The May Beetles Page 15

  At Debrecen we fulfilled our obligations to recall the dead in a ritual way. We remembered my grandfather, Ignac Yitzchak Kellner, who was seventy-four when he was taken from the train carriage at Auschwitz and expired there beside the rails. And of course we remembered my father, Gyula Yechiel Keimovits, who gave us life and his name. He was a man so beloved, so tender and supportive that even today, when I am at an age much greater than he ever reached, I recall him with tears and pain.

  We also remembered Aunt Klara and my cousins Mira, Mimi and Katika. I told the Gutmans about the day Mira was taken. ‘She was holding my hand,’ I said. ‘There was such chaos – we didn’t know that one line was for the gas chamber, and the other for the sheds of the living. But even if she’d known, Mira would have gone with her mother and sisters.’

  We did not yet know about the other Kellner relatives who had perished. Shloime Kellner, his wife, Basha, and three of their four children were dead: Shloime in a labour camp, Basha and the three children in the gas chamber. Their eldest son, Yossi, survived, and in time went to live in Israel. He and many other prisoners were abandoned by the SS in a railway carriage at the end of the war. They spent twelve days in freezing weather, finally being released by the soldiers of the advancing Red Army. Yossi was amongst the few still alive when the carriage door was flung open. Manci Moshkovits, my mother’s youngest half-sister, and her husband, Moishe, were both killed. And of course there were the Lichtmans, whom we’d hurried to embrace in Budapest. Seventeen of my mother’s immediate family, all killed.

  We took the train to Nyírbátor and walked from the railway station into the town. Everything we saw was familiar, and yet it wasn’t. The streets, the acacia trees, the houses, the shops – everything was transformed by what we had experienced. We were not the people who had been taken from the town on carts eighteen months earlier.

  I recalled that, as we left Nyírbátor all that time ago, I had sworn to have my revenge. Now I had returned, and my revenge was that I was still alive. My life would go on.

  CHAPTER 22

  Home

  We were home, but we were also homeless. We had lived in a number of rented houses in Nyírbátor after my parents sold the house at 1 Pócsi Utca, so there was nowhere for us to return to. But by enquiring here and there, we came to realise that we were not the first Jews to have come back to the town. In fact we were almost the last: all the other surviving Jews of Nyírbátor – one hundred and thirty out of three thousand – had found their way back.

  Amongst them was my father’s cousin, Yakab Kramer, together with his son Mishi – the boy who gave us the news of the German occupation of Budapest. ‘We did not know that we would ever see you again,’ Yakab said. ‘And now you will stay with us until you find a way ahead.’

  We stayed with Yakab and Mishi for a week or so, then we moved into Grandfather Kellner’s old house, living in the half that had been occupied by Lipe and Klara’s family. Once more we told our stories, this time to Yakab and Mishi and other Jews we met in the town. My stomach became painfully knotted whenever I spoke about our experiences.

  The Russian army commemorated the first anniversary of the liberation of Hungary in Nyírbátor on 5 April 1946. Baba and Marta, by now Russian speakers, took part in the event.

  Just across the street was the synagogue, and much of the furniture that had once belonged to the Jews of Nyírbátor had been stored there since April 1944, the time of our expulsion. We picked our way through what was left, which was not much, as those who had returned to Nyírbátor earlier than us had taken most of it. We found nothing of ours.

  Not long afterwards, my mother was visiting a neighbour and noticed that the dining table and the chairs bore a startling resemblance to our own table and bentwood chairs. She made a claim on them, startling the woman, who’d found them in the synagogue. ‘Well, people can say that anything belongs to them,’ the woman said. ‘Where’s your proof?’

  My mother told the woman that if she turned all the chairs upside down, she would find the following sentence written on the bottom of one: ‘If I cannot marry the Prince of Wales, I will marry no one.’ I had written this when I was thirteen; the Prince of Wales was courting Wallis Simpson at the time, and it was all over the news. They upended the chairs and found the proof. My mother reclaimed her table and chairs, and they were carried back to our own kitchen – much to the chagrin of the woman who had enjoyed ownership of them for a few months.

