Marton

 A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I made a quick trip to Las Vegas, where we lived for the past several years. Our first stop, admittedly out of the ordinary for a visit to Las Vegas, was the King David Cemetery.

There, lying flush with the ground, was the gravestone we had come 2,000 miles to visit:
MARTON ACKERMAN
JUNE 13, 1929 - FEBRUARY 3, 2022
A LOVING FRIEND

​I met Marton one winter afternoon in 2014, a few months after moving to Las Vegas. A frail, thin man with a Torah scroll pendant hanging from his neck, he had penetrating, pale blue eyes and a smile hued with melancholy.

That he could smile at all was a wonder. The song of his life, from the very start, was played in the minor key.

When just a toddler, his parents separated, not only relationally, but geographically, his mother taking him and his brother from their home in Mexico back to the old country, in Hungary.

Life there was happier, but it was not easy. He grew up in poverty, an Orthodox Jewish boy, living in a cramped Budapest apartment with his mother, grandmother, aunts, little sister, and elder brother, unable even to afford a toothbrush.

The Nazis occupied Hungary in March 1944. He was a 14-year-old boy living in a house full of women, trying to make sense of a world gone mad. Gentile children — peers, many of them — imbibed the antisemitism of their parents, teachers, priests, and media, and spewed venomous remarks at him.

Soon, the abuse became physical. On one occasion, a group of non-Jewish kids surrounded him and repeatedly banged his head up against a metal storefront shutter, yelling “Christ-killer!” with each blow.

Eventually, he and his brother were separated from the rest of the family and were put to work inside the Budapest Ghetto.

On one occasion, while clearing debris in the ghetto, a bomb was dropped. Marton and his brother saw it hit the cobblestone pavement, bounce into the air, and detonate. It sent his brother through a storefront window, while he was thrown to the ground. Shrapnel marred his face. One piece of metal remained in his earlobe for the rest of his life.

The Allies liberated Budapest in 1945. He was just a few months shy of his 16th birthday and was faced with the daunting job not only of putting his young life back together, but also of trying to build an adult life from scratch.

That task was a long and winding road. Hungary was then governed by Soviet Russia, and their brutality combined with a severe lack of food, led him and his brother to seek refuge elsewhere. Their first stop was Romania, where they were detained and put in jail for six months for failing to produce identity papers.

Through a series of miraculous events, he and his brother were able to get out of jail and return to Budapest. But rumors started circulating that the Soviets were preparing to take young Hungarians back to Russia to help reconstruct the country. He wanted no part of that. So, off to Germany he went.

There, he was arrested, again, this time by the allies, and was put in a displaced persons camp.

A couple of years, and countless twists and turns later, he ended up back where his life started, in Mexico City. There, he lived for ten years before immigrating to the United States in the late 1950s.

For Marton, life in the States was humble, but satisfying. He married and worked a steady job at the same company for some 30 years before retiring to Las Vegas.

Our friendship began because of a volunteer program with which I served. Each week, I took him to get groceries, to have his hair cut, or to visit his doctor. But as time went on, we bonded in a special way.

The 60-plus years between us meant nothing in the light of shared interests and mutual respect.

As the years passed, Marton became a part of my family. In fact, he was like family before I even had one of my own.

When new members were added — first my wife, then my daughter and son — Marton embraced them wholeheartedly.

In his last year, he moved just across the parking lot from us at our condominium complex. Either my wife or I visited him every day, and my children enjoyed raiding his candy dish and climbing onto his lap to jabber and to play with their “Zayde” — Yiddish for grandpa.

A year has passed now since Marton died. Standing by his grave, the brisk morning wind blowing at our backs, my wife and I each collected a pebble and put it on his stone, an ancient Jewish tradition.

Rabbi Simkha Weintraub explains that “by placing the stone, we show that we have been there, and that the individual’s memory continues to live on in and through us.”

I don’t know if my children will have any memory of Marton. But I know that my wife and I could never forget him.

So, each February, as we feel the throb of loss, we’ll sit with our children and tell them about the sweet man with the sad smile and the pale blue eyes and the Torah scroll around his neck.

And we’ll urge them, too, to never forget.