The Szilagyi Family

3. The Szilágyi family

This Chapter is partially based on the unpublished book “Létszámon felül” [Redundant] by my late uncle, Béla Szilágyi.

Albert, the young house painter from Szilágy County could not stay in one place for long. He went from town to town and finally showed up in Komárom County. It so happened that he was hired by the Weiners in Tata-Tóváros to paint the walls of their kitchen. He immediately noticed Adél’s long black hair. He asked her out and after several dates proposed marriage by asking her mother first: “Mama, dear Mama, you are the most beautiful woman on this Earth! Please promise that you will give your daughter to nobody but me.” When the mother agreed, he embraced her in his dirty overalls smelling of paint. The deal was struck. Ignátz Weiner couldn’t stand Szilágyi but his wife’s will was stronger than his, as is usually the case. Mr. Weiner never talked to Albert and even refused to see him on his deathbed.

Adél was not particularly fond of Albert, but Mrs. Weiner explained to her that there was no sense in waiting any longer. After all, she was already 22 years old. He was 29, had a good profession and could certainly raise a family. Adél was an obedient daughter and finally gave in, so they married in 1901. A year later, Nándor was born. He was a beautiful baby but died soon of blood poisoning. As soon as his little body was put in a casket, his grandmother left home and was not heard from for two weeks. Four other children followed: Miklós in 1903, Károly on July 17, 1904, Malvin (Manci) in 1906, and finally Béla on September 30, 1911 (Yom Kippur day).

Szilágyi (as the mother of Albert’s children called him) was not an ordinary painter. He called the paint “grace” and considered himself an artist. He fabricated an easel for designing new decorations for wall paintings, and liked to be praised for his work. Indeed, he worked diligently, painted hulls of warships as well as walls of apartments, merrily whistling, standing on a ladder and moving with it as if the legs of the ladder were continuations of his own - but he always smelled of paint and could not make Adél love him. She worked as a seamstress, cared for the children, cooked, laundered, ironed at the same time. She worked fast; work was burning under her hand. She was irritated by Albert’s relative slowness and meticulous activities. He always had his own ideas

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about the walls that he was supposed to paint and these ideas did not always meet with those of the walls’ owners. For this reason he lost quite a number of orders. He was not able to establish a workshop of his own, either. He tried once but it did not last long. At the same time, Adél saw the business success of her sister Katica, which made her even more irritable.

On the other hand, Szilágyi could hardly tolerate Adél’s constant nagging and reprimands like this: “I can’t stand him. Other men are happy if their wives criticize them because they understand that this is based on caring. I have to put up with his tardiness and then listen to his complaints about being tired. How about me? Oh, how tired I am!”

Albert did not like the little town and after the children’s births they moved to Budapest. First they lived in the Wekerle Settlement (a slum for the poorest workers), then in Pestújhely. They liked the place there but their landlady, a godly Catholic, could not tolerate their religion and they had to move again, this time to a little house in Telepes Street, then to Bosnyák Square in the Zugló district. Here their apartment was at the end of the second court of a huge tenement house. It consisted of two little rooms and a kitchen for the couple and their four children. The sun never shined there. They were so poor that they had to sub-let a little dark and wet closet to a young couple. Eight people in a two-room apartment!

During World War I Albert was already in his forties. He found work in a military shipyard and was fortunate, because this work was considered important to the war effort; therefore, he was not called to military service. (Hungary was not a major naval power, but it had a flotilla on the Danube.) Although he was full of energy, he started to get bald, called himself an over-aged (korhaladott) man and frequently was tired. He also thought that any man who has a family is old by definition and deserves more rest than bachelors. After work he ate his dinner, and then went to bed with a jug of water that he drank each time he woke up. When he went to sleep again, he snored heavily. He behaved at home in an orderly manner, went to the synagogue every Saturday, and put on a black suit on Sundays. However, he needed all the space to himself, and this made Adél furious.

Albert was very proud of being the head of the family. When Johanna, his mother-in-law, wrote a letter from Tata, it was always addressed “To the hands of the honorable painter and decorator, Mr.

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Albert Szilágyi.” He was also a strict disciplinarian, but did not have the strength to provide security for his wife and eventually keep his family together.

