The Feig Family

Zeidy — Laci of Tiszadob, Mordechai of Brooklyn

Born Christmas Day, 1922. Last son of a household that did not survive.

— ZEIDY —

Laci · Mordechai

1922–1990

Tiszadob sits on the upper Tisza river in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county, in northeastern Hungary. The land around it is damp and green where the river floods, dotted with willows and acacia; at the western edge of the village stands the Andrássy Castle, built in the 1880s by Count Gyula Andrássy — the first foreign minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — a neo-Gothic silhouette with a boxwood labyrinth and an English garden that any Jewish child in the village would have known as simply the kastély. About three thousand people lived in Tiszadob in the early twentieth century; at its peak the Jewish community numbered about a hundred, Orthodox, tied to the rabbinical world of Nagykálló and the Satmar Hasidic courts. This was Lina Klein's village and Emanuel Klein's village, and it was the village their youngest son Laci was born into on 25 December 1922.

When Lina gave birth to him that winter, she was forty-three. Her husband Emanuel was thirty-five. Their first child Ilona was already ten, their second son Jenő was nine. The gap between Jenő and the new baby was a long nine years with no other children in between — just a long pause.

At the Shabbos table in Tiszadob, Lina called him Laci — the Hungarian diminutive of László, which itself was the civil form of his Hebrew name, Eliezer. His full Hebrew name was Mordechai Eliezer. His older brother Jenő was Jenő bácsi to the family that would come after. His older sister Ilona turned thirty-two in the spring of 1944.

Of the four people in the Klein household in May 1944, two survived. Laci — twenty-one that spring, prime age for a Hungarian labor battalion call-up — and Jenő, thirty-one, who would end the war at Theresienstadt. Emanuel was fifty-seven. Lina was sixty-five. Ilona was thirty-two. None of them saw the summer.

We honor our loved ones resting here. — Tiszadob cemetery memorial, sponsored jointly by Laci and Jenő Klein

Two brothers came back. They came back to the village, or they sent money for someone else to return, and together they paid for a memorial stone in the Tiszadob cemetery. That inscription is one of the few physical traces left of the household they grew up in. Everything else was taken.

Laci made his way to America. When he presented his landing papers at the reception station — HIAS desks at Castle Garden, at the Marseilles Hotel near the piers, or inside a curtained Ellis Island annex — a clerk heard his name. Somehow — and this has always been the family's clearest story — "Klein" on the page became "Feig." Whether the clerk read it off a misread manifest, mistranscribed a Hungarian-accented answer, or confused Laci's paper with the next man's in line, no one now knows. In that second, a name that had belonged to his father and his grandfather in Tiszadob for a hundred years ceased to be his legal name in America.

He lived for forty more years under the name the paperwork gave him.

In the early 1950s he married Irene Weisz, a girl from Apagy, a village forty miles from Tiszadob. He died in September 1990, aged sixty-seven, in Brooklyn.

— TISZADOB CEMETERY MEMORIAL —

"Tiszteljük az itt nyugvó szeretteinket"

We honor our loved ones resting here.

The plaque bears five names. Three are family: Büchler Lajos (Ilona Klein's husband), Klein Jenő (Laci's brother), and Klein Laci. The other two — Kohn Icu and Kohn Ilus — are presumed unrelated to the Klein family.

Bobby — Irene of Apagy

Born 2 April 1924. The heart of this family — the one everyone was closest to. What she told her son, in her own words, in 2014.

— BOBBY —

Irene · Weisz

1924–2013

In 2014, Menachem's daughter Michal sat her father down and asked him to tell the story of his mother's life. What follows comes almost entirely from that recording — Irene's own childhood and young womanhood, as she told it to her son, and as he told it to his daughter. The memories she carried from Apagy were, as Menachem put it, always very positive. Life was very peaceful. They used to say family was always together.

