Rozsa Kovesdi

Letters in a Suitcase

A close-knit family, a unit of four.

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In 1990 my brother and I got the phone call from Hungary that our mother had passed away. The two of us together briefly returned to Hungary. One of our somber tasks was to empty our parents’ apartment, our childhood home, in a hurry. We could not bring back much with us. We took the family films and photographs, a vase that used to belong to our maternal grandparents and another vase that belonged to our paternal grandparents, who perished in Auschwitz. Everything else we pretty much gave away or threw away. One thing we could not throw away. We found letters, the family correspondence our mother had saved from before, during, and after WWII—from people who had survived and from those who had perished. There was no time to sort out or read them. I shoveled the letters into a large suitcase and brought them with me to America. That was almost thirty years ago. This year I turned seventy, the age my mother died. The time has come to open that suitcase, to open the past and to honor the history of my family.

I was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary. I left Hungary as an adult, at age thirty-three. My life experience is different from the children of Holocaust survivors who were born in faraway countries, having only a vague sense of the home countries from which their survivor parents emigrated. I am neither “First” nor truly “Second Generation.” I feel I am somewhere in-between, “First-and-a-half.” I grew up in a country where the Holocaust happened. I lived among the people who participated in those events. I speak the language. I absorbed the culture first-hand. My identity is inextricably intertwined with the place and with the family stories I grew up hearing.

My parents, Dezső Kövesdi and Katalin Káldori got married in October 1939 on my mother’s twentieth birthday. It was a marriage of deep, eternal love and commitment that lasted throughout their lives. Each one of them wanted to survive the war for the sake of the other. For the vicious persecutions they faced fell not just on him or on her, but were an equal threat to their shared life as devoted husband and wife.

In 1942 my father was drafted into forced labor service. These Jewish labor battalions were attached to the Hungarian Army and treated with extreme cruelty. My father spent the next three years on the Eastern Front, in the swamps of German-occupied Ukraine. He sarcastically called that three-year harrowing experience “The Great Jamboree.”

My parents did not know about each other’s fate during those three long years from 1942 to 1945. My father wrote in his diary in 1945, when he was just hoping but not yet sure my mother had survived: “I need you very much. I stayed alive for you. I felt you are holding my hand and telling me what I needed to do, how, and when. The hope that you survive and wait for me has lived inside me all along. Wherever I was, in whatever situation, I just summoned you, ‘My Little One, help me.’ I believed with almost fetishistic, cabalistic conviction and perseverance that we are helping each other even from afar, and nothing can harm us.” My mother felt the same way. She called my father “My life.”

The bravery of my mother saved her and her sister’s lives. In October 1944, the Hungarian Arrow Cross (Hungarian fascists) took over the government and all hell broke loose. At age twenty-five my mother and her younger sister took a train from Budapest toward Eastern Hungary where the Soviet Army was advancing and fighting the Germans and Hungarians.  The hope was that they would be liberated by the Soviet Army in a matter of days or weeks. The battle for Hungary took much longer. My mother and her sister spent three months wandering through villages between the German and Soviet Army lines, sometimes in no man’s land. Villages were changing hands back and forth. My mother and her sister were not hiding; they worked as farmhands. They pretended they were Christian refugees from Transylvania, who had been bombed out and had lost everything, including their documents. By then all the Jews in the Hungarian countryside had been deported to Auschwitz. The remaining Jews in Hungary were confined behind the high walls and barbed wire of the Budapest Ghetto. As there were no Jews left in the villages, it was inconceivable to people that the two young women wandering around freely could be Jews.

My father told stories of his survival. He was taken to Ukraine in 1942 with thousands of young military-age Hungarian Jewish men. Only a handful returned. He survived the cruelty of Hungarian sergeants, death marches, starvation, extreme cold, mines blowing up in front of him and behind him, and enemy fire. My father was a fatalist. He often said his survival was due more to fate and luck than to anything he did. But he was too humble. It was not just fate and luck. He saved himself by acting when others were passively waiting.

Initially, his talent and skills helped him survive.  My father was a superb engineer who kept the generator running for his army unit under often difficult conditions. But his physical stamina was important for his survival too, he recognized. With stubborn determination, he did everything to keep his body in top condition; not to get sick, not to get weak. He wanted to survive as revenge against the people who wanted him dead. Toward the end of the war when the Soviet Red Army started its offensive, the Hungarian Army began shipping the Jewish labor battalions from Ukraine to concentration camps in the West. My father and his friend stepped off the train and escaped into the mountains somewhere in Slovakia. The Hungarian Army had its problems—they were losing the war. At that point, they did not pay much attention to guarding railroad cars. Still, only my father and his friend stepped off the train. It was easier to wait passively for events to take their course and hope for the best than to act.

