Did she, too, live in terror of being deported? How much did all that have to do with her illness and her paranoia?
Was her paranoia the result of her fear that my father’s activities in Hungary would be uncovered?
I remembered some things my mother had said to my father when I was a child:
“You are still fighting your war. We lost it! We lost it!”
And: “I have always known the truth, haven’t I?”
And: “Did you forget the bad things that you learned in Hungary?”
And: “Liar! Liar! I believe not a word anymore! I have heard all the lies! I have seen through all the lies! I know what you are!”
And: “A murderer! Your son! Like you!”
I knew, of course, that many of the things she had said were a manifestation of her schizoid madness. I knew my father wasn’t a murderer or torturer, literally speaking. He didn’t kill or torture Jews with his own hands.
But did the words he wrote and said cause those who read and heard them to murder and torture Jews?
The only honest answer to that, it became evident to me, was … Yes, that was possible.
I remembered what Father John Mundweil had said about my mother and father: “I know more than you know about your parents. They are good people. Human. Like you. Like me. But good people. Both of them.”
I said to myself: Maybe Father John knew some things about them, but he didn’t know enough.
“You’re my friend,” I said to Gerry Messerman one day. “But I would understand if you told me you don’t want anything to do with this case.”
“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “I never imagined that I would defend anyone on these charges. And I know he doesn’t deserve me defending him.”
“Then don’t,” I said. “Please. You’re right.”
“I think your father is the most manipulative man I’ve met in all my years as an attorney and I’ve met some pretty manipulative people. I don’t care about your father, but I care about you.”
“You’re going to defend him because of me?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Do you know what would happen if this case went to trial? Do you know what the media would do with this? You’re the guy who wrote Music Box, about a war criminal and his child. You’re Hollywood’s most high-profile screenwriter. How would people out there feel in the future about paying millions of dollars to the son of an alleged or proven or deported war criminal? I’m going to do everything in my power not to let this go to trial and go to the press.”
“It’s more ironic than Music Box, Gerry,” I said. “A dad commits war crimes. He raises a kid who abhors any kind of bigotry. The kid becomes good friends with a prominent Jewish attorney. When the dad’s war crimes are discovered, the prominent Jewish attorney defends him against the war crimes—not because of the dad but because of the kid. The fact that the attorney is Jewish is key to helping the dad get away with what he did to other Jews. By raising a kid who loathes any kind of bigotry, the dad planted the seeds of his own escape.”
“That’s all occurred to me.” Gerry nodded. “I’ll trade you an irony. The dad has been a professional anti-Communist his whole life, partly to obscure the fact that he’s pro-Nazi. Then one day Communism falls. That’s the cause the dad has devoted his whole life to—the Fall of Communism. And that’s what causes him to be uncovered. Because for the first time, the Justice Department has access to records back there. The dad never would have been uncovered had Communism not fallen.”
I told my father that Gerry Messerman had agreed to represent him at the hearings.
“I will thank him,” he said. “It is a wonderful thing to do for me.”
“He’s not doing it for you,” I said. “He loathes what you did. He’s doing it because of me.”
My father seemed surprised.
“Oh,” he said.
And then, after a moment, he said, “But it will be very good for me to have a Jew representing me in this situation, no?”
He saw the scorn in my eyes as I turned away from him. I heard him say, “But it’s true, no? Why are you so angry?”
Gerry gave my father a list of questions to answer. Among them:
Q—Did you see the movie Music Box?
A—Yes I did.
Q—How did you respond to it?
A—I told Joe I am proud of him. I congratulate him. I told him the drama is a perfect literary piece.
Q—Do you have some feeling about the effect that the investigation of you might have upon Joe?
A—Yes I do. I am deeply sorry. Maybe those Hungarians planned this who were angry with Music Box. Maybe they went to Justice Department to get me to get Joe. And they accomplish maybe what they planned. I am sorry.
Q—What are your feelings?
A—I told one Hungarian who was complaining against Joe: I love Joe because he is my son. I respect Joe because he is a talented writer. That means that I respect my son and love what he is doing. The Music Box tells the truth.
Q—Did Joe read any of your books?
A—You have to ask that from Joe.
Q—Did you ask him to read your books?
A—We are both writers. Perhaps not in the same category—he is, thank God, greater than me. But anyway we are writers. And a writer never ask another writer if he has read his book.
Q—What are your feelings about any of Joe’s work?
A—I am proud of Joe. His most important characteristic is the sense of justice. He hates crime against humanism, and he loves everybody and everything which is human. And that is the great gladness of my life after all the injustice I have seen.
I dreaded the start of the hearings. I was ashamed of what we already knew my father had done and was afraid, never mind his steadfast denials, of what else we’d find out.
Gerry had convinced the Office of Special Investigations not to hold the hearings in the federal building because of my high profile. They would be held, instead, in the conference room of his law office.
I told my agents in L.A. that I would have to be in Cleveland for an extended time because my father was ill.
I waited with my father in Gerry’s office as the OSI people filed into the conference room and then the three of us went in.
