The May Beetles Read online

  A great deal of digging and excavating was going on in Nyírbátor, and all this activity could not be hidden from the authorities. There would have been many reports to the gendarmes by non-Jewish neighbours. The gendarmes took the nine members of the Judenrat into custody, questioned them and beat them with fists and clubs and rifle butts – the punishment that had been promised. The savage beatings of the Jewish elders made wrecks of them. My grandfather Ignac was incapable of walking when he was finally allowed home. And old bones do not repair quickly. It is a terrible sorrow for me to recall, even to this day, that my grandfather’s last weeks of life were riven with pain. He was a man whose dignity had shone out of his face all of his life. Very little dignity remains when one has been beaten like an animal.

  The Judenrat informed us that we could take only what we could carry. We prepared for our next life – one in a ghetto – by making a rucksack for each member of our family. A whole houseful of furniture, pictures, books, utensils, ornaments, rugs, crockery, pots and pans, clothing, all reduced to what would fit in our rucksacks. Dishes from which we had eaten a thousand meals, rugs we had settled on with a book in hand – so many things in which we had invested our feelings. It wounded me to leave these things behind. And my mother was wounded even more deeply. For half of her life she had been a housewife, and she had built up this home for us, her children and her husband, by adding one more useful or beautiful thing. But she didn’t weep as she sewed our sacks. She understood perfectly, I think, that we would all have to rely on her strength in the time ahead.

  We packed food into our rucksacks too. We did not imagine that these people who were prepared to take our homes and belongings from us would undertake to feed us. Mother prepared special, nourishing foods for us to pack.

  We made bigger bags for our bedding and pillows. Our busy hands distracted us just enough to keep despair at bay. ‘Sew! Cut! Firmer stitches!’ I told myself, and my mind made my hands obey. Thoughts of my poor, broken grandfather caused tears to well in my eyes. ‘Sew! Cut! Firmer stitches!’ I said again, and the thoughts were subdued.

  By the morning of the twenty-first of April, we were ready. The rucksacks were packed. The gendarmes knocked loudly on our door at precisely nine o’clock, as they had said they would. They were not rough and cruel on this occasion; they were polite. ‘Mr Keimovits, you and your family members are to report to the synagogue before being moved to another place for an indefinite period. This is by order of the military commander of the region. As you know, only such items as can be carried are permitted on the journey.’ We walked out of our home, rucksacks on our backs and other bags in our arms.

  My family was the first of all the Jewish families of Nyírbátor to be ordered to the synagogue. We were told by the gendarmes of their intention to take the wealthiest and most influential families first. They didn’t say why, but I could guess. The authorities wanted to gratify the non-Jewish populace with some ‘how-the-mighty-have-fallen’ scenes. But my father was neither wealthy nor influential. These gendarmes, in choosing my family, were harking back to their peasant heritage: the fathers and grandfathers of those who became gendarmes were the sons of landless peasants who laboured all their lives in a hand-to-mouth existence. They were conditioned to believe that a man who owned cattle was, by definition, wealthy, and since my father dealt in the sale of cattle, he must therefore be the wealthiest Jew in Nyírbátor. So the gendarmes chose the Keimovits family to be removed first. (It took me some time to understand this; I was mystified for years.)

  We walked to the synagogue under our burdens, armed gendarmes at either side. It was spring: the trees were coming into leaf, and the birds returning from their winter sanctuaries. How many times had I walked to school in this season of life renewed, carrying my school books, pausing every few steps to rejoice in the emerging greenery? Now I was bewildered. It was almost impossible for me to accept that our home was gone, and that the Hungarian Nazis had forced us onto this dreaded route. My fingers curled into a fist and one thought occupied my mind: ‘I will return and I will have my revenge.’

  Opposite the synagogue lived my grandfather Ignac. When we arrived at the synagogue, he, my Uncle Lipe, his wife Klara and their three daughters were standing at their gate. My grandfather was being supported by my uncle. They waved to us, the first family to be brought in. I raised my hand to wave back to my grandfather, uncle, aunt and cousins; it felt like an appeal.

