Outcasts (2 page)
"Listen, you know the minister of housing? Her mother is from Nagyszollos. She asked me a lot of questions that I simply don't know the answer to. I need you to chat with her. She seems to know a lot about the place."
After introducing them, Bela left again to organize the seating. The banquet hall had almost completely filled up by then and it was time to introduce the minister. It couldn't have been more than ten minutes since Bela left them, but when he returned to the reception area he found Minister Hosek and Picke with their arms around each other. Bela was shocked to see that the minister's lovely, composed white face had turned beet red. Tears were rolling down her face.
What the hell has she said to the minister in such a short time to make her cry? Bela thought. They had to begin the formalities of the evening, the greetings and speeches, and now the minister was upset.
As soon as he had a chance, Bela pulled his sister aside. "What happened?"
"The minister is Hedy's daughter," she began.
Bela stared at his sister. There was only one Hedy he could think of. Their older brother, Tibor, had been passionately in love with a Hedy Weisz and had talked about her incessantly after the war.
"Isn't it unbelievable?" Picke continued. "She didn't know he was our brother but started telling me all kinds of stories about him. As soon as she said the name âTibor Schroeder,' we both started crying." Bela and Picke's mother had been married twice so they had a different last name than Tibor. "Hedy lives in New York and still remembers him fondly. Chaviva said she will bring us together." She stopped for a moment, lost in thought. "It's such a shame Tibor never lived to see this day."
T
HIS LOVE STORY THAT
happened so long ago in such a faraway place called Nagyszollos has always fascinated me. It has taken me years to discover all the pieces of the story.
Nagyszollos is part of a region known as Karpatalja, a key geographic area bordering Hungary to the southwest, Slovakia to the west, Ukraine to the northeast, Poland to the northwest, and Romania to the southeast. Since the First World War, it has been claimed by six different countries.
Until the First World War, Karpatalja was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The region was a place of acceptance, absorbing tens of thousands of immigrants from east and west. Jews came from the east escaping pogroms, and Germans, Hungarians, even Britons, came from the west to work as engineers in mines or teachers in the schools, or to buy relatively inexpensive lands. Whether they came from elsewhere or were among the ethnic groups who had already been working there for centuries, like the Rusyns, Hungarians, and Slavs, the people who lived there gained the respect of their neighbours and were welcomed to build their life there if they worked diligently.
Maybe because it is located geographically at the meeting place of the Hungarian Plains and the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, or, possibly, because it was a point of conjunction for so many ethnic groups and religions, the area became very fertile ground for writers, poets, legends, and unbelievable happenings.
My mother, too, was born in Nagyszollos; my grandfather, a senator in the Czech Parliament, represented the region during the interwar period. As a child, I heard interesting, quirky, unbelievable stories of the place and, in my mind, Nagyszollos became a magical land of undulating, bountiful hills full of apple and peach trees and fields of vineyards - a place of majesty and mystery. There was a real baron who lived in a castle in the town. The children I grew up with only read about barons and lords in their fairy-tale books, but I knew of a real baron. He was named Perenyi and he lived in Nagyszollos. My grandparents often visited him and his family. I envisioned his castle, and heard about how our relatives went there each Sunday after church for visits and went horseback riding on the expansive grounds. In my imagination, I created a magnificent film about the place.
The region was famous for its viticulture. My grandmother's family owned forty-five acres of vineyards and dozens of acres of fruit orchards. By the time I heard about the privileged life of my mother's family, however, the vineyards, lands, and the elegant family home were just a memory. My family lived in a wood-framed, two-storey house in a low income neighbourhood of Cleveland, Ohio, where my parents rented out rooms on the second floor. My grandmother, the senator's wife, struggled to help support the family by working as a seamstress in a bridal shop. In addition to my sisters and me, my mother babysat other children as well to earn extra income while my father toiled at two shift jobs in different factories. He had a Ph.D. in law, but the degree was of little use in America. As he travelled from one job to the other, he studied the dog-eared English dictionary he carried with him, picking up English phrases while riding on the bus. During those early years, we hardly ever saw him.
We grew up realizing there was no easy road to success in the New World, but stories of the Old World still haunted my dreams.
At the end of the Second World War, Karpatalja was annexed by the Soviet empire and became a closed region where the Soviet troops and tanks were stationed during the height of the Cold War. Even if one was able to obtain a visa to fly to Moscow or Kiev, one still could not travel to the region without special government permission. Then, even if you acquired the right credentials, you would still be assigned a guide from the Ministry of Information to travel with you. Possibly, the fact that this region had been hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world for so many years added to its mystique. Only after 1989, when
glasnost
descended on the region, did it finally became possible to cross into Ukraine from Hungary and visit - if you were willing to wait seemingly endless hours at the border.
I visited Karpatalja and Nagyszollos for the first time in 1993. Married for the second time to a man whose family also came from this part of the world, I desperately wanted to see the place that had absorbed so much of my imagination as a child. The visit, when it finally took place, was incredibly disappointing.
By the time we crossed the border into Ukraine, darkness had fallen like a thick wool blanket. Streetlights, even on the main roads, were not working. The neglected roads were full of potholes and difficult to navigate and there were no hotels or restaurants to be seen. We found our way to a nearby village where the president of a local community organization offered us a humble dinner and a place to stay. We were grateful for the respite, although the Russian cognac our host offered us smelled a bit like rusty water. It was an inauspicious beginning to the trip.
The next day the sun was shining as we drove into Nagyszollos, but the disappointment I had felt the day before simply hung over me like an enormous fog as I stared at the Perenyi Castle of my dreams. The white-washed paint was peeling, the roof had been crudely patched, and the manor house stood silent and naked against the elements.
