A serene permanence seemed to abide in the weekly menu and starched caps worn by the house staff. Even if faces changed from Juliska to Piroska, from Erzsi to Irma, from Regina to Vilma, there was little change in the preparation and serving of food. The younger members of the family were at a loss to explain what intolerable problem lay behind a change in staff, as they were satisfied with all of them, from Juliska to Vilma. They all married properly, with a proper dowry. Nor could the younger generation understand the odd new relationships being forced not only on themselves, but on everyone around them. More than one of the well-provided for heirs made the case for cohabitation.
Now those days were gone too. I stood on the balcony in an overcoat, watching the spits of foam jostling on the rocks: the Körös was a sweeping mass of water even when low. I went to see Six Hours After the War with its images of camp prisoners and the unforgettable inside-left soccer star: every day an armed policeman in one uniform or another would take them to clear rubble. Once I had spent the requisite amount of time with the baby and the plump women in the warmth of the second floor, I would go up to my room and read or close my eyes and concentrate on the river’s thrum, gripping the armrests of my chair and waving my head back and forth until I was dizzy and could no longer think.
My month there passed quickly, even though I visited the bureau for returned deportees every morning. Camps began to be liberated at the end of April and the beginning of May. The men and women would arrive in their striped uniforms or various combinations of striped and civilian garments. They were gaunt, and their voices seemed to emerge from the bottom of a well. Their eyes were on constant alert, anticipating the next blow. The clients—the deportees—gathered in a large hall. Behind the windows at the counter, clerks would refer to a list that might shed light on who was alive and who dead. They also distributed civilian clothes. Many departed carrying the striped garments; others left the camp uniform there, better forgotten.
I asked the none-too-friendly woman behind the window whether she could tell me anything about my parents, which she could not. Leaving her our present address, I sat down on a chair in the hall and waited for them to come, because here they would receive not only civilian clothing but also a bit of money and information about where we were. And where would they go if not here? My mother, who was from Nagyvárad, would naturally come here: everyone went to the city of their birth. And it was from Nagyvárad that her older sisters and their children and grandchildren had left for the gas chambers. Someone might come back, though not the children. They would most certainly not be coming.
I tried to imagine my parents entering the hall, stepping up to the window, and asking after us, imagine myself dashing over to them and touching them. I wondered whether they had changed much, whether we would spot one another easily. Returnees showed us photographs of faces looking out at the camera with candor. The intervening year had carved the knowledge of death and mourning on one and all, even the most ordinary. One told me my parents’ chances of survival would be better if they happened to have ended up in Austria rather than Auschwitz, though nothing was yet certain. So I found myself hoping that my parents were in what was still German-controlled territory—in other words, in constant mortal danger—because it would have been worse to imagine them in liberated Auschwitz.
I had heard about what had happened there. Since no other Jewish children from Nagyvárad and the surrounding region had survived, I was the only child waiting for parents at the bureau. The women sitting on the bench next to me explained that the Polish–Jewish inmates would take the children from their hands and pass them to a grandmother or other old woman: they wanted to save the younger women from having to accompany their children to the gas chambers if so directed by Dr. Mengele. The doctor must have particularly hated children if he sent young women and others still capable of working to be gassed just for holding the hand of a child: the children had to die, immediately, unconditionally. Children and those in physical contact with them were motioned by the doctor to the right the way you snap your hand over a mosquito buzzing around you in summer on the terrace. He saw my coevals as pests, not children. He saw the children’s faces, yet did not see them, his eyes cataracted over with words, an officer, intelligent and imperious, carrying out his command to the letter. And since the command was to exterminate every last trace of them, there was no place for individual consideration: each Jewish child was a mere speck in the mass. It did not matter what sort of children they were; all that mattered was that they were Jewish. People said the doctor was no more than a vain young man with a handsome face, more interested in twins—that is, his scientific career—than in his anthropomorphic guinea pigs. What a nice gift for the Führer if medicine could help Germanic—or preferably just German—mothers to give birth to twins and limit the propagation of others. In a short time Europe would be teeming with fertile Germans.
At any rate, I was a real curiosity at the bureau. Some parents would not look at me; others looked at me and cried. One wanted to give me something I didn’t accept; another shook me, then cried like the others. It was too much in the end. They had my address; they could find me. I stopped going.
I recently had a visit from a Berettyóúfalu acquaintance, the writer Tibor Tardos, who is now seventy-eight. For me he will always be the legend, the big boy. His father, the lawyer Henrik Tardos, was a friend of my father’s who died of diabetes at the age I am now. I remember his bald pate as if it were yesterday. A clear-sighted man, he sent Tibor to Paris, where he preferred chasing women and tennis balls to studying: he wanted to be a writer. Bored with politics, he would not have thought of leaving on his own, but in 1938, after Munich, his father realized that the Allies would not protect Eastern Europe from Hitler—in other words, that our fate was sealed. He was a tall, affable man. He dressed well and thought straight. Not one to fall for rhetoric, he sensed the interests behind the words. He presented the county health officer with a gold cigarette case, and Tibor was released from military service and allowed to return to Paris. There he wrote surrealist books that his father would proudly show me, though he understood not a word. When he sent his son a telegram, he would ask my mother to translate it, since she was the only one in his circle of acquaintances who more or less knew French. After the war I stood before their bookcase as his father took down Tibor’s books like relics. And relics they were.
