True Confections (25 page)

Fischer & Czaplinsky, a bakery with an adjoining coffeehouse on Kazinczy Street in the heart of the bustling Jewish Quarter (on the flat, Pest side of the Danube), thrived immediately, and within a couple of years there were five employees working alongside Julius and Péter to keep the customers satisfied with their good strong coffee and all their buttery little cookies and
kiffles
, their
rigó jancsi
, their flakey strudels, and especially their signature
Kürtóskalácsus
, a yeasty sweet dough wound around cylinders that slowly rotated over hot coals until the pastry was browned.

Julius, now a handsome and prosperous citizen of the neighborhood, had become something of a ladies’ man, with a series of girlfriends, each one believing that she would be the one to claim this attractive and slightly melancholy loner, that she would be the one with whom he would want to settle down and raise a family. But sooner or later, each one would discover evidence of a growing indifference combined with hints of a new woman in his life. Each one would withdraw, defeated, with a slightly broken heart, to be replaced by the next one, and the next.

Then Szilvia Weisz came to work in the bakery at Fischer & Czaplinsky. She was a quiet little worker with a refulgent smile and the nimblest fingers when it came to wrapping the dough for the
kürtóskalácsus
, not too loose or it would fall onto the coals, but not too tight or it would crack apart as it sizzled and browned. Something shifted inside of Julius, some corner of his brittle heart began to soften whenever he saw her, but each time he asked her to go out with him, she told him she would not go out with a playboy, no matter how handsome or charming.

For six months she refused his advances until finally, when
he told her he loved her and had not been with another woman in all that time (which was very nearly the truth), she agreed to go to a chamber music concert with him. A few nights later they went to dinner, and shortly after that they were keeping company every evening, and then they were engaged to be married, and then they were married. The Weisz family, all of them hardworking diamond buyers and cutters, welcomed Julius, and made him feel truly part of a family for the first time since he was a child. Soon there was a baby girl, Matild, born in 1937, and after that a boy, Geza, born in early 1939.

The First Jewish Law, restricting to 20 percent the number of Jews who could have certain administrative positions or hold certain kinds of jobs, had been passed in 1938. Ten years before that, the entire extended Fischer family had converted en masse, all twenty-seven of them becoming churchgoing Lutherans at once, and so they did not think these laws applied to them. Two days after Geza was born, the Second Jewish Law reduced the “economic participation” of the Jews of Hungary to 5 percent, and soon after that the business dropped the Czaplinsky name.

Cash payments to certain officials who were friendly with other officials allowed the Fischer family to continue to avoid being named as Jews. While Julius kept working on the bakery side, he was no longer welcome in any Fischer home, and he was asked to refrain from claiming any blood connection to them. Restoring his name to the business was nothing to discuss at this time, perhaps in the future, if peace should ever break out.

More and more Jews were moving from all over the countryside to Pest, and Fischer’s had never been busier. Julius and Péter added as many tables and chairs as they could cram in. Hungary’s right-wing government was allied with Germany, and the quarter million Jews of Budapest, though increasingly constricted by the new rules in their daily lives, continued to go to
work, conduct their business, marry, have babies, and raise their families, believing they were reasonably safe from further losses or restrictions. What more could happen?

S
ZILVIA’S YOUNGER SISTER
, Ágnes, worked as a secretary at a prosperous law firm until she was forced to leave when the Second Jewish Law was passed. Her boss was very sorry to lose such a pleasant and efficient worker. She was really a very beautiful girl, nice to look at every day, and she had such a good knowledge of German and French. He really regretted that she had to go, especially for such a shameful reason (he himself had a Jewish grandmother, but thankfully nobody was aware of this blot on his record). When he encountered a government bureaucrat he had known since childhood when they both went out to smoke cigars during an intermission at the opera, he put in a good word for Ágnes and all of her desirable attributes.

