For example, your first device is stubbornness: it may have come in varying forms, but I can tell you there was no lack of it at Zeitz, and at times it can be of immense assistance, so I observed. For instance, I found out more from Bandi Citrom about that weird band, collection, breed, or whatever one should call them, a specimen of which — on my left in the row — had already somewhat astonished me on my arrival. It was he who told me that we call them “Finns.” Certainly if you ask them where they are from, they really do reply — if they see fit to give you any answer at all, that is — something like “ fin Minkács,” for example, by which they mean they are from Munkachevo, or “fin Sadarada,” which, for example (and you have to guess), is Sátoraljaújhely. Bandi Citrom already knows their organization from labor camp and doesn’t speak very highly of it. They can be seen everywhere, at work, while marching or at Appell , rocking rhythmically back and forth as they unflaggingly mutter their prayers to themselves, like some unrepayable debt. When meanwhile they speak out of the corner of the mouth to whisper across something like, “Knife for sale,” you don’t pay any attention. All the less so, however tempting it may be, especially in the morning, when it is “Soup for sale,” because, however strange it may sound, they don’t touch soup nor even the sausage that we occasionally get — nothing prescribed by their religion. “So what do they live on?” you might well ask, and Bandi Citrom would reply: you don’t have to worry about them, they look after themselves. He would be right too because, as you see, they stay alive. Among one another and with the Latvians they use Yiddish, but they also speak German, Slovakian, and a smattering of who knows what, only not Hungarian — unless it’s a question of doing business, of course. On one occasion (there was no getting out of it), as luck would have it, I ended up in their work Kommando. Their first question was “Rayds di yiddish?” When I told them that, no, unfortunately I didn’t, that was it as far as they were concerned, I became a nonperson, they looked at me as if I were thin air, or rather didn’t exist at all. I tried to speak, get myself noticed, but to no avail. “ Di bisht nisht kai yid, d’bisht a shaygets,”[12] they shook their heads, and I could only wonder at how people who after all were reputedly at home in the business world could cling so irrationally to something from which the harm to them was so much more, the losses so much greater, than any gains with regard to the end result. That day I learned that the discomfiture, the skin-crawling awkwardness which at times took hold between us was already familiar to me from back home, as if there had been something not quite right about me, as if I did not quite measure up to the proper ideal, in short as if I were somehow Jewish — a rather odd feeling to have after all, I reckoned, in the midst of Jews, in a concentration camp.
At other times it was Bandi Citrom who slightly amazed me. Whether at work or during a break, I often heard, and quickly learned from him, his favorite song, which he had brought with him from his labor service days in the punishment company: “We clear mines from land in the Uk-raine, / But even there we’re never chicken…” was how it began, and I was specially fond of the closing lines, which go: “If a com-rade, a good bud-dy, should be lost, / For those back home our ri-poste / Is: / Come of us what may, / Our dear old home-land, / We’ll not de-ceive you, at any cost.” A noble sentiment, undeniably, and the somber tune, more on the slow side than snappy, along with the ditty as a whole, did not fail to exert their influence on me too, naturally— only somehow they merely jogged my memory of the gendarme, that time back on the train, when he reminded us of our being Hungarian; only in the end, strictly speaking, the homeland had punished them too. I mentioned this to him once, what’s more. He did not come up with any counterargument either, yet he seemed to be just a little put out, even annoyed one could say. On some occasion the next day, though, very wrapped up in something, he again started whistling, humming, and finally singing it as if any recollection of that had been clean forgotten. Another frequently repeated refrain was that he would again “set foot on the pavements of Forget-me-not Road,” that being where he lived back home, and he mentioned the street, even the number of the house, so many times and in so many ways that finally I too knew all its attractions by heart, almost longed to go there myself, even though in my own recollections I actually knew it only as a fairly secluded backstreet somewhere in the neighborhood of the Eastern Railway Terminal. He often spoke about, evoked, and also reminded me of other places too, squares, avenues, houses, as well as certain well-known slogans and advertising signs that blazed on their roofs and in various shopwindows—“the lights of Budapest” as he called them, though here I had to correct him, being obliged to point out that those lights no longer existed on account of the blackout regulations, and the bombing, to be sure, had knocked the city’s panorama about a bit here and there. He fell silent, but as far as I could make out the news was not very much to his liking. The next day, though, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he again started to go on about the lights.
But then, could anyone be acquainted with all the variants of stubbornness? For I can assure you, had I but known, there were many variants I could have chosen from in Zeitz. I heard about the past, the future, and a lot, a very great deal, about freedom above all; indeed, I can safely say, nowhere does one hear as much about it, it seems, as among prisoners, which naturally makes a lot of sense after all, I suppose. Yet others took some strange pleasure in an adage, a joke, a wisecrack of sorts. I heard this one myself, naturally. There is an hour of the day which falls between returning from the factory and the evening Appell, a distinctive, always bustling, and liberated hour that I, for my part, always looked forward to and enjoyed the most while in the Lager; as it happened, this was generally also supper time. I was just pushing my way through the milling, trading, and chatting knots of people when someone bumped into me, and a pair of tiny, worried eyes above a singular nose gazed at me from under the loose-fitting convict’s cap. “I don’t believe it,” we both said almost simultaneously, as he had recognized me and I him, the man with the bad luck. He immediately appeared to be delighted and inquired where my quarters were. Block 5, I told him. “Pity,” he said regretfully, since he was lodged elsewhere. He complained that he didn’t “get to see familiar faces,” and when I told him that I didn’t either he somehow looked crestfallen, though I don’t know why. “We’re becoming split up, all split up,” he observed with an implication in his words and the shaking of his head that was somewhat lost on me. Then his face brightened all of a sudden, and he asked, “Do you know what this here,” pointing to his chest, “this letter ‘U,’ signifies?” Sure I did, I told him: “Ungar, Hungarian.” “No,” he answered, “Unschuldig,” meaning “innocent,” then gave a snort of laughter followed by prolonged nodding of the head with a brooding expression, as if the notion were somehow highly gratifying, though I have no idea why. Subsequently, and quite often in the beginning, I saw the same on others in the camp from whom I also heard that wisecrack, as if they derived some warming, fortifying emotion from it — that at least is what was suggested by the unfailingly identical laugh and then that same softening of features, the dolefully smiling and yet somehow euphoric expression with which they told and hailed this witticism each and every time they told it, in much the same sort of way as when a person hears music that deeply touches his feelings or some particularly moving story.