The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - John Lorinc: Finding the Facts of My Family's Stories

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Journalist John Lorinc's new memoir, "No Jews Live Here," is a documentation of four generations of his Hungarian Jewish family's journey through the Holocaust, the 1956 Revolution and ultimate settlement in Canada. Lorinc took a journalistic approach to find the facts behind the stories he heard growing up.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a fractured information environment, isn't it hard to tell what's real and what's not? I'm Molly Thomas, host of a new show called Big If True. We're fighting misinformation one story at a time. Subscribe on YouTube and follow us on Instagram. I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far?

We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith, a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. In 1956, some 36,000 Hungarians emigrated to Canada, fleeing the Soviet invasion of their country. Journalist John Lawrence's parents were among them. In his new memoir, No Jews Live Here, he mines the stories he heard growing up to document

four generations of his Hungarian Jewish family's journey through the Holocaust, the 56th Revolution, and ultimate settlement in Toronto. And John Lawrence joins us now here in studio. Great to have you back here. Yeah, thanks very much. You did a nice job on this book, John. Well done. I appreciate it. Thank you. Congratulations. I want to know what prompted you to start looking into the facts behind the stories that your parents told you about their background? Well, I grew up with all these stories, right? They were just around me.

And I became increasingly sort of concerned that I wouldn't be able to, that when my mother dies, that I've lost them. So during the pandemic, I ended up going up to visit her at her retirement home. Couldn't go inside, so we would sit on a park bench or on the terrace behind. And I just put my tape recorder down and started

just recording her stories. And then I realized from some discussions with friends that it would make sense to kind of try to expand on this. And it also dovetailed with like a longstanding desire to write something about my grandmother, who was a character. She's the star of the story. No question about it.

We'll get to her in a second. How do you fact check your mother? Well, so I had, so this is a good question. And so what if I interviewed her extensively about 30 years ago for a story that I'd been assigned to do by Saturday night that didn't end up being published, but I kept all my research notes. And so what I tried to do was check one set of interviews

against the other, the more recent interviews that I did a couple of years ago, and then triangulate with information that I could find about actual events that occurred. And that's the way I sort of went about trying to corroborate details. There are some things you can't corroborate, and that's the nature of the form, the memoir. But I tried to corroborate as much as I could. Your last name is Lawrence, spelled L-O-R-I-N-C.

That was not your family name overseas. What was it back then? So my father's name was Lustig, which is a German name. Like a lot of Eastern European Jews had German names. In German, it means happy. In Hungarian, it has a sort of pejorative connotation, lazy. And he didn't like that name. And after the war, he changed it to Lawrence. My mother doesn't know why he chose Lawrence.

I don't know why he chose Lawrence. It's an incredibly obscure name. Well, let me add another question to the whys about this. If he was going to anglicize his name, which a lot of Eastern Europeans did when they came over here, why did he choose to spell Lawrence like that instead of like everybody else spells Lawrence? So he changed his name before they came to Canada.

So he changed it at some point between 1945 and 1956. And then they didn't go all the way to L-A-W-R-E-N-C. How many people have mispronounced your name over the years? Countless. Well, you've got to admit, you know, it's a tough one. It's a tough one. And most people will never meet another one that's

not related to me. Exactly. The most people will never meet another one that's not related to me. Exactly. The timing of this book, why is that important to you? So the timing is an important question for all the obvious reasons. I didn't write this book to make any comments about what's going on in the Middle East.

I started working on it before October 7th. But I was writing it when that attack came on October 7th and then the subsequent invasion of Gaza. And it really made me pay attention to the content a lot more intensely. As I mentioned to your producer, I ended up writing one of the chapters about 1944, which was the worst time in Hungary, during the week of October 7th, which is not an experience I want to do twice. It was a pretty intense week, and it was a pretty intense subject matter to be writing about.

And I think that these stories are worth telling and remembering for various reasons. We could talk about those. But one of them is that in the case of the Hungarian Jews, they went from a very kind of settled, cosmopolitan, peaceful, integrated life to horrors in the course of a decade. And that's the thing that it's important to sit with and to remember that societies can turn like that.

