Robert Ratonyi was born in Budapest in January 1938, the year of the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, a year he calls a bad one for a Jewish child to be born in Europe. His father was conscripted into a labor battalion in 1942, when Robert was four, and never came back. On the night of October 10, 1944, soldiers emptied his building, lined the Jews up single file, ordered the adults three steps forward, and marched his mother out. He was six. A friend of his mother's walked him across a bombed-out city to his grandparents, and for the next three months the family moved seven times between the walled ghetto and the Swedish protected houses set up under Raoul Wallenberg: ten people sleeping on the floor of one room with the windows blown out, a fifteen-year-old cousin slipping out without his yellow star to barter for food. When hunger left Robert too weak to walk, his grandfather carried him on his back. The Red Army reached the ghetto on January 18, 1945, a week after his seventh birthday. His mother came home in July.
He escaped Hungary after the 1956 uprising, reached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by 1961, and built a business in Atlanta. On the third anniversary of October 7, Jenny Beth Martin asks him what he saw, how he survived, what he found when he studied every genocide of the twentieth century, why he says Hamas crossed the same line the Nazis did, and why he has spent sixteen years standing in front of students in Georgia telling them what happened.
Guest: Robert Ratonyi, Holocaust survivor, author of From Darkness into Light: My Journey Through Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to Freedom, and a speaker for the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust and the William Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum in Atlanta.
Today's topics:
• 1938: the Anschluss, Kristallnacht, and why his father decided there would be no more children
• Why Hungary joined Hitler, and why the Hungarian Holocaust did not begin until 1944
• 1942: his father conscripted into a labor battalion when Robert was four; he never saw him again
• Eichmann in Budapest, March 1944: most of Hungary's Jews outside the capital deported in six weeks, the great majority to Auschwitz
• Yellow star houses, and the night of October 10, 1944, when soldiers took the adults and left the children behind
• Julia, his mother's friend, and the walk through a bombed-out Budapest to his grandparents
• The ghetto: twenty-five city blocks, a ten-foot wall, four gates, and a pile of jewelry on the sidewalk
• Raoul Wallenberg's Schutzpass: the Swedish paper that moved a family into a protected house, and the cousin in an Arrow Cross uniform who got them out of the ghetto
• The Arrow Cross raids: show the pass, hand over the jewelry, or be taken to the Danube
• The last room: Kazinczy Street, ten people on the floor, no windows, and cousin Mike slipping out without his yellow star to barter for food
• Too weak to carry the grinder, then too weak to walk: carried into the ghetto on his grandfather's back
• January 18, 1945: the soldiers at the window were Russian, and the crowd was shouting the word for bread
• July 1945: word that his mother had survived the Lichtenwörth labor camp in Austria
• 34 genocides in the twentieth century, and the one thing Ratonyi says none of them had in common
• The thin line: good and evil in every human heart, and why Ratonyi says Hamas crossed it on October 7
• Why he says the Nazis tried to hide their crimes and Hamas did not
• Sixteen years of speaking: small-town Georgia halls, the students the Breman Museum buses in every year, and the Atlanta students who go to Auschwitz after hearing him
• The $1.5 million endowment that now carries his name, and the Catholic school that opened an institute on the history of antisemitism
• Martin Niemöller, Lord Acton, and the lesson Ratonyi leaves every audience: you cannot be apathetic
• Why he says the Constitution's divided power is the answer to the most dangerous thing in the world
The Jenny Beth Show airs live Monday through Friday at 1:00 PM ET. Hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. Subscribe for daily analysis of politics, policy, and the fight for constitutionally limited government. teapartypatriots.org
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