Dragons & Butterflies: Sentenced to Die, Choosing to Live (2 page)

After a stop in the Belgian Congo, where they changed planes, they touched down at Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg. From there they caught a bus to Vanderbijlpark, an industrial city south of Johannesburg.

It was Christmas Eve.

To begin with, Katalin and Fritz stayed with fellow Hungarian immigrants. Then they made their way to the prosperous gold-mining town of Slurry, 260km west of Johannesburg, in what is now North West, where the young Fritz got a job in a cement factory. But they did not stay there long. Within a year the family moved to nearby Mafeking (now Mahikeng). In the years that followed, the family was to relocate several times from one dull town to the next, but they adjusted relatively easily in a country of diverse ethnicity.

In 1957 Katalin and Fritz were blessed with a beautiful baby girl, Joan Barbara, my sister, a first-generation South African.

My own story begins early in 1959, when my parents were still living in Mafeking. Katalin, now a young housewife, loved to sing and dance. Oblivious to the tiny heart that was already beating in her womb, one morning, as she went about her chores, bobbing her head and moving her hips to ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ crackling out of the speakers of an old record player, she found herself facing a dilemma.

Fritz had begun to drink excessively, and the rages and physical violence that went with his drinking, and of which she bore the brunt, were taking their toll on her. She wasn’t sure how much more she could take. When she looked in the mirror on the wall at the entrance to their living room, she still saw a woman of unassuming beauty. She was aware of how men gazed at her wherever she went and that other women were envious of her looks. Today, as she paused in her housework and caught sight of her reflection, she gently touched her cheekbone where a slight discoloration of the skin had begun to appear. Her eyes welled with tears. How much more humiliation could she endure? How much more physical abuse could she cope with when Fritz was drunk and became violent?

Although Katalin had threatened to leave Fritz many times, until that day she hadn’t had it in her heart to actually pack up and go. When he broke down, as he routinely did afterwards, and begged for her forgiveness, promising never to raise his hand to her again, she always forgave him, but always against her better judgement. No more, she vowed, as she looked into her eyes reflected in the mirror. This time would be the last.

For a while, the situation at home seemed to improve, and, when they did fight, the make-up sex with Fritz was more passionate than before. She believed that her husband was genuinely making an effort, and it helped that he was trying to limit his drinking to weekends only.

And then Katalin discovered she was pregnant – with me.

The last thing she needed in her life was another child, especially in such a rocky home environment, but she was firmly opposed to abortion. In her culture it was considered the greatest of blessings to have as many children as possible, and so she began to come round to the prospect of a third child, and hopefully a boy this time – a son for Fritz.

On 14 October 1959, as the sun began to set, Katalin lay resting in the hospital ward where she was soon to give birth. She placed her hands softly on her swollen belly. Startled by the sudden rustling of tree branches scratching against the windows, she looked outside. The leaves moved about in a gusty wind and the sky on the distant horizon was a deep sullen grey. Perhaps there would be a storm that night.

Csodalatos latvany
, she thought wistfully, what an awesome sight, as the waning rays of the sun filtered through her window, casting a pattern of shadows on the walls and accentuating shades of glowing vermilion. Suddenly there was a blinding lightning flash, followed by a series of deafening rolls of thunder.

She watched, mesmerised by the kaleidoscopic display outside and the crashing and rumbling of thunder echoing over the low hills. Nature was putting on a dramatic display for her new arrival. It must be a boy, she thought. At the precise moment that the heavens parted and torrents of rain sheeted down, my mother’s own waters broke and she went into labour. Eight hours later, I gulped my first breath of life. With the snipping of the umbilical cord, the moment when we are no longer an extension of our mothers but a separate entity, Alexander Shani Krebs gave a high-pitched cry. Perhaps if I had had an idea of the wretched childhood that awaited me, I might very well have wormed my way back into my mother’s womb. But there was no going back for me!

