DAYS AND DEATH

György Fenyö. My father’s father. His surname translates as ‘fir tree’. That was what he was called. What was his name? That depends on who named him.

It may have been Emperor Joseph II, though the two were born two centuries apart. My forebears lived under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and they were Jews. Thus they were obliged to comply with a new law introduced on 1 January 1788, which determined what they were to be called. There were 120 permissible first names for men, but only 37 for women.

Up until 1788, each father had passed on his first name as a surname, in an interlocking shifting cycle whereby each new generation bore traces of the one before. Sometimes people took their name from their place of birth. But all that was forbidden under the new law. Jews’ surnames were to be Germanised and to remain unchanged from then on.

Many of the Emperor’s officials enjoyed themselves thoroughly at the time, and plenty earned extra income when the new names were registered. People who were lucky or able to pay were given a grand name, suggesting gold, silver, rubies, or diamonds, metal-shimmering or diamond-glowing. If the official in charge had had a bad night or was short on imagination, the Jew was obliged to take whatever was on offer. Colours. Anything visible outside the window. Green, black, white, stone, fir tree, forest. If the official was a nasty piece of work, the name would reflect his character: Saumagen, Wanzenknicker, Küssemich. Maybe my forefathers were bakers? Maybe they were poor and longed to be blessed with white bread? Maybe the official was allotting classes of names associated with farming on the day in question? They were given the name Weitzner. Wheat growers. Fine.

But the Austro-Hungarian monarchy revolved restlessly around itself and its domestic struggle for power. Just 50 years later, the Hungarian component found a way of expanding its influence by registering more Hungarian citizens within the monarchy’s borders — as if the kingdom were a ship and power would shift from one side to another, depending solely on the weight of the passengers.

The change that got under way in the mid-nineteenth century went by the name of ‘Magyarisation’. Jews with German surnames were instructed to swap them for Hungarian ones. The times repeat themselves. Nationalism repeats itself. Bribes repeat themselves. Is the Hungarian official responsible for registering names in a good mood? What can he see outside the window? A pine, or maybe a fir tree? Fenyö.

Now this is our name.

If events take place on the same date, can one say they are separate? If events take place with an intervening gap of 200 years, can one describe them as contemporaneous?

When I think of my father’s father, rain falls thick, a grey curtain. György Fenyö.

A deluge of days has passed since his death, impossible to count, as no one knows when it took place. Some time in January or February 1943, perhaps. Possibly near Batúryn in Ukraine, or in Bielgorod. Time and again my father dreams about his dad, dreams that he has survived, that he’s coming back. A returning dream about a return. But he won’t return. Instead, rain falls and I stand in it: sometimes it’s as fine as mist, sometimes a downpour, but it is always so dense that the view is obscured.

I’d like to think there were a few years of happiness in György Fenyö’s life. He met a 20-year-old girl in Budapest and immediately fell in love. That was in 1931.

The following year, Lilly and György married in the Great Synagogue in Dohány Street, though neither was religious. She was fine-boned, quick-witted, Sorbonne-educated. He was elegant, temperamental, and charming. Were any photographs taken? There were. White veil, black high-crowned hat, two smiles, each turned entirely to the other.

And then — did they give a party? What did they dine on at the wedding feast? I don’t know. Everything has gone. Her well-to-do family was not pleased that she loved a poor, uneducated man, but she went her own way. For a year or so, they rented a fine old house in leafy Buda and drove a DKW cabriolet.

I know György Fenyö had a perfect memory for music; after hearing a tune, he could immediately play it on the piano with an appropriate harmonisation. I know he played Mozart’s Sonata Facile in C Major. I know my father’s mother, Lilly, liked him to play Isaac Albéniz’s Tango, Opus 165. That is all.

The memories trickle down through the generations. Stalactites of absence.

Their son, my father, was born in June 1936. I imagine a further two bright years in György Fenyö’s short life, until his employment in Budapest’s tar and asphalt factory came to an end. A new law decreed that Jews could not own factories, so his uncle lost the company and he lost his job. After that, he tried to earn a living as a photographer. That didn’t work. He went to Paris to find employment. That didn’t work.

On the outbreak of war in September 1939, he managed, by the skin of his teeth, to travel from Paris to neutral Lisbon. He was offered a job in South America, but the residence permit was only for him — not his wife and son — so he turned the offer down. Instead, he returned to Budapest by boat, with a wooden box full of oranges. How many oranges, were they done up in tissue paper, did they smell of sun and fresh sweetness, did they glow in his arms?

