The next morning we got up at three-thirty. Standing in the bathtub, the cold water having gushed over my head, I opened my eyes and saw myself in the mirror. Laló Kádár came for us at five in a light, gray suit. He had bought the tickets the previous day. The stork couple stood motionless in the growing light by the Tablets of the Covenant.
Our parents’ house closed behind us. Whoever comes may have whatever remains. We took a fiacre to the station. There was little traffic. Whoever looked at us looked at us with indifference. No one said anything. We were shadows, irregular shadows at that, on a road of our own, without bayonet escort for the time being. We waited at the station for the Budapest express from Nagyvárad. We leaned against the platform’s green railing. It was growing warm. People stared at the yellow stars on our chests. How could we be there?
I was glad to see the train come. By the time I began looking back from the train window, I could make out only the steam mill and the Calvinist church tower. Soon nothing at all. Something had ended. Today I would say it was childhood. I saw that István too was clenching his teeth: we both felt the finality of it. We stood wordlessly by the window: German military trains with cannons and tanks on flatbed cars, someone playing a harmonica, gray uniforms, rubber mackintoshes.
There were people at work in the fields. The wheat was high and turning yellow in spots: a good harvest. The previous day the Szolnok railway station had been bombed. The control tower had toppled, the overpass been struck. Burned out, blackened ruins. We stood there for some time, giving priority to German military trains. Another train also went by. Women’s eyes behind a cattle-car window screened with barbed wire, Jewish women’s eyes most likely.
People on the platforms looked serious and frightened. The train made long stops. Everything was slow, but ordinary. Announcements often spoke of track repairs. Inspectors came twice during the journey to examine papers. The first time the chief inspector, a chubby, red-faced mustachioed man, wearing a small round feathered cap, snarled at Laló Kádár and said, “How come you’re meddling in Jew business if you’re a real Hungarian? How come you’re escorting Jew brats?” Laló paled and did not respond.
There was no problem with the papers themselves, but I had a feeling that this inspector had the power to kick us off the train under some pretense or other. He looked us over, not yet sure whether he felt like it; we looked back, unsmiling, serious. We were children of privilege, and he was clearly not a member of the gentry, but I could not tell whether this would tip the scales in our favor or vice versa. He moved on.
Our stars and this little incident made us unusual passengers. Our fellow passengers said not a word either to us or to Laló. At times like this it is better to say nothing. The second inspection was almost lackadaisical and went more smoothly. The papers were in order, the inspector nodded coolly.
I was afraid of Budapest though I had traveled there with my mother for a week the previous year to partake of its pleasures. In the glass gallery of Nyugati Station we had entrusted ourselves to the care of a pink-capped porter, then taken a cab to the Hungária Hotel, where a bellboy opened the door to our anteroom and pulled back the floor-length cambric lace curtain so I could step out onto the balcony and view the Danube, the bridges, the green row of chestnut trees on the far bank, and the Royal Castle in all their radiance. I could hardly breathe I was so happy; I grew weak, as one does when the curtain rises at the opera and a fabulous ballroom emerges from the darkness. Then my mother stood behind me; now she might have been in that cattle car. Then we had a porter; now we carried our own bags. Yet now as then the glassed-in gallery was beautiful, untouched by bombs. “The invasion has begun!” shouted the newspaper hawker. “British and American troops land on the beaches of Normandy!” People pressed around the leather bag holding the papers, but made no comment. István and I set down our bags and shook hands. Then we looked around at the people. They were just like the people back in Újfalu: they acted as if nothing had happened.
We bade Laló Kádár a heavy-hearted farewell. He could return home now. How I would have liked to go back with him.
We later found out that the next day all Berettyóújfalu Jews were rounded up. Accompanied by gendarmes, they dragged their bags through the streets. The rest of the population watched them from the sidelines, some with greetings, others with insults, but most were silent. Thus just one day after our departure the Újfalu Jews were taken in cattle cars to the ghetto in Nagyvárad and from there to Auschwitz.
