárban.
Holocaust basement hiding
Two jewish brothers in nazi germany survive in a basement during WWII
The remains of the Lublin ghetto part 5
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In 1939 Lublin had a population of around 120,000 people, one third of which were Jewish.
The Nazis captured Lublin on 18 September 1939. Whilst still under military occupation, persecution began.
In December 1939 a Judenrat (Jewish Council) was established with 24 members. The head was Henryk Bekker, an engineer who had been a local politician before the war. I have never come across any negative references to Bekker. He was murdered in Bełżec on 30 March 1942. His deputy was Marek Alten who was a lawyer from the region of Tarnów who had been an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army in WW1. He seems to have believed that he could talk to the Germans as equals, particularly if they came from Austria. Within time however it seems as though power went to his head. After the deportations to Bełżec, he became head of the Judenrat and was shot in the ghetto of Majdan Tatarski on 9 November 1942.
The Nazis had a plan of making the Lublin district into a Judenreservat (Jewish settlement area or literally reserve). This policy was discontinued in 1940 after thousands of people from Germany and Austria above all had been brought to small ghettos in the area. Later the Nazis closed some of the smaller ghettos and sent people to Lublin or other ghettos.
The Lublin ghetto as such was set up in March 1941. Even after it was set up, some people who worked for the Nazi authorities were allowed to stay outside the ghetto. The ghetto was formed in the streets around the castle, part of the Old Town and several streets to the north towards where the Yeshiva and Old Jewish cemetery still remain.
The ghetto was not enclosed like at Warsaw, Kraków or Łódż. There were some temporary barbed wire entanglements erected, however for much of the time it was in existence, Jews could live on one side of the street and other people on the other.
People died of starvation in the ghetto but not to the extent that this happened elsewhere as it was possible to bring food into the ghetto. An article in the Berliner Tagblatt of December 1940 had a series of photographs showing people being arrested for trading in foodstuffs.
The reason why people did not escape is clear. They had no documents - where could they go and how would they procure food and shelter?
In the late winter of 1942 the Nazis divided the ghetto in part A for those not working and B which is in the upper part which still survives for those working for the authorities. Thus all the people earmarked for deportation already found themselves in the lower part of the ghetto.
On 16 March 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hermann Höfle informed representatives of Nazi institutions in Lublin that all unemployed Jews would be deported to the last station in Lublin district - a place called Bełżec. The employed would be deported to another ghetto around 3km distant at Majdan Tatarski and from there they would be accommodated in Majdanek. At 22:00 on that day the ghetto was surrounded by SS and Trawniki men. A search light was set up and people forced to attend a roll call. Some, mainly the elderly and ill, were murdered. At midnight Hermann Worthoff from the Lublin Gestapo told the Judenrat that 1,500 people from the lower ghetto would be taken to the east to work and could take only 15 kg of luggage with them.
Those chosen for the journey on this night and every night were put in the Great Synagogue and then marched around 3km to the Umschlagplatz on the periphery of the town.
On 17 March 1942 these people became the first victims of the Bełżec death camp.
Around 1,000 - 1,500 people were taken to Bełżec daily until 14 April 1942. Some people were shot in the Niemce Forest to the north of Lublin.
On 14 April 1942 there were still around 7,000 people in the ghetto, many in hiding. In one of my films you can see the cellars which were uncovered by a building owner. To solve this problem, the Nazis moved everyone to the ghetto in Majdan Tatarski.
The Nazis introduced a J Ausweis for workers (but not their families) as part of the deportation process. On 22 April 1942 they gathered the population in the Po Farze Square. People were forced to kneel and hold their papers up. Those that did not have the correct papers were taken away and murdered.
First Person with Susan Darvas, June 5, 2019
Through the First Person program, Holocaust survivors have the opportunity to share their remarkable personal stories of hope, tragedy, and survival with thousands of visitors at the Museum. This program was recorded June 5, 2019. It features Susan Darvas, who was born Susan Lakatos on April 24, 1934, in Budapest, Hungary. She grew up in a Jewish family. In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary and began forcing Jews who lived outside of Budapest to relocate to ghettos in city centers. In late 1944, through his connections with non Jews in Hungary, Susan’s father Manos was able to secure an affidavit that allowed the family to move into an area of the city under the protection of the Spanish government. In April 1945, Hungary was liberated by Soviet troops.
Shortly thereafter, a communist regime began in Hungary. Susan escaped communist Hungary with her husband in 1956 and they eventually made their way to the United States.
Murder of Verkhovka Jews in Yaltushkov
Vladimir Eftor, who was born in Verkhovka in 1931 and was deported with his family and other Verkhovka Jews to Yaltushkov in late 1941 tells how the inmates of Yaltushkov ghetto were driven out of their houses and brought to the gathering point, where able-bodied were separated from those who were to be shot. Eftor tells how he succeeded to join the clolumn of the able-bodied people where his father was, and how subsequently his father succeeded to rescue their entire family from being shot.
