From Máramarossziget to Manchester: A Jewish Journey

From the unpaved streets of Sziget to the affluent suburbs of Manchester, Stephen Pogany traces the remarkable, often harrowing journey of Nóra Platschek, a Jewish woman whose quiet resilience defied war, exile, and loss. Through family records, personal memories, and historical insight, this deeply human narrative challenges antisemitic myths and reclaims the dignity of ordinary lives swept up in extraordinary times.

 

 

My Grandmother, Nóra 

It was many years after my grandmother’s death in a suburb of Manchester, England that my father happened to mention that Nóra, his mother, had been born in Sighetu Marmației, known to Hungarians as Máramarossziget or simply as Sziget.  Part of the sprawling multi-ethnic, muti-confessional Austro-Hungarian Empire until its dissolution in late 1918, Sziget is probably best known as the birthplace of the author and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. Apart from four years during World War Two, when the town reverted to Hungary together with the whole of northern Transylvania, Sziget has been part of Romania since 1920 when Hungary was forced to cede a large swathe of territory to its eastern neighbor at the Paris Peace Conference.^[1]

My father, who changed his family name from the troublingly Jewish “Platschek” to the impeccably Hungarian “Pogány” some years after World War Two, never asked Nóra about her memories of Sziget. For her part, my grandmother seems not to have volunteered any information about her early life in this remote and once heavily Jewish town that boasted numerous synagogues and prayer halls until the Shoah. For many years I remained unaware of Nóra’s intimate connection to Sziget and simply assumed that she had always lived within Hungary’s shrunken, post-1920 borders. 

As a young child I sometimes stayed with Nóra at her modest, one storey house built of cob in Orosházá, a small, unremarkable town in south-east Hungary. Nóra and her husband, Lajos, spent most of their adult lives in Orosházá where Lajos taught mathematics and physics at the local polgári or secondary school.  Having resumed full-time teaching after World War Two, despite repeated warnings from his doctor about his chronic heart condition, Lajos succumbed to a massive coronary in 1954. Some years later, Nóra left Orosházá for good, accompanied by a large wooden trunk containing her most important possessions ⎯  clothes, a brass mortar and pestle, several enamel pots and pans, and a small hand-painted porcelain vase with a hairline crack. My grandmother joined me and my parents in Manchester, England, where we had settled in 1957 after fleeing Hungary the previous year, following the collapse of Hungary’s anti-Soviet revolt. 

In Orosházá, Nóra had proven herself to be a dutiful wife and mother, if prone to bouts of depression. She kept house, raised two sons, argued with my grandfather about the family’s shaky finances, endured recurrent bouts of debilitating migraine and played cards with friends and neighbours for small sums of money. Although Nóra and Lajos were Jewish and occasionally attended the local synagogue, the family regularly ate pork. Like their gentile neighbours and like other highly assimilated Jewish families in Orosháza, my grandparents even bought a piglet each spring which they kept in a sty behind their house.^[2] Slaughtered the following winter, when it was full-grown, the animal provided the family with copious quantities of meat, as well as lard, some of which was fashioned into Hungarian delicacies such as salami, hurka, disznósajt and szalonna.

Nóra’s birth certificate records that she was born in Sziget on 27 April 1899. The certificate also notes that her father, Móritz Lébovits, was twenty-eight years old at the time of Nóra’s birth and that he earned his living as a shoe-smith. Nóra’s mother, Czeczilia, a housewife, was just twenty-three. The birth certificate states that Móritz and Czeczilia were residents of Sziget and that, like their daughter, they belonged to the “Israelite” i.e. Jewish faith.

None of my Jewish relatives could have imagined how their lives would be transformed in the following decades.

