In November 1944, widow Karolin Lieferánt was incarcerated in the Budapest ghetto, after which she disappeared without a trace. Her married daughters, Henrietta Steinitz and Paula Swartz, went to the ghetto to look for her, were caught on the street by Arrow Cross men and sent on a death march towards Austria. On 20 November 1944, they sent a postcard from Győr. This missive was the last sign of life from either of them. Their husbands, László Steinitz and László-Simcha Swartz, were murdered in the course of their service in the Hungarian Army labor battalions. Karolin's four sons – Izsák, Richard, Károly and Leopold were also murdered. Her daughters-in-law and her grandchildren survived.
The names Karolin, Izsák, Richard, Károly and Leopold Lieferánt, Henrietta and László Steinitz and Paula and László-Simcha Swartz are documented in the Book of Names, nine of the 4,800,000 names of Holocaust victims that have been collected by Yad Vashem and are commemorated in this monumental installation. This is their story.
Armin Lieferánt and his wife Karolin née Mauser lived in Budapest and ran a haberdashery store. They had three daughters, Henrietta (b. 1904), Paula (b. 1906) and Gisela (b. 1910), and four sons, Izsák (b. 1905), Richard (b. 1914), Károly and Leopold-Poldi. Gisela was killed in an accident in 1932.
In April 1930, Henrietta married László Steinitz. In 1931, their daughter Hermine (Aviva) was born, and two years later, they had a son, Georg (Mordechai). László was a wholesaler of processed meat products, and Henrietta had a haberdashery store. Paula Lieferánt married László-Simcha Swartz, and they both worked in the grocery store located at the entrance to their home. Their daughter Ilona was born in 1935. Two of Henrietta and Paula's four brothers got married; Richard, a textile engineer, married Anna Cohen and they had a daughter, Katy. Izsák, a chemist, married Dr. Erzsébet Laufer and their daughter Erica was born in 1941. The other two brothers remained single: Károly, a textile weaver by trade, who enjoyed drawing and writing poetry, and Leopold, who was a trader.
The extended Lieferánt family was very close-knit, and led a traditional Jewish lifestyle. The married children lived close to their parents. They would attend synagogue together, and share holiday meals at the family home. In 1942, Armin passed away, and Karolin continued to run the store. The same year, her sons and sons-in-law were recruited to the Hungarian Army labor battalions. Some of them served near Budapest, and used to come home on furlough from time to time. In 1943, Henrietta, Paula and their children moved in with Karolin.
On 19 March 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary. "That day, Father and Uncle [László Swartz] were at home, on furlough from the army," relates Mordechai. "In the afternoon, a Hungarian soldier arrived and requested that they return to camp in light of the situation, and they went back."
The following day, a national Jewish Council (Judenrat) was established in Budapest, and on 15 April, the Jews were forced to wear the Yellow Star on their clothes. Between May-July 1944, approximately 435,000 Jews from outlying Hungarian cities were deported to extermination at Auschwitz. In June, the Jews of Budapest were ordered to move to specific houses that were marked with a yellow star, and their movements were restricted. Karolin's house was one of the marked houses, and people who were not family members moved in.
On 15 October, the Arrow Cross, a radical right-wing party that was pro-Nazi and antisemitic, took power in Hungary, and the persecution of the Jews of Budapest began. Some 25,000 Jews, both men and women, were taken from the marked houses for forced labor, and beginning on 6 November, were forced on death marches. Jews recruited for forced labor and those caught on the streets and in the houses of Budapest were marched in the direction of Austria. Survivors of these death marches were handed over to the Germans and sent to concentration camps.
In November 1944, a ghetto was established in Budapest. Mordechai relates:
Policemen came to the house and told us to pack what we could carry, because we were moving to the ghetto. We left the house… We took clothes, cooked food, and we went on foot… Father was in the labor camp at the time, and we walked with Grandma, who was sick. After walking for about 100 meters, a Hungarian soldier came and inquired about the Steinitz and Swartz families… He gave us Swedish letters of protection, one for us and one for my aunt and her daughter [Paula and Ilona Swartz]… We reached the banks of the Danube and we had to cross the river. The ghetto was established in Pest. There were already many Jews there… They asked who had letters of protection, and sent us to the right. The others, including Grandma, were sent to the left and continued on to the ghetto… We arrived at one of the protected houses [houses in Budapest that were designated for Jews with letters of protection issued for them by neutral countries: Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and the Vatican].
The next day, I went with my aunt [Paula] towards the ghetto. It was so hard for us that we were here and Grandma was in the ghetto. On the way, we saw a group of Jewish forced laborers. Among them were Father and Uncle [László Swartz, Paula's husband]. They brought us food. We tried to enter the ghetto, but we didn't succeed. We went back, and that was that. My mother didn't give up, and the next day, she went again with my aunt. They took the letters of protection with them, which were considered akin to an insurance policy. They left and didn’t come back.
Aviva, Mordechai and Ilona remained in the protected house. A few days later, their aunt, Erzsébet, who was living under an assumed identity, came, took them out of there and moved them to different places in Budapest and outside of the city. Erzsébet made sure that the children had places to hide until liberation.
On 20 July 1944, Henrietta Steinitz and Paula Swartz wrote a postcard to their children from Győr. The postcard was addressed to a Mrs. Berger, who was living in the same protected house as the children. They apologized for having left the children, and promised to return as soon as possible. To their children, they wrote that they should behave well until their return. That was the last sign of life received from Henrietta and Paula.
In February 1945, the Red Army liberated Budapest. The children waited for their parents to return, and moved between relatives and institutions. Their grandmother, parents, aunts and uncles did not come back. They were amongst the tens of thousands of Budapest Jews murdered on the banks of the Danube, on the death marches to Austria, and in the concentration camps.
In April 1946, Aviva and Mordechai immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) through the Youth Aliya. They sailed on the "Champollion" together with some 1,000 child and teenage Holocaust survivors, and settled in Kibbutz Nan. Ilona immigrated to Israel in 1959.
In 1985, Mordechai Shacham (Steinitz) submitted Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem in memory of his grandmother Karolin Lieferánt, his parents Henrietta and László Steinitz, his aunt and uncle Paula and László -Simcha Swartz, and his uncles, Richard, Izsák, Károly and Leopold Lieferánt. In 2013, documents and photographs of the Lieferánt, Steinitz and Swartz families were donated to Yad Vashem as part of the national project, "Gathering the Fragments", including a Hebrew translation of a poem that Károly Lieferánt wrote in hiding in Budapest before he was caught and murdered:
Will I merit this?
Worn and crushed
But joyful and grateful
With an aching body and a heavy heart
I will arrive at the front door in my city (Budapest)
And I will kneel on the cold, hard threshold
And there, I will wail, sobbing, "Thank you, oh Lord!"
Will I merit this?
