Surviving the Shoah in Budapest
Gabe Schlisser tells his story
There seems to be a self-enforced hierarchy among Holocaust survivors.
We all recognize that anyone who was sent to a concentration camp endured the kind of hell that the rest of us literally cannot imagine, even when we think we can.
But the ones who were not in a camp but still were Jews in central and eastern Europe during the Holocaust and survived, or who got out before or even during and survived, lived through fear, impoverishment, hunger, disease, enormous physical discomfort, and constant insecurity. Their experiences, too, are unimaginable to all but the least lucky among us.
There are some Holocaust survivors who have been hesitant about talking much about their experiences, feeling as if they are claiming some sort of unearned valor; some of those survivors, though, are beginning to tell their stories now, some 80 years later. Those stories are horrifying, powerful, and, yes, unimaginable.
Many Holocaust survivors went on to have good lives; they found love, created families, worked not only hard but also creatively and usefully, and made the world far, far better than it had been before they entered it. Their ability to keep going, much less to prosper, is miraculous.
Every survivor’s story is different. Every story involves some stroke of luck — often it’s a good person doing something life-risking, or it can be an accident, a noticed and seized opportunity, a coincidence — as well as strength, courage, and endurance.
Those of us lucky enough to have been spared the horrors, born to parents and grandparents equally lucky, are obligated to help the survivors tell their stories.
As we approach Yom HaShoah, which will start at sundown on Wednesday, April 23, this year, here’s Gabe Schlisser’s story.
Gabor Vadas, as he was then, was born in Budapest on September 9, 1935. His family was quite comfortable — his father and his business partner manufactured women’s coats, which were sold not only in Hungary but in Austria and Germany as well. The family apartment was “on Eotvos Street, very close to Andrássy út, which is like the Champs-Élysées in Paris,” Mr. Schlisser said. “It’s where the opera is, and the foreign embassies are.” Living there was like living in Manhattan in the East 80s, between Fifth and Madison, near the Met.
“My father — his name was Adolf Vadas — was what now you’d call modern Orthodox,” Mr. Schlisser said. “He went to shul every morning; he dressed very modern, and looked just like everyone else.” The family belonged to the Neolog Dohany Street Synagogue, which is not only the largest shul in the city but among the largest in the world. Gabi went to a Jewish elementary school.
His father’s background was chasidic; his own parents were Satmar chasidim who had many children, one of whom became a shochet. Most of his siblings, like Adolf, became modern Orthodox. One went to the United States before the war, but all the others, including Adolf, were murdered.
His mother was born Katalin Kellert to a father, Andor Kellert, “a believer in the Russian revolution,” who “went to Russia during the First World War and never came back,” Mr. Schlisser said. So she was brought up by her mother, Regina, who was born on Hungary’s ever-shifting border with Romania.
Mr. Schlisser remembers the building he grew up in, as well as his fourth-floor apartment. There was an elevator, but “when I was a little boy, I used to race down the stairs,” he said. As for the apartment, “It was lovely. It had two bedrooms, so my brother, Tibor, and I shared one. He was seven years older than me. He used to drag me along with him, and that is how I learned how to play soccer. I started playing with the older boys, and I became pretty good at it. If I had stayed in Hungary, I would have become a pro, or at least I would have tried to. But” — spoiler alert! — “I became a pro here.
“That was because he dragged me along. I never forgot that his friends used to ask him, ‘Why are you bringing the little guy with you?’ We were that close. What I remember most is how we used to talk at night, in our room. It’s funny how some things just stay with you.
“Before the war, I recall, every Sunday my mother’s brother would take me to a soccer game. My father wasn’t sporty, but my uncle was. We used to root for the Jewish team, MTK Budapest.”
The family’s idyllic life gradually changed as Europe descended into war. The Nazis didn’t invade Hungary until March 19, 1944, but before then, “there was a group of very bad Hungarians, the Arrows Cross,” Mr. Schlisser said. “They were killers. They were known to take people, line them up by the Danube, make them take their shoes off, and then shoot them. The shoes” — 60 of them, in cast iron — “now are a memorial along the river.
“My recollection is that my father’s business partner was smart enough to go to Argentina two years earlier,” he said. But his father didn’t want to go.
Soon after the Germans invaded, they rounded up Jewish men to send to what they called work camps but actually were death camps. Adolf and Tibor Vadas were among those men. Tibor died of typhus on the road to Mathausen, Mr. Schlisser said; Adolf died in the death camp. But he wasn’t gassed. For one thing, Mr. Schlisser said, the ovens weren’t working by then. They’d given out because they’d been overused. But Mr. Vadas didn’t wait for them. “Some of the people who came back told me that my father couldn’t bear what had happened to his son, so he attacked a Nazi officer and was killed,” Mr. Schlisser said.
“I remember saying goodbye to my father,” he continued. “The last thing my father said to me was that he regretted not going to Argentina, the way his partner did. He was happy that he and Tibor would be in the same work camp, but the last thing he said was that ‘I didn’t do what my friend did, and it may cost me my life.’” (Of course, he was right. It did.)
