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Part 7: After the War
Leslie Rübner
On 18th January 1945, Pest was liberated by the Red Army. Freedom!! We and all the surviving Jews were free to come and go as we pleased. Unfortunately, our flat received a direct hit and was no more, so we went back to my mother’s cousin’s flat. Zeida survived the ghetto, but was skin and bones and very ill. My mother was trying to nurse him back to health, but he was so weak that he could not even sit up. As there were no doctors or medication, nothing could be done for him and a few days after liberation he passed away. He, like so many other dead, was simply buried in a hole dug in one of the very few open spaces, with a label attached to his leg for identification. Zeida’s brother Samu and their father Shmuel, my great-grandfather, were killed just before liberation. They found refuge in one of the protected houses. During the attack on Budapest, they were in the basement of a block of flats. During a lull in the fighting, they came up for fresh air and a sudden bombardment finished them off. My great-grandfather was in his late nineties. Corpses were piling everywhere. Some neatly stacked, others just all over the place. Luckily for the survivors, it was a bitterly cold winter.
We soon learnt the fate of the rest of the family. Samu left a wife and four children without a father. The oldest, Judith, was also hit and was very ill for a long time. The two older boys, Yuda and Beri were lucky. They had a place on a transport to Palestine and left during the War. After Israeli Independence, the surviving members of my mother’s family in Budapest, Aunt Laura and Uncle Illes, the Weizses, Auntie Bella (Samu’s widow) and her son and daughter, went on aliyah. My mother’s brother, Uncle Simon, and his wife Auntie Manci, survivors of Auschwitz, went to the open city of Tangiers, then they moved to Madrid and finally settled in Brooklyn, USA. The two step sisters, Olga and Bluma, were in Romania during the War. They both married there. En-route to America, they stayed with us for a short while.
My father’s family fared much worse. His two sisters in Balassagyarmat, with their husbands and many children, perished in Auschwitz. One of his sisters-in-law and her children, died in Bergen-Belzen. His two brothers both survived, one, with his wife in a Budapest protected building and the oldest the one who lost all his family in Bergen-Belzen, in London. The War had caught him in London, where he was on business. He tried to bring his family out, but was defeated by red tape.
My father returned after 6 years of absence and he set about to restore our lives. He had found a repairable bombed-out flat in the same block where we lived before, and he had it seen to. My father, with his brother, resumed his business activities and for a while we did not do too badly. In December 1946, my youngest brother Moshe (Dr Paul Rubner) was born. After a long search, my mother found Juliska (a woman whom my mother had given our belongings to for safe keeping). Of course she refused to return anything, and as there was no written proof of ownership, she kept all our belongings.
The Hungarian Communists received 17 percent in the first post war elections, equal to the Social Democrats. But the presence of the Red Army in the country and strong support for the Communists within other parties, allowed them time to whittle away their political opponents. Within two years, the Communists had broken the power base of the ruling Smallholders Party (Kisgazda Párt), the strongest party in the new government, and by 1948, every party but the Social Democrats had vanished. These two parties merged in June 1948 to become the Hungarian Workers Party and in 1949, the Communists took over with no opposition in Parliament.
Father’s business was nationalised with no compensation. A warrant for the arrest my father and uncle was issued for illegally exporting goose down feathers to Israel. They were imprisoned for nine months awaiting trial but were found not guilty. This episode left us totally destitute. Both my parents had to find a job.
Mother became a homeworker for a co-operative society, retrieving usable materials from industrial waste. She was sitting on a low stool in the middle of the kitchen repairing, among other things, torn, used potato bags. Eventually, my father found a position in an egg trays-producing co-operative. He started as an unskilled worker, but managed to work his way up to manager. After a short while, he could find a permanent job there for my mother too.
Life was incredibly hard. The regime was fiercely anti-religious, especially anti-Jewish. In Moscow, Stalin accused nine doctors, six of them Jewish, of plotting to poison the Soviet leadership. These innocent men were arrested and, at Stalin’s personal instruction, tortured in order to obtain confessions. Stalin died on 5 March 1953, just days before their trial was to begin. A month later, Pravda, the Soviet daily, announced that the doctors were innocent and had been released from prison. In accusing the Jewish doctors of being poisoners, Stalin was, of course, reviving a libel that was common among medieval anti-Semites. This trial was copied throughout the “Socialist” countries. Pre-dating the Doctors trial, there was an anti-Semitic show trial in 1952, involving high-ranking politicians of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In November 1951, under pressure from Stalin, the Czechoslovak authorities had Slánský, a Jew, the second most powerful man in Czechoslovakia behind president Gottwald, imprisoned. Later other Jewish Communists were also arrested. Under extreme psychological pressure, accompanied by torture and sleep and food deprivation, they were forced to confess to absurd crimes: conspiracy against the Communist regime; cooperation with “imperialist” intelligence services; Titoism; Trotskyism; Zionism so on and so forth. Hungary was also preparing an anti-Zionist show trial. People we knew well were arrested and tortured in preparation for a show trial. Luckily Stalin died.
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Our family of five lived in a single room and kitchen with a shared outside toilet. We lived in the same block as before the war, in the Jewish Quarter of Budapest. Our original flat was the only one to have been shaved off from the top of the building by, probably, an American plane.
