I helped Agnes into my car. She's petit, under 5 feet tall, and as usual when I drive her, I make sure she's buckled up like I would a child, though she's 84 years old. After all she has been through, I feel like I am driving the most precious cargo when she's with me.
As we drive, we notice the beautiful buds and flowering trees everywhere we look. It's a cool morning, so the windows stay closed, but it's a glorious-looking Spring day. There's pink, yellow, soft green, and purple on the tree-lined streets of the towns we drive through.
"Early Spring holds so much promise," I say, "I just love it."
"Yes," agrees Agnes. "Especially after the tough winter we just had."
"I guess yours was particularly tough," I add.
We are both quiet. Agnes lost her beloved husband David just a month ago.
A few minutes later she says, "My mother always said, 'Wear clean underwear, because you never know what might happen. You might get in an accident.'"
That seems a little out of the blue, and I wonder if she's commenting on my driving, or just thinking about her mother and the presentation she's about to give in about a half an hour.
"My mother always said that too! I am just now thinking maybe it's a metaphor for always being ready, and not really about underwear?"
"You mean like keeping your paperwork in order and keeping a clean house?" says Agnes.
"Oh, gosh, I hope not!" I laugh, thinking about my office and my desk in particular. "I was more thinking about making sure your relationships are resolved with people, you know, just in case. I mean, I never thought about it until just this minute, but maybe clean underwear is a metaphor for a clean slate."
Agnes seems to like that, and we go back and forth a bit on this topic.
When we arrive at the school, she practically bounds out of my car, and grabs her bag from my backseat, and moves so quickly from the parking lot to the door that I have to run a little to catch up after collecting my laptop and bag so I can get the door for her. We are at a Jewish high school program, so Agnes can tell her story to the students. It is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
For the past six weeks, I have been meeting with her, at her house, and looking at her photos, and working with her to encapsulate her story of survival into a half-hour speech accompanied by a power point presentation.
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| Agnes and I pose for a selfie. Probably her first. |
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| Good thing it was a small lectern! |
Agnes was born in 1930. She led a very happy life, although she doesn't remember a time when the rules weren't at least little different for Jews than they were for Gentiles in Budapest, Hungary. Both her parents worked, and they were very comfortable.
She attended at school for girls until the age of 14 (1944) when the Nazis came into Hungary. At that time, Jews were forced to move from their homes into the Budapest ghetto. Agnes was an only child, and in an act of defiance, which she says was very unlike her, when her parents were getting ready to go to the ghetto, she refused to go with them. Agnes hid in the basement of her house, behind a curtain next to the toilet, for hours, while the Nazis made a clean sweep of the house and the neighborhood. What she remembers is that she knew it was wrong to place so many Jews in such a small, confined area. She was right. It turned out that there were mines under the ghetto that were never detonated.
After several hours, Agnes emerged. It was dark. She removed the yellow star from her clothing, and made a decision to take shelter with her mother's good friend Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a Jew, but married to a non-Jew. She lived across the city, in the very elite part of town. Agnes was sure that Elizabeth would hide her in her giant home and she would be safe and warm. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Elizabeth gave her 20 crowns, and said that the war would soon be over, and sent this poor, freezing, Jewish girl back out into the cold rainy night.
Agnes made her way back across the river toward the neighborhood she knew. As she walked the dangerous streets, an air raid (were they Americans trying to bomb a German military stronghold?) made her find shelter wherever she could. The rain had turned to snow.
Finally, Agnes found shelter at a little house with a garden, and an awning to protect her a bit from the elements. She covered herself with a newspaper and used her schoolbooks as a pillow. Completely exhausted, she fell asleep.
Agnes awoke to a stranger staring at her. He was an older fellow, and she somehow knew it would be okay to tell him the truth. She told him her parents were taken to the ghetto. He asked if she was a Jew, and made her prove it by reciting the Shema. (This is the prayer every Jewish child learns first, and states that God is one.) Although Agnes' family had never been religious, she did get Jewish studies once a week at her school, and she knew the Shema by heart. The man was a Jewish pharmacist, whose business was forced closed. He gave Agnes some bread, and then asked her to do something for him. He drew a map of where his pharmacy was located, and gave her the key to the door. He gave her money for the trolley, and told her he needed her to bring back nitroglycerin pills for his heart. Not thinking of the dangers of such a trip, Agnes went to the pharmacy and found the medicine. It was on the trolley back that she met the one person who is most likely responsible for saving her life.
Agnes sat next to a man who was reading a theatrical publication. She says that from this, she intuitively knew he must not be a Nazi. She noticed he had a tiny flag of Sweden on his lapel. In German, she introduced herself, and he said his name was Raoul. She asked if he was from Sweden, and he confirmed he was, and she somehow knew he was safe, and she spoke quickly, quietly and freely to him. She explained that her parents were taken to the ghetto, and that she was alone and had nowhere to go. He asked her age.
"14 years old," she told him. He wrote an address on a piece of paper, and handed it to her.
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| Raoul Wallenberg, famous for saving thousands of Jews, from his passport photo. |
Raoul Wallenberg got off the Trolley at the next exit, but in those 15 minutes, Agnes' fate was changed.
Agnes brought the pharmacist his nitroglycerin, and he rewarded her with 10 more Hungarian crowns. She took the money to a shop and brought a small amount of food. As a young child, not knowing what to do to prepare for what may be ahead, she bought a 5 gallon jar of apricot preserves as well, and the shopkeeper gave her a shopping basket on wheels to drag it through the streets.
Agnes found the address given to her by the stranger on the trolley. It was a former gymnasium, now transformed into a shelter for children orphaned by the war. Agnes did as she was told by Raoul, and told the director that she was an experienced baby nurse. And it turned out she was a natural with the children and worked hard tending to them until the Russian occupation of Hungary in January of 1945. She says that the apricot jam worked wonders with the children, as it was the only sweet thing they had, and it helped quiet down the little ones as well.
Agnes' parents did survive the ghetto, but when she found them after the ghetto was liquidated, she barely recognized them. They tried to move back to their home, but it had been taken over by fascists who refused to leave. The family was allowed to live in the basement of their own house. At this time, Agnes, now 15 felt that she was a parent to her parents. She joined a Zionist organization, and made plans to emigrate to Israel.
Agnes' story of survival continues, as she managed to get to France with the other Zionist teens, again leaving her parents behind, and boarding the Zionist ship Latrun. With the Haifa coast IN VIEW... it was bombed by British forces and everyone on board was forced to board another ship and sent back to DP camps in Cyprus for a year.
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| Fishing Boat Latrun, as it was sinking, due to grenades in the hull. |
But Agnes did make it to Israel where she lived for many years, both on Kibbutz Matzubah (coincidentally where my husband volunteered many years later), and in Tel Aviv. Her parents joined her in Israel, and later, when she got married, she and her husband David moved to the United States.
Agnes is much more than a Holocaust survivor. She is an artist, a botanist, herbalist and a naturalist. Just yesterday, she gave me a homemade cream for my eyes, which were looking a little puffy, in her opinion. She concocts elixirs from natural ingredients that cure all sorts of aches and pains. Agnes is an expert gardener and horticulturist. And although English is not her native language, she's an excellent writer as well.
Agnes' Hebrew name is Bracha, which means blessing, and that is what she is.
I'm proud to call her my friend.
And I'm proud to help keep her story alive.
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| "I wanted the students to know that you shouldn't follow the crowd, especially if you know it's wrong. I hope they heard that message." |
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| Agnes, with one of her scultures, at an exhibition of her work. |
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| April 27, 2014 |
