Suti and a group of ten others slipped out of the school at Selvino one evening in the early spring, determined to finally make their way to the land of their dreams. They were convinced that they had heard enough about the details of the journey to be able to make their way. They heard about the places where boats secretly embarked. They hitched rides toward the seaside of Italy, through Genoa, Bolgliasco, La Specian, finding themselves south of Aral, near a little seaside hamlet called Metaponto. It was the place of an old Greek ruin. Here, Haganah was hiring local fisherman to take groups across the Mediterranean. The Haganah organizers recruited Suti and his friends to assist in ferrying the pontoon boats full of people to fishing vessels anchored four hundred metres offshore. When these ships left for Palestine without them, Suti and his group complained to the organizers, saying they wouldn't help anymore if they would be left behind.
The authorities of the Haganah complied, and sent an old fisherman's vessel, the Shoshanna, to take Suti and his friends, along with 150 others, across the Mediterranean. It was a harrowing journey - they encountered a vicious storm while they were passing through the Greek Islands. The tremendous gale-force winds forced the ship off course to take shelter in the shadow of one of the islands.
The overcrowded ship carrying Suti finally landed on a sandbank just a few hundred metres offshore from Palestine. Suti, determined as ever, jumped into the ocean and swam ashore. It was his birthday - March 12, 1947 - and he wanted to be in Palestine by the time he turned seventeen. It was an emotional moment in Suti's life, but he didn't have a second to savour it. Zionist groups, waiting for the passengers onshore, pulled them out of the sea and hurried them onto a bus - a regularly scheduled bus route operated by South Yehuda. Jews and Palestinian residents alike used the bus service. The Zionists ushered the new arrivals onto this bus in the hope that they would enter the country unnoticed. The bus route ran directly through two English military camps, and to the great chagrin of Suti, the busses were halted and everyone on the ship was eventually rounded up and taken into British captivity in Cyprus.
Suti spent one week in Cyprus. He was questioned at length about the customs, movies, geography, and general life in Palestine. He responded to every trivia question correctly. The British officer interrogating Suti finally took out a coin, flipped it through the air, caught it, and asked, "What was that?" The official answer was "fifty mil," but they were trying to see if Suti knew the slang for the coin. He did, answering "a shilling." The officer told him to go home to Palestine.
The Zionists spirited Suti away to a kibbutz. He was a young man with no identification whatsoever, and it was explained that until a new ID was created for him, he was not allowed to walk the streets or go anywhere in Palestine. Even inside the kibbutz, called Givat Brenner, he was told not to talk to anyone about how he got there. He was allowed to go to the mess hall and eat three meals a day and instructed to do nothing else. It was here that Suti saw for the first time what a glorious, abundant paradise this place called Palestine was. The sun was always shining. Date and avocado groves thrived inside the kibbutz, and he marvelled at the wonderful scent of the fruit trees. Everything was in bloom.
A man was leading a donkey pulling a little cart of ripe oranges. When the man noticed Suti staring at the oranges, he asked if he would like one. Suti nodded eagerly and took one. The man kept watching the young refugee and asked, "would you like some more?" Suti nodded again. "Then take as many as you would like." Suti grabbed about a half dozen oranges and hightailed it back to his room.
Within two days, Sandor Weisz officially became Yitzhak Weisz and a resident of Palestine. He knew which kibbutz he wanted to go to, but first he wanted to find his brother, Bandi, who lived in Natanya. Yitzhak disembarked from the bus in the centre of Natanya and didn't quite know how to find his brother. He looked around and, amazingly, recognized someone from home - Karoly Aushpitz from Kaszony, a neighbouring community in Karpatalja. Yitzhak went up to him and asked in Hebrew, "Do you speak Hungarian?"
Karoly turned, stared at Yitzhak and replied, "Why do you ask?" Yitzhak explained he was looking for his brother.
