Michael Lavalette interviewed Stephen Kapos, a Holocaust survivor, about his experiences in childhood and youth to his involvement in the Palestine movement

I wonder if you could tell us a little about your early life during the Holocaust?

I was born and grew up in Budapest. My grandfather was a cantor at the Synagogue but my father was not religious and we were brought up as secular Jews.

Hungary in the inter-war period was led by the dictator Admiral Horthy. He was in control of the country from 1920 to 1944. He came to power to put down the Hungarian revolution that broke out at the end of the First World War. Under Horthy, the Communist Party was banned, the left was persecuted and the country introduced a range of anti-Semitic laws that were amongst the worst anywhere in the world until the rise of Mussolini and Hitler.

Horthy’s ‘numerous clauses’ law, for example, limited the number of Jews allowed to enter universities and that meant my father, for example, had to do part of his medical training in Prague. There was an atmosphere of anti-Semitism, but more general legal anti-Semitism only took hold in the 1940s.

At the start of the Second World War, Hungary joined the Axis forces. Hungarian forces joined the invasion of the Soviet Union. Anti-Semitism grew and became more vicious. Between 1939 and 1944, some 63,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered, usually by the Hungarian ‘Arrow Cross’ (that is the Hungarian Nazis).

In 1944, Horthy knew the war was lost and tried to make peace with the Allies. On 19 March 1944, the Germans invaded. The invading troops included the Sonderkommando and they started to round up the local Jewish population. They were aided by the Arrow Cross. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, over 434,000 Jews were deported on 147 trains, most of them to Auschwitz, where about 80% were gassed on arrival.

In Hungary, there was an unusual agreement, for a time, between the Nazis and a Zionist named Rezső Kasztner. When the Germans took over, close to 12,000 Jews were transported to the death camps every day. Kasztner made a deal with some leading Germans (including Eichmann) whereby some wealthy Jews, mostly Transylvanian Jews, or those with particular skills, would be offered a place on a ‘Kasztner train’ that would take them to Switzerland, via Belsen. In return, the Germans got trucks for the Eastern Front, money, jewellery and textiles for the army.

My father was a doctor and psychoanalyst. We were selected to be part of one of the trains, due to our Transylvanian connections. The family was moved to a ‘holding camp’. There were Hungarian guards and then barbed wire and, in front of them, Nazi guards. At this stage, this wasn’t to keep people in the camp, but to stop others trying to get in and onto the trains.

But Hitler got wind of the ‘agreement’ and stopped it. My father was taken, but not to Switzerland. He got stuck in Belsen and later transferred to Theresienstadt.

The Arrow Cross were now rounding people up. Two of my friends came very close to death. One was taken with his mother to the Danube. The Arrow Cross men shot them from a high point over the river and they went into the water. His mother was killed, but he was only injured and the Danube took him downstream where he scrambled out and was taken in by a local. He survived but was deeply traumatised – I lost touch with him after the war.

A second friend was travelling on a tram car with his mother and father. He went down the front to watch the driver. At one stop, the Arrow Cross came on to check papers. They took his mother and father. To save him, they said nothing, but when he turned around a few stops later, they had gone, and he never saw them again.

As it was getting more dangerous, my mother took us away from the holding camp. My aunt acted as a nurse and she managed to get me taken in by a group of Protestant pastors. This group was made up of Calvinist and Lutheran pastors, some local lawyers (one of whom was my uncle) and the Swiss Red Cross. The group was called The Good Shepherd Mission and was led by pastor Gabor Sztehlo. Sztehlo was related to the extremely wealthy Hagenmacher family (whose wealth came from brewing). They had Swiss connections and ‘donated’ their family villa in the Buda hills to be the first rescue home. They told the Germans that they were housing Aryan refugees from the East and got false papers together to keep us safe.

This was the home I was taken to first. But eventually there was an archipelago of homes that managed to save a total of 2000 Jewish children. Sztehlo has a monument erected in central Budapest and has a tree devoted to him in Yad Vashem in the ‘forest of the Aryan righteous’.

When I arrived in the Hagenmacher villa, I was very much alone. I couldn’t acknowledge my aunt. I was separated from my mother and my father had been taken to Belsen.

The pastors looked after us, but the war was closing in. We were encircled and the Soviet forces cut all supplies to the German forces on the Buda side (where we were). So we were hungry, tired and were always on the move from one ‘safe’ place to another.

At Christmas 1944, the German garrison invited us children to their Christmas dinner. We couldn’t say anything, of course. At the dinner, they split us all up at the table: a German soldier, then one of us, then a German soldier etc. At the end of the table was a huge Swastika flag hanging! Here were all these Jewish children being fed and partied by the Nazis who thought we were ‘Aryan refugees’!

