My Canary Yellow Star (22 page)
Read My Canary Yellow Star Online
Authors: Eva Wiseman
My mother was wrong. Gray, cold water awaited me an hour later. I stood there, naked, shivering, staring at the water for a long moment before stepping into the tub. It was so cold it made me shudder, and I had to close my eyes to shut out the sight of the scum floating on top. After a while, however, I began to enjoy myself. We had no soap, but the water felt cool and refreshing against my skin. I was just rinsing my hair when the first shot came whistling through the door, just missing my head. It was followed in the blink of an eye by a second missile that came even closer. A crater appeared in the wall to my left. There was heavy pounding on the door.
“Let me in! Let me in! Are you all right?” It was Mama. Desperation filled her voice.
“Just a minute!” I climbed out of the tub, dried off quickly, jumped into my clothes, and opened the door.
“Oh, my God! You could have been killed!” Mama hugged me. The noise outside was deafening. Sirens were shrilling, people were screaming.
“We must go down to the bomb shelter immediately,” Mama urged.
Each of us carried a mattress and a pillow down the staircase to the basement. The neighbors were heading in the same direction. The noise outside was growing even louder.
Downstairs, we were able to find enough room to stay together on the cement floor. At least two hundred people were packed like matches in a box in the cold basement. The noise outside didn’t cease for days. Every now and then, a few brave souls made their way upstairs to the various kitchens and collected whatever meager supplies were left. Several women made thin soup and boiled potatoes on the janitor’s ancient stove. But most of the time, we went hungry. In spite of the din outside, however, the crowd was surprisingly full of laughter and high hopes. All of us realized that the heavy mortar attack meant that the Soviet troops couldn’t be far behind, and that they were getting the upper hand. A rumor that the Soviets had surrounded Budapest cheered our hearts. They were calling through megaphones, ordering the Arrow Cross and the Germans to lay down their arms. We greeted the arrival of the New Year with fervent prayers for the war to be over.
“This can’t last much longer,” Ervin said one morning. “I’m going outside to look around.”
“I’ll come with you,” Gabor volunteered.
“Absolutely not!” Mama was vehement. “I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to either one of you after all we’ve suffered. It would kill me. You’ll wait here.”
One look at her determined face convinced the boys to co-operate. For the next two weeks, Ervin and Gabor, like the rest of us, whiled away their time in complete boredom and ever-increasing hope. Early on the morning of January 16, my brother shook me awake. The others were still asleep. I could see the excitement on Ervin’s thin face.
“Listen!” he said. “Just listen!”
I did as I was told. For a minute, I was completely puzzled. I heard nothing, not a sound.
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen!” he insisted.
Suddenly, I realized what he meant. It was so quiet outside that you could have heard a bird chirping. Ervin and I stared at each other, then I jumped out of bed, put on my shoes, and threw Mama’s coat over my clothes. We tumbled up the staircase leading to the front entrance of the building, pushed open the heavy door to the courtyard, and peeked out. A soldier in a dark green uniform and a fur hat with a five-pointed red star on it was opening the iron gate of the front garden. He saw us at the same time as we saw him. He said something in a language we couldn’t understand and pointed his rifle at us.
“The Soviets are here! The war must be over!” Ervin crowed with joy.
He grabbed my hands and we jumped up and down, whooping with happiness. The soldier seemed puzzled. He kept his rifle pointed at us.
“We’re your friends! Welcome!” I told him.
We tried approaching him, but he backed away with a bewildered expression. He didn’t seem to understand me. Nor did he lower his rifle. I pointed to the canary yellow star sewn onto Mama’s coat. I tore the star off, threw it on the ground, and trampled it into the dirty snow with the heel of my shoe. Comprehension dawned on the soldier’s face and he lowered his gun.
We ran up to him. Ervin shook his hand, and I kissed him on the cheek.
T
wo days later, we moved back to Aunt Miriam’s apartment. The couple who had been living there abandoned it and returned to their country home. Although we were happy to be back, the familiar rooms echoed with the laughter and tears of our beloved dead. Mama and Mrs. Grof stood guard by the front windows – waiting and waiting for any of our missing relatives to turn up.
