Murray Deutsch recently visited Alfred State
College and did a presentation about his family’s experiences during WWII. His
parents were born in Czechoslovakia, which is known today as Ukraine. His dad
was a traveling teacher and his mother was rich, spoiled, owned property and
lived on a farm. After graduating high school his mother went to Budapest to
attend college and worked as a wig maker. She was a social butterfly and
networked with many people. As time passed it became common knowledge that an
event, later known as the Holocaust, was occurring. The Holocaust began because
Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Third Reich, had convinced the German populace
that they were a superior race. The goal of the Holocaust was to target and methodically irradiate
mass numbers of Jewish descendents to create a superior race. This irradiation
would create expanded opportunities for German leadership and living regions
for the new German race. The Holocaust occurred predominately during WWII, from
1941-1945. This genocide became known as the largest in modern history.
It became obvious
to his mother and father that the Jewish population was being targeted. They
feared that they would be transported
by freight train to specially built extermination camps where, if they survived
the journey, they would be systematically killed in gas chambers. His
mother and father needed to become creative to be able to survive. Because of
her social connections his mother was saved because others assisted her to
become a nun in disguise. She worked in a hospital that fronted as providing
health care, but actually took in people that were Jewish to hide them from the
Nazi’s control and extermination. His dad however was captured and placed in a
labor concentration camp and was continuously in fear that he would die. He
noticed a huge pile of trash in the middle of the camp and he decided to crawl
underneath it and hide for three days and nights. After hearing that the
fighting and yelling had ceased, he crawled out and slipped out of the camp and
headed towards Budapest. He eventually escaped to the refugee hospital where he
met his future wife, the nun. They fell in love and were married a short time
later.
After the war ended they
traveled back to her childhood home but found it occupied by another family and
were told to leave. This was not uncommon for survivors to not be able to
recover their own personal property after surviving the war. They had nowhere
to live, but they heard about survivor refugee camps located in Turio, Italy,
where his parents relocated and lived for a few years. During their time there
they had two children, his brother and himself. During their time in Italy they
repeatedly applied for paperwork to move the United States and eventually
arrived in the States.
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