The May Beetles Read online

  Néni is a Hungarian word usually translated as ‘auntie’. It was the semi-official title of our teachers at the Jewish school. Néni really means ‘a woman who has the authority to act in the role of a close relative, but with more firmness than one would normally expect to be exercised by an actual aunt’. Marishka Néni was my teacher for first and second grades, and I adored her. She was around thirty, unmarried, and devoted to the kids in her class. Like most teachers, she had her favourites amongst the children, and I was pleased that I was one. My eagerness to learn, and my ability, commended me to her. My small transgressions were of the sort that teachers of Marishka Néni’s sort find forgivable. She would often discover me reading a book under the desk; her remonstrations were mild.

  Idushka Néni was my third-grade teacher, and I knew even before I stepped into her classroom in 1936 that she was stricter than her colleague, and less inclined to overlook my penchant for reading during class. On my first day in her class, at the age of nine, I listened attentively and restrained my compulsion to read my book under the desk – for that day at least. As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. Certainly Idushka Néni was tougher than Marishka Néni, but she was no monster.

  When school was over for the day, I walked to a shop nearby owned by my uncle and waited there for my mother. I’d chatter cheerfully with my uncle, then chatter just as cheerfully with my mother as we walked home. I could go from waking in the morning to falling asleep at night with barely a frown to crease my brow.

  I see now that my childhood in Nyírbátor prepared my sisters and me for a passionate engagement with life. Loving parents, a certain level of material comfort, conscientious schooling. The moral dimension of our lives, nourished by our parents, was equally straightforward. We were expected to be courteous, kind, generous. We did not mock those less fortunate than we were.

  The project of building a good life – of raising happy children, of running a modest household, of making an income that will feed and clothe a family – is not a superhuman undertaking. It is, I think, a natural way to go about things. And there need only be a small complement of goodness in any person to turn him away from the evil things he might imagine. An alternative existed for Feri Szucs when he shouted out his foolish slogan. That alternative was to recall that we had once played together happily. For Feri Szucs, every Feri Szucs, this is an alternative of far greater reward.

  CHAPTER 5

  The May Beetles

  Laws that discriminated against Jews had already been enacted by 1937. No Jewish student was permitted to attend any Hungarian university, for instance. This meant that Erna, Marta and I would have to go elsewhere if we wanted a university education. But I didn’t think of universities in 1937. I thought of the Jewish day school, where I had reached the fourth grade. I thought, too, of our headmaster, Mr Gondosh, and my thoughts were not endearing.

  He was not a Jew who took comfort from belonging to the Jewish community of Nyírbátor, but instead identified with the much broader Hungarian gentile community. He had changed his name from Gottlieb, a common Jewish surname, to the solidly Hungarian name of Gondosh. He was a loyal supporter of the Hungarian monarchy and wished his allegiance to be as conspicuous as possible. He required his students to stand and come to attention whenever the name of the Hungarian Regent, Horthy Miklós, was mentioned. It was mentioned often. Once we’d leapt to attention, we raised our chins and recited a formal commendation, like vassals: ‘Long live Horthy Miklós, His Majesty, Regent of Hungary.’ We couldn’t have cared less about the Regent and were embarrassed by this stupid and gratuitous charade; we knew nonsense when we heard it.

  One of my classmates was a boy named Sanyi. He had a ruddy, round face. The son of a landholder, he came from a little village outside of Nyírbátor. (I learned only later that Sanyi was a cousin of the man who would become my husband.) Sanyi was a happy kid, always smiling. Gondosh made him sit in the first row so that he would be nearby whenever Gondosh took it into his head to slap Sanyi’s face. The poor child never did anything to invite these slaps – Gondosh just didn’t like him. Whenever he administered a slap, he called out cruelly: ‘Your face invites me for a slap.’ Did he think this was witty? What an extraordinary thing that we could still adore our little school despite the bullying of this self-important, detestable Gondosh.

  Poor Sanyi was not Gondosh’s only victim. His prey included a number of boys and girls, children he detested for one reason or another, perhaps because they were strugglers academically. All were punished without the least explanation.

