Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence.
Watch Julie Meetal talk about her father's story. (Navigate to Julie Meetal, then "Not your typical survivor.") 
Painting the past: part two
Mansfield artist Julie Meetal had waited decades to hear her father talk about his years in the Holocaust. Now, she slipped a tape into a VCR and watched as he finally told the story.
The video had been made on a Friday morning, Nov. 16, 1995, but the man on the television screen was dressed as if for the synagogue, in a gray suit and purple tie. He was 76 years old that day, a fellow with curly gray hair and a thick mustache who sat surrounded by family photographs in his Arlington living room. But anxiety clearly flickered across his face, and he fidgeted nervously in his chair.
The voice of the woman, an interviewer from Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, came from somewhere off-camera.
"Would you please tell us your name?"
"Leslie Mittelman," he answered in thickly accented English.
He had raised two children, first in Israel, then in the United States. He was a doting grandfather who lived in Texas, selling children's clothes at Trader's Village in Grand Prairie to keep busy in retirement. But in the next two hours, sitting there at home, he would speak of a very different world, would for the first time tell a very different story.
As a boy he had lived with his parents, a sister and two brothers in a small house in the Hungarian city of Debrecen. After school, he worked with his father, a cabinetmaker. He attended a Jewish school, loved playing soccer, got a new suit once a year, and a new girlfriend about every week.
"I meet a girl and I definitely want to get married with her, until I meet another one," Mittelman said in the video, his eyes twinkling.
But girlfriends or not, it was difficult to be a Jew in Hungary then, he said. Sometimes, to avoid another fistfight, he would try to hide his heritage. He was always looking behind him, especially while riding past the Catholic school, because a Jewish boy never knew when the Catholic kids would give chase. Then it got worse. Jewish schools were closed. Hungarian Jews were required to wear armbands bearing yellow stars and needed special papers to leave their homes.
Mittelman was 18 when the war started. Although an older brother had already fled to Palestine, Mittelman was immediately drafted into a unit of the Hungarian army that consisted completely of Jews. Instead of rifles, the 285 Jewish conscripts were given shovels and tools and shuttled around Hungary to build military bases and shooting ranges for the German army.
For nearly a year, Mittelman's unit was assigned to a small town a few miles from Debrecen. They were housed in an elementary school where local Jewish girls often came to visit, and Mittelman quickly fell in love with one of them, a dark-haired beauty named Magda. Their romance was helped along by a sympathetic officer who looked the other way when Mittelman sneaked away to visit his girl. Leslie and Magda carried on that way until his unit was loaded onto a train for the Russian front.
Not long afterward and unbeknownst to Mittelman, Magda and her family also would be loaded onto boxcars with a different destination, a previously obscure place in Poland called Auschwitz.
The hill that moved
At the border between Hungary and the Ukraine, German officers forced Mittelman's labor unit to lay mines, though none of them was trained for the job. Two members of the unit were killed by explosions on the first day. About 20 more died in the following weeks, before the unit pushed north across the Soviet border. There, in the Ukraine, Mittelman got his first terrible hint about the fate of European Jews.
As the son of a cabinetmaker, officers often put him to work repairing broken and antiquated equipment. One day, his commander ordered him to make a buggy wheel, and delivered Mittelman to the door of an old Ukrainian who might help. When the old man, a gentile, answered Mittelman's knock at the door, he immediately began to cry.
"Why are you crying?" Mittelman asked.
"You remind me of my son," the man said. "Just like your height. Almost your face."
"What happened to your son?" Mittelman asked.
"He went with the Russian guerrillas," the man replied. "I don't know if he's alive or not. I will do for you the wheel."
Before they began to work, the old man took him to the door of his shop and pointed.
"Look at that hill there," the old man said.
Mittelman saw a mound of dirt that seemed to be about a mile long.
"That hill covers 9,000 Jews," the old man said. "Germans took the Jewish population there, with the help of the Ukrainians, and they dig the ditch and they kill them. They buried them. The hill was moving for days because the people, most of them were alive when they covered them. Nine thousand Jews. We're never going to see another day when we're not going to remember that hill, because it's right here in the middle of town."
On the video, more than a half-century later, Mittelman's voice rose when he spoke of the hill, as if he still could not believe it.
