Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 16, 1994 TAG: 9411160122
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BUDAPEST, HUNGARY LENGTH: Medium
Fifty years ago, Julia Gati, her mother and her 16-month-old son were rounded up with the rest of Budapest's Jews and herded into a ghetto, where 20,000 people, including her mother, died in the next two months.
``My mother died there, she starved to death,'' the 72-year-old retired school teacher said Tuesday, 50 years after Hungary's Nazi puppet regime created the Budapest Ghetto. ``I have no idea how we survived. It was a miracle.''
The 50th anniversary passed almost unnoticed. Only one newspaper, the liberal Magyar Hirlap, noted the date and what it meant to the city. But there were no official commemorations.
The deputy leader of Hungary's Jewish community, Rabbi Ernoe Lazarovits, said Jews would never commemorate such a hated date, but he acknowledged he wasn't even sure what day the barricades went up around Budapest's Jewish quarter.
World War II was almost over when the Arrow Cross - fascists opposed to the Hungarian government's attempt to end its alliance with Nazi Germany - overthrew Regent Miklos Horthy.
Together with the occupying Germans, they herded about 70,000 of Budapest's Jews into the ghetto, set up around the main Budapest synagogue.
Between Nov. 15, 1944, and Jan. 18, 1945, when the Soviet army liberated the ghetto, approximately 20,000 Jews died in the ghetto, either of starvation, disease or exposure, or at the hands of gangs working for the Arrow Cross regime.
Between Germany's occupation in March 1944 and the creation of the ghetto, almost 90 percent of Hungary's Jews were sent to death camps.
``We had no food, no water, no heating'' in the ghetto, Gati recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.
Gati's 66-year-old mother, Margit Kohn, died of starvation in December 1944. ``But my son and I survived, thanks to the Russians, who gave us food and drink,'' she said.
The fact that her little son could survive such horror made Gati religious, which she had not been before the war.
``Until then I hadn't believed in God, but since that time I've been a true believer,'' Gati said. Her son, Gabor, also lives in Budapest.
Budapest's Jewish ghetto was one of the few in Europe to be left intact after the war. Although it was mined, the Nazis did not have time to blow it up because the Red Army was advancing. About 50,000 Jews were liberated.
An estimated 100,000 Jews live in Hungary, mostly in Budapest, giving the country the largest Jewish community in eastern Europe.
by CNB