He thought the reaction of the man was very strange indeed - Karoly knew his entire family back home. Yitzhak realized there were grave security issues to worry about in this country and attributed these security concerns to Karoly's strange behaviour. Karoly took Yitzhak to his own home and locked him in a room until Bandi came back to the city. Bandi was the chauffeur of the Mayor of Netanya. Karoly went to tell Bandi the news, and Bandi hurried over to see his younger brother.
The brothers were elated to be together again. They spoke for two days - every waking hour. Yitzhak again related everything that had happened to him. Every once in a while a tear flowed down Bandi's cheek as Yitzhak related what happened to Icuka, Hedy, Aliz, himself, and their father. Then Bandi spoke about his service in the Hungarian work brigades and his escape through Romania where he got caught and came within a hair's breath of being executed.
At one point in their discussion, Bandi asked his brother: "Why couldn't you save Father?" It was a turning point. The question made Yitzhak realize that Bandi really couldn't comprehend what they had gone through. He had no answer, but the question hurt him to the core.
Gradually, bit by bit, Bandi told Yitzhak he was a member of the Irgun, the top secret information-gathering agency. Headed by Menachem Begin, this underground organization was responsible for blowing up trains, robbing banks, and kidnapping British officers. One of the main goals of Irgun was to destabilize British rule in Palestine. Once Yitzhak learned all this, he understood a bit better the mindset of his brother. He also realized that Bandi was conservative in his political beliefs, whereas Yitzhak had been inculcated with leftist beliefs. They agreed to disagree on many subjects.
Within two days, Yitzhak once again said farewell to his brother and departed for his ultimate destination: the kibbutz in Merhavija. There, Yitzhak immersed himself in the life of a kibbutz. Hard work was emphasized, and he and the other young people switched jobs every day. They cleared vast fields of stone, transforming the land into tillable soil. Once crops were planted, they harvested cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers. Large herds of dairy cows had to be fed and tended to. The daily assignments included work in the blacksmith shop where all the agricultural equipment was maintained, repaired, and replaced.
Leftist ideology seeped into every aspect of life at Merhavija, however, and family life was secondary to the building of the kibbutz. It was emphasized on a daily basis that every member of this kibbutz was equally important, but they should forget about their own biological families. Everyone was encouraged to work for the homeland, to die for the homeland. Nothing else mattered. The organizers of the kibbutz knew Bandi well and were aware of his conservative mindset. Yitzhak was told outright to cut all his ties to his brother.
The leaders of the kibbutz simply didn't know how to handle survivors of the Holocaust - they were an enigma. Of the three hundred or so young people at the kibbutz, twenty were survivors and special efforts were made to keep them separated from the rest - and in particular, from the youngsters born on the kibbutz. With time, the survivors were made to feel like they had some incurable infectious disease. The organizers held separate ideological sessions with the survivors, and inculcated them with the belief that the past had no effect on their lives anymore - it was only the future one should focus on.
In September 1946, after six months at Merhavija, Yitzhak quit the kibbutz. He was fed up with being told over and over again that Bandi is "not one of us." They forced him to make a choice between Bandi and the kibbutz, and Yitzhak chose his brother. He was sick of waking up and going to bed to revolutionary music and of the communist ideology seeping into every aspect of his life. He desperately wanted to help build this new Jewish homeland, but realized that he had to find some other way.
Yitzhak went to live with Bandi and his cousin Gyula Berger - they sublet a single room with three cots. He brief
ly worked as an apprentice in a diamond-cutting factory, but realized this, again, was not something he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
Yitzhak was haunted by a song that was popular in Hungary during the war: "A Cowardly Nation Does Not Have a Country." The words of this song rang in his ears and made him realize that he wanted to become a soldier in service of the Jewish people. He enlisted with the Haganah, which was at the time a "sports organization" working clandestinely on organizing the Jewish armed forces. When he volunteered to join, one of the first questions they asked him was his age.
"I'm seventeen and a half," Yitzhak replied.
Major Yitzhak Livnat with his wife, Ilana, circa 1955.
