The Time of the Uprooted (27 page)
Incredible but true: I did protect her. Yes, I, little Jewish boy that I was, protected the celebrated singer, the star whom Budapest’s new all-powerful masters dreamed of. Yes, I saved Ilonka from humiliation and chagrin.
In my mind’s eye I see us there. We go hand in hand to stand in line at a bakery. We find it hard to get around. It’s a cold gray day; mud and dirty snow lie amid the ruins. Suddenly, a Russian soldier appears and grabs Ilonka by the arm. “Come, you!” he yells in her face. He keeps repeating those two words, all the Hungarian he knows. He’s drunk. He stinks. Ilonka struggles. As for me, I cling to her, crying, “No, she’s mine!” People in the line see what’s happening, but they pretend not to notice. By chance, an officer emerges from a building and comes to our rescue. Cringing, the drunken soldier disappears. The officer hands me a piece of bread and scolds the onlookers in bad German. “Cowards, that’s what you are! You see a boy defend a woman’s honor and you do nothing! You disgust me!” And he takes us into the bakery. The people are hostile and resentful, but they dare not show it. As for me, I’m proud of myself. I protected Ilonka. I kept my promise.
I SEE US AGAIN, TWO OR THREE WEEKS LATER. We’re in bed. It’s still early. We slept badly. The room is freezing. I’m wearing three shirts under my pajamas, but my body is still shivering. Holding our blankets tightly, we listen to the wind whistling through the ruined rooftops and the charred branches of the leafless trees. Suddenly, we hear an unexpected sound: heavy footsteps mounting the stairs, or what’s left of them. Pounding at the door. We hold our breath. If we don’t answer, maybe they’ll think no one is here, and they’ll go away. But they pound harder, and now the door creaks open. Four men enter, three officers and a civilian. With them comes the wind from Siberia. And fear, a great wave of fear that keeps me from breathing or even thinking. I hide under the coat I’m using as an extra blanket. In vain, the cold still seeps into me. I try to push it away. Never have I shivered so, my entire body shaking. I keep my eyes closed but my ears open, my senses on the alert. I hear everything. I hear time as it goes by. Two Hungarian and one Russian officer accompany the civilian. They surround the bed. The civilian, who is tall and thin, speaks angrily. “We know who you are: Ilonka Andràsi, the nightclub singer. You collaborated with the enemy. You’re under arrest. Come with us.” Ilonka makes no protest. She hasn’t told me so, but she was expecting to be apprehended and mistreated. As she is already dressed, she gets easily to her feet. All she does is point to me and say, “And the child, who is going to care for him?” The civilian turns to me.“Who are you?” Holding back my tears, I reply, “You’re making a mistake. She’s not a bad person. She did nothing wrong. She worked against the Germans and against the Nyilas.” “Shut up, brat,” says a short, stocky man, one of the Hungarian officers. “We didn’t ask your advice about this scum who gave such pleasure to our country’s assassins. We want to know who you are.” “My name is Pé— no, it’s Gamaliel. My name is Gamaliel Friedman. I’m a Jew, and it was Ilonka who saved me.” The tall, thin one interrupts. “That’s a lie! She went to bed with the fascists; she was working for them. As for you, you little bastard, you must be hers, so you’re no Jew!” “Yes, I am, I’m a Jew, I’m telling you. My parents are Jews. And so am I.” I feel as if I’m about to burst out sobbing, but I’m able to hold back my tears. The civilian and the two Hungarians talk among themselves in lowered voices. Ilonka has started weeping. I see disaster ahead. They’re going to separate us. What will they do to her? And what’s to become of me? Where and with whom can I wait for my parents to come back? I get ready to jump up from my bed and to implore them to take me with Ilonka. To prison, anyplace. I’ll share her cell and her ordeal. I want whatever happens to her to happen to me. The Russian officer, meanwhile, has been observing me with interest. He comes over and says a few words to me in his language. “I don’t understand Russian,” I say. He asks, “How about German?” “I understand some German.” “Good, we’ll speak German. You say you’re a Jew. Where are your parents?” I tell him I’m waiting for them. “They were deported, but they’ll come back.” He switches languages. “Do you speak Yiddish?” “Yes, some.” Now he’s paying close attention. “Since you’re a Jew, or claim you are, prove it to me. What do you know about Judaism?” I must have looked puzzled, because he saw I hadn’t understood his question. He rephrased it. “What for a Jew is the most important of prayers?” Frightened, I’m about to say the Our Father, the prayer in which Ilonka had so often drilled me. Luckily, I catch myself, though I don’t really know why the Russian is asking me, and I reply, “The Shma Yisrael: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.’ ” “Good, very good. And Rosh Hashana, what’s that?” “The New Year.” “And Yom Kippur?” “The Day of Atonement. We pray to God to write our names in the Book of Life.” “And this year, did you pray like a good boy?” Yes, I prayed, I prayed often, but alone and in silence. Now I recall for whom and for what I prayed. For my mother and my father. I implored God to protect them, to let them return, even if they were sick, as soon as possible. I feel one tear, then another, burning as they trickle down my cheek. The Russian officer leans over me and wipes my face with his sleeve. He gives an order that neither the tall, thin man nor the short, stocky one seems to like. At that, he straightens up and repeats the order. That is enough to make the third Hungarian officer signal the others to obey the order and leave. The Russian officer sits on the rumpled bed and asks me to sit next to him. “I’m a Jew, from Kiev,” he tells us. “I’ve killed a lot of Germans, and I’ll kill more, to make them pay for the crimes they committed against our people.” He stops, and Ilonka takes the opportunity to say, in her hit-or-miss German, that she’s sorry she has nothing to offer him. She begins to explain why, but he interrupts. “I’ll bring you food and coal later on. But first tell me who you are and what you’re doing. . . .” So we tell him the whole story. My father, my mother. The fascist terror, the cruelty of the Nyilas. The roundups. The sleepless nights. Evenings at the cabaret. The sacrifices Ilonka made to keep me with her. Two hours go by, and still we have not finished. The Russian officer gets to his feet and says, “I have to go back to headquarters. I’ll come by this afternoon with supplies. I’ll post a soldier outside to guarantee your safety.”
He keeps his word. He brings us bread, sugar, coal, oil, and two fur coats, all repossessed from opulent homes where a month ago the fascist bosses were living. Ilonka hugs and kisses me, then says in front of him, “Thank you, my child. You saved me.” And I—who saved me? My father? My prayers?
CAPTAIN TOLYA—THAT WAS THE RUSSIAN OFFICER’S name—became a regular visitor. Thanks to him, Ilonka’s and Gamaliel’s circumstances improved, to the point of seeming extravagant to them. Their humble apartment was now livable. It was warm, and they had enough to eat. Most important, they were safe. Armed with official papers, Ilonka no longer feared denunciation. She found work in a sort of cabaret where Russian officers and Hungarian Communists, united in their devotion to the Red Army, danced and sang and drank the night away. If now and then a soldier who had had one drink too many made advances, she had only to mention the officer’s name to cool the man’s ardor.
Tolya went only rarely to the cabaret. He preferred to spend evenings with Gamaliel. He taught him to play chess, and, more important, he set out to inculcate him with the virtues of the Communist ideal. He told him about Stalin, the greatest genius of the century, if not all time, the supreme guide, the exemplary teacher who understood all things, who knew it all and perhaps more, a man who might telephone a poet in the middle of the night for the sole purpose of discussing his work. “But you talk about him as if he were God,” said Gamaliel, dismayed. “There is no God,” Tolya replied curtly. Gamaliel was baffled. “How about my prayers? The prayers my father taught me, and you know them, since—” “Yes, I know them,” Tolya conceded. “When I was a child, I learned many childish things. Then I grew up. You’ll grow up, too.” Gamaliel spoke no more of God, but at night, before going to sleep, he would think about his parents and their prayers.
Tolya was the first who spoke to Gamaliel of his parents’ death. Until then, Ilonka and her young protégé still had hope. She ran from one government office to another, checking updated lists of survivors, interrogating members of the Jewish community, and always returned forlorn, empty-handed. But Tolya had access to better sources. He discovered when and how Gamaliel’s father had died. He had been executed in Dachau days before its liberation. As for his mother, she probably died in Auschwitz the day of her arrival with so many others, like so many others. “Be strong, my young comrade,” Tolya told Gamaliel. “I know, it isn’t easy. Try to lean on me.” And from that moment on, Gamaliel, brokenhearted, refrained from mentioning his parents.
