Outcasts (6 page)
But it was when Bandi, Aliz, and Hedy were at school and the two little ones had settled down for a nap in the afternoon that she settled down to read the serious articles in the Zionist periodical
Mult es Jovo
(
Past and Future
). From a series published by that periodical, she learned much about the history of the Jews in the region where she lived, who had lived in the Carpathian Basin almost without interruption for over one thousand years. The Jewish population in Hungary was eighty thousand in 1787 and their numbers tripled to 238,000 by 1840. At that time, larger numbers of Jews who were fleeing from pogroms and political instability in what is present day Ukraine and Russia began to arrive in the northeastern part of the Hungarian Kingdom from Galicia, north of the Carpathians.
In 1895, the legal status of the Jews was sealed with the admission of Judaism into the legally recognized religions of Hungary (
recepcio
). The ramifications of this, as Terez learned from her readings, were that the Jews no longer had to be identified as a separate ethnic group. By 1910, their numbers reached nearly one million. More importantly, seventy-five percent of Jews - about 705,000 - declared Hungarian to be their mother tongue. By 1930, fourteen percent of the population in Karpatalja - or 102,500 people - were Jewish. In towns such as Nagyszollos, whose total population was fifteen thousand, the Jewish numbers reached one-third of the population.
Once Terez understood the history, she knew why her family had stayed in Hungary. As far back as she could remember, her family had lived in the Kingdom of Hungary and she could trace her ancestral lineage back to the late 1700s. It was then that landowners were required to register the size of their holdings and her grandfather's brother, Jozsef Leizerovics, was registered as a landowner in the village of Ladmoc in Zemplen County in northern Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her own grandfather, Jakab, had owned and operated a lime kiln (
meszegeto
).
The periodical wrote at length about history and current events, and detailed the shocking reality of life for German Jews who, by 1936, had been stripped of all their economic power. She read how over 250,000 of them had been forced to leave the country, many immigrating to Palestine. Terez had to read and reread the reports on
Kristallnacht
. It seemed incomprehensible to her that 191 synagogues had been destroyed with axes and hammers by incensed mobs.
Mult es Jovo
also published first-hand accounts of the widespread rioting in Palestine and, later, explained how the British commissioned a white paper to set up a quota system limiting Jewish immigration to twelve thousand people per year to appease the Arabs in the British Colonies.
The more she read, the more dread filled her heart as she realized that the political situation in Germany was spilling over into other countries as well. When neighbouring Romania joined Hitler's Germany, the periodical provided the first detailed reports of the terror tactics of the Iron Guard in Romania and the bombing of a Jewish theatre in Timisoara (
Temesvar).
Sometimes Terez became so distraught after reading
Mult es Jovo
that she had to put it away and couldn't pick it up again for days. The stories of what was happening to Jews in other areas filled her with horror at what might happen at home. One evening, as they made their way home after dark, Vilmos and Terez saw two men come stumbling out of a local bar. They were obviously drunk. Still a bit of a distance from them, they overheard one of the men say to the other, "Hey Joska, now that we're feeling no pain, let's go beat up the next person we see."
"Good idea," replied the other.
Terez put her hand on her husband's arm and whispered to him, "Let's go home another way, Vilmos."
"Nonsense," Vilmos responded as he purposefully walked toward the inebriated men. When they approached, Joska stopped for a moment then recognized the couple. He lifted his hat with his hand, put it to his chest in a swooping motion, and said, "
Jo estet Weisz ur!
" ("Good evening, Mr. Weisz!")
Still, her world was safe and the rhythm of their lives continued unchanged. She was determined to teach her children about the wonderful world of books and, before bed, after all the children were changed into their pyjamas and had washed and brushed their hair, Terez read aloud to them. Every evening, she gathered her children around her and read poetry to them with the youngest, Icuka, curled up on her lap. She knew much poetry by heart and recited her favourites, particularly the poetry of her favourite poet, Sandor Petofi.
One evening, as she read Petofi's "
Egy Telem Debrecenben
" ("One of My Winters in Debrecen"), she told the children that Petofi had been poor and talked to them about the misery of poverty and hunger. By the time she finished reading the poem, all the children had tears in their eyes.
"Mother," Bandi asked, turning to his mother, "are we rich?"
"Why do you ask, my son?" Terez asked, surprised by the question.
"Maybe we could send a hundred korona to Petofi," Bandi replied, pleading a little.
Terez was proud of her son, proud of his generous heart, and had to explain to him that Petofi had died a long time ago.
W
HEN
B
ELA
A
YKLER
was three, he wouldn't go to sleep unless his
pesztonka,
his sixteen-year-old babysitter, lay down next to him. He loved the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, and he would wrap his fingers around her plump, blond ringlets and put his face right next to hers until he fell asleep. As the baby of the family, his mother, Karola, doted on him. Little Bela's world was full of fascination and discovery, and his bedroom had shelf upon shelf of children's books he could explore. But very quickly he learned to pass over the stories of gnomes, witches, princesses, and dragons and went directly to the stories of great battles and conflicts. He loved military history from an early age, whether tales of Roman legionnaires or Napoleon's conquests, and dreamt of knights and great battles of valour and glory.
