George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

“Poor dear. Don’t they have anything better to do? Maybe it’s because you’re such a big, handsome, strapping man and they’re jealous of me and the children.”

The children — Uncle Ern? took good care of them. He gave Éva’s hand in marriage to a highly reputed pharmacist and arranged for Bandi to study in England and become an architectural engineer. His son Pál, though, whose triumphs at Exeter were more on the tennis courts than in the medical labs, he brought home and installed in his company: he, at least, would not organize a strike against his father as son Bandi had done after marrying a robust, red-haired woman active in the left wing of the Workers’ Party, an lifelong advocate for the poor in Parliament.

Uncle Imre was killed in Budapest by the leader of an Arrow Cross patrol who refused to recognize his exceptional status. Detecting an inappropriate tone of voice in the officer, Uncle Imre informed him that he was speaking with a reserve lieutenant, whereupon the officer unceremoniously shot Uncle Imre in the head. My cousin, the architect Bandi Schwartz (later Andy Short) survived the war as an English doughboy. The beautiful wife and daughter of his easygoing younger brother Pál were sent together to the gas chamber because the mother would not let go of the girl’s hand. Pali escaped from his forced-labor unit and organized a group of partisans of various nationalities and religions in the mountains of Máramaros. They lacked the weapons to conduct major operations but did manage to disperse the smaller units sent to pursue them.

Éva, the youngest of the three siblings, ended up at Birkenau, but a Polish prisoner pulled her daughter Kati’s hand from Éva’s and put it in the hand of Aunt Margit, the girl’s grandmother, and although the two of them went to the gas chamber Éva remained alive. She worked in a factory, growing weaker and weaker and moving from camp to camp, until finally she received word in a hospital barracks that her husband Pál Farkas, a pharmacist and perfumer, was alive. Word of her got back to him as well, and taking heart at the prospect of meeting again they recovered and returned home.

In our family the older generations were generally bourgeois liberals and, if forced to choose a party affiliation, identified with the Social Democrats. As for the younger generations, they were radicals, Communists for the most part. Perhaps that is why I felt uncomfortable when my father, returning from the deportation camps, thought of nothing but reopening the hardware business in Berettyóújfalu and taking up the life he had once had. They might have known that nothing could be as before. But even though the young felt that radical change would affect everything in life and I might well have taken my place at my cousin István’s side in that sneering communist chorus, I identified with my parents. When I asked István who could better manage our fathers’ businesses in Berettyóújfalu (Ferenc Dobó’s books, Béla Zádor’s textiles, József Konrád’s hardware) than they themselves, who had done it over a lifetime, he dismissed the question as insubstantial. “One of the assistants will take over,” he said.

My father still believed in the return to what he thought of as normalcy: he would reopen his business in the ransacked house with a fraction of what he had once had and the customers would come and greet him and hold profound discussions on questions both timely and eternal, sitting in upholstered armchairs and eating food they had brought from home in their wagons — garlic sausage or paprika bacon or plain old salted bacon with bread and red onions — and drinking the fresh artesian water he provided. The staff, my father, and his regular customers, all on familiar terms, had so much to talk about in winter as they warmed themselves around the enormous iron stove or in summer as they enjoyed the cool, spacious room.

The younger family members, who had professional or humanities degrees and whose parents had been killed, wanted a radical break with the old order. “Why do you want things to be as they were?” they asked, seeing us move home — or at least to what we imagined to be home — with all our chattels. We should be happy to be alive, the sole surviving Jewish family in Berettyóújfalu, parents and children reunited. When our friends and relatives brought up their gassed wives and children, my parents maintained a somber silence.

People did not stop telling me I was living for the others as well as for myself. That frightened me. If it had been a mere bombastic phrase, I would not have minded the rebuke implicit in it, but I knew there was more involved: now I had to act as they would have acted had they still been alive or at least act in a way calculated to win the approval of my murdered childhood friends. Even with relatives I felt a mixture of tribute and antipathy in their response to my having survived and being able to return to the nest and live happily ever after.

Another issue soon insinuated its way into our talk: Were we bourgeois or communist? “Had my father lived, he might well be my enemy,” István had told me. I was no enemy of my father, nor did he harbor ill will against us. It was only natural for him to take István and Pál Zádor, the sons of his late sister Mariska and cousin Béla, into his house. He did the same for my cousin Zsófi Klein. István and Pali spent a year in school in Kolozsvár, skiing down to the main square in winter, but by the summer of 1946 it was clear that Transylvania would revert to Romania and they came home to Berettyóújfalu.

The new age began for me in the summer of 1945. The family was together and out of mortal danger. Our old life had resumed its course, after a fashion, in the house at Berettyóújfalu, the hardware business having reopened on the ground floor. My sister was soon attending the gimnázium in Debrecen, taking room and board with the family of a retired officer. As for me, it was the dawn of freedom: I was now being privately tutored — meaning that every once in a while I went to see a teacher — and working in my father’s shop, where three shelves were now filled with goods brought in from Budapest, Salgótarján, and Bonyhád. (They came in Studebaker trucks, now in Russian hands, which were used in civilian commerce and sometimes escorted by the Soviet military on roads not yet free of danger. Everything of course had its price.)

In December a second cousin of mine arrived on the scene. His name was Ern? Steiner, and he was a good-looking, active young man who refused to acknowledge the border separating Berettyóújfalu from Nagyvárad. He and his friends would race their jalopy of a truck across it through frozen fields carrying goods. “I always take two or three shots in the air to get the border guards to look back.” Ern? had been liberated by the French in May. He could converse with them and had developed a taste for Calvados and Gauloises. Arriving home in the summer, he learned that his parents and younger sister had not survived, and although other families were living in their former house Ern? reoccupied his old room, telling the new residents to behave themselves and showing them the pistol he carried under his jacket. Ern? did not want to stay long and soon began carrying people, not just goods, westward. Many young Jews of his ilk had been sailing from Marseille to Haifa after returning from labor service to learn they were without families.

“I’m ready,” said Ern? one day.

I gave him a questioning look.

“Ready for anything,” he said dryly. His knapsack held everything he owned.

“Why not take over your father’s business?” I asked.

Ern? gave my arm a stroke. “That chapter is over.” But to acknowledge that I too had a point, he added, “Your father’s still alive. You’re helping him.”