That was the opening salvo foreshadowing the fate of one Jewish family in the Holocaust.
The Jews of Hungary were the last to be uprooted and deported to extermination, and my family did not escape this fate. My grandfather and grandmother were sent to a concentration camp in Germany. My grandfather did not survive the harsh conditions on the journey, and died in the cattle car. My grandmother was murdered in the Ravensbrück camp.
My father was deported on the last train that left Budapest for Mauthausen. We do not know where he is buried, and I never had the privilege of reciting Kaddish for him.
There is good reason why the railway car became one of the iconic symbols of the Holocaust.
The Nazi extermination machine didn't stint on resources, and stopped at nothing to uproot the Jews and annihilate them.
Centuries of Jewish life were severed in an instant, and as the poet Itzhak Katzenelson, murdered in the Shoah, wrote, "As it rises over the town in Lithuania and Poland, the sun will no longer see a Jew shining in the window at the hour of the morning prayer."
My mother, Miriam, was unusually resourceful and courageous, and she succeeded in rescuing me, a nine-year-old child, and my six-year-old little brother, from the firing squad on the banks of the Danube.
We survived.
At the end of the war, we were lonely and destitute.
Strangers took over our home, and there was nothing left for us in Hungary.
Once again, we packed a suitcase, and set off on our nomadic journey to Eretz Israel.
On the way, in the DP camps in Germany, while we prepared to immigrate, we learned Hebrew and sang songs of Eretz Israel, but its gates and those of the rest of the world were locked to us.
In the spring of 1949, I finally saw the lights of Haifa from the sea, and I knew that I had come home.
I joined Kibbutz Shamir, and then a settlement on the Syrian border.
I was an agriculturalist, I grew cotton, and over the years, I earned a doctorate.
I developed a sensor that measures the "thirst" of trees and indicates appropriate irrigation levels.
I, the nine-year-old Jewish boy on the banks of the Danube, initiated a start-up in the State of Israel that benefits the whole world!
As a Holocaust survivor who sat glued to the radio on 29 November [1947 – the UN Resolution on the establishment of the State of Israel], and counted the votes of "Yes" and "No" with everyone else, I understood that the Jewish State is a miracle that we need to safeguard – I hope we can overcome our differences – because the Jews have no other country!
Moshe Meron
Moshe Herzog (later Meron) was born in 1935 in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, the eldest son of Tibor-Tuvia Herzog and Erzsebet-Miriam (née Menzel). His younger brother Shlomo was born three years later. Moshe's family lived with his maternal grandparents on the outskirts of Budapest, supported by their building supplies store.
In March 1944, the German Army entered Hungary. In April, the Jews were required to don a yellow star, and in May the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began. In November 1944, all the Jews in Moshe's neighborhood were ordered to gather in one building. Miriam, whose husband had been drafted into the Hungarian forced labor battalions, understood the threat. She removed the yellow badges from their clothes and, under the cover of darkness, the three boarded a tram. They traveled to the sewing shop she was supposed to report at for forced labor, but found it deserted. The next day, still without their yellow stars, they passed through the checkpoints on the Danube Bridge and reached Tibor's camp, which was located in a paper factory. During that freezing night, they used paper as blankets. Moshe's grandparents were deported the next day, never to return.
Tibor managed to provide his family with protective passports that required them to live at a certain address in Budapest. Without knowing they would never see him again, Miriam and the two children went to the building, whose occupants were protected by Vatican City passports. There they lived with another 20 people in a three-room apartment in the "Little Ghetto" ("International Ghetto"), which had been established in the city. The ghetto housed approximately 15,000 Jews who held documents provided by embassies of neutral countries.
A week later, the Jews in Moshe's building were forced to march to a nearby square. On the way, a German officer separated the able-bodied from their loved ones. Miriam held tight to her terrified sons, even when threatened with a weapon. In the park, fascist Arrow Cross men rounded the Jews up on the pretext of checking documents. Hundreds stood waiting their turn. Learning from their experience, Miriam retreated to the last row with her children. There, she bribed a policeman with her gold necklace to escort them back to their building, which was now empty. The rest of the Jews in the square were shot, and their bodies thrown into the Danube.
Until the end of the war, Moshe, Miriam and Shlomo lived in fear and starvation. Miriam cooked for the rest of the ghetto residents in exchange for food. Tibor was taken to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he died.
After the war, the family lived in European DP camps, and in 1949 they immigrated to Israel. Moshe joined Kibbutz Shamir, and began to grow cotton. He later earned a doctorate in Agricultural Science and initiated three startups. He continues his research until today. Moshe and Tova have four children and eleven grandchildren.
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