It is one thing to learn about history from books; it is another to hear about it from people who lived it. I visited Mrs. Klara Margaretten, a Baltimore senior, who shared her interesting life story.
Mrs. Margaretten is the mother of
Judy Landman and Lazer Margaretten of Baltimore. Her husband was Yaakov Mordechai
Margaretten, the younger brother of Moshe Magaretten, who used to be in the
chicken business in Baltimore, and later ran the kitchen at Ner Yisrael. Klara’s
husband was the youngest of 14 children, of whom only five brothers survived
the Holocaust.
Early Life
Klara has an amazing memory and
remembers details and dates of things that happened long ago. She was born in
June of 1944, one year before the war ended in Hungary. Three months prior, on
March 19, 1944, the Nazis had invaded Hungary. Klara’s father, who was taken to
a labor camp by the Nazis before she was born, never met his new baby daughter.
A Hungarian friend who was in the labor camp with her father told Klara’s
mother that he had received a postcard notifying him of her birth before he was
killed.
Living in Budapest, Klara’s mother and
her baby were not taken to concentration camp right away because the Nazis took
the people from the villages first. In addition, Klara’s mother had Wallenberg
papers, referred to as a Schutzpasse, protective documents and letters issued
by Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg. The papers identified their holders as
Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation. They were housed in special “extra-territorial”
buildings in Budapest that flew the Swedish flag, and the Nazis did not touch
them.
Wallenberg, who was posthumously
named a “righteous of the nations” by Yad Vashem, arrived in Budapest with
protective passports for 650 Jews. Seeing the dire situation of the Jews, however,
he eventually saved thousands in 32 buildings, two hospitals, and a soup
kitchen. Klara does not know how her mother got those papers, but they saved
her life.
Life under the Communists
After the war, Klara’s mother continued
to live in Hungary but returned to her village, Bekescsaba, where her father’s
parents owned property. They had been deported to concentration camp during the
war and did not return. After the Germans lost the war, Hungary was taken over
by the Russians and became a Communist country. Eventually, Communist officials
took over her house, and Klara and her mother had to leave the village. Because
they gave their house to the Communists, they were given permission to rent a
house in Budapest. Klara’s stepfather closed his business because it was hard
to run a business under the Communist system. In Budapest he worked in a
factory.
Klara remembers both good things
and bad things about life under the Communists. One of the good things was the
educational system. Every high school student could go to university, and the
cost of schooling depended on the student’s grade point average. Even if a
student did not have such a high-grade point average, it did not cost very much
to go to university. One of the bad things was the lack of food. Klara
remembers needing tickets to buy bread, flour, or sugar. To get meat, you had
to line up early in the morning at the butcher store, and even then, there was
no guarantee that you would get what you wanted. Klara’s family was not
religious, so she does know much about what the kosher food situation was.
The Hungarian revolution in 1956 got
rid of the Communists, and many people, including many Jews, left Hungary. However,
Klara and her mother remained. Klara remembers that after the revolution the
economy was better, and there was more food and more freedom. Her mother worked
as a seamstress and a bookkeeper until she was 84 years old and died only about
10 years ago at age 96.
Marriage to Mr. Margaretten
In 1973, Klara married Yaakov
Mordechai Margaretten, a survivor of Auschwitz. His history was quite different
from hers. He came from a town in Hungary called Derescske. After liberation,
Mr. Margaretten was taken to Germany. He came to the United States in 1946. He
was greeted by Rabbi Kulefsky, zt”l, and Rabbi Neuberger, zt”l,
and learned in Ner Yisrael for a short time. He later left for Europe because
he did not like it in the U.S. At the airport, he met a man who convinced him
to go to Spain and gave him information about a person who could set him up in
business. Mr. Margaretten lived in Spain for 20 years; he also worked in Vietnam
as an accountant for a few years.
In 1973, he traveled to Hungary to
visit his old village. While he was in Hungary, the director of a museum he was
visiting introduced him to an upstairs neighbor, Klara Arvai. Yaakov Mordechai,
known then as Jack, was 15 years older than 29-year-old Klara, but they got
married and were very happy together. Klara says that, at first, she was
worried about the 15-year age difference, but when she got to know him, she saw
how wonderful he was.
The couple left Hungary and came to
the United States as Mr. Margaretten felt it very important for his children to
be U.S. citizens. Their two children were born in Miami, and then they returned
to Spain. They ended up in America, though, because he did not want to bring up
a son in a Catholic country like Spain. While living in America, the family returned
often to Hungary to visit Klara’s mother for the Yomim Tovim. It was on one of
these occasions that Mr. Margaretten passed away suddenly on Rosh Hashanah
night.
Klara and her two children came
back to the United States and settled in Baltimore, where Yaakov Mordechai’s
brothers took care of the family and helped them get settled. Klara had
training as a chemist because of her education in Hungary and was able to get a
job. (Coincidently, Judy, who was five years old at the time, went to Bais
Yaakov kindergarten and had my mother, Paula Eiseman, as her teacher. Judy
still remembers my mother’s kindness fondly.)
Although Klara grew up secular with
no mesorah, her whole life is a sefer on emunah and bitachon,
which she absorbed from her mother’s strength and resilience. Living close to
her husbands’ brothers in Baltimore, she learned so much and adopted the frum
lifestyle. Today, she is a member of Tiferes Yisrael shul and is very proud
of her children and grandchildren. It was a pleasure to meet her and to hear
about her life.
Sidebar
Mr. Margaretten’s Memoir
During the interview, Mrs.
Margaretten gave me a memoir that her husband had written for his family about
his experiences in Auschwitz and after the war. The memoir was originally
written in Hungarian and translated into English. His descriptions are very
vivid, the cruelty unfathomable. In this excerpt, he begins by describing a “selektzia,”
where the prisoners were selected for life or death: “People were being sent
one by one to the weak group, and I knew I would have the same fate. I did not
give us so easily. When you see death facing you in the face, you want to live.
You cling to life more and try everything to stay alive.
“…On Friday night we got another
order that everybody had to go into the barracks, and I knew what would be next….
They took all the children and loaded them onto the truck. Many children did
not want to go onto the truck, because it was Shabbos. These children were beat
to death with a stick…. Soon everything was quiet. I could not sleep knowing
that they took close to 3,000 children to the crematorium. Innocent little
sheep. On Friday night, when all over the world thousands of Jews lit candles
and prayed to G-d, the crematorium was flaming with Jewish children’s
bodies.
“Things that we all take for
granted – like being able to use the bathroom when needed, sleeping on a
comfortable bed, having food to eat when you are hungry – were not happening in
Auschwitz. The goal of the people in charge was to make the life of the
prisoners as miserable as possible.
“After we were liberated, we rode
through Germany. I watched people from the wagon. My heart was full of anger,
and I thought to myself that when I was free, I would take revenge on those
people who were living in the lap of luxury. I could not imagine that there
were still free people in the world who could walk freely without SS guards
beating them up. We passed Berlin, and I noticed the buses running and the
children happily eating ice cream cones….”
