George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Uncle Andor was the air-raid captain in his five-story building and would make his way with a squeaky lamp up and down between the shelter and the ground floor. He wore a shiny helmet that barely revealed his prideful, jutting chin and pink dewlap. By September the Jews were required to squeeze together into a smaller space, and we had to move, because he, Aunt Gizi, and our two cousins Ági and Jancsi got so small a room that it barely held their four cots. I remember the heavy smell of the friendly but unfamiliar woman and children. There was no place for us.

Aunt Zsófi lived in the next building. She was not a blood relative but the wife of Dr. Gyula Zádor, my father’s cousin. By then my two cousins, István and Pál Zádor, were living there, along with Aunt Zsófi’s son, Péter Polonyi, who was nearly our age. The face of a man with close-cropped graying hair emerges from the fog of memory. I liked his family name: Mandula, “Almond.” I also recall a child a little older than me. Since we were forbidden to go out into the street, we played in the hallway. Aunt Zsófi was willing to let us live there as long as Uncle Andor’s family took care of feeding us. For the first few days we still went back to our relatives’ room for lunch.

Then came 15 October, the day Regent Horthy announced on the radio that he had requested a cease-fire. It was a bright autumn Sunday morning. People flowed out into the street. We too were giddy with the news. Everyone in the building — women and children, old and young — was Jewish. The old men climbed a ladder to take down the yellow paper star on the plank over the entrance. Some ripped off the yellow stars from their coats right there in the street. We might go on living after all, go home, find our parents; everything might again be as it had been in the days of a peacetime that perhaps never was. We waited for news of confirmation; the radio broadcast nothing but some incomprehensible public announcements: the Regent’s address was not followed up by official substantiation.

We walked around our block. Not everyone in the neighborhood had dared to remove the emblem from the doorways of Jewish buildings, but one of the children had set fire to the yellow cardboard star and we stood around watching it burn. A couple not wearing yellow stars strolled past arm in arm. “See how insolent they’ve become,” said a man in a hat to the woman in a hat. The new armed command was nowhere in evidence, but German military vehicles and trucks full of green-shirted men with Arrow Cross armbands raced along the Ring wearing looks of agitated determination.

A Jew asked a policeman whether there were any new regulations, whether we could now go outside after curfew. Officially we had the right to be in public areas only from eleven in the morning until five in the afternoon. Uncertainty was everywhere. What were we to do now that things had taken a 180-degree turn and official talk was of peace, not heroic battle, when the old rules seemed no longer to apply and Jews were not partitioned off from the Aryan “national organism”? What should we Jews be doing once the law no longer permitted persecution? That day we had no idea what to do on our own behalf.

By that night we had: the cease-fire had merely been a clumsy move by a clumsy regent, who had informed the German ambassador of his intention before telling his own troops! Szálasi, the leader of the Arrow Cross, announced the regent’s removal, declaring that we would now fight even more resolutely at the side of our great German allies to win the war and cleanse our fatherland — of me. Extermination was next. Vermin, cockroach, Jew — you’re done for! The will of steel was there; the rest was merely a matter of execution. It was important to remain discreet, since there were still about one hundred thousand Jews in Budapest and the open murder of so many people might create a mood of defeatism among the Christian population, but slaughter was on the way, a St. Bartholomew’s night. Stay away from your home, hide if you can, or blend into the crowd, fade into the background, don’t be conspicuous or you’ll get yourself popped off.

We looked down through the open roof at the cinema screen: the Jew-baiting propaganda film I Came from Tarnopol was still playing. We trotted up and down the hallways of our building and even dared to go outside, where we excitedly discussed developments. We were wild game and fearful of the hunters, who, though little people like us, had been supplied by politics with weapons and the authorization to kill even children and the aged for as long as the yellow star was legal.

My view was that since I was innocent the laws that ordered my extermination were themselves illegal. I had seen little snots go around killing as easily as one shoots a hare or swats a fly, all in the name of our state, our fatherland. We were dealing with the ultimate enemy, the one who claims your life, and for want of a better method he was prepared to shoot you into the Danube and let the water carry you off.

We took a powder , as people used to say. Uncle Andor laid out his plan to us with sober self-confidence: we were to hide in the basement workshop they called the glove factory, three blocks away. We couldn’t take much, as the Arrow Cross was patrolling the area and we had to be inconspicuous. We could sleep on the cutting table and wash at the basin in the toilet. We couldn’t turn on the lights, but when the sun was shining enough light came into the room at midday to read by. Not hearing any shooting outside, we hoped the worst would not come. By the second day certain comforts made their absence felt in the dark workshop, particularly to Uncle Andor, who noticed in the morning that he had left his shaving brush at home. A painful loss. Though you could rub up a little rudimentary foam with the tip of your finger after wetting the skin and applying soap, neither the operation nor its result was aesthetically satisfactory. Uncle Andor felt it was inadvisable to return home (though the St. Bartholomew’s night had not materialized), but he did want that shaving brush. The simplest solution in Uncle Andor’s eyes (after excluding the draconian options of brushless shaving and not shaving at all) was for me to fetch the brush.

I set off. There were soldiers wearing armbands standing at the gate of the third building down. It was drizzling. Perhaps they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. They called me over.

“Hey kid, come over here. Are you a Jew?”

“What makes you ask?”

“Well, you could be,” they said.

“I could,” said I.

“Well, are you?”

“What makes you ask?” I said, returning to my original question.

“Hey, that’s the way Jews talk.”

“Are you a Jew?” I asked.

“What makes you ask?” he said.

“You know how they talk.”

“Drop your pants.”

I didn’t move. We stared at each other.

“Well?”

“It’s raining.”

“All right. Get going.”

He and I both knew the score. He just didn’t feel like killing me.

The rest of the way was incident-free. When I got to the apartment, the elderly ladies asked me excitedly where the family had spent the night. I no longer remember what I came up with — something about being guests somewhere — but they got a peek of me slipping the shaving brush into my pocket from the shelf below the bathroom mirror. “You came for that ?” asked one of the ladies.

“Good-bye,” I said.

On the corner I saw Arrow Cross men coming up Hollán Street at a run. I took a quick turn to the left, hoping to get back to my family via a Pozsonyi Avenue detour, but I didn’t realize they would be making parallel runs, and in large numbers, and that they would not only be coming down Pozsonyi Avenue in a row that spanned the entire street, but also from behind, from the Saint Stephen Ring, to sweep up everyone in sight. In those days it was not unusual to find Jews at midday in the New Leopold Town district. Those they detained were dispatched to a brick factory in Old Buda, and from there they would be sent westward, on foot. There were still a few spots where Jews could be packed off onto railroad cars. It would be a few weeks before the authorities adopted the simplified procedure of fencing in an area and shooting people into the Danube.