Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  During that trip to Hungary, I had cracked for the first time in my grandfather’s hometown, Újfehértó, twenty-five minutes from the town where my grandmother was born. The bureaucrat who was being paid to print birth certificates and death certificates and other such documents for people in precisely my position had made us come back three days in a row, and each time she had a different excuse. Here we were on the third day, with our official stamps procured, all fees paid, and the front door to the town hall locked for an hour already with Angelika and I still in it, and still there was this tut-tutting, the opening and shutting of doors with ancient ledgers peering temptingly behind them, the meandering phone conversations in Hungarian that I couldn’t understand, and still those certificates weren’t printed.

  My translator indicated that I might have to wait and receive the rest in the mail. We’d had no trouble procuring the birth and marriage records of my grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother in Levelek. Indeed, the registrar had produced them with a joyous smile. Here in Újfehértó, I felt the tears come and quickly left the room. My eyes began to swim as the cleaner painstakingly removed the padlock from the double doors so that I could exit the building, and outside the scene blurred into brown and gray as I collapsed onto a bench.

  Zoltán came and sat next to me, inquiring what was wrong. “I don’t understand,” I heaved, wishing I could stop sobbing. “Why does she have to be that way?”

  The translator explained briefly, “Some people are just like that. Bureaucrats. It’s unfortunate but it happens all the time. Not everyone can be a lovely person.”

  I’m so thrilled that we were able to do this, Zoltán had said to me yesterday evening after dropping me off at the college. Hungarians can help. There is no anti-Semitism here. Poor Zoltán. I was sure there wasn’t a shred of anti-Semitism in his heart, nor was there any in the lovely group of people he had assembled to assist me in my research, but I know that he would have felt terrible to realize that on the rest of my trip, I would learn something very different from what he wanted me to.

  Perhaps my bitterness set in for good once I arrived back in Budapest, when I met, for the first time, a Jew who was afraid. Or maybe it was earlier—maybe it happened when I saw what my life could have been like had tensions not culminated in that awful “final solution.” Would I have had to live being subject to humiliation by a local Christian population with the power to intimidate me? Surely I wouldn’t have access to the rights I have today; I wouldn’t have been able to pursue social equality, let alone my education.

  In Budapest I met my friend Ella, who took me to the Jewish quarter. Here I saw a living Jewish community, a kosher butcher, a Belzer chasid from Israel who had moved back here with his children and was able to converse with me in Yiddish, women in sheitels escorting young boys with messy side curls, Hebrew writing next to Hungarian, and synagogues and ritual baths and all the familiar paraphernalia. Cholent, a staple dish in Jewish communities worldwide, was listed on most restaurant menus.

  After we toured the Orthodox synagogue together, Ella and I decided to drop by the Judaica shop next door. A young man was working there, sitting behind a desk piled with books. He had curly brown hair and a nice familiar face, very Jewish-looking. So I asked. I did not see Ella’s face behind me go white. Peter—that was his name—drew inward and away from me, his shoulders scrunching up in defense.

  “That’s a very private issue,” he said.

  Oh. Where I came from, it wasn’t private at all. A Jew, traveling, meets another Jew, and says, “Shalom.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ella apologized in a whisper. “She’s from America.”

  “Ah.” Peter relaxed a bit.

  “What—you can’t ask someone if they’re Jewish in Hungary?”

  Ella nodded. “It’s a very offensive question here, almost never asked for a positive reason. You have to be very careful in this anti-Semitic environment.”

  “It’s that bad?” I thought back to the handful of days I had spent in the east of Hungary, where I had seen quite a few cities and villages and towns, and met so many people, and only the dreadful bureaucrat stood out to me as someone who might have been, just maybe, a tad anti-Semitic. But she could also have been a generally rude and unhelpful person, no? Or an overworked and underpaid civil servant? Or a frustrated matron resentful of an entitled American who swooped into her town with chauffeur, translator, and esteemed university president in tow?

  “I heard about the Jobbik party, and Gÿongyösi’s idea for a list of Jews as national security risks, but that was laughed out of parliament, right?” I said.

  Ella’s forehead was creased. “He’s got eight percent now, but with next year’s elections, he’ll get twenty percent at least.”

  “What happened? Is everyone suddenly going crazy? Is anti-Semitism becoming acceptable again?”

  “The problem is, in Hungary, it never left,” Ella said darkly.

  There was still flooding then, so Ella couldn’t show me the sculpted shoes that lined the banks of the Danube. Instead, she led me to the larger Dohány Utcai synagogue, with its gracious courtyard, now a memorial, where the Jews of Budapest had been made to await deportation. In the last days of the war, she informed me—when the Nazis had retreated in anticipation of the Russian advance—the Hungarians had taken it upon themselves to drag the remaining Jews down to the river and shoot them into it. To save ammunition they had tied groups of five or six together and shot just one; the rest of the group would fall into the river and be drowned instead.

  They had been made to take off their shoes first; big and small, old and new, they had lined the banks afterward. The sculptors had re-created the scene by placing replicas along both sides of the Danube. For weeks, Ella told me, the Danube had been red with blood. “They weren’t under any orders,” she said. “They just wanted to get rid of the Jews before the world came to its senses again, and the opportunity was lost.”

