While I was still sheltered and working in the Glass House, even during those rare intervals when we were not busy with copying lists of names, we were not idle. We always sought something to do, something that might become useful in the future. For my first pursuit I acquired an empty notebook and started to translate a book from German to Hungarian. The only book available that was worthwhile was the text that served as the ideological foundation of our movement. One of the girls volunteered as a scribe and wrote down what I dictated. Fortunately, she had nice readable handwriting and correct spelling. I do not remember how much I managed to translate or what happened to the completed part.

My next task was to record as many of our Eretz Yisraeli songs as I could recall and save both the Hebrew and the Hungarian versions for posterity….

I was never bored. As the days of Hanukkah approached we, my partner, Bohrer (whose first name has regretfully escaped me), and I decided to prepare some entertainment to raise the prevailing spirits in the overcrowded house and to ease the almost unbearable fear and tension, which increased with the rapidly nearing war front. We composed a parody based on Noah’s Ark, afloat on the high waters of the Deluge threatening to inundate the whole world; the Glass House was the Ark in which the chosen creatures found refuge and the leaders of the House were Noah and his family who fulfilled the Providential mission to save the refugees for a future world where no crime, no evil; and no hatred would exist. We performed the play amid the increasingly audible battle noise of detonations of artillery shells and airborne bombs outside. In spite of these distractions, we achieved our main goal: there was much laughter, and the audience rewarded the show with a standing ovation and cries of warm thanks.

While more and more people, many of them members of different youth movements, sought refuge in the Glass House, each movement sought to secure a more or less separate area for its members. I was one of the first members of Hashomer Hatzair, and we managed to settle one corner of the basement where the glass bricks were stored. We used them to build a sort of fence “to mark our territory”. The place was filled within a couple of days. As more and more forced-labor escapees bearing Schutzpasses were admitted, the task of feeding 2,500–3,000 people and securing sleeping space and minimal facilities of hygiene for them became impossible, not to speak of any work space.

At a certain point the crowdedness in the house became unbearable. The house management decided therefore to open a parallel safe house nearby at 17 Wekerle Street, which also enjoyed exterritorial status. I was included in its specially chosen administrative crew and was accommodated in a small room of my own, probably a former dressing closet, but next to a bathroom with warm water for a daily shower. We also could resume our official task. I do not remember what we did but probably continued copying more lists.

As a senior member of our movement, who was supposed to know most of our members, I was also in charge of controlling the admittance of people who sought refuge. One morning the guards at the gate informed me that a jolly young girl wanted to see me: a member of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, called Haya Roth, sister of Shosha Roth. They asked me whether I knew her. I had not met Haya in the movement, but I knew the name of Shosha as an active member of a younger group. I told the guards to admit the girl and send her up to me. A smiling, well-dressed (in those crazy days!) and good-looking girl entered my modest office. She presented herself and told me that her younger sister Sosha had joined the “pilot group” that supposedly was on its way to Palestine and was stuck at that time in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. I tried to console her, or maybe simply wanted to be nice, telling her that my brother and three sisters suffered the same fate. She also told me that she was hiding in the city with relatives and friends, and that they were short of food, especially bread. As a matter of fact she had come to get some food, if there was any. There was a grave shortage of food in Budapest during the siege. I asked her to follow me to the store in the yard, where Efra Teichman was in charge of supplying the Ghetto and the “Protected Houses”. While we descended the two floors, I whistled one of my favorite Eretz Yisraeli songs. Haya asked me in a wondering tone, “Are you in a mood to whistle this melody while the world outside is burning?” I answered cheerfully, “What can happen? When worst comes to worst, they can make us swim in the Blue Danube!” (In those days, the Arrow-Cross gangs caught Jews in the streets or picked them out of Jewish Houses, marched them to the bank of the Danube, ordered them to strip, and machine-gunned the shivering bodies into the waves.) The poor girl did not know whether to laugh or to cry at my macabre humor. At the store I presented her to Efra and asked him to help her as much as he could. We parted with a friendly Good-bye.

During the last stormy days of the Soviet siege, Arrow-Cross militiamen managed to capture and murder three of the most prominent members of our Rescue Committee: Simcha Hunwald, one of the senior leaders of the Hashomer Hatzair movement; Otto Komoly, the chairman of the Hungarian Zionist Organization; and Arthur Weiss, the owner of the Glass House. May their memory be blessed!

