Outcasts
Page 4
Suti knew instinctively that it was because of her that they all felt so safe. She had established a routine to their lives that never varied. Monday was wash day when Suti and Icuka squealed with joy as they played hide-and-seek between the freshly washed sheets drying stiffly on the line. Tuesday was ironing and Wednesday was cleaning day. His mother, who had a melodious, captivating voice, often sang while she worked and Suti learned the lyrics to almost every song she sang.
The children always knew when it was Thursday because of the wonderful smell of freshly baked bread that filled the house. His favourite, though, was kakaos kifli (cinnamon-and-cocoa-filled buns) that she would bake to his great delight. Sometimes she even filled the buns with poppy-seed filling. It seemed that whenever Suti and Icuka started to argue over something, Mother was always there with the cinnamon-and-cocoa-filled buns and milk to settle them down. Mother was also a wonderful cook. She made the best toltott kaposzta (cabbage rolls) Suti had ever tasted and wonderful soups and stews. There was always a delicious aroma wafting through the house when she cooked. But there were certain foods, like garlic and cornbread, that she strictly kept out of their home.
On high holidays, Father took the family to the synagogue, but it was Mother who kept a kosher household and lit candles on Friday night. She told her children about Jewish traditions and dreamed of someday making aliyah - settling in Palestine, the Jewish homeland. She was proud that her children would go to Hebrew elementary school before they transferred to the polgari (middle school).
Terez smiled down at her son now as Suti stood on the floor and she rubbed him dry with a towel. The young wife and mother knew she was the central focus of the family - the one who kept them all going. They relied on her for practically everything and she, in turn, realized her life would be pointless without her loving husband and children. She was content and loved the rhythm, the steady, predictable flow of their structured lives. Spring came slowly to this region, being so close of the mountains, and April was frequently rainy and cool. But once the lilacs came into bloom, Terez knew that her days would soon be filled with vital tasks until winter. In the spring, Terez planted and tended her garden. The rich soil of Karpatalja produced a bountiful crop of vegetables and, as she weeded and cultivated her plants, she could keep a watchful eye on the children as they played. Then there was the fruit orchard which needed nurturing all summer. The acacia trees, which lent their sweetness to the honey the bees made in the region, also needed attention. When summer ended and the leaves began to transform into rich auburns, yellows, and oranges, Terez set to work harvesting, pickling, and storing the vegetables she had grown all summer. She cooked vats of jam with the fruit from the abundant plum, peach, and apricot trees. In this cycle of abundance, their household was practically self-contained and the few things they didn't produce they acquired by barter or purchase. The family's every need was in close proximity to their home.
The Weisz family. Back row (left to right): Bandi, Hedy, and Aliz. Front row (left to right): Terez, Suti, Icuka, and Vilmos.
Terez considered herself fortunate. Her family lived a protected, privileged life and her husband, Vilmos, was well-respected in the small community of Nagyszollos, not only because of his close relationship with Baron Perenyi but also because he was straightforward and led an honest life. She remembered the day when the handsome Vilmos Weisz had come calling. He was a proper young man from a good Jewish family and had recently returned from serving in the Austro-Hungarian army with distinction in the First World War. Although the courtship didn't last long - they really didn't know each other very well before they got married - Terez was excited by the possibility of sharing her life with this determined young man.
Vilmos Weisz and Terez Leizerovics were married in a traditional Jewish ceremony on March 13, 1921. Their first child - a daughter they named Aliz - was born in Ordarma, near Ungvar, where they lived. She was soon followed by a son, Bandi. In 1924, Vilmos was invited by Baron Perenyi to take charge of his distillery in Nagyszollos and that year Vilmos, his young wife, Terez, and their two children, Aliz and Bandi, moved to the baron's estate in Nagyszollos where their family settled in and where three more children, Hedy, Sandor (nicknamed "Suti") and Icuka were born.
Vilmos was the love of Terez's life. She loved her husband's tenderness and knew Vilmos was devoted to her and the children. He showed her he loved her every day in all kinds of little ways. He had a good sense of humour and there was always laughter in their home. In the evenings, when they gathered as a family, he played Hungarian folk songs on his violin with zest, feeling the emotional lyrics of the tragic songs. One of their favourite songs was "A Ven Cigany" ("The Old Gypsy"). It told the story of an aging gypsy whose songs are no longer wanted by anyone at the tavern where he has played all his life. At the end of the song, the gypsy's wife comes to collect her husband from the tavern and expresses thanks to the tavern-goers as she says good night. But they hardly notice her. By the time Vilmos got to the last notes of this particular song, tears were usually streaming down his face.
Terez loved the fact that he could show his emotions, unlike so many men of his generation. In his heart, Vilmos was a proud Hungarian and even though Nagyszollos hadn't been part of Hungary since 1920, he empathized with the Hungarian minority in Karpatalja.
After she helped Suti dress and sent him back outside with a gentle slap on the behind, she settled down to read a little before the family congregated for dinner. When she had a little time to herself, Terez always read. She was very young when she married Vilmos and naïve in the ways of the world, so she immersed herself in history books, current events, and the lives of the characters in books that transported her out of this relatively small town, if only for a short time. She scoured the town's small library for books she hadn't yet read, establishing a network of like-minded women with whom she formed a book exchange, a sort of informal lending library. Cultural magazines such as the monthly magazine Szinhazi Elet, about news in the world of theatre, came regularly to the house from Budapest. She also perused the latest fashion magazines and sewed well-tailored, au courant dresses and outfits for herself and the children. Whenever she went out, she proudly wore a hat and the stylish outfits she had made herself.
But it was when Bandi, Aliz, and Hedy were at school and the two little ones had settled down for a nap in the afternoon that she settled down to read the serious articles in the Zionist periodical Mult es Jovo (Past and Future). From a series published by that periodical, she learned much about the history of the Jews in the region where she lived, who had lived in the Carpathian Basin almost without interruption for over one thousand years. The Jewish population in Hungary was eighty thousand in 1787 and their numbers tripled to 238,000 by 1840. At that time, larger numbers of Jews who were fleeing from pogroms and political instability in what is present day Ukraine and Russia began to arrive in the northeastern part of the Hungarian Kingdom from Galicia, north of the Carpathians.
In 1895, the legal status of the Jews was sealed with the admission of Judaism into the legally recognized religions of Hungary (recepcio). The ramifications of this, as Terez learned from her readings, were that the Jews no longer had to be identified as a separate ethnic group. By 1910, their numbers reached nearly one million. More importantly, seventy-five percent of Jews - about 705,000 - declared Hungarian to be their mother tongue. By 1930, fourteen percent of the population in Karpatalja - or 102,500 people - were Jewish. In towns such as Nagyszollos, whose total population was fifteen thousand, the Jewish numbers reached one-third of the population.
Once Terez understood the history, she knew why her family had stayed in Hungary. As far back as she could remember, her family had lived in the Kingdom of Hungary and she could trace her ancestral lineage back to the late 1700s. It was then that landowners were required to register the size of their holdings and her grandfather's brother, Jozsef Leizerovics, was registered as a landowner in the village of Ladmoc in Zemplen County in northern Hungary i
n the second half of the nineteenth century. Her own grandfather, Jakab, had owned and operated a lime kiln (meszegeto).
The periodical wrote at length about history and current events, and detailed the shocking reality of life for German Jews who, by 1936, had been stripped of all their economic power. She read how over 250,000 of them had been forced to leave the country, many immigrating to Palestine. Terez had to read and reread the reports on Kristallnacht. It seemed incomprehensible to her that 191 synagogues had been destroyed with axes and hammers by incensed mobs. Mult es Jovo also published first-hand accounts of the widespread rioting in Palestine and, later, explained how the British commissioned a white paper to set up a quota system limiting Jewish immigration to twelve thousand people per year to appease the Arabs in the British Colonies.
The more she read, the more dread filled her heart as she realized that the political situation in Germany was spilling over into other countries as well. When neighbouring Romania joined Hitler's Germany, the periodical provided the first detailed reports of the terror tactics of the Iron Guard in Romania and the bombing of a Jewish theatre in Timisoara (Temesvar).
