Thanksgiving
After I graduated from college in 1987, I took a job at East Hill Farm and School, an alternative school located on a mountain top farm in southern Vermont. The director had started the school as a space where children of all abilities and needs could learn together. It was an invention of necessity. After their first son, Andy, was born with microcephaly doctors urged him and his wife to institutionalize the child. Instead, they decided to create a school where the son could have a dignified life.[1]
One of the students was a man who was my age and suffered from constant grand and petit mal seizures. He was a day student and he and his mother, Erika, lived in a nearby town. Erika was my mom’s age, born in 1932 in Vienna. My mom had been born the same year in Budapest. Erika shared with me memories of police visiting her family home after the Anschluss, when Nazi Germany occupied Austria in 1938. My mom had shared memories of police visits to her home around the same time. At the time, Hungary was ruled by a Catholic nationalist authoritarian, Admiral Horthy.
Erika was Jewish. My mom, born Doris Perl, was raised Catholic. After marrying my father, a Methodist from Oklahoma, they joined an Episcopal church where my sisters and I were baptized and confirmed. When my siblings would ask my mom or older relatives why the family had left Hungary, they would explain that it was a decision driven by a practical desire to get out of the way of the war that many believed inevitable.
Erika and my mom both arrived in New York in 1939. Erika was the first person I’d ever met who was a Jewish refugee from Nazism. Well, that was not quite true.
Over Thanksgiving dinner at a rented house in Vermont in the fall of 1987, my younger sister asked my mother if there were any other Jewish family members aside from the husband of my mom’s aunt, Klári. I knew that my great uncle by marriage had been executed on the banks of the Danube by the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s version of Nazis. Klári and her son Paul survived the war and eventually came to the U.S.
“Well,” she said, “all of my grandparents were Jewish.” My two sisters and I were stunned. My grandparents were married in a synagogue in Vienna, where my grandmother had been raised. As far as I can tell, no one in the family practiced the Judaism. In 1936, at age four, my mother and her baby sister had been baptized Catholic. The idea was that if they were Catholic, immigration might be easier. Immigration officials in New York knew better and labeled them “Hebrews” even though their passports designated them as Roman Catholic.
When I got back to school the next Monday, I told Erika. She was not surprised. In fact, she knew I must be Jewish. Apparently not knowing you are Jewish is a thing.[2]
Talking
Throughout my childhood, there had been clues that the story of my family was not what it seemed. My mother’s maiden name was Perl. This had been explained simply as a “German” family name.
I was the darkest white kid in my elementary school. People often asked me “where are you from?” In high school, there were twin girls, blondes, who came from a prominent family in Hungary. When I told them my mom was from Hungary, they responded bluntly “You don’t look Hungarian.” I thought this was odd since most of my Hungarian relatives, and particularly my mom, were various shades of dark. Not a blond among them, that I recall.
There were other clues. We had no relatives anywhere in Hungary, or Austria, where my grandmother had been born and raised. My grandparents were supposedly Catholic, but I never heard them talk about attending church. That was explained by the fact that they just were not interested in religion. Which was true.
Since my mom arrived in the US at age seven and therefore did not have many memories of life in Europe, I started asking older relatives about what they knew or remembered. One of my mother’s cousins agreed to talk, but we had to go into the furthest reaches of her house and then, even though no one was in the house, she closed the door. Then she asked, “What do you want to know?”
My grandfather, who through great ingenuity had extracted the family from Europe, was not happy at all that I had been asking around about this topic. He was especially irate that I had spoken to his sister, Klári. He adored her and had helped her get to the United States and had supported her financially. My grandmother, who lost many aunts, uncles, and cousins in Holocaust proved more open to talking.
Not long after learning about the family, my sister Katie, who had asked the question at Thanksgiving, took a job as an English teacher in recently post-communist Hungary. None of the kids had ever visited. My mom had been back once. My grandfather also just once. Klári, who went by Clary when she arrived in the US, never went back. I had never thought to wonder why no one wanted to go to Hungary.
I went to visit Katie, and I found Hungary alienating. We visited the family’s old apartment building. No one was left. It felt less like going home and more like visiting a cemetery.
