Albert Halm

Title: My Handwriting Saved Me: Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor
Author: Albert Halm
Publisher: Self-Published
Place of Publication: Randwick, NSW
Year of Publication: 2017
Location of Book: Sydney Jewish Museum and some public libraries. Kindle eBook available.
Cities/towns/camps: Slovakia: Bratislava; Ukraine: Tchorna Tisa, Jasina; Hungary: Mátészalka ghetto; Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau; Austria: Mauthausen, Ebensee forced labour camp; France: Paris; Israel: Haifa; Australia: Sydney.
Note: those cities/towns/camps underlined are those which are most central to the narrative.
Genre: Memoir
Key events/experiences: ghetto; concentration camp; prisoner-functionary.

My Handwriting Saved Meis the 255-page memoir of Holocaust survivor Albert Halm who grew up in the borderlands of Subcarpathian Ruthenia before being deported to the concentration camps in 1944. In Ebensee, his elegant handwriting secured him a clerical position at the Jewish hospital where, at risk of execution, he secretly compiled a list of Jewish inmates murdered by the Nazis, now preserved in the Yad Vashem archives.

Pages 1-40 trace the author’s ancestry and family history. Pages 41-81 describe his childhood and village life in Tchorna Tisa. Pages 82-114 detail cultural and religious life in the region and explore Jewish-Christian relations. Pages 115-53 recount his schooling and antisemitic restrictions under Ukrainian, Hungarian and German occupation. Pages 153-71 describe his internment in the Mátészalka ghetto, and deportation to Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Ebensee. Pages 172-95 cover liberation, his return to Prague and emigration to Australia. Pages 196-243 reflect on his return travels to Europe, and the lives of his surviving relatives. The memoir concludes with an appendix of historical documents, photographs, and a timeline.

Albert Halm was born Vojtech Rosenberg on 10 October 1926 in Bratislava, the illegitimate child of Nachuma Halm and Josef Rosenberg. A year after his birth, he was brought to the remote village of Tchorna Tisa in the Carpathian Mountains to be raised by his grandparents. The family were devout Orthodox-Jewish farmers and lived in austere conditions.

In 1931, Albert began attending a Czech public school and Cheder in Jasina. After the Ukrainian occupation in 1938, Jewish students were expelled from public schools. When Hungary annexed the region in March 1939, the family changed their name to avoid antisemitic scrutiny and Albert became Bela Halm. Antisemitic restrictions intensified as Hungarian forces mobilised Jewish labour brigades, imposed curfews on the Jews and denied them ration coupons, forcing fourteen-year-old Albert to take a clerical job with the forestry office to support himself and his struggling family.

As Nazi rule spread across Europe, Jewish refugees arrived in the region with reports of atrocities, only to be met with brutality by Hungarian border patrols. Despite the risk of severe punishment, the Halm family occasionally sheltered refugees in their cellar and barn loft until 1943, when Hungarian officers partially commandeered the home.

In March 1944, Nazi Germany occupied the region. The following month, SS officers arrested the family and brought them to a holding centre in Jasina. After several days, they were interned in the Mátészalka ghetto. Weeks later, Albert was transported to Auschwitz, where he was selected for forced labour and sent to Mauthausen.

Albert was later transferred to the Ebensee forced labour camp. There, prisoners survived on watery broth and occasional scraps of horse meat, while enduring back-breaking quarry work. Corpses accumulated in heaps; when the crematorium could not cope,  the inmates were forced to dig vast pits between barracks to burn the dead, filling the camp with smoke and stench.

After contracting chickenpox, Albert was moved to the infectious disease ward of the Jewish hospital, where he hid among the sickest patients to avoid selection. Aided by the compassionate German-Christian prisoner-functionary Ernest, Albert secured a position as a cleaner. Due to his elegant handwriting Albert was later assigned clerical duties and served as the unofficial Blockschreiber (record keeper) responsible for recording patient details.

At great personal risk, Albert began secretly duplicating death records, preserving the names and dates of over 1,600 murdered inmates. When rumours of evacuation circulated, he buried the records beneath the hospital floor. The following day, SS men with sniffer dogs searched the hospital and burned official documents, but Albert’s cache remained undiscovered.

The evacuation never took place and the SS abandoned Ebensee shortly before liberation on 6 May 1945. Albert retrieved the buried records, which survive today in the Yad Vashem archives. Severely malnourished and suffering from a leg infection, he spent two weeks in hospital before being repatriated to Prague, where he reunited with his mother and received aid from the Catholic Charita.

In Prague, Albert worked for a government agency tasked with reclaiming stolen Jewish property and began training as a radio technician. Confronted by painful memories, however, he resolved to emigrate and secured landing permits to Australia. Aided by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), he relocated to Paris for two months before sailing aboard the SS Teti from Marseille to Haifa. Stranded in Mount Carmel for two months during the civil war, he finally departed for Australia aboard the SS Partizanka, arriving in Sydney in early 1948 when aged 21.  He was supported by the Jewish Welfare Society.

Determined to resume his education, Albert enrolled at Petersham College. After graduating in 1953, he studied Medical Radiography, eventually becoming Chief Radiographer at Prince of Wales Hospital and receiving the Order of Australia Medal in 1983 for his services to Medicine. In 1956, he married Ruth Denoff and they had two children, Peter and Bonita.

Throughout his life, Albert remained active in Holocaust commemoration. He attended the first World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem in 1981 and subsequently founded the Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (AAJHS). Under his leadership, the AAJHS hosted the first International Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Sydney in 1985. In 1989, he published The Gift of Life, a commemorative volume preserving the papers presented at the World  Gathering.

After being interviewed by the Shoah Foundation in 1992, Albert began writing his memoir, completing it shortly before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. After his death in 2013, his children edited his manuscript for publication.

My Handwriting Saved Me is a candid and richly detailed autobiography of the author’s life and wartime experiences. It offers an in-depth portrait of the history, geography and cultural life of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, particularly the author’s hometown, and provides extensive reflections on peasant life, Orthodox Jewish traditions, and Jewish-Christian relations in the region. Further, while the narrative offers only brief reference to Mauthausen and Auschwitz it provides a vivid description of life in Ebensee. Readers should note some typographical errors in the historical timeline (e.g. the author was deported to Mauthausen in the spring of 1944, not 1945). Editorial additions include footnotes, a family tree, photographs, maps, and a timeline.