In the Darkroom (21 page)

Even his pets are Hungarian, I thought, as I followed Szekely, a retired trauma surgeon and anesthesiologist, down the hall and into the dining room of his gracious home in Lake Oswego, with views of Mount Hood and Mount Adams. His two big kuvasz dogs, members of an ancient breed said to have accompanied the Magyars on their conquest of the Carpathian Basin, lumbered after us. “We were just in Budapest,” Otto told me as his wife, Margaret, an OR nurse, laid out a sumptuous dinner, a traditional Magyar repast that began with cherry soup and concluded, six courses later, with palacsinta (thin pancakes rolled in fruit jam and dusted with confectioners' sugar). “We visited your father.”

“When?” I asked. In early May, he said.

Geranium-planting season. “Wasn't he … out of the country?”

“He said he was leaving, I think it was the very next day. He was going to”—Otto struggled to recall the name—“Malaysia?” He found it an odd destination for a vacation. I didn't say anything. If my father hadn't told her classmate about the operation, it didn't seem my place to inform him.

While Margaret served the chicken paprikas, Otto went to a sideboard and retrieved some pictures from their trip to Budapest. In the first one, my father is standing in front of the house in the Buda Hills. As Otto handed it to me, he exchanged a glance with Margaret. “We have a name for that house,” he said. “Kafka's Castle.” In the next picture, the Szekelys are posed next to an elaborate luncheon spread my father has prepared: herring rolls, goose pâté, sausage and shrimp on openfaced sandwiches. My father's fondness for Danish smorgasbord dated to his years in Copenhagen six decades earlier. The last shot captured my father in his new basement workshop, beside his old Black & Decker saw, wearing khaki trousers and a man's dress shirt and tie. His face is unusually soft and round, with a glossy sheen. He had been taking female hormones for months.

Otto could summon few specifics about my father's years at the Zsidó Gimnázium, other than that István was “small, like me,” not athletic, and not very communicative. My teenage father had managed, Otto recalled, to communicate one thing: that the Friedman family “came from wealth” and “owned real estate.” Otto gave me the names of a few other classmates who might remember more, but when I called them, their memories were as sparse. Jaacov Steiner, an audiology professor in Tel Aviv, knew the most: he and my father had attended the same schools since they were six years old. “My best friend in the class,” my father had described Jaacov to me, though when I asked why, she couldn't come up with anything more than “he was nice to me.” Jaacov's memories were less nice. “Your father was something of a troublemaker in the classroom, repeatedly interrupting the teacher,” he told me. “A restless and difficult child. But the school put up with it, because of Jenő Friedman's money.” He also remembered my father boarding with a teacher, but recalled a different reason than the pending divorce. “The Friedmans had a live-in maid—and your father punched her, twice, very hard in the stomach and legs. The family doctor suggested he be sent to live where he'd be disciplined.”

After dinner, Otto ushered me into his study. He settled heavily on the couch, the dogs at his feet. His broad-planed face and bushy eyebrows that arched in two sharp Vs were, I thought, classically Hungarian. He laid out on a table a very few yellowing photographs, the remains of a life interrupted. He shuffled through them slowly and picked up one to show me. It was a yearbook photo, five rows of boys, formal and posed in ties and blazers, on bleachers in front of a brick wall. I recognized a slight boy toward the back with an anxious half-grin, assuming a Napoleon hand-in-vest pose. “Pista,” Otto said. My teenage father, in a swank tweed blazer with wide lapels, was the best-dressed of the group. “This is our Class of '45,” Otto said, handing me the photo. The “class that never graduated.”