As long as I have known you, and I've known you a couple of decades anyway, maybe more, you are a pretty straight-ahead unemotional guy. So now you're talking about writing about the worst chapter of your family's history at a time 14 months ago when Israelis are suffering their worst post-holocaust trauma. Right. Did you have any personal difficulty getting through all that? Well, you know, I think the honest, my honest answer would be that in regards to the material of the book, you know, the subject matter, not terribly much because a lot of these stories I knew, what I did manage

to discover during the course of the research is what happened to my father's father who disappeared without a trace and was never heard from again. When I figured out what happened to him using some document searches and so on. That was kind of cathartic. And I was glad to be able to put that in the book and kind of memorialize him that way. It's also, everything that's gone on in Israel has been incredibly intense, right?

Both the pogrom that happened on October 7th and then this terrible, you know, attack on the Palestinian people that's caused so much suffering and devastation. And, you know, it's hard not to be, it's hard not to think about the two things at the same time. And I think it was important to think about the two things at the same time. These stories and the stories of the people who are living in those kibbutzim in the south of Israel and the People who are living in Palestine and are enduring terrible trauma. It's untold misery. Yeah all of it

All right. Let's circle back to your maternal grandmother. This is Ilona Sheldon if you wouldn't mind put a picture up of her there. She is Okay, tell us about her Ilona There she is. Okay, tell us about her. Alona, my mother's mother, was a person that I saw a lot of when we were growing up. She came over for dinner every Sunday. She was one of the major inspirations for this book.

The working title of this book was called Best Appreciated From Afar, and this was really her. She was a big personality. She loved gossip, she went to the horse races. She was always decked out in costume jewelry. She wore high heels to her dying day, so much so that her feet were kind of malformed because of it. And she began her life in the lap of luxury. Her parents were affluent business people. She was sent to school in Switzerland. She had nannies.

She had no expectations around her life. And then things started going bad in Hungary in the late 1930s. And quite unexpectedly, she was able to access this kind of resilience and resourcefulness that enabled her to protect almost all of her family during these terrible moments that happened in 1944, from March to, basically, March 1944 to early 1945. And then she had to survive with two young children

after the war and all the devastation. Then came to Canada, reinvented herself as a seamstress, lived in Montreal, came to Toronto, did it all over again. So she was a person, she was an incredible survivor. At the same time, she was kind of an anti-Semite. I was just going to ask you about this. This is a Jewish woman who kind of didn't like Jews. Right, and so her parents had converted in the 1920s

and she regarded being Jewish in Hungary as being a social liability. And so she said, she used to say to my mother, that the day that her parents converted was the best day of her life. Converted away from Judaism. Converted away from Judaism. And so there was a lot of that kind of self-hatred,

self-loathing, social opportunism in Hungary at that time. Which sort of makes me understand why. And yet I still need to hear an explanation from you about the moment in your childhood, and I think you were maybe 10, when your father came to you and said, John, you're Jewish, but don't tell anybody. What did you make of that as a 10-year-old? What did you make of that as a 10-year-old? So I remember it very vividly. I remember where we were in the neighborhood where I grew up, which was in Lawrence Park.

I remember asking my father how people could tell the difference between Jews and non-Jews, you know, if everybody dressed the same. I didn't find it to be a shocking sort of revelation, but he said it's a secret, don't tell anybody. And so I didn't tell anybody for a long time. And one of the things that I came to learn over the years is that this is an experience that many Hungarian Jews have had, including my generation, people who were born here who had that experience, and certainly in my mother's, you know, my parents' generation and then the generations between.

And one of the things I wanted to do with this book is to kind of unpack why that was. Right? Because you didn't grow up in Nazi-dominated Eastern Europe. No, no. You grew up in Toronto. In Toronto. And, you know, after a number of years, I realized that, you know, pogroms were not very common in North Toronto in the 1970s. And so I thought, OK, well, I don't need to keep that secret because I'm not in danger.

