A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  13

  In Budapest

  IN 1948 THE COMMUNIST PARTY, WHICH HAD BEEN IN A coalition government, simply took over the Hungarian government the same way that the party had done in Czechoslovakia, except that in Hungary the Communist party had been only a small minority faction. The takeover was not popular with the general population. But many Jews at the time had been more concerned about the resurgence of extreme right-wing nationalist movements. To them, the Communist party was the alternative to fascism.

  The new government was led by Matyas Rakosi, who had a Jewish mother and a number of close Jewish associates, including the head of internal police, Gabor Peters. But these ties did not mean that their ascension to power was good for Hungarian Jews. Zionist organizations were banned. Jewish publications were closed down. The only Jewish organizations permitted were those directly controlled by the state under the auspices of the official Jewish Community. The curriculum in Jewish schools was made to conform to the state curriculum, and the schools were eventually taken over by the state. One Jewish high school was allowed, the Anne Frank School, but it was maintained as a kind of second-class high school, since its graduates would find it difficult to be accepted by universities. As in Czechoslovakia, any Jewish religious activities or affiliations would greatly damage the chances for advancement not only of an individual but sometimes of the family.

  The policy of nationalizing the economy also came as a hard blow to many Jews, because they happened to be of the merchant class. To Ilona and Geza Seifert, now married, the antireligious policies meant a dismantling of three years of hard work by the community in building Jewish institutions. In addition, Ilona's father lost his soda factory. Gyula Lippner tried to keep his family china shop—since he was a party member who had enthusiastically supported the regime, he hoped one little china shop in Ujpest would be permitted. Originally, it was said that the nationalization was only for substantial businesses and that little shops would not be bothered. But in 1949 a few Jews were arrested on charges of Zionism, and Lippner decided that this was no time for a Jew to test the limits of the new system. He voluntarily turned over the china shop and accepted a job with a large state-owned paper company.

  The Lippners were not practicing Jews, but they told their two sons that the family was Jewish and they repeatedly explained that they should be careful with this information because “it is a very dangerous thing to be a Jew in Hungary.” In general they tried to be good Communists and raise their sons to be good Communists and join the young Communists, and they did all the other things good Communist families did to get ahead.

  Even the Konrads’ hardware store in Berettyo was nationalized. Many of the surviving Jewish men had started new families with Jewish women from elsewhere or non-Jewish women from town, and they had opened small shops in their traditional trades. In 1949, once they realized that even these little shops were to be taken, signs appeared on the doors of little ateliers all over Berettyo saying that the owner was away and would be back shortly. The shop owners and their families loaded themselves into trucks and drove to Czechoslovakia, from where they could still travel easily to “the new Soviet ally,” Israel. They settled in a small town on the Mediterranean coast, where they reopened their shops, and continued to speak Hungarian. For two decades Berettyo Jewish life was preserved in this Israeli village.

  In Berettyo itself, Jewish life had ended. The more affluent and better-educated families did not get on the trucks to Israel but instead drifted, a few at a time, to Budapest. Gyorgy Konrad, now 16, went to Budapest in search of something to do after the family hardware business was nationalized. Having struggled to learn Russian ever since those first curious troops had appeared in Berettyo in 1945, he had now learned it well enough to work translating articles from Pravda and other party organs into Hungarian. These were wordy, tedious thousand-word items that tortured language to assure political conformity. Each of Gyorgy's translations was carefully filed in an archive, where in all probability it was never again seen.

