Search for Lost Fortune Forces Survivor to Relive Nazi Horrors

NEW YORK — In February 1945, with the German army in retreat, Leslie Gabor’s father returned to his hometown in Hungary in search of his lost life.

He went looking for his family, his large red-roofed home, his grain warehouses and the Swiss bank account numbers that his wife had written in secret places on their furniture.

About all he found was a metal box containing gold coins and watches hidden under the woodshed. The townspeople had no news about his family. His warehouses were empty. His house had been ransacked by the Germans or the Hungarians.

There was no sign of the dining room sideboard or the kitchen cabinet on which his wife had recorded the bank-account numbers.

“We lost everything,” says Gabor, now 80, wearing a red silk tie with matching handkerchief, hints of the dashing and affluent young businessman he had once been.

“We lost the family. We lost a fortune.”

Gabor tells his family’s story fast and furiously. His narrative is unadorned, filled with facts and dates. They are safe and impersonal, and he can handle them. He can’t handle the small memories--such as a special dinner his mother had for him on his return from a labor camp. Or the last time he said goodbye to her.

“You don’t want to look back,” he says. “When you look back, you see what happened.”

In the last few months, however, Nazi dealings with Switzerland and half-century-old claims by Holocaust victims against Swiss banks have become front-page news, and Gabor decided to make one last attempt to recover his family’s money.

From 1940 to 1943, he estimates, his mother transferred $100,000--worth about $1 million today, not including interest--into Union Bank of Switzerland and another bank whose name he cannot remember.

Gabor’s efforts to recover the money are forcing him for the first time to confront the horrors of his past. And it hurts deep and hard. “Very hard,” he says.

Last year, he wrote the agency in Switzerland that handles dormant-account searches for the banks. And he has written to join a $20-billion class-action lawsuit, referring to the extinguished lives of his mother, brother, sister, brother-in-law and the baby niece he never saw.

“But, at the minimum, the money we put in the bank, we want to get it.”

For Gabor, his family’s Swiss accounts represent the hard-working but well-heeled life that he lived as a young man. It was a life of first-class travel, luxury hotels, expensive English suits, Italian hats and monogrammed alligator wallets stuffed with money.

It was a life that revolved around family and the family grain business. His father had 100 employees, four managers and four foremen. But the Goldsteins were the heart of the business. His mother managed it at home, while he and his father traveled to Budapest to sell grain on the commodities market.

Gabor--who changed his name in 1945 to avoid being recognized as Jewish--proudly displays an old business postcard listing the locations of the family’s warehouses. He mentions that his father was the largest taxpayer in Bercel, a town of 3,000. The Goldsteins were among 40 Orthodox Jewish families in the town.

“At home, I was a king,” Gabor says in broken English as he sits in the sparsely furnished living room of his middle-class house on Long Island. “Here, I was absolutely nothing.”

When he came to New York City, Gabor struggled, first in the chemical business and later in religious import sales. Finally he established himself selling off-price goods to chain stores. Eventually he had enough to provide a comfortable home for his wife, an Auschwitz survivor, and their two daughters. But he has never lived as he did in Hungary.

The beginning of the end there came in 1940. Early that year, when Gabor was in the Hungarian army, his mother took the Orient Express to Switzerland to open two bank accounts. She was determined to keep her family from losing everything, as they did during the financial crisis in the late 1920s, Gabor says.

It was illegal to have a foreign bank account, so after carefully recording the account numbers on the credenza in the dining room and a kitchen cabinet, she destroyed all documents about the accounts.

“We all knew where the numbers were,” Gabor says. “The main thing was the money was in Switzerland, in a good place, in a safe place.”

Several times a year, his mother would transfer money to the Swiss accounts. She stopped in early 1943, when it became too dangerous. She then started buying U.S. dollars, English pounds and gold pieces, and placing them, with jewelry and stock certificates, in metal containers that she hid.

On March 19, 1944, Gabor, who was back home after stints in two labor camps, and his father took a train to Budapest on business.

There, disembarking passengers were forced into two lines, one for Jews and one for Gentiles. Gabor and his father managed to slip into the Gentile line, thanks in part to Gabor’s wallet-size card showing he had earned an army medal.

While the two men were in Budapest, their family in Bercel was rounded up by the Nazis, sent to a ghetto and, finally, to Auschwitz.

“My mother from the concentration camp, from Auschwitz, sent a card to our hotel,” Gabor recalls. It said, “ ‘We have a wonderful time here. We cook for the younger ones who went out to work. I hope you are well too.’

“We were so misled by the Germans,” he adds.

Forever the wheeler-dealer, Gabor survived, often because he would carry an extra gold watch and money in his pocket and, when his own means failed him, had influential contacts.

At one point, he bought Gentile identification papers and used them to check into the luxurious Royal Hotel, which the Nazis were using as their headquarters.

“I figured that would be the safest thing,” he says. “They would think Jews would never have the nerve to check in where they were.”

Eventually, though, he ended up in a labor camp.

In spring 1945, after the Soviet army pushed the Germans out of Hungary, his father went home. Gabor did not. He says that he did not have the nerve, that he could not face the horror of what had happened.

In Bercel, all his father found was the metal box in the ground, containing about 250 gold coins, two gold watches and some stock certificates.

Two months later, the older man telephoned Union Bank and the second bank. They told him that without a death certificate and account number, they could not research his claim.

That summer, a friend traveling to Zurich made inquiries in person. The banks’ answers were the same. In the early 1960s, Gabor believes, his father went to Switzerland and tried to recover his money.

Gabor’s efforts have proved no more successful.

In February, he received a letter from the Swiss agency that is handling claims from Holocaust victims. “This indicates that no dormant accounts . . . are held in any Swiss banks under any of the names or designations cited by you,” it read.

Gabor says he gave the names Goldstein and Schweitzer, his mother’s maiden name. But he believes his mother, to protect her identity, may have used another name.

Mel Urbach, a lawyer in one of the class-action lawsuits, said: “My guess is the Germans found the numbers and went back to Switzerland and withdrew the funds.”

This month, a Union Bank spokesman in New York City confirmed that a check of the bank’s dormant accounts found no match with the names Goldstein or Schweitzer.

“We empathize with his predicament,” said the spokesman, David Walker. “We welcome an opportunity to discuss his situation fully. We will do everything possible to assist him in his search.”

Walker noted that the three major Swiss banks earlier this year became the original contributors to a humanitarian fund for Holocaust survivors and have been cooperating with an independent audit of dormant accounts by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Gabor is not impressed. He lets the letter from Switzerland fall to the floor.

“I didn’t pick this story from the air,” he says.

The letter joins a pile of papers and memorabilia at Gabor’s feet, vestiges of his stolen past. There are stock receipts; his 1939 driver’s license; a 1940 postcard from his sister to a friend in Romania; a photo of his mother and father.

And, perhaps most symbolic, a worn alligator wallet, with the initials “L.G.” in silver, now poignantly empty.