CARPATHIA
Background and References
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Yacov Drummer is my second cousin. His grandmother Feige was the daughter of R'Yacov Richter of Kiralyhaza (for whom he was named) and the sister of my grandfather Baruch. Yacov grew up in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia (most people continued to use the Hungarian name Monkacs), survived the Nazi Death Camps and emigrated to Israel. In Israel he married Leah Jacobovitz, worked for may years as supervisor for the Israeli Telephone Company, and raised two sons who have provided the couple with numerous grandchildren. The following is a translation (Hebrew to English) of that part of Yacov's testimony which deals with his growing up in Mukachevo and describes his life up to the time (the beginning of May 1944) that he and his family were transported from the Monkacs ghetto to the Auschwitz Death Camp. Yacov's testimony was recorded by Yishayahu Perry for the Survivors of the Shoa, Visual History Foundation, on 10 November 1996 in the town of Azor (a Suburb, Southwest of Tel-Aviv) Israel, where Yacov and Leah lived at the time. |
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OUR FAMILY My name is Yacov Drummer. I was born to Joseph and Devora Drummer on 24 June 1924 (25 Nisan 5684) in the city of Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia. My immediate family included my parents and seven children - four sisters, two brothers and myself. I was eldest child and the only one to survive the Holocaust. My mother died of Cancer in 1942. My father, my four sisters (Bila, Rachel, Sarah and Hanna), and my brothers (Shmuel and Menahem-Zev aka Mendel-Wolf) were murdered in Auschwitz. Father had a factory that produced soap, soda and other chemical products and we lived prosperously until the Hungarians returned to the region in 1939. We were an observant, Orthodox Jewish family - but were not fanatic. Father, a chemist who had completed secular studies in Vienna, was a follower of the Satmar Rebbe - but he was also a Zionist. In spite of his Rebbe's strong opposition to Zionism we had Zionist literature in our home and father maintained continual correspondence with a younger brother (Avraham) who had emigrated to the Holy Land in 1921. Father's attachment to the Satmar Rebbe came through his father. The Satmar Rebbe began his rabbinate in the town of Irsheva where Grandfather lived. In fact, Grandfather was one of those who helped the Satmar Rebbe - formerly head of the Yeshiva in Irsheva, get his appointment. Grandfather was devoted to the Rebbe and so Father, too, became a follower of his. There was considerable Zionist activity in Monkacs including Mizrachi, Agudat Yisrael, and Betar. The Monkacs Rabbi, R'Shapira, was strongly anti-Zionist, as were almost all the rabbis of this region. One of our neighbors was the head of Betar in Monkacs. When the leader of Betar, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, visited Monkacs our neighbor (without telling my parents) dressed one of my sisters in a Betar uniform and had Jabotinsky present her with a bouquet of flowers. When father was told about it he was quite angry and afraid of repercussions in the court of the Rebbe. Fortunately, the incident passed unnoticed. However, When Father enrolled my younger sister in the city's Hebrew School he was told that if he did not remove his daughter from the Zionist's influence, the Rebbe's followers would boycott his products. He felt he had to comply. Later, when R'Shapira died and was replaced by the more tolerant R'Rabinovitz, Father again enrolled her in the Hebrew school and afterwards she attended the city's Hebrew High School. I finished 11 years of secular schooling in Monkacs. From age 3 to age 16 I also studied in Heder and, during secular school vacation, in Yeshiva - I was even sent to Yeshivas in other towns (Kiralyhaza and Valyava). Father insisted that I study (torah) every morning and then late into the evening, after finishing my secular school work. He would wake me at five o'clock in the morning and take me with him to synagogue where we said our morning prayers and studied Gemara. When we returned home I ate breakfast and went to public school. In Monkacs everyone spoke a number of languages - mostly Hungarian, Ruthenian, German, and Czech - and Jews also spoke Yiddish. There were (public) schools in Czech, Russian, Hungarian and Hebrew. I studied for five years in a Czech school and then for three years in a private German school in which most of the students were Schwabian (Volks-Deutsch). Every month I brought 150 (later 200) Krona to pay to the school. I still remember the Principal Tomas, the Head Teacher Kokay and some other teachers including a young woman - Edith Odenal - who was said to be Jewish and who came from Valyava (a town about 20 km from Monkacs). From 1940 to 1944 I attended a technical vocational school in the evenings while working as a mechanic in a garage during the day (both of these activities were to be crucial to my survival). Monkacs was a Jewish city. The largest part of the urban population was Jewish, while most of the non-Jews lived in the surrounding countryside. When Sabbath came almost all the shops in the city, except for the shop of the pig butcher, were closed. In general, non-Jews had little choice but to accept the Jews and accommodate to their presence. As a child I was rarely involved with non-Jews, except in school - and there, I sometimes had trouble. I recall an incident where I had a fight with another student - in the end he yelled at me 'you better watch yourself Jew, Hitler is coming'. I reported this to the teacher and the boy was punished. |
