“Now look at the signatures below,” Attila said. “Can you read them?”
Above the signatures were three words printed in another language, then translated into Hungarian:
Königlich Schwedische Gesandtschaft
Svéd Királyi Követség
“It’s signed on behalf of the Swedish king,” Attila said solemnly.
I tried to make out one of the signatures on my grandfather’s pass. “R. Wallen—”
“Raoul Wallenberg!” Attila said, slapping at the Schutz-Passes in my hand. “Now look at these,” he said and pointed to the passes of our parents.
“How did Aunt Hermina get hold of our parents’ and grandparents’ passes?”
“You’ll find out soon, my curious little kitten.”
The signature on them was even more difficult to decipher. I could make out a P in the first name and a B in the second, but what a hurried scrawl it was.
“Paul Beck!” Attila shouted, angry, punching my shoulder from behind. “Look at it.” And when I did, I saw that he was right. I wondered why Paul Beck hadn’t been taught to write with better penmanship. He would not have gotten away with it in Mrs. Molnar’s class.
“The mystery man,” I said.
“Do you know what these are?” Attila said. “They’re official documents. It makes our parents and grandparents and me Swedish!”
“We’re not Swedish,” I said lamely.
“Of course not, my little monkey boot.” My brother jammed the passes at me and rummaged through the other bundles of papers and photographs. He got right down on his knees with his head inside the trunk.
So these were our confidence men, Raoul Wallenberg and Paul Beck, our family’s own secret men.
“Look,” Attila said. He handed me a photo of Hermina with our grandmother and maybe Agi, their sister, and four other women, all of them in their teens. “Look at this,” he said, a moment later. It was a grainy photo of a boy bound to a man back-to-back with heavy rope. They were standing on a bridge with some guards holding them by the neck. I couldn’t tell which bridge it was, but the parliament buildings in the background meant that it was the Danube and Budapest.
“What was going on?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” my brother said.
Another photo showed a long lineup of well-dressed people. The street looked familiar, Terez Boulevard, possibly. And there was another picture of a man seated at a card table, the table set among people on the sidewalk. The man was signing a document.
“Now look at this,” my brother said. He had moved on to the next exhibit. It was a belt with a bold silver buckle featuring a powerful eagle standing on a bicycle wheel with the spokes bent. A swastika. Three words I could not understand were inscribed above the bird: Gott mit Uns.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know; it’s German,” Attila said. He was still foraging. He handed me a postcard. On the front was a colorful picture of an army truck with a swastika painted on its side. It was not being driven but pulled by a horse with bleeding hooves. A soldier walked alongside the vehicle. He wore a torn and patched uniform with the Iron Cross dangling from his neck but flung to the back instead of the front. At the bottom of the photo was the caption L’ALLEMAGNE, 1945. I turned the postcard over. Someone had written on the back:
Edward et Hermina,
Vive les Alliés! Merci pour la délivrance!
—Mancus
Attila handed me a yellow piece of paper. “Look at all the languages the Crow Woman speaks.”
“Don’t call her that,” I said.
My brother glared at me.
“It’s not necessary,” I added.
I looked at the paper. I tried to sound out the word printed in bold at the head of the document: Arbeitsnachweis. Typed into the space left blank on the paper were names I recognized: “Dr. Edward and Hermina Izsak.” I stared intently at the last word before pronouncing it: “Izsak.”
“Edward is Uncle Ede,” my brother said, his voice muffled by the trunk. “And Izsak is the surname, Ede and Hermina’s.”
Before I knew it, I was holding a yellow cloth badge with a star on it, a six-pointed one, like the one on our temple back home and at the head of the gate of my grandfather’s cemetery. As I ran the cloth badge between my fingers, my brother said, “You can pin it on later as a crappy sheriff’s badge, and I’ll wear the buckle. I’ll be the outlaw, and you can try to arrest me, if you can catch me.”
Attila thrust another document at me. It was entitled Evacuation de Paris—Instructions pour la population.
