Out in the Open

When I was thirteen, I learned that my maternal grandfather was Jewish — and a concentration camp survivor.

My family was on a summer road trip to the East Coast. For my father, it was his first time in Halifax since he had arrived at the famed Pier 21 several decades before. By that point, I was keenly aware of how common his immigration story was, not just in our heavily Italian Canadian neighbourhood but in so many communities across Canada. I distinctly recall my mother making an offhand comment about arriving in Canada around the same time as my dad — 1959, to be exact — but in Saint John and by air instead of sea. I then realized that I knew comparatively little about her side of the family. Her father had a Polish surname, but he had died the year before I was born. My mother’s family were not Catholic, even though her mother, still living, was Italian. Rarer still, they observed no religion at all and conspicuously ignored Christmas while growing up.

When I casually inquired, my mother matter-of-factly explained that my middle name, David, was in fact my deceased grandfather’s real first name. And that since I was now thirteen — the same age at which she first learned about her father’s origin story — she was ready to tell me all about him. It was, to borrow the journalist John Lorinc’s phrase in the introduction of No Jews Live Here, “a story demanding to be told.” As I would learn, and as Lorinc makes painstakingly clear in his book, an untold story of Holocaust tragedy and survival is also a surprisingly common family history for many Canadians.

In No Jews Live Here, Lorinc skillfully balances an emotionally compelling memoir with rich family characters and sharp historical insight. He weaves primary and secondary sources with his own family lore, working hard to cross-reference and validate what he’s gleaned from relatives over the decades. These colourful stories create a riveting through line that takes readers from prewar to postwar Hungary — a grim period for Hungarian Jews that included, as Winston Churchill described the slaughter at the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” Although his is an inherently tragic topic, Lorinc maintains an intimate and educational tone throughout his book.

The principal person he brings back to life is his maternal grandmother, Ilona Barta (née Schwarcz), born in 1906 in a town known today as Târgu Mureș, Romania (though it was then in Hungary). Lorinc has complicated feelings about the unconventional figure he grew up with in Toronto, and he takes care to judiciously unpack her past with compassion, vividly describing a personality that could have been forged only at the sharp end of brutality. Lorinc fairly contextualizes some of Ilona’s uncomfortable eccentricities: at one point, for example, she mused about insurance fraud as a potential income source in Canada. In doing so, he conveys how the trauma of survival never really leaves a person who’s been through the type of violence that Ilona experienced while fighting to save her family from the Holocaust. In the fullness of her narrative, she emerges as an empathetic woman worthy of admiration.

Lorinc draws on such historians as John Lukacs, author of Budapest 1900, to set the scene for Ilona and her family in prewar Hungary. Despite flashes of antisemitism, they had found their place, relocating a successful grain-dealing business to Budapest in the 1920s after changing their surname and converting to Lutheranism. Ilona married Pal Barta, son of another well‑off Jewish family, in 1928. As they grew increasingly affluent, both families took pains to hide their origins. But as Hungary’s politics leaned toward Nazism, the Bartas were nonetheless defined as Jewish based on lineage; anti-Jewish laws led to their assets, including a farm, being confiscated. The family rented a cottage on Lake Balaton to pass the summer of 1943, shortly after their farm was seized. Unbeknownst to them, the gas chambers and ovens at Auschwitz — just 500 kilometres away —“were already working overtime.”

The Barta family’s fortunes dimmed further. In 1944, the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie — a paramilitary police force under the command of Nazi collaborators and known for its sadistic behaviour even before the war — began forcing Jews into ghettos or onto trains bound for camps throughout Europe. Remaining Jews wore the infamous yellow star when out in the few public spaces where they were allowed.

