The May Beetles Page 5

  We Jewish girls attended school on Saturdays also, under the proviso that we should not be made to write, as it was forbidden. According to the strictures of Judaism, when we reached the age of twelve we were not to carry anything on the street on the Sabbath. This was a problem, but not insurmountable. One of our friends would come to our house and, as a favour, carry our bags to school, and then back again.

  For us Orthodox girls, there were few chances to get together with boys, or even to speak to them. We didn’t go to dance classes, for instance, where we might have come face-to-face with a boy. And there was no opportunity to glance at boys at the swimming pool – and receive glances in return – since we were unwelcome there. It would have been heaven to meet an attractive boy who not only took an interest in me as a girl – and I was quite pretty, if I may say so without sounding vain – but who also revealed a profound interest in the destination of the soul of the flea. Imagine – attraction and philosophy combined!

  The eccentric Rabbi Lemberger provided religious instruction to the Jewish girls of the high school. He was an old man with a white beard. We attended his service in the Liberal synagogue on Saturday mornings – and we attended in droves. It wasn’t that we hungered for enlightenment, but rather that the synagogue offered us a glimpse, from the women’s gallery, of the boys below. Our hope was that they might glance up at us every now and again. Each of us girls had our favourite boy, and the boy whose glance inflamed my heart was Miki. He was fourteen, a year older than me.

  For the whole of that time in Rabbi Lemberger’s synagogue, my life was seeing Miki. Wooing, tender words of endearment – all were magically captured in those glances, and never a word spoken between us. When I lay in bed at night I did not think of Miki; I was too deeply occupied with sorting through questions of theology, and with attempting to solve existential conundrums. But the thrill of seeing his face for two seconds on Shabbat morning, his eyes seeking out mine … My memories of Miki are still sweet and clear today.

  CHAPTER 7

  Sources of Delight

  If my mother had kept a diary, it would have been a thing of beauty. Her handwriting was exquisite. My mother took great pride in her employment of language, and held it pretty much a sin to show any negligence: she would never permit a single error in grammar or an ill-chosen word. The care she took reflected her reverence for what could be achieved with language – the art of the great writers.

  I have already written fondly of my own love of literature. As in any love affair, one can recall certain peaks of intensity. Once, while visiting my maternal grandparents, I came upon a small bookshelf in a corner of the living room. On it I discovered a dozen large volumes, containing bound copies of a weekly magazine for girls, Magyar Lányok (‘Hungarian Girls’). Each volume held a year’s worth of issues. I had never seen the magazine before, and indeed it was no longer published; these issues had been purchased for my mother and her sisters before the First World War.

  Preparing to go to a wedding.

  Back row from left: Baba, Marta, a maid, Klari (Lipe’s wife and Boeske’s sister-in-law). Front row from left: unknown, cousin Mira Kellner.

  Mira was holding Baba’s hand during Mengele’s selection, as we will read later.

  From left: Mira again, baby Kati, Klari and Mimi Kellner.

  I opened a volume and flicked through it: stories, poems, articles that told of the history of Hungary and other lands. The pages, although yellow with age and devoid of coloured illustrations, gleamed for me. Just one issue of Magyar Lányok would have thrilled me, but fifty-two issues in a single volume, and twelve volumes! This was a blessing fallen from heaven and I was crazy with excitement. I asked and was permitted to bring the volumes back to our own house.

  Each time I opened a volume to read the issues, I breathed in that transporting tang of paper in its infinitely slow decay – a preface to the even greater pleasure of plundering the stories and articles. I did not have to wait weeks to read each instalment of a story that captivated me, as my mother would have waited; I could turn to the continuation in the next issue, and the next. I read each issue twice, at least. It made not the slightest difference to me that I knew the conclusion to a story. I read late into the night, illuminating the pages of Magyar Lányok with the beam of a torch under my doona. Such was the allure of reading that I can still recall, seventy years later, some of the sentences I read in Magyar Lányok.

  The magazines in their binders were not my only source of reading, of course. My mother kept a substantial library and I was free to make my choice from the shelves. And Nyírbátor had a lending library, a good one, with many foreign works translated into Hungarian. It was a private business run by the wife of our family dentist. Mother and I called in at the library regularly, and became so familiar with it that we more or less thought of its shelves of books as an extension of our home.

  The reviews in the newspapers and magazines to which my mother subscribed kept us fairly well informed about recently published books. We knew who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature each year. We did not always know much about the winners of the prize, but we assumed that the books of the Nobel laureates would be wonderful to read. The newspapers and magazines also made us aware of the films and stage shows running in Budapest. It was not likely that we could travel to the capital to attend the theatre – we were not that fancy, or that well heeled – but still it was good to be au courant culturally. Nyírbátor had a cinema, and we paid for our tickets and sat in that velvety darkness every now and again. The movies were usually popular fare. I was no intellectual snob – I was as interested in gossip about actors and actresses as in Nobel laureates.

