Brothers separated in Holocaust reunite after 60 yrs
Published: March 14, 2005
It was the fall of 1944, and two young frightened
Jewish children were waiting in a Budapest apartment for their mother who had gone out to the war-ravaged streets searching for food for her children.
Although the defeat of Nazi Germany was in sight, the determined German liquidation of Hungarian Jewry continued.
Their mother would never return.
The older brother was six, and the younger one was two years old.
Eventually the concierge of the building heard the
cries of the half-starved children, and they were
separated; the older boy, with his darker visage, was handed over to a Jewish family, and the young infant, with his blond features, was sent to an orphanage, where he would later be adopted by a non-Jewish family.
Their parents and most of their immediate family would perish in the Holocaust, but, amazingly, the two children managed to survive the last tragic months of the war, even as Hungary’s Jewish community was mostly obliterated.
For the next 61 years, the two brothers would remain separated, never knowing that the other had survived.
The memory each had of the other was but faint and
dimming light from a period of total darkness.
Until an ironic twist of events, chance, and a
determined Holocaust researcher would come together to reunite the two brothers together in Jerusalem on Sunday.
For six decades, Avraham Paskesz, 67, — the older of the two boys — kept in his mind the fast-fading memory of an autumn night, in an apartment with a sickly young infant waiting for their mother to come back.
That was all he remembered from the war, having
blacked-out the rest — including being forced to go on a Nazi Death March — before ending up in a DP camp in Austria in 1945.
“My memory was all gone,” Paskesz recalled Sunday,
“from then on, everything [in my mind about the war]was erased.”
[The only exception was the Yellow Star of David and the placard he was forced to wear with his name and date of birth].
After the war ended, neither Paskesz nor the
international aid organizations dealing with displaced persons could locate his parents, his aunts or his uncles, and all were assumed killed. His nameless younger brother was also thought to be among the dead.
At the age of nine, Paskesz was able to get on a boat with a group of sixteen Hungarian and Polish Jews to what was then-Palestine, where he grew up as an orphan. He eventually married and had two children, keeping the memories of the Holocaust that so haunt him buried deep inside.
“It was healthier that way,” he said, noting that he never told his children what he went through in the tragic time.
[His now 37 year old daughter, Shosh Peleg, recalls how, as a child, Holocaust Day was like Yom Kippur in their home, with the TV off and complete silence, and her father disappearing from their suburban Tel Aviv apartment for hours every year on that day.
Peleg remembers how as a child in school she herself always dreamed that her father has a missing sibling who was alive somewhere.]
In the meantime, unbeknownst to him, his younger
brother, Ervin Paskesz, who remained in Budapest, was being brought up in a Hungarian orphanage.
Ervin Paskesz had even located his grandmother who
told him that his father had been killed in the war,and that his mother and brother had vanished. She showed him pictures of the family which he would safeguard for the next half a century.
Although the younger Paskesz found his grandmother, the Hungarian Government deemed her too old, and unfit to care for her grandson, and so he was raised at the orphanage.
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: