The May Beetles Read online

  One day, with no warning at all, we were told to pack up and go to the station, where we would board a train to the city of Stettin, three hundred kilometres west of Marienwerder. (Stettin was then part of Germany, but a few months later became Polish territory and was renamed Szczecin.) At the station we realised that the entire staff of the hospital was boarding the train.

  It was a long journey, and the mood amongst the passengers, especially the Russian soldiers, was cheerful and relaxed. There was a great deal of singing accompanied by the harmonica, and smiling Russian faces all around us. We were special favourites of the soldiers, this time in a good way – they weren’t about to assault us.

  The scene we saw through the windows as we travelled west was one of devastation. Germany had been bombed to smithereens. Many towns and villages were reduced to rubble. People stood like wraiths amidst the ruins, their faces haggard. When the Jewish women of Auschwitz were sent by train to Stutthof, I had seen well-dressed, well-fed Polish and ethnic German civilians, and I had both envied and resented them. How things had changed. In the eight months since then, millions of tonnes of bombs had been dropped from the sky on this region. Now I pitied the people we saw.

  There was a question we asked all those we met, or at least those who we thought might have the answer: ‘Have you met anyone who came from a concentration camp?’ We were always told, ‘No, not a soul.’ Apart from the Red Army officer who supervised the cheese factory, we had not come across another Jew. We came to think that we were the only Jews left. But we held out hope that some would emerge from hiding when peace came. Of course, the one we most wished to embrace was our father.

  The train stopped one evening some way from Stettin. A soldier made enquiries, then told us that the rails ahead were damaged and would be repaired overnight. We alighted from the carriage and shuffled down an embankment to open fields. There was no station and no town to be seen. Soldiers were busily erecting their tents in the fading light. Those of us who were not soldiers were given large squares of carpet from which to fashion shelters, and a couple of blankets each. We didn’t attempt to build a proper hut but simply constructed a type of shelter, with a carpet square on the ground and blankets slung between four stakes as walls, but open to the sky. The night was mild, with no prospect of rain. We settled on our backs and gazed up at the heavens, where a million stars glittered. I found myself smiling at them, blessing their beauty. I was still smiling when I fell asleep.

  An hour or two later I was awoken by the sound of gunfire. I raised myself and saw the faces of my mother and my sisters in the moonlight, their expressions as alarmed as my own. The gunfire intensified and the four of us began whimpering in despair. Tracers of many colours criss-crossed the night sky. The Russians had abandoned us in our sleep! The Germans had come back and we would be captured a second time! I was not so much breathing as panting, in short, shallow gasps. To come so close to safety only to become captives once more was a horrific prospect.

  ‘What is happening?’ I whispered to my mother.

  We clung to each other, Mother, Erna, Marta and me. At that moment, if we’d had the power to choose oblivion, I think we would have done so. The knot of pain in my heart was the worst I’d ever known.

  Then someone lifted the blanket wall and looked in. ‘Girls, girls, wake up!’ a voice shouted. ‘The war has ended! The war has ended!’ It was a Russian soldier, smiling with glistening teeth. ‘Wake up, girls! Come and celebrate! The war is finished! Voyna zakonchilas!’

  CHAPTER 21

  Return

  We did not know that the German city of Stettin would become the Polish city of Szczecin within the year. Nor did we know that our native Hungary would bend to the will and rule of the Russians. We knew nothing at all of the way in which Europe was to be carved up.

  It was the middle of May 1945. Mother, with her gift for homemaking, turned our barren new apartment into a warm and welcoming place. We were beginning to resemble proper human beings once more – quite well dressed for the season. In the ghost town of Stettin, the only other people on the streets were Russian soldiers. Most of the other women were Russian nurses and military personnel, many of them pretty but not fashionable.

  One lovely Sunday afternoon, Erna and I decided to attend a big regional concert being staged by the Russians. When we were on the train coming to Stettin, one of the soldiers had serenaded us on his harmonica with Brahms’ ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’. The soldiers had suggested that we Hungarian girls might like to dance with them to the Brahms rhapsody in the future.

  The concert was being staged in an enormous hall. By the time we arrived, dressed in white blouses and plain skirts, it was already packed with soldiers and nurses. We stood at the back, a long way from the podium. A couple of smart young soldiers approached us, made gentlemanly bows and asked us to follow them. Erna and I winked at each other to show we were game, and we allowed ourselves to be escorted all the way to the front row, where a fat Red Army general was seated. We were ushered to seats on either side of the general, who was by no means a young or good-looking man. He had rows of medals and ribbons on the breast of his uniform jacket, and when he smiled at Erna and me he displayed a mouth full of gold teeth. I thought: ‘Dear God, what have we got ourselves into?’

  Still, we sat cheerfully through the concert, applauded all the acts and tried to look moved when the Russians on stage sang sentimental ballads. At the conclusion of each item on the program, the general would ask us questions about our lives back in Hungary and pay us compliments on our beauty. We, in turn, asked him about life in Russia, and complimented him on his great success against the Wehrmacht.

  After the final item, the general turned to Erna and invited the two of us to join him afterwards. ‘Big party,’ he said. ‘Food, drink. We all laugh and sing! You come to the big party.’

  ‘Comrade General,’ Erna replied, ‘we must apologise and decline; our mother will be expecting us home.’

  The general was appalled. We were refusing a party with the glorious, victorious Russian soldiers?

  ‘Many apologies, Comrade General, but our mother worries about us like crazy,’ Erna said. ‘We must get home.’

  The general was offended, and left in a huff.

  For us, Stettin was a relief. Through June, July and August we were well-fed and relaxed. Nothing much was happening. The Russians went about their work, whatever it was; a few of the locals who’d left the city before the Russian occupation drifted back. After a period of rest, we were sent to work in the kitchens that prepared food for the Russian military. It wasn’t hard work, and it gave us access to all the food we could possibly eat.

  There were no complaints from me, or from Erna or Marta, but something was stirring in our mother. Her birthday came around on the twenty-ninth of August. Back in Nyírbátor, we had always made a big fuss of her, but all we could do in Stettin was sit by her bedside and wish her a happy birthday.

  ‘Girls, I have something to say,’ she began. ‘I couldn’t sleep all night. I was terribly sad. I was remembering past birthdays, all of them, in Nyírbátor. Suddenly I realised who I am, who we are. I said to myself, “Boeske, enough is enough – it is time to take your daughters home.” Girls, we are going back to Nyírbátor.’

  None of us had spoken much before about ‘going home’. It was as if the whole idea of a return to Nyírbátor had become unthinkable. My mother’s imagination was the first to awaken. My reaction to the prospect of another upheaval, though, was delight. I was very moved by Mother’s profound conviction.

  All over Germany, millions of people were on the move. The Germans themselves were desperate for shelter, and for employment, and they would go anywhere just to find a tiny bit of comfort. Millions of others – non-Germans, former captives – were also struggling to reach their homelands. We knew that train travel was the only possibility, but we also knew that the railways of Germany, bombed to pieces, only carried a few trains at this time. Those trains that did run �
� and we had seen some passing through Stettin – were packed with passengers; people would hang from the sides of the carriages, or even climb onto the roofs. Only the Russian soldiers travelled inside the train. They had the authority to order all other passengers out.

  ‘Do we not belong to the Red Army?’ my mother said. ‘Have we not worked for the Russians for months? I will ask them to give us a special pass, one that says we are special friends of the Red Army and can travel in the carriages.’

  As we served meals to the Russian big shots, we were able to make a special request of them. But they were annoyed that we weren’t going with them to Russia. Few people, however, were as persistent as my mother, and gradually she wore down the officer in command of the Stettin forces. ‘Please,’ she pleaded. ‘We have served the glorious army of the Soviet Union but now it is time for us to return to our home. So please give us a pass that will allow us to travel in the train carriages with the Russian soldiers.’

