When my grandmother, Blanche Klein Sobel, came to the United States from Hungary in December 1902, with her mother, Rose (Rezi), and her two youngest siblings, Bertha and Maurice (Moritz), they joined most of the family, including her father, Bernat, and four older siblings already in Chicago. Left behind in Sarospatak was their eldest brother, Abraham (Adolph) Klein, with his wife of a dozen years, Lenka Grönstein, and three children, Lajos, Arthur, and Yolanka. Already married and established in the town as the owner of the Kozpont/Central restaurant and coffeehouse, Abris, as he was affectionately known, stayed in Sarospatak where he also tended their father’s vineyard. My father, Walter, has often told the childhood story of his mother exclaiming on receiving mail from her eldest brother, “Abris hat geschrieben einen brief.” (Abris has written a letter.) Dad recalls these updates arriving into the 1920s, but did not remember any during the 1930s.
Abris and his family stayed in Hungary during the years the Nazi pestilence swept across the country. Because Granny only mentioned Abris a couple of times in family history discussions in 1977 to 1979, I mourned Abris, Lenka, Arthur, and Yolanka as victims of the Holocaust.1
In September 1980, I had lunch near Chicago with Abris’ eldest son, Dr. Lajos (Louis) Klein, and his wife, Ida Roth Klein, who emigrated from Budapest in 1960 after the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. I do not recall Ida or Lajos mentioning that his father, Abris, or siblings had lived after the war. (They mentioned a Kocsis daughter and her husband living near Detroit, but I was not able to find them then.)
In May 1982, this sense of Abris’s loss was reinforced by an experience visiting his and Granny’s hometown, Sarospatak, a beautiful college town 200 kilometers northeast of Budapest on the Bodrog River. There, on the street, I met Sandor Gelb, a wizened old man who I immediately learned had been at Auschwitz with Abris. When Istvan Derda, the vice principal of the high school (to whom I had been encouraged to write in advance of the trip to find English speakers), introduced me to Mr. Gelb as Abris’s great-nephew, the elderly gentleman burst into tears from the searing memories of Auschwitz with Abris. This experience is etched into my memory. Later, Mr. Gelb took us to the overgrown cemetery where we found Kleins, but no names recognizable as relatives.
On my visit to Sarospatak, I saw the location of Abris’ coffee house, then occupied by a government store. There I bought a colorful red, black, and white table covering for Granny who, nearly blind as she was, recognized it as Hungarian when I gave it to her shortly after my return a few months before her death in 1982, too soon to finish a long letter to her about the trip. I also met one of the town’s other remaining Jews, Erzabet Buchalter, who knew Abris, but could not, due to the language barrier, tell me anything she knew about him or his fate.
In September 1985, I received a letter from Kalman Ujszaszy, whom I had met on the 1982 trip to Sarospatak. He explained, “the Kozpont/Central restaurant and coffee house, owned by Abris/Abraham Klein, was closed by the early 1930s and used for storage until its demolition in the 1980s together with all the neighboring houses.” He added, “In the 1920s, students of the [Reformed] College often visited the place, where Jonas Janesi ‘the prima’s’ played with the best gypsy band of the town.” (On my Sarospatak visit, I had dinner and listened to gypsy music at the Hotel Bodrog with Americans of Hungarian descent.)
In September 2002, an Italian Jewish political scientist colleague, Professor Renato Mannheimer of Milan, who knew I was a researcher at Harvard, asked if I could borrow from Harvard’s Widener Library a 1946 book not available in Italy. Counted Remnant: Register of the Jewish Survivors in Budapest might include information on his family. A friend who was about to join me for lunch happened to be in the library at the time when we spoke by telephone, and he offered to find the book. She read names spelled “Manheimer,” but there were no “Mannheimers.”
The friend brought the book so I could double-check for Mannheimers and look for Sobels and Kleins, which I did not expect to find. Much to my shock, when I opened the book to Klein on page 561, there was “Klein, Abraham, Sarospatak, 1868, Schwartz, Roszalia. VIII. Rakoczi ut 9.” This was Abris! Abris survived!
While not familiar with particular individuals’ stories, I was aware that some people had survived Auschwitz. I was overjoyed and told the first person I saw. This news was tempered, however, by not finding his wife, Lenka (who would have been listed as a Klein Abrahamne). Though Dr. Klein Lajos was listed, I could not find the other children, Arthur and Yolanka (Frisch). I assumed the other Klein relatives had also perished.
The source for Counted Remnant was listed as card records created in a 1946 Budapest survey by the Hungarian Section of the American Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC). Since there appeared to be a card for each of the survivors and the American Red Cross has a Missing Persons Tracing Service, I asked the Boston branch to see if they could discover more about Abris and other Klein family members.
