The Hungarian government hastened to mobilize all its muscle in service of the Final Solution. The Hungarian Ministry of the Interior drew up the plans. One ministry undersecretary, László Endre, urged Eichmann (successfully) to quadruple the number of Jewish transports. Eichmann liked to joke that Endre “wanted to eat the Jews with paprika.” Less than three weeks into the German occupation, local authorities received the ministry’s order to ghettoize and deport their Jewish citizens. “The Royal Hungarian Government,” the decree began, “will soon have the country purged of Jews.”
A very few county and municipal officials refused to participate. They were the exception. “If any local administration deviated from the national directives,” historian Elek Karsai noted in his study of the management of the Hungarian deportations, “they were aimed at exceeding the target: either by implementing the government decrees ahead of schedule or by taking more severe and harsher measures than required.” The eagerness of government functionaries was matched by the nation’s civilians. In the first eight days of the Nazi occupation in Budapest, Hungarian citizens filed 30,000 denunciations against hidden Jews and Jewish property, compared with 350 in the first years of German-occupied Holland.
In short order the Hungarian government would issue more than one hundred anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were not allowed to travel, own cars or bicycles, or make use of radios or phones. Jews were not allowed to publish books, nor could any books they’d already published be sold. (The April 1944 decree, “Concerning the Protection of Hungarian Intellectual Life from the Literary Works of Jewish Authors,” ordered such works shredded or publicly burned. One such bonfire in Budapest consumed 447,627 volumes, “the equivalent,” Braham noted, “of 22 fully loaded freight cars.”) Jews were not allowed to employ Christian servants, or wear school or military uniforms, or swim in pools or public baths, or patronize bars, restaurants, catering services, cafés, espresso stands, or pastry shops.
My grandfather’s car, the lace-curtained Renault with the dashboard vase for one rose, was confiscated and the Christian maid, governess, and cook let go. At Ráday 9, the ground-floor shops—the furrier, beauty parlor, and patisserie—were off-limits to the family who owned the building. Not that they owned it any longer. Transactions of property by Jews were invalidated, assets seized, safe-deposit boxes sealed, commercial and industrial establishments shut down or assigned to Christian managers. In any case, the Friedman family was no longer living at Ráday 9. By then, my father was boarding with his disciplinarian teacher, Rozi was residing at her furnished studio, and Jenő was living at the Hotel Astoria. (He would soon have to find other lodgings; after the German occupation, the Astoria became a Gestapo headquarters.) Still another decree forbade Jews to purchase butter, eggs, rice, any meat except beef, or—that essential of Hungarian cuisine—paprika. By fall, Jewish rations had fallen to starvation levels. My father recalls slipping into the pastry shop at Ráday 9—by then abandoned—and running his fingers along the display counter, searching for crumbs.
The Jews of Budapest were the last in the country slated for transport to Auschwitz. In preparation, on June 16, 1944, 250,000 Budapest Jews were told they had three days to abandon their homes and move into one of the two thousand apartment buildings selected as “Yellow Star” houses. They were to leave their furnishings behind, to be enjoyed by the new Christian tenants.
My grandmother Rozi wound up in a Yellow Star house in a bleak section of southern Pest. She shared her room with a dozen others. The occupants were forbidden to have guests or speak with people through their windows and could leave only for a very few designated hours to buy food (riding to stores only on the last car of the tram). My father saw his mother once during her months in the Star house. He regretted the visit. Shortly after he’d slipped inside, the police came and sealed the doors. “They wouldn’t let anyone out,” my father said. He waited till night, then “climbed to the rooftop, and walked from roof to roof until I found an open door and got away.” He never went back. “I wasn’t going to get trapped in any stupid Star house.”
At some point in the late spring of 1944, my father and my grandfather returned to Ráday 9 and holed up in the apartment of a gentile physician. The doctor had taken his family to their vacation home in Lake Balaton and invited Jenő and István to stay in the empty flat. Father and son hunkered down there for two months, curtains drawn, lights dimmed, listening to the BBC “very quietly” on the radio. Then the tenants returned. My father decamped to the streets and a series of hiding places. My grandfather Jenő relocated, too—briefly to the homes of friends and then to what had been, only a short while earlier, his other Budapest property. The apartment building at Váci 28 had been requisitioned as a Yellow Star house. A regulation foot-high Star of David, displayed on a black background, now hung over its entrance. Jenő bedded down in a former maid’s room.
