Seven years ago I was continually praying that he would survive, that he would finally make an effort to be who he truly was. He did survive but there was no such effort. Maybe the energy required for it had been all used up in his battle for survival, when, in the months following the operation, he had to learn how to walk again, to write and to use a knife again. Perhaps, once he had been through that awkward process, it seemed easier to sink back into routine, into the open arms of habits, lies and half-truths. Perhaps the whole thing was impossible anyway because by that time who would have believed that his was a real change of direction rather than the kind of Damascene conversion the great majority of his generation had undergone so many times, whose most recent public manifestations we had watched with a shudder on television and read in the press ever since the 1989 régime change? Maybe it was simply impossible. But I don’t think he even tried. He opened the yellow suitcase just once and carefully, anxiously spread the top layer of its contents before us. On the very top was his safe pass from Raoul Wallenberg, the photo showing a skeletal seventeen-year-old young man with a big nose and a warm open gaze. Next to it his parents’ divorce document, his father’s Budapest University record with laudatory notes from the famous physicist Lóránd Eötvös, a memorial plaque showing Comrade Lenin in profile, and his For A Socialist Patria medal. He studiously locked the seven locks of the case again so that it would remain undisturbed in his jungle-like study. For a while yet I continued feverishly searching out books for him, the material he required to write his new epoch-shaking work, but eventually we both lost enthusiasm and my father returned to writing political pamphlets. He was still striving to understand what had gone so irreparably wrong with communism and why. But the very premise from which he started guaranteed that he would fail to find a proper answer.
The seven years between my father’s two illnesses were like a suspended judgement, the term of trial described in fairy tales. Whether the race we were running was against death or for life is hard to say. In the end the two are inextricably wound together. We were trying to squeeze the last drops out of life while all the time becoming familiar with the thought of death. ‘My dear sister,’ I wrote, ‘I know the clock ticks for all of us. But, from now on, we can actually hear his clock ticking. At night, when we get into bed, I can think of little else, my one desire now at this of all times being to get pregnant.’
The story of my father’s death is interwoven with another story that is not concerned with the series of real changes in my father or in the events surrounding him. This other story is made up of memories, thoughts and emotions that followed, blended with and, in some cases, anticipated reality. This story unwound in me and did not end with my father’s death, nor with his funeral, and will, it may be assumed, continue as long as I live, because when someone matters to us they remain a part of our lives even though the place they occupy is continually changing.
The first page of this other story begins with the scene that hot August afternoon when we finally succeeded in dragging the suitcases full of books home to Németvölgyi Road and my father lay down to rest in the parlour in a short-sleeved shirt with a wet handkerchief on the back of his neck. My mother and I sat behind him, horrified, on the other side of the glazed door, in the hall. My father must have felt a little better eventually because he got up and stood at the window. His powerful upper torso was caught in a halo of afternoon sunlight. He turned to move towards us when he suddenly swayed, stiff, like a statue about to topple. For a split second he seemed to hover in the air precisely like one of those bronze statues we had seen dragged down with ropes about their necks on TV; the arc of the statue’s fall is always broken for a moment and a terrified murmur runs through the spectators as if they fear it might come to life suddenly and strike them down in a final act of revenge. When the statue finally hits the ground with a mighty crash the people in the crowd cry out and descend on it. They kick it, pick at it, beat it with their bare fists and sandaled feet, unleashing decades of fury. But even then, even when they are on top, they alone feel the pain of each blow.
Alarmed, we dashed into the room and succeeded in catching him before he fell against the table. In the midst of this confusion the bell shrilled: it was Tamás making an unexpected visit. That night I tossed and turned, sleepless in my bed, suspecting that something irredeemable was happening and that we could do nothing to stop it. Three days later, in Helsingør or some other northern city, I was sitting in a conference room, neatly dressed, solemnly listening to my fellow experts, but my head was an impenetrable ball of cotton wool. One afternoon I suddenly felt so ill that I had to leave the auditorium. I dragged myself towards the salvation of the hotel entrance in the low, slanting sunlight: the fierce unexpected cold seemed to slice right through me. I walked slowly and uncertainly as if the space before me had torn like cheap wrapping paper, as if a terrible depth of icy blackness lay in wait beyond the rip. If I fell into that chasm there would be no return.