A nation-wide census conducted by the Hungarian authorities the following year found that almost thirty-eight per cent of the population of Sziget — 6,335 out of 16,901 persons –– identified as “Israelite” or Jewish in terms of religion.^[3] However, very nearly two thirds of the town’s Jews, almost certainly including my great grandparents, listed their mother tongue as Hungarian,^[4] which was widely treated as proof that their national identity was Hungarian, a concept that should not be confused with citizenship. While citizenship is a legal category, conferring various rights and obligations, national identity, as understood in Central and Eastern Europe, indicates a person’s attachment or sense of belonging to a specific nation, such as the Poles, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats or Hungarians.

In western Hungary, including in the capital, Budapest, an even higher proportion of Jews had become native Hungarian speakers by 1900, routinely describing themselves as Hungarians of the “Mosaic faith”. By contrast, many Orthodox Jews, living mostly in villages and small towns in northeast Hungary and in neighbouring Austrian-administered Galicia, resisted such modernizing trends. Like their forefathers, they generally spoke Yiddish amongst themselves, while their whole way of life and sense of identity was bound up with their Jewish faith. 

Jews in Hungary at the Turn of the 20th Century

From the lofty vantage point of the twenty first century, it may seem curious, that a growing proportion of Hungary’s Jews ⎯ including virtually every member of my family ⎯ should have been proud to identify as Hungarian by 1900. Within a couple of decades, a virulent strain of antisemitism would spread throughout almost every sector of Hungarian society. During World War One, as the Dual Monarchy suffered a succession of costly military reverses and as domestic consumers faced steep price increases for essentials, including foodstuffs, Jews were accused of profiteering and of insufficient patriotism, notably by the Catholic press and by senior Catholic clerics, including Bishop Ottokár Prohászka.^[5] In the inter-war era, Hungary’s Jews were often blamed for encouraging the spread of Marxism-Leninism and capitalism, while Jewish writers, playwrights and journalists were routinely accused of corrupting Hungarians with pornography and with dangerous ideas such as secularism, liberalism and socialism. From the late ‘30s onwards, as Hungary gradually aligned itself with Nazi Germany, Hungary’s parliament enacted a series of increasingly draconian anti-Jewish laws that robbed many Jews of their livelihoods and gradually excluded them from the economic, political, intellectual and cultural life of the country.^[6] In due course, Hungary’s Jews were deprived of virtually all of their real and moveable property, while even their physical movements were drastically curtailed. All of this turned out to be merely the prelude to the attempted physical extermination of the entire Jewish population of Hungary and the annexed territories, a massive bureaucratic and logistical exercise in which Hungarian administrations and personnel ⎯ politicians, civil servants, gendarmes, soldiers, Arrow Cross militiamen, local government officials, railwaymen and many others ⎯ collaborated extensively and often enthusiastically with Nazi Germany.^[7] As emphasised by Randolph Braham, the preeminent historian of the Holocaust in Hungary:^[8]

 

“…the Nazis found in Hungary a group of accomplices who outdid even them in their eagerness to eliminate the Jews from the country. And indeed, it was primarily the joint, concerted and single-minded drive by these two groups that made the effectuation of the Final Solution in Hungary possible: neither group could have succeeded without the other.”

 

Close cooperation between the Nazis and the Hungarian authorities led to the deaths of almost six hundred thousand Hungarian Jews, including thousands of Jews from Sziget and from smaller towns and villages across Maramureș county.^[9] 

Yet, if virulent antisemitism became a defining feature of Hungarian politics and society during the inter-war era and World War Two, it’s undeniable that Jews enjoyed significantly greater rights, freedoms and opportunities in Hungary than in virtually any other part of East Central and Eastern Europe, let alone Russia, from the mid-19th century until 1919.^[10] Within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which granted substantial autonomy to Hungary, the Hungarian parliament passed a far-reaching Jewish emancipation law in 1867.^[11] This provided that the “Israelite” (i.e. Jewish) inhabitants of Hungary are “entitled to the full enjoyment of all civil and political rights on the same basis as its Christian residents”. In 1895, further legislation enacted by Hungary’s parliament granted Judaism equal status with Christianity.^[12] The extent of Jewish integration and upwards mobility in Hungarian society, during the period of the Dual Monarchy, can be gauged from the fact that no fewer than 108 Jews were elected to serve in the lower house of Hungary’s parliament between 1867 and 1918.^[13] In addition, six Jews were appointed to ministerial posts between 1910 and 1917.

No-one in my grandmother’s family aspired to a role in national politics. For the most part, Nóra’s relatives, like those of her husband, Lajos, were preoccupied with the necessity of earning a living. Yet, like most Hungarian Jews in the early years of the 20th century, they were proud to call themselves Hungarian, identifying fully and unreservedly with the Hungarian nation, its language, culture and aspirations. 

Following the outbreak of World War One, several of Nóra’s male relatives volunteered to fight, risking death or severe injury. Lajos, Nóra’s future husband, also volunteered, while Lajos’s youngest brother, Dezső, rose through the ranks to become a reserve lieutenant. Wounded in late 1917 and taken prisoner by the French the following year, Dezső’s numerous military decorations included a Bronze Medal for Valour.^[14] Dezső had interrupted his legal studies at a college in Máramarossziget to join up. 

The Nazis found in Hungary a group of accomplices who outdid even them in their eagerness to eliminate the Jews from the country. – Randolph Braham

Numerous Jewish relatives on my mother’s side of the family also fought for Hungary in the Great War. Miklós, my maternal grandfather, and Ágoston, my mother’s uncle, sustained life-changing injuries while serving as junior infantry officers on the Italian front.  Ágoston, who went on to become a highly respected football official and amateur coach in Hungary ⎯ his playing career was abruptly ended by a wartime injury ⎯ was particularly proud of the fact that he had graduated from the Royal Hungarian Ludovika Defence Academy, Hungary’s equivalent of Westpoint.^[15]

None of my Jewish relatives could have imagined how their lives would be transformed in the following decades. Having taken full advantage of the opportunity to integrate within Hungarian society they were bewildered and appalled to find themselves cast out and vilified on account of their Jewish ancestry. In 1942, still in his mid-fifties, Lajos was compelled to take early retirement from his teaching post at the polgári school in Orosháza because of Hungary’s Second Jewish Law, which barred Jews from employment in the public sector. In late spring 1944, following increased pressure from Hungary’s wartime ally, Nazi Germany, Jews living in the annexed territories and in Hungary’s provinces were interned in makeshift, insanitary ghettoes until they could be transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Almost 440,000 Hungarian Jews were sent in freight cars to the notorious Nazi camp,^[16] with buckets for sanitation and, at best, a meagre quantity of drinking water.

A mere twenty thousand Jews from Hungary’s provinces, including the Jews of Orosháza, escaped this fate, which in most cases was tantamount to a death sentence. Benefiting from a temporary reprieve, they were sent to Strasshof near Vienna and put to work in factories, on farms, and on various reconstruction projects.^[17] Many of Orosháza’s Jews, including my sixteen-year-old father and his parents, repaired railway tracks damaged in repeated Allied bombing raids.

Like thousands of other Hungarian Jewish men of military age, my father’s elder brother, István, had been conscripted into an auxiliary labour battalion earlier in the War.^[18] Jewish auxiliary labour servicemen were not allowed to bear arms and often accompanied units of Hungary’s armed forces. Tasked with digging anti-tank trenches and other physically demanding work, Jewish labour servicemen were not infrequently subject to sadistic and inhuman treatment by their Hungarian guards, while they were often denied proper clothing, adequate rations or even minimal medical care.^[19]

According to records held by the Hungarian National Archives, my uncle, István Platschek, died in March 1945 in Rostov, in a Soviet labour camp.^[20] One of thousands of Hungarian citizens randomly seized by Soviet military units in Hungary and despatched as slave labourers to the USSR, towards the end of the War,^[21] István had been detained by Soviet troops in Puspökladány, Hungary, on 12 October 1944. In all likelihood, he had escaped from the auxiliary labour battallion by this point. As Soviet forces advanced from the east, many of the Hungarian troops who had guarded Jewish labour servicemen simply fled.