While they maintained their vigil, Ervin, Gabor, and I went to the offices of the International Red Cross, where we found out about the unspeakable horrors of the concentration camps and the martyrdom of millions of Jewish men, women, and children. We scanned the lists of camp survivors, but none of the names we hoped to find ever appeared.
Mama and Mrs. Grof did not give up. They never left their post by the windows – day after day, week after week, month after month. But no one they were waiting for ever turned the corner of our street. After a long, long time, even these two desperate women stopped waiting.
Life went on. We even learned how to be happy again, but nothing was ever the same as before.
To save one life is as if you have saved the world.
– The Talmud
T
here really was a Swedish diplomat called Raoul Wallenberg, and he was a true hero. Wallenberg saved the world over and over again, rescuing 100,000 Jewish men, women, and children during the six months that he spent in Budapest, Hungary, during the Holocaust. Many of the Hungarian Jews who owed their lives to Wallenberg’s courage and goodness were young people like Marta, Ervin, and Gabor in My Canary Yellow Star.
By the time Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944, the Hungarian countryside had been emptied of its Jewish inhabitants. More than 430,000 Jews had already been deported to concentration camps like Auschwitz in
Poland, most of them never to return. However, another 230,000 Jews still remained in Budapest. Wallenberg saved the lives of thousands of these people by issuing them Schutz-Passes, Swedish protective passports. He also sheltered more than 20,000 Jews in the International Ghetto in Swedish-protected safe houses and saved the lives of many more by pulling them off the trains that were waiting to transport them to death camps in Poland and Germany. Through skilled diplomacy, Wallenberg prevented the Germans and the Arrow Cross from massacring the 70,000 Jewish inhabitants of the large Budapest Ghetto at the end of the war, and from dynamiting the Ghetto itself.
On January 17, 1945, the day Pest was liberated by the Soviets, Wallenberg, his driver, and a Soviet guard left for the town of Debrecen, where the Soviet headquarters were located. Wallenberg wanted to present his plans for relief work in war-ravaged Hungary and for the restoration of stolen Jewish property. He never returned from this trip. He seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.
For many, many years, people believed that Wallenberg was still alive in the terrible prisons of the former Soviet Union. Others insisted that he was shot at the infamous Lubyanka prison soon after the end of the war. None of the rumors was ever substantiated. In late 2000, the Russians did admit that they had suspected Wallenberg of being an American spy and had wrongfully imprisoned him. But they stopped short of fully explaining what had happened
to him. In January 2001, a joint Russian-Swedish committee released a report that reached no definitive conclusion about Wallenberg’s fate. The Russians returned to a long-held claim that he had died of a heart attack in prison in 1947. He would have been thirty-five. The Swedish officials, on the other hand, maintained that it is still unclear if Wallenberg is dead or alive. Only one thing is certain: Raoul Wallenberg, a beacon of decency in a most indecent world, was never heard from again.
Raoul Wallenberg
| bar mitzvah | a religious ceremony for Jewish boys when they reach thirteen |
| cantor | a person who chants and leads the prayers in a synagogue |
| chala | a bread made with eggs, traditionally eaten on Shabbos |
| cholent | a traditional Jewish Shabbos dish usually made with meat and vegetables and allowed to cook overnight |
| menorah | a candelabrum with eight branches used during Hanukah |
| nokedli | Hungarian dumplings |
| Rosh Hashanah | the Jewish New Year |
| Shabbos | the Jewish Sabbath, or day of rest and religious observance |
| Shema | a Jewish declaration of faith used as an important prayer |
| tallis (p1. tallisim) | a prayer shawl |
| Torah | the first five books of the Bible; also called the Pentateuch |
| yarmulke | a skullcap worn by Jewish men |
| Yom Kippur | a sacred Jewish holy day marked by fasting and prayers of repentance; falls eight days after Rosh Hashanah |
Copyright © 2001 by Eva Wiseman
Published in Canada by Tundra Books,
75 Sherbourne Street, Toronto, Ontario M5A 2P9
Published in the United States by
Tundra Books of Northern New York,
P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901
Library of Congress Control Number: 2001086828
All rights reserved. The use of any part of the publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wiseman, Eva, [date]
My canary yellow star
eISBN: 978-1-77049-053-6
I. Title.
PS8595.114M9 2001 jC813.54 C2001-930266-5
PZ7.W57MY 2001
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
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