Footnote to History

Andrew Laszlo

Description

Arriving in America after World War II, Andrew Laszlo kept much of his Hungarian childhood a secret. Decades later, his wife Ann, convinced him to share the secret with his grown children. 

When Andrew was born in 1926, His middle-class family lived in Papa, a small town west of Budapest. It was a happy time.

At age fifteen, Andrew was not allowed to join the Boy Scouts. His brother could not attend the university. The reason…. Their mother was Jewish. As Nazi inspired antisemitism grew, Andrew’s determination to survive was tested again and again.

On March 19, 1944, Germany invaded Hungary. He wrote: “…as I warned you…Yes, from here on this account is going to get rough.”

His family was relocated to the Ghetto and forced to wear the yellow Star of David. Andrew’s brother, Sandor, and then Andrew were conscripted into Hungarian Labor forces. His mother, father, grandmother and aunt were taken away.

As the war dragged on, Andrew was sent to the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. Years later; his children learned that Anne Frank was a prisoner in the camp at the same time. She perished before the war ended.

The loss of his family deeply affected Andrew. At 20 years old, having nothing left, he escaped Russian occupied Hungary and made his way to post-war Germany. There, he filed an emigration petition for the United States. He arrived in New York Harbor on January 17, 1947. He carried his secret past locked in his heart…for 50 years.

Andrew Laszlo went on to have a distinguished motion picture career. He was a cinematographer for over 50 movies and televisions series, including Shogun and Rambo, First Blood. He worked with many of the movie stars of his time. He traveled the world doing pictures and teaching the next generation of film makers.

Sujets

• Holocaust
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Outskirts Press
• Date de parution: 12 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781977263704
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

