The May Beetles Page 6

Young Jewish men were no longer permitted to serve with the regular Hungarian armed forces; instead, they were required to join the Labour Service and dig trenches, latrines and the like. In short, they had to devote themselves to the most menial tasks of all. Their rations barely kept them alive, and if they were injured or fell ill, they would receive next to no medical aid. On the battlefield, they became human minesweepers, sent out into fields known to be sown with landmines; many would be blown to pieces.

  With his Labour Service unit, Lajos was sent to the Eastern Front in Russia. Erna, desolate in Nyírbátor, waited for a light-green postcard from him – cards issued at the front that allowed for no more than a few words of news. She treasured these rare gifts from her husband-to-be. What Lajos conveyed in his few permitted words was a few weeks old by the time she received them. The cards Lajos sent Erna were smudged with his tears.

  (At the end of 1944, what was left of Lajos’s Labour Service battalion was marched right through Hungary to Germany. We heard more than a year later that Lajos died on that death march; his body was thrown to the side of the road.)

  I recall the summer of 1942 more vividly and in more detail that any season during the years of growing danger. I recall the warm winds that carried the fragrance of blossoms. I recall flirting with boys with intense delight on the long evenings. The dusk crept over us by such slow degrees that the darkness settled without our noticing it. We left the street reluctantly – left our games, left the boys avid for more of our teasing, our smiles. Each evening, as I entered our house, I hoped that tomorrow would be as enthralling as was today.

  I was happy, and I loved life and its bounty. But at the same time, I was a thinking, growing person, facing all the tribulations typical of my fourteen years, and more. Questions flooded into my mind, and they seemed so urgent, almost as if life could not continue until I found the answers. Some were profound and existential, to do with the obligations of a human being in the world; others were religious, relating to faith and belief. I longed for a friend with whom I could talk about the troubles that beset me, but I had no friends who would find any natural sympathy with the things I wished to discuss.

  I had a loving relationship with my mother, and we could talk happily about books, clothes and boys. But I did not dare raise the subject of religion. My mother brought me up to honour our beliefs in exactly the way prescribed by the fathers of our Orthodox faith. She considered the rites and rules of our faith to be fairly much beyond analysis or enquiry. There was a way to live, a way to worship, a way to be a Jew. I doubt she thought that any good could come from critical scrutiny or introspection.

  It was not the same for me. I desperately wanted answers that would resolve my doubts. There was nothing wanton about this; I hadn’t gone out looking for contradictions in the tenets of my faith merely to be contradictory. No, my doubts were simply the product of a reflective intelligence. Some were rooted in basic logic. If the Jews were chosen by God from amongst all the peoples of the earth, surely that meant that there was a hierarchy of races in heaven. This seemed to me to mar the concept of the family of man. I had other doubts, too, about the intentions and ambitions of God, and I could not shrug them off. My arguments with my faith led me into a wilderness of despair. But these were heavy thoughts that would get in the way of the enjoyment of my days, and I remember collecting them as they came to my mind and putting them off until the nights.

  At the age of fourteen I finished my formal education. But I longed to continue my studies. It seemed my destiny to learn, and to thrive in my learning, but now I was thwarted. I knew that tears would not change my circumstances. There was no school for higher education in my town, and I had no prospect of attending a non-Jewish school in a nearby town. All the Jewish high schools were far away from us, and they did not offer dormitories for students from remote towns such as Nyírbátor.

  So I just kept on reading: an unstructured education, but better than nothing. I was both student and teacher.

  Baba, aged fifteen, in 1942. The photo was taken by Kati Lichtmann, then a student of photography. On the back of the photo is Kati’s handwritten declaration: ‘Isten nevében kezdem el’ (In God’s name I start my work). This photograph was not buried, but kept safe by a neighbour.

  CHAPTER 9

  Mishi’s News

  When from 1938 Jews who could not prove that they were Hungarian citizens began to be deported, my father searched for the documents that would save us from the same fate. He found documents showing that in 1820 the Hungarian authorities had issued a permit allowing one of our Keimovits ancestors to open an inn at 1 Pócsi Utca, Nyírbátor, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county, Kingdom of Hungary. Many other Jews were not so lucky. For the lack of a slip of paper, their lives were overtaken by wretchedness and poverty; many died at the hands of the anti-Semitic Hungarian ‘Guardians of Order’.