István’s Soviet captors were indifferent to his ethnicity, his religious background, or the fact that he was a victim of Nazi Germany and of Hungary’s deeply antisemitic regime. For the Soviets, István remained a Hungarian, first and foremost, and therefore shared in Hungary’s responsibility for multiple egregious crimes against the USSR, including the invasion and occupation of Soviet territory, the wholesale destruction of  property and the murder of Soviet civilians, in conjunction with its ally, Nazi Germany.

Nóra’s Early Life in Sziget at the Turn of the 20th Century

In the early years of the 20th century a small elite in Sziget — successful traders and businessmen, senior public officials, well regarded lawyers and physicians, the town’s brothel-keeper — lived comfortably or, in some cases, with the trappings of wealth. However, a much larger proportion of Sziget’s inhabitants — artisans, petty traders, manual workers, domestic servants, day labourers and others — struggled to support themselves and their families.

During the winter months, when there was significantly less work for day labourers and others who mostly worked out of doors, many adults and children relied on charity. For example, on 11 March 1902, an article in Máramarosi Újság, a local Hungarian-language newspaper, noted that between 7 February and 6 March, on the personal initiative of the county’s most senior public official, Baron Ervin Roszner and his family, 2,720 kilos of bread and 1,932 litres of milk were distributed free of charge in Sziget.^[22] Six hundred and sixty-eight children and four hundred and seventeen adults benefited from the program.  An editorial in the same issue of the newspaper called for the establishment of a people’s kitchen in Sziget to feed the poor as Baron Roszner’s charitable support would cease at the end of the month.

Nóra’s father, Móritz Lébovits, was one of fourteen shoe smiths in Sziget at the turn of the 20th century.^[23] The town also boasted sixteen bootmakers.  For whatever reason — the location of his premises, an insufficient circle of relatives, friends and acquaintances, or unsatisfactory workmanship — Móritz was amongst the least successful members of his profession in Sziget. According to the town’s tax register, Móritz’s income tax for 1902 was assessed at 10 Crowns.^[24] Only one of his competitors, a widow, paid even less income tax (6.3 Crowns), while eleven of his peers were assessed at sums ranging from 12 to 40 Crowns. 

Another tax file held in the Maramureș branch of  the Romanian National Archives, in Baia Mare, offers a further insight into my great grandfather’s material circumstances. According to this document, which lists the occupants of residential buildings in Sziget in 1902, Móritz, Czeczilia and their children — Nóra had an elder sister, Francziska, born in January 1897 — lodged at No. 86 Fecske Street. The building’s residents and their occupations are set out in the file as follows:^[25]

 

86, Fecske Street

Jenő Bányai:                       A religious studies teacher and the building’s owner 

Widow Seregi:                    housekeeper

Mari:                                    maid

János Kondrás & wife:        unemployed waiter

János Komáromi & wife:     carpenter

Mór Lebovics [sic]^[26] & wife:   shoe smith

Mihály Turicska:                  woodcutter    

     

The modest occupations of the tenants at 86 Fecske Street —including an unemployed waiter and a woodcutter — is revealing. It suggests that the overriding characteristic that the residents had in common was their poverty. Móritz Lébovits’s fortunes did not improve the following year. Sziget’s tax authorities once again assessed his income tax liability at 10 Crowns, significantly less than that of most of his competitors.^[27]

At some point during 1903, Móritz Lébovits’s name and other details in the town’s tax register were crossed through with a blue pencil.  The word “eltávozott”, which means „departed” in Hungarian and is frequently used as a euphemism for “deceased”, was written in the margin. Without their only breadwinner the family would have been plunged almost instantly into severe poverty. They would have had to rely on the generosity of relatives and friends, and on such work ⎯ almost invariably poorly remunerated ⎯ as would have been available in that period to women lacking formal qualifications.