The summer my father died may have begun on that spring day in 1939 when his family was forced to leave the Golden City of Prague. They had moved there some years previously to escape the ever stricter anti-Jewish laws that no longer allowed my grandfather, Lajos, who was a doctor, to practise in fancy-folk-costume-wearing Hungary, his homeland. It did not matter that his Jewish ancestors had distinguished themselves in the 1848 War of Liberation, not to mention the First World War in which his father had been decorated as an officer. Lajos was a successful doctor who spoke many languages. Due to the Numerus Clausus laws limiting the number of Jews in education in Hungary, he had to do part of his degree in Czechoslovakia, which meant it was easy for him to get a job in Prague, at the Switzerland-based company Wander. He loved curing people, but was particularly interested in research. Decades later my Australian relatives would shake their heads as they told me how during the summer holidays he would catch frogs on the family estate and dissect them while explaining the functions of various organs to the servants. While at Wander he worked specifically on a version of the vitamin drink Ovomaltin and, according to my father on one of his rare excursions into family history, it was on him and his little sister that Lajos experimented.
His childhood in Prague was the one truly golden era of my father’s life. He managed later to wrest fragments of greater or lesser happiness from fate but all these were overcast by the shadow of what followed Prague. There, in the lulling peace of the mid-1930s, in that beautiful, dreaming city, my father could forget himself. He would ramble around the Old Town, along the banks of the Vltava, over the enchanted isle of Kampa, enjoying the complex cultures and traditions of the place, as well as the old-fashioned bourgeois democracy that, along with its concomitant sense of human dignity and self-consciousness, made Prague such a generous city. At school, children quickly outgrew cowboys and Indians and were playing at Spanish Civil War, though it was never easy to get anyone to be a Francoist. Crowning it all was the inexhaustible city library where my father spent long leisurely afternoons. Leaving the library, he would stroll home to the Mala Strana, past loud coffee houses full of people debating, past the tinkling of cups and raucous female laughter, noticing novelties in toyshop displays, cautiously slapping the blanket-covered sides of the by now ever-rarer cab-horses and dreamily watching round-backed trams as they clanged and turned at the heavily arcaded corner of the Malé Mesto. The Golden City was a pleasantly spacious place, far beyond the shady picnic areas in its outskirts. My father’s family spent the summer holidays with Aunt Gigi in Dobsina, a Slovakian spa, or at the village of Třebíč, the home of the young girl in charge of the household staff; sometimes they would go for a couple of days to Nagyszőlős to play with distant cousins; occasionally Lajos’s relatives from the Transylvanian town of Dés would appear and, when Grandmother felt particularly nostalgic, they visited her father’s grave in Baden, near Vienna.
My father’s days of happy drifting came to a jarring stop in the spring of 1939 when Europe abandoned the on
ly free, democratic state of Eastern Europe to the burgeoning forces of fascism. On the day following the occupation of Czechoslovakia by German troops on 16 March 1939, Lajos received a directive telling him to leave the country within forty-eight hours. Europe had started closing its doors and his only option was to return to Horthy-run Hungary from where, a few years before, he and his family had escaped. My grandmother and the two small children left straight away, only Lajos remaining behind to settle matters regarding the flat and other miscellaneous things. Szera, my intelligent, well-travelled and ever cheerful grandmother, sat quietly on a worn velvet seat of the Budapest-bound train in her black-veiled hat.
‘Good afternoon to you, Mr Inspector,’ she greeted eagerly the garlic-and-cheap-brandy-smelling police officer who was checking their passports. My little-boy father was seized by an unfamiliar anxiety.
