THE SHOCKING TRUTH THAT THE WORLD MUST NOT FORGET

Violet Benady tells her story to Alice Mascarenhas

"I didn't believe it then, and I still don't believe it now. But the world must believe that it all happened. It really did happen," these were words she would repeat time and time again as I heard her monologue. My questions brought her back to the present for brief moments as she retold the horrors of what happened to her parents and her family during the Second World War. Although her parents survived the ordeal the rest of her family was exterminated at Auschwitz. 

Violet Benady may not have been 'collected' or experienced the horrors of life in a concentration camp but in her own way she is a Holocaust survivor and a witness to the atrocities committed under Nazi Germany. At the tender age of 14 she with her violin in one hand and her small suitcase in the other her parents sent her out to the world to save her from the hands of the Nazis. I spent an hour and half in her company realising how hard asking her to relive her memories would be - at times there were moments of silence as tears gently rolled down her cheeks...I waited patiently as she fought them back...but quickly composed she continued with her story not because she wanted to tell her story but because she her story needs to be told.

"They were murdered," she tells me coldly and without hesitation. 

"Of course no one believed Hitler they just thought he was crazy. He was a house painter but he was such an excellent speaker that he mesmerised the whole of Germany and beyond. And who would have believed that his promises would come true and he would carry out such unimaginable atrocities anyway." 

Violet has not spoken about her life for over 50 years. For all these years she has refused interviews and remained silent. Now 60 years on after the liberation of Auschwitz she feels it is her duty to tell her story so that the world will not forget. "I am telling you this now because I am at an age where I have reached the conclusion that I must speak. I must speak because after my generation, the new generation of my children, my grandchildren, and the children who will come after, they won't remember because they were not witnesses to what happened. I must speak now because my life was absolutely changed as a result of the Second World War and what happened to the Jews."

She believes no one wants to hear the stories anymore.

"I don't want to hear them myself but it is history. It was true. And when there are people who say it did not happen the people of my generation must speak up. This is why I agreed to this interview. For 50 years I have remained silent and because I am 85 and my time is limited, there won't be anymore witnesses. The world must believe it happened. The world must remember what they did. I am talking to you because these atrocities were committed and the world must remember always."

Her life may have been very different if it had not been for "the Hitler way".

She pauses for a moment as she places her thoughts. Suddenly she says in a defiant tone.

"We should have stopped them somehow," but quickly on reflection she adds.

"But it is very easy to say we should have stopped them -easy to say this when they had a gun in their hand which was pointed at you. When they would shoot with no remorse. Children all lined up and shot along the Danube in a river of blood. The river turned red as it flowed through Budapest. How can one believe that this happened?"

"When you read the Diary of Anne Frank or when one sees the films such as made by Spielberg, I laugh because those are children's stories compared to what really happened."

As the story turns to her later life she admits she once "chickened out" whilst in Jerusalem visiting the Holocaust Monument. Here was a library of books bearing the names of the all the people who had been put through the gas chambers.

"Your maiden name was Sussman? There are many with that surname if you like you can find out when the Sussman's were put through the gas chamber?" she said. But she turned away and left not wanting to know.

"As long as there is a Germany and German people, they will be marked forever because of what happened and what their forefathers did. I don't judge anyone today, the youngsters, but they will carry and should carry that mark forever because of the atrocities they committed," she believes.

Over the years her music became an outlet for her anguish.

"If you believe in a soul then that soul needs feeding - music is a good vitamin to keep the soul alive and to help it survive...I managed to survive although there were times I found to all too hard to take. The burden of my family's annihilation...but I got back my peace of mind. It would have been impossible to have lived in such intense pain of horror...what happened to all those who died was not normal. It was murder. I have lived with the murder of my family for years. The shadows. The pain. That unbelievable feeling remained with me. But time is a good healer and of course the music feeds the soul...

BORN IN HUNGARY

Violet Sussman was born to parent who were quite old by the standards of that time. Her mother gave birth to her at the age of 39 in Budapest, Hungary. Her father, 49, had served as an officer in the Hussars during World War II. Hers was a happy childhood and her parents encouraged her to play the violin. But those happy years were to be short lived as Hitler's final solution soon swept through Europe. Even today, more than sixty years on, as the world commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz she finds it hard to believe that it all really happened.