A few months later, Tolya was sent back to Kiev, where he was discharged. “Don’t worry,” Gamaliel said to Ilonka. “He won’t forget us; I’m sure of it.” Ilonka did not show her concern. They could not foresee that their protector, a committed Communist but also a Jew, would be arrested and tortured during the anti-Jewish purges in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1948, Ilonka lost her job: Communism disapproved of nightclubs. A cousin who was a seminary student came by regularly to confide his own concerns: The Church was suspect under communism. Sometimes the dinner conversation would turn to Gamaliel and his future. The seminary student feared a revival of the old anti-Semitism, now masquerading as militant Stalinism, and he offered the boy an easy, practical solution: conversion. Ilonka spoke out against it. “He didn’t convert to save his life during the occupation, and you want him to convert now? He might as well sign up for the Communist youth!” Ilonka proved to be right. Tolya’s idealistic account had made a deep impression on Gamaliel. To believe in Stalin was to express gratitude to the Jewish captain from Kiev, to whom they owed so much. If Tolya had invited Gamaliel to come join him, he would have moved heaven and earth to persuade Ilonka to accompany him. So, proud of his red scarf, he became a sort of Party Pioneer. Doing nothing by halves, he turned into a zealous Communist. Moscow was his Jerusalem, the Party his religion, Marx his Bible. Meanwhile, he decided he would no longer hide behind his Hungarian name, Péter. Henceforth, he would be Gamaliel to everyone.
Came the day of disenchantment. The Jewish heroes of the resistance movement were accused of Zionism and cosmopolitanism, dismissed from the Party, jailed, tried, and sentenced. Gamaliel himself was too young to suffer their fate. But some members of his unit knew about his past, and that was enough to make him undesirable to the leaders and contaminated in the eyes of his comrades.
Came the 1956 uprising. He was out in the streets, among the young rebels throwing stones at the secret police and their informers. Like everyone else, he was delirious with joy. Budapest was ecstatically celebrating its victory over the oppressors. The civilized world was on the side of the people, backing their struggle; the march to freedom could not be stopped. But Ilonka, wiser and more farsighted than Gamaliel, was pessimistic.
“You put your trust in the world and its humanity,” she said. “You rebels make me laugh. You forget the Soviet Union’s territorial ambitions. Stalin may be dead, but Moscow will never leave. Any retreat would be a defeat. Just wait a while and you’ll see the Russian tanks again. . . . The day of repression is coming; it’s inevitable. Don’t stay here any longer. Go to Vienna while the borders are still open, then take the first train to France.”
“And you, Ilonka, will you come also?”
“Of course I will. I can’t be separated from you. Tell me when you get to Paris. I’ll join you there. I promise you we’ll soon be together again, and, like you, I keep my promises. So, young man, do you agree?”
No, Gamaliel did not agree. The illusion of victory had gone to the rebels’ heads. Even when the Soviet tanks appeared, he, like the other insurgents, refused to believe they intended to drown their uprising in blood. Gamaliel was arrested with a group of young rebels, but he succeeded in escaping on his way to jail. He did not go home, for fear of endangering Ilonka, but he was able to telephone.
“I can only talk a moment, Ilonka,” he said. “There are still mobs of people on the roads, in the trains, at the borders. They say they’re not checking too carefully, so it’s easy to slip across. Leave right away; don’t take anything. We’ll meet in Vienna. Rendezvous at the French consulate.”
Once he was in the Austrian capital, Gamaliel waited for her day after day outside the consulate. He had obtained his visa for France, and the consul’s secretary, moved by his story, had promised to get one for Ilonka as soon as she arrived.
But Ilonka did not come. He tried to telephone Budapest, but the line was out. He was able to reach a friend, whom he asked to check on her. His friend called back the next day to say he had gone to Ilonka’s and rung the doorbell; no one had answered. Still, Gamaliel did not give up hope. He waited another week; then the consul’s secretary, taking pity on him, advised him to go on to Paris. Once there, he would send the secretary his address and she would give it to Ilonka as soon as she arrived. Heavyhearted, he took the night train with a group of other refugees. Along with leaving Austria, he was also leaving his childhood.