  Two of Nyírbátor’s shuls – the Orthodox and the Liberal – were built side-by-side. The gendarmes directed us into the Liberal shul. Women of the town, non-Jews of course, had been ordered to wait at the entrance and search the belongings of all those who arrived. We placed our bags on the ground and waited wretchedly while these women went through them with busy fingers, giving cries of triumph when they found something that should have been forfeited to the authorities earlier. They threw whatever they confiscated into a corner – booty that would be divided amongst them at their leisure. More intimate searches would be conducted later, it was said. Midwives were on duty to probe the bodies of the women and girls. My mother, my sisters and I somehow escaped this ignominy.

  More Jewish families arrived, then many more still, until the Liberal shul was full. On the faces of the adults I saw humiliation, despair, resignation, and here and there anger. The children, especially the smaller ones, were frightened and clung to their parents, sometimes also clutching a comforting toy. The older children, although just as terrified as their younger brothers and sisters, tried to look brave. Some even displayed a certain amount of resentment. The adults talked to each other, but not in the animated way that they would have if this had been a gathering before worship – of business, of interesting news from afar. No, this was conversation of a different sort.

  I recognised many of the arrivals as the wealthier Jews of the town – businessmen and professionals. There was not one amongst them who looked as if he could take command, tell us to stiffen our spines, thrust out our chins. The mood of demoralisation was so pervasive that even small smiles of recognition when one family met another seemed out of place. I heard people murmur: ‘What is to become of us?’ Once the Liberal shul was full, the Orthodox shul was opened, and soon the flow of Jewish families filled it too. I had never seen so many of my faith gathered together in this way.

  We knew that we wouldn’t be kept for the rest of our days locked up in the two synagogues. At four o’clock the next morning, a long line of horses and carts pulled up outside. It appeared that every farmer in the region with a wagon to his name and a beast to draw it had turned up to earn whatever fee the town’s administrators were paying. We were herded from the shul to the first of the carts, and told to hand our bags and backpacks up to the driver. Then we climbed aboard and sat on top of our baggage.

  As the cart began the journey to wherever we were going, I saw the curtains of the houses that lined the way twitching: those inside were watching, no doubt enjoying our humiliation. The injustice of it burned in my chest. I whispered to myself again: ‘I will return and have my revenge.’ Those who were spying at us from behind their curtains seemed the most despicable of all.

  The cart lurched along, forcing us to sway to keep our balance. The peasant driving the cart said nothing, and was apparently indifferent to whatever was going on with the Jews of Nyírbátor. He was being paid – perhaps that was all he thought about.

  My father asked the driver: ‘Where are you taking us? Where are we going?’

  The driver said: ‘Simapuszta.’

  ‘Simapuszta?’ my father asked. ‘Why there?’

  ‘The Jews are going to Simapuszta. That’s all I know. The Jews are going to Simapuszta.’

  We looked at each other, puzzled. Simapuszta? It was nothing – rural land, further north in the direction of Nyíregyháza. Why take us from Nyírbátor to Simapuszta? What was in Simapuszta?

  The countryside we passed through was the common vista of the north-eastern plains. Meadows, crop
s, farmhouses that had stood for one or two or three centuries, cattle, pigs in muddy enclosures. The journey took maybe three hours, and when we arrived we found a broad, barren area enclosed by wire. Within the enclosed area stood a number of huge barns, and it was here we were expected to bed down. Tents had also been erected on the bare earth outside. The gendarmes bustled us into one of the barns, and a small patch of ground was designated as the area that would be occupied by the Keimovits family.

  My mother didn’t grumble or complain. She set to work laying our bedding, issuing instructions to Erna and Marta and me. On each side of our patch of earth, other families were doing the same thing. It was now late in the afternoon – almost evening – and my mother wanted to feed us from the provisions we had packed.

