My Father's Last Farewell

Unspeakable sorrow filled our deeply shocked hearts as we left our warm homes. With a gloomy face that reflected how we all felt, my father put on his backpack and said his last farewell to us. I silently escorted my father to the train station. We walked side-by-side for thirty short minutes before he arrived at the appointed place. My father met other forced laborers there, including a childhood friend of his. A pair of local gendarmes yelled at me and told my father to board the train, which was already waiting. I choked back the tears as I parted from my father. I stayed on to see him take a seat in the train, a cigarette in his mouth and his reddish brown face with a very sad expression. This was the last time I ever saw him.

The parting from my father reminds me of an episode about another relative murdered by the Nazis. It relates to my first cousin Bela, born in 1927, like me. Both his parents (his mother was my father's sister), his two younger brothers <Terenire, Tomas> and he perished in gas chambers - nobody survived the murderous clutches of Nazi Germany.

After finishing secondary school, Bela worked as an apprentice for a dental technician in Puspokladany, living with his employer's family. When the Nazis invaded, they took over many houses owned by Jews, including this family's house. The head of the household had already been taken to forced labor service so only the employer's wife and Bela were there. The wife moved to live with friends, and Bela pretended he was a non-Jew, utilizing his limited knowledge of the German language to become friendly with those SS soldiers. For a short while, this scheme worked for Bela, or at least he thought it did. Then one night one of the SS soldiers entered Bela's room dead drunk and woke him up shouting, "you dirty Jew, who do you think you're fooling, I'll kill you right now", as he pointed his gun at Bela's head. Scared to death, Bela packed his belongings the next day and parted from us as he prepared to return to his parents in Nadudvar. Bela offered me his camera, and my parents let me ride my bike with him to Nadudvar to pick it up.

Years before, when we were both thirteen, Bela declared he would marry me when we turned eighteen. I never intended to accept his proposal - first, because he was my first cousin, and second, because at the age of ten I had already selected my future husband. Now, nearing Nadudvar, he must have subconsciously felt that his days on earth were numbered, so he proposed to marry me on the spot. He was deeply depressed when I refused. He gave me his camera as soon as we reached my aunt's house, and we exchanged farewells, both of us soon to enter the ghetto.

© David Muskal, 2001