Two weeks later I was strolling along the Danube, and Vera had been gassed and burned. I did not know at the time that of the two hundred Jewish children in the town the only ones still alive were the four of us who had left, two quiet twins with freckles, who became the subjects of testicular experiments, and my cousin Zsófi, fourteen at the time, who was waved by Doctor Mengele’s baton into the group of those capable of work. She endured the ordeal and came home. All the others ended up as ashes.
I spent the summer of 1944 mainly on the balcony of my Aunt Gizella’s Budapest apartment on the fourth floor of 36 Ern? Hollán Street. I could see the corner from there and would wait for my parents to appear, coming up from Saint Stephen Ring. They never did.
Aunt Gizu’s husband, Uncle Andor, had served his country as a first lieutenant in the First World War. A glass case housing porcelain and silver knickknacks also contained a small burgundy cushion for his war decorations: a signum laudis, iron crosses, and various other medals of honor. Having failed to gain special status in light of his war record, he would haunt the Budapest Jewish Council during the hours Jews were permitted to circulate, and bring back reassuring news.
Uncle Andor was far from the pride of the family, but he did save our lives: when the Gestapo took our parents off, it was Uncle Andor who sent the letter of invitation. That he would later abandon us was the result of duress, but rescue us he did. Not a handsome man, he carried himself as dashingly as he could, holding his chin high and pulling his shoulders back. Always the “gentleman,” he ate corn on the cob and peaches with a knife and fork. There was something cloyingly condescending in his manner: he would give me encouraging pats on the back. But he also indulged in surprising and graceless outbursts of emotion.
Back in the twenties Andor had sent twenty-one red roses to Gizella, my mother’s older sister, to win her dowry and settle his debts. After they said their vows, he asked my grandfather—proudly at first, though ultimately on his knees—to keep his money in his, Andor’s, bank, because how would it look for the young man if even his wife’s father had no faith in his institution. Grandfather acceded and transferred his accounts. The next day Andor’s bank declared bankruptcy and my grandfather went broke through the good offices of his son-in-law. With the family’s support Andor rented an apartment in Budapest, opening a glove shop nearby and securing them a comfortable bourgeois existence.
Uncle Andor was the air-raid captain in his five-story building and would make his way with a squeaky lamp up and down between the shelter and the ground floor. He wore a shiny helmet that barely revealed his prideful, jutting chin and pink dewlap. By September the Jews were required to squeeze together into a smaller space, and we had to move, because he, Aunt Gizi, and our two cousins Ági and Jancsi got so small a room that it barely held their four cots. I remember the heavy smell of the friendly but unfamiliar woman and children. There was no place for us.
Aunt Zsófi lived in the next building. She was not a blood relative but the wife of Dr. Gyula Zádor, my father’s cousin. By then my two cousins, István and Pál Zádor, were living there, along with Aunt Zsófi’s son, Péter Polonyi, who was nearly our age. The face of a man with close-cropped graying hair emerges from the fog of memory. I liked his family name: Mandula, “Almond.” I also recall a child a little older than me. Since we were forbidden to go out into the street, we played in the hallway. Aunt Zsófi was willing to let us live there as long as Uncle Andor’s family took care of feeding us. For the first few days we still w
ent back to our relatives’ room for lunch.
Then came 15 October, the day Regent Horthy announced on the radio that he had requested a cease-fire. It was a bright autumn Sunday morning. People flowed out into the street. We too were giddy with the news. Everyone in the building—women and children, old and young—was Jewish. The old men climbed a ladder to take down the yellow paper star on the plank over the entrance. Some ripped off the yellow stars from their coats right there in the street. We might go on living after all, go home, find our parents; everything might again be as it had been in the days of a peacetime that perhaps never was. We waited for news of confirmation; the radio broadcast nothing but some incomprehensible public announcements: the Regent’s address was not followed up by official substantiation.
