‘I have only good memories of the first nine years of my childhood. It was a nice, happy time.’
Gábor Hirsch The ‘King of Trains’ – more precisely, one of the routes of the Orient Express – passed from the 1920s through the town of Békéscsaba in south-eastern Hungary.54 Even as a boy, Gábor Hirsch was fascinated by it, imagining the adventure, glamour and unknown worlds associated with this special train.
Gábor’s father János owned an electrical supply and radio shop in Békéscsaba, which he had opened around 1925 with his uncle Ferenc. The uncle emigrated a few years later to Egypt, after which János ran the business on his own. His wife Ella was one of the sales assistants. In its heyday, the business had between ten and fifteen trainees.55
Békéscsaba had a population of around 50,000 at the time, of whom some 2,500, or perhaps 3,000, were Jews, like the Hirsch family.56 The Jewish community of Békéscsaba dates back to the end of the eighteenth century. The oldest gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of the Neolog (reform) community is of Jakob Singer, who died in 1821. A monument in the town park commemorates the victims of a cholera epidemic of 1825, including eleven Jews. According to Gábor Hirsch’s research, there were two independent religious Jewish communities in Békéscsaba after 1883: the orthodox, and the liberal – or Neolog – community, which the Hirsch family belonged to. The first synagogue was built in 1850, and a second one for the orthodox community was built in 1894.57 The two synagogues faced one another on either side of Luther Street.
Gábor’s Austrian nanny was called Hildegard. She was around 25 years old and he got on well with her. His mother wanted him to learn languages. ‘She believed it was important. That’s why we had Hildegard.’ From 1933, Gábor attended a private German-language kindergarten, and in 1936 he started at the Neolog community’s Jewish elementary school. ‘There were only three boys and thirteen girls in my class, two of whom were not Jewish.’
The Hirsch family were so-called ‘three-day Jews’. They celebrated the High Holidays: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, at the end of the summer, marking the start of autumn; then, ten days later, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement at the end of forty days of repentance.
In 1940, Gábor switched to the Evangelical Rudolf-Gymnasium. There were fifty-four boys and girls in his class, including four Jewish pupils, ‘more than usual for the time’. While the non-Jewish children had religious instruction, they were allowed to play in the school yard. ‘We had religion classes at other times in the Jewish community rooms.’ One of his teachers was the rabbi Jakob Silberfeld, who was murdered in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.58
And, ‘naturally’, Shabbat, the weekly day of rest from Friday to Saturday evening, was particularly important for the Hirsch family. ‘On Friday evening, we lit the candles and ate the Shabbat bread, the braided poppyseed loaf.’
On Saturday morning, however, Gábor went to school, which was held on six days a week. On Saturday afternoon, he attended the service in the synagogue in preparation for his barmitzvah, the religious coming of age of young boys when they turn 13. Some non-Jewish boys made occasional reproaches to Gábor: ‘If you’re a Jew, you must like the English.’ One was the son of a doctor. After the war, ‘this boy, of all people’ attended an English grammar school and ‘later went to the USA’.
Dagmar Fantlová
Kutná Hora is a typical Czech town. There was a German man living in our building. He came from somewhere near the border. Later, he proved to be a Nazi. Before, he had lived there without attracting notice.
My father was a doctor, and my mother a housewife. I had a younger sister called Rita. We lived peacefully in Kutná Hora until 1939.
These were the first sentences that Dagmar Lieblová (née Fantlová) related about herself.
The town, founded in the twelfth century as a miners’ settlement, became very wealthy towards the end of the thirteenth century on account of its silver mines. The famous Prague groschen were minted there at the time.59
For a long time, Jews were not allowed to live in the old central Bohemian town. On 30 July 1526, the mayor and elders of Kutná Hora adopted a decision: ‘The Jews may not stay in Kuttenberg [Kutná Hora] except on market days or if they have to appear in court. Non-observance of this regulation will be subject to a fine of 5 schock groschen.’60 A bill or clearance called a ‘bolette’ had to be acquired beforehand.61 It remained that way for several centuries.62 Almost without interruption since the early fourteenth century, however, there had been a large Jewish community in the neighbouring town of Kolin,63 where many Jews who did business in Kutná Hora lived.64 The old Jewish cemetery in Kolin, with over 2,500 graves, has survived to this day. The oldest legible gravestone dates from 1492.65 The seventeenth-century baroque synagogue is also still standing.66
Jews were not allowed to settle permanently in Kutná Hora until the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1871, the first Jewish religious association was constituted, with fourteen members. A good twenty years later, there were 159 Jews in the town, and by 1910 their number had grown to 206. An imposing synagogue had been built eight years earlier. There was no Jewish cemetery in Kutná Hora, and the autonomous community buried its dead in the cemeteries in Malešov, Zbraslavice and Kolin. The Jewish inhabitants lived above all from commerce, or owned businesses making consumer items. There was a textile factory, the Teller sugar factory and the Strakosch shoe factory.67
Like most of the Jews in Kutná Hora, the Fantl family regarded themselves first and foremost as Czech. They ‘naturally’ celebrated the main holidays and went to the synagogue. On Shabbat, Dagmar was allowed to go to school. ‘I wasn’t supposed to do any homework. My grandmother didn’t want me to, but my father always said: “No, the children have to do their homework on Saturdays.”’
The Fantls celebrated Christmas.
It was a major family celebration. Relatives came to our house. We also had visitors at Easter and Pesach. We bought matzo, unleavened bread, and baked cakes ourselves. My mother would prepare little packages as presents for various acquaintances. That’s how it was in those days in a town like Kutná Hora. The Jewish and Christian holidays were mixed up. And during the Nazi era people said in surprise: ‘Dr Fantl is a Jew? We didn’t know.’
In 1932, when Dagmar’s younger sister Rita was born, the family bought a nice large house with several apartments. On the ground floor was Julius Fantl’s surgery. In the new house there was also a Sudeten German lodger called Zotter. ‘He worked in a small shoe factory owned by a Jew.’
Dagmar’s maternal grandparents moved into the house in 1935. They brought their old housekeeper Františka Holická with them. She had been with the family since the 1920s and was affectionately referred to as Fany, Aunt Fany or Fanynka.
Dagmar started learning German when she was 8. Her parents and grandparents knew German ‘of course’, but it was never spoken at home. ‘It was customary to learn languages.’ Two years later, Dagmar started learning English. ‘My German wasn’t particularly good at the time. And my grandmother always went on about it.’
Jürgen Loewenstein and Wolfgang Wermuth are real Berlin boys – or at least they were once. They never met.
Jürgen grew up in the Scheunenviertel district of Berlin. Now in the Mitte district, not far from the television tower, it was originally outside the city walls. There were stalls, sheds and barns, where Berlin farmers stored hay and straw. This is how the district got its name [‘Scheune’ is German for ‘barn’], which it retained long after the barns had disappeared. From the late nineteenth century, it was often the first port of call for Jews fleeing the pogroms in eastern Europe.