Captain Laszlo Ocskay - a forgotten hero
The school in Abonyi Utca in Budapest, where my father was in hiding from October 1944, and where he later attended as a pupil.
Today I visited the school where my father was in hiding from October 1944 until the summer after the liberation. I’ve mentioned this before in a previous blog post – my grandfather was a forced labourer in the battalion of Captain Osckay of the Hungarian Army. Unbeknownst to the 2000+ Jews he hid in this school, Osckay was protecting them from being deported to the camps and/or murdered like many of the other Jews in Hungary.
Two cobblestones on a pavement in Budapest marking the place from where two Jewish people were deported to a concentration camp.
My father must have had some kind of protective shield around him from an early age. He entered this school at the age of 12 with his father, grandfather, mother and little sister.
In the early 2000’s, another survivor endeavoured to get Captain Osckay commemorated on the Yad Vashem monument, the Righteous among the Nations in Israel. In the process he made a film which my father participated in, which told the story of this “Forgotten Hero”.
The hallway of the school
I had visited this school before with my mother and father and my children and their father, we had stood in the entrance hall and I saw my father cry for the second and final time in my life.
A classroom in the school in Abonyi Utca
This time, there was an 11th grade girl in the entrance who offered to show me around, and this time it was my tears that were shed. She told me that they learnt the whole story of the Jews hidden in their school, and she was extremely proud to be the student of a school with such historical significance, because she could feel it held in the walls of the building.
They had been shown the film that was made, and in fact one of the great-grandchildren of Captain Osckay was in her class but not in school today.
I looked out over the newly renovated playground, knowing that this was the place where my father, his family and the others were, at regular intervals during their stay in the school, lined up to be marched off by Arrow Cross (Hungarian fascist) thugs. Captain Osckay would appear with a piece of paper stamped by the SS and they would be saved again. There is a belief that Osckay had close contacts amongst the high command of the German Army who had been his comrades in WW1, along with many Jewish soldiers, which presumably led him to save these Jewish lives when he was in a position to do so. As time went by, the whole building came to be protected by SS officers, and so the ironic truth exists that I owe my life to the Nazis. I owe Laszló Osckay my life, of course.
If you are interested in the re-inclusion in your DNA of those excluded parts and what you carry for them, you could join me on 23rd-24th November at my Footprints of the Ancestors workshop in Kingston-upon-Thames, https://www.facebook.com/events/1070376055092007 or at my next retreat, Borders of Belonging https://www.poppyaltmann.com/events at Trealy Farm in Wales on 31st January – 2nd February.
Watch the film here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ps3uDP_l5w
Read more here: