The Marton Ackerman Story

It’s a warm summer day in Las Vegas, but the heat is set at 80 degrees inside his house. Clad in his light blue, button-down pajamas, a gold Torah scroll on a chain hanging from his neck, he sits back in his deep, black leather sofa.

On the coffee table in front of him is a glass of Coke, a landline phone, cell phone, medications, and a calendar marked with dates with doctors. He carefully lifts the Coke from the table and takes a sip through his bendy straw. He prepares to go back in time.

“We were very poor, and luckily I had a loving family,” he says. “We never went to bed without getting a kiss from my mother. And that’s what I remember from early days.

Marton Ackerman was born in Mexico to two Jewish Hungarian parents in 1929. His parents split up when he was very young, his father staying in Mexico, while his mother took her three children and went back to Hungary. When Hitler invaded Hungary in March 1944, Marton was 14 years old.

“The place where we lived was a huge building with apartments in it. We were on the second floor. On the first floor was the temple, a Jewish shul. We lived in 3-bedroom house, 3-½, I think. ...it was a tenement.”

Marton lived in that building--Kiraly Street 6--with his mother, older brother, younger sister, maternal grandmother, and two aunts.

“My mother and all of my aunts worked [for] a textile factory repairing the bad parts of the whole sheet of material. They would bring it to us, and I remember that the living room was almost up in the ceiling with textiles, and we kids used to go up on a top and--” He makes a sliding sound with his mouth, as he demonstrates with his hand how they would slide down the stack of cloth.

Sitting on the couch in his Las Vegas home, Marton stares down at the coffee table in front of him, looking through it to a distant time and place.

“I had a happy childhood for awhile,” he says with a smile that doesn’t make it from one side of his mouth to the other.

Indeed, Marton’s childhood years were marbled with moments of beauty and tragedy. He played in the streets of Pest, the poorer half of Budapest. He sang in a choir at the synagogue with his boyhood friend, Tibi. He fished from the banks of the Danube River and brought his catches home for his mother to fry.

“The non-Jewish friends that I had way back, I never went to school with them, but we gathered together in the park and we played together...football or climbing the hills of Buda,” he tells me, smiling as he talks. “And they were okay with me, you know. But when this started, I think it was...well, antisemitism always was there, but it got worse.”

For Marton, rumblings of the persecution Hungarian Jewry would eventually experience began years before the Nazis occupied his homeland.

“[Young people] were trying to spying on us when we were getting out of our school,” he says. “I remember the stores in Budapest had metal curtains they would pull down over the windows. The only reason I remember them is because the...young people would shove me into them and my head would hit the metal.”

Marton endured these “beatings”, as he calls them, while the young people, students of a local Catholic school, threw racial and religious slurs at him, calling him “dirty Jew” and other names.

Although Marton, now 90, cannot remember the exact year when these things happened, he does know that it was shortly after these beatings that he dropped out of the 8th grade, due to the family’s financial difficulties.

“I went as an apprentice to a furrier, where they made fur coats and all that,” he says. “It was at that time that they started to deport the older Jews. They sent them to work camps and some of them to concentration camps. But my family, we were okay for another year.”

On April 5, 1944, the decree was made that all Hungarian Jews were to wear a yellow star of David on their clothing. Marton remembers that time.

“We had to wear yellow stars,” he says. “We were restricted on what time we could go out and when we couldn’t. But in the building there were quite a few Jewish kids, and--stupid us--we decided to take off our yellow stars and go to the movies. We sneaked in, because no one had money. But there were always ways for kids to get into the movies.”

Life for the Ackerman family changed drastically in the fall of 1944. On November 29, the Royal Hungarian Government ordered all Jews to leave their homes and to move into the newly formed ghetto.

“Well, they just came in, you know,” he tells me of the morning Nazi officials came to his family’s apartment. He stares at the fireplace across the room from where he is sitting.

“They didn’t ask us permission. And not just our [apartment], but everybody who was Jewish there. And evidently they knew who was [Jewish], because there were other people [living there], too; not just Jews.”

Before moving into the ghetto, the Ackerman family was first taken to a horse racing track, where the men and women were divided into two groups.

“My brother and I went to one side and the other part of my family went on the other side,” he says. “This was the first time I was away from my mother.”

At the race track, 15-year-old Marton encountered the complexities of human nature and of the war, in particular. After being ordered to hand over his wallet by a member of the Arrow Cross Party--a Nazi-backed, Hungarian political group--something strange happened.

“I gave him my wallet that had only my Mexican birth certificate and a picture of the Belzy Rebbe that my grandmother gave me,” Marton tells me. “I told him it was my grandfather. He gave me back my wallet with the birth certificate and the picture. Surprisingly, this man gave me 100 pengő. It was a big sum at that time for me, at least. I never seen a 100 pengő. He said, ‘Good health. Good luck’. To this day, I do not know why he did that, but it helped me survive the war. I later used it to buy apples and potatoes from the farmers.”