  On the morning of the fifteenth of December, 1937, I mentioned to Mr Gondosh that it was my birthday. It was the custom in Hungary, when your birthday came around, for your friends, your schoolmates and your relatives to give you a gentle tug on your left earlobe as a sign of recognition. The headmaster had me stand in front of his desk while all the kids in the class approached me, one by one, and tugged my earlobe. Thirty-five kids altogether administered the birthday tug, including the very religious class members, boys with long payot, who would not normally take part in such a ritual. I walked home from school along the familiar paths with a very sore ear and a sense of having deserved the pain for my vanity.

  My birthday presents were waiting for me when I arrived home. Nothing big and gaudy – small things, inexpensive, such as a card game of ingenious design, and another game that called for the player to manipulate an oblong glass case, in which small silver balls rolled. The object of the game was to make the silver balls drop into tiny holes. When you had trapped all the balls in the holes, you had triumphed and could scatter the balls and attempt to triumph all over again.

  While I was enjoying myself with my games, I happened to reach up and touch my left earlobe. I discovered that my earring was gone. These earrings of mine were much loved. Five light-blue precious stones making a five-petal flower, with a tiny gold bubble at the centre. I could only think that it had been snatched from my ear by one of my classmates, either accidentally or intentionally. To lose an earring was not a catastrophe, but it is still the first thing that comes to my mind when I think back to 1937.

  So I was ten. I had lived a full decade in Nyírbátor, and my life had been crammed with gladness. When in a vague way I contemplated the path ahead of me, the anti-Semites of Hungary and Germany did not make my future seem especially fraught. My mother listened to the news on the radio and read the newspapers. She shared the news with my father, and also with her children. I listened, of course, but not with genuine alarm, or even foreboding. To be honest, my greatest fear at the age of ten was the same as it had been at the age of nine, and eight, and seven, and even further back.

  As I have said, my mother was in charge of discipline in our family and was capable of administering slaps and smacks whenever she thought it necessary. I was afraid of her. I dreaded rousing her to anger, or even causing her to be displeased with me. The thought made me feel ill.

  My mother’s ingenuity I also recall. She had to be ingenious, for in the years following the Great Depression, every family in Hungary (like almost everywhere else) had to make the household budget stretch further. My father’s six siblings, who had migrated to America at the start of the century, would send us packages every so often, thinking of us as the strugglers of the family. Of course, they were themselves hit hard by the Depression, but maybe not as hard as we Hungarians. They sent bundles of used clothing, and from the fabric of these garments my mother had dresses made for Erna and Marta and me. The very fact that our dresses had originated in America imparted a glamour that Marta and I acted out by talking loudly to each other in gibberish – our version of the American language.

  We played in all manner of ways. What a delight it was to leave footprints in the freshly fallen snow that covered the road on the way to school. I placed one shod foot after another, after another, after another, then I turned my head to see the indentations I had left. It was as if I had left my signature on the snow. With other child
ren, I would run and then slide on the soles of my shoes along a flat surface of snow that had been compressed into an ice sheet. Who could slide the furthest? By this time Jewish children were unwelcome at the frozen artificial pond in Nyírbátor, where the children of the more well-to-do Christian families went to skate. The laws that regulated what Jews could and could not do were not always specific; often it was a matter of assumption. If we could not go here and we could not go there, maybe we could not go skating on the pond. So we didn’t go, and because we didn’t, it became a de facto ban. It was the same with the tennis court and the public swimming pool.

  Jewish exclusion in Nyírbátor at this time was something like being ostracised. But it was much more vicious. It wounded me to be disdained in that way. Even though I was a child, I deplored injustice – and this was clearly an injustice. Jews live every day with a heightened awareness of injustice. It has been a part of Jewish consciousness for centuries. We are born into a legacy of injustice, and it never goes away. At the age of ten, I was forced to endure an injustice that was baffling for its lack of foundation.

  A little later than the events I am relating now, a Catholic girl told me, with an expression of malicious triumph, that our Regent Horthy could never be King Horthy because he wasn’t a Catholic; he was a Lutheran. She took pleasure in knowing that Horthy lacked this fine but necessary distinction. I experienced a moment of illumination. I thought: ‘Oh, so it is not just Jews who are scorned. The Christian Catholics think the Christian Lutherans, too, are dreadful people!’