My sisters were not the only family members to suddenly learn that they were Jewish. When my mom’s younger sister Marietta Pritchard, was in college in the 1950s, a classmate wondered why a Jewish girl was wearing a crucifix. Difficult conversations with her parents followed. Decades later she studied Hungarian, made trips to various places of importance to family history in Hungary, Austria, and the Czech Republic, and read through letters and other documents. The result of that work was a very moving family history and memoir. Her book focuses on her own experiences as an immigrant and on her maternal grandfather, Ernst Fürth, who died in Vichy France after nearly being deported from the Drancy transit camp to Auschwitz.[3]
About a decade ago, I started reading more about inter-war Hungary and it explained a lot about my grandfather. After the First World War, and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Hungary went through a violent revolution and counterrevolution. My grandfather only mentions it in passing in his unpublished memoir, but it may have been a defining moment for him. In 1919, Hungary experienced the 100-day communist government of Béla Kun. Kun was a World War One veteran and Jewish. When Kun was overthrown and fled to the Soviet Union (Stalin eventually had him executed in a purge) Hungary experienced a White Terror which was anticommunist and antisemitic. At least a 1000 Jews were lynched, alongside many more suspected of supporting the fallen regime. Out of that spasm of violence was born the so-called “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy theory.[4] The theory argues that Jews are responsible for both communism and unfettered capitalism, and it is still very much with us.[5]
Hungary then passed Europe’s first anti-Jewish laws of the twentieth century. The 1920 Numerus Clausus law placed limits on the number of Jews in universities. The year before the family left, the Hungarian government passed other laws modeled on Germany’s antisemitic program. In the inter-war period Hungary was in the grips of an authoritarian state but the ruler, Regent Admiral Horthy, was hostile to fascist groups like the Arrow Cross. [6]
As my grandfather recalled in his unpublished memoir, by the mid-1930s there were growing signs that things were not going to end well. An early warning came from a colleague with connections to the Austrian Nazis. The war was coming, and it would be particularly bad for Jews. The final straw was a visit to his father-in-law, Ernst Fürth, in Vienna, after the Anschluss. “Soldiers with steel helmets were standing guard before most public buildings, machine guns on the corners, swastikas all over the place, people in black uniforms in open trucks carrying people.” [7]
He went back to Budapest and applied for visas everywhere that he could, but his focus was the United States. Immigration restrictions passed in the United States in the 1920s had imposed strict quotas on Eastern Europeans. He found a loophole: an agricultural visa for which he qualified. With his characteristic wit, he explained how he got the visa. “Moses was directed by God. He gave him excellent direction. […]Árpád followed a golden stag to reach the Danube. We followed the Immigration and Naturalization Statutes of 1907 amended in 1922. It worked well…j’y reste.”[8]
I started going up to New York to visit my great aunt Klári and her son Paul. I had only met them a couple of times in my life. They were essentially strangers. Klári was warm and funny and ancient. She enjoyed eating jam straight out of the jar. She was a lifelong practitioner of yoga, having first learned about it sometime after the First World War.
She told me what had happened in Budapest. The Hungarian fascists stormed into the safe house run by the Swedish legation. For some reason, her husband and his brother were grabbed. She and Paul somehow were spared. She had no idea why.
Learning More
Hungary had played a dangerous game during the war. Admiral Horthy, regent of the Kingdom of Hungary, wanted to get back territories that Hungary had lost after the Treaty of Trianon and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In all, they managed to seize a slice of Czechoslovakia, some of Transylvania, and a chunk of Yugoslavia. And, tragically, they sent divisions to the Eastern Front and Yugoslavia in support of the Germans. But Horthy refused to deport Hungary’s Jews. The house of cards collapsed when Horthy attempted to make a separate peace with the Allies when it became clear that nothing would stop the advancing Soviets. Hitler then orchestrated a coup in March 1944 and placed several pro-Nazi politicians in leadership. Only then did deportations of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps begin. As the Soviet army drew closer, the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross, were ushered into power by the Germans.
