Never Again, Never Forget

Raoul Wallenberg was said to have helped save the lives of close to 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazis and fascists during World War II.
Katherine Goldstein Prevost’s life was not one of them. But, she’ll tell you, she was lucky.
Prevost was in her early 20s when the Nazis came for her in the Budapest ghetto tenement she shared with her mother. She had heard of Wallenberg, a Scandinavian Christian with a sliver of Jewish ancestry. She knew what he was trying to do, but she had had no dealings with the Swedish diplomat turned savior.
To get into see Wallenberg, and potentially get one of his semi-legal Swedish repatriation passports, or be able to hide in one of his country’s protected homes in the Hungarian capitol city, took something Prevost said her orthodox Jewish family didn’t have.
Money.
“We were poor; we had nothing,” said Prevost, now 89 years old. “We lived in a cold water flat; we had no money to buy a passport.”
So, she ended up being sent to one of the many “subcamps” attached to the infamous Dachau concentration camp toward the end of the war.
But first came the death march. And the photo of her place in it.
Honoring the Fallen
Jonathan Adelman, a professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, will make a presentation at 7 p.m. on Thursday, August 15 at the Jewish Community Center in West Ashley in honor of what would have been the 101^st anniversary of Wallenberg’s birth.
The author of a dozen books on Wallenberg, Adelman has spoken extensively on the diplomat savior — from Israeli embassies in Jerusalem and Washington, D.C., to guest lectures at Cambridge and Oxford and international speaking tours on behalf of the U.S. State Department.
The center is located at 1645 Raoul Wallenberg Blvd., named more than three decades ago in honor of the hero by Charleston City Council.
While West Ashleyians may know that Wallenberg’s boulevard terminates at Highway 61, less is known internationally about where his life ended. Conflicting reports have Wallenberg dying in different decades in the hands and prisons of his Russians captors, who imprisoned him following the war.
Prevost, by contrast, has lived a long, interesting life.
‘I was lucky’
Sitting in her comfortable senior apartment this week at Bishop Gadsden, a continuum of care facility on Camp Road on James Island, Prevost didn’t  have to think too hard to remember what happened to her.
Bright and sprightly as her cat, Prevost tells tales of getting to know a budding Hollywood starlet, of marrying a “doll” of a man, of befriending German-Americans and of moving to Charleston from Long Island to be closer to her son, a Folly Beach builder, in her remaining years.
“That’s me.  That’s the coat,” she says, pointing at a photo printed for her by the museum staff at Dachau. Through a window, someone had snapped a black and white photo of thousands of Jews trundling through the streets  on their way to work camps. For some, it was a march to death.
Years ago, Prevost was touring Dachau with her late husband, a non-practicing Catholic, when she spied the photo. Upon closer inspection, she recognized her old coat, its fur collar already cut away and confiscated.
“It was a blanket of a thing,” she says. “My only shame was that I didn’t turn, that I can’t see my face in the picture.”
The march began on the same day as Thanksgiving 1944 in America, remembers Prevost.
It was too late in the war for the Nazis to tattoo Jews or issue camp uniforms, so the march, which ended in Poland, looks eerily benign. Along the way, she and others covered about 30 kilometers a day, about 20 miles, and slept on the side of the roads at night.
Assigned to a labor camp, Prevost worked in the forests and fields. There, the laborers shaved and cut off their own hair, because of bugs and infestations.
Guilt flooded her heart at the camps as she realized how easy she had had it compared to Jews who’d been snared by the fascists earlier in the war. To this day, she says she recoils at the idea that she survived because “God loved you.”
“What about the millions of children who died in the camps?” she asks. “I was lucky.”
Liberated by Patton’s army, she found her way to America to the home of long-lost relations. Along the way, she met her husband, Arthur, got married, had kids, worked in clothing sales and found her passion: caring for babies in nurseries.
A lapsed Jew, she found a spiritual home in the Unitarian Church in Long Island and later here. After the Soviet occupation of Hungary ended in the early 1990s, Prevost continued to return to Hungary, becoming better acquainted with her expanding family.
One thing Prevost says she learned from the troubled times was not to generalize. So, she says, she will attend the Wallenberg celebration on Thursday and hear how someone risked his life to save the lives of tens of thousands of women just like her.