“That was his goodbye to me.”
But 9-year-old Gabi, his mother, and his grandmother did survive.
“We lived together, but they put me in a Red Cross home, thinking that it would be safer for me,” Mr. Schlisser said. “We lived on the Pest side of the city, and the Red Cross home was on the Buda side. Buda is the hilly side, the vacation side. She thought that would be better.”
“It turned out that there were two such homes within sight of each other, for 8- and 9-year-old kids. My uncle was in the underground. He had a Christian girlfriend, who visited me, and told me that the kids in the other house had been evacuated, and they’d never heard from them again. They” — that’s the partisans — “never heard of them again. They had no idea where they’d been taken. So there was no safety in the Red Cross.
“So she gave me the address in the ghetto where my mother and grandmother were” — they’d been moved there as the Germans rounded up the Jews and stored them all together so they’d be more easily retrievable for their trip to the death camp — “and she gave me some money and instructions about how to get there. It wasn’t really very far away.
“One night, around 4 o’clock in the morning, I climbed the fence. You have to take a streetcar to go across the Danube, and I remember that there were only three other people on the streetcar. I never looked at them.
“Somehow, after I got off the streetcar, I walked, and whenever people walked by, I hid in doorways, until I found their building.
“They were elated to see me. They had an apartment on the third or fourth floor — the buildings weren’t very high — and every night there were sirens, because there were air raids and bombings, so we had to run down to the basement.
“That lasted for a couple of weeks, and then we had to live in the basement because the bombing was so frequent. Sometimes it was the Russians who were doing it, and sometimes it was the other Allied forces. We would hear about it on the radio. Many of the buildings were crushed.
“So there were about 30 people living downstairs in the basement. It was usually a storage area, but we set up a bunch of chairs, like in a theater. Everybody had their seat, and once or twice a day someone would bring in some food that we shared.
“I have no idea how my mother and grandmother survived, because they gave me their food.
“You’d put your coat on your chair,” he continued. “That’s significant because sometimes at the end of the night the Germans, who were running away from the Russians, would run through the basement, and sometimes they’d just shoot everyone who was there.” The basements of the buildings on the block were connected, sort of like subway cars, so it was possible to go from one end of the block to the other end staying entirely underground.
“Every time the Germans came in with guns, my mother would push me down into the coats, so I wouldn’t be visible. I remember it like it was today. As I was sitting down there, I knew that they were afraid that they were losing the war.”
And then the Germans did lose, in January of 1945. “All of a sudden it was quiet somehow,” Mr. Schlisser said. “The Russians took over. We even were able to get back to our apartment, because my uncle’s girlfriend had taken it” — remember, she was Christian, so she could — “and so we were able to go back to it.
“There was no food. People were killing animals on the street and eating them. The Russians were horrible. If they wanted something — women, or jewelry — they’d announce in Russian that they were soldiers.” Then they took what they wanted.
Even after the war was fully over, and normal life resumed, at least on the surface, nothing was normal again.
“My mother would never talk about any of it,” Mr. Schlisser said. “She stayed in bed when she found out about my father and my brother, and she wouldn’t get up. Finally, my uncle bought her a little dog, and that little dog stayed in bed with her. Finally, my uncle said to her, ‘You have another son.’
“But she was devastated. They were married for 17 years, my mother and my father, and it was a real love affair. She said that her life was over. She was angry at God. But she continued my Jewish education, and I did have a bar mitzvah, in the Dohany Street Synagogue, somehow. She played cards. She played cards all the time.”
In 1947, Katalin Kellert Vadas married Morris Schlisser, who survived Dachau. “I have to say the truth,” Mr. Schlisser said. “My mother was not that attracted to him. But he had an American background.”
How did that happen? “He was born when his parents were visiting New York,” Mr. Schlisser said. “He never took Hungarian citizenship. He was an American citizen. So we were evicted from Budapest in 1950 as undesirables.” That was under the country’s Communist government. “We were the only ones on that train headed to Vienna. It took a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of lawyers to get us kicked out of Hungary.”
It also took his adoption; the only way that Gabi could leave Hungary with his mother would be if her husband became his stepfather. “I decided to keep the name,” he said. He’d already lived through enough change.
The family lived in Paris and in a DP camp in Austria as they waited to get to America. “HIAS and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee were supporting us,” he said. “I was 15 years old, with no school to go to and nothing to do. My mother used to cook to make money, and my stepfather and I would work as waiters, but all I did all day most days was to play chess.
“Today I play chess online with my grandson.”
Like his new wife, who became Catherine Schlisser when she moved to the United States, Morris Schlisser had been married before. His first wife was in Bergen-Belsen; she was alive when the camp was liberated, but she was so sick that she died two weeks later. They had five children; one of his daughters, Miriam, was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, got sick on the death march, was left behind, alone, in Ravensbrück — she was 10 — and survived because a Gypsy family saved her and took her back to Hungary. “She, my mother, her father, and I lived together from 1947 to 1949, when she got hooked up with the Zionist underground,” Mr. Schlisser said. “She had courage and independence.