A year ago, my mother’s last surviving cousin, who is close to my age, introduced me to the contemporary Hungarian writer Gábor Zoltán’s story, “Neighborhood.” It recounts the brutal actions of the Arrow Cross in his Budapest neighborhood during the war. It was startling to read because it was explicit about the sadism of these fascists. Killing Jews and other regime opponents, including deserters and Roma people, was always accompanied by excruciating torture and often involved rape of men and women.[9] It rattled me because prior to that, the deaths of Klári’s husband and his brother had been unspecific and abstract. What I knew, or thought was likely true, is that they were captured by the Arrow Cross, marched to the banks of the Danube, and shot sometime in January. Their bodies floated down the river.
Recently, this same cousin sent me Zoltán’s recently translated novel, Orgy. The book tells the story of a Gentile who gets detained by the Arrow Cross. His wife and lover are both Jewish. He gets dragged into the Arrow Cross’ inner workings whilst trying to survive and protect wife and lover. The title of the book refers to the Arrow Cross’s intense and depraved fascination with inflicting pain upon its victims. [10]
Even by the standards of wartime fascists, the Arrow Cross were utterly lawless. Their aim was not just to liquidate the Jewish population but also to plunder. And to do so quickly before the approaching Russians occupied the city. Arrow Cross behavior is especially strange considering that their instinct to survive the inevitable arrival of a hostile army was surpassed by a desire to kill Jews and their supposed enablers, and to steal anything they could. Many believed the rumors that Ferenc Szálasi, the Arrow Cross leader, was poised to lead a combined force of Hungarian and German units in a counteroffensive that would push the Russian Army back.
Zoltán’s novel, which is graphic in its depiction of violence, led me into the safer terrain of historians. After reading some of historian Andrea Pető’s work, I contacted her and explained that I was researching my family. One big problem, I explained, was that I cannot speak Hungarian. She then directed me to an archivist at the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial.[11] I shared the barebones information that I had. His research colleague began to send me detailed information from archives in Budapest and beyond. She also translated the material. The archival record about the murderous terror of the Arrow Cross is huge and highly detailed.
The basic facts are that the six Sveds, Klári, her husband Andor, their son Paul, and Andor’s brother, Jenő, and his wife and son, were in a safe house at 1 Jókai Street, on the Pest side of the city. It was likely under the protection of the Swiss or Swedish legation. On January 8, 1945, a group of Arrow Cross thugs broke into the house. They may have simply been looking for food or valuables to loot. Regardless, they discovered a group of Jews in hiding.
As I had mentioned earlier, Klári had told me that when the Arrow Cross broke into the house, the Sved brothers were dragged off, taken to the Danube and shot. There is a very famous and moving monument to these victims on the banks of the Danube. It is a row of pairs of empty shoes.
What really happened, according to the documents, is more terrifying. All six of them were forcibly removed from the safe house on January 8, 1945.[12] Where exactly the women and the two children were sent is not clear. It is possible that they were sent to the Arrow Cross house. More likely they were sent to the Jewish ghetto. Whatever happened, wherever they went, they survived.[13]
An Arrow Cross unit transported Jenő and Andor to an Arrow Cross house in Buda, most likely 14 Városház utca, where “most of the Arrow Cross houses were located.” These were more than detention centers. They were also torture centers. That house was under the direction of Lajos Tal, a so-called “investigation team leader.”[14]
The evidence on the brothers’ fate is contradictory. Some reports indicate that on January 17, nine days after being detained, the brothers were taken to the Danube and shot.
A 1951 notary document, however, shows that Jenő Sved, Klari’s brother-in-law, died on February 15, 1945. It is likely that this document may have been part of an effort to claim life insurance payment. [15] Yad Vashem also shows the brothers’ death date as February 15.[16]
Whichever date is correct, we can surmise that the Sved brothers spent at least 9 days in Arrow Cross captivity. Their captors likely tortured them.
Their final moments must have been grim. Arrow Cross thugs would have tied up the prisoners in groups, possibly naked. At gun point, they would have marched the prisoners to the river. The Arrow Cross men then shot the prisoners. Many reports suggest that they would often only shoot one or two in a group. Those not shot would be pulled into the river by the weight of the dead and drown to death. Monuments to atrocity, like the empty shoes, can never capture horror. They might not have even had shoes on if the Arrow Cross wanted to steal their shoes.
