A Guest in my Own Country

by George Konrad

  I took to drinking from the lids of water barrels like a peasant boy. I went to the artesian well in front of the post office, where my good suit and shoes provoked pleasure at our misfortune from the constant semicircle of its users. But even with the yellow star I made new acquaintances: women occasionally greeted me warmly on the street; I would exchange a few words while waiting for the well. The village idiot, who once managed to eat an entire bucket of cooked beans on a bet, asked me for my yellow star. The onlookers laughed: still crazy as ever.

  Then one morning they came, a loud pounding at the garden gate. I looked down from the balcony and saw five German officers, as many Hungarian gendarmes, and the ridiculous policeman Csontos, who had previously threatened to inform on everyone, but would let it slide for a few pengős. There were black caps too, but we did not yet know that they were the Gestapo. My father donned his tweed jacket, regulation yellow star and all, and went down to open the gate.

  The Gestapo officer informed him in German that he had received a report accusing him of being an English spy and keeping a radio transmitter hidden in the attic. The house was searched from cellar to roof. I knew he had no transmitter, but it felt good to think he had been accused of having one. I very much wanted to look up to him. Had they searched him for a weapon I would have respected him even more.

  My father was rather fearful and sensitive to pain, so my mother, the stronger of the two, led the Germans and gendarmes through the house, moving among them without any show of nerves and providing succinct information. They collected a few things—money, jewelry, a camera—but made no major finds. They appeared dissatisfied and ordered my father and uncle to go with them to the gendarmerie barracks and divulge where they had hidden the radio transmitter and, in general, what was hidden where. “Or, madam, would you truly have us believe that you are hiding nothing?”

  Starting 15 May my father was no longer mine but the Gestapo’s. He departed through the garden gate accompanied by gendarmes and German officers. I watched his slightly bent back from the upstairs balcony. I had never seen him escorted by bayonets before. After he and my uncle had been led off, we went to the dining room, where we could follow them through the window facing the street. In front were the Gestapo officers, behind them a couple of gendarmes in their sickle-feathered caps, then my father and uncle, then more gendarmes with bayonets at the ready, and the ridiculous Csontos policeman drawing up the rear. Everything else was as it always was: the cow pats drying in threes on the hot cobblestones, it being mid-May, the yellow light falling on the thick spire of the Calvinist church, the indifferent row of locust trees lining the main street.

  My father looked neither right nor left: he greeted no one, nor did anyone greet him. It is instructive to observe the faces of acquaintances approaching from the opposite direction when one is being escorted by armed men. Although my father knew everyone he passed, he walked like an actor making an entrance on stage. The scene was not outrageous, just unusual. At first the faces showed puzzlement; then, slowly, things fell into place: Well, of course, it’s the next step, they’re taking the Jews. Only my mother and we children remained in the house.

  Mother felt something had to be done. How could Hungarian gendarmes take her husband away at the command of some Germans in black uniforms? And what of the Hungarian leadership in the local administration? Had those gentlemen, whom we knew, contributed to the situation?

  Mother put on a good dress and went to report the incident to the chief constable and lodge a complaint. As she was leaving the constable’s office, a black car pulled up alongside her and a voice in German called out, “Step in, Mrs. Konrád, or do you want me to lock you up with your husband?” He was the chief Gestapo officer. My mother nodded. They did her the favor of putting her in the same jail as my father, though in another section. The gendarmes had rounded up a number of wealthier and better known Jews as hostages. Their wives had stayed at home. Only my mother went with her husband.

  That saved our lives. I later found out it was an Arrow Cross pastry-maker who had turned us in. I have him to thank that I am alive today. Perhaps he bore us a grudge for avoiding his shop, though the entrance was pretty spectacular: polar bears—cut from planks with jigsaws and painted in oils—licking raspberry and vanilla ice cream. But the fare was worse than at Petrik’s, where two little bird-faced old ladies with buns of gray hair served cream pastries and ice cream against a backdrop of butter-colored tile walls. They used eggs, sugar, vanilla—the proper ingredients—and eschewed experimentation. They were not Arrow Cross, and they went to church every Sunday morning, arm in arm, in white silk blouses and dark gray veiled hats. They opened their shop only after Mass, still redolent of church, selling cream pastries still warm from having been baked at dawn.