  At the age of twelve, I myself was a keen young actress. It was a further outlet for the creative urge in me, and one I could not resist. On the stage, with so many pairs of eyes appreciating my prettiness, my craft, my ability to retain perfectly the lines of my character – I relished it. Indeed, no play in our high school could be performed without me, and I took to the stage with the demeanour of a diva, full of self-confidence. My greatest role was in a play in which I commanded two roles: a grandmother and a fairy. The play called for me first to appear as the shrivelled grandmother, stooped and hobbling, getting along with the aid of a walking stick. At a certain point in the unfolding drama, I was transformed into a radiant fairy.

  The latter role called for a certain amount of nimble dancing, which was not one of my talents. My teacher, Miss Lenke, sent me along to private dance classes to help me prepare. The lessons had to be private, because Jewish kids were not welcome at the regular classes. My parents were not concerned about their daughter dancing alongside gentile kids at school, I’m happy to say, and I was permitted to attend the classes. But after my private instruction, Miss Lenke asked me to stay on and take part in her class for the other children of Nyírbátor – the children who were not Jewish. And I adored the experience. A circle was formed, boys and girls paired. This was the closest I had ever been to a boy, and even though my boy, on that day, was not the divine Miki, he did nicely enough. I attended four dance classes and relished every minute. But that was it. I had mastered my dance for the play, so there was no further reason – no further excuse – for me to go along.

  When I was thirteen, my beloved Miss Lenke gave me a poem to recite on Mother’s Day. I read through the text with mounting disappointment. It was a decidedly pedestrian piece of work – short, lifeless, a concatenation of platitudes. What opportunity would this forgettable stuff provide for me to shine on stage? So I decided to surprise Miss Lenke by reciting another poem altogether, one suitable for Mother’s Day but much more engaging. I studied the text of my poem closely, and three days before the recital I went to Miss Lenke and told her, very tactfully, that the poem she had chosen left a great deal to be desired. I then recited my alternative poem, and Miss Lenke was thrilled. On the day of the recital, I stood on stage, gave a wonderful rendition of the poem and was able to enjoy the sight of my mothe
r, seated in the audience, beaming with pride as I made my curtsies.

  A family day trip in 1939 to the Hungarian territories, recently returned from Slovakia.

  Standing, from left: Boeske, Janni Krammer (Gyula’s first cousin), his wife, Illus, and Erna.

  Sitting, from left: Marta, Baba, Gyula and the driver (obscured by smoke).

  Not everything I involved myself in creatively brought the reward of applause. One of my more homely pursuits at that time was embroidery, a craft that my sisters and I practised assiduously. Hungary had long been home to beautiful embroidery. Patterns varied from region to region, or even within regions. We learned a number of different stitches and techniques, all traditional, under the tutelage of our schoolteacher and our mother, who had herself been perfecting her embroidery since childhood. Tablecloths, serviettes, blouses, dresses, handkerchiefs, scarves – we took on everything. In Hungary it was accepted that any piece of cloth, whatever its use, could surely be improved by being embroidered. I recall times of blessed peace when we all worked together with our embroidery on our laps or within a frame, a perfect feminine harmony of endeavour: my mother singing, and nothing in the world to distract us.

  The craft of embroidery became the answer to a problem that my parents had to face once Erna had finished high school. Five years older than me, she was barred from attending university and so needed an occupation until she married, which might not be for a few years. My parents decided to open a shop in the town centre. My mother would be the proprietor. Erna was sent to Budapest for a year – this was in 1938 – to complete an advanced apprenticeship in the art of embroidery at a ladies’ finishing school.

  A building was leased when Erna returned from Budapest. It was fitted out with a long wooden counter, handsome timber shelves, tables and chairs. A large window faced the street, and in the window all manner of embroidered items were on display. A sign was hung: ‘Erna’s Handwork Shop’. The shop attracted customers, but running a business in a way that actually afforded a profit was not amongst my mother’s talents. In her generosity, she extended credit to people who couldn’t or wouldn’t repay her, and at the end of each month my father was compelled to make up the difference between the shop’s income and its outgoing expenses. The shop was one half a business, one half a social meeting place.

  Our house in these years was often transformed into a type of salon, where Jews from the town, women and girls, for the most part, gathered to enjoy my mother’s hospitality and conversation. I was there, soaking in the atmosphere, attending to what three or four voices were saying at the one time. We were all knitting, comparing patterns, laughing easily, perhaps listening to music, too. My mother was always at the heart of the gathering, not by intention but by virtue of her charisma. I could see why my father so adored her, even if the chatter of these gatherings drove him crazy. My father did not overflow with the joy of life, as my mother did; he was quieter, more reserved.