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THE HUNGARIANS RETURN I was 14 years old when the Hungarians reoccupied the region. I remember that I wanted to see the soldiers march into the city. My mother warned me not to go but I went to watch anyhow. The column of soldiers, with their vehicles and small tanks, moved into the center of the city and came to a halt. Suddenly one of the soldiers stepped out of the column came up to me and lifted me up by my peyos. I was so upset I didn't hear what he said but I ran home crying. Mother reminded me that she had warned me not to go. We soon felt the effects of the arrival of the Hungarians - their anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitism they aroused in our non-Jewish neighbors who were told that they no longer had to fear the Jews. Not long after their arrival the license for Father's factory was withdrawn and he had to accept a non-Jewish 'partner' (a Strawman) through whom he could run his business. One such 'partner' (Dr. Freitag, Bela-Yerush - a lawyer from Budapest) really took advantage of us. He sold off a great deal of raw materials and pocketed the money. However, another 'Strawman', a man who worked in the law courts, befriended Father and cooperated with him - to their mutual advantage. Never-the-less our economic situation continued to deteriorate and we were forced to rely on help from Grandfather's family in Irsheva. Grandfather himself had died in 1941. He had been a banker, who owned a small private bank, and was well off. When the Hungarians arrived one of the first edicts they issued declared a 'moritorium' on bank loans - Non-Jews did not have to repay loans to banks owned by Jews. This edict resulted in considerable loss to Grandfather's bank and seriously damaged the fortunes of that branch of the family too. In 1941 the Hungarians transported a great many Jews to the Ukraine because they could not prove they were Hungarian citizens (most of them had come to the region after WW I, when it was part of Czechoslovakia). Some said as many as 30,000 men, women and children were transported - in one instance they transported all the Jewish residents of a large village and its surroundings, among them members of my own family. They were taken to Kamenetz-Podolsk where they were set upon by the Ukrainians. Very few survived. A young man related to us, named Adler - he was about 20 years old and had lived in a village near the city of Hust - came back from the Ukraine. He was afraid to return to his home and so he came to us. He told us his story and we thought it miraculous that he had managed to survive at all. Father gave him money and I took him to Budapest and gave him my bicycle permit to use as identification and help get himself settled. I never heard from him after that - I don't know if he survived. During the period of the Hungarian administration newspapers and the radio told almost nothing of what was happening to the Jews in Germany, Poland and the rest of Europe. Earlier, before the Anschluss (Germany's occupation of Austria in March, 1938), Father had gone to Austria and brought out his cousin Emil Richter and his family (Emil, son of Grandmother's brother Avraham, had been Cantor in the Great Synagogue of Baden - a well known resort near Vienna). Now there were whispered rumors in the synagogue about the awful things that were happening to Jews of Poland. A number of school friends of mine (most of them from the nearby village of Polyana) were Hoch-Deutsche and were drafted into the Wehrmacht. One of them came home on leave and came looking for me. When we met he told me to get out as quickly as I could. He said that he had come from Poland - they were killing Jews there and before long would be coming to do the same in Hungary. Father was not unaware of what was going on, and had made arrangements for me to join his brother Avraham in the Holy Land. He gave a good deal of money to representatives of 'Youth Aliyah' to obtain a transit card for me - but two weeks before I was supposed to leave they told him that the transit card he paid for had been given to a Jew who had escaped from Poland. In 1943 my brother was arrested and imprisoned along with other Jews, politicians and undesirables. We didn't know why they took him but the Hungarians always could find a reason if they wanted to persecute a Jew (some said that it was because at one time he voted for the Czechs). After about six months he was released - without expaination for either his arrest or his release - and he returned home. |
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THE GHETTO IN MONKACS I was not at home when they took my father and two youngest sisters to the ghetto. We were reunited later when I arrived with the rest of my brothers and sisters and we remained together there for about one month. Since our house was not within the confines of the ghetto we slept in the stairwell of one of the houses that was in the ghetto. When mother had died in 1942 Father had his factory to manage and I, as the eldest son, had to help him look after the younger children. In the ghetto, most of the time, he had to manage them without me. I was a welder and a mechanic and the Hungarians took me for all manner of jobs. Father did manage to improvise a small kitchen but he had a very difficult time obtaining and preparing food for the family. In the ghetto we were visited by representatives of the Yudenraht who told us that we would be taken to Germany to work in the fields and that it was desirable that we bring suitable tools. I remember Father sending me out to try to collect tools even though I should have been helping to take care of the children. Another time, an uncle - my mother's brother - came and suggested that I join him. The family had a vineyard in the country and he had a rifle hidden in the vineyard since WW I - he suggested we go and hide there together. I told him that I couldn't go with him because I had to help my father with the children. One time, I and a few other young men were taken to a brick factory and were told to install water pipes and a pump - they gave me a half hour to plan the installation. Months later, when I was in the Duselberger concentration camp, one of the supervisors showed me a copy of the newspaper 'Der Sturmer'. There were pictures from Monkacs in the paper - including a picture of me, stripped to the waist, installing the pipes. Early in May, I was brought to another brick factory. I had been there for a few days when a train arrived I wandered over to see who was on board. To my great surprise I found my entire family on the train. Without a second thought I got on and we all left Monkacs together on that train, with no idea of where we were going to end up. |