The most intimate of human relationships is that between a child and a parent, and the most impressionable time is the years between birth and cognitive emotional response, although we do not consciously remember this period. We know that these early stages of a child’s development begin to form and mould the fundamental aspects of those intrinsic behaviour patterns that we will carry through to adulthood. In fact, this goes even further back – to when we are still in the womb. This could very well have been the time when my later problems originated, but they were all still ahead of me on that wild and stormy night.

During my mother’s pregnancy, Fritz had unfortunately returned to his old antics. He seemed to be forever drunk, and on many occasions would stay out all night, returning the next morning with the fragrance of another woman’s perfume lingering on his skin. My parents were constantly at each other’s throats, screaming and shouting. I am surprised I wasn’t born with a hearing impediment because of the brutal, unthinking way my father treated Katalin during her pregnancy. So much for my mother’s wishful thinking; instead of her pregnancy being a portent of better things to come, there must have been times when she thought I was more of a curse than a blessing.

One night, when I was a mere infant, my father, intoxicated of course, attacked my mother with a milk bottle. While she was attempting to wrestle it from his hand, the bottle slipped and crashed to the floor, shattering into razor-sharp pieces. In her frenzy to escape, Katalin accidentally stood on a jagged shard, which deeply lacerated the sole of her bare foot. Instinctively she pulled the glass from the soft tissue in which it had lodged and, limping painfully, with blood spurting from the wound, she scooped up my sister in one arm, plucked me out of my cot with the other, darted out of the house, and ran to our neighbours.

Our neighbours were typical, middle-class, church-going Afrikaners. Shocked by the state of my injured, frightened mother, they rushed her to the hospital. When she returned home, Katalin arrived with a police escort because she believed that her life and those of her children were in danger.

My father was arrested and charged, and divorce proceedings soon commenced. By the time I was a year old, Katalin and Fritz were officially divorced.

Marika, my half-sister, had eloped at the age of 16, at around the time I was born, and married a Hungarian guy, Bela Gurics. By the time of the divorce, she was already long gone.

Being an immigrant and now a single parent with two kids in a foreign country wasn’t exactly the life my mother had envisaged for herself when she escaped from Hungary. Even after the divorce my father wasn’t a very responsible person; he was always either late with his maintenance payments or else he couldn’t pay the amount agreed upon for one reason or another. Providing for her children was beginning to prove an almost impossible task for Katalin, but she was still young and beautiful, and, as fate would have it, it wasn’t too long or very surprising before she surrendered to the beguiling charms of another ultra-egotistical Hungarian man. Janos Horvath was ten years Katalin’s junior and a contemptible charmer who turned out to be nothing more than an ill-mannered peasant.

Perhaps it was love at first sight, but they married before they really got to know each other properly. We all moved into Janos’s house in Orkney, a mining town run by the Vaal Reefs gold-mining group.

Because I was so young when my mother remarried, I actually thought that Janos was my real father, and so I grew up calling him ‘Dad’. As the years went by, though, it became apparent that my stepfather was even more psychotic than my biological father.

In those early years, life at home was pretty much ‘normal’, probably not very different to the modest stereotypical families we were friendly with. Normal, that is, except that Joan and I had an abusive stepfather along with a mother who, coming from a family of Hungarian bureaucrats, was an obstinate disciplinarian and who firmly believed that the opinions of children counted for nothing. Joan and I were severely chastised for the slightest transgression. My parents were sticklers for discipline and never hesitated to inflict as much physical pain as they thought was appropriate for whatever they perceived as a wrongdoing. We were only too aware of the repercussions if we neglected to meet the standards set by our parents. But, besides the authoritarian conditions we had to endure, we were nevertheless content and healthy, and we never went hungry. My mom was an excellent cook and she prepared lavish traditional Hungarian dishes for the family.

Unlike other families, we didn’t employ domestic helpers and so, as soon as we were old enough, my sister and I were required to help with the chores around the house. We became domesticated. Personal hygiene was of particular importance to my mother and was vigorously administered. I often found myself subjected to one of her severe scrubbing sessions, and as a result I hated taking a bath. She would go to work on me with one of those huge brushes whose bristles were so hard they left scratch marks on your skin.