Holocaust survivor Herman tells the story of deportation from the town of Sighet to Auschwitz
Town in Romania. Sziget (Hun., also Máramarossziget; in Jewish sources Sziget, Siget, or the older Sihot) was the capital of Máramaros county in the Kingdom of Hungary before northern Transylvania became part of Romania after World War I. The town was returned to Hungary briefly between 1940 and 1944. Surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains, it was located in a region least affected by modernization in the kingdom. In all of Hungary, the cultural and economic profile of the Jews of Máramaros county most resembled those of the eastern European shtetls.
The growth of the Jewish population in the eighteenth century was caused by a steady migration from Poland. Around 1759, when Tsevi Fisch came from Poland to serve as the county and Sziget's first rabbi, the fledgling community could not have been home to more than 100 Jews. The Sabbatian heresy made inroads in this sparsely settled region. Several of Jakub Frank's intimates came from Sziget and in the 1760s a significant number converted to Christianity. On the eve of World War I, close to 8,000 Jews lived in the city (constituting roughly 37% of its population). The city's Hasidim had become more and more variegated. Besides followers of the Teitelbaums and the Vizhnitser rebbe, whose Hasidim continued to dominate most of Máramaros county, there were now followers of new Hasidic dynasties such as Spinka, founded by Yosef Me'ir Weiss, and Kretchnev (a Nadwórna offshoot), founded by Me'ir Rosenbaum. Later, Yosef Lichtenstein founded a court of his own. Strictly speaking, he was not a Hasid, but as was the case with his famous uncle Hillel Lichtenstein, his exemplary piety attracted a considerable following among craftsmen and laborers. He stunned Sziget when on the Shavu'ot after the Balfour Declaration in 1917 he delivered an impassioned four-hour sermon on behalf of Zionism. He became the spiritual leader of religious Zionists in the town.
The Mizraḥi of Transylvania held its first national conference in Sziget in 1929 with Rabbi Danzig a member of its presidium. Besides the various Zionist youth movements founded after World War I, Tseirey Agudas Yisroel also flourished in the 1930s. Those aligned with Vizhnits supported the movement, but it even received the tacit approval of a young rabbi who introduced vocational training in the yeshiva in anticipation of immigration to Palestine.
Sziget was a center of Hebrew printing from the 1870s, and there were several short-lived attempts, in particular by the legendary humorist Hirsh Leib Gottlieb, to publish newspapers in Hebrew and Yiddish. Among the writers who worked in Sziget were the historian Yekuti'el Yehudah Greenwald and the Yiddish poet Yoysef Holder. Memoirs of Sziget on the eve of the Holocaust were later written by Elie Wiesel and David Weiss Halivni.
During the interwar period, the Jewish population of Sighet (now in Romania) leveled off at roughly 11,000. Most were killed in Auschwitz in 1944. In the years immediately after the war, the city once again briefly boasted about 2,000 Jews, but these were not born locally. In 2000, several dozen Jews lived in Sighet.
The Pope, The Jesuits, and The NWO - explanations by David Mould
The Pope, The Jesuits, and The NWO - good explanations and background information by David Mould
BBC News From Holocaust survivor to pop star
BBC Inside Out meets Dorit Oliver-Wolff who lived through the Holocaust and went on to became a famous German singer.
Dorit was a five-year-old Jewish girl living in Hungary when Nazism started to spread across Europe.
Today she is a pensioner living in Eastbourne, but still remembers the trauma of trying to escape from the Nazis and avoid being sent to a concentration camp.
Presenter Natalie Graham followed her story and heard how she escaped death twice.
Copyright: Still photographs are copyright and courtesy of TopFoto, Getty Images, and Cornelia du Vinage. Archive film is copyright of ITN Source and Transit Film.
eva.stories
Based on a true story
In memory of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust
FEB 13 HIGHLIGHT = START OF STORY
היילייט פברואר 13 = תחילת הסטורי
bit.ly/2vvXCqX
The remains of the Lublin ghetto part 9
SEE MY SITE ON FACEBOOK :
SEE FULL PLAYLIST :
In 1939 Lublin had a population of around 120,000 people, one third of which were Jewish.
The Nazis captured Lublin on 18 September 1939. Whilst still under military occupation, persecution began.
In December 1939 a Judenrat (Jewish Council) was established with 24 members. The head was Henryk Bekker, an engineer who had been a local politician before the war. I have never come across any negative references to Bekker. He was murdered in Bełżec on 30 March 1942. His deputy was Marek Alten who was a lawyer from the region of Tarnów who had been an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army in WW1. He seems to have believed that he could talk to the Germans as equals, particularly if they came from Austria. Within time however it seems as though power went to his head. After the deportations to Bełżec, he became head of the Judenrat and was shot in the ghetto of Majdan Tatarski on 9 November 1942.
