I don’t appreciate the black humour quite so much on this occasion. I hardly think you would be downplaying the seriousness of experiences you acquired in the death camps quite as much if you hadn’t written your works.
But that has given me the right to be totally frank. Look, the fact is that we are having this conversation now, and not in 1946 or ’47. That is to say, in the meantime I have written my books, and that has obviously altered my memories: they have acquired another character, I might say, maybe even faded, irrespective of the time that has passed. But the fact that I later became a writer in itself presupposes a singular nature. What I have in mind is that more than likely I stand in a different kind of metabolic relationship to reality than do others. What torments most people as an indigestible thought in my case proves all of a sudden to be the raw material for a novel, and as it gains shape I am rid of it. It’s not a conscious act, of course; in my younger days it must have been working quite instinctively inside me. As it is now, looking back on myself from sixty years later, what I see is a fundamentally cheerful young man, who is greedy for life and will not allow anyone or anything to put him off. Of course, he remembers everything that happened to him, but he fits that into the natural order of things. He doesn’t feel any self-pity; he doesn’t ask, like so many others, “why me of all people?”; if asked about his experiences he talks about them with complete detachment: it’s not that he brags about them, but he’s kind of proud of them, if you see what I mean. More than that, I’ll tell you something even more curious: he calls on their help for the remainder of his life.
Is that what you are referring to in Galley Boat-Log when you write that the Stalinist dictatorship saved you from feelings of major disappointment, indeed from suicide?11
Yes, that’s probably so.
There is something that we have not yet clarified. Before you spoke about the sense of belonging, you said that you were carried into Communism by decency. What exactly do you mean?
That one had to take sides. As I mentioned, young people at the time were galvanized by heated debates. The country was in the grip of a great creative zest in the immediate post-war years; at the same time the prevailing conditions were very chaotic. In late 1945 the depreciation in what was then still the unit of Hungarian currency, the pengő, got underway, which over the next six months grew into what is still on record as the greatest hyperinflation in history. Pengő denominations became first “million pengő” then “billion pengő” denominations, with one billion pengős as the basic unit, and even that not for long. Shops would hourly alter the price tickets they displayed. In the spring of 1946, on the terraces of the Budapest cafés such as the “Jeep,” the “Liver Fat,” the “Moulin Rouge,” and the like, customers paid in broken gold for their coffees and whiskeys. The head-waiters carried around tiny scales in their pockets, which they would pull out when the bill was settled and hide away in terror when there was a “raid.” An Economic Police force was set up, which not infrequently found itself in pitched gun battles with smugglers and “black marketeers.” A person couldn’t live from regular wages: factories and offices — including the Budapest-Salgótarján Engineering Works, where my mother worked — paid wages in “kind,” giving employees potatoes or flour instead of money. Otherwise, an exultant sense of freedom reigned. A true democracy began to emerge in Hungary for the first time in the country’s history, and on the basis of the population’s free vote, what’s more. But look here! It’s not my job to dish out history lessons, but let me mention the alleged testament of the international jurist István Bibó that made the rounds many years later among Budapest intellectuals: “When I die,” he is supposed to have said or written, “carve on the headstone of my grave: ‘Here rests István Bibó, flourished 1945–1948.’” That says something about the age, wouldn’t you agree?
You observed all that from a school desk or the Liver Fat café?
That’s a good question. I didn’t spend the bulk of my time on the school bench, that’s for sure. How could I have? The cinemas were full of viewers for American films, old and new ones alike: Lewis Seiler’s Guadalcanal Diary; Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo with Erich von Stroheim; Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca. I devoured war films; I couldn’t get enough of the German defeat; it’s more than possible that I gave vent to my ressentiment toward the film screen. Yet I equally enjoyed films like Broadway Rhythm with George Gershwin’s magical soundtrack — to list them all I wouldn’t know where to start. Then again, not far from the school was Pollack’s Table Tennis and Billiard Room. We would meet up at eight o’clock in the morning at the school, but by nine or ten o’clock our gang would be either in a cinema or at the ping-pong table, or possibly in the steam bath at the Hungária Hotel. And it was at afternoon teas then that I suddenly discovered girls …
Plus the Communist Party.
Well yes, there must have been some slight connection between the two. Life so had it that I came across mainly girls from well-to-do middle-class families, but I was in the painful position that I never had enough money to pay for them. Our group would engage in vitriolic debates about the meaning of life and the vulgar role played by money: I would win the arguments, but not the girls. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was what started my interest in class struggle. But then again, let’s face it, society was still full of discredited Fascists. At the time, “Holocaust denial” was as yet an unheard-of concept, of course, but tendencies of that kind had already started to crop up in the press and in private conversations. On the other hand, I was not able to identify with the strictly “Jewish” arguments, either: I was not drawn to Zionism, I was repelled by Jewish self-pity, I had no interest in religion, and I was irritated by a suspicion that I should be seeking out the anti-Semite in everybody. A classless society seemed to me to be truly the best solution, but the very first time I appeared at the “district,” I hit the major snag of finding myself face-to-face with a concierge who had been a well-known Fascist in our area. How did he come to be there? Oh yes, he grinned; when the war was over he instantly joined the Party. I had a word with someone — possibly the district Party secretary himself. He then proceeded to explain to me that yes, indeed, Fascism had duped many members of the proletariat, they had to be enlightened — or “re-educated,” as he put it — but this was a matter of proletarians who were “capable of progress” and had to be set on the correct path. That rather upset my in any case sensitive stomach, but however averse I was to the concierge and the Party secretary it did nothing to alter my attraction to radical social solutions. After Auschwitz, I felt the correct thing to do was not to base my relationships on personal feelings but on the principles of social progress.
Hmm!
Yes of course! It was bloody stupid of me, as I soon realized.
How did that hang together with all those American films, the billiard hall, the school-leaving exams, and the afternoon teas?