At the time I was too young to understand this, but my mother was a woman of exceptional faith, who had secretly embarked on a spiritual path of her own. Although as children we were well acquainted with stories from both the Old and New Testaments, we had a limited knowledge of other faiths outside of Christianity. Religion, in the traditional sense of worship and adherence, was never practised in our home but was rather enforced by the more fundamental principles of what was morally right or unethical and wrong, as set down in the Ten Commandments.

Although Katalin might to outsiders have appeared to be complacent and happy, she was strict in her ways. Beneath what she allowed to appear on the surface there lurked a deeply sad soul. Every year, in the private confines of her bedroom, my mother would light candles, cover her head with a shawl and pray. Although I was intrigued by this ritual, I was too preoccupied with being a child to give it much thought, and I couldn’t really have been bothered with what I saw as one of my mother’s eccentricities. Nor did she offer any explanation. It was only years later that I learnt my mother was lighting a Yahrzeit candle in memory of her dearly loved family, who had all perished at the hands of the Nazis in Budapest during 1944.

My memories of my early years are patchy. Although I couldn’t have known it at the time, it became evident that I was ‘different’ and destined not to have a normal life. I do recall suffering from terrible nightmares, when I would wake up crying hysterically to the point of being inconsolable. I developed an intense fear of the dark and had acute claustrophobia. In addition, I was already showing symptoms of the insomnia that would be a problem for me all my life. My sister Joan, whom we called Babi, was quite the opposite: she was a sleepwalker and an adventurous little girl who, besides often roaming around the house in her sleep, was on occasion found strolling in the streets at all hours of the night – fast asleep.

One memory that does still live with me, vividly so, is of an incident that occurred when I was about four years old. I must have just started primary school. My stepfather Janos had transformed the back yard of the property we lived on into a regular animal kingdom. We had chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, turkeys and even a couple of pigs, with their squealing piglets running around. His pride and joy, however, were his racing pigeons.

I was given the task of tending to his birds. This primarily entailed ensuring that they had water and cleaning their cages, and also making sure that the gate leading into their enclosure was bolted at all times. Janos himself took care of feeding them. I guess this had something to do with the master bonding with his birds.

One afternoon, our neighbour’s cat managed to get over the 2m-high wall that separated our properties and somehow worked the bolt on the pigeons’ cage free from the latch. The cat then proceeded methodically to devour a couple of Janos’s most prized birds.

Janos routinely checked all the animals just before dusk.

I was peacefully sorting through my silkworm boxes in my room when I heard Janos repeatedly shouting my name. At first I pretended not to hear him, but when my mother told me that my father required my attention I had no choice. I couldn’t fathom what on earth Janos was going on about, as I generally fulfilled all my duties as he instructed. But there was no mistaking from his furious tone, firstly, that something was seriously wrong and, secondly, that I was in trouble. I was frightened, but I reluctantly went to find him.

I walked through the kitchen and out the back door. I passed beneath the mulberry tree where our two German shepherds were stretched out in the late afternoon sunshine. For a moment I wished I could have traded places with one of them. They looked at me soulfully, almost as if they understood what was about to happen. It couldn’t have been for more than a few seconds that I allowed my mind to drift. I was just standing there, gazing up at the sky, when Janos’s shriek startled me back into reality.

Trembling, I hesitantly approached him. He yelled all sorts of profanities at me in Hungarian – even now I would be embarrassed to repeat them. Next, in a single motion, he grabbed me by my collar, lifted me into the air, and proceeded to shove my face against the fence, pointing with his free hand at the dismembered bodies of the dead pigeons, the remains of which were scattered over the floor of the cage. He accused me of negligence and even threatened to kill me. In his anger he had tightened his grip around my throat and I could feel myself choking and then beginning to black out. All of a sudden, he hurled me to the ground. The next thing I knew I was being punched and kicked repeatedly, and then Janos was beating me with a wooden plank. Half-unconscious, I could hear our dogs barking like crazy. If they hadn’t been chained to their kennels, I think they would have ripped Janos to pieces. Those dogs were my best and only friends.