Weisz Cousins

First picture; Andi and Zsolt Kelenyi and kids today.
Second picture: Visit in 1985; my father at far right. Andi is the little girl with the doll.

Zsolt Kelenyi is a very successful Budapest businessman who married my cousin Andi a number of years ago. In addition to their children Ballint and Bette, they have a brand-new baby girl, Nora.

They live in a modern home with all the latest appliances, IPhones, wi-fi, plasma screen TV. They are widely traveled and have been in the U.S. several times, but we lost track of each other after my dad died in 1985. We happily re-discovered each other in 2009 when I made a trip to Hungary to find information about my roots.

Andi’s mother was Lilli Weisz. Lilli’s father was Moritz Weisz and the brother of my great-grandfather Illes Weisz. So Andi and I are third cousins.

When my dad and I came to Budapest 26 years ago, I had no idea that we had any relatives left here. My father never mentioned them and there was certainly no way to find out if there were any survivors. Immediately after Hungary’s liberation, the Iron Curtain shut off all communication with the west.

But as soon as we got off the train from Vienna, my father said to me, “I think I may have some cousins here.”

“Cousins?” I nearly choked with surprise. “What cousins? You never said anything about family surviving the war.” My father ran into a phone booth, shushing me as he dialed and spoke to an operator. I understood nothing of the conversation between my father and the operator or a hurried second call. My father stepped out of the booth, took me by the arm, and ran to a bus stop. “We’re going to Visegradi Street.” Trying to keep up with him, I said out of breath, “What’s there?”

“My cousins,” he said, stepping on the bus.

We took several buses, running to catch each one, my father seeming to know where he was going. I was peppering him with questions that he would wave off, saying “You’ll see ven ve get there.” We arrived in the 13th district near Újpest, my father’s old neighborhood. and quickly walked down Visegradi Utca, a street with pock-marked apartment buildings and storefronts. My father stopped in front of one building and quickly scanned the names of the inhabitants listed outside the front entrance. My father rang a bell, and we walked into a dark lobby. At the top of the staircase appeared a little old lady, wearing black, a head full of white hair wrapped in a babushka, a scarf. “Tibi?” she said timidly.

My father sprinted up the staircase like a 16-year-old boy and embraced his mother’s favorite cousin, Lilli. Standing behind Lilli was her daughter Cica, Cica’s husband Attila, and their daughter, my third cousin, Andrea. They circled us in a ceremonial embrace, jumping up and down, speaking Hungarian, crying, laughing, slowly moving us into their small but warm apartment. I didn’t know what they were saying, and my father was a poor translator for this occasion, too involved in the overwhelming feelings of the moment to stop and tell me what was being said. But it didn’t matter. To see my father home again, the center of attention, in the loving embrace of a family that had been torn apart for more than 40 years was enough for me. I smiled and sat mutely for hours during this initial reunion, savoring the rapid exchanges of stories that my relatives must have been sharing.

The next day, Lilli and the family took us on a tour of my father’s old haunts, the places he had known as a child and later as an adolescent. Many of the familiar landmarks were gone, replaced with ugly Communist housing projects. But my father was still able to navigate and point to where his family had lived.

But the biggest surprise awaited us. We approached a walled three-story building, more Byzantine in architecture than Hungarian. It was covered with scaffolding and workmen were clearly in the middle of a reconstruction process. My dad stopped and looked at it from across the street, and then said to us, “C’mon. We’re going in.”

“What is this place, Dad?” I asked.

“The synagogue vhere I was bar mitzvahed,” he proclaimed.

I grabbed my dad’s arm in the middle of the street and stopped him. “What do you mean—bar mitzvahed? You never told me you were bar mitzvahed!”

My father never mentioned a religious life before the war; as a matter of fact, he took great pains to tell me that his family was completely assimilated. I thought that meant his family was not really very Jewish and certainly not observant of tradition. He didn’t answer and turned back toward the synagogue. My father said something to the workers, and they let us into the synagogue’s courtyard. We walked along the interior of the wall before we went into the building.