  This life I am revealing – this father, this mother, this family – is the life I would wish for everyone. No harm in any of us, but instead a sense of the inexhaustible sources of delight in the world. Yes, if I could bestow a gift on others, it would be to live as my family had lived before the great darkness. Let everyone know what it was to bask in the love and care of such a mother and such a father. Let everyone know what it was to have Erna and Marta as sisters.

  Baba, aged fifteen, in May 1943.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Speck of Light

  Beyond my life with my family in Nyírbátor, of course, the approach of war in Europe was quickening. News reached us of the German onslaught and atrocities enacted against Jews, and we were well aware of the growing anti-Semitism in Hungary. My family, and all the Jews of Nyírbátor, felt increasingly menaced.

  By late 1940 Europe belonged to Hitler. His armies occupied France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and half of Poland. In Italy, Hitler’s ally Mussolini was in power. In Spain, Franco, a great admirer of the man who bombed Guernica, supported Hitler without actually committing Spanish troops to fight alongside German troops. The leaders of Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary took their orders from Hitler, while Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was prepared to do whatever he must to appease the Axis powers.

  We had seen the darkness grow. But we thought: ‘It will not come here.’ Even as we had such thoughts, we knew that we were deceiving ourselves. Jews were being deported from Hungary for lacking citizenship papers, and they departed in a wretched state. Other Jews arrived from the German occupied countries around us, from Poland or Slovakia, and told us of the horrors they’d seen. A cousin came to Nyírbátor from Bratislava with a story of young Jewish women there who had been taken to the front to satisfy the lust of the German soldiers. We hoped Hitler would be defeated. But perhaps there was more to the unwillingness of my family, and of so many other Jewish families, to flee the danger. A type of inertia ties people to the soil on which they have stood for so long.

  When I was fourteen, a letter came from an address in the Slovakian territories (newly restored to Hungarian rule by the generous Germans). The sender’s name was Mädy; she was my age and she wanted a pen-friend. To find a correspondent, she turned to her distant relative in my town, the spinster daughter of a Jewish teacher, who gave her my name. I was flattered, but also simply glad. A pen-friend – yes, I could enjoy that.

  I wrote back to Mädy and told her about myself, my town, my family. She replied, offering the same sort of information. She lived in the town of Huszt, away to the north-east, bigger than Nyírbátor but by no means a thriving city. After a number of letters each way, we made plans to visit each other. Mädy came to Nyírbátor first, during the school holidays. Later, I visited her in Huszt, and stayed for two weeks. She had two sisters; one wore a metal frame of the sort employed at that time for children recovering from polio. Mädy was a jolly girl, full of fun, fond of jokes, but we didn’t quite share the intellectual interest I had hoped we would. Mädy made a second visit to Nyírbátor the following year, but I declined a second visit to Huszt. It wasn’t that my family thought it too dangerous for me to leave Nyírbátor, but our sense of siege may have contributed to my reluctance to go north again.

  One of our neighbours was Mrs Graber, the mother of ten children. Mrs Graber had come to Nyírbátor from Poland. She could not provide proof of Hungarian citizenship and was deported by the state to Poland, leaving her ten children behind with Mr Graber. By some miracle Mrs Graber managed to return, and she had seen things in Poland that would haunt her forever: Jews in their thousands digging deep trenches with shovels and picks. The Germans would then make them kneel at the lip of the trench, and would shoot each person in the back of the head. This is what Mrs Graber witnessed.

  Any war creates a graveyard of hopes and longings. My sister Erna, fair-haired and beautiful, met a young man by the name of Lajos, who came from Mátészalka. Lajos was tall and handsome, and he and Erna fell in love. Erna had been in Szoboszló running a small kiosk on behalf of my mother’s half-sister, Anna, who had fallen ill with what turned out to be tuberculosis. One fine day, along came Lajos, and one way or another a warm friendship developed. His family owned a hat factory, so it might be expected that he could make a good living, and he was only two or three years older than Erna, so he was accepted as a suitor. My sister was happy, of course – more than happy.

  When the time came for her handsome young man to visit our family at Nyírbátor, everything seemed ripe for an engagement. Ahead of his arrival, Lajos sent his sweetheart a huge basket of flowers, pink hydrangeas, rare in Hungary. Lajos included a note with his tribute: ‘Flowers for a golden flower.’ Marta and I were amused, but I also approved of the sentiment and thought it romantic. Lajos asked my father for permission to marry Erna. My father discussed the proposal with my mother for about thirty seconds, then informed Lajos that, indeed, he could take Erna as his wife.

  The wedding day was set for June of that year, 1942. Our family vis
ited Lajos’s family, and then there was a reciprocal visit. The planning for the marriage went ahead, and also for Shavuot, the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Sivan, when Jews commemorate the revelation of the Torah to the assembled Jewish nation at Mount Sinai. Shavuot is mostly a day of feasting and smiles but Lajos had some awful news to share with Erna, news he kept to himself throughout the Shavuot rites. He had been called up for Labour Service.