This Friday at our Chapter meeting we will have a guest speaker from
the Talking Book and Braille Library, bringing us the, "What's new"
news. We will ask her what the status is regarding recording local
books by local authors. For a period of time there were no funds for
this program. If it is up and running again, the book can be recorded
and made available nation-wide.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/20/16, Alice Dampman Humel <alicedh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
will this show up on BARD? or at least through your local library outlet
there in Washington?
On Sep 20, 2016, at 10:57 AM, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This article from the Port Townsend features our Jefferson County
Council of the Blind's oldest member.
Carl Jarvis
****
Edith Kapka has always loved to tell stories.
On June 30, Edith sat next to a row of old family photographs in her
Port Townsend home, her daughter Marga Kapka at her side. It was her
103rd birthday.
With the help of Marga, Edith just published “Roots and Branches,” a
historical novel based on her life as a young woman surviving World
War II in Hungary.
The book is available for purchase on
Amazon.com.
A public book signing and presentation is set for 2 p.m., Saturday,
Aug. 6 at the Port Townsend Public Library's Library Learning Center,
1256 Lawrence.
Edith faced vision loss 33 years ago due to glaucoma, which has left
her partially blind. When Edith was no longer able to type at 93,
Marga, 69, helped
her mother finish writing the book. The novel follows the fictional
Szabo family from the Nazi occupation of Budapest, Hungary, in March
1944 until the
city's liberation by Russian forces in February 1945. Edith chose
historical fiction over memoir so she could bring more history into
the story, Marga
said.
“It was very rewarding for me because I got to work closely with my
mother, and everything had a story that she was willing to share,”
Marga said.
Edith was born in 1913 in Budapest. Before the Nazis came on March 19,
1944 – a date Edith recalls exactly – Budapest was a beautiful city,
divided by
the Danube River into two distinct sections, Buda (hill) and Pest (flat).
She was raised Christian, although she always worried her family would
be arrested for being Jewish during the war because her father was
Jewish, she said.
In the book, the Szabo family represents the many Hungarian Jewish
families they knew, she said. During the Nazi occupation, thousands of
Jews and Romani
people in Hungary were deported to concentration camps.
After Allied air forces bombed Budapest on April 3, 1945, Edith and
her then four children fled to the countryside, settling in a village
called Koroshegy,
west of Budapest. Marga was not yet born. Edith's late husband, John
Kapka, stayed in the city to work, seeing his family every weekend
until intense bombing
prevented him from visiting. The rails were often bombed, forcing
passengers to get off the train and hide in ditches, Edith said.
In November 1944, Nazi forces arrested John and put him into a
political prison “for no reason,” she said. She traveled to Budapest
three times to visit
her husband at Marko Street Prison, bringing food – a bribe – for the
prison guard, as food was scarce in the city, the bread made with
sawdust.
“Anyu, how did you feel when you had to leave Apu behind in the
prison?” Marga asked her mother.
In the Hungarian language, anyu means mother, and apu, father.
“What could I do? There’s nothing I could do,” Edith said.
“But how did you feel?” Marga asked again in Hungarian.
“I’ll leave that to your imagination,” Edith said. “It was very, very
hard because we didn't know if we would ever see each other again.”
She tried to get her husband released by speaking with Ferenc Szálsi,
the Fascist leader of the Nazi-backed Hungarian Arrow Cross Party in
power at the
time.
“I pretended to be German and spoke German to the guards so they would
let me through to Szálsi,” Edith said.
By Christmas, Russian troops had arrived in the village where Edith
and her four children were living, setting up secret
telecommunications in the woods
near her house. Her family was unable to get a pine tree for
Christmas, she said.
On a snowy Christmas Eve, Edith went to bed early thinking about her
husband. She awoke to the sound of a gate opening and two Russian
soldiers were at
her door.
“They came back with a beautiful, beautiful pine tree,” Edith said.
“That was something very special.”
Edith notes that the soldiers were from Kiev, Ukraine, and unlike
other soldiers, who were more hostile.
“That's one of the things my mother remembers a lot during these
brutal times was the kindness of people,” Marga said.
In February 1945, Russian forces liberated Budapest and defeated the
Nazis, who blew up every bridge crossing the Danube to keep the
Russians from following
them west.
The Nazis rounded up prisoners and forced them to retreat west on
“death marches,” Edith said. The Nazis believed John Kapka was ill, so
they isolated
him in prison and left him behind, which saved him from the death
marches. It turned out he only had a bad case of fleas.
cj6g0nt28tws
Once released, he set out by foot to find his family and reunited with
them around Easter 1945.
“I opened the door and didn't recognize him,” Edith said. “He had lost
so much weight, his clothes were just hanging on him, and the kids
were afraid of
him.”
The family returned to Budapest in July, but the city was changed,
demolished. She cried when she saw it. Her eldest daughter began first
grade, but Stalin
had replaced all the teachers with communist teachers, she said.
The Kapkas moved to Belgium in 1945 to escape the brutality of
Budapest. Two years later, fearing the expanding Soviet empire, they
escaped Europe with
visas for Venezuela, as the U.S. quota for Hungarian immigrants had
been filled. Shortly after their arrival in 1947 in New York City,
Marga was born,
allowing them to permanently stay in the U.S.
In 1949, the family moved to Cleveland, joining the world's
second-largest population of Hungarians next to Budapest's, Marga
said. Edith and John had
a total of 10 children, six girls and four boys.
Marga, a retired English teacher who taught at Port Townsend High
School and overseas, has lived in Port Townsend with her husband since
1993.
Edith began writing shortly after John Kapka's death in 1982. “I just
felt the urge [to write] after my husband passed away,” she said.
Three summers ago, Marga began working with Edith to create a book
from her mother's handwritten pages.
“There were times when I would look at [my mother] as the character in
the book and remember, 'Oh, this is my mother, and these things
happened to her,’”
Marga said. “I came to see her not only as a survivor, but as a person
who really values life.”
They finished the book on May 1, 2016 through the publisher’s “print
on demand” process.
“I hope [readers] would learn that my country is not as savage as many
believe,” Edith said, “and to work for peace, to choose leaders who
work for peace.”
