Tales of the Holocaust — Part 2

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part story. The first part appeared in the June 27 edition of Seacoast Sunday.

EXETER — Thomas Weisshaus, 82, is a man with a story to share, but for more than 50 years his tale of tragedy and heartbreaking loss as one of 60,000 Budapest Jews to survive the Holocaust was one he was wary to relive.

Save for a cousin living in Australia, Weisshaus is the only member of his family left to tell the story of what happened to them and their countrymen after the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944. Weisshaus arrived in America alone at age 18. His father and mother were both lost to the war and his surviving brother stayed in their native Hungary.

“I never told the story in a public way to anyone,” he said. “Even my family complained that I never spoke that much about it.”

Weisshaus’s journey to America was finally relayed on a seemingly innocuous Saturday night in 2003 when he was looking in the paper to see what movies were playing and found a listing for a middle school play titled “Under a Yellow Star: Diaries of Children of the Holocaust” by the Nottingham Theatre Project. He was drawn to the play as two weeks after the March 19, 1944, invasion Weisshaus and all Hungarian Jews were forced to wear the Yellow Star.

After seeing the play, which consisted of recitations of speeches from memoirs and journals left behind by children who lived during the Holocaust, Weisshaus approached the director to tell her he was a Holocaust survivor and was invited to speak to the audience after the performance. “It was the first time since 1947 that I ever got up in a public place to talk about anything having to do with what I had experienced,” he said.

In 1942, his father was enlisted in a forced-labor brigade by the Hungarian army. Five months later, Hungarian soldiers showed up at the family’s door with his father’s ring. 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 sent to the forced labor brigades, but managed to survive the war and live out his life in Hungary. 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.

While 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 food every few days. Being caught in the streets by German soldiers meant death. After a while, his mother stopped bringing food and the last four members of his family, including his mother, grandmother, aunt and cousin, disappeared without a trace.

From the sixth floor of his safe house, Weisshaus saw masses of people shot and dumped into the Danube River. “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,” he said.

Weisshaus came to the United States in 1947 on a United Nations program for Holocaust orphans. On a 1952 trip to the West Coast, he stopped in Chicago where he met his future wife, Patricia. He served as an English teacher for nearly 50 years, teaching at Tabor Academy in Marion, Mass., the University of Illinois and other prep schools.

The act of speaking on stage and the reaction he received inspired Weisshaus to travel with the Nottingham

Theatre Project speaking after every performance, and later to share his story with students throughout New England.

The idea to turn his spoken tale into memoirs came about three years ago. Weisshaus did so by dictating his experiences and transcribing them into a memoir. “I would rather have it sound the way I sound when I’m talking to children about my experiences because at that time I am the 16-year-old who is going through those experiences and that way you’re getting the story the way it really was,” he said.

Through his struggles he speaks to a greater tale: that of 480,000 Hungarian Jews killed during the Holocaust and the legacy of those who survived.

“The whole book is about my not being a victim and my not accepting the role of victim,” he said. “A victim is someone who is helpless and the Jews were never victims in that way. They insisted on a just world and a world that was worth living in. Those are not victims but people that invite those who don’t understand how to live to learn how to live.”

In sharing reasons for crafting his memoir, Weisshaus referenced a quote by Holocaust survivor and memoirist Elie Wiese!: “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: His duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

“We still have places in the world where we don’t treat each other as brothers,” he said. “We still have an unfinished job.”

Weisshaus’ memoirs, “Not a Victim! Tales of Survival in Nazi Budapest,” are set to be released in the coming months.