Sometimes Terez became so distraught after reading Mult es Jovo that she had to put it away and couldn't pick it up again for days. The stories of what was happening to Jews in other areas filled her with horror at what might happen at home. One evening, as they made their way home after dark, Vilmos and Terez saw two men come stumbling out of a local bar. They were obviously drunk. Still a bit of a distance from them, they overheard one of the men say to the other, "Hey Joska, now that we're feeling no pain, let's go beat up the next person we see."
"Good idea," replied the other.
Terez put her hand on her husband's arm and whispered to him, "Let's go home another way, Vilmos."
"Nonsense," Vilmos responded as he purposefully walked toward the inebriated men. When they approached, Joska stopped for a moment then recognized the couple. He lifted his hat with his hand, put it to his chest in a swooping motion, and said, "Jo estet Weisz ur!" ("Good evening, Mr. Weisz!")
Still, her world was safe and the rhythm of their lives continued unchanged. She was determined to teach her children about the wonderful world of books and, before bed, after all the children were changed into their pyjamas and had washed and brushed their hair, Terez read aloud to them. Every evening, she gathered her children around her and read poetry to them with the youngest, Icuka, curled up on her lap. She knew much poetry by heart and recited her favourites, particularly the poetry of her favourite poet, Sandor Petofi.
One evening, as she read Petofi's "Egy Telem Debrecenben" ("One of My Winters in Debrecen"), she told the children that Petofi had been poor and talked to them about the misery of poverty and hunger. By the time she finished reading the poem, all the children had tears in their eyes.
"Mother," Bandi asked, turning to his mother, "are we rich?"
"Why do you ask, my son?" Terez asked, surprised by the question.
"Maybe we could send a hundred korona to Petofi," Bandi replied, pleading a little.
Terez was proud of her son, proud of his generous heart, and had to explain to him that Petofi had died a long time ago.
chapter 4 | 1937
WHEN BELA AYKLER was three, he wouldn't go to sleep unless his pesztonka, his sixteen-year-old babysitter, lay down next to him. He loved the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, and he would wrap his fingers around her plump, blond ringlets and put his face right next to hers until he fell asleep. As the baby of the family, his mother, Karola, doted on him. Little Bela's world was full of fascination and discovery, and his bedroom had shelf upon shelf of children's books he could explore. But very quickly he learned to pass over the stories of gnomes, witches, princesses, and dragons and went directly to the stories of great battles and conflicts. He loved military history from an early age, whether tales of Roman legionnaires or Napoleon's conquests, and dreamt of knights and great battles of valour and glory.
He would plead with his mother to tell and retell the story of one of his great, great, great granduncles who had helped to defend the fortress of Szigetvar against the Turks. Over and over she read to him about the siege that lasted for years and the endless onslaught of fierce, turbaned warriors with black eyes who clashed with the brave Magyar officers and their men defending the fortress. When they ran out of cannonballs, his mother told him, the Magyars poured vats of boiling tar and water on the heads of their enemies. The Turks, in turn, formed a human tourniquet around the fortress and blockaded anyone or anything from getting in or out. Eventually, the defenders ran out of ammunition and were being slowly starved to death. When it became impossible to continue, the warriors who remained inside the fortress made a pact. Instead of waiting for the inevitable surrender or slaughter, they rode out of the fortress in a blaze of glory, knowing they were facing imminent but mercifully quick death.
Tibor Schroeder as a young man.
Bela's brown eyes would open wide as he listened, rapt with emotion, to his mother's story. His ancestor had been one of those brave warriors, a captain who rode out alongside the fortress commander Miklos Zrinyi on that final day. He never grew tired of this tale and knew that, one day, he would follow in the footsteps of his father, grandfather, and great-great-great-granduncle and would become a professional soldier, a great warrior, as many generations of his family had been before him since 1525 in Bavaria.
