We stand at the tram stop.
The tram rattles off, leaving the darkness behind it, and disappears into the even darker distance.
Snow is covering the ice of the Erzsébet Ice Rink. The loudspeaker is dead. There are no street lamps shining on Amerikai Road either. It’s as if we were not stepping ahead but downwards to a place where the darkness is even greater still. Maybe we’ll move on if we see anything suspicious, I say to Vera. What do you mean suspicious? she asks. Well, suspicious, like something that could get us into trouble. So where shall we go then? she asks.
Carl Lutz checks how things are going with issuing Schutzbriefe at Vadász Street. The previous day or the next day?
The typists watch him as he makes telephone calls. He lists the houses in József Katona Street, Tátra Street and Pannónia Street on the front door of which a sign has to be set up to state that the occupants of the house are under the protection of the Swiss Legation. He takes over numbers 4, 15/a, 15/n and 14–16, Tàtra Street, hands over numbers 7/a and 7/b Hollár Street to the Swedish Consulate and in return asks that on the front door of number 36 Pannónia Street a letter declaring that it enjoys Swiss diplomatic immunity should also be put up alongside the note testifying to its Swedish protection.
I can find no photograph of Lutz standing, telephone in hand, in front of the ladies.
He goes out and opens the door with the sign ‘Supplies for Protected Houses’. He confers with the secretaries. He then leaves the house, forcing a way through the scrum at the gate.
I am standing at the corner of János Arany Street. I set off because I want not only to retrace my own steps but also follow the traces of Carl Lutz’s footsteps, covered over as they are by many hundred of steps at the time and many hundreds of thousands of steps since then.
Next to the old photograph recording the typists at work I place one of Father András Kun. He is not standing on the bank of the Danube where a few days later he will shoot bursts of submachine-gun fire but speaking at an open-air meeting. On one page is a stern-faced, shaven-headed man in a black uniform; on the other a raincoated young man with a necktie and an ardent look on his face. Father András Kun, a former Minorite friar, has a masculine look with thick, chiselled eyebrows. His right hand is raised in a Nazi salute, the wide sleeve of his cassock slipping back over the arm; he is sporting an obvious Arrow Cross insignia.
Lutz reaches his embassy, housed in the former US Legation in Szabadság Square, and goes upstairs into his office. Gertrud hastens to meet him. They kiss. There is a blonde woman seated in one of the armchairs. Familiar, it crosses Lutz’s mind. On the table are a bottle of cognac and two brandy glasses. Gertrud takes out another and pours for all three of them. They clink glasses. Gertrud refreshes the drinks. Frau Gizella, do you remember her? She was travelling with the officers along the road to Vienna.
The officers in the Hungarian Army resistance had been arrested and mostly shot in the back of the head; those who were still alive were awaiting sentencing — that much Lutz already knows. He puts in a telephone call and meanwhile sinks into the depths of a leather armchair, leans back and stretches both legs before him. At the other end of the line is Ambassador Carl Ivan Danielsson, head of the Swedish mission to Budapest. Lutz asks if he has been called back to Stockholm or whether he is travelling and what was the thinking in the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs about Szálasi’s call on the ambassadors in Budapest to join the Hungarian government in moving to Sopron? Gertrud lights up a Darling and blows smoke rings. Gizi is amazed, as if she were a little girl sitting in the circus, with everyone around her, similarly pigtailed little girls and close-cropped little boys, clapping the stunt. Carl Lutz dials another number and after a few sentences replaces the receiver. Both Danielsson and Angelo Rotta are staying, he says. So, will we? Gertrud asks. We’ll stay.
He did not seem tense or uncertain, just tired, Gizi tells Mother later. I didn’t pay much attention to him. I was looking at a photograph on the wall — just imagine, there was a stag looking back at me, standing in a meadow and making a magnificent show, in glorious colours with sunlit mountains behind it. It turned out the photograph had been taken in the Swiss Alps. Mother later told me, we were out there with your grandfather — just a moment, in ’23 perhaps.
Gertrud tells Gizi that twenty years before Carl Lutz had taken photographs; some had even appeared in newspapers. He had photographed not only in Switzerland but also Sweden, Germany and, naturally, Palestine, where after the outbreak of the war, as an employee of the Swiss Ministry for Foreign Affairs, he had represented German interests with the UK, the mandated power. There were around a couple of dozen of his photographs on the walls, Gizi told Mother, including some he had shot in Budapest, among them one showing two Arrow Crossers with submachine guns dragging a women by the hair — and you could see the street sign of the wall behind them: Pannónia Street — and I asked Gertrud when that had been, and she said he’d taken it only last week. That was when Carl had travelled along the road to Vienna.
Gizi gets up and looks more closely all along the photographs on the walls. He develops most of them himself, says Gertrud. Gizi would never have thought that for Lutz a glance cast at the pictures was the simplest form of approaching what I call a crime scene, nor can she know that Mother would later recount in just as much detail what she had heard from her.
The rocky promontory of the Meldegg is a splendid vantage point from which it is rewarding to take a picture at any time of day. Lutz is particularly fond of sunset: in the back-lighting at this hour the distant snake of the Rhine has a silvery sheen, but the light appears to come to a standstill, with the eastern part of Lake Constance already grey. The tranquil green villages take shelter in the folds of the hillsides. Indiscernible to other eyes, he knows exactly which among the many steeples is the church steeple of Walzenhausen, his native village. Wherever he is sent, to his postings in Palestine, Berlin and Budapest, the photographs are always there on the walls of his various offices, the sights making the foreign environment more homely, even though they do not do away with the sense of homelessness — as for that, he thinks that is because of a deeper matter he has no chance of resolving.
It could be, he says to Gertrud, five years before they arrived in Budapest, while he was pinning up two newer photographs on the wall of his office in Haifa, that these conflicts never can be reconciled. In one of the photographs Arabs are throwing stones at a lorry full of Jews, and two of them are grabbing one of the truck’s passengers; alongside them is a third who has a dagger in one hand. In the other photograph armed Jewish men are breaking into an Arab hovel, a little Arab boy watching on with curiosity. By the end Carl had begun to loath the Arabs, Gertrud tells Gizi in front of the picture, and he began to detest the Jews and British officials as well.