Róbert Rátonyi

* 1938

  • So we were in that situation. Then one day on the morning of January 18, just a week after I turned 7, there was a lot of silence on the street. What happened? It used to be so special that you can’t hear people walking down the street. The adults went to the window to see what was going on. I asked one of my aunts that I also wanted to see what was going on, I also wanted to see what was happening. Then they took me to the window and I looked out and you could still see if you looked to the left - Kazinczy Street is not a straight street, but there is such a turn where you could see (our house was directly opposite the gate of the synagogue, which was never open, so no one came there, even now it might be the same as it was then), on the left we could see the arrowcross leaving the ghetto, they withdrew and within minutes we could see the Russian soldiers coming in. I will never forget that there was a big shout all of a sudden when the Russian soldiers showed up people rushed out of their houses, rushed towards the Russian soldiers and shouted "hleba hleba hleba", which means bread in Russian. Everyone there was hungry and asked the soldiers for food. And so we got liberated on January 18th.

  • “The daily caloric intake we got was maybe 500 calories a day. We got 2 servings of soup maybe, or a piece of bread. Everyone was dying in the ghetto. And at that time it was that kind of winter, more and more people were dying of starvation or illness, or they froze to death. The dead were being left on the street and you could see heaps of dead bodies lying on the street. And honestly, would it have been a matter of days for us to see how long we would live? And I remember I was already too weak, I couldn’t stand on my feet anymore due to lack of food and I was the youngest. I guess the older ones were in a very bad situation too, but at least they could keep on going. All I remember is that the windows were always broken, so you could constantly hear the noise, people were coming and going, crying, shouting, this and that, and there was bombing in the ghetto too. Miklós's job was to go to the kitchen and bring us the daily ration of soup in a bucket. He once went to the kitchen with the bucket and just then a Russian plane came and started shooting the people on the streets. When the Russians came, they didn’t see where the ghetto was, where the wall was, they fired at everything that was moving. Miklós came home with the soup in the bucket, he stood by the gate as he heard the plane, then when the plane left, he looked into the bucket and saw that the soup was gone, a bullet had shot through the bucket and there went their lunch.”

  • “We woke up at about 3-4 am on October 10th, someone was banging on our door. Everyone had to go out into the yard. It was already quite cold in October, we had to get dressed. My mother told me, and hurried to get dressed. Then we had to go out into the yard. There were only Jews in the house then. It was a jellow-star house. There were soldiers outside, I don't know how many, maybe 4-5-6 soldiers with rifles. (...) They told every Jew to line up. Then they said the adults have to take two steps ahead. We, the kids, stayed back. By then, everyone was crying. One commander who was there said “adults turn left and step forward”. And we kids stayed there. This is how I’d ended up alone. And I had no idea, I didn’t even know what was about to happen. I just remember that around 8 o'clock in the morning a very good friend of my mother, Aunt Juci, came into our apartment and said, “Robi, get your clothes, I'll take you to your grandparents in Budapest. And that's what happened. “

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And we kids stayed there. This is how I’d ended up alone. And I had no idea, I didn’t even know what was about to happen. I just remember that around 8 o‘clock in the morning a very good friend of my mother, Aunt Juci, came into our apartment and said, “Robi, get your clothes, I‘ll take you to your grandparents in Budapest. And that‘s what happened

Robert Ratonyi was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht and when Nazi Germany annexed Austria into the Third Reich signaling Hitler’s intent to start World War II in 1939. He survived the Holocaust even though both his parents were deported, his father in 1942 and his mother in 1944, to different concentration camps. His mother survived and brought Robert up under the Soviet communist dictatorship. He was a freshman at the Technical University of Budapest, where he was caught up in the bloody uprising against the regime in October 1956. After the Russians crushed the uprising, he escaped to Austria and immigrated to Canada in February 1957, where he met his wife, who is also a Holocaust survivor from Hungary. In Montreal, Canada, Robert restarted his life, learned English, worked during the day and continued his education in an evening engineering program at a local university. In 1961, he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, where he received his BSc. and MSc. degrees in engineering. He also earned an MSc. degree in management from Drexel University and began a new career in business and finance. Robert Ratonyi has developed a successful business career working for several large corporations, such as GE, Exxon, Xerox and Contel. After his corporate career, he started his own merger & acquisition business in Atlanta, Georgia in 1986. He also worked as an investment banker in Budapest, Hungary, after the fall of the “Iron Curtain,” for the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) in 1993 and 1994, to aid the Hungarian government in their privatization program. He is now semi-retired as a portfolio manager, and as a child Holocaust survivor speaks to middle and high school students regularly on behalf of the William Breman Jewish Heritage & Holocaust Museum, and on behalf of the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust throughout Georgia at churches, educational institutions, and civic organizations. He and his wife live in Atlanta and are fervent supporters of the arts, education as well as local Jewish organizations.