Outcasts (18 page)
"Sanyi, it's so terrible that Mother isn't here with us."
Suti couldn't answer. He simply hung his head, turned, and walked away so that she couldn't see that he, too, was crying.
He went down to the courtyard and noticed an entire row of gendarmes. They wouldn't let him pass. Then he saw a big crowd of people waiting to be told where and when to leave. Two gendarmes were counting the people. Suddenly, Suti heard: "You pig, you'll be exterminated!"
It was Kovacs, the sergeant, the one who had spoken to Suti's father as if he were a dog. Kovacs was one of the counters. He was hitting somebody at the front of the line with his rifle butt.
Suti couldn't watch anymore. He couldn't believe what was going on. He wondered if these men were capable of killing innocent people.
People were leaving. They were already at his neighbour's house.
They were counting: "Twenty more Jews, 3,478, 3,479, 3,480!"
Suti realized that among them were friends and neighbours - the Ilkovics family. He waved weakly to his friends through tears, then went back to his family's room where he saw Terez Alexander, a girl who had escaped from Slovakia.
Suti turned to his father and said, "Father, it will be our turn soon."
"Not today, son," his father said. "Today only 3,500 are going."
B
Y THE SPRING OF
1944, the entire region of Karpatalja was a closed military zone. At night, the residents could hear the Russian troops getting closer and the relentless bombardment was ominous. Fear of the unknown began to creep into people's hearts and minds.
The creation of the ghetto in the heart of Nagyszollos happened overnight, the military operation unfolding with amazing speed. Although the newspapers reported that the "ghettoization" of the Jewish population was being done "for their own protection," there was a sinister feeling about what was happening. An entire neighbourhood, four streets near the synagogue and the so-called Magyar sor (Hungarian way) was walled off and declared to be an area restricted only to Jews. One-third of the population of the town - some five thousand Jewish residents - were ordered to report to the ghetto, where they were joined by another five thousand Jews from other parts of Ugocsa County. In the ghetto, four or five families were crammed into a single family house - one family to a room, if they were fortunate. The air was saturated with lies and propaganda, and despite telephones being a rarity in Nagyszollos, rumours spread through the community with lightning speed.
Dire warnings were published in newspapers and broadcast on the radio about contact with the Jews. Anyone guilty of aiding, abetting, and/or hiding Jews would be faced with immediate imprisonment and, most likely, death. Any Jews who did not report to the ghetto or resisted the order would face a firing squad.
Entire neighbourhoods became dark and silent and stores were boarded up. The lifeblood of the town's existence appeared to have been sucked out of the community. Because the community had been so entwined, everyone knew someone in the ghetto: neighbours, friends, business partners. Children asked about their missing playmates but were given ambiguous responses about their whereabouts. Those who believed in the prophesies of the Bible saw this as a sure sign of the arrival of the devil's reign of terror.
Those ten thousand or so non-Jewish residents who remained in the town pulled down the awnings and window coverings of their homes and withdrew to life indoors. No one wanted to speculate about the dreadful events taking place around them. They felt they no longer had control over their own fate, let alone the fate of others. Everyone knew that the war was lost. The Nazis were dictating what was happening in their homeland while the Red Terror's artillery was already pounding at the eastern border. Their hometown would soon be part of the front lines. Yet people pretended to go about their daily business as if everything were normal. Anyone who had a friend or someone they knew or cared about in the ghetto, however, realized that life in the community had been irrevocably altered.
The relatively few local members of the Arrow Cross Party in Nagyszollos became brazen. With the Nazis in control of Hungary, the members of this party felt their time had finally come, and their plans to clean the streets of Jewish "scum" could finally be implemented. Solitary acts of defiance were met with brutality. If anyone dared openly criticize them, they were harassed or beaten.