Ilona’s survival instincts evolved as the situation worsened. She bribed a bureaucrat for a better work unit placement for her husband, who was then in a factory in the south. She paid a former secretary of her father’s grain business to hide her and her daughter, Eva, Lorinc’s mother, for a time. At one point, the indefatigable woman secured fake documents that allowed the entire family to pose as Romanian refugees. Still, they could not escape Budapest. Despite Ilona’s steadfast commitment to maintaining a sense of normalcy — going so far as to buy a Christmas tree and presents for her children on December 23, 1944 — the family would meet ultimate tragedy when the Soviet army finally arrived and laid siege to the city days later. On January 15, Pal Barta, Ilona’s husband, was killed by shrapnel on a Budapest street, leaving her a widow with two children.

Lorinc draws his title from an incident after Pal was ordered into forced labour and sent away. Officials were rounding up residents from Ilona’s mixed apartment block, and she attempted to repurpose an absent Gentile neighbour’s door sign, which read “No Jews Live Here,” to misdirect them.

While Ilona’s story forms the emotional core of this book, Lorinc also delves into his father’s experiences, which provide a contrasting perspective on survival and memory. No less intriguing a figure, though harder to narratively unpack, Janos Lusztig was only eighteen in 1944, when he was sent to work in a copper mine in the town of Bor, Serbia. Lorinc traces pieces of his father’s eventual escape by drawing upon accounts by survivors, including Ferenc Andai, who recalled how enslaved labourers were liberated by daring Yugoslav partisans as they were marched across the Balkans. After the war, still wary of appearing Jewish, Janos changed his surname to Lorinc — and had his nose fixed.

While the author impressively teases out some details, the picture of his father remains unfinished. In part this is because John, as he was known in Canada, did not wish to talk about his history in a work camp, his daring and violent escape, nor the “terrible nightmares” he had for much of his life. Yet his incomplete story does illuminate how easily histories can be lost.

John also serves in his son’s book as a foil to Ilona, whose internalized antisemitism would rear up periodically. She never approved of Eva’s marriage, although she followed the couple to Canada shortly after they fled Budapest for good in 1956 — part of the largest refugee movement in postwar Europe. Despite their differences, John and Ilona remained united in hiding their heritage until the very end; only after John’s premature death in 1975 did the author and his family begin celebrating Hanukkah (in spite of Ilona’s protestations).

Despite the occasional slow pacing — there are extended discussions of familial disputes that belabour some of Ilona’s idiosyncrasies — No Jews Live Here is a poignant exploration of survival and identity that will resonate deeply with readers interested in Holocaust history. Through a vivid portrayal of resilience and generational trauma, Lorinc brings new life to familiar themes.

When my mother was thirteen, living in Toronto, her world was thrown upside down by a surprise house guest. A seemingly new-found first cousin named Meir, some years older, arrived one day to stay in the family home, with only a suitcase and a few books. Meir hailed from Israel, my mother and her siblings were told, and had come to study at York University. His father was the brother of their father. No further details were offered when Meir moved in — and certainly no explanation of why he had an entirely different last name. “Ask your father,” Meir offered his confused younger cousins with a wry smile.

Over several months, my curious mother and her siblings worked to pry every detail they could from my wary grandmother. Their father’s real name was David Perlmutter. He had been born in southern Poland in 1919. And he was Jewish. He had lost his parents and most of his family when they were separated and, presumably, sent to various Nazi camps — my grandfather to Natzweiler-Struthof, where he was prisoner number 115717. He suffered health problems for the rest of his life, including a bout with tuberculosis, but his condition did come with two silver linings. First, that was how, after the war, he met my Italian grandmother, a nurse’s aide at a hospital in Switzerland. Second, it was how the entire family arrived in Canada in December 1959: through a federal government humanitarian initiative aimed at settling refugees afflicted with tuberculosis.

Eventually my mother found a new equilibrium with her father. Her curiosity was only mildly sated, but she was wise enough not to probe him directly, even though he knew that my grandmother had told the kids about his past. All he would offer was the occasional reminder to never let anyone know they were Jewish — the exact same warning provided to ten-year-old John Lorinc by his father when he was first told of his family history.