“Can you cook?” the captain asked.
“Yes… I was… the… chef,” Claude said, coughing.
The Nazi turned his head as he ordered, “Take him to my house, clean him up, and see if he can boil water.”
Claude became the captain’s personal cook. It was barely survival, but again where there was food there was life. Claude stayed alive by feeding the fat Nazi officer like he was the Archduke. While the Hungarian people starved under Nazi occupation, “the Pig” always had fine butchered meats and fresh vegetables for Claude to prepare every day. Many times Claude thought of adding a dash of lye to the soup or iodine to the sauce, but that would only kill Hans, the lowly private who served as the pig’s credenza, tasting everything before the swine ate.
During one of the final days of the war, when the battles outside the city were looming closer and closer, Claude and all the servants and workers who had evaded death by becoming slaves to these “Aryan Supermen” were rounded up and hastily put up against a wall to be killed. Claude heard the bolt action from the rifles of the SS troops as they aimed their weapons. A once proud people were about to be robbed of the only thing they had left, their lives.
Claude flinched as the shooting started. He waited a seeming eternity for what would surely be the searing pain of hot bullets puncturing his body, but it never came. He crouched low covering his head. From somewhere deep inside him he drummed up the courage to look behind him. All the SS men were sprawled over the ground, steam vapor emanating from the bullet holes in their crisp, black uniforms as the heat of their blood hit the cold winter’s air. Beyond them were the mud-stained, olive drab uniforms of American soldiers, their guns smoldering as a few of them continued firing sporadic bursts and single shots at SS men still alive or trying to escape. At that moment, Claude started to believe in God once again, a belief he had abandoned in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that the Nazis brought with them into Hungary.
At war’s end, he set up the street cart and reasoned that if he just made enough money to survive the winters, then he was living the life of a king. Accordingly, he only prepared so much meat every day and, when it was gone, he was off. He’d go home, simmer tomorrow’s pot, then read, walk, or watch the children play.
So it was, that on this fine autumn day, the two businessmen were dabbing sauerkraut juice from their smiling mouths when he heard it. Although his mind didn’t recognize it at first, his body reacted. He slammed down the lids on his cart, dropped the serving fork, and started running, as fast as his old legs could carry him.
“Claude! Where are you going? My friend wants more of your fine knockwurst! What is that noise?”
Like a low hanging fog, rolling in from around the corner, a rumbling growl swept over the cobblestones. Then came a metallic clanking sound, then the barrel and finally the tracks of a Soviet TU-24 attack tank. Hundreds of Soviet infantry troops swarmed behind the tank. The two businessmen, who were only thirteen when the Germans left Budapest, started running as well.
It was the beginning of the Communist siege of Hungary in 1956.
“Tony, enough with the clanging, it’s no use. You’re just waking everybody up.”
“That cheap, tightwad, son-of-a-bitch of a landlord, I’ll clang him with a wrench!” Clank, clank, clank was the sound Tony’s crescent wrench made as he rapped the radiator in his fifth floor walk-up tenement apartment. “Send up more steam fer Christ sakes, ya bastard!” Tony, the burly truck driver, yelled at the pipes as if the landlord was nestled warm in his apartment on the first floor, with his ear frying on a steam pipe listening in delight to the freezing cold agony of his tenants on this bone-chilling winter night.
“I’m going to check on Peter,” Anna Remo said as she went into the other room and found her little two-year-old son curled up and shivering in his brown snowsuit and mittens. She plucked the child from the crib and felt under the blanket for his bottle. It had been warm milk when she put him to bed, but it was now partially frozen. She brought the little boy into their bed and held him close to her body for warmth under the covers.
Tony came back to bed swearing he was going to kill that wop of a landlord. Although he was Italian, Tony Remo selectively used the term whenever anybody, whose name ended in a vowel, acted like a criminal. As he lay there, a faint whistle started and grew progressively more sibilant. It was the air valve on the steam radiator; the whistling would stop when the unit was hot. It took twenty minutes but the warm silence commenced. Tony had won tonight’s war with the pipes. Maybe the old wop was listening. For Tony and his family, that was life in the Northeast Bronx in 1956.
Suddenly, it was the horror of 1939 all over again. Hungarians were being arrested and others were being beaten into submission. Like then, many congregated secretly in the basements and tunnels trying to find a way out. Tonight seven men — seven scientists, who escaped the Nazis by luck, were huddled in the basement of a church awaiting their savior. He was a freedom fighter during the last war and had made a name for himself. He was fearless, striking the enemy silently and then disappearing. Now that the heel of the Soviet boot was on top of them, Hungarians only whispered the legends about him.
The group of men had only the warm clothes on their backs and one small suitcase each. The Monsignor who ran the church was a member of the newly formed Underground Railroad that sprung up as the Russians took more and more prisoners. Not just laborers, but also the intelligentsia. Those people whose fertile minds alone posed a threat to the great irrationalism of the Soviet State. The aim of the apparatchik was a “re-education” campaign to convert these Hungarian national treasures into right-thinking communists. The last lesson, if all else failed, was a bullet to the brain.
“Where is he?” Dr. Brodenchy asked.
“He cannot very well take the tram, Doctor,” the Monsignor said. “He must make his way through alleys and back roads. They know his face.”
Brodenchy’s hand was shaking. Not in anticipation of the dangers that lay ahead, but in concern for his father and sisters who he would be leaving behind. Surely, the Russians would treat his father, an Imam, with the respect due a member of the clergy. Still, the worry mounted, but he could not get past the army, back to his hometown. He was caught here when the Russians came. They will be all right. They will be all right.
There were two knocks, then three, then one at the storm cellar door to the church’s basement — the pre-arranged signal for Kasiko Halman, the one who would shepherd them from the red menace. The men were surprised when they saw him. He was smaller and dirtier than his legend and the Kalashnikov machine gun that was slung around his torso, was held there by a frayed rope.
“How many?” Kasiko asked curtly.
“Seven.”
He spun and turned to the Priest. “You said six.”
“Err, it’s my fault,” Dr. Brodenchy said, stepping forward. “My brother was caught staying with us when the tanks came…. I promised our father.”
Kasiko walked up to Dr. Brodenchy, his cold stare frosting the doctor’s graying temples.
It was as if Kasiko peered into his soul, “You. You are Muslim?”
“Yes.” He tried not to flinch, doing the best an academician could in the face of this hired killer.
Kasiko continued his stare. Suddenly the doctor realized there was a new calculus at work here. He could almost hear Kasiko deciding if risking his life for a Muslim was worth it. The fear of being left behind welled up inside the older brother. His mouth went dry and swallowing was hard. He stuttered and mumbled, “My broth…brother was away in school but suddenly he came….”