As the Szálasi regime continued, the overall situation of the Jews worsened day by day. The fate of those living in the ghetto grew progressively more cruel. Words like ‘terrible’ or ‘horrible’ little by little lost their significance: there is no language to describe the daily sufferings of concentration camp or ghetto. They were tormented not only by the overcrowding and the hunger, but also by the hopelessness, the lack of any prospect of improvement. The Arrow-Crossers turned up from time to time and simply shot all the inhabitants of a given building. They didn’t even bother to herd them down to the Danube. No one knew when their turn would come, which house would be next, and so the terror was unrelenting. More and more stories leaked out about the German mass-extermination and cremation camps, and even the most optimistic people realized that there was no route to salvation. People became lethargic, without faith, despairing. Their will to live was ebbing away. They lost their appetite, refusing even the little food they could get. They died like flies in autumn.
Of course, unhygienic living conditions and rampant malnutrition encouraged disease. Eventually there came a time when death no longer shocked the spirits of the living, becoming simply part of the routine. There was an epidemic of a particular kind of diarrhea that affected people psychologically as well: it made those suffering from it feel constantly dirty. They kept demanding to be washed, asking for their clothes to be changed. It was impossible to keep them in bed: even those close to death crawled to the faucet to try to wash themselves, and it was there that death frequently overtook them.
Even people who had been exempted for economic reasons were driven into the ghetto by the Arrow-Crossers, but there were some who had the special privilege of being exterminated in their own homes. The whole city knew Muki Knapp, who was famous for his skill as a businessman, with the result that the Germans also used his services. Neither he nor his wife wore a star. At the behest of the Germans, Knapp made several journeys to Portugal to obtain vital industrial commodities. He and his wife lived in Kossuth Square, in the apartment where they had always lived. One day, two armed Arrow-Crossers went to the apartment and shot both of them.
People under the protection of foreign embassies were not pushed into the ghetto. They lived in ‘protected’ houses, that is, houses provided for foreigners. On several occasions such houses were surrounded, and the inhabitants were hauled off to the Danube, where they were shot dead.
The Red Cross, and representatives of foreign diplomatic missions, visited the ghetto regularly, but there was little they could do. It was rumored that the Arrow-Crossers would blow up the entire ghetto one night. There were indeed plans to do so, but they were not put into effect, presumably because the Christians had still not been moved out.
A new decree from the Arrow Cross government required ‘spouses of Aryans’ to move to the ghetto. In Hungary there was a high level of assimilation and over time this had resulted in a great many mixed marriages where one partner was Christian and the other a converted or active Jew. The Jewish partner was known in Hungarian as an ‘Aryan-spouse’ (árja-párja). Even Mrs Horthy was a descendant of such a Jewish – Gentile marriage, and so was the infamous anti-Semitic politician Béla Imrédy. Up to now, members of mixed marriages had been exempted from the anti-Jewish regulations, but this now changed. New tragedies ensued. Sometimes, out of solidarity with a marriage partner, the Gentile partner moved to the ghetto too, but there was also a wave of suicides.
Some time later, I had occasion to meet a heroic member of the aristocracy, who had been committed to the ghetto because of her efforts to help escaping Jews. Baroness Orczy was not easily intimidated, even in the ghetto, and since she knew the secret phone number of the minister for internal affairs, she called him and terrorized him with denunciations and threats. Nothing works better against terrorists than terror.
Shortly after the new regulation came out, an Arrow Cross journalist, a regular visitor to the Ministry for Internal Affairs, created a sensation by telephoning the Telegraph Office, without authorization, and telling them that the publication of the decree was done in error and needed to be corrected immediately in the Official Gazette. On the basis of the call, the Telegraph Office duly published the correction and announced that the favorable treatment for ‘Aryan-spouses’ would continue. The resulting confusion was enough for Baroness Orczy: she used the occasion to gain liberation for a number of the ‘Aryan-spouses’ through telephoned threats.
As had happened frequently in the past, they hauled this blue-eyed, solemn-faced, restless woman off to the Arrow Cross headquarters, where they had already knocked out one of her teeth. An Arrow Cross detective beat her with his fists and whipped her – and then, suddenly, he had a new idea.
He interrupted the beating and offered the baroness a cigarette. ‘Would you like a smoke?’
‘Very much.’
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve knocked you around. It doesn’t seem to work. You answer back as though you weren’t really in our power at all. Why not take the step of joining us in our propaganda work? The pay is good. We need persistent, self-assured women like you, always ready with an answer. What do you think?’
‘You must be joking. That’s my answer.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t you know, poor fool that you are, that you and your pals will hang within two weeks?’
The detective struck her across the face with his whip.
My personal contact with the ghetto stopped after we got my mother-in-law out. Once in a while I was able to send in food and cigarettes by way of Imre, but later, with the food situation in the city getting worse, and the constant bombings, he and his mother moved in with relatives in a little village on the Danube.
