More Anti-Semitic Laws

Summer passed, autumn came. The latest anti-Semitic Hungarian laws further restricted our business trade, limiting the weight of merchandise Jews could send. One of my father's friends helped us circumvent the regulations by letting my father write his name as the sender of goods. Thus, we prepared packages addressed from two different senders - my father and his friend - in order to evade the new law.

The local gendarme weighed each consignment we sent by rail, and my father also had to present himself at the gendarme's office each time for formalities. My father asked me to join him each time and I had to rent a bicycle in order to reach the train station. Riding later in the afternoon one day, and with no headlight on my bicycle, a driver came from the opposite direction and hit the front wheel of my bicycle. Instead of apologizing, Mr. Ragyva, the Jew-hating local fireman, blamed me for the accident. I had to carry back the bike, with its crooked front wheel, to the rental agency. I felt so angry and feared that I would have to pay for the damage, but Zoli, being a fine young man, gave me a replacement bicycle right away. Father waited on me in the company of a gendarme. We walked into the office, both of us in a dejected mood. We were afraid that the gendarme would discover our illegal shipping method, but after interrogating us he just asked my father to sign a firm verifying that he was the sender of the merchandise and let us go.

I grew up sixteen years in the midst of an anti-Semitic environment that included hatred and humiliation directed from part of the Christian population. The Hungarian government passed laws that gradually limited our trade and hardened our existence. We had to swallow our dignity and accept a limited, humiliating form of life. Having no choice, we did so.

During those short years, I know of very few families who left our town to foreign lands. But they really should have, as it was no secret that Jewish lives were going up in flames or down in mass graves by the hundreds of thousands in neighboring countries.

© David Muskal, 2001