He travelled home to his death.

For a few months in 1940 and then in 1941, he was ordered to carry out forced labour for the Hungarian Fascist army. But he came back once more to Budapest, to Lilly, his son, and his mother, Amalia Weitzner. In the autumn of 1942, he was summoned again for the third and last time.

I don’t want to write this. I stand in falling rain, falling death, words that evoke death, and death that evokes my words. My father’s fatherlessness; this is the sound of the rain:

Under Hungary’s anti-Jewish laws, Jews were banned from enlisting in the regular army. Instead, special battalions were set up for political dissidents and the country’s Jews.

My father was a six-year-old boy. On the morning when the third order to report for forced labour arrived, he found to his surprise that everyone in the family was up before him. His father, György Fenyö, was seated on the sofa, his head in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees. The boy asked if they could go on an outing to the Danube, to go swimming or rowing. The answer was no.

György Fenyö, who had just turned 35, was dispatched in November 1942 to an internment camp in Nagykáta, with a bag containing warm underwear, tinted glasses to protect against snow-blindness, and some food supplies. The muddy camp was surrounded by barbed wire. Fear dwelt in the huts, and it was justified. The interned men could be called prisoners; they could also be called slaves.

The camp commandant divided them up into battalions and instructed their respective group leaders to make sure they did not return alive, as they were enemies of the state. Most of the guards were members of the violently anti-Semitic Arrow Cross movement. They treated Jews with extraordinary cruelty and brutality.

Was he killed by hanging or by shooting? Was he forced to prepare the way for advancing Nazi troops on the Eastern Front by walking out into minefields so that he was blown to pieces? Did he have to crawl on all fours, holding a bowl between his teeth and barking like a dog? Did he fall ill, was he placed in a hut that was then set alight? Was he forced to climb a tree and jump from branch to branch, then shot when he fell? Was he hung up by his bound hands and beaten? Were buckets of cold water poured over him where he hung, so that he turned into a lump of ice and froze to death at minus 30 degrees?

On 31 December 1942, György Fenyö was still alive somewhere in Ukraine. He wrote a postcard to Lilly with the words ‘you were the better half of my life’. It is not clear to me what those words actually mean. Then he went to his death, his absence as real as rain. Unrelenting.

Once there was a woman called Alice Hoffman, the mother of my father’s mother.

There is a photograph from the 1910s that shows her in a high-necked white dress. A very young woman, photographed in profile. Her hair looks like mine. Her face reminds me of mine as it was in my twenties. She was born on 29 April, like me.

Alice Hoffman from Budapest married Béla Wollak, and they had a daughter, Lilly. She was an only child who lost her mother at the age of four, when gentle Alice died of dysentery after drinking unpasteurised milk.

I wish I could talk to my grandmother, Lilly, about the early years of her life, which were hard and lonely. But once we held each other’s hands and danced round and round to music, I recall. Other than that, I have little experience of having a family. There is nothing but names, rain falling over names, names falling through the generations. Alice, Lilly, and the boy who would become my father. He was given the same name as his father, although that was not customary and no one can explain why.

They lived together for several years — the boy; his mother, Lilly; his father, György; and his father’s mother, Amalia — in an apartment with one bedroom, a sitting room, a hall, a kitchen, and a bathroom. There was a piano. An oil painting hung on the wall, a portrait of Alice Hoffman. Normality persisted under abnormal circumstances.

When the Germans occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, the boy who was to become my father was eight years old and already fatherless. He had only just started school when he was forced to leave, being a Jew. Neither his mother nor his father was a believer, and it was not until he was five years old that he connected the word with himself. A stranger, walking past him as he was playing, called him a stinking Jew. The boy went to his mother and asked her what ‘Jew’ meant. Lilly answered simply: ‘There are two kinds of people, good ones and bad ones. And that’s the only thing that matters.’

I want to tell the story of my grandmother Lilly. She did her best.

