George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Starting 15 May my father was no longer mine but the Gestapo’s. He departed through the garden gate accompanied by gendarmes and German officers. I watched his slightly bent back from the upstairs balcony. I had never seen him escorted by bayonets before. After he and my uncle had been led off, we went to the dining room, where we could follow them through the window facing the street. In front were the Gestapo officers, behind them a couple of gendarmes in their sickle-feathered caps, then my father and uncle, then more gendarmes with bayonets at the ready, and the ridiculous Csontos policeman drawing up the rear. Everything else was as it always was: the cow pats drying in threes on the hot cobblestones, it being mid-May, the yellow light falling on the thick spire of the Calvinist church, the indifferent row of locust trees lining the main street.

My father looked neither right nor left: he greeted no one, nor did anyone greet him. It is instructive to observe the faces of acquaintances approaching from the opposite direction when one is being escorted by armed men. Although my father knew everyone he passed, he walked like an actor making an entrance on stage. The scene was not outrageous, just unusual. At first the faces showed puzzlement; then, slowly, things fell into place: Well, of course, it’s the next step, they’re taking the Jews. Only my mother and we children remained in the house.

Mother felt something had to be done. How could Hungarian gendarmes take her husband away at the command of some Germans in black uniforms? And what of the Hungarian leadership in the local administration? Had those gentlemen, whom we knew, contributed to the situation?

Mother put on a good dress and went to report the incident to the chief constable and lodge a complaint. As she was leaving the constable’s office, a black car pulled up alongside her and a voice in German called out, “Step in, Mrs. Konrád, or do you want me to lock you up with your husband?” He was the chief Gestapo officer. My mother nodded. They did her the favor of putting her in the same jail as my father, though in another section. The gendarmes had rounded up a number of wealthier and better known Jews as hostages. Their wives had stayed at home. Only my mother went with her husband.

That saved our lives. I later found out it was an Arrow Cross pastry-maker who had turned us in. I have him to thank that I am alive today. Perhaps he bore us a grudge for avoiding his shop, though the entrance was pretty spectacular: polar bears — cut from planks with jigsaws and painted in oils — licking raspberry and vanilla ice cream. But the fare was worse than at Petrik’s, where two little bird-faced old ladies with buns of gray hair served cream pastries and ice cream against a backdrop of butter-colored tile walls. They used eggs, sugar, vanilla — the proper ingredients — and eschewed experimentation. They were not Arrow Cross, and they went to church every Sunday morning, arm in arm, in white silk blouses and dark gray veiled hats. They opened their shop only after Mass, still redolent of church, selling cream pastries still warm from having been baked at dawn.

But they did not determine history. Providence had placed my fate in the hands of their rival, the one who compensated for poor quality with painted icebergs and seals. By finding an appropriate outlet for his flights of fancy in the genre of the denunciation letter and thereby landing my parents in a Gestapo internment camp, he bestowed a great fortune upon us, for the result was that we all, each in his own way, avoided the common fate of the Jews of Újfalu: Auschwitz.

Four of us children were left: myself, my sister, and my two cousins. They still had their Jewish governess Ibi, who, what with the fear and uncertain prospects of the times, exuded a less than pleasant smell. She was an awkward, weak-spined girl who had trouble with the cooking and cleaning: everything ended up jumbled and more or less dirty.

It was disturbing to see a way of life disintegrate, and I watched it crumble day by day. The absence of our parents and the worry were bad enough, but the nausea of helplessness was worse. István and I decided that our parents had made a mistake: we should have abandoned everything and departed earlier, because now we would have to abandon the house and garden anyway.

It was hot, a beautiful early summer, the cranes occupying their usual spot by the Tables of the Covenant. We played ping-pong like maniacs. The small market on Mondays, the large one on Thursdays, and on Friday afternoons, yellow stars on their jackets, a prayer shawl under their arms, the Jewish men plying their usual route past our house to the synagogue. Every evening we followed the regulations for the blackout, putting slat frames covered with black paper in the windows.

Though no longer allowed into the pool, we would peek through the fence and watch the boys imitating Stukas, the German dive-bombers, as they dived screeching from the trampoline into the twenty-five meter basin fed by the lazy, quiet flow of the artesian water. As usual it was drained on Sunday and would refill by Wednesday afternoon. The previous year István, Pali, and I had swum eighty lengths and were given money for chicken paprikás and noodles at the pool restaurant.

Taking walks with the yellow star gradually grew less pleasant. The message in the faces of the passersby did not generally leave a good feeling. The crudest would communicate, “Well, now you’ll get what’s been coming to you!”; the majority, “Aha. So that’s how it is. So they’re taking you away. Well, let them!” Even the warm looks, looks of sympathy, were combined with a quickened pace: solidarity in a hurry. We preferred to stay in the garden. I would swing for hours, until my head spun.

One day at noon a squadron of English and American bombers flashed their silver over the town. They dropped nothing on us, just sparkled in the light on the way to bomb the Debrecen railway station. The church bells tolled; a siren bleated. Gendarmes checked to see that everyone was down in the cellar. But we did not hide; we put our heads back and scoured the sky: Good. Up there at least they are in charge.

We got a postcard from my parents in Debrecen saying they were well, nothing more. Although the radio had been confiscated, we had other things to conceal: a sack of flour obtained without a permit, a few sides of bacon. They were in the cellar in a very clever spot that the house’s architect (Mr. Berger, who ended up in the same transport and same camp as my parents) had shown my father in 1933, saying that a hiding place might come in handy some day. It was a tiny nook in total darkness on the far side of the concrete water tank and under the basement stair, a place only the most meticulous searcher would find. Our searchers were not so meticulous as all that.

There was also some money concealed behind the drawer in my father’s desk: three packs of hundreds, thirty thousand pengős, the price of a large house. Even more serious was a cache of two iron boxes buried in the pipe shed and containing gold jewelry, for which my father had regularly traded a portion of his inventory. One box was buried in the corner and was later discovered, but they never found the other one because it was in the asymmetrical center of the area, where a gray-enamel kettle holding oats for the angora rabbits hung from a ceiling beam.

In those days we kept a dozen rabbits in a warren in the yard. Along the sides of the uppermost two cages were little wooden birthing-boxes, their doors open to the mother’s large compartment. Bunnies are pink and hairless at birth and cuddle together, shivering, under their mother’s belly. I would have liked to stroke them with at least the tip of my finger, but was told that the mother smells the scent of the human hand on her young and either pushes the human-scented young away or eats it. We were allowed to touch them only after their fur began to grow. Then we could take a few bunnies on our beds and play with them.