That night the military spokesman at Wilhelmstrasse relays to Hitler the news that Budapest is considered indefensible; even the generals would find it acceptable if it were declared an open city. Hitler flies into a rage and yells that if he had no regrets about sacrificing German cities, then why should there be any regret about a foreign one? Vessenmayer, who is also present, adds, We are not worried about Budapest being destroyed if that means Vienna can be defended. For the wired order to Budapest, Ferenc Fiala, Szálasi’s deputy and press officer, calls a press conference. The only thing that can save Budapest and its inhabitants from destruction is to fight, and by common consent the Hungarian and German leaderships and the Hungarian and German armies will undertake to do that.
Hitler personally puts Obergruppenführer Winkelmann, commander of the SS Police in Budapest, in charge with the defence of the city. Four days later he gives a personal order to replace him when Winkelmann also reports that, militarily speaking, defence of the city is hopeless. Szálasi accepts a German instruction whereby bridges and public utilities on any ground that is surrendered should be blown up.
Gizi gets out of the Red Cross car at the corner of Andrássy Avenue and Mihály Munkácsy Street. The three-storey house is one of the city’s most modern buildings: clean lines, closed balconies, a Red Cross sign on the gate. The lads have been given to understand that they need to give four rings on the door bell. In the corridors of the upper floors there are doors on both sides, some of them open. The faces of curious boys; on the second floor there are young girls.
She is led into a cabin-like room by the rear staircase. Divan, wardrobe, two seats, a washbasin. She is told where the toilet is at the end of the corridor. She may not switch the light on as the blackout measures were not perfect; she is given a pocket torch. On the seat are books and newspapers; she looks through the magazines under the bedclothes. One announcement is for a Levente alert that will be at seven o’clock on Thursday morning:
The enthusiastic army of our Levente sons will have to fulfil a most important task, which calls for many industrious young hands. The chief treasure of a Levente is his honour, says the Levente law. Now our Leventes are again being called on to prove that they are the staunchest guards and defenders of the nation’s fortune.
She does not know what day it is; she does not know when it will be Thursday.
Carl Lutz, attaché case in hand, gets out from the Packard in front of Keleti Railway Terminus. He goes up the eight steps leading to the platform.
It is Thursday morning. He is taking the 7.30 train to Vienna, where he will have to wait two hours for the connection to Zürich.
This is same time that Gizi wakes up in the Red Cross home on Mihály Munkácsy Street. She takes a clean set of underwear from her grip, washes the dirty items in the washbasin, rolls the knickers and cotton stockings up in a clean handkerchief.
The escalator takes me up from the Baross Square metro station. On the right is a Princess Patisserie; on the left they are selling kebabs, and there is a Pizza Hut. A table offers espresso coffee made from Omnia beans for sixty forint a cup. Five rows of steps lead from the subways to the platforms. I go up.
Lutz looks back at the statue of Gábor Baross — the revered Hungarian Minister of Ways and Communications in the latter part of the nineteenth century — which was standing at the head of Rákóczi Avenue, Budapest’s main street. Open trucks, packed with Levente youths of sixteen or seventeen, are turning into Baross Square from Rottenbiller Street in front of the Fillér Store. On the platform papers are being checked by two men with Arrow Cross armbands; behind them a sickle-plumed military policeman is standing.
I look at the Arrivals and Departures indicator boards. Two homeless people are sitting on a bench fishing lumps of preserved meat from a can with their fingers. A third is lying on the ground next to them in a dirty quilted coverlet.
Lutz looks for the service for Vienna. The vaulted glass roof of the station is showing bomb damage in a number of places. It is starting to snow through the gaps on to the platforms. He reaches the first-class compartments. Another Arrow Cross patrol passes by. He again has to show his diplomatic passport. Two MPs, rifles trained on him, are leading off a young man in Home Guard uniform. A porter arrives with elegant luggage on his trolley; a women in an astrakhan coat is on the arm of a Home Guard major. Two other Arrow Crossers are kicking a yellow-armbanded forced-labour serviceman who is stretched out on the ground. Lutz takes photographs, and he tries to get a shot of the smoke plume of one of the in-coming engines.
I am standing by the buffers of platform 4. The Wiener Walzer service from Vienna is due and arrives on platform 5. Passengers flood out. Jeans, jazzy shirts, Adidas bags, suitcases with zippers. The asphalt surface of the platform has no doubt been renovated a good few times in the past sixty years, but all the same it is like a find at Pompeii. The two homeless are well mannered enough to take their empty cans to the bin; the third does not budge from the filthy coverlet.
Lutz hears gunfire.
He also hears the sound of a violin.
He still has time before the train departs and goes over to the arrivals side of the platform.
When he first arrived in Budapest this was where Ambassador Jaeger had waited for him in the hall which leads out on to Kerepesi Road.
The bursts of gunfire he heard are coming from the trotting racetrack slightly further up Kerepesi Road and on the right; he can hear the difference between a short and a long burst. The music is coming from close at hand: Schubert. Lutz used to play the violin when he was young, and later on he even played Palestrina occasionally in an impromptu quartet. He recognizes Schubert’s String Quintet in C. He can hear the first violin and one of the two cello parts, but both are being played on violins. MPs are standing guard on the doors to and from Kerepesi Road.
The second movement of the string quintet. It’s so boundless, he said to Gertrud after a concert performance of it in Zürich. Boundlessly sad, Gertrud had said. No, Lutz had protested, just boundless, boundless.
Even sixty years later there are still four chandeliers of five lamps each hanging from the ceiling of the waiting-room. The two violinists are standing on the left by the wall. One is in a worn-out raincoat, the other is in a black overcoat with fraying sleeves. Both are unshaven and wearing checked peaked caps. Both have dark glasses; two white canes are propped against the wall.
They finish the movement, and immediately they start to replay it from the beginning. Lutz has the feeling that they have been doing this for a long time. Maybe that is why they are not conspicuous to the Arrow Crossers and the MPs. Lutz takes out a banknote and drops it into the tin plate by their feet. They don’t thank him, but he has a feeling that they can see him even from behind the black lenses. Their violin bows are threadbare; the cello line sounds almost scraped out.
I steer clear of the cars waiting by the exits on to Kerepesi Road and walk back to Baross Square. I count the number of steps leading up to the station. Opposite, where the former Fillér Store used to be, is the Grand Hotel Hungária. On the left, next to the Golden Park Hotel, the vacant site of a building destroyed by bombing during the war is fenced off. On the right are unplugged bullet holes on the uppermost floor of the house at the corner of Gábor Bethlen Street.
Once more I go up the same eight steps on which Carl Lutz made his way up to the platform, then I stroll off to the right into the waiting-room which leads to Kerepesi Road. I count the number of chandeliers again. I find it hard to credit Lutz’s idea that the two men with black-lensed glasses and white canes could have been playing for days. It is impossible that Arrow Cross patrols would have neglected to check their papers and realized that both the dark glasses and white canes were covers. It seems impossible that they would play their violins with such worn-out bows — and the cello part on one at that — and meanwhile around them army deserters were being captured and forced-labour serviceman kicked around while MPs are checking the papers of anyone who goes near any platform. Lutz no doubt hid from the spectacle behind music that might be conjured up in this context and stopped his ears with what he felt to be the boundless sounds of the Adagio of the String Quintet in C.