"Oh no, that won't do. Our minimum age for recruits is eighteen."
Suti gave the recruiters a stern look.
"Okay, if you don't take me, someone else will."
They enlisted him on the spot.
Yitzhak Weisz decided to join the signal corps - the unit that trained in basic signal communications, like Morse code, wireless, and field telephone units. He was chosen for signal-school training because he could read and write Hebrew highly proficiently. A large percentage of the new army recruits were European-born or newcomers who hadn't yet mastered the Hebrew language. In February 1948, Yitzhak was enrolled in a one-month signal course. By the time he finished in March of 1948, the state of Israel was declared and the armed forces were made official. By 1954, Yitzhak Weisz was a major and second in command of the main school for signals.
The signal school organized a Hanukkah party late in November 1953. Yitzhak was one of the hosts. At the party he met a stunning, self-confident young woman named Ilana. Yitzhak's commander introduced her as his younger brother's fiancée and asked Yitzhak to look after her. Yitzhak was happy to comply.
Before Ilana met Yitzak, her parents had warned her about "the walking skeletons" who were arriving from Europe. They were damaged individuals, her parents said. No matter how promising a young man may be, if he was a survivor from Europe, it was best not to get involved with him.
But something about Yitzhak touched Ilana to her very core. There was something different about this man. He was also an officer in the Israeli army - an intriguing man who exuded an inner strength, as if there was nothing in the world that could intimidate him. The more time Ilana spent with Yitzhak, the more she wanted to be with him. When they were apart, Ilana thought of the captivating young officer constantly and began to have grave doubts about her engagement.
Within a few weeks, she broke off her engagement and Ilana and Yitzhak became inseparable. They married a short time later, much to the chagrin of her parents.
With time Ilana found out he was Hungarian and had changed his name to Yitzhak Weisz from Sandor Weisz. Other than that, there was little Yitzhak would share with her about his past. One day she noticed the number tattoo on his upper left arm. When she pleaded with him to tell her more about what he went through during the war, he put his arms around her, hugged her tight, and said very firmly, "At this point I want to forget about everything that happened. I left the damn bloody continent of Europe behind and really never want to see it again. I have buried my past. I love you and want to build a future with you here. That is my story."
chapter 28 | 1946
ON ONE OR TWO evenings during the week, Bela and his friend Laszlo Imre went to a social club where dances were held for young singles. Organized by the Catholic church, it was an ideal place for the two handsome young men to meet eligible young women. The church-sponsored socials were intended to give hope to young people to rebuild their lives, marry, and start families. But most of these young people had seen too much and they were fed up with the deprivation and suffering of the many years of war. The prevalent feeling was still "let's live for the moment because who knows what tomorrow will bring."
Bela and Imre were naturally attracted to the women who wanted to party. When things developed to the point where the female partner indicated her willingness to meet one of them privately, the two young men even had a furnished apartment to take them to. The "love nest" was in an abandoned building with a distinct feeling of openness: the walls had bombed out holes and one wall was completely missing. The entire apartment was like an open, covered veranda. But it had been a relatively warm summer and they could continue to use it for several months into the fall. It was just one of many such buildings, abandoned since being bombed, declared unsafe - but it made a quiet, secure love nest.
With the exception of his exhilarating social life, Bela's life in Budapest became quite routine. He had a steady job at the clock factory - a loathsome, tedious job, but one he hoped would eventually lead to a trade. On Saturdays he continued to travel to the countryside to trade blocks of salt for bacon, butter, ham, and eggs on the black market.
But his sense of security melted away on the day Bela received a letter ordering him to report to the nearby Hungarian army barracks on Ulloi ut. Since the devastating experience in the American-run prisoner-of-war camp, he had sought to divest himself of his military past - to irrevocably cut those ties. Now, it seemed, his years at military school kept a grip on him that he couldn't seem to eradicate.
Bela had little choice. As ordered, he reported to the army barracks. He was directed to the inner office, where he noticed a first lieutenant overseeing the operations.
