The ancient city of Budapest, with its spires, its fountains, the rippling Danube. Not long ago, dark times swallowed it up. Janos Cegledy lived there, a small boy. The police pushed him into tighter and narrower corners of the city with each passing year, and he got smaller still due to malnourishment.
Yet there’s a brightness to him, now 86, as he stands waiting outside Nerima Station in Tokyo. He’s still small, and surprisingly fast, and almost recalls a boy in a different time and place.
Eighty years ago, Janos and his family lived through the depths of World War II. They survived in a walled-off ghetto, packed in with the assimilated Jews of Budapest — doctors, lawyers, financiers, academics. Hungarian regent Miklos Horthy had defied the Nazis to this point. But now with one son mysteriously dead and another held captive in Germany, Horthy had little choice. The Holocaust, in all its ungodly brutality, was coming to Budapest.
The Nazis arrived and took Cegledy’s parents over the border into Austria, leaving Cegledy behind with his grandparents. His mother, to Lichtenworth. His father, to Mauthausen. Over 90,000 died there.
Eighty years later, Cegledy tells me about his past in a quiet community center in Tokyo. “I am uniquely lucky,” he says. “Incredibly lucky amongst the people I know.” His old-world accent is not one I hear much anymore. I remember a similar accent from the Holocaust survivors I met as a child in Hebrew school in Pennsylvania. It contains a delight, a charm, that intellectual ring of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Jews from Sigmund Freud to Gustav Mahler were at the forefront of a prosperous civilization. Cegledy is critical of his own English, but his word choice is immaculate. “I don’t know anyone quite as lucky as I was. Because my immediate family — we all survived.”
But Cegledy doesn’t get into the details of how his mother and father got out alive — not until he cracks a few good jokes. He can’t help himself when he hears that I went to a different synagogue in Tokyo than him for the Jewish High Holidays this year.
“There are two Jews stranded on a tropical island,” he says, leaning over the table. “Years pass, and when they’re finally rescued, the rescuers are surprised to see that there are three buildings on the island. The first Jew points at the first building and says, ‘Oh, this one is the synagogue I go to.’ The second Jew points at the second and says, ‘Oh, that one is the synagogue I go to.’ ‘What about that one?’ the rescuers ask, pointing to the third building. ‘Well,’ the two Jews say, ‘That’s the synagogue that neither of us go to!’ And this is true about Tokyo today.” It’s a delightful variant of the old “two Jews, three opinions” paradigm. It has me laughing for some time.
It took Cegledy many years to work up the courage to ask his mother about her days in the concentration camp. They were at Cegledy’s country house in Yamanaka, Yamanashi Prefecture, years after he had established himself in Japan as a leading classical pianist and professor of piano. “She told me,” Cegledy recalls, “‘Oh, my concentration camp wasn’t one of the really bad ones. There were hangings and beatings of course, but there was no gas chamber.’ So that describes Lichtenworth.” Instead, the primarily Hungarian women at the all-female Lichtenworth worked until they died, or simply starved.
Cegledy never managed to ask his father the same question. Mauthausen was a different story — the gas chambers there ran overtime. Cegledy remembers clearly the day his father came home from the camp, long after his mother, months after the war had ended, limping on two canes.
“When the Americans came in to liberate the camp, there were dead all over,” Cegledy tells me. “I don’t know whether they bulldozed them into mass graves or what. But they were surveying what to do with all the bodies, and they noticed, look, that one is still moving. That was my father.”
The man weighed 28 kilograms and was barely alive. And never — never — would he talk about what happened to him there.
Cegledy takes a moment to once again emphasize how lucky he was. Hungary came after Germany, after Poland, after Czechoslovakia — it was the last country the Nazis went to address the “Jewish question.” Today’s largest Jewish community in central Europe survives in Budapest for this simple reason.
A life on the keys
As for Cegledy and his family, they lived on in New Zealand, where they emigrated after the war. He managed to study piano in Germany on a scholarship. After that, Cegledy went to Japan, making a living off the back of his musical talent. His playing earned him a contract teaching position at the Toho College of Music. Later, he joined the faculty of Musashino Academia Musicae to teach advanced students. He became a part of the Tokyo Jewish community.
Cegledy married and settled down in Japan. He composed piano pieces for young children, Yiddish folk songs, sonatinas, choir pieces, piano duets. He went on concert tours to Australasia, the Middle East, and the United States; he gave concerts and lecture recitals at such prestigious institutions as Yale and the University of Washington, and at the Liszt Society Festival. He bought the country retreat in Yamanaka, a quiet place to relax and think, full of books to read.
As a child, Cegledy was far from the typical piano protege. He had just six months of piano lessons in Budapest before the war struck. After emigrating to New Zealand, his family had to wait two years for their belongings to arrive, as everything got held up in a seaside warehouse in Rotterdam. Cegledy remembers sitting on apple crates. By the time the piano arrived, the keys were so soaked with humidity that you could sit on them like a bench.
So they hauled a heater over to the piano to evaporate all the water out of it and, soon enough, Cegledy couldn’t stop playing. In fact, he did nothing but play.
“My older brother was the best student in the class, whereas I kept going down from Class B, to class C, to class D,” he says. “My parents got very worried about me —
I didn’t do anything, after all. So they took me to the most famous piano teacher in New Zealand.”
The young Cegledy played a sonata, followed by his own composition. His parents were sitting off to the side as they anxiously awaited the teacher’s verdict on whether or not their son had a future in piano. Finally, the teacher responded: “Oh, he’ll be all right. In spite of his teachers.”
