My Jewish Budapest
by George Szirtes · 11/01/06
But that was the third, so-far-unmentioned part of my parents’ identikit. Socialism. My father actually worked in one of the ministries, but my mother, or so I later understood from him, was to the left of him. She did not complain of shortages or repressive regimes. She was more ideologically driven, more passionate about such things than he, the leader of one of the twelve departments in the Ministry of Building. How ironic then that he should be a member of the Party when she was not. Because they had not let her in. Her Transylvanian family was middle class and so she was ranked, not as a class enemy, but as a class alien. My father, on the other hand, rose from the ranks of working-class and lower-middle-class Budapest. He was a reliable member, albeit a Jew, in a department, that, it later turned out, employed a number of other Jews.
Middle class and Transylvanian. Transylvania now belonged to Romania, and had done since 1919, with a brief break during the war when my mother, at the age of sixteen, came up to Budapest all by herself, to train as a photographer with one of the leading photographers of the time, Károly Escher. After the war, Transylvania reverted to Romania, so her family was abroad again. That, surely, was why they were never part of the reckoning, hardly ever mentioned. Once upon a time, so the story slowly filtered and clarified and set into a kind of acceptable shape, there was a pretty mother and a handsome father in the city of Kolozsvár, now renamed Cluj. Mother’s relatives were magistrates and such, father’s had some kind of sweet factory. Kolozsvár was a major cultural center and university town, a very Hungarian urbs in broadly Romanian rus. In this city lived the family that also included the most beautiful, intelligent and brave boy in the world, my mother’s elder brother, who, tragically, could not bear her and continually rejected her. There had been difficult times in the great recession after 1929, but on the whole it was a happy family, until my mother, the pretty little creature in the photographs, fell desperately ill at the age of fourteen and was confined to the house for over a year, a house from whose balcony she could see the municipal park with its open-air skating rink, where friends would wave at her. (I have since seen the park and the dried-up pond that would have been the skating rink).
But how did the story go on? Did it stop with them being abroad and out of contact? No, it eventually turned out: The fact was that they were dead, every last one of them, as were their own extended families and friends and, quite possibly, everyone they had ever known. All dead. Is this what happened to the Lutherans of Transylvania?
That’s enough story for tonight, children, she said as she kissed them goodnight.
BUT BACK TO the science and general-knowledge magazine. I was a voracious reader in those early years and I read the articles in it and studied the brown diagrams and photographs. There was an article there with a terrifying picture of people in white hoods, carrying burning crosses. They were the Ku Klux Klan and they were in distant, fascist, wicked America. They were in the business of hating and killing blacks but would be happy to extend the same treatment to Jews. I was scared. The reason I was scared is that I understood that we were dangerously close to being identified as Jews.
I did the math of all the family I actually knew or knew of. There was my father to begin with, and his two kindly, aged, aunts who were often with us, who were both clearly Jews and religious ones at that; and there was my father’s mother and his sister, both of whom were deeply hated by my mother for reasons that were to become relatively clear far later. They were Jews too. That is five to one in favor of Jews, if you did not include us, six if we did include my father’s father who had died at Auschwitz. That seemed a rather overwhelming majority.
And so we were soothed and distracted and pressurized and loved more, I imagine, than were the majority of children; with a passionate, almost-intolerable intensity by my Lutheran mother and with a busy, tired tenderness by my father, the Jew.
I did not know that Jewish Budapest was going on in disguise, or semi-disguise, that the prisons still held many who would happily have murdered us. I didn’t know that my father had changed his Germanic (hence Jewish-sounding) surname from Schwartz to the more Hungarian Szirtes. Nor did I know that all four leading political figures in the worst and most repressive Stalinist days of the early fifties were Moscow-trained Jews with Hungaricized names. I forget which Soviet leader –it might have been Khruschev or Molotov–told Rákosi, the dictator from 1949-1954, that the Hungarians had never had a Jewish king and that he would not be the first.
I did not know that the very district in which we lived–the seventh–had been the ghetto into which most Budapest Jews had been driven, and that the great synagogue on Dohány utca, a few blocks away by the ring road, was the collecting point and administration center for the disposition of Jews. I did not know that my father’s mother and sister had survived by living in “safe houses’” provided by the Swede, Raul Wallenberg, and that my mother had been taken from there in the course of a sudden raid by the Arrow Cross militia, whose habit it had become to pick up stray Jews, line them up by the Danube and shoot them down. I didn’t know that Imre Kertész, who is some eighteen-years older than me and who was to win the Nobel Prize with his account of being removed to Auschwitz, probably lived a few streets away, in a family that was also keeping its head down, being good Hungarian citizens, being secular, all to no avail.