NOTES AND COMMENTS(1) Mukachevo (Monkacs, in Hungarian) is located in Transcarpathia, which today is the Zakarpatskaya Oblast [district] of the Republic of Ukraine. It is a region in the Carpathian Mountains covering an area of about 4,900 square miles (12,700 sq km). In 1939 it had a multinational population of about 500,000: about 50% Ruthenians (a branch of the Ukrainian people), 33% Hungarians and 15% Jews. The region experienced many vicissitudes in the 20th century. Prior to WW I it was part of Hungary and after the war it was incorporated into Czechoslovakia (treaty of Trianon - 1921). In March 1939, following an abortive attempt at establishing independence, it reverted to Hungary. After World War II, it was ceded to the USSR by Czechoslovakia and incorporated as part of the Ukrainian SSR. (2) There is evidence of the presence of Jews in the region from the 15th century, but in the 19th century, the region witnessed a large influx of Jews from Russia, Romania, and Poland. The Jews of the region were known for their strict piety. Many of them (56 % in 1930) lived in rural areas and 18% of them were farmers (the highest percentage of farmers among Jewish populations of the world at that time). They were also very poor. Nevertheless, a network of Jewish and Hebrew educational institutions was established, including Hebrew secondary schools. The schools remained in operation almost up to the time in 1944 when the region's Jews were deported to extermination camps. Transcarpathia had the only legally functioning schools in (Nazi ruled) Europe in which Hebrew was the language of instruction. It was also a center of lively Zionist activity - despite the opposition of the Hasidic rabbis of the region (who were the leaders of Hasidic opposition to Zionism). (3) During the Czechoslovak period, the Jews were able to develop an independent Jewish life. The Jews were highly appreciative of the attitude of the Czech authorities who felt that a strengthening Jewish consciousness among the Jews would reduced their attachment to Hungary and the Hungarian language. When the region was seized by Hungary in 1939, Jews who were known for their pro-Czechoslovak sympathies, were among the first victims of the anti-semitic new regime. For the five months that preceded the Hungarian occupation of the Transcarpathia, it was established as an autonomous region within the Czechoslovak state. The local administration contained strong Nazi elements who sought to vent their spite on the Jews. Generally speaking, the Ruthenian population did not support the anti-Jewish policy pursued by the local government; nevertheless, when the pro Nazi elements were removed and the region was annexed to Hungary, the Jews felt some relief. (4) Transcarpathian Jewry now had to renew previous ties with the Jewish leadership in Budapest. After some hesitation, the latter took the new community under its wing. Still, the gap between the Jews of the great metropolis and those of the distant border region was not entirely bridged. Until the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Jews of the region, to a large degree, managed to hold on to their way of life, and even to provide refuge and aid to Jews from Slovakia and Poland who had fled to the region to escape deportation and death. Businesses, which had ostensibly been handed over to non-Jews, in fact remained in the hands of their original owners, and the Jews continued to play an active role in the local economy. (5) An exception to this relatively tranquil state of affairs was the expulsion of 'Jewish foreign nationals' from the region, in July and August 1941. A very large number of Jews whose families had been living in the region for generations were expelled as 'foreign nationals'; in some instances entire communities were expelled. As many as 18,000 thousand Jews were affected. Most of them were murdered by the SS, in Kamenets-Podolski and Kolomyia, which were located in German occupied Eastern Galicia. When reports of the massacre reached Budapest, prominent Jews there intervened with the central Hungarian authorities, and the deportations were discontinued. Seven transports that were en route to the border were sent back, and the passengers on these trains were released and permitted to return to their homes. The drafting of local Jews into the Hungarian army's Munkaszolgalat (Labor Service System) also exacted a heavy toll, and many of the young Jews from the region perished in that service. (6) The plan for the total deportation of Hungarian Jewry, which the Nazis put into effect in 1944, was begun in Transcarpathia. A rapid process of ghettoization was launched - Jews from the small localities and provincial towns were rounded up and taken to district centers, and from there were deported to the east. The entire process of deportation from the region was under way by the middle of May 1944. For the most part the Hungarian police and gendarmerie did the job, with a few German units and some Jewish collaborators also taking part. In general, the local Hungarian population showed less sympathy toward the Jews than did the Ruthenians. When the Germans occupied Hungary in March 19, 1944, they imposed the payment of heavy tributes on some Jewish communities. In Uzhgorod, the Greek Catholic Church, whose local bishop had been known for his humanitarian attitude toward the Jews, helped them find the sum required for the ransom. (7) Liberation and Aftermath: A small number of the Jews of Carpathia escaped to the mountains or took refuge in prepared hiding places. Only 20% of Transcarpathian Jewry survived the war, and when the area was annexed by the Soviet Union, most of the survivors chose to leave. After a short stay in the Sudeten region, in Bohemia, most of these Jews emigrated to Israel or to other countries.
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