  In any such crisis as this, men and women take upon themselves the burden and danger of bringing relief. Periodically, many Jews, young and old, were rounded up at random and taken to various holding camps. My mother’s sister Marta lived in Budapest. Armin, her husband, was forever occupied with looking after those who remained, who were liable, on any day, to be taken from their homes by the police or by gendarmes. Armin became a one-man relief agency, finding places to hide those in danger, feeding them with kosher food, offering words of encouragement. How Armin still managed to make a living, I can’t imagine. It was said in our household that he was devoted to his heroic role all day, every day.

  Lajos, Erna’s sweetheart, was one of tens of thousands of Jewish men who were conscripted into the Labour Service in 1942. Sons and bridegrooms, fathers and breadwinners, all sent to Russia under the command of the Hungarian army. By early 1943, I doubt there remained a single Jewish family in Hungary that was not mourning the death, deportation or conscription of a relative or a close friend at the hands of the Hungarian army. The darkness had deepened. And Hungarian Jews were better off than Jews in other European countries. It was said that the Hungarian Regent, Horthy Miklós, accepted very large bribes from wealthy Jews not to order the rounding up of all Hungarian Jews. But the distinction between the lucky and the unlucky Jews of Hungary was steadily shrinking. My father and mother did not want to imagine the time, now not far ahead, when all the Jews of Hungary would be wretched, starving, condemned to death.

  By mid-March of 1944, I was more a young woman than a child. I had celebrated my sixteenth birthday three months earlier. Yet my understanding of the situation we were in had not changed radically. For six years now I’d been conscious that the danger we faced was increasing. The incremental adjustments I had made meant I was as prepared as I could be for whatever was coming next. Only let the next change be nothing too severe, I prayed. Let me continue to enjoy Sundays with my friends, and with my mother’s friends, who gathered at our house for games and conversation, girls as well as boys. Above all, let my cousin Mishi be amongst us: so good-looking, so well built, a carefree boy with an infectious laugh and a wealth of jokes to share.

  Sunday the nineteenth of March, however, was unlike any other Sunday I had experienced. And I was not able to assimilate the news that Mishi brought with him. He knocked on our door much earlier than we were prepared for; my mother said, with a puzzled expression, ‘At this hour? Who would arrive as early as this?’ She hurried to the door, with me close behind.

  Mishi stood on the verandah, a horrified expression on his face. ‘Auntie Boeske, the Germans!’

  My mother tried to calm him down. ‘Mishi, come inside. Please, make some sense. What about the Germans?’

  ‘The Germans are taking over Hungary! Even now they are taking over Hungary.’

  ‘Where did you hear this, Mishi?’

  ‘In the town. Everybody knows. They are marching into Budapest. Many, many soldiers on foot with guns. Even now.’

  It was not so much Mishi’s news that shocked me as Mishi himself. This was not the boy whom we all knew. No jokes now, no bant
er, no smiles. I was used to the daily bombast of the Hungarian troops marching through Nyírbátor, singing their hateful songs at the tops of their voices. Those words now become a message of intent, and the full horror of that message was visible on Mishi’s face. ‘Hey, Jew, hey, Jew, hey, you stinking Jew, What are you doing here amongst us Hungarians?’ The question now seemed to provide its own answer.

  The expression on Mishi’s face that morning brought back to me an incident from a year earlier, when I was travelling by train to visit a friend. I had struck up a conversation with a young Hungarian man seated opposite me. This fellow, not yet in uniform, told me that he had been called up for military service in the Hungarian army.

  ‘And where will you be sent to?’ I asked him. He was a pleasant young fellow.

  ‘Where will I serve? In a place called Nyírbátor. I have to report to Nyírbátor barracks shortly. I don’t know anything about the place.’

  ‘Oh, that’s where I live!’ I said, surprised and delighted by the coincidence. ‘That’s my home town.’

  ‘Really? Then you can tell me about it. What’s it like?’

  ‘Pretty measly,’ I said, meaning simply that Nyírbátor was fairly small and insignificant.

