Everyone could see that my father with his humble smile was the mainstay of the family. Though the fifth of the six siblings, he was the only son. The financial situation of his sisters was more precarious, and the younger generation disparaged his bourgeois decency, sense of proportion, and self-knowledge. I could sense my cousins’ arrogance, the arrogance the intelligentsia feels in the face of middle-class stability.
My father was not at all receptive to communist slogans, always returning to the principle of free elections and rejecting the revolutions taking place all over the globe. “In an election you have many choices, son. That is all I know.” He listened to the BBC during the war and after. He would also spend hours with Radio Free Europe, delicately turning the knob to minimize the jamming.
The trip back from Bucharest was a long one and mostly in trucks. Anyone with any kind of vehicle set up benches on it and became a chauffeur. There were about twenty of us seated in a very old contraption. Speed was out of the question, but limping along in a group made the trip easy to bear. I was interested to know who was sitting next to me and across from me. Who were these people with whom I got off occasionally to stretch? Opposite me was a Romanian girl about my age who ran down from the embankment at the edge of a wood and gave a shout of joy: Vai, ce frumos! (Oh, how beautiful!), though there was still plenty to worry about and many dead to mourn.
In Brassó we again visited Uncle Ern?, the hotel manager, stocky, polite, relaxed, though sometimes reticent. Before the war I had spent long summers with him in the woods belonging to my grandfather’s family. He lived then in a large, wooden house in the snowcapped mountains of Máramaros, where he had been delegated by his family to plant trees and produce lumber. The company had a sawmill and a train of its own chuffing merrily up and down the mountainside. I felt on top of the world at five or six riding that little train hauling stripped tree trunks over the wide mountain tracks. My grandfather traveled all the way to and from the mill in his own upholstered passenger car.
I can see them now—sturdily built men, broad-shouldered, tight-bellied, and mustachioed: Uncle Ern?, my mother’s older brother, and one of her brothers-in-law Pista, a misanthrope who, once the passion for cursing Jews had seized him, could be calmed only by the application of leeches to his back. Whenever I was a guest at their house, he heckled me after lunch, mocked me by saying I attended a cheder, a Talmudic school, which I did not—we simply lived near it—but old Pista was not one for fine distinctions. He was angry because his attempt at settling in Palestine had failed, and he was tired of constantly being a Jew. He loved the woods and fishing for trout in icy creeks. He loved feeding the pigs growing fat in their sties, and giving them a friendly kick in the rump, sprinkling groats for the chickens and decapitating them with a swing of the axe. Once he took me up to a part of the mountain where they burned wood for charcoal. He bought wild strawberries in glazed pots from the Gypsies. That rascally girl was there, the one who would frighten me by laughing and rolling her eyeballs so only the whites showed. I wanted to touch her, but lacked the courage. No one could top Pista at lighting campfires or roasting meat, and no one knew the crevasses and waterfalls better than he. It was a joy to help him skewer the bacon, chicken legs, onions, and peppers. And we had a good laugh wolfing down all traces of bacon as soon as we heard the chuff-chuff of the locomotive, which at this hour of the evening could only be carrying grandfather in his personal car.
The old gentleman liked to sit out on the porch of the wooden forest house, where his papers would be delivered to him, always a bit late. He would leave it only to accompany us to a small town in the Carpathians, where next to a lovely square stood the local prison. On Sunday afternoons the inmates would reach through the bars to sell their handiwork: wooden whistles and pipes, clacking roosters, birdcages. Their cells were their workshops. We would stroll along the tree-lined gravel path, watching them whittle. One of them had killed a man, we were told. He made slippers.
Grandfather, a cousin of the head rabbis of Trier and Manchester, read the masters of modern Jewish scholarship. He had been president of the Nagyvárad congregation at one time. He did not much bother himself with the details of the lumber industry.
