Miklós Vámos - The Book of Fathers

The three of them had been called up for labor service on the same day. Balázs Csillag was not unduly upset. This was the fourth time he had been called up, and three times his father had managed to sort the matter out and got him off the call-up list. He thought his father would be able to do the same this time.

The call-up papers marked UHI-Urgent, Hurry, Immediate-said they were to present themselves at Nagykáta. From the train he alighted in the company of Zoli Nagy and Dr. Pista Kádas as if they were young men on some study trip without a care in the world; in the yard of the company HQ they were transformed at a stroke into cannon fodder. The officer who bellowed at them inarticulately gave them to understand: if they had hitherto been suffering under the delusion that they were human beings, they were to forget at once this grave misconception, because they were nothing but filthy Jews. They could not speak to members of the guard staff; they were to reply only if they were asked a question, and even then they had to stand at a distance of three paces. Their civil possessions were to be placed on the table and they should bid them a fond farewell. Their wallets likewise: they are to retain a maximum of fifty pengö. Parcels from home are not permitted. Their letters will be subject to censorship. They may receive visitors once a month, exclusively from their nearest and dearest. They may not smoke, since the regulations do not entitle them to tobacco rations. They are obliged to wear the yellow armband day and night. Christians of Jewish origin receive a white armband, communists and other criminals a yellow armband with black polka dots. They are obliged to look after their regular uniform; they are liable to pay for any damage to it. Rosettes may not be worn in their camp caps.

Balázs Csillag could not help but guffaw. He found it amusing that any filthy Jew should obtain a rosette for his army cap, from which it had been carefully removed on arrival. His sense of humor was rewarded by being lashed to a tree by the full-throated officer, who they were soon to discover was Lieutenant-Colonel Lipót Muray, known among the labor battalion workers as the Hangman of Nagykáta. His arms, which had been forced back, and his shoulders, which were all but dislocated, were, within three minutes of being tied to the tree, engulfed by agonizing pain; within five minutes this had spread to all of his body; and by the eighth minute he had lost consciousness. On the orders of Lieutenant-Colonel Muray a bucket of cold water restored him to the land of the living. The Hangman of Nagykáta was not keen on his victims fainting; let the filthy Jews experience every single moment of their punishment.

He had no choice but to realize that he no longer enjoyed any kind of protection. There followed some weeks of “training,” of which the daily high point was five o’clock tea, as Lieutenant-Colonel Muray designated his very own invention: precisely at five in the afternoon-seventeen zero-zero, as they called it-the Jews selected for this purpose would be herded into the cellars of the HQ and there the supervisory staff of the forced labor unit would beat them as long as they detected a single movement in any of the bodies. The blood-curdling screams for help were perhaps audible even in the surrounding villages. Balázs Csillag was never chosen; Zoli Nagy was, twice: the first time he returned with a broken arm, the second time with a shattered shinbone. He was still limping when they were wagoned up and taken to the front, as part of the 14th Light Infantry. The journey took several days by train, to Rechitsa, whence they continued on foot towards the east.

By the time they reached the Don, their numbers had halved. The staff became increasingly hysterical, but the cause of the majority of deaths was frostbite and hypothermia. Many remained by the roadside, turning with blank faces into the snow, thinking that they would stagger up again after forty winks. The soldiers knew there was no point wasting a bullet on them.

The work of the labor servicemen was to build mine-barrages and barbed-wire barriers and to repair railway lines repeatedly blown up by the Russian partisans. This Sisyphean task seemed increasingly pointless; sometimes the engines were able to move only for half a day. There were sections-Balázs Csillag counted them-where in the course of two weeks they changed the rails, bent and blasted by the explosions, no fewer than nine times, and the sleepers burned to charcoal.

In the freezing cold of January they received orders to clear the ground for the regular army; that is, to pick up the mines in a clearing, on the far side of which some tall pines were bending and bowing in the fierce wind. In the labor battalion the rumor went around that that forest already sheltered advance units of the Russian army. Balázs Csillag did not believe this. Those pine needles reminded him of Balatonszemes, Papa’s holiday cottage. What if they were there? When one has to lie on one’s stomach to dig antipersonnel mines out of the frozen soil with a trench spade and any one of them can explode at any time, shetsko jedno whether there are Russian soldiers in the woods.

There was movement in the shadow of the trees. They hissed at each other to lie low. A smallish goat emerged and gently trotted over to the minefield, starting to graze on the tasty green scrub. The laborers held their breath to see when it would be blown sky-high, but the goat, it seems, was too light to trigger an explosion, the mines having been set to respond to a human’s weight. Balázs Csillag watched the oddly graceful creature with great pleasure. The Russian goat is rather similar to the Hungarian goat, except that it is slimmer. Much, much slimmer.

About this time, some eight versts away, the Russians launched an offensive. They broke through the middle of the front, driving a wedge between the German, Italian, and Hungarian forces. Balázs Csillag’s labor battalion was almost entirely wiped out. The three of them, however, by some miracle, managed to survive.

Zoli Nagy, Dr. Pista Kádas, and Balázs Csillag were always together, because of shared sympathies and identical fields of interest. The “legal eagles” the others called them. They formed an alliance, promising each other that they would use their joint strength to survive the war. This promise was not kept by Zoli Nagy, who suddenly, while loading wooden logs, felt dizzy and was torn to unrecognizable shreds by the sleepers and logs that collapsed upon him. His few possessions were shared out equally. Balázs Csillag ended up with a book and a photograph. A curly-haired brunette smiled back from the photograph, with unquenchable optimism, in a bathing suit of some soft fabric, on some kind of a beach, leaning against a blindingly white wall. On the back of the picture, in Zoli Nagy’s careful script: “Yoli, the very first time. August 21, 1943.” Balázs Csillag wondered any number of times what and how it was that very first time on August 21, 1943.

The book was a Household Companion from the turn of the century. Balázs Csillag tried to guess why Zoli Nagy had chosen to go to war with a specialized volume of this kind, but from the ex libris that said “The property of Helga Kondraschek-Not on loan, even to you!,” he guessed that Zoli, too, had found it, or inherited it as he had done.

In his most difficult moments he always found refuge in this volume. If he was very hungry he read all the clever household tips and the five-or six-course meals that husbands returning exhausted from work could be dazzled by. If he was cold, he studied the knitting patterns. If he was plagued by fleas, he read up on the techniques of washing and ironing. He knew every paragraph of the 365 pages of the work. He could not get enough of it.

No sensible gentleman gives serious thought to marriage until he is assured of an income of at least three thousand crowns per annum. One thousand crowns is adequate to live on only if one draws the reins in tight and lives a singular life. A married couple require at least twice, but preferably three times, as much.