  The ticket conductor was standing nearby and overheard my answer. It threw him into a rage. ‘Stinking Jewess!’ he shouted for all to hear. ‘How dare you call a Hungarian town measly! Our motherland! How dare you!’ He wanted to throw me off the train.

  Some passengers who witnessed this rabid outpouring took my side, and told the conductor he would do no such thing. Others were fully in favour of punishing me with eviction for the gross crime of referring to Nyírbátor as ‘measly’. In the end, I was permitted to remain on the train, but it was a close-run thing. The idea that any hyper-patriot could give vent to this sort of anti-Semitic rant without being thought mentally unstable stayed with me.

  Not much later than that episode, I was making another train journey, perhaps even along the same route. I stood in a carriage full of passengers while a group barely a metre away discussed my possible origins in an animated way. ‘Is she a Jew? Of course she’s a Jew! I’m not so sure. Dear God, can there be any doubt – she’s a Jew! ’ I gazed out of a window, pretending I heard nothing, but my sense of injustice was inflamed. What I could not say, but wished with all my being that I could, was this: ‘A Jew – yes, I am a Jew, and I thank God that being a Jew distinguishes me from people such as you!’

  The danger I was in when the conductor abused me came back when Mishi stood pale and trembling in our hallway, telling us his dreadful news. I already knew how serious our situation was, but the disdain and violence in the conductor’s face merged in my mind with an image of soldiers marching into Budapest, and I knew something horrible lay ahead.

  I must have had a sort of premonition three months earlier, on the eve of my sixteenth birthday. That night, I’d been unable to fall asleep. I lay in the warmth and comfort of my bed, sobbing my heart out. On the night of the fourteenth of December, 1943, the slow build-up of danger I’d been experiencing overwhelmed me. I was mourning the end of my childhood, saying goodbye to the first part of my life and anticipating the perilous future.

  The Germans changed the Hungarian government on the day they marched into Budapest. The puppet government immediately enacted anti-Jewish laws and sanctions even more severe than those already in place. The Germans, after establishing what was expected, preferred to leave the persecution of the Jewish population to the Hungarians. And what was expected was what had been done in other European countries the Nazis had occupied or dominated. The catalogue of abuses taking place in Austria, Germany, Romania, France, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Belgium – arrests, detention, outright murder – was now to be visited upon Hungarian Jews.

  An especially brutal arm of the Hungarian national police – the gendarmes, as they were called – was given responsibility for rounding up Jews. The gendarmes were greatly feared in Hungary, and not only by Jews: they were capable of behaving vilely towards anyone. But they took a special relish in persecuting Jews, and were urged on in this by their Nazi masters.

  Bad news came thick and fast. Day after day, we heard about new regulations, new restrictions, new demands. The Hungarians were obsessed with their ‘Jewish question’, and worked on nothing else but the Jewish laws. The German troops in Budapest made it more urgent that the Hungarians should find ways to show their compliance, but the smug looks on the faces of the gendarmes in their rooster-plumed helmets advertised their delight in enforcing the new laws. They had been waiting for this.

  The authorities demanded that in all towns and villages a Judenrat, or ‘Jewish Council’, be established. Eight or nine leaders of the Jewish community were to be selected in each town, or in each congregation in the cities. These people would be the contact between the administrators and the Jewish population. My grandfather, Ignac Kellner, seventy-three years old, was a member of the nine-man Judenrat of Nyírbátor.

  One law passed after the arrival of the Germans made it mandatory for all Jewish families to surrender their jewellery, and also any radios they owned, to the authorities. In Nyírbátor the Town Hall was to be the depository of these possessions. We knew this was simply legalised theft. We would never see the jewellery again, never have our radios returned. How I sorrowed for the loss of our radio! Where would our news come from now? We would hear nothing but that which the authorities wanted us to hear: propaganda and lies.

  From the fifth of April, every Jew was ordered to wear a yellow star, which had to be sewn to whatever outer garment he or she wore, on the left side, above the heart. It was emphasised that the yellow star must be clearly visible. Our household was full of females expert in the use of needle and thread, but I can’t remember the actual sewing on of the yellow stars. I am sure we did sew the stars on; to have defied the authorities would have been courting disaster. That was something we now understood: we could be killed by the Hungarians, probably the gendarmes, and there would be no enquiry, no coroner’s report. We would live or die according to the wishes of people who hated us.