Apagy sat about fifty kilometers south-southwest of Tiszadob, in the Nyírség — a flat plain of yellow sand, acacia groves, tobacco fields, and apple orchards that the novelist Gyula Krúdy called the yellow dusty Nyírség. The village lay seventeen kilometers east of Nyíregyháza, the county seat, and in 1904 the opening of the Vásárosnamény–Nyíregyháza railway had given it a station and a small commercial economy. About 2,400 people lived there in the 1930s; the Jewish community peaked at around 160 — roughly thirteen percent of the village — and had declined to ninety-two on the eve of 1944. Like Tiszadob it was Orthodox and Chassidic-touched; the tomb of the Kállói Rebbe at Nagykálló, fifteen kilometers south, was the spiritual magnet of the whole district.

Irene was born in Apagy on 2 April 1924, the middle child and only daughter of Lipat and Regina. Her older brother Imre was three years older. Three younger brothers followed: Endre (Chaim Shalom), Erno (Eliyahu), and Jeno (Shlomo Yehuda). The family lived in the same building as her father's general store — the store sold every kind of food — and the house was near the railway station; travelers passing through used to stop by, and Irene's mother would serve them meals. Lipat was a middle-class provider. Beyond the store, he worked as a middleman, shipping trainloads of potatoes from local farmers to the cities.

The house had no running water, no electricity, no central heating, no telephone — standard for a Nyírség village at that time. They pumped water from a well and heated it on a wood stove for baths taken in a kitchen tub. In winter they warmed the beds with hot stones and slept under thick down covers. Only one person in the whole town owned a car. If someone needed to receive a phone call, a message arrived from the post office telling them when to come and stand by the line. Perishables sat in a dug-out pit in the basement under hay and a slab of ice that lasted a long time in the cool underground.

Irene's cousins the Feldmans lived directly across the street — the children of Regina's brother (most likely Ignácz Feldman, born 1894). On Shabbos afternoons the two families spread cloths on the big backyard lawn and sat together to shmooze. Relations with the non-Jewish villagers were peaceful; until the war, Menachem said, everything was fine.

Irene's mother Regina was, in her daughter's telling, a tzadeikes — a great cook and baker who always helped the poor. Regina's own mother, Irene's grandmother — a widow — lived with them in the house. Irene shared a bed with her. She gave her mother only the greatest respect, calling her by a name of affection. That grandmother was almost certainly Miriam Grósz Feldman, though the Ancestry records list her dying in 1932 — a date contradicted by the testimony that follows.

There was no Bais Yaakov in Apagy, so Irene attended the public school. She was popular at recess because she filled her pockets with chocolates and candies from her father's store to share with her friends. Everyone wanted to be her friend that way. The rabbi was not Apagy's alone — he cycled between three or four towns, each Shabbos in a different one, and came by every once in a while. Irene's older brother Imre did not stay for school in Apagy; he was sent to live with his grandparents Simon and Rozalia in Nyírbogát, where the Jewish community was larger and the schooling better. Every Sunday the family in Apagy hired a horse and buggy and traveled to Nyírbogát to see Imre and the grandparents together.

By 1941 or 1942 all the young men, including Irene's brother Imre, had been taken to Hungarian forced-labor battalions. The Hungarian government had banned Jews from having meat. The family made falsche fisch — false fish — from whatever they could. The women and the older men and the children were left in the houses. Hungary, by the terms of the war, was still a relatively slow-moving place compared to Poland. The Germans did not come to deport the Jews of Apagy until 1944.

Shortly after Pesach that year the family was moved to a ghetto. Around Shavuos they were forced into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The deportation of Hungarian Jewry, the last great mass killing of the Shoah, took place between 15 May and 9 July 1944; more than four hundred thousand people — Irene and her family among them — were transported in a span of eight weeks.

