In the Darkroom (27 page)

The “exception” would be rendered meaningless when the Germans occupied Slovakia in the fall of 1944. Leopold and Sidonia fled into the countryside, where their son Alexander encountered them one last time. He'd been in a forced labor camp during the deportations and had fled to join the Slovak National Uprising. After the revolt failed and he was lying low with false documents in a small village, Alexander heard rumors that his parents were hiding in the forest and, after days of searching, found them huddled with twenty others in a woodsman's shack. “The Germans are coming,” Alexander told them. He begged his parents to keep themselves hidden. His mother asked for his shirt. “She wanted to wash it,” Alexander said. Sidonia scrubbed the garment as best she could and hung it near the fire. When it was dry enough to wear, she told him, “Go! Go! Save yourself.” Alexander fled. The following day, an SS unit descended on the hut and sent all of its inhabitants to concentration camps in Germany: Leopold to Sachsenhausen, Sidonia to Ravensbrück.

Alexander presented me with a document, several pages long. It was a list of names, composed on a manual typewriter by a functionary: a roster of the lost Jews of Spišské Podhradie. The fastidious bureaucratic record listed the dead alphabetically, followed by date of birth, concentration camp, date of death. There were 416 names on the list, all but 20 of the Jews who had been residents of Spišské Podhradie. Nos. 135 and 136 were Leopold and Sidonia Grünberger.

When Adolf Eichmann came to Budapest on March 19, 1944, the first day of the German occupation, to oversee the “Jewish Question” in Hungary, he arrived with ten to twelve officers and an administrative staff (including secretaries, cooks, and chauffeurs) of a mere two hundred—and with no clear authority to direct the Hungarian government. “What was unique about the German regime in Hungary,” Hungarian historian György Ránki observed, “was that a relatively large degree of national sovereignty was left in the hands of the [Hungarian] government, even more than had been done anywhere else in Europe, including Denmark.” Denmark had famously used its sovereignty to resist the anti-Jewish dictates of its occupiers. With only a handful of SS officers in the entire country, the Hungarian officialdom would seem to have been in an even stronger position to counter German edicts, but right from the start it chose otherwise. When the SS and the Gestapo arrested hundreds of prominent and professional Jews in Budapest in the first two weeks of the occupation—and interned them in the rabbinical seminary building where my father had attended elementary school—neither the parliament nor Regent Horthy protested. Every branch of Hungarian lawmaking and law enforcement would fall into line. Eichmann was startled, if pleased, by the occupied state's willingness, even enthusiasm. “Hungary was the only European country to encourage us relentlessly,” he said later. “They were never satisfied with the rate of the deportations; no matter how much we speeded it up, they always found us too slow.” He had no objections, of course: “Everything went like a dream.”

The Hungarian government hastened to mobilize all its muscle in service of the Final Solution. The Hungarian Ministry of the Interior drew up the plans. One ministry undersecretary, László Endre, urged Eichmann (successfully) to quadruple the number of Jewish transports. Eichmann liked to joke that Endre “wanted to eat the Jews with paprika.” Less than three weeks into the German occupation, local authorities received the ministry's order to ghettoize and deport their Jewish citizens. “The Royal Hungarian Government,” the decree began, “will soon have the country purged of Jews.”

A very few county and municipal officials refused to participate. They were the exception. “If any local administration deviated from the national directives,” historian Elek Karsai noted in his study of the management of the Hungarian deportations, “they were aimed at exceeding the target: either by implementing the government decrees ahead of schedule or by taking more severe and harsher measures than required.” The eagerness of government functionaries was matched by the nation's civilians. In the first eight days of the Nazi occupation in Budapest, Hungarian citizens filed 30,000 denunciations against hidden Jews and Jewish property, compared with 350 in the first
years
of German-occupied Holland.

