The Kallos Family Book 2022

18 • THE KALLOS FAMILY
of junior school, four years of middle school) for
young people to learn a trade or other skill or to
go straight to work by the age of around 14. Ernst
went to Budapest to learn carpentry. He remained
there even when the political unrest spread and
became more intense. It was in this way that he
avoided deportation to concentration camp. Babi
Tabak remained in Técső where, as requested by
Iren, she learnt dressmaking with Erzsebet (Erzsi)
Borbey at Salon Elizabeth Haute Couture, located
on Fő utca. Because Babi didn’t really like dressmaking
she became more of a personal assistant
to her teacher.
It was here that Babi Tabak met Lily Ruttner,
who was to become the author’s mother. During
the early 1940s, when they were in their adolescence,
the three girls – Babi, Biri and Lily
– became good friends. They formed a tight
social group with three other girls – Moca Lebovitz
Ester (Esti) Shimshowitz, and Ella Roth. The
six girls met on Sundays to enjoy activities in the
town centre or along the banks of the Tisa River
where they swam in summer, and on Vasút utca
at the cinema, which was located not far from the
Kallos Hotel. They socialised with non-Jewish
boys and dreamed of having a boyfriend.
Together with the other girls Biri Kallos celebrated
her seventeenth birthday on 25 August
1943 during the fourth year of the Hungarian
occupation. The hotel chef made her favourite
meal: wiener schnitzel, roast potatoes, peas and
carrots, and an icecream cake for dessert. Of
course, Biri, Babi and Lily could never have
imagined that a year later they would be in Auschwitz–Birkenau
in the same C lager, Block 16,
and then, hidden in a forest sharing the same
barracks in Lübberstedt–Bilohe, a sub camp
of Neuengamme concentration camp, making
bombs for Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe.
Of these six girlfriends, five survived; Ella
Roth perished.
One of the survivors of this group, Ester
(Esti) Shimshowitz, gave evidence at Adolf
Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Israel. Eichmann, the
architect of the deportation of European Jews,
including 90,000 from Sub Carpathian Ruthenia,
to the camps and gas chambers, was the
chief implementer of the Final Solution.
The Ickovic family
Tailor Abraham Ickovic’s label sewn into his
clothing.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE USC SHOAH FOUNDATION
FROM ITS INTERVIEW OF SHEINDY ICKOVIC.
Biri was also friendly with Sheindy Ickovic,
whose father Abraham owned the successful
tailoring business Pansky a Damsky Krejci
(Men’s and Women’s Clothing). Abraham
Ickovic, who learnt cutting patterns from his
trips to Belgium and Prague, was considered as
good as the big city tailors.
Sheindy and her brother Leibe had also
attended gymnasium in Chust before the
signing of the Munich Agreement, but they
travelled there daily from Ťačovo and boarded
in Chust with a cousin only over the Sabbath to
avoid travelling on Judaism’s holy day of rest
and prayer. The observant Jewish students did
not have to write in class on Shabbat but they
did have to attend.
Every Pesach (Passover) and Rosh Hashana
(Jewish New Year), Zoltan Kallos and his son
Laci would buy a new suit from the Ickovics.
The Ickovics lived in a large house on the
corner of Kossuth and Mehalyi Gabor utca,