  But they did not determine history. Providence had placed my fate in the hands of their rival, the one who compensated for poor quality with painted icebergs and seals. By finding an appropriate outlet for his flights of fancy in the genre of the denunciation letter and thereby landing my parents in a Gestapo internment camp, he bestowed a great fortune upon us, for the result was that we all, each in his own way, avoided the common fate of the Jews of Újfalu: Auschwitz.

  Four of us children were left: myself, my sister, and my two cousins. They still had their Jewish governess Ibi, who, what with the fear and uncertain prospects of the times, exuded a less than pleasant smell. She was an awkward, weak-spined girl who had trouble with the cooking and cleaning: everything ended up jumbled and more or less dirty.

  It was disturbing to see a way of life disintegrate, and I watched it crumble day by day. The absence of our parents and the worry were bad enough, but the nausea of helplessness was worse. István and I decided that our parents had made a mistake: we should have abandoned everything and departed earlier, because now we would have to abandon the house and garden anyway.

  It was hot, a beautiful early summer, the cranes occupying their usual spot by the Tables of the Covenant. We played ping-pong like maniacs. The small market on Mondays, the large one on Thursdays, and on Friday afternoons, yellow stars on their jackets, a prayer shawl under their arms, the Jewish men plying their usual route past our house to the synagogue. Every evening we followed the regulations for the blackout, putting slat frames covered with black paper in the windows.

  Though no longer allowed into the pool, we would peek through the fence and watch the boys imitating Stukas, the German dive-bombers, as they dived screeching from the trampoline into the twenty-five meter basin fed by the lazy, quiet flow of the artesian water. As usual it was drained on Sunday and would refill by Wednesday afternoon. The previous year István, Pali, and I had swum eighty lengths and were given money for chicken paprikás and noodles at the pool restaurant.

  Taking walks with the yellow star gradually grew less pleasant. The message in the faces of the passersby did not generally leave a good feeling. The crudest would communicate, “Well, now you’ll get what’s been coming to you!”; the majority, “Aha. So that’s how it is. So they’re taking you away. Well, let them!” Even the warm looks, looks of sympathy, were combined with a quickened pace: solidarity in a hurry. We preferred to stay in the garden. I would swing for hours, until my head spun.

  One day at noon a squadron of English and American bombers flashed their silver over the town. They dropped nothing on us, just sparkled in the light on the way to bomb the Debrecen railway station. The church bells tolled; a siren bleated. Gendarmes checked to see that everyone was down in the cellar. But we did not hide; we put our heads back and scoured the sky: Good. Up there at least they are in charge.

  We got a postcard from my parents in Debrecen saying they were well, nothing more. Although the radio had been confiscated, we had other things to conceal: a sack of flour obtained without a permit, a few sides of bacon. They were in the cellar in a very clever spot that the house’s architect (Mr. Berger, who ended up in the same transport and same camp as my parents) had shown my father in
1933, saying that a hiding place might come in handy some day. It was a tiny nook in total darkness on the far side of the concrete water tank and under the basement stair, a place only the most meticulous searcher would find. Our searchers were not so meticulous as all that.

  There was also some money concealed behind the drawer in my father’s desk: three packs of hundreds, thirty thousand pengős, the price of a large house. Even more serious was a cache of two iron boxes buried in the pipe shed and containing gold jewelry, for which my father had regularly traded a portion of his inventory. One box was buried in the corner and was later discovered, but they never found the other one because it was in the asymmetrical center of the area, where a gray-enamel kettle holding oats for the angora rabbits hung from a ceiling beam.