The Nazis had a plan of making the Lublin district into a Judenreservat (Jewish settlement area or literally reserve). This policy was discontinued in 1940 after thousands of people from Germany and Austria above all had been brought to small ghettos in the area. Later the Nazis closed some of the smaller ghettos and sent people to Lublin or other ghettos.
The Lublin ghetto as such was set up in March 1941. Even after it was set up, some people who worked for the Nazi authorities were allowed to stay outside the ghetto. The ghetto was formed in the streets around the castle, part of the Old Town and several streets to the north towards where the Yeshiva and Old Jewish cemetery still remain.
The ghetto was not enclosed like at Warsaw, Kraków or Łódż. There were some temporary barbed wire entanglements erected, however for much of the time it was in existence, Jews could live on one side of the street and other people on the other.
People died of starvation in the ghetto but not to the extent that this happened elsewhere as it was possible to bring food into the ghetto. An article in the Berliner Tagblatt of December 1940 had a series of photographs showing people being arrested for trading in foodstuffs.
The reason why people did not escape is clear. They had no documents - where could they go and how would they procure food and shelter?
In the late winter of 1942 the Nazis divided the ghetto in part A for those not working and B which is in the upper part which still survives for those working for the authorities. Thus all the people earmarked for deportation already found themselves in the lower part of the ghetto.
On 16 March 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hermann Höfle informed representatives of Nazi institutions in Lublin that all unemployed Jews would be deported to the last station in Lublin district - a place called Bełżec. The employed would be deported to another ghetto around 3km distant at Majdan Tatarski and from there they would be accommodated in Majdanek. At 22:00 on that day the ghetto was surrounded by SS and Trawniki men. A search light was set up and people forced to attend a roll call. Some, mainly the elderly and ill, were murdered. At midnight Hermann Worthoff from the Lublin Gestapo told the Judenrat that 1,500 people from the lower ghetto would be taken to the east to work and could take only 15 kg of luggage with them.
Those chosen for the journey on this night and every night were put in the Great Synagogue and then marched around 3km to the Umschlagplatz on the periphery of the town.
On 17 March 1942 these people became the first victims of the Bełżec death camp.
Around 1,000 - 1,500 people were taken to Bełżec daily until 14 April 1942. Some people were shot in the Niemce Forest to the north of Lublin.
On 14 April 1942 there were still around 7,000 people in the ghetto, many in hiding. In one of my films you can see the cellars which were uncovered by a building owner. To solve this problem, the Nazis moved everyone to the ghetto in Majdan Tatarski.
The Nazis introduced a J Ausweis for workers (but not their families) as part of the deportation process. On 22 April 1942 they gathered the population in the Po Farze Square. People were forced to kneel and hold their papers up. Those that did not have the correct papers were taken away and murdered.
Jews hiding in Rozhniativ (Galicia) during the war
© 2014,
We did an extensive research for the US crew working on movie depicting story of a Holocaust survivor coming back after years to the place where he was hidden during the war. In a small Galician town at the feet of the Carpathian Mountains, Rozhniativ (Rożniatów, Rozhniatov), we've found a tiny cottage with a cellar where he had spent two years of his childhood, 1942–1944.
Here we present our own footage of the site layered with the excerpts from an interview with Adela Shplak, the only one neighbour and eye-witness of the events.
In 2006 a Pole and an Ukrainian, Michał Jagiełłowicz and Ostap Yurechko who helped the Jews to survive, were awarded the title of the Righteous Among the Nation.
We'll keep you updated about the US movie on the story.
Simcha Rotem, 1997 Wallenberg Lecture
A participant in both the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, Rotem helped rescue survivors by making clever use of the city's maze-like underground sewer system.
About the Wallenberg Medal and Lecture
Each year the recipient of the Wallenberg Medal is invited to present a lecture at the University of Michigan. The medalists take the stage at Rackham Auditorium and share their stories with an audience drawn from our campus and many surrounding communities.
Each Lecture is different. In some years, survivors of Nazi persecution recounted their physical resistance in face of hellish danger. In others, medalists considered the effect over the years that the bravery of friends and family has had on the course of history. Lectures have been given by politicians who explain why they resisted unjust governments and, in turn, worked to develop a new order, honoring their personal vision with decades of public service. Some medalists have focused on their missions: to reject a life of wealth and rescue people who are literally slaves of corrupt businesses; to devote a life to the non-violent and peaceful pursuit of human rights.
What the Wallenberg Lecturers have in common is their ability to inspire all with their vision, and the reality of their strength to act upon that vision. Here is the power of an eyewitness account to convince us that, although evil truly occurs, with moral courage individual actions effect a change in the world. In their Lectures, the Wallenberg medalists reveal a common characteristic: they acted selflessly without expectation of reward. The Lectures are profiles of moral excellence in ordinary people. The words of the medalists help us to imagine how it is that some can see all people as human; they share a vision of human dignity.