Yesterday our community had the opportunity to hear Dr. Andras Lacko's, a Holocaust survivor's story, and also to commemorate the 6 million Jews who did not survive and those who did. This transplanted Hungarian-Canadian now Texan biochemist, shared his story with a brief geography and history lesson of Hungary, interspersing his family's and Jewish community's fate as a result of the German and Russian tactics.
One of the occupation tactics was to move all the Jews into a 6 block radius, a Jewish ghetto, to be burned, but this was foiled with the arrival of the Russians.
We listened to what our speaker's Mom lived through as the youngest in her family having to move in and share a 2-bedroom apartment with 17 other family members. Then, when it was time for the family to evacuate and go to the train station where trains awaited to take them to the camps, his Mom, a secretary, ran into an acquaintance who invited her to lunch. This woman, living in the apartment, was the maid of the apartment's owner, a Jewish doctor who had been taken away. She offered false papers to help his Mom escape.
Andras, her 15-year-old son, had been left in an orphanage for a week and his Grandparents got him out. He and another boy contacted scarlet fever and were isolated. Surprisingly, when the soldiers opened the door where the 2 kids were being kept, they didn't go inside not wanting to contact the disease. The boys were left there until they were transported to a military hospital, where they were given 3 hot meals/day. It was such a gift in a dark time. When the Russians were getting closer, the Germans left in a hurry. The 15-year-old boys awoke one morning to an empty hospital. The temps were 20 below, and they headed to the basement of a nearby factory, hiding out there for a bit. They, then found his childhood home's street and his home, where there was no electricity or wood.
The Russians took about 3 weeks to occupy the city in 1945.
Andras and his Mom were reunited.
700,000 Hungarian Jewish lives were taken. Dr. Lacko's family amazingly had a high survival rate of 80% , albeit with some close calls. Dr. Lacko now lives in Dallas, but he immigrated to Canada from Hungary at age 17.
Dr Lacko and 5 congregants lit candles to remember family members who either perished or survived in Hungary, Belarus, Germany and Poland. May the memories of those who perished always be for a blessing and may we also give thanks to those who survived to tell their stories...
