“At that time, even the high school teachers protected people from politics. For my part, I had never heard of politics when in Hungarian high school. It was wartime with Germans… Russians attacking… It was a taboo. The awareness was not what it’s today with television and such. Radio was all there was. My father listened to the BBC on the radio at night, which was forbidden. The commander of the German military penitentiary camp stayed in this room. They were the soldiers who built the anti-tank fortifications in Luka. Their commander stayed with us. He was a high school teacher from Alsace-Lorraine. When my father was listening to the radio in the other room, he was always alert to notice when the officer came home, so that he wouldn’t hear the BBC jingle – boom-boom-boom-boom. All of a sudden, the door opens – boom-boom-boom-boom – and he was in the doorway. He was not gestapo or SS, but he was in the Wehrmacht. He shut the door and said: ‘Herr Doctor, I know where I’m staying.’ He knew that my father was one of those ‘unreliable’, an anti-Nazi.”
“They started coming back during the summer, after the frontline had moved, which was back in March. One by one, just one or two in six months, people from Šahy. Those Slovaks who had survived the holocaust in Budapest usually came back. See, Jews from Slovakia fled to Budapest because the anti-Jewish laws took effect in Slovakia earlier – they usually hid or ‘got lost’ in Hungary. So, the community that got together here after the war, those were not the former Šahy citizens. Maybe their ancestors had been local natives, but then new families came. There were not more than 250 of them. (…) One lady who died aged well over ninety, don’t know exactly, had survived Auschwitz – the labour camp and then a death march. She fell by the wayside. Normally, they [Nazis] shot everyone who was unable to walk. As the frontline approached, they drove the prisoners away and the camps emptied. She fell down and they thought she was dead, so they left her alone. The locals found her, helped her and she recovered. She survived it all. She would never speak about it. One doctor’s wife who also came back from Auschwitz was only able to say a few words about it four or five years ago. We recorded her recollections for a DVD. Those people didn’t want to speak about it. They wanted to forget. Terrible things. You could sense that they no longer felt at home when they arrived. They were so insecure. Whenever something happened in politics, such as in 1968, they took the opportunity right away and left the country. They wouldn’t stay.”
“They wanted my mum to work as a stoker in the temporary hospital in high school. I went instead of her. What I saw was just horrible. Wounded people all over the corridors, pools of blood… Of course, I stoked the fire, but by the time I completed the round of all the classrooms, the fire had gone out in the first one. I’d get slapped or kicked every now and then. They begged for water, so I brought them some. That was one thing. Then it was over and I went home. They hired a driver and a lawyer as grave diggers. I was the third to join them. I buried 170 Russians in Šahy, apart from other things. It was the winter – December – and the soil was frozen forty centimetres deep. They brought them every day. Those were not soldiers injured on the frontline; they came from the hospitals. I saw so many injured in plaster casts; if they were shot in the chest or in the belly, they were from here to here in the cast. The men literally rotted in it. They would always bring five or six of them in on a small cart with one horse: naked, no dog tags, plus like twenty severed legs and thirty arms. That was horrible. We had to dig the graves that way, one wall, so that we didn’t have to redo it.”
Štefan Márton was born in Biharkeresztes, Hungary on 13 May 1932. The family moved to Šahy, a small town on the current Slovak-Hungarian Border, in 1938. He learned about his Jewish origins in 1944 when the pro-Nazi Kingdom of Hungary ordered Jews to wear the yellow stars. The ordinance did not apply to Štefan himself, as his father came from a deeply religious Roman Catholic family, but it applied to his mother – even though she had been christened almost thirty years earlier and did not profess the Jewish faith. Štefan remembers the establishing and functioning of the Jewish ghetto in Šahy, the deportation of some 1,200 Jews in the spring of 1944, and the few individuals who returned from the Auschwitz concentration camp. He witnessed the passage of the frontline across southern Slovakia in the winter of 1944, hiding in the cellar of their house with almost 30 other people for a month and surviving on dried peas during the final days. When the worst of the combat subsided and the frontline moved several kilometres westward, he was on forced deployment at the local hospital at age 13 and had to dig mass graves at -40°C in the wintertime. He buried more than 170 soldiers in his town, most of them Russians. He remembers the post-war forced population exchange between Slovakia and Hungary and the subsequent collectivisation of agriculture and nationalisation of industry in the 1950s. He describes the effect of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 on the life of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia as well as the negligible impact of the Prague Spring 1968 in the area. As a graduate veterinarian, he took part in a six-month expedition to Mongolia in 1964, wrote the book In a Country of Deafening Silence about it, and shot documentary film footage. He wrote several veterinarian publications as well as historical and memory papers. In 2022, he lived in his hometown of Šahy where he has been active socially and culturally.
Štefan Márton (the youngest in the front) with family: father Jozef, mother Lydia, grandmother Sára Groszová, grandfather Armin Grosz, and sister Eva, 1930s
Štefan Márton (the youngest in the front) with family: father Jozef, mother Lydia, grandmother Sára Groszová, grandfather Armin Grosz, and sister Eva, 1930s