Seizing an escape
By early fall 1943, word of the German army's retreat from Russia began reaching Mittelman's unit, and the pounding of the Soviet artillery could be heard growing closer. The Jews were put to work creating a minefield two miles long and a mile deep along the Pripet River, where the advancing Soviets were expected to cross. In the haste to lay down the explosives, Mittelman said, about 80 more members of his unit were killed.
Amid that horror, the rout of the Nazis continued. German tanks and infantry roared past the Jewish workers, headed south, and Mittelman's unit eventually was ordered to join the retreat. He and two other Jews were made responsible for a horse-drawn wagon full of Russian goods that the Germans had plundered. Others in Mittelman's exhausted and malnourished unit were shot dead if they faltered. Mittelman's retreat ended when a wheel on his wagon shattered in the road.
"The commander left a sergeant there with us to fix the wagon," Mittelman said. "I think the sergeant was afraid [of] what will happen with the Russians coming. We were on the road with the buggy, two horses, three Jews and the sergeant. He says to me, 'Mittelman, you fix the wagon and you come after us.' He left us."
The wagon wheel was soon repaired, but Mittelman had no intention of following the Germans.
"Boys, I am not going further," he said. "We saw enough."
They turned into the forest instead, wandering through gaps in the trees until a small house appeared in a clearing. When a rifle-bearing member of the Polish resistance greeted them, the three Jews quickly swore a new allegiance, pleading to join the fight against the Nazis. Within days, Mittelman was dispatched with small groups of commandos, helping sabotage railroads and bridges in front of the retreating Germans.
One excursion was particularly memorable, he said. Early in his time with the guerrillas, he was sent out with three other men and two young women. The men stayed hidden in the forest while the provocatively dressed girls stood by a main road, anticipating German supply trucks. Two trucks stopped to pick up the girls, and six German soldiers were quickly taken prisoner.
The supply trucks were driven to the guerrilla camp and emptied. Then the two girls took over.
"These two girls took the Germans in the forest with a shovel and they said, 'Dig.' They said, 'That's the way you did it with my parents,'" Mittelman remembered. "And they dig the hole and they kill the Germans there. They said, 'This is the way you kill my parents.' They [the Germans] all fell on their knee praying. They shoot them right in the hole and they covered them."
"I never saw in my life girls doing what those girls were doing," Mittelman told the interviewer that day in his living room. His voice was thick with admiration. "They were the greatest kids I ever saw."
A friend named Sam
Mittelman's band of guerrillas was eventually ordered into Warsaw. On his third night there, Mittelman and a friend named Sam were perched on top of a warehouse, where Mittelman fired down at German patrols with a machine gun. Sam fed him a belt of ammunition. Then the flow of bullets stopped.
"Sam, I don't get supply," Mittelman remembered yelling. "I'm stuck. What are you doing? I looked at Sam. He had no head! I don't know [if it] was some kind of grenade."
He made a chopping motion at his neck.
"One of them cut his head," Mittelman remembered. "He had no head next to me. Oh, my God. I was full of blood."
For one of the few times in his testimony, Mittelman's voice cracked briefly, and he looked off into the Texas day. Then he told of leaving Sam's body and trying to flee with another guerrilla through the streets of Warsaw. The Germans had filled the night sky with flares attached to parachutes, lighting up the streets. Thus exposed, Mittelman was shot down by German soldiers, his legs riddled with bullets.
"I am telling my friend, 'I can't stand on my leg. Can you help me?'" Mittelman said. "He said, 'You crazy? How can I help you. Everyone is going to die here.' He left me there. I tried crawling from there, and again the [flares] went up in the air and they saw me there the second time. They shoot me that time on the arm, my head and back. I couldn't move. I laid there unconscious."
He would have died there, too, had it not been for the fact that, when they walked up, German soldiers saw that Mittelman was wearing a Hungarian army uniform. That was certainly why they bothered loading him onto a stretcher and carrying him to a field hospital. The next miracle was harder to explain. Why would a Hungarian doctor, a gentile working for the Nazis in Poland, risk his life to save a Jew?