  By the spring of 1938, the snow had melted. At school we were studying the emergence of the May beetle. It’s a large, nut-brown beetle, with double wings and serrated legs. I thought the May beetle beautiful, even though I had a near phobia of insects. Even today, these beetles are the only insects I am willing to touch. They tickle your fingers when you handle them.

  The larvae of the May beetle live on the roots of plants and emerge only once every four years. They gather in great numbers on the acacia trees, emitting a strident sound. For some reason, Nyírbátor’s schools paid the children of the town to shake the trees, dislodge the May beetles in their thousands, gather them up in cardboard boxes and turn them over to the beetle authority. Inside the boxes – some small, some large – the beetles would crawl over each other in their panic, a seething mass of them, deeply fascinating to watch. The beetles could open their wings and fly away, but they almost never did. It was as if they accepted their captive status: that they would likely never know the freedom of their acacia trees again.

  A group photograph of the Saturday afternoon Jewish girls’ club, Club Miriam, in 1941. The girls are all aged thirteen or fourteen.

  Top row, from left: Lili Galet, Eva Rothberger, Magda Blier, Magda Schwartz, Edi Katz(?), Boeske Roth(?), Kato Weinberger, Anna Berger, Baba Keimovits.

  Middle row: unknown, Eva Ratz, Marta Keimovits, Mrs Lemberger (Rabbi’s wife), Piroska Grunfeld (the group’s organiser), Eva Schwartz, Magda Klein (Andor Schwartz’s cousin), Ver Fried, Annushka Zeger.

  Front row: Erna Fetman, Gabi Friedman, Eva Berger.

  These names are accurate to the best of Baba’s recollection. There is no one left to confirm them with. (If there is a reader of this book who can provide any corrections, please inform the publisher.) Baba is certain that Eva Rothberg, her sister Marta, Piroska Grunfeld, Eva Schwarz, Magda Klein and Anna Berger survived the Holocaust. Annushka Zeger died on the death march, as we will read later.

  CHAPTER 6

  High School

  I took after my mother, Erna took after my father, and Marta was a hybrid, with some of each. There was not a person in the world I would rather have resembled than my mother. But in one regard it would have been better for me if I were not so wholly modelled on her, for she suffered from crippling rheumatic pains in her legs, and so did I. Sometimes in our house in Pócsi Utca we would be moaning almost in unison: ‘Oh, my legs! My legs!’

  My mother believed that she had developed rheumatic pains in her legs after travelling during winter in unheated trains. But I had not journeyed in an unheated train in the middle of the Hungarian winter, so where did my leg pains come from? The doctor who was called on occasions to examine me came up with the not unreasonable theory that, in resembling my mother in so many ways, I also resembled her in sources of suffering. The pain was very real. I remember long nights with my mother or my father rubbing my aching limbs with methylated spirits. I recall the smell of the spirits, but not any relief that came my way through its application.

  Proper relief for the pain was found at Hajdúszoboszló, the town where we had family holidays. It was home to a resort called Szoboszló, famous for the therapeutic properties of its natural springs. Often it was just Mother and me who travelled to Hajdúszoboszló during the summer. We went by train, and as we neared the town the pleasant reek of the mineral waters reached me and my heart raced. The waters were warm, and we would lean back and float, growing less and less rheumatic as the minutes passed. The benefit of these mineral baths I accepted without question, and the pain abated when we bathed at Szoboszló. I suppose part of the thrill of bathing at Szoboszló was simply that I had my mother to myself.

  Approximately three thousand Jews lived in Nyírbátor, or around a quarter of the town’s population. Such a high percentage was unusual in Hungary. I grew up with Jews to my north, south, east and west, to my left and right, ahead of me and behind me. So my impression was that we were more numerous than we were, in fact. Jewish culture and Jewish traditions were constantly before my eyes. Until the late 1930s, my impression was that it was as natural to be Jewish as to be anything else. I did not feel marginalised, although I was increasingly conscious of a level of disdain.

