by Shani Krebs
Although I was used to being around slain animals, having been taught to wring the neck of a chicken at age five, I was squeamish at the sight of blood. Whenever Janos brought home game he had shot, I couldn’t help feeling pangs of remorse for the dead creatures.
The one positive result of my first hunting mission, however, which I wasn’t aware of at the time, was that I overcame my fear of darkness and my nightmares ended. There were several occasions after this when Janos took me hunting, and each time my confidence grew, making these trips more interesting and adventurous for me. Janos even allowed me to fire his shotgun. The first time, I almost dislocated my shoulder. There were times when we would sleep out in the bush and Janos would skin and disembowel a rabbit and cook it over a fire for dinner. I felt at one with nature. Being outdoors produced in me a certain tranquillity and sense of inner peace. I remember these outings with fondness.
After we had been living in Westonaria for about three years, Janos got fed up with working on the mines. His restlessness was compounded by constantly having to work night shift. In addition, there had recently been a series of accidents in which miners had been trapped underground, with many dying of suffocation before rescue workers could reach them.
It was time for change, so once again we moved. This time we went to the fast-developing industrial town of Vanderbijlpark, where my mother and my biological father Fritz had first lived when they came to South Africa. The main reason for moving here, besides employment opportunities, was the presence of the Hungarian community. My half-sister Marika and her husband Bela lived in Vanderbijlpark, and they now had a new baby daughter, Zsuzsika, which meant that I was an uncle. Most of the Hungarians in the area either knew each other personally or had connected at one time or another, and everyone figured in the gossip that was so prevalent within that small European community.
There was also an intricate but reliable network that helped people to track down relatives or friends who, like my own parents, had fled the Soviet crackdown in 1956, in the course of which entire families had been split up. The need to reunite lost family members was still very much alive among Hungarian exiles.
Our family took up residence in a modern apartment block called Kronendaal Heights, where we occupied a two-bedroomed flat. This meant I had to share a room with Joan, not a happy situation for me. Our flat was on the ground floor directly adjacent to the entrance, where there was a suite of doctors’ rooms. The smell of sterile liquid always seemed to hang in the passageway, which triggered in me a phobia of doctors and hospitals. In front of the building was a swimming pool encircled by a well-manicured, lush green lawn, a variety of tropical trees, ferns and bushes, and a steel fence.
The change from living in virtual isolation on the hill to the hustle and bustle of a large town was invigorating. Joan and I were enrolled in Oliver Lodge Primary School, which was right behind our building. Next door was a church. By now I was nine or ten years of age and in Standard 3.
There were many nationalities in Vanderbijlpark – Greek, Portuguese, Scots, Italian and English-speaking South Africans – and this made life so much more interesting at school. The kids were generally friendlier, and everyone seemed to know one another. Some of the kids in my class were already physically well developed; some even had facial hair.
Our teachers had a liberal attitude, as the majority of foreigners had difficulty keeping up with the rest of the class. The lax discipline gave the school a certain ambience that also encouraged a degree of unruliness.
One year, we went on a school tour to Rhodesia where we visited the Victoria Falls. A group of us were standing really close to the edge, looking down, when one of my friends slipped. I managed to grab his collar and prevent him from going over the edge. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but the memory of how lucky he was has always stuck with me.
Another time, while at the Wankie Game Reserve, I was in the toilet when I was confronted by three older kids. Although they were in my standard at school, they were all a good three years older than me. They cornered me and one of them took out his dick and tried to force himself on me. It was a terrifying experience, feeling all these hands trying to subdue me. I wrestled and wriggled, punched and kicked my way free. I never ever spoke about the incident to anyone.
In Vanderbijlpark social events were organised regularly on the weekend. There were private parties or discos, which were held at one of the many church halls, or people would meet up at the local movie house to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Then there was the renowned Mikado bioscope, also known as ‘the bughouse’, where two feature films were run and re-run the entire day. The bughouse attracted some fairly unsavoury customers – me being one of them – who would make a day of it.
The Mikado was owned by a Hungarian woman who was married to a Portuguese man. Her name was Manya and she was a good friend of my mother. She used to let me in for free. From a very young age I loved movies. When the lights dimmed and that big screen sputtered into life, I was propelled into a world of fantasy, and my own reality ceased to exist. My favourite films were Westerns, but somehow I always found myself identifying more with the Indian warriors who, though lacking the firepower of the cowboys, were far superior when it came to surviving in the bush. I loved especially the ‘spaghetti Westerns’ starring Clint Eastwood – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, For a Few Dollars More and A Fistful of Dollars. I had a comprehensive personal collection of film posters, and these became my pride and joy.
In the diversity of the communities and nationalities in our town, we came to associate certain groups with certain things. For example, the Portuguese controlled all the fresh fruit and vegetable shops, the Greeks monopolised the corner café and fish and chip outlets, the Germans and Swiss exercised exclusive rights over the specialised engineering industries, the Lebanese had second-hand car dealerships, and the Afrikaners farmed the land and occupied most of the civil service positions.