On July 7, just as the deportations were to commence in Budapest, Regent Horthy announced a halt in what he called “the transfer.” He made the decision for various reasons—among them, the degenerating military situation, the mounting appeals from Allied and neutral powers, and the pleas of world leaders. The Jewish population of Budapest was, for the time being, spared, an act that forever elevated Horthy in the estimation of not only my father but of many of the capital’s Jews, who attributed their survival to the Regent.
Horthy’s order to halt the deportation of Budapest’s Jews proved a brief reprieve—“the false spring,” it would be called in retrospect, though it spanned from late summer into fall. On October 15, after Horthy announced that he had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union, the Germans launched Operation Panzerfaust, kidnapping Horthy’s son and forcing the Regent’s resignation and imprisonment. Horthy abdicated in favor of the Germans’ handpicked new head of state, Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the fascist Arrow Cross Party. A former army officer, fervid anti-Semite, and Magyar nationalist (though only partly Magyar himself), Szálasi promulgated an incoherent ideology he called “Hungarism.” (During a prison stint in 1938, and “with the help of the Bible,” he had worked out Jesus’s family tree and concluded that Jesus was not a Jew but a “Godvanian,” an imaginary race that he believed to be related to the Magyars.) Szálasi was from Kassa.
The new prime minister promptly set to eliminating the Budapest Jews, seeking to resume the deportations in early November (after Himmler had ordered them halted). Szálasi’s Arrow Cross troops—mostly young men, many with criminal records (“primitive shoemaker types,” my father said, “and not too bright”)—carried out a full-bore, if increasingly freelance, Judenfrei extermination program that killed many thousands of the city’s Jews and sent nearly eighty thousand on death marches to the Austrian border. In late November 1944, the Arrow Cross regime ordered the city’s surviving Jews herded out of the Yellow Star houses and into the newly designated ghetto, a hastily walled-off deathtrap erected in the heart of the old Jewish quarter. In an area of only 0.1 square miles, soon teeming with rats, raw sewage, and typhus, seventy thousand Jews were incarcerated. Little food came in, no garbage came out. By December, the thousands of corpses stacked in the courtyards of buildings (including the Dohány Street Synagogue) had fused into blocks of ice.
My father moved from hiding place to hiding place. For a while, he took refuge in an old barracks on the outskirts of Buda that doubled as an airplane graveyard. The Hungarian army used the parade grounds to store the mangled hulks of shot-down Allied bombers. At night, my father would bed down on one of the abandoned military cots. Whenever the coast was clear, she told me, “I would sneak into the cockpits, and pretend I was a bomber pilot.” Long before my father developed a passion for Microsoft flight videos, young István was simulating takeoffs and landings. Army officers finally chased him out, and he found a new hiding spot on the edge of Pest in a Christian neighborhood. By then, he had acquired, via the Zionist underground, an armband that belonged to one of the Hungarian Nazi-aligned parties.
Whi
le my father was piloting downed planes and roaming the streets with fascist regalia and an incriminating lack of foreskin, my grandparents had reunited, albeit by accident. They both happened to seek shelter in one of the “protected houses” along the river by St. Stephen’s Park, an area that came to be known as the International Ghetto. Starting in the late summer of 1944, the neutral legations of Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, and the Vatican began issuing tens of thousands of official-looking safe-conduct passes and protective passports that (theoretically) shielded the city’s Jews from deportation. The non-aligned diplomatic missions declared several dozen apartment buildings in the city as safe zones. Rozi and Jenő wound up independently taking refuge in the same Swiss protected house on Pozsonyi út, a couple blocks from the Danube. They shared a room with about forty other people, including my father’s cousin, Judit (later Yudit) Yarden, and her parents.
