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Part 5: 90 Dob Street
Leslie Rübner
The autumn of 1944 found us in a “Jewish House” in Budapest. These blocks of flats had a Yellow Star of David displayed on their facade. Since the German occupation on March 19th, our future was even less certain than before. My mother frantically tried to find us a safe haven. She tried to get a place in a Swiss protected building, the “Glass House”, in 29, Vadász Street, but getting a place there was hopeless. Just when desperation set in, a cousin of hers offered us a place in a house of refuge organised by the underground Socialists. The building was supposed to be a Catholic orphanage in 90 Dob Street, Budapest. In fact, Jewish children and their carers filled it.
We collected what we could carry and left the small box room my mother, younger brother, my grandfather and I called home since we were forced to move to the “Jewish house”, leaving my grandfather, Zeidie, there in the small box room. Jews over the age of five had to wear a canary yellow six pointed, star-shaped material on their outer garments to be easily identifiable whenever they ventured outside. My mother, my younger brother of three and a half and I, a child of 6 set out. Mother and I made sure that the yellow mark was clearly visible to avoid arrest just before reaching this comparatively safe place. This “haven” was a two-storey office building with a large arched, locked gate in the middle of the frontage. We knocked hard on the wooden door and eventually the gate creaked open.
We entered into a sort of tunnel under the first floor of the building leading on to the courtyard. At the far end was the caretaker’s bungalow. Inside the gate, a reception committee was waiting. One of them approached us and with a blade and ceremoniously removed the accursed yellow material from our coats.
We settled in on the first floor in the room filled with children. There were also some adult residents in the house. I noticed three mothers and a student there. There were a number of older people too, people who paid large sums of money for a place, who kept themselves totally separated. As the Catholic Church ran this establishment the Arrow Cross, the uniformed Hungarian Nazis, being good Catholics, would not enter.
New children kept on joining us in the House. One particular boy is worth a mention. He kept fighting with everybody, screaming, and swearing a lot. When we learnt that he saw his parents murdered by the Arrow Cross, the children kept on winding him up by chanting “they killed your mummy and they killed your daddy”. Once after such a wind up, he had thrown a window open and screamed at full throttle “Arrow Cross! Come, there are JEWS in this house!” Luckily, no one heard him. One of the mothers told us to be understanding with this boy.
The three mothers and the student looked after the children as best as they could. This task became increasingly more difficult. As the war progressed and the Russians were closing in on Budapest, supplies were drying up. At one point, they had cut off the water then the electricity, followed by the gas. This meant that the toilets overflowed and there was no way to keep the children clean. We were plagued by both head and clothes lice; and at night the bedbugs gave the lice a hand. Our blood was literally sucked from us day and night. Keeping them under control was impossible. I remember pressing those creatures between my thumbnails as a kind of blood sport.
The mothers asked the people with no connection to the children to help in this difficult situation; after all, THEY were supposed to be the carers but they just kept driving us away to make sure they would not catch something nasty.
In the meantime, the Front was moving across Pest. Bomb attacks became regular events. Night and day, we heard explosions. My mother approached the caretaker to let us join the others in the underground shelter (the cellar), but as we were on the first floor, in his considered opinion we were safe. As children, we had great fun watching the aerial battles in the sky. The sight of aeroplanes chasing and shooting each other fascinated us. We saw planes suddenly catching fire and falling out of the sky. One day a bomb had fallen on to the caretaker’s bungalow and settled on the loft. Luckily, it did not explode. To be on the safe side, the caretaker also moved into the shelter. One of the mothers, thinking it to be the right time, again asked him to let us down into the shelter. His replied, “I wish I was as safe as you.” A few days later, for some reason, the caretaker went to inspect the gate and a fire burst hit him. As he was lying on the tiles dying, he had a change of heart and allowed us down into the shelter.
The winter of 1944/45 was a bitterly cold one. The River Danube had frozen solid. We had no means of heating and the supply of food dried up. Although there was no water, we had plenty of snow to melt. While it was still very cold, the temperature in the cellar (shelter) was just about above freezing.
In the cellar, days turned to nights without noticing the difference, so I could not tell when suddenly we heard knocking noises coming from the adjoining cellar. Bricks had started to fall off the adjoining wall and in no time, a little opening appeared. A German soldier came through followed by another. The first barked in German, “Why was not the separating wall knocked down? Why haven’t you followed the order proclaimed by the High Command?” Not waiting for a reply, they scuttled through as fast as they possibly could up the stairs and exited.
Not ten minutes later another two soldiers, at a leisurely pace, with sub machine gun at the ready, came through. They wore strange uniforms. They addressed us in Russian. My mother, who originated from Carpathian Russia, had understood the soldiers and therefore it fell on her to reply. She told them that the Germans had passed through and left the building.
We were liberated!
As the Russians had looked around, they noticed the student in his scholars’ uniform. One of the soldiers swung his gun toward him and called him a Nazi. My mother explained to him that this boy, far from being a Nazi, was actually a Jewish student. The Russians would not believe her. In desperation, she told the boy that “this is not the time to be bashful and show them the proof”. The soldiers moved on.
We had run out of food. After three days of fasting, I passed out. My mother had a fright and so with the other two mothers decided to venture out to find some food. On leaving, they suddenly came upon a Soviet machine gun placement at our entrance. My mother had approached one of the soldiers and explained to them that there were Jewish children in hiding in the building without food or warmth. The soldier replied “So you say you are Jewish. We will see”. He had shouted to one of the other soldiers “Nachum come here”. Nachum came and started up a conversation in Yiddish. The other two mothers, being local girls understood only Hungarian and a spattering of German, but my mother’s mother tongue was Yiddish and so she spoke to Nachum. Nachum took them to a field kitchen and there the soldiers gave the three mothers some wonderful black Russian bread, vegetables, horse meat and firewood. The officer on duty told them to come back the next day for more, but when the women returned, they had gone.
On January 17, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated all of Budapest. In a few days, we came up from the cellar and one by one, a parent, an uncle or some other relative came to pick up the children. Soon no one remained except the boy who had seen his parents butchered. He was still in a difficult mental state. Eventually somebody from America claimed him. Now, we also could return home. Our flat was in the Jewish Quarter, in what was the Ghetto. We arrived at our street, but our side of the block of flats had been bombed. Our home was in the middle of the street in the shape of a pile of bricks. We returned to the room where we left my grandfather. The two months in the Ghetto left my Zeida totally emaciated. A few days later, my Grandfather passed away in my mother’s arms. In one of the courtyards, we scraped him under ground.
A few months later, we exhumed my Zeida and with his father and brother, who perished at the same time, reburied him in the Orthodox Jewish cemetery.
My father had walked home from a concentration camp in Germany. He arranged another flat in our block and this is where we stayed until we left Budapest in 1956.
Eighteen years later, on the 2nd November 1938 at the First Vienna Arbitration, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy returned the largely Magyar-populated territories of southern Slovakia and Carpathian Rus to Hungary. After the Second World War it was the Soviet Union who had annexed Carpathian Rus and attached it to the Ukraine.
Sadly, the Second World War also put an end to the Jewish golden age in Czechoslovakia. After the restoration to Hungary, Sub-Carpathian Jews were the first ones deported to Auschwitz and their destruction by the Germans and Hungarians, put an end to a thriving, vibrant and unique community.
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