In short order the Hungarian government would issue more than one hundred anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were not allowed to travel, own cars or bicycles, or make use of radios or phones. Jews were not allowed to publish books, nor could any books they'd already published be sold. (The April 1944 decree, “Concerning the Protection of Hungarian Intellectual Life from the Literary Works of Jewish Authors,” ordered such works shredded or publicly burned. One such bonfire in Budapest consumed 447,627 volumes, “the equivalent,” Braham noted, “of 22 fully loaded freight cars.”) Jews were not allowed to employ Christian servants, or wear school or military uniforms, or swim in pools or public baths, or patronize bars, restaurants, catering services, cafés, espresso stands, or pastry shops.

My grandfather's car, the lace-curtained Renault with the dashboard vase for one rose, was confiscated and the Christian maid, governess, and cook let go. At Ráday 9, the ground-floor shops—the furrier, beauty parlor, and patisserie—were off-limits to the family who owned the building. Not that they owned it any longer. Transactions of property by Jews were invalidated, assets seized, safe-deposit boxes sealed, commercial and industrial establishments shut down or assigned to Christian managers. In any case, the Friedman family was no longer living at Ráday 9. By then, my father was boarding with his disciplinarian teacher, Rozi was residing at her furnished studio, and Jenő was living at the Hotel Astoria. (He would soon have to find other lodgings; after the German occupation, the Astoria became a Gestapo headquarters.) Still another decree forbade Jews to purchase butter, eggs, rice, any meat except beef, or—that essential of Hungarian cuisine—paprika. By fall, Jewish rations had fallen to starvation levels. My father recalls slipping into the pastry shop at Ráday 9—by then abandoned—and running his fingers along the display counter, searching for crumbs.

The Jews of Budapest were the last in the country slated for transport to Auschwitz. In preparation, on June 16, 1944, 250,000 Budapest Jews were told they had three days to abandon their homes and move into one of the two thousand apartment buildings selected as “Yellow Star” houses. They were to leave their furnishings behind, to be enjoyed by the new Christian tenants.

My grandmother Rozi wound up in a Yellow Star house in a bleak section of southern Pest. She shared her room with a dozen others. The occupants were forbidden to have guests or speak with people through their windows and could leave only for a very few designated hours to buy food (riding to stores only on the last car of the tram). My father saw his mother once during her months in the Star house. He regretted the visit. Shortly after he'd slipped inside, the police came and sealed the doors. “They wouldn't let anyone out,” my father said. He waited till night, then “climbed to the rooftop, and walked from roof to roof until I found an open door and got away.” He never went back. “I wasn't going to get trapped in any stupid Star house.”

At some point in the late spring of 1944, my father and my grandfather returned to Ráday 9 and holed up in the apartment of a gentile physician. The doctor had taken his family to their vacation home in Lake Balaton and invited Jenő and István to stay in the empty flat. Father and son hunkered down there for two months, curtains drawn, lights dimmed, listening to the BBC “very quietly” on the radio. Then the tenants returned. My father decamped to the streets and a series of hiding places. My grandfather Jenő relocated, too—briefly to the homes of friends and then to what had been, only a short while earlier, his other Budapest property. The apartment building at Váci 28 had been requisitioned as a Yellow Star house. A regulation foot-high Star of David, displayed on a black background, now hung over its entrance. Jenő bedded down in a former maid's room.

On July 7, just as the deportations were to commence in Budapest, Regent Horthy announced a halt in what he called “the transfer.” He made the decision for various reasons—among them, the degenerating military situation, the mounting appeals from Allied and neutral powers, and the pleas of world leaders. The Jewish population of Budapest was, for the time being, spared, an act that forever elevated Horthy in the estimation of not only my father but of many of the capital's Jews, who attributed their survival to the Regent.

Horthy's order to halt the deportation of Budapest's Jews proved a brief reprieve—“the false spring,” it would be called in retrospect, though it spanned from late summer into fall. On October 15, after Horthy announced that he had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union, the Germans launched Operation Panzerfaust, kidnapping Horthy's son and forcing the Regent's resignation and imprisonment. Horthy abdicated in favor of the Germans' handpicked new head of state, Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the fascist Arrow Cross Party. A former army officer, fervid anti-Semite, and Magyar nationalist (though only partly Magyar himself), Szálasi promulgated an incoherent ideology he called “Hungarism.” (During a prison stint in 1938, and “with the help of the Bible,” he had worked out Jesus's family tree and concluded that Jesus was not a Jew but a “Godvanian,” an imaginary race that he believed to be related to the Magyars.) Szálasi was from Kassa.