The Italians, renowned for their culinary skills, introduced their cuisine through a fast-growing chain of classy restaurants, while our esteemed Jewish counterparts, noted for being astute businessmen but wrongly perceived as extortionist moneylenders, occupied the more distinguished positions in the medical profession, and also dominated the wholesale and clothing industries.
Hungarians were commonly known as being jacks of all trades and masters of none. While some of the men were qualified tradesmen, many were involved in less honourable professions and in shady dealings. These extended from prostitution, gambling and pornography to illegal trading in uncut diamonds. In a country where it was rumoured that diamonds the size of pebbles washed up on the shore and gold nuggets could be found in the street, the desire for success by whatever means possible could be easily justified. Besides providing for one’s immediate family and establishing one’s roots in a foreign country, there was the added moral obligation of financially assisting relatives back home in Budapest.
Although Hungarians played hard, partying was restricted to one night during the week and to the weekends.
One Sunday morning, when I was ten years old, my mother told Joan and me to put on our best clothes. She had a surprise for us. At first I thought she was taking us to church for some reason, although the only time G-d was mentioned in our home was when someone was cursing. It turned out that Janos was going to take us to meet someone – and this someone turned out to be our real father, Fritz, who was living right there in Vanderbijlpark. I can’t say I remember what I was feeling – probably nothing. My biological father had abandoned me at a very young age; Janos, although he was abusive and regularly beat the crap out of me, was more of a father presence in my life than anybody else. I suppose you could say I was nervous. All I knew about my dad was that, according to my mother, whenever I was angry with someone, I would say that that person was ‘no better than my bastard pig father’. Not a great legacy so far.
Janos drove us in his car. We pulled up next to a three-storey apartment b
uilding above a café at an intersection on a main road. After telling us where to go, Janos drove off, leaving Joan and I standing on the pavement. For a moment we stood there in silence. Then Joan took my hand and said, ‘Let’s go meet our father.’
A half-drunk Hungarian man opened the door to us. We stepped into a flat filled with smoke. There were at least six other men present, sitting around a table playing cards. The lounge and dining room area was one room and quite spacious. My eyes darted around as I wondered which one of these men was my father. If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t have chosen any of them. It didn’t matter anyway as he was as much of a stranger to me as all of them.
The man who had let us in called out, ‘Hey, Fritz! Here are your kids.’
My father was slumped in one of the chairs in the lounge. It seemed to be a great effort for him to get up and greet us. I’m not sure if this was because he was drunk or whether it was out of a lack of interest. His breath reeked of alcohol and cigarettes. His attention went straight to Joan. He hugged and kissed her, saying how he couldn’t believe how big she had grown. Then he looked at me, his eyes moving from my head to my toes. He stretched out his hand and, reluctantly, I shook it. I’m not sure why he didn’t hug me. Joan sat on his knee while I sat down on the couch opposite them. He didn’t look anything like me. He was balding, and what hair he had was combed back slickly with Brylcreem. And he was not a big man; for some reason I had thought he would be.
Fritz asked us about our mother, school and other stuff like that. Then he said, and I’m still not sure if he was joking or not, that Joan was his daughter but that I was not his son. He seemed to find this very funny. Apparently he was convinced that my mother had had an affair with Janos when they were still together and that I was the result. As the morning progressed, he did little to impress me. He was quick to tell us that he was getting remarried to an Afrikaner woman named Anna-Marie who had five of her own children, the youngest of whom was a boy my age, Christo. He said he had just got a job at the Iscor steelworks and would be staying in Vanderbijlpark and that we would be seeing a lot more of him. I don’t think it was me that he wanted to see, but rather my sister, and I couldn’t wait to get away from there.
When Janos came to fetch us, he asked how the visit had gone. I asked him if it was true that he was my father. He denied this, so the question was, who really was my father? At home my mother tried to convince me that Fritz was in fact my dad but I wasn’t convinced. I didn’t care. Fathers, in my opinion, were people the world could do without.
After that first time we visited Fritz fairly often; I became good friends with Christo, his stepson. We went to boxing classes together and generally got up to mischief. Fritz changed his attitude towards me after my mother talked to him, but neither of us ever expressed much recognition of our blood tie. I never could accept him as my father. I felt nothing for him. Besides Christo, Anna-Marie’s other kids were already grown up. She and Fritz enjoyed drinking, as it turned out, and Fritz would bash her up every now and again. This would lead to him getting a hiding from one of her sons. How dysfunctional could you get?
Just as I was beginning Standard 5, my mother dumped Janos. At first it was strange not having him around, but I can’t say I missed him.
Mom got a job at Iscor, where she ran the canteen, which meant that my sister and I had the run of the house while she was at work. That was disastrous. It seems we had inherited our parents’ fighting spirit and we fought like cat and dog. My mother did her best to bring up two strong-willed individuals on her own, but being a single parent wasn’t easy. We were difficult to control, and she constantly threatened to send us to boarding school if we didn’t get along. Stubborn as we were, we paid no heed to her warnings.