  My observations of Jewish life in Budapest absorbed me completely. For the first time, I was not only able to imagine prewar Judaism but also able to see it. The community proceeded as if no time had passed. Did I want to see those ancient tenement buildings around echoing courtyards from which spectral Nazis drove their sobbing victims? Could I visualize the archetypal Jew, his head bent in humility, looking at the floor, all of his movements restrained in such a way as to draw the least amount of attention to himself? What did I know of this life, where one’s identity must be kept secret, where one must always look over a shoulder in search of a menacing pursuer? I watched a man step out of a kosher pizza shop and take off his yarmulke, stuffing it into his pocket before he walked down the street. No, I never knew of such privations. I had yearned to take off my Hasidic costume so that I could blend in and be normal, but I never experienced a desire to do so out of fear. It was fear that had kept us so separate in Europe, and that continued to do so in a place like Budapest, but how long would that threat work in America? Even I had eventually realized that those stories of hate and persecution, designed to teach me to keep my distance from gentiles, no longer applied in the New World, in the melting pot of Brooklyn.

  I headed for Sweden after that, because it was the only place I had ever heard my grandmother speak of fondly. She had spent most of her time there with her friend Edith, who had been with her in the camps. Edith had accompanied my grandmother’s exit from Bergen-Belsen by walking alongside the stretcher on which she was placed by the British Red Cross; she had obtained transport on the same ship to Sweden, where my grandmother was sent to recuperate from typhus in health resorts that had been temporarily refashioned into refugee camps. But I had only ever known Edith as the woman who lived in Chicago, the one who occasionally flew in to New York to see my grandmother, but whom I could never meet. She was not allowed in our home, for she was secular.

  In Sweden, as I slowly filled in the gaps in my grandmother�
��s history, I realized that back then, it must not have mattered that Edith was on the verge of renouncing her faith while my grandmother was about to dive in headfirst. It seemed clear to me that faith must have been irrelevant in a world turned upside down by war; rather, it was something to grapple with when the ground steadied itself underneath one’s feet.

  I had a photograph of my grandmother standing next to Edith in front of a grand house, with tall pine trees filling the background. I showed this photograph to the woman working at the archive in Malmö.

  Operation White Buses, it had been called, the Swedish relief effort that rescued hundreds of Holocaust victims directly from the camps. “But that wouldn’t have been her,” I said. “She was rescued by the Red Cross. Was there another way she could have arrived in Sweden?”

  “They painted red crosses on those white buses,” she explained. “That’s how they were able to get past the military.”

  The clerk took another look at the copy of the Swedish alien’s passport I had brought with me. Perhaps here, she said, pointing to the stamp from the Statten Uttlands Kommission, or the Swedish Aliens Commission. The way the archives program in Sweden was organized, each city was home to a different archive. Nothing was digitized. The records of the Aliens Commission were located in the Riksarkivet in Stockholm.

  I took a train to Stockholm that afternoon, where I was informed that the archive I was looking for was closeted away in a special room that only one expert had access to, and he needed to be called in. I waited impatiently for an hour until he arrived. A lanky, middle-aged man, gray-haired, bearded, with skin the ghastly white color of chalk, he took my ticket wordlessly and disappeared for twenty minutes.

  He came back with a slim white box, which he opened on the table in front of me.

  “Sorry, this was all I could find,” he said haltingly.

  In the box was a thick folder containing sheaves of documents about my grandmother, all in Swedish. I was speechless with joy. At best, I had expected a one-page record of her temporary presence in the country.

  I gave the man a spontaneous hug, which almost made him jump out of his skin.

  “You don’t know how much this means to me,” I said. He backed away, his eyes widened in alarm.

  “You’re welcome,” he said once he was at a safe distance.

  Another employee helped me with the initial translation. There were pages of testimony about her experiences during the war, which had been collected by international police. It was delivered woodenly, but, although that could have been the translator’s work, it seemed somehow to be my grandmother’s voice. I could almost hear her saying those words out loud. The testimony had been taken in German, the documents said. Had she indeed spoken a rudimentary German, or was that Yiddish they were referring to? I had never heard her speak a word of German.

  She had been one of two hundred Hungarian women, chosen for their ability to perform skilled labor, culled from Auschwitz and taken to various munitions factories throughout Germany, where they were forced to fashion weapons for the Nazi army. They had to have known that they were aiding the war effort, I assumed. Later, I would learn from online research that a memorial had been erected for those two hundred women in the small town in Germany where they had worked, at the site of the former Phillips-Valvo factory where the munitions had been produced. The memorial was erected out of sensitivity to those women who had been forced into the particular cruelty of manufacturing the agents of their own destruction. Much like feeding chicken to a chicken, I thought. I tried to imagine my grandmother producing guns, bombs, or grenades. My grandmother, who could whip a meringue so fine that it hovered over the bowl. Had her fingers shaped cold metal? Had they been blackened with powder? Try as I might, I couldn’t envision it.

