Eva Urbach

Title: Through Coloured Glass: Reflections on my changing world
Author: Eva Urbach
Publisher: Makor Jewish Community Library
Place of publication: Caulfield South, VIC
Year of Publication: 2008
Location of Book: Lamm Jewish Library, Sydney Jewish Museum, Monash University and other public libraries
Cities/town/camps: Germany: Hamburg, Berlin; Netherlands: Rotterdam; United Kingdom: London; Australia: Sydney, Melbourne
Note: those cities/towns/camps underlined are those which are most central to the narrative
Genre: Memoir
Key events/experiences: Kristallnacht; Nazi Germany; Jewish refugee; child survivor

I Still Remember is the 98-page memoir of Hungarian-born survivor David Kaye who was conscripted into the Hungarian forced labour battalion in 1943. In 1945, he was delivered to the German army in Austria where he survived after escaping from a death march to Mauthausen.

Pages 1-14 provides front matter, including introductory notes on the author’s experiences and reasons for writing his memoir. Pages 15-31 describe the lives of his parents and brother, recounting his father’s experiences as a soldier in the First World War. Pages 32-48 recall the onset of the war and his family’s wartime experiences. Pages 49-73 describe his own experiences in the Hungarian forced labour battalion. Pages 74-98 recount liberation, his post-war life in Austrian DP camps, and his eventual emigration to and life in Australia.

David Kaye was born 3 August 1922 in the Hungarian village of Sumeg to tailors Frida and Alexander Klein. He had an older brother, Imre. When David was seventeen, he left high school to learn tailoring. In 1942, David’s brother was conscripted into forced labour service. He was taken to the Russian front and never seen again

In 1943, David was conscripted in the Hungarian labour battalion and sent to a military compound in Koszeg. After two months, he was sent with a group of labourers to Uzhok in the Carpathian Mountains in modern-day Ukraine to build bunkers, toiling in freezing temperatures without adequate food. As the Russian army approached, the prisoners were marched inland, building trenches to slow the Russian advance. Retreating from the continued Russian advance, they were marched further west to the Austro-Hungarian border and brutally beaten by Arrow Cross soldiers before being delivered to the German army. Under the supervision of the Organisation Todt (the civil engineering arm of the German forced labour system), their new German captors were comparatively kind and, although still forced to dig trenches in freezing cold, the prisoners were provided better food rations and working conditions. However, SS commanders soon took over and the prisoners were again forced on a march, this time to the Mauthausen concentration camp, in brutally cold conditions, without adequate food or shelter, and subject to cruel beating if they could not keep up. Many died. David and a group of close friends managed to slip away in a rural area in the vicinity of Graz. Hiding in bushes, David witnessed German soldiers execute a group of camp prisoners. David learnt after the war that two days following their escape many of the prisoners from their march were brutally shot by the SS near the town of Eisenerz.

The group wandered the countryside searching for food and accommodation, receiving help from sympathetic farmers. In the village of Tiefernitz, David found work and shelter as a farmhand for an Austrian woman whose husband was fighting on the Russian front. His friends found work in neighbouring villages. In May 1945, the town was liberated by the Russian army and the group made the long journey back to Hungary. Upon returning to Sumeg, David discovered strangers occupying his home and moved-in with a fellow survivor. He learnt from a niece that his father and mother were murdered in Auschwitz.

After the war, David joined a Zionist group with the intention of leaving Hungary for Palestine. With the help of a Zionist organisation, Bricha, David left Hungary in April 1946 with his sister-in-law’s siblings. Crossing the border illegally into Austria, he spent another eighteen months in various DP camps whilst awaiting passage. Frustrated,  David crossed illegally into Italy but was arrested and returned to Austria. As his plans to emigrate to Palestine through Italy were routinely thwarted, in 1949, David left for Paris where he met his future wife. Married in 1950 and desperate to leave Europe, the couple applied for visas to several countries, deciding to emigrate wherever their application was first approved. Their landing permit to Australia arrived first, sponsored by a friend living in Sydney, and they arrived in 1952.

After several years working in the Sydney clothing industry, the Kayes finally established a successful furniture business. Their son Robert was born in 1955. In 1979, David returned to Hungary and Austria with his wife and son to say Kaddish for his family and those murdered during the march.

I Still Remember is the brief but intensely personal and contemplative story of the author’s life. Rather than merely recounting his own experiences, he attempts to reconstruct those of his perished family and friends, drawing on witness testimonies. The chronology is at times haphazard with the author acknowledging that the memoir was written for his grandchildren and “never intended to withstand literary or public scrutiny.” As a result, the memoir does not present a comprehensive account, preferring to adopt a writing style which honours the ‘limits’ of the author’s memory and spontaneously describes memorable episodes.