Bianca’s gift to John: ‘I’ve gone back to acknowledging my background’

Hungarian-born John Havas tells MIRIAM HECHTMAN how his daughter Bianca helped him get back in touch with the Jewish roots he had buried

John Havas, 78, worked in finance for many years and now volunteers his time to coach others. Bianca Havas, 46, John’s daughter, is a leadership facilitator and consultant. They both live in Sydney.

JOHN

I was born in 1942 into a Jewish family in Hungary. In April 1944, when the Nazis came into power in Hungary, my parents organised “upstanding” Christian families to care for my brother and me. We both survived. I was there for about 18 months and the family looked after me so well they didn’t want to give me back to my parents. I never found out who they were.

I remember my two grandmothers were often praying in Hebrew or Yiddish on Friday evenings. We always kept the Sabbath Friday night dinners. That was my only exposure to Judaism because my parents never took me to synagogue. They stopped going because they were too insecure for our family’s safety in the post-war years.

When I was six years old, I went to a Catholic school and made my first communion. But at home, I would see my grandparents praying and reading the Old Testament. It was very confusing. My father had decided that for safety reasons, he would bring his children up as Catholics.

Years later I realised he never believed in it because before he passed away, I asked him where he wanted to be buried and he said, “of course in the Jewish cemetery”.

When the Communists came in 1950, I lived in fear. I remember my parents saying, “dive under the bed” when there was a knock on the door. I remember very clearly as a seven-year-old when the secret police came and took everything away - all our money, books, my father’s car, jewellery.

Growing up, I knew I was of Jewish origin but my energies as a child were helping my parents survive. So religion wasn’t an important part of my life; it was more about surviving. I realised later in life that surviving was a low level of existence because it doesn’t allow one to learn the importance of reaching a higher level of one’s existence. Luckily, later in life I learnt a little bit more about that.