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William West (* 1919)

• born September 25, 1919 in Velké Loučky near Mukačevo, Czechoslovak Republic

• grew up in a Hungarian Jewish family

• in May 1940 escaped to Budapest and was briefly apprehended by secret police

• escaped deportation in Hungary by taking train to Piraeus, Greece

• traveled on the SS ELENI KANAVARIOTI ship to Lisbon, Portugal

• traveled on the SS NYASSA ship to Hoboken, New Jersey

• enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought in the Pacific during the Second World War

• attended medical school at Charles University in Prague before escaping the country after Communist coup d’etat

• attended medical school at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany and graduated in 1952

• returned to the United States to complete residency

• practiced as a pediatrician for more than 50 years in Stockton, California

CZECH, HUNGARIAN, OR SOMEPLACE IN-BETWEEN

William West (formerly William Weiss) was born on September 25, 1919 in Velké Loučky, a small town five kilometres outside of Mukačevo in the region of Carpathian Ruthenia in modern-day Ukraine. He was born into a Hungarian Jewish family.

West’s father, David, owned various properties and vineyards in the region. He had left for the United States at the age of thirteen to join his brother in New York, but returned in 1905 and married his first wife, with whom he had six children. David’s first wife died in 1917, likely after complications during childbirth, and he remarried a year later to Hanika Lebovics. Hanika and David had West, the oldest in the family, followed by John, Eduard, and Rudika.

At the time of West’s birth, Ukrainian Cossacks led by Semyon Petliura attempted to conquer Mukačevo but were successfully fought off by a Jewish civilian guard. For a time, Mukačevo was split between the Czech and the Romanian armies, and a passport was even needed to cross certain streets. On June 4, 1920, the region, which had previously been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, officially became part of the Czechoslovak Republic as a result of the Treaty of Trianon. West remembers his relatives were initially unhappy about the split from Hungary, which would become a separate nation state with much reduced borders. West’s father had even served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. But under the treaty, Jewish residents of Mukačevo were granted official minority status along with all other Jews in Czechoslovakia. “The city was practically 50 percent Jewish – the highest number of Jewish people percentage-wise in all of Central Europe,” recalled West.

A HEBREW EDUCATION

At the age of six, West’s father enrolled him in a Czech elementary school. “But none of us could speak Czech,” explained West. “We all spoke Hungarian, all of us. My dad felt like through osmosis I’ll learn the language, but I didn’t and they kept me back the first year.” After the experience at the Czech school, West briefly attended a Hungarian school, before he transferred to the Munkacs Hebrew Gymnasium, a secondary school where the curriculum was taught in Hebrew. The school was founded in 1925 and received a personal donation from then-Czechoslovak President Thomas Masaryk in the amount of 10,000 crowns.

Historians have described the school as the most prestigious Jewish secondary school east of Warsaw. “It was a non-Orthodox school and of course the local Rabbi was very much against it so all the Orthodox Jews were against the school because we wore no head covers and couldn’t be taught anything about Jewish history,” said West of the school. West graduated from the Munkacs Hebrew Gymnasium in 1939.

ESCAPE FROM SECRET POLICE

Throughout Europe, the situation was rapidly deteriorating. “We had a radio at the time, there were no TVs available obviously, and this radio was always set on Warsaw because Warsaw always had jazz music which we kind of all favored, and some American music. But in between was a German station, with nothing but Hitler speeches and it frightened the heck out of us. My mother strictly forbade [us] to have this station [on]; she was afraid of it.”

By 1938, Nazi Germany had annexed Sudetenland and in March 1939 it invaded the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Hungary seized the opportunity to regain the northern territories that it had lost in the Treaty of Trianon and promptly annexed Carpathian Ruthenia, including Mukačevo, and parts of Slovakia. During this time, new anti-Jewish laws were passed. “Eventually it got so bad that you could not sit in the park anymore if you were Jewish. You could not do this or that, all kinds of various laws restricting even your movements,” remembered West.

By May 1940, West and his two brothers, John and Eduard, left for Budapest, Hungary to obtain visas that would allow them to travel through Europe and eventually to the United States. They were successful in receiving the visas, though they were only valid for four months. Months later, in August, West was apprehended by secret police agents while walking along Váci Utca, one of the main pedestrian streets still present in Budapest today.

“I was grabbed by three secret service people. One of them, who seemed to be the oldest of the three, said, ‘Grab those two guys and take them down to headquarters.’ Here I was, totally flabbergasted,” recalled West. “And he started questioning me...I was questioned for two solid hours, meanwhile I already had tears in my eyes. I thought it was going to be a bad end. I was shaking.” The secret police agent decided to let him go, telling him that it was because of West’s “stupidity” that he took pity on him. The agent also said it was the only time he had done such a thing. Before letting West go, he clued him in on two pieces of important information: Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Foreign Minister and son-in-law of Benito Mussolini, would be arriving in Budapest the next day; and the Oriental Express train leaving from Budapest that day would be his last opportunity to get out of Hungary.

