A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  The children listened, too, especially the Kornfelds’ son Pinchas. Pinchas was eight years old and curious about everything—about the hole in the floor of the upstairs shul in the big Orthodox synagogue, and about the blackened ruins of the Van Den Nestlei synagogue. He would stand on the sidewalk at Van Den Nestlei and stare at a surviving red-colored wall where a slogan had been written in Yiddish by angry Jewish leftists before the war: “Down with Passover. Long live May Day!” Pinchas wondered about those May Day Jews. He had never heard Jews talk like that. What really aroused his curiosity was the fact that they had misspelled the word for Passover, Pesach. What kind of school had they gone to, misspelling Pesach?

  This wide-eyed skinny boy was barely noticed in post-Holocaust Antwerp, but he stole glimpses at a world that was so dark and so twisted, it was beyond all imagining. No monster story, no horror fiction, was like this. At night, in his parents’ small house, everyone had their sleeping place. Pinchas's place was in the big front room on a couch. The room was always full of survivors, and rather than sleep, he lay still and listened to their terrifying stories of how they had lost their parents, their children, their wives. The survivors could not stop talking—and Pinchas could not stop listening. He read books with first-hand accounts of survivors—there was an explosion of such books in Yiddish after the war.

  The survivors shared more than their stories. Many of them were ill with contagious diseases, which spread through the little house. All three children developed a skin disease, an itchy rash that plagued them for months. Finally they were taken to the hospital and placed in a sulphurous solution and scrubbed with wire brushes while they screamed in pain. Sometimes the Kornfeld children had to miss a few weeks of school because of these diseases, but they were still ahead of most of the Jewish children because unlike most surviving children, they had gone to school throughout the entire war. Not many Jewish children were left. The first postwar Jewish school had started with only seventeen pupils.

  Even with their diseases, it was inconceivable that Israel Kornfeld would close his door to survivors. It was what he believed in doing. Later on, when there were no longer needy survivors, he found other people who needed help. There is always someone who needs help.

  4

  Liberated

  Budapest

  “AUTUMN AND BUDA WERE BORN OF THE SAME mother,” wrote Gyula Krudy, a turn-of-the-century Hungarian novelist. On one bank are the hills of Buda, the last foothills of the lower Carpathian range. On the other side is the cramped urban flatland of Pest, the beginning of the Great Hungarian Plains that were once Europe's wheat fields. For a few weeks in the fall, when the horse chestnuts start dropping from the trees, and the hills turn amber and coral, and a sweet smell of rot rises, people succumb to the beauty of Buda with a kind of drunken emotionalism. A porous light, the color of raspberry cream, appears on the horizon and filters the view of the curvaceous green steeples over in Pest. Between Buda and Pest flows the wide Danube. If rivers had voices, in the fall of 1944 the Danube would have screamed.

  In March of that year the Germans, no longer trusting their ally, Miklos Horthy, had invaded. Jews were herded into a small neighborhood around the huge synagogue on Dohany Street. The streets were walled off, and guarded gates installed. About 130,000 Jews were trapped inside this ghetto. A few months later, on October 14, Horthy was overthrown by Hungarian fascists. Goon squads called Arrow Cross, after their emblem, a Hungarian version of the swastika, took over Budapest. Vicious, uneducated young men, some only teenagers, ruled the streets by force of arms. If they felt like shooting someone, they shot. But their favored activity was rounding up Jews in Pest, marching them to the banks of the Danube, standing behind them, opening fire, and simply letting the bodies crumple into the river, to be swept south by the current.

  Zsuzsa, a nurse, went to visit her mother in the ghetto at the end of her hospital shift and found her walking down a street toward the river with a group of Jews, carrying their belongings in bundles as though they were leaving on a trip. Teenagers wearing armbands pointed the way with machine guns and pistols. Zsuzsa was able to grab her mother, pull her away, and hide her in the hospital until the Liberation.