When the Weisz family was forced into the ghetto, it was a turning point for Tibor. He realized that no one could save his fiancée. He blamed himself for his naïveté. Tibor had, until then, believed that Hedy, her father, and the rest of the Weisz family were in a special category because they were employed by Baron Perenyi and they would certainly fall under his protection. After all, Perenyi was a former governor of Karpatalja. But the protection of the Perenyi name evaporated when the order came. Even Karoly Hokky, the member of Parliament for the district and close personal friend of the family, had written countless letters of guarantee for Jewish citizens of the community. He had personally gone to Budapest to intervene on their behalf. All to no avail. Whether they were decorated veterans of the First World War, deemed essential to the war effort, or had converted to Christianity, they were all, in the end, herded off to the ghetto. Letters, guarantees, past contributions, evidence of loyalty ultimately meant nothing.
Tibor realized that he could trust no one to help find a solution to the problem of how to become reunited with his fiancée. Yet he tried to remain analytical in dealing with what seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle. As much as his heart ached, he vowed to solve the problem.
Tibor first had to find a way to communicate with Hedy, to send her messages, to see her. He knew he could rely on the one person still in his employ: Peter, the delivery boy. Crippled by bone disease as a child, Lame Peter, as he was called, moved with great difficulty because one leg was significantly shorter than the other. Tibor had created a bicycle for Peter with a specially designed pedal system and had given him a job as a delivery and messenger boy. The boy and bike became inseparable. Peter became a whole person on that bicycle. He felt he had no handicap, no hindrance when he rode it. Peter knew it was Tibor who had given him a new life and he was eternally grateful to his employer for this. He was constantly pedalling his way through the main thoroughfares, zipping in and around cars and horse-drawn carts. With time, the lame boy on his strangely engineered bicycle had become part of the flow of traffic in Nagyszollos. Tibor realized no one noticed Peter any longer or thought anything of it when they happened to see him.
Tibor drew Peter aside one day and asked him to do a bit of a scouting assignment. But before Tibor even had a chance to explain what the task was, Peter replied, "Yes, sir!" His loyalty to Tibor was unquestioning.
Tibor asked Peter to ride around the entire perimeter of the ghetto three times a day for one week and note the exact area or areas where there was the least traffic flow. He explained to the boy that this assignment was critically important and top secret. Peter went off to complete the assignment with no questions asked. After five days, Peter reported that there was one section of the outside perimeter where he hardly ever saw any pedestrians, cars, or carriages.
Tibor followed Peter to the exact spot and later, at dusk, returned on his motorcycle with a few tools. He loosened two boards in the fence, just enough for one person to slip through, then attached hooks and latches to the boards so that he could take the boards off any time he wanted to and reattach them. To any casual observer on the outer perimeter, the fence appeared to be perfectly intact.
Tibor stayed at the fence all night and watched until dawn to be absolutely sure that what Peter had reported was in fact true. He had to secure the area and be familiar with the chirping of every cricket if this was to become the place for his clandestine meetings with Hedy. When he felt confident that everything was secure, Tibor had Peter take a message to Hedy. Tibor didn't ask Peter how he got through; he only wanted to make sure that his message had been delivered.
Hedy came to meet Tibor that very evening. Tibor was already at the perimeter of the gate when she approached and Hedy simply melted into his arms. She didn't have to say one word about how dreadful it was in there; he could sense it in her silence, feel it in the tenseness of the muscles of her sinuous arms and back. The only thing Tibor could think of saying to her was how much he loved her, how he missed her. When he whispered it softly in her ear, he could feel her arms tighten around his neck. She nodded and quietly cried.
From that night on, Tibor often went to meet Hedy at their secret meeting place. He was always dressed in full military uniform so that if, by chance, someone would happen by and see a uniformed soldier hugging a woman by a fence, no one would think of reporting or questioning it.
In the third week of May 1944, rumours began circulating daily about the fate of the Jews - where they would be going and when. Each time he met Hedy, she told him about another rumoured destination, another embellishment on what their fate would be. One such rumour was that they were going to the westernmost part of the country to work on the estate of Count Esterhazy and could come back home again once it was safe for them to return.
Tibor also began to ask around and found out that trains had been ordered. But what he couldn't find out, no matter whom he contacted, was where the trains would be heading with their human cargo. Then Tibor's reserve unit was ordered to travel to western Hungary, near Gyor, for military exercises. The reservists were scheduled to leave in three days and Tibor was assigned the task of preparing the train for departure. He realized the timing of the departure of the train to western Hungary was ideal for what he had been secretly planning for weeks.
