What, I wondered on the way back to my hotel, past bakeries and dimly lit bars where men stood in front of fruit machines, ignoring the cigarette ash on their trousers, what distinguished my grandmother’s parents from Aunt Margit? My great-grandparents watched as the Mandls were shot, and did all they could to hush up the crime, and in Rechnitz, just before the end of the war, Margit was dancing while 180 people fell into a grave that they had been forced to dig for themselves.
It was late afternoon, and it had indeed stopped raining; the asphalt was dry in many places. I had headphones on, and went past the hotel, going along the streets instead as if I were mowing a lawn, four blocks to the left, up another, then four blocks back. They were not bloodthirsty monsters. My relations had not tortured or shot anyone. They had simply watched and done nothing, they had stopped thinking, they had stopped existing as human beings although they knew what was going on. Is that, in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the banality of evil? I asked myself as I walked and walked, feeling that I never wanted to stop putting one foot in front of another. Everyone knew all about it, I murmured to myself. Passers by, looking at me, might have thought I was humming along to a song, but I was thinking of a passage in the book Von den Flammen verzehrt [Consumed by Flames], by the journalist Lilly Kertész, a Hungarian from the town of Eger, who had been deported to Auschwitz in 1944. She describes her neighbours looking down into the yard and watching as the Jews were taken away. ‘You won’t be coming back,’ they shouted as music and laughter came from their apartments, and she was surprised. ‘I knew the people who lived in that building. They had always seemed friendly to me.’
The far right Arrow Cross party could no longer keep up with the killing in the winter months of 1944. The trains were full, so they sent tens of thousands of Jews and Roma gypsies on death marches, driven by Hungarian gendarmes, who whipped them on for up to thirty kilometres a day; every fifth prisoner died. Everyone could see that from their windows too; they stood behind the lace curtains and watched the parade. What did they do then? Make soup, go to bed early?
And what about all the people who watched the Jews of Budapest–women, children, the old–chained together by handcuffs as they fell into the ice-cold Danube? Only the one at the end of the chain had to be shot, and then they would all be dragged into the river after that first one. Why didn’t the passers by begin to scream? Why didn’t the people in their fine apartments fling themselves down on their backs and kick furiously like babies? Why did they all take it so calmly? For the sake of law and order? For fear of losing their self-control?