When imaginary bats fluttered too thickly around Uncle Pista in the dining room, his head would grow so red that my great aunt Ilona had no choice but to bring out the pickle jars holding the thin, balled-up, wriggling leeches. Aunt Ilona would have her husband straddle the chair backwards and take off his shirt. Then she would set the leeches on the vast expanse of Uncle Pista’s back—it was almost as wide as the dining table—one by one, in rows. They would set to work—pumping assiduously, growing thick and fat—and suck the red right out of Uncle Pista’s head. Within a quarter of an hour Uncle Pista would reach the point where he lost all interest in the Jewish question: it was nonsense either way.
If I was in the mood, the two of us would cross the creek on a narrow plank, then proceed stone by stone across its other branch and arrive at a clearing where we could watch the deer walking along the path. When they caught sight of Uncle Pista, they would flinch and give a start, but he would just blink his eyes innocently and they would go back to their grazing or have a drink from the stream and move on along the path in a group. I very much enjoyed having Uncle Pista take me along on these excursions. He even forgave me for wetting the bed after a big lunch. Since I was already five, my mother would have punished me for such slovenly behavior by canceling all afternoon entertainments, but Pista would sneak me out of the house to the ice-cold creek, where, standing still as a statue he would reach into the water and in a flash grab a silver trout. Then we would settle down on a mossy outcrop, where Pista checked the brandy flask to see whether there was still some marc left, for what else can one do at dusk if one’s feet are cold but have another pull from the flask.
In May 1944 Pista tied three trunks to his landau, took his seat on the driver’s box in front of his wife and son, and like the other patriotic Jews in the region drove to the Nagyvárad ghetto. A freight train took them northward. Uncle Pista and Aunt Ilonka, my mother’s favorite sister, were soon turned to ashes. Their son Gyuri Frank, my most kind cousin, died of typhus a year later in Mauthausen. He had taught me how to make world-champion soccer players out of overcoat buttons using a file and some pitch.
My uncles did not do a good job of analyzing future prospects when they conferred in the Golden Eagle Café in Nagyvárad. My mother’s oldest brother Imre had held various jobs: he had been a croupier and a maître d’, going from table to table with a friendly word to everyone. He always kept a table for his current girlfriend, a strawberry blonde, like all the previous ones. Imre had broad shoulders, a dark-brown tan, and a pin-stripe mustache, but he was bald and short. Sometimes he mounted the orchestra platform and took the leader’s violin from him. Grandfather was less than enthusiastic about all this and steered clear of the café where his son Imre wasted his time with such madness.
Uncle Pista and my two Uncle Ernős would go there to see Uncle Imre, and the four of them would put their heads together and take counsel about how to survive the war. The most successful solution was the one Uncle Ern? Schwartz came up with: a coronary. No more did he hop into his smooth-riding Citroën and have his chauffeur take him on one of those sometimes mysterious trips of his. Whenever he was ferried to the kind of woman who made demands on him—the kind that gossiped to her girlfriends about who gave her the new ring or fur—Uncle Ern? had no choice but to stand in the doorway of Aunt Margit’s room, rest his brow against the doorjamb, and complain to her about how low the human race had sunk: “Just imagine, my dear, they’re going on about me again! This time about X and me!”
“Poor dear. Don’t they have anything better to do? Maybe it’s because you’re such a big, handsome, strapping man and they’re jealous of me and the children.”
The children—Uncle Ern? took good care of them. He gave Éva’s hand in marriage to a highly reputed pharmacist and arra
nged for Bandi to study in England and become an architectural engineer. His son Pál, though, whose triumphs at Exeter were more on the tennis courts than in the medical labs, he brought home and installed in his company: he, at least, would not organize a strike against his father as son Bandi had done after marrying a robust, red-haired woman active in the left wing of the Workers’ Party, an lifelong advocate for the poor in Parliament.