But nevertheless, you know, my parents and most of their friends were very adamant about just leaving all of that behind. That was a European thing. It caused them nothing but trouble, produced yellow stars and hardship, death. When they came to Canada, it was like, that's over. We're gonna be Canadians. We're not gonna be religious in any way.

But did it put something in your head? Yes, of course. Suggesting that there's something wrong with being Jewish. It didn't put in my head that there was something wrong with it, but that there was some, there was a big question mark associated with it. Why was this a secret that I needed to keep?

What was the content of that need for secrecy? And consequently I became very interested in the Holocaust and in the Second World War and then later in, in Hungarian Jewish culture. But that was sort of the pebble in the pond, ironically, because the whole intent was to, here's a piece of information, but you don't need to do anything with it except not tell anybody.

And it's kind of taken over your life, in fact. Well, I mean, it's taken over part of my life. Part of your life, yeah, for sure. As you got older, did you ever revisit that conversation with your dad? With him? Yeah. No, because he, so I was 12. I know you were young when he died.

Yeah, and so it didn't come up because he, you know, I was 10 when he told me, and you know, then was 10 when he told me and, you know, then he was gone. Okay. Let's talk about, and Sheldon, I'm on the bottom of page two here, can we get that photo of Ilona and Paul up? This is their wedding. These are your maternal grandparents.

What happened to them during the war? So during the war, my grandfather, whose name was Paul, who was a, you know, he ran a farm in the south of Hungary. He, like everybody else, lost everything, right? So systematically all of their, you know, their possessions were taken away from them. They couldn't run the farm. And he ended up in a, you know, in a forced labor unit in 1944. And my grandmother was sort of on her own

to try to figure out how to protect her kids, my mother and my uncle. And they were in hiding for a while. They had to buy fake IDs. And in the most intense period of the war, which was December of 1945, and there was the Soviet troops who were surrounding Budapest, and there was a terrible siege of Budapest,

they kind of went into hiding, posing as Romanian refugees, and ended up hiding in the basement of a building which was you know where there were a whole platoon of German soldiers were camped out in the courtyard of this building and you know in at the height of the siege you know there was all this intense artillery and bombing out on the street and they were in the basement and a man came down to the basement and said all the able-bodied men have to come up to the street and help pull in the wounded German soldiers. And immediately my grandfather was struck by shrapnel and basically bled to death in

the next couple hours. And after that, my grandmother, this woman who had been born into the lap of luxury, was a widow. And she had to make do for herself, and she did. And that was a remarkable thing. And not unique to her, I have to stress, right? That so many people had to survive, had to find resilience within themselves in different ways. And so she was one of those people. That's your mother's parents.

What about your father's parents? They were. We have a picture of them, too. Sheldon, you want to bring that up? This is Yoska and Clara, your paternal grandparents. Yeah. What's their story during the war? So their story is a little bit more elusive,

because for part of 1944, my father was in forced labor camp in Yugoslavia. And they only had, you know, he was an only child. So while he was away, it's not clear what happened to them. I don't know if they were in hiding. I don't know what their specific circumstances. But in early November of 1944, Joschka, that's sort of a short form for Joseph, was taken away.

And I always grew up knowing that he had just disappeared and didn't know what happened to him. I've done some searches and found little clues and while I was working on the book I found a bigger clue about when exactly he was taken away and then I cross-referenced what else was happening in Hungary at that time. And there was a death march that was ordered by Eichmann to get about 50 or 60,000 Hungarian Jews to the Austrian-Hungarian border to dig tank traps. And I believe he probably died on that death march.