  THE GAZDAG FAMILY lived in Ferencvaros, in southern Pest, where a small tributary forks off the Danube, only to rejoin it south of the capital. Both parents were party members who enjoyed the opportunities of the new system: Ervin was a chemical engineer, and Zsuzsa, no longer a nurse, was a film editor. A successful Communist family, they believed in the future of this new egalitarian society. Their son Gyula, born in 1947, was six years old walking home from first grade with several other children. Suddenly his friends started pushing one boy because he was fat. Gyula decided to defend the fat boy—he was being raised with this kind of idealism. For the rest of the walk home, the boys shouted, pushed, and scuffled until, one by one, they broke away at their homes. When they got: to the street where the Gazdags lived, only Gyula, the fat boy, and one of the other boys were left. They were neighbors. Each boy went to the gate of his building, but they continued to shout at each other. The fat boy shouted at the other boy, “You dirty Jew!” That seemed to put the other boy in his place, so Gyula also started shouting “Dirty Jew!” He went right over to the gateway and shouted it in the boy's face. At that moment an elderly woman who lived in Gyula's building was trying to get through the gate. She glared at Gyula and said, “You silly little boy. You are Jew too,” and pushed past him to the street.

  Gyula could not understand why this nice old lady had cursed at him. He had done nothing wrong. He had just been keeping some bullies from picking on a fat boy. He told his mother what bad happened and asked why the woman had cursed at him.

  Zsuzsa explained what a Jew was. Then she explained that her family had gone to Vienna and come back to Budapest to flee the Nazis, and that the Nazis had put his grandmother in the ghetto, and that the Arrow Cross had been about to shoot her by the Danube when she hid her in the hospital. And she told Gyula about his grandfather, and how he had been taken to Auschwitz and killed. Then she had to explain what Auschwitz was and how he was killed. Then she told him that his father was a Jew also, and that he had escaped to France, and she told him about his fighting with the Resistance.

  Hours later, six-year-old Gyula was changed. He took to saying openly in school that he was a Jew. And he angrily denounced children who used the word Jew as a curse. He could not stop thinking about the things he had learned, about the deportations and Auschwitz. When he was eight years old, he resolved that he would be a filmmaker and make movies about the Holocaust.

  THE GADOS LIVED in Ujpest. To them, the essential fact remained that the Red Army had saved them. Both Bela and his wife joined the Communist party. As a lawyer with Red Army experience and a party member, Bela soon became a judge in the Hungarian Army. But at the time of the Slansky trial, Hungarian Jews were being removed from prominent places, and he was among the Jewish officers who were thrown out of the military. Nobody told him that it was because he was a Jew. Like many other Jewish officers, he was dismissed with no explanation at all. Eventually, the most prominent Jew, Matyas Rakosi, was removed as head of government and replaced by Imre Nagy, who was charged with cleaning up the party. Cleaning up meant expelling Jews, even some of his own close friends.

  Bela Gado's son, Gyorgy, who had been rescued in his hiding place by his father and the Red Army, had also become a party member. But he was growing angry about what was happening to the party and the country, and increasingly he said so to other party members, which was a risky thing for a civil servant to do. Soon there came a restructuring in government that left no job for him. After nine months out of work, he realized his civil service days were over, and he became a schoolteacher.

  Many Hungarians were getting angry not only about the abuses of power but about the economy, which was lowering Hungary's living standard. Under these pressures, Nagy turned out not to be Moscow's man. He made the economic policy less rigid, allowed a small degree of private initiative, and released political prisoners, including those accused of Zionism. In doing so, he pleased some Hungarians but not the Soviets, who removed him
from power in February 1955, just as a few years earlier they had removed the populist Wfadysfaw GomuHca in Poland. Matyas Rakosi was returned, and Hungarians grew angrier. Encouraged by a Polish movement that came so close to open revolt in October 1956 that Moscow had to bring Gomulka back, a popular movement in Hungary started openly demanding not only the return of Nagy but free elections. Hoping there was a choice between the two demands, Moscow rehabilitated Nagy.

  The concession was a tactical error, one that the Soviets were to make again. Spurred on by their small victory, the Hungarians pressed for more, demanding the removal of Soviet troops, democracy, and free speech. Nagy himself pressed further demands on Moscow, such as release from the Warsaw Pact, and neutral East-West status. Austria, Hungary's historical partner, had successfully negotiated such an arrangement the year before.

