Tomi Komoly
TK: Family photo of TK with his wife Gill and daughters Tanya and Gabriella
TK: Photo of his mother which he took shortly before he left Hungary
TK: at his Bar Mitzvah
TK: Inside the yellow star house where TK lived with his mother
TK: Budapest after the war 1945
TK: Photo of his Uncle
TK: Hednesford Army camp where TK was temporarily placed after his arrival in the UK
TK: Budapest after the war
TK: 1944
TK: Technikum school photo
TK: TK's father on the left with friends
TK: Border crossing (from Hungary into Austria) 1956
TK: In the middle is TK's grandfather
TK: June 2019
TKT: school photo 1951
TK: Newspaper clipping announcing his parents' engagement
TK: TK's father with his five siblings
TK: The Red Army in Budapest
TK: with his great-aunt
TK: Wedding of Tomi and Gill Komoly
TK: during his service in the Hungarian Army
TK: Budapest 1956 a week after the uprising- this is a secret policeman on a lamppost; the sign says " This is what's going to happen to all Communists and Jews"
TK: Red cross tracing form filed by TK's mother in 1967 to find her husband
TK: TK's father
TK: On the 21st June 1944 TK and his family had to move into a yellow star house in the centre of Budapest (which looked like this one)
TK: One of the first computers in Britain: TK worked with it when he studied at the Royal College of Science and Technology in Glasgow
TK: Grandparents David Kohn - one of the founding members of the International Zionist Congress in Basel and first Chairman of the Hungarian Zionist Federation and his wife Emilia Klauber
TK: TK with his parents
TK: This building was used as a school which TK attended when schools opened up after the war
TK: Cartoon of TK's father when he was a prisoner of war (WW I)
TK on the boat from Ostend to Dover
TK: ruins of a bridge which was blown up by the Germans during the Russian advance
TK: The Jewish Refugee Committee found TK lodgings in Dollis Hill
TK: Modern photo of the house in Budapest where TK lived for ten years
TK: Shortly after his arrival in Vienna
TK: Red Army in Budapest 1945
TK: June 2019
TK: Cookbook with his grandmother's favourite recipes
TK: TK's uncle Otto's personal diary: "Alfred that he- he is at the Dohány Street Synagogue. And “I’m trying to get some certificates to release him."
TK: "my father had been put into the forced labour battalion
TK: Budapest
TK: TK's parents' Ketubah
TK: TK's mother
TK: Gradfather Vámos (formerly Steierman)
TK: as a young child with his father
TK: Grandmother
TK: Jewish cemetery Budapest: David Kohn and Emilia Klauber with their daughter Dora and a plaque for his father Alfred
TK: "in Hungarian schools you have a yearbook
TK: TK with his parents and his mother's family
TK: Paying respect to Churchill
TK: as a young child
Tomi Komoly
Born: 1936
Place of Birth: Budapest
Arrived in Britain: 17/03/1957
Interview Number: RV242
Interview Summary
Date of interview: 26/06/2019
Tomi (born Tamas) Komoly was born in 1936 in Budapest and his father was a scrap metal merchant. Alfred Komoly, (born Kohn), was called up to forced labour in 1943 and during a brief visit to his family, was denounced and killed in Budapest in 1944. An uncle, Otto Komoly had been instrumental in saving lives on the controversial ‘Kasztner Train’. Tomi and his mother survived in Swedish protected houses, in a non-Jewish home and in extremely harsh conditions in Budapest. They were liberated in January 1944. Tomi began university but left Hungary in 1956, crossing on foot into Austria. The Jewish Refugees Committee supported him and he finished a mechanical engineering course in Glasgow. He went on to do research at Imperial College and worked for ICI.
Place of Birth
More & more as I go on in life, I want to give credit to my mother for some kind of inborn instinct or wisdom that probably women have more than men. She had a sense of what dangers lay ahead. Whereas the average Jewish person or family by this time acquired the mentality of ‘As long as we do as we’re told, we’re OK.’ ‘Don’t rattle the bush’, kind of thing. Don’t go outside your own sphere of ability & power. She must have been looking to see what is to come. And realised that the Yellow Star houses were just a 1st step towards rounding up people, putting them on trains to Auschwitz & other camps. By then there were 2 locations that had names. 1 was a railway station called Kistarcsa. The other was just referred to as the Téglagyár, the brick factory. Those two words entered my world. They achieved a kind of symbolism, the kind of penultimate danger. She was aware of that. And she though that staying in the Yellow Star house was going to be dangerous. And she was absolutely right, of course.
Mother finding safety in Columbus Street Camp