“It was a good village,” said the aged Tibor to me. “People lived side by side in peace until those German insanities started happening.” Life had an order to it. In the movie theater owned by the father of our friend Karcsi Makk, the boxes on the left were for Jews, the boxes on the right for Christians. They would tip their hats to one another and nod their ambiguous nods. They were separate, yet together. Young peasants sat in the cheaper seats in front of them, Gypsy children in the first row. On Sunday afternoons the Apollo Theater offered a cross-section of village society.
The generation of our fathers needed no incentive to work. Diligence was in their blood, though there were those who aped aristocratic ways: hunting, playing cards, and taking drink with the gentry. Jews had their own tennis court, right next to the Christians’, and the Jewish bourgeoisie engaged German governesses for their children and had them taught French or English if they could afford it. Friendships were separate from professional interests. Henrik Tardos in his capacity as lawyer for the Berettyóújfalu Jewish community demanded that my father remove one meter from a newly built multistory house. The community held that the house infringed upon the three-meter-wide service road running from the back of our garden to the synagogue behind it, the road I looked down on from the balcony every Friday evening. That is when the men in black hats would walk three abreast, their tallises rolled up under their arms and their prayer books in their hands, deep in conversation and not the least cramped for space. But the community leaders, friends and former classmates of my father, proved unmovable. They may have been annoyed at the idea of a multistory house on t
he main road, the only one at the time besides the community center, because on the Great Plain towns tended to expand horizontally into the distance. Imagination moved horizontally, and my father’s vertical vision needed curbing. The proceedings went all the way to the Supreme Court, and although my father won the suit his friendship with Tardos remained intact. Nor was the subject broached at their Sunday-afternoon gatherings over coffee, cake, and liqueur.
I was surprised that Tibor did not know what had happened to his father. He was aware that he had been deported to Austria, but not that the Gestapo had arrested him with my father and one of the Kepes brothers. The other Kepes brother was taken to Auschwitz but came back with a number on his arm. They were robust men, not particularly well-educated but quick to take the initiative, worthy of respect, and full of good will. One was a lumber merchant; the other dealt in wines. They saw to it that their children went to university, but like Tibor’s father they never left Berettyóújfalu. Their wives died in Auschwitz with one of their daughters. They were beautiful, educated girls, like Dr. Spernáth’s daughter. Dr. Spernáth’s son was a strapping young man. He is alive to this day, having survived the war, thanks to false papers, as a Wehrmacht officer. His parents were killed in Auschwitz.
There was reason enough for the Jews of Berettyóújfalu to be politically active and save their children by sending them away, even if they themselves remained. They were fine where they were: they had built houses, made lives, and earned reputations in plain view of everyone. Be it honor or shame, they had brought it upon themselves. They were known for the quality of the firewood, the wine, the cart-axles they sold. My son Miklós used to make fun of me when I asked him about the shoes he bought. “Are they nice and comfortable?” He may have realized I was quoting my father, but I approved of my father’s concern wholeheartedly.
My mother and father came back from their Austrian internment camp at the end of May 1945. They cleaned out the house and started up the business again. They did not give the issue a second thought, as it would never have occurred to my father not to pick up where he had left off. At first there were just four shelves of goods, then six, then twelve. The shelves filled fast, as there were five children to support.
As a survivor, I owe my greatest gratitude to Providence, yet much as I would like to regard it as something other than coincidence, I am uneasy with every case of providential mercy. For if the Lord of the Fates willed my survival, then why not the survival of the other children? They were no more guilty than I, after all. I cannot be so generous as to hand over Vera, Gyuri, Kati, Jutka, Baba, Jancsi, Gabi, or Ica, to say nothing of Aunt Sarolta, Uncle Dolfi, Aunt Giza, Uncle Náci, Aunt Ilonka, Uncle Pista, Aunt Margit, Uncle Béla, Uncle Gyula and the rest to complete oblivion.
In place of a childhood there is an absence, a story that has not been and perhaps cannot be fully told. Two generations after the fact, I feel prompted to preserve the memory of the Jews of Berettyóújfalu. The synagogue is now an iron-goods warehouse. There was some talk of turning it into a concert hall, but nothing came of it. The Jews who return to visit generally go to see Annus Lisztes, a sharp woman in her eighties, one of the original inhabitants, who lives in the house of the former rabbi. “Come more often. It’s your home town, isn’t it?” she said to me last summer.
In August 1945 we got a phone call from the border crossing at Biharkeresztes informing us that István and Pali, two orphans traveling from their aunt’s in Kolozsvár (which had once again become part of Romania) to their uncle’s in Berettyóújfalu, were waiting there to be picked up. My parents happened to be taking a summer break in Hajdúszoboszló, and my father had left the business in my hands. I went to a carter who said he was too tired to go anywhere, but his horse and cart would go if I drove them. This was a staggering offer on his part; it was tantamount to entrusting a boy of thirteen with an automobile. Until then I had been allowed to hold the reins only if the coachman sat next to me on the box. Anyway, the carter hitched up the horses, and I climbed onto the box and gave the reins a tug. I could have taken the old road, but chose the new one, so I could drive the length of the town.
