At least that’s who his family thought he was for as long as they could remember.
But … was that his real name?
He was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 10, 1928, as István Rokza. The youngest of two brothers.
István was a Jew.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Amb. Andras Simonyi, 66092
At the age of 16,
he was employed as an apprentice in a bicycle repair shop…
…until the Nazis arrested him in May 1944.
Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-680-8285A-16
They put him in one of the Gestapo prisons in Budapest…
Fortepan
…until he was deported to the Neuengamme concentration camp.
KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme, ANg F 1981-279
He only had two things with him when he was arrested. Some money and a pen. Both were taken away from him in the concentration camp.
He had to do forced labor.
Someone pushed István into a saw. He lost the fingers on his right hand.
Shortly before the end of the war, the Nazis sent him on a death march…
Stadtarchiv Landsberg am Lech
…to the Sandbostel death camp.
He
survived.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 76685, courtesy of Arnold Bauer Barach
It took 3 months before István was even strong enough to leave the Bergen-Belsen emergency hospital.
IWM, BU 4844
Just 3 days after he was discharged, he traveled to Sweden by ship.
Sjöhistoriska museet, Fo88706AB
He stayed there for at least two years. After that, there are no more records of his whereabouts…
…until June 1949, when his trail picks up again in Salzburg.
JDC Archives, 25288, Al Taylor
This is where he
met his brother György – he too had survived.
Both did an apprenticeship in agriculture there.
István left Europe in 1949. His destination was the young state of Israel.
From this point on, he called himself Yosef.
Did he want to leave the past behind him? He certainly wanted to start his new life with a new name. He set up a new existence as Yosef.
Foto aus dem Besitz der Familie Rokza
He worked as a farmer and a long-distance truck driver. Football, running, boxing – all of these were no problem. As a young man, he was even Israel’s table tennis champion. And in spite of his disability, he wrote with his right hand.
But he hardly ever spoke about his past.
He didn’t even speak of his own brother any more.
His children and his wife Sarah, a Romanian Holocaust survivor, only knew him as Yosef.
And he died as Yosef too – in 1996. He left his wife, 5 children, and, at the time of writing, 19 grandchildren, and 23 great-grandchildren.
Foto aus dem Besitz der Famlie Rokza
However, 22 years after his death, the Roksa family received a message from the past.
An envelope. It contained an ink pen that had once belonged to a young man: István Rokza, son of Hedwig Miriam Füllop and Anton Schlomo Rokza, brother of György Rokza.
István’s pen will go to his grandson Ravid.
It will always be a reminder of the two lives that István Yosef Rokza had to lead.
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