  Of course, we had buried our big wooden crate in the back garden of our landlords’ place in April 1944. My mother’s younger unmarried brother, Bimi, who had survived in Budapest under the Germans, had already dug it up for us. He had emerged from hiding in January 1945 and decided to go to Nyírbátor to live. Once there, he had paid a visit to our old landladies, to enquire if we had left anything with them. They told him of the crate buried in the back garden. The rain that season was steady and persistent, and the old ladies were worried that whatever was in the crate would spoil. Bimi dug it up, and sure enough, most of what was inside had been ruined by water seeping in. He took what he could to Grandfather’s house: some of Erna’s trousseau; the silver candlestick holder; the water-damaged photo albums; the demijohn of goose fat. They were symbolic of our lives after the Shoah: damaged, and in certain respects unable to be repaired.

  Soon after moving into Aunt Klara’s house, we opened a shop – the same shop that Erna and Mother had managed before we were taken away. As it happened, Klara’s husband, Lipe, had run a haberdasher’s shop. When the Jews of the town were being rounded up, he took the goods from the shop and stored them in the shaft of a skylight. The festival of Sukkot was coming and we decided to build a sukka by opening that skylight and setting up palm fronds as its roof, as the Jewish law prescribes. We opened the panel that sealed off the skylight, and down tumbled the socks, handkerchiefs, gloves, and odds and ends of Lipe’s shop. We saw in this raining down of gloves and socks from above a sign that our plan to revive our shop accorded with God’s wishes. We stocked our shop and opened for business.

  One day a young man named Andor Schwartz came into the shop. He had heard that I wanted to buy a few US dollars, and he needed some Hungarian forints to buy groceries. Andor had lived in Budapest for much of the war, even though many of his family had stayed in Nyírbátor. After the Germans invaded on the nineteenth of March, 1944, he was conscripted into the Labour Service in Kassa. He soon escaped and went to Budapest. He survived on his wits for some months, and then found refuge in the Swiss embassy until liberation by the Red Army on the nineteenth of January, 1945. Andor made his way back to Nyírbátor alone.

  He went to his family home, and found it empty. He came to know from various sources that all those dear to him had died in the slaughter. On the floor of the house was what Andor recognised at a glance as his family tree; it had formerly been framed and displayed on the wall. The watercolour painting of a tree – with trunk, branches and foliage – showed the generations of his family going back to the 1700s. He felt as if he were being mocked in his grief.

  Andor’s suffering was such that he lay down on the floor of that house, with no wish to move again. His father, mother, brother, sister and cousins had all vanished from the face of the earth, and he alone was left. He lay in a lifeless state for three days, and he repudiated God.

  After those three days Andor’s friends heard of his despair and came to the house. ‘Andor Schwartz, what is this?’ they asked. ‘You must rouse yourself and face life.’ He didn’t move. ‘Many have suffered,’ his friends said. ‘You are not the only one. Rouse yourself, find your courage.’ Still Andor did not move. His friends knelt around him and repeated their entreaties, and finally he climbed to his feet.

  ‘I will find courage,’ he said. ‘But this is my vow: I will keep a kosher household, I will lay tefillin, but I will never again say Hallel. I will not sing the praise of the God who allowed my family to be taken from me.’

  All this took place before we retu
rned to Nyírbátor; Andor later told me the story. In fact I had met him before we were expelled and taken to Auschwitz. I had invited him to a party; I’d wanted to introduce him to a girlfriend of mine with the idea that he would take to her. But he didn’t come – he went back to Budapest instead. Of course, Andor, if he’d wished, could have had the pick of all the girls. He was more than handsome. He was also intelligent and had a charisma that drew people to him. Still, I wasn’t crazy about him. I needed to mature before I could appreciate what was in Andor.