The sun had abandoned the stubbled field, leaving the landscape to cool. It was dark by the time I reached Biharkeresztes. I would have liked to hug István, but he just held out his hand. I babbled something about the horses. He had come from a real city where the cream of the Transylvanian Hungarian intellectuals were regular visitors at his uncle’s villa. Whatever I told him was a mere village anecdote.
“How is stabilization going?” asked István, to raise the level of conversation. He was referring to the monetary reform. I was proud to give him some kind of answer and disappointed he had no interest in my cart, whose progress he called slow and bumpy. This was undoubtedly so. He barely watched while I watered the horses at the sweep. When I mentioned that horses had been stabled at the Újfalu synagogue by the Germans, then the Hungarians, then the Soviets, all he said was “Hm.” He was through with Jews now that they had been swept away by history. I mentioned Uncle Béla, but this too irritated him. I still had my parents, whereas he was orphaned and had no reason to love his parents’ bourgeois reality. He said that he had become a communist and that his father, had he survived, would be his enemy.
István had read Stalin’s The Questions of Leninism several times and had even taken a crack at Das Kapital; I had read nothing of the sort. István had put up communist posters; I had put up nothing of the sort. I had attended various election rallies, drawn by the fact that there were several parties: what I liked about the communists was that they were communists; I liked the smallholders because they were smallholders. István had joined the Hungarian Communist Party at the age of thirteen. By fifteen he was an official Party activist, earning a salary by teaching Das Kapital to adults. At twenty he was expelled from the Party and the university for something he had written, and at twenty-three he played a significant role in the Revolution in Győr, so significant that when the Soviet tanks rolled in, his boss and friend, the elderly Attila Szigethy, told him to leave the country. Szigethy himself waited calmly to be arrested, and a short time later was to fall from the fourth-floor window of political police headquarters onto the cement courtyard below. I never joined the Party and never thought I should leave the country, not even after 1956.
István was more theoretical than I and had a more sensitive and radical morality than my own. He was a revolutionary, while I am conservative by nature: I prefer to let things be. My worldview was eclectic, and I did not adhere to any doctrine. Flitting about and refraining from headlong commitment, I could always correct my excesses the next day. Everything István said had an intelligent beginning, middle, and end. If I took a stab at something and he liked it, he would make an approving click with his tongue. He formulated every problem as if speaking to himself.
“This Revolution,” he said to me at the end of October 1956, as we stood holding machine guns on the student national guard truck, “is not only against Stalin; it has no use for Lenin either.” I was not the least shaken by this statement. By that point István had run through every conceivable issue based on an analysis of data he had smuggled from the State Planning Office and on his experience in the countryside.
“The only benefit of emigration is that I’ve got hold of a copy of Kierkegaard,” he wrote to me from Oxford. What came after the defeat of the Revolution, a slightly less-communistic, more bourgeois communism, was something István did not find particularly tasteful. No one could be homesick for that! Had he not emigrated, he might well have hanged. If that kind of thing was to my liking, I was welcome to it.
István pretty much knew all three volumes of Das Kapital by heart, but capital itself left him cold. He was found dead in his bed in March 1960, a doctoral student at Trinity College. Gas poisoning, signs of suicide, no note. The previous night he had returned to his rented flat from his brother Pali’s birthday party. He had moved out of College lodgings, which he regarded as a rubber
-walled sanatorium and where he had had a servant. The housemaid called the police. He was buried in Oxford. The Budapest Esti Hírlap printed a small obituary on the last page. Not long ago someone said he had it on reliable authority that István had had “suicide committed on him.” He was the best mind of the young post-1956 Hungarian diaspora, which may have given rise to the statement. Pali looked into the matter, but the source had gone silent.
Some time in the seventies I traveled to Berettyóújfalu with my children and our American cousin Tony, Pali’s son. We cut a path through the man-tall weeds to the family plot, where Tony cried out, “Jesus Christ! I’m standing on my grandmother!” It was Aunt Mariska’s marble grave. My daughter Dorka, tired of the graves, wanted to swim, so we sent her down to the Berettyó. The water smelled like pig manure. One of the cooperative stables was emptying its wastewater into it.
We walked the length of the town. The single-story middle-class houses on the main street, the homes of vanished Jews, stood gray and peeling. I drank pálinka in the railway bar. Everything was as it had been forty years earlier except that the hansoms were gone and the restaurant had become a bar. On the train an elderly Gypsy had given his son a slap for suspecting his father of stealing his money. The boy put up no defense, only cried and vowed to kill him. “I cannot strike my father, but I can shove a knife into his throat.” A policeman with a German shepherd and a truncheon appeared on the scene. “Jesus fucking Christ! Why don’t you respect your father? Put down that knife, and don’t you be stabbing anyone on me here in the train. You’ll get it back in Budapest.”
A Guest in my Own Country Page 11
