Sept. 2025
Agi Meinhard
We are on the fifth day of a heritage trip to Hungary. My entire little family is together on this trip: my husband, our daughter, our son and his wife, and his two children.
During the first three days of our trip, we explored the beautiful and lively city of my birth, Budapest, including the elegant apartment building and neighbourhood where I spent the first two-and-a-half years of my life. Not only did we revel in the picturesque sights of the city that included the Buda Castle, the Hungarian Parliament, St. Istvan’s Basilica and Europe’s largest synagogue, the magnificent Dohany Utca Synagogue, we also luxuriated in the famous Gellert spa, bathing in the healing waters of its natural warm springs. Morning, noon and night we sampled the delicious food in the city’s many restaurants. Our culinary adventure ended in the legendary Gerbeaud Café, where we felt like royalty as we were served its world-famous pastry in the café’s palatial interior.
Early one morning we set out from Budapest to the tiny village of Anarcs (population 1,800) where my father and his nine siblings grew up. Although we found my grandparents’ house, the visit to Anarcs turned out to be disappointing. I had been hoping to explore the village’s Jewish cemetery, because my ancestral roots in the village can be traced to 1734. Alas, I was informed that the cemetery had been bulldozed, and a commercial building erected in its place. Aghast, I asked the city clerk how they could have done such a thing. She just shrugged. “That’s it then, eh?” I muttered, sotto voce in English. “It’s not enough that there are no longer any living Jews in this godforsaken village, you had to obliterate even the record of their existence dating back almost 300 years.” Somewhere under that commercial building lies generations of my family. Even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I hope that building is haunted.
But today we are here in Debrecen, my mother’s hometown. Although it is Hungary’s second largest city, its population of about 200,000 is only one-eighth the size of Budapest. It is a charming little city, with narrow tree-lined avenues meeting broad boulevards that are plied with modern streetcars. Not far from our hotel is a large park, complete with lake and zoo, and bordering it is the University of Debrecen, bustling with students. Three blocks away is the neighbourhood that had once been the centre of Debrecen’s Jewish life. Unlike in Anarcs, Debrecen has not only preserved its Jewish sites but has recently begun to place bronze “stepping stones” in front of the residences of Jews who were killed in the holocaust. I will order one for my grandparents. As we walk along the narrow streets, it is not hard to imagine what the neighbourhood looked like before the deportation of the Jews in 1944.
At that time, three synagogues, and several small prayer houses, served the 12,000 Jews of Debrecen. The main synagogue, completed in 1897 in the Moorish style, was the second tallest structure in the city, standing at 43 metres high and accommodating 600 men on the main floor and 500 women in the two galleries. Unfortunately, only a plaque marks the site where it stood. It was damaged during the war and later demolished. The two smaller synagogues still exist, as does the building that housed the Jewish Gimnazium, which is now an art and music school.
Our tour starts in the pink-tinged Orthodox synagogue, built in 1893. Leaving its ornate interior, we proceed to the memorial wall, erected in 2015 The wall is inscribed with more than 6,000 of the Debrecen Jews who perished in the Shoah.
My grandchildren quickly run up to the wall to search for the names of my grandparents and point them out to me. Seeing their names inscribed in a place where they must have walked with my mother and her brothers makes them real in a way that their photographs hadn’t.
From here we walk another few meters to the Status Quo Synagogue. Built in 1910, it was a satellite of the great synagogue and served the students who were studying at the Jewish High School. While viewing the sanctuary, attractive in its refreshing simplicity, I mention to our guide that my great grandfather, Jozsef Burger, had been the congregation’s scribe and Torah reader from the late 1800s until his death in 1926. Hearing this, our guide shows us the foundational documents of the 1897 Great Synagogue. There, on the bottom of the document, right beside the signature of the rabbi, is my great grandfather’s signature. I am surprised by the feeling of pride that overtakes me.
We are now at the end of our tour, ready to leave. I am thanking our guide, when a woman walks in. Our guide introduces her as his wife. Looking at her, I determine that she is around my age, which means her parents must be contemporaries of my mother, so I ask her in Hungarian: “Are you originally from Debrecen?”
“No,” she replies. “I am from Kis Varda. A small town an hour and a half from here.”
“I know Kis Varda,” I say. “My father is from Anarcs,” (six kilometers from Kis Varda).
“Anarcs! Really? What’s your family name?”
When I say “Gottlieb”, she is shocked. After regaining her composure, she says:
“My mother’s brother, my uncle, married Sari Gottlieb, from Anarcs.”
“Sari was my father’s favourite sister.” I gush. “She taught him how to tie his shoelaces.”
“My mother used to babysit for her little nieces and loved them fiercely.” She continues. Now the smile fades from her face as she tells me something that I already know. “Sari and her three little daughters were deported to Auschwitz and never came back.”
We both spontaneously move towards each other and end up in a teary hug, holding those three little shared cousins whose lives were cut short between us. In a trembling voice she adds, “I am named after their eldest daughter Zsuzsi.”
As we say goodbye, promising to keep in touch, Zsuzsi looks up toward heaven and says, “This was bashert.”
Perhaps. Or maybe it was just coincidence. Had my newly discovered relative, Zsuzsi, not decided to say hello to her husband on her way to work that day, or had we left the synagogue just a few minutes earlier, we would never have met. And had I not asked her, looking for some connection to my mother’s family, whether she had grown up in Debrecen, I would never have discovered this close tie to my father’s sister.
Whether bashert or a random coincidence, it was, without question, the emotional highlight of our trip, not only for me, but for all of us.
CAPTION The author’s family members at the Wall of Names in Debrecen, Hungary.
