For 55 years, Eva Zaret has been searching for her father. She has looked for him in Budapest, in the Carpathian Mountains, in Ukraine, Austria, New Jersey, Milwaukee and California. Wherever she has lived, he has been in her thoughts by day — and in her nightmares by night.
She never found him, though, because her father died more than 55 years ago, most likely during a forced march back to Hungary from a Nazi German labor camp in Yugoslavia. All of the relatives on her father’s side of the family were killed by the Nazis as well.
Save one.
Eva’s cousin Peter Halas, her father’s great-nephew, was hidden from the Nazis by a Kurdish family living in Budapest. He had escaped the shooting deaths of his mother and grandfather (Eva’s cousin and uncle, respectively) by sheer chance; flu had kept him from a family gathering that ended with a surprise visit by the Nazis.
Though Eva and Peter were only children when the Nazis occupied Hungary, Eva knew that Peter had survived the war. During the ensuing years, she never was able to make contact with him. Yet the more she missed her father and searched for him in her heart, the more she yearned to find Peter.
Eva was first prevented from finding Peter because she was trapped for 10 years in the Carpathian Mountains, where she had gone to regain her health following the liberation of Budapest in 1945. But the Soviet Union had taken control of the area, and it became the Ukraine.
Then in 1956, when she was finally able to return to Budapest and had heard that the 17-year-old Peter was in the city, the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union broke out. Eva got sick again, this time with hepatitis, and was rushed to the hospital amid the street fighting. The young wife and mother soon signed herself out and escaped across the border, making her way to Austria. From there she came to the U.S.
For the next several years, Eva raised her family and got busy with her new life, first in New Jersey, then in Milwaukee and California. But she never forgot her father, and she never forgot Peter.
After returning to Milwaukee in the mid-1970s, she began looking again for Peter in earnest. She even visited her sister in Budapest, but the Iron Curtain prevented a free flow of visits and information and she couldn’t find anybody who knew what had happened to him.
After her marriage in 1978 to Mel Zaret, he took up the search for Peter, using all the national and international contacts he had made during a long career of Jewish communal service. The Jewish Agency for Israel aided the search in Hungary, where an elderly man who had known of the family was found. A little boy fitting the details of Peter’s life had survived he said, and was living in Australia.
Wrong name
“Mel searched in Australia,” Eva said in an interview last week as she told me her story. “But all these years, for some reason, I had Peter’s last name wrong. I was a child at the time, and in my mind I had mixed up his father’s last name and his first. Mel was looking for someone with the wrong last name.
“Then, last year, I took my daughter, Judy, to the Carpathian Mountains to show her where she was born. We spent some time with surviving members of my mother’s family in Budapest. I was determined to find someone who knew where Peter was, and I finally found a distant relative who did.
“Several months later, I was in Chicago shopping with my daughters. Mel called me on the cell phone and told me Peter had just called from Australia. I started screaming so loudly I think the whole shopping center heard. Everyone thought something terrible had happened.”
Far from it. For in finding Peter, Eva Zaret had finally found her father.
Over the next few months, Peter and Eva communicated by phone and by e-mail. Then, in January of this year, Eva and Mel made the long trip to Australia for a face-to-face reunion.
“The joy of that first meeting was indescribable,” Eva said. “After 55 years of waiting and hoping and searching, we found one another. He hadn’t even known of my existence.”
During the next month, Eva and Mel met all of Peter’s family and friends and got to know the close-knit Australian Jewish community. They traveled a bit together, but mostly they talked.
“It was very helpful to me, to see Peter and to talk to him,” Eva said. “I am his only surviving relative on his mother’s side of the family, and he is my only surviving relative on my father’s side of the family. Can you imagine how it was when all of a sudden one day we both began repeating the same story about my father and his family?
“I loved Peter in my mind before I even met him. No matter what he would have been or looked like, I would have loved him regardless. But now that I have gotten to know him and his family, I love them all. And I am so thankful to Mel, who has spent 23 years helping me find Peter, for insisting that we go.”
“For the 23 years that I have known her,” Mel said, “Eva has suffered from nightmares of Nazis and of how her father might have died. Since she has met Peter, the nightmares seem to have stopped.”
“Finding Peter gave me a little closure,” agreed Eva. “I adored my father when I was little, and, for me, Peter was a part of my father. When he smiles, I see my father.”
Although liberation freed those who were trapped by the physical horrors of the Holocaust, liberation of the souls who were scarred by it remains ongoing.
At this Passover, as we celebrate our liberation from slavery in Egypt, let us remember Eva and the many other Jews throughout the world whose physical or spiritual liberation has been hard-won, or is still awaited.
Hag Pesach sameach.
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