On arrival at Birkenau, Irene saw her grandmother — the grandmother she had shared a bed with, too weak to step down quickly enough — and her uncle, the grandmother's son, who reached up to help her, shot in front of her by a Nazi guard. The uncle was almost certainly Ignácz Feldman, Regina's brother; Yad Vashem records his death in 1944. Her parents Lipat and Regina, and her three younger brothers Endre, Erno, and Jeno, did not survive the deportations. Her father Lipat was transferred onward through the camp system to KZ Ebensee — a subcamp of Mauthausen in the Austrian Alps, opened in late 1943 for tunneling labor, and one of the final and worst camps in the Mauthausen complex. He died there on 17 February 1945, eighty days before the camp was liberated by American troops on 6 May.

Irene spent the next year in the camp system — Auschwitz and at least one other location where prisoners were kept for forced labor. By the end she weighed seventy pounds. A guard's dog bit her foot while she searched garbage for potato peels, and the infection lasted months. By liberation she was so reduced that the Allied soldiers who opened the barracks had placed her among the dead, and only realized otherwise when they noticed her moving. That discovery saved her life twice over — because other survivors died from eating the first heavy rations their shrunken bodies could not process, and she, in a hospital bed instead of a canteen line, was spared that too.

From the hospital, when she was strong enough, she was sent to Sweden. She lived there for five years, together with other girls who had lost their families. They stayed in a home. People took care of them. The Swedish king and his people, she would say, were very kind. Her older brother Imre — taken to forced labor before the deportations — had survived too, but he had returned to Hungary, married, and was now trapped there: the Russians had closed the borders and he could not leave until the 1956 revolution opened a door.

Her father's younger sister Aunt Esther — Simon and Rozalia's eighth child, born 1905 — had gone to America before the war and settled in Chicago. Irene had known her well as a child: Esther had lived in Nyírbogát with the grandparents, and Irene had seen her every Sunday on the horse-and-buggy visits, and Esther had come to Apagy too. In Sweden, Esther found her, and began sending packages of food. Through her Chicago relatives Irene was finally granted a visa, and in 1950, at twenty-six, she took a boat to New York. An uncle's brother-in-law met her at the dock and put her on a train to Chicago. When she arrived, the American cousins — all of whom still spoke Hungarian — made her a big party.

Aunt Esther by then had remarried (her first husband, Jack Yeno Fogel, a Yeshiva bachur, had enlisted in the American army and been killed in France in 1944), and had a baby daughter about one or two years old. Irene stayed with Esther in Chicago. But Chicago, to Irene, felt like a place where Shabbos was fading. The community was drifting. When an introduction was made to a young man who did not keep Shabbos, she declined. She went to New York for a friend's wedding and decided to stay.

She met Laci, the boy from Tiszadob. They got engaged. They had nothing. They walked into a housewares store and bought three plates, three spoons, three forks, three cups — one for Tati, one for me, and one for a guest. After the wedding they paid the caterer by opening the gift envelopes one by one.

A well-to-do uncle offered to open a business for them in Chicago, to set them up near family. It would have been an easier life; they had almost no family in New York. They decided not to go. The Yiddishkeit, they felt, would be lost in Chicago. Better to stay poor in Brooklyn where their children could grow up religious. It was not, Menachem said, even a real question for them.

The important thing is to look back — to look back at the generation before you, to follow in their footsteps. Not to chase after whatever is new. Technology didn't mean anything to her. What matters is looking back at where you come from. — Irene Feig, as summarized by her son Menachem, 2014

She had no desire, ever, to return to Hungary. A murderous country, she called it, where the goyim murdered our people. After the war, when her brother Imre finally did return to their old house in Apagy, the principal of the public school — a friend he had known before the war — came by to try to befriend the family again. Imre wasn't interested. Neither was Irene.

She died in Brooklyn in 2013, at eighty-nine, having raised a family whose children and grandchildren live the life she chose to stay for. Of all the people in this document — of all the names and dates on this tree — Irene is the one everyone who is alive today remembers best. She is the person this family is closest to. Everything on this page that comes after 1944 starts with her survival.

Simon & Rozalia — The House at Nyírbogát

Eleven children, a long marriage, and the grandparents before the war.