  There were few gendarmes about; it was almost as if we were guarding ourselves. And where might we have run off to? Into the empty plains? No, if we’d thought of fleeing, we would have done it earlier – months or years earlier. There would be no running away now.

  CHAPTER 11

  Train

  When I reflect on the weeks at Simapuszta, I see a strange, almost grotesque mixture of realities. We gossiped, we bantered, we made plans for the future, and we flirted. Well, I flirted, along with many other girls of my age. We didn’t know, of course, that we were on the way to hell. But we might have deduced that the Germans intended to kill us all. If we had deduced that, would we have sat with our heads bowed and our cheeks wet? I don’t know. We may still have chattered away, simply because we would not have believed that we were marked for death.

  Ignac, Uncle Lipe, his wife and my cousins arrived at the camp two days later. They were assigned to an area a long way from us; the ghetto was vast. News of their arrival came to us from our neighbours, who’d picked it up from someone further away. We went to visit them as soon as we heard, as we were desperately worried about Grandfather’s condition. He was bedridden, unable to move.

  I had adopted a way of looking at our situation that made it possible for me to avoid despair: I took only short views and long views; nothing in between. The short view showed me still alive; my mother and father, Marta and Erna were all still healthy and breathing. The long view projected me months or even years ahead, living in Nyírbátor again, the war over, the Nazis annihilated. I could shut out the time in between. But seeing my grandfather Ignac, broken and wracked with pain, reminded me that brutality was the first recourse of the gendarmes, and of their Nazi masters. If it suited their strategy to beat everyone in the camp in the way they’d beaten my grandfather, they would, without hesitation.

  The gendarmes fed us nothing but a watery soup made by boiling potato peelings. It would have been possible to die of malnutrition even if you’d consumed gallons of that stuff each day. Most people had brought food with them, and those who hadn’t were fed by those who had. Did we need any further proof that the Hungarians were unconcerned if we died? At meal times, my mother made us our own soup, more substantial than the camp soup. She had given thought to what would keep us alive not just for days, but for weeks.

  ‘Girls, find a branch somewhere and sweep the ground,’ she said. ‘Pick up all the twigs from the sweepings and bring them to me.’

  We did as we were told, and Mother used the twigs to start a small fire out in the open. She added larger pieces of wood to the blaze – where she came by them I cannot say – and heated the soup in a pot she’d brought from home. When the soup was ready, she called to all of us: ‘Come and eat!’ People as versatile as my mother can appear at their best in almost any situation. At home, she ruled the house with serene confidence; here in the camp, she adapted in whatever ways were required. Her competence never deserted her.

  We also received food from a man my father knew, not a Jew, who came to the camp with bread and other foods. He was not paid to do this; it was act of friendship, of sympathy. And our relatives in Budapest, not yet detained, managed to send us a parcel of food by post! Amazingly, letters and parcels were still delivered to us.

  So the camp of Jews from Nyírbátor and the region around became, over that first week of detention, a community of the oppressed. Family by family, a struggle was played out each day. Fathers and mothers strove to hold on to their remaining authority as parents. It was they who had to say, ‘We will endure.’ Not perhaps in those exact words, but with that message.

  As in any community, rivalry and spite still held sway here and there. A few of our distant relatives were at the Simapuszta ghetto, quite poor families whom we rarely saw. Their poverty embittered them towards my father and his family. They rejoiced in the levelling that forced the ‘rich’ Keimovits family to struggle along with everyone else. They saw me sweeping for twigs, and they saw Mother with her sleeves rolled up, struggling to heat her soup, and they called out exultantly, ‘Not so high and mighty now, are we? The hoity-toity family of Gyula Keimovits!’ I didn’t understand what they were talking about; it had to be explained to me. I was amazed.