The first lieutenant looked familiar. Then, slowly it dawned on Bela: the man, named Ferenc Rokus, had dated his sister, Picke, back home. For a while, the two were very much in love.
Bela realized he couldn't greet Rokus or make any sign of recognition. This was simply the reality of their time. If Rokus had become an ardent communist, he couldn't admit to knowing the Aykler's without denouncing them as being part of the old world order. Once the denunciations happened, it would be a matter of hours or days before Bela would be shipped off to labour camps in Siberia. Not a day passed that Bela and Imre didn't learn about someone being taken away, with no hearing and no possibility to defend themselves. He felt faint.
Bela handed over his papers and looked away nonchalantly. Feri looked at him and smiled.
"Don't you recognize me, Berci? How is Picke?"
Bela smiled back, feeling a genuine warmth emanating from Ferenc.
"It's good to see you," he replied. "I believe my parents and Picke are either in Austria or Germany somewhere because they left before me - I've lost touch with them."
After reminiscing a while about the past in Nagyszollos, Bela asked quietly, "Could you tell me what is going to happen? Have I been called in to be sent to Siberia or what?"
"No way," Rokus replied. "There is a shortage of non-commissioned officers and we are reorganizing the army right now and recruiting anyone we think can contribute to that."
Bela was grateful for the reassurance, although still a bit distraught about being forced back into military life. He would desperately miss his lovers in Budapest. Still, it was far better than his job of spray-painting clocks. After registering he received his orders, was given the rank of sergeant, and was told where to pick up his new uniform.
Bela as a refugee in Austria.
Three days later, Bela reported to a commanding officer at the Nyugati train station at 5:00 a.m. There, on the platform, were hundreds of newly arrived former prisoners of war. Bela first noticed the acrid, choking smell emanating from the group, who had evidently not washed in a long time. Bela learned that most had been in prisoner-of-war camps for at least six months, some as long as one year.
Some wore army issue shirts and pants - their clothes were threadbare and dirty. They had nothing with them other than the clothes on their backs. The one thing they all had in common was a tin can hanging from a button or button hole, attached by a single string or a wire. Bela recognized from his own experience that this tin can was the most prized possession that any prisoner of war could have: a tin can in which they got whatever was being passed out, be it water, a bit of soup, or gruel. A container to
sustain their strength, their life. He saw in them a reflection of his own past life.
Everyone was ordered to board the train. Bela and other noncommissioned officers sat separately in a regular passenger compartment. Bela didn't know the other men - his future colleagues - but was grateful that they were separated from the others and didn't have to endure that unbearable smell.
The former prisoners of war were ordered to board cattle cars, where benches had been loaded. All the passengers on that early morning train, whether in the passenger cars or cattle cars, seemed to be relieved when they realized the train was heading west instead of east. Bela and other noncommissioned officers sat separately in a regular passenger compartment.
Many hours later, the train pulled into Szombathely, where more officers were waiting for them. Sergeant Aykler was assigned a platoon of thirty men. They were given two wagons with four horses to take the platoon to their final destination. The platoon was provided with one machine gun with a short row of twenty-five to thirty bullets and thirty single-bolt action guns (First World War era) to be handed out later to each soldier. Each gun was supplied with only five shots of ammunition. Bela reflected on the symbolic meaning of this: the lack of trust demonstrated by the Russian occupying forces toward the new Hungarian army. In contrast, the Russians had tanks and trucks, and each soldier carried a submachine gun that disgorged seventy-two bullets within seconds.
The final destination of the platoon was a village called Henye. The men were all quartered at homes in the village.
The villagers of Henye reluctantly took the soldiers in - not less than two to a home. Most of the homes did not have furniture or heat in this room. All the soldiers were given iron bed frames and a sack to be filled with straw as a mattress. Bela, their commanding officer, had to make sure everyone was provided with a metal bed. He gave his men a little speech about how they were here to win the villagers over with their correct behaviour, not to cause any problems for the locals.
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