Albert was a conservative Jew, but was unable to transplant his religiousness into his more practical wife. He had an old prayer book (I still have it!) where he entered the names of his children, Miklós, Károly, Manczi (sic!), and Béla, together with their Hebrew names. As Albert’s Hebrew name was Avrochom (Abraham). What a coincidence! (See next Chapter). Károly’s name was Chaim ben Avrochom. Chaim means life. Alas, it was a short life! Miklós and Károly went through the ceremonies of their Bar Mitzvah while the family was still together. These were festive days for Albert. He was proud of his “grown-up” 13-year-old sons. Though Adél was not a typical Jewish woman, she lit candles every Friday evening and was genuinely afraid of the vengeful God of the Jews. They kept the holy days like every other Jewish family.

The children went to school in Angol Street, but the school building was partially occupied by a temporary hospital for wounded soldiers, and education had become a secondary mission of the school. Miklós and Manci loved this situation. Béla’s teacher was Erzsébet Kunfalvi, a young lady who taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and singing. The pupils had to learn patriotic songs like this:

Tied vagyok, tied Hazám, e szív, e lélek.Kit szeretnék, ha Téged nem szeretnélek?Szent egyház keblem belseje, oltára képed;Te állsz, s ha kell, a templomot is ledöntöm érted.

Miklós was a strong, skillful, handsome blond boy. His upper front teeth protruded from his mouth. He was extremely stubborn, shy, and very sensitive. He was full of energy, loved streetcars, took revenge when another boy seemed to be rude to him, and liked to eat and drink everything very hot. He had always been a lazy student and his father had started to give him hard assignments at a young age. He worked like a horse, bringing wood for heating from a remote lumberyard and doing other heavy-duty jobs. He also had to stand in line regularly for bread, which was rationed during the war. When he felt hurt by his parents, he tightened his lips and cried a lot.

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He received frequent thrashing from his father, who could not tolerate his stubbornness and also believed that a boy can only become a man if he gets his dole of beating from his father. Adél impotently watched these sessions. She could only cry and be very unhappy. During these beatings Miklós usually behaved like a martyr without uttering a word, but hate grew in him against his father, his fate, and the whole world. Indeed, he did not ask to be the eldest son, the war was not his fault either, and why were they so poor anyway?

Once his father brought home a huge package. He liked to wrap his presents in several layers of paper to prolong the excitement of opening them. This time it was a talking doll for Manci. The doll was beautiful with long blond hair. Miklós soon decapitated the doll “to see how the talking mechanism works.” Albert gave him several slaps on his face and turned him out of the door. Károly found him at the streetcar terminal and brought him back. On the occasion of the boy’s Bar Mitzvah, Albert forgave him and even gave him his old pocket watch inherited from his own father, but Miklós was already lost to his family.

Károly was just the opposite of Miklós. He was the pride of the family. When the other children did something wrong, their mother immediately said to them: “My Károly would never do this, you know.” Károly was short, anemic, not strong, had freckles, frequent nose-bleeds, and weak eyesight (he wore eyeglasses), but he was an outstanding student and an exemplary boy in every respect. He was a kind-hearted, nice, pleasant person who even tried to make the world more tolerable for Miklós. He participated in his older brother’s escapades just to make him feel better. They went together to the nearby streetcar terminus and pulled down the current collectors just for fun. They also played soccer together with other boys from the neighborhood. He was a steadfast, down to earth lad who loved life, had a practical mind, and evaluated situations almost always correctly.

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Károly’s 8th-grade report sheet from the Egressy-út Middle School

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The family’s only entertainment was the silent movie. On Sunday afternoons, while Albert was sleeping at home, Adél took her children to a cheap movie theater to watch Harold Lloyd, Paula Negri, Waldemar Psylander, and Tom Mix’s cowboy movies. There were also news reels showing the latest developments on the front.

By 1918 the war situation had worsened. The markets were empty. Families were losing their sons. Poor kids whom no one would have noticed were immortalized on monuments to dead heroes. Wounded soldiers were coming back from the front in ever increasing numbers. They stood at the street corners on crutches, their stumps bandaged with dirty cloth, some of them wearing dark glasses, and begged. Anti-war leaflets appeared on the street. Károly read them with the interest of a thinking young man. Albert furiously hated the government of István Tisza and participated in the general strike of the workers.