Neal Sher, the head of the OSI, was there with his top man, Eli Rosenbaum. I knew who these people were because I’d researched the OSI for Music Box, but I’d never met or spoken to them.
I admired their dedication to this cause and as I watched them, sitting there next to my father and Gerry Messerman, I thought to myself:
I’m sitting on the wrong side of the table.
With them was a Hungarian historian named Judith Schulmann. She had difficulty even looking at my father and I was sure she had lost relatives in the Holocaust.
I knew her aversion to my father’s face wasn’t directed at me, but I felt ashamed.
My instinct was to go to Judith Schulmann and beg for her forgiveness, even though I knew this was irrational: I’d done nothing wrong.
My father stared stonily at all of them.
Neal Sher questioned my father under oath:
Q—Mr. Eszterhás, you said earlier that you’ve come to believe, while in the United States, that what you wrote in the book about the Jews was bad and was wrong?
A—Yes.
Q—Precisely when or what event triggered you to rethink that?
A—Well, I have seen that I am wrong earlier, too. When they take out the Jews from Hungary.
Q—And that was in 1944?
A—I think so, yes.
Q—The Jews were put in a ghetto?
A—Yes.
Q—And they were deported to Auschwitz?
A—I have seen a march of old women they take to the station, railway station.
Q—And deported?
A—Yes.
Q—And that was very near the end of the war?
A—Yes.
Q—1944?
A—Yes.
/> Q—So at that point, when you saw what was happening to the Jews, it made you feel bad about what you had written in 1934?
A—Yes.
Q—And you have felt bad about it since?
A—Yes, it was always stronger and stronger.
Q—During the period you were in the refugee camps in Europe—before you came to the United States—you had a recollection of what was in your book; you knew generally that you were advocating—you had advocated the persecution of Jews, am I correct?
A—I know that—that I was an anti-Semitic and so I advocated. It was a general feeling that it was wrong and I was among the people who did wrong.
Q—So you knew then, while you were still in Europe, before you came to this country, that you had advocated anti-Semitism?
A—Yes.
It was one of the longest days of my life. They asked my father a question and he either denied something or said he couldn’t remember. Then they provided documented evidence of what they were alleging.
I learned that … my father had indeed worked in the Propaganda Ministry … had written hundreds of vicious anti-Semitic editorials … had even edited government-funded anti-Semitic publications … and had even organized a book burning.
I sat there looking at the evidence, listening, my head down.
A book burning!
How could a writer be involved in a book burning?
How had he published all those novels in Hungary? By stopping other writers from being published? By banning and burning their books as an official in the Propaganda Ministry?
Almost as an aside at the end of that first day, I learned that my mother—my shy, pious, religious mother!—had been a registered member of Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party, Hungarian Nazis openly dedicated to the extermination of Jews.
I felt too tired to talk at the end of that day, said a quick goodbye to Gerry Messerman, ignored my father, waiting to talk to me, and went back to the hotel.
There was no doubt about any of it now. Even my mother had joined the only party in Hungary openly espousing the extermination of Jews.
The Arrow Cross Party was the same heinous, sadistic, bestial party which Armin belongs to in Music Box.
How could my mother have done it?
What kind of guilt did she feel after the war—in the refugee camps and in Cleveland?
What did her guilt have to do with her mental illness?
I remembered the moment when I was a child and she had shrieked at my father, “I know the man you are!”
What had she really meant?
What had she really been saying?
I knew what her Arrow Cross Party card meant to me: she knew everything my father had done and approved of it.
Fervently so.
· · ·
I was bombarded with a buzzsaw of childhood memories as I sat in the darkened living room of my hotel suite that night, slugging my Tanqueray … staring out the window across the river at the West Side where I had grown up.
I remembered my father screaming at that bitch, Margie, who ran that Hungarian diner in New York, screaming the words into her face: “I am not a Nazi!” and her response: “You’re all Nazis, all you dirty DPs.”
I remembered my mother telling me that the Zsidos had killed Jesus and my father telling her to “stop filling the boy with nonsense … Jesus was a Jew.”
I remembered the Franciscans who wanted to run anti-Semitic articles in their newspaper and my father’s shouted words to them: “Stop this madness! You can’t say these things here! Didn’t you learn your lesson?”
And I thought about the words which had shaped my whole life, words my father had said to me: “Remember this, Jozsi. Jews are people like any other people, some good, some not so good. Just like Hungarians. Some good, some not so good. Never judge a man by his nationality or his color or his religion. Judge him by his character. Whether he is a good man or a not so good man.”