He ordered twelve train cars for the transport and added two supply cars for equipment, foodstuffs, and ammunition. These two cars would be sealed at embarkation and opened only once they arrived at their final destination, somewhere near Gyor. Each afternoon, after closing the office, he went to work on the inside of one of the supply cars, taking with him tools and pieces of lumber. The station master, Berti Mecseri, heard the hammering and saw the supplies being loaded night after night, but he didn't ask any questions.
Tibor researched the guards' schedule at the front entrance to the ghetto, again making use of the skills of his "invisible" bicycle assistant Peter. He discovered that the SS guards left their posts at 6:00 p.m. each day, handing over the watch to the local members of the Hungarian gendarmes and the new recruits of the Arrow Cross militia. Tibor knew two young men who had recently joined the militia - Dezso Horvath and Tamas Kun. Both their fathers still worked for the winery operated by Tibor's family. Horvath and Kun were typical of the young men recruited by the Arrow Cross in the latter years of the war: they were from simple, hard-working families, had little education, and were lured by the promise of a solid job. Tibor knew they were the types to follow orders exactly. He also knew they were paid very little.
Pretending to be on official business as he walked by their post one evening, Tibor nonchalantly invited them to his office for a coffee and brandy after their shift. When Horvath and Kun came by, their eyes lit up as Tibor pulled out an elegant box filled with Cuban, hand-rolled cigars.
By the time Tibor poured the second glass of brandy, he gingerly directed the conversation toward security procedures in the ghetto. Horvath and Kun talked openly about how, and under what conditions, passes were obtained for leaving the ghetto. As they talked, Tibor learned about the confidential details of the police bureaucracy guarding the ghetto.
At the same time, he tried to calculate the exact state of their intoxication. Before he proposed anything, he wanted to make sure they were pleasantly inebriated, but not so much so that they wouldn't remember the conversation.
Making a conscious effort to speak slowly so they would hear and understand each word, he began by telling them that he needed their assistance, that he wanted to enter into a business transaction with them. Both looked at him, unaware of the seriousness of what Tibor was about to request. Tibor launched right into the proposal. He bluntly told them that he would offer each of them fifty
pengo
(about one week's wages) to forge a temporary pass and help spirit a woman out of the ghetto. The two sat in stunned silence. Kun pretended to be indignant as he stopped sucking on the cigar in his mouth.
Before he began to speak, though, Tibor reiterated, "Fifty
pengos
, gentlemen. Think of what your wives could do with one week's wages as a bonus. It will be cash. No one will hear or know about it. No one will question why one Jewish woman is being escorted out of the ghetto by a man in a Hungarian military uniform. You'll just hand her over to my custody." He could see that they were on the hook. "Twenty-five now and twenty-five when she is safely out and you provide me with proof of the destroyed paperwork. I need your firm acceptance of this proposal tonight."
"What woman?" Horvath asked.
Tibor knew then, by the tone of his voice, that they would take the bribe.
"Hedy Weisz. She knows this office inside out, did all of the paperwork before she was taken away. And I need her back!" Tibor instantly regretted the explanation, but it was out. They looked at each other and nodded. They agreed to his terms and told Tibor that the next night, when they were on duty, he could come and collect the Jewish woman. Tibor sent a message to Hedy that he would be coming through the front gate to visit her on the evening of May 26, the next day. As Tibor had instructed, Peter whispered to her, "The boss says to stay calm, Miss Hedy. Everything will be all right."
It was a perfectly still, warm May evening and the full moon shone in the night sky above them. The room where the Weisz family was housed had a direct view of the front entrance of the ghetto. Hedy watched from the window. Compared to the noise level during the day, at ten o'clock at night it was quiet. She could hear Tibor's footsteps on the cobblestone road as he approached. The moon above them lit the night sky; it looked magical. She watched as he approached and saluted the guards, and the guards saluted back. Then he handed over some official-looking papers. Hedy felt as if her legs had turned to jelly.
