"Part of My Heritage"--The Németh
family
contributed by John Geroe
I am connected to
Hódmezõvásárhely through family
relations. My great-grandfather, David ANISZFELD, who established
the Aniszfeld Hardware Corporation, settled there in
1864 and married Eszter SINGER. They had seven children: sons
Sándor, who turned the Aniszfeld Corporation into one of the
most prestigious enterprises in town, and
was a well respected President of the Jewish Community, Dr. Endre
AMBRUZS, a renowned medical doctor, Zsigmond, and József, a
veteran of World War I, who died of his wounds. Their three
daughters were Hermina ANISZFELD SZÖKE, Ilona ANISZFELD REISZ and
Julianna ANISZFELD NÉMETH, my maternal grandmother, born in
1876.
My grandfather Jenõ NÉMETH,
owner of a large general store, married Julianna ANISZFELD. The
couple lived in Szentes and they had three children: Dezsõ, who
became a dentist, Margit, and my mother, Boriska.
In addition, my
aunt
Borbála (Barbara) KERTÉSZ NÉMETH, one of two
daughters of Sándor KERTÉSZ, whose family settled
in Hódmezõvásárhely
in 1830, and
Margit nee FUCHS,
was
born here
in 1911. Sándor (Alexander)
KERTÉSZ was a wholesale textile merchant. Finishing in the
top of her graduating class, Borbála set out to go to the
Medical School, but instead married Dr. Dezsõ (Desider)
NÉMETH, a dentist in Szentes, and son of Julianna and
Jenõ.
My lovely cousin, Marika
(Maria), was their only child. Borbála's sister, Iren
Aliz, married Dr. VARADI, an attorney, and they had two children.
Following the German occupation of Hungary on
March 19, 1944, the family was taken to a ghetto in Szeged. From
there, in June 1944, they were assigned to one of the Kasztner trains*
with the destination of Strasshof, Austria. From this collecting
place, the German government sent my family to a farm town in Western
Austria, Göstling an der Ybbs, for farm work. With the front
approaching, on April 13, 1945, a few days before the American Army
reached the town, the scared farmers invited the forced laborers to
take shelter with them in their cellars. From the group of
Jewish laborers, one woman was assigned to do the necessary shopping
for
food. The rest of the group was readying to go into the cellars,
and hoping the Americans would arrive shortly. During this time,
Waffen-SS officer Ernst BURIAN and six SS troopers armed with bazookas
and hand grenades found the group in their camp quarters. They
machine gunned the entire contingency of 76 deportees. The
youngest victims were aged two and four, while the oldest victims were
Mrs. Hanni SCHIFFMANN, age 86, and my grandfather, Jenõ
NÉMETH, age 78.** The only survivor was the woman away
shopping.***
The victims were buried in a mass grave in the
only Christian cemetery in town. After the war, a commemorative
obelisk, inscribed on three sides with the names of all the victims was
erected. After the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when I escaped to
Austria, I asked the Göstling an der Ybbs city officials for
information about my relatives. The Mayor sent me the
information, including dates of birth of my immediate NÉMETH
family. Later, I received pictures of the obelisk.
I'd like to say special thanks to Judy
Petersen for her extraordinary work in keeping alive the flame of our
Jewish heritage through her ShtetLinks page, and to JewishGen, for
hosting this important and educational link.
*Webmaster
note: The Kasztner trains were the result of "blood for trucks"
negotiations between a group of SS, including Adolf Eichmann, and a
group of Jewish leaders (the Vaada),
including Rudolf (Rezsö) Kasztner,
in Budapest. In
exchange for money, jewelry and valuables, in 1944 some 1700 prominent
and other Jews of Budapest, including several members of Kasztner's
family, were taken to safety in Switzerland via a short stay in a
special part of the Bergen Belsen camp. It is unknown how much
money was actually transferred to the Nazis, but the original request
was for 5,000,000 Swiss francs. In addition, as a result of the
negotiations, during the deportations of late June 1944, approximately
7 trainloads totaling a little over 20,000 additional Jews from the
ghettos of Baja, Debrecen, Szeged and Szolnok were diverted from transports to Auschwitz and went
instead to Strasshof, Austria. From Strasshof, the Jews were sent
to a number of communities in Austria where the Germans badly
needed additional slave labor for industry and agriculture. Their
treatment varied, but on the whole they were treated relatively
humanely. About 75% of them, including children and elderly,
survived.
**Szabolcs Szita: Trading in Lives?
Central European University Press, 2005
***According to the website <http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at> as
a result of the trials following WWII, Ernst Burian was convicted and
sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor. He was released a
mere 9 years later as part of a general Nazi amnesty in 1957.
