I daren’t ask “what did happen?”
Both of them were murdered in Auschwitz. From the window of the cattle truck they were able to throw a letter card addressed to my mother: “We’ve been stuck on a train, we’re being carried off somewhere, we don’t know where”—that, roughly, is what it said.
Does the letter card still exist?
My mother had it for a long time. I still remember today the downward-sloping two lines scribbled in pencil on the grey-coloured paper.
And how did the letter card reach the addressee?
Some kind-hearted soul must have found it, put a stamp on it, and posted it. My mother was still at her own address, but during the forced “clustering” of the Jewish population she moved into a “Yellow Star” house in Gyöngyhaz Street.3 As you no doubt know, before a ghetto was set up in Budapest, there was an ordinance that decreed that several Jewish families were to move in together into single properties. The resulting houses of mass lodgings were then referred to as “Jewish houses” and a yellow star was nailed up over the entrances. I myself was living in a house like that before … how should I put it: before I was “arrested,” specifically with my stepmother at 24/B Vas Street,4 where her entire family “moved in.”
Let’s go back a little to Budapest before the war. Your father and mother had divorced, and meanwhile they had put you in a boarding school for boys as a full-boarder. When was that?
Around 1934. I was five and the youngest pupil at the institution. I completed the four years of my elementary schooling there. “Let’s leap to it!” says old whatshisname in Zsigmond Móricz’s Faithful Until Death …
Póslaki.
Yes, of course: good old Mr. Póslaki!
Do you like that book?
I was fond of Misi Nyilas, the poor lad. And also of Nemeček and the rest in Ferenc Molnár’s The Paul Street Boys. And Winnetou and loads more, but most of all C.S. Forester’s Captain Hornblower book.
I’m not familiar with that.
Marvellous book! Solace for my sick soul. Incredible as it may seem, the book was published in 1943, right in the midst of the war! I was given it as a present by my governess, Auntie Susie (I called her Auntie even though she can only have been in her early thirties and incidentally the favourite target of my amatory awakening and sexual fantasies, of which the lady in question would have known nothing), who came to the home in Baross Street twice a week to cram a bit of Latin grammar and mathematics into my dim-witted head. I was thirteen then, and the book was a bar mitzvah gift. You know what that is, don’t you?
Sure. A coming-of-age initiation on a boy’s thirteenth birthday, rather like Confirmation for Christians.
So, it was necessary to pick a rabbi to conduct the service. The done thing for a boy at the Madách Gymnasium in Barcsay Street5 was to pick the religious instruction teacher, a certain Itzak Schmelczer, who had a silvery moustache and a neat little goatee. I liked his Old Testament stories in which lords of the desert at the head of their flocks meet up and, as a token of good will, slaughter and roast a kid goat. My mouth would be drooling by the end. I thought the Hungarian word for kid (gödölye) had such a splendid ring that for a long time I thrilled in its sheer sound without having a clear idea of what exactly it meant. My father instructed me to ask him what his price was for a bar mitzvah. You want me to ask? Tell him your father asked you to. I shilly-shallied for days before I plucked up the courage to approach the teacher’s desk and ask: Oh, yes, my father said to ask the teacher what it costs for a whatsitsname, er … The world did not collapse around me, and the floor didn’t open up before me, as I was half-expecting it would; instead the rabbi responded: Tell your dad that I’ll take it on, and the price is a goose. I would have been happier if he had said gödölye. And just to be clear, that was 1943 and the black-market price for a goose was a hundred peng? — quite a substantial sum in those days.6 The bar mitzvah went ahead; the rabbi and packed congregation sang psalms, and during prayers the elders announced aloud the donations that were intended for the synagogue. I personally was present in my dark-blue, braided, Hungarian-style best suit, a so-called “Bocskai” suit. The utter absurdity of the situation was thereby complete, but evidently no one grasped that. Anyway, I didn’t particularly want to talk about that …
No, but about the English sea captain.
Captain Hornblower, the commander of the flagship, then of a frigate, and later still of a ship of the line, which participates in maintaining the blockade that was set up against Napoleonic France. He was a marvellous figure: plagued by an inferiority complex, he constantly doubted his own abilities, fell in love with the unattainable Lady Barbara (Susie for me: if she turned her face to the light a soft, ever-so-fine fluff could be seen on her upper lip, which drove me to distraction!) — a quite baffling figure for a Hungarian boy who had been used to the unimpeachable heroism of János Arany’s Toldi, John and Matthias Hunyadi, and the protagonists of Maurus Jókai’s tales; a fallibly human figure, who in the end wins his fights and is an implacable opponent of usurpers, of Corsican despots, as Napoleon is apostrophized in the book. Only a dunce could not tell that the latter stood for Hitler, whom the Anglo-Saxon powers would eventually defeat, because they had one attribute no dictator could call on, and that was humanity, the ability to admit weakness, which can be a fount of incredible strength.
You called the book a solace for your “sick soul.”
Yes. I think that I was dealing with a pretty sick soul at that time, and I don’t mean I was tormented simply by adolescence, the usual tortures of puberty. I hated those around me, hated myself, hated my school, I hated anyone or anything; I even hated having to climb out of bed in the morning. I hated even our home in Baross Street. The housing shortage started in Budapest during the war, you know; that was when the partitioning of apartments started, turning a single solidly constructed flat into two or three shoddily built flatlets. Ours, for instance, didn’t have a hallway, so one entered by stepping directly from the outside corridor into the living room, and for some inexplicable reason I took this to be a catastrophe that had been visited on us. It was useless my stepmother urging me to invite my friends round from time to time; I feared that they would burst out laughing the moment they stepped from the corridor into the front room. Apart from anything else the room contained my bed — an ungainly piece of furniture that was a sofa by day and a couch by night. My father and stepmother slept in the inner room, where there was a stupid clock perched on top of one of those obligatory display cabinets stuffed with all manner of china knick-knacks. The clock struck once on every half-hour and on the hour it would peal the Big Ben chimes. Sometimes I would awake early and lie there in torment, waiting for the hour to strike. If it struck just once I couldn’t tell from that what time it was; I had to wait for Big Ben. One, two, three … six — no, the pig would chime once more: seven o’clock, time to get up! I would cower mutely in bed. Two or three minutes later my father would start calling from behind the door. He would call my name at an ever-growing volume. Master Imre! Emmerich! Emerico! Grudgingly I would crawl out of bed. It was my task to light the gas ring under a kettle of water for the Planta tea. A tough life kids have.