  Four weeks we spent in the Simapuszta ghetto, sleeping on the ground, sweeping the earth with twigs. It takes longer than four weeks for a life to become ‘normal’. For me, ‘normal’ was still Nyírbátor: three meals a day, the comfort of a bedroom, of a mattress underneath me when I slept. It was Shabbat with all of its beloved rituals. It was my mother busy in the kitchen, my mother singing. The truth, if I had only known it, was that ‘normal’ no longer existed for me. A year of sweeping with twigs in the Simapuszta ghetto would never be normal.

  Rumours ran through the camp about what was to happen to us. We were now well into the month of May, close to summer, a golden time in each year’s calendar for me. I hoped that the war would end before the summer was over, so I could enjoy the warmth of the season back at home. But the rumours we were hearing spoke of a long journey by train to the north.

  On the twenty-second of May, everyone in the camp was ordered to pack up their belongings, except for their bedding, and march to the railway station in Nyíregyháza, a distance of about fifteen kilometres. ‘Why is the bedding to be left behind?’ I wondered. ‘Are we going to a place where beds and bedding are provided? Or are we going to a place where we will not be permitted to sleep?’ We did as we were told. There were a thousand or more of us – we vastly outnumbered those who were issuing the orders – but we did not disobey. To rebel would have been futile: we would have been shot. And despite the rumours, we still had some hope that all would be well. Hope is tenacious.

  From the Simapuszta ghetto we walked to the railway station in Nyíregyháza, carrying our rucksacks. My family kept close together and spoke little. Indeed, amongst the great throng marching to Nyíregyháza there was very little conversation. We were not baffled by the enmity of the Germans, nor by the eager complicity of the Hungarians. We were Jews, and this is what Jews suffered. Some survived, some perished.

  A train with many carriages was waiting for us, not at the station itself but before the station, in a field. It was a train designed to carry cattle and the like. The carriages were made of horizontal planks of timber, once painted but now ancient and flaking. When the sliding door of each carriage was drawn open, the interior appalled us. There were no seats, and the carriages stunk to high heaven.

  We looked at each other, all of us in the crowd beside the train, and on each face one could see a recognition that our lives meant nothing to those who had brought us here. The beasts that had once been conveyed in these carriages would have been going to slaughterhouses. And these carriages were now thought suitable for human beings. ‘Seventy to a carriage,’ the guards shouted. ‘Seventy to a carriage!’ Families were permitted to stay together. Fathers climbed into the carriages and reached down for their children, who were lifted up by their mothers. By this time there was fear in the air; many children were crying.

  I clambered into a carriage with my backpack, then stood up and looked about quickly for Marta and Erna, who had gone ahead of me. My mother was already in the carriage too, and n
ow Father climbed up and we were all together.

  More and more people climbed into the carriage, and we were forced further and further back. ‘Dear God, there is no more room,’ I thought to myself. But there was more room: our carriage did not yet hold seventy people. We were pushed further in, away from the door, keeping track of each other out of the corners of our eyes. ‘They can’t treat people this way!’ I thought. Despite all we’d been through, I hadn’t fully accepted that the guards and the gendarmes could do anything they wished to do; that they were unrestrained by any humane consideration.

  On the faces around me, I saw terror, resignation, exhaustion. I looked down at the upturned faces of children who only came up to my waist. They were hoping, I’m sure, for some guidance from the adults around them. If anything in the world can be considered to be simply wrong – for all people, at all times, regardless of culture or religion – it is to subject children to the sort of dread and confusion that the Jewish children in that train carriage experienced. That can never be other than wrong. We can’t have a world unless we believe that.

  The twenty or so carriages of the train were loaded with the Jews of Nyírbátor over a period of perhaps an hour. We all had to stand as there was not enough room for us to sit. We waited for whatever was to come next. The train began to move, very slowly at first, building up speed. I had travelled on trains many times before, of course. I had always enjoyed the moment when the train pulled out of the station, and I loved watching the scenery change. But this time my heart sank when I felt the train begin to move. ‘People are not forced to travel in this way if the destination is anywhere good,’ I thought. ‘We are going to a bad place, I know it.’