— SIMON WEISZ —

Shaul · Shmuel

1860–1940

— ROZALIA GRÓSZ —

Fogel · Rachel

1871–1933

Simon Weisz — Shaul / Samuel in his Hebrew and civil variants — was born on 17 November 1860 in Petneháza, a village of a few hundred houses in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county. His parents Leopold Abraham "Lebli" Weisz and Pepi Pessil Schvarcz were both twenty-five when he arrived. Family records also show older siblings — Lajos (b. 1866), Izidor (b. 1871), Morris (b. 1879), and Roza (b. 1858, later settled in Budapest) — labeled in the Ancestry tree as Simon's half-siblings. The designation points to one of Simon's parents having had a first marriage before they met. The clearest evidence for this is Morris's surname: Weinberger, not Weisz, which strongly suggests a different father. Whether it was Leopold who was previously widowed or Pepi who was — and therefore which of these siblings share which parent with Simon — is not yet resolved in the records.

Some time before 1891, Simon married Rozalia Grósz — called also Róza Sara, Rachel, or in Yiddish affectionate "Fogel" (little bird). She was eleven years his junior. Their first daughter Giza was born in 1891 in Nyíregyháza and died the same year, less than a year old. Their second child — born 24 March 1892 in Nyírbogát, where the family had now moved — was a son: Leopold "Lipat" Weisz, Irene's father.

Over the next seventeen years, Simon and Rozalia would have more children, for a documented total of eleven — "five sons and six daughters," per Simon's Ancestry biography. We can name nine of them with dates and fates: Giza, Lipat, Hanni, Malvin, Regina, Szerena Sara, Dávid, Esther, and Ignácz Izeek. Two more — almost certainly sons who died in infancy or childhood and were never entered in the timeline records — remain unknown to us.

Of the nine we can name, two died as infants (Giza in 1891, Dávid at three days old in 1904). Three daughters died young, in their twenties and thirties, of illnesses whose nature has not yet been recovered from the records: Regina at twenty-nine, Hanni at thirty-four, Malvin at thirty-eight — all in the 1929–1935 window. Two daughters made it to America before the war and lived long American lives: Szerena Sara to Chicago (died 1979, age seventy-seven), Esther to Chicago and later Skokie (died 2003, age ninety-seven). Lipat and Ignácz Izeek are the other sides of that ledger — Lipat at Ebensee in 1945, Ignácz's fate still not confirmed.

Rozalia died on 9 March 1933 at sixty-one, in Nyírbogát. Simon died in 1940, aged eighty. Both were spared, by the timing of natural death, what came to the county four years later.

Aunt Esther — The Chicago Thread

The sister who left before it closed.

Esther Fogel — born Esther Weisz, 3 October 1905, the ninth of Simon and Rozalia's eleven children — left Hungary for the United States sometime before the war. She had lived with Simon and Rozalia in Nyírbogát, and Irene knew her well from the Sunday horse-and-buggy visits. By 1944 Esther was living in Chicago and was naturalized an American citizen there. The Fogel name came from her first husband, Jack Yeno Fogel, a Yeshiva bachur who enlisted in the American army. He died on 14 September 1944 in Lorraine, France, during the Allied advance — the family remembered it as D-Day, but the records place it in the fall campaign three months later. Either way, he did not come home.

In 1947 Esther remarried — David V. Schon, in Chicago — and had a daughter with him, born around 1948 or 1949. (That daughter, Irene recalled, was about one or two years old when Irene arrived in 1950.) David died on 1 January 1979. Esther outlived him by twenty-four years and died on 2 July 2003 in Skokie, Illinois, at the age of ninety-seven.

But it was Esther who kept Irene alive across the ocean — the packages from Chicago that reached the survivors' home in Sweden, the room she offered her niece when the boat from Europe docked in 1950, the aunt who opened her door to the survivor-girl of her older brother Lipat. When Irene later said that the most important thing was to look back and follow in the footsteps of the generations before — Esther was one of those footsteps.

Regina — The Feldmans of Jákó

The other half of Irene's family — first cousins who became in-laws.

