Memoir of the vanished Jewish community of Kisvarda by Gabriel Erem

The sun is beating down hard on the surface of the bright, smooth Jerusalem stone. The single word carved into the rock hits me like a bolt of lightning: “Kisvarda”.

I slowly close my eyes and then take a second look: am I seeing this right? I am in Jerusalem in the very heart of the Holy Land, on the hallowed grounds of Yad Vashem. The signpost at the intersection helps: “Valley of the destroyed communities”. In front of us lays the biggest cemetery on earth that holds the restless souls of six million murdered human beings.

The word carved into the stone pierces my heart like a blade.
Kisvarda. Once upon a time home of my ancestors since 1747. Today it is a bustling little metropolis, resembling an over-packed hornet’s nest, a re-born Phoenix rising from the ashes of a troubled history. But something is missing. Something, that was part and parcel of the local population for a hundred and ninety seven years. My relatives. My community. The Jews.

Today, there is no one left. The Jewish cemetery is no longer expecting new occupants. The last Jew of Kisvarda was laid to rest in this orphaned, overgrown, neglected garden of eternity some years ago.

Our still magnificent synagogue, a masterpiece of Moorish architecture, once the throbbing heart of our vibrant and colorful community today serves as a haphazard and terribly neglected regional museum overseen by a drunken Hungarian custodian who has no idea about what this imposing edifice once represented to a living community. It is heart-breaking to see how the orphaned building just stands there today in its awe-inspiring former glory, like a bride frozen in the ice-tomb of an unforeseen catastrophe, still dressed in her best, waiting for her chosen who will never return.

Only the wondering, restless, silently crying souls reside behind its stained windows. The souls of all those, whose tortured bodies were taken away from our world by the trains of hatred on Monday, May 29, 1944. The last train from the Ghetto. The entire families of my Father and Mother among them. Every single person who would have meant anything to me. My aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, their rabbis, teachers, doctors, grocers and shoemakers. My entire incinerated Universe.

Today I am standing on the hills of Jerusalem, but in the eyes of my soul I am watching with indescribable horror and utter helplessness the loading of the filthy cattle cars with their precious human cargo. Next to the brickyard a handful of over-zealous Hungarian gendarmes in their impeccable, shiny uniforms are enthusiastically clubbing entire families into the over-packed cattle cars. The butt of a rifle hits hard. Bones are breaking, but in the mad hell of it all there is no time for cries. The faces, the eyes the tears, the prayers and the cries will be forever carved into my heart.

My paternal Grandfather, Avraham Yitzhak Eichler was sixty-nine years old at the time. His wife Anna Gerendasi was fifty-five. All my father’s siblings, Vilmos (44), Hugo (43), Margit (35), Olga (25) together with the siblings of my grandfather, Samuel, Henrik, Jeno, Odon and Gizella. My maternal grandmother Ilona Berger and her sister Szerena together with her fourteen children were transformed into smoke and ashes within thirty minutes of arriving at Auschwitz. My Uncle Willie and his wife Bella with their two
children, one six years old, the other barely four were sent straight into the gas chambers.

Many years later an eyewitness who survived told me, that when the numbered, beaten and starved human cargo of the cattlecars was delivered to the selection platform of the death factory, an elegantly dressed SS doctor was standing on the embankment. Constantly smiling, he casually pointed to the left and to the right with his soft kid gloves.

The Angel of Death. Dr. Mengele. My gap-toothed, handsome, well-dressed constant companion in my nightmares ever since I can remember. For I was there too. When that monster selected my Mother to serve as his human guinea pig, he selected me for life too. A cursed burden, that is crushing to live with every day of my life.

My Aunt Olga, who managed to hold on to her beautiful twins, was the first one on the road to the gas chamber. She walked, with her head erect, one child on her arm, the other walking beside her, holding hands on the road of no return.

Back at the loading dock, an unfortunate Jew from our town who was weakened by the arduous three day ride in the suffocating cattle cars was moving slower than the others. A huge SS soldier took a swing at him with the butt of his rifle, scattering his brain all over the pavement.

My uncle Willie Eichler who was just a moment earlier standing next to the man who was so savagely slain, suddenly bolted out of the lineup and with his bare dealing a single, powerful blow, knocked the SS butcher dead.

My uncle then one last time looked at his wife who was still holding on to their beautiful twins on her arms, knowing what faith was awaiting all of them, he calmly walked over to the electrified fence and threw himself on the high-voltage barbed wire.