The financial situation of the family grew increasingly serious as the war went on. They rarely ate any meat. One summer Adél and Béla went to spend a month with Uncle Jakab in Alpár while Manci was sent to her grandmother in Szilágysomlyó to gain some strength under the hills of Transylvania. Adél and Béla also visited a distant relative, Aunt Juliska in nearby Hódos. Adél repaired all the clothes of the families with whom she was staying. The two older boys remained with their father and assisted him in his extra assignments to paint walls in private apartments on top of his work at the shipyard. The boys carried the paint and performed any other hard work for their father.

Emperor Franz Joseph died in November 1916; two years later the war ended in defeat; Tisza was assassinated; then the Hungarian Republic was proclaimed and Count Mihály Károlyi came to power. All these major historic events, however, had little effect on poor families like the Szilágyis.

* * *

Albert and Adél lived together for 18 years without love (he probably loved her but she never loved him). Like many other languages, but unlike modern English, Hungarian has formal and informal tenses; in the old days, informal tenses were only appropriate among close family and friends. Albert and Adél always used the formal tense with each other, as did the children, addressing

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them with the German words Mutter and Vater. (This was rather common at the time among other families, too). Before Albert went to work, he melted his glue on the cooking range. Adél found the smell unbearable.

One winter morning in 1919 she could not stand Szilágyi any longer. She took her two younger children and returned to her mother in Tata. The two older boys remained with their father. Albert was desperate. He begged her to stay, even followed her to the railroad station to make a final attempt, but she remained adamant. They never saw each other again.

She was a tough woman anyway. Her thin lips were tightened most of the time. She never kissed any of her children; Manci was just “you, girl” to her. Károly and Béla, the two favorites, received exceptional treatment. Károly was “my best child,” Béla “my sweet little boy.”

The situation in Tata was very tight, so one day Adél decided to move with Béla to Komárom where Katica lived in upper middle-class circumstances. (Albert used to call Katica a princess). Manci was left with her grandmother.

Manci was then a nervous, easily scared, clumsy, anemic thirteen-year old girl with thin legs clad in constantly sagging stockings. Her shoes always looked too big for her size. However, she had beautiful long curly hair. The whole girl looked like a huge stack of blond hair. Her mother liked to braid it, and when she was ready she held the girl’s cheeks in between her palms for just a little bit longer than a moment. That was the way she expressed her love.Manci did not want to continue attending school, and was not forced to do so.

The eight-year-old Béla was a tall, shy, sad, melancholic child. His teeth were similar to those of Miklós. He adored his mother with an almost religious zeal. Early in his life he had already decided that life is not really worth living, but he could fluently read and write at five and was reading one book after another with enthusiasm. He had also started to write down on small slips of paper all important events, like “Mutter had a toothache” and “Vater was angry.” He had the talent to find a meaning in things that most people would not even notice. Writing his diary had become a daily routine and he continued it until his death. His writing was very beautiful. I remember his calligraphic letters and diary that are lost because I valued them so much that I put them into the Box in 1979 (more about this later).

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Béla sank into a deep depression. He blamed himself for everything: “I should have shown more love to Miklós. I should have jumped in between them when Vater was beating him. I should have remained in Budapest with Vater and my two brothers. I should have …”

In Komárom, Adél and Béla first did not stay with Katica but lived in a modest room with one bed where the two of them slept together. Lőwinger helped Adél to rent a small tobacco shop where she was selling matches, shoelaces, candies, and cigarette paper (she did not have a permit to sell tobacco).

After the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed in 1919 and the country descended into anarchy, Komárom became a theater of war. The new countries of the Little Entente (Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia) attacked Hungary from all sides. Adél’s little shop was destroyed during the first days of the war. They moved to the Lőwingers’ house and Adél went back to sewing.

Although Komárom is not far from Tata, soon it became a foreign city. The Trianon Treaty gave it to Czechoslovakia. Lőwinger’s shop had a new signboard: “Alexander Lőwinger – Obchod s koreninomim tovarom.” The population, however, remained mostly Hungarian and the schools continued to teach in Hungarian.

