The Case
The Helmans of Tiszabogdány
One card in 2019. More than three hundred records by 2026. A family of carters from a village on the Tisza, and the two cousins who came back.
Helen was born in Tiszabogdány, in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, in 1929, to Zacharias Helman and Roza Landó. She was the sole survivor of her immediate family. Her mother, her father and five of her brothers and sisters were murdered. For most of her descendants’ lives the family had nothing of them: no photograph, no date, no place beyond the name of a village.
What the records gave back
The day after Passover, the entire Jewish population of the Rakhiv district is rounded up and held about eight days in the village school. The family had always believed they went to the ghetto at Sighet. The town’s own survivors’ book and the district records show it was Mátészalka, two hundred kilometres west.
The Mátészalka ghetto is emptied in exactly three trains. The middle one, logged passing Kassa with 3,298 people aboard, is the only one that fits the family’s registration dates.
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Roza and five of the children are sent to the side that meant death. Zacharias and his two nephews are selected for labour. Seventeen people born in Tiszabogdány are documented admitted across those three days.
The three men are shipped to Buchenwald and housed together in Z-4, in the Little Camp. At intake they are photographed one behind the other: boards 322, 323 and 324.
The two nephews are assigned to the synthetic-fuel plant at Rehmsdorf, code-named Wille. On 23 July, Zacharias is sent instead to Magdeburg-Rothensee.
Worked past use, Zacharias is ordered back to Auschwitz on the 6th and moved on the 8th. He is killed there about the 10th, on the same ground where his wife and children had waited five months before.
Rehmsdorf is evacuated. The train is strafed from the air, the survivors are marched the rest of the way, and perhaps one in ten reaches Terezín. Both nephews are among them, and both are liberated there.
Budapest. Two boys from the village find Helen and tell her what had happened to her family. Their own registration forms, filled out in their own hands that summer, place them in the city in the month she always said they were.
What it found that nobody was looking for
Two of the three men in those photographs were cousins whose names the family had never heard. They surfaced on a camp roster during a search for someone else, and they turned out to be the ones who carried the family’s story out.
Following them forward led to their descendants in Israel: a branch that had not known Helen or her father existed, and who had never held their own parents’ birth records. Those records were released online only last year.
The records did not replace my grandmother’s memory. They tested it. The ghetto she could not name, the transport she never knew the date of, the trade she remembered her father working, the cousins she said found her in Budapest: every one of them is now on a document created by the people trying to erase her. She was right about all of it, and she never saw a single one of these papers.
A further identification, of a photograph taken in the birch grove at Birkenau on 26 May 1944, is in preparation for submission to Yad Vashem. It is put forward as probable and warranting formal review, not as proven.