My maternal grandmother, Ilona Berger was fifty-five years old. She was driven into the gas chamber among the very first of the new arrivals. Her husband, my grandfather Vilmos Frank was also fifty-five at the time. (He was somewhat luckier than the rest of my family, since he was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery in World
War I. when he served in the Astro-Hungarian army of Emperor Franz Josef. As a reward for his heroism, he was “only” sent to the Therezienstadt camp, which was a model camp to fool the Red Cross inspectors).

My Father Kalman fared somewhat better, he and his 23 year old twin brother Gabriel (after whom I was named) were sent to perform back-braking slave labor with their other brothers Samuel (36), Ernest (33) and Joseph (32). They were driven onto the Russian minefields by their Hungarian Nazi captors as human detonators. Only the twins survived the horrors of the eastern front. All other members of my family had perished in the furious inferno of Nazi hatred.

Why am I mentioning them by name? So that future generations should know that they existed. They have no tombstone. They have no resting-place.

But they lived. They were people. They were feeling human beings. They rejoiced. They were sad. They worked. They celebrated. They were part of the colorful mosaic that was the world of Kisvarda and vicinity, tucked away in the idyllic, quiet and simple country life that was pre-World War II Eastern Europe.

Recently I returned to my birthplace, one last time. There I stood, facing the gates of my Grandfather’s home. The lion’s head with the knocker was long gone, but the old garden was intact. The fruit- laden trees planted once upon a time by my grandparents were still there.

Standing there in silence, I took out my camera to take some photographs of the house, when the door opened and this old man
in his eighties, wearing the garb of a prosperous Hungarian peasant appeared. First he looked me over and then he turned to me with a traditional Hungarian greeting: ”May God give you a good day, Sir!”

He then asked me why I was taking pictures of his house. When I told him, that it used to be the home of my deported grandparents he grew visibly agitated and worried, apparently fearing, that I came to re-claim the house the land and the business that he had taken from my murdered family.

When I reassured him, that I was only there to simply take a few pictures for my children, he became somewhat friendlier and suddenly he told me: “you know, we were all feeling really bad at first when your loved ones were being taken away for the gas chambers.” Ten, adjusting his handlebar mustache he added: “you know we knew that they were all turned into soap and lampshades”.

Then, volunteering some more sympathy for my loss he added: "I think you should know that, your grandparents were exceptionally good folks, although they were Jewish….”

I am sure he must have meant this as a compliment, but it was a painful reminder to me, that precious little has changed in these parts in the past fifty-some years.

Right there and then this wave of emotion flooded me: something must be done to make sure, that the memories of my ancestors’ shtetl should not disappear without a trace behind the trapdoors of the bottomless pit that is History.

For the very few of us who by the grace of fate have survived from the inferno of our apportioned destiny, it is our sacred mission to not only remember but also to remind those that will follow in our footsteps of what was done to us.

The few of us who remain, think of our vanished past with painful nostalgia, of the abandoned, robbed, gutted home, the orphaned synagogue, and the Jewish schools that will no longer be rebuilt. There will be no more Jewish weddings in Kisvarda, and the echoes of laughter of the once vibrant Jewish community center are now blown away by the merciless winds of time.

But the faces remain. They haunt me in my dreams. And yes, I do recognize them all in an instant, because their imprint is burned forever in my broken soul. Inside me they will live on forever. The timeless powers of eternity engraved their un-earesable images in every part of my being.

I am now the keeper of this precious treasure, not by choice but by fateful circumstance.

The basic premise to the survival of the Jews as a people is the task assigned by the Almighty: “”….and tell your sons…” Tell them about the life you had. Tell them about your town, your community- places, they will never see.

And frankly, they don’t miss it, only we do, the chosen keepers of the eternal flame. For only we know, that we left a lot more behind then mere houses and gardens. What we left behind were our nurturing roots, our torn-away loves, our evaporated dreams, and our never-happened youth with all those years that were full of promise. It is where we left behind nearly all of our beliefs in humanity and all of our faith.

But we must tell our children, and to our children’s children that even in this drastically changing world around us, we can find our rightful places. If only we can carry on with that homegrown, old-fashioned and time-tested value system handed down to us by those, taken from us by the flames of hatred. We will live.

With our very being, every day, every hour and every minute we must raise an eternal memorial to the gigantic cultural heritage. To those orphaned places of worship, the dismembered burned Torah scrolls, the prayer books that were ripped apart, in which once upon a time shaking hands marked the dates of joy and of solemn remembrances of yesteryears.

