Ilona Mermelstein says there were three specific moments during the Holocaust when she was saved from almost certain death. Three hinge points that led to her being an year-old grandmother living in a comfortable Vancouver apartment, rather than being among the , Hungarian Jews murdered in the closing months of the Second World War. If Kiss had gone only a few steps further, her fate would have been sealed: Deportation to the Kistarcsa transit camp outside the city, before ultimately being loaded onto a cattle car for the kilometre journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Left on her own, the seven-year-old Mermelstein, then known by the last name Kiss, would have been swiftly rounded up by Hungarian authorities and placed on her own cattle car for Auschwitz. If she survived the journey, she would have been immediately dispatched — along with all the other children on the train — to one of the four gas chambers active in the camp during the summer of Instead, her mother returned home and began making plans to go into hiding.
Her grandparents ran a jewelry and clock repair shop, her father had been conscripted into the Hungarian Air Force and Mermelstein was in first grade. Mermelstein and her family were members of the last intact Jewish population in continental Europe. The family shop remained open. Mermelstein continued to attend school. Like thousands of other Jewish men, her father Daniel had been forced into dangerous labour service with the Hungarian military, and had almost been killed in a training accident.
But he remained in touch with his family, and was even able to slip out on occasion for quick visits home. All this was due to the ironic fact that Hungary was a close ally of the Nazis. This newsletter tackles hot topics with boldness, verve and wit. Subscriber-exclusive edition on Fridays. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.
The next issue of Platformed will soon be in your inbox. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. The Horthy government had spent the war purging Jews from the civil service, stripping them of the right to vote and banning intermarriage. But the Hungarian government had repeatedly ignored German demands to subject its own Jewish population to their Final Solution. By , with the war having decisively turned against Nazi Germany, it would have been easy to imagine that Hungary would emerge from the war as an oasis of Jewish safety.