There were relatives in Kraków: Imre; his wife, Erzsébet; and their children, Ida and János. When Poland was occupied in 1939, they were threatened with deportation, but, if they could prove that they were Hungarians, they might be all right. Lilly sold her jewellery so she could afford bribes to obtain the necessary documents, and that bought some time for four people, perhaps the chance of being saved, for the time being, one day at a time — time would tell. A neighbour betrayed them to the Gestapo. Whether they were Hungarian or Polish was irrelevant; they were Jews, and the family was taken to the Polish village of Oświęcim, known to the Germans as Auschwitz. Imre, Erzsébet, and 15-year-old János were gassed the same day. Twenty-year-old Ida was selected for survival and slave labour, first in Auschwitz, subsequently in Bergen-Belsen. I find this information about them in the camp archive. Not everything was destroyed. There is no mention of the neighbour’s name. Ida never uttered a word about her experiences.

There is no flowing way to write this, no gentle stream of words, no reconciliation to be found in a gripping narrative. The sentences are staccato. Everything breaks, is broken again and again, faced with barbed wire. A time without mercy. Three times Lilly saved her son’s life, the son who would become my father. But I am rushing ahead.

The boy lived with his mother, Lilly, and his father’s mother, Amalia. There were days that no one can account for any longer. That is how life is; the days vanish and cannot be remembered; they merely pass through the body, leaving a deposit of time. Then came the spring of 1944, and the stars on their clothes were yellow.

The Nazis had tired of the fact that Hungary was not doing anything about its Jews. The head of state, Miklós Horthy, seemed to want to avoid the issue. Despite all the laws against the Jews and the open hatred, it was as if he was not prepared to take the last, decisive step towards actual elimination. Moreover, he had had one of his right-hand men hold talks with the Allies about a separate peace — a betrayal that Hitler took personally. So Hitler invited Regent Horthy to Schloss Kleßheim, Austria, and while they were at table the Nazis set about Operation Margarethe — that is, they occupied Hungary.

Horthy was allowed to keep his post, on condition that he replaced his right-hand man and that he obeyed orders in future.

Then came Adolf Eichmann. Over the course of eight weeks, 424,000 Jews and 28,000 Roma were deported to their death. It was very efficient. A purpose-built railway line to Birkenau, purpose-built platforms, special commandos. There are photographs. An SS man stood on the platform with his camera. The photographs were put into an album. He hid it. Someone found it.

The death that spread through Hungary left voids. Unoccupied houses, apartments with clothes left hanging in the wardrobes, families with lingering tenderness in their empty embraces.

Lilly, the boy, and his grandmother Amalia were not allowed to stay in their apartment. At half-past-ten one evening in June, Arrow Cross troops arrived and threw them out. Lilly, the boy, and his grandmother had to take what they could in a suitcase or a rucksack, carry their bedclothes on their backs, and make their way on foot to another emptied house, the assembly point. It grew crowded, over-full, chaotic. My father, the boy, lay head to foot with his grandmother. It was a house for Jews. His memories are a child’s memories.

After the summer, the delicately built, vivacious Lilly was forcibly recruited for cleaning and other rough manual labour at the Radetzky barracks, where the soldiers of the Arrow Cross movement were stationed. She was issued with a special card which entitled her to walk through the city, despite the star she wore. She was able to bring bits and pieces of leftovers home.

On 15 October 1944, the Arrow Cross movement wrested power from Horthy in a coup d’état. There were soldiers everywhere. Now Lilly saved my father’s life for the first time.

The day after the coup, 16 October, was a grey day. For some reason, Lilly, my father, and Amalia were to visit a Christian friend of Lilly’s. Since they had to walk several kilometres across Budapest, although Jews were not allowed in the streets, Lilly removed the stars they wore over their hearts. But soon someone spotted them; they were pursued by a young man on a bicycle. An assistant at the bakery where they bought bread, he recognised them, yelled after them. He pedalled after them. Other Hungarians in the street reacted. Threats as oppressive as thunder.

On Batthyány Square, the market hall had been converted into barracks for the ordinary German soldiers in grey uniforms — not the deadly dangerous, black-uniformed SS — and one of the officers noticed the baker’s assistant on his bicycle and the three people he was pursuing. He intervened, his rifle at the ready, telling Lilly, the boy, and Amalia they ought to be executed by firing squad for walking starless.

What Lilly said, how she said it, how she managed, was something the eight-year-old who was to become my father could not comprehend, and which he is therefore unable to render. Besides, he was unable to understand German at that time. He remembers the fear, not the words. He remembers how the German officer gave in and agreed to let them return, how he called out to the German soldiers on guard duty: ‘Diese Juden passieren lassen.’

And so, passing guard after guard, they went back the same way they came. From guard to guard, the words were called out. How the Hungarians in the streets stared.