Ágnes, who was fortunately possessed of blonde, wispy hair and dark blue eyes, was soon offered employment in the Budapest central government offices as a correspondence typist-translator, where her German skills were desperately needed. The job was hers provided that she promise to keep her mouth shut about her background.

It was an open secret that the employment laws were enforced haphazardly, though the increasing power of the right-wing Arrow Cross Party was making both the Jews and their sympathizers more paranoiac with every passing day. Szilvia was home with the children and no longer worked at the bakery, but Julius would often come in the door at night with upsetting reports about groups of Arrow Cross Party members swaggering into the coffeehouse and forcing Jewish customers to vacate the tables they wanted. One afternoon Péter quietly took Julius
aside to warn him that he might not be able to keep working at Fischer’s much longer, and it might be safer for them all if he were to try and find something else, for now.

On a hot August night, Ágnes came for dinner with Szilvia and Julius, and after the babies were asleep, she took off her shoe and unfolded some sheets of onionskin paper, illicit extra carbon copies of documents she had translated into Hungarian and typed that afternoon. There was a memo from the Reich Central Security Office in Berlin titled
Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt
. The author of the memo was Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann.

The Madagascar Plan called for the resettlement of all the Jews of Europe on Madagascar, a million a year, over a period of four years. This was so much more desirable and efficient than the piecemeal efforts at deportation of Jews into centralized holding centers as they were flushed out from every city and every town and every village of Europe. No Jews, none at all, would remain in Europe.

The accompanying memo by Franz Rademacher, the recently appointed head of the
Judenreferat III der Abteilung Deutschland
(the Jewish Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), which Ágnes had also translated into Hungarian for distribution among the various government departments, included references to the stopping of construction of the Warsaw Ghetto and deportations of Jews into Poland, which had both been suspended on July 10. The Madagascar Plan would render unnecessary all that effort to transport Jews into Poland for temporary containment.

The Madagascar Plan memo went on to detail cost estimates for coordinating and commissioning sufficient fleets of seaworthy vessels for the massive transportation effort that would be necessary, which depended largely on strategies for using ships
from the British fleet, the imminent availability of which was confidently anticipated. The SS would carry on the Jewish expulsion in Europe, before ultimately governing the Jewish settlement.

Madagascar would only be a Mandate; the Jews living there would not be entitled to German citizenship. Meanwhile, the Jews deported to Madagascar would lose their various European citizenships from the date of deportation. Having all the Jews of Europe residents of the Mandate of Madagascar would prevent the possible establishment by Jews in Palestine of a state of their own. It would also help prevent any opportunity for them to exploit the symbolic importance of Jerusalem. The Madagascar Plan would create a central European bank funded with seized Jewish assets; this money would pay for the evacuation and resettlement of all the Jews, and the bank would also play a permanent role as the only permitted institution for any transaction between the Jews on Madagascar and the outside world. Hermann Göring would oversee the administration of the plan’s economics.

Most significantly, the Jews remaining under German control on Madagascar would function as a useful bargaining chip for the future good behavior of the members of their race in America. The generosity shown by Germany in permitting cultural, economic, administrative, and legal self-administration to the Jews on Madagascar would also be very useful for propaganda purposes. The administration and execution of the Madagascar Plan was assigned to various offices within the Third Reich: Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s office would negotiate the French peace treaty necessary to the handing over of Madagascar to Germany, and it would help design any other treaties required to deal with Europe’s Jews. The Information Department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, along with
Joseph Goebbels in the Propaganda Ministry, would filter all worldwide information about the plan. Viktor Brack of the Führer Chancellory would oversee transportation. There was no mention of any consideration for the native population of Madagascar.

The three of them sat at the table studying the documents until after midnight, talking very little. Finally, Julius crumpled all the pages into a ball on a dinner plate and set them alight with his cigarette.

