My father was an unconventional man. He held only two 9-5 jobs, as far as I know, and the first one only lasted until noon. This job was given to him by some Jewish refugee organization around 1949 and was a total mismatch for his interests and temperament. He had to repair watches in a factory setting.
At lunch, he saw the boss walk down the factory aisle, embraced by two buxom blondes. My father quit on the spot, reasoning that he was not going to work his life away in some dull factory so that some other guy could be surrounded by beautiful women.
The second 9-5 job was an effort to become a business owner. He partnered with a Chicago man in running a drapery business—Madewell Interiors. My father had worked with my mother in her drapery business so he knew what was involved in creating draperies as well as installing them. For a brief stint, he drove a station wagon with the company logo on its wood panel, something that for some strange reason embarrassed me.
The partnership broke up when my father had an affair with his partner’s wife Nancy, a woman whose cheap looks and perfume somehow appealed to my dad. The affair led to my parents’ divorce, my dad’s eventual marriage to Nancy, and a few years later, Nancy’s suicide.
After my parents split up, my dad went off the grid. Never that responsible to begin with, my dad had trouble with authority figures, whether it was the local police, the IRS, or landlords. He moved around a lot.
He married a third time (or at least he said he was married) to a much younger Jamaican woman who already had two children. When my dad was 50 and I was 25, he surprised me and my sister with a new baby, Sheba, who became the light of his life and the twinkle in his eye. His new family moved to Florida where he began selling Mexican furniture.
My father was an incredibly personable man and a great salesperson. He made friends with everyone, from attorneys to celebrities to Jewish Mafioso in Miami. They all loved his stories about the merchandise that he bought and sold. He spoke three languages fluently—Hungarian, German, and English, and was working on Spanish. He read prodigiously and particularly liked to read about military history.
Though he was a forgetful father (leaving the hard work of parenting to our mother), he was a loving one. He was the parent who knew how to have fun, taking us on vacations to exotic places like New Orleans or Mexico or to the local swimming pool where he showed off his glorious swimming strokes and played water soccer with some Hungarian friends.
He loved warm weather and exotic women. He liked spicy food and a cold watermelon on a hot day. He enjoyed cooking, particularly his signature breaded veal cutlet dish that left the kitchen in total disarray.
I often asked my father about his war experiences but he waved off any conversation on the subject. I asked him about the ugly scar on his upper thigh which looked like a knife wound. He didn’t answer.
In 1984, it was clear to me that my father’s health was failing, and I knew that I would have no more chances to learn about my dad if I didn’t go with him to Budapest, his home. At first, my father refused. He had no fond memories that he wished to re-visit, but I persisted and eventually, he relented. I mistakenly thought that if I put my father back in his native element that somehow I would understand him better. Perhaps all Hungarians are as crazy as my father, I thought.
The ten days or so that I spent in Budapest with my father were, in fact, a revelation, but not in the ways that I hoped. He became a young man again. His Hungarian language skills first haltingly returned, then flowed. He ran me around the city on buses and taxis, his local orientation returning in seconds after we arrived, in spite of 40 years’ absence and a total rehabilitation of a city in ruins when he saw it last in 1945. He surprised me with an announcement that he might have surviving cousins in Budapest and then found them hours later, a joyous reunion with his mother’s favorite cousin and her offspring. My dad shocked me with a visit to the synagogue where he was bar mitzvahed (my father dismissed most religious observation when I was growing up) and then broke down in tears to discover his name and that of his father and relatives on the synagogue’s memorial wall. Once he was in Budapest, he threatened to stay there violating the terms of our visas. He didn’t want to leave his home town again.
During that trip, I did not learn about what happened to my father during World War II. I discoverered the details in 2009 and 2010, 25 years after my father died.
My father suffered terribly during the Holocaust. Taken from his mother and father in 1943 and deported to Bor, Yugoslavia, he slaved in a copper mine owned by the Siemens corporation for six months before being taken on a death march to Germany. Few men survived that march. My father made it to Buchenwald concentration camp, and then was taken to Dora Nordhausen where he worked in the tunnels making V-2 rockets. 20,000 men died in those tunnels. Toward the end of the war, my father apparently became gravely ill and was taken to the Boelke Kaserne, a subcamp of Dora, where he and 1500 other men were left to die—no food, no water, nothing. The conditions at that subcamp were so horrific that when I visited that place in 2009, both my German guide and I broke down and cried in my guide’s car, unable to go further.
Somehow my father made it to liberation in April and was taken to a hospital in Osterode, Germany, to recover. There he met my mother, and the rest is history.
My father’s mother, Rosza Weisz, also survived the concentration camps, and the three of them—my father, my mother, and my grandmother—came to the U.S. in July, 1946. My father’s father, Vilmos Munk, died in Mauthasen.
I have pieced together my father’s story and that of his family over the years. I wish that I had a few more hours with my father to tell him what I learned and how I corroborated many of the little details he shared with me about his ancestors. I believe it is his handwriting as well as my childish scrawl that appears on the back of many of the pictures that my grandmother Rosza rescued from the ruins of their home and brought with her to the U.S. What a treasure those pictures are to me now.
I don’t know how my father would feel about what I learned about his Holocaust story. I remember how angry he was when I returned home from Yad Vashem in Israel with information about the Bor copper mines and told him that Siemens Corporation owned the operation. He started inquiring about suing Siemens but passed away before his efforts came to anything.
I think my dad would be surprised at my interest in his life and fascinated with the information that I found about his history and ancestry. I believe that he kept his history from me and my sisters because he had put his past behind him and he didn’t want to be reminded of his losses. He also may have wanted to spare us from the knowledge that life can be incredibly cruel and people can be utterly savage.
So while the trip to Hungary in 1985 and probably the journey I am on right now may not give me any more insight into what made my dad tick, I go to Budapest with a light heart, knowing that my father would want it that way.
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