Excerpt
On March 19, 1944, Thomas Steiner was playing among the fruit trees in the courtyard of his home when he heard the far away sounds of a marching band. Such sounds were unusual in the part of the town where his family lived, away from the center of town in a largely residential neighborhood. As the sound of the music became stronger and stronger, Thomas became curious to see what the source of it was. He exited through the main gate and saw at some distance a group of soldiers marching down the street in an orderly fashion toward their house.
As the soldiers came closer, he noticed that in front was a marching band, followed by a marching group of soldiers without musical instruments.
The sound of loud and lively music and the sight of orderly marching soldiers were of great interest to Thomas and other kids who also ran out to the street to see what was happening. A bunch of children were already followed the tail end of the newly arrived, goose-stepping army unit. Thomas and other kids on his street joined them.
It was great fun. With sandals on their feet on that warm mid-March day, the children tried to imitate the echoing sound of the soldiers’ boots hitting the ground. The pounding boots, swinging arms, neatly pressed uniforms and the glistening tips of shouldered rifles, let alone the sound of music, made for an exhilarating experience to the children.
Thomas followed the marching unit for a couple of blocks, and then returned home.
He told his mother of his great experience, but, instead of her sharing his excitement, she scolded him. Thomas had no idea what he had done wrong. There was a war, these were soldiers, and his father was a soldier too, actually in a Jewish forced-labor unit somewhere in Russia. He was not aware of the fact that the marching soldiers were part of the German army occupying Hungary that day, and their town as well.
*
A few weeks later, all the Jews of the town were gathered into a ghetto. They were also ordered to wear yellow stars, sewn to the left side of their shirts or coats. The three thousand or so Jews of their little Hungarian town of some sixty thousand inhabitants were crowded into a block of houses next to the town’s two synagogues where most of the Jews, including the Steiners, lived. As all their houses were small, one-story buildings, each containing two or three bedrooms, gathering the Jews in them meant that some ten or twelve women and children ended up in each room.
Only women and children could be gathered in the ghetto. Husbands and fathers had long before been taken away to forced-labor camps, serving as auxiliary units to Hungarian and German forces on the Russian front.
*
It was a hot summer day. The air was already quite warm at nine o’clock in the morning. Thomas, ten years old, and his brother Peter, eight, wore shorts and short-sleeved shirts, to which the bright yellow stars were already attached. They were playing in the big, fenced courtyard of their home. At ten o’clock, just about an hour later, they were to leave the ghetto and, as on most days, go out to buy some food at the grocery store around the corner. Wearing the yellow stars was required beyond the ghetto that, along with neighboring homes, their home had become.
Their mother called them from the door of their apartment a few yards away. Thomas and Peter assumed that, as on previous days, she would give them the list of things to buy and some money for the purchase.
That morning, however, she had a different task for the two boys. They were not being sent to buy food, and they would not have to be back by noon when the gates of the ghetto were closed. At ten o’clock they were to leave the ghetto through the side gate and follow from a distance Aunt Julia wherever she went.
“Don’t say a word to anyone,” their mother warned standing above them in the doorway, “not now, not after you leave. You are going to leave the ghetto. I will too, perhaps tomorrow. In the meantime, after you are out of the gate, just follow Aunt Julia in her black dress.”
The two boys listened attentively even though they were a bit bewildered. Their mother continued:
“When you reach the main street” – she paused for a second – “no, when you reach the train station, you will take off the yellow stars from each others’ shirts. Is that clear?”
They nodded. Their mother’s voice was stern, commanding. They did not dare to ask any questions. In any case, their instructions sounded like a description of a new and interesting game they were to play, with possible surprises.
At ten o’clock, their mother kissed them, and hugged them longer than usual, and Thomas and Peter left through the side gate at the end of the courtyard. That gate, not the main gate on the other side of the courtyard, was the one that could be opened at ten for two hours for the inhabitants of the ghetto.
It was, as Thomas recalls now, June 10, 1944.
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