Iván Sándor - Legacy

I lose the gaze of the fourteen-year-old boy; I can see only his back in the crowd. I try to keep track of him.

He tightens the belt on his windcheater.

At the gate is a renewed crackle of gunfire. Soldiers are again ripping protective passports in two. Dead people are lugged behind the brick-drying sheds. Father and Uncle Lajos come to an agreement that they will not show their Swiss Schutzbriefe even if challenged to do so — it’s not worth taking the risk that they will be ripped up. A trench-coated diplomat whose identity is unknown to me, and all I see is that he is gesturing as if he were observing us; as if he were grateful that we are not flocking to him, not pleading for anything. It takes fifty-eight years until the two gazes find each other, and even then only I am able to see him while writing this.

What remains of our bread is dry. Mother gives me a square of chocolate.

The third morning. Father’s face is grey. He has a leather peaked cap with a cloth lining that he can pull down over the ears; this was what he wore when he was a passenger in a car. Comes in handy right now, says Mother. Father finished six years of elementary-school education in the small town of Kiskunhalas; he was the seventh of eight siblings. He was able to invent stories as he sat at my bedside of an evening. One of the stories was about Jericho and a tall, spry black lad’s adventures in the African jungle, while another was about Little Red Riding Hood and her being able to fly with outstretched arms and travel on clouds.

The first time Father went out on the streets wearing a yellow star was on 5 April 1944 to go to his workshop at 41 Francia Road. He leaves the barrier on Thököly Road, turns left, goes past József Rübner’s timber shop. Single-storey working-class housing; dwellings consisting of just a single room and kitchen, communal latrines at the end of the corridor. Number 41 is the sole two-storey building with a garden. The balconied apartment on the mezzanine over the workshop is the home for the lawyer Dr Erno Fogas and his family. That morning he sets off in a lieutenant’s uniform. Father would like to turn back so that they could avoid each other, but now there is no chance. Twenty metres, ten … He saluted from a long way off, he tells Mother that evening. He halted. Saluted in anticipation. Set off again, saluted again.

I can’t see a German soldier anywhere. Nor at the KISOK station.

Another column is sent off. They vanish at the bend in Vörösvár Road. Kafka’s genius, Walter Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem, lies in the fact that he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to the Haggadic element of transmissibility; Scholem replied that in other words it was about a crisis in transmissibility of truth. Six years after that exchange of letters we, too, are falling in. The marching columns line up. Again Home Guards with Arrow Cross armbands, submachine gunners in black. Again an officer at the head of each column. Again gendarmes bringing up the rear.

I strap up my knapsack, wind my scarf round my neck. Shouted commands. The left-hand column sets off. It wheels off and vanishes in the fog. The right-hand column sets off.

I am approaching the intersection of Bécsi Road and Vörösvár Road on a number 1 tram.

On the right are two single-storey buildings with peeling plasterwork. I can recall their like. They must have been built in the first couple of decades of the last century. Dwellings of a single room and kitchen with no mod cons. In the row of shops facing the street a depot for Suzuki scooters, a launderette, a discount paint shop. At the corner a Piazza Italia restaurant. On the valley slope stands a string of villas on Remete Hill. Big picture windows, balconies, underground garages.

I set off to the left along Bécsi Road. A SEAT automobile showroom, INTERSPAR, Eurocenter. They operate with huge bulldozers. Stone mounds. An asphalt road on top of the clay hillside leads to the string of villas. A parking lot in front of the Praktiker Store.

On 17 November, the day before we were lined up, Ferenc Szálasi issues a memorandum on the definitive settlement of the Jewish question.

(2) The Jews loaned on behalf of the German government, whom the German government is prepared to employ as able-bodied in the interest of a shared conduct of the war. These Jews are obliged to work for the benefit of the Hungarian nation. Their fate will be determined by the Hungarian state consonant with European considerations in the course of a general resolution of Europe’s Jewish question.

Those European considerations had been decided years before then, at the Wannsee Conference.

(3) Jews remaining for the time being in Hungary are to be concentrated in ghettos. Each ghetto will have four gates located at the four main points of the compass. Jews may only leave the ghetto in the event that they are transported out as Jews on loan for forced labour.

On the afternoon of 18 November Carl Lutz, accompanied by Raoul Wallenberg, comes across several hundred people in possession of Swiss and Swedish passports heading for Gönyű on the highway to Vienna.

That same day the commanding general at the Wehrmacht HQ in Budapest reports to the SS Reichsführer in Berlin that the Swiss Embassy is disrupting the Jewish action by distributing Schutzbriefe much as before. Guidance is requested as to what action should be taken.

Eichmann, the director of a special Judenkommando, added the following comment to the sentence in Szálasi’s memorandum, according to which a boarded-up ghetto will have four gates under the supervision of the police and Arrow Cross functionaries: ‘Jews must be escorted through these gates, but in principle no one may leave.’

In Ferenciek Square lie two Home Guards who have been hacked down. Around their necks are cards saying ‘Army deserters’.

On the instructions of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs, Edmund Veesenmayer, the German Ambassador to Budapest, lodges a protest note about how ‘the Swiss are sabotaging joint German-Hungarian war efforts’. The Hungarian Ministry for Foreign Affairs takes immediate action, and additional Arrow Cross detachments arrive at the Óbuda Brickworks.

I am standing between Mother and Father in the marching column. They are holding my hands and are not wearing gloves. The trench-coated diplomat also has no gloves on. The man beside him is wearing a Red Cross armband. They are having a discussion with a lieutenant colonel. The latter orders the captain standing at the head of our column to come over to him. The captain then bawls out that those over sixty and children under sixteen may fall out.

There is no scrum, no rush. Everyone looks around. An elderly woman moves off. Someone asks what will happen to those who stay in line.

Father adjusts my cap; Mother rewinds the scarf round my neck. Put your gloves on, she says. She reels off a list of the rations I shall find in my knapsack; Father lists the documents that I have on me and slips some banknotes into my windcheater pocket.

The Róberts are also taking leave of Mádi.

A gendarme NCO lines us up.

Father is able only to call out names and ranks.

Mother would like her smile to be my memory of these moments.

We hold hands and wave with our free hands.

Mádi pulls out two tins of food from her knapsack. She darts over and gives them to her parents.

I don’t remember that, however. It’s something she tells me fifty-eight years later over a cup of coffee. Our parents had no doubt that we ought to stay behind, she says.

The column reaches the gate. It wheels to the left then disappears.

We are also lined up. In front of me is a short, slight old lady. She has applied lipstick; her face is sallow, but I can see traces of lipstick on either side. She whispers something.