George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Even as we spooned our soup from Rosenthal porcelain bowls, the image of our parents taken from Nagyvárad and Kolozsvár to the gas chambers had floated in the air above the chrome-plated silverware and the covered soup tureen. Whenever they were mentioned, a silence would fall over the room and Iboly and Laci’s faces strained to hold back the spasms tightening their throats.

With a nod from Hitler and Mussolini Hungarian troops reoccupied Northern Transylvania — and hence Nagyvárad and Kolozsvár — from Romania in 1940. In 1944 the Jews in Northern Transylvania were deported to Auschwitz, while the Jews in Southern Transylvania remained under Romanian rule. Thus my uncle from Brassó and cousin from Bucharest survived that critical year, while my relatives from Nagyvárad, Kolozsvár, and Berettyóújfalu, except those few young men drafted into forced-labor service units alongside the army, perished. Some of the men in the labor units were eventually shot into mass graves anyway, but others were left to live — the decision being determined at their commander’s whim — and made their way back home. In other words, the fate of the Jews sent to forced labor depended on whether their company commander happened to feel like killing or rescuing them at the time. If he was a hardened fascist who stuck to his guns or if such a one replaced the softer and more feeling reservist, the Jewish men’s days were numbered. Although I avoided imagining where my parents might have ended up, I had heard enough at the Office of Deportee Aid in Nagyvárad about what happened to those who managed to pull themselves off the train on the platform at Birkenau, where prisoners were divided into groups depending on their usefulness. If they had gone to work in the fields, they would occasionally find something edible.

We had no idea when Laci would arrive with our parents. Each day could be the day. The excitement of anticipation was great.

Suddenly I was no longer able to give my full attention to little Kati’s meanderings in the garden. Yes, even Kati, to whom I owed a new fairy tale, could wait. The tailor in the ground-floor shop — he was supposed to measure me for a new suit, though I was perfectly content with the old one — could wait too. Indeed, I was glad I wouldn’t have to hear him ask on which side, right or left, I put my “tool.” I needed time for the most important thing of all: retiring to an elevated spot in the garden that let me keep track of all who arrived.

Finally the rumble of the familiar car, the slam of its doors, and the voices of several people, most prominently Laci’s. Then a woman’s voice: my mother’s. I ran out to take my mother’s bag from her hand. Éva too appeared, eager to take my father’s rucksack. Bickering about who would take what was a restraining influence on the excitement of falling into one another’s embrace. It would give the kisses time to dry. Walking into the garden, my father squinted in the bright June sunshine and dropped behind; my mother held out her arms. I had to gulp back my tears. Yes, these were my parents.

They were smaller, thinner, and older than the image I had been carrying in my mind. The eyes of both held the same probing question: Who are you, you who have been in my thoughts for so long? Laci left us to ourselves. There was a long silence during which we held one another’s hands. I looked at them and nodded, then said the words Mother, Father . Then we did all sorts of things: we walked to a park my sister and I now knew inside out; we treated my parents at the Italian ice-cream vendor’s. Gazing at a girl with black curls drinking from her palm at the fountain, then sprinkling the water over her hair, I felt a bittersweet peacefulness settle over me: how nice that the people around us had no desire to stake us out, turn us in, have us dragged off and exterminated. You can relax when no one around you wants you dead.

After dinner, in our pajamas, we squatted on our parents’ bed and listened to one another’s adventure novels. My mother told their story, my father commenting with an occasional grimace. On the forced march from Vienna to Mauthausen a dozen of them had dashed into the woods at a bend in the road at my mother’s instigation. They were so quick that the guards failed to notice. It was early spring and survival in the woods was difficult. They encountered an SS unit and passed themselves off as Hungarian refugees. The soldiers were glad the group spoke German and was willing to cook the hares and deer they had found in the forest, so they all sat around the roast in a friendly mood. A pretty young girl among the escapees rather caught the fancy of the young and handsome unit commander, who engaged in some coy flirtatiousness in the interest of good relations.

This sylvan idyll, which lasted two weeks, turned out to have saved their lives, since none of those who reached Mauthausen — those who had not dared to escape at the time — remained alive. My father’s role in the adventure was to keep his mouth shut, as his acting would not have got him far: he was incapable of cheating or lying and had always kept his books assiduously, always paid his taxes, and never bought on credit (though he also enjoyed the minute discount he received from paying in cash). He would repeat ad nauseam the German saying Ein Mann, ein Wort —a man is as good as his word — but such simple-minded piety was dangerous. He would never have survived the war had he not yielded to Mother, who in the face of authority and laws was stronger-willed, more tenacious, impulsive. The commander, ever more frustrated by the forcefulness with which the young woman rebuffed him, eventually reported a band of escaped Jews hiding in the forest.

So in April 1945 they were packed into a wagon by Austrian gendarmes and traveled for days to reach a multipurpose camp located amidst cherry trees in bloom and housing people of every origin, a great many prisoners of war included. It was not an extermination camp, though, and it was there, in Krems, that my parents were liberated.

Mother’s quiet yet determined resistance predated their ordeal. Take, for example, the case of the broiled sausage. The market square in Berettyóújfalu had an open kitchen stand from which the aroma of pork sausage wafted far and wide, enticing not so much mother as son, who had fallen into temptation. From whatever angle I sniffed, the sausage would win out.

Not that it had no competition: I was particularly partial to the smell of sunflower rolls — leftover sunflower seeds pressed into a disc and used as fodder — that filtered through that olfactory cavalcade. I was also drawn by the gentle whiteness of the tables where old ladies sold sour cream, butter, farmer’s cheese, and ewe-cheeses big as a child’s head. Ultimately my mother ceded to the pressure and bought a twist of sausage. Daringly we sneaked bites before lunch, sitting on the pinewood chairs in the kitchen and using my pocketknife. We ate quickly, like conspirators, hoping to conceal our assault on Jewish dietary proscriptions from my father, ever the good son, who though resigned to the fact that my mother bought rump of beef along with the shoulder, would have found the appearance of pork in the house unconscionable. In any case, our attempts at concealment failed: my father happened to come upstairs in search of my mother and got an eyeful of the sausage champers. And yet he pretended to have seen nothing.

My mother was willing to lie, to break the law if necessary. She had led the eager Gestapo officers and Hungarian gendarmes around the house and denied what needed to be denied. Women are better at that sort of thing. When my mother was arrested with my father in May 1944, they were first held for two days at the fire station in Berettyóújfalu. I thank my stars that my mother had the nerve to get herself locked up, leaving us children on our own. One of the gendarmes accepted a bribe to let my father into the room where my mother was being held and she told him in no uncertain terms to demand an audience with Chief Constable György Fényes at the local police headquarters, which was well disposed towards them. She thereby saved both Father and herself, since the train they were packed into went by mistake to Austria instead of Auschwitz, and in Austria chances of survival were sixty percent. She also saved us, because had she been at our side the gas chamber would have been our lot — mine for certain, and most likely Éva’s as well. I never held her leaving us against her: a woman’s place is at her husband’s side.