J
ULIUS LEFT FOR
Madagascar three weeks later, with as many diamonds sewn into the linings of his coat and his best three-piece suit as he could safely carry without attracting attention. Péter had bought him out of the bakery and coffeehouse with cash, less than Julius thought was fair, but more than Péter had any obligation to provide, under the circumstances. Leaving only enough money for Szilvia to buy what she and the babies would need for a few months, all the rest of their savings had been converted to diamonds thanks to Szilvia’s brother, who had gotten the highest possible prices for Szilvia’s jewelry and her great-aunt Lena’s upright piano, though the babies liked to hear Szilvia play it after dinner and Matild had cried when the men came to carry it down the stairs.

Julius promised Szilvia he would get word to her as quickly as he could. He vowed that he would be sending for them just as soon as possible, sooner than she could imagine. They would all be together again, and safe once and for all. Although he could hardly bear to leave his family, he set out, determined to find a way to make a new and better life for Szilvia, Matild, and little Geza. Ágnes, too, and the rest of the Weisz family. And Péter, if he had the sense to raise his hand as a Jew and leave with his
family, early instead of late, rather than live in fear of discovery all the rest of his days in Jew-cleansed Budapest.

Did those stuck-up Fischers think they wouldn’t be found out? With those noses? How much praying on those sturdy Fischer knees in a fashionable Lutheran church would it take to change Aunt Borbála into a gentile from Buda instead of the imperious Jewess from Pest she always had been? Did they really believe they would be able to keep their place in the world that was changing around them?

Julius’s arduous journey to Madagascar took almost six months. It had been surprisingly easy to get a visa for Zanzibar, with the assistance of Ágnes’s supervisor, who gladly swapped a furtive and efficient groping from Ágnes for rubber-stamped traveling papers for Julius that would allow him to cross borders as he worked his way south to the Greek coast. Julius took some trains, but mostly, he walked. From the Greek coast Julius sailed across to Egypt on a barge laden with barrels of olive oil. It was by then January 1941. Working his way down the east coast of Africa, Julius arrived in Madagascar on a freighter from Zanzibar.

O
KAY, ACTUALLY
I have no idea how Julius got from Budapest to Madagascar, or how long it took. I am at the limit of my imaginative ability for reconstructing the most likely scenarios. It doesn’t matter. So let’s just say that when we next see Julius, he has arrived in Madagascar from Zanzibar. It is the middle of March, the height of the hot, rainy season. Picture him in your mind’s eye. We pick up the narrative thread here.

The Malagasy dockworkers think Julius Czaplinsky is a very funny sight indeed as he totters down the gangplank in his woolen three-piece suit, with his greatcoat folded over his arm,
staggering slightly under the weight of his leather suitcase. As Julius traipses around the muddy, rutted lanes of the port town of Mahajanga, having spent most of the past month sweltering insanely in the heat so constantly that he thought he might die of heat suffocation, he finally feels it is safe enough to take off the jacket and vest of his suit and carry them over his arm with his overcoat. At last, he can wear his damp and grimy shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows.

Julius has that Czaplinsky motivation and determination that has become so diluted in Howard. He has arrived in Madagascar to figure out the best claim to stake, and then he plans to stake it hard and deep, ahead of the four million Jews who will soon begin to pour out of ships at every port, each of them hoping (as displaced Jews always do) to find a toehold to start a new life in this alien place.

Julius is here to get established ahead of the competition. Should he buy buildings in towns, begin constructing simple housing on empty lots that he will be able to rent or sell at premium prices? Should he stake a strong position in shipping and import-export in one or more of the port towns? Should he buy arable land for agriculture? Where would it be most desirable for his family to live? In the central mountainous region or along one of the coasts? He has to find his way and think it all through, make the most of his advantage.

The Madagascar Plan had described the possibility of an all-Jewish administrative government that would be overseen by the SS. Perhaps he would qualify for consideration for some official position of authority, should that prove desirable, given his foresight about getting established early, without simply waiting to be one of four million souls rounded up and shipped to this strange island only 644 kilometers off the east coast of Africa, a world away from anything European Jews have ever known.