I saw a hundred quick flashes, too, inside my head as I stared across the blackness of that river at the streets where I had grown up:
My father at that Indians game in his beret and trench coat, reading Crime and Punishment … Walking down Lorain Avenue with a bag of popcorn under his coat so it would stay warm for me … Telling me the world wasn’t ending as my mother knelt on the floor and prayed … Playing his cheap, half-busted violin in the cabin in Cook Forest, tears in his eyes … Buying the red-and-white Ford convertible (for me) that he looked so ridiculous in … Urging me to read, to “sitzfleisch,” to make something of myself … Sitting on the bench at the library, telling me masturbating wouldn’t make me blind … Paying a fortune for the neon sign at Papp’s Bar that I had destroyed with my BB gun … Telling the priest off at Cathedral Latin after I had written the essay called “Jesus Was a Bum” … Being booed by his Hungarian friends because his son had written a movie called Music Box.
· · ·
Eli Rosenbaum was the principal deputy director of the Office of Special Investigations.
He questioned my father under oath:
Q—Mr. Eszterhás, you have repeatedly characterized Nemzet Politika to us in this hearing as a bad book that you regret having written. Could you explain?
A—That’s because the whole book is bad. The anti-Semitic attack in the book is not only ugly in the description but it’s stupid and in the conclusion it’s bad. It’s bad, it’s anti-Semitic, and I hate it today.
Q—When did you come to the conclusion that Nemzet Politika was a bad book?
A—When I got a copy of the book now. Because I did not know—I completely forgot what was in the book. And now that I read it I was shocked and ashamed, too, I have to say.
Q—I just want to ask you whether you agree that there is a great deal of inflammatory language about Jews in this book?
A—Yes, there is. I hate the book. I hate the book and everything that you say about the anti-Semitism in the book is true.
As the hearings continued, I felt like I was being buried by an avalanche of filth.
My father had lied on his immigration application, never mentioning his novels or his writings. He’d listed his occupation as “printer.” It was obvious why: if he had said he was a writer, he ran the risk of someone finding what he had written.
The Nazi camp our family had gone to when we left Hungary, Perg, wasn’t “a part” of Mauthausen, as my father had told me. It was near Mauthausen, but it wasn’t a camp … it was a place of safe haven granted by the Germans to friendly government officials at a time when the Russians were invading Hungary.
I understood now the real import of a story I had been told as a child … my father had gone from refugee camp to refugee camp fleeing the Communists. But I knew now that he hadn’t been fleeing Communists; he had been fleeing Hungarian war criminal charges.
I kept playing my nightmarish mental game with myself: matching stories I had been told as a child to what I was learning now.
I had been told that my mother, very pregnant with me, had left Budapest and gone to the town of Szombathely because of invading Russians. But that, I learned now, wasn’t the whole truth. Szombathely had been designated by the Arrow Cross government as the place to which all dependents of government officials were to be evacuated.
The Arrow Cross! A foaming-at-the-mouth, murderous regime … and my father had been a part of its government!
There was even some evidence, not completely corroborated, that my father had either been a part of or in charge of the Arrow Cross’s efforts to burn government documents as the Russians approached.
And there was the affidavit of a man who had worked with my father in the Propaganda Ministry who referred to him as “a rabid anti-Semitic ideologue.”
· · ·
I heard the names of his friends I remembered hearing about or meeting in my childhood … the subjects, I now learned, of other OSI war crimes investigations.
I remembered all those stories I’d heard as a child about my father’s
trip to London as the guest of “Lord Razmeer” and Ward Price of the London Daily Mail.
I remembered because I heard now that Lord Rothermere and Ward Price, both English Nazis, had invited Europe’s most fervent young Nazis to England—among them my father. Ward Price, I heard now, had even been charged with war crimes at Nuremberg.
And I remembered this scene from my childhood.
“Did you get a copy of Nemzet Politika yet?” I asked him.
“Why do you ask me about Nemzet Politika.” My father smiled. “You don’t read my books anyway.”
“You said it will be the most difficult to find.”
“No, I don’t have a copy yet,” my father said.
“When I grow up,” I said, “I will find it for you.”
“Thank you.” He smiled. “Will you read it, too?”
“All right,” I said. “I promise that if I find Nemzet Politika I will read it.”
“Thank you,” he said, his arm around me. “That means very much to me. I will hold you to your promise.”
And I remembered the moment when I was a teenager in Youngstown and he found me reading a book about Auschwitz.
“Did you know that the Jews were taken down to the Danube in Budapest and murdered?” I asked my father.
“We all heard rumors,” he said. “But that’s all they were. We didn’t see anything firsthand. We didn’t know.”
“What would you have done?” I asked my father, “if you would have seen it yourself. Would you have tried to stop it?”
My father looked at me a long moment.
“I could tell you that I would have,” he said. “It would be easy for me to say that to you. I could look like a big hero in my boy’s eyes. But it was a feverish and insane time. The Nyilas [the Arrow Cross] were terrorizing everyone. I don’t know what I would have done if I would have seen it myself. But I hope I would have done the right thing.”
I knew now, though, that he was lying to me in Youngstown when he had said, “We all heard rumors. But that’s all they were. We didn’t see anything firsthand. We didn’t know.”
In his testimony at this hearing, he admitted that he had seen it firsthand when he said to Neal Sher: “I have seen a march of old women they take to the station, railway station.”
Sher: “And deported?”
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