The gendarme NCO leads the column. Beside him is the man with the Red Cross armband. I carry Vera’s small case. Mádi has a knapsack. Vera’s twelfth birthday had been in August. She’s wearing a dark-blue overcoat and dark-blue beret. Her mother, in the same column as our parents, may by now be on the highway threading through the Pilis Hills. Her father has been away for two years on forced-labour service. There has been no news of him. Our first kiss was in the summer, in the back yard of the yellow-star house.
The yard was in part a garden, in part a storage dump for building materials: sacks of lime, piles of cement, ladders. We were sitting on a stack of bricks. We had seen in films how one was supposed to kiss, but I wasn’t holding her hand, did not embrace her, did not bring my lips close to hers. She did not pull away, but I have the impression that I heard a frightened cry when we parted. The kiss must have hurt her; my groin is aching.
We reach another brick-drying shed. Here, too, a person has only as much room as one’s body can squeeze out in the crush of people. Vera calls out to Mádi. They whisper. Mádi has already had her first period and passes on advice. After a while Vera feels bold enough to hold hands with me, squeezing when she feel a spasm.
The 1943 map marks the Bohn Brickworks on the left-hand side of Bécsi Road; on the right are the drying sheds of the Újlaki Brickworks. Zápor Street is to the east, Vályog and Föld Streets to the south.
These three streets are also marked on the map from 2002. Built-up housing blocks. Many old houses and a few recently built business establishments.
On the 1943 map, on the left of Vörösvár Road, are Óbuda’s old cemetery and Testvér Hill; to the right are the Óbuda limeworks and new cemetery. Bécsi Road swings north-westwards toward Solymár Valley; to the right are Arany Hill and Üröm Hill. That is the direction in which the columns disappeared.
We sometimes get to our feet then sit back down — that’s how much room we have to move. In the evening we are herded down a set of wooden steps without banisters into a yard. Many stumble and fall so that those coming after trample over them.
We line up anew.
An officer once again heads the column. This time there are two men with Red Cross armbands accompanying us. We head towards town along Bécsi Road, at times under orders to proceed at a fast march. The streets are deserted. No light filters out from behind the blackout papers pasted on windows. The armed men are also silent.
We are nearing the Danube.
Those in front slow down; those behind run into us, and we pile up.
On to Margit Bridge.
But there’s no bridge.
The armed men again bawl out the order to move ahead: By twos! By twos!
I can’t see the Danube.
Now I see it.
The reason I could not see it was because I have never before seen it at the same level as my feet … The waves are slopping over the planks.
Two of us can fit on the planks alongside each other. I hold Vera by the hand. It is not possible to hang on to a swaying cable fastened to buoys bobbing on the water. The crossing was constructed by men on assault craft. An old woman slips, and we tread on her. One of the submachine gunners pushes her into the river with his foot. Armed men are also stumbling along among us. One right behind me is roaring ‘Left, right! Left, right! His expression astounds me. Never before have I seen a look of naked terror on the face of an Arrow Crosser. The NCO yells out, Don’t all step at the same time, you bloody fools! Stop swinging!
The moon is not shining. The stars cannot be seen. The wind is stiff. The column is swaying. It is not impossible we’ll have to swim. Anything is possible. I step deliberately, not so much on the wooden planking, the end of which is separated from the wrecked stump of the bridge by a gap of half a metre. Some manage to jump across. The elderly and small children are helped across by elderly people and children. The old girl with the lipstick again ends up beside me. She has on a thin black coat. Dangling ridiculously from one arm is a leather handbag.
You, Luca, were not there, in the brickworks, I say thirty-two years later. We are sitting in her apartment at 30 Mexikói Road.
That morning when the Arrow Crossers came, by pure chance I happened to have gone down to the shed for fuel under the outside staircase, says Luca Wallesz; that’s where I hid, but they took Mother and the others off to the brickworks. I don’t remember anything of that. But she was, says Luca, you yourself told her that the over-sixties could quit the marching column. I don’t remember that, I reiterate that time thirty-two years later, and now, a further twenty-six later, all I can remember is Gitta Gyenes’s lips daubed with lipstick.
I don’t even remember that when I was talking with Luca in 1976 there was also a young girl sitting in the room, which is why I don’t recognize her, twenty-six years on, as she comes out of the gates of Zsuzsa Kossuth Gymnasium, exchanges words with her students and sets off towards the Praktiker DIY Store, and when she passes she looks at me as if she had recognized me.
At the Pest end of the bridge are three ack-ack guns. The barrel of one of them is slowly lowered and trained on us; the barrels of the other two are also not pointing up at the sky but towards the city.
The streets evaporate into the blank of my memory; the stumbling people into unrecollectability.
Why were the guns pointing towards the city and not at the sky? The gunners in charge were Hungarian artillerymen. It was as if they found that reassuring then; as if the two flanks of the valley that embraced the brick-drying sheds we had already left behind an hour before had moved stealthily to encompass the dark city.
The block of the Great Synagogue on Dohány Street.
The column is not herded towards the main entrance.
We go round the building and reach a smaller doorway. That, too, can only be entered two by two. Again we are crushed against one another. I hold Vera by the hand, pulling her after me. Stairs. A corridor. More stairs. A large hall.
A big purge is likewise commencing in the Chamber of Actors. In the course of his presidency Ferenc Kiss did all within his power to make sure that roses of Hebron, along with Jewish actors, should vanish both from before the film cameras and from stages, but despite all his efforts numerous Jews still remained members of the Chamber. To mention just a few: Gyula Bartos, Lajos Básti, Oszkár Beregi, Dezső Ernster, Ella Gömbaszögi, Gyula Gózon, Vilmos Komor, Andor Lendvai, Erzsi Pártos, Blanka Pécy, Gabriella Relle, Jenő Törzs. It is now at last curtains for them, together with many other Israelite contemporaries of theirs.
That, in the hush of the library, is from the edition of the daily newspaper Magyarország for 1 April 1944.
The main reading room, the devastated Goldmark Room.
Shattered chair fragments by the walls and the half-light merge with the old newspaper; the touch of the pen, refilled while writing this, merges with the voices of Dezső Ernster and Andor Lendvai heard in the winter of 1943 sitting in the eighth row of the theatre. Vilmos Komor is conducting the chamber orchestra.
By the time Jewish actors are banned from taking to the stage the Hungarian Israelite National Cultural Association has installed a theatre hall on the first floor of a building that adjoins the Dohány Street Synagogue.
I have a precise recollection of that eighth row. Dark-brown long trousers, herringbone jacket. An ageing gentleman singing on the small stage. That ageing gentleman was then all of forty-two years old.
According to the 1994 edition of the Actors’ Encyclopaedia, Andor Lendvai was born in the town of Vác in 1901; he studied in Vienna, Milan and Munich. Between 1934 and 1961 he was a bass soloist at the Hungarian State Opera House and appeared with great success in guest roles at Vienna, Lucerne, Rome and Moscow; one of his main roles was as Mephisto in Gounod’s Faust. What the Encyclopaedia does not underline is that when he sang Mephisto was exactly when he was not a member of Hungarian State Opera.