In the summer of 2008, the Red Cross sent Abris’ 1946 card (F-18-48, 12/15/50). It does not have much information beyond what is in Counted Remnant, except for the comment, “Hung. Jew” and source of the information “AJDC Hung. Section, Budapest/CLI New York.”2
More recently, in December 2008, the Red Cross forwarded an August 2008 letter from the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, saying that they had found Abris’ final resting place. “Mr Abraham Klein passed away in Budapest on October 11, 1952, and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Kozma utaca, Budapest in Sector 17/B, row 7, place 3.” So Abris had died and been buried in the Jewish cemetery in Budapest. May he be for a blessing.
Even more reassuring was that he was buried with his beloved wife, Lenka. “His wife, ‘Linda’ Gronstein, was buried at the same place.” So Lenka apparently survived, too! What wonderful news. Later, the Red Cross discovered that Lenka had died on March 17, 1942, so she fortunately had missed the worst of the Holocaust. Perhaps the other children survived also.3
Just recently, I have learned two more pieces of the stories of Abris, Lenka, and their children. A letter from my grandfather, Karl, to Granny Blanche mentions her oldest brother, Jake, calling Grandpa to translate a letter from Abris in February 1947, requesting financial assistance for a gravestone for Lenka in Budapest. Then, in checking family history notebooks from 1977 to 1979 for this article, I also found notes from a January 1979 conversation with Granny and the entry: “Adolph and sons—went to Vienna—died in Budapest.” At the time, I had totally missed the significance, probably because Abris was rarely referred to as Adolph, and had not followed up on the comments. The meeting a few years after with Sandor Gelb in Sarospatak had reinforced my belief that Abris and his family had perished at Auschwitz.
I have now asked the Chicago Red Cross to trace Arthur’s daughter, whose family name is something like Benedeck, whom a relative told me lived in Budapest with her husband and two children. It would be moving to meet them and find out more about how some family members survived (and others perished) during those terrible times.
Whether or not I can find any living relatives, Abris’ living through the war and concentration camp was a stunning discovery. What a blessing, Abris survived!
Notes
- Early in my research, I also learned that when the rest of the Sobel family emigrated to the United States (by the 1920s), the eldest sister of my grandfather, Karl B. Sobel, —Cecelia Szobel Wildfeuer—married to Samuel Wildfeuer, stayed in Hungary and was also transported away by the Germans in May of 1942. Samuel and Cecelia appear as numbers 98 and 99 (Helena is 100) of 542 Jews on “The Transport List of Jews from the Sabinov District, Slovakia, about May 23, 1942.” (Yad Vashem file no. 10997, item 5762539) The record indicates: “Victims (all).” Testimony of SlovakJews indicated that most of the 58,000 co-religionists were deported to the Lublin ghetto and Auschwitz, Cecelia and Sam’slikely fate.
- The Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center indicates that 596,000 of 800,000 (74%) of Hungarian Jews were among the 5,962,129 victims of the Holocaust and 204,000 (26%) among the 3,546,211 “survivors.” The same website indicates that 71,000 of 88,950 Slovak Jews (80%) were victims of the Nazis; only 17,950 (20%) were “survivors.” Toward the mitzvah of recording the names of each and every Holocaust victim, the Yad Vashem site indicates 3,800,000 names had been recorded by 2010. Though victims and survivors are inadequate terms, it is also a mitzvah to record the names and stories of all those who lived through the concentration camps, labor camps, battalions, and ghettoes and still prevailed.
- In May 2009, the Hungarian Red Cross wrote that “Mr. Artur Klein was born…on August 4, 1894 in Sarospatak. His father was Abraham Klein who owned a restaurant, his mother was Lena Grunstein….His name was not listed among deported persons.” Last year the Chicago Red Cross brought records for a Klein Arthur born in 1896, whose details did not match. In researching this article, I discovered a Klein Arthur from Budapest, born 1894, in the Yad Vashem database of Shoah victims from Hungary. In checking the source from The Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center, I could not find Arthur’s record, but learned that almost all Hungarian Holocaust victims were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Though the Yad Vashem summary record of birth year and last residence seemed to match, it was only by accessing the full record that his fate was sealed: The birth date of August 4, 1894, and parents named Abraham Klein and Karolin Gruenstein confirmed his end: Date of death: 10/1944. Arthur perished.
A political scientist, Richard Sobel has been researching family history since the 1970s and has spoken on Jewish genealogy in Cambridge and Chicago. He visited his grandmother’s hometown of Sarospatak, Hungary, in 1982 and his grandfather’s near Presov, Slovakia, in 1995. He has previously published in AVOTAYNU and Morasha.
