Kaldi Art Collection

Kaldi was a well-known collector of Hungarian Art before the war. He is mentioned in a number of books describing the seizure of art in 1944 by Eichmann and the Hungarian Fascist authorities, as is his collection, which included three works by Munkacsy. We are aware of two of them. The first, Piano Lesson (in the greenhouse) was sold by his wife Kaldi Jenosne (we do not know yet her maiden name) in 1962 to the Munkacsy museum in a town in southeast Hungary. The second painting, Line of Trees, was sold at auction in Budapest in 2002 by individuals as yet unknown.

He had a very substantial rug and clock collection which according to the son of his attorney Ferenc Faludi, ended up on the famous "Gold Train" seized in Austria by US troops. The contents being hopelessly resorted to make the determination of provenance impossible, they were sold at auction in NYC during 1948, the proceeds being used to pay for the resettlement of Jewish refugees.

Birth Record of Jozsef Kohn (Jeno Kaldi)

Here is the birth record for Jeno Kaldi, who was born Jozsef Kohn to Mor Kohn and Juli Deutsch in Janoshaza, Vas County, Hungary on August 18, 1872.

The Beginning of My Search: 1989

Twenty years ago, I asked my wife's aunt, Bella Winkler Gorog, to tell me about her family. Even at the age of 90, she had an excellent memory and proceeded to give list dozens of her aunts, uncles and cousins who were killed in the Shoah. Among them was a cousin named Jenő Kaldi, whom she remembered had been the manager of the Benz Co. in Budapest, Hungary and that his name was formerly Kohn. I entered "Kaldi" and "Kaldy" into the Jewish Genealogy Family Finder on the JewishGen.org Web site and figured I would get to this corner of the family later on. I inquired of a researcher in Hungary and he confirmed that Kaldi was an employee of the Benz Co. but knew nothing further. I contact the Mercedes Benz archivist, and he too confirmed that Kaldy was a former employee but knew nothing further.

A few years later, I received an email from a boy in Australia inquiring after Jenő Kaldi. He reported that his grandfather had been an inmate at Mauthausen in November 1944 when he was wounded by a stray bullet fired by a German guard. The next day the Germans came looking for the wounded man to remove him from work detail and send him to the hospital, a virtual death sentence. At that moment, an older man stood up and said, "I'm him!" and was marched off to the hospital, never to be seen again. According to the boy, the man's name was Jenő Kaldi, and after the war the younger man, before moving to Australia, adopted the last name of the man who had saved him, and had named his son John Kaldi, now a famous sedimentary geologist living in Australia.

Two decades later, thanks to the invention of the World Wide Web, I have learned a lot more.

I would like to hear from anyone who has an interest in Jeno Kaldi. Please contact me by responding below.

Adam Brown