As they were being escorted, Bela noticed a family friend and distant relative, Imre Rez, walking toward them on the same side of the street. Bela didn't want to give a sign of recognition for fear that Imre would be taken into custody as well for knowing them, but crossed his hands at the wrist, as if they were tied together, and showed this gesture to Imre bacsi, hoping he would realize what was happening to them and know the best way to help.
They arrived at the Russian command headquarters and were shoved toward benches in a waiting area. Tibor avoided looking at Bela. What could he say to his younger brother now? They were exhausted, starving, and in Russian custody. And it was because of his own stubbornness that they had ended up in this godforsaken place.
The Russian guard was a husky man with an enormous round head, framed by tufts of dark brown hair. His eyes were like chestnuts sunken into a mass of skin, puffed up from the copious amounts of lard that he obviously consumed on a regular basis. With his olive skin and slightly Asiatic appearance, he looked like a Kyrgiz tribesman. The Russian military uniform was stretched at the buttons and, as he sat looking at his Soviet army-issue rifle, he held his fat finger on the trigger.
Bela, who couldn't get his eyes off the guard since they sat down, turned to Tibor and whispered, "This is what we're going to do: I will jump on him and then he will shoot us and we'll be done with this whole thing."
Tibor started to tell his brother what a bad idea that was, when the Russian bellowed at them.
"Zatknis! Eb tvow mat!" ("Shut up, motherfucker!")
Flies buzzed around the room. After what seemed like an interminable wait, the guard signalled it was time for their hearing. It was around noon.
They went into a hearing room, with a portrait of Stalin hanging a bit crookedly on the wall. A longish, hastily made table stood at one side of the room, where three persons could sit and face the accused. Two chairs were occupied, one on the right by a civilian translator, and one on the left by a uniformed soldier. The guard motioned the accused to face the table and remain standing. This was their courthouse.
As a Russian major came in, both occupants of the chairs stood up and waited for the major to take the chair in the centre, then they all sat down. He was a muscular man, slightly above average height, with a meticulous appearance. The seams of his pant legs were perfectly ironed.
The major's first order was to have the prisoners searched again, and the contents of their pockets emptied onto the table.
As Bela surrendered his military-school identification card, the little ray of hope he still had about getting out of there alive evaporated.
The hearing began with the major asking what the charges were against the two accused. It became obvious when the civilian started to speak and translate the words of the major that he was the translator sent by their family friend and relative, Imre Rez.
The two militias who brought in the accused began the accusations. The one who had been responsible for grinding Bela's heel into a bloody mess spoke first. Not more than twenty years old, he seemed confident and arrogant for his age.
"Will it please this hearing, we have found two war criminals. The one on the right," he pointed to Bela, "was influential in the deportation of the Jews from Karpatalja."
The other militia, anxious to begin speaking as well, interrupted him.
"And taunted them and beat them while they were in the ghetto."
The two were eager to expand on the details of the charges, interrupting each other frequently.
"The one on the left is a rich businessman and landowner in Nagyszollos. They live in the biggest and most modern house in the middle of vineyards. Hundreds of people who worked for them were abused and kept in line by their estate foreman."
"They are the sons of a famous general who was the military commander of Karpatalja. Through them, we can find out where he is."
During this time, the major, with the identification card in hand, had a private conversation with the translator - they were examining the card in great detail. During this conversation, the major's relaxed and controlled facial expression slowly changed, becoming more and more agitated and finally turning beet-red from anger.
Without warning, his body language changed. Throwing the ID down on the table, he stood up he began yelling in a harsh, uncontrolled voice. Tibor and Bela couldn't make out much of what he was yelling except for the fact that his diatribe was dangerously angry, and obviously directed at them. The seemingly interminable outburst continued for a number of minutes.
At the end, the major shouted orders at the guards and left the room. As they were being led away by the guards, Tibor and Bela were convinced he had ordered the guards to take them out to be shot. Instead, the guards led them out of the room, down the stairs, and pushed them out onto the street.
Tibor and Bela stood stunned, looking at each other. They couldn't believe what had just taken place. In a daze, they picked up their papers and identification from the ground and stood in the shade across from the building from where they had just been ejected, not quite knowing where to go or what to do.
The translator came out of the building and motioned for them to follow him.
"My name is Peter. I was sent by your relative, Imre Rez, to translate at this hearing. I knew your father well." He kept his voice low so that only they could hear what he was about to say.
"What happened in there?" Tibor asked.
"You are two very lucky young men. The major comes from an educated background. His father was an officer in the Russian army during the First World War. When he saw your military-school identification, he quickly realized you couldn't have possibly been involved with the deportation of the Jews - you were fifteen years old. He became furious with your accusers because, as it turned out, his father was shoved under the frozen Volga alive, murdered on the basis of false testimony. The major ordered your accusers to be locked up. Let's keep moving, your relative has asked to me to take you to his house and I think it would be wise to get you off the streets as soon as possible. Who knows what kind of repercussions could come out of this hearing."
Bela simply couldn't cope with the incredible twists and turns of the events swirling around them. The heat, thirst, hunger, and exhaustion finally took their toll; there was a buzzing sound in his head.
