That day the front line reached Gödöllő, just to the north-east of Pest. The battalion of troops that was left from the routed Hungarian 18th and 10th infantry divisions were pulled into the German formations. Somewhat further east a large part of the badly trained reserves deserts at the village of Tápiósgyörgy on 12 December. To replace them two thousand Arrow Cross volunteers. Colonel Pál Prónay, a hussar who formed a company of officers during the White Terror in 1919, prepares the force for deployment. László Vannay, who had also been in the officers’ company in 1919, organized a battalion formed mostly of youths between the ages of fifteen and eighteen and using drill sergeants from the SS 22nd Cavalry Division. On the same day that Gertrud had a prolonged view of the cadet-school cyclist, Vannay’s detail murdered several dozen people in the cellars of the Toldy Gymnasium in Buda and by the bank of the Danube, executing army deserters and Soviet soldiers who had been taken prisoner. Ferenc Szálasi bestowed the rank of major on Vannay, who made good the losses in his battalion by staging round-ups in cellars, thrusting rifles into the hands of anyone considered able to fight and, without training, pitching them straight into active service.
‘Ervin Gálantay, volunteer dispatch rider for the Vannay battalion, as a pupil at the Kőszeg cadet school’ — a photograph signed Krisztián Ungváry on page 91 of a book entitled Budapest ostroma (The Siege of Budapest) published in 1998. Oval head, military cap pulled down to the right eyebrow. Stern expression on the face.
Carl Lutz comes out of the other room and views the photographs that have been pinned up on the wall. Most particularly that in which Lieutenant-Colonel Bagossy, who is accompanying him, is pointing his revolver at the lieutenant wearing the Arrow Cross armband. I can’t make Bagossy out, says Carl Lutz. He’s a wild beast. He imagined that the secrets within the pictures were beyond his knowledge. Lutz takes photographs in order to capture things that other people would not discover; Gertrud likewise. Could it be there is something to be discovered in the picture but not what he had thought? Many of the details are for him unidentifiable, even though he thought he had remembered everything. The looks, the place, the weather … Apparently not … He tries to conjure up his earlier self on earlier pictures, in which he, too, can be seen. Everything can be seen, yet it’s still as if something were missing. Two weeks earlier he had taken a picture of the entrance to the Foreign Ministry in Berne. He had felt like taking a few photographs of the city; he had sought something in the entrance to the building, but he only now woke up to what that was while looking at the photographs pinned up on the wall. In the Foreign Ministry the response to all of his questions was that they had received his reports and collated them, whereas the truth was they had kept quiet about them and let them rot at the bottom of desk drawers.
Gertrud pours herself a glass of cognac. She does not pour one for Carl Lutz. She is surprised that he asks for one.
You were also not fond of the Jews in Palestine, says Gertrud. They are all lying. Lutz reconstructs years later what he replies to this. Who? In Berne, of course, everybody in the Foreign Ministry. Of course, Gertrud said, he is later to write. Yet it was with them that you wanted to make a career, you do now as well …
Lutz puts down the full glass of cognac on the table. Gertrud turns away. Maybe she thought, Lutz writes later, that she ought not to have said what she said.
All he says by way of a response to his wife is that it was a happy chance coming across Feine in Palestine.
But you didn’t tell me everything you knew even then, did you, darling, any more than you are doing now.
No, I didn’t.
Do you think that is proper?
It’s an official secret.
Also what you learned from Feine …
He made me swear not to tell …
They all lie, so it doesn’t matter if he made you swear.
With that I just spread my arms, Lutz was to write.
He goes back into the other room.
I also did not tell you that his parting words were, You cannot understand, Carl, that we know what the future will be. It just hasn’t happened yet.
Gertrud is sitting in one of the armchairs waggling a foot in small circles. She breathes in deeply, pulling in and tensing her abdominal muscles. She twists her head, gets up, fills the coffee percolator, lights the gas flame under it. The water comes to the boil three times in the flask. She cautiously opens the door to the other room. Lutz has already fallen asleep on the double bed in the office that had not long ago been converted into a sleeping place. The standard lamp had not been switched off, which was unusual. The light of a lamp on the small round table. A file lay on the table — orange with a green cord to fasten it. The knot was undone, and the file was open.
Gertrud had not seen the orange file before. There was no question that her husband had readied it for her. She switches off the standard lamp and goes back into the office.
It was 11.35 in the evening.
At the top were Carl Lutz’s notes. He had written the first in Budapest.
On 30 July 1942 Dr Jezler had reported in top-secret code to the central security authorities the atrocious events in the east that had been the product of the decisions reached at the Wannsee Conference. The reaction of the centre in Berne: the mutual mudslinging should be treated critically.
Gertrud lights up a cigarette. Who is this Dr Jezler? What is this mutual mudslinging?
Why do they not take minutes of sessions of the Federal Council? Lutz writes on the following page. Do they not want the Swiss population to learn about what they themselves already know?
Photostats: ‘In France children are brutally separated from their parents. We were eyewitnesses to scenes which reawaken memories of the massacres in Bethlehem. All the signs are that there is a single main goaclass="underline" the total annihilation of Jewry.’ From the 27 August 1942 issue of the Schweizerische Kirchenzeitung of Lucerne.
In October 1942 National Councillor Albert Oeri appeals to the first session of the Swiss Assembly on Refugee Affairs: ‘It is not possible to make everything we know public. I am able to state, however, that what awaits those who are caught at our borders while trying to escape is far worse than death.’
In Vilnius 60,000 Jews have been slaughtered, reports a Swiss newspaper in February 1943.
In March 1943 the Work Relief Society of Zürich draws attention to the fact that every refusal of entry at the border is, in practice, tantamount to a death sentence.
On 27 July 1943 it is reported in one of the synagogues in Zürich that hundreds of thousands of families have been exterminated.
Gertrud can hear bursts of submachine-gun fire from the street.
It is five past midnight.
Instruction of 29 December 1942 by Dr Heinrich Rothmund, head of the Swiss Central Police Bodies, to border units: ‘All possible care must be taken that refugees who are to be refused are not allowed to come into telephone contact with anybody, whether directly or through intermediaries.’
Gertrud would like to have another cognac, but she senses that she would be sick.
She takes a drink.
She does not vomit.
When I returned to Berne last week I upbraided them for everything, writes Lutz.
Gertrud can see from the date that the note was written two weeks before. They nodded, he writes, then started to talk about other things.
Not only were they humiliating themselves but me as well; nevertheless, I do not regret making the trip. I can see more clearly the sin of which I have no part, but I might as well have had, and I must bear the shame of that. Yesterday I found in the library that the American Legation left here a copy of an English translation of The Brothers Karamazov. I have been reading it at night. Gertrud, thank goodness, sleeps very soundly. I read Alyosha’s words: We are good, good … When did I last go to church?