During a recent dinner party at a friend’s house in Williamsburg, I was asked, as a Holocaust survivor who escaped from a Nazi slave-labor camp and joined the anti-Nazi underground in Budapest, Hungary, what did I do once the Red Army liberated the city?
I replied: “I became a translator to a Soviet general. He was commanding a combat division fighting German SS troops in the streets of Budapest.”
“My Russian was far from perfect,” I said, “but being fluent in Czech-Slovak, a Slavic language, and speaking a smattering of Russian made me a ‘king in the land of blind.’ At that time, very few Hungarians understand or spoke Russian.”
The Soviet general set up his headquarters in a luxury high-rise apartment building in the center of the city. He took over a whole floor. The rest of the building was occupied by wealthy Hungarian families, mostly women and children. The men were serving in the Hungarian army or were in hiding.
Hungarian women were terrified of being raped by Soviet soldiers, quite justifiably. But having the division headquarters in the building provided the women living there with a degree of security.
That is, until the Soviet general ordered me to arrange for one of the women living in the building to “volunteer” to join him for dinner each night. I could not find a “volunteer.” I was desperate, because my existence depended on the general.
Historical records show that during the siege of Budapest, tens of thousands of Hungarian soldiers were captured by Soviet forces. As prisoners of war, they were shipped to the Soviet Union to help rebuild the country. They were dying there by the thousands.
Hundreds of captured Hungarian soldiers managed to escape. To make up for the number of escapes, the Soviet military police set up dragnets all over the streets of Budapest. No one was safe from being shipped to the Soviet Union as a prisoner of war.
To be safe on my errands for the general, he issued me a “bumashka” (official document), testifying that I was serving as a translator for the division headquarters. It was signed by him under a large official stamp.
Also, he assigned two armed Soviet military policemen as my escorts. I was never bothered.
My assignment to find a female companion for the general required, for me, free movement around the city, especially at night.
I lived in Budapest before the Second World War and remembered that there was a district in the city where officially sanctioned houses of prostitution flourished. They were under medical supervision.
I set out with my military police escort for Conti Utca, a street known for having several functioning houses of prostitution. I explained to the madam at one of the houses that whoever volunteers to join the general for “dinner” would be richly rewarded with cash and food. Food was worth more than gold in a starving city.
A young Hungarian woman volunteered and accompanied us to the division headquarters. A few hours later, laden with all kinds of food and bottles of wine, we escorted the young lady back to Conti Utca.
During the following two weeks, girls at Conti Utca begged the madam to be chosen to be the general’s “dinner companion.”
In the eyes of the women in the apartment building, I had become a hero. They couldn’t have been more thankful.
Once my hometown — Parkan, on the Czechoslovak side of the Danube River — was liberated, I returned home. I found only my father alive. My brother, who returned later, survived after almost dying of starvation at a Nazi concentration camp. All other members of my family perished in the Holocaust.
Shortly after the liberation of Czechoslovakia, I moved to Prague. I resumed my journalistic studies and subsequently became a foreign correspondent, based in Prague.
In 1954, at the height of the Stalinist terror, my wife, Jaroslava, and I escaped Communist Czechoslovakia. After some years spent in Europe, we arrived in the United States in 1958. We found here, our “Shining City on the Hill.”
Frank Shatz is a Williamsburg resident. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place,” the compilation of his selected columns. The book is available at the Bruton Parish Shop and on Amazon.com.