Regina — also Rivke — Feldman was born on 31 August 1892 in Jákó, a village in Szabolcs-Szatmár, to Elias Feldman (age thirty-two) and Miriam Grósz (age thirty). Miriam was also known as Amália. She was the older sister of Rozalia Grósz — the sister who had married Simon Weisz in Nyírbogát, twelve miles away, and whose son Lipat was born the same year as Regina: 1892.

Regina grew up with six siblings. József, the eldest, died in 1899 in Kisvárda at the age of eleven. Two brothers made it to America before the war: Samuel Feldman, born 6 October 1890 in Jákó, emigrated to the United States and lived out his life in Skokie, Illinois, dying 5 November 1967; and Henry Hyman (Chaim) Feldman, born 28 March 1897 in Nyíregyháza, who settled in Chicago and lived to ninety-three, dying 16 December 1990 — three months after his nephew Laci died in Brooklyn. Three more siblings remained in Hungary: Bernát, Róza, and Ignácz. Ignácz was born 6 December 1894 in Jákó and was murdered in 1944; he is the most likely identity of the uncle Irene described being shot at the Auschwitz ramp helping his mother. The fates of Bernát and Róza are not yet recovered.

The parallel with the Weisz family is striking. Just as two of Simon & Rozalia's daughters (Esther and Szerena) settled in Chicago before the war, two of Elias & Miriam's sons (Samuel and Henry) did the same. When Irene arrived in America in 1949, she was coming to a city where she had both Weisz and Feldman relatives — two sides of the same extended family who had crossed the ocean a generation earlier.

Regina and Lipat married sometime before 1921 — their eldest son Imre was born in Apagy in August 1921. Irene followed in April 1924, and three more sons after her: Endre Chaim Shalom, Erno Eliyahu, and Jeno Shlomo Yehuda.

Her mother Miriam died in 1932, two years before anti-Semitism would sharpen. Regina herself was murdered in the deportations of 1944, fifty-two years old. Her husband Lipat survived the initial deportations and was transferred through the camp system to KZ Ebensee in Austria, where he died on 17 February 1945 — eighty days before liberation.

Brooklyn, the early 1950s

Two survivors from two villages forty miles apart meet in a third country.

They were introduced, or reintroduced, in the Hungarian-speaking survivor community that had gathered in Brooklyn after the war. Laci was about thirty, Irene about twenty-six. They married in the early 1950s and became, on paper, Mordechai and Irene Feig. Their daughter Rivka — Rena on her birth certificate — was born 4 December 1956. Their son Menachem was born 4 October 1957 — eleven months later.

The home they built was, in every meaningful sense, the beginning of this family. Everyone pictured here who comes after Laci and Irene exists because two people from a world that was destroyed chose to build a new one in its place — and chose to build it, specifically, in a community that would raise their children religious.

Rivka — Rivka Rochel — married R' Laibe Schwartz and raised seven children: two daughters (Miriam, married Horowitz; Blimi, married Klein) and five sons (Aryeh, Moshe, Menachem, Mordechai, and Pinchus Schwartz). She passed away in December 2024, eleven years after her mother Irene, and three days before what would have been her sixty-eighth birthday. Her seven children and their own families carry the line forward.

Today

Menachem and Fruma — and the six that came after.

Menachem married Fruma. Together they had six children, given in birth order: Yitzchak Yosef, Yehudah Leib, Eliyahu Shaul, Mordechai, Michal, and Aryeh. Some of the names carry the line forward: Mordechai for Zeidy Laci (Mordechai Eliezer), Eliyahu for Irene's brother Erno — murdered 1944 — and Shaul for Simon Weisz, the 2nd great-grandfather in Nyírbogát. Michal — fifth of the six — is the daughter who in 2014 sat her father down and recorded the story of his mother's life, without which most of Chapter Two would not be on this page.

Eli — Eliyahu Shaul, third of the six — is the one gathering the names and building this tree, so that his own children and the generations after will know what the names were and who stood behind the dates.