An airplane roared over our heads. Then I heard rustling outside. “We have to go now,” I said.
“Not just yet.” My brother withdrew a packet of letters tied with a blue ribbon. “Look at these,” he said. The handwriting was familiar to me, the soft loops, the swooping lines, like embroidery. They were from our grandmother. I could even tell which pen she’d used, my grandfather Robert’s famous 1924 Waterman fountain pen, which he’d kept in the middle drawer of his mahogany desk and which we’d all gotten to try. The pen had outlasted my grandfather. I hoped somebody had brought it with us from Budapest. The letters were from our grandmother to Hermina.
“Sit down,” my brother told me. I pulled up a little footstool and sat. He took out the top letter and eyed it feverishly. “Listen,” he said. “Listen.”
1 Jokai Street
Budapest, Hungary
18 July 1945
My dear Hermi,
Our Paul did something that looms over these days like some kind of monument, the way tall Paul does over each of us. I am sorry that I have not been able to share the story with anyone, even you, Hermi, until now. We’re always worried about who might read the letter and what the consequences might be.
I don’t know how much information made it out to you, so you might or might not know that Paul was helping the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg issue false papers to Jews here in Budapest. They were agents of heaven, the two of them, and they were fearless. Jews and Gypsies were being rounded up and marched to train stations for deportation, sometimes to Auschwitz, where so many of us perished, Hermi. Our poor Lajos, as you know. Poor Agi. And Magda, and her boy Bandi—do you remember how he played piano—composed for the piano at 13 and 14? I can’t think of it.
So Mr. Wallenberg would set up a small folding table at the station and from a briefcase he’d brought with him pull out files and set them out neatly, like a notary, 60 or 70 or 75 newly minted Swedish passports each time, in alphabetical order, complete with photographs. Our Paul was his sidekick, a deputized Swedish diplomat himself, with his own false papers, like ours.
There was disorder at the station, as you can imagine. I say “disorder” rather than “chaos” because our captors managed it all with the butts of their rifles. Sometimes, though, there was a din on the platform, and Mr. Wallenberg would have trouble delaying the proceedings, so Paul would climb to the top of the train itself and blow a whistle. Imagine it. He’d blow his shrill whistle and, when he got people’s attention, captors and captives alike, he’d announce that there were 70 (or however many) Swedish nationals on board and that the Swedish officials (Paul and Mr. Wallenberg) demanded their release. The Germans would cooperate, since they were the ones who had proclaimed that they were deporting certain groups and certain groups only, but certainly not Swedes.
One day Simon, Lili, our little Attila, my Robert, and I were rounded up and marched away. That day, strangely, we saw no sign of Paul or Mr. Wallenberg. We were crammed into a windowless car with hundreds of others. It was this time last year, a hot July day. I felt especially sorry for my dear husband, who had never known anything but the most respectful treatment—and don’t you know all about that, you and your dear Ede? Yet he didn’t say a word. We were all in shock, I guess. Surprisingly, even our usually restless little grandson was subdued that day. I can’t imagine what he was thinking. Better not to know.
To h
ead us off, our Paul borrowed a Swedish embassy car, an Alfa Romeo, no less, from Mr. Wallenberg. He had heard from his sister that we had been taken. He drove a good distance out of Budapest, parked the car across the train tracks, got out, and waited for our train to approach and come to a stop.
Hermi, try to picture it: the train stopped, the Einsatzkommando got off, along with a few officers, and Paul told the commander that they had four Swedish nationals, plus a boy, on board and that he demanded their release. He presented our papers to the commander. The officer looked Paul over, heard his perfect German, without even a trace of a Hungarian accent, or, for that matter, Swedish one, and walked down the row of cars, sliding open one door after another. The German called out, “Beck! Robert, Klari, Simon, Lili, Attila!” No one on board knew if it was a good thing or bad to be a Beck at that moment. It was generally not a good thing to be singled out. Usually it was not to receive a reward that your name was being called.
