Margit "Baba" Schwartz, an author who wrote a memoir about surviving Auschwitz and a death march through Poland with her mother and sisters, died June 9 in Melbourne. She was 89.
A dedicated diarist throughout her life, Baba accumulated stacks of journals and documents filled with memories, philosophical ruminations and poetry. In 2014, after the death of her husband Andor, Baba set to work compiling and moulding these disparate texts into a memoir.
The May Beetles, published by Black Inc in 2016, chronicles the tumultuous first two decades of Baba's life. The title of the book comes from an insect native to her home town of Nyirbator, in north-eastern Hungary. Baba recalls that these small beetles were collected each year by local children and handed over to the authorities, who disposed of them.
"Inside the boxes – some small, some large – the beetles would crawl over each other in their panic, a seething mass of them," Baba writes. "The beetles could open their wings and fly away, but they almost never did. It was as if they accepted their captive status." The title foreshadows the horror that was to befall her family during World War II, when she and other Jews of Nyibator were detained and deported to concentration camps across Europe for extermination.
As well as providing testimony, Baba's lyrical yet unswerving storytelling made The May Beetles a critical success. Helen Garner writes that the memoir is "a calmly personal account of a mighty cataclysm; astonishing in its dignity and composure, unforgettable in its sweetness of tone".
The daughter of Gyula Keimovits, a livestock dealer, and Erzsebet "Boeske" Kellner, Margit Keimovits was born on December 15, 1927, the second of three girls. The privations of the Great Depression meant that the Keimovtises lived simply. Yet Baba's early childhood was joyful and carefree. The 3000 Jews of Nyibator lived in peace with their 9000 non-Jewish neighbours. Baba and her two sisters, Erna and Marta, would exchange Christmas gifts for Channukah gifts with the children next door.
But by 1937, the reverberations of Hitler's anti-Semitic politics began to unsettle this calm co-existence. The intelligent and ambitious Keimovits girls had to accept that as Jews they would not be able to go to university. More painfully, they also had to absorb a new social status; their neighbours, with whom they used to play in the streets, would now treat them with derision, often hissing abusive slurs as they passed by.
Baba's parents wanted to believe that their political situation would improve, but in March 1944, when Baba was 16, the Nazis marched into Hungary. In April, the 3000 Jews of Nyibator were forced from their houses and sent to a makeshift prison camp in Simapuszta. From there, on May 22, they were transported by cattle train – 70 to a cart for three days – to Auschwitz.
On arrival Baba, along with her mother and sisters, was separated from Gyula and selected for labour, not the gas chambers. They were set to work in a clothing factory, ripping open the stolen cushions and doonas of Jewish inmates, so that the feathers could be repurposed for military coats. Under the guidance of Baba's mother, the family formed a tight unit, sharing their rations, singing songs in the barracks to one another at night, and holding each other up if the other would fall during regular selections for extermination.
After a number of weeks, the women in Baba's barracks were assembled and once again packed in cattle trains and transported to Stutthof, another death camp. Six weeks passed and then they were ordered to evacuate the camp and march south-west towards Berlin with a group of German soldiers retreating from the Russian army.
The women set up camps, dug trenches and cooked food for the army. The march continued into the middle of winter, January 1945. Many of the women died from cold and deprivation.
After eight months in German captivity, Baba's mother planned an escape, certain her daughters would die if they remained. One morning, they hid in a grain cellar and waited for the Germans to clear off. Desperate for food and shelter, they sought refuge on a farm owned by a Polish family, pretending to be displaced ethnic Germans.
Our lives were just like their lives, that our thoughts and feelings were just like theirs.
Baba Schwartz
In March 1945, the Russian army arrived. Baba's mother explained to the soldiers that they were Jewish refugees, not Germans. They were then sent to a refugee camp in the Russian-occupied German city of Stettin. After three months of convalescence, the Keimovitses made their way back to Nyibator, where they learned that only 130 of the original 3000 Jewish inhabitants survived. The rest had been murdered, including their beloved Gyula.
Among those who survived was Andor Schwartz, a 21-year-old man who had lost his entire family. Seeking companionship and a new future, Baba and Andor married on January 26, 1947 and had their first child, Moshe, in March, 1948.
Re-establishing a life in Hungary was difficult, and operating a business proved dangerous under the looming threat of Soviet Communism. So the young Schwartz family fled once again, over the Western border to Czechoslovakia and on to a refugee camp in Vienna. From there, they went by train to a port city in Italy and boarded a repurposed military ship which took them to Haifa, in the newly established state of Israel.
Over the next few years, Baba and Andor built up a small farm that produced cattle, poultry and a number of crops in a rural village called Shafir. Baba taught herself Hebrew and immersed herself deeply in a burgeoning Israeli culture. In 1952, Baba gave birth to their second son, Yechiel (Alan).
In 1958, the Schwartz family packed up once more and moved to Melbourne, where Baba would be reunited with her sisters. Arriving penniless, the young parents took jobs in factories; Baba taught Hebrew at a Jewish day school on the side.
Taking out a loan, Baba and Andor bought a farm in Nar Nar Goon, Gippsland. They moved there to live and developed the property into an industrious cattle producer. They sold the farm and then tried their luck in a number of other ventures: a cafe in Dandenong called The Manhattan, a milk bar in Richmond, a boarding house.
When Baba and Andor had their youngest son, Danny, the family moved to Balaclava Road, Caulfield, and settled. Along with raising her three sons, and assisting Andor with his property development business, Baba found time to resume the education she had been denied as a young girl. She received her matriculation in 1977, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University in 1981. Baba majored in philosophy, but took pleasure in studying a diverse range of subjects.
In later life, she would recall sprinting down the stairs of the Menzies Building at the Clayton campus after a Latin class just to make it home in time to prepare the Sabbath meal.
Baba expanded her learning through assiduous reading and note taking. She kept a small library in the house, which contained books on philosophy, science, literature and Jewish scripture, in languages including Hebrew, Russian, German and Italian, in which she was conversant.
Later in life, Baba published two books of her own. The first, The Lost Art of Baking With Yeast, in 2010, was a book of Baba's recipes for cakes and breads, introducing the uninitiated into the traditions and techniques of handling yeast dough that Baba had learnt from her mother in Hungary. The second was The May Beetles in 2016.
When Andor passed away in 2014, Baba moved into an apartment on Flinders Street that overlooked the city, the Yarra river and, in the distance, Port Phillip Bay. She treasured having visitors join her to discuss whatever book she was reading. She also enjoyed sitting silently, watching the people go about their lives in the busy streets below. While having lived a tumultuous life, she retained a childlike wonderment in and joy for the beauty and sometimes the terribleness of human existence.
That her life and stories had a home between the covers of a book gave Baba a deep sense of contentment. As well as safe-housing her testimony, it captured and transmitted her voice, which would speak to future generations and tell them that "our lives were just like their lives, that our thoughts and feelings were just like theirs. That we weren't another breed; only the times were different."