  It took ten days but my mother prevailed. A soldier brought us a sheet of paper on which something in Russian was scrawled. The words said that we were authorised to travel in train carriages all over Germany. And there was a less official note at the end: ‘But go now to your home, ungrateful people, if you don’t want to come with us to Russia.’ We gathered up our few possessions, our bedding and clothing, and hurried down to the railway station as fast as our legs could carry us.

  And so we commenced our journey back to Hungary. Our travel certificate was at times accepted, at times not. On good days we found a place for ourselves in carriages; on bad days we packed ourselves on as best we could. Every carriage was stuffed full of humanity, many struggling like us to find our lives again. We stopped here and there. At one station Erna and I went in search of food, and approached the station master to ask for directions. We knew instantly that we’d chosen the wrong man. Lust bloomed on his face and without the least hesitation he began to grope us. We escaped him.

  Finally we were in a carriage taking us to Berlin. A woman on the train, a German woman but certainly not a Nazi, told my mother of a place in Berlin that catered to displaced Jews. ‘I have the address for you,’ she said, and wrote it on a slip of paper. ‘The people there will help you, I am sure.’

  We came at last to Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin. It had been badly damaged by bombs, but a few platforms were functioning, the rubble cleared away. It was a pleasant autumn afternoon. Mother approached people in the streets and asked directions to the address of the organisation that assisted Jews. And we found it: an intact building amongst thousands that had been destroyed. A garden thrived at the front of the building, and a path led us to an impressive entrance. We sat at a garden table and waited.

  A woman in a nurse’s uniform appeared. Speaking German, she called out to us: ‘Happy new year!’ We looked at each other, puzzled. What was she talking about? It was September. Then understanding dawned on us: it was the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. The significance of this moved each of us – my mother, Erna, Marta and me.

  The relief organisation headquarters was a place where Jews could catch their breath, as it were, and consider their options. We decided we would stay in Berlin for ten days, until the day after Yom Kippur, when we would take a train to Hungary. We met others who also wished to return to their former homes, and who hoped to find that their relatives and friends had done the same. There were also those who did not expect to meet their children, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, sweethearts, aunts, uncles or cousins ever again. Some knew about the deaths of their dear ones. Many of these Jews would choose to migrate to countries outside Europe – America, Canada or Australia – for who could ever again trust Europe? Some would choose Palestine, where the state of Israel was being promoted as a homeland for the Jews.

  Jewish agencies that promoted resettlement in Palestine were active in Europe at that time. ‘Israel is coming,’ they said. ‘Live with us in Israel. Never again will you be marched from your houses at gunpoint.’ In the synagogue attached to the relief organisation’s building, Jews with broken lives gathered to tell their stories. Sometimes we prayed; sometimes we sat without uttering a word.

  In the synagogue, stories were told all day long. ‘We were taken to Bergen-Belsen in the north … We went to Monowitz, a terrible place … to Majdanek … to Chełmno …’ Not all the stories were of suffering, though. Many spoke of everyday matters – of where they had found lodgings, of their plans for the future, even of new romances. But the two great themes of the stories we heard in the synagogue were ‘I have suffered’ and ‘This I will now do’. For me, it was arresting to see the often calm and deliberate expressions of people as they spoke about taking up their lives where they had left off years earlier.

  At the synagogue we came to know a nice young man from Poland named Aron. At the relief organisation headquarters he had met and fallen in love with a Hungarian girl called Eva, who had since departed Berlin for Hungary. He spoke of her with tenderness and longing. When we revealed to this lovelorn fellow that we too were Hungarians, he began to bubble with excitement. He wanted to help us in any way he could, as if by coming to our aid he would be honouring his love for his absent sweetheart. He even offered to pay for our train fares to Hungary. ‘Ladies, I’ll come with you on the train to Budapest,’ he said. ‘And you can help me find Eva.’ We quickly agreed.

  From Berlin to Budapest is a journey of more than a day, but we had seats in a carriage with our young friend and it wasn’t such an ordeal. Aron chattered incessantly about his girlfriend the whole way. We only half listened, distracted by the emotions filling our hearts as we returned home sixteen months after being forced from it. Seeing road signs and station names in Hungarian moved me to tears.