“It was a very elite school,” he continued, “and the teachers were world class.” The Zsidó Gimnázium was famed for its academic erudition, its faculty chockablock with celebrated scholars of mathematics, archaeology, history, linguistics, the classics, and the Hungarian language. Rising anti-Semitism had forced many preeminent Jewish scholars to teach high school. Fears of Jewish “domination” of higher education produced the Numerus Clausus Act of 1920, which placed a restrictive quota on Jewish university students. (The bill was the first anti-Semitic law in interwar Europe.) The list of eminent Hungarians Jews driven abroad by rising discrimination is long and Nobel laureate–studded: among them, mathematician John von Neumann; physicists Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Theodore von Kármán, and Edward Teller; chemist George de Hevesy; and sociologist Karl Mannheim. By the late 1930s, further anti-Jewish legislation would impose a harsh quota on Jewish professors. Among the esteemed Jewish educators who sought employment at the Zsidó Gymnázium were David Rafael Fuchs, Finno-Ugric philologist and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Salamon Widder, eminent Hebraist; and Mihály Fekete, leading mathematician and later rector of Jerusalem's Hebrew University. The Gimnázium's head of physical education, Zoltán Dückstein, was the Hungarian Olympics coach who had led the nation's team to victories in boxing, fencing, wrestling, and water polo in the 1932 summer games in Los Angeles.

Otto slid a worn finger across the class photo, stopping at each face to identify the boy by his future profession: physicist, chemist, biologist, aeronautics engineer, computer scientist, cardiologist, electrical engineer, psychiatrist, radiologist, museum director, professional athlete memorialized in the Canadian Hall of Fame, billionaire businessman and founder of the world's largest gold-mining company. … Those were the ones who survived, of course. Before the war, there were sixty-one boys on the class roster. After, there were fewer than twenty. When Otto organized the class reunion in Toronto in 2001, there were sixteen. “Now there are twelve,” Otto said. He looked up, his darkly lined eyes resting on mine. “Your father is the only one who lives in Hungary.”

On the day the Germans occupied Budapest, March 19, 1944, the Zsidó Gimnázium sent its students home. Not wanting to cause alarm, the administration said they were being excused to celebrate the birthday of the Father of Hungarian Democracy, Lajos Kossuth. Final report cards were handed out early, starting on April 4, the day before a decree by the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior went into effect requiring Jews to wear the yellow Star of David. Soon after the last graduating class (the Class of '44) took final exams, the Hungarian military commandeered the building as a transit camp for Jewish forced labor.

The teenage Otto aimed to be a poet. In that, he was a true Hungarian, poetry being the most exalted of Magyar arts. Before Otto's father was forced out of his job as financial director of a chemical company—and ultimately taken to his death in Auschwitz—his son borrowed his office typewriter and composed “The Collected Works of Otto Szekely.” Otto tried to summon a few of the verses from memory now, in English. In one, a poem about winter, he remembered writing, “The snow is laughing on the smile of the sun.” (“The wordplay is better in Hungarian,” he said.) In another, an artistic take on rain, he described a downpour as “the death of clouds.”

In the summer of '44, Otto wrote his last poem. It was for his sister, who had been forcibly relocated with their mother to one of the city's “Yellow Star” houses, requisitioned apartment buildings that served as wartime holding pens for Budapest Jews in the last year of the war. The houses were intended to be the final stop before deportation. Otto could no longer recall the exact words, but he remembered the parable he used, the story of a wolf who lurks outside a barn while the sheep are sleeping. “I reversed it to say, one day we sheep will be on the outside, and the wolf will be trapped in the barn. I wanted to give her hope.” His sister carried the poem up and down the stairs of her Yellow Star house, reading it to the other residents. The poem did lift her spirits, though not her odds. Late in 1944, she was loaded on the last transport from Budapest to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhoid fever.

A month and a half before his sister's deportation, seventeen-year-old Otto was rounded up by the Hungarian Arrow Cross and sent into forced labor, digging trenches to halt the progress of the Soviet army. He had no outdoor gear, but “my mother was a magician. She cut my jacket short to make a backpack.” And she somehow scrounged enough flour and sugar to make him a batch of cookies. For the next many weeks, he dug in the pouring rain. “You couldn't get dry. At night I just lay right on the ground.” The cookies in his backpack turned to mulch. Otto spooned out a speck of dough each day. “It kept me alive.”

In the winter of '44, the cookie dough ran out, and his unit was turned west. “There was a bad feeling, because we knew the rumor”: heading west, he said, meant heading to a concentration camp. One night as they passed through a village, “we stopped for some reason. I was on the edge of the road and I saw, just by accident, a little gate to a fenced-in yard. I touched it to see if it was open.” He extended a finger above the coffee table, pushing on an invisible gate. “And it wasn't locked. I watched. I waited. Waiting, waiting, waiting.” When the nearest guards were looking the other way, he slipped through the gate “and I just walked, I didn't know where.”