How the young baker stood rooted to the spot. How no one could touch them, now those words were being called out over their heads, following them like a vigilant bird all the way back to the Jews’ house. Diese Juden passieren lassen.

Every day, Lilly went to the Arrow Cross barracks to carry out her forced labour. It seems that she talked about right and wrong with more than one Jew-hater. She called that ‘discussing ideology’, and believed she could influence them. A few days later she saved my father’s life for the second time.

Lilly was in the barracks when she heard that something had happened. Who told her? She heard that everyone living in the Jews’ house had been arrested and taken to an assembly point at the police station in Bimbó Street. She left her work. She made her way to the police station. She brought an Arrow Cross officer with her.

Why did he go with her, not the other way round?

My grandmother Lilly, the tenderness I feel. The affection of unanswered questions.

In the courtyard of the police station, the people were standing in rows. Children. Old people. Waiting for the death march. For hours they waited, standing in line in the courtyard. Lilly got there in time with the Arrow Cross officer. They got to the courtyard in time, they found the eight-year-old, the boy, and his grandmother Amalia. They managed to get them out of the line in time.

That was the second time.

A time without mercy, without words. The remaining Jews in Budapest were concentrated in an enclosed area around the Great Synagogue. Easier to catch, easier to control. Now the boy, Lilly, and Amalia were assigned to an apartment in that area by the Arrow Cross officer. Lilly had to return immediately to her work in the barracks and took the boy with her. His grandmother Amalia went to the apartment in the ghetto. Later that same evening, when Lilly had finished her work and arrived at the house with the boy, it was emptied. A company of Arrow Cross soldiers had taken all the old people and children, and now they were gone. Amalia Weitzner. My father remembers a very kindly, affectionate grandmother. She was 73.

Someone else had lived in the flat before them. There had been deportation after deportation, a series of abductions. Now Lilly and the boy were to live there. In the cupboard, they found glass jars of homemade jam.

When the Soviet Red Army attacked Budapest, the ghetto was sealed off. The eight-year-old boy who was to become my father lay seriously ill, suffering from dysentery, on a blanket on top of a sandbag, in a cellar.

He, Lilly, and a few others sought cover.

How long did they stay there? No one knows. German soldiers made their way in and stole all the clocks they could find before withdrawing.

January was cold. Smoky air in every intake of breath when they made a fire on the bare ground. Somewhere there was silence, somewhere there was the sound of war. Somewhere up there in the streets, the tanks were rolling past.

A wall separated them from the cellar of the neighbouring house. I don’t know what colour it was or whether it was made of brick. The boy on the sandbag doesn’t remember it, yet the wall must have been there, because it was suddenly smashed to pieces. The wall broke, and the Russians came through. There is nothing frightening in the fragment of memory my father hands down to me. He was the boy lying on the sandbag, weak with illness. The memory is 70 years old, but it exists, it is dated, a decisive moment in a series of uncertainties. The wall remained in his memory because it was shattered and Russian soldiers came in. Lilly and the boy were saved. 18 January 1945. They climbed up out of the cellar and left the ghetto.

Wrecked lorries, hanging cables, dead horses in the streets, dirt, debris, people in ragged clothing, iron beams laid bare by explosions. There were houses without facades, with rooms, floors, and ceilings cut in half; kitchens and bedrooms cut in half; scenery ripped open theatrically; lives torn apart. Everything was brown and grey. Now my father is deeply absorbed by the work of the artist Anselm Kiefer.

They found shelter with the Christian friend. To be able to buy rice and milk powder for the boy, Lilly sold blood. That was the third time she saved his life.

Days and death. Lilly worked as a waitress in a café, but she had lost her faith in a future in Budapest. She decided to emigrate to Palestine. While she was waiting for an immigration permit, she sent the boy to the Zionists, who took him to the camp for orphaned children in Strüth, Ansbach.

The flat where they had once lived together — the charming György, Lilly, the boy, and his grandmother Amalia — was bombed to pieces, the piano reduced to wires and splinters. All that remained was the large oil painting that still hung on a wall, the portrait of Lilly’s mother, gentle Alice Hoffman.

My father’s father. An alien expression, a blank space in my vocabulary. Reported missing. Old photographs, archived documents from UNRRA or the murderers — none of these can fill the emptiness.

Taken for forced labour service to the Ukraine on November 28, 1942, and perished at Bielgorod in February 1943.

