Foreigner at Home: The Expulsion of the Kaufer Family

„At the beginning of 1939 my father, Ármin Kaufer received a writ from the municipality
that he must go there and bring his citizenship certificate. We looked at each other astonished,
what is this? Naturally my father didn’t have a citizenship certificate, but there was a
document that he had been a sergeant during the First World War, he had a decoration.”
Ármin Kaufer was one of those Jews living in Monor, a town close to Budapest, who was
summoned to present his certificate – as a result of an extensive controlling procedure,
through which the KEOKH (Külföldieket Ellenőrző Országos Központi Hatóság – National
Central Office for Controlling Foreigners) aimed at monitoring refugees and foreigners. At
this stage the Kaufer family did not know that they were facing a three-year-long case.

The Kaufer family

Ármin Kaufer was born in Nagymácséd (Veľká Mača), in 1885. His family moved to
Monor when he was still a child. He grew up there and married Ella Weisz in 1921. Their son,
Tibor, was born two years later. Kaufer worked as a clerk at the timber-yard of Ignác
Polacsek & son.
In the 1930s 450 assimilated Jews lived in Monor. Besides the synagogue, the community
maintained a school, which was frequented by Jewish and Christian children alike, among
them Tibor Kaufer. Tibor, after finishing his studies there, went to a commercial secondary
school in the capital, in order to study accounting.
From the end of the 1930s the family’s life was embittered by the anti-Jewish laws, which
restricted the presence of Jews in economic and intellectual spheres. Due to these laws, in
May 1940 Ármin Kaufer lost his job. He was still employed at the timber-yard, but only as a
watchman, then as an unskilled worker. Instead of having the possibility to work according to
his specialization, Tibor was also hired at the timber-yard. Later the family was forced to
leave their house and move to a smaller one.
The following months and years brought even more hardships to the Kaufers. Like most
able-bodied adult Jewish men, both father and son were conscripted for unarmed military
labor service, which served as a means of humiliation: Jews were not considered worthy of
serving in the regular army; moreover, as military laborers, they had to wear yellow or white
armbands (according to their faith: Israelite or Christian, respectively). Before Hungary
entered the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941, military
labor usually lasted for a couple of months, afterwards Jewish companies were brought to the
front, together with non-Jewish soldiers.
In the meanwhile, however, and even bigger danger threatened the family.

The citizenship certificate

The second anti-Jewish law banned Jews from obtaining Hungarian citizenship, which
resulted in inspections in Monor, in order to examine the citizenship of the local Jews. In
April 1939 the leading civil servant of the municipality summoned Ármin Kaufer. He had to
present his citizenship certificate – however, at this time only those, who wanted to get trade
certificate, were obliged to obtain a citizenship certificate. Naturally, “[Kaufer] could not
prove his Hungarian citizenship”, as it was written in the report of a local civil servant. In
order to get the certificate, first he had to obtain his parents’ birth certificates and marriage
certificate, and he had to prove that he was living in the territory of Hungary in 1921, the year
when the Treaty of Trianon was ratified.
By March 1940 Ármin Kaufer had handed in his citizenship application to the Ministry of
Interior. However, he still had to get the appropriate certificates about his ancestors.
According to the documents of Monor municipality, throughout the entire year he asked for
deferrals, as his case was not dealt with in the ministry and even at the end of the year, he was
still waiting for his citizenship certificate.
Finally in early 1941 the notary ordered Kaufer to obtain a residence certificate, which
proved that he lived in Monor. “The municipality does not have any objections against
granting the residence certificate,” as it was written in the report of the notary. “If this is the
only problem, I have been living here since I was five; my brother is a civil servant here. But
all of this was nothing. The case belongs to KEOKH, because until we get the citizenship
certificate, we count as foreigners or homeless,” remembered Tibor Kaufer. “So the hunt for
documents started,” he added.
Apparently, though, initially the quest for birth certificates was without success, as at the
end of March 1941 a turning point came in the case. The leader of the municipality issued a
decree, according to which the entire family was “expelled and banned from returning; and
they are obliged to leave the country within 60 days after the issuing of my final order.”
 Expelled
“Finally we were put on the list of homeless,” recounted Tibor Kaufer. His father appealed
against the decision of the municipality, however, KEOKH upheld it. From this point, instead
of dealing with the local civil servants, the family had to face the bureaucratic machinery of a
state institution, whose main purpose at this time was to observe and control (especially
Jewish) refugees and non-Hungarians.
Even though until early autumn Kaufer got a deferral, in mid-September a letter arrived
from KEOKH to the municipality: “The foreigner asked for the extension of the deadline for
leaving. I do not grant this request. In case they do not leave the territory of Hungary or prove
their citizenship with a certificate within 30 days after the proclamation of this decree, I order
you to arrest the foreigner and his family, and escort them to the Budapest police
headquarter’s department of detention and deportation.”
By the end of October, though, the expulsion was deferred again for a month. And here the
chain of official documents ceases – what happened next, turns out from interviews with
Tibor Kaufer: “One of my father’s cousins, who lived in Galánta [Galanta], did everything in
order to get certificates for us; so finally we managed to get a paper, according to which
during the time of Joseph II there was a census for Jews and one of my father’s ancestors was
included in that. Based on this we received the residence certificate, then the citizenship
certificate.”
Besides the documents sent by Kaufer’s cousin at the right time, another person also
contributed to the fortunate outcome of this case: “Luckily the local police commissioner,
Béla Reviczky of Revisnye was a very kind man: when the summons and warrants came from
KEOKH, he put the papers to the bottom of the pile.” At times like this he sent a message to
the Kaufer family, that “even though he put the papers at the bottom in order to hide them
from law enforcement, so our case would come as late as possible, we should do something
finally to get the papers, because he could not do this for eternity.”
With the help of the police commissioner and the adequate documents, finally the Kaufer
family escaped the great round-up and deportations organized by KEOKH in the late summer
of 1941, which ended up in the Kamenets-Podolsky massacre, when a Nazi killing squad
murdered 23 600 Jews in the territory of occupied Ukraine, among them approximately
15 000 Jews deported from Hungary.

On 17 April 1944 Tibor was called in for military labor service. He served at various
locations, including the Eastern front. At the end of March 1945, together with his fellow
laborers, he was taken to Mauthausen labor camp, then to Gunskirchen, where he was
liberated by American soldiers on 4 May. He returned to Monor in July, only to find out that
in the meanwhile his parents had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau where both of them
had perished.

Sources
USC – VHA interview of Tibor Koltai, 51720 (in Hungarian)
MNL-PML [Hungarian National Archives – Archives of Pest County] V.1075 Cb Monor
municipality documents, 3442/1942: the case of Ármin Kaufer
Tibor Kaufer’s recollections, written in 1998:
http://mozsa.hu/dynamic/visszaemlekezesek_elem_pdfhu_1.pdf
Csilla Paczolay Mesterházi: Monor és a Holocaust [Monor and the Holocaust], Monor (MA
thesis), 2000.