He quickly concocted a new identity, which he proffered whenever he was stopped. “I said I was a Hungarian who had escaped from Romania from the Russians, because there were a lot of Hungarians from Transylvania who were fleeing then.” A Christian Hungarian, of course. He had no documents to support this fiction. “But my fear wasn't that I had no papers,” he said.

I asked, though I knew.

“That they would tell me to open my fly. That was my main fear.”

Many years later, Otto would refuse to have his son circumcised. “I never wanted to put my son in that circumstance.”

By the winter of 1944, Budapest was, like so many war-torn European countries, a “city of women.” Hungary's capital was also, and notably, a city of Jewish women. In Budapest, 60.1 percent of Jewish women would survive the war, compared with 42.7 percent of men.

Invariably in war, the male enemy is deemed the greater threat (never mind that Hungarian Jews were never the enemy). But also in play was a complex history of fantasies and phobias about Jewish masculinity, centuries in the making and by no means limited to Hungary. The reigning (and contradictory) spectral images of the male Jew—the effeminate castrate who threatened to demoralize Christian manhood, the concupiscent satyr who threatened to despoil Christian virgins, and, of course, the avaricious parasite who threatened to deplete the Christian coffers—resonated throughout Europe. In Trianon-shamed interwar Hungary, the Jewish man was a figure onto whom so many social and economic humiliations and fears were projected. In Dezső Szabó's wildly popular 1919 novel,
The Swept-Away Village
, a young and strapping gentile soldier returns to his Hungarian village after World War I to find his country corrupted by Jews, the town beauty ruined by Jewish lovers (she eventually becomes a prostitute in the “modern Sodom” of Jew-infested Budapest), and his best friend, a Christian poet, rendered insane and impotent by the siren call of (Jewish) cosmopolitan decadence. The hero stands firm against Semitic contamination, marrying a Christian peasant girl and vowing to uphold the ideals of the Magyar countryside, “the cradle of the Hungarian race.” To so many gentile Hungarians debilitated by the conditions of the time, the story explained everything: the source of their emasculation resided in the simultaneously lecherous and limp-wristed Jewish urbanite who sashayed through the boulevards of Pest, degrading Christian morals with his sexual infirmities and draining the nation of its wealth and well-being.

One day I was discussing the perception of Jews in Hungarian society with the distinguished Budapest psychoanalyst Judit Mészáros. When we got to the interwar years, she reached for her book,
Ferenczi and Beyond
—about the Budapest School of psychoanalysis—and turned to a reproduction of a 1920s anti-Semitic poster. It depicted a grotesquely fat man with flaking skin, naked except for boots, crouching on bandy legs. He gazes blindly out of spectacles perched over a hooked nose and slobbering lips. A quill pen is tucked behind one ear, another impaled like an arrow in his sagging breasts. Under his left arm hangs a bulging money bag, stamped with a Star of David, spilling gold coins. His right hand reaches for a copy of
Pesti Napló
, a Hungarian newspaper of the time. The lettering above his head reads, “Le az élődi sajtóval!” Down with the Parasite Press!

“What do you notice?” Mészáros asked.

I pointed to the “parasite's” crotch. This pestilential figure had no gonads.

“Yes,” she said. “Castrated.” She snapped the book shut. “Sometimes,” she said, “a single picture condenses everything.”

The three “Jewish Laws” passed by the Hungarian Parliament in the late '30s and early '40s devastated Jewish manhood. The first and second laws imposed severe restrictions on professional, managerial, commercial, and industrial employment, eliminating more than 80 percent of jobs for Jewish breadwinners. The third law's “race-protecting” prohibition of intermarriage and extramarital intercourse specifically banned sexual relations between Jewish
men
and gentile women. “After the ‘Jewish Laws' caused men to lose their employment and undermined them economically,” historian Zoltán Vági and his coauthors observed in
The Holocaust in Hungary
:
Evolution of a Genocide
, “a unique form of ‘emancipation' emerged. The relations between the sexes, gender roles, and the division of labor began to change.” Soon, with the inception of forced labor, the male breadwinner would literally vanish from the home.