Unfinished conversation with Péter Bánki, Holocaust survivor from Győr
Péter is 87 years old, born in Győr in 1938.
Our fragmentary and sometimes vague conversation took place by phone at the end of December 2024. By mid-January this year, we intended to clarify the ambiguous parts of the discussion at a personal meeting in Győr and Péter also wanted to hand over family photographs for publication. However, this meeting did not take place. On the day of our planned meeting, I travelled to Győr, not living there, and rang his apartment in vain. From the neighbours I learnt that he had been hospitalised for serious health reasons in the meantime. I managed to visit him in the hospital, but of course we were unable to continue our conversation there. When I called one of his sons after the visit, he refused any further contact. I could not find his other son.
This is our fourth post with a Holocaust survivor from Győr. I am not aware of any other survivers from Győr. I cannot verify with Péter the details of his life story learnt on the phone any more.
However, I feel obliged to publish these fragments as a tribute to Péter Bánki assuming the ethical risk of publishing this document without his consent. Dots in the text indicate a lack of data and uncertainty about the information received.
About Péter’s parents …
… I came to the world in 1938 …
… my father was born into a Jewish family. … he was taken into a forced labour camp … I can hardly remember him because he died in 194… on the Eastern Front, in the Tula region of Russia. I don’t know the cause of his death, maybe he was shot, maybe he got flectyphus … So I ended up half orphaned. My father’s death affected my whole life…
Life after the death of his father
I have vague memories … for a while in Győr, in the 1940s, I was imprisoned with my mother because I walked down the street in a transparent jacket made of nylon-like material and we didn’t pin the yellow star on the outside of the jacket. I remember a big prison cell, we didn’t have a bed, there must have been about a hundred of us crammed together …
Another thing I remember is that my mother and I went to Bishop Vilmos Apor of Győr to request his help so that we could be baptised and escape persecution … The bishop gave us a Catholic prayer book … I remember that we were hiding in Győr with a parish priest called Szelestey … (Béla Szelestey (1903-1986) was a pastor from 1935, then a parish priest in Győr-Nádorváros; source – ed.)
June 1944 …
We were not deported …
After the war …
For a while I was sent to a Jewish organisation ORZSA (?) in Budapest. They looked after orphaned Jewish children and taught Zionist ideas … I remember we sang Zionist songs …
I have the feeling that my mother wanted to get rid of me somehow, because without my father, that is, without her husband, she basically resisted to take me in. She wanted to restart her shattered life and married Gyula Steiner, who was the owner of a locksmith’s shop in Győr and later worked as an independent master (Gyula Steiner was the President of the Győr Jewish Community in the 1960s – ed.) … I had a bad relationship with my mother’s new husband …
… I completed one or two classes in Győr, then I was sent to live with my mother’s brother in Pest, where I continued my schooling … after a while I wrote a letter to my mother because I wanted to return to Győr …
I went back to my mother, but I was still a burden in the family. My stepfather worked all day …, my mother was busy with the housework … Several times they told me, almost as a threat, that I would be sent to Pannonhalma to study at the boarding school there so that I would become a “little priest” …
After an argument I left our home …
How did your later life turn out?
I graduated from the Győr Music Secondary School, popularly known as the “Conservatory”, in violin. As I did not have a home, the school allowed me to practice for my classes there … later I continued my violin studies at the Győr Music Teacher Training Institute for further three years and obtained a teacher’s diploma … (by that time, music teacher training in Győr was connected to the Budapest Academy of Music, later it became an independent college, and, finally, this institution was merged into the University of Győr – ed.)
For a while I was a member of the orchestra Líra (?) … with whom we played in Balatonfüred in the summers …
… for decades I taught at the Liszt Ferenc Music School in Győr. … in the seventies I was a member of the Győr Philharmonic Orchestra and played also in the Győr Theatre Orchestra…
With the help of my paternal uncle, I bought a flat … and got married. I lived 58 years with my wife, who died a year ago of cancer …
Today
After my retirement … I played the violin in a trio for a few years with other musicians of my age, then the trio was dissolved, for a while two of us continued to play together … today I don’t touch the violin anymore …
I have two sons …
… sometimes I rode my motorbike to the swimming pool to keep myself company. Occasionally, I met a cousin who lives in Győrszentiván …
The phone conversation ended here …
The interview was conducted, edited and translated into English by Péter Krausz
Thanks to Marinka Spiegel for clarifying the institutional background of Peter’s music teacher degree.