We walked around our block. Not everyone in the neighborhood had dared to remove the emblem from the doorways of Jewish buildings, but one of the children had set fire to the yellow cardboard star and we stood around watching it burn. A couple not wearing yellow stars strolled past arm in arm. “See how insolent they’ve become,” said a man in a hat to the woman in a hat. The new armed command was nowhere in evidence, but German military vehicles and trucks full of green-shirted men with Arrow Cross armbands raced along the Ring wearing looks of agitated determination.
A Jew asked a policeman whether there were any new regulations, whether we could now go outside after curfew. Officially we had the right to be in public areas only from eleven in the morning until five in the afternoon. Uncertainty was everywhere. What were we to do now that things had taken a 180-degree turn and official talk was of peace, not heroic battle, when the old rules seemed no longer to apply and Jews were not partitioned off from the Aryan “national organism”? What should we Jews be doing once the law no longer permitted persecution? That day we had no idea what to do on our own behalf.
By that night we had: the cease-fire had merely been a clumsy move by a clumsy regent, who had informed the German ambassador of his intention before telling his own troops! Szálasi, the leader of the Arrow Cross, announced the regent’s removal, declaring that we would now fight even more resolutely at the side of our great German allies to win the war and cleanse our fatherland—of me. Extermination was next. Vermin, cockroach, Jew—you’re done for! The will of steel was there; the rest was merely a matter of execution. It was important to remain discreet, since there were still about one hundred thousand Jews in Budapest and the open murder of so many people might create a mood of defeatism among the Christian population, but slaughter was on the way, a St. Bartholomew’s night. Stay away from your home, hide if you can, or blend into the crowd, fade into the background, don’t be conspicuous or you’ll get yourself popped off.
We looked down through the open roof at the cinema screen: the Jew-baiting propaganda film I Came from Tarnopol was still playing. We trotted up and down the hallways of our building and even dared to go outside, where we excitedly discussed developments. We were wild game and fearful of the hunters, who, though little people like us, had been supplied by politics with weapons and the authorization to kill even children and the aged for as long as the yellow star was legal.
My view was that since I was innocent the laws that ordered my extermination were themselves illegal. I had seen little snots go around killing as easily as one shoots a hare or swats a fly, all in the name of our state, our fatherland. We were dealing with the ultimate enemy, the one who claims your life, and for want of a better method he was prepared to shoot you into the Danube and let the water carry you off.
We took a powder, as people used to say. Uncle Andor laid out his plan to us with sober self-confidence: we were to hide in the basement workshop they called the glove factory, three blocks away. We couldn’t take much, as the Arrow Cross was patrolling the area and we had to be inconspicuous. We could sleep on the cutting table and wash at the basin in the toilet. We couldn’t turn on the lights, but when the sun was shining enough light came into the room at midday to read by. Not hearing any shooting outside, we hoped the worst would not come. By the second day certain comforts made their absence felt in the dark workshop, particularly to Uncle Andor, who noticed in the morning that he had left his shaving brush at home. A painful loss. Though you could rub up a little rudimentary foam with the tip of your finger after wetting the skin and applying soap, neither the operation nor its result was aesthetically satisfactory. Uncle Andor felt it was inadvisable to return home (though the St. Bartholomew’s night had not materialized), but he did want that shaving brush. The simplest solution in Uncle Andor’s eyes (after excluding the draconian options of brushless shaving and not shaving at all) was for me to fetch the brush.
I set off. There were soldiers wearing armbands standing at the gate of the third building down. It was drizzling. Perhaps they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. They called me over.
“Hey kid, come over here. Are you a Jew?”
“What makes you ask?”
“Well, you could be,” they said.
“I could,” said I.
“Well, are you?”
“What makes you ask?” I said, returning to my original question.
“Hey, that’s the way Jews talk.”
“Are you a Jew?” I asked.
“What makes you ask?” he said.
“You know how they talk.”
“Drop your pants.”
I didn’t move. We stared at each other.
“Well?”
“It’s raining.”
“All right. Get going.”
He and I both knew the score. He just didn’t feel like killing me.