  Once all demonstrations were banned, a huge spontaneous rally filled the streets of Pest. The police opened fire on the demonstrators, which turned a protest into an uprising. The well-organized working class joined the rebellion. “Revolutionary committees” were set up to take control throughout the country, and as the uprising increasingly became an open rebellion, Hungarian soldiers were called out. But the troops only chatted and commiserated with the rebels. The Soviets called out their own troops, but there were not enough of them in Hungary to contain what was now a nationwide armed rebellion.

  In October 1956, Gyorgy Konrad was editing a new literary magazine, which by chance had been scheduled for publication on October 27, the day of the outlawed demonstration. He had finished his studies that summer, and he and his classmates had been inducted into the military. Their training included not only instructions on the use of weapons but lectures by officers on abstract notions such as “the nature of the enemy.” Konrad would listen to these lectures with his mouth slightly twisted in his ironic smile, but the “nature of the enemy” lecture proved to be too much for him and he exploded in great heaves of laughter. Soon he was declared an “anarchist” and thrown out of the army. This was the same army from whom his university colleagues obtained weapons a few months later, in October 1956. Konrad, not wishing to take part in a shooting war, stayed home for a few days after the illegal demonstration. But since it did not wind down and was too interesting to miss, he decided to wander over to the campus and around town.

  At the university, rebels had stacks of boxes. There were boxes of apricot jelly from the far right-wing Otto von Hapsburg, and boxes of light weapons from the police. Somebody had sent cans of corned beef. When Gyorgy arrived at the campus, it was all being distributed to the young revolutionaries. “Who wants a submachine gun?” someone shouted. Konrad raised his hand and was handed the weapon.

  It was amusing to walk around Budapest wearing an armband and holding a submachine gun at your side. “I carried it like an umbrella,” he said. He did not want to shoot anyone, but he did have some things he wanted to do. He visited the various publishing houses, this tall young man with a mop of curly brown hair leaning on a submachine gun, and asked to see the director. He was always ushered into the director's office immediately, and the director always readily agreed that writers should have far greater artistic freedom. A submachine gun, it seemed, was a useful tool for a writer.

  But it also had some disadvantages. A small elderly woman pulled on his arm and said, “Young man, please come here.” Without waiting for him to answer, she dragged him down the street, over to where a group of women were standing and pointing up at a building.

  “There on the third floor is an AVH man,” one woman said. The AVH was the despised internal police. Then all the women started shouting at once.

  “What do you want?” Konrad finally shouted over their voices.

  The small elderly woman looked at him as though he were an astonishing simpleton. Then she shouted, “Shoot him!”

  “No, no. I'm not going to shoot him.”

  “Of course. He's AVH. We have him cornered,” she said, trying for a conspiratorial tone.

  “No, no.”

  “Why not? You have the gun!”

  Konrad tried to explain that although it was true that he was carrying a weapon, he did not shoot people. He tried to calm the women. But one of them shouted, “If you won't shoot him, I will go find someone else to shoot him.”

  “All right,” said Konrad. “Take me to him.” The woman led him into the building and up to the third floor, where they found an unarmed man crouching in terror. Konrad pointed the submachine gun at him. “All right,” he said. “Get up and start walking.”

  While the women cheered, he marched his prisoner out of the building and down a quiet street to shoot him. The man explained that he was from the AVH, but he kept insisting that he only played in a band. This brought the same mischievous smile to Konrad's face that had caused the army to declare him an anarchist.

  “What instrument do you play?”

  “Tuba,” was the shaky-voiced reply. And Konrad laughed as he marched his prisoner safely away from the angry women.

  “I think you'd better find a safer place to hide,” Konrad said, shaking his head as the man ran off. He wasn't going to shoot a tuba player.