  There was also a list of places and dates in her file; they were penciled on yellowing paper and difficult to decipher, but they turned out to be a detailed itinerary of her time in Sweden. I asked the clerk to show me where the places were on a map. His finger swiped haphazardly from region to region, north, south, east, west, back and forth, as he scrolled down the list in chronological order.

  “How could she have moved around this much?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “They went where there was room for them.”

  I knew I didn’t have time to make it to all the places on the list. Some of them were a day’s ride away. But I rented a car and headed to the lake region in Central Sweden, where spas and resorts traditionally used by Sweden’s upper class for a restorative cure had been converted into temporary refugee camps after the war. These were the places she would have recovered in. Afterward, she worked as a farmhand and then as a seamstress, first in a small-town factory, then in a big city.

  Sweden’s lake region consisted of deserted roads of pebble and dirt and an endless horizon of tall, spindly pines with raw trunks the color of cocoa powder. Loka Brunn, a famous old spa town now restored to its former glory, was deathly quiet. There was a small museum there, designed to explain the town’s role during World Wars I and II, but although it was open, there were no visitors or employees in any of the hushed rooms I peered into. This was the region that supplied Loka, the sparkling mineral water available in every café and market in Sweden, but where the production process took place I could not fathom.

  I took a dip in the clear, still lake at the edge of town, even though it was barely sixty degrees out, and the sun hovered somewhere behind the towering pines. Two small gray birds skimmed the water for fish. I watched their legs blur like those of roadrunners on the surface of the water and wished I knew what kind of birds they were. Perhaps they had been here sixty-odd years ago, and she had smiled at the sound of their high-pitched trills. I was glad to be here now, alone in the quiet, looking at a scene my grandmother had gazed at all those years ago. It was nice to know that she had been somewhere beautiful, that it hadn’t all been ugliness. It was some consolation, I supposed, that she had ended up here, instead of going back to Hungary and getting stuck behind the iron curtain.

  Back in Stockholm, I ordered porridge in Café Giffi in Södermalm and noticed all the familiar pastries of my childhood behind the glass display case. My grandmother had made those, but who had taught her how? They were certainly not traditional Hungarian confections, and couldn’t have been passed down from her mother, as she’d claimed. The round lacy cookies I remembered were called Tosca flan here. They were sandwiched together with pastry cream, not dipped in chocolate as she had done.

  “Are you Jewish?” the white-haired Chinese man who owned the café asked as he brought me my porridge. I had this panicked thought that someone had informed him I might be coming, which I immediately dismissed as ridiculous.

  “Yes,” I answered in a cautious tone.

  “Are you American?” he asked, with even more enthusiasm this time.

  “Yes,” I said again.

  “You look just like Woody Allen!”

  I look like a cantankerous old man—great.

  “You should meet Leon,” he urged. “My best customer. Comes in every day. Also Jewish.”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking that Jews must be a rare thing around here if he thinks we need to stick together.

  Leon was eighty-six, exactly the same age as my grandmother. He had come to Sweden as a refugee from Berlin when he was eight years old, before the war. He was very hard of hearing and incredibly lecherous. He’d never been married, he said, but he now regretted it. He didn’t like feminists.

  “Do you remember the survivors,” I asked, trying to steer the conversation away from his obsolete political views. “When they came here after the war?”

  “They kept to themselves, mostly because they scared everyone else. They had these swollen bellies, you know.”

  “Because of the shock of sudden nutrition?”

  “I suppose. They ate a lot. They were hungry all the time. The
y were all trying to compulsively put on weight.”

  The photograph of my grandmother that I had found in her file had shocked me. I could barely recognize her, with her swollen face, her hollow, unseeing expression.

  “Did they seem sad?” I asked.

  “Sad? No!” he said with great certainty. “If anything, they seemed very strong.”

  I left the café after that, wanting that sentence to define my conversation with him. Of course she had seemed strong. It wasn’t the depressives who survived the horrors of war; it was the stoic and valiant who made it through. Of course she wouldn’t have spent much time lamenting her losses. She threw herself into skilled work, made plans for the future. She wanted to replace the family she had lost by marrying and having many children. I suppose it made sense that she would choose for a husband someone familiar, someone who spoke her native languages and came from her region, when she had lost everything else familiar in her life.

  I had pieced together from her file that the Hungarian government wouldn’t give her an identity document after the war. She had appealed over and over to the embassy in Stockholm. It was only after Swedish diplomatic interference that she finally received a piece of paper stating she had been born in Hungary but was not a citizen. This had proved enough to apply for an alien’s passport, which had then allowed her application for U.S. citizenship to finally be approved, after three tries.

  It provoked me deeply, seeing evidence of her travails in this arena. It was unimaginable that someone who had just survived hell should have to be consumed for three years with the maddening process of begging for a home in any country that would take her. She had even considered emigrating to Cuba under the condition that she would only perform agricultural labor. It was written into an agreement she signed with the Cuban government. She had stated, over and over, her intention to emigrate to Palestine! She, who had ultimately married into a fervently anti-Zionist community.