Sometimes, the Germans and even some locals would start to question who we were. So we’d quickly have to move again. I remember one night they moved us. It was snowing and we were moving slowly. Suddenly the Soviet troops from the nearby front line started firing at us! They obviously just saw people moving in the snow and thought we were soldiers.

Then, one day I remember a Soviet soldier appeared in the doorway of our shelter. He was a big man, with a big Cossack hat on. But he was a frontline soldier and all he wanted to know was where the Germans were. Later on, there were terrible attacks on some of the women, rapes and other abuses. But these weren’t done by the frontline troops, as those were too concerned about fighting and surviving and discovering where the enemy were.

When Budapest was liberated, I didn’t know what would happen. But after a few weeks, my mother found me! She had survived. We went back to our old home, but it was destroyed, and we were homeless.

We hadn’t heard anything from my father since he had been taken. But one day I was playing outside when I saw him walking towards us! He had survived Belsen and Theresienstadt and had managed to come back to Budapest. So we were reunited, but of course, so many of my friends and relatives had died in the Holocaust. Fifteen members of my family had perished.

You and your family stayed in Hungary after the war. You stayed until 1956. Can you tell us a little about this period?

When the family got back together, we were all very happy. Life was hard, of course, but we were together and we felt that things could be better now.

My father and most of our family joined the Communist Party. They had been central to the resistance and the liberation, and nobody wanted a return to the dictatorship of Horthy or the horrors of the Arrow Cross. We all supported the initial radical reforms such as nationalisation of factories and separation of church and state.

My father became a senior Public Health Officer. Gradually Budapest was rebuilt. Between 1945 and 1948, there was a multi-party democracy, though the Soviets remained powerfully in the background. But in 1948, Hungary became a ‘People’s Democracy’ and the Communist Party was the only political party with any power.

After 1948, anti-Semitism was outlawed but survived in latent form. Local war-resistance leaders were marginalised, or worse killed in show trials or sent to the gulag. Life was hard: all society’s resources went into building heavy industry, but the standard of living was poor.

On 5 March 1953, Stalin died. This led to a power struggle at the top of Soviet society. Eventually, Nikita Khrushchev gained power and committed the Communist Party to a policy of ‘de-Stalinisation. On 25 February 1956, Khrushchev addressed a closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In what became known as his ‘secret speech’, he revealed the brutalities and harshness of the Stalin era. This prompted all manner of Communist reform movements.

We didn’t want a return to capitalism, we certainly didn’t want a return to the dictatorship era, we wanted to keep the nationalised industries and a collective system. But we wanted greater freedom, a better standard of living, and an end to discrimination. We wanted Hungarian Communism to be able to take its own path.

This came to a head in 1956. I was at Budapest University in my second year of training to be an architect. On 23 October, I went into University and students were mingling everywhere: classes were cancelled and we demanded the right to march and present our ‘16 demands’ for change.

The local authorities refused to allow us to march, but we made representations a few times until they eventually said we could march. By now, it was late in the afternoon and as we marched towards the parliament, we were joined by workers returning home from work.

We made our way into the city centre, and eventually a delegation went to the state radio station demanding they broadcast our demands. This was refused and a confrontation followed between the crowd and a security detail defending the radio station. A shot was fired by a nervous security guard and a fire fight ensued as the regular police handed their weapons to the crowd. Finally, the radio was overrun by the people. There were many fatalities. When I went home that evening, there were tanks on the streets and we didn’t know what was going to happen.

The movement spread very quickly. Workers councils were set up. There were defence organisations set up. And eventually the reformer Imre Nagy took control. Nagy announced he was disbanding the secret police and re-establishing a multi-party system with a coalition government. We really thought we could improve our life as a real Hungarian People’s Democracy.

But on 4 November, Soviet troops entered Budapest. At this point, Nagy announced Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact, this was a final act of defiance. But between 4 and 12 November, the Soviets ruthlessly suppressed the uprising. Around 2500 Hungarians were killed and around 200,000 fled abroad. I was one of those who left.

So at the end of the uprising you became a political refugee. How did you get to Britain?

I decided to leave, but my family stayed in Budapest. I left Budapest and made my way to Austria. A guide took us and directed us across the border. When we arrived in the Austrian village near the border, it was unbelievable. There were coaches waiting for us. We were taken to a reception camp where we were fed, registered and given temporary accommodation. We were then asked ‘where do you want to go?’ You were just asked to join the right queue! The announcement said ‘if you want to go to Italy, join this queue’ ‘if you want to go to the UK, join this queue’ and so on.

