He remained unconscious for days after. He was thirty-one years old.
The next few months were a nightmare as Dad went through a slow and painful recovery in a local hospital. After he was well enough to be discharged, he made his way back to Miskolc, where he learned that none of his immediate family had survived the concentration camp in Auschwitz. He was now completely alone, with one arm, his beloved family gone, and his life-long dream of being a concert cellist shattered with the loss of his arm.
After the war was officially over, the Soviet Army occupied Hungary along with most of Eastern Europe For several years after the war, the Soviets used political pressure to ensure that communists would be the governing majority in the Soviet Union’s neighboring Eastern European countries. In February 1946 the Hungarian monarchy was officially abolished and replaced with the Soviet-controlled Republic of Hungary. After the mutual assistance treaty between Russia and Hungary in 1949, Soviet troops in Hungary became a mainstay until the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991.
When Dad returned to Miskolc, he found the family home destroyed, the vinegar factory bombed out and badly damaged, and most of the photo shops in ruins. The family fortune had been buried in Miskolc. This was a common practice among the Jewish people when the persecution began. They were trying to protect their assets for family members so they could rebuild their lives in the event they were lucky enough to survive the Holocaust. My father used this money (and sold the family’s jewelry) to pay the costs of rebuilding the vinegar factory.
My father had a distant aunt who was, like him, the only survivor of her immediate family from the Holocaust. She owned a very small grocery store in Miskolc, and Dad stayed with her while he rebuilt the vinegar factory, the family home, and his personal life.
One day Dad went to his aunt’s store to pick up some groceries. When he was paying for the food he saw a beautiful young girl in her teens at the cash register. The rest, as they say, was history. Gabriella Molnar was a stunning young beauty and Dad was a very handsome man in his prime. It was love at first sight for both of them. The pretty young lady would soon become Dad’s wife and my mother.
Love’s Orphan
Chapter 1
Love’s Orphan
Chapter 1
The famous trio performed all over the country and Europe.
New Trio Image
Formal photo of my father when he began performing as a solo
cellist with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra circa 1938.
Love’s Orphan
Chapter
Last picture of my father with two arms immediately after arriving at the labor camp. He is smiling for the camera, not really knowing what to expect.
Formal photo of my father when he began performing as a solo cellist with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra circa 1938.
Love’s Orphan
Chapter
The back side of the tombstone shows the list of the names of my father’s family killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
The tombstone of my paternal grandfather; the only member of the Kalman family who passed away right before the family was taken to the gas chambers. Our son, Nathan, is in the foreground.
Love’s Orphan
Chapter
Fred Balazs and my father: A lifetime of unbreakable friendship.
Last picture of my father with two arms immediately after arriving to labor camp. He is smiling, not really knowing what to expect.
Fred Balazs and my Father: a life time of unbreakable friendship.
Love’s Orphan
Chapter
Love’s Orphan
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
My Mother
Gabriella Molnar, my mother, was born on March 18, 1929 in Debrecen, Hungary. She was the third child out of six. When she was born her parents already had two girls, and soon after her, they had two boys and another girl. Mom never had anything new, only hand-me-downs from her two older sisters. She was closest with the firstborn, Aranyka, and oddly enough both of them married much older men and then divorced, and then married twice more. They also shared the similar trait that their lives were primarily focused on men. It seemed they were unable to live their lives alone.
Mom’s birth seemed a prophecy of hard times to come. My grandmother was on her way home from the outdoor village market when she could tell that her baby was coming and there was no stopping it. Grandfather was at work, but fortunately the two older girls, Aranyka and Mandi, were there to help. They were close to the famous Nine Arch bridge when my grandmother could not go any farther, and she lay down under one of the arches where there was shade and some privacy. It was not an easy birth, but it was quick. At that point some good-hearted women came with my two young aunts, and they cut the cord and wrapped my mother in some warm towels. Then somebody came back with a wagon to take grandmother home. The next day, the village doctor paid her a visit, but she was already up taking care of her family. Grandmother used to say that the birth was just the forewarning that there wasn’t going to be anything easy about raising my mother.
I know Mom got into trouble a lot for not minding, or not telling the truth, or just generally misbehaving. Grandmother always had to be there to rescue her, and the other children often felt that Mom got more attention than they did. It sometimes makes me think of the story of the Prodigal Son in the Bible, who caused so much heartache and pain for his father, yet was still loved and welcomed home regardless of what he had done in the past.
My grandmother, Margit Jassinger, came from a very poor Orthodox Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary. There she met my grandfather, Miklos Molnar, who was a university graduate and an engineer by profession. He came from a very prominent Roman Catholic Family. Their worlds could not have been more different, but as they say, love is blind and nothing could come between them. They fell in love, and then broke with tradition by getting married without the approval of their families. In the early 1900 it was simply unheard of for an orthodox Jewish girl to date or be even in the same room with a man of Roman Catholic faith
While there had always been a tenuous relationship between Jews and Christians in Europe, the divide grew to its most dangerous level during the twentieth century. “Blood libel” accusations (the baseless claim