The Lőwingers continued to thrive. Soon they built a new house where they planned to live and reopen their shop on the ground floor. Adél and Béla had to move again and again, from one small one-room apartment to another. Adél refused to accept any furniture from her sister, except for an old bed. Her sewing machine was constantly at work. She was only forty years old, but her legs were already full of phlebitis, and wrinkles started to develop around her lips. To ease the strain on her varicose veins she wore full-length slippers made of soft material (I saw these same slippers on her twenty five years later in the Ghetto). Her legs were constantly on the move as she drove the sewing machine, but she seldom left the apartment because walking was difficult for her.

A year after their departure they received a letter from Tata. It was from Károly. He informed his mother that a woman, Aunt Emma, had moved in with his father. She did not love Albert’s sons and did not let Károly go to school any longer. (Emma and Albert would later marry, after Albert’s divorce from Adél.)

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Szilágyi Albert and his new wife, Emma in 1926

As soon as Miklós graduated from his apprenticeship as a journeyman electrician he left home. He was seen at the streetcar terminus but soon disappeared. Then Albert received a letter from Jakab telling him that Miklós showed up in Alpár on his way to Bucharest.

Károly left his father, too. He went to Tata, then tried to join his mother, but could not get to the foreign city of Komárom. Being stuck in Tata, he stayed with his grandmother who lived there in deep poverty. He enrolled in a local printing shop as an apprentice without pay. He received food from the printer, part of which he brought home for grandma and Manci.

Adél was stricken by these news. She drove the sewing machine in silence for weeks, but her tightened lips and sleepless nights testified to her grief. She applied for a permit to cross the border and stay in Hungary for three days, left Béla with a neighbor, and went to Tata. When she got off the train and walked toward her mother’s dwelling, she saw a barefooted boy in torn pants pulling a cart full of books. It was Károly! The boy was overwhelmed with joy. He fell on his knees and covered his mother’s hands with tears and kisses.

Two weeks later, Adél went to Tata again. She brought some clothes for Károly and took Manci with her to Komárom. She arranged work for the girl as an apprentice milliner. The workshop

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was hardly ever heated and the poor girl tolerated the cold very badly.

Béla was the only one in the family who had the opportunity for education beyond middle school. At ten he wrote the following application to the Rector of the Benedictine High School (Gymnasium, as it was called in Latin) in Komárom:

“Honorable Very Reverend Master Rector!I am applying to you, Honorable Very Reverend Master Rector,

with the respectful request to have the kindness to accept me as a first-year student of the Komárom High Gymnasium with full tuition waiver.

To support my application I would like to mention my spotless excellent grades in the elementary school and the fact that my poor mother does not have any movable or landed property. She maintains her and her family’s subsistence by the work of her diligent hands.

Hoping that The Honorable Very Reverend Master Rector accepts my humble request, I remain

Your humble servant,Béla Szilágyi, 4th grade elementary school student.Dated: July 15, 1921.”

Two weeks later Adél and Béla stood in the office of the Honorable Very Reverend Master Rector. He greeted them kindly but asked two unpleasant questions: “What is your citizenship?” and “Where is the father of the boy?” When he heard about the separation, he became stricter: “Don’t you know that marriage is a sacrament? You have four children. Do you know what you are doing?”

The lecture on marriage was just the old monk’s moral duty. However, the problem of citizenship was more serious. Adél had to write a petition to the “Ministerstve Skolstva” (Department of Education) of the Czechoslovak Republic to admit Béla to the school in spite of his foreign citizenship.

The petition was successful, Béla passed the entrance exam, and he was admitted to the Gymnasium. Instruction was in Hungarian and co-educational. There was a Latin class every day but ancient Greek and Slovak were also mandatory. Béla diligently studied Latin declinations – and slept on the floor at home. The Slovak teacher had

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translated Ferenc Molnár’s famous Hungarian book about the boys of Pál Street into the Slovak language: “Chlapci z Pavlovskoj ulice.” School started with prayers: “Deus vicorda fidelium sancti spiritus illustratione decuisti…”

The Catholic education was beneficial to Béla. The Benedictine priest-teachers gave him a good education and were very tolerant of the Jewish students. As a good and needy student, he received not only a full tuition waiver but also free textbooks and even some clothing.