We approached the once-elegant home my husband was born in, but the two-storey house stood like a brick skeleton, stripped even of its window frames. We discovered that, during the communist era, it had been used as a private club for communist henchmen, a brothel, and later a restaurant. The family had never sold it or signed the ownership over to anyone, so the local government hadn't known what to do with it, considering that the former owners could come back at any time to claim what was theirs. They allowed local hooligans to smash it apart, brick by brick, and carry away what they could. In front of the expansive property, goats munched on grass where flowering plants and vineyards had once grown.
The gate enclosure was locked in front of my grandmother's ancestral home, and the main entrance to the house was on the side, away from the dusty streets. I gazed through the wrought-iron fence and tried to imagine what it might have looked like once. The courtyard was still the same, but the fertile garden, about which my grandmother had talked so much, was completely destroyed. Before our trip, my grandmother had reminded me to look for the enormous evergreen, lilac, and magnolia trees in the garden behind the house. I knew I wouldn't have the heart to tell her that the property had been subdivided in the back, a row of little ramshackle houses standing where the garden had once been.
A simply dressed, elderly man came by to ask us what we were looking at. When he spoke, I noticed he hardly had any teeth. I told him my family had once lived here. He stared at me sadly and walked away.
The entire town felt gritty with dirt, but there were some hopeful signs of reconstruction. The massive, Gothic, Roman Catholic church, constructed in the fourteenth century, was being slowly cleaned, the years of grime painted over. When the Russian troops descended on the region, their commanders had nailed the front door shut and used the side entrances, first as a horse livery and then as the local garbage dump. They had cut a hole in the roof to let the stench out and allow the rain, snow, and sleet in.
When we left the town after a few hours of looking around, my husband joked bitterly, "Well, darling, I hope you agree we've been here twice - the first and the last time."
A
FTER THAT VISIT
, I tried to shut the place out of my mind and could never have imagined writing this story until I met Chaviva Hosek's uncle, Sandor Weisz. He had also been born there and, through his eyes, I learned once again to appreciate the incredibly interesting lives and relationships that had unfolded there.
In March 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and Adolf Eichmann himself moved to Budapest to supervise the "Final Solution." By April, the ten thousand Jews of Ugocsa County had been placed in a ghetto in Nagyszollos. Between May and June, some 100,000 Karpataljan Jews were deported to the death camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sandor Weisz, his sisters, and his father were among them. Most never returned.
Sandor Weisz went to Palestine after being liberated from Mauthausen in the spring of 1945, determined to leave the damn continent of Europe behind him forever. He denied his Hungarian past, refusing to utter a single word in Hungarian for over thirty years. It was too painful. His family were Hungarian Jews, immersed in the Hungarian language and culture, who had been living in Hungary since the 1700s. He became a Zionist and changed his name to Yitzhak Livnat.
But, in the mid-1970s, Yitzhak Livnat grew tired of denial, tired of rejecting his past, his mother tongue, the culture, and the world he was raised in. Today, Yitzhak Livnat, known by his childhood nickname of Suti, spends his time scouring the village records and archives of the towns where his ancestors once lived, pulling together the fragments of his own and his family's past, documenting their lives and coming to terms with what happened to them over sixty years ago.
While I had heard and read much about the Holocaust, hearing about and experiencing the story of this one family changed my outlook forever. The saga of their suffering is overwhelming.
I also found out, bit by bit, the details of a mysterious love affair between a Christian man, Tibor Schroeder, and a Jewish girl, Hedy Weisz, who fell in love at a time when such a relationship was against the law, defined as a "defamation of race." This love affair and the time in which it occurred are the core of this book.
The Schroeder-Aykler residence on the hill overlooking Nagyszollos.
Since delving into their history, I have come to appreciate how unusual this story is and what an enormous amount of courage it took for Tibor to try to save Hedy. The story, I think, is unprecedented.
While many stories have been told about how individuals survived the Holocaust, this story is very different. It is the story of the human interconnectedness of two individuals from very different backgrounds, their love for each other, and their vow to stay true to one another despite what human conventions or historical situations demanded of them. It is the story of tremendous courage and passion, the enduring nature of hope, and belief in the goodness of the human heart.
All the events are true.
Tibor passed away in January 1982 but left detailed documentation, letters, and diaries of his life. I am indebted to my now-deceased mother-in-law, Karola Aykler - Tibor, Bela, and Picke's mother - who wrote extensive diaries of her early life in Nagyszollos, where this story begins.
This book is their story, a tribute and a legacy to them.
A
S THE HORSE-DRAWN
carriage pulled up to the construction site that would soon be their new family home, Karola realized she had never felt such happiness, such pure contentment, before in her life. Karola's first marriage had disintegrated, leaving her alone with two sons, but she was recently remarried and pregnant again. This house symbolized a new beginning, a fresh start for all of them. She stepped out of the carriage, very elegant in her beige wool coat, her long brown hair pinned up under a matching hat. She adjusted her cashmere scarf more snugly around her neck and pulled on her gloves. It was February and, in this region surrounded by the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, the winter cold crept into one's bones. Karola gazed out at the land owned by her family and the vineyards that stretched as far as the eye could see up the hill and beyond. The vineyards in this area were renowned for producing particularly good wine because of the rich volcanic soil on the terraced hillsides. Her father had amalgamated all their properties to build this dream house and she was amazed at how the massive structure that would soon be an integral part of their lives became more remarkable, more a distinct entity each time they visited. The two storeys were already under roof now and carpenters were busy laying the oak parquet floors onto the unfinished concrete.
