Tomi Komoly

More & more as I go on in life, I want to give credit to my mother for some kind of inborn instinct or wisdom that probably women have more than men. She had a sense of what dangers lay ahead. Whereas the average Jewish person or family by this time acquired the mentality of ‘As long as we do as we’re told, we’re OK.’ ‘Don’t rattle the bush’, kind of thing. Don’t go outside your own sphere of ability & power. She must have been looking to see what is to come. And realised that the Yellow Star houses were just a 1st step towards rounding up people, putting them on trains to Auschwitz & other camps. By then there were 2 locations that had names. 1 was a railway station called Kistarcsa. The other was just referred to as the Téglagyár, the brick factory. Those two words entered my world. They achieved a kind of symbolism, the kind of penultimate danger. She was aware of that. And she though that staying in the Yellow Star house was going to be dangerous. And she was absolutely right, of course.