  At the Budapest-Nyugati railway station we saw a familiar face: Vera Feleki, the elder sister of my first childhood sweetheart, Gyuri. Vera, it turned out, was not alone in the world. She and her lover ran a hotel in Budapest, and she insisted that we come and stay there. We were standing together just outside the station in Budapest, which hadn’t been badly bombed.

  There was a question we had to ask Vera, although we dreaded the answer. But my mother asked.

  ‘Your husband did not return, Boeske,’ Vera said. ‘And, Baba, Gyuri did not return either.’

  More than six months had passed since the liberation of the camps, and anyone found alive had been documented. If my father had survived, it would be known by now. It came as no great shock to have it confirmed that he’d perished, and yet at the same time it did. But we did not weep – not there and then.

  Vera also told us that the rounding up of Jews in Budapest had not been as thorough as in the regional towns and cities. Some had remained hidden, or had been able to bribe officials to overlook them. Churches had become sanctuaries for a significant number. Others had obtained documentation that permitted them to pass as Christians. Foreign embassies had taken in thousands of Jews, Vera said. One way or another, a certain number of Jews had eluded the Hungarians and the SS. Those who had not – some hundreds of thousands – had been forced to march without food or shelter towards Germany. It was said that tens of thousands of Jews had died on these marches.

  This news gave us hope that our Budapest relatives, the Lichtmans, might still be alive in the city. They were my mother’s sister’s family. We had no reason to believe that they would be amongst the Budapest Jews who had survived, but we wanted to believe it.

  We went with Vera to her hotel and were shown to a room, and then we hurried to the Lichtmans’ address, 1 Jókai Tér, in a suburb of the city. As we rode the tram, I thought of how my aunt Marta and her family had made me so welcome on my only visit to Budapest years ago. We held out hope that Aunt Marta, her husband, Armin, and my cousins were still alive.

  But it was too much to hope for. We reached the Lichtmans’ house, only to find it occupied by another family. The man who answered our knock on the door had never heard of them. He only knew that the family w
ho had lived there before him were long gone – to where, he had no idea.

  We returned crestfallen to Vera’s hotel and told her of our disappointment. But then we learned from her that other relatives of ours had definitely survived: Boeske’s half-brother, Feivi Gutman, his wife, Bolyika, and their children, Gitta and Yankele, were living in Debrecen. The news lifted our spirits, but I stifled my delight; I didn’t want another disappointment.

  The Lichtman family before the war, about 1937.

  From left: Moshe, aged about nine, Marta (Boeske’s only full sister), Kati and Armin. Moshe survived and went to Israel. Marta and Armin were taken away and didn’t return. Kati, the young photographer who took the photo of Baba on page 84, ended up in a ghetto in Bratislava and starved herself to death.

  In the early 1940s many young Jewish men of Budapest were arrested and held in a town called Kistarcsa. Armin dedicated himself completely to staying in touch with those men and assisting them in any way he could.

  We left Budapest between Yom Kippur and Sukkot, having found a place for ourselves on the train to Debrecen. There, we found the Gutmans alive and thriving. It was like swallowing some fabulous tonic that revives you within seconds. We kissed, we hugged, we wept.

  The Gutmans’ story was absorbing. They had all been sent to a camp in Austria, and they would surely have been murdered had not Eichmann, the Nazi minister in charge of the murder of Jews, chosen them as one of the Jewish families at Theresienstadt to be spared. In 1944, when it became apparent to many in the SS that Germany would be defeated, a deal was made to save some Jewish families, who would be exhibited to the invading Allies as examples of the compassionate treatment of Jews. The scheme was an utter fraud, of course, but it allowed the Gutmans to survive. They were kept in Austria, fed and sheltered, until the very end of the war. Thus, the Gutmans were amongst the small proportion of European Jewish families – of those who remained in Europe – still intact in May 1945.