My brother and I were born right after the war. My brother was born in 1946, in a UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) displaced person camp. I was born in 1949, back in Budapest. My earliest memory about being a Jew is that my parents, my brother and I were hiking in the Buda Mountains in Hungary, as we did every Sunday. We were a very close-knit family, a unit of four. 

There were no grandparents, uncles, aunts or cousins. While hiking, my parents sometimes talked about the war. The war was a great adventure and the heroes were my parents—Jews who were brave and resourceful and could outsmart the Hungarians and Germans who tried to kill them. I was a naïve child; I did not know that if your parents were Jews then you were, too. I wanted to be a Jew and sheepishly asked if I was. My parents assured me that I, too, was a Jew, and I was thrilled.

We had a small, colorful rug in our living room where I grew up in Budapest, Hungary. I knew from my mother that the rug was made by my father’s father. Almost everything I knew about my father’s family was from my mother. My father was the sole survivor of his family. His parents, his beloved older sister, Béba, and her nine-year-old son Tibike were all deported to Auschwitz in July 1944 and sent to the gas chamber immediately upon arrival.

As a child, I was intrigued by the rug in our living room and asked my father about it. My father did not answer; he could not. He looked at the rug and tears swelled in his eyes. I had never seen my father crying. Those tears did not roll down his face. They stayed in his eyes, just as his unbearable pain always stayed inside.  At that moment he did not need to talk. I felt the depth of his pain for the loss of his family. I understood his silence and never asked again.

Looking back, I have so much admiration for the strength of my parents that they were able to select the parts of their harrowing experiences that they could portray as a “great adventure.” It is not that we children did not know about the part of our family that perished in the Holocaust. However, the overwhelming message was a positive one, survival against all odds. I am sure that the main force that drove my parents was protecting us children from the horrors and trauma they went through. I also want to believe that their positive framing of the past was helping them move on with their lives.  I will never know for sure. They both passed away a long time ago. They have my eternal gratitude for giving us a happy, and “normal” childhood.

Finally, I dragged out the heavy suitcase from the closet and opened it. It was filled to the brim with letters. How would I read so many letters? It seemed like an insurmountable task. Then I started sorting the packets of letters tied with strings and opened the first packet from 1937.

I am completely absorbed in the letters. I am meeting my paternal grandparents and my aunt in their own words for the first time. They were murdered in Auschwitz before I was born. I am meeting my parents’ younger selves. They struggled and suffered a lot more than I understood as a child. My father wrote to my mother in 1940: “I keep thinking how long, how long, how long. How long can it go on that they can commit injustices without any purpose or reason, how long will this go on. You are my life and I am yours. This torment will be over, this night of agony. We will live as we imagined it, and we will be happy. That's what life owes us and that's what we must have.”

As I read the letters, the past becomes the present. It is like sitting in a time machine and living their lives, their feelings, their thoughts. I do not want it to end. As long as I am reading their letters, they are alive.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to the Drew Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study for the transformative experience provided by its Writing Workshop for Second Generation Holocaust Survivors. My special thanks are extended to the leaders of the Workshop, Dr. Ann Saltzman, Professor Emerita of Psychology, and Dr. Robert Ready, Professor Emeritus of English who helped me open the “suitcase” in both symbolic and practical terms. I would like to offer my thanks to my brother, Dr. Imre Kovesdi who is always my first reader. I wish to thank my friends, Dr. Carmela Patrias and Steve Frankel for their insightful comments. Last but not least, I am grateful to Dr. Eva Vogel for encouraging me to apply to the Workshop in the first place.

Originally published in the collection “From Generation to Generation; Essays by Children of Holocaust Survivors,” Edited by Dr. Robert Ready and Dr. Ann L. Saltzman, Drew University Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study, 2021.

Rozsa Kovesdi was born in Hungary to two Holocaust survivors. Her father survived three years of forced labor service in the Eastern front during WWII. Her mother survived the Shoah by refusing to move to the Budapest Ghetto and pretending to be a Christian refugee from Transylvania. Rozsa spent her first career as an architect in Hungary. In 1982 she immigrated to Canada and later to the US. In 1988 she earned a Master’s Degree in Computer Science. Her second career as a software engineer spanned almost 30 years including 10 years at Bell Labs R&D, leading-edge technology startups, and work in the financial industry. Rozsa is now working towards her third career as a genealogist family historian.

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