Tales of the Holocaust — Part 1

[Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part story. See the July 4 Seacoast Sunday for Part 2.]

In the clear voice still tinged with the accent he carried with him from Hungary in 1947 on a United Nations program for Holocaust orphans, Thomas Weisshaus, 87, shares his tale of surviving the Holocaust as a teenager.

Filled with tragedy and heartbreak but also of courage and humanity in times of despair and hopelessness, his is a tale that will soon be available in his memoirs titled “Not a Victim: Tales of Survival in Nazi Budapest,” set to be released in coming months.

Save for a cousin living in Sydney, Australia, Weisshaus, of Exeter, is the only member of his family left to tell the story of what happened to them and their fellow countrymen after the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944.

In telling of his family’s struggles and tribulations, he speaks to an even greater tale, which is that of the more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews murdered as part of the Nazis’s “Final Solution.”

In 1942, Thomas’s father was enlisted in a forced-labor brigade by the Hungarian army that had sided with Germany to regain what the country had lost during World War I.

“One morning he came to my bed to say goodbye at 5 a.m. when it was still dark,” he said. “He tried to say goodbye to me and he lifted me up and hugged me and I hugged him, but the trouble was it was a school morning and at 5 o’clock in the morning I was in the deepest part of sleep. Being a typical teenager, I didn’t really have any concept of what it meant that my father was leaving on this trip or that I would possibly never see him again.

“I said goodbye to him, but it was as if I would be seeing him in a week.”

Five months later Hungarian soldiers showed up at the family’s door to deliver a ring from his father’s hand to his mother. Like thousands of his countrymen his father died from a combination of hunger and sickness.

“That was the beginning of the destruction of my family, one by one,” he said.

His brother Endre was next sent to the forced labor brigades but managed to survive the war and live out his life in Hungary.

In order to support his family, Thomas began working in a factory where plastic caps for wine bottles were made and for a time even became an extra for the Hungarian cinema.

On Oct. 15, 1944, the military demanded all men age 16 and older, including Weisshaus and his uncle Laszlo Hajos, come out and meet in the courtyard. Marching in columns out of the city the men were instructed to dig ditches to stop Russian tanks. For weeks they dug on an island in the Danube River through rain, rations of rotten vegetables and little sleep. While digging the ditches, Weisshaus and his uncle could see about 15,000 to 20,000 men on the other side of the river who had also been digging loaded into trains.

Sitting in the mud on a rainy day, surrounded by hopelessness and facing a certain death, Weisshaus and his uncle heard a soldier calling his uncle’s name. They were led to a Hungarian colonel, who informed them the uncle’s wife, Mariska, had come to the Nazi camp to plead with soldiers to let her husband and nephew go.

“For a Jewish woman to walk into a Nazi camp facing what could have been her death and to get us out of there was unfathomable,” he said. “To this day I don’t know how she did it.”

Following his return to Budapest, Weisshaus was placed, by his mother, in a safe house set up by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. He was given a passport, and became a Swedish citizen.

Although the remainder of his family was living in the basement of an apartment building in another part of the city, his mother would bring him pots of food every few days, even though being caught in the streets by German soldiers meant death.

“She could not give up fighting for me in any way,” he said. “She was going to bring me food at any price.”

After a while, his mother stopped delivering food and the last four members of his family, including his mother, grandmother, aunt and cousin, disappeared from the building without a trace.

From the sixth floor of his safe house Weisshaus could actually see a number of massacres taking place on the Danube River, where masses of people were shot and dumped into the river.

“I could see red blotches on the snow and the ice that was covering the river at the time,” he said. “The horrible thought has many times come to my mind that I might have actually seen the murder of my mother and the others without knowing that it was them getting shot.”

Those experiences, and countless others, for decades appeared as though they would fade away as Weisshaus was reticent to recount the experiences. That all changed one Saturday night when he saw a school play.

[The continuing tale of Weisshaus’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor, his journey to America, and how he came to write his memoirs will continue in Part 2 of the story in the Seacoast Sunday edition of July 4.]