Nikolay Schwartz ‘s brother Ernest Schwartz with his wife Ioheved

My younger brother Ernest Schwartz with his wife Ioheved. My sister Yelizaveta Klein (nee Schwartz), gave me this photograph, when we met in Budapest in 1965 for the first time after 24 years apart. My sister corresponded with my brother after World War II while I didn't know he had survived. I met with my brother later, but as for his wife, I've only seen a photo of hers. This photo was taken in Ramat Gan in Israel in 1956.

When World War II began, my brother Earnest studied in a vocational school in Budapest. The Hungarian fascists were more loyal to Hungarian Jews than to Subcarpathian Jews. Many Jews could stay in their houses in Hungary and were not taken to concentration camps. The only mandatory thing that fascists did was painting yellow hexagonal stars on Jewish houses, though I guess, I know little about it, or what I know is what I heard from others. When Germans invaded Budapest [March 19th 1944], Earnest and 50 other students of their vocational school found refuge in the Swiss Embassy. They were hiding there until the end of the war. From Budapest they moved to Romania where they tried to take a boat to Palestine. [illegally] Their boat was arrested by British soldiers and sent to Crete in Greece.

They kept them for a long time there, but then Greek fishermen secretly took them to Palestine in their boats. Earnest joined a kibbutz. Then he finished a construction vocational school and returned to his kibbutz where he married Iogheved, a girl who was born in Palestine. She was a teacher. Earnest took part in the Six-Day War. After the war he continued his work in the kibbutz. Earnest and Ioheved didn't have children. I met with my brother once. He arrived in Budapest like Elisabeth since he couldn't get a visa to the USSR. We spent a week together and then my brother returned to Israel. Earnest died in 1983. I didn't go to his funeral. Citizens of the USSR couldn't travel abroad then. My sister took a plane to go to my brother's funeral. Later she wrote me that our brother was buried in accordance with Jewish traditions.