  It was December 1945, late in the month, when I saw Andor again. By this time he was twenty-one, and was making one of his regular visits to Nyírbátor. I invited him to the Saint Sylvester party my mother was organising. The feast of Saint Sylvester falls on the thirty-first of December, New Year’s Eve, and everyone celebrates. This time I was hoping to fix him up with my friend Zsuzsi. Andor and I chatted for a while but I had no designs on him myself. In any case, Andor said he wouldn’t be attending the party.

  ‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to go if you don’t wish to.’

  ‘If you’re not there, there will be no celebration,’ he replied.

  That was the first indication of his interest in me. I had always thought he was more interested in Marta.

  We had scarcely opened our shop when Erna married Sanyi Grosz and declared her intention of travelling to a Displaced Persons camp in Germany to register as a prospective immigrant to Australia, or to Canada, if not America. She did not trust Europe; she did not believe that this was the last of all Holocausts. And so we farewelled them on the train. Soon after that we closed the shop.

  There was nothing for us girls to do in Nyírbátor. Mother was concerned for us and decided to send us to a Zionist girls’ home in Budapest. I instantly became an ardent Zionist, so much so that my mother called me an extremist. The look of conviction on my face must have startled the less committed. After about a month there Marta and I came home to Nyírbátor, and I announced loudly: ‘I’m going to Israel!’

  ‘All right, sure,’ my mother said. ‘But what about me?’

  ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought about that,’ I said, feeling selfish.

  Around this time Mother’s sister-in-law had proposed a match for her, but she hadn’t taken it seriously until that moment. Her daughters would be starting lives of their own, and she had to find a new life for herself too. The man she’d been matched with went by the name of Laci Schneck. Both were in their middle forties, which made it one of the few matches at the time between two mature Jews. Most European Jewish women in their thirties were dead, sent to the gas chambers with their young children in the camps. Almost all those who survived were young women, like me and my sisters. My mother survived only because she looked younger than she actually was.

  The celebration of Bela (Bill) Gross’s brit milah in a Displaced Persons’ camp in Ansbach, Germany, on 13 October 1947.

  Erna is at the left end of the bottom row, and her husband, Sanyi Grosz, is second from the right in the middle row (next to the man reading a prayer book).

  Mother went off to Debrecen to meet Schneck while Marta and I were still in Nyírbátor, intending to return to the girls’ home in Budapest. Marta did not approve of my mother remarrying with what seemed like haste, but I had no objection. There were very few men of her age to choose from. Those who had survived the Shoah were mostly marrying girls half their age. So Mother and Schneck were engaged, and Schneck went to Debrecen to spend Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with the Gutman family. Mother stayed there too.

  I had been sure that she wouldn’t leave her daughters to celebrate the high holidays by ourselves, but I was wrong. In a strange way, though, it was a good thing that she left us alone for a while. At this time Marta and I gave full vent to our mourning. At the synagogue I sat at my mother’s seat with her bronze nameplate and cried like I had never cried before. I talked to my father, telling him about everything that had happened since his death. I told him that Boeske was no longer his wife: she would soon be Mrs Schneck.

  Marta and I returned to the girls’ camp in Budapest. Across the Danube there was another camp, where young Zionists were trained for agriculture in Israel. It was known as the hachshara, the Hebrew word for preparation. Marta and I spent a few enjoyable months there. We learnt Hebrew, we danced, we sang and were among comrades, all intent on aliyah.

  Boeske in 1945, before she married Schneck.

  My mother, meanwhile, contacted me and Marta to say that she had accepted Schneck’s proposal of marriage. She asked me to go to Nyírbátor and pack up the house. Our time at the girls’ home was at an end in any case, and my determination to go to Israel was undiminished. Marta and I would stay with my Uncle Bimi in Budapest to get ready to leave for Israel.

  Andor visited me while I was packing up the house. He wore a smart shirt, a sleeveless jumper, slacks, a fur-lined leather jacket, and boots that laced up in a complicated way – everything he ever wore complemented his good looks. He wanted me to marry him, he said.

  In Budapest, I knew, he was the darling of numerous ladies, any one of whom would have walked over broken glass to hear him say, ‘Will you marry me?’ So I treated his proposal as a joke. ‘Marry me?’ I said. ‘Really? I’m not what you’re looking for. I’m irresponsible, I’m lazy, I would never get the housework done.’ I recognised that we were perfect for each other, but at the same time perfectly wrong.