As a youngster she can recall Jewish shop windows being broken and Jewish synagogues ransacked. Whenever she asked my father why it was happening and why the police did not stop it he would simply reply.

"It does not really matter because the people who were doing it are scum. As they have no work they break out in anger. They hit the Jews because we are a scapegoat. Nothing can be done because they believed the Jews are stupid and ignorant, a just lower class. Intelligent people who are kind and well brought up would not do things like this."

But he was wrong, she insisted several times, "because it should have been stopped then!"

Nothing really dramatic happened in Budapest as far as she can remember until the middle of the 1930s. At 14 she was a student at the Budapest Music Academy quite happily learning how to play the violin with her violin professor.

"But it was already starting to smell a bit. Rumours were eminating from Europe that there was trouble with the Jews and that there was a plan to make a new race in Germany which would be cleaned from the poisonous Jews who caused all the trouble. 'If it were not for the Jews Germany would be Deutchland Uberales  - Germany over the top of the world, but first they had to clean the Jewish problem because they were like cockcroaches'. That is what they said."

1935 BRINGS CHANGES

Then suddenly one day the mood changed. It was 1935. Still a music student she retells the story of how students with brown shirts already in the Nazi Party in Budapest had entered the Music Academy destroying and breaking up all the musical instrument s that belonged to the Jewish students. How did they know they were Jewish students? Then all documents, passports, musical indexes, revealed the religion of each person. This was the same throughout central Europe.

"When this happened I locked myself in the lavatory. It was the first time I had really felt fear. I feared for my life. I was trembling. They moved in, the scums, the students from the university wearing brown shirts. Even today when I hear an instrument break, a string or a part of the violin, I still tremble. How much more did I tremble then when I heard the screaming, banging and shattering of the instruments.

At the time there were rumours emerging from Poland that the Jews were going to be "cleared out". She reiterates, "unfortunately no one believed it and by standing still they made their worst move. By standing still they lost thousands and millions of lives because no one would believe it. Who could believe those stories that they were going to kill people just because they were of a different colour or a different religion or race?"

TIME TO LEAVE

Although she did not believe her parents were terrified to hear how Jewish girls aged 16 and 18 were being collected from different parts of Europe and sent to Germany to entertain the German soldiers.

"I was an only child and they did not want to put me through this ordeal. And you know what entertaining meant? And I can assure that I would have bitten the ear off any soldier who dared to touch me and I would have been shot at that very moment."

It was 1936. Not yet 16 her parents did whatever they had to do to obtain a union musician card to get their daughter out of Hungary and away from the Nazis. With her violin in one hand and her little suitcase of clothes in the other Violet made a promise to her parents that she would never return until it was safe. They sent her off on her own to work and earn and living. Making her way to Istanbul her violin was to be her survival.

A deep sigh and a tear later, Violet relives the moment with conviction and fortitude.

"My parents put me on a train. They planned everything very well and got in touch with musical agencies which gave me contracts. I was not frightened at all. I thought it was a big joke and I loved playing the violin. I just didn't believe. The trouble was that people didn't believe either."

As a good daughter she kept her promise. She corresponded with her parents but because the letters were censored she found she had to read in between the lines - and read into what they were not writing about.

"What was in between the lines? Your cousin Dora and Eva left Budapest. And I would think. How could they have left Budapest? They were 17. Where they taken? Did they leave like I had left? Or when the letter said 'daddy's business was closed down and it is not as good as before' - I then found out they had no money. Then I heard how Jews were forced to wear the yellow star.

"The money I earned went back to them because I knew my father could not make money. I know what hunger is because I would buy nothing - and I sent the money to them but only until 1939."

It was then the letters stopped. Violet would not learn what happened to her family until 1945. 

FINDING A NEW HOME

By 1939 she was already in Gibraltar and had married her husband Juda (Juggy). Violet had arrived as part of an orchestra. She had been given two options Rimini or Gibraltar - and chose Gibraltar and remained ever since.

"I knew nothing about Gibraltar only from what I learnt in school. It was a British colony, the pound was good and Englishmen were gentlemen. I came with an all Jewish orchestra. I played here for three months, and when the war broke out because I was Hungarian I had to go and I went to Tangier and worked there. My future husband would court me by making the trip on the Mons Calpe.

Juggy and Violet were married in December 1939. She was still in touch with her parents and the letters by now were slow in coming. As she moved with the evacuation of the civilian population to London the letters ceased altogether although some were returned address unknown.

Writing a couple of letters to some of her Christian friends their replies were short and carefully worded 'that they had been taken but did not know where'. By 1940 there were already rumours of the atrocities being committed.

"But I did not believe it. Put those words 100 times into the article," she insisted again.

"How could one believe the horrendous stories - the ghettos, the concentration camps, and the people who were placed in a line and shot, and every day the numbers increased, and the gas chambers. How could one believe that? I was in my early 20s what I felt I would play on my piano (quietly singing painfully recalling)....my yiddisha mama, I need her more than I'll ever know...." And her eyes swelled again. And again silence. 

Lost for words I waited for the moment to pass....and she repeats, "I am here talking to you to tell you that it happened but we just didn't believe it," as she held back the rest of the tears.

During the war she received news from the Red Cross that both her parents had disappeared.

"They just disappeared. Nobody knew anything. I had no news."

REUNITED

They were bad years full of anguish and full of pain.

But although the rest of her family perished in the hands of the Nazis her parents had miraculously survived. They had not been sent to any concentration camp but had remained in the ghetto in Budapest. It was 1945 when she received a telegram telling her they were alive. But she was not to see them until July 1946 in London's Paddington Station.

"They were old and broken. Two skeletons. It was terrible," silence again as the picture of the meeting almost hangs in the air. It was from this moment on that Violet really had to begin to come to terms with the Holocaust. Her mother would live to the age of 101 but her father died shortly after from a simple cold because of his condition.

"My mother had no flesh on her gum and she lost her teeth one by one. She was unable to drink cold or hot drinks because it would hurt her so much."

Such was their weakness and their condition that Violet's doctor told her outright that if she fed them she would kill them. They could only eat small portions until the could rebuild their strength and their resistance. 

Recalling the story of the day after the liberation in the concentration camp at Auschwitz where the survivors had been fed and in the morning had been found dead because their bodies had not been able to cope, just skeletons their stomachs had burst. Again she remains silent.

She admits she found it hard to cope with all of this. She could take the physical side of having to build them up but the mental stress of what she had to hear was almost unbearable.

"I was 26 and I was very brave but the stories became too much. They really got to me. They started to talk and they started to tell me what happened. It was not like today when we hear of say the latest disaster in South East Asia and by giving money we have done our duty. What they told me was that my uncles, aunties and cousins were all gone. Each story from each family member was unbearable.

"What happened to uncle Louis? I would ask. 'He was alright because when they came to collect him he cut his throat in the lavatory, so he was alright.' How can you take that? How could they say he was alright? I could not understand.

"My cousin Claire, she was in Auschwitz. She was standing outside the gas chamber, and my aunty who was standing beside her had very thick glasses and she quickly took them from her and put them on. My aunty asked her why and she replied 'I have to put them on because if they see me with them on I will go with you and you will not go alone'...and they walked into the gas chamber.  

"The stories they had to tell came out of them like a flood, like a tidal wave. They themselves were beaten and starved and tortured. They had to let go of what they had been through, they had to tell of what they saw, what they went through, what happened?"

But it was not just the stories. One day on a walk with both her parents on the Strand in London they came across a policeman. The experience was shocking. Both began to shake uncontrollably.

"What's the matter I asked? They are English policemen. But every time they saw a uniform it was the same. They were conditioned to react like this. My doctor told me they had to throw out the dirt. They needed to talk and that one day they would stop and they would not talk about it anymore. And they did. One year on the stories just stopped.

"I had my mother with me for 37 glorious years until she died in 1983. She never talk about it anymore after that first year but she never got back her sense of security."

“She locked her bedroom door every night even though she was guarded by our dog Fritz. I called him by a German name because they named their dogs by Jewish names,” she adds, almost as an appendage.

Violet made Gibraltar her home and over the years has learnt to live with her memories and how to ease the pain. She admits today she has mellowed over time.  By the end of our conversation I somehow knew she had only scratched the surface of her story - that there was much more that will never be told and that understandably the scars and wounds remain too deep to re-tell of some of the atrocities committed in a time which in relative terms was just a moment in time and a moment ago.

As I walked out the door...the rich tones of her violin could be heard… intensely, sharply, defiantly..."it must never be forgotten..."