Imagine our surprise when our door was thrown open and the sun fell on us. As our eyes adjusted, we could see Paul standing there, wearing his camel-hair cape and panama hat. His clothes were too warm for the weather, but with his cornflower eyes and the tipsy red curls beneath the brim of his hat, he looked every bit the Swede he was playing.
We wanted to shout “Hallelujah!” but of course couldn’t and didn’t. We couldn’t give any sign that we knew the man in the cape, and Lili right away signaled Attila to be quiet. The child looked scared. The four of us knew right away what role we were to play, and Attila might have sensed it too, I suppose.
The officer told me to get down. I understood aussteigen. The five of us worked our way to the door. Simon helped me down to the gravel. Then he helped Attila and Lili and his father. The officer studied our faces and compared them to the photographs on the papers Paul had given him. Lili’s picture had been placed strategically on top, since she is blond and blue-eyed. And then there was her blond boy with her. Finally, the commander told us we could go.
Well, you won’t believe it, Hermi. Paul asked the man if they had taken our valuables. The commander said yes. So Paul asked for them back. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing. The officer looked at Paul and then his eyes ranged over our faces. The man told his junior officer to go get our things. The man ran to fetch a burlap sack. Paul said to us in German, and in a voice as cool as the commander’s, that we should find our jewelry.
Robert looked in the sack, reached in, and pulled out a pocket watch. He read the inscription on the back and slipped the watch into his vest pocket. I combed through the bag and took out an emerald pin, which I held up to the light before fastening the brooch to my chest. It went with my rose jacket perfectly, though it was not mine. Simon shook his head when the sack was passed to him, and then the sack went to Lili. Simon took Attila from her arms.
They had taken her wedding ring, so she reached into the bag and tried on several rings before finding one that fit. When she did, she slipped it on and smiled.
Lili still has that ring, and she wears it as her wedding ring, though it is inscribed “Ivan. 13 Aprilis 1935.” I wonder if Ivan—the poor man—and his wife ever made it back.
Paul helped each of us into the Alfa Romeo, and he did so in the most patient and civil manner imaginable, considering we were holding up the train run by the Germans. The car was cream-colored. It matched Paul’s outfit. He drove us back to Budapest to a building annexed by the Swedes, and we lived out the remaining months of the war in an office. I have enclosed the Schutz-Passes so you can see what kind of operation it was.
My dear Hermi, even as I recall those days and relive them, it’s hard for me to believe that we were once so trapped and so near the end of things. Of life! I know your own personal chapter was even bigger, considerably darker. Yet here we are, all of us. We made it, Hermi, and you are still singing. And your Ede was allowed to continue his good work.
Paul doesn’t say much about you, I’m afraid, but he doesn’t say much about anything. While most people are trying to get on with their lives, he spends his time here with us, in Robert’s study with the lights switched off and the curtains drawn, most often, and he hardly stirs, even when we call him for a meal. He must be wondering about his hero and ours, Mr. Wallenberg, who was taken somewhere by the Russians in January, from Debrecen, and has not been seen since. But more than Paul’s hero, Mr. Wallenberg was his mentor, his inspiration. There was no going back to the simple practice of law after what Paul had accomplished under Mr. Wallenberg’s tutelage. I sometimes think that for someone who bore so much, it’s sad that Paul is not able now to bear the weight of his thoughts. Still, I will tell him I have reported to you about him and his circumstances.
His sister Rozsi is here with us too. Poor thing is waiting for Tibor, her fiancé, to return from the war. He was taken as well, but the Swedes and their helpers could not save him. With each passing day, we become less hopeful.
Paul did give me permission to write to you both, the aunt and uncle he most admires, I believe. I would say he might even have been pleased that I was willing to do so.
Hermi, when I think of you, it makes me happy to know that people are singing again.
I send fondest good wishes and love from all of us to you and to dear Ede.
with my love,
Klari
Attila looked up at me. He’d read the letter like a trained actor, gripped by it. His eyes were red and bursting.