It remains an abiding mystery to me why Lajos did not simply gather up his family and set off west or south. He had the qualifications, the languages, the money – everything necessary to build a new life. It is of course true that in the following few years no part of Europe was exactly a holiday resort, but their chances of survival would have been greater than in Hungary where death was a certainty patiently waiting to call. Maybe it was his ties to the past, to the family and to the language that tugged at his heart, calling him back to Budapest, whose streets echoed with irredentist and anti-Semitic slogans. Perhaps it was love. Soon after they arrived home, Lajos and Szera divorced. My grandfather was quickly called up for forced labour service, Jews not being considered eligible for the army proper. A couple of months later, after two spells of that, he married a young woman who might have been a colleague of his in one or other of the hospitals that took pity on him and allowed him, secretly and unpaid, to practise his calling (that is, when he was not digging ditches for the amusement of his guards). In a photograph of Lajos that my father showed me just once, and even then only rather jealously, he stands smiling under a blossoming fruit tree, his arm round a young woman with beautiful eyes.
Two months later, during his next spell of forced labour service, they ordered his brigade to the Russian Front. In the autumn of 1943 my grandmother received an official letter in which the relevant authorities dryly informed her that my father was now a War Orphan. He was not a National Orphan, a title that would have conferred on him some faint melancholy glory and implied a certain level of financial support, but a War Orphan so that it was made entirely clear to one and all that, even in death, Grandfather, along with the more than half a million Jews who followed him, was no part of the Nation. But even before this letter my father was prepared for a new journey. At the end of summer 1940, hardly a year after returning from the Golden City, my grandmother took my father’s hand and boarded a train.
‘Say nothing about this to anyone,’ Szera had warned him. The train journey of several hours was passed mostly in anxious silence.
‘I’ll be back for you soon,’ my grandmother said, her voice breaking as she turned round and left the little boy in his short trousers clumsily waving after her on the courtyard of the foundling home.
As he stood there waving at the figure of his mother rapidly diminishing into the distance – she only turned back once but was so far off that her features were hardly distinguishable – it was as if my father were looking to shoo away the ill fortune hovering about his head. He took a few steps forward, then lowered his arm and held on to the wire fence surrounding the front yard. The dark form of my grandmother had long disappeared round a bend of the street. My father stared stiffly at the empty space by the house on the corner, then he slowly removed his fingers from the cold wire and pushed his continually slipping glasses back on to the bridge of his nose. He gazed around the empty yard. It was so quiet he could hear his heart beating fast. Maybe that is when something snapped in him. Maybe it was then, in the autumn of 1940, that the summer my father died really began.
In the first version of my personal history the wicked grandmother departs once and for all only to end her life in a charitable institution somewhere near Sydney some decades later, as lonely and as wretched as her faithless life deserved.
Four summers later, with modest German support and the active collaboration of the Hungarian public, all the remaining members of my father’s family were herded up by the cock-feather-wearing militia – a police force to whom civil, democratic governments now tend to raise memorials – and sent off in sealed cattle-trucks towards the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Rich and poor, realists and dreamers, the miserly and the generous, bigots and freethinkers, women, old people, children, everyone disappeared behind the doors of the showers. But my father was beyond such concerns by then, having found his true place in a new family, the illegal Communist Party. It was I who felt the full strength of that blow forty years later when, pressed against the cold walls of the black labyrinth of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, in every recited name I thought to recognise the names of family members long gone up in smoke.
What made my grandfather, Lajos, return home to Hungary in 1939? What made the writer György Bálint return from England, where refuge was assured, so that he would perish in the Jewish Hospital in the Ukraine two years later? Why did Walter Benjamin ignore the urgings of his friends and leave escape to the very last minute when the only way out led to pills of arsenic at Port Bau? Why did Lev Nussimbaum hang around in Rome, Vienna and Berlin, unable to believe his eyes, only to perish in Italy before he could be reduced to a mere number in one or other concentration camp?
Disbelief is the recurring motif in every survivor’s story. ‘I did not believe that it could happen to us, not here, not even when it was happening right in front of our eyes.’ Beyond ties of affection and the desire to cling to the familiar, it is perhaps this trust that is the most important factor in explaining why six million Jews allowed themselves to be packed into wagons. Their conviction that the world was a rational place based on certain shared values was so firm that they doubted the evidence of their own senses. They simply couldn’t believe they were seeing the destruction of a moral order based on the values of the Enlightenment, an order whose toppling would bury them, too.
