The armed men come back from the far end of the corridor, three men jostling before them. There are rats scuttling under the beds.
The dead were carried out on stretchers in the morning.
Father struggles to his feet and takes me by the hand; we set off. We leave our outer garments on the bed. He wraps himself in a blanket, I in the duffel coat. Ten minutes we get to wash, he says, we have to hurry, and it takes three or four of the ten minutes for us to reach the ground-floor showers. There is soap and a towel. He washes his groin, his chest and armpits; he says I should do the same. I had never seen him undressed before. He had lost so much weight that the skin on his arms and legs is wrinkled. He scrubs my back and I scrub his.
Vera is sitting on Mother’s bed, and Mother is cutting her hair with a pair of scissors. Vera looks at me, and I say that short hair suits her. She says she had wanted for ages to have it cut in the French fashion, like a boy, but her mummy had never allowed her. Mother reports that while we were taking the shower Gizi had popped in on a visit, and she had asked her to get Vera’s name added to our Swiss safe-conduct pass under our family name, saying it quietly so that Vera does not hear. Gizi had said she would try.
That was already the third or fourth visit Gizi had made to the hospital, says Mother. The first time she came she, too, had searched for us by torchlight, and the second time she knew where we were. The first time she came, I remember, she had a photograph of Bőzsi, and she was shining the torch on it, going over to each bed and asking if they had seen her. She brought bread and she brought apples, and after she had gone right along the whole corridor with Bőzsi’s photograph she came back to us, and your father sat her down beside him and tried to set her mind at rest. So I just let it be; there are times when a few words from a man can have more effect, says Mother.
That evening I have to gather my things together and make tracks. Dr Temesváry says that an Arrow Cross patrol can drop by at any moment, and he cannot give any guarantees for the safety of anyone who cannot prove he is incapacitated. Vera can stay as maybe they are not after young girls, but you, he adds, are tall enough to look older.
I am pleased that he treats me as a grown-up, using the polite form of ‘you’; maybe that’s down to the duffel coat. He says I can hide in the nurses’ home, the single-storey block out at the back, next to the fence. I pack my haversack, and we take leave of each other. It’s not far away, Dr Temesváry tells Mother.
The yard is dark. A nurse leads me by the hand; we dodge around the heaps of snow. Just show me the way, I say, and I’ll find it by myself. So she points it out. There are several single-storey buildings in the yard; it’s the last of those I need to aim for. Corpses are lying by the wall of the first building. When will they be buried?
Yesterday I leafed through some old books. It was at one of the lines of the Passover Haggadah that the features of the rabbi on Nagyfuvaros Street flashed through my mind: ‘As for the one who does not know how to ask, you must initiate him.’
The nurses’ home is dark. There are six beds on each on side. I pick one. No, that one, says a young nurse who is undressing by the last bed — not telling me to turn around. She’s in a white petticoat. It is from under the blanket that she then tells me to try to get some sleep; she will have to get up at midnight, which is when her relief comes. Are you cold? I am. Me, too, she says. Rub your feet together under the blanket, she advises. The duffel coat helps. I wonder if Soproni survived his wound. If he didn’t then was he buried in my windcheater?
There is a pine tree standing in the corner with a few burned-down candles on it. Could it be that the nurses were celebrating Christ mas that evening?
At midnight I am awakened to find all around us is shaking. I guess it is midnight from the fact that another nurse is undressing in the corner and slipping into the place of the one I saw earlier. It’s started, she says. The thunder of the cannon fire can be heard from Pestújhely, the XVth District, out to the north-east. They have started. Are you Jewish? she asks. Why? Does it matter to you? I’m not, she says, but nothing matters.
I would like to have a chat with her, and I get a sense that she, too, would quite like that. But then I also want to get some sleep.
Continuous gunfire.
On 23 December Soviet troops from Transdanubia, which are now surrounding Budapest, occupy Érd, the village lying just beyond the south-eastern outskirts of Buda. Hitler, having declared Budapest a fortress city which has to be defended to the last man, rejects a request from General Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, the commander of IX Waffen-SS Alpine Corps, to regroup the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer from the bridgehead in Pest, but Colonel-General Guderian, Chief of Staff of the General Army, consents to this on his own responsibility. On 24 December at 4.15 Guderian and General Hermann Balck, then in command of the German 6th Army, request permission to surrender Budapest in order to withdraw the troops to western Hungary, but Hitler rejects that proposal, too.
In the Opera House in Pest a performance of Aïda was given. Before the start of Act 2 an actor in military uniform appeared on stage in front of the curtain to pass on to the audience the frontline’s greeting. I can reassure you all with a clear conscience that Budapest remains in Hungarian hands, he says.
A memorandum prepared at the Swedish Embassy reports that some twenty-five Arrow Cross soldiers broke into the Red Cross home at number 7–11 Mihály Munkácsy Street, where, the children having earlier been removed to the ghetto, a further group had been placed under protection. Two sick elderly women who were in the building were shot out of hand, and two three-year-olds in room 8 on the second floor were also shot dead.
Men of the University 1st Assault Battalion are placed on alert on the orders of Emil Kovarcz, Arrow Cross commander and a minister without portfolio in the Hungarian Government of National Unity. István Zakó, the Arrow Cross Party youth leader, proposes that university students may leave the capital with the fleeing Arrow Cross militiamen, but the decision is taken to stay and fight. Our action will help the Hungarian cause, declares Gyula Fischer, the battalion commander.
General Iván Hindy, commander of the remnant of the Hungarian forces defending the city, delivers a radio appeal to the inhabitants of Budapest. The situation is serious, but the capital will be relieved speedily. He submits a report to the Minister of Defence and the Chief of the General Staff:
The great mass of people may not await the Russians as liberators, but they are in such a mental state that they await Soviet occupation with resignation. People are weeping and in despair that the city will be destroyed. They think with horror of the possibility that all the bridges will be blown up.
By near daybreak I have got used to the continuous thunder.
The nurse is also awake. She smiles, and I try to smile back. She is very young. Her clothes rustle as she dresses. I turn my back, although it would be good to take a peek. But now she is already by my bed and gives me a peck on the brow.
The black Packard whisks through villages. Gertrud Lutz is sitting beside the chauffeur with Gizi in the back seat. Gertrud has been this way before; the legation rented a holiday house at Bicske, around thirty kilometres due west of Buda. Gizi has also been here. The time they had gone to Hegyeshalom they had driven along the highway passing through Gönyű by the Danube, just before Győr. This time, too, she has a white headscarf and an ICRC armband.
They do not talk, although Gertrud occasionally says a few words to the chauffeur, and he himself occasionally enquires if they should drive further. The sounds of tank guns and machine guns can be picked up from the thunder; they are travelling near the front line. Gertrud tells him to drive on; she wants to buy potatoes, flour and fat. She had recently come to an agreement with a farmer living next to the rented house that he would slaughter a pig. Gertrud has the feeling that for all that they are constantly running across soldiers marching or fleeing westwards and having to stop because German panzers are cutting across the highway. But being in the ravaged countryside is better than staying in the blacked-out city.