After thinking about all of this, I wondered how the researchers had put together this story. What was the evidence? Another detailed response followed my query. Simply, after the war, the Hungarian government put Arrow Cross members on trial for murder. There were many trials. And each trial involved eyewitnesses. [17] There were three witnesses to the removal of the Sved family from the safe house. A dentist, Dr. Julia Altmann (name listed in the notarial documents is her married name, Mrs. Tivadar Földes), testified that she saw the events from a nearby building. Researchers explained how Dr. Altmann could have witnessed the tragedy.
In the map of the Teréz boulevard and Jókai street, it is important, that the two addresses, Teréz boulevard 6 and Jókai street 1 are very close to each other, so Julia Altman really could see the moving of the people, the dragging / deportation of family Svéd (or another people too from this address), so it maybe an acceptable fact that Julia Altmann could be a witness.
I then wondered how Dr. Altmann had known who the Sveds were? There were two Jewish employees of the legations who were at the safe house. One was Károly Altmann. As the researcher noted, he “could be a kin of […]Julia Altmann.” The other employee, Márton Gosztonyi, was also a witness. Finally, there was a third eyewitness, a janitor in Altmann’s building, Mrs Lajos Turi née Erzsébet Kopasz.[18]
What about the perpetrators? Many were captured, sometimes after hiding out for several years, and put on trial. Lajos Tal operated the Arrow Cross house in Buda, and along with his son, led the raid on Jokai street. He lived under a false identity after the war but was finally captured in 1948. He was tried, sentenced to death, and hanged. Others involved in the crimes met the same fate.[19]
In the past few years, I discovered that many of my grandmother’s aunts and uncles who mostly lived In Austria died during the war. An uncle and his wife committed suicide after the Anschluss.[20] There is a Stolpersteine with their names. Several others perished in camps. A few years ago, my aunt, the real family historian, gave me his gold-plated pocket watch. She doesn’t know how it got to the United States.
The Last Visit
The last time I saw Paul Sved, he had moved into a retirement community after his wife had died. But Paul’s mind was beginning to fray. His apartment was full of Post-it notes to remind him of, well, everything and anything. He had perfect recall, however, about his childhood.
Most of his stories about surviving the war had a whimsical character to them. He mentioned seeing Soviet soldiers wearing five to ten wristwatches that they had looted from dead bodies. He had happened upon an abandoned accordion and was pleased with his find until a Soviet soldier relieved him of the instrument. He even had a story from the time in the safe house when he had dismantled a telephone that was vital to the safety of the residents.
When I asked him about wartime trauma, his or that of others, he had an answer that still sticks with me. “Well,” he responded, “it helped that we were all going through the same thing.” He was also very proud of saving several children’s lives. When he saw kids playing with ordnance, he would yell at them to drop them immediately. Always a sober minded and practical man.
After that visit, we talked on the phone occasionally. He was increasingly frustrated by the loss of memory. When COVID hit, we were quite worried that his isolation would become intolerable.
He was among the first wave of people killed by the virus. Several years later, his ashes were buried next to his mother at her yoga school in Switzerland.
Memory, History, and Family
The tragic story of my Central European family keeps ringing in my head as the Trump administration dismantles constitutional guard rails, praises dictators, and targets the most vulnerable among us. The illegal detention and deportation of immigrants and even foreign tourists are, to use my grandfather’s words, “signs” of more horror to come. And then there is Gaza and the weaponization of antisemitism.[21]
Early in my process of understanding my family history, I came across a short story by a Hungarian survivor, George Konrad. “A Priest of Frivolity” tells the story of a group of Jews who are trapped in Budapest. As the inevitable end is coming, with fascists hungry to kill any Jews they can find before the Russians show up, a character shares a reflection on politics:
I’ve always thought of politics as a circus […]In the ring the clowns kick each other in the rear, brawl, and quarrel and throw things, while we munch on pretzels and drink raspberry juice. Then we go home and don’t think about the circus for a long time. But the situation changes when the circus gates are locked, the cages are opened, and the lion is set free to run into the audience. Then the tamer with his whip is truly the ringmaster. Someone from the audience protests. ‘Let us out of here!’ The lion tamer cracks his whip, and the lion mauls the protester to death. When I find myself in such close quarters with politics, the laughter freezes on my lips.[22]
We now live in times when the circus lion is out of the cage.