  At the end of our conversation, Andor went back to Budapest, probably relieved that I’d declined his offer of marriage. I was just as relieved that I’d wriggled out of becoming Mrs Schwartz.

  When I went to stay with Uncle Bimi in Budapest, I wrote a letter to Andor on a typewriter in the study. I composed it as an anonymous letter, as if from some well-wisher who had only his best interests at heart, and I explained why he should never think of marrying Baba Keimovits. It was as if I might embrace Andor’s marriage proposal against my will, and so I was making a preemptive renunciation. Also, I didn’t yet wish to give up my liberty as a single woman. I had my plans to go to Israel, as I had told Andor. He was not attracted to the idea of sailing off to Haifa. I folded the typewritten letter, slipped it into an envelope and posted it to Andor.

  Baba is fourth from the left, standing. Marta is directly below her, and their cousin Yossi Kellner is the man without a shirt at the extreme right. He did migrate to Israel, and lived on a kibbutz. The goose at the front is a joke, referring to the logo of the humorous magazine Lúdas Matyi.

  My anonymous letter was written and posted at a time of confusion in Hungary. The war had been over for almost eighteen months, and it was widely accepted that the Russians would make all the important decisions in the country, now and in the future. But private enterprise was still permitted. Andor was a clever man with a head for business, and I thought of him as thriving and prosperous. As a matter of fact, Andor was broke. He had made a load of money in tobacco on the black market, and had confidently bought truckloads of cigarettes, storing them in a warehouse. With no warning, the government appointed by the Russians declared a state monopoly on tobacco, and Andor’s warehouse of cigarettes was rendered worthless.

  I knew nothing of this, and thought of him as a wealthy young man. Not that it mattered, because I wasn’t going to marry him. Or maybe I would marry him. Actually, I doubted it. Then I was certain again …

  I had yet to see my mother since her marriage to Schneck, and so I decided to arrange to make a visit to Banhegyes, where they were living. When I called her on the phone, I told her that I was engaged – even though I was far from sure that I was. Mother let out a shriek. ‘Dear God! What are you telling me?’ Before I told her the name of the man to whom I was engaged, I reminded her that she had already given her approval. ‘What? Baba, are you mad? I gave no approval!’

  The hachshara, or preparation camp to migrate to Palestine, in Rona Utca, Pest.

  Top: Baba dances with other young people. She is at the top centre, framed by e
ntryway to the building behind.

  ‘Yes, Mother. Once, when Andor came to visit us with a friend, you said: “He would make a good husband for one of my girls.”’

  ‘Nonsense! I said no such thing.’

  ‘Mother, it’s Andor Schwartz.’

  ‘Andor Schwartz? You are engaged to Andor Schwartz?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  Was I? Yes. No. Maybe.

  My head in a muddle, I took the train to Banhegyes on a Friday. It was a slow train, and I realised in the middle of the journey that I would not reach my destination before Shabbat. I would have to break my journey at Békéscsaba and spend a day with a friend in the town, Ibi. I went through all the reasons why I should and should not marry Andor with her, and by the time I reached Banhegyes, I had decided that I would become his wife. I was greeted by my mother and her new husband. After hugs and kisses, I asked if I could use the telephone. I dialled Andor’s number. ‘I accept your proposal,’ I said. ‘We’ll get married.’ I would become Mrs Schwartz.

  Andor and Baba at the time of their engagement, 1946.

  CHAPTER 23

  Hallel

  On my return to Budapest, I met Andor at Uncle Bimi’s house. But instead of gaiety and hurrahs and jubilation, he led me to the typewriter in the study – he knew where to find it. He said, ‘Baba, sit down and type me something.’ He had my anonymous letter in his hand, and he wanted to see if the type matched. Reluctantly, I typed a few lines and Andor compared what I’d written with the letter. I conceded that what Andor suspected was true, but he didn’t make me suffer over it.