He was very fond of his headmaster, Father János Gömör-Kapisztrán, with whom he maintained a friendship until the priest’s death. The Father taught geography, chemistry, and biology. He frequently took the class to side trips to nearby towns and villages, even to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. When they reached the eleventh grade, he took the class to Prague for ten days! Béla never forgot this visit to one of the centers of European culture and the beautiful capital of the only democratic country in Central Europe.

When he was already at higher grades, Béla earned some money by tutoring younger students. He met his first unreturned love, Klára, an affluent girl who was one year older than he and engaged to a Czech officer. He also developed some friendships in the school that lasted all his life. His class had regular get-togethers even many years after their graduation. On the other hand, Gyula Alapy, the dreaded later prosecutor of Cardinal Mindszenthy and László Rajk, was also one of his classmates. Alapy was a sadist even as a child. When they went rowing on the Danube, he was always happy to catch a duck and break the poor bird’s neck.

Béla diligently prepared for the matriculation exam. As usual, he got good grades in all subjects except mathematics. As a result, his final result was not “excellent” but only “good.” Therefore, he lost hope for exceptional treatment in the pursuit of his dream to become a teacher.

The Father presented him an elegant suit for the graduation ceremony. His uncle gave him a walking stick as a symbol of an educated gentleman. He was singing “Gaudeamus igitur” and the traditional Hungarian graduation song at the ceremony together with his more fortunate classmates:

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Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus Post jucundam juventutem, post molestam senectutem. Nos habebit humus, Nos habebit humus.

Ballag már a vén diák, tovább, tovább. Isten veletek cimborák, tovább, tovább. Ez út hazánkba visszavisz, Filiszter leszek magam is. Tovább, tovább, tovább! Fel búcsúcsókra cimborák.

Szilágyi Béla at graduation (1929)

He could not attend university for three reasons: 1) He was very poor and could not afford to enroll either in Czechoslovakia or in Hungary. 2) As a Hungarian citizen, no Czechoslovak university would have accepted him. 3) Because of Numerus Clausus (the law that severely restricted the number of Jewish students in Hungarian universities) it would have been even more difficult in Hungary. He tried to enroll in a two-year teachers’ college that prepared teachers for elementary schools but was not accepted because of his citizenship.

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Károly comforted him with his letter. He wrote to him that the situation in Hungary was intolerable for those few Jewish students who were accepted to universities. The student members of the fascist Turul Society regularly mocked and beat them up.

* * *

Miklós was 17 years old when he left his father. He somehow managed to cross the Romanian border, spent a short time with Uncle Jakab, and then continued his long lonely walk. He tried to find shelter on his way, but most people chased him away, so he slept in roadside ditches. After some wandering in Transylvania he settled down with a Gypsy girl in Bucharest. His parents did not hear a word from him for sixteen years. He did not even bother to send them a postcard, so everybody thought that he was dead.

When he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in 1936, he suddenly remembered his mother and one autumn day he simply showed up in Budapest as if he had just left the day before. When he learned that half a year before his return another Miklós Szilágyi was born who received his first name in his uncle’s memory, he was seriously hurt. How could all his folks believe in his death while he was still alive?

Szilágyi Miklós Miklós in Bucharest

Károly became a journeyman at 19. He was an excellent typesetter. He fell in love with the printing profession and became a

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master of it. He moved to Budapest where he joined the Printers’ Trade Union, which was a powerful workers’ organization. The printers helped each other in every respect. They preferred unemployment to working for less than the pay established in their collective bargaining agreement.

He was also an outstanding human being. He was smart and devoted to his mother, brothers, and sister. He signed his letters to Komárom as “your faithful son and loving brother.” It was enough to look into his eyes to see that he was a good and cheerful man. Everybody loved him. He had lots of friends. He was rather short but had long curly hair and was a handsome young man. He was very popular with girls.

He was a down-to-earth, steadfast man who became the pillar of the family. He supported them, helped as much as he could, and also tried to raise their spirits. He never gave up on anything worked diligently and supported all who needed his support.

Szilágyi Károly in 1923

He found temporary work in Budapest that did not last long. He had to endure the life of the unemployed. He even tried to find employment abroad. He went as far as Galati, Romania, but soon came back to Budapest.

