Sister in Sorrow: Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary

1. Brainstorming about the Life Histories of Women Holocaust Survivors

1 1 Brainstorming about the Life Histories of Women Holocaust Survivors And the poor, unfortunate one, this little sister of mine, they took her away. All four of us wanted to follow her. They beat us but would not let us die. The poor one, they took only her, and us they put on a transport, again on a train. We marched, did not know where nor why. We marched. Rachel Markowitz, Szilágysómlyo–Petach Tikva, 1991 In the Beginning There Was a Name The beginning of this book is a name: Ilana, my Hebrew name, or Ilona, the Hungarian name of two of my female relatives, one on the side of each of my parents. Both women were murdered in the Holocaust. For some reason, my parents named my sister and two brothers after their own parents and other relatives who had died from natural causes long before the Holocaust. Only I was given a ‘‘memorial candle’’ name, a practice well documented in the study of the ‘‘second generation’’ of the Holocaust in psychology and related fields.∞ The first Ilona, or Ilush, was my mother’s aunt on her mother’s side. Little was known about this aunt in my family except that she was very religious and red-haired, as were some of her children. Along with them, 2 Chapter 1 she was deported to Auschwitz (her husband’s fate is completely unknown ), and to the best of the family’s knowledge, none of them ever returned. The second Ilush was also called an aunt, although she was in fact my father’s first wife who had died in Auschwitz, together with their son, Péter-Pinchas. Until I reached adolescence, this distinction in status or familial relationship did not matter. For me, this Ilush too was an aunt, just like my other aunts and uncles whom I never met, either because they had died long ago or because they never came to Israel like my parents. Péter was, therefore, part brother, part cousin, though his very existence was so vague to me that I never grasped the problematics of defining our kinship. Only as an adult, while writing the PhD thesis on which the present book is based,≤ was I at times lured to the fantasy that my half brother was alive somewhere and that circumstances might still bring us together, although I knew that the chances for that were nil. During World War II my father served in the so-called labor battalions , or forced labor service within the framework of the Hungarian army.≥ Once the war was over, he waited for his wife’s return, but her name never appeared on the lists of the survivors. Instead, at the o≈ce where the lists were published, he met the woman who would be my mother. The two married and started a new family. In this family, whenever one of the deceased Ilushes was mentioned, it was always with the emphatic adjective ‘‘poor,’’ which is widespread in the Hungarian language when talking about su√ering and su√erers, in the same way that the adjective dear (drága) (sometimes in the literal meaning of sweet [édes]) is almost automatically attached to first-degree family members. It is my clear recollection that my mother never expressed any resentment toward her predecessor, very much unlike the treatment of such phenomena in world literature or in Israeli narratives dealing with ‘‘second generation’’ and ‘‘second’’ families.∂ In addition, Ilush’s brother, Mishka, was a frequent and welcome guest at our home who played and joked with us children just like a real uncle. In spite of the burden of memories and consciousness of relatives who ‘‘remained there,’’ or perhaps because of them, my parents did not tell us much about their past and families, let alone discuss meanings of names or possible resemblances and di√erences between the two ‘‘aunts’’ and their namesake. In our ‘‘family folklore,’’ although the Holocaust was not a taboo subject, it was dealt with as minimally as possible, a matter brought up by the children in light of memorial events or information gotten from the outside that aroused our curiosity.∑ Our parents always Life Histories of Women Holocaust Survivors 3 answered succinctly, focusing on facts, dates, places, and names. Our father, so we were told, served in the Hungarian labor battalions; his wife and son ‘‘never returned’’; our mother escaped...