As the siege of Budapest gathered momentum, the battle noise came closer and louder day-by-day; Soviet bombs and artillery shells hit more and more houses; and walking in the streets became impossible. The only people outside were the bloodthirsty Arrow-Cross gangs who kept hunting for Jewish prey. At last, on the morning of January 18, 1945, the long awaited, cheerful news was announced all over the house: “The Red Army has arrived, we are free!” Although our entire expectations had been focused on this moment, it took several minutes to grasp the full meaning of this new situation. I am unable to do justice to the relief I felt. The constant fear, the Sword of Damocles, which had been swinging over our lives, lifted like a heavy weight from our conscience and disappeared like a bad dream, evaporating into the morning sunshine as if by a magic wand. I felt as if I were awakening from a nightmare, as if I had become weightless. A sense of joy and elation I had not experienced before overcame me: at last we could breathe freely! This elation lasted, despite the barbaric behavior of Soviet soldiers toward the civilian population.

When we ventured out, the spectacle all about the city was catastrophic. Many once stylish buildings were in ruins and others were severely damaged. Those walls that were still standing showed traces of fierce airborne and artillery attacks. Heaps of dirty snow full of debris and frozen carcasses of horses were scattered all over the streets. People gathered around each horse, trying to cut pieces of flesh for food. Masses of wrecked military lorries and tanks told the story of violent house-to-house battles everywhere. What had become of our enchanting city? There was no time to wonder and ponder about such sentimental questions; many heavy tasks were ahead.

Our movement had established scores of homes for children who were orphaned or left without parental care. The management and crew of these homes were members of Zionist youth movements. Such charitable institutes had enjoyed the patronage of the International Red Cross and exterritorial status even during the Nazi and Arrow-Cross regime. Unfortunately, the murderous Arrow-Cross gangs did not always respect this status. They often burst violently into such homes, arresting or killing the personnel and stealing equipment and food supplies.

My first task was to restore a home that had suffered such a violent visit. I was the head of a crew of three volunteer women and I still shudder when I recall the horrible sight we encountered on entering the home in Teleky Pál-utca. Right in the anteroom 10-12 frozen corpses of little children were lined up on the floor. In the inner room the stench was unbearable. In each crib we found 5-6 children, from toddlers up to 8- or 9-year olds, some dead, others near starvation. They were crawling about, smeared all over with their feces. After we had separated the living from the dead and changed the bed linens, using a roll of white linen cloth we had brought along, we washed the children, dressed them in new clothes, and put them into the clean beds. Alas, diarrhea often worked faster than we could. Within a few minutes the fresh, white beds were no longer clean. All that time the children were moaning, asking for their parents and for food. Their digestive systems could not absorb the food we had brought. We were at a loss. Nobody of the home’s staff was there to help. Most probably they had been murdered or arrested by the sadistic brutes who had perpetrated that gruesome display of small frozen corpses mixed with barely living infants in the same beds.

While we were discussing what to do, a Russian soldier burst into the room, probably looking for valuables and for liquor, as the comrades used to do all over the city. He was shocked by what he saw and asked what all this meant. None of us spoke Russian, but by summoning everything we knew in Slovakian and Czech we tried to explain that the Nyilasok had killed the staff and many of the children, taken away their food, and left this mess. He uttered a juicy Russian curse and ran off. Within a few minutes he was back with an officer and more soldiers, who carried sacks of rice, sugar and bread. The officer advised us to feed the children rice first, in order to stop the diarrhea. It took several days of hard work to restore minimal cleanliness. The generosity and the humane attitude of the Russian soldier doubtlessly contributed to saving the lives of those poor children.

Our volunteer friends visited several more such homes and with unprecedented love and devotion saved and rehabilitated about 6,000 children. In a gigantic enterprise, they brought them together in the Eastern town of Békéscsaba, where, unlike in Budapest, there was no food shortage. Teachers tried there to help the kids complete the classes they had missed during the gloomy months of persecution. Most of those children were brought to Eretz Yisrael and got the best of education by Aliyat Hanoar, an organization for Youth Immigration.

My next task was teaching and counseling in an orphanage of Polish children whose parents had been murdered or arrested. They had been out of school for years and there was much work to do in catching up with any reasonable curriculum. I was chosen for the task, I suppose, because of my former experience with teenagers at the Zöldmáli Apprentice Home some years earlier. There was a major obstacle—the language. The children knew very little Hungarian; they spoke Polish and Yiddish. I did not speak Polish, but remembered some Slovak and Czech, which are Slavonic cousins of Polish. I did my teaching in Yiddish and partly in Czech. This odd situation caused much confusion and merriment, because they spoke Yiddish with a different accent. Nevertheless we made considerable progress. The institute’s manager, Dr. Osterweil, a Polish physician, and his wife were satisfied with our significant achievement.

In addition to teaching, I also took part in establishing a Hakhshara, a preparatory course for Kibbutz life, for members of the Movement over the age of 20. It was meant to prepare them for Aliyah, immigration to Eretz Yisrael, by living in a commune similar to that in the Kibbutzim. The community was housed in a nice villa in Zugló, the 14th District of Budapest. Since public transportation was not yet functioning, I had to walk daily to and from that remote suburb, 1½ hours at brisk pace in each direction.

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