He lived in a rented room. Going back to his father was out of the question because Károly and Emma did not get along.

Eventually, a large printing house employed him. His new job gave him some security. He started to enjoy life and also wrote novels and poetry. (I had all his manuscripts but was foolish enough to put them in the Box. I still remember one of his poems that was about two brothers who found themselves on the two sides of the

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Great War. They had no other choice but kill each other: “Beleestem és beleestél … Beléd küldöm a gyilkos ólmot.”)

This handsome young man is Szilágyi Károly (around 1926)

Károly in 1926 Szilágyi Károly, the established printer (around 1930)

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Károly (with the cane) having “To Karcsi with sincere friendship, a good time with friends in the Klári, March 9, 1933” Budapest City Park in 1930 (On the back of the picture: “Ujjé! A Ligetbe nagyszerű!!”)

In 1928 Károly finally managed to visit his mother, sister, and brother in Komárom. He decided to take all of them to Budapest so that Mutter would not have to work. Soon Adél and Manci left Béla alone in Komárom because there was still one year to go before his graduation. He was given room and board at the Gymnasium, but Lőwinger was afraid of appearing as though he did not care about his nephew, so Béla was forced to move to them. He obeyed, but felt abandoned and unhappy. He tried to deserve their care by tutoring his cousin, Laci, who attended the same gymnasium but was more interested in music than in ancient Greek.

Adél took her sewing machine with her. Mutter and her two children rented Szilágyi Albertné a small apartment in the Josefstadt district Weiner Ida Adél in 1930

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of Budapest. They suffered not only from poverty but also from the bedbugs that overwhelmed their beds. Adél tried to get rid of them by treating the beds with kerosene.

Béla soon joined his family in Budapest. He had to find employment at the time of the Great Depression, when there was no employment available. Finally, he had to accept menial jobs for little pay, like checking credit information for banks, going from address to address on foot to save the cost of a trolley ticket.

Béla in 1930 Béla strolling about the Béla around 1931

streets of Budapest

Although at that time a high-school diploma meant a very substantial education, eventually he became a bookbinder’s apprentice. He learned this trade well and in a couple of years became a journeyman. He worked long hours in big printing shops under rude masters and sometimes had to work so late that could not get home before 10 pm when the gates of the big apartment houses were closed. He had to wake up and pay the gatekeeper to let him in, then eat something, go to bed, soon wake up and start his monotonous labor all over again. Although he was a responsible young man who liked his work with books, he saw no perspective in his life and became a depressed and morally crippled man. He adored his mother like a goddess and was too shy with girls. He did not even have the time and money to date. He started to believe that he had been chosen by fate to be unhappy. He accepted his fate with

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resignation: “I will not sit behind a teacher’s desk and behold my students. Instead, all my life I will bind books in a smelly workshop. My only consolation is that sometimes, secretly I can raise the covers of the books to take a look of what is inside. I am a redundant man.”

No wonder that the communists found him. After the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, the Trianon Treaty, and the military coup of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Communist Party was outlawed in Hungary. Most of its leaders escaped abroad, and many of them were hanged or tortured to death during the White Terror, but the Party was still alive. Once the Szilágyis had a tenant by the name of Mr. Kovács (literally, Mr. Smith). His real name happened to be Károly Kiss. He later became one of Mátyás Rákosi’s closest comrades and Chairman of the powerful Control Committee of the Communist Party, then Secretary of the Presidium of the Hungarian People’s Republic. He and his comrades were capable of organizing relatively massive demonstrations like the one in 1930 that was brutally dispersed by the sabers of mounted policemen. Béla was there as a member of the illegal Communist Party.

Manci continued to make hats. She worked in a milliner’s workshop for 30 pengő a month at a time when a reasonable salary was about 200 pengő. (“Havi 200 pengő fixszel az ember könnyen viccel.”) She became a beautiful, sensuous young woman. Her hands, however, started to give up. She developed arthritis from the years of working in the cold workshop. Soon she lost the ability to move her fingers and had to stop working.

Szilágyi Manci (about 1928)

* * *

This is the story of the origins of the Szilágyi family. While I was writing this, I constantly struggled with tears. I wish I could resurrect these people for an hour, just to tell them how much I love them.

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