Had my father’s parents been more opportunist, had they stayed together, bound by strong ties of custom and desire for security like everyone else, they would surely have sent their children to relatives in the country in order to save them from deportation. Had they done so, the local authorities would gladly have assisted the children to clamber into the wagons in the direction of a hastily cleaned gas chamber. Perhaps they would have arrived there in the same transport as my mother’s little friends, the twin girls who might still have remembered the pain and affection on my mother’s face, who had wanted to say farewell to them, in one of the few gestures of empathy that might have comforted them briefly in their disgrace before they were butchered. But one of my father’s parents had long vanished into dust on the wide cornfields of the Eastern Front, ‘On the banks of a cool fast-flowing stream’, as the popular Russian song has it, while the other, my grandmother Szera, was hiding out alone somewhere in Budapest.
My father’s parents might perhaps have escaped had they not been such incorrigible dreamers. Had Lajos not always been on the look-out for something better, something more perfect, the family might have remained together in some place of refuge. Then the divorce that was bound to follow would have been a private matter, not history of the tragic kind. My father would have become a respectable bookworm, my aunt a recognised fashion designer in one of the quieter nooks of the world, and my sister and I would have remained lost opportunities in the rich storehouse of life. If Szera’s survival instinct had not overcome her trust in the world order she could not have saved my father. But, on the other hand, if she had not been an incorrigible dreamer she would not have survived all that happened to her.
Szera loved Lajos, as she did his miniature mortal version, my father, with every fibre of her being. Lajos may have left her for another woman
but Szera was convinced that once the bad times were over he would come to his senses and return to his family. This blind and tempting hope was ended by the receipt of the curt message that Lajos had perished somewhere in the Ukraine. Szera was without money or work, alone in Budapest – a city that had turned into a deathtrap – with two small children. Her family had been scattered, her friends were either in hiding, or deported, or had already leapt through windows to their deaths. In the early autumn of 1940 my grandmother took the desperate step of placing her son in an orphanage and her daughter in a Catholic convent, so that there should be not the least shadow of doubt that they were not Jewish. A couple of years later, when my father was expelled from the foundling home and returned to Budapest, his mother was living in a sublet in Bródy Sándor Street, where he sheltered until he found a reasonably well-paid position as a delivery boy at a second-hand bookstore. In the bloody months of 1944, Szera, who allegedly had some kind of direct line to the Swedish Embassy and its life-saving staff, got him a specially manufactured Swedish passport, one of Raoul Wallenberg’s Schutzpasses. When my father demanded more, Grandmother managed to procure enough documents to supply the needs of the whole underground communist cell.
After the war, while her son was preoccupied with the task of saving the world and her daughter was falling resoundingly in love, Szera, left alone, tried to steady her boat on the extraordinarily troubled waters of politics in the new People’s Democracy. She understood nothing, nor was there anyone in a position to explain things to her. Her nearest relatives, together with their families, had either been killed in the war or were adrift in the world somewhere inside or beyond the borders. Szera was hoping her darling firstborn would appear and enlighten her. The darling firstborn, however, was involved in preparations for the 1948 elections on behalf of the Communist Party. Like many other women of her class, Szera had no education or work experience that might have offered her the means to a livelihood. She survived by trading money on the black market, the money sent by her brother Izidor, a gentleman of substantial means who looked like Paul Newman and who had had the historical foresight to move to Australia before the war. The Hungarian forint was weakening all the time so this was likely to have been a remunerative activity and the vigilant authorities quickly spotted what she was doing and threw her into prison along with other speculators. Szera waited in vain for her son to arrive like a prince on a white charger to rescue her. When the appointed comrades investigated his background and found that he was the son of a well-to-do Jewish family, he had to state in writing that he had cut all contact with his class-alien family. And, being a man of his word, he tried to keep this promise throughout his life.
The Summer My Father Died Page 2