Judith Kallman Sparks "A Candle in the Heart"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 10 August 2012 11:31

Written by Laura Blum

On a fall morning in 1942, at the station watching her and her parents, sister and brother being thrown into a cattle car, a 4-year-old girl named Judith did what anyone would do in the circumstances. She screamed. A soldier put a gun to her head and threatened to drag her onboard as well. She shut up.

Listen closely and you'll hear the silent scream in Judith Alter Kallman’s memoir, A Candle in the Heart. The personal testimony gives voice to the despair and hope of surviving the Holocaust as a Jewish orphan.

Depending on your view of human resilience, you'll either be astonished or simply stunned by Judith's story of transcendance. Just making it out of the outhouse where she slipped and dipped meets a lifetime's quotient of fortitude.

To describe her earliest years as happy and secure would be accurate and at least partly explanatory. Judith was the youngest of six children living comfortably in the spa town of Pieštany, then part of Czechoslovakia and today under the Slovakian flag. It seems likely that Judith inherited some of her talents from her father, Jona Mannheimer, who owned a successful general store. From her Hungarian-born mother Dora she learned pluck and the importance of doing what you believe in. She recalls how her mother lit Shabbat candles even though it made the family a target of anti-Semitic violence.

With such passons on the rise and the Slovak Republic under the Third Reich, the family fled with the barest essentials and went into hiding with peasants. They were soon betrayed, however, and Judith staggered her way to relatives in Hungary against ineffable odds.

Judith had to rely on her instincts and on the kindness of strangers. She has some of those “strangers” (including London Rabbis MB Wiessmandl and Solomon Schonfeld) to thank for her rescue and ultimate arrival in America where she would write her own chapter of the American dream.

Judith sat down with FilmFestivalTraveler.com to reflect on her book and the personal journey it traces.

Q: Despite the horrors you describe, A Candle in the Heart is ultimately a chronicle of hope and legacy. Tell us about your choice of title.

A: It was always the light of the candle that...gave me the hope and faith to get through everything I went through. I always remembered my mother's eight Shabbat candles, and we were eight in the family. Later on, when we got out of prison, it was on the eighth night of Chanuka. When I walked into [my Hungarian foster] house and saw the eight candles, it right away brought me back to my home. 

Q: What was life like for your family in Pieštany?

JK: We were quite comfortable. It was the only two-storey building and we had a courtyard. We had full-time help; it was a wonderful life. My father traveled a lot, both as a salesman and for the store.

Q: So when the family needed help, whether papers or safe refuge, there was a reservoir of good will.

JK: My father always managed to keep us secure and get the right papers because he was fluent in German. He looked like an aristocrat: reddish-blond hair, green eyes, tall. He had the German look, because originally we were German. He managed somehow to always save us from place to place till we got to Jilina, and there we were caught living as non-Jews.

Q: That was the betrayal you wrote about.

JK: Yes, that was the betrayal for money. They sold us. They saw six children. And it was reported that we were Jewish. But later on somehow the underground managed to help us. Well, two of my siblings were caught.

Q: Where did you think your parents were headed when they boarded the cattle car marked “Z” for Zidov (Jews)? What did you understand?

JK: I didn´t really. Earlier we had been put in a lager, or camp, but my father got papers where we were listed as non-Jews. I was home when the Hlinka guards came and inspected the papers. They were so bad that they paid the Germans to take us and get rid of us. The Slovakian role is so little known.

Q: You describe a harrowing experience in an outhouse when Hlinka soldiers descended on the farm where you and your family were in hiding in 1942. What gave you the stamina, courage and presence of mind to escape from this unthinkable fate?

JK: I´m not religious, but I feel God is within me and guiding me throughout my life. If something bad happens, He will be there to help me. I lost my parents. I had nothing to hold on to...beyond the memory of their nurturing. In the outhouse, it was my faith and hope gave me that strong courage. Automatically I reached for those rusty nails [to pull myself out] as if I was being guided.

Q: The Stern family in Budapest would soon offer you a secure, loving home. Were you a fiction writer you almost could´t create more perfect timing than this “Chanuka miracle” after prison.

JK: That gave me even more strength than my memory of home. When they took me out of Conti Prison and I was brought to their home, my Anyu (mother) opened up her arms and took me to her bosom. The fear disappeared and the love and the nurturing was like, "You're mine and you will never again be lost." They loved me unconditionally and I gave them back that love. They had lost their child. My siblings couldn´t give that connection because they were older. It was a little harder to get to them, but I had a need for [the Sterns]. They put me in their bedroom to sleep.