When he turned six and could read for himself, his favourite stories were of the Wild West - stories by Karl May about Winnetou, the wise Chief of the Apache Tribe, and Old Shatterhand his white blood-brother. By the age of eight, he had begun organizing the neighbourhood boys into elaborate games of cowboys and Indians. Bela always wanted to be an Indian. He made a deliberate decision to be on the side of the underdogs because he identified with them. He felt a great affinity with the side that was outnumbered, outgunned, squeezed out of their native land, and living in a country where they were not welcome because they were part of a different tribe.
When two local bullies, the Balsai boys, pummelled his best friend Istvan Hokky and split his upper lip, Bela vowed revenge. Istvan was skinny, wore glasses, and was often sick with earaches and nosebleeds. Bela, on the other hand, was pudgy and strong, even as a young boy. He was incensed that the two bullies would attack his weak friend and knew in his heart they wouldn't have dared touch Istvan if he had been around.
The Balsai boys often used a path that went through his family's vineyard to get to their summer house. Bela devised an elaborate plan to pay back the bullies. He organized all his friends, luring them over to his house in the afternoons after school to play cowboys and Indians, and waited. On a particularly bright and crisp fall afternoon, the Balsai brothers finally came walking through and were ambushed by a half dozen of Bela's "army" who tied them by the arms to a branch of a tree and left them there with their feet dangling. By the time the overseer, Mihaly bacsi, heard the blood-curdling screams of the captives and came to their rescue, the fire Bela and the gang had set underneath them was already smoking their feet.
Bela wasn't intimidated by the punishment he would receive. The satisfaction of knowing he had evened the score for his friend Istvan made it all worthwhile. They had succeeded in smoking out the enemy by exactly the same methods the Indians utilized on the white men who massacred Indians or encroached on their land. He knew the Balsai boys would never intimidate them again.
Bela lived with his parents, his older brothers, Istvan and Tibor, and older sister, Picke, in a big house on the side of a hill, their vineyards extending in every direction. For Bela, their home was an amazing place and their land was magnificent with its own streams and forest. The property bordered on the ruin of the fourteenth-century Kanko Castle, whose stone foundation and partial remnants were owned by the Perenyi family. Bela considered it his own private haunted fiefdom, where he and his friends, or the "army of liberation" as they liked to call themselves, played in the old ruins and
re-enacted the many stories and legends they heard about the place. According to local lore, a famous Franciscan monk was buried there, a priest who had led the charge against the Turks in a place called Nandorfehervar. When he died, his supporters had smuggled his body back here for safe burial. Another local legend claimed that a few renegade Franciscans had once kidnapped a beautiful young Perenyi girl from the baron's estate and held her captive in the castle.
Bela's grandfather and mother ran the winery and he knew from a very early age that growing grapes was a meticulous, time-consuming occupation. At various times of the year there were hundreds of workers who arrived from the surrounding hillside districts to help in the planting, separating, covering up, weeding, and harvesting of the grapes. Young Bela looked up to his tall, distinguished-looking grandfather and would follow him along as he directed the work to be done in the vineyards. He loved the sound of Grandfather's melodious, calm voice as he provided direction and inquired about the progress of the work.
When merchants arrived at the house wanting to buy grapes or wine, Bela knew that if he wanted to stay in the room, he had to be very quiet. He sat patiently, not uttering a word, bewitched by the way his grandfather firmly and quietly negotiated with the purchasers. The most interesting buyers were men who Grandfather called Ortodox Zsidok (Orthodox Jews). They had long beards like Bela's father but curly sideburns as well. The Jews not only bought the grapes but insisted on pressing them the old-fashioned way: by foot. Bela always sat close by and watched the rhythm of their movements, listening as they sang their fascinating songs. They would come in threes and the men would roll up their loose pant legs and get into the vat full of grapes. They held on to each other's shoulders and sang in a language that Grandfather said was called Hebrew as they crushed the grapes to make their special kosher wine. Grandfather told Bela that although their religion was different, these Jews were Hungarians and had stayed loyal to Hungary, even after the borders were changed. At Easter time, Jewish women brought freshly baked sheets of paszka (matzo) to the house as gifts for his grandfather. Bela loved to bite into the crispy treats.