Was it still possible for such an advertisement to appear after the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944?
So it seems, because it did appear. But my mother took on an even odder thing than that. She upped and just as she was, yellow star on her chest, went off to the War Office — I think that’s what the Ministry of Defence was called by then.
She must have been a very plucky lady.
She was plucky, to be sure, but most of all, she had no real grasp of what was going on all around her. Her “trust in the world” remained unscathed right to the end. She was a good-looking woman, my mother; she had an elegant dress sense and would let nothing stop her. She might wear a yellow star and board “the rear platform of a tram” as the regulations required, but men would still leap to their feet and offer her a seat inside the carriage. She was proud of the fact that she bore a resemblance to Anna Töke, who was a famous actress of the time, so it sometimes happened that passers-by in the street would ask for her autograph. She was simply unwilling to face up to facts, to size up the magnitude of the risks. I just can’t imagine how she managed to get through to the office of some quite high-ranking officer — a captain or major. “But madam,” the major protested, “please! May I ask you at least to be so kind as to take the yellow star off your dress …” Needless to say, my mother demanded that her son be returned, or at the very least that she be told where he was and what had happened to him. What’s more, the major made inquiries about it straight away, and Mother was informed that her son and his companions had been taken off to Transylvania and put to work as loggers at a timber-forest there; and even if her mind was not entirely put at rest by that, right there and then Mother was willing to believe it for the time being, because that was what she wanted to believe. At the time people would hold on for dear life to such illusions as they had contrived about the world order being rational.
Astounding! But that reminds me of something for which I have been seeking an answer ever since my first encounter with your books. Were the Jews of Hungary really quite so ill-informed? Quite so much in the dark about what was in store for them?
I can only speak for my own experiences in Budapest, insofar as I picked up anything from my immediate circle of family and acquaintances: nobody here suspected anything, and I never heard of any place called Auschwitz. All Jewish families would listen in secret to the BBC radio broadcasts — at least until Jews were obliged to “hand over” their wireless sets, that is — and if they heard anything that ruffled their optimism, they would just dismiss it as “English propaganda.”
What lay behind that?
There were many causes, both historical and psychological. There is no question that after the obliteration of the Hungarian Eighth Army on the Don bend — in the course of which countless Jews who had been sent there on labor service, to be used in mine-clearance work on the battlefield, also died — the enthusiasm for war let up. That momentary relief, in 1943, deluded the Jewish population, who believed that they were in a privileged position. Rumours about the shuttlecock diplomacy being conducted by Prime Minister Miklós Kállay went the rounds, with people saying that “a deal” was going to be struck with the Allies behind the backs of the Germans. Then on March 19th, 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary, and at Birkenau they made a start on enlarging the crematoria and laying a new railway track in preparation for the arrival of transports from Hungary. A high-ranking SS officer by the name of Eichmann arrived in Budapest to be greeted with a considerable sum of money from the Jewish Council. At the same time they were given a copy of the so-called “Vrba-Wetzlar Report” or the “Auschwitz Protocols.” Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzlar, a pair of Slovak Jewish prisoners, after lengthy and very thorough preparatory work, managed to escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp and to assemble a memorandum in which they gave a precise description of what was happening in that death factory. Considerable space was also devoted to the preparations that were under way to handle the consignments of Jews from Hungary, already then, with the preparations as yet still in progress, anticipating the disastrous fate that would meet those consignments. The Jewish Council in Hungary discussed the report and decided not to make its contents known to the Jewish populace of several hundred thousand, whom the gendarmes had in fact already started to herd together into hastily improvised ghettos.
How is the Jewish Council’s decision to be explained?
It is inexplicable in my view. I could perhaps give your question the highly paradoxical answer that they wished to preempt a panic breaking out among the Jewish population.
A bitter paradox … What is most depressing of all is that, sadly, it is all too near the mark. So, you had no idea either where that train was taking you.
Nobody did. There were sixty of us in the cattle truck, and not one of us had heard the name “Auschwitz.”
That scene in Fatelessness when Köves spots a deserted railway station through the wired-over window slot of the carriage and picks out the name “Auschwitz” from the building — is that fiction, or did it happen in reality?
As true to life as could be, and yet it also served the novel’s fictional structure superbly.
So, in relation to that, no worry crossed your mind that it might be anecdotal?
No, because I couldn’t have dreamed up anything better if I tried. Besides which, I wouldn’t have dared to dream up something like that.
There, you see …
See what?
The fact that when it comes down to it you do feel bound by reality; you do set down real life, and lived reality at that. There’s the football pitch, for example. You write in Galley Boat-Log that you have a clear recollection of one at Auschwitz …
Birkenau.
Fair enough! Of the football pitch at Birkenau, and yet you did not dare to write that in your novel until you happened to come across a mention of it by Borowski.
In his short story This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Tadeusz Borowski is one of those writers you can count on the fingers of two hands who in the death camps discovered something important about the human condition and were capable of expressing it. He wrote five or six powerful short stories in such a crystal-clear style and in such a brilliant, classical form that almost reminds me of the novellas of Prosper Mérimée. And then he too committed suicide. But tell me, now, why do you crow so much each and every time you catch me writing some true, actual detail, or “reality,” as you put it?
Because you blur reality with your fiction theory. You cut yourself out of your own stories.
There’s no question of that. It’s just that my proper place is not in the story but at the writing desk (admittedly, I didn’t yet have a piece of furniture like that at the time). Allow me to call on one or two great exemplars as my witnesses. Would War and Peace, for instance, still be a good book even if Napoleon and the Russian campaign had never existed?