On Passover two years ago, Carol Moskot’s mother handed her an envelope containing five postcards sent by Moskot’s grandfather to his wife. She tells the story behind them:
As my husband begins to recite the story of our enslaved forebears, my thoughts drift to a more recent story of slavery and one person in particular—my maternal grandfather, László Braun.
Almost 80 years ago, in 1943, the Nazis made him a slave when they sent him to the copper mines of Bor, Serbia. He never returned. For Elizabeth, his wife and my grandmother, the trauma of losing her beloved László drove a permanent wedge into her heart. Although I would sometimes see a smile on her Revlonned red lips, it always quickly faded. It pained me that my mother, Agnes, affectionately known as Ágika, had never met her father.
László and Elizabeth married in a Budapest synagogue on March 16, 1942. Not long thereafter, László and other able-bodied Hungarian Jewish men were conscripted into slave-labor battalions, a fate only slightly better than that endured by their brethren elsewhere:
Following France’s defeat in 1941, Europe’s largest copper mine in Bor, Serbia, was transferred from French ownership to the Germans. Nazi civilians operated the mine and used Jewish slave labor. Bor provided 50 percent of the copper requirements for the Reich’s war industry to make cannonballs, cartridges, machine guns, and tanks. The problem was that by 1942, the entire Jewish population of occupied Serbia had fled or been killed, so the Nazis turned to the remaining Jews of Budapest to supply that labor.
László sent the postcards, which Moskot presents in translation, to Elizabeth from Bor. He survived inhuman conditions, a death march, and a massacre, only to die in a second death march.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/carol-moskot/holocaust-hungary-grandfathers-story/