The photographs presented here were recently donated, along with letters, documents and family records, to the Vancouver Holocaust Educational Centre by Ilona Mermelstein, an eighty-two-year-old Hungarian Jewish child survivor of the Holocaust. They were taken by Ilona’s father, Daniel Kiss, who was in the plane as it burst into flames and who was the last to escape after landing, the wings falling off as he leaped to the ground.

When she donated these photos, Ilona told of how Daniel was conscripted into the Hungarian Air Force in 1943 and worked as a mechanic. On the day these photos were taken, he and several other Hungarian men were ordered to pull a target tug, a training exercise during which an airplane pulls a target—a bright orange piece of fabric, for example—attached to the plane by several hundred feet of steel rope for artillery and aircraft carriers to fire at from the ground. Daniel’s plane was hit by artillery fire during the training exercise and caught fire. The airplane had been outfitted with one too few parachutes, and the men on board decided that rather than leaving any one of them behind, they would all stay with the plane as it hurtled toward the ground.

After the incident Daniel Kiss wrote a letter to his family: “Recently I almost died a bit! Would you have felt sorry for me? One of our engines caught fire and only the Good God kept us afloat above and let us get to the airfield. By the time we landed and jumped out of the machine, it was totally engulfed by fire. Thank god, all of us survived somehow and we were saved from almost certain death—we were not even scratched—but the machine burned down completely. I will send some photos home.”

The following year, the Hungarian Army handed over its Jewish conscripts to the German Army. Daniel Kiss was sent to a labour camp, where he worked as a mechanic repairing German aircraft engines in the tunnels and bunkers underneath the Dreher Brewery in Budapest. One night, Daniel’s supervisor allowed him and the other men in his group to return home to get a change of civilian clothes; the reason for this is unknown. Daniel’s family home was not far from Budapest and he somehow found a motorcycle to ride the hour to get there. Ilona remembers that night: her father appeared at the house around midnight, fetched his clothes, kissed his family, and slipped back out to return to the labour camp.

As the Soviet Army approached Budapest in the fall of 1944 and the production line was being moved back to Germany (the Jewish Hungarian labourers in tow), the change of clothes allowed Daniel to blend in with civilians taking refuge in the tunnel system, where Daniel stayed until the Soviet Army liberated Hungary in January 1945. After World War Two Daniel Kiss and his family settled in Budapest, where Daniel worked as head engineer at agricultural collectives; he died in 1959. Ilona Mermelstein moved from Hungary to Vancouver in 1990 to be closer to her sister.

View the full collection here.

—Michał Kozłowski

Special thanks to Ilona Mermelstein, Aaron Csaplanos (Ilona’s grandson) and Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre staff for support on this piece.