He woke up the next morning between clean sheets, after sleeping some sixteen hours at the home of their relative. They were offered eggs, bread, sliced meats, and tea for breakfast - a seemingly sumptuous meal after living on scraps for days. Never had a meal tasted so wonderful. Imre bacsi hired a detective to escort them to Budapest. On the train, the detective behaved as if they were his prisoners. The detective explained he had to do this so that another group of militias wouldn't arrest them.
"It is a very dangerous time we are living in," he told them.
chapter 25 | summer 1945
WHEN TIBOR AND BELA arrived in Budapest in summer of 1945, after the harrowing experience in Satoraljaujhely, they went to their father's apartment, but it was crammed full of the in-laws of their older brother. Istvan and his wife occupied the study, his mother and father-in-law occupied the master bedroom, his brother-in-law and wife slept in the dining room on a chaise lounge, his sister-in-law and her husband were in the main parlour. Another brother-in-law slept on the floor of the kitchen. The entire family fled from Nagyszollos and had nowhere else to go. "What was I supposed to do?" queried Istvan. "Tell my wife's family to go somewhere else?"
The only spot remaining for Tibor and Bela was just inside the front entranceway - in the hallway on the floor. They slept there on a few coats - there was no more bedding left.
The Budapest they remembered had been completely devastated since the last time they were there. The siege of the city went on for three months, with advancing Russian forces pounding from the east, while the retreating German and Hungarian forces were inflicting terrible damage from the west. All the bridges connecting Buda to Pest were blown to bits by
the retreating armies in the spring of 1945 in order to slow down, if just for a little while, the relentless push by the Russians westward. The once-proud Chain Bridge looked pitiable, its massive chain links, like broken arms, plunging vertically into the river.
Hardly a street survived without bombed-out buildings and piles of rubble. Homeless families created makeshift shelters out of tin sheets, loose stones, and bricks - whatever they could find. Fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats were a rarity. Water and electricity were only available during certain hours of the week, if at all.
Hungarians had always been wary of greeting the Russians as "liberators" - there was a widespread feeling among the population that one oppressor was being replaced by another. In a short while, their worst fears were confirmed. The residents of the capital were subjected to a brutal campaign of rape and looting by the army of liberation. Anyone stopped on the streets without proper papers could be incarcerated without reason, or worse, put on a train and sent to work camps in the gulags of Siberia.
After a few days, Bela decided he had enough of the crowded living conditions. Everyone was starting to get on his nerves, including Tibor. Bela was determined to make a go of it alone.
Bela remembered the address of Imre Laszlo, his friend from military school. He found Laszlo and together they decided to look for ways of eking out an existence. There was a tremendous need for movers in the city - tens of thousands of people had to get their possessions out of bombed-out buildings and move them to some other location. No horses or carts were left in the city. Everything with wheels seemed to have vanished with the military or fleeing population. Bela and Laszlo were lucky - somehow they found a cart, hitched themselves to it, and started an impromptu moving business. The idea went well for a few weeks until an elderly woman asked them to transport her furniture to the other side of the city. The apartment she was moving into was on the sixth floor of a building that had no elevator. When Bela and Laszlo finished transporting the piano up six floors, they looked at each other and realized they were both thinking the same thing: enough of this!
A distant relative, Sara neni, offered Bela a place to live. She didn't have any children herself and always considered Bela the son she never had. Through a contact, she secured a job for Bela spray-painting timepieces at a clock factory.
Bela loathed this job as well, but he didn't want to quit right away because he felt he might hurt Sara neni, who was constantly helping him. Inflation in postwar Hungary was out of control. He realized that this job was a complete waste of time. By the time Bela got his pay at the end of the week, he had enough money to purchase his weekly transit pass, and nothing more. And he had to run to the train station for fear that the cost of the pass would go even higher in the twenty minutes it took him to dash there. He didn't know how he was going to pay Sara neni for room and board while making nothing wages.
On a brilliant August Saturday morning, Bela dropped by his father's apartment. Istvan and his wife's family were all seated around the dining room table having lunch. They invited Bela to join them. Bela's eyes grew wider as he saw the cornucopia of delicacies on the table: smoked ham, cheese, real butter, plump fresh tomatoes, and pickled beets. Bela tried not to let his eyes give away how amazed he was, but he hadn't seen ham in a half year, let alone seen such a sumptuous feast in the ruins of Budapest. After eating a delicious meal, he pulled his brother aside and asked him how he was providing like this for his family.
Istvan was working at a shipping company, along with his friend and former business partner, Bela Friedmann - they were loading and unloading cargo containers. Lately they were packing containers of salt. Istvan explained they had obtained a few cartons of salt that "fell by the wayside."
"We made sure we took the packages in such a way that no one would ever miss them," Istvan explained. "The only way to make real money in postwar Hungary is on the black market. The small towns and villages in the countryside have meat, vegetables, milk, cheese, and butter. It's a simple barter system, really. The newspapers are full of condemnations of the black market - but what is the present regime thinking? Until they get inflation under control, and people can earn a decent wage and support their families, the black market will flourish. Go try your luck - but be careful." With that, Istvan gave Bela several packets of salt, wrapped tightly in wax paper.
