Home
As a child survivor who came to Canada in July 1951, Robert Mermelstein earned a Ph.D in chemistry from the University of Alberta. He worked 28 years for the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, NY, before becoming a Vancouverite. In his reprinted autobiography, My Life: A Journey from Mukacevo to Vancouver—Prevailing Over Adversity and Challenges (Vancouver, 2018), he mentions he has made it a practice to search once a year for any new mentions of his little-known birthplace, Munkacs / Mukacevo, at Hungary's eastern border, where deportations to the concentration camps from Hungary began. He has discovered the five known surviving Jewish youth from the Munkacs region are: Zoltan Matyash, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, Amos Rubin, his bbrother Paul and himself.
The Jewish population of Mukacevo in western Ukraine hovers at around one hundred. When it was still called Munkacs and Robert Mermelstein was born there on April 20, 1936, there were about 12,000 Jews comprising about forty per cent of the population. The Munich Agreement enabled Adolf Hitler to wrest political control of the Carpathian region from the former Czechoslovakia). The final deportation train left on May 23, 1944 carrying 3,080 victims. But Robert Mermelstein wasn't on it.
He has recounted:
"Two days after the end of Pesach in 1944, my father Salamon (a leader in the town's Jewish community), was arrested, while my mother Blanka, my brother, Paul and I were marched with a group of Jews to the local brickyard. There we met my mother's sister Janka, her physician husband and their two children. About a week after being imprisoned in the brickyard, Paul and I were separately smuggled, inside empty soup pots, into the ghetto by Rose Goldberger, one of the women escorts of food supplied to the ghetto. Rose, known to us as Rozsi, was the senior saleswoman in my parents' glass and china store, located on the main street in Munkacs. She also escorted our mother from the brickyard into the ghetto, where my parents were briefly reunited, and my father urged my mother to, "Go and save the children!"
"That was the last time I saw my father.
"My mother and I hid in a room in the ghetto for about a week; I was told that my new, Hungarian-sounding, family name was Meszaros, and warned never to undress in the presence of strangers. I was also told not to ask questions, to memorize some basic Christian prayers, and to follow the instructions of family members. My brother Paul was in hiding with our Aunt Ilonka at another location in the ghetto and given identical instructions. One evening at dusk, my mother and I left our room and passed through a gate to where a taxi, with a Christian electrician sitting in the front passenger seat, waited. The taxi took us to a railroad crossing close to the train station and the three of us walked between the tracks for about 200 meters and boarded a waiting train from the back. Our overnight ride was uneventful; fortunately, at that early stage of Jewish persecution, there were no document checks at the station in Budapest.
"My Uncle Emil, stationed with a labour battalion in a Budapest suburb, was able to rent us a room for a month. Paul and Ilonka, who had made the same journey with the electrician a few days earlier, were in that room waiting for us. We had forged Christian identity papers which were obtained by my father and were able to avoid any situation in which they might be closely inspected. Between June and early December 1944, our mother and aunt arranged for Paul and I to live in a Franciscan monastery's orphanage near Budapest's Elisabeth Hospital. It provided refuge to a number of hidden Jewish children. There I learned the Lord's prayer, Psalm 23 and how to make the sign of the cross, along with basic arithmetic, reading and writing. I got along well with the other boys and played games with them during recess. By mid-December we heard the sound of Russian heavy weapons and saw bright flashes in the sky at night. Ilonka appeared and ordered us to pack our small suitcases. She insisted to the guards at the monastery gate that these two small boys had to join their relatives for the upcoming Christmas holidays. She took us to the nearby apartment of a communist couple, named Rakosi, who were hiding several Jews, including our mother. We spent nearly two weeks in their apartment, until the sound of approaching artillery shells chased us to the basement of the building.
"On the third or fourth of January 1945, the first Russian forces entered our shelter, which was crowded with frightened women and children. We returned to Munkacs in March 1945 to establish who of our relatives had survived and what property or assets, if any, could be recovered. All of the returnees were anxious to locate surviving family members. Most survivors left to restart their lives elsewhere in Europe, the British-mandate Palestine, or North America. It soon became apparent that our father, grandparents, aunts (save for one), uncles and cousins had all been murdered. Several of our former neighbours told us that our father and closest relatives were on the last train transport from Munkacs, which arrived in Auschwitz two days before Shavuot, 1944.