Q: They also helped you resolve a thorny social problem at school.

JK: In school I was the foreigner and the kids didn´t want me around them. I felt very lost and very alone. Vera Czik was this very fancy girl who was spoiled beyond belief. I wanted to join her and her friends at jump rope. She pushed me and I fell. “You're not allowed to play with us." I went home crying and my father, Apu, went back to school with me and they called her parents to come. When the girl's father heard my name, he said, "My cousin was married to a Mannheimer." It turned out that he was my mother's cousin. Then Vera became my best friend and the Cziks bought me clothes. Whatever she got I got.

Q: But the care-free life was short-lived. How did it feel when in March 1944 the Germans invaded Hungary? Did you feel the bad old days are here again?

JK: It was a big shakeup. Suddenly I was scared again. But in a way I felt very secure with Apu and Anyu because they said, "We are going to make sure that we are safe and you feel protected."

Q: Did you feel they had the power to do that?

JK: Yeah, because the Regent of Hungary used to come to their restaurant and they were friends.

Q: The Regent came for cholent?

JK: He came for cholent, yes! But the Regent suddenly was in trouble, himself. Apu had connections with the underground and -- these were Raul Wallenberg times -- he got papers under Swiss Red Cross and Karl Lutz's protection. We went into hiding in a glass house that had been a factory.

Q: When you read about the reemergence of anti-semitism in Hungary today, what goes through your mind?

JK: In Budapest they´re putting out posters of a soldier who's holding a Jewish puppet with a Star of David on his head and money falling out of his pocket. I recognize what's going on, and that´s why I feel so strongly that the young have to be educated: Never again!

Q: What would you most want young readers to take away from your story of survival?

JK: Strength. Belief. Faith. But I can´t even see a young person today going through an ordeal. A 4-year-old cries if he doesn´t get a toy. If you remember my story with my shoes...

Q: I wondered if your later interest in fashion may have harked back to that time in your life when you were not allowed to dress nicely and suffered so much shame and yearning.

JK: You´re being now a psychiatrist! (Laughs.) I'm not sure. Deep down it could have been my interest. But I was always dreaming of going to America to study fashion. I went to F.I.T.

Q: During the Bosnian War, [publisher, editor] Helen Gurley Brown launched a local edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. For once Cosmo had my enthusiastic support. We don't have anything else in those moments but hope and beauty. What do you think the link is between beauty and dignity? Beauty and survival?

JK: A very strong connection, I think. It's the beauty of life that makes you want to live. The sun shines. It's what you look for.

Q: What did 9/11 bring up for you, and how were you able to overcome your resurgent fears?

JK: We were in Geneva during that time. We were in a restaurant and somebody was signaling that she would like to talk to me. It turns out that she was looking for Americans. She was telling us that she was seeking asylum in the United States, and could we help her? She claimed she was married to the cousin of [the former Libyan leader] Gaddafi because she had a child with him. She was living at the Richmont Hotel in Geneva. She was saying that she had a lot to tell the United States. If you saw her, her look and everything, she was not real. She went to the American Embassy; she went to the FBI; she went to the CIA, and they didn't believe her story. She gave me newspaper clippings and she gave me her card. She said something would happen in the United States. And I started to get very scared.

Q: You started to believe her?

JK: I started to believe her.

Q: Because she was so specific?

JK: Because things can happen. And she was so definite about it.

Q: Did your husband start to believe her?

JK: He let it go. Americans can be so naive. It's beautiful but it's...

Q: Luxurious.

JK: Yet it´s not the reality. I told my husband, "I think I will tell her that we're going to London instead of New York, because she may have connections and put a bomb." Three hours into our flight I see that something is very wrong on the screen. I try to get an attendant but they are running around. Suddenly the stewardess comes to First Class and says, "I have terrible news."

Already my whole body is shaking. From the bottom of my gut, I´m feeling that the bomb is on the plane. My thoughts always go beyond. The stewardess says 50,000 people were killed. She's putting us in a terrible panic. The plane had already turned around headed back to Switzerland. Suddenly everything came to the surface -- the fear of the whole German experience got hold of me and I got so hysterical. It took 10 minutes to calm me down and put me in control of myself. I think, God forbid...that's why we have to be on our toes.

Q: Do you ever fear that America could succumb to institutionalized persecution?

JK: I hope and pray that it doesn't. But it all depends on our leadership. Whenever there are hard times, Jews are always blamed. And the Americans are not quite picking it up.

Q: What would most surprise your American friends to learn about you?

JK: The background and experiences I describe in my book are a shocking revelation.