  Three synagogues – Liberal, Orthodox and Hassidic – served the community; the worshippers chose their membership according to their taste or their traditions. My family belonged to the Orthodox congregation, the largest of the three. All members of the Orthodox congregation were, as you would expect, strict Sabbath observers. Our stern rabbi came from the famous Teitelbaum dynasty of the Szatmár region. Every Jew in Nyírbátor listened to what he had to say, whether or not they belonged to the Orthodox congregation. He ordered the Jews of the Liberal synagogue to close their shops on the Sabbath – a rule amongst the Orthodox that Liberal Jews might have been happy to ignore – and they did as he told them. The Liberal synagogue, with its beautiful stained-glass windows, was a far more aesthetically pleasing piece of architecture than the dour Orthodox shul, but it wasn’t as well-attended. The assimilated Jews of the Liberal synagogue took their religious obligations far less seriously than the God-fearing Orthodox Jews, and most only went to shul on the high holy days. The more prosperous and sophisticated Jews of Nyírbátor were better represented in the Liberal congregation than amongst the Orthodox.

  The Orthodox shul, then, a little dowdy on the outside, was also fairly utilitarian on the inside. I attended it only occasionally as a child. I visited the Liberal shul at a fairly young age and preferred it. Those at the Orthodox synagogue, coming from the poorer families of the town, dressed with less flair, and their grooming in general was less impressive. At the age I was then, good grooming suggested superiority.

  The Hassidic shul remained something of a mystery to me. It was even more unprepossessing than the Orthodox synagogue. My sisters and I knew the children of the Hassidim, since they attended the Jewish elementary school, but they kept pretty much to themselves, dressed in their black garb. They made me somewhat uneasy, as if they didn’t understand the ordinary mechanisms of friendship, or didn’t wish to understand them.

  The poorer Jews of Nyírbátor let their children’s education lapse after the six years of Jewish day school, but the children of middle-class families went on to the non-Jewish high school for a further four years of education. The girls’ high school I attended after my tenth birthday was not Jewish. There was nothing special about the school, except for the quality
of instruction, which was of a truly high standard. My mother wanted her daughters to enjoy all the education available to them, knowing as she did that four years of high school was as far as Marta and Erna and I could go, as a university career was closed to us.

  At the high school I had seven teachers, each specialising in one subject – mathematics, history and so on. Other than the headmaster, all my teachers were female, quite young, and all took their profession seriously. The headmaster, a Catholic priest, taught us German. (His background was German, in fact, and he would within a few years reveal himself to be a rabid anti-Semite.) I adored my secondary school with the same vigour that I’d displayed in my primary school years. All around me at the high school were girls who also relished learning. We were ready each day to be enlightened. Amongst the students were a group we spoke of as ‘incomers’. These were girls who caught the train into Nyírbátor from outlying villages, then walked to the school from the station, which was some distance. They were lovely, serious girls, diligent and ambitious, and I admired their commitment.

  I was weaker in maths than in other subjects. I enjoyed the humanities more, and especially the art classes we had. I recall one of my pictures with special affection. The subject was given to us as Easter approached: the Easter bunny, with painted eggs scattered around, and two children, a boy and a girl, the intended recipients of the coloured eggs, smiling in anticipation. I was around twelve at this time. We were permitted to work on the picture away from school, and so one afternoon in early April, after returning from school, I was out in our garden with my paints and brushes. Everything about my picture pleased me: the shapes I had fashioned of bunny, boy, girl; the colours I’d chosen; the relation of the figures to each other. All around me, the greenery of our garden glittered in the sunlight. I experienced a deep sense of self-approval for what I’d rendered, a type of bliss very much like the creative joy I’d felt when composing poetry ex tempore at our kitchen table years earlier. I was barely conscious of anything but my picture, the smell of the paint, and the green blur that surrounded me. I heard my mother calling me as the afternoon light faded and dusk arrived: ‘Baba! Come inside, it’s cold!’ She called once, twice, five times, and each time I applied myself to my task with greater dedication. Cold? What did ‘cold’ matter when I was thoroughly enjoying myself? But my mother’s cries became more insistent, carrying that note of true annoyance that I dreaded. And so, with the greatest reluctance, I called it a day and went inside.