Ilona Mermelstein says there were three specific moments during the Holocaust when she was saved from almost certain death.
Three hinge points that led to her being an 87-year-old grandmother living in a comfortable Vancouver apartment, rather than being among the 570,000 Hungarian Jews murdered in the closing months of the Second World War.
The first was a Hungarian gendarme stationed outside a police station on Budapest’s Mosonyi Street. As Mermelstein’s mother, Klára Kiss, walked towards the front door, the officer kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, but delivered a whispered warning.
“Madam, you can walk into this building, but if you do, you will never walk out,” he said.
If Kiss had gone only a few steps further, her fate would have been sealed: Deportation to the Kistarcsa transit camp outside the city, before ultimately being loaded onto a cattle car for the 500-kilometre journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Left on her own, the seven-year-old Mermelstein, then known by the last name Kiss, would have been swiftly rounded up by Hungarian authorities and placed on her own cattle car for Auschwitz. If she survived the journey, she would have been immediately dispatched — along with all the other children on the train — to one of the four gas chambers active in the camp during the summer of 1944.
Instead, her mother returned home and began making plans to go into hiding.
“God bless this officer, whoever he might be,” said Mermelstein, speaking in Hungarian (her comments were translated by her grandson, Aron Csaplanos).
In 1944, Mermelstein was living in the Hungarian village of Tápiószele, just outside the capital of Budapest. Her grandparents ran a jewelry and clock repair shop, her father had been conscripted into the Hungarian Air Force and Mermelstein was in first grade. One of her closest companions was a doll with a paper mache head that she had oddly filled with candy: Anytime she was given a treat, she “fed” half of it to her doll by putting it inside the doll’s body.
Mermelstein and her family were members of the last intact Jewish population in continental Europe. By 1944, most of the Holocaust’s six million Jewish victims were already dead. All around the borders of Hungary were the death camps, mass graves and liquidated ghettoes of Nazi Germany’s fevered rush to eradicate European Jewry.
But Hungary’s approximately 800,000 Jews — about five per cent of the total population — continued to live in relative safety. Mermelstein’s grandfather, a First World War veteran, continued to receive state veterans’ benefits. The family shop remained open. Mermelstein continued to attend school.
Like thousands of other Jewish men, her father Daniel had been forced into dangerous labour service with the Hungarian military, and had almost been killed in a 1943 training accident. But he remained in touch with his family, and was even able to slip out on occasion for quick visits home.
All this was due to the ironic fact that Hungary was a close ally of the Nazis. Hungary was led by Miklós Horthy, an authoritarian who was vocally antisemitic.
“I have been an anti-Semite throughout my life,” he would write in a 1940 letter, calling it “intolerable” that “the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary.”
The Horthy government had spent the war purging Jews from the civil service, stripping them of the right to vote and banning intermarriage. They’d even ordered the deportation of thousands of non-Hungarian Jews into what is now Ukraine, where they were immediately murdered by Nazi death squads.
When Mermelstein had started school, she said she’d initially been able to sit at the front of the class — until, as a Jew, she was ordered to the back. On one walk home, she described being jeered by fellow children, yelling a Hungarian taunt that roughly translates to “hang the Jew.”
But the Hungarian government had repeatedly ignored German demands to subject its own Jewish population to their Final Solution.
By 1944, with the war having decisively turned against Nazi Germany, it would have been easy to imagine that Hungary would emerge from the war as an oasis of Jewish safety. That was, in fact, the plan: At the right moment the Horthy government intended to switch sides to the allies and present their “rescued” Jews as insurance against the war crimes trials coming for other Axis leaders.
On March 19, 1944, Nazi Germany began the occupation of its Hungarian ally. For the first time, German soldiers entered Hungarian cities and took direct control of the organs of state power, including the Hungarian gendarmerie.
Their goal was to prevent Hungarian capitulation to advancing Soviet armies, and also to hurriedly murder the country’s Jews while they still could.
Mermelstein’s first inkling that something had gone wrong was going to her grandparent’s home and finding it empty, with the windows and doors left open.
Hungarian police had arrested her grandparents in a dragnet of suspected communists. But within hours, all the other arrestees were free, with only the Jews remaining in custody.
Kiss’s encounter with the Mosonyi Street gendarme would happen while she was attempting to answer one of the last-ever communications she would receive from her mother; a cryptic postcard requesting food.
Tragically, their last interaction had been a fight: The night before her parents’ arrest, Kiss had screamed at her mother, accusing her of pushing herself too hard amid the stresses of their worsening situation. The regret over this last meeting would give Kiss and her daughter a lifelong commitment to always saying “I love you” each night, whatever the circumstances.
Mermelstein and her mother had an unusually clear picture of what fate awaited them if they were caught.
In the Holocaust’s early stages, victims might have believed that they were merely facing forced relocation — with the truth only being revealed once they were led to remote areas and hastily transferred into mass-killing sites. Or, if they stepped into a “shower” for delousing and found it filling with poison gas.
But Hungary’s Jews would have been able to know what had happened to their Jewish brethren in the likes of Poland or the occupied Soviet Union.
Mermelstein described hearing allied radio broadcasts describing death camps and a systematic campaign of mass murder that had claimed millions.