We are messengers with an awesome mission. We must remind the coming generations, that those names carved into memorial plaques were real people. Lives. Hopes. Neighbors. Friends. Us.

The sunshine of Jerusalem sharply reflects from the surface of the letters carved into the stone.”Kisvarda”. I close my eyes. “Kisvarda”. It is such a small dot on the map of the world, that it is impossible to find it any more. But it is so gigantic on the maps of our hearts, that it can never be forgotten.

Wherever I am, in New York, Jerusalem or Alaska, all I have to do is simply close my eyes and I am instantly transported back to the world that once was.

I can see Main Street with it’s glittering shops, an Eastern-European shtetl version of today’s Madison Avenue: the millinery shop of old Mr. Kastner, the cigar stand of the one-legged Leslie Fischer, the always over stuffed delicatessen of Andor Klein, the fine art framing shop of Samuel Eichler, the hiking and bicycle shop of Paul Schwartz and Nicholas Geiger, the fine watch shop of the Eimer family, the glittering crystal shop of the Teichmanns, the spectacular shoe store of the Reismanns, the Biedermann and Kovacs supermarket, the instant printing shop of Preiss publishers, the Frenkl family’s perfume boutique.

And look! Around the corner on display are the freshly made chocolate delicacies of the Stuhmers, next to the Vadasz gift boutique and the custom-made shoe salon of the Preraus. Next door is the Schwartz family’s soft-drink stand, the Kellner and Klein department store.

You see, there once was a world here. Our world. A world full of life of joy of hope of future. What remains today is an enormous void. They are all gone. Their lives snuffed out irrevocably. Our once brightly shining Menorah, symbol of a rich Jewish life stands inverted, nearly buried, its lights irrevocably suffocated by the sands of time.

As a young journalist, back in 1973 shortly after the Yom Kippur war I had a chance to meet the late Golda Meir. She was a wise woman who possessed a tremendous sense of destiny. She spoke with the unquestionable authority of a person destined to be a leader, but always with an ever-present sadness in her voice.

She told me something that will reverberate in my soul until my dying day: “Son, the world is sick and tired with hearing about us Jews. For them the Six Million is a number, a statistic. They don’t seem to understand that for us, the real tragedy is not just the loss of our Six Million. But it is the generations that will not happen after them…”

I often think of what Golda said back then. Frankly until then I wasn’t thinking in those terms. But ever since….

Recently she came to my mind in the middle of a festive dinner in New York City, benefiting the venerable Weizmann Institute of Science. There at the head table, forty-four people were seated. They all had three things in common: they were all Jewish, they were all involved with some kind of research at the Weizmann- and all of them were Nobel Laureates in something.

It was a truly awesome sight. I thought to myself: Look what we have given to the world in brainpower, knowledge and goodness! I was pondering: probably no other nationality, creed, race or religion is represented in such disproportionately high numbers among these extraordinary gifts to the world. We are a special people!

And then I thought of the last frame of Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”. There was a two-liner on the screen that said: “Of the 1,100 human being Oscar Schindler saved, there are 6,700 descendants alive today.” And then I thought of Kisvarda. And then of what Golda said. Using the same equation I then came to the conclusion, that in the flames of the Shoah, we actually lost about thirty six million of our people.

I am forever haunted by the “what if” questions: how many potential Einsteins? What could have been? How many possible Nobel Laureates? Teachers. Poets. Inventors. Doctors. Researchers. We will never know….

The sun is beating down hard on the surface of the bright, smooth Jerusalem stone. The single word carved into the rock hits me like a bolt of lightning: “Kisvarda”.

The word carved into the stone pierces my heart like a blade.
Kisvarda. Once upon a time home of my ancestors since 1747. Today it is a bustling metropolis, resembling an over-packed hornet’s nest, a re-born Phoenix rising from the ashes of a troubled history. But something is missing. Something, that was part and parcel of the local population for a hundred and ninety seven years. My relatives. My community. The Jews.

Wondering. Always on the way somewhere, nobody really knows where. Always moving along with the winds of time. When will this Diaspora end? Will it ever? Ours is a journey of many
Millennia. Are we on a ship that constantly sails the oceans of ages, but never puts into port?

The warm Jerusalem breeze gently caresses my face. I am among my own now. I am at home. In the Hall of Remembrance. I turn my eyes skyward and slowly utter the hallowed words of the ancient prayer for the dead: “Yisgadal veyiskadash sh’meh rabbah…”

Compiled by Peter Spiro

If you have additional information or old photographs to contribute, please send them to me at the address below.

Updated December 10, 2009

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