The next morning I search for Baritone and ask him his name.
Everyone is asleep. Every minute someone starts up, everyone is sighing or snoring or asking for water. Father goes out, saying he is off to the guard on the gate, although his stint is in the morning, and he is almost certainly doing it to give us more space. Mother also goes out, so we tuck Vera up. I can now stretch out and promptly fall asleep.
I awaken to the sound of shouting. One of the lamps is burning. The doctor is called for.
The physicist is asleep on his feet, his hands in his lap, chin on chest. He has a thick and wavy head of hair, which is greying. I stagger outside. Mother is seated on the steps at the front gate. I send her inside. There is room next to Vera. She should sleep.
The physicist is now awake and, prowling around, going up to the first floor then back down and outside into the yard. I tag along behind him. A patch of sky can be seen as it crossed by searchlight beams. An aircraft is caught, tracer fire roars up and hits it and it comes down somewhere near the Ferdinand Bridge, over the railway tracks just outside the Nyugati Railway Terminus.
The barrage of artillery fire from the north-east is continuous.
They’re coming, says the physicist. Listen. From the interval between a bang and the shell striking you can work out roughly how far away they are. They must be just beyond the north-east of Pest near Rákospalota.
I ask him when he reckons they will get as far as here.
That depends partly on Guderian. I have an idea who Guderian is but don’t know exactly, so I ask. He’s a good soldier, smart, well equipped; he’s already taken part in a fair few blitzkrieg campaigns. He says it as if he were explaining a mathematical equation and wants his listeners to follow what he is saying, so he speaks slowly and puts an emphasis on the word he considers to be the most important, and at that point rises his right arm; he does not lower his voice at the end of the sentence but drops his raised arm. The day before yesterday he had listened to the BBC from London; it’s from there he has heard that Guderian sees no point in defending Budapest any further and has sent Major-General Walther Wenck to Hitler to ask that the German forces be permitted to break out. But Hitler, according to the BBC, still refused to consent to this. It now depends on those smart generals whether another forty or fifty thousand lives will be sacrificed, ourselves included, he says.
We have water for two days, I say, and we also have two more days’ bread rations.
That won’t be enough, he says, because these clowns are going to carry out their orders.
So, how many days in that case?
It’s impossible to predict, just as it is whether Wallenberg and Lutz will succeed in preventing everyone from being taken from the protected houses to the ghetto.
Us, too?
Us, too.
I ask who Wallenberg and Lutz are. I ask him if this is something else he has learned from the British radio broadcasts. He says they are diplomats, brave men. London says nothing about them; he has heard about them from friends, and there is also a young man here who is a singer in the OMIKE chorus, and he was close to Carl Lutz — he had heard about them from him, as well.
Baritone, I think to myself. I know the bloke myself. We had a chat yesterday. I went to the OMIKE concerts.
The physicist again resorts to waving his hands around. Superb, absolutely superb the performances they gave. What voices: Ernster, Lendvai, Gabi Relle, Annie Spiegel.
I thought Uncle Laci wasn’t Jewish, I say.
Poppycock, he says. No one ever said that only Jews could attend.
The next morning two corpses were carried out. I stand in front of Vera so she should not see them.
Arrow Cross and German squads break into the Bethlen Place Hospital in District VII, a stone’s throw away from the Keleti Railway Terminus. Most of the men are carted off to the bank of the Danube and executed. Arrow Cross shock troops were hauling off to the ghetto even non-Jewish British, American and Swedish citizens classified as hostiles. The daily ration allocated for the ghetto had a calorific value of between 150 and 800 calories. The food was cooked in five kitchens, and the deliverymen were regularly attacked, robbed and shot dead by Arrow Cross patrols. Officials working in the Jókai Street offices of the Swedish Legation, just off the Oktogon, were murdered. Arthur Weiss — owner of the Glass House on Vadász Street, which was being used as an office by the Swiss Legation, and one of the men who had come up with the idea of using the privileges of diplomatic protection — was also one of the victims of the Arrow Cross bloodbath, as I read in documents of that period. According to the log kept by the Institute of Forensic Medicine the bodies of an average of around fifty to sixty people who had been shot in the back of the head were brought in daily. A group was snatched from the ghetto and finished off in Ferenc Liszt Square, again just off Andrássy Avenue by the Oktogon, with the bodies left lying in front of the Japan coffee house. In the streets of the ghetto thousands of bodies were left in the open, and epidemic disease appeared unavoidable.
The physicist is in discussion with Father. Father says we will get more room in one of the second-floor apartments. It’s the warden’s own apartment; they are going to clear out another room. There will be seven of us, which is still better than the cellar. There is lighting, and there is access via the hall as well as through the bathroom. We hand over our mattress. On the warden’s instructions two men come to take away the sack of potatoes.
In the bathroom are empty cans of tinned food, empty sacks, brooms, Wellington boots. In the room are two couches, a divan and a mattress on the floor. The physicist helps Mother place the haversacks. He volunteers to be the one who sleeps on the mattress. On one of the couches a little girl is sleeping under a blanket — she must be about eight years old. Her mother is standing beside her, petrified. The young girl slips out from under the blanket, steps over to Vera, holds her hand out and introduces herself. Will you come and play? Vera is unhesitant in introducing herself by the name she is supposed to use, and the young girl’s mother also introduces herself, saying that they, too, had come up from the cellar.
Mother allocates the sleeping places. Father and the physicist go downstairs to chop wood. Vera and I are given the spare couch; Mother and Father will sleep on the divan. Before leaving, the physicist says that if the empty sacks are brought in from the bathroom they will make a sleeping place, then he can pass the mattress on to someone else. Mother acquired some margarine, so she spreads it on one slice of bread each for Vera and me. Holding hands with Vera, the young girl gazes in astonishment at her eating. Mother spreads a slice of bread for her, too, at which the girl’s mother produces a bag of peanuts from under her blanket and offers these around. She looks at Mother to check whether I can accept. Vera and I take two nuts each from the palm of her hand.
Mother boils water in the kitchen, which she pours into a bowl. I slip off my clothes and stand in the basin as she washes me from head to toe with a soapy rag; I don’t ask where she acquired the soap. As there are no towels I dry myself on another rag. It may be a tea cloth, but it is clean. While Mother washes Vera in the bowl I go out into the hall. There are now several more sitting on mattresses than there had been before. We greet one another.
The door to one of the rooms opens, and the warden’s wife hurries out, slamming the door shut behind her. I carefully open it. The room is very nicely fitted out with furniture of brown walnut: large and small sideboards, an oval table and six chairs. Our own dining-room was like this, except in a lighter colour. There is a glass cabinet on the wall between two windows; that is also reminiscent of our place, likewise at my grandparents’ place — large and small side boards, an oval table and six chairs there, too.