By John Toth
The Bulletin
If your grandfathers are still alive, give them a big hug and tell them you love them. That’s what I have never been able to do.
Both of my grandfathers died before I was born - way before. I knew my grandmothers, but not all that well. On my mother’s side, I hardly spent any time with her.
On my father’s side, I stayed with her for a few weeks in the summer of 1964. She was brave enough to take care of my cousin and I that summer. It was a lot of fun on our part, but my grandmother probably had a different opinion.
In the summer of 1965, I wanted to go back, but my parents told me that they decided to send me to summer camp for two weeks and then to day camp for the rest of the summer.
Summer camp was horrible. I couldn’t wait for it to end, even though there was really nothing at home that I wanted to go back to, except for my parents.
We lived in poverty in Budapest, Hungary. Home sweet home was a small room that the three of us lived in. Both of my parents smoked, and the room stunk of tobacco.
In the country, the air was fresher, but the camp had few activities. Most of the time we just roamed around and were bored. Nobody around me liked it, and we all wanted to go home - even me. Maybe I was just withdrawing from second-hand smoke, I don’t know.
Grandma could not handle both my cousin and I, so I wound up in camp, and my cousin wound up being bored out of his mind with grandma.
At least he didn’t have to go to that lousy government summer camp. The day camp wasn’t all that bad. We took a lot of trips all over the city and the nearby countryside. I had a lot of fun there.
But I digress. My grandfathers died fairly young, way before I was born. On my mother’s side, my grandpa got locked into a commercial freezer he was repairing, and by the time they noticed that he was in there, he was almost dead. According to my mother, he died a short time later from pneumonia.
He left behind six or seven children and a wife. A few months after he died, antibiotics became commercially available, which would have brought him back to health in about a week.
Then World War II broke out.
My mother salvaged one photo of him. It was a picture of a picture and not a good one.
That’s one more photo than I saw of my paternal grandfather, who died during WWII. One day he left the house and never returned.
Nobody knows what happened to him. My mother and father guessed that he was rounded up by the Nazis that occupied Hungary at the time. Most of those who were randomly rounded up were never seen again.
They died in work camps somewhere. My grandfather was Catholic, but to the Nazis, it didn’t make a lot of difference. When the Nazis needed slave labor, they just rounded up a bunch of civilians in occupied areas and took them away.
My mother was rounded up one day when she was out looking for food - any food. She managed to escape before she was loaded onto the truck. She knew several people who also were rounded up at the time. She said she never saw any of them again.
So, my maternal grandfather died as a result of an industrial accident before WWII, and my paternal grandfather disappeared during the war, which ended in 1945. I was born in 1955.
I didn’t know what I was missing until I saw that some of my classmates were being picked up by their grandparents after school, or their grandfathers. Then I started questioning what had happened to my grandfathers and was told of their fate.
My three children were lucky enough to grow up knowing their maternal grandparents. Their paternal ones died at age 60. My oldest child was a baby when my mother died. The other two children were born years after they both died.
Grandparents don’t last forever, so give them a big hug, especially the grandfathers, since statistically we tend to check out earlier than grandmothers. Hug them like I would have if I had been given a chance, because once they’re gone, you can’t get them back.
Visit them as often as you can. Go out of your way to be with them and help them whichever way you can. And one more thing, pick their minds about the past and family, because once they’re gone, all that knowledge will also be gone.
Enjoy Grandparents Day with them, but also make as many days Grandparents Day as you can. You won’t regret it.
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