Susan Kalev, 80, lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights. On a sunny spring day, you’ll find her three cats zooming around her apartment, surrounded by gallery walls of photos documenting Kalev’s long and full life.
From the relative idyll of her uptown home, Kalev, a Holocaust survivor, can still remember the sounds of the Russians’ rifles not far behind her family as they fled into the woods from their home in Budapest. The year was 1956, and Kalev, 12, and her family were fleeing Communist rule, making their way to Austria and, eventually, New York.
“It was very hush-hush,” Kalev, who still speaks with a slight Hungarian accent, told the New York Jewish Week. Her parents “just packed a suitcase, and they said, ‘yes, we have to go.’”
The four of them — Kalev; her mother, Ilona Spiegel; her stepfather, Arpad Steiner, and her younger half-sister, Marian — were among 200,000 Hungarians who fled the country during the Hungarian Revolution.
This was the second time that Kalev and her parents had to remake their lives. Kalev was born in 1944 in an internment camp in Budapest; later that same year, they were relocated to the Budapest Ghetto.
Kalev, who has lived in the United States since 1956, and in her Washington Heights home for 50 years, is among some 14,7000 Holocaust survivors living in New York State, according to a report last January from the Claims Conference. But that’s a number that is rapidly decreasing around the world.
On Tuesday, ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is observed by Jewish communities around the world, and begins this year on Wednesday evening, the Claims Conference released a report projecting that only half of the remaining Holocaust survivors will be alive in six years.
Though she has no memories of World War II, Kalev’s early life was shaped entirely by the war and the subsequent revolution. Her parents never spoke about what they endured during the Holocaust, but Kalev, a licensed clinical social worker, has made it one of her missions in life to continue sharing her experiences.
“I think that my choice of profession to be a counselor, to be a therapist — people who have gone through divorce or separation, grieving, losses, trauma — I think it certainly has something to do with what I have experienced,” said Kalev, who is also an animal rights activist and a Holocaust educational speaker.
Kalev vividly recalls first arriving in New York City on Christmas in 1956. “It was a very different atmosphere for me when we came to New York, because people could say, ‘I’m Jewish,’ ‘I’m this,’ ‘I’m that’,” Kalev said. “It was like — really you could say that!? It was a very different experience for me.”
These days, Kalev still works part-time as a social worker, connecting with her clients via telephone. Her two daughters, Edya and Nehar, are grown; Kalev divorced their father, Jonah Kalev, 15 years into their marriage. In addition to her work, Kalev’s cats, Gingy, Sushi and Ziggy, keep her company. SelfHelp, a community service organization that provides social services to Holocaust survivors, helps provide access to social events.
It’s a drastically different situation than the one Kalev was born into in 1944. Conditions were already dire in the Budapest Ghetto when Henrik Weltner and Ilona Spiegel welcomed a baby girl: Quarters were cramped and dirty, and food was scarce. More than half of the ghetto’s population was eventually deported to Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Susan’s older sister, Marian, died of an illness in the ghetto at just 3 years old; most of Susan’s extended family did not survive the Holocaust.
By January 1945, the Soviets had liberated Hungary, and the ghetto was opened. Mother and daughter were freed. But Kalev’s father, who had been deported from Hungary sometime in 1944, was deported again to a small concentration camp on the border of Austria and Hungary called Donnerskirchen, according to records held by Yad Vashem. Weltner was murdered in October 1945 — nine months after his wife and younger daughter were liberated.
“She went back to the town where she lived with my father, and she waited,” Susan said of her mother. “He did not come back.”
Eventually, Ilona remarried another Holocaust survivor, Arpad Steiner, who had also lost much of his family in the Holocaust. They had another daughter, also named Marian.
“I did not know that this was my stepfather, because they never told me,” Kalev said. “People in that generation didn’t talk about these things.” (Kalev was about 9 years old when a cousin accidentally revealed the family secret.)
When they first arrived in New York City, with the help of Jewish Family Services, the family spent six months living in the Hotel Endicott — now a co-op on 81st Street and Columbus Avenue. The girls attended a yeshiva on the Upper West Side. Eventually, the family of four moved into an apartment of their own in Washington Heights.
Kalev’s mother, who was a seamstress in Hungary, trained as an accountant and became a real estate agent. Her stepfather, who worked in the wine industry in Hungary, was in his 60s by then, and never quite found his footing in New York. He became a stay-at-home dad.
“It was a big adjustment for all of us,” she said.
New Yorker through and through
Though she’s a New Yorker through and through, Kalev remains committed to her heritage. She speaks Hungarian fluently and has traveled to Hungary several times to visit the places her mother used to frequent — cafes, schools, the site of her former home.
Fifteen years ago, she joined a group of people who survived World War II as children in Hungary; the members put together a book and video sharing their stories, and they continue to meet monthly on Zoom. Kalev is also a member of a group of infant Holocaust survivors, with whom she meets regularly on Zoom.
“Basically it’s just a little community where you can talk about how you’re feeling, to share the story and to educate,” said Kalev, who was at one point a member of Lincoln Square Synagogue, a Modern Orthodox congregation on the Upper West Side. “It’s become very important to me.”
She added, “I think it is important to do, and not to be silent, because my parents were silent and didn’t talk about it and I do want to share it.”
Another issue Kalev isn’t staying silent on: Her concerns about the state of freedom and democracy in both her birthplace and in her adopted home.
“I’m not experiencing it personally, but I’m very aware that this administration, that there is a lot of movement to the right where — and also in Hungary, [Prime Minister Viktor] Orban is — very much turning into a fascist kind of atmosphere,” Kalev said.
(Orban has been in power since 2010 and is currently serving his fourth term. He and his political party, Fidesz, have seized control of the Hungarian media and university system, changed the constitution to undermine the courts, and promoted the Great Replacement white supremacist conspiracy theory.)
“There is a lot of anxiety and fear about being an authoritarian country and then when that happens, there’s a lot of fear on the part of a Jewish population,” she said. “I think worldwide, there seems to be a lot of upheaval and change, a lot of shifting, and I think it’s a little scary for everybody.”
