A Guest in my Own Country

by George Konrad

  Every morning, when we were permitted outside, Aunt Zsófi set out to procure papers. One or another neutral embassy took apartment buildings under its wing, hanging signs over the main entrance indicating that a given house was under the protection of the Swiss, Swedish, Spanish, or Vatican mission. Papal protection was said to be the best. If you couldn’t make it into a safe house, you went to the ghetto, where they had started dismantling the high fence and gates. Owing to Aunt Zsófi’s secret morning trips we had a good chance of getting letters of protection from the Swiss.

  I did not grieve over the loss of Uncle Andor’s supervision, as I felt more at home with Aunt Zsófi and my cousins from Berettyóújfalu. We were a natural “we” again, a branch of my father’s family. Dr. Gyula Zádor, Zsófia’s husband and István and Pali’s paternal uncle, was interned in a work camp. A neurologist and psychiatrist, he had studied in Heidelberg and practiced in Zurich, and returned home in 1938. He had been the personification of irony in my childhood mythology. For some inner reason a chilly element would infiltrate his otherwise warm, heartfelt smile. It gave me pause: he seemed to be making fun at my expense.

  Here is an example. When I was five, I had a hernia operation, after which I screamed at the top of my lungs for them to remove my bonds: I had just come around from the anesthesia and could not tolerate being tied down. It was outrageous not to be trusted with my own decisions, as if my five-year-old self lacked the brains to lie motionless and rest after the operation without being humiliatingly strapped to the bed. Besides, the white gauze they used, the white bed, the staff all in white, the white room—it offended my sense of color.

  My governess Lívia’s camel-hair housecoat was of a warm beige. Whenever she touched me—to give me a spoonful of medicine or hold my left arm down and take my temperature—she did so with kindness. But the nurse—that unfamiliar, middle-aged excuse for a woman—had no right to lay a hand on me just because she happened to be disguised in a white shell. I wanted her out of there, her and her energetic, aggressive benevolence! I had stiffened my body into a girder and was screaming bloody murder—No! I won’t give in! Unbind me!—when a familiar face appeared at the foot of my bed. Thick, graying hair, a high forehead, and that cheeky smile, incredulous at my rage, certain I was playacting. Where did that white-gowned figure get off looking into my soul? Even if he was Uncle Gyula behind the white mask.

  Our family doctor, Dr. Spernáth, would come and see us in civilian clothes, a gray suit. Éva and I would hide behind the dining-room curtains so he wouldn’t be able to “stick us” or so we wouldn’t have to take that disgusting cod liver oil or just for the sake of hiding, so we could later appear, forcing back giggles of complicity. Uncle Spinach (for that was what we called him) would talk politics with my father even as he listened to our chests. This tickled unpleasantly, because Dr. Spernáth was bald and his cold pate had a medicinal smell that turned our stomachs. We shuddered when that head pressed against our bare skin. Yet despite his white gown Uncle Gyula said he would recommend that they untie my straps if I stopped squirming. The pact was made and kept.

  Some thirty years later I asked another ironist, the psychologist Ferenc Mérei, whether he had known Uncle Gyula. He said something to the effect that he had been considered half-crazy. In 1941 Dr. Gyula Zádor had rented a large apartment in the middle of town, at 5 Szép Street, furnished it in his wife’s Bauhaus taste, and opened a private practice with his Heidelberg and Zurich diplomas and his reputation as chief neurologist at the Jewish Hospital. There might have been no Second World War; he had simply followed the logical path for a man of his standing. His beautiful wife, whom he wooed away from a respected and successful journalist, was a friend to poets, painters, and all kinds of revolutionaries.

  Uncle Gyula himself came from a more modest background. His family in Berettyóújfalu gave him his portion of the inheritance early to get him started. Their house served as both shop and workshop. They were their own bosses and enjoyed looking in on the warm, private side of life whenever they felt so inclined. The shop and workshop gave onto the street, the world, while the back and upstairs room belonged to the Biedermeier zone, the realm of passions, quick successions of joy and despair, passion and resentment. Their life was beautiful one moment, unbearable the next.

