The Dugo Drive: Eating a falafel every year to remember the Death March

When he was 14 years old the Germans entered Hungary, his homeland, and immediately began with their well oiled round up and persecution of the Jewish population. “My family and neighbors were sent into a crowded Ghetto. All our belongings were stolen together with our dignity,” Dugo relates. “We thought nothing worse could happen to us, but we were wrong”.

Within days transports to the concentration camps began emptying out the Ghettos. On arrival in Buchenwald, the men and women were separated and the women and children were sent directly to the gas chambers. The young David Leitner quickly caught on to what was happening, and made sure to stay in the line of the men where his father and older brother, Shmuel, also were sent.

The infamous Mengele saw that a number of youngsters like Dugo were getting into the line for slave laborers and tried to push them back into those designated for extermination. He attempted to remove the number that had already been imprinted on their arm. Somehow that group managed to manipulate their return to the line of the laborers. “We knew that in order to survive we had to work and so our group of ten youngsters volunteered for the “Shist Komeden” (the toilet cleaners) where we also got something to eat every day,” he recalls. “We sang all the time, as a kind of insurance that we were still alive.”

But even that terrible existence was about to end, and on Simchat Torah the chevriah were added to those taken to the crematorium along with a large crowd of screaming, crying and praying Jews and pushed into the “showers” knowing their end was near. Just as the heavy iron door to the men’s showers was about to close , a German officer pulled it open and yelled “I need 50 strong young men immediately,” and Dugo was one of the first to volunteer . Thus he was saved again and assigned to another task. The war, however, was closing in on the camp.

By January 18, 1945 the Russians were clearly nearing the site of the concentration camp. The Germans didn’t want to wait. They gathered all the inmates still on their feet and in the dead of winter started them out on a terrible Death March further inland where the weather sometimes dropped to 18 degrees below zero “We were ill clad, sometimes with only rags tied around our feet. We hardly got anything to eat and we were marched for three days,” Dugo relates. “People died like flies, in the thousands. Of the 60,000 prisoners that started out on the Death March, only 20,000 remained at our destination, another concentration camp.”

David doesn’t know how he stayed on his feet. “My legs just moved automatically, and I kept remembering my mother’s good cooking, especially the “Bilkalach”, the round, brown donut like buns she used to make and which she promised they’d eat one day in Eretz Yisrael. I think that’s what kept me going.”

Dugo survived the Death March but was interned in three other camps before the war ended in June 1945. That’s where he received the second number that’s on his arm. Once on their transfer to the Mauchasan Camp by rail their train was bombed by the allies, and of the 350 prisoners who had suffered so much, only half escaped. His daughter, Zehava Kor ,who investigated her father’s history , found David Leitner listed as #156 of the arrivals.

Once the war ended Dugo immediately made plans to come to Palestine and like so many new immigrants was quickly enlisted in the Hagana and fought in the War for Independence. There he met up with his brother Shmuel, who together with their father had been in another labor camp all along and suffered their own Death March on which the elder Leiter died. Shmuel became a chef in a hotel in Tel Aviv and had a son, but tragically died on Tu B’Shvat at the age of 47 due to ill health. |This year his son became a grandfather to a lovely baby girl, Shmuel’s first great granddaughter had he lived. His younger brother, meanwhile was in the founding garin of a cooperative village near Ashdot called Nir Galim, where many of the original settlers are Hungarian Holocaust survivors like him.

One of the first stops that Dugo made in Eretz Yisrael was to the shuk in Mahane Yehuda, and there for the first time in his life he saw round brown balls bubbling in hot oil which he took to be his mother’s promise of the Bilkalach that awaited him in Eretz Yisrael. He learned they were called falafel and they tasted heavenly, especially packed in an Israeli pita with salad, french fries, techina and pickles.

Every year since then Dugo goes to the closest falafel stand on January l8, the day that the Death March began, and eats a falafel to commemorate his survival, sometimes with a sign saying “Am Yisrael Hai” (Israel Lives). 

What started as a neighborhood and family tradition has blossomed into a country wide celebration. Dugo’s daughter , Zehava, works in the center for perpetuating knowledge of the Shoah, in Nir Galim called Beit HaEdut. When she and her sister couldn’t handle the number of telephone calls and requests for interviews that her father’s unique custom elicited, she transferred perpetuating the story to the center. Thus every year through Beit HaEdut, (the house of witness) more and more private citizens, youth groups, senior citizen clubs, institutions, and schools now latch on to the Dugo Drive. This year alone over 1,000 photos of people eating falafel on January 18 were sent in, and who knows how many more ate the Israeli national dish in his honor.

A book was put out about David Leitner’s extraordinary life history which is now available in English, with the title, “Dugo, the True Story” and a telling sub-title “Wasn’t It Enough That I Was an Orphan; Did I Have To Be Sad As Well?” Zehava says that’s actually my father’s motto throughout his life. Only a person who can still see the positive side of life after what he’s gone through can invigorate us all. This year due to the Corona virus many zooms were produced around Dugo’s story. She knows about eight: for soldiers, the police force and for many private groups and school children. When you ask Dugo, why don’t you use the Hebrew date ? he answers “ I didn’t choose the date on which the Germans started the Death March, they did!” 

Rabbi Elyada Ofran made an intriguing comparison between this event, Dugo’s Drive and the Passover Seder. On a certain date we gather together to commemorate an unforgettable event for our nation. We eat a certain food clearly designated – whether matza or falafel. We relate the story and engage in thanks to the fact that we were liberated. Thus with a concrete deed we connect ourselves to a pivotal historical occasion, especially using a culinary act, insuring it’s lasting effect on this generation and the coming ones as well. Remember January 18 and remember “Am Yisrael Hai!”