Ilonka did not keep her promise.
Gamaliel never saw her again.
12
ONE EVENING IN NEW YORK, GAMALIEL AND HIS friends were having dinner in Eve’s apartment. The conversation turned to despair. Each man evoked it in his own manner.
For Diego, it was the day when, as a sergeant in the Foreign Legion, he came face-to-face with a former SS officer guilty of massacres in Poland, the Ukraine, and France. Tall, broad-shouldered, built like a bull, with a boxer’s nose and ears, he didn’t care about the rumors concerning him and would take on any man who challenged him. Diego had sworn during the war in Spain that if he ever set eyes on a fascist he would make him regret the day he was born, but now he realized he would not be able to live up to his oath. His superior, when informed, coldly reminded him that the law of the Legion was that any man who joined it left his past behind.
“If I ever felt despair,” Diego said, “it was because of that man. Each time I saw him, I thought, If a bastard like that can walk the earth freely, with complete impunity, then our world was poorly made and our victory in ’forty-five was but a pathetic charade.”
Bolek reacted heatedly, as usual. “Injustice may inspire anger or rebellion, but must not create despair. Injustice has been part of our world since its beginning. The wolf is stronger than the lamb, and there’s nothing we can do about it, except to pity the lamb and shoot the wolf. Despair is something else. That’s when you no longer believe in anything.
“In the ghetto,” he said, “I sometimes doubted not our eventual victory but our capacity to take part in it. One night, we were informed of the death of Asher Baumgarten, a poet and chronicler. We in the resistance movement used to tell him what was going on behind the walls, and he was to bear witness to our suffering and our struggle, for History’s sake, for we were sure we were soon to die. What Emmanuel Ringelblum was doing in Warsaw, we wanted to do in our town, Davarowsk. We counted on Asher. We counted on his objectivity, his talent as a writer, his mission as the carrier of memory. On the day the Germans rounded up the last of the children, the ghetto was in mourning, feeling shame as well as pain. The next night, Asher killed himself. He asked us in his farewell letter to forgive him for giving up, but, he wrote, ‘I saw the children; I witnessed their cries and their tears. And I no longer have the words to tell it....’ There it is. That was the most despairing moment of my life.”
Gad told of a more recent time, the postwar period. “I had a rich and happy life as a child and as an adolescent. I lacked for nothing. I had my own car, a studio in Manhattan, a group of friends. My father was admired for his generosity, my mother for her hospitality. People may have envied us our happiness, but they said we deserved it. My parents loved each other. My brothers attended the yeshiva; my sisters were college students. Then misfortune befell us. My father lost his entire fortune overnight. Worse: He lost all his friends. He was alone and miserable. He couldn’t understand. ‘All those people who flattered me, who swore eternal gratitude, where are they? Why did they vanish?’ he asked. He was alone one evening in his den, and, for the first time in his adult life, he began to weep. The door was half-open, and I saw him. Those tears filled me with despair. Not long after that, he called our family together and told us he had decided to take us all to Israel.”
“I understand,” Bolek said. “But I think sometimes it would be better not to understand.”
“How about you, Gamaliel?” Diego asked.
Gamaliel hesitated. Should he summon up his memories, still so painful, of those last months of the war in Budapest? Or the days of waiting in Vienna?
“As for me, I despair only when I’m in love,” he said, trying to lighten the mood.
No one laughed. So he spoke of his mother, of Ilonka, of Esther. He thought of them with joy, but then, at once, sadness came over him.
“You’re really unlucky,” Diego said. “All you have to do is love a woman for her to vanish from your life.”
Yes, Gamaliel thought, I haven’t had any luck. My good luck died with my mother, probably somewhere in Poland. But I was lucky with Ilonka, wasn’t I? I wouldn’t have survived without her. I wouldn’t have known the day of liberation. I wouldn’t have met Esther, or Eve, or Tolya, or any of my friends. Hadn’t Ilonka been a second mother to me, doing for me what any mother would do for her son?