  Pesach came, the festival of Jewish freedom: the Children of Israel, the Exodus from Egypt three thousand years ago, deliverance from slavery, the birth of a nation. It was obligatory for the heirs of those wanderers who made that journey with Moses to remember, and to retell, the days of slavery and redemption.

  With all the agonising worries, our mother prepared a kosher Pesach Seder. We chanted the traditional verses of the Haggadah. And, following tradition, at the beginning of the night the youngest participant – Marta – started singing ‘The Four Questions’:

  Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot?

  Sheb’khol haleilot anu okhlin hametz umatzah; halailah hazeh, kuloh matza …

  Why is this night different from all other nights?

  On all other nights we eat both chametz and matzah; on this night, we eat only matzah …

  On the night of our last Seder before the catastrophe, there was another difference: my father was unable to read, let alone chant the text. He wept right through the ceremony. He knew clearly what the future could hold; he had been a prisoner of war for two years during the First World War. He knew, but he was powerless to protect his family, and that overwhelmed him. I saw his tears run down his cheeks at that Seder, and my heart within me ached.

  Ignac Kellner, Boeske’s father and Baba’s grandfather.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Road to Simapuszta

  It was on that Pesach night that Nyírbátor’s authorities chose to test the town’s newly installed air-raid sirens. Everyone had been instructed what we should do when the siren sounded but when we heard that wailing at our Seder table, we remained where we were for a short time. It was as if we needed an extra minute before we could accept the shame of leaving our Seder. I looked at my father’s face, at his ashen cheeks. Mingled with my love for him was a profound pity. As if he had not already suffered en
ough indignity.

  We filed out into the chill of the spring evening and stood huddled together, my father still sobbing, and my mother too. We were mournful. When we returned to our Seder, we were in a mood that made us especially sympathetic to the Jews of Egypt when they heard Moses and Aaron commanding them to quit their homes and put their feet to the road of flight. But we did not have a Moses, and we had no place to go.

  The next day, the nine members of Nyírbátor’s Judenrat, including my grandfather, were informed that the entire Jewish population was to be transported to ghettoes in other towns. Not one Jewish soul would be permitted to remain. And the nine men of the Judenrat were ordered to keep this news to themselves. If they shared what they had been told with other Jews, they were told, they would be punished severely. Well, the nine men immediately shared their knowledge with their families, and within a short time every Jew in Nyírbátor understood what awaited them. How could these men have kept such news to themselves? They had been placed in an impossible position, and they chose the punishment they had been warned about. They must have thought it was preferable to betraying their fellow Jews.

  Knowing now that they were to be taken a long way from their homes, the Jews of Nyírbátor began a frantic concealment of whatever valuables they had that were capable of being hidden: any remaining jewellery, gold, silver, family heirlooms – items too precious for the feeling invested in them to be abandoned to the thieves who would descend on their homes ten minutes after the owners’ departure. Holes were dug in back gardens, in vacant fields; the hollows of trees were claimed as improvised vaults. The less pessimistic hid their valuables in the homes they would be abandoning – up in the ceiling, in nooks and crannies, in chimneys – hoping that they would one day return.

  By this time we weren’t living at 1 Pócsi Utca any more; we were renting elsewhere. Our landlady and her hunchback daughter gave us permission to bury a timber crate with our possessions in the backyard. My mother and father knew that our landlady and her daughter could be trusted: they liked and respected us. In the crate my mother stowed Erna’s trousseau, silver cutlery, silver candelabras, jewellery, and the Meisen dinnerware that she so treasured; also clothing, furs, photographs, many odds and ends. And goose fat. My mother used goose fat in cooking and baking; she regarded it as indispensable. So she sealed some in a big enamel container and added it to the crate. A deep hole was required, and one was dug under cover of darkness. The crate was lowered in, and earth packed on top. The hole was a grave, and what was being buried was the life we had lived in Nyírbátor up until April 1944.