“I must have hit some record. I ran like a gazelle,” said West, recalling how he rushed home after the agent let him go. They left behind their mother and youngest brother Rudika, who would both later perish in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

West and his brothers narrowly made the train out of Budapest headed for Piraeus, Greece that day. West recalls that on the journey there were many people on the train that he did not understand but later came to realize were speaking Ladino, a Judaeo-Spanish language derived from Old Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews. It was September 1 when the brothers reached Greece.

Indeed, the secret police agent had told the truth. On August 30, 1940, Count Galeazzo Ciano met with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hungarian Foreign Minister István Csáky, and Romanian Foreign Minister Mihail Manoilescu at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna.  With the reluctant agreement of Romania, the countries signed the Second Vienna Award, which brought the region of Transylvania under Hungarian rule. By November 20, 1940, the Hungarian government under Prime Minister Pál Teleki would officially join the Tripartite Pact military alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan – the so-called Axis Powers.

FROM GREECE TO PORTUGAL BY SEA

Not long after their arrival, the brothers boarded the ship ELENI KANAVARIOTI from the port of Piraeus. It was a difficult journey. On the third day, they ran out of drinking water and had to buy a cantaloupe or lemon to quench their thirst. And on the fourth day at sea, an Italian submarine surfaced nearby. The submarine ordered the ship to dock at Reggio Calabria, a port located at the boot of Italy. Once docked, the captain announced that everyone aboard had to send in their passports.

“Three people walked in,” recalled West. “All three of them in long leather coats. Gestapo. One sat down and he had two others sitting next to him. There was a covered army truck nearby. And he calls out the names and gives [the passport] back to you or tells you to step to the left, step to the right – that kind of thing. About a dozen people were taken off the boat and the rest were given back their passports. We were very skinny, hungry-looking, and he let us go.”

After the terrifying incident, they set sail again for Lisbon. However, in the meantime, West and his brothers’ visas had expired. When they arrived in Portugal, all the passengers were let off the ship except for the three brothers. Because their visas had expired, they would be sent back to Greece. A Hungarian woman who West had befriended on the ship came back to the port every day, for six days, to negotiate with the entry officers. Finally, they let West and his brothers come ashore on the day the ship was to set sail back to Greece. “If it wouldn’t have been for her, I would have perished,” said West.

LISBON AND PASSAGE TO AMERICA

Once in Portugal, West and his brothers went to American embassy to renew their visas. There, hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were waiting. West filled out a new visa application form and put Czechoslovak as his nationality. “I found out later that the former Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, begged U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue visas for all former Czech citizens that were stranded overseas,” said West. West later realized that if he had marked down Hungarian as his nationality, he would never have made it out of Europe.

While West and his brothers waited for their visas, they rented a one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Lisbon. They purchased water from a salesman that brought water to the apartment complex by donkey and ate fish soup every day in order to save money. Each day, they walked many miles into the city because there was no transportation available. On one such day, West happened to pass the German embassy. “There were two huge Nazi flags hanging from the window all the way down to the sidewalk. They covered the whole building. It would give you the shivers,” he said.

After several months and with very little money left, West received a telegram from the American embassy that their visas had been approved. They went to the shipping line and bought tickets for passage on the SS NYASSA, which sailed for Hoboken, New Jersey two days later. By the time the ship left port, it was December 1940. The journey was treacherous and the brothers were very seasick. Along the way, another submarine surfaced. “Again, I thought it was our turn. I thought it would be the end of us,” remembered West. The submarine let their ship go. Ten days later, the ship arrived in Hoboken and the brothers finally reunited with their father who awaited them. Upon arrival, West changed his surname from Weiss.

EPILOGUE

Once in New York, West worked odd jobs. Not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942, West joined the United States’ Army and served four and a half years. He was part of a battalion that fought in the Pacific campaign in the Battle of Kwajalein. Both of his brothers, John and Eduard, also served in the U.S. military in the European Theater and were part of military units that helped to liberate Czechoslovakia.

Having completed his military service, West travelled to Prague, Czechoslovakia in order to enroll at Charles University with funds he received from the G.I. Bill, but his time there was short-lived due to the Communist coup d‘état in February 1948. West crossed the border into Germany and attended medical school at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, where he graduated in 1952. He returned to the United States with his medical degree, firsting interning in Chicago, Illinois and later completing his medical residency in Oakland, California. His final residency work was done at San Joaquin County Hospital in French Camp, outside of Stockton, California. He worked as a pediatrician for over 50 years in San Joaquin Valley, retiring at the age of 90. West has two children, Richard and Annette, with his wife Brigitte; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. He resides in Stockton, California.