Uncle Imre was killed in Budapest by the leader of an Arrow Cross patrol who refused to recognize his exceptional status. Detecting an inappropriate tone of voice in the officer, Uncle Imre informed him that he was speaking with a reserve lieutenant, whereupon the officer unceremoniously shot Uncle Imre in the head. My cousin, the architect Bandi Schwartz (later Andy Short) survived the war as an English doughboy. The beautiful wife and daughter of his easygoing younger brother Pál were sent together to the gas chamber because the mother would not let go of the girl’s hand. Pali escaped from his forced-labor unit and organized a group of partisans of various nationalities and religions in the mountains of Máramaros. They lacked the weapons to conduct major operations but did manage to disperse the smaller units sent to pursue them.
Éva, the youngest of the three siblings, ended up at Birkenau, but a Polish prisoner pulled her daughter Kati’s hand from Éva’s and put it in the hand of Aunt Margit, the girl’s grandmother, and although the two of them went to the gas chamber Éva remained alive. She worked in a factory, growing weaker and weaker and moving from camp to camp, until finally she received word in a hospital barracks that her husband Pál Farkas, a pharmacist and perfumer, was alive. Word of her got back to him as well, and taking heart at the prospect of meeting again they recovered and returned home.
In our family the older generations were generally bourgeois liberals and, if forced to choose a party affiliation, identified with the Social Democrats. As for the younger generations, they were radicals, Communists for the most part. Perhaps that is why I felt uncomfortable when my father, returning from the deportation camps, thought of nothing but reopening the hardware business in Berettyóújfalu and taking up the life he had once had. They might have known that nothing could be as before. But even though the young felt that radical change would affect everything in life and I might well have taken my place at my cousin István’s side in that sneering communist chorus, I identified with my parents. When I asked István who could better manage our fathers’ businesses in Berettyóújfalu (Ferenc Dobó’s books, Béla Zádor’s textiles, József Konrád’s hardware) than they themselves, who had done it over a lifetime, he dismissed the question as insubstantial. “One of the assistants will take over,” he said.
My father still believed in the return to what he thought of as normalcy: he would reopen his business in the ransacked house with a fraction of what he had once had and the customers would come and greet him and hold profound discussions on questions both timely and eternal, sitting in upholstered armchairs and eating food they had brought from home in their wagons—garlic sausage or paprika bacon or plain old salted bacon with bread and red onions—and drinking the fresh artesian water he provided. The staff, my father, and his regular customers, all on familiar terms, had so much to talk about in winter as they warmed themselves around the enormous iron stove or in summer as they enjoyed the cool, spacious room.
The younger family members, who had professional or humanities degrees and whose parents had been killed, wanted a radical break with the old order. “Why do you want things to be as they were?” they asked, seeing us move home—or at least to what we imagined to be home—with all our chattels. We should be happy to be alive, the sole surviving Jewish family in Berettyóújfalu, parents and children reunited. When our friends and relatives brought up their gassed wives and children, my parents maintained a somber silence.
People did not stop telling me I was living for the others as well as for myself. That frightened me. If it had been a mere bombastic phrase, I would not have minded the rebuke implicit in it, but I knew there was more involved: now I had to act as they would have acted had they still been alive or at least act in a way calculated to win the approval of my murdered childhood friends. Even with relatives I felt a mixture of tribute and antipathy in their response to my having survived and being able to return to the nest and live happily ever after.
Another issue soon insinuated its way into our talk: Were we bourgeois or communist? “Had my father lived, he might well be my enemy,” István had told me. I was no enemy of my father, nor did he harbor ill will against us. It was only natural for him to take István and Pál Zádor, the sons of his late sister Mariska and cousin Béla, into his house. He did the same for my cousin Zsófi Klein. István and Pali spent a year in school in Kolozsvár, skiing down to the main square in winter, but by the summer of 1946 it was clear that Transylvania would revert to Romania and they came home to Berettyóújfalu.