Along the interior of the wall were panel after panel of inscribed names in alphabetical order. I turned to my cousin Andi, then a twelve-year-old girl who could speak a little English, and asked her what this wall was. She explained that the surviving remnants of the Jews in this area created this memorial to people from this congregation and neighborhood who died during World War II. Thousands of names of Újpest Jews were on this long series of walls which surrounded the building.

As my elderly cousin Lilli walked along the wall, my father walked behind her, followed by the rest of us, until we came to a panel that bore the name “Munk.” We all stopped as my father stared at the wall. His eyes filled with tears and began to sob. In front of him was the name of his father, “Vilmos Munk, age 49,” the name of his aunts, the name of his one-year-old cousin, and finally, his own name—“Tibor Munk, age 19.”

At first, we were too overcome by this unbearably sad sight to ask why my father’s name was on this memorial wall as one of the Holocaust dead. But the engravings explained why my relatives did not know of my father’s existence until he had just then returned to Budapest. They thought he was dead. Why was my father’s name on the wall? When he had returned to Budapest in 1945, he never gave his name to the authorities, fearful that he would be deported again. So he became one of the many Hungarians assumed dead after the war.

As my father explained and no doubt added some details about his distrust of authority, my relatives nodded their heads, and we all began to laugh through the tears. “Don’t tell them that I am alive,” he whispered, hinting that I should never to trust the authorities. Even today, my father’s name appears on other monuments commemorating Budapest’s lost Jewry and on the Yad Vashem database as one of the many Holocaust martyrs.

My father lingered over the names of his family, and sat for a picture where he points to his father’s name and his own. That was as close as I came to knowing a little more about my father’s past on that trip. His Holocaust secrets remained with him.

As our trip neared its end and my father’s visa was due to expire, he tried to figure out a way to extend his trip. Now that he had come home again, he didn’t want to leave. He was having too much fun. He even briefly thought about renting a priest’s hassock and smuggling some Hungarian artifacts out of the country as a souvenir, an illegal act that appealed to my father’s desire to outwit the authorities.

In the end, he took the few personal possessions he carried with him on this trip—his watch, a jackknife—and gave them to Attila cousins to remember him by. As he boarded his train, he looked back longingly one last time at the city of his youth and waved goodbye.

We kept up a correspondence with Andi and her family for a while, and then we lost touch. As I mentioned, in 2009, when I found Andi again (Attila was still at the same Visegradi address), she was a married mother of two, and Lilli, Klari, and sadly her mother Cica had passed away.

Since I saw them last, Zsolt and Andi have taken a motorcycle trip across the U.S. following Route 66. For some crazy reasons, Hungarians think it’s fun to go across America on Harleys, visiting what is really American from the 1950s. They started from Chicago, but not before meeting my sister Judy and my daughter Jennifer very briefly.

On this visit, as usual, Andi remembered my fondness for Budapest pastry and had purchased enough cakes and cookies to feed the neighborhood. And then when we couldn’t finish everything, she packed up a box and sent them home with me.

I was surprised to hear my cousin indicate that she would like to move to the U.S.—surprised because she lives a good life here in Budapest. Her husband and I talked on the way home, and I tried to explain that America is not like what you see in the movies. We are a troubled society, particularly economically. While we have many conveniences, we certainly have much to envy of the Europeans in terms of their lifestyles.

While Zsolt held their baby and tried to comfort her (she’s teething), I gave everyone some small gifts. One of the more important gifts was a scrolled family tree showing our common Weisz ancestors.

But I saved the best for last. Somehow, I had come into possession of Andi’s great-grandparent’s railroad passes from the 1930. Inside the passes were pictures of Mor and Regina Weisz, Andi’s direct ancestors Both Mor and his brother Illes (my great-grandfather) were railroad conductors on the Magyar Railway. They must have left Rosza Poutas, the farms where they grew up, and made it to the big city and gotten these good jobs on the railroad. I believe that my grandmother Rosza Weisz had taken these mementos of a long-ago era with her to the U.S., where they became part of a box of my belongings passed down to me.

I thought it was time these photos came home, just like me.