

"NO" 2000-2009 War and Military


NOLAN 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.
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.
"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.
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."
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.
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."
"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.
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.

  N... Names     NO... Names     Welcome Home

NOLAN - All Categories in OGSPI