He would plead with his mother to tell and retell the story of one of his great, great, great granduncles who had helped to defend the fortress of Szigetvar against the Turks. Over and over she read to him about the siege that lasted for years and the endless onslaught of fierce, turbaned warriors with black eyes who clashed with the brave Magyar officers and their men defending the fortress. When they ran out of cannonballs, his mother told him, the Magyars poured vats of boiling tar and water on the heads of their enemies. The Turks, in turn, formed a human tourniquet around the fortress and blockaded anyone or anything from getting in or out. Eventually, the defenders ran out of ammunition and were being slowly starved to death. When it became impossible to continue, the warriors who remained inside the fortress made a pact. Instead of waiting for the inevitable surrender or slaughter, they rode out of the fortress in a blaze of glory, knowing they were facing imminent but mercifully quick death.
Tibor Schroeder as a young man.
Bela's brown eyes would open wide as he listened, rapt with emotion, to his mother's story. His ancestor had been one of those brave warriors, a captain who rode out alongside the fortress commander Miklos Zrinyi on that final day. He never grew tired of this tale and knew that, one day, he would follow in the footsteps of his father, grandfather, and great-great-great-granduncle and would become a professional soldier, a great warrior, as many generations of his family had been before him since 1525 in Bavaria.
When he turned six and could read for himself, his favourite stories were of the Wild West - stories by Karl May about Winnetou, the wise Chief of the Apache Tribe, and Old Shatterhand his white blood-brother. By the age of eight, he had begun organizing the neighbourhood boys into elaborate games of cowboys and Indians. Bela always wanted to be an Indian. He made a deliberate decision to be on the side of the underdogs because he identified with them. He felt a great affinity with the side that was outnumbered, outgunned, squeezed out of their native land, and living in a country where they were not welcome because they were part of a different tribe.
When two local bullies, the Balsai boys, pummelled his best friend Istvan Hokky and split his upper lip, Bela vowed revenge. Istvan was skinny, wore glasses, and was often sick with earaches and nosebleeds. Bela, on the other hand, was pudgy and strong, even as a young boy. He was incensed that the two bullies would attack his weak friend and knew in his heart they wouldn't have dared touch Istvan if he had been around.
The Balsai boys often used a path that went through his family's vineyard to get to their summer house. Bela devised an elaborate plan to pay back the bullies. He organized all his friends, luring them over to his house in the afternoons after school to play cowboys and Indians, and waited. On a particularly bright and crisp fall afternoon, the Balsai brothers finally came walking through and were ambushed by a half dozen of Bela's "army" who tied them by the arms to a branch of a tree and left them there with their feet dangling. By the time the overseer, Mihaly bacsi, heard the blood-curdling screams of the captives and came to their rescue, the fire Bela and the gang had set underneath them was already smoking their feet.
Bela wasn't intimidated by the punishment he would receive. The satisfaction of knowing he had evened the score for his friend Istvan made it all worthwhile. They had succeeded in smoking out the enemy by exactly the same methods the Indians utilized on the white men who massacred Indians or encroached on their land. He knew the Balsai boys would never intimidate them again.
Bela lived with his parents, his older brothers, Istvan and Tibor, and older sister, Picke, in a big house on the side of a hill, their vineyards extending in every direction. For Bela, their home was an amazing place and their land was magnificent with its own streams and forest. The property bordered on the ruin of the fourteenth-century Kanko Castle, whose stone foundation and partial remnants were owned by the Perenyi family. Bela considered it his own private haunted fiefdom, where he and his friends, or the "army of liberation" as they liked to call themselves, played in the old ruins and re-enacted the many stories and legends they heard about the place. According to local lore, a famous Franciscan monk was buried there, a priest who had led the charge against the Turks in a place called Nandorfehervar. When he died, his supporters had smuggled his body back here for safe burial. Another local legend claimed that a few renegade Franciscans had once kidnapped a beautiful young Perenyi girl from the baron's estate and held her captive in the castle.
Bela's grandfather and mother ran the winery and he knew from a very early age that growing grapes was a meticulous, time-consuming occupation. At various times of the year there were hundreds of workers who arrived from the surrounding hillside districts to help in the planting, separating, covering up, weeding, and harvesting of the grapes. Young Bela looked up to his tall, distinguished-looking grandfather and would follow him along as he directed the work to be done in the vineyards. He loved the sound of Grandfather's melodious, calm voice as he provided direction and inquired about the progress of the work.
When merchants arrived at the house wanting to buy grapes or wine, Bela knew that if he wanted to stay in the room, he had to be very quiet. He sat patiently, not uttering a word, bewitched by the way his grandfather firmly and quietly negotiated with the purchasers. The most interesting buyers were men who Grandfather called
Ortodox Zsidok
(Orthodox Jews). They had long beards like Bela's father but curly sideburns as well. The Jews not only bought the grapes but insisted on pressing them the old-fashioned way: by foot. Bela always sat close by and watched the rhythm of their movements, listening as they sang their fascinating songs. They would come in threes and the men would roll up their loose pant legs and get into the vat full of grapes. They held on to each other's shoulders and sang in a language that Grandfather said was called Hebrew as they crushed the grapes to make their special kosher wine. Grandfather told Bela that although their religion was different, these Jews were Hungarians and had stayed loyal to Hungary, even after the borders were changed. At Easter time, Jewish women brought freshly baked sheets of
paszka
(matzo) to the house as gifts for his grandfather. Bela loved to bite into the crispy treats.
But Bela only realized how many people loved his grandfather when he passed away. The wake was held at the house and Bela, barely four years old, sat perched at the top of the staircase watching as long rows of neighbours and friends came to pay their respects. It seemed the lines lasted days. When they took the coffin away to the cemetery in a fancy horse-drawn carriage, Bela was allowed to sit in the front with the coachman. The seat was high and he was amazed at how much he could see from above. He felt very important sitting up there, not quite realizing at such a young age what it was all about.
