Thomas Foster

Title: Frozen Boots: A story of love and survival
Author: Thomas Foster
Publisher: Sydney Jewish Museum
Place of publication: Darlinghurst, NSW.
Year of Publication: 2006
Location of Book: Lamm Jewish Library, Sydney Jewish Museum, State Library of NSW and National Library of Australia.
Cities/towns/camps: Hungary: Budapest; Russia: Bryansk; Ukraine: Kiev; France: Marseille; Australia: Sydney.
Note: those cities/towns/camps underlined are those which are most central to the narrative.
Genre: Memoir
Key events/experiences: Hungarian labour brigade survivor; false papers; survival in hiding.

Frozen Boots is the autobiography of Thomas Foster, a Hungarian-Jew who survived slave labour in the Hungarian labour brigade on the Eastern Front and who after the war rebuilt his life in Sydney. Of Tom’s group of 240 Jewish boys who left Budapest for the Russian front, he was one of only eight known survivors.

Pages 1-27 recount his time in the Hungarian labour brigade from July 1940 until April 1943. Pages 28-51 detail the author’s harrowing journey from the forests of Eastern Ukraine to Budapest from 1943-1944 as Hungarian forces fled the advancing Red Army. Pages 52-64 cover the Nazi Occupation of Hungary in 1944 and Tom’s experiences in hiding in Budapest. Pages 65-105 describe the author’s upbringing in pre-war Hungary. Pages 106-148 recount the author’s migration to Sydney, his new life in Australia, and travels in Europe and Israel during the 1950s and 60s. Pages 149-83 continue to describe the author’s life in Sydney, his successful business, his life with wife Juci and the growth of their family.

Tom Fruchter (now Foster) was born on 21 November 1917 in Budapest, the only child of Josefa and Herman Fruchter. Tom was raised in a poor, religious Jewish household. Less than six months after Tom’s Bar Mitzvah, his father fell ill and died in 1931. To make ends meet, Tom first worked as a hair-dresser in a small Hungarian village, Cegled, and later as a labourer at a demolition site on the outskirts of Budapest. In September 1938 he met and fell in love with his future wife, Juci.

After the onset of the war, in July 1940, Tom was conscripted into the Hungarian army. In accordance with antisemitic legislation, he was placed in a Jewish brigade that was forced to labour on the eastern front. His group was sent to the Ukrainian border to aid the advancing Hungarian army by building roads, removing trees and performing other labour tasks, without adequate food or shelter. Thankfully, Tom’s mother who had important Christian contacts was able to secure several temporary discharges for Tom. During one of these respites in Budapest, in June 1942, Tom was able to marry Juci before being forced to return to the front. At the Russian-Ukrainian border, in the Bryansk forest, Tom’s brigade was subject to raids by Jewish and Soviet partisans. In his brigade, Tom built a close relationship with Hachek, another young Jew, a friendship that was crucial to their mutual survival. The Jewish labourers were forced to perform life-threatening work, crawling in the snow to locate and defuse mines. They were frequently subjected to cruel punishment for the entertainment of the Hungarian officers. In wintertime, they had to lie naked in the freezing snow and many froze to death.

In January 1943, as partisans and the Russian army broke through the German front, the Hungarian army was ordered to return home. Over many long months, Tom travelled in the snow, often having to take cover from Russian fighter jets all whilst enduring starvation and abuse by Hungarian officers who forced him to dig graves for his fallen comrades. He contracted pneumonia and then typhus, and after developing a severe tooth infection he had three teeth pulled out with pliers, without anaesthesia. One night, whilst taking refuge in the barn of a Russian villager, Tom awoke to find his boots had frozen solid. For a brief time, Tom and Hachek worked for the Wehrmacht to receive better rations until they were able to secure passage by train to Budapest.

In 1944, Hungary was occupied by German forces and antisemitic measures increased. Tom and Juci’s family were forced into the Budapest ghetto and Tom was again taken as a slave labourer, this time at the Siemens factory in the outskirts of Budapest. He avoided deportation to the camps on several occasions and once managed to flee to his mother’s hiding place in Budapest. Juci, who herself escaped an Aktion in the ghetto, was rescued by an elderly Christian woman who hid her. Tom’s mother was once again able to use her contacts to secure false papers for the family and they hid in an apartment in Buda during the siege of the city, enduring  hunger and Russian bombs. In January 1945, when the Soviet army occupied the city, Tom and his family endured further harassment, this time by Russian soldiers.

Although they were able to move to their pre-war apartment and Tom found clerical work in the police department, life under communism was difficult. Tom’s Uncle Willie, who had emigrated to Sydney in the 1930s, convinced Tom to join him. Juci gave birth to their son, Gyuri on 5 July 1946. Using contacts in the new Communist government, Tom obtained passports for his wife, child and mother. On 20 February 1947, the Fruchter family, with the assistance of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, travelled to Paris where they stayed for four months until they were able to secure passage to Sydney from Marseille. Travelling through the Americas and French Polynesia, they arrived in Sydney on 29 September 1947.

Frozen Boots describes in rich detail the author’s experiences as a Hungarian labour brigade survivor, paying close attention to the landscape, local actors and everyday life on the eastern front. The memoir is written in chronological order with the exception of chapter eight, which is devoted to the author’s family history. It was written with the help of the author’s family and the Sydney Jewish Museum’s “Community Stories Project”, and is part of the Museum’s collection of survivor testimonies.