Not a blatant case that would shock in its singular horror
In 1957, Yad Vashem launched an international essay competition with the aim of collecting personal memories about the decimated Jewish communities and the fate of Jews during the Shoah, for future generations. The contest aimed to maintain the memories of the Holocaust and ensure that the world would never forget the atrocities committed against the Jewish people. Participants could choose to write about a single event or narrate their story throughout the entire war. The personal stories could be related to various aspects such as the ghettos, labour battalions, deportation, concentration camps, liberation, escape or aliya.
Entrants were requested to write about community life, anti-Semitic politics, resistance, and relations between Jews and non-Jews during the Holocaust. It was important for authors to describe not only general events but also daily life. Yad Vashem emphasized that authors should only include their personal stories and not rely on hearsay or what they had read about. They were promised that their memoirs would only be seen by historians and that nothing would be published without their consent. However, today the pieces are available in digitised form on the Yad Vashem website. Most likely, they have not yet been used in publications.
Two hundred works were submitted from fifteen countries. This is a significant number, considering that twelve years after the war, Holocaust survivors still rarely spoke about their experiences, and even then, mostly among close family only.
Amongst others, entries were received from authors born or living in Hungary or in Hungarian-inhabited areas of the surrounding countries. These include Éva Beregi, who managed to leave the country on a Kasztner train, Gábor Horovitz, who wrote a play in Hebrew about his experiences, or Zvi Erez, who was rescued by Raoul Wallenberg.
A Győr-born survivor, Helén Keller submitted a piece too, which is to be found in the Yad Vashem Archive under file number O.39/65. In six pages, she summarises her experiences of the Holocaust and the journey with her husband to Eretz Israel in a clear, curt, and objective manner. At the onset of the essay, the author reveals hesitating for a long time about entering the contest or not, due to previous rejections of her earlier poetic work by Israeli newspapers. Eventually, it was published by a Hungarian newspaper in New York, ‘Az Ember’ (The Human), depicted by her as “dogmatic Christian”. Her opus was titled ‘Hell Unleashed’.
Helén was born in 1928 into a Jewish merchant family. While most of her relatives had converted to Catholicism early on, her family remained Jewish, although they were not observant. In 1939, she was refused admission to the state grammar school on the grounds of numerus clausus. She had the opportunity to study in a Christian school where she was treated well and not discriminated against. However, her Jewish consciousness grew. In autumn 1943, she was no longer permitted to attend this school either. She became a private student at the Jewish school in Debrecen.
Meanwhile, her father was conscripted into the labour battalion in 1940, where he was severely abused, and subsequently fell ill, leading to his discharge. In March 1944, the Keller family’s store and apartment were seized, and they were sent to the Győr ghetto. Just before the deportation, Helén’s mother suggested that the family commit suicide, but Helén resisted, and the plan was eventually dropped. Although she had the opportunity to escape, she chose to stay with her mother: “I was unwilling to leave my mother alone. Today, I’m grateful that I stayed with, otherwise I would have never been able to forgive myself my mother’s death.”
They were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where on an occasion she defended her mom, and had therefore a confrontation with the ‘Lagerälteste’. Her bravery earned respect, and the woman even supported her later on. They went through the hell of Ravensbrück and Berlin Reinickendorf-Ost. During a selection, her weakened mother was taken away but at the last moment, with incredible presence of mind, she managed to get her out of a locked room, which later turned out to be the gas chamber. Helén describes several other instances where her determination saved her mother’s life. In the last days of the war, they were forced to build a barricade around Berlin and were eventually forced in a death march towards Sachsenhausen. They never arrived there because their guards escaped and finally the Red Army freed the prisoners.
Upon returning to Győr, Helén did not stay for long, as her family had been stripped of everything and she was treated like a stranger. Instead, she went to Budapest. There she met her future husband (whose surname was presumably József, although it is not clear).
Together, they left Hungary illegally with the intention of making aliya via Italy but ended up stranded there for two years. They eventually got married in Rome. They escaped to France but were deported back. They managed to board an illegal immigrant boat in Italy. By this time, they had a baby already. The young family finally arrived in Haifa via an internment camp in Cyprus in November 1947. Life in Israel was also challenging. Helén’s husband, a sculptor by profession, took a job in a horticulture, then volunteered to fight in the first Arab-Israeli war, and later joined the police. Meanwhile, their second child was born, and Helén became a teacher. Her health deteriorated.
Here the story of József Keller Helén ends. Unfortunately, we do not know what happened to her later, and she does not talk about the fate of her parents either. According to a testimony kept at Yad Vashem her mother was murdered in Ravensbrück.
“In my work, I am not dealing with a blatant case that would shock in its singular horror, Instead, I wanted to expose to our people the collective, terrible tragedy of Jewry; I want you not to forget! And do not let others forget!”- Helén József Keller wrote in the introduction.
Written and translated by György Polgár
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my cousin Esther Bánki, Director of the Van ‘t Lindenhoutmuseum in the Netherlands, who drew my attention to the essay of József Keller Helén,
and
Anna Rinenberg of the Yad Vashem Archives for the background information she provided. Yad Vashem file number: Yad Vashem Archive O.39/65.
Epilogue to the story of Helén Keller
Our reader Katalin Váradi, whose father knew Helén Keller’s father, wrote the following:
“I am quite certain that this is Keller Hella, the daughter of my father’s childhood friend Lajos Keller.
I met Hella long after the change of regime through my father. She was no longer a teacher but a professional accountant. Her husband, Menyhért Bar Josafat – from the city of Máramarossziget – was a very dominant personality. I think he was in the army at the time and was an internationally renowned painter. They had two sons, the eldest, Ici, an architect and father of four, who died at a relatively young age. The younger son, a policeman, became disabled and then happened to become a naturopath and probably had two children.
Hella has visited Hungary several times, including with her grandchildren. Once, at one of her earlier schools, she spoke to the pupils about the Holocaust, and they occasionally visited her father’s grave, as they had promised. I tried to track her down through my Israeli contacts, but as she had moved after Menyhért’s death, I wasn’t successful”.
Her husband, whose Hebrew name became Yehuda Bar Yoshafat, created sculptures and paintings that sometimes still appear at auctions. This is what one can find out about him about him on the internet:
„Yehuda Bar Yoshafat (1922-1993) – studied painting and sculpting at the Budapest academy by the renouned Hungarian artist Kisfaludy, Strobl Zsigmond. During the Holocaust period he moved from one labor camp to the other, ran away several times and survived by miracle after he was sentenced to death. between the years 1945-47 he lived in Italy, where he hed his first two solo exhibitions. In November 1947 he immigrated to Israel. Between the years 1955-1983 he held 7 solo exhibtions of sculpting and painiting across Israel.
In March 1982 29 of his works decorated the Opera performance of “The Emperor of Atlantis”, written in the Theresienstadt Ghetto and performed at the Tel Aviv Culture Palace (Heichal Hatarbut) Charles Bronfman Auditorium. Was among the founders of the Painters and Sculptors Union in Be’er Sheva and the South.”
My thanks to Katalin Váradi for the valuable information and to Esther Bánki for sending me the Győr list.
György Polgár