These details of Nóra’s early life in Sziget — together with other information culled from documents held in Romania’s National Archives — have a broader significance. Antisemitism, which grew exponentially in the inter-war era in countries including Hungary and Romania, and which was one of the defining characteristics of German National Socialist (i.e. Nazi) ideology, was fed by a variety of damaging and false assumptions, i.e. that Jews are almost invariably rich, successful, powerful, and that they strenuously avoid physically demanding forms of labour. The lives of Nóra’s family members and of most of the Jews in Sziget, at the turn of the 20th century, directly contradict these assumptions. Although some Jews in Sziget were undoubtedly affluent — including several timber merchants, the owner of a restaurant, a wine merchant, and several butchers and slaughterhouse proprietors — a far larger proportion of the town’s Jews engaged in physically demanding work that, for the most part, was poorly paid. Tax records and other documents show that, at the beginning of the 20th century, many of Sziget’s tinsmiths, tanners, carters, market traders, peddlers and rag and bone men were Jewish.^[28] Jews in Sziget also worked as roadmenders, domestic servants, shop assistants, clerks, teachers, midwives, and day labourers.^[29] In 1900, for example, fifteen out of fifty-seven mothers who gave birth to illegitimate children in Sziget were Jewish. Of these, four worked as napszámos or day labourers, five were employed as maids or cooks, one was a fruit seller and one a seamstress.^[30] Stereotypes depicting Jews as overwhelmingly wealthy, privileged and successful obscure a far more complex and variegated reality.

Using Jews as a universal ‘explanation’ for virtually all of the problems facing societies has been extraordinarily seductive over the course of two millennia.

In addition to the large Jewish community in Sziget, many of Maramureș’ Jews lived in villages and in small towns. For example, 108 Jews had settled in the village of Giulești (formerly known as Máragyulafalva) by 1880, a figure that reached a peak of 207 in 1920, before starting to decline.^[31] Most of the village’s Jews worked in the agricultural sector, in logging and in timber processing. Randolph Braham notes that the majority of Giulești’s Jews were “extremely poor”.^[32] Similarly, in 1944 there were 442 Jews living in another typical village in Maramureș, Berbești (formerly known as Bárdfalva). Most of the Jews of Berbești were poor and worked in the agricultural sector or as petty traders.^[33] Very few Jews from either village survived the Shoah.

At a time when strikingly negative stereotypes about Jews have become increasingly commonplace, on both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum, it is vitally important to challenge antisemitic tropes with facts. Using Jews as a universal ‘explanation’ for virtually all of the problems facing societies has been extraordinarily seductive over the course of two millennia. However, focusing on individual Jewish lives, such as those of Nóra and Lajos, may help to subvert antisemitic tropes and aid in rehumanising a people who, throughout history, have been subject to persistent and unparalleled campaigns of dehumanisation.

III. Postscript

Nóra’s life ended far from Maramureș in Greater Manchester in the north of England. Resilient and resourceful, Nóra spent little more than a year living with her son and daughter-in-law, despite her severely limited and idiosyncratic grasp of English. Determined to regain her independence she found work as a companion and housekeeper to an elderly Jewish bachelor with a fatal fondness for ostentatious cigars, who had spent much of his working life as a mining engineer in Namibia. Following his death, Nóra was promptly hired to look after a genteel Jewish widow, in her eighties, moving into the widow’s spacious apartment in a leafy suburb of Manchester. In November 1966,  still working full time, Nóra died in her sleep following a sudden heart attack. She was sixty-seven years old, the exact age at which Lajos, her late husband, had succumbed to a massive coronary while continuing to teach mathematics and physics to pupils attending Orosháza’s polgári school.

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Stephen Pogany