"Our looted home, with most of its furnishings and contents stolen, became a temporary haven for several friends and acquaintances. Conversations primarily revolved around the severe conditions in concentration camps and how most inmates? fates depended on the duration of their confinement--although determination, perseverance and luck also played a role. I listened intently to the returning adults talk about the past several months of their lives, but most of the names they mentioned were unfamiliar to me. Our neighbour's son, Amos Rubin, who had hid with a local Righteous Gentile family, was the only Jewish adolescent I encountered during our brief return to Munkacs. It became apparent to me that Amos, Paul and I were the only survivors younger than sixteen out of a group of an estimated 3,000 Jewish youth who lived in the Munkacs region in April 1944. Three thousand Jewish youth from one city were murdered and apparently, only three young boys had survived.
"In mid-July 1945, about six weeks prior to the scheduled closing of the Russian-Hungarian border, we returned to Budapest with nothing but a change of clothing. I was nine years old and had very little understanding of what had occurred in the world between April 1944 and our liberation from hiding. We resumed using our real name, Mermelstein, and resumed our education. While there was a strong effort by the Jewish community to involve its youth in social, cultural and recreational activities, neither Paul nor I met anyone from Munkacs in these Jewish youth groups. My Bar Mitzvah celebration was a very modest event, held in school due to our dire financial situation.
"Our family of four (mother, aunt and two boys) left Budapest for Vienna, Austria in 1949, with the intention of moving to Israel. We eventually decided to emigrate to Canada. The foundation of my Jewish identity was formed during these turbulent five to seven years, between the end of the Shoah and our first couple of years in Canada. We arrived in Halifax on July 4, 1951 and travelled to Montreal. The next fifteen years can best be described as a typical immigrant experience: two adults struggling with a difficult financial situation due to limited employment skills, while Paul and I concentrated on our education. My science teacher, Mrs. Gottesman, awakened in me an interest in science which ultimately led to a Ph.D in chemistry and two years of post-doctoral training in life sciences. At the age of 30, I joined Xerox Corporation as a research scientist.
"During the summer of 1968, my wife and I made our first trip to Israel. There we met Amos Rubin and his mother, who I had not seen since 1945. It was an extraordinary, emotional meeting; we discussed the circumstances of how each of us survived the Shoah. I asked Amos whether he knew of any other Jewish youth from our hometown who had survived. He mentioned a young boy, Matyash, who was deported, but survived initial selection at Auschwitz due to his unusual height. This specific detail remained buried in my memory for more than 50 years. Amos survived by a combination of my mother's advice, his parents' guidance and the heroic actions of the Righteous Strausz family. His late father's biography quotes a conversation with my mother just before Passover, "You have a Christian benefactor who can be of great assistance," and continues, "Mrs. Mermelstein said in full confidence that all of us will perish, but if there is any possibility of escape, our duty is to do everything possible [to achieve such an outcome].""
In late December 2019, my nephew sent me an article titled: "A Holocaust Survivor Now Struggling to Pay Rent," published in the New York Times' Neediest Cases Fund section. The article described the difficult life history of a Mr. Zoltan Matyash, who reached his Bar Mitzvah age in early 1944, shortly before his deportation from Munkacs. The Matyash family of 20 people (grandparents, uncles and cousins), were deported to Auschwitz. Eighteen perished, and only Zoltan and his father survived. When Dr. Mengele asked Zoltan Matyash's age, his father said he was 18, which would make him fit for labour. In this way he survived the concentration camps and returned to his hometown to be reunited with his father. Matyash married and worked as a furniture upholsterer in the United States. Eventually, he retired and encountered financial problems.
Upon reading this story, I remembered, vaguely, Amos Rubin's response to my question about surviving Jewish youth from Munkacs, asked back in 1968. Zoltan Matyash was the youth of unusual height who survived initial selection at Auschwitz. My wife and I decided to send a donation to cover the cost of one year of rent for the Matyash family. In 2018, I self-published an autobiography: My Life: A Journey from Mukacevo to Vancouver. In it I write that only three people under the age of 16 who lived in Mukacevo at the time of the deportations survived. I am very pleased and most thankful to write that this statement has been proven wrong.
*
[Robert Mermelstein is not to be confused with Mel Mermenstein who built his own 1,000 sq. ft. Holocaust museum at the rear of his successful lumber manufacturing business. He became newsworthy for decades when he launched an ultimately successful lawsuit versus the anti-Semitic Institute for Historical Review for its false claim that the horrors of the Holocaust could not be validated. Mermelstein's heroic and tenacious fight resulted in a feature length film in which he was portrayed by Leonard Nimoy.]