The rest of the way was incident-free. When I got to the apartment, the elderly ladies asked me excitedly where the family had spent the night. I no longer remember what I came up with—something about being guests somewhere—but they got a peek of me slipping the shaving brush into my pocket from the shelf below the bathroom mirror. “You came for that?” asked one of the ladies.
“Good-bye,” I said.
On the corner I saw Arrow Cross men coming up Hollán Street at a run. I took a quick turn to the left, hoping to get back to my family via a Pozsonyi Avenue detour, but I didn’t realize they would be making parallel runs, and in large numbers, and that they would not only be coming down Pozsonyi Avenue in a row that spanned the entire street, but also from behind, from the Saint Stephen Ring, to sweep up everyone in sight. In those days it was not unusual to find Jews at midday in the New Leopold Town district. Those they detained were dispatched to a brick factory in Old Buda, and from there they would be sent westward, on foot. There were still a few spots where Jews could be packed off onto railroad cars. It would be a few weeks before the authorities adopted the simplified procedure of fencing in an area and shooting people into the Danube.
I saw a thin man wearing glasses and a white armband trying to explain his exceptional status: he had once risked his life fighting Béla Kun’s commune. The Arrow Cross man was silent for a moment, then spit a cigarette butt into his face and led him off to the side. People stood in line to have their papers checked. It wasn’t enough to have a document with an official seal; you had to answer questions.
I picked a line where a man in a leather coat and a hat with a flipped-up visor, hands on hips, was putting people through the questions. When there were only two people in front of me, I slipped down on my hands and knees and crawled off past his brown hunting boots: there was no way he could keep track of what was going on with all the people milling around. I was careful to amble my way back to the workshop, going around the block and making sure no one saw me enter.
“So you’re back,” said Uncle Andor, kindly patting my head. He immediately had a shave using plenty of cologne, then paced up and down stroking his chin. The lunch hour was approaching. Uncle Andor said the workshop was not a good hiding place, so one by one we should all go back to where we had been staying. As for my sister and me, we could go to his place for lunch after four, u
ntil which time we were to wait “with that woman,” meaning Aunt Zsófi. He liked to speak disparagingly of her. But when we rang the bell at 9 Hollán Street at four o’clock, the door was opened by the same elderly lady who had noticed my little maneuver with the shaving brush that morning. When I asked where the family was, she said that my uncle, his wife, and their two children had departed with their luggage. Where they had gone she did not know.
There we stood, Éva and I, at a loss what to do. It took a little time for us to grasp that our relatives had left for a hiding place, that Uncle Andor had procured them false papers with which they would register as a Christian family of Transylvanian refugees under a new name and stay with acquaintances who had agreed to take them in for money. We went back the next day and the day after, but there was no news.
Half a year later, in April of 1945, I caught a glimpse of Aunt Gizu on a street corner in Nagyvárad. I did a double take, but she went her way on the other side of the street. A week later we met face to face. She invited me to walk with her, but I demurred. She told me their new address. It was the address of relatives from Várad who had disappeared into thin air and whose apartment she and her family had taken over. I quickly took my leave with a shaky promise to visit.
On that night, 15 October, Aunt Zsófi also went into hiding with the boys, Péter, István, and Pali. They took very few bags and went to the Margaret Ring, where an acquaintance had given them his apartment. They entered without yellow stars. They had only just set down their bags when a resident phoned and told them to make a quick getaway because the concierge had reported them as possible Jews. Rushing down the stairs, they saw the elevator moving up with armed Arrow Cross men inside. They heard the pounding on the door upstairs and scurried back to their wonted place of fear.
Aunt Zsófi not only gave us lodging; she gave us food and care as well. After taking in my sister and me, she had five children in the two rooms of a good-sized temporary apartment. She sold her things to feed us. Meanwhile, we children thought up ways to escape—climbing down a rope from the bathroom window onto a garage roof—should the Arrow Cross come to take us away.
A Guest in my Own Country Page 5