  In those days we kept a dozen rabbits in a warren in the yard. Along the sides of the uppermost two cages were little wooden birthing-boxes, their doors open to the mother’s large compartment. Bunnies are pink and hairless at birth and cuddle together, shivering, under their mother’s belly. I would have liked to stroke them with at least the tip of my finger, but was told that the mother smells the scent of the human hand on her young and either pushes the human-scented young away or eats it. We were allowed to touch them only after their fur began to grow. Then we could take a few bunnies on our beds and play with them.

  It was a joy to spin the soft, white shearings into yarn on a wheel. The line tended to break unless I was careful, in which case the foot-powered spinning wheel, jerry-built from bicycle wheels, could turn it unbroken for minutes on end, gently winding the line onto the spindle. The line that was unwinding from the ball of wool I held in my left hand, regulating its thickness between my right thumb and index finger. On winter afternoons, when the stove gave off more than enough heat even with its doors closed, we would transfer the yarn onto reels. We would listen to war news and classical music over the radio while my mother knitted us warm hats and skating sweaters from a Norwegian pattern.

  Anyway, the kettle in the pipe shed hung there to keep the mice from fouling the oats for the rabbits. Though it was suspended from a wire attached to a hook on the ceiling, the mice managed to reach the oats by climbing along the ceiling beams and plopping down into Canaan, which turned out to be their vale of tears, because they were unable to clamber up the enameled walls of the kettle with their little claws and would scramble round and round, just above the endless bounty until a gruesome hand grabbed them by the tail and slammed them down on the cornerstone.

  Night after night with admirable foresight Mother showed us exactly what she and Father had buried. “In case we are separated or never meet again, you children need to know what we have.” Both my sister and I noted everything precisely. We spoke to no one about it. Even children can keep a secret. Our mother also sewed a few thin gold chains into our overcoats in case we needed them wherever we ended up. We had to prepare to be parted. The tone of the conversation was quite objective.

  In May 1944 it was rumored that Jews outside the capital would be resettled in a work camp in what had been Polish territory. Cities were being built for them amidst lakes and forests. They would be set off from the population at large, but their lot would otherwise be decent. From this point on, Jews and Christians could not live together or even have contact with one another. The source of the problem—we, that is—had to be isolated.

  The authorities relied on our understanding: Of course we can’t live together; how could we ever think such a thing? The Hungarian Jewish newspaper was still exhorting everyone to respect the laws and follow regulations to the letter: Now, in this difficult hour, in this time of trial we must hold our own and show we are good Hungarians; only then can we hope for relief.

  The national solidarity behind segregation was all well and good, but how complicated the process was to organize and execute, how much meticulous work was required on the authorities’ part, how many Interior Ministry functionaries, high and low, had to curtail their hard-earned sleep and beg their wives’ forgiveness. And this deportation took a great deal of work. Every bureau had to play its part, from the gendarmerie to the Commissioner for Abandoned Possessions. Worthy of special praise was the railway workers’ model cooperation during enemy bombing: in a matter of weeks they had packed the Jews into freight trains and rolled them out of the country. Collecting six hundred thousand Jews, fencing them in, then transporting them with an armed patrol to freight cars—now that was something to drink to. The daily papers of the provincial cities announced with a sigh of relief that the air was clear, the region judenfrei, Jew-free.

  We received a letter from relatives in Budapest inviting us to stay with them. We needed to decide quickly whether to go. Jews were no longer allowed to travel on trains, and papers were checked constantly: denunciation was a responsibility generally accepted. To travel to our relatives’ in Budapest would require special permission from the gendarmerie, an exception, a onetime suspension of the regulations. And why go, anyway? Why not stay behind with the others? We had aunts and uncles and cousins here in town; we were still in our own house. Maybe they wouldn’t come for us. Maybe some higher power would intervene. Swinging on my swing, I felt the joy of our ever-present swallows unalloyed. I was an Újfalu boy to the marrow of my bones. I would live here and die here.

