Once again, major war is raging in the world, and it is taking place in the same region where I experienced World War Two - Eastern Europe.
I come from Budapest. My family spent part of the war hiding “underground” by Hungary’s Lake Balaton. For two reasons: (1) We are Jewish (on my mother’s side) and (2) the war was intensifying in Budapest. By 1944, the city was being bombed nearly daily, and the Battle of Budapest raged during that year’s winter. The battle pitted the German Wehrmacht aided by the pitiful remnants of the Hungarian army vs. the Soviet Red Army.
The Soviet forces reached Hungary in the fall of 1944/5. Budapest fell to them in February of 1945. The war’s last year (1944-45) was exceptionally gruesome. The Battle of Budapest lasted nearly two months. The Russians (actually the Ukrainians) besieged the city from Christmas 1944 to mid-February 1945. At the end of the siege, the city had been reduced to rubble and ashes, looking like Dresden, Rotterdam, Hamburg and other bombed cities. There wasn't a single bridge left connecting the two sides of the city - Buda and Pest. The battle killed about 100,000 German, Hungarian and Soviet soldiers and about 40,000 civilians, 7,000 of them executed.(Siege of Budapest)
My family decided to evacuate the city and go underground somewhere on the shores of Lake Balaton. That is where we spent the winter of 1944-45, one of the coldest on record. I turned four that year. On a snowy winter morning, a large group gathered outside our house on Budapest’s Hill of Roses, and we began the trek to the lake, about two hundred kilometers away. We would look for an area that was already under Soviet control. The group included me, my parents Ata and Jules, my grandparents, my twin sisters Juliette and Madeleine, my aunt Iça and her fiancé Robi, some other toddlers, and several Jewish friends traveling as gentiles with false papers. We all moved to the South shore of Lake Balaton, where we spent the entire winter and the following spring.
I remember walking down the snow-covered beach with my father. We heard a distant buzz. I asked him what it was, and he pointed towards a neat symmetrical formation of small, glistening, metallic objects high in the clear blue sky, saying, “Those are American airplanes flying to drop their bombs over Budapest.” I asked why, and “are the Americans going to bomb us too?” “No, Tom,” he reassured me. “The Americans are our friends. They are helping Russia defeat Germany. Soon all the Germans will be dead or gone, and we’ll be able to go home.”
That winter and spring, there was fierce fighting around Lake Balaton. This is one of Europe’s largest lakes, and it was essentially the front line for both armies. We moved several times from village to village, running away from the fighting as much as possible. We spent several weeks in the town of Balaton-Lelle, then Balaton Boglar, and then Karad. For a while we stayed in a church sacristy. I saw the a dead baby. We all slept on the floor, crowded like sardines. There were no amenities, no diapers, and food was scarce. The area changed hands between Germans and Russians several times, but eventually the Russians prevailed.
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My grandfather Imre had become fluent in Russian while in captivity in Siberia during World War One, so he became the translator. My family thought that we had been liberated, not realizing at the time that this would only lead to a new form of servitude. At that time, most Hungarians, not just the Jews, welcomed the Russian liberators with open arms.
My family had to contend with the Russian soldiers stationed in the same houses as the ones to which we had fled, and which they requisitioned. The Russians fit the stereotype found in the literature. They were more primitive than my middle-class Hungarian family. Some of them came from as far as Siberia and Mongolia. They drank enormously and many were essentially illiterate. They were mesmerized by western gadgets like watches and fountain pens - which they took at will. You could see some of them walking around with half a dozen watches around their wrists.
The Russian soldiers also hugged and were often kind to children. This stereotype was also valid. Some of them would take me on their lap, as they took their guns apart for cleaning and oiling. They would explain the mechanisms to me, and they tried to explain to me how to use it. My mother didn’t like this.
When the Russians got drunk - which was practically daily - serious problems could ensue. They would get back from the field already drunk, or they started to get drunk on whatever local Barack or other liquor they got their hands on, and then all hell broke loose. The wild and drunken soldiers would start shooting off their guns randomly in all directions - mostly skywards, but sometimes in more dangerous directions. Rapes and attempted rapes were a chronic threat and occurrence.
My mother and my aunt Iça were very vulnerable. One night, everyone was having dinner together at a long table. At the head of the table sat a short stocky Russian officer. He was in charge and he was drinking a lot. He shouted incessantly and ordered everyone around. After a while he stood up, slapped his boots loudly to demand everyone’s attention, and said, Everybody out, except you and you,” pointing at my mother and aunt Iça – two beautiful women, one in her twenties and the other one only sixteen. Then he turned to my grandfather, sitting right next to him, and barked, “Translate!”
So my grandfather translated the order and everyone obeyed and filed out of the room, except my mother, Iça and my grandfather.
The Russian’s face turned beet red and he shouted at my grandfather, “Didn’t you hear me? I said OUT!
Grandfather Imre, with his head down, answered in a low, calm voice, “I heard you.” But he didn’t move.
The Russian shouted, “Don’t you know that I can shoot you and kill you the instant you disobey me?”
Imre: “Yes I know.”
Then the short stocky officer gave the dinner table a loud kick with his boot, some plates fell to the floor, and he stomped out of the room and out of the house, red-faced and furious. Such was the courage of my grandfather!
This was not an isolated incident. My grandmother often had to fend off drunken soldiers as well. Once she physically shoved one of the soldiers out the front door. After she slammed the door shut, I walked up to her and asked, AGrandma, weren=t you afraid that he was going to shoot you?
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And here is another interesting memory:
One winter morning my mother had to go barter some of our possessions for a few potatoes. She went on her bike which no longer had tires, riding on the wheels’ metal rims. The bike’s rubber tires, like anything else valuable, had been confiscated by the Red Army.
As Ata rode down the snow-covered road, a young Cossack soldier stopped her. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Very politely and timidly, he demanded that she give him her boots. Using some Russian, some Hungarian and a little signing and pointing, he insisted that he needed the boots more than she did, because the following day he was going to have to go fight the Nazis in the snow and possibly on the icy lake. He pointed to his own feet, with only sandals on, and looked at my mother’s boots, which he wanted. So, she had no choice but to take them off and hand them over. He thanked her profusely -- at gun point.
My mother returned home carrying a big bag of potatoes on her tire-less bike, wearing nothing but socks in the snow.
© Tom Kando 2022;All Rights Reserved
