Adorian and Rozalia Stark
Adorian (Adrian) Stark (Avraham ben Tzvi) was born on May 19, 1906, the eldest of five children to Hermann Stark and Berta Engel. The family lived in Berettyóújfalu, Hungary, where they had a successful import/export business specializing in European gourmet foods.
Before the Holocaust, Adrian’s sister Ilona was married to Mishka Lindenfeld. They had two children: a son, Akos, and a daughter, Judit. Adrian’s brother, Bertalan, was married to Magda Grosz. His younger brother Moritz and sister Roza were single. Before World War II, Adrian was married to Elsa Izrael and he took over the family business at his father’s request even though his dream was to be a chemist.
When the war broke out, Adrian was conscripted into a forced labor camp of the Hungarian army. Prior to being drafted, he asked a family friend, who was a doctor, to operate on his legs. This disqualified him from performing hard labor. He ended up being assigned clerical duties, and used this opportunity to forge papers and save the lives of many fellow Jews.
Shortly after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Jews of Berettyóújfalu were rounded up and concentrated in a local ghetto before being transferred to the town’s brickyard on June 7th. A day later, they were moved to the ghetto in nearby Nagyvàrad (Oradea in Romanian), from where they were deported to Auschwitz a few days later.
Adrian was the sole survivor of his entire family. Most of his relatives were murdered at Auschwitz, including his first wife Elsa, who was pregnant with their child at the time. The family business was destroyed.
Rozalia (Rose) Kornitzer (Sara Fradle) was born on March 20, 1915 in Szerencs, Hungary, to Salamon (Yekutiel Zalman) and Maria (Miriam) Kornitzer. Rose was the seventh of nine children - three girls and six boys. She was also the great, great, great granddaughter of the Chatam Sofer (Moshe Sofer), one of the leading Orthodox rabbis of European Jewry in the first half of the 19th century.
Rose’s father Salamon owned a large distillery and acres of vineyards in the Tokaji grape region of Hungary. After several of his sons took charge of the factory, Salamon was able to turn to politics. He served as a member of the chamber of commerce, chairman of the board of the local bank, and president of the local Jewish community, which was established towards the end of the 18th century and served many smaller villages in northern Hungary. Salamon built the local Jewish school and mikvah, and paid for the burial of the indigent with his own money.
Although the fascist Hungarian government initially collaborated with the Nazis and implemented increasingly restrictive anti-Jewish laws, the liquidation of Hungary’s Jewish population didn’t begin until after the German occupation in March 1944. In June, at the end of Passover, the town’s roughly 1,000 Jews were sent to the ghetto in nearby Miskolc and subsequently deported to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered. Only some 140 survived.
Rose’s family was rescued thanks to the foresight of her older brother, Béla, a journalist who advised them to flee to Budapest. They escaped impending deportation from Szerencs by moving from one hiding place to another; at one point, Béla arranged for his Orthodox parents and siblings to find shelter in a Carmelite convent.
Before the Holocaust, Rose had been engaged to Gyula Blum from Zirc, Hungary, who perished while serving in a Hungarian army forced labor battalion. After the war, she was introduced to Adrian by Claire Rosenberg, her older brother’s wife, and the two were married in 1946. They settled in Budapest and had a daughter, Eva, on August 6, 1947.
After surviving the traumas of the Shoah, Adrian and Rose worked hard to build a new life together under the communist regime in Hungary. Rose used her creative skills to sew and knit items for a manufacturer. She travelled for over an hour by bus to obtain the material, produced the garments at home, and then travelled back to deliver the finished products. Adrian worked in an administrative capacity at a Jewish nursing home in Buda, a suburb of Budapest. In the early 1950’s, the couple’s numerous requests for a visa to Israel were repeatedly denied. Rose was 40 years old when she gave birth to a son, Arthur (Akos), on April 25, 1955.
In October 1956, after Russian tanks gunned down unarmed student protesters, Hungarians took to the streets to revolt against Soviet rule, and briefly seized control of the country. After 12 days, the uprising was viciously crushed as the Soviets came in with tanks and troops on November 4, 1956. Approximately 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Russian soldiers were killed. It was a perilous time but these events created a brief opportunity to escape the Communist dictatorship.
Rose and Adrian debated whether to take the risk to flee. Adrian thought it was too dangerous with an 18-month-old and nine-year-old. Rose bravely convinced Adrian that they needed to seize the moment. The escape was treacherous; the couple paid a farmer to drive them and their two children in the back of his wagon for several hours to the countryside. Carrying only one small suitcase and dressed in peasant garb, they trudged through muddy fields on a cold winter night as Russian helicopters overhead searched for those like them who were trying to escape. As they reached the Iron Curtain along the tightly policed Austrian border, the Red Cross came looking for refugees, bringing German shepherds to help rescue them.
Once again, Rose’s brother Béla was instrumental in helping them escape. Due to his opposition to the Communist regime, he was forced to flee Hungary right after the war. He applied for political asylum and settled in New York in 1946. Béla flew to meet the family in Vienna and expedited their emigration to the United States. On January 7th, 1957, they arrived in America aboard a Pan Am flight full of refugees.
The family’s first stop was Camp Kilmer, a New Jersey army base that served as a refugee absorption center. In another fortuitous turn of events, Rose’s cousin, Dr. George Frederick, who served as a U.S. Army captain, was second in command at the base. Very soon after that, the family was able to join Rose’s mother Miriam, who managed to emigrate earlier, in Woodbridge, New Jersey.
Adrian and Rose settled in Plainfield, New Jersey, where they worked hard, raised their two children and belonged to a local Orthodox synagogue. Rose passed away at the age of 64 on December 18, 1979. Adrian passed away on August 8, 1996, shortly after turning 90. He greatly enjoyed being part of his shul community and celebrating Shabbat and holidays. He also took great pride in his six grandchildren, among them Ilana Sidorsky, who graduated Heschel high school in 2008 and served as a faculty member from 2014-2019, focusing on Israel education and social action programming.
Postscript: In 2005, Eva and Arthur returned to Hungary for the first time since their escape. Traveling with their spouses and children, they visited their mother’s home in Szerencs, their childhood apartment in Budapest, and various Holocaust museums and and monuments.