"Tomorrow the sun will shine."
That is how my father encouraged his comrades at the overcrowded "hospital" in Ukraine in the winter of 1943, on the eastern front of World War II.
Hundreds of Hungarian Jewish forced labourers were being treated for wounds and diseases in an abandoned stall with breaking walls. Patients - tangled over beds, chairs and the floor - often found themselves in snow when they woke up in the morning. There were few doctors and almost no medicine.
My father, Ervin Brody, had his toe amputated there, without anaesthesia, to save his leg from the frostbite that had crippled him on a retreat march of 600km through the Russian winter, after their German masters had been defeated at Stalingrad.
Of the 265 men in his labour company, only a few dozen survived. His steel discipline and physical strength, as a championship tennis player, pulled him through that ordeal, as they would his entire life.
The siege of Budapest
"Tomorrow the sun will shine" has become a kind of mantra in my family.
In the 23 years since my father died, I have thought a lot about "Mompi", as we called him ever since I could not pronounce "mon papa" as a baby. My life as a human rights activist, which has taken me to war-zones, refugee camps and ghettos across the globe, has been a constant reminder that, despite my privileged position, I live only one generation removed from the conflict and turmoil of Mompi's world.
Or perhaps, only one pandemic away.
In Barcelona, where I now live, thousands have died in overburdened make-shift hospitals. At least here, there are doctors, medicine and no snow. In New York, where we grew up, Mompi's widow (my step-mother) died last month of natural causes at 96, but the virus prevented us from being with her.
After he returned from Ukraine, the Hungarian collaborationist government sent Mompi to a large labour battalion at a Yugoslav copper mine where a sadistic commander took pleasure in torturing the workers.
The battallion was disbanded in the face of a Soviet advance in October 1944, and thousands of Jews were shot by the retreating Nazis on a forced march towards Hungary.
When news of the massacre made it back to my father's family in Budapest, they assumed he was dead. In fact, he had managed to escape with some friends during a thunderstorm.
Mompi often told me that one of the happiest sights of his life, after three days wending through a forest to avoid detection, was the red star on the cap of one of Marshal Tito's communist Partisans manning a machine-gun position.
From there, my father joined the advancing Soviet army as a translator and auxiliary and marched with them to the siege of Budapest, his home.
Read more here...
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/sun-shine-war-time-lessons-father-200421085457048.html