The doctor's name was Kozak. He was the one who drew a Christian cross over a bandage on Mittelman's forehead. On his hospital charts, Kozak recorded that the patient was a Hungarian army regular wounded while fighting for the Nazis against the advancing Soviets. The doctor checked on him twice a day. Kozak brought Mittelman salami and wine.
"He tried to keep me alive," Mittelman remembered. "He knew I am Jewish. He had to know. No. 1, I believe I was talking [in delirium about being a Jew.] No. 2, I was naked, and the Germans did not get circumcisions. I think he knew who I am, and he saved me. He was fighting for me to get well. I had his name and I went to his place after the war, trying to find him."
Mittelman would never be able to thank the doctor.
"I believe he never returned to Hungary," he said.
Freedom and love
As the war came to an end, the Germans had little interest in what they thought was a badly wounded Hungarian soldier, and offered Mittelman his discharge papers. He hobbled from place to place in Poland, finding shelter with whomever would take him in, until the Soviet army finally arrived and the Germans were no longer to be feared. Mittelman rode a train home. Back in Debrecen, he was amazed to find that his mother, sister and brother had all survived the war, assigned to work camps but somehow managing to avoid Auschwitz.
Mittelman's father had not been so fortunate. He had been separated from the rest of his family, and died two days before the British army liberated the work camp at Bergen-Belsen. Of the 285 members of his work unit in the Hungarian army, Mittelman later learned, he was one of only eight to survive.
As for Magda, Mittelman could only fear the worst. Then, a few days after returning home, he received a telegram at his home in Debrecen.
"I am back," the telegram from the dark-haired beauty said. "Come to get me."
He traveled by train and horse-drawn carriage to the place where Magda was staying with relatives. They were married in her hometown on July 11, 1945. A wedding feast consisted of potato soup with some noodles and cheese.
Fifty years later, Magda was brought into the Arlington living room and took a chair next to her husband. Mittelman's daughter, the artist Julie Meetal, her husband and children had been waiting in the next room while Leslie Mittelman completed his testimony. Now they, too, joined the smiling couple.
"Next to me is my beautiful wife," Mittelman said to the camera. "She deserves a Nobel Prize, a statue ... She deserved better than what I gave to her.
"I have two children," he continued. "One lives in New York. One lives right next to me."
Mittelman looked up at Julie Meetal, a dark-haired woman in her 40s who stood beaming to his right.
"My daughter," he said. "She is a stinker."
An extraordinary man
When the video ended, Julie Meetal sat alone in her darkened bedroom, her heart pounding and images swirling in her head. For the rest of her life, whenever she heard the word Ukraine, she would envision the hill from her father's story, and the thousands of Jews buried alive. She remembered the vengeance of the girls in the forest, and her father's pride in them. The death of Sam. The wounds, which explained Leslie Mittelman's chronic pain for all those years. The heroism and humanity of one Hungarian doctor.
She smiled. A stinker. That's what her father had always called her, from the time she was a little girl. And nothing in his testimony had surprised her, not really, because Meetal had always known that he was an extraordinary man, full of life and courage. As she sat there that day, she felt many things, but most of all, it was pride. Leslie Mittelman's example was one that was too often lost in the story of the Holocaust. Jews fought back. Those who could, did.
But she knew that her journey through the horrors of the past was only half done. Another videotape beckoned, the story of her mother, yet for several months Meetal could not bring herself to watch it. Meetal had always adored her father, but her relationship with her mother had been contentious. Meetal had never understood her mother's chronic negativity and gloominess, and the resulting quarrels left much baggage between them.
And Auschwitz. It would take time for Meetal to brace herself, to prepare for her mother's memories of that terrible place.
Next: Where are we?
Painting the past: the series
Sunday: A journey of art and healing begins
Today: A soldier's story
Tuesday: A mother's painful memories
Wednesday: The artist purges her soul through her work.
Missed a day? Find the series online at star-telegram.com/living
Online resources
USC Shoah Foundation Institute: college.usc.edu/vhi
Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem: yadvashem.org
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: ushmm.org
The Color of Memory: Art by Two Daughters of the Holocaust
Through May 31
Exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Julie Meetal and Veronique Jonas
Dallas Holocaust Museum, 211 Record St., in the West End
10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday
Free
214-741-7500; dallasholocaustmuseum.org and www.colorofmemory.com