Housing in post-war Hungary was dire. Some families had to share a flat with a single kitchen; other families who were removed from the Capital City for being Class Aliens were made to live in some Kulak’s kitchen. (Kulaks were landed peasants and therefore enemies of the working class). Some even become cave dwellers.
The Communist government boasted full employment. If you were out of work, you were arrested and imprisoned. As in the Russian feudal system, one could be fired, but the worker could not give notice; the employee became just another machine. The poor worker could be transferred by his company without notice. Maybe five people did a single person’s job. In this “Workers’ Paradise”, there were chronic shortages of basic food stuff. When a shop suddenly had, for example milk, in no time there was an enormous queue of women with pots in their hands. At that time, the milk was sold not in a bottle or carton, but was measured into your vessel and before consumption you had to boil it for health reasons.
On Fridays, straight after school we rushed off to the mikveh. The Budapest mikveh of those days was quite different from the ones you see here. In Budapest, if you dig down deep enough, 70° Centigrade hot water shoots up. The men’s mikveh had 3 sections. The third class consisted of banks of showers where one could clean oneself before entering the mikveh, which was the size of a small swimming pool. For children the mikveh was free. We just dumped our clothes in a corner, and had a lot of fun doing pull-ups on a horizontal pipe or just swimming up and down. At the edges of the pool was a stone ledge where elderly people used to sit; and every now and then one of them shouted to the caretaker for more hot water. We came home clean for Shabbat.
As for my mother preparing for the Sabbath day, there were no Kosher facilities. The challahs were home-baked and were called barches. After Shul (interestingly there were plenty of shuls all over the Jewish District, sadly with diminishing membership), my father made Kiddush and HaMotzei over the challahs, and we started our Friday night meal with fish in jelly, followed by chicken or sometimes goose. Geese were valued for their fat; my mother collected it in a large bin.
I think it was before Passover in 1946, there was no Pesach flour, and so no matzo could be baked. Luckily, bags of sealed matzah meal were found and that were used for baking the matzah.
That year, most families had no separate Pesach dishes. At the ladies’ mikveh there was a colossal water heater set at maximum. To make it even hotter, red-hot stones were dropped into the tank, and the housewives brought their pots, pans, cutlery to dip it in to the overheated water, or put in the fire to burn off the chametz.
The 1956 uprising, on 23rd October, lasting until 10th November, had started with a student march through the centre of Budapest to the parliament building, who then tried to take over the National Radio broadcasting station. The Communist government fell. On 4th November, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and by 10th November, the Communists were back in power. As there was no effective government for a short while, there was an opportunity to flee - about 200,000 did so, with myself included. I ended up in Israel.
>Read about the story of Leslie's escape from Hungary in 'The Great Escape'<
My mother’s brother, Simon, at the time living in Madrid, came to Vienna to organise the rescue of our family from Budapest. He found a Hungarian who just crossed the border, who for a great deal of money, was prepared to get my family out. One morning, a complete stranger was ringing my parent’s front door, offering to take them over to Austria. My father refused to go unless his brother and his sister-in-law were coming too. He reluctantly agreed, but by this time the frontiers were gradually being secured and the guide had no idea where the safe crossings now were. They walked through rain-soaked fields in search of an opening in the border. My mother found it increasingly hard to walk in deep mud. My 10-year-old youngest brother, anxious to get to the West, was trying to hold her up. All is well that ends well, as they eventually arrived in Vienna and on Uncle Simon’s advice, they proceeded to London to join my paternal uncle Shiye there.
In the UK, Clement Attlee was ousted as the head of the Conservative government. The new Prime Minister was Harold (You Never Had It So Good) Macmillan. The Evening News and Evening Standard cost tuppence ha-penny and so did the cheapest fare on the bus. Vicky (a Hungarian Jew), who coined the name Supermac, was the Evening Standard’s cartoonist. The Farthing was still in circulation. And if you went to the City of London, you were confronted by numerous bomb sites.
For the first time, my mother had a settled and safe life here in London. My parents first rented, then bought a house in Stamford Hill and they perfectly fitted into the Charedi community there. My Uncle Shiye helped the family to establish itself. He gave a job to my father. My mother, always on the look out for a job opportunity, on hearing that someone left her job in an imitation jewellery manufacturing concern in Farringdon Road EC1, systematically knocked on all doors until she had found the place and got the job. In London, she saw her second son David receive an Honours degree in electronics engineering from Queen Mary College. Her youngest son Moshe (Paul), after a couple years at Manchester Yeshivah, also qualified in electronics engineering. He received a first-class honours degree from the Imperial College. However, his heart was set on studying medicine, so he enrolled in St Bartholomew Hospital and started all over again. He became a first-class, highly respected general practitioner. My mother saw all three of her boys grow up as observant Jews and marry girls from good families.
In 1976, after Shavuot, on a Tuesday after Bank Holiday Monday, my father was on his way home from work. Crossing the road in Barking, at the Ripple Way and River Road corner, a young man, who had just passed his driving test, knocked my father down, killing him.
My mother died in 1999 of old age and we buried her in Petach Tikvah’s Segula cemetery.
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