  But if they did come? It was easier to hide in Budapest, harder to find a needle in that haystack. I cast spells on the garden gate, still foolishly hoping my parents would simply return. I’d hear a knock, open the gate, and there they’d be, smiling in the gateway. I heard a knock. Jumping off the swing, I ran to the gate and slid back the bolt. There was no one standing there. Only German soldiers sauntering along the street with local girls.

  I gave myself a good shake: we must leave the house after all. I went up to the apartment to make sure the cache of thirty thousand pengős was in its place. It was. I crossed the street to the house of a Christian lawyer, a good customer of my father’s, rightist, yes, but not excessively anti-Semitic. I asked him to arrange transit permits for us. “It will cost a lot,” he said. “Do you have money?” I said we did. “How much?” I told him. He said it was enough and I should give him half in advance. I went home and took him the fifteen thousand. He said he would let us know the next day what he had arranged. The whole matter was to remain between ourselves. Not a word about the money.

  All of us discussed the issue. I was the most intent on going. That the others were hesitant was understandable: none of us relished the idea of being lodgers. Besides, we still had enough to eat and could curl up in our own armchairs. Our nearest relatives came and told us not to leave: they might deport only the residents of Nagyvárad, not us. Hungarian Jews had long since been reassuring themselves that what had happened to the Polish Jews could never happen to them.

  By now every Jew had been registered. Under orders from the county registrar the congregation itself drew up the list, organizing it by street and number. As a result the gendarmes had no trouble rounding everyone up in the wee hours. Absolutely no one in town would risk hiding us. Since it would be harder to round up the Budapest Jews—they outnumbered us by far—they would go last. At least we could gain time.

  The lawyer came the next day for the other fifteen thousand and told me I could pick up the papers. But first, he said, I should go to see Somody, the headmaster at the Civic Boys’ School, a good man who had a high opinion of my abilities. I should thank him for being receptive to our petition. I went to the headmaster, thanked him for his kindness, and clicked my heels. He smiled at me, stroked my head, and said that I should continue to study hard and be a good Magyar. Now I could go to the gendarmerie for the transit papers.

  A staff sergeant at the gendarmerie formulated the permit and knocked it out on a typewriter with his large hands. It took him some time to extract the information from the birth records and police registration papers and integrate it into the text. Rifles in the corner stand, hats with sickle-feathers on the hat stand, the smel
l of boots, an old desk, a green table lamp, an ink pad, separate permits for each of us four, eight thumps with the seal. A corporal eating bacon at the other desk looked over at me.

  “So you’re leaving?”

  “Yes we are.”

  The staff sergeant handed me the four sheets of paper. He had worked hard and was satisfied with himself. And with me because I smiled at him deferentially. He wished me a pleasant journey, for which I thanked him. The papers fit into the inner pocket of my linen suit jacket. I had something in my pocket that other Jews lacked. The town leadership had given its blessing to our departure.

  Laló Kádár offered to accompany us to our relatives’ in Budapest. We were glad: Christians would no longer set foot in our garden; segregation was practically total. He was an assistant in my uncle’s textile factory, a tall and elegant young man, center-half on the town’s soccer team. His younger sister Katalin was my sister’s classmate and friend and often came to our place to play board games. She had a black ponytail, very white teeth, and large brown eyes. I used to stare at her when she visited, and when it was time to say hello or goodbye I never neglected to kiss her on the cheek. She was three years older than I and therefore taller as well. She would come up to me to say goodbye. We would stand in silence before she let me kiss her.

  My cousin Vera, who was my age, also came to see us. She wanted to know if I would write to her and where. It was still unclear which of us should feel sorry for the other. I kissed her on the cheek too, at dusk on 5 June 1944. We then set to packing. The question was how much to take and for what? What should we leave behind? Come to think of it, we wouldn’t need this, we wouldn’t need that either. Beyond the weight limit prescribed by railway regulations we had to keep in mind that once we arrived we could keep only what we could carry.