  So this Berettyóújfalu citizen of the world, who had the temerity to look down on us, natives of the same town, had taken up residence in the capital as if everything were perfectly normal, as if the number one business of the day were to build his patient base and publish his findings in domestic and international professional journals. As he sat under the arbor in his Újfalu garden I would stare at his white cord trousers, yellow shoes, and bluish-pink silk shirt. He would let us villagers turn our finest phrases, but even as he listened he was forming his own big-city opinions about us. We were naive; irony was something we had no experience of; we did not realize that existence is ambiguous and even love jaundiced. Uncle Gyula’s village optimism was tainted with the city-dweller’s ability to see through things. The city slicker pokes his nose into everything and always seems to know what cards you’ve got. As if people didn’t reveal their true selves the very first time they shake hands! When Uncle Gyula first gave me that look of his, he was not yet forty. Now that I could be his father, I feel that had he not been killed his true, naive nature would have won out. (Actually, it did win out, though in a self-destructive way: through his village burgher’s respect for the law he voluntarily returned to a labor camp, leaving his wife behind.)

  Aunt Zsófi was a delicate, thin figure of a woman. Everything about her was silvery: her voice, her eyes, and the few graying locks in her thick, black hair. I often had the feeling that we little wild creatures amused her. She had a son, Péter Polonyi, and acted as guardian for my two cousins, István and Pál Zádor. And by the good graces of fate and Uncle Andor my sister Éva and I added two more to her charge. Four boys make a lot of noise, and Aunt Zsófi would occasionally get a headache and ask us to disappear—for a while at least.

  In the fall of 1944 Aunt Zsófi must have been thirty. She sometimes had a sardonic glint in her eye, but her voice had a delicacy to it that came from a distant shore. Never one to hesitate about doing what her taste dictated, she treated us as her very own, a single mother to five children. She even managed to see to it that we got through those abominable times with our souls intact.

  Her husband would have been able to skip out on the forced-labor camp: he was granted a day’s leave to visit his family at Christmas of 1944. Despite Zsófi’s entreaties the doctor returned to the camp: he had no desire to get his family into trouble, he had his sick comrades to treat, and what is more he had promised his charitable commander to return. But while he was away, the charitable commander had been replaced, and the honest Doctor Zádor and his patients—poets and scholars all—ended up in a mass grave.

  Jews were still being deported to Auschwitz from Budapest’s outer districts of Újpest and Kispest as late as the summer. They could have come into the city on foot or by tram, but they followed orders and went to the railway station. The communists among them—the Zionists, the resistors, the bold—got hold of false papers and went into hiding. The more resigned and perhaps fearful middle class tried to ride out the dangerous times in safe houses. The safe houses were inhabited by better-off, secular Jews who had managed to contact one of the neutral diplomatic embassies. The poorer, orthodox Jews, who had black beards and hats, wives wrapped in shawls, sons with side-locks, and daughters with big eyes, went to the ghetto. That was their place: it had the greatest concentration of synagogues. Both they and the neutral diplomats must have felt this. But it was open season in the ghetto: drunken Arrow Cross men would go in and shoot at will.

  Swiss letters of protection, Schützpässe, were distributed in an operation organized by the Swiss consul, Carl Lutz. His name comes up less often than that of his Swedish colleague Raoul Wallenberg, though Lutz saved as many people as Wallenberg. Unde
r the protection of the Helvetic Confederation we moved to 49 Pozsonyi Avenue, a building where my greatest respect went to three or four young men hiding out in the cellar, about whom people whispered that they were resistors and had defected from the military. There were perhaps eighty of us living in a three-room apartment on the fourth floor. At night we would stack up any furniture that could not be slept on. Not everyone got a bed or mattress, but everyone had at least a rug. The four of us boys slept on mattresses on the floor by the window behind a pile of furniture. It was like an ongoing house party. There was always someone to talk to. For two hours every morning we could leave the building, five children clinging to a beautiful young woman. Aunt Zsófi protected us, as perhaps we did her. Whoever asked for her papers was astounded. “Are they all yours?” The crush diminished as time passed: some people moved down to hiding places, while others were abducted during spur-of-the-moment raids and shot into the Danube.