That late fall and winter, armed gangs of Arrow Cross adherents took a particular malicious pleasure in invading the protected houses—they regarded the occupants as privileged Jews and thus even more tempting targets. Soon the “protected” were being hauled off, some to be interrogated and beaten in Arrow Cross detention centers, others forced on death marches. Thousands more were taken to the Danube and shot into the river. To save on bullets, Arrow Cross gunmen tied people together—often family members—shot one into the river, and let the sinking corpse drown the rest.
My father heard reports of the shootings. One day, she said (in one of the detail-free childhood anecdotes my father had proferred in my youth, an anecdote I’d never known whether to believe), a teenaged Pista had shown up at the Swiss protected house where his parents were living and, displaying his Hungarian Nazi armband, “saaaved” them.
“Which house?” I asked one afternoon in Buda. We were sitting in her dining room over the remains of coffee and cake. I laid out a city street map on the dining-room table and pointed to the half-dozen-block area where most of the protected houses were grouped.
“Waaall,” my father said, “one of those buildings. I don’t remember.”
“Why don’t we go over there and see?” I pressed. A stupid question.
“No point,” she said, shoving the map aside.
She diverted the conversation to one of the few topics from the past she didn’t mind revisiting—her own father’s excellent taste. “My father was always very classy,” she said, ticking off a list of examples I’d heard many times: the custom-made suits (“beautiful fabric he ordered from England”), the classics he kept in his study’s glass display cases (“very fine, elegant bound editions”), the Renault with the lace-curtained rear window and the dashboard flower vase.
“Pretty stylish,” I said, wearily pushing the crumbs around on my plate and wishing she’d move on.
“Waaall,” she laughed, “of course, my father didn’t know what to do when the car broke down!”
“Not a grease monkey, huh?”
“No, but he did take a course on auto repair once. Aaand”—the finger aloft, her digital exclamation point—“he bought overalls to wear when he would go for his class at the garage. Gray, with a matching gray cap. I was a similar size. So I wore it.”
“You fixed the car?”
“No!”
“For what then?”
“Vadász Street.”
“What?”
“You’re not listening!”
I was. I just wasn’t getting it, though I should have. In 2004, when my father was leading the guided tour of her feminine wardrobe on my first visit to the Buda house, she had pointed out the one outfit from her former life that hadn’t been exiled to the armoire of male castoffs. Hanging in her bedroom closet was a pair of white overalls, carefully pressed and preserved in a dry-cleaning bag. It was the uniform my father had worn as a volunteer for the Yorktown Heights Ambulance Corps. I remembered the nights he was on call; he’d wear the uniform around the house, starched and ironed. I was startled that he’d held on to it, and perplexed by its significance. What was this conflation of clothing and saving, regalia and rescue?
15
The Grand Hotel Royal
“Vadász Street,” my father repeated. She was referring to the “Glass House,” a former glass factory turned Swiss protected building at Vadász utca 29, where clandestine Zionist youth organizations had set up shop in the fall of 1944. The youth groups printed and distributed tens of thousands of false identity papers, helped smuggle Jews to the Romanian border, and tried to collect useful information to aid the Allied effort. After the Arrow Cross takeover, the young Zionists also began collecting fascist party uniforms and armbands to wear while gathering intelligence and distributing forged documents. Their numbers were small—maybe a few hundred, one of the smallest such movements in Central Europe—and many were refugees from Slovakia and Poland.
My father joined Betar, a Zionist youth organization, at the behest of his seventeen-year-old cousin, Frigyes “Friczi” Schwarcz, who had come to the city in 1944 intent on instigating an armed resistance. The two young men shared an abandoned apartment briefly, before Friczi decamped to a “bunker” on the outskirts of Pest to organize an uprising. Soon thereafter, neighbors denounced him and his handful of young bunker-mates, and they were all killed. “They were going to ‘fight the Nazis!’ ” my father scoffed. “They didn’t even know how to use a gun. Friczi wanted to be a hero. And he didn’t survive.”
My father continued to work sporadically with Betar. “I had this one contact. He’d get in touch and give me a task—like, go spy on some building where the Nazis were. I’d wear my father’s overalls and cap.”
