The light of pocket torches on dead bodies lying in the mud. On both sides are lines of submachine guns. The lieutenant salutes. Identifies himself. The front of the procession has now passed beyond the gate. Our row is next.
II
We pass through the wide-open wooden gate of the brickworks.
One of the escorts with an Arrow Cross armband, his submachine gun pointing up in the air, fires a short burst.
The piles of drying bricks are orange-coloured cubes.
The chimney for the kilns is a black point.
St Margit’s Hospital is a green brick shape.
The first map to show the hospital was issued by the Hungarian Geological Institute Ltd (Budapest V, Rudolf Square) in 1905. The second is from the Hungarian Royal Home Guard Cartographic Institute (Budapest II, 7–9 Olaszfasor) in 1943. The third is from 2002.
A century ago brick kilns stood on both sides of Bécsi Road, from the start of Szépvölgyi Road, level with the middle of Margit Island, to Vörösvár Road near the far end. Sixty years ago they started only from Elek Fényes Road, the two central points being the Újlaki Brickworks on the right and the Bohn Brickworks on the left of Bécsi Road. The 2002 map shows Remete Hill with a new housing estate that has been built in their place.
The site where the chimney for the brick kilns stood is now at the entrance to a Praktiker DIY Store.
Where the gateway once stood, through which Carl Lutz’s automobile passed not long before us, is a stone block: ‘In winter 1944 many tens of thousands of our persecuted Jewish Hungarian fellow citizens were dispatched from this site, the area of the former Óbuda Brickworks, en route to Nazi concentration camps. Their memory shall be preserved.’
Students exit just fifty metres from the stone block through the gates of the Zsuzsa Kossuth Gymnasium.
I am unable to set my knapsack down, unable to change my sopping-wet socks; I have to hang on tightly, with Mother on my left holding on to my hands, Father holding on to my right arm, so as not to be carried off by the people who are pushing from behind.
A schoolmistress also comes out through the gymnasium gates and speaks to two schoolgirls.
Mother’s grip is torn from mine in the mêlée; Father pushes his way between us and clasps both of us by the arm, dragging us along. The crowd is squeezed into one of the brickyard drying sheds. We tread on bodies. Father’s name is being shouted. Lajos’s family, Mother says. The light of a pocket torch flashes. The Róbert family. They are sitting on their rucksacks. I, too, have only as much space as my knapsack takes up.
The schoolmistress says goodbye to two of the female students. She heads for the Praktiker Store. It starts to rain. My feet are freezing in my thin-soled shoes.
Mother wraps a blanket round me; Father folded it before we set off, strapping the U-shaped sausage to his own, military-style, although he was never a soldier.
We open some tinned meat and tear off crusts of bread. Father and Uncle Lajos go off for water; there’s a tap outside. When they get back Mother goes off with Aunt Bőzsi. Mother is forty-one, Aunt Bőzsi forty-four. When they return they say the ladies is in the same place as the gents. I set off in the dark. The sky is starry. Armed men surround the standing and squatting people. Beyond the brick-drying sheds is a semicircle carved out of the hillside. As I squat the kiln chimney looks even taller.
The first night passes; 16 November.
A second night passes.
On 17 November Friedrich Born, the ICRC’s authorized representative in Budapest, will not budge until he is allowed into the Óbuda Brickworks, writes Theo Tschuy. When he gets back he says that ‘he had seen a mass of men and women of all ages crowded together, including teenagers and people in their eighties. Marching columns were formed in one to three days to set off westwards.’
Carl Lutz’s Packard drives in through the gateway another time.
We must leave the brick-drying sheds.
We are lounging about in the mud. We see the automobile.
Young children are playing in the puddles.
At around this time Edmund Veesenmayer, the Reich’s plenipotentiary representative, sends a fresh telegram to Berlin. ‘Despite technical difficulties, Szálasi is disposed to continue energetically with removal of the Jews of Budapest.’ At much the same time Carl Lutz and Raoul Wallenberg request the papal nuncio, Angelo Rotta, to pass on to Szálasi a memorandum of protest from the accredited representatives to Budapest of the neutral powers:
On the day after 15 October the new government and His Excellency Ferenc Szálasi decided, and announced officially, that the annihilation of the Jews was not going to be continued. Notwithstanding this, representatives of the neutral powers have learned from absolutely reliable sources that a renewed decision had been made to deport all Jews, and this is being implemented with such merciless cruelty that the entire world is witness to the inhumanities that attend its implementation (small children forcibly separated from their mothers; all, including the old and sick, having to lie under the inadequate cover of a brickworks; men and women being left for days on end without any nourishment; the perpetration of rape on women; the shooting to death for trivial offences).
Meanwhile it is asserted that it is not a question of deportation, merely of labour service abroad. The representatives of the neutral powers, however, are well aware of the dreadful truth that this term conceals for the majority of the unfortunates. The atrocities with which the transportations have been carried out make it predictable what the final outcome of these tragic events will be.
Mother apportions the food. We ate twice yesterday; today once.
The valley is sheer, in places twenty metres high. On top, submachine-gun-toting Arrow Crossers are posted every ten to fifteen metres. I venture close to the gate, peer beyond the barbed-wire fencing. People are chatting and pointing at us.
Two men get out of the Packard. Twenty or thirty people race towards them. An Arrow Crosser fires a shot in the air. My name is called from the far side of the barbed-wire fence. A pair of big, brown eyes; headscarf pulled down over the brow; well-worn winter coat. Jolán Bors is standing there, one of the three, at times five, employees in Father’s paper-processing workshop. She’s in her thirties, a former nun. She pasted paper bags; she had to lay out the precision-cut sheets of paper on a big trestle table; glue was applied with a brush, after which the paper could be folded. I have no idea she had been standing by the barbed wire. She had brought a few kilograms of apples. She had implored the commanding officer of the sentries to be permitted to hand in the bag — she had been allowed. Eat while you can, says a bespectacled old man. These people are going to kill everyone.
In the autumn of 1944 the wife of Dr Kővári, who was a next-door neighbour, made a trip home to Novi Sad (by that time known as Újvidék once more) to see her younger sister. They were both killed by Hungarian soldiers and their bodies tumbled into the Danube. Dr Kővári had been discharged as a first lieutenant at the end of the First World War. When he learned what had happened he put on his officer’s uniform, pinned on his medals and, after donning an officer’s kepi with its lacquered visor, went off to make the rounds of his patients. The block’s air-raid warden admonishes him that his dress contravenes the law and if he does not take it off he will be reported. Standing next to him as he says that was his wife, wearing a fur coat that her younger brother, an army sergeant, had brought back from a village in Ukraine.