  In the winter of 1944–45 I saw any number of dead bodies. I could picture myself among them, but the tasks of day-to-day existence obscured most of my imaginings. Danger makes you practical. Only at isolated moments do you face the possibility of death—when someone holds a pistol to your head, for example. Then you feel: yes, it could happen. You become an adult from the moment you face your own death, which means I have been an adult from the age of eleven. For some people it happens earlier, for others later, and there are those for whom the moment never comes.

  Death is hardly pleasant, nor is mortal danger. But you can be standing on a rooftop terrace with fighter planes machine-gunning above and feel the whole scene is not all that serious. So let’s just slide around in our hobnailed boots on the ice rink we have made with a few buckets of water. Not all that serious later saved me from succumbing to melodramatic moods.

  I owe my life to a benevolent chain of coincidences. It has proved an enduring gift to recognize, at the age of eleven, the bald fact that I could be killed at any time, and to have learned how to act in such a situation. In the winter of 1944–45 I thought of death as I might have thought of, say, firewood: there was nothing unusual about it. It was outside my control, like drawing the wrong card.

  Beautiful young women in ski boots and Norwegian sweaters were smoking cigarettes, their abundant hair combed smooth into a bun, their long legs crossed in ski pants. They laughed at all kinds of things I did not understand. They were different from the small-town beauties I had known: more malicious, more enigmatic, radical yet refined. They spoke of the French surrealists, German expressionists, and Russian abstractionists like old friends. They were artists, dancers, left-wingers—and they stretched so beautifully. They would sing for us children, sing the “Internationale” and “Dubinushka” in Hungarian.

  But none amazed me more than Aunt Zsófi. I would have loved to perform some heroic act for her and did not dare to so much as scratch myself in her sight. Her slightly indolent voice would ask, “My knight in shining armor, will you accompany me?” I would have accompanied her to the gates of hell. For Aunt Zsófi’s sake I was willing to hold thick novels under my arms to keep my elbows in while eating. The more fearful moved down into the cellar, but Aunt Zsófi was unable to separate cleanliness from human dignity. She would have found it repulsive for us to hide from the explosive and incendiary bombs, the cannonballs and artillery mines, down in the bomb shelter, the putrid darkness, the chaotically congested company of so many ill-washed bodies. What if it did raise the level of risk a notch.

  “Dignity means more than security,” she would say. “We are not going to let the lice take us over.” We did not go down to the cellar even when the sirens started. The most sensible choice was the rooftop terrace, where the winter sun shone brightly every morning even in January, though at temperatures of twenty degrees below freezing. We would pour out a few buckets of water and make a fabulous skating rink for ourselves. With a running start you could slide from one end to the other. Machine-gun rounds from Ratas, Soviet fighter planes, landed on the ice with a pop. We always looked up to see where the bombs pouring from their bellies would fall. A cloud of dust or smoke indicated whether the bomb was explosive or incendiary.

  From the street below came the rumble of trams carrying trunks of ammunition to the front, now just a few blocks away, and the voices of Germans shouting to one another. The Russians were getting close, but the Arrow Cross was still goring Jews and Christian defectors in the neighborhood. The word “gore” was on every public poster; it meant kill on the spot and leave the body behind. With weapons exploding in the street, documents meant nothing: only drunkenness and fear had meaning—and the sympathy or antipathy of the moment. The armed men in armbands had plenty of people to shoot, though they had begun to sense they couldn’t execute every single Jew. They may even have had trouble getting into the man-hunting mood day in and day out. Filling the ice-flow-congested Danube with old ladies and young girls was an art whose charm was intermittent. Even the defenseless people they killed—and they could have killed as many as they pleased—even they expressed a modicum of resistance in their eyes, reinforced by the gaze of passersby, who watched the quiet winter coats being led down to the riverbank with some degree of empathy. Of course you needed to make time for other things too, like drinking and getting warm. It must also have occurred to the men in armbands that if the Russians were at the outskirts of the city—and with plenty of artillery too, judging from the din—they would hardly stop but forge on into the center. If they occupied the entire city, Arrow Cross troops could expect anything but decorations, not a pleasant thought by any means. The mood for murder flared up and flagged by turns.

