The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  The date stamped was February 2, 1951, notarized in München, Germany, and drafted from the Displaced Persons’ (DP) Camp in Hersbruck, Germany, where my father had lived for a short time after fleeing Hungary for Czechoslovakia. The document confirmed his birthplace as Budapest, his citizenship as Hungarian—“Ungarisch.”

  “Where did this come from?” I asked my mother.

  “From the filing cabinet,” she said, motioning vaguely to the drawer.

  “Yes, but before the filing cabinet. Did you know you had this?”

  “I knew, but I guess I forgot. Anyway, it’s yours now. You can use it.”

  “Dad knows about this document?”

  “Of course.”

  Downstairs, I thanked my father.

  “It won’t make a difference,” he said, his voice still gripped by fear. “Nothing will help you. You won’t get this citizenship. You think the communists are just going to hand over citizenship to you? To me?”

  “Dad, Hungary isn’t communist anymore.”

  “Oh, you are so naive.”

  Along with my father’s application, which I also completed on his behalf, I submitted my own to the Hungarian Embassy. In essence, I proceeded in the absence of verification of my paternal grandfather’s identity, one of the key elements to the entire application. My father, born out of wedlock, had never known his father. Which was to say he’d never met his father. I, however, had grown up with my father, but still I didn’t know him.

  25

  MACKENZIE SUMMONED ME TO his office in late July 2002. I had barely taken a seat when he broke the news.

  “This firm has no incentive to take your case to trial. We will have to settle out of court. Sorry.”

  His words were like an unexpected amputation.

  “What if I don’t want to settle?”

  “Peter…”

  “What if I say I don’t agree to settle? It is my decision, is it not?”

  “Peter, this firm has already spent more than 15,000 dollars on disbursements alone. We could spend another fifteen before we even walk into court. I would be in a tough position if you insisted on going to trial, if we could settle, since I would then have to go to my partners and explain the details of what this suit is costing them. This is a business decision, Peter. This is about money.”

  “This has never been about money. Not to me…”

  “Besides, defense has shifted its focus away from our claims of impropriety on the part of Alfonzo and to the effectiveness and validity of his therapy. Like the shit in the bottle: that could be seen as a justifiable form of treatment. Considering you allowed the doctor to make you sniffit.”

  “Allowed him?”

  “Within the confines of Alfonzo’s paradigm, this form of treatment did have its own internal logic.”

  “Alfonzo’s ‘internal logic’ was barbaric and homophobic, and I had been under the impression that you agreed with that.”

  Defense would be flying in experts from around the world, Mackenzie explained. Even if I were awarded a substantial settlement, which he said was “unlikely,” with what his firm could spend in expert witnesses alone, “you could still go bankrupt.” I would be in my late forties or fifties before the matter was even concluded, he said. “Do you really want to spend the next ten or fifteen years of your life fighting this? At the end of the day, I still have to tell my partners why I think we should take this case to trial, and there just doesn’t seem to be a reason why we should.”

  “What about all the reasons why I filed the suit in the first place? To stop people like Alfonzo from inflicting this type of harm on anyone else in the future. To create legal precedent. Bring public awareness to this kind of abuse of trust. People have been subjected to this type of abuse for decades. Isn’t that enough of a reason? This doesn’t bother you? You could just walk away from this?”

  “Trial has never brought closure to anyone,” he replied, ignoring my previous remark. “Rarely, if ever, do plaintiffs walk away from the experience of litigation with a feeling of restitution. More often than not, they leave more damaged than before. Settling is in everyone’s best interest.”

  Regarding the possibility of my case creating legal precedent, Mackenzie explained that the Canadian Medical Protective Association—the mutual defense organization responsible for providing indemnification to all licensed doctors in the country—sent out details of all malpractice suits to all their members, including causes of action and information about settlements, excluding amounts.

  “Their bulletins would dissuade physicians from practicing similar types of therapy in the future,” Mackenzie assured me.

  He’d explained the different types of damages before, but once again, he told me that the Canadian courts had put a ceiling on the amount that could be awarded in these types of cases.

  “I suggest we make an offer of 150,000 dollars, all-inclusive, with a deadline of today at noon, at which point our offer would be irrevocably withdrawn.”

  “And you can assure me that this organization—”

  “The Canadian Medical Protective Association.”

  “That they’ll report on my case, that it’ll be written up and sent to all practicing psychiatrists, explaining the essence of my case?”

  “Bulletins are mailed out automatically.”

  “Okay. Fine. Make the offer.”

  We waited a month to hear back from the defense; when we did, they rejected our offer and countered with an offer of $40,000, which we countered with $75,000, all-inclusive. For three months we heard nothing. Mackenzie agreed to call and ask for their response. A week later, he called to tell me that defense had rejected our counter. Three months worth of faxes and phone calls followed. Defense made inquiries about how much we’d spent so far on disbursements. Mackenzie set deadlines, which the defense promptly missed.