BOOKS:
By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685 (1979)
My Life: A Journey from Mukacevo to Vancouver: Prevailing Over Adversity and Challenges (Vancouver, 2018).
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
PHOTOS: Shoes at Auschwitz; Auschwitz 2 (exterior), book jacket, Auschwitz furnaces prior to demolition, Mermelstein visiting Birkenhau remains of gas ovens
The Jewish population of Mukacevo in western Ukraine hovers at around one hundred. When it was still called Munkacs and Robert Mermelstein was born there on April 20, 1936, there were about 12,000 Jews comprising about forty per cent of the population. The Munich Agreement enabled Adolf Hitler to wrest political control of the Carpathian region from the former Czechoslovakia). The final deportation train left on May 23, 1944 carrying 3,080 victims. But Robert Mermelstein wasn't on it.
He has recounted:
"Two days after the end of Pesach in 1944, my father Salamon (a leader in the town's Jewish community), was arrested, while my mother Blanka, my brother, Paul and I were marched with a group of Jews to the local brickyard. There we met my mother's sister Janka, her physician husband and their two children. About a week after being imprisoned in the brickyard, Paul and I were separately smuggled, inside empty soup pots, into the ghetto by Rose Goldberger, one of the women escorts of food supplied to the ghetto. Rose, known to us as Rozsi, was the senior saleswoman in my parents' glass and china store, located on the main street in Munkacs. She also escorted our mother from the brickyard into the ghetto, where my parents were briefly reunited, and my father urged my mother to, "Go and save the children!"
"That was the last time I saw my father.
"My mother and I hid in a room in the ghetto for about a week; I was told that my new, Hungarian-sounding, family name was Meszaros, and warned never to undress in the presence of strangers. I was also told not to ask questions, to memorize some basic Christian prayers, and to follow the instructions of family members. My brother Paul was in hiding with our Aunt Ilonka at another location in the ghetto and given identical instructions. One evening at dusk, my mother and I left our room and passed through a gate to where a taxi, with a Christian electrician sitting in the front passenger seat, waited. The taxi took us to a railroad crossing close to the train station and the three of us walked between the tracks for about 200 meters and boarded a waiting train from the back. Our overnight ride was uneventful; fortunately, at that early stage of Jewish persecution, there were no document checks at the station in Budapest.
"My Uncle Emil, stationed with a labour battalion in a Budapest suburb, was able to rent us a room for a month. Paul and Ilonka, who had made the same journey with the electrician a few days earlier, were in that room waiting for us. We had forged Christian identity papers which were obtained by my father and were able to avoid any situation in which they might be closely inspected. Between June and early December 1944, our mother and aunt arranged for Paul and I to live in a Franciscan monastery's orphanage near Budapest's Elisabeth Hospital. It provided refuge to a number of hidden Jewish children. There I learned the Lord's prayer, Psalm 23 and how to make the sign of the cross, along with basic arithmetic, reading and writing. I got along well with the other boys and played games with them during recess. By mid-December we heard the sound of Russian heavy weapons and saw bright flashes in the sky at night. Ilonka appeared and ordered us to pack our small suitcases. She insisted to the guards at the monastery gate that these two small boys had to join their relatives for the upcoming Christmas holidays. She took us to the nearby apartment of a communist couple, named Rakosi, who were hiding several Jews, including our mother. We spent nearly two weeks in their apartment, until the sound of approaching artillery shells chased us to the basement of the building.
"On the third or fourth of January 1945, the first Russian forces entered our shelter, which was crowded with frightened women and children. We returned to Munkacs in March 1945 to establish who of our relatives had survived and what property or assets, if any, could be recovered. All of the returnees were anxious to locate surviving family members. Most survivors left to restart their lives elsewhere in Europe, the British-mandate Palestine, or North America. It soon became apparent that our father, grandparents, aunts (save for one), uncles and cousins had all been murdered. Several of our former neighbours told us that our father and closest relatives were on the last train transport from Munkacs, which arrived in Auschwitz two days before Shavuot, 1944.
"Our looted home, with most of its furnishings and contents stolen, became a temporary haven for several friends and acquaintances. Conversations primarily revolved around the severe conditions in concentration camps and how most inmates? fates depended on the duration of their confinement--although determination, perseverance and luck also played a role. I listened intently to the returning adults talk about the past several months of their lives, but most of the names they mentioned were unfamiliar to me. Our neighbour's son, Amos Rubin, who had hid with a local Righteous Gentile family, was the only Jewish adolescent I encountered during our brief return to Munkacs. It became apparent to me that Amos, Paul and I were the only survivors younger than sixteen out of a group of an estimated 3,000 Jewish youth who lived in the Munkacs region in April 1944. Three thousand Jewish youth from one city were murdered and apparently, only three young boys had survived.