Before I left, I knew I wanted to come to Britain, so I joined the queue! In the queue, I was told by British representatives that I would be welcomed. Before I left, I listened to a BBC broadcast which promised Hungarian university students the continuity of their studies in the UK, with grants to make it possible!

I was put on a train and the train travelled right across Europe. Everywhere we stopped, there were Hungarian flags, the National Anthem played, we were fed and given tea, coffee and chocolate. We were welcomed everywhere. Quite a contrast with how refugees from the West’s wars in the Middle East are treated today!

Of course, I know this was in the context of the Cold War. The ‘West’ was trying to portray us as the victims of ‘the horrors of Communism’ and they were doing this for their own reasons. I think there was also a sense of guilt for not supporting the Hungarians’ fight and providing cover for the Soviet re-invasion by the coincidental Suez adventure. But I did feel welcomed.

I eventually came to Britain and was housed in a former army camp in Swindon. After a short time, I was able to get a place at university in London and resume my degree in Architecture.

There was an emigre Hungarian community in London and my father knew some of them through his training and practice in medicine, psychoanalysis and public health. They were able to help me with my early steps in the country.

Can you tell us a little about your political life in Britain?

I was always aware of what was going on in the world, of course, but in the 1960s and 1970s I was wary of going on demonstrations. I didn’t go on the protests against the war in Vietnam, for example, because my last demonstration had ended up with tanks on the streets!

But by the late 1990s, I decided I needed to get involved and I joined the Labour Party. Over the next few years, I held all sorts of positions in the Labour Party at branch and constituency level.

When Jeremy Corbyn stood for leader, I was really enthusiastic. I joined Momentum and thought we had a chance to really make a difference. I started to speak about my childhood and the Holocaust – at meetings and to schools.

But something else happened. I started to see that the experiences of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank matched, in some ways, my earlier experiences in the Holocaust. I’m not saying these are exactly the same, but there are echoes.

On a visit to family members in Haifa, I was shocked and appalled at the level of racism they had towards the Palestinians. They dehumanised Palestinians in a way that was similar to how we were dehumanised by the Nazis and the Arrow Cross.

The people of Gaza are subjected to siege, the denial of food, water, power, fuel and medicines. This rhymes with my experience in 1944 when the front line reached us and for the period of fighting, a period of four to five months, we were under a similar siege and deprived of all essentials. This makes me appreciate even more the sufferings of Gaza.

I look at Palestinians whose houses have been destroyed and are made homeless and I remember that I have been through that. I see pictures of Palestinians who, without any notice, find family members ‘disappeared’ either into prison, or killed or vaporised in an attack. That matches things that I, and others, experienced during the Holocaust.

So I started to speak out about these kinds of things and to argue that ‘Never Again’ only makes sense if it means ‘Never Again for anyone and for everyone’.

But when I was due to speak to a socialist group about my experience of the Holocaust, on Holocaust Memorial Day, Starmer’s Labour Party didn’t like it. They accused me of intending to speak to a ‘proscribed’ socialist group and that, if I went ahead, I would be subject to a disciplinary investigation. This usually led to expulsion. I resigned immediately.

At this time, some people in Labour and Zionist activists started to abuse me and call me a ‘capo’, which is a terribly abusive slur. They are accusing me of being equivalent to one of the concentration-camp collaborators who brutalised people in the camps.

Over the last few years, I have spent my time speaking about the Holocaust and engaging in solidarity activities with the Palestinians.

You can’t speak directly about the events of 18 January at present, but why do you think the Met are clamping down on Palestinian solidarity?

Let me start by saying that when I was called in for interview, ‘invited in’ as they put it, I was so pleased and so moved by the number of people who came and protested outside the police station and offered me such solidarity. I’d like to thank them!

But on the broader question. Both Tory and Labour Governments have tried to criminalise our movement. The British state is a huge supporter of Israel. They see it as the country best placed to protect their interests in the region.

Our movement in solidarity with the Palestinians challenges their international priorities. So we have had Sunak and Braverman trying to stop people marching, arresting people for the chants they shout or the banners they are holding. They called our marches ‘hate marches’. They tried to stop us last November. But they couldn’t break us.

Under Labour, with a large majority, and no election for four years, they want to push us back. There is no way that the attacks on our rights that we have seen this year have not been authorised by Starmer and Cooper.

But it’s important we resist. We cannot be intimidated. This attack is on Palestine solidarity, but if they get away with it, it will have implications for every protest movement going forward.