  In late November 2002, I met with Mackenzie to discuss defense’s latest offer of $45,000. We decided to counter one last time; either way I had resigned myself to settling, if only because I could not stand one more day of uncertainty.

  By early December, I instructed Mackenzie to accept defense’s latest offer of $60,000, all-inclusive, on condition that we receive the money within the week.

  I was at my office job on December 13, 2002, my thirty-eighth birthday, when Mackenzie called to ask if I could be in his office within an hour. The money had arrived.

  The two of us were sitting in his boardroom, one hour later.

  “You probably realize that we’ve never drawn up a contingency agreement,” Mackenzie began—a statement, delivered in his typical monotone voice, that seemed to signal more alarm bells. He went on to say that the rules and regulations of the Law Society of British Columbia—the regulatory body of all licensed lawyers in the province—prohibited him from charging a contingency if we had not signed such an agreement. In these kinds of circumstances, he said, charging me billable hours “would be appropriate,” even though those hours “totaled more than 30,000 dollars.” He paused, as if waiting for my comment. I said nothing. “However,” he continued, “in the spirit of what we had agreed to at the start of this suit, we have deducted from that amount enough billable hours in order to bring the total owing to us down to what you would have been charged had we drawn up a contingency agreement at thirty percent.”

  “I have a question. By accepting this money, I’m not agreeing to not write about my experiences, right?”

  “There is no such agreement,” Mackenzie said. “But if you’re asking me, I would recommend that you not write about Alfonzo or anything to do with the therapy.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I can’t tell you what to do, but my suggestion is to take the money and move on with your life. If you wrote about the doctor, you’d be setting yourself up for a lawsuit.”

  “Even if I changed everyone’s name?”

  “You’d have to change most of the details in order for all the people involved not to be identified. Even so, my ad
vice is to put this whole experience behind you and to just move on.”

  “What about him writing about me? He still has more than a hundred taped hours of me saying hateful things about gays.”

  “There’s nothing we can do about that. He’s free to use it, if he changes your name.”

  “So he can write anything he wants about me, but I can’t write about him.”

  “My advice to you is that you don’t. I can’t tell you what to do.”

  “In terms of the Medical Protective—”

  “The Canadian Medical Protective Association.”

  “They’ll definitely document my case.”

  “You’ll need to contact the association yourself. What they choose to do is outside my—”

  “Choose? I thought you said they document all malpractice suits in their bulletins.”

  “I have no knowledge about which cases they choose to document. There is nothing I can do about that.”

  “So how do I find out if—”

  “You’ll have to just call them yourself.”

  I half expected him to say something more. He didn’t.

  I signed the final letter of agreement sitting on the table between us, and Mackenzie handed me a check. After costs and disbursements totaling $15,000, Mackenzie’s fee of $13,500 and various taxes, my amount was for $30,793.08.

  I stood, shook Mackenzie’s hand one last time, thanked him, smiled, and left, without fanfare or catharsis. As if I’d been pushed back into invisibility.

  In the ensuing months, after numerous phone calls, I discovered that the only way for me to view the bulletins from the Canadian Medical Protective Association was through a library in Montreal. Because of copyright laws, the 2003 “Information Letters” could not be faxed to me; however, the librarian was kind enough to read through the only three bulletins published since the beginning of 2003.

  No details of my suit were documented at all.

  For four years I had also been reading through the College of Physicians and Surgeons’ quarterly bulletins, distributed to every registered medical practitioner in the province, which contained decisions of complaints brought before the ethical standards and conduct review committee, the same committee that reviewed my complaint in 1999.

  The details of my complaint to the College of Physicians and Surgeons also were never included in the quarterly bulletins.

  |||||||||||

  When it was announced at my job in 2003 that all government employees in British Columbia would be offered early retirements— or, in my case, three-week cash payouts for every year of employment—I accepted the offer, calculated at roughly $9,000, and started to plan my trip to Europe, with or without my Hungarian citizenship.

  I emailed Ingrid, a maternal cousin twelve years my senior, in Linz, Austria. Ingrid and I had met only once before, during her visit to Canada in 1978, and though we’d had little in common at the time, for some reason I’d always felt a connection with her. In my email I told her I was planning a trip to Europe and wanted to spend time with her. She was thrilled. So was I. To connect with my relatives in Europe, the life my parents had escaped, had always been a dream, one of the many mocked by Alfonzo.

  |||||||||||

  In preparation for Christmas 2003, I was standing at my mother’s side rolling out dough for ten poppy seed strudels when she started talking about the camps. Many of her stories, by this time, were familiar, but each time she told one they always seemed new.

  “Before the war we were segregated, ostracized, Germans living in a non-German country, foreigners in our own home, today’s Serbia. After the war, we were sent to camps. State-sanctioned ethnic cleansing. Those of us who survived, or escaped, were declared ‘stateless.’ Persona non grata. When I finally made it into Austria, after my own escape, I had to have a friend swear before a judge that I really existed. In the eyes of the government I did not even exist.”

  “Did you tell people you were German?”

