At the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Lutz is urged to check seemingly forged Swiss protective passports, Schutzbriefe, that participants in rescue operations had produced — with his approval and in more than a few cases his cooperation — and he is also urged personally to separate ‘genuine’ and ‘forged’ safe-conduct papers at the Óbuda Brickworks, failure to acknowledge any document, he writes, being tantamount to a death sentence to the holder of the paper.
At one time my wife and I stood four hours in snow and ice inside the ill-famed Óbuda brickyards performing this sad business of sorting out Schutzbriefe. We witnessed soul-searching scenes. Five thousand unhappy human beings stood in one row, freezing, trembling, hungry, carrying small bundles with their belongings, and showed me their papers. I shall never forget their terrified faces. Again and again the police had to intervene because the people almost tore off my clothes as they pleaded with me. This was the last upsurge of a will to live before resignation set in, which usually ended in death. For us it was mental torture to have to sort out these documents. On these occasions we saw human beings hit with dog whips. They fell to the ground with bleeding faces, and we were ourselves openly threatened with weapons if we tried to intervene … I drove towards the brickworks past a procession in order to show the people that not all hope was yet lost.
There are two people sitting on the back seat behind the driver, the man on the side nearer the kerb. He has a longish face, thin-rimmed spectacles, thin, tightly clamped lips, hair sleeked and with a parting, chiselled chin — I see that on a photograph fifty-eight years later.
There are also lots of people on the pavement in Bécsi Road. Yesterday it was repeated on the wireless that on 30 January 1942 Hitler announced to the world at large what, at the Wannsee Conference ten days before, had still been kept secret, namely, that the war was going to come to a successful conclusion with the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.
A black Packard is now driving in front of us. We are not to know that it will shortly reach its destination, turn off under a massive wooden gate, pull up in the mud in front of the dead bodies lying on the ground, and the long-faced man and a fur-coated woman get out.
We are still proceeding along Bécsi Road.
The boy should not look over there. Father does not say to me, Don’t look over there, but instead speaks to Mother, as if it were her responsibility that I should not look over there — but where? I am walking between them. I can see them exchange looks; this is an unspoken agreement between them. It is Father’s task to recognize that the time has come for something unavoidable for all of us, and after that come Mother’s tiny tasks, but in this case she can do nothing as she is walking on my left and can do nothing to stop me looking over to the right.
There is a dead body lying in the gateway.
Pulled out of the column and just now being covered with newspapers.
The two booted feet and right hand are poking from underneath. The fingers stretched out. The palm of the hand rigid in shellfishlike fashion. The hand looks as if it were charred.
Heart attack, says someone in front.
Can a heart attack be like an electric shock? Flashing through one and charring the flesh?
We have to pick up our step.
Those who lag behind get beaten with rifle-butts.
It is possible that what I thought was charring was a threadbare black glove. Some of us gave a fleeting glance at the dead body.
A young man steps out of another gateway and turns up the collar of his winter overcoat, pulls the visor of his cap down over his eyes. He steps off the pavement when the BuMuT conductor with the Arrow Cross armband and the submachine-gun-toting Home Guard move away from each other. He slips an envelope into the hand of one of the men who is marching just ahead of us, says something to him, turns around and vanishes into another gateway.
So, at six in the morning Misi sees an armed detachment through the spyhole in their front door at 78 Amerikai Road, asks for time to get the keys, but he doesn’t bring them; instead he hurries out of the back door into the caretaker’s apartment and ten minutes later reappears with a few papers that belong to the caretaker’s absent son, watches his family’s Swiss Schutzbriefe being ripped up, hurries off to the Glass House at 29 Vadász Street (an annexe of the Swiss Legation and home to the local office of the Jewish Agency and where Schutzbriefe were produced) in Pest’s inner-city Vth District. He pushes his way through the crowd of several hundred who are pleading for such documents, acquires authenticated copies, heads across the city in search of our column, reaches it, hurries ahead, waits under a gateway on Bécsi Road, steps out at an appropriate moment, slips the documents into the hand of the man on the outside of the row, who immediately passes them on. Misi vanishes, and all that is what his sister tells me fifty-eight years later while we drink coffee. I, though, do not recall this, whereas she does not recall a dead body covered with newspaper.
Misi is average-sized. Wears spectacles. Not the sporting type. He goes to the opera, sings Verdi arias. His voice is none too good. The column leaves the dead body behind. Him, too.
On the stretch of the Millennium Underground, which runs from the city centre to Zugló, in one of the showcases recently installed at the Opera House station is a group photograph of the pupils at the Israelite Gymnasium who took their school-leaving examinations in 1944. Dark suits, white shirts, ties, regulation six-point stars on the breast pockets of the jackets. Misi is on the second row, fourth from the left.
Hung. Royal Government on the matter of decree 1240/1944 concerning the distinguishing marks for Jews. Outside the home, from the time the current decree comes into force onwards, all Jews regardless of gender who have completed their sixth year of life are obliged to wear on the left breast of the outer garment a readily visible canary-yellow star of 10 x 10 cm in diameter and made of silk or satin cloth.
M. is blinking in the photograph. He looks young for his age. Seven months later he would be breaking through detachments in the city. He does not his clean his steamed-up spectacles. He knows which gateway to wait in, when he should step out, how he should approach the column and in what direction he should disappear.
I would like to get there. I would like to put the knapsack down, change socks, dry my clothes.
Far in the distance, at the end of Bécsi Road, in the last few minutes before darkness falls, the chimney of a brick kiln pokes up into the sky.
On the left is the entrance to the St Margit’s Hospital, a sure point from which to get one’s bearings in the gloom.
By now the sheds full of drying bricks are visible in the arch of the hillside.
The space behind the enormous, wide-open gate swallows up the columns ahead of us.
The sound of gunfire in the distance. I am able to tell from the gunfire the difference between rifle shots and submachine-gun bursts. These are dull-sounding cracks from a north-easterly direction.
A bend in the road. The front of our column flashes in the light of pocket torches. Bayonets are fitted on to rifles; submachine-gun barrels are directed at us. The lieutenant, as if this were a dress parade, is marching four paces ahead of the first row with two deputies falling in behind him — one the gendarme NCO, the other a Party functionary. We march in step on command — women, old people and children younger than me as well — as if we were marching in the schoolyard past the dais at some festivity. Or rather, no, as if I were sleepwalking. Not that the column is a dream, but everything that has happened, both before and after. The truth is my path to the gateway. I am a fourteen-year-old boy, and I see the face of an elderly man as he watches me, trying to write down what he see as he bends over a sheet of paper.