Here is from your book. We're going to do an excerpt here, Sheldon. I'm at the middle of page three. This is your father who didn't say much about his time in that Serbian copper mine. But here's the quote from the book. Like countless others who endured trauma during the Holocaust and war in general, my father did not relate his experiences,

and I was too young to understand why. There is the obvious answer. The listener, me, lacked the maturity and the context to deal with the harshness of his experiences. Yet, the ubiquity of heavy silences that define the lives of so many survivors and veterans, as well as perpetrators and bystanders, suggests something else, a kind of psychological or psychic outer limit beyond which the conventional tools of memory and storytelling vanish into a black hole. What did you, I mean, did you eventually find out enough to satisfy your curiosity about the conditions your father existed in in that copper camp? Almost. I, so I knew some stories.

There was a particular type of torture that they used at that camp. I knew that he had this aversion to onions, because they had so little food that they had to forage for wild onions in the forests around this camp. And he just loathed the taste of that. So he never wanted to have onions in anything that he, my mother made.

And then while I was doing the research for this book, and even a little bit before I started writing it, I came across a memoir that had been translated about a guy who had been in this exact same forced labor camp, which was this copper mine in Eastern Yugoslavia. And reading his memoir was really a very gripping experience for me because he told the story of what had happened to the guys who survived this copper mine.

And so he was telling a story that my father would have seen. And that was a cathartic experience to read that memoir. And it was one of the motivations for me for writing this book. We're going to do another excerpt from the book. This is about the devastation of the Holocaust on the Jewish community in Hungary. And here's what you write.

The ultimate impact of the Holocaust in Hungary was horrific. During the Second World War, 618,000 Hungarian Jews were killed or deported by Hungarian and Nazi officials, soldiers, and police officers. To put that staggering number into sharper context, as of 1941, when Hungary entered the conflict, the country's Jewish population stood at just over 825,000, meaning three in four perished. In Budapest, just over half the city's pre-war Jewish population survived. Approximately 119,000 Budapest Jews were liberated in early 1945, while 105,453 died or were killed by

the Nazis, the Hungarian gendarmerie, and the Arrow Cross, basically the fascists of Hungary. We know a lot about the effects of the Holocaust on German Jews, on Polish Jews, a lot less about the impact on Hungarian Jews. How come? Well, I would say that there are a number of reasons. One, it's very important, and I really tried to get at this in the book, to understand the timing.

So the worst parts of the Holocaust in Hungary were in the spring of 1944 and in the fall of 1944. And if you think about what else is going on in the Second World War at the time, exactly the moment when trains full of Hungarian Jews, primarily from the rural areas, were going to Auschwitz, the Allies had landed in the beaches of Normandy and were basically liberating France and the low countries. And then the Americans were pushing up through Italy,

and the Soviets were coming in through Eastern Europe. And so there was this kind of weird split screen where history recalls that at that point, the Germans were really back on their heels. But in Hungary, because Hungary had remained nominally independent, it wasn't invaded like Austria or Czechoslovakia, they hadn't gotten into heavy deportations until 1944, until March of 1944.

And so it's this last gasp of what happened in the final solution. And the other, I think, important detail is that the way the Germans and the Hungarian fascists managed that deportation is they began in the rural areas. And the rural areas were primarily orthodox. So the religious communities, small religious communities in Hungary were wiped off the face of the map. Whereas in Budapest, the Budapest Jews were very assimilated.

And many of them were converted. Or they had nothing to do with the traditional Jewish institutions. And then after the war, if they survived, a lot of them just went like enough, no more. And so those stories were much more muted, I think, than the stories of the survivors from other parts of Europe and Central Europe.

I read a word in your book I hadn't seen before, Judapest. Judapest, yeah. They called Budapest, Judapest because there were so many Jewish people there. Okay, your parents. Sheldon, top of page five. Let's get that picture of John's parents up there.

How did your parents meet and marry? There they are. So, this is a funny story. So after the war, my mother, my mother was looking for a job as a secretary and ended up following up a job posting at the Department of Pathology at the medical school in Budapest. And my father, at that point, was a pathologist. He was a young physician.

They were both in their 20s. And so my mother showed up to apply for this job and she saw this guy who was standing there in a white medical coat and he didn't have a shirt on for some reason. And he said to her, you know, he introduced himself and he said to her, do you want to see an autopsy? And my mother said, no, I don't think so. That's an interesting pickup line. It's an epic pickup line.

