“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 Street Synagogue, with its stately 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 were especially absorbing because now I was able not only to imagine prewar Judaism but to actually see it, for the community that had remained had proceeded as if no time had passed. Did I want to see those ancient tenement buildings around echoing courtyards from which spectral tormentors drove their sobbing victims? There they were, still as shabby and rotting as they had been then, children’s voices echoing through the courtyard like trapped spirits. Could I visualize the archetypal Jew, his head bent in humility, looking at the floor, all his movements restrained so as to draw the least amount of attention to himself? There he was, the man who stepped out of the kosher restaurant and put his kippah in his pocket, checking to see if he was being watched. 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? No, I never knew 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 could that threat still apply to me? 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 where I had grown up. The question was, was this true anywhere else? Had Europe changed at all, or was it still the same place my grandmother had described?
5
REISE
JOURNEY
The next stop on my journey was Sweden, the only place I had ever heard my grandmother speak of solely with fondness. She had spent most of her time there with her friend Edith, who had been with her in the camps. I had never been permitted to meet her nor was she allowed in our home, due to her status as a nonbeliever. My grandmother had kept those visits a secret from everyone else except for me; she had entrusted me with the story of their friendship, and I had learned that Edith was the other woman in that photo of my grandmother being carried out of Bergen-Belsen on a stretcher lifted by handsome, smiling, fair-haired men, squinting shyly and uncertainly into the camera, for it was she who had insisted that my grandmother was still alive, even as she lay intertwined among the gray corpses, her breathing so slow as to be barely noticeable. Edith had accompanied my grandmother during her rescue by the British Red Cross; they 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. Now 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.
Later my grandmother would explain to me that there were only two justifiable alternatives after the Holocaust: to renounce God completely, because the Shoah itself served as proof of either his nonexistence or his irrelevance, or to embrace the idea that God was a ball of fury and set out to appease him by sacrificing oneself on the altar of ritual worship. To her, Edith’s choice was as grounded and rational as that of the survivors who had founded our community; that the two choices had so diverged from each other was a matter of arbitrary happenstance.
* * *
• • •
In Sweden, there would be a chance to fill in some of the gaps in my grandmother’s history. I arrived there by flying to Copenhagen and crossing the bridge to Malmö by train, knowing that the city had been the first port of entry for the two women, as demonstrated by the stamps on my grandmother’s travel papers. I took a bus to the outskirts in search of the local Riksarkivet division, and once I had an audience with the woman working at the archive, I opened the little shoebox I had been using to store the relevant photos and documents and they spilled out onto the counter in a haphazard pile. The archivist lifted a photo gingerly from the assemblage; there was my grandmother standing next to Edith in front of a grand house, with tall pine trees filling the background. “This looks like the lake region,” she mused. “It’s a collection of spa resorts in the center of the country.”
My grandmother, she explained then, had been brought to Sweden as part of Operation Vita Bussarna (white buses), 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—look at this photo here! 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.”
“But why her? Why would they take her?”
“She had typhus, correct? At that time, Sweden had a special program to rehabilitate typhus victims, and because they were especially equipped to support sufferers, and the Allies were afraid of an epidemic, most of them were quarantined in the lake region.”
But records of my grandmother were not in the archive. The clerk took another look at the copy of the Swedish alien’s passport I had pointed to. Perhaps here, she said, pointing to the stamp from the Swedish Aliens Commission. The way the archives program in Sweden was organized, she explained, each city w
as home to a different archive. Nothing was digitized. The records of the Aliens Commission were located in the Riksarkivet in Stockholm, she said. I would have to take a train all the way across the country.
It took six hours; the train was old and made loud clacking sounds on the tracks and seemed to traverse painfully slowly through an unchanging landscape, and although the weather was moderate for summer, the beating sun warmed the cars past comfortable temperatures and the windows propped open did nothing to help. I arrived in the Swedish capital sweaty and exhausted from the trip.
In Stockholm I found a cheap hostel to sleep in, as the hotels were all extremely expensive, in comparison to not just Hungary but also New York, and I did not want to exceed my budget for the trip only one week in. I purchased a single room with a shared bathroom; it was so tiny it had room only for a ninety-centimeter bed and a small table that folded out from the wall, but the window overlooked Gamla Stan, the old town of Stockholm, and I could hear church bells ringing in the distance.
After I showered, I went out into the bright midsummer evening to find a bar in which to have a drink and something small to eat before going to sleep, and around the corner from the hostel, in a large square facing a canal, I met Erik. I was looking for a café I had located on a map, trying to orient myself according to its grid. Perhaps I looked quite obviously like a tired tourist in need of help, and he offered it in passing on his way home from work. I suppose I was my usual American self, in that I shared too much information and requested too much of it from him, but this time it did not seem to offend or unnerve him like I had become accustomed to expect from Europeans. First he offered to walk with me part of the way, then all the way, and by the time we had arrived at my destination, he turned to me and said shyly, “You know, I know a better café where we could have dinner. I would love to invite you for a meal, if you don’t mind some company.”
I was surprised but very flattered. Erik was very Swedish—tall and slender with fine, angular bone structure and very pale eyes. I found him handsome but also foreign, and I felt toward him the way, for example, I had felt upon having my first taste of lobster in Paris—attracted but also nervous and uncertain about what to expect.
