A Candle in the Heart: Memoir of a Child Survivor by Judith Mannheimer Alter Kallman; Wordsmithy 2011; ISBN 978-1-935119010-1, 315 pages, price unlisted.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO–This is an unusual Holocaust memoir because it moves from a child’s terror to her comfort, back to terror and then to reassurance, in a journey that takes readers from Czechoslovakia to Hungary to Great Britain to Israel and finally to the United States.
Judith Mannheimer’s childhood memories include the peace and tranquility of Shabbat in her home in Piestany, Czechoslovakia, where she was born in 1937. They also include living on the run after the pro-Nazi Hlinka took over the country. In 1941, the child Judith had to use an outhouse situated over a stream and fell through the seat into the mucky waters below. Somehow she was able to climb back up to safety, but the terrifying experience made her wary of using strange toilets. In 1942, she was at nursery school when her parents and other family members were arrested at their home. Separated from their parents, Judith and three remaining siblings were farmed out to relatives. Nevertheless, they were watched in horror as their parents were loaded on the trains, never to return.
From then on an orphan, five-year-old Judith, two older brothers and a sister were smuggled to Budapest, Hungary, where they divided into pairs. Judith and her brother Bubi were captured and put into the Conti Street prison. Word of the little girl in prison spread through Budapest’s Jewish community and Maurice and Ilonka Stern, owners of the well-known Sterns’ restaurant in the Jewish quarter, took the little girl in, showering her with affection, and giving her a home in which to recover.
Only it couldn’t last, the Nazis overthrew the Hungarian government in 1944, and Judith, now 7, was forced with her brothers and sister to wear a yellow star and to live in the ghetto that was built in the vicinity of the Sterns’ home. Eventually, the Sterns moved with Judith into hidden quarters in the ‘Glass House,’ a former glass factory that Switzerland’s representative Carl Lutz set up as a sanctuary north of the Jewish quarter. The Sterns took over responsibility for cooking for 3,000 Jews who were hiding in tunnels and byways the Glass House, as well as for another 12,000 Jews in other safe houses established by the Swiss.
On December 31, 1944, members of the Arrow Cross began pulling people out of Glass House hiding places, lining them up and shooting them one at a time. Stern and Judith were forced into that line, but before the executioners could reach them, a convoy of the Swiss Red Cross and the Swiss diplomatic corps pulled up, forcing the Arrow Cross to hastily depart.
On January 18, 1945, Russian troops liberated Pest, and a month later the Soviets captured Buda, across the Danube River. Judith’s former life with the Sterns resumed all too briefly; Ilonka Stern fell ill. When she died, the bereft Maurice sent Judith to a children’s camp in Hungary, from which she ran away. When she reached Budapest, she collapsed physically, requiring many weeks of rehabilitation. Maurice subsequently married a beautiful woman, who wanted no part of someone else’s child. So Maurice sent Judith to a mountain camp in Czechoslovakia. With her contact with the Sterns severed, Judith was gathered up by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld and placed in a post-war Kindertransport to England. She stayed with a reserved, Orthodox foster family while attending a school run by Schonfeld. Their lack of warmth persuaded her, at age 13, to migrate to Israel, where she lived at the Kfar Baya youth village in Ra’anana.
The English that she had learned served her well in Israel because she was able to serve as a tour guide for many English-speaking visitors, including a young man who would become her first husband, Howard Alter, to whom she was wed at age 18 on December 28, 1955. Alter brought her to New York.
They owned a business called Howard Notions and Trimming Company, and eventually had three children. Learning American ways, and avoiding anything that would remind her of her childhood in Europe, Judith was happy being a suburban housewife. But in 1972, her husband’s life was claimed by cancer.
Now on her own again, Judith took care of her children rather than being the recipient of care. This enabled her to grow psychologically into a more independent person. Instead of rushing into the security of another marriage, she waited until June 3, 1981 to marry attorney Irwin Kallman, the second marriage for each . By 1983 she was a grandmother, and today she is a great-grandmother.
Such is the outline of an unusual life. Beyond these bare facts, however, this book is worth reading because it provides insight into the human spirit, and how even the youngest and most fragile among us can survive incredible trauma.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com