Early revelations about the scale of the Holocaust were due in part to the actions of another Vancouverite, Rudolf Vrba.
Vrba, who died in Vancouver in 2006 and is buried in the Lower Mainland, had managed the near-impossible feat of escaping from Auschwitz.
The Slovak-born Vrba had been a member of the Sonderkommando; battalions of Jewish prisoners forced to process the bodies of gas chamber victims. After stripping the corpses of hair and gold teeth, the Sonderkommando members would burn them in crematoria. Or, if the killing volume was particularly high, in open pits.
In early 1944, the 19-year-old Vrba had deduced that the camp was gearing up for a massive influx of Hungarian Jews, and he formed a plan to escape and tell the world in the hopes of preventing the last great mass-killing of the Holocaust.
Mermelstein and her mother were going into hiding just as the world was getting its first detailed picture of the Nazi concentration camp system via the Vrba-drafted “Auschwitz Protocols.”
The “selection” process by which Jews were separated into those slated for immediate execution, and those who could be worked to death. A warehouse complex known as “Kanada” where the clothes, valuables and luggage of murdered victims were sorted and repurposed for German use. The gas chambers employing Zyklon B, a commercial rodenticide. A killing system so efficient that entire freight trains of Jewish victims could be turned to ash in a matter of hours.
Mermelstein and her mother had been invited to hide in the mansion home of the Blaskovich family, non-Jewish family friends. Her mother had been told that “when they come for the Jews,” they could conceal themselves among the antiques in the home’s storerooms. During the months of hunger and deprivation that followed, Mermelstein rationed out the stale candy stored inside her doll.
The home is now a museum. Although, oddly, its role in Mermelstein’s salvation is unmentioned amid displays showcasing 19th century furniture and preserved gardens.
The second time Mermelstein’s life was saved was just before they went into hiding, and her mother narrowly avoided boarding a train that was targeted by Allied bombing, killing everyone aboard. Here again, Mermelstein would have been left alone and defenceless against Hungary’s nationwide Jewish roundup.
Her third and most dramatic brush with death came when winter approached, and Mermelstein and her mother hatched a plan to retrieve heavy clothing from their abandoned home. They blackened their faces with coal dust in an attempt to look like transients, and walked the one hour back into Tápiószele, reasoning that if caught they could say they were simply robbing the homes of evacuated Jews.
While inside the home, they were surprised by a Hungarian-speaking SS officer.
As Mermelstein relates, she watched in horror, her hand covering her mouth to prevent her screaming, as the officer produced a gun and held it to her mother’s head.
“I thought they took all of you away! You should have been taken to die!” she remembers him saying.
The commotion attracted the attention of a prostitute, who was in Tápiószele in anticipation of the arrival of the Soviet Red Army.
As Csaplanos said in translation, the woman came in and “started caressing the SS officer, saying ‘Come with me, we’ll have a good time. Leave this woman alone; she’s just a lowly Hungarian maid that used to work for the Jews. She’s only here stealing.’”
“Eventually, the German said, ‘Okay, leave these stupid Hungarians,’” he said.
Mermelstein’s grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz, although the precise date and circumstances are not known. Their names are on a small Tápiószele Holocaust memorial, alongside 55 others.
Of the estimated 565,000 Hungarian Jews murdered between 1939 and 1945, more than 400,000 had been deported to Auschwitz over a period of just eight weeks.
A cousin and aunt of Mermelstein’s were also among them. The cousin survived, albeit with deep scars from a near-fatal beating at the hands of the SS. “She had a bump on her head which I still remember seeing,” said Csaplanos.
The aunt, Aranka, died under particularly sadistic circumstances. Suffering from severe dysentery, she was handpicked for recuperation by the notorious Josef Mengele, chief physician of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. “Immediately after she was healthy, he sent her straight to the gas chamber,” said Csaplanos.
Many Holocaust survivors emerged to find their entire world shattered. Whole family trees wiped out. Home villages that had ceased to exist. Neighbours that had seized their property and were not happy about their return; in some cases, Holocaust survivors returned home only to be massacred in pogroms.
Like everywhere else in Europe, Hungary’s Jewish population has not come close to recovering. Even today, the number of Jews in the country is less than an eighth of what it was prior to the feverish deportations of mid-1944.
But Mermelstein emerged into a life that, to her, was much the same as before — her young age helping to gloss over the trauma of what had happened.
Her father also survived the war and the family was able to reoccupy their Tápiószele home — Mermelstein would live there until her until her emigration to Canada in 1990.
The family’s valuables, stored in the attic, were spared from Soviet looting for the simple reason that Soviet soldiers had stolen the ladder that led to it. Her family was even able to obtain justice against local Nazi collaborators, pointing them out to post-war authorities.
For the next 55 years, Mermelstein lived among sites defined by her family’s experience of the Holocaust. There was the Budapest brewery under which her father had been forced to repair aircraft engines for the Luftwaffe. She regularly rode a Budapest tram past the Mosonyi Street police station where her mother had narrowly avoided arrest.
Although the deportations had been ordered by Germans, they’d been coordinated and executed by Hungarians. Mermelstein grew up in a country that had murdered her grandparents and attempted to kill her, but also one where non-Jewish friends and strangers alike had kept her alive.
“There were good people and bad people,” she said. “But there were more good people than bad people.”