  Gyorgy Konrad was one of eighteen people living in a house in Pest that was under the protection of the Swiss government. One of the others was an eighteen-year-old girl, with whom eleven-year-old Gyorgy had fallen into the throes of quivery young love. When she ventured out onto the street one day, the Arrow Cross found her, threw her in with a group they had already gathered, and marched them to the Danube. The group stood on the riverbank in a line, with the Arrow Cross behind them. She was at one end and could hear the gunshots and the splash of falling bodies as they worked down the line. And then—nothing. They had used their last bullet on the man next to her. Out of ammunition, they let her go.

  In another house near the ghetto Erzsebet Falk, a non-Jewish woman with a Jewish husband had given shelter to eighty-seven people, including sixty-four Jews. In January 1945 the artillery at night was getting closer. On the night of the seventeenth, the refugees in the Falk house hid in the basement, listening to the bursts and explosions as the world's largest army blasted the world's second-largest army off the streets of Pest one block at a time.

  As they huddled in the basement speculating on where each ever-closer explosion had landed, they heard a young voice shout, “All right, line up!” Seven young men in brown and green with Arrow Cross armbands, machine guns, and pistols had broken into the basement, looking wild with panic and fury.

  “Come on!” they shouted. “Everybody has to go! You are all Jews. We are going to the Danube. Now!”

  Erzsebet Falk went over to them, and in a soft, gracious voice said, “Please. There is plenty of time to line everyone up. But first, we have a very nice dinner here. What I suggest is that you have a little dinner. It is past seven. We have some good wine. Whatever we do, we should do after dinner. Let's have some wine now.”

  The seven teenagers had some wine, and as they gulped it by the glassful over the course of an hour, their speech grew sloppy, their voices louder. Soon they rolled up their jacket sleeves, exposing arms that were covered with watches and bracelets, from wrist to elbow, like displays in a pawnshop. “Know where we got these?” one of them called out. “Jews! We got them from Jews like you! Two hours ago at the river.” One of them mimed machine-gunning. All seven burst into laughter.

  One glass later, they were again ordering everyone to line up, shouting, “Come on! We're going to the damned river!” But at that moment a shell exploded nearby, and two of the Arrow Cross panicked and ran out of the cellar toward the gate. As they crossed the courtyard, another explosion shook the building, and when the hidden people looked out into the courtyard through the settling cloud of dust and smoke, they saw one of the Arrow Cross lying in a half-inch of blood, with his right leg missing from the midthigh.

  The other six Arrow Cross, pale and trembling, returned to the basement and the wine bottles. For hours, the people of the house sat and watched these young men grow drunker and drunker. Finally, when a lookout at the gate reported that the Red Army was only a few blocks away, the Arrow Cross took off their brown shirts and replaced them with red ones, preparing to cheer the Red Army. Their logic was uncomplicated: If Brown Shirts wore brown shirts, surely the Reds liked people in red. But one of them could not bring himself to be a Red. Tm not going to wear that. Never,” he declared. Then they ran chaotically into the street. A burst of gunfire was heard, and the Arrow Cross who had not changed his shirt was dead. One who had changed into civilian clothes went up to the fifth floor and was shooting down at the Soviets. They charged into the house, climbed the stairs, and killed him.

  After the Soviets finished off the Arrow Cross at the Falk house, they returned with bread and supplies. It was January 18, and it had been a cold snowy winter, made harsher by the fact that there was hardly an unbroken window left in Pest. The streets were blocked with the carbon
ized chassis of trucks and tanks and the corpses of soldiers and civilians. In the distance, explosions were heard. The Germans, having retreated to Buda, were blowing up all the bridges on the Danube.

  There were two different vantage points from which one could view the arrival of the Red Army—another one of those defining rifts between Jews and non-Jews. Non-Jews were not hiding in basements waiting for a band of adolescent maniacs to march them to the river and shoot them. Nor had they seen their relatives shipped off by train to Polish death camps. Recently the trains had stopped, because someone had mysteriously blown up the tracks. But the Germans, ever resourceful, were working on a new idea. They had wired the ghetto, where seventy thousand Jews were still walled in, and they intended to blow up the entire ten blocks. Had the Red Army not arrived, they certainly would have flipped the switch.