In my father’s earliest memory of his father, they are holding each other’s hand, with a handkerchief in between. The sun is hot. They are on an excursion to Lake Balaton during the holidays and are on their way up Mount Badacsony. The mountain path under their feet rattles with loose pebbles, but the handkerchief prevents their hands from sliding out of each other’s grip.

A white handkerchief — I picture it; its whiteness becomes the core of the memory — almost translucent with moisture between their hands, like a layer of time, both a closeness and a warm distance that binds them together. If my father is four years old at the time, he has two years left to gather memories of his dad.

Both my father and his father are called György, but I don’t know why. György is the Hungarian form of George.

The man who became my father’s father grew up in Debrecen, the son of a tailor. But why did he break off his studies? Did he fail at school? There is no one who can answer. Having no school-leaving diploma was unheard of; failing your exams was a source of shame that could drive people to suicide. Perhaps that was why he wanted to leave the little town and his father’s tailoring business? Or was he adventurous? Perhaps he had no choice? But György Fenyö was not allowed to leave home until he had taken his examination as a tailor. He must have a trade, his father, Sándor, decided.

After that, György travelled to Paris. It was 1924; he was 17 and spoke no French. Naturally, he went hungry. After a while, he returned to Hungary, now to the capital, Budapest, where one of his mother’s brothers gave him a job in his tar and asphalt factory.

He played the banjo. The piano. He practised the accordion. Became a manager at the asphalt factory. Backcombed his thick black hair till it gleamed. Took portrait after portrait with the camera facing him and the self-timer half-hidden in his hand. That is how I see him now, as he wants to see himself then. Thus our gazes meet through silver and light, in an encounter that is both real and illusory.

Sometimes he photographed himself together with Lilly and his son. The boy was both amused and embarrassed, but still part of the trinity that was soon to be divided, part of the inscrutable gravity they tried to hide behind their smiles. Together, in black and white, they all look into a future that never develops. It all took place in the past, when everything was a continuum, and the days went by as they were supposed to, in an orderly fashion. Before the violence.

Memories like tombstones erected over a body that is long gone. What else is there to do, other than to describe the world so it becomes visible? I, who have always had a father, take his fatherlessness upon me. I, who have always had a father who looks into the future, take his memories and look back. Take what he misses, and feel it.

On my first birthday, they say, my father gave me some Hungarian sausage for the first time, and apparently I enjoyed it, though that anecdote comes from his memory, not mine. But I do remember us walking along a path through a deciduous forest next to a lake. I am four years old. He is carrying me on his shoulders, and I am holding onto his hair.

A graveyard is an inverted city. People under the earth instead of above it, in the form of urns and ashes, not muscle mass and 37 degrees. The transformation from being to not being. Those who enter to visit the memory of the dead remain outsiders.

In Normandy, the graves of the American soldiers stand to attention in white, while those of the Germans are monuments of darkening stone. Silent cities, where those who no longer exist sing inaudible songs about non-life to the living.

And then there are other cemeteries, all over Europe, which bear witness to absence through an even more audible silence — in Prague, in Berlin, in Kraków. The dead lie beneath a layer of time and a layer of dilapidation, their names written in ivy.

I visit such a place to lay a stone on my grandmother Lilly’s grave in Rákoskeresztúr, Budapest. Rows of gravestones stand exposed to the elements, crooked and shadowy. Abandoned because all those who would have visited them were murdered.

1947. 1974. Two dates, the same figures, separated by 27 years. Time is somewhere in the shadows.

In December 1974, my father writes me a letter. I will soon be ten years old. The envelope bears the phrase ‘To be handed over now’ in his handwriting, which is hard to decipher. He puts the letter in a bank safe deposit box with his loan documents and deeds. In the event of his death, it is to be given to me, his only child. But he lives, and it is only very recently that I have read the letter.

It consists of 19 typewritten lines. Eighteen of them express a father’s love. The last, the nineteenth, is a single sentence, an exhortation. It forms a link between the dates. He might equally well have written it to himself in 1947, when he was in Strüth, Ansbach, as to me in 1974 in Kungsholmen, Stockholm. One ten-year-old is connected to the other.

And although I was never given the letter as a child, I have always been aware of the exhortation. Here it is in letters stamped into the paper by his resolute hammering on the typewriter:

Never pity yourself.

I try to assemble the year 1947 into a splintered whole. This is lunacy, but time does not leave me alone.