Ozma and I stayed together. What else could we do? He and I had completely opposite temperaments, but we complemented each other in many ways: we needed one another. We had our little differences. Lajos asked me, for example, to obtain a forged birth certificate for the actress Kerényi, who was a friend of his wife. I delivered the document and Lajos asked how much he owed me.
‘Two hundred pengős.’
He gave me the money and said with a sour smile: ‘Sometimes I just don’t understand you, Lexi. You give documents to people you don’t know at all for free, and then you charge me two hundred pengős.’
‘You’re so thrifty, Lajos, that you won’t miss two hundred pengős. Do you know the story of Mayor Lueger of Vienna? He was a notorious anti-Semite, but he was once seen walking down Kärtner Street arm in arm with a Jew. A friend asked him how he, an anti-Semite, could walk around in public with a Jew? “Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich (I decide who is a Jew),” he replied. I do the same with the prices of documents: I decide who pays.’
These small skirmishes at least took the boredom out of our relationship.
In the autumn, when the theaters opened for the season, we bought four season tickets for the National Theater and for the Opera. Most often I gave these tickets to boys who had escaped from labor camps, and insisted that during the intermissions they eat some of the particularly good Gerbeaud pastries served at the buffet. This was my way of helping them rediscover a little human dignity – my third front, as it were.
After my wife had left for the country, I went to visit the Avases. The sister-in-law had been taken to the hospital because of a premature birth, brought on by Szálasi’s proclamation and the fear and terror it produced. Jutka had moved to Pest because the sister-in-law’s family was also now living with the Avases and the apartment was very overcrowded. I was concerned that so many people were living in the same apartment, particularly because the others in the building also seemed to be Jews in hiding. While I was visiting, there was an air-raid warning and we all had to go down to the cellar. Sitting in the shelter, I had the impression that the whole group was Jewish.
Avas reassured me with one of his ex cathedra sentences: ‘Nothing bad will happen.’
The Avases had been back in the apartment for some four or five weeks when one evening four young men came to their door. A knock on the door. A request for identity papers. There were four people in the apartment at the time – the Avases, the sister-in-law and her mother. When he was asked for his papers, Avas stood up quite quietly, to his full and imposing height, and slowly and deliberately removed his wallet from his pocket to show his card. But before he could do so, his knees suddenly crumpled and he fell to the floor. The women rushed over to help. The thrashing of his legs as the apoplexy seized him and the frightened cries of the women so upset the Arrow-Crossers that one after the other they stole away, not just out of the apartment but out of the building. I had always admired Avas as a model of coolness under pressure. But it seems that even people so outwardly cool have their emotions: a little check of identity papers and they collapse. Paradoxically, the stroke saved Avas. Somehow they managed to find an ambulance and get him to the hospital. Eventually he was taken to the sanitarium at Budakeszi, where he remained quietly for the rest of the Arrow Cross period, along with his wife as his nurse.
A few days later I learned of a worse tragedy, a visitation of fate that befell my best clients, the Schwartz family. George and his family had a newly built rental apartment building on Ipoly Street. The agent suggested that the family move into the last vacant apartment in the building. They called me to ask my advice. Although I insisted that it would not be prudent for the family to remain together, they decided to go ahead. Their household staff remained in the old apartment and a maid carried a hot dinner over every day. She was very pretty, and the policeman on duty at the corner noticed her and struck up a conversation. This blossomed into friendship, and the girl happened to mention that she was taking dinner to her Jewish employers. The policeman was a member of the Arrow Cross Party and immediately reported the matter. One night the Arrow-Crossers arrived and took the husband and wife, their two young daughters and the building superintendent to the Danube and shot them.
Another client of mine perished at about the same time, Pauer, the vinegar manufacturer. One day in December I was walking along Rákóczi Street and noticed with great amazement that his factory was still in business. So I went in and asked the secretary, ‘Where’s the boss?’
‘In the office.’
Pauer was a bachelor, a very wealthy man. On several occasions he had hired me, as a lawyer, to make inquiries at foreign embassies about whether there were ways of purchasing special awards from the Red Cross, the Knights of Malta, and so on. I walked into his office, where he greeted me very cordially. I could not hide my surprise at finding him in his own house, in his own office.
Assuming that he would listen to my friendly advice, I confronted him: ‘Look, you’re tempting fate if you live this way. The Arrow-Crossers won’t stay in power for more than a couple of months. You have a good Swabian face: no one will bother you if you disappear and live somewhere as a pretend-Christian for a while.’
He was the type of client whom I would have charged handsomely, had he ordered documents from me.
‘My dear sir, that’s really not necessary in my case.’
‘Why? Don’t the Jewish laws apply to you?’
‘Of course, but I have influence with certain kinds of people, so I really don’t need to disappear. Please don’t repeat it, but the Budapest chief of police keeps me apprised of the situation on a daily basis.’
And while I stood there he called the chief of police, apparently to prove to me that he had good relations with the right kinds of people. The police chief assured him that there was no change in the situation.
Three days later, they shot him and his mother in a corner of the factory yard. This man valued his good connections more than his life.