"In mid-July 1945, about six weeks prior to the scheduled closing of the Russian-Hungarian border, we returned to Budapest with nothing but a change of clothing. I was nine years old and had very little understanding of what had occurred in the world between April 1944 and our liberation from hiding. We resumed using our real name, Mermelstein, and resumed our education. While there was a strong effort by the Jewish community to involve its youth in social, cultural and recreational activities, neither Paul nor I met anyone from Munkacs in these Jewish youth groups. My Bar Mitzvah celebration was a very modest event, held in school due to our dire financial situation.
"Our family of four (mother, aunt and two boys) left Budapest for Vienna, Austria in 1949, with the intention of moving to Israel. We eventually decided to emigrate to Canada. The foundation of my Jewish identity was formed during these turbulent five to seven years, between the end of the Shoah and our first couple of years in Canada. We arrived in Halifax on July 4, 1951 and travelled to Montreal. The next fifteen years can best be described as a typical immigrant experience: two adults struggling with a difficult financial situation due to limited employment skills, while Paul and I concentrated on our education. My science teacher, Mrs. Gottesman, awakened in me an interest in science which ultimately led to a Ph.D in chemistry and two years of post-doctoral training in life sciences. At the age of 30, I joined Xerox Corporation as a research scientist.
"During the summer of 1968, my wife and I made our first trip to Israel. There we met Amos Rubin and his mother, who I had not seen since 1945. It was an extraordinary, emotional meeting; we discussed the circumstances of how each of us survived the Shoah. I asked Amos whether he knew of any other Jewish youth from our hometown who had survived. He mentioned a young boy, Matyash, who was deported, but survived initial selection at Auschwitz due to his unusual height. This specific detail remained buried in my memory for more than 50 years. Amos survived by a combination of my mother's advice, his parents' guidance and the heroic actions of the Righteous Strausz family. His late father's biography quotes a conversation with my mother just before Passover, "You have a Christian benefactor who can be of great assistance," and continues, "Mrs. Mermelstein said in full confidence that all of us will perish, but if there is any possibility of escape, our duty is to do everything possible [to achieve such an outcome].""
In late December 2019, my nephew sent me an article titled: "A Holocaust Survivor Now Struggling to Pay Rent," published in the New York Times' Neediest Cases Fund section. The article described the difficult life history of a Mr. Zoltan Matyash, who reached his Bar Mitzvah age in early 1944, shortly before his deportation from Munkacs. The Matyash family of 20 people (grandparents, uncles and cousins), were deported to Auschwitz. Eighteen perished, and only Zoltan and his father survived. When Dr. Mengele asked Zoltan Matyash's age, his father said he was 18, which would make him fit for labour. In this way he survived the concentration camps and returned to his hometown to be reunited with his father. Matyash married and worked as a furniture upholsterer in the United States. Eventually, he retired and encountered financial problems.
Upon reading this story, I remembered, vaguely, Amos Rubin's response to my question about surviving Jewish youth from Munkacs, asked back in 1968. Zoltan Matyash was the youth of unusual height who survived initial selection at Auschwitz. My wife and I decided to send a donation to cover the cost of one year of rent for the Matyash family. In 2018, I self-published an autobiography: My Life: A Journey from Mukacevo to Vancouver. In it I write that only three people under the age of 16 who lived in Mukacevo at the time of the deportations survived. I am very pleased and most thankful to write that this statement has been proven wrong.
*
[Robert Mermelstein is not to be confused with Mel Mermenstein who built his own 1,000 sq. ft. Holocaust museum at the rear of his successful lumber manufacturing business. He became newsworthy for decades when he launched an ultimately successful lawsuit versus the anti-Semitic Institute for Historical Review for its false claim that the horrors of the Holocaust could not be validated. Mermelstein's heroic and tenacious fight resulted in a feature length film in which he was portrayed by Leonard Nimoy.]
BOOKS:
By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685 (1979)
My Life: A Journey from Mukacevo to Vancouver: Prevailing Over Adversity and Challenges (Vancouver, 2018).
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
PHOTOS: Shoes at Auschwitz; Auschwitz 2 (exterior), book jacket, Auschwitz furnaces prior to demolition, Mermelstein visiting Birkenhau remains of gas ovens
