SISTER TARZITIA / Borbála Trencsényi
I only have two photos of Aunt Etus. One of them was taken at the Academy of Sciences while she was talking to the Israeli Ambassador at the reception held after she was awarded the honorary title “Righteous among the Nations”. This award was created by the Yad Vashem Institute of Jerusalem to honour those who risked their lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust. Aunt Etus and the ambassador were talking in Hungarian, as His Excellency had grown up in Dob Street in Budapest…
In the photo you cannot hear the voice of the ninety-year-old former nun, fresh like a little girl’s, or her Southern Hungarian accent, and you cannot see her playful smile. Nor does the photo convey her strong sense of humour, her love for life, her unaffected charm. It does not show, but I am sure because I had known her for sixty-five years, that she greatly enjoyed the bustle of the reception after the monotonous daily rhythm of the Catholic rest home in Verőce. While they were nibbling on kosher sandwiches, the ambassador asked her: “Why did you do it?” To which Aunt Etus simply replied: “Because I could.”
My mother found the one-and-a-half-year-old daughter of one of her beloved pupils in their Csengeri Street home in the autumn of 1944. The child’s father had already been taken to labour service, her grandparents were in the ghetto, and — as my mother learned from the caretaker — the little girl’s mother was taken by the Arrow Cross just the day before. My mother wrapped the child in a blanket and carried her in her arms to find her a safe place. (Our family was staying with acquaintances, because the caretaker of our building was an Arrow Cross member, and our half-Jewish family had to escape…) There was a priest she knew who was said to help those in need, but it turned out that the Gestapo was watching him. So she went to the Swedish Red Cross — but every inch of space was already taken there. Relying on what she heard on the street, she then went to the cloister on Svábhegy, where several Jewish children and adults had found refuge – until they were carried off by an Arrow Cross raid a few days before Christmas…
The Mother Superior did not want to receive the little girl because they had no room left, and they were not prepared to care for such a small child. Then, as my mother told me, a young nun, Sister Tarzitia, came out of a small room, took the child, and kept her in her cell even during the raids. She also saved the lives of two other little girls and their mother — but that is a different story…
Sister Tarzitia and the other nuns had to leave the cloister of the Daughters of Divine Love in 1950, and the building was taken over by the State Protection Authority. Sister Tarzitia became Etelka Kuntich (Aunt Etus to us). She first found work in the mine in Dudar, then she became a kindergarten teacher in a small village in the Bakony.
Her colleagues named the nursery school in Olaszfalu after her when she was still alive. They did not know that she had been a nun, let alone what she had done in 1944. They learned it from an article in the journal Óvodai Nevelés [Nursery School Education] in the year she received the award from Yad Vashem…
