Reminiscences of a Turbulent Youth by Andrew Louis Reeves
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1 BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: REMINISCENCES OF A TURBULENT YOUTH by ANDREW LOUIS REEVES VOLUME I: THE PERIOD UNTIL 1945. FIRST DRAFT, SEPTEMBER 1993 ----------------------------------------------------------- THIRD PRINTOUT (REVISED), JANUARY 2010 2 The author: Andrew L. Reeves, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus (Occup. & Environ. Health Sciences) Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA Address: 573 Pemberton Grosse Pointe Park, MI 48230-1711 Phone & Fax 313/822-4651 e-mail: [email protected] 3 P R E F A C E ----------------------------------------------------------------------- MEMOIR-WRITING is the prerogative of the famous, and it is clear that--some youthful dreams to the contrary notwithstanding--I have not made it. So, what am I doing with this rather lengthy narrative which, bringing my life story just up to the arrival in the United States, already comprises some 100,000 words? I have written it mainly with my children, children-in-law, and grandchildren in mind. They should have a written account of what it took to survive the vicissitudes of the twentieth century and to ensure that they could or can grow up as citizens of a free and prosperous country. As I attempted to describe my own ancestry I was amazed to realize how little I know of it. I have fairly accurate data only about my parents. My grandparents' lives are already quite blurred in my awareness and any effort at going back further in the family tree drew complete blanks in all directions. So, if my literary efforts are good for nothing more than to give my own grandchildren and their descendants a perspective of their own roots, that will have already accomplished a worthy purpose. In fact, the detailed family histories in Chapters 1 and 13 are of conceivable interest only to them. However, the stories of my deportation, liberation, and escape seem to be commanding a wider interest and whenever I recounted these events in the company of my friends, I was invariably urged to commit these memories to writing. A manuscript I circulated resulted in the unanimous recommendation to have it published in book form. It is true that the historic times this autobiography deals with have already been reported, analyzed, and even fictionalized by scores of writers, but to these I can now add my own personal element. Moreover, it seems that the story and fate of Eichmann's "Schanz-Juden" (the deportees from Budapest who built the South-East Wall for the defense of Vienna) has not been written up in detail thus far at all. In that respect, this work might even be worthy of the historian's interest. It is of particular satisfaction to me that I can now write not only of Nazism but also of European Communism in the past tense. By a string of luckiest coincidences, my professional and other travels allowed me to be bodily present in Budapest during the ceremonial reburial of Imre Nagy; in Berlin during the breach of the wall; in Beijing during the brief thaw between the death of Mao and the Tian-An-Men massacres; and in Moscow during the accelerating manifestations of ineptitude of the Perestroika reform movement. Where all this will lead may be as yet uncertain in some cases but the judgment of history on the Communist form of government has been spoken. Between a Rock and a Hard Place is not a novel, and it contains no fictitious elements. Everything is recounted as remembered, with a conscientious effort at factuality, objectivity, and accurateness. The 4 historic framework is supplied as the context of my personal story. For background information, I used the resources of my library freely and I trust that at this point it is not necessary to burden the text with references and source credits. I am indebted to my wife Shirley for her careful grammatical review of my draft. This work is dedicated to my grandchildren Danny, Melanie, Stevie, Philip and Alex. It comes from the first Reeves (spelled as such) and the first American in the clan. Grosse Pointe, Michigan, October 1993. THE AUTHOR 5 T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PREFACE.............................................................. 3 Chapter 1--Ancestry.................................................. 6 Early History................................................... 6 Paternal Lineage................................................ 10 Maternal Lineage................................................ 12 Recent History.................................................. 13 Chapter 2--Childhood................................................. 16 Neonatal Injury................................................. 16 Pre-School and Grade School Years............................... 17 Middle School and High School Years............................. 25 Conversion and Graduation....................................... 37 Chapter 3--Nazi Persecution: The Early Phase......................... 40 The New Graduate................................................ 41 Worker at the Dr. Wander Pharmaceutical Company................. 42 Intermezzo: Student of Law...................................... 45 Chapter 4--Nazi Persecution: The Middle Phase........................ 49 The German Occupation of Hungary................................ 49 Labor Service in the Hungarian Army............................. 54 October 15, 1944................................................ 57 Chapter 5--Nazi Persecution: The End Phase........................... 65 Deportation..................................................... 65 Slave Labor on the South-East Wall.............................. 65 Death March No.1................................................ 75 Mauthausen Concentration Camp................................... 78 Death March No.2................................................ 81 Gunskirchen..................................................... 83 Chapter 6--Liberation................................................ 87 The Last Days in Gunskirchen.................................... 87 May 4, 1945..................................................... 88 First Days of Freedom........................................... 97 Living on the Fat of the Land...................................101 Leonding DP Camp................................................108 Chapter 7—The End of an Era..........................................109 Homecoming......................................................109 The Siege and Occupation of Budapest............................112 Summary: Balance Sheet of the Holocaust.........................115 THE END OF VOLUME I..................................................125 6 C H A P T E R O N E ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A N C E S T R Y AS FAR AS I KNOW, I come one hundred per cent from Jewish-Hungarian stock--but personal awareness of my ancestry goes back only two generations, i.e. to about mid-nineteenth century. All earlier family history must be inferred from general historical facts. Early History Scattered Jews have lived in the territory of Hungary at least as long as the gentile Hungarians, and perhaps longer. The country was part of the Roman Empire: the western part under the name of Pannonia since the Emperor Augustus and the eastern part under the name of Dacia since the Emperor Trajanus. What happened to the Roman settlers (among whom, according to gravestones, there were Jews) during the period of the Great Migrations is not known. The country reputedly served as the headquarters of Attila's Huns in the fifth century A.D. and of Bajan's Avars in the seventh century A.D. The Hungarians conquered the land under their chieftain Árpád in the ninth century A.D. and it has been alleged that some of these conquering Hungarian hordes were also Jewish. This allegation is not quite as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance. It is well known from medieval sources that the Khazars, an ancient people of the North Caspian steppes, adopted the Jewish religion sometime in the eighth century A.D.--the story, told and retold many times, was the subject of Judah Halevi's "Kuzari", and more recently of Arthur Koestler's "The Thirteenth Tribe". Koestler goes so far as to suggest that the whole body of Eastern European Jewry essentially descended from the Khazars. More conventional historians believe that only the Khazar royal court and perhaps a few other leading families converted and these converts were absorbed, or otherwise disappeared, when Eastern Europe adopted Christianity. Hungarian Jewry developed an interest in the Khazar question when archeological research indicated that the Hungarian tribes during their pre- conquest migrations in Eastern Europe came into contact with the Khazars and were actually joined by a sub-tribe of the Khazars called Khabars. If these Khabars were of the Jewish religion, and if they remained with the Hungarians after the Conquest, then the situation allows the assumption that among the conquering tribes settling in the land of Hungary in the ninth century A.D. there already were Jews. I personally learned of this hypothesis in the 1930's in the course of Jewish religious instruction rather than in the regular history classes. No doubt it was taught to us as countermeasure to official Nazi-inspired propaganda that depicted Jews as late and nefarious infiltrators into the fabric of the Hungarian nation. Asserting that our roots in the land went back all the way to the Conquest, and were tied up with a steppe-dwelling, 7 horsey people indistinguishable