  One of the men with the Red Army was Bela Gado, a Hungarian Jew who had been shipped off to forced labor in a Serbian mine. His wife had been deported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. After the Soviets took Serbia in October, Gado used his limited Russian to talk them into taking him with them through Romania and the Hungarian plain and into Pest. Just north of Pest, in the suburb of Ujpest—New Pest—his two sons were being hidden by Catholic priests in a Silesian brothers’ school. The boys thought it was only a matter of time before the Arrow Cross found them. Then suddenly the Red Army was blasting its way through the streets, and their father was there. Gyorgy Gado, Bela's fourteen-year-old son, did not remember the Liberation as festive. “A part of the population feared this change and the Liberation. A part had felt it was an occupation.… As for me, all the Jews felt they were liberated. For if the Russians had not come, all the Jewish population of Budapest would have been exterminated, without any doubt.”

  Historian John Lukacs later wrote about what he saw of the Red Army on that day: “Immediately behind the fighting patrols appeared a flood of soldiers in the street, some of them caracoling on horseback.” He described them robbing and raping their way through Pest.

  Ilona, Erzsebet Falk's niece who was hiding in the Falk house, recalled it differently: “They came by horses, and they brought colored telephone wire. And I was so happy to see the young soldiers with the red star here.” She pointed to her forehead. “And the people came out with yellow stars. And the young soldiers went down from the tanks, and there was very great happiness.”

  Gyorgy Konrad, who had been living in the Swiss house, was a little less euphoric. “There was some stealing and not too many rapes,” he recalled. But with his parents being held in some unknown place abroad, he had been waiting in his “safe” house wondering how long the Swiss protection would be respected. He had already worked out a desperate plan of action for running from the Arrow Cross when they tried to drag him to the river. For him, the Soviets could not have come too soon. What he most remembered about those first days was Soviet soldiers going to pharmacies and searching for bottles of a brand of eau de cologne called Chat Noir, which they would drink in hearty gulpfuls.

  One infantryman, Moritz Mebel, remembered Budapest as giving a notably cool reception to the liberators. Mebel was not a Soviet. He had been born in Erfurt in the Thuringer region of central Germany, in a kosher Jewish household. When he was seven years old, his religious grandmother died and the household's dietary laws were dropped, although the family still occasionally went to synagogue. Other children would shout “dirty Jew” at him as he walked down the street. When he was ten years old, Hitler came to power, and his parents fled with him to Moscow. His cousins and their family stayed behind and were killed by the Nazis, while Moritz was safely studying, attending a German-language international school for leftist refugee families. When the war came, he joined the Red Army and stood with thousands of other infantrymen at a line that in 1941 was virtually the gateway to the city, although it is now within the Moscow city limits and marked with a monument that people pass on their way into town from the airport. It was there that Mebel's infantry unit began their journey. They drove the Germans back across Russia, Romania, and the Ukraine. But Budapest stood out in Mebel's memory as a particularly tough fight. The unit had to liberate Pest house by house, fighting not Germans but Hungarians, while the Germans in Buda held the high ground and shot down on them at will.

  In Mebel's mind, there were two kinds of people in Budapest. “A part of the population was glad we were liberating them—but of course, not the ones who were fighting us.” After Pest fell, some welcomed them, but others hoped—the great fear of Pest's Jews— that the Germans who were just across the river in Buda with its commanding heights, would come back.

  ALTHOUGH THE GERMANS did not come back, ghetto survivors were still dying from hunger and disease at a rate of hundreds every week. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, an amalgam of American Jewish organizations, cooked for 3,500 people each day. Synagogues, which had been used as stables, and other community buildings were in ruins. It would take several years to restore them.

  Erzsebet Falk's niece Ilona, born in 1921 to an old middle-class Jewish Budapest family, had not been able to finish her high school education because in the late 1930s the Hungarian government, as a good faith gesture to its German friends, passed laws restricting Jews from schools. After Liberation, Ilona's father rebuilt his soda water factory, where she had had to spend her teens instead of in school. Now she realized that the extra chairs and tables in the factory could be used to furnish a new Jewish kindergarten that the Joint was funding. When the kindergarten was opened, Geza Seifert, the lawyer in charge of the project, took her by the hand and said, “I would like to thank you for the beautiful work that you have done.” Ilona looked back with her soft eyes and elegantly featured face. She could see the effect she was having on him. As Geza Seifert took her hand, she had only one thought: “Is he married?” He was not, and soon after their meeting, he married Ilona.