“Lessons were always a struggle because I was a late starter,” Cegledy says. “Learning good habits early is important. And without good habits, it’s difficult to lose the bad ones.”
Cegledy’s career has consisted of piano performance, composition and teaching in equal doses, leaving an impact on the lives of thousands of students. He explains that throughout East Asia, the common teaching focus is rigorous training to develop technical skills. But his own focus has always been on teaching his students how to think about music.
“A level of efficiency and competence has become omnipresent in East Asia,” Cegledy says. “But teaching people how to think is just going to become more difficult, now that artificial intelligence is going to deliver us answers on whether or not they are correct, before we can even ask the question.”
When writing his Jewish and secular compositions, Cegledy doesn’t rely on inspiration. He follows the old adage of “compose first, get inspired later.” He constructs his pieces like an architect: deciding the dimensions, the materials and, from there, the design.
“There may be an idea, such as a harmonic or tonal idea. It’s a much more cerebral approach and perhaps not so many people compose like that now,” he says. His compositions and numerous editions of other composers have been published by Zen On, one of the leading music publishers in Japan.
He considers one of his finest achievements to be his work at the Leschetizky Society of Japan, an organization dedicated to classical piano teaching, performance and exchange, where Cegledy serves as president. At its peak in the late-1990s and early 2000s, the group grew to 80 members, open not only to professionals but anyone passionate about music — “and to this day a very nice group of people.”
Although a resident of Japan for over 50 years, Cegledy has none of the irritation or pent-up frustration that at times characterizes the long-term foreign resident. He doesn’t lose the sparkle in his gaze when the receptionist tells us about the strict time limit for using the community facility, and that no, there is no trash can. When I ask him about what he would like to see change about Japanese society, he responds with effusive praise.
“There is a certain civility and politeness here which you don’t find anywhere else,” he says. “It’s a part of the very language. In no other language is everyone addressed with an honorific. You basically talk to the company CEO and the lady who cleans the toilet in a similar way, and I think that is the most wonderful thing.”
Cegledy sees this civility as extending to all facets of life in Japan. A civility that is “reflected in everyday life.” The simplicity of tatami mat rooms, with a flower arrangement, a picture scroll and tatami where people can sit. “Japan is my place,” he told Courrier Japon.
‘There are always deniers’
Not that he sees Japan as purely sunshine and roses. He remarks that Japan’s homogeneity, particularly in its way of thinking, will pose challenges for it in the future. “Japan is not a country that easily develops individual thinking — it’s just not a part of the social structure. A society that moves together homogeneously is very strong, but not very flexible,” he says. “We need (more) people with critical thinking and the courage to go their own way.”
Now happily retired, Cegledy embraces his daily walks around Nerima, alongside attending synagogue, giving occasional piano performances and visiting the countryside. But with all that he has lived through, Cegledy inevitably connects the dots between the horrors of the past and those of today.
Since Oct. 7, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas massacred 1,200 Jews and took 240 hostage, the retaliatory Israeli offensive has killed over 17,700. “I can’t help sympathizing with the people caught in between. My heart goes out to (the Palestinians),” Cegledy says. “I don’t see how the killing doesn’t result in more (terrorists) rising up, so long as both Jews and Palestinians claim the Holy Land for themselves.”
But Cegledy also worries about the rise in Holocaust denial, which he has experienced throughout his life — even when his parents, actual concentration camp survivors, were still alive. “If you can deny the Holocaust, then you can deny the major reason that Israel came to exist in the first place. And you can’t win a debate with a denier.”
Cegledy feels safe in Japan, where he says ignorance about Jews rarely lapses into antisemitism. I tend to agree. There’s a surreal tranquility here, with just a few thousand Jewish residents, sundered from the unthinkable tragedy of Oct. 7 and the deep-rooted trauma and violence in Israel. Or even the U.S. and Europe, where synagogues burn and teachers hide from their own rioting students. Would it even matter if I wore a kippah in the street? A Star of David around my neck? Would anyone here even notice?
Cegledy feels closely connected to Tokyo’s diverse Jewish community that gladly mixes the ultra-orthodox with everyone from Japanese Jews to secular Israelis to half-Jewish Americans looking for a taste of home. Although not religiously observant, he is committed to the community, and the humanitarianism, intellectual traditions, and peace-oriented essence of Judaism and Judaic law.
“To me, the essence of Judaism is that we stick together,” he says. “I don’t mind having differences among us. I’m the type of Jew who always makes an effort — who tries to turn the tide around.”
The need to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, not just in honor of the past, but to protect lives in the future, is what motivates Cegledy to speak about such terrors, mainly at schools.
“When I give my talks, mainly at schools, I always start by saying, ‘Why am I here? Why am I talking to you? It’s because I experienced this firsthand. It’s because I was there. I survived.’ And talking to young people, I say, ‘When you become old like I am now, and somebody denies that it ever happened, you can say that, when you were young, you met a survivor who could describe it’ — and I think this is how the Holocaust should be taught. There are always deniers.”
Having grown up in relative peace, it should not be a heavy burden for me or anyone else in my generation to take on. While Judaism is ancient and complex, memory of the Holocaust is as scalding hot as a freshly forged sword. It is a new tool that can be wielded for the benefit of all humanity.
I light the first Hanukkah candle, pursue peace. I light the next, stand up for the persecuted. I light the next — never forget.
And so the memory lives on, just as Cegledy has — relentlessly, fearlessly, joyfully.
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