Gabriel Kern

In March, 1944 I was 11 years old and my whole world turned upside down. The German army occupied my country, Hungary, and changed the government to a puppet regime and passed several anti-Jewish laws. Jews had to wear yellow stars on their clothing, could not own businesses, had no right to attend universities, could not marry Christians, were placed in separate classrooms in public schools, were restricted from certain jobs and so on and one. My father and mother were arrested for political reasons and I had to stay with an aunt who took care of me for about a year.

In June, 1944 my parents were deported in cattle wagons to Auschwitz and were separated on arrival. It is most likely that my father (age 40_ was taken to the gas chambers shortly after and my mother became an inmate of the camp. She slept on a straw mattress on the floor in overcrowded barracks, had very little food, no medical care and suffered a lot of physical abuse. In the fall of 1944 she was shipped to Poland where she had to dig tank trap ditches for the army.

In the meantime in Budapest life got more difficult, a ghetto was established for all the Jews, there were food shortages, overcrowding in small apartments, continuous aerial bombardment, burned out buildings, looting by anti-semitic gangs and killings of Jews occasionally. Money had no value, you had to trade gold for food. I had no news, from my parents at all. In August, 1945 my 62 year old grandmother and I were arrested for no reason while walking on the street and were marched with a large group of Jews to an abandoned brick factory in the outskirts of Budapest. After two days there were some agents of Raoul Wallenberg appeared on the scene and arranged for kids and the elderly to be transported back to Budapest. We were in this group, luckily, the others were taken to concentration camps as we learned later.

In January, 1945, the Russian army surrounded Budapest and eventually captured it in a fierce battle. We spent most of the time in a bomb shelter in the basement, sitting on a wooden bench. My ankle was wounded when I once went upstairs to eat something. The arrival of the Russians liberated the Jews but the hunger persisted. We had to move to a small town where food was easier to find.

In the spring of 1945, my mother returned from German captivity, having escaped from a forced march from Poland to Germany in the dark of night. A kind German family gave her shelter for a few nights. After a happy reunion we picked up our lives again. For several years I was waiting for my father to come back .

Eventually I left Hungary , along with my first cousin and emigrated to Winnipeg Canada with a group of other teenagers who had lost parents. My mother was able to join me a year later. From Winnipeg, I moved to Montreal, where I attended McGill University and met my wife.

At the age of 25 I married my wife who at the time was 21. We settled in Brooklyn, New York and eventually had two children- Richard and Marlene. I got a Master’s degree in Physics from Columbia University at night while I worked as an electrical engineer.

Marlene Kern Fischer wrote the following about her father

“Those are some of the details of my father’s life but they don’t explain who he was. Although my father was deeply affected by the Holocaust, I never felt as if it defined him. He remained connected to his country of origin, returning to visit his relatives who remained there when he could, but he deeply appreciated all this country had to offer. I remember him taking me into the voting booth with him when I was a little girl and explaining to me how lucky we were to be able to have the right to choose our country’s leaders.

My father lost his own father when he was only 12, yet he was able to be a very nuturing and loving father himself. He taught my brother and me how to swim, ride a bike and ice skate. He loved to play games with us and was my first scrabble opponent. He did not let me win and when I finally beat him, after nearly two years of trying, I knew it was a true victory. Although English was not his first language and he spoke with a slight Hungarian accent, my dad showed a remarkable aptitude for the nuances of the language and was able to tutor me in both math and English when I needed help with my schoolwork.

My father did not speak much about the Holocaust and the horrors he had witnessed, perhaps as a way to protect me or perhaps because it was because it was too painful for him to talk about. Occasionally he would mention something, such as a last letter he received form his father before he was killed in Auschwitz, or how things were in the ghetto in which he was interned during the war. In truth I didn’t encourage him to talk about the Holocaust because as a child, I found the enormity of what he and others had gone through terrifying and hard to process. Actually as an adult, I still find it all hard to process.

Despite everything, or perhaps because of it, my father had a deep appreciation of life. He enjoyed music, especially gypsy, opera, classical and big band and was a wonderful piano player and dancer. He loved to ravel, take pictures, garden and play chess. My dad had a good sense of humor and loved to laugh, especially at his own jokes. He adored his five grandsons and was able to attend all of their bar mitzvahs, including the last one which was only a few years ago. May father was in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease at that point, however, he was able to get out of his wheelchair briefly and dance with me. I know how happy he was to be there.

I miss my dad and think about him often but I also remember the lessons he taught me about being happy and appreciating the little things in life. I see some of him in his grandchildren and I know that his legacy lives on in all of us.”