A survivor’s journey
From Transylvania to Bergen-Belsen to Romania to New Jersey
Sometimes you meet someone and you just stare and say, “You did what?” And then you say, “Excuse me, you did what?” And then again, “What?”
That often happens when you’re lucky enough to meet a Holocaust survivor. You know that anyone who survived the Holocaust and remembers enough to be able to talk about it firsthand is — to understate politely — not young. In my experience, the Holocaust survivors who still are willing and able to talk about it are both physically and emotionally tough. They have to be.
So you go into Crane’s Mill in West Caldwell — a lovely place, including independent and assisted living facilities as well as more advanced care, Lutheran, but so discreetly so that you don’t notice unless you’re looking closely at the logo, and noticeably full of observant Jews — not knowing exactly who you’ll meet.
And you meet Marta Gotthard.
Ms. Gotthard, newly turned 90, was born in March 1935 in Cluj, a city in Transylvania that was shuttled regularly between Hungary and Romania. It was Romanian when she was born, became Hungarian during the war, and is in Romania now. The language she spoke at home was Hungarian.
She remembers prewar Cluj well, she said — “I remember it a lot better than I remember what happened yesterday,” she jokes, although that seems not quite accurate.
Although her mother’s family “was very simple people,” she said, both her father, Josef Szabo, born in 1903, and her mother, Erzsbet (later Elizabeth) Klein Szabo, born three years later, were accountants. “Szabo means tailor,” Ms. Gotthard said. The name is Hungarian. “They didn’t have last names in the corner of Transylvania where he was born until the beginning of the 20th century, and then they got names based on their trade. Probably my great-grandfather was a tailor.”
Being an accountant then wasn’t like being a CPA now, she added. You got a kind of basic training; her father completed it when he was 18. Then “he went to Palestine,” she said. “He was a chalutz.” A pioneer. “He was on a kibbutz. Then when my grandfather died, he came back. He was going to go back to Palestine — but then he met my mother, and that was that.” He was fluent in Hebrew, she added.
The family of four — Josef, Erzsbet, Marta, and the baby, Paul — lived in Cluj until 1942, “when the Hungarian army joined Hitler’s army to go into the Soviet Union, and my father was taken.” The Hungarians impressed Jewish men into service — “Why should the Christians have to fight in the war, and the Jews be allowed to stay home?” — but instead they were made slave laborers. “They were beaten, they were not fed, we had to send them clothing.” Meanwhile, the women and children left behind were purposely impoverished. “There were only a certain number of Jews allowed to work in a company. My mother lost her job. She had worked in the same company as her sisters, and they weren’t allowed to have three Jews in one department.
“So we didn’t have any money.”
When she was 6 years old, in the middle of third grade, “They took us to the ghetto,” she said. “The ghetto there was a brick factory. There were no walls inside. You had to drape blankets around your area. It was me, my grandparents, my three aunts, my two cousins, and my brother. All the men were doing forced labor in Ukraine.
“It was the end of March when they took us in, and it was cold,” she said.
“Soon enough, the trains started. Cattle cars, that took people straight to Auschwitz.
“This was Hungary in 1944. They knew what they were doing. They had it down to a science. First they took the Poles, then the Germans, the Czechs, the Slovaks — they knew exactly how to do it.”
The brick factory started to empty out.
“But my mom, my brother, and I were in the last transport, because I had the measles.
“A doctor came to see us in the middle of the night and said that I could not get on a train with the measles, because all the children on that train will get the measles too. He did something — I don’t know exactly what he did — and he said that we could stay in the ghetto until the last transport.”
That doctor was Jewish, just like everyone else in the ghetto, Ms. Gotthard said. And of course the idea of sparing children from the measles, which is highly contagious and most if not all of them would have gotten it, is grimly ludicrous, because all the children on that train were headed toward their deaths at Auschwitz. The ovens would have claimed them long before the virus could have finished its work.
In fact, her brother and her two cousins all got the measles. The cousins were put on a train anyway. “They walked into the gas chambers with measles,” Ms. Gotthard said. “Of my extended family, only one uncle came back.”
The last train eventually came, and the family — Marta, Paul, and their mother — were shoved onto it. “I was very sick. The ghetto was empty when we left. My father was still in Ukraine. We didn’t know he was alive, and he didn’t know that we were alive. Because he had been a chalutz, he was strong. He built the highway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. So the lawyer and the doctor he was with there both died, but he didn’t.”