Marton and his brother, Gene, along with many of the other Jewish males, were moved from the race track to a brick yard, and then eventually from the brickyard to the ghetto. In the ghetto, they were put to work doing hard manual labor.

“Incredibly, we were once out working on a house, demolishing it, getting the dangerous things off of the top,” he says as he lifts his glass of Coke off of the coffee table and takes a drink. “When we finished that work, we came down and we could hear the sirens, meaning it was an air raid. You won’t believe this, a bomb fell down just a short distance from where I was.”

When the bomb hit the ground, he saw it bounce into the air. When it came back down, it detonated upon impact with the cobblestone street, sending his brother flying through the air and through the display window of a nearby store.

The explosion forced Marton violently to the ground. Metal shrapnel hurtled through the dust-laden air, one piece embedding itself into the back of his scalp, another piece lodged in his earlobe, where it remains to this day.

“It was chaos,” he says. “I don’t know where the guard was, but...lots of people died there, and when I woke up from the blast, first thing I saw was a man’s leg away from his body. And the guy pleading, ‘Everybody, please help me!’”

Miraculously, Gene was unharmed by his crash through the display window, but Marton was injured by the shrapnel.

“A young Nazi grabbed me and took me someplace where they couldn’t see us,” he says. “And he had a satchel on, I don’t know what you call it, and he took out a bottle of liquor. And gave me a shot. He felt sorry for me, I guess.”

Surprised by the kindness of the Nazi, Marton and his brother began searching the streets for someone to help stop the bleeding from Marton’s head.

“So we went to the Red Cross,” he says, “and believe it or not, the Red Cross refused to tend to me because I was Jewish. The Red Cross center was supposed to be an international place, but they would not accept this Jewish kid.” He slowly shakes his head. “They never did apologize for not taking in the Jews during the war.”

With the Red Cross refusing to help Marton, the brothers began their search for someone who would.
“[We] walked the streets until we found another doctor who accepted me,” he says.

The Hungarian doctor showed compassion to the young man.

“I was bleeding profusely. He cleaned me up and put a clamp on my skull. He said, ‘I’m going to make you a turban. You don’t need it, but maybe it’ll save you from going to work up on the buildings, and maybe they’ll start treating you right’.”

News of the advancing Russian Army motivated the Arrow Cross to march their prisoners to Germany, where they would be used as forced labor to help the rapidly declining war effort for the Nazis.

“We walked and walked,” Marton tells me. “And if you couldn’t walk anymore, you were shot. I saw it with my own eyes. They shot an old man. He didn't fall down. He just slumped to his knees. He was dead. I don’t know how many they killed that time, but the march went on.”

This “death march”, as it was called, continued its bloody and merciless journey, until one day a motorcycle pulled up alongside the ragged band of marching prisoners.

“A messenger on a motorcycle stopped the column,” he says. “Then he asked if there was any foreign born in the column, or something to that effect.”

Marton and Gene, as Mexican citizens, made the decision to step forward.

“We were in shock, and we didn’t know if they picked us to kill us right there,” he says. “But the situation was bad, and many times you wanted to die. We didn’t know what was going to happen, but as I told you, it didn’t make any sense to live like that.”

It turned out that the Ackerman brothers’ decision to step forward probably saved their lives from almost certain death, either on the march or in Germany. Those who had foreign passports were sent back to the ghetto, where they were put to work again.

Unbeknownst to Marton and Gene, while they were working in the ghetto, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg was working to establish more than 30 safe houses in the ghetto for Jews with certificates of protection from neutral nations.

“In December,” Marton tells me, “somebody came to the ghetto and told me that my Aunt Lenke was taken to Auschwitz, and my Aunt Malvin, Grandmother, Mother, and sister Piroska were living in a safe house. If I wanted, he would help me and my brother to escape from the ghetto and take us to the safe house.”

The brothers readily agreed.

Living in the ghetto was a young man, whom Marton refers to as “this smart kid”, who advised the brothers that an escape from the ghetto would require them to clean themselves up, so as not to appear like prisoners.

“That day,” he says, “my brother, this guy, and I walked straight, like we knew what we were doing. We just went ‘Heil Hitler!’, while looking stern, and they let us out.”

Marton and Gene were reunited with their family at the safe house, where they lived for the duration of the war. Budapest was liberated by the Soviets on February 13, 1945.

Although the traumatic events of the Holocaust Marton endured are nearly 8 decades in the past, the memories of those days are fresh in his mind.

“I still have nightmares about it. I wake up screaming,” he says. He adjusts his position on the couch and looks at me. He sighs. “So I don’t know. It was bad times, and I don’t like to think about it, you know. It hurts, even after so many years.”

Despite these haunting memories, Marton carries with him an indomitable happiness. “We are all human beings,” he says. “And always smile. I survived the Holocaust, and yet I smile.”

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