“Why?”
My father gave me one of her you-idiot looks. “Because, as I told you, they were gray. The Luftwaffe color. I acted like I was a Luftwaffe mechanic, working for the Nazis.”
“That worked?” I doubted it.
“It worked quite well.” And it led, she said, to “an even more absurd happening.” One day, the Betar contact asked my father to spy on an elementary school that had been commandeered by the SS and was now occupied by the Gestapo and the Arrow Cross. “They would take people in there to question them and beat them up,” my father said. His job was to try to find out who was being held.
“It turned out it was my elementary school.” The school housed in the Rabbinical Seminary of Hungary, which my father had attended until he was ten. “I put on my ‘uniform’ and went over there with my false papers, and I volunteered to be one of the guards on night duty. Waaall, these Arrow Cross guys were not too bright! They were happy someone came to help them.”
“What did you find out?”
“Nothing significant. It wasn’t that long. Maybe a week. … But no one suspected me of being Jewish. I didn’t act like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like doing stupid things.” Her voice was rising. “Like taking ‘protection’ papers from some diplomats who couldn’t really do anything.” She meant her parents. “Like moving into a ‘protected’ house and saying, ‘Oh, now we’re protected!’ ” She affected a fey tone as she spoke these last words. “Waaall, okay,” she conceded, “maybe they were for a little time. … But then I had to get them out of there.”
I reached for my notebook. “How?”
“I’ve told you all that.”
“Not the details.”
She studied her empty plate for a while. “What do you want to know?”
“That day … were you wearing the overalls?” It was a dumb question, but a safe one; she liked to talk about clothes.
“No, I just wore the armband. And an Arrow Cross hat.” She wanted to pass that day as a Hungarian Nazi, not a German officer. “And I had a gun.”
“A gun?”
“Just an old army rifle. I probably got that from someone at Vadász. I do know it didn’t have any bullets!” Not that it would have mattered, my father noted. Like Friczi, young István didn’t know how to shoot.
“And they let you
in?”
“I was armed, so it was all correct.” He told the guard at the front door that he had orders to take away the Friedmans. “I acted mean, but not too mean. I didn’t overdo it.”
“They weren’t suspicious?” I had trouble imagining this.
“I told you, I know how to fake things.” She rose to her feet and began swinging her arms. “I marched upstairs, hup two, hup two, and I pushed open the door and yelled, ‘Is there a Jenő Friedman in here? And his wife? Send those goddam Jews out here! And they can’t bring anything!’ ” She waved a fist in the air, brandishing an invisible rifle.
“And they were in there?”
“There were as many people as could fit,” she recalled of the room, “all crammed up” against one another, “old people, sick people, little children.” He remembered their stares. “They all felt sorry for my parents,” she said. “They thought, ‘Oh, this Naaazi is going to kill the poor Friedmans!’ ” My father said he ordered his parents toward the door. As they were heading down the corridor, an elderly Jewish man sidled up. “He wanted to know if I could get him false papers.” That is, he recognized the young man in the fascist armband as a fellow Jew. “I yelled at him, ‘Get out of here or I’ll take you, too!’ ” The man backed away, and my father marched his parents down the stairs at gunpoint.
“When we went past the guard at the front door, I gave the salute, and I shouted, ‘Long live Szálasi!’ ” My father dusted crumbs off her doily placemat. “And that’s how I brought the family together.”
Afterward, father, mother, and son set up housekeeping in the winter of 1944 in an abandoned flat on the outskirts of Pest. They were now, according to the false papers my father had obtained from the Zionist youth resistance, the “Fabians,” Catholic refugees from the Romanian town of Brașov. When the long Siege of Budapest began, a few days after Christmas, a bomb fell directly across the street, shattering every window in the unit. The Fabians retreated to the cellar, where they spent the rest of the war. “When we came up from the basement,” my father recalled, “a man was upstairs and he started shouting, ‘I am the rightful owner of this house!’ We told him, ‘Calm down, calm down! We’re not staying.’ Then he introduced himself, and you know what his name turned out to be? Friedman.”