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Footnote to History From Hungary to America, The Memoir of a Holocaust Survivor All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2023 Andrew Laszlo Sr. v2.0
Text and photographs © 1996 by Andrew Laszlo; 2002 by University Press of America, Inc.; 2023 by Andrew Laszlo, Jr. Foreword © 2023 by Andrew Laszlo, Jr.
The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.
This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Outskirts Press, Inc. http://www.outskirtspress.com
ISBN: 978-1-9772-6370-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023901822
FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY was originally self-published as a limited edition by the author in 1996. It was published by University Press of America, Inc. in 2002. This edition is published by Outskirts Press, Parker, Colorado, in 2023.
The original photographs, letters, and postcards in this book now reside at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, and are available for scholars and researchers.
Front cover photo: Forced as a young Jewish man to join the Hungarian Labor Service camp at K szeg, Hungary, Andrew Laszlo wears the camp uniform with the mandatory yellow armband on his left arm. Photo courtesy of the Laszlo family.
Back cover photo: Photo used with the permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Outskirts Press and the “OP” logo are trademarks belonging to Outskirts Press, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Nem tudom hol alusztok, Nem tudom hol haltatok meg, Tudom menyit szenvedtetek, Emlékeid örökre szivemben van.
To my wife and children
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1: 1926 – Before School
Chapter 2: 1930 – More Before School
Chapter 3: Picking Up Where I Left Off…
Chapter 4: To 1932 God’s Big Book…
Chapter 5: 1932 – 1936 Elementary School
Chapter 6: 1936 – 1940 Starting Decade Two
Chapter 7: 1939 – 1943 The War Years
Chapter 8: 1942 – 1944 Bad Times Start
Chapter 9: 1944 – March | April | May | June “Shave Every Day…”
Chapter 10: 1944 – June | July | August “Think of Us Often…”
Chapter 11: 1944 – September | October Deserting
Chapter 12: 1944 – October | November | December 1945 – January | February | March A Privileged Life
Chapter 13: 1945 – March | May Going to Switzerland
Chapter 14: 1945 – Going Home
Chapter 15: 1945 – 1946 Home Again
Chapter 16: 1946 – 1947 Going to America
Epilogue
Photographs & Correspondence
FOREWORD
by Andrew Laszlo, Jr.
My father told me of his secret when I was in my early forties. Until then, my mother, my three siblings, and I knew only that he had survived World War II and escaped Hungary under Soviet occupation. There was more to this story, much more. It was not something he cared to discuss, though occasionally there were anecdotes of happy memories and descriptions of his childhood. We did not know that he, his mother, father, and brother were all victims of the Holocaust and that only he survived.
On the date of the fiftieth anniversary of his arrival in New York Harbor, leather-bound copies of this book (he bound them himself) arrived at our doorsteps. He had made a conscious decision to keep this secret to himself so that his past would not be a defining influence in our lives. Though revisiting nightmarish memories and traumatic experiences must have been extremely difficult, he wrote of them in stunning detail. Remarkably, he had stored them away in a part of his mind where they could be retrieved but would not overwhelm his ability to go forward.
When my father arrived in New York, having turned twenty-one in transit, he had two dollars and sixty-three cents in his pocket. He wore clothes that he had sewn out of US Army blankets. He did not speak the English language. He had no college degree or formal profession. What he did have was the will to start again and leave a terrible past behind. He learned English by sitting in movie theaters watching continuous double features.
He was drafted into the US Army where he was assigned to the Signal Corps and learned to use modern motion picture equipment. He obtained his first job in the movie business on the Phil Silvers Show by claiming to be an expert on a new piece of camera equipment that no one on the set (including himself ) had ever seen. After being told to come to work the following week, he hid in the studio over the weekend and practiced taking the camera apart and putting it back together. By the time the crew returned on Monday, he operated the camera perfectly.
My father went on to have a distinguished career. He was the director of photography for over fifty movies and television series. His credits include Shogun and Rambo: First Blood . He was nominated for two Emmy Awards. He traveled the world making films and teaching the next generation of filmmakers.
In 2004, he was an honoree along with Elie Wiesel at the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. Two years later, while accepting a lifetime achievement award from the Hungarian National Film Institute, he reminded the audience of Hungary’s role in the Holocaust, admonishing them to never allow such horrors to happen again.
After reading his book, we traveled with him to Pápa, his hometown, where we retraced his odyssey from the family home to the ghetto, to the railroad station that led to the concentration camp. We visited his mother’s burial place in the graveyard of the Pápa synagogue, once one of the largest in Europe, but now in disrepair with few remaining members. It was Holocaust Remembrance Week in Hungary. I remarked to my father that I was glad the Hungarian people were trying to make amends, but upon leaving the ceremony, we walked around a street corner and noticed a fresh swastika drawn on a wall, a reminder that hatred still existed.
Since my father’s death on October 7, 2011, I discovered that he was in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the same time as Anne Frank. As much as I mourn that period in history, I recognize that there were also many heroes, like his friend Rosa who risked his own life to bring my father water and cheese when he was starving on the train to Belsen. It is with that spirit that I republish Footnote to History . It is a monument to a great man and a reminder of a dark time in history. I hope that keeping the story alive might in some way prevent it from happening again.
PREFACE
The following autobiographical account of my early years took almost ten years to complete—close to forty years after it probably should have been written. I have often wondered why it took so long. Though I have more than a few explanations that might be acceptable, I’m not absolutely convinced that the real reason for this delay may not be buried—hidden somewhere in the unreachable crevasses of my mind. I also wonder if an explanation is really important. As the reader will soon realize, when this book was written, it was not intended for general publication. Why did I take all those years to write it then? And once I wrote it, why was I still reluctant to publish it? The answer, I believe, is simple. I wrote about my early life and experiences, not just because I considered them unique and interesting, but because the events depicted in this book dramatically affected me and my family. Yet my wife and children knew practically nothing about the events and circumstances of my early life.
The book was written for my wife and children. I wanted to inform them, and thought that it would be easier and better to put the swirling mass of my thoughts on paper, than to tell the story orally, which at best would have been fragmented and disconnected. Writing about my memories in a more or less structured, coherent fashion, I sensed, would add continuity, and make the overall picture easier to understand.
I had also hoped that writing the book would lift the pressure I was living under for many years as I kept most details of my former life a closely guarded secret, and would help the reader understand the reasons behind that secrecy.
Because the book was intended only for my family, it contains certain elements that my wife and children are familiar with. But now that the book has been published, some explanations of those elements are necessary. For instance, the opening page of the prologue makes reference to my daughter, as she “…waited for Vice President Quayle’s plane in Shannon, Ireland…” without offering any further explanation. Everyone in my family knows that Liz—Lizzo , as we still call her—worked for the White House at that time in what is called the “advance section.” The advance section is composed of Secret Service people, communications specialists, aides, and so on. Lizzo, in spite of her young age, was in what we thought was an important position, going all over the world helping to arrange and set up trips for the president, or the vice president, and their families and staff. That is why she was in Ireland.
Similarly, the caption under the first two photographs in the photo section of the book reads: Your Grandparents . Had the book been written for the general public, this caption would read: My Mother and Father . The book is full of similar, at times unexplained, references. But once the general theme and intent of the account—as it was written for my family— become obvious, I hope that this exclusivity, the familiarity of language as one talks with one’s family, will become acceptable to the reader.
I invite the reader to try to fill in, disregard, or simply wonder about gaps that remain unexplained; or, in vi