The following text is not a historical study. It is a retelling of the witness’s life story based on the memories recorded in the interview. The story was processed by external collaborators of the Memory of Nations. In some cases, the short biography draws on documents made available by the Security Forces Archives, State District Archives, National Archives, or other institutions. These are used merely to complement the witness’s testimony. The referenced pages of such files are saved in the Documents section.

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László Rohonczy (* 1935)

The reminiscence’s mother died in childbirth, so he was raised by his grandparents, in Gyömrő.

„They thought that the siege of Budapest would be very cruel. Let us not experience that there, they took me to the Uplands, where I spent several summers on vacation, a small village called Nagytőre. On the Garam bank. (...) They took me there to avoid the war. Maybe we won’t even hear that there was a war. The war lasted for three months there, the front was there. (...) Where the Russians came through, in the morning, in the afternoon the Germans repelled them. Then it was quiet for a week. They came through again, repelled them again. But every blessed day they mined the village with mines. Now this was a small village where there was the main highway and a connecting road went from there, a road shaped like this, there were two terraced houses. The village had a couple of hundred inhabitants. So it wasn’t big. (...) We understood it that way, especially with children’s minds (...) Interestingly, they didn’t always target the houses, in fact, they rarely targeted the houses, they targeted the areas behind the houses, maybe they did it to instill fear, so we were lying in bed, first bang, we said who it was by name, second, third, now we’re coming. It went on. (...) It was quiet all day, there was no problem, no problem, when the final breakthrough happened. (...) My grandparents came from there, the relatives are still there.” „There were no factories there, people were engaged in agriculture, they only went to Léva to buy salt, sugar and flour. (...) One half of the relatives was in Nagytőre, the other in Zsemlér, right on the other side of the Garam. (...) I really liked being there.”

 

World War II childhood memories

„There was a terrifying moment, perhaps the only time I was so scared in my life. The German soldiers knew that the final showdown was coming. The German soldiers were stationed with us. I studied German for four years in the civilian school and could speak to them perfectly. (...) We understood each other perfectly, they studied Hungarian and I studied German. They felt that the end was here. They said that out in the fields there were these corn cones (...) they marked, they drew where, in this cone, the things were hidden. They can’t take it anymore, they’re giving it to us. We went out at night with my brother-in-law. We couldn’t find it, it was starting to dawn. They started shooting. Now the plow leaves a furrow as it goes. Well, we crawled in that furrow. That was probably the scariest thing about the war for me.”

„There were seventeen German soldiers there, when the Russians finally came over, there were a lot of Russian soldiers and we picked up these seventeen German soldiers dead.” „They were out on the Garam bank, the area behind them was mined, and the exit roads were mined too. So these seventeen young guys couldn’t escape, they could shoot as long as they were alive, but we picked up all seventeen, they stayed there. What happened to them then, God knows. What happened to them, whether they were taken home, we don’t know. (...) Now they literally fought until their last breath. They couldn’t do anything.”

„They could talk to me, and then through me to the family members, they were interested, they asked questions. They were young guys. (...) And it’s interesting that there was another one, almost unbelievable, that before the war actually started there, a gendarme came with his wife, asking if he couldn’t stay here for two days. (...) And there’s that woman in front of me, she was in this thin spring coat, with a fur collar. Believe it or not, she sat on a chair for three months, slept on it, and didn’t take off her coat, because her husband was coming to get her. And when the front withdrew, her husband was there three days later. He really came to get her.”

 

In the shadow of Soviet weapons

There was basically no contact with the Russians, because they came over and moved on. „There was a mill in this small village. The mill caught fire from the illuminated, tracer shell, something. And so there were those who tried to go there to save flour, what they could. They were just afraid that the Russians would notice them from the other side and that would cause trouble. And the Russians didn’t shoot. In the end, the whole village went there for flour, and they didn’t shoot there. So we carried a lot, a lot of flour home. We had a relatively cheerful life, you know, »cheerful«…”

„There were ovens in all houses. We were told like ‘Cut a piece of bread and a piece of sausage, eat it’, so that was Canaan for us. We lived like Marci in Heves county.”

After the war, the grandmother and the godmother also arrived to get the child. “And then we set off home, from there, to Gyömrő on foot. There was no means of transport, the journey took several days. I don’t remember how we slept on the way, where we slept, interestingly enough. It happened eighty years ago.” “What we saw was that it wasn’t a happy life. Luckily, no one got hurt. (...) (Life) was shaken up. My grandfather had a hairdressing shop, because he was 70% disabled, his right leg was shot, he couldn’t bend. And he got a business license in the Rákosi regime, which was a very big deal…”