May 06, 2012
articles.latimes.com
The Holocaust and the sins of the father
By Les Gapay

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.

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