The disasters overtaking my close friends had a profound effect on me, despite my efforts to cultivate a thick skin. I often wondered how I would behave if I fell into the hands of the Arrow-Crossers and faced certain death. I imagined I would not wait to be executed but would try to escape, try to get out in whatever way I could. In any case, it would be better to get shot by the guards, to perish in a life-and-death struggle, than simply to give up.
The big question, though, was whether I would have the strength to act. It was surely this question that brought on my nightmares . . . A door would open and I would find myself staring into a huge 45 revolver in the hands of an Arrow-Crosser . . . Someone would be sitting on the edge of my bed, trying to tie my hands. I would try to cry out, but no sound would come . . . Often I dreamed that I was in the hands of a firing squad. At the very moment of the command to shoot I would wake up. Waking up after a dream like that, needless to say, always filled me with relief – but not just because the dream had come to an end. Above all, I was pleased at how I had behaved. Within my dreams, I was never overcome by fear, never gave in, never begged forgiveness. I always checked to see whether my heart was beating faster than normal.
According to Adler, a psychologist whose views were opposed to those of Freud, dreams represent not so much the subconscious rising to the surface as the desires of the dreamer. My dreams were no guarantee that I would hold up when faced with the real thing. I never seemed to be concerned in my dreams with the possibility that something might happen to my sons or my wife. But I decided to be more careful and attentive in future. A little self-criticism caused me to condemn my conduct when, on a recent occasion, in what must have been a fit of cockiness or maybe spite, I took nine Labor Service Jews to dinner at Gundel, a famous restaurant, at a time when they were cooking for only forty people a night because of the food shortage. Furthermore, we were pretty loud and undisciplined.
On December 9, Lame Karcsi came to visit for the last time, sent by my wife. He had come by in November, bringing a big basket of fresh mushrooms, sour cream and a big fat goose, gifts from Aunt Zsuzsi and Julia. From Julia he brought a long letter. The mails were no longer working, and only this adventurous, confused young man got any pleasure from the terrible journey. Julia gave a faithful account of her life in Almádi. When she returned from Pest, she went back to the retired school principal and rented the same room. But she failed to observe that the room had neither stove nor fireplace. So when, a few days later, the autumn rains began, she caught such a terrible cold that she had no option but to move in with the Brandeisz family, in their one-room home. ‘But you won’t believe it,’ she wrote.
A miracle has happened. Every evening, in the pitch dark, I walked back to my room at the principal’s house, at the other end of the village – a half-hour walk at least. At that hour there was no one on the street. And for the first time in my life I was not afraid. My steps echoed in the silence, and occasionally dogs barked at me, or one of them followed me part of the way. When the doctor told me I had a bad case of sinusitis and needed to stay in the warm, Elza invited me to move in with her, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. When a neighbor of hers, who has a three-room house, asked Aunt Zsuzsi how she could possibly make room for me, Aunt Zsuzsi replied, ‘We can fit her in because we’re used to living in one room!’ Elza let me share her bed: the two of us sleep in opposite directions on a pretty large sofa, each with our own eiderdown. I’m not sure whether I would ever have shared my bed with someone in the old days. I don’t know whether you realize what a different world I’m living in now. Every evening Zsusza reads from the Bible and sometimes sings psalms. On the slopes of Káptalan Hill there are thick pinewoods. Now that I am friendly with several of our neighbors, we go up there to pick mushrooms. The mushrooms emerge from the forest floor a few hours after rain, when everything is still wet. They smell so wonderful! You have to look for the path the mushrooms follow – the mushroom-stream, we call it. Because in the place where you find a given kind of mushroom there are always more: they ‘flow’ under the dead pine-needles. And their colors! You can see for yourself how unusual they are! Pink, bright blue, yellow. And these are all definitely edible mushrooms. I can now recognize them with absolute certainty and tell the difference between these mushrooms and the various poisonous ones. I am still going to Felsőörs, to the country folk there, and I stay friendly with Uncle Mihálcsa . . .
Karcsi’s December journey was full of difficulties. The German-Russian front was by then moving towards the south of us and he had to make a detour all the way up north and come in from Győr, on the only possible road, getting rides on military trucks. Even so, he produced a big roasted loin of pork from his knapsack. Julia said in her letter that she went to Veszprém, where a radio repair shop fixed her little short-wave radio; so now, at night, she could listen to the German-language program of the BBC. The trip to Veszprém was full of adventure: there was no train, so for part of the way she went by cart and most of the trip she did on foot, with the radio in her knapsack. She wanted news of everyone – her mother, the children, Jutka. And did I know what it meant, and why they kept repeating, ‘Le baton du marechal est en bakélite’ on the French-language program?
Through Karcsi I sent Julia a gold necklace, a brooch and lots of cigarettes, so that if Aunt Zsuzsi’s supply of yarns ran out, she too would have something to trade.
Our adventurous messenger was just able to make his way back, through the front and the lines behind it, and Julia received my letter and package – but I found this out only much later. In the meantime, for several long months, we were cut off from one another. The Germans occasionally retreated from, and then recaptured, the area around Lake Velence. Lake Velence is on the road to Balaton.