The new age began for me in the summer of 1945. The family was together and out of mortal danger. Our old life had resumed its course, after a fashion, in the house at Berettyóújfalu, the hardware business having reopened on the ground floor. My sister was soon attending the gimnázium in Debrecen, taking room and board with the family of a retired officer. As for me, it was the dawn of freedom: I was now being privately tutored—meaning that every once in a while I went to see a teacher—and working in my father’s shop, where three shelves were now filled with goods brought in from Budapest, Salgótarján, and Bonyhád. (They came in Studebaker trucks, now in Russian hands, which were used in civilian commerce and sometimes escorted by the Soviet military on roads not yet free of danger. Everything of course had its price.)
In December a second cousin of mine arrived on the scene. His name was Ern? Steiner, and he was a good-looking, active young man who refused to acknowledge the border separating Berettyóújfalu from Nagyvárad. He and his friends would race their jalopy of a truck across it through frozen fields carrying goods. “I always take two or three shots in the air to get the border guards to look back.” Ern? had been liberated by the French in May. He could converse with them and had developed a taste for Calvados and Gauloises. Arriving home in the summer, he learned that his parents and younger sister had not survived, and although other families were living in their former house Ern? reoccupied his old room, telling the new residents to behave themselves and showing them the pistol he carried under his jacket. Ern? did not want to stay long and soon began carrying people, not just goods, westward. Many young Jews of his ilk had been sailing from Marseille to Haifa after returning from labor service to learn they were without families.
“I’m ready,” said Ern? one day.
I gave him a questioning look.
“Ready for anything,” he said dryly. His knapsack held everything he owned.
“Why not take over your father’s business?” I asked.
Ern? gave my arm a stroke. “That chapter is over.” But to acknowledge that I too had a point, he added, “Your father’s still alive. You’re helping him.”
From the wheel of the truck he reached down to shake my hand one last time. I stood in front of our house and waved as he pulled away, en route to the Holy Land. Holy, he said, because they had given their blood for it. The next year in Haifa he would be active in disabling or sinking English patrol boats so the passengers on immigrant ships could maneuver their rowboats to the shoreline.
I wanted my own space and took over my old room so as to escape the wheezing and snoring of others and have the freedom to turn on the light whenever I pleased. I needed a room where guests could sit and talk, but where no one could just come traipsing in. My craving for privacy came from a desire to know the terrain: if the dogs reacted to late-night passersby, I wanted to know what courtyard they were barking from.
Although the churchyard adjacent to the garden had once provided many playmates, I currently had only my cousins István and Pali and Zsófi Klein. Zsófi had returned from Bergen-Belsen thin but tenacious and with no other place
to go. There were now five children in the house. It was never quiet. We cooked in enormous pots. Leftovers were unknown.
My father took it for granted that he should support us all. He enjoyed being back in the saddle, watching the stock gradually spread from one wall to the next and rehiring his shop assistants. Some of the old customers hugged him and squeezed his hand seeing him there again by the door. “My Józsika,” they called him, a form of address dating back to his childhood. He well recalled that there had been no hugs the previous year, but never mentioned it.
By the tile stove, which was still beechwood-burning in the winter of 1945–46, I listened to the conversations of the people who came to visit. A girl named Kati and I would cut holes in apples to remove the core and fill them cinnamon and molasses, sugar not yet having returned to the market. I was particularly interested in the opinions of Laci Nyúl, Kati’s broad-shouldered and obstinate cousin. He had returned from labor service a tough customer and later barely escaped imprisonment by the Soviets. He wore a short leather jacket and high laced boots. His family had owned the local slaughterhouse, and he helped out at the butcher shop, where kosher and non-kosher products now coexisted. Immersed in blood to the elbows, he sliced pork legs and chops all day long. On the way to our house he would rub cologne into his chin. He had dreams of sties housing hundreds of pigs and a thoroughly modern meat-packing plant, a dream he would punctuate with endless views of the great figures of Hungarian literature. He held Mihály Babits in the highest esteem, knew the poems of Attila József, and brought a number of living authors—Milán Füst, Lajos Nagy, Lajos Kassák, Tibor Déry—to my attention. My sister would see him to the door; I humbly retired. Their parting words seemed to take longer than absolutely necessary.
A Guest in my Own Country Page 16