In early December, in the summer of 1971, one day my mother left for work much earlier than normal and returned unusually late that evening. Besides the regular chitchat at dinner, she offered no explanation. Later in the evening, after taking our respective baths and just before bedtime, we were summoned to her bedroom, where she seated us one on either side of her. I had never before seen my mom so pensive and tormented. Her subdued posture made it obvious that we were in for something unpleasant. She took our hands, and, in a solemn and melancholy tone, she began to explain that, since her separation from Janos, it had become increasingly difficult for her to make ends meet, and that now she could no longer support us. In addition, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, worrying about us and our future.
She then revealed what she had been doing that day: she had been to Johannesburg to confirm and finalise our acceptance and admission into Arcadia, a Jewish orphanage. Then she told us that we would be leaving first thing in the morning. Joan began to cry, tearfully protesting that we were not orphans and that she couldn’t send us away. We belonged with our mother.
My mother’s eyes, in turn, filled with tears and I saw that her lips were quivering. There followed an awkward moment of silence as she did her best to compose herself. She wasn’t finished. She said there was something else very important that we needed to know. We listened attentively as she told us how, when she was a young girl, in 1944, her parents, Margit Blanca Hecht and Shandor Sinkowitz, had been taken away by the Nazis in the dead of night. She had had three uncles, her father’s brothers, who had all been killed before the war. She had witnessed her sisters, brothers, uncle and aunts and their children being taken away, loaded into cattle cars and sealed freight trains, and sent to the gas chambers where they, along with millions of other Jews, were exterminated. She also spoke of a stepsister who had been shot and killed for no reason other than that she was a Jew. My mother took refuge in the ghetto and managed to survive among the community there. She got some work in a shoe factory. Then the SS came and rounded up all the Jews in the factory. They lined them up and took them away to be shot. One of the soldiers, however, took a liking to her and pulled her out of the line. Eventually the war ended and, miraculously, my mother had survived its hell.
By this time, all three of us were in tears. My mom said that she hoped one day we would understand her reluctance to share the tragedy that had befallen her family, and she tried, too, to describe the apprehension she’d felt about teaching us the way of our forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But now that we were old enough, she’d decided, it was our right by birth to know the truth and seeing that we were about to embark on a new life, where we would be among our own people, we should be proud of our heritage, and free to learn the traditions of our religion which, G-d willing, we would one day hand down to our children and they to theirs.
Tears continued to fall from my mom’s eyes as she hugged us tightly and begged us to forgive her for failing in her duties as a mother. She promised that she would be in constant contact with us and would visit regularly. She also stressed that Joan and I should always love and protect each other, no matter what, and that we should strive to be good and righteous. She told us never to forget that she loved us more than anything in this world, and that it broke her heart to let us go. To this day her words that night and the memory of that moment resonate in my head, and whenever I think of it the tears still come.
Chapter 2
Arcadia
The period of time between my mother’s heart-rending disclosures and our arrival at Arcadia remains something of a blur for me, but I do remember the desolate moment at the orphanage when Joan and I tearfully wished her farewell. At the same time we were greeted and welcomed by the compassionate smiles of Doc and Ma Lichtigfeld. The trauma of being separated from my mother, the imposing buildings that were to be our new home, and the sheer size and grandeur of the property all rendered me speechless.
I felt so many emotions: abandoned, lost, confused and anxious about what sort of cruel and deprived existence awaited us beyond the huge double wooden doors that graced the entrance to Arcadia. Joan and I were ushered to our respective departments. She was taken to the junior girls’ section; I went to the new boys’ departmen
t, which was formerly the hospital. There I was received by the principal, Sydney Klevansky, aka Vicky, whose cheerful disposition immediately dismissed all notions of malevolence that, until then, I’d associated with boarding schools.
After the grand tour, Vicky showed me to my dormitory. I understood that the other occupants – David and Sammy Lasker, Charles Goldman and Glen Osher – were roughly my age. The December school holidays had already begun and some of the Arcadia children were on vacation with their parents, while the majority had either gone out for the day or were preparing to do so. Vicky introduced me to Charles, who was on his way out to the bioscope, and instructed him to help me settle in. Running late, Charles apologetically excused himself but casually pointed in the direction of his wardrobe, saying that he was in a hurry, but, if I felt like it, there was a pile of comics in his bottom drawer. I was welcome to help myself.
With all the excitement and upheaval of the past 14 hours, I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. I think I was asleep even before my head hit the pillow. I couldn’t have slept for more than an hour and a half, though, before I woke up. After freshening up, I set about to unpack my things. When my mom was arranging our admission to the Arc, as everyone called it, she had been told that we wouldn’t need to bring anything with us besides the clothes on our backs, as they would take care of all our needs. Luckily, Joan and I had brought some clothing and toiletries with us, as it later became apparent that the only clothes supplied by the Arc were donated and second-hand items, most of them unwearable.
When I was finished unpacking I decided to check out Charles’ comic books. I sat on the floor in front of the wardrobe, pulled open the bottom drawer and systematically began removing all the comics. I discovered that he had an extensive collection of some of my favourites, and I was drawn irresistibly into a sanctuary of make-believe.