  “Not when I arrived in England. I was Austrian.”

  “So you hid your identity.”

  “Not hid, survived. I did what I needed to do in order to survive. People assumed I was Yugoslavian because I was born in Yugoslavia. I just didn’t tell them I was German. Even today, seventy years later, you tell someone you’re German and they think of one thing and one thing only.”

  “Can you help, please?” I said, mildly panicked, motioning with my floured hands at the holey dough, which had not been my desired outcome. “You’re better at this…”

  “Patience…patience. When you’ve lived as long as I have, you develop patience for things like this, that’s all…”

  “Whatever it is, your hands are more tempered than mine…”

  She put her apron back on and began kneading the dough. “Where was I with my story?”

  “You had left Yugoslavia…”

  “I escaped into Romania, then I went to Austria, and on to England.”

  “Where did you live in Romania?”

  “I worked for a Jewish family. They knew I’d escaped a concentration camp so they gave me food and a bed. Every day potato soup and a slice of bread, but it kept me alive.”

  “How long were you there? What did you do?”

  “Three months. Nothing. I lived incognito. No one saw me during the day. I was scared of being caught and deported back to the camp.”

  “How many of our relatives were in camps?”

  “My brother escaped from a children’s camp. My grandmother died in a death camp when she was ninety. My cousin, Ingrid’s mother, she was taken to Dnipropetrovsk in the Ukraine, and worked for two years in a cement factory. My great aunt was moved from one camp to another. She watched her grandmother die, and then her mother. Finally she decided that she was not going to be next. She escaped when she was sixty-five.”

  My mother had told me the story of her own escape many times before, including in the story she’d written for me when I was nineteen.

  By early 1947, she had been jailed in the barren pantry of the OZNA headquarters for several months. The approaching weekend meant that soon her tormentor, the camp commandant, would return for his weekly interrogation. Still, she managed to fall into a deep and restful sleep. In the middle of the night she awoke, not frightened or startled, but peacefully, sweetly.

  And as she woke, she heard her mother, who had died years earlier, saying, You must go now.

  Mice scampered across her feet as she sat up; and then the church bells began to chime—four chimes for the full hour, and then two. With no thought of capture, she stood, unfastened the panel in the door, and stepped through the opening and into the hallway, by the espalier trellis. She didn’t question the possibility of escape or whether she might succeed. Her mother had told her it was time to go, and so she did.

  She lay on her belly and crawled soldier-like across the smooth tile floor. Only after she’d passed the kitchen, where she heard the guards breathing not five feet away, did she stand. Baskets of chrysanthemums hung from the wrought-iron bars of the trellis: she used them to steady herself, climbed the height of the building, one rung at a time, grabbed hold of the drainpipes, and heaved herself up onto the gravel roof. Down below, a courier left the building’s front door, and then the windows were thrown open wide. Lying on her stomach, with the brightness of the harvest moon reflected off her white blouse, she was in full view for all to see.

  But her mother’s voice was still with her, encouraging her fainting spirit: You must go now.

  When the commotion below subsided, she slithered up the crest of the roof, where the east and north joined at an angle. A couple of times she disturbed dried leaves and bits of granite, but no one seemed to notice as it scattered to the ground. Soon she reached the top of the roof, where she could see the guard at the south end of the house.

  She just watched him for several minutes. He had a pattern of walking from the door of the house to the corner of the street, his gun slung over his shoulder, and shouti
ng across the street to a second guard, who was standing watch at another store. They exchanged a few words in Serbian, then the second guard would go south as the first walked west. When he reached the door again, he would turn and then take at least three to four minutes before returning to the headquarters. This was the time she had to use—when one guard was down the side street and the other guard’s back was turned.

  The moment one guard was down the street and the other’s back was turned, she lowered herself down the water pipe, then landed on the metal-lined awning with a thump. For a moment she thought that someone would come looking to see what had caused the noise. Instead, the guards made their usual joke as they reached their corners. She knew she had to move; time was slipping away. She threw her shoes down onto the boulevard, preparing to jump, but just as she did, a crowd approached from a nearby hotel. They were singing in Hungarian, seemingly drunk, and walked under the awning and over the sandals. They didn’t look up.

  After they had passed and the guards had had their little chat, she jumped. Pain seared through her ankle and shot up her leg, but she grabbed her sandals and began to walk.

  A block later, she approached the small hotel as its front doors swung open. Before anyone left, she had turned and walked in another direction.

  She passed the house of the local police. The lights inside the office were on, and two policemen were lying in the open windows, looking out onto the street. It was a warm night. They were smoking. Her shoes were still hidden in her blouse, since she’d had no time to put them on, and her ankle was swelling fast, but she walked straight, with conviction and confidence, as though she knew precisely where she was going.

  Two blocks later, an old man she had known rode toward her on a bicycle. He had been a policeman during the German occupation, but had spied on the Germans. They were only a little more than a block away from the police headquarters. One shout from him and she would have been caught and returned to jail. He rode his bike right past her, never once looking back.