I could have spared myself the anxiety. In Erik I found a deeply kind, gentle, and intelligent man, one who had wrested himself from the poorer rural provinces at a young age; at twenty-six he was already a junior associate at a prestigious law firm and he blushed self-consciously when he informed me that he had recently been awarded a Wallenberg scholarship to study international law at Stanford. He was to move there in August and was very excited, but also nervous. He didn’t know any Americans, although he liked what he saw in movies, and, he told me, I confirmed all of his fantasies. I was friendly and open, he said, unlike other Swedish people he knew; he liked my directness. It seemed we both liked the foreign qualities in each other that would be taken for granted in our homelands.
After having drunk enough of the rosé he had ordered, I confessed to finding him handsome, and this seemed to surprise him so much he actually accused me of joking at his expense.
We walked back toward my hostel in the evening, which was still in a kind of early twilight phase as the midnight sun had peaked only ten days earlier, and upon seeing where I was staying Erik hesitated, then said, “This may seem wildly inappropriate, but I can’t help but mention that I have a lovely spacious apartment not far from here that is probably way more comfortable, and definitely more safe, than this arrangement.”
I laughed. “Are you asking me to go home with you?”
“No! Well, yes. But that’s not what I meant!” And he was so charming in his stumbling that I couldn’t help but kiss him.
It was not love, but something else, something sweet and light and above all palliative after the psychological tension that had been building since the beginning of this trip. I told him the real reason I was in Sweden, having feared, at first, that the seriousness of purpose and the mention of the Holocaust would turn him off. But he was sympathetic and curious and wanted to help, telling me where to go first thing on Monday morning and even drawing a route for me on the map.
On Monday, Erik went to work and I took a bus to the address he had written down for me, which was the main archive center. At the information desk I was informed that the division 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 the ticket that had been wordlessly issued to me and disappeared for twenty minutes.
He came back with a slim white box, which he opened on the table in front of me.
“Sorry, but this was all I could find,” he said haltingly, in heavily accented English, and removed from the box a thick folder containing sheaves of documents about my grandmother, all in Swedish. I was speechless with joy at this unexpected bounty. At best, I had hoped for a one-page record of her temporary presence in the country. I reached over to give the archivist 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, and he continued to walk backward until he was out of the room.
* * *
• • •
Later, Erik and I spread copies of the documents out on his kitchen table and he helped me with the initial translation. There were pages of testimony about her experiences during the war, which had been collected by international police. The translation was wooden, but I could almost hear my grandmother 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. Certainly she had not spoken that language, the language of those people. No, it must have been Daytshmerish, that dressed-up version of Yiddish that we had made fun of as children, what Rezzori had termed yiddling in his book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, what I myself had made use of in Hungary to communicate with Zoltán.
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 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. 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.
It was so unreal, all of it. Tangible, on paper, incontrovertible evidence, and yet unreal. I couldn’t build the mental bridge between everything I had experienced as a child raised in my grandmother’s home and this chilling war story. For try as I might, I could not see the connection between this tale and the story of our community. She looked so modern in the photos, so independent. She had been so industrious in Sweden, after her recovery. Having been sent with other refugees to the south to pick fruit for a paltry wage, she had succeeded in quickly separating herself from the others by landing a post in Gothenburg as a couture seamstress—sömmerska was the word in Swedish. I thought of summer when I read it, which seemed fitting, for my memories of her are bound up among roses and sunshine and birdseed.
There was a long list of places and dates in her file; they were penciled on yellowing paper an
d difficult to decipher, but they comprised a detailed itinerary of her time in Sweden. I asked Erik 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. Erik wondered if the refugees had been shipped according to how much room there was for them, and where.
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 the next day, without so much as a discussion, Erik called in sick to work and rented a shiny gray Volvo and we drove to the lake region in central Sweden, where spas and resorts traditionally used by Sweden’s upper class for restoration had been converted into temporary refugee camps after the war. These were the places my grandmother would have recovered in. Afterward, she worked in a small town, then in a big city, in the house of a local designer. There she had found the friends who had tried to help her emigrate.
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. We drove past lake after lake after lake, each one shimmering a cold, clear blue under a comparatively pale sky. When we arrived at Loka Brunn, a famous old spa town now restored to its former architectural glory, the small settlement was deathly quiet. The doors to the cluster of houses there were all open, but the buildings were silent and still. Together they served as a kind of museum, designed to explain the town’s role during World Wars I and II, but although it was officially open for visitors, there were neither any of these nor any employees in all of the rooms we peered into.
At the next address, we were able to walk around the enormous old castle in which the refugees had been housed, the grand house in that photo of my grandmother and Edith, with its elegant veranda, the wall of which Edith had perched on in the photo, her hand wrapped around the support beam and the rest of her body leaning out as if getting ready to swing off and jump to the lawn below. My grandmother had stood there with her back straight, her head tucked slightly to the side and her smile an obligatory pose for the camera—it made her look much older than I knew she had been, older in fact than anyone I knew, so old that I thought such a smile would look misplaced on any human being, for it was entirely otherworldly in its aching sadness.
Exodus, Revisited Page 19
