FAYTER w@ca.on.wentworth.hamilton.hamilton_spectator 2002-08-01 published
Tapestry survived war that ripped family apart
By Mary K.
NOLAN
The Hamilton Spectator
The tapestry dominating the two-storey teal-blue wall above Lily
Sazz FAYTER's piano looks custom-made for that spot.
But the striking eight-by-nine-foot hanging, given to her by
her late paternal grandmother Ilona, has not always enjoyed such
a place of honour.
At one time, the tapestry lay in tatters, buried in mud, and
stained with the bootprints of SS soldiers -- much like the millions
of Jewish families whose lives were muddied and ripped apart
by the Holocaust.
Sazz FAYTER's family was among them, losing members of three
generations to indiscriminate Nazi bullets, the gas chambers
of Auschwitz, freezing temperatures, hunger, disease and other
horrors of Hitler's campaign of extermination.
One who survived was Ilona, who emerged from the Second World
War minus her husband, her younger boy, two of her three brothers
and both her parents. Whether it was the will of God, the hand
of fate or the fact that she looked strong and healthy and useful,
Ilona -- a woman of 44 -- was not sent to "the showers" like
her barely teenaged son Leslie, shot in an abandoned brickyard
like her crippled mother or hauled off the cattle train like
her blind old father.
Ilona had already survived tuberculosis at 15, the Spanish flu
epidemic of 1919, and the loss of her husband Sandor
GUTLOHN,
who was conscripted early in the war and taken to Ukraine where
he died of a heart attack in 1942.
In May 1944, when the Jews in her Hungarian home town, Miskolc,
were rounded up and disposed of, Ilona's 18-year-old son Paul
was loaded onto one of the Nazis' infamous trains. Young Leslie,
newly 13 and probably a sweet boy who could not imagine the evil
that prevailed, ran ahead through the confusion of the crowded
platform to try to save his mother a seat on the train, but was
prevented from rejoining her.
"All she could hear was him calling out, 'Mother, Mother!'" Sazz
FAYTER intones dispassionately, as she reads the details from
a sheet prepared by her sister and based on an interview with
their grandmother. Later, "Ilona would hear from a woman in the
barracks that Leslie had been in the same train car as her and
had gone straight to his death in the gas chamber."
Ilona endured four months at Auschwitz, the indescribable horrors
of which -- the disease, the filth, the hunger, the indignities
-- are well chronicled. She was working as a labourer -- laying
bricks, building roads, cleaning soldiers' quarters-- when the
camp was liberated in the spring of 1945.
As the war ended, chaos reigned. Roads and bridges had been destroyed
and the weak, sick, displaced, traumatized Jews who survived
the camps were hundreds of miles from the homes and families
they'd left.
Alone, with no idea of the fate of her loved ones and no way
to get home, the emaciated Ilona stayed on at Auschwitz for another
month. Eventually, she managed to get to an uncle's house in
Budapest where son Paul arrived four days later. It was a joyous
reunion, but Paul and Ilona were the only ones left.
He, too, had been in a concentration camp, where his job had
been to shovel bodies out of the gas chambers and into the crematoria.
She was barely 90 pounds; he was frail and weak at 19, and would
lose his teeth prematurely and suffer ill health for the rest
of his life, which ended in 1979 at the age of 53.
The two made their way back to Miskolc, and it is there, Sazz
FAYTER believes, that Ilona found the tapestry. Although the
details are unclear, it would appear that the tapestry had been
part of the family's furnishings and had been damaged or destroyed
by the SS soldiers who were using their home as an outpost.
"What I never got straight was whose family the tapestry was
in to begin with," says Sazz
FAYTER, a newly married blues musician
living in Dundas. "I only know that when she came back, this
thing was strewn on the ground in the mud. There'd been a lot
of rain and the soldiers were using her books as stepping stones
over the mud."
