What Happened On The Brooklyn Subway

By Author: kinhomchan
Total Articles: 66
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Marcel Steinberger, a native of Hungary, was a man of nearly fifty, with bushy white hair and kind brown eyes. A methodical man, he always took the 9:09 train from his suburban home to Queens, New York, where he caught a subway into the city.
On the morning of January 10, 1948, Sternberger boarded the 9:09 as usual. En route, he suddenly decided to visit a Hungarian friend who lived in Brooklyn and was ill.
So Steinberger changed to the subway for Brooklyn, went to his friend's house, and stayed until midafternoon. He then boarded a Manhattan-bound subway for his Fifth Avenue office. Here is Marcel's incredible story.
The car was crowded, and there seemed to be no chance of a seat. But just as I entered, a man sitting by the door suddenly jumped up to leave, and I slipped into his empty place.I'd been living in New York long enough not to start conversations with strangers. But being a photographer, I have always had the peculiar habit of analyzing people's faces, and I was struck by the features of the passenger on my left.
He was probably in his late thirties, and when he glanced up, his eyes seemed ...
... to have a hurt expression in them. He was reading a Hungarian-language newspaper, and something, prompted me to say in Hungarian,"! Hope you don't mind if I glance at your paper. "
The man seemed surprised to be addressed in his native language. But he answered politely, "You may read it if you like. I'll have time later on. "
Instead of reading, we began to talk. During the half-hour ride to town, I learned his name was Bella Pigskin. A law student when World War I started, he had been put into a German labor battalion and sent to the Ukraine. Later he was captured by the Russians and put to work burying the German dead. After the war, he covered hundreds of miles on foot until he reached his home in Debrecen, a large city in eastern Hungary.
When he went to his former address, he found the apartment that had once been occupied by his father, mother, brothers and sisters, as well as the apartment he had shared with his wife, were both occupied by strangers. None of them had ever heard of his family.
Full of sadness, he turned to leave when a boy ran after him, calling, and Paskin basis Pigskin basis that means
Uncle Pigskin. The child was the son of some of his old neighbors. He went to the boy's home and talked to his parents Your whole family is dead," they told him. "The Nazis took them to Auschwitz.
Auschwitz had been one of the worst Nazi concentrate camps. Hearing this, Paskin gave up all hope. A few days later, too heartsick to remain any longer in Hungary, he set again on foot, stealing across border after border until he reached Paris. He managed to immigrate to the United States in October 1947, just three months before I met him.
The entire time he had been talking, kept thinking that somehow his story seemed familiar. A young woman whom I had met recently at the home of friends had also been from Debrecen; she had been at Auschwitz; from there she had been transferred to work in a German munitions factory. Her relatives had been killed in the gas chambers. Later, she was liberated by the Americans and was brought here in 1946, in the first boatload of displaced persons.
Her story had moved me so much that I had written down her address and phone number, intending to invite her to meet my family and thus help relieve a little of the terrible emptiness in her life.
It seemed impossible that there could be any connection between these two people, but as I neared my station, I fumbled anxiously in my address book. I asked in what I hoped was a casual voice, Was your wife's name Maria?"
He turned pale. "Yes!" he answered. "How did you know?"
He looked as if he were about to faint.
I said, Let's get off the train. I took him by the arm at the next station and led him to a phone booth. He stood there like a man in a trance while I dialed her phone number.
It seemed a long time before Maria Pigskin answered. (Later I learned her room was near the telephone, but she was in the habit of never answering it because she had few friends and the calls were always for someone else. This time, however, there was no one else at homeland after let-ting it rings for a while, she responded.