The new prime minister promptly set to eliminating the Budapest Jews, seeking to resume the deportations in early November (
after
Himmler had ordered them halted). Szálasi's Arrow Cross troops—mostly young men, many with criminal records (“primitive shoemaker types,” my father said, “and not too bright”)—carried out a full-bore, if increasingly freelance, Judenfrei extermination program that killed many thousands of the city's Jews and sent nearly eighty thousand on death marches to the Austrian border. In late November 1944, the Arrow Cross regime ordered the city's surviving Jews herded out of the Yellow Star houses and into the newly designated ghetto, a hastily walled-off deathtrap erected in the heart of the old Jewish quarter. In an area of only 0.1 square miles, soon teeming with rats, raw sewage, and typhus, seventy thousand Jews were incarcerated. Little food came in, no garbage came out. By December, the thousands of corpses stacked in the courtyards of buildings (including the Dohány Street Synagogue) had fused into blocks of ice.

My father moved from hiding place to hiding place. For a while, he took refuge in an old barracks on the outskirts of Buda that doubled as an airplane graveyard. The Hungarian army used the parade grounds to store the mangled hulks of shot-down Allied bombers. At night, my father would bed down on one of the abandoned military cots. Whenever the coast was clear, she told me, “I would sneak into the cockpits, and pretend I was a bomber pilot.” Long before my father developed a passion for Microsoft flight videos, young István was simulating takeoffs and landings. Army officers finally chased him out, and he found a new hiding spot on the edge of Pest in a Christian neighborhood. By then, he had acquired, via the Zionist underground, an armband that belonged to one of the Hungarian Nazi-aligned parties.

While my father was piloting downed planes and roaming the streets with fascist regalia and an incriminating lack of foreskin, my grandparents had reunited, albeit by accident. They both happened to seek shelter in one of the “protected houses” along the river by St. Stephen's Park, an area that came to be known as the International Ghetto. Starting in the late summer of 1944, the neutral legations of Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, and the Vatican began issuing tens of thousands of official-looking safe-conduct passes and protective passports that (theoretically) shielded the city's Jews from deportation. The non-aligned diplomatic missions declared several dozen apartment buildings in the city as safe zones. Rozi and Jenő wound up independently taking refuge in the same Swiss protected house on Pozsonyi út, a couple blocks from the Danube. They shared a room with about forty other people, including my father's cousin, Judit (later Yudit) Yarden, and her parents.

That late fall and winter, armed gangs of Arrow Cross adherents took a particular malicious pleasure in invading the protected houses—they regarded the occupants as privileged Jews and thus even more tempting targets. Soon the “protected” were being hauled off, some to be interrogated and beaten in Arrow Cross detention centers, others forced on death marches. Thousands more were taken to the Danube and shot into the river. To save on bullets, Arrow Cross gunmen tied people together—often family members—shot one into the river, and let the sinking corpse drown the rest.

My father heard reports of the shootings. One day, she said (in one of the detail-free childhood anecdotes my father had proferred in my youth, an anecdote I'd never known whether to believe), a teenaged Pista had shown up at the Swiss protected house where his parents were living and, displaying his Hungarian Nazi armband, “saaaved” them.

“Which house?” I asked one afternoon in Buda. We were sitting in her dining room over the remains of coffee and cake. I laid out a city street map on the dining-room table and pointed to the half-dozen-block area where most of the protected houses were grouped.

“Waaall,” my father said, “one of those buildings. I don't remember.”

“Why don't we go over there and see?” I pressed. A stupid question.

“No point,” she said, shoving the map aside.

She diverted the conversation to one of the few topics from the past she didn't mind revisiting—her own father's excellent taste. “My father was always very classy,” she said, ticking off a list of examples I'd heard many times: the custom-made suits (“beautiful fabric he ordered from England”), the classics he kept in his study's glass display cases (“very fine, elegant bound editions”), the Renault with the lace-curtained rear window and the dashboard flower vase.