In 1939, we traveled aboard the last Orient Express before the war began. This was the luxurious train that connected the Black Sea with the North Sea and was a very popular mode of travel.
It took a day and a half to go from Ostend, where we had been visiting my grandparents, back home to Budapest. It would be the last time we saw them. After that, we couldn’t travel outside Hungary.
I remember vividly looking out the windows and seeing first Nazi signs as we passed through Germany.
We children heard about the war, of course, but we didn’t know much about it in the beginning. There were no shortages that I can remember. Everything proceeded as usual.
My parents, however, understood the political situation. Obviously it affected the business—positively, in a way, because we, like all such businesses, supplied strategic goods, iron, and steel. We had certain privileges like cars and gasoline, which was otherwise rationed. The Heinrichs had enough stamps to get even that precious commodity.
The firm, retail as well as wholesale, evolved. We sold everything from nails, screwdrivers, and hammers to all sorts of household articles, like enamel dishes and knives. But we also sold things like rails, steel plates, and wire—all of which we had in our warehouses—directly to construction companies.
My father and his cousins cooperated well in running the business—and business was good. Social life hadn’t diminished. Jews were not being persecuted (and Jews were of course very important to the cultural and social life of Budapest and of Hungary in general).
We were part of the Axis, because we didn’t have any choice, in light of Hungary’s geographical location. Austria has been annexed in 1938 by Nazi Germany. By that time, Italy—with Mussolini and the Fascisti already in power—was on the side of Hitler.
Miklós Horthy, the head of state, tried his best to keep Hungary neutral, but it was impossible. The only negotiation option open to him was to join the war effort on the side of the Axis powers, with the proviso that the Germans would not enter Hungary.
Our military and police remained in hands of the Hungarian government. Obviously, there were right-leaning members of the government, but Horthy was able to maneuver things so that the civil population—except for those whose sons had been conscripted into the army—was largely unaffected by the war. At least there were no troop movements visible.
Hungary was then a small country, with maybe ten or eleven million people. Today business is international, but there was no globalization at that time. We were Hungarians, doing Hungarian business.
Although the Hapsburgs in Austria were already exiled or banned by the end of World War I, Hungary remained a kingdom, theoretically. As part of the defunct dual monarchy, the king of Hungary remained a member of the Hapsburg family, and in the absence of such a member, Admiral Horthy had been named regent.
At the top of Central European societies like ours were the nobility and aristocracy, those who possessed large land holdings. These were prominent people—huge families with huge holdings—and they were striving to stay that way.
Members of the peasantry owned virtually nothing but perhaps small plots of land. The days of serfdom were long gone, but this level of society remained, just called by a different name.
The category in between—which today we call the middle class—was the so-called gentry, some of whom earned nobility. The Heinrich family was in that category; recall that my ancestors had earned nobility through acts of courage and aiding the war effort during the Napoleonic Wars. (One marker of this level of status was the amount of taxes paid. There were actual published lists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of what people paid in taxes....)
Listen to the episode for the entire chapter.