“She also had trouble living with my mother, just like I did with her father. That’s why we became so close.
“She moved to Israel when she was 15, knowing no one, and she built a life for herself. She married a young man who survived Auschwitz, Yacob Wrobel, and they had four children. Today there are 40 people in the family. I keep in touch with them; I visited four times in the last decade, until she passed away.”
Mr. Schlisser wrote letters to his long-dead brother Tibor and his stepsister, Miriam, after Miriam died a few years ago, because they always were in his heart. “I think that I survived because I looked forward and moved forward, but somehow those two letters made me feel a lot better,” he said. Those letters tell the story of what happened to each of them; they are filled with love, sadness, grief, and pride.
He has other step siblings; he was not as close to the stepsisters who escaped to Sweden and stayed there, but he has a stepbrother in Louisville, Kentucky, Paul Schlisser. The two men have grown close fairly recently.
Mr. Schlisser remembers the trip across the Atlantic to New York vividly.
“It started out easy,” he said. “I was the first one to be sick, in the English Channel. After that, I was the only one out of 1,500 passengers in the cafeteria. The Atlantic is very rough in December. My parents stayed sick in bed the whole time.
“The ship, the General Hershey, got damaged after five days of a six-day storm, so for two days we had to wear life jackets. Then the captain figured out that he could prevent that if he changed directions with the wind. It took us 14 days to get to New York, and because we arrived on December 25, we had to stay on the ship for another day.
“We left Hungary in the summer of 1950, and we arrived in the United States in December of 1951,” he said.
“We had a cousin in New York, and my stepfather had a sister there too, so we were okay when we got here. We stayed at our cousins’ house on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and I went to Theodore Rosevelt High School.” He learned English there — and became Gabe, not Gabi or Gabor — and then he was able to go first to Hunter College for a pre-engineering program, and then to City College uptown. “If you met a certain average, you could go, and it was free,” he said. “I also got a scholarship, and it made a difference.”
His parents worked, but they didn’t thrive. And “my relationship with my stepfather was formal. It was not warm. We weren’t close, but we were very respectful of each other.”
He became an electrical engineer, and he played soccer, Mr. Schlisser said. He played professionally for a series of teams; “I was getting 35 bucks a game in the early ’60s.” Even after he gave up his professional slot, “I played on the Tenafly team until I was in my 40s.”
Mr. Schlisser went on to have a stellar — and fascinating — career. First, he worked as a hardware developer for ITT, which had a facility in Nutley. “ITT was a government contractor, and it took a year and a half for me to get a security clearance,” he said. “I managed projects for the army.” His work then was doing “the development and management of direct fire simulation,” he said. “We put a small laser on an M-16 rifle, and people wore helmets with four detectors and a hip box full of electronics to communicate, so you could fire and sense whether or not you’d be hit.
“Then I switched as computers were coming out. That was around the late ’60s. They were called minicomputers — they were in huge rooms, where we programmed cards. I made that switch very early in software development — it was a big switch — and I never regretted it.
“Then I got involved in developing security systems. When you inserted a card, you retrieved an image. My business partner and I worked together for many decades; later we sold this system to the State Department, for use in remote embassies.”
Mr. Schlisser’s career is too long and too intricate to detail here. He did fascinating work, and the pleasure he took in it is apparent when he discusses it.
He also got married, to Sheila Zagelman, in 1960. They have two children, Andrea Edelstein and Adam Schlisser, and two grandchildren, Lauren and Michael. The family moved to Fort Lee, then to Teaneck, and then to Tenafly, where they lived for 44 years. Now they’re in an apartment in Englewood.
The family joined Temple Emanu-El, now in Closter, in the early 1970s, when it was in Englewood, and Mr. Schlisser has been very active there. He’s a former president — he had a strong, sometimes contentious, always intellectually respectful relationship with Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who led the shul when he was president, and he raves about its current rabbi, David-Seth Kirshner — and still a board member; he’s also on the board of the Jewish Home in Rockleigh.
The Conservative movement feels just right for him, he said, sounding a little like Goldilocks. “I didn’t feel that I was Orthodox, and when I go to an Orthodox shul for yahrzeit it feels disorganized, and I like structure. And when we’re invited to the Reform shul, I feel like I’m in a church. I never doubted that a Conservative shul is where I belong.”
Why join any shul? “Because I am what I am, and the rest of the world looks at me as what I am, and you can’t change that.” Belief is one thing — that can come and go — but being an active, visible part of the community is another.
Although he hasn’t been very public about his experiences during the Holocaust until now, Mr. Schlisser thinks that it’s time for that to change.
“I went to two survivors’ conferences in Washington, but I didn’t do any private talks about it,” Mr. Schlisser said. “I thought that my couple of months in the ghetto did not compare to what people went through in concentration camps. But now I also think that I should get my story out.”
Thank you for telling it, Mr. Schlisser.
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