Bela had heard about the black marketeering that went on between the city and the countryside, but he never imagined there would be so many people on the train heading west toward Gyor. The train was packed on Saturday morning, with hundreds of men and women even climbing to the top of the train and hanging on. This is where Bela finally found a spot. Carrying knapsacks and suitcases held close to their bodies, they were mainly dressed in grey, brown, and black work clothes. Could all these people be heading to sell things in the countryside? Bela tucked the precious cargo into the safari pants he still wore - it had many closable pockets.
As the train pulled out of the Nyugati train station, another slow-moving train was just pulling in. It was also packed to the rafters with people coming back from the countryside. The two trains passed each other and a great cry went up: "Death to the black marketers!"
I guess this is what will greet us on the way back, he thought.
TIBOR'S DAY USUALLY BEGAN before dawn. He awoke, dressed, and drank a cupful of something that distantly resembled the taste of coffee. It was instant coffee laced with chicory, and no matter how much of it one drank, there was never the feeling that one had consumed enough caffeine. What I wouldn't give for a good cup of espresso, he thought.
By five in the morning he was out of the apartment, looking for places where Jews from Karpatalja might gather - looking for anyone who might have any bit of information about Hedy. He would search the streets until 8:00 a.m. when he went to his uncle's restaurant to work. After working all day, he would go back to walking and searching. He usually got back to the apartment late at night after darkness fell on the city.
Over the past few weeks, he had felt that he had walked down every street, side street, and alleyway of the city. His feet ached by the end of the day - he barely felt the pain anymore. The soles of his shoes were nearly worn through. He remembered with regret the many pairs of shoes he had left back home. He wished he had taken just a few more pairs. Yet he kept walking, relentlessly, knocking on doors, making enquiries.
Sometimes he was met with a smile of a neighbour - a Jew from Nagyszollos who remembered his family. Sometimes he was greeted with disdain and suspicion. Often he was asked to explain himself: "What do you want with the Weisz family?" But most of the time people just stared back at him when he asked about Hedy Weisz, the daughter of Vilmos Weisz and Terez Leizerovich from Nagyszollos.
Karola Aykler and Domokos Aykler as refugees in Austria.
One day in early August, fortune smiled upon him. He encountered a young woman named Sara who remembered that the Aykler-Schroeder family had sent yeast into the ghetto - with it, she had been able to bake bread for her family. This young woman had seen Hedy's younger brother, Suti, in an apartment block around Nagymezo utca. Tibor was elated.
The next morning at five he walked to the building on Nagymezo ut. It wasn't even dawn, yet Tibor felt it would be another hot summer day. There was a bit of a hot breeze, reflected off the concrete buildings and streets. He waited until seven, when people started entering and leaving the building. Tibor didn't recognize Suti at first - when he saw the skinny kid walking toward him, he looked twice, then three times. Suti slowed down as well - the young man standing at the entranceway to the building had a familiar stance about him.
"Sutikam," Tibor said.
Suti smiled - a big warm smile. They hugged each other.
"I'm just going to work," Tibor began. "I'm working at my uncle's restaurant cleaning up rubble. Will you come with me and talk to me while I work? I'm desperate to find out about what happened to you and your family."
Suti agreed to come along so they could talk. H
e saw anxiousness in Tibor's eyes.
As they walked along, the questions started pouring out of Tibor: How long had he been in Budapest? When had he returned? What had happened to them since he had last seen them at the train station in Nagyszollos?
Finally, he blurted out, "Did you know I am in love with Hedy?"
Suti stopped, turned to Tibor, and replied, "Yes, Hedy told me you were in love with each other and that you were engaged to be married. She told me on the train, once we left Nagyszollos. She was holding the prayer book you gave her on the platform."
One tear slipped inadvertently out of Tibor's right eye, and he wiped it away quickly.
"Is she all right?" Tibor asked quietly, tentatively, almost as if he feared hearing the answer.
Suti started telling, slowly at first, then sentence by sentence, what had happened to them since he last saw Tibor on that fateful day more than one year ago.
Suti explained the last time he saw Hedy was in January, when they emptied the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. "It was a horrible place in Poland. Icuka was taken away on the first day when they arrived. She got into the wrong lineup - the one for small children and elderly women. They went into a building that was a human crematorium. That was the last time anyone saw her alive." Suti could see the colour drain from Tibor's face as he spoke.
"Hedy and Aliz were together," Suti continued. "They shaved their heads. I don't know where they are today. I hope they are all right. But I know I wouldn't be alive were it not for Hedy encouraging me to fight to survive. Father died a few days after we were liberated - he was very sick with typhus." Suti's voice cracked with emotion.
They were still walking side by side, Tibor's face ashen, his whole being visibly shaken by all he had heard. After minutes of silence, as if he needed the time to absorb all of this, he reached over, gently putting his arm around Suti's shoulders. "I feel like a boxer whose head has been pummelled by too many blows. There are no words to express how sorry I am for the suffering endured by your family. If only I could have done more ...." His voice broke, and no more words came out. There was nothing more to say.
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