“A war does not end till the last survivor has died.”

The quote above is from the last chapter of my cousin’s book: ‘Magda’s Daughter’. I don’t know who coined the quote originally, I have heard it many times in various guises, but whoever came up with the original thought hit the nail right on the head.

The sentence contains an awful truth; no matter how, when and where you experience a war, the memories will haunt you to your dying days. As veterans, statesmen, heads of states, clergymen, observers, soldiers, relatives, descendents and the media gathered on the Normandy beaches to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of the landings that changed the course of history, that awful truth reflected well on the faces of those who were active participants of those heroic and tragic events.

Yes, there was some pride showing, remembering the day’s achievement that signalled the beginning of the end of Hitler’s evil empire, but sadness, sorrow and thoughtful reflection was more apparent than pride. Many thousands of people lost their lives on that fateful day, soldiers of the Allied Forces, soldiers of the German Army, men and women of the French Resistance and innocent civilian bystanders. Surviving comrades, relatives, friends, and sweethearts of those perished still carry the scar in their souls sixty years after the events. And even those who just witnessed the events, the carnage, without the loss of a loved one, still carry the awful memory with them, never to forget till their dying days. Such are the effects of war. It leaves scars, visible as well as invisible ones, scars that fester on till life ebbs away.

On that day, sixty years ago, I was a frightened, apprehensive 10 year old kid in Budapest, cooped up in cramped quarters of a block of flats designated as a “Jewish House.” I had good reasons to be frightened and apprehensive. Many members of my family had already been rounded up, taken for “Deportation”, or forced labour.

Every one of us living in that block of flat was compelled to wear a yellow David’s Star. We were all marked out, prospective victims of a tyrannical system, hell bent to wipe us off the face of this earth. We knew it, as we waited for the day our turn would come. In addition, as we were waiting for the slaughter by our captors, we had to endure daily and nightly devastating aerial bombardment, carried out by the Allies.

We heard of the Normandy landings from a BBC broadcast on our radio. Having a radio and listening to the BBC carried the risk of instant execution, yet we listened to the broadcast every night. This was just another reason for me to feel apprehensive; I was aware of the risk and fearful of the consequences.

My immediate family quietly celebrated the news, than, in a more sober and sombre mood, acknowledged that it would be probably too late for our salvation by the time the allied forces reached Budapest.

Just eight days after D-Day, on the 14^th of June 1944, my mother, my two aunts, my cousin Ėvi and I removed the Yellow Stars from our garments, slipped out of the Jewish House and with falsified papers and under assumed identities went on the run, to escape the certain fate waiting for us.

My aunt Magda, cousin Ėvi and I went into hiding in a small village in western Hungary, whilst my mother with her elder sister - aunt Kati – moved from safe house to safe house in and around Budapest. The two of them survived  - constantly dodging the Gestapo dragnet - the siege of Budapest by the Red Army, when large areas of the city were razed to the ground by heavy artillery and aerial bombardment.

The three of us, in that little village, went through and survived the “baptism of fire” in the front line, when in March the following year the Red Army and the Germans fought a decisive tank, artillery and infantry battle in and around the village.

D-Day was a decisive turning point in the Second World War, a colossal event in history. Even though I was a child and many hundreds of miles removed from the actual events, the memory of that day is still etched in my mind. Later events that brought the stench of death and carnage right into our nostrils, rather than diminishing the memory of D-Day, it elevated the events in our minds.

To us it meant that, from that day onwards, Hitler’s Army was on the run, giving us just a chink of hope for our own salvation. Maybe for our elders that chink of hope was the driving force that made our survival possible.

I and many others in occupied and oppressed Europe had good reasons to celebrate that day, and for those of us who survived, many more reasons to be grateful for the courage and sacrifices of those brave young man who breached the defences of “Fortress Europe”.

For the vast majority of people today, D-Day is part of history; nothing more than a legend with a few mementoes of hardware in museums to muse over.

For us, the survivors, it is living memory, with scars running deep and still bleeding.

We buried some of our dead, but we can never burry our past. It lives on, haunts us, still capable of forcing us to shed tears for the people we loved and lost.

For us that war never ended. It never will…. Not until the last one of the survivors has died…

As I watched the poignant pictures of remembrance, listened to the speeches, I could not help wondering about survivors of other wars that followed later on, after those events of June 1944, survivors of more recent and still active wars, and those yet to come… and I could not help shedding tears for all those yet to die in today’s many wars and the wars of tomorrow…

Is humanity doomed forever to carry scars and to keep shedding tears for loved ones lost?…

Will humanity ever learn?… Will the wars ever end?…

© P. J. Oszmann (6 June 2004)