As Sazz FAYTER speaks, sitting in the shadow of the bold Torontali-patterned
tapestry, one can almost picture her beloved "Nagymami," the
broken, battered Ilona, coming upon the remnants of her once-happy
home and stooping to pull the filthy piece of fabric out of the
mire. A skilled needleworker, she mended the holes and tears
as best she could, using whatever thread was available in that
lean post-war period under communist rule. Close inspection reveals
her fine stitchery and the mismatched colours of her repair job.
Ilona remarried in 1946, taking up with Sandor
SZASZ, a neighbour
who had lost his wife to the Holocaust. A year later, her son
was introduced to 15-year-old Vera
SPITZER, who'd been interned
at the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia. She was one of
the few young survivors of the Holocaust, in which nearly two
million young children were killed outright or died during their
imprisonment.
It was love at first sight and they married in the spring of
1948, the groom 21 and his bride just 16. Paul, who carried his
father's surname, took on his stepfather's name of
SZASZ because
GUTLOHN sounded too Jewish. The newlyweds moved in with Ilona
and Sandor, who were farming, and Ilona taught her daughter-in-law
the wifely skills of cooking and managing a household. A baby,
Susan, arrived in 1951.
But the troubles of this family, which had already endured more
suffering and hardship than one lifetime should hold, were not
over yet. Hungary's political climate was threatening, and the
family was uprooted to a suburb of Budapest so Paul could work
in an agricultural commune and Vera in a communal farm and greenhouse
operation while Ilona cared for little Susan.
A month after the outbreak of the Hungarian revolution in November
1956, Paul and Vera bundled up their five-year-old daughter and
fled in the night to the Austrian border, armed with a sedative-filled
hypodermic needle in case the little one needed silencing. They
ended up in Vienna where they secured refugee visas, took the
train to Le Havre and boarded a Cunard ship bound for Halifax.
Vera was seasick throughout the arduous North Atlantic crossing
in January, and was greeted with walls of snow and another train
trip, this one to Montreal.
Sandor and Ilona got their visas a year later and arrived in
Montreal, probably bringing the family's meagre possessions with
them, including the tapestry. The family eventually moved to
a Beamsville fruit farm, and expanded with the birth of daughter
Lily in 1960.
"With Vera working on the farm, it was Ilona who cooked, baked,
helped Susan with her homework, and cared for Lily," Sazz
FAYTER
continues reading. "She and Sandor lived downstairs, Paul, Vera
and the two girls lived upstairs in the old house."
Sazz FAYTER, who changed her name from Szasz to Sazz for professional
reasons, remembers the tapestry hanging on the wall in that house,
but wasn't aware of its significance until Ilona and Sandor moved
to a retirement home in Hamilton. That's when Ilona passed it
on to her granddaughter.
"When she was moving, she didn't have room for it, so she gave
it to me and told me the story behind it," says Sazz
FAYTER.
"I had the room for it and I was a little closer to her than
my sister. I was really moved. It will always be a prized possession
of mine."
The tapestry, which may date from the early 1900s, is probably
not particularly rare or valuable, Sazz
FAYTER speculates.
"They probably aren't that uncommon in Hungary. I'm sure these
things survive quite well when they're not trod upon."
Ilona was an "amazing" woman, says Sazz
FAYTER -- friendly, smart,
cultured, "an incredible homemaker" and a spectacular cook who
blended Hungarian foods with Jewish influence, specialized in
pastries, goulash, stuffed peppers, challah and other comforts,
and invariably burned herself while making her dobos torta, a
spectacular chocolate and candy-coated layer cake.
In deference to her new husband's allergies, Sazz
FAYTER recently
took the tapestry to a dry cleaner's where she nervously signed
a waiver releasing them from any responsibility for damage. But
it came back defiantly in one piece, its colours bright, its
shape maintained.
Ilona's tapestry has survived far worse.
You can contact Mary K.
NOLAN at mnolan@ hamiltonspectator.com
or at 905-526-4689.
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