But my father didn't take no for an answer, and he asked again. And then my mother sort of looked at him, and she said, OK, he's a good looking guy. And so she went with him and watched this autopsy And so she you know her joke which she likes to tell she told it to me again yesterday when I was visiting her Said she met, you know my father over a dead body And that's accurate isn't it? It's absolutely accurate. Yeah fascinating. Okay Let's let's take our remaining moments here and talk about Hungary

post-world war We're now 1956 and a lot of Hungarians had to make, well, they made decisions that a lot of them had not made during World War II. In the war, a lot of them stayed too long and paid the ultimate price for it. In 1956, a lot of them, once the Soviets invaded, decided, decided you know we're not going to make that mistake again and they left. And this country welcomed tens of thousands of Hungarians to our shores. How did your family decide it was time to leave rather than stick it out? So in Budapest during the revolution I mean there were a lot of demonstrations there were a lot there was a lot was a lot of stuff happening in the streets. And again, my parents were young people.

They were 30 and 24. And like young people, they were curious. They wandered around. And at one point, they saw a guy being lynched. And the crowd was yelling, kill the communist, kill the Jew interchangeably. And the reason for that is because there were a lot of Jews who were very senior in the Communist Party. And by 1956, the Communist Party in Hungary was much loathed. It was a very harsh Stalinist government And people wanted to get rid of them.

But my parents sort of saw that. And they thought, OK, this could become ugly. And so they joined many people who decided to just get out. And the people who left Hungary were both Jews and Gentiles alike. There were a lot of people who experienced, again, the Soviet invasion of Budapest in 1956, and the shelling and the violence that went with that.

And they said, we want to go somewhere where there's peace and not live through this again. And that's what they did. And they made this decision in days. And it astonishes me how quickly they decided to uproot themselves. Did they find what they were looking for in Canada? Absolutely and I you know I think that so I should say that they they're accidental Canadians they wanted to emigrate to the United States and when

they got to Vienna they found that there was a very long lineup outside the American Embassy and they had You know they had cloth coats on and it was very cold and somebody said well in the Canadian Embassy you could wait inside and so that's why they became Canadians and but you know they were proud Canadians and they you know, they they were happy to live here. And they were very fortunate because Canada, at that point, was welcoming to these refugees. There were all sorts of amazing things that were happening to the people who were coming here.

And within a couple of days when they arrived, they were sort of adopted by a Hungarian couple who had been here already and helped set them up and they got you know they got jobs and internships and so on so they were very very fortunate and had a couple of kids and had a couple of kids and and you know I feel very fortunate to have been born in Canada to be born in Toronto you know it's a welcoming society welcoming society and I hope that it's still a welcoming society because there are other people who need to find refuge in the way that the Hungarians did in 1956. John, I'm going to ask you one last question which is for the longest time

I think exclusively what I read of yours was about urban affairs and urban politics and you were very focused on that. And with a previous book, The Ward, and now with this book, No Jews Live Here, you're writing about stuff that is fairly new to you in terms of the breadth of your career. Are you reclaiming your Jewish heritage? Well, to some extent, and I'm trying to kind of connect it to things in my life at the moment and in my career. And I'm not a practicing Jew.

One of my sons had a B'nai Mitzvah in a very secular setting. We identify as Jewish, but we also do Christmas. But the history of it is, I think, important to know and to not have as a secret. And to me, it's also connected to something else I do professionally, which is write about cities. Because my parents were really urban people, and all the people that I grew up with were very urban.

And so I think that there's a sort of a synchronicity there between their urbanness and the content of this book. You got kids? I do. You got grandkids? Not yet, no. Your grandkids will be very happy you wrote this book. Thank you.

Beyond other people as well. No Jews live here. This is John Lawrence's memoir, and we are delighted that it has brought him to TVO tonight. Thank you, John. Thanks, Steve.