All the other cattle-car trains hauling Jews from Cluj took them to their deaths at Auschwitz, but this train went to Bergen-Belsen. And although Bergen-Belsen also was a concentration camp where many thousands of people died, she and most of the others on that train did not.
It was the Kastner train.
This is a complicated and emotionally fraught part of Holocaust history. Rudolf Kastner was a Hungarian Jew who managed to negotiate the eventual freedom of about 1,600 Jews with Eichmann. Because a great deal of money was involved — some wealthy Jews were able to pay for their freedom, although others, like Ms. Gotthard and her family, did not — the operation was controversial. Kastner went from being seen as a hero to a villain. He was prosecuted in Israel and found guilty, and he was assassinated.Since then, his moral guilt has been relitigated both theoretically and literally.
What clearly is true is that if Ms. Gotthard had been on another train out of Hungary rather than that one, she would not have survived.
She remembers her time at Bergen-Belsen. “I probably saw Anne Frank every day, although I didn’t know her,” she said. “There were little enclosures for different groups — we were in the Hungarian enclosure, and the Dutch were next to us.
“We learned Hebrew there,” she said. How did she learn? Certainly there was no school in a concentration camp. “If there are two Jews together, one will be learning from the other, so there is a school. There were a lot of children there, and a few women who had been teachers. One of them was my mom’s friend.
“We had no paper, but we had some little pieces of wood. I don’t know where we found them. But we smoothed them with our fingers,” and they could scratch letters onto them. “We learned Hebrew letters that way.”
Later, she said, “we learned that we were hostages, and that they were trying to sell us for war materiel. But who is going to sell the Nazis tanks? How could the Jews in England, who were trying to save us, go find tanks for them? But finally they gave them trucks for us. It was supposed to be 10,000 trucks, but they never got them.
“But they got money. Some money changed hands. And in January they put us on trains and sent us to Switzerland. Just the Hungarian kids. Later we found that there were just 1,600 Jews. It was not a huge group.
“The ones with money got out earlier. We — my mother, my brother, and I — were in the second transport out of Bergen-Belsen. We went in January. In February, Anne Frank died of starvation and typhus.”
Then, “we were in Switzerland. Nobody was going to kill us. But we could not leave. We were still prisoners. They were afraid that people would disappear. It was impossible to become a Swiss citizen.
“We were hungry, but not as hungry as in the camps.” And although they were on edge, restless, bored, and unmoored, “nobody threatened to kill us.” They were infinitely better off than they had been.
Next, “after a short time, the children were able to go to Zionist camps, where they could feed us, and they taught us Hebrew. We were completely away from our mother, but she let us go. They said that we’d have better food, and it wouldn’t be as cold.
“The camp was in Switzerland, but it was not so high up in the mountains. The conditions were better. We were able to play. It was much better.
“We still were inside an enclosure. There was some school, but not much. I remember some math, and lots of Hebrew.” Her brother, three years younger, was there too. “I remember that he cried all the time; I kept being called to come get him because he was crying.”
And then the war ended.
“They started making arrangements to take us to Palestine, but the British weren’t very happy about it, so those arrangements took a little while. And my mother said that she wasn’t going to Palestine. ‘I’m going home,’ she said. ‘I promised my husband, and he promised me, that if we survive the war, we will meet at our house at Cluj.’
“My brother and I were very upset, but my mom said that’s what we were doing. It wasn’t like now, when you could just email. There was nothing organized then. There was no way to find out who survived and who didn’t unless you had an understanding that if we both survive, we will meet in this place.
“My mother said, ‘No way am I going to Palestine.’ She didn’t speak Hebrew.”
So they went back; they took a train to Budapest and a truck to Cluj. “The truck stopped in front of the theater in the middle of town — and my father was there.
“We didn’t even know if he was alive.
“The truck was high. Somebody opened the back of the truck, and someone grabbed my brother and put him down on the ground, and then someone grabbed me and put me down on the ground, and then grabbed my mother. My mother was almost out of her mind.”
It turned out that although her mother had not known if her husband had lived or died, “my father had seen a list of people who had come back from Switzerland, and he knew that we were alive.