  Shooting at Russians was dangerous; Jews were fish in a barrel. Life is a matter of luck, and death bad luck. You can do something for yourself, but not much, and sometimes pride keeps you from doing even that. Several people had been taken from the apartment the previous night. From the next room, not ours.

  I watch the Germans. Can they really believe they will drive back the Russians, just five blocks away? Intelligent as they are, they have no idea what they are and are not allowed to do. The Arrow Cross, on the other hand, are the bottom of the barrel, the school dropouts. Their only talent is for torturing cats. A child has to grow up to understand just how underdeveloped adults can be. A fourteen-year-old kid with a gun accompanies unarmed people down to the bank of the Danube. Instead of grabbing the gun from his hand, they go where he orders them. Most victims call it fate, but fate should cause fear and stir them to self-defense whether the threat be sleet falling on their garden or death at the hands of an enemy. Yet people much like pets get used to seeing their companions cut down around them. You can’t feel outrage and empathy every half hour. Standing out on the roof terrace, we hear the occasional sputter of shots. Someone (armed) checks the papers of someone else (unarmed). The former doesn’t like the latter’s face or papers, stands him against the wall, and shoots him dead. The people taken down to the Danube have to stand in a row, their faces to the river. The shots come from behind.

  Even so abundant a variety of violent deaths could not obscure the beauty of those dazzling winter mornings. In the shadow of our mortality bread became more like bread, jam more like jam. I gladly chopped all kinds of furniture into firewood. We even ventured down to the riverbank, where we chopped up a small pier. It was good dry pine that burned wonderfully with its white paint.

  We knew that the Russians had come in great numbers with tanks and heavy artillery. They had relatively fewer planes than the English and Americans, whose bombers arrived mostly later, in the summer of 1944; in the winter it was still the Ratas that thundered though the sky.

  Klára often stood out on the roof terrace, adjusting her black ponytail, tying and untying it. I would give it an occasional yank. She had a little birthmark at the base of her nose and a mole at the tip. In exchange for my services I was granted permission on that very terrace to plant a quick kiss on that mole. It was forbidden to tarry on the nose. Klára lik
ed to speak of parts of her body without possessive pronouns, as if they were independent beings: “The nose has had enough,” she informed me. We spent a lot of time wrestling. It was no easy task to pin Klára down: one of us, then the other would end up on top. Once in a while I managed to pin her shoulders to the horsehair mattress on the floor and lie on her belly, but I would get such a bite on the wrist that the rows of teeth left a lasting mark. “Do you have what it takes to hold your hand over the candle?” asked Klára. I did, and got a burn mark on my palm. Klára kissed it. I carefully slid my fist into my pocket, as if holding a sparrow.

  Klára could not stand being shut in and was incapable of spending the entire day in the safe house. The curfew for Jews did not apply to her. I would try to detain her. I was worried, but did not dog her heels. She would make the rounds of the neighborhood, then boast of what she had seen. When an officer asked for her papers, she lacked the nerve to answer his skeptical questions; she merely held her peace. They led Klára down to the Danube together with a long line of Jews. There she recognized one of her aunts and squeezed in next to her. The were all told to empty their pockets and stand with their hands up, facing the bare trees of Margaret Island, the freestanding piers of the bombed-out Margaret Bridge. Her aunt pitched forward into the river, but Klára was not hit. “You’re lucky my magazine ran out,” said the machine-gunner with a friendly laugh. “Now move it—and be good at home!” Thus did the junior (though no longer all that young) officer send her on her way.

  I opened the street door for Klára, having recognized the sound of her footsteps through the planked-up door. “Let’s stand here a minute,” she said. “Hold my hand. And don’t let me out tomorrow. Stay with me all day. Don’t tell Mother they shot Sári dead right at my side.”