Precious few people who have dined at the upscale Teahouse Restaurant in Stanley Park can tell you its origins are Yugoslavian, Hungarian and Jewish. The original proprietors were displaced persons, Eva and Steve Floris, whose own story would likely have remained untold were it not for the bizarre and tragic death of Eva Floris on Granville Island in 2000. Grief-stricken and guilt-ridden when the family car plunged into the waters of False Creek, causing Eva to drown, Steve Floris, an agnostic Jew, resolved to pay tribute to their lives two years later with his memoir, Escape from Pannonia: A Tale of Two Survivors (Creative Connections, an imprint of Granville Island Publishing, 2002). "I wanted to express our gratitude to Canada for giving us refuge," Floris wrote. "and now that my wife is gone, killed tragically through my own mistake, I want more than ever to tell our story which I have kept hidden in my heart for so many years."

Born in Budapest on September 21, 1920, Steve Floris was sent as schoolboy by the fascist-leaning Hungarian government to visit Mussolini's Italy. He was not impressed. With few career paths available to Jews upon graduation from high school, he trained as an apprentice in his uncle's pastry shop and candy factory. In 1943, when Floris was conscripted for a Hungarian labour battalion, his culinary skills kept him alive and fed. He was transferred the day before his battalion was overwhelmed by Russian soldiers. Those who weren't killed were sent to Siberia. Floris was eventually sent to a work camp in Austria in 1944. As Allies forces advanced, he was loaded onto a cattle car but the train was forced to stop because the tracks had been bombed at the town of Krems. Parallel to the tracks was a road crowded with refugees on foot. Floris was able to escape and infiltrate the throng of refugees. Through a series of deceptions and disguises, he made his way his way back to Budapest where he was re-united with his mother and his beloved Eva.

Eva had been living in Yugoslavian city of Novi Sad (now the second-largest city in Serbia) in 1941 when Nazi-affiliated gendarmes murdered Jews, Gypsies and Serbs in the early days of January, 1942. Variously known as the Novi Sad massacre, the Raid in southern Backa or the Ujvidek massacre, this was a campaign of terror undertaken by forces from Hungary, commanded by Kiralyi Honvedseg, ostensibly to vanquish partisans after Hungary had annexed Yugoslav territories. In fact, citizens were detained at random. The Danube was strewn with corpses when an estimated 3,000-to-4,000 civilians were slaughtered in the Backa (or Bacska) region, approximately 1,000 in Eva's hometown. Famously, victims were forced to march across the frozen Danube, only to drown in the icey waters when the ice sheet was shelled from the shore. Others were pushed into the gaping holes or simply gunned down in the streets. Officially, the Hungarian government condemned the raid and four perpetrators were executed in 1943, but deep resentments have lingered. One of the alleged perpetrators, Sandor Kepiro, was tried in 2011 for murdering 30 civilians in the Novi Sad massacre but he was acquitted. In 2013, Hungary's president formally apologized to Serbia. That apology came too late for Eva Floris.

After surviving World War II, the couple soon discovered the new yoke of communism was nearly as stifling and prejudicial as the Nazis. Seeking better prospects in Austria, they found jobs working for the American Joint Distribution Committee which was the primary North American agency helping Jewish survivors in Europe. When they were allowed to immigrate to Canada from Salzburg, they arrived in Halifax on September 23, 1948 and were sent to the harsh climate of Winnipeg. "One day, my wife told me of a conversation she overheard between a hairdresser and a customer at the beauty parlor," Floris writes. "The customers said, 'I listed my house for sale a year ago because we want to move to B.C. and not a bite yet!' The hairdresser replied, 'If I could sell this crummy business wouldn't I be in Vancouver in an instant!' It was that overheard conversation that prompted Eva and Steve Floris to save all their money for two bus tickets to Vancouver. Escaping the prairie winter, they arrived on January 4, 1949.

Life on the West Coast seemed idyllic. The couple obtained a lease from the Vancouver Park Board to operate the then-named Art Gallery Tea Room in Stanley Park. The building had been a garrison and officer's mess during World War II. Under their management the operation became the iconic Ferguson Point Tea House until they sold the restaurant in 1964 and went into real estate. While they succeeded in the Vancouver real estate market, the so-called tea room fell into disrepair until it was re-opened in 1978 as The Teahouse restaurant. The Florises made numerous trips back to Europe where they were alarmed to find that anti-Semitism was still much-entrenched.

"On numerous occasions in the course of this story I refer to my Jewish heritage, yet I am not really a religious man at all. You could call me an agnostic. When I was a young man, I considered myself first and foremost not a Jew but a Hungarian. I studied the country's history, loved its literature, its music and its arts. I felt sorry for its great poets and novelists, who were unknown outside the borders of the country merely because they wrote in a language so removed from other living languages that few ever got translated. Bit by bit, however, I became aware that Hungarians were anti-Semitic. My fellow countrymen, I learned, considered Jews to be despicable usurers, exploiters of decent working men, con artists, Christ killers, bolsheviks, capitalists, cheats, seducers of virtuous Christian virgins. The great Hungarian novelist Mikszath Kalman summed up the Hungarian attitude when he described an anti-Semite as a person who despises Jews more than absolutely necessary. Eventually, this anti-Semitism produced the Holocaust, which I had the good fortune to survive. Compared to those millions who perished in the Nazi extermination camps, my suffering may seem trivial. Yet to me and the other Hungarian Jews who survived, such suffering was very real, and those of us who did survive have a responsibility to bear witness, especially since there are some who try to deny that the Holocaust ever happened."

BOOKS:

Escape from Pannonia: A Tale of Two Survivors (Creative Connections Publishing, an imprint of Granville Island Publishing, 2002) 978-1894694032

BELOW: On the banks of the Danube, Novi Sad was named European Capital of Culture for 2021. This stature evokes the 1942 massacre. / Tea Room 1960 / Corpses of civilians, Novi Sad, 1942

[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit