George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

So this Berettyóújfalu citizen of the world, who had the temerity to look down on us, natives of the same town, had taken up residence in the capital as if everything were perfectly normal, as if the number one business of the day were to build his patient base and publish his findings in domestic and international professional journals. As he sat under the arbor in his Újfalu garden I would stare at his white cord trousers, yellow shoes, and bluish-pink silk shirt. He would let us villagers turn our finest phrases, but even as he listened he was forming his own big-city opinions about us. We were naive; irony was something we had no experience of; we did not realize that existence is ambiguous and even love jaundiced. Uncle Gyula’s village optimism was tainted with the city-dweller’s ability to see through things. The city slicker pokes his nose into everything and always seems to know what cards you’ve got. As if people didn’t reveal their true selves the very first time they shake hands! When Uncle Gyula first gave me that look of his, he was not yet forty. Now that I could be his father, I feel that had he not been killed his true, naive nature would have won out. (Actually, it did win out, though in a self-destructive way: through his village burgher’s respect for the law he voluntarily returned to a labor camp, leaving his wife behind.)

Aunt Zsófi was a delicate, thin figure of a woman. Everything about her was silvery: her voice, her eyes, and the few graying locks in her thick, black hair. I often had the feeling that we little wild creatures amused her. She had a son, Péter Polonyi, and acted as guardian for my two cousins, István and Pál Zádor. And by the good graces of fate and Uncle Andor my sister Éva and I added two more to her charge. Four boys make a lot of noise, and Aunt Zsófi would occasionally get a headache and ask us to disappear — for a while at least.

In the fall of 1944 Aunt Zsófi must have been thirty. She sometimes had a sardonic glint in her eye, but her voice had a delicacy to it that came from a distant shore. Never one to hesitate about doing what her taste dictated, she treated us as her very own, a single mother to five children. She even managed to see to it that we got through those abominable times with our souls intact.

Her husband would have been able to skip out on the forced-labor camp: he was granted a day’s leave to visit his family at Christmas of 1944. Despite Zsófi’s entreaties the doctor returned to the camp: he had no desire to get his family into trouble, he had his sick comrades to treat, and what is more he had promised his charitable commander to return. But while he was away, the charitable commander had been replaced, and the honest Doctor Zádor and his patients — poets and scholars all — ended up in a mass grave.

Jews were still being deported to Auschwitz from Budapest’s outer districts of Újpest and Kispest as late as the summer. They could have come into the city on foot or by tram, but they followed orders and went to the railway station. The communists among them — the Zionists, the resistors, the bold — got hold of false papers and went into hiding. The more resigned and perhaps fearful middle class tried to ride out the dangerous times in safe houses. The safe houses were inhabited by better-off, secular Jews who had managed to contact one of the neutral diplomatic embassies. The poorer, orthodox Jews, who had black beards and hats, wives wrapped in shawls, sons with side-locks, and daughters with big eyes, went to the ghetto. That was their place: it had the greatest concentration of synagogues. Both they and the neutral diplomats must have felt this. But it was open season in the ghetto: drunken Arrow Cross men would go in and shoot at will.

Swiss letters of protection, Schützpässe , were distributed in an operation organized by the Swiss consul, Carl Lutz. His name comes up less often than that of his Swedish colleague Raoul Wallenberg, though Lutz saved as many people as Wallenberg. Under the protection of the Helvetic Confederation we moved to 49 Pozsonyi Avenue, a building where my greatest respect went to three or four young men hiding out in the cellar, about whom people whispered that they were resistors and had defected from the military. There were perhaps eighty of us living in a three-room apartment on the fourth floor. At night we would stack up any furniture that could not be slept on. Not everyone got a bed or mattress, but everyone had at least a rug. The four of us boys slept on mattresses on the floor by the window behind a pile of furniture. It was like an ongoing house party. There was always someone to talk to. For two hours every morning we could leave the building, five children clinging to a beautiful young woman. Aunt Zsófi protected us, as perhaps we did her. Whoever asked for her papers was astounded. “Are they all yours?” The crush diminished as time passed: some people moved down to hiding places, while others were abducted during spur-of-the-moment raids and shot into the Danube.

In the winter of 1944–45 I saw any number of dead bodies. I could picture myself among them, but the tasks of day-to-day existence obscured most of my imaginings. Danger makes you practical. Only at isolated moments do you face the possibility of death — when someone holds a pistol to your head, for example. Then you feel: yes, it could happen. You become an adult from the moment you face your own death, which means I have been an adult from the age of eleven. For some people it happens earlier, for others later, and there are those for whom the moment never comes.

Death is hardly pleasant, nor is mortal danger. But you can be standing on a rooftop terrace with fighter planes machine-gunning above and feel the whole scene is not all that serious. So let’s just slide around in our hobnailed boots on the ice rink we have made with a few buckets of water. Not all that serious later saved me from succumbing to melodramatic moods.

I owe my life to a benevolent chain of coincidences. It has proved an enduring gift to recognize, at the age of eleven, the bald fact that I could be killed at any time, and to have learned how to act in such a situation. In the winter of 1944–45 I thought of death as I might have thought of, say, firewood: there was nothing unusual about it. It was outside my control, like drawing the wrong card.

Beautiful young women in ski boots and Norwegian sweaters were smoking cigarettes, their abundant hair combed smooth into a bun, their long legs crossed in ski pants. They laughed at all kinds of things I did not understand. They were different from the small-town beauties I had known: more malicious, more enigmatic, radical yet refined. They spoke of the French surrealists, German expressionists, and Russian abstractionists like old friends. They were artists, dancers, left-wingers — and they stretched so beautifully. They would sing for us children, sing the “Internationale” and “Dubinushka” in Hungarian.

But none amazed me more than Aunt Zsófi. I would have loved to perform some heroic act for her and did not dare to so much as scratch myself in her sight. Her slightly indolent voice would ask, “My knight in shining armor, will you accompany me?” I would have accompanied her to the gates of hell. For Aunt Zsófi’s sake I was willing to hold thick novels under my arms to keep my elbows in while eating. The more fearful moved down into the cellar, but Aunt Zsófi was unable to separate cleanliness from human dignity. She would have found it repulsive for us to hide from the explosive and incendiary bombs, the cannonballs and artillery mines, down in the bomb shelter, the putrid darkness, the chaotically congested company of so many ill-washed bodies. What if it did raise the level of risk a notch.

“Dignity means more than security,” she would say. “We are not going to let the lice take us over.” We did not go down to the cellar even when the sirens started. The most sensible choice was the rooftop terrace, where the winter sun shone brightly every morning even in January, though at temperatures of twenty degrees below freezing. We would pour out a few buckets of water and make a fabulous skating rink for ourselves. With a running start you could slide from one end to the other. Machine-gun rounds from Ratas, Soviet fighter planes, landed on the ice with a pop. We always looked up to see where the bombs pouring from their bellies would fall. A cloud of dust or smoke indicated whether the bomb was explosive or incendiary.