“Do you remember?” I asked.
“Not a thing,” Attila said, his voice cracked now. “I was practically a baby. I wonder what happened to Aunt Hermina and Uncle Ede. Why was their chapter worse?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t tell Attila. I didn’t know what he would do.
Attila folded the letter methodically and tucked it back into its envelope. He added the Schutz-Passes, then slipped the envelope into his back pocket. He tied the blue ribbon around the rest of the little bundle, placed it all back in the trunk, closed the lid, and then, without saying a word, shot out of the shed like a bird. I had to run after him, rushing to close the door of the shed behind me, slipping, almost, on a patch of mud.
Inside, he was searching for our father. Our mother, grandmother, and Babette were in the large kitchen with its sunny windows.
When my brother joined us, our mother asked where we’d been. “Don’t disappear like that,” she said, “please, my darlings.” She took each of us in her arms, but Attila broke away.
Babette was standing by to make my brother and me an omelet. She and our mother were beaming out smiles like rapiers back and forth across the kitchen.
Attila was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. If cartoon speech balloons had been shooting out of his head, they’d have contained only exclamation points and question marks. “Where’s Dad?” he asked. “Where is he?”
“He’s out,” our grandmother said. “What is the matter with you? Why don’t you sit down?”
“I’d rather stand on my own legs,” he said. He actually snorted and stamped his foot. “What about Aunt Hermina?” he burst out. “Why did she have it worse than we did? How could you have it worse than being placed on a death train and then hiding out in an office building?”
My mother got to her feet. Her smile was gone. “How do you know that?”
Attila stamped his foot again. “What really did happen to Paul Beck?” he asked. “We were in Hungary for eleven years after Paul left. We were under Russian rule. The Russians came to our house. They kicked us out. They let us slip out of the country, though they didn’t care for our men, Raoul Wallenberg and Paul. What is it about this story that doesn’t add up? Help me, O Lord, to see the logic of your ways. Help me, O humans.”
“Your father will be back any minute,” our mother said. “He’s been out with Aunt Hermina, making some arrangements for our departure. He’s under a great deal of strain. Please don’t add to it by asking your questions. There will be time enough for everything.”
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br /> “What did Aunt Hermina mean about Dad’s cousin?” Attila said, snorting again as he did. He clenched a fist. “What could he have stopped? Where did Paul go? Where is he? Has anybody ever seen him again?”
“Why are you cross-examining us?” our mother said.
“Because I want to know.”
“Don’t you think we want to know more too?”
Babette approached my brother, not knowing what was being said but understanding the tone. She took my brother’s chin in her hand and smiled at him until he took a deep breath. Then she set to work making our eggs, aiming her breasts at the stove, where they could serve little purpose.
“We want to know as much as you do, dear,” Mamu said. “We’ve been looking for Paul for years. We don’t know what became of him, but we’re hoping. We’ve looked everywhere. He was strong-headed enough to go hunting for Raoul Wallenberg in Siberia, for all we know.”
“But he was with us in our house. Wasn’t Paul with us in our house? What happened? Where did he go? Why did he go?”
“Yes, Paul was in our house,” our grandmother said, “and his sister Rozsi too. Their own town house in Budapest had been destroyed. But please, let’s take this into the other room.”
We left Babette and moved down the hall to the solarium. My mother, grandmother, and I sat on a low flowered divan while my brother paced back and forth in front of us.
“I need to know everything that happened,” Attila said. “What happened to Paul and to Rozsi?”
“Why do you have to know this now?” asked our mother. “I’m trying my best to keep you and your brother from harm, but you won’t let me. You fight me and your father.”
My brother stopped, took our mother by the shoulders, and said, “You’re not protecting us from harm by keeping this from us.”
Our mother glanced at our grandmother, who looked down. Our mother got to her feet. “I’ll tell you if you sit down.”
The Afterlife of Stars Page 13
