I kept the regimental Karl Troop Cross for a long time, along with the tiddlywinks for table-top soccer and my lead soldiers. I could see you were attracted by it, says Gizi a few weeks after Józsi’s funeral. Have it. It’s yours!
Black suits Gizi, says Mother to Father.
By the summer of 1944 we were already living in the Róbert family’s dwelling, the yellow-star house at 78 Amerikai Road, when Gizi and Bőzsi rang the bell. Good grief! says Mother, why haven’t you got a yellow star on your clothing? Aren’t you afraid of running into an identification check? We’re disappearing, says Gizi, we’ve just come to say goodbye; Károly is going to look after us. Károly is a second lieutenant in the artillery. He does not come into the house but takes a stroll in the street. He was one of the young cadets who were Józsi’s seconds for that duel, says Mother after Gizi and Bőzsi have left. The blonde hair looked good on them, didn’t it? she says to Father, but Father doesn’t reply.
On 12 November Károly was present at the residence of Captain Vilmos Tartsay when the military wing of the Liberation Committee of the Hungarian National Uprising was formed. A week later Gizi is waiting for him at their home in Óbuda to tell him she has no news of Bőzsi; she was worried and asked him to accompany her to Zugló, the XIVth District. They need to search for the kid: that’s how she puts it, Gizi is still talking that way about her now 26-year-old younger sister. The first lieutenant obtains a car from a fellow officer. They don’t find Bőzsi at Gyarmat Street; the acquaintance at whose place she had been living with false papers says that the caretaker for the block had informed on her. Two Arrow Crossers had come and taken her to the KISOK ground on Queen Erzsébet Avenue, says Bőzsi’s landlord. He had heard that from there everyone was taken to the Óbuda Brickworks.
That afternoon is the first time Gizi saw Carl Lutz at the brickworks. She learned that the group Bőzsi ended up with has already been sent off towards Hegyeshalom.
Three days later Carl Lutz reads the report of Police Captain Batizfalvy about these marching columns:
They follow the autobahn through Pilisvörösvár, Dorog and along the Danube past Süttő, Szőny and Gönyű to Mosonmagaróvár. Ten thousand Hungarians have already been handed over to the Germans at the frontier. As of now there are some 13,000 walking on the highway. Almost 10,000 have disappeared from the numbers who set off from the brickworks; some of them died because they were unable to walk the distance, some were shot and a few hundred escaped. Death ships are anchored at Gönyű; several hundred are lying on board suffering from dysentery. The barges are guarded by the gendarmerie.
Veesenmayer, the Reich Plenipotentiary in Hungary, communicates to Berlin that, according to Eichmann’s figures, a further 40,000 needed to be readied for handover.
SS Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner, with the military rank of General in the Waffen-SS, reports the same day that he is setting off to inspect the Waffen-SS divisions fighting in the Hungarian theatre, in the course of which he was going to meet SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher in Vienna. He did not wish to give credence to Becher’s report about the state of those who were walking on the highway, which was why he was heading for Budapest. He encountered the marching columns halfway there. He can see that the escorts are Hungarian gendarmes and Arrow Crossers; he can see the corpses lying by the road. He returns to Vienna and reports to Becher that he now believes what he had heard from him, and once he got to Budapest he would immediately lodge a protest with Obergruppenführer Otto Winkelmann, the commander of the SS Police in Budapest.
Hans Jüttner never reaches Budapest, as he is posted elsewhere.
On that very same day Colonel-General Károly Beregfy, Szálasi’s Minister of Defence, issues an instruction in which he bestows on unit commanders the right to massacre and decimate:
Any commander who is unable to maintain discipline and order with the means at his disposal is not suited to command, and it is necessary to proceed accordingly. Military financial support will be withdrawn from the dependants of all deserters.
In an official report, the Swedish Legation in Budapest recounts that those who arrive alive in Hegyeshalom are handed over to Captain Péterfy, his immediate colleagues being Captain Kalotay and Captain Csepelka. Before being handed over to the Germans those who remain alive are quartered in barns in which the bedding litter is filthy and contagious and dysentery is rife.
The Opel Kadett turns on to the highway.
The first column is reached as they are approaching Gönyű.
The car creeps slowly past the marchers. Gizi scans every face. She gets out and checks the dead bodies in the ditch. She does not find Bőzsi among the living or the dead. The groups are separated by a distance of fifteen to twenty kilometres. When they reach the next one Gizi always gets out, always looks at the faces of the dead and dying. After the third column Károly will not let her get out of the car on her own. He has to present himself to the officer in charge of each column. He shows one of the blank safe-conduct permits that Batizfalvy gave Lutz on which his name and rank have been typed.
At Abda, just outside Győr, a German car approaches from the direction of Vienna. The two vehicles are unable to pass one another because of a passing column. They have to stop. Standartenführer Becher gets out; Károly likewise. He salutes and reports to the general that he is on an inspection tour, carrying orders for Captain Péterfy at Hegyeshalom. The general nods and gets back into his car.
He gave me a good once-over, Gizi later tells Mother.
The officer smiles and asks where the ladies are staying. He uses the plural but only has eyes for one, the tall blonde woman. Gizi smiles back. With her right hand she brushes aside the strands of hair fluttering over her eyes and tidies them behind her ear.
Strings of small red paprikas and bulbs of garlic are hanging outside the shop fronts by the side of the road at Abda. Glazed pottery plates, jugs, hand-woven fabric. Fords, Audis, Mazdas and Opels are coming from the direction of Vienna, tourists getting out and buying. They drink beers.
If just one of the stables had been preserved. One of the barns. Or a new building with plastic walls was standing there so that passing cars and the astonished faces looking from those cars could be reflected in it while the interior space was also visible, the composed piles of accessories — not blankets, sodden knapsacks, shoes with their soles come adrift and scraps of clothing, maybe, but jeans, casual jackets with zip fasteners, coloured knitted shirts, briefcases, Adidas bags and, tossed among them, a scattering of bloodied clumps of straw and a scattering of plastic human body parts as in a Guernica, from which those passing by in the cars would quickly avert their gaze.
The Opel Kadett turns off in front of an office for the commanding officer that has been set up in the frontier post. Károly hands over the safe-conduct pass to Captain Péterfy and a list of the twenty-five names of people he has to transport back to Budapest. Captain Péterfy establishes that signature and stamp are authentic.
Three ICRC ambulances draw up and park behind the Opel Kadett.
Gizi proceeds alongside Károly. They enter the first shed.
White-gowned young men get down from the three Red Cross vans. They belong to the He-Halutz.
Several hundred people are stretched out in the shed. Gizi calls out Bőzsi’s name.
The He-Halutzim had been ordered not to bother about the list of names but to stretcher those who are in the worst condition to the ambulances.
Gizi now calls out Bőzsi’s name in the second shed.