Everyone but Estera accepted this situation. When the schools opened again a few days later, she attended classes as doggedly as ever but no longer touched a textbook. Instead she read tattered, greasy, illegally published political brochures and talked furtively on street corners with a group of girls whose company she now sought as much as she had avoided it before. She spent less and less time at home, but when at home she had constant visitors, mostly girls, but a boy or two as well (Čutura came two or three times; the Blams knew him as Miroslav’s friend and were surprised when he asked for Estera), and they would sit and whisper, or he would give her messages to deliver, or take her to meetings. When the summer vacation came, Estera turned into a complete renegade, leaving early in the morning with her bathing suit and a cold lunch and returning at night, dirty, sunburnt, full of scratches and with a new, coarse, mocking expression on her once round, now gaunt, wolflike, raw-boned face. She ate her supper silently and voraciously, hardly hearing her mother’s reproaches, and then went off to a bath and bed.
One night she failed to come home at all, and Vilim and Blanka Blam ran all over the neighborhood looking for her. They even phoned the hospital — to no avail. She showed up at the door early the next morning, just after curfew, in her summer dress and sandals, shivering and covered with mud, and when Blanka Blam began showering her with questions and threats, Estera cut her short by saying that no one was to tell she’d been away that night if they cared for their lives. Called to the rescue from his warm morning bed, Vilim Blam tried the mild tone of an older friend, but he received an even sharper response, namely, that people were different and so they should mind their own business, as she had when the two of them committed their indiscretions not so long ago.
That autumn, like most of her friends, she went back to school, but one day late in October, when her mother was expecting her home for lunch, two agents appeared at the door asking for Estera Blam. Before Blanka had time to explain that her daughter was in school, they shoved her aside, entered the house, searched every inch of it — even under the beds in Erzsébet Csokonay’s apartment — and, after tearing all Estera’s books off the shelves, ordered the petrified woman to notify the police the moment her daughter showed up. But she and Vilim, who came home just after the agents had left, waited in vain. They would never turn Estera over to the police, of course; they would sneak her onto the train for Budapest, where Blanka Blam had a niece. But Estera didn’t come back that day or that evening or that night. She never came back.
The morning after that sleepless night, Vilim Blam went to the Mercury to see Popadić. He woke him and explained what had happened. Popadić told him to be patient and promised to find out what he could. Vilim went home to get a little sleep, but in the afternoon he was back at the newspaper office waiting for Popadić. Still no news, Popadić said with a sympathetic shake of the head. But a short time later he was on the phone telling Blam to return to the office immediately. He sat him down and solemnly, silently handed him a sheet of paper, an official press communiqué provided by the police. At noon on 23 October 1941 the Communists Estera Blam, student, aged seventeen, Jewish, and Andja Šovljanski, seamstress, aged eighteen, Serb, were killed in an armed battle with the Royal Gendarmerie while resisting arrest. They were suspected of having taken part in antistate activities: distributing pamphlets and setting fire to grain fields in the vicinity of the city.
Blam read the communiqué several times but refused to accept what it said. “That’s not my Estera. That’s not my Estera,” he mumbled, looking up expectantly at Popadić. But Popadić stood there helpless. Then Blam rose to his feet and put down the communiqué. “I want to see her.” Popadić told him it was impossible: Estera had been buried in an unmarked grave and with no witnesses. He tried to make Blam face the inevitable. It was the times, he said. No one knew what tomorrow might bring or whose actions now would prove far-sighted then. “You may be proud of her someday,” he said to him confidentially, ushering him out of the office and advising him to stay at home for at least a week.
But Vilim Blam and his wife did not have time to take pride in their daughter’s death, their own following three months later, nearly to the day. The only person to derive some benefit from Estera’s heroism was Miroslav Blam, because Popadić now transferred his favor to him — perhaps out of guilt for having sided with the murderers.
It so happened that while Estera was undergoing transformation into a political activist, Miroslav also separated himself from the family. He suddenly married, rented a furnished room as if he had no home, and, without a thought to either his further education or employment, declared himself independent. Vilim Blam, though stricken by so unconsidered a move on the part of his pride and joy, resolved to help him. Since Miroslav would not hear of coming back home and since Vilim could not afford to support two households, Vilim quickly sold the house — with Funkenstein as the agent — and passed most of the money on to his son to cover basic needs.
Such was the precarious state of affairs at the time of Estera’s death. When Vilim Blam returned to work in Popadić’s office seven days after the tragic event and, encouraged by his friend to unburden himself, mentioned how concerned he and his wife were — over and above their inconsolable grief at Estera’s death — about the intolerable position their son and last hope was now in, Popadić thought a moment and said that, unlike Miroslav’s worried father, he regarded Miroslav’s marriage as a sign of common sense. By marrying a Christian and converting to Christianity — which he, Popadić, was willing and able to facilitate through his ties with the clergy — Miroslav would avoid being persecuted as a Jew. During the next few days, while Miroslav Blam lay with his hands under his head in his rented room waiting for Janja to come home from work, Popadić made phone calls and had a number of personal conversations on his behalf, after which he told Vilim Blam to have the boy report to his office. He ordered a taxi and took Miroslav first to the Orthodox church, where a priest in full regalia was waiting, and then to the Úti Travel Agency, where Miroslav was hired as a bookkeeper. The expedition wound up at Miroslav’s temporary residence, where Popadić had a chance to observe his protégé’s straitened circumstances and to meet his wife, Janja. His interest sparked by both, he obtained an apartment for the newlyweds at the Mercury and, somewhat later, a regular job for Janja at a nearby restaurant.
Chapter Eight
THERE ARE TWO published records of Novi Sad under the Occupation: a book entitled Crimes of the Occupation Forces in Vojvodina, 1941–44, which devotes an entire chapter to Novi Sad, and the run of Naše novine, the daily edited by Predrag Popadić under Hungarian rule.
The book was written after the war. It is therefore based on materials found in the enemy’s archives, statements made by survivors and witnesses, war criminals’ confessions of the atrocities inflicted on the civilian population from the entry of Hungarian troops on 11 April 1941 to their retreat on 22 October 1944. Its pages trace how the invaders put their intentions into practice; they include directives of the High Command and Counterintelligence on the use of terror against the Slav and Jewish population, on the suppression of Communist activities in their ranks and the society at large, and accounts of the arrests, transports to camps and hard labor, and beatings and killings by which the directives were carried out. In some instances, the thread from intention to practice leads through dry reports, beginning with circular number such-and-such that provides the basis for order so-and-so and ending with the measures taken and the number of people detained, imprisoned, or liquidated. In others, an eyewitness account by an onlooker or perpetrator will paint satanic pictures drenched in blood still warm and accompanied by echoing screams. We learn, for example, the grounds for officer A. B.’s decision to sentence prisoner C. D. to “trussing,” which involved counting how many minutes a person could stand on his toes while bound hand and foot before fainting, having a heart attack, or going out of his mind; we learn which agent hammered tacks under Communists’ fingernails, which one mashed their testicles, which one slashed the soles of their feet, or which detachment of soldiers sent to carry out a search riddled with their bullets every member of the household from Grandma and Grandpa lying ill in their beds to toddlers wailing as they ran for cover under wardrobes and tables. In other words, sometimes it takes a bit more imagination to conjure up the crime, sometimes a bit less, but crime is always the dominant goal and theme.