Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

KLARA HAD SURVIVED the Siege of Budapest in a women’s shelter at Szabadság tér, under the protection of the International Red Cross. The Allies would not bomb it; the Germans had little interest in it. The inhabitants, young mothers and babies, were of no use to them. Klara had gone there in early December, a few weeks after the Russians had reached the southeastern edge of the capital. By that time Horthy had been deposed, the Arrow Cross had come to power, and seventy thousand Jews had been deported from Budapest. Those who had escaped deportation had had to move twice: first from their original homes to yellow-star buildings, Jewish-only apartments in neighborhoods all over the city; and then to a tiny ghetto in the Seventh District, in the streets surrounding the Great Synagogue.

In the first wave of displacements, Klara and Ilana, the children, Klara’s mother, and Elza Hász had all been assigned to a building on Balzac utca, in the Sixth District. Polaner had gone with them. The diminutive Mrs. Klein, grandmother of Miklós Klein, had provided her goat cart to help them transport their things. Klara had seen Klein’s grandmother on a last desperate visit to the Margit körút prison, where György was supposed to have been interned; Mrs. Klein had been there to inquire about Miklós. There had been no news of either man that day, but as the women had walked together afterward along the Danube embankment, trying to distract each other from their fear and grief, they’d talked of the practical difficulties of the upcoming move. On the day designated for their departure from Nefelejcs utca, Klara had awakened to an early-morning knock at the door. It was Miklós Klein’s grandmother in her peasant skirt and black boots, with the news that her goat cart stood at the ready in the courtyard. Klara had looked over the balcony railing, and there was the cart beside the fountain, two white goats sniffing at the water. Miklós Klein’s grandmother, it turned out, had been assigned to a building not far from Klara’s own, and had already transported what she and her husband could salvage from their tiny homestead in Angyalföld. Seven goats had accompanied them to the inner district of the city: these two wethers, two milch does, three kids. Klara could see them herself that very afternoon, Klein’s grandmother said; she’d hidden the goats in a carriage house behind the yellow-star building on Csanády utca.

Even with the aid of the goat cart, they’d had to leave almost everything behind. They were moving into a single room in a three-room apartment with a shared bath; one family lived there already and a third would join them. Klara and Ilana, the children, the elder and younger Mrs. Hász, and Polaner, carrying his loaded gun-the seven of them had crossed the city on foot, through crowds of thousands of Jewish men and women and children pushing their possessions in wheelbarrows or carrying them on their backs or leading them along in horse carts. It took four hours to make the journey of two kilometers. When they carried their things upstairs, they found that all the rooms were occupied; a fourth family had been assigned to the apartment at the last moment. But there was nowhere else for any of them to go, so they would have to share. And that was the beginning of five months in that apartment on Balzac utca. Soon it came to seem to Klara that she had always slept on a pallet on the floor between her mother and her child, had always shared a bath with sixteen others, had always woken to the sound of her elder sister-in-law weeping. Miklós Klein’s grandmother arrived every few days with goat’s milk for the children and for Klara, reminding Klara that she must keep up her strength for the sake of the baby in her womb. But Klara’s pregnancy seemed a terrible irony, the mockery of a promise. As she waited in line for bread one day, two old women had spoken of her as though she weren’t there, or couldn’t hear: Look at that poor Jewish pregnant woman. What a shame she’s got no future.

In fact, the aperture to any future beyond the war seemed to contract by the day. They lived in constant fear of deportation; from the outlying towns came news of thousands sent away in closed trains. In the capital itself there were horrors enough: frequent Arrow Cross raids on the yellow-star buildings, the displaced families’ possessions stolen, men and women taken away for no reason other than that they happened to be home when the Nyilas men arrived. At times there was reason for hope, reason to think the nightmare might soon end; in July, Horthy stopped all deportations of Jews from Hungary. The Budapest Jews thought they were saved. Klara heard rumors in the streets of talks between Hungary and the Allies, plans for an armistice. Then in mid-October came Horthy’s announcement that Hungary had concluded a separate peace with the Russians. For a few hours there were mad celebrations in the streets. Men tore down the yellow-star signs above their doorways, and women ripped the yellow-star patches from their children’s coats. But then came the terrible double blow of the Arrow Cross coup and Szálasi’s installation as prime minister. The deportations began again, this time in Budapest: Tens of thousands of men and women were taken from their houses and marched to the brickyards at Óbuda, then onward toward Austria. The actions of the Arrow Cross seemed dictated purely by cruel whim. A gang of Nyilas men had raided the building across the street from their own, and had deported nearly a dozen men and women, many of them too old for active labor; Klara had expected their own building to be raided at any moment, but the men had never returned.

All that time, the front lines of the war had been drawing closer and closer. Hitler, determined to keep the Russians from reaching Vienna, decided to delay them at Budapest as long as possible; as winter approached, Nazi and Hungarian forces dug in for what everyone already knew to be a futile struggle. Red Army forces encircled the city in a tightening ring. Air raids drove the terrified civilians underground every night. At times it seemed to Klara they were living in the air-raid shelter, that they spent their entire lives huddling in the dark. There were moments when she almost wished for the shuddering blast she’d experienced a thousand times in her mind, the crushing darkness after which there would be nothing at all. But one morning when Klein’s grandmother came to deliver the goat’s milk, she brought a slip of hope: A few women and children from her building had moved to an International Red Cross shelter at Szabadság tér, at the very center of the city. Klara and Ilana must go there as soon as possible, must try to get in while there was still space. If Klara was lucky, she might be able to have her baby there. Surely there would be a better chance of getting medical help if she were under the protection of the International Red Cross.

The next day the order came that the Jews must move again at the end of November, this time to the ghetto in the Seventh District. It was clear that there was no time to waste. Klara and Ilana went that afternoon to make inquiries at the International Red Cross offices at Vadász utca, and learned that Klein’s grandmother had been correct: There was a shelter for women and babies at Szabadság tér. Klara and Ilana received papers that would allow them to bring the children there that very day. They went home and packed the last of their money and valuables, the children’s diapers and clothing, a few sheets and blankets; they loaded the bundles into Tamás’s and Ádám’s baby carriages and dressed the children in their warmest coats. Then, for the last time, Klara said goodbye to Elza Hász and to her own mother-though she had not known it was to be the last time. Her mother had pressed her wedding band and engagement ring into Klara’s hand.