The only great-grandparent I ever met was my Grandma Mollie, the mother of my mother’s mother. I don’t have many memories of her — her white hair always knotted into a bun, her “old lady” purse, a drawerful of rubber bands and plastic bags and wax paper in her kitchen, because you never know when you might need it. My mother has many stories and memories, because her Grandma Mollie often cared for her after school or when her parents were away from their home in Rockville Center, New York, where they all lived. Grandma Mollie left me a set of demitasse cups when she died. I still have them, somewhere, along with a note from her.
My grandma, Frieda, was a world traveler but she never had the opportunity to return to Granda Mollie’s home town, Vamosujfalu, Hungary, which for a long time was behind the Iron Curtain. Mollie left there in 1897, when she was nine years old. I am the first to return.
I didn’t know what I would find, but Karesz gave me hope. He said the best place to start was in the Town Hall, where he would ask the clerk to look up some family records. Prior to our trip, I had shared our family tree with Karesz, and I already knew that Mollie had come to the US with her mother, née Betti Weisz, and several siblings after Betti’s husband, Aron, had died in an accident. Frieda had said something fell on his head.
I also knew Mollie had siblings, all of whom had emigrated to New York, except the eldest. I didn’t know much about him and his family, also someone from the LDS Church had told me that several of his family — children and grandchildren — had did in the Holocaust.
First, we had to find the small town. I had printed a map from the Internet. Karesz had never been there, but knew the region, as his father had lived within an hour’s drive of there, along the Slovakian border.
When we saw the town sign, I felt something — not quite excitement, more disbelief?
Once in Vamosujfalu, we stopped a lady walking along the road to ask directions to the Town Hall. She said it would be closed.
When doing genealogy research, Karesz says never to call ahead because it’s easier for the person on the phone to say no, we can’t help you. We showed up. Karesz started telling the story to her, as she was standing outside at the end of her lunch break. She looked skeptical. He said we’d come all the way from America. She invited us inside.
He asked her to look up the names of some of the Friedmans to see if she could find any civil recordings of births or deaths. My great-grandfather, Aron, had died in 1896, the year prior to the family emigrating to the US. She said she would look. Karesz asked if there was a Jewish cemetery in town. She suggested we ask the Mayor Lajos Jadloczki.
The Mayor suggested we come into his office. Karesz told the story again, this time in great detail. The Mayor said the old cemetery was inaccessible. What does that mean, I asked? Can we go there anyway? There was more discussion. The Mayor looked for a report that may have mentioned Vamosujfalu residents who died in the Holocaust. The report was from WWI.
We talked for longer, and finally, the Mayor said, OK, I will take you to the cemetery. It is behind the “normal” (read Christian) cemetery.
He told us to leave our rental car and get into the city van.
We drove through the town. He pointed out a war memorial. Few Jewish names. We drove past the normal cemetery, and spoke to two women standing there. The graves were immaculate. There were flowers growing everywhere.
We continued down a dirt road and found this:
There were thick, spiky brambles, overgrown weeds, trees, a ditch of water on one side, plowed fields on two more sides. We walked around trying to see in.
Then we saw some headstones.
More to come…
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