“Then we found out that nobody except us was alive. Before the war, my mother had four sisters and my father and eight sisters and brothers. My father and one of his brothers survived. My mother was all alone. Completely alone.
“We didn’t go back to our house. So my parents built a little house out of town. It was cheap. But there were troops there, and they got drunk every night, so it was dangerous to live there. We went to my aunt’s apartment, next to the synagogue. She’d been alone, so it was just one and a half rooms.
“And then we went back to our house, and back to school.”
It turned out that some Jewish families had managed to cross the border into Romania. “Some terrible things happened there, but there weren’t any transports” to take Jews to death camps, Ms. Gotthard said.
The family learned to speak Romanian. Ms. Gotthard, who hadn’t finished third grade and missed fourth grade, began fifth grade, as more-or-less normal life resumed. “I finished grade school, finished high school, and went to college,” she said. “We moved to Bucharest.”
She went from college to graduate school and then she earned a doctorate. “I’m a structural engineer,” she said. Why? “Because I was very good at math and very bad at literature,” she said. “Give me a math problem any day. Just don’t make me write!”
It wasn’t entirely unusual for women to become structural engineers in Romania, she added. In fact, “there are two women in this building from Romania, and we’re both engineers.”
Romania was part of the Soviet Union, led by communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu from 1965 until he and his wife were executed by firing squad in 1989. So although she hadn’t gone as much from the frying pan to the fire, metaphorically speaking, as maybe from the fire to the frying pan, still it wasn’t a good place to live.
So she and her family — by then her family was her husband, George Gotthard, and their two children — decided to leave. Why? “That’s an easy question,” she said. “Who wanted to stay in Romania?
“We applied to go to Israel, but there was a problem. Israel paid for us to go, but Romania said they didn’t pay enough. We got these papers, and they were stamped negatri, negatri, negatri. That means rejected, rejected, rejected.
“So I lost my job. I was teaching engineering at the university. And my husband, who was a research chemist working for Mrs. Ceaușescu, who was the director of the chemical research institute, lost his job. But they didn’t let us go.
“And then somebody told my mom, ‘You are old. Old people can go to the West, because the hope is that you won’t come back, and we won’t have to pay your pension. So my mom went to Israel. We had family there, from before the war. She asked who could help, because people who could pay to leave, in addition to what Israel was paying, could leave.
Later, her mother went back to Romania, and she and her father stayed there. “They had a pension, they were old, they spoke Romanian. My brother stayed too. But finally they all went to Toronto, and they all died there.” Her brother, who was childless, took care of their parents.
“One of the cousins said that Cousin Adolf, in New York, was very well to do. So my momma wrote him a letter. He sent $15,000 for all of us to leave, in addition to what Israel was paying.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Gotthard and her family were able to leave Romania. “We had to go to Italy for at least six months — we stayed there for seven — because you couldn’t apply for an American visa from a communist country. That was in 1973. My daughter was 10 years old, and my son was 13.
“Then we came to New Jersey, and HIAS took care of us.” (HIAS is the new name for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.)
Why the United States instead of Israel? “The uncle who paid the $15,000, Uncle Adolph, said that we were coming here instead of to Israel.” They became close to that uncle. “We always were invited to Friday night dinner at his house.
“He lived on Fifth Avenue, across the street from the museum.” That is, of course, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He was a very good man,” she added. “And he was very religious. He wore his kippah all the time.”
The family moved first to Elizabeth — Mr. Gotthard worked in Linden — and then to West Orange, where they bought a house.
“I worked as an engineer, first in New York and then for the electric company in Parsippany,” she said. “We were building nuclear power plants, but we closed them after the meltdown at Three Mile Island. Whenever you had any modifications, everything had to be very carefully calculated and documented.”
And it had to be done in English.
“I speak three languages fluently,” Ms. Gotthard said. They are Hungarian, Romanian, and English. “I used to speak pretty good French, and as a child I spoke German. I spoke Hebrew, but I was never fluent in it. When I came to America, I had to learn English, under a lot of pressure, and I didn’t lose my Hungarian or my Romanian.”
Ms. Gotthard, who is widowed, has four grandchildren. “My son, Gabe, lives in California and has two girls, and my daughter, Veronica Frischman, lives in Millburn and has two boys. One of them is married.”
“Out of my family who was alive in 1938 or 1940, I am the only one standing.”
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