  As the Third Reich collapsed, the men who had been deported to labor camps started to return to Budapest. But often they found that their women and children were gone, murdered in Polish death camps. Gyula Lippner was one of them. He made it back to the family china shop in Ujpest, but he came back alone. His mother, his three sisters, his wife, and his daughter were all killed at Auschwitz. He reopened the shop that his father had inherited from his grandfather, who had first opened it in 1908. A friend who had survived the labor camp with him had two sisters who had survived Auschwitz. In 1946 Gyula Lippner married one of his friend's sisters. A year later, they had their first son, George.

  Now with a child to support, Lippner had to supplement his small income from the china shop. Fortunately, he had experience in one of the most useful trades of 1945 —installing windows. Anyone in Pest who could install windows had work.

  GYORGY KONRAD'S parents both survived, and once they were reunited, the family returned to their town, Berettyo Ujfalu, near the Romanian border, only to discover that they were virtually the only intact Jewish family left. Almost all of Gyorgy's schoolmates were dead. While Budapest still had a sizable Jewish population, there were few left in the rest of Hungary. Jews who did return to towns and villages found it difficult to get their property back. In Miskolc hostility became so violent that it turned into a small pogrom.

  Before the war, about one in every ten people in Berettyo was Jewish—a total of about a thousand Jews. The Konrad name was originally Kahn, one of the many names borne by Kohenim, the descendants of Aaron. For more than three thousand years, the male descendants of Moses's brother Aaron have been recognized for a priestly role in Judaism. Names such as Cohen, Kahn, Cowen, Kahane often indicate this line. Just as Georges Caen's father had slightly changed the name to sound more French, Gyorgy's father had changed it to Konrad to sound more Hungarian. It hadn't spared either of them.

  The Konrad family had kept a fairly traditional Jewish life in Berettyo. Gyorgy hated having to wear the religious vest under his clothes. The only way anyone could tell that he was wearing it, th
ough, was by its four fringes that appear on the outside. Finally, he took to carrying four strings around. When he saw the rabbi coming, he would stand with his mop of curly black hair and his mischievous off-center grin, and arrange his hand with the strings unfurled at his hip so that it looked as if he were wearing the undergarment.

  Under Horthy, Jewish men in provincial Hungary had been sent off to forced labor camps. Later, the Jews who had been left behind, women and children, had been sent to death camps. Now most of the survivors were men. Every time Gyorgy caught a glimpse of one of them looking at his own family, he imagined seeing in their sad, sunken eyes what they were thinking: “Why did you survive and not my wife and children?” Gyorgy was certain that that was their thought. It was his too. “Why were we the lucky ones?” Gyorgy wondered.

  Berettyo was an interesting place for an inquisitive twelve-year-old to live. Soviet troops were stationed there, and a corporal served as translator for the officers. Gyorgy had to speak to these Russians because he had to speak to everyone, and this corporal was the only one who spoke his language. They would make trades, striking bargains that always tremendously satisfied Gyorgy but on occasion greatly displeased his mother, such as when he traded her watch for a bayonet.

  The soldiers tried to maintain good relations with the townspeople. Occasionally, soldiers would rob someone's home. When the locals complained, the guilty soldiers were arrested and jailed in the headquarters. Sometimes an extremely fat and good-natured colonel, who drove a Mercedes too big and shiny for the town, would personally kick a soldier down stairs into a cellar, which made a good impression on the townspeople. Soldiers bought things in the Konrads’ hardware store and became acquainted with the family. Sometimes they would come over to the Konrads’ house. On those occasions Gyorgy's parents would always get his sister out of sight—these Russians could be unpredictable. They drank vodka and ate raw onions, taking crunching bites off them as though they were apples, and slurped tremendous amounts of raw eggs, sucking them noisily out of the top of the shells. Gyorgy thought these Russians were a funny people.