But as Paul would have said, we are all in it together.
Jonathan Ablard is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean and professor of History at Ithaca College. He is the author of Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880-1983, published by University of Calgary Press in 2008, as well as articles on the history of military conscription in Argentina, obesity in Latin America, and conspiracy theories.
[1] Jonathan Bliss, “A School on a Farm,” Education Revolution (Spring 2006): 13-18.
[2] Ferenc Erös, András Kovács and Katalin Lévai, “How did I find out that I was a Jew? Interviews,” in George Schöpflin, “Jews and Hungarians,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 17:3 (1987): 55-66. For a moving memoir about learning about survivors in the family, see Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom (New York: Picador, 2017).
[3] Her work made it possible for me to write this essay. Marietta Pritchard, Among Strangers: A Family History (Impress: Northampton, Massachusetts, 2010) and “The Rings of our Grandmothers,” The Massachusetts Review 37:1 (Spring 1996): 121-129. The archive of Ernest Fürth’s papers, including letters that he wrote to the family from Europe which my aunt collected, are housed at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City. The record of his time at Drancy is available at the Arolsen Archives Other relatives of my grandmother died by suicide after the Anschluss or in concentration camps. “Sanitarium Head Ends Life,” The New York Times (April 5, 1938)
[4] Béla Bodó, The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919-1921 (New York: Routledge, 2019).
[5] A modern-day version of this is the demonization of Hungarian Holocaust survivor, financier, and philanthropist George Soros.
[6] On the interwar period, see János Székely, Temptation (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020). The novel was first published in 1946. There is a famous joke about how Hungary was a landlocked kingdom ruled by a regent who was an admiral. https://creativeconflictwisdom.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/conflict-humor-hungarys-declaration-of-war-on-the-usa-in-1941/
[7] George Perl, Recollections/Emlékezés (unpublished manuscript).
[8] George Perl, Recollections/Emlékezés (unpublished manuscript). He noted that once one was legally in the United State, you could not be deported. That sounds like wishful thinking in 2025.
[9] Gábor Zoltán, “Neighbourhood,” Asymptote (no date is listed on the website. The original Hungarian version was published in 2013).
[10] Gábor Zoltán, Orgy (Frankfurt: CEEOL Press, 2022)
[11] Holocaust Memorial Center/Holokauszt Emlékközpont. The archivists requested that I not list their names for this essay. I am indebted to their tireless work on my behalf.
[12] Correspondence with Holocaust Memorial Center (December 2024)
[13] According to researchers at the Holocaust Memorial Center, “they were taken from the Pest side (Jókai street) to Buda (where in general the Arrow Cross bases were established mainly, like Németvölgyi road, Városmajor street and other in district XII).” (January 7, 2025).
[14] Correspondence with Holocaust Memorial Center (January 7, 2025)
[15] Steven Sullivan, “Marta’s List: The Pursuit of Holocaust Survivors’ Lost Insurance Claims,” National Archives and Records Administration. My aunt recalls her father helping Klári with the insurance claim.
[16] Correspondence with Holocaust Memorial Center ( January 7, 2025)
[17] Ildikó Barna and Andrea Pető, Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (New York: Central European University Press, 2014).
[18] Correspondence with Holocaust Memorial Center,( January 7, 2025). Traditionally, in Hungary married women’s legal name is often listed as “wife of” the husband.
[19] Andrea Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (London: Palgrave MacMillian, 2020). Researchers provided names of several others likely involved in the case of the Sved families.
[20] “Sanitarium Head Ends Life,” The New York Times (April 5, 1938)
[21] Omer Bartov, “I’m a Genocide Scholar: I Know it When I See It,” The New York Times (July 15, 2025)
[22] George Konrad, “The High Priest of Frivolity,” The New Yorker (May 9, 1992): 37.