A friend of mine got a lifetime achievement
award recently, and it got me to thinking about the Holocaust
again, something that's never been completely out of my mind
for the last 22 years.
Randolph L. Braham and I are an odd couple to be friends
because our families were on different sides of the Holocaust.
His emails to me over the last 20 years have always been
signed Randy, but I call him Professor Braham out of respect.
Braham is distinguished professor emeritus of political
science at the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York, director of the Rosenthal Center for Holocaust
Studies there, and the author of more than 60 books on the
Holocaust. His parents and many relatives were killed — murdered
in cold blood is more accurate — in the Holocaust in
Northern Transylvania, which during World War II was part
of Hungary. Braham himself was in a forced-labor camp during
the war.
My late father, on the other hand, was one of the perpetrators
of the Holocaust in Hungary.
His name was Laszlo Gyapay, and he was the mayor of a large
city in the Transylvanian portion of Hungary during the war.
In 1944, he created a ghetto where Jews were required to
live. Ultimately, 36,000 Jews were sent from Nagyvarad to
the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, most to their
deaths. My father was convicted in 1946 of anti-Jewish war
crimes in absentia and sentenced to life in prison. But I
knew nothing about his past growing up as a child in Montana,
where we settled in 1951 after living for 51/2 years in West
German camps for displaced persons.
It wasn't until after a divorce in 1987 that I started trying
to find out more about who I was, a search that ultimately
led to the truth about my father. In 1990, I traveled to
Hungary, where long-lost relatives and a friend of my late
mother told me about my father's role during the war. I then
began trying to learn everything I could about his actions.
After I found a mention of my father in one of Braham's
books in 1991, I phoned him in New York. He was surprised
by my call, but very kind and helpful and referred me to
other works of his, including one that contained the war
crimes judgment against my father and others. He sent me
various documents over the years and even translated them
when necessary.
Concerned about what effect the revelations were having
on me, he also offered some advice. "You should do as
I do," he said. "Treat your research like a surgeon
doing an emergency procedure on his own mother. You can't
afford to get personally involved."
It was difficult advice to follow, especially after I began
talking to Hungarian Holocaust survivors in New York and
Europe who remembered my father. One told me about an exhibit
mentioning my father in a Jewish museum in Budapest. A couple
said conditions in the ghetto had a reputation as being the
worst in Hungary. Others blamed my father personally for
what happened to them in the ghetto and at Auschwitz.
I also visited the scene of my father's war crimes in what
is now the city of Oradea, but was then called Nagyvarad.
There, I met with a handful of surviving Jews who showed
me the former ghetto, including the chambers where Jews thought
to be hiding valuables were tortured.At Auschwitz, I saw
the barracks and bunks that some of the survivors I'd interviewed
had lived in. articles.latimes.com
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