Last Letters from the Holocaust: 1944

10 February 1944

Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș), Hungary

"Beggars can't be choosers"

Last letter written by Farkas and Aranka Spirer

Farkas Spirer wrote these words in the last postcard he and his wife Aranka sent from their city of residence, Marosvásárhely, in northern Transylvania, to their brother-in-law, Hananya Kaufman (Lipot) in Bucharest.  Three months later, Farkas and Aranka were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau, together with their daughters.  Hananya survived.

The Spirers, Farkas-Ze'ev and Aranka-Leah née Geist, lived with their daughters Erna-Chana (b. 1928) and Miriam (b. 1930), in Târgu Mureș (Marosvásárhely in Hungarian), which formed part of Romania between the two World Wars. Farkas was a trader and his daughters went to Jewish schools.

In August 1940, control of the city was transferred from Romania to Hungary, and the Hungarian anti-Jewish legislation was enforced there with far more severity than in Hungary itself.  In March 1944 the Germans invaded Hungary and in early May, a ghetto was established on the site of an abandoned brick factory in Marosvásárhely. The deportation of the Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau commenced at the end of May.  They were deported on three transports, the last of which left on 6 June.  The Spirers were amongst those deported.  "According to testimonies that reached relatives", related the Spirers' niece, Chava Unger, "Aranka and the girls were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival.  Farkas passed the selection and was sent to forced labor, but was murdered when wolf-hounds were set on him." 

Mark Alman, a school friend of Erna Spirer, had started compiling a high-school yearbook, but ultimately made an album in memory of his schoolmates and teachers from the high school in Marosvásárhely murdered in the Holocaust.  Erna's name and portrait are included in the album.  "Usually," he wrote:

"we make a yearbook for high-school graduates, but regrettably, these plans were foiled by the Holocaust. We were 50 [students]; 25 of us survived."

In 1956, Freide Kaufman submitted pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem in memory of her sister, Aranka-Leah and her daughters Erna and Miriam, and in memory of another sister, Rezsin-Rachel Schwimer and her children, 8-year-old Toibe and 3-year-old Chana.

In 1988, Rachel's daughter Malka Levy submitted Pages of Testimony in memory of her uncle Farkas Spirer and other family members.  In 2007, Freide's daughter Chava Unger donated the last postcard that her aunt and uncle wrote to her parents, to Yad Vashem for posterity.  In the accompanying letter she wrote:

"Farkas Spirer, his wife Aranka and their two daughters were murdered in the Holocaust, and this postcard is perhaps the only evidence of the fact that they once existed."