  Konrad went home and decided he should get rid of the submachine gun. But the next morning, November 4, when he went to return it to the university, there were Soviet tanks on the street-entire armored columns that had been brought in from somewhere. People kept pulling him into doorways and warning him not to get near any major streets with that submachine gun. He could find himself standing in front of a Soviet armored division with nothing but a submachine gun. He returned home and dropped off the weapon, and then went back to the university, unarmed, only to find the campus wedged in with large steel clanking Soviet tanks. The university rebels were sitting around with their weapons. They certainly weren't going to start shooting at this many tanks. By the end of the day, the Soviets told them to give up, or the university would be leveled. They gave up.

  IN SOUTHERN PEST, in Ferencvaros, the shooting started on October 24. A tank rumbled into firing position in front of the Gazdags’ building, firing with an enormous boom down their little street. At the end of the street were rebel-held barracks, which answered with the steady pop-pop-pop of machine guns. The tank responded with booms so large, they shook the windows, which had to be opened to keep from shattering. For six days the fighting prevented anyone from leaving the Gazdags’ building, and they had been caught with nothing to eat but potatoes. There was not even anything to put on the potato. Gyula's grandmother baked them by the rackful for three meals each day. On October 30 the shooting stopped, and Gyula's grandmother went out and bought food and spent the quiet day cooking and preparing for when the fighting would start again.

  Sunday morning, Gyula was sleeping in his bed. At six o'clock he was awakened and given some new books that had been wrapped for Christmas. These Jewish atheists celebrated Christmas. Then he was led to the bomb shelter that had been set up in the basement of the building in preparation for World War III. Gyula had spent his childhood dreading World War III, the inevitable showdown with the Americans that could happen at any time. All buildings had to have bomb shelters where the residents could sit out the nuclear holocaust.

  The fighting grew heavier—more than just one tank and a few machine guns. There was a war up there, not with the Americans but with the Soviets. But for nine-year-old Gyula, this was the best time of his whole childhood. The children of the building spent the entire day in the basement playing. Each family set up beds in the cubicle used for their belongings. The whole family was there. No one went to school. No one went to work. And making it even more exciting, they sat around all day by candlelight. And when the parents got dull and started debating, the children could just roam from cubicle to cubicle and find other children with whom to play. To Gyula, this seemed some sort of model lifestyle.

  His parents sat on the bed and talked about leaving Hungary. But Zsuzsa was adamant that she was not going to spend
any more of her life moving. She had started in Budapest, fled to Vienna, then back to Budapest—it was enough. She was staying here, come what may.

  GEORGE LIPPNER was also nine years old, and he also was hiding with his family in the basement of their home in Ojpest. But he wasn't enjoying it. The family spent a night in the basement when the shooting was particularly violent, and when they came up in the morning, they found that two crosses had been painted on their door. Looking outside, they found similar markings on all the homes of neighbors of Jewish origin. These neighbors, like the Lippners, did not practice Judaism or talk about it. Nevertheless, somebody had known which doors to paint. George had no idea what Jewish practices were, or the difference between one kind of Jew and another. But now he understood what his parents had been telling him: It was dangerous to be a Jew in Hungary, and he was scared.

  But another nine-year-old boy, Andras Kovacs, did think it was fun. Kovacs, like Konrdd, was changed from a Kohen name in the last century. Andras's father, Imre, was a Sachsenhausen survivor with many relatives who didn't survive. Living in the sixth district in central Pest, not far from the traditional Jewish area, they had many Jewish neighbors. This was also a convenient location for the uprising. Only a few yards from the Kovacses’ building was a barricade, and neighborhood people would go home and shower or eat or rest and then go back to the barricades. One young man in their building went to the barricade faithfully every morning at eight o'clock. Andras remembers it as “a sort of comfortable revolution.” His parents seemed confident that soon United Nations troops would arrive and Hungary would be declared neutral—the Austrian solution. But one clay, as Andras was walking in the street with his mother, two rebels raised their arms in fascist salutes and greeted each other, “Sieg heil” and then his mother started to be frightened.