My father translated the first paragraph:
Dear Parents, Baba, Tomi, Eva, Misi,
With one toothbrush, and two slightly crinkled trousers in our hands, we have arrived in heaven. Now we are sitting here above the clouds in the heart of Copenhagen and, shaking off the circulating chaos of our experiences, we are trying to describe faithfully to you everything that has happened to us. …
“I wrote this with Tibor,” my father said. It was their first letter home, a narrative of their exodus across post-Nazi Europe, a chronicle of escape.
In the morning greyness on the third of December 1946, a mysterious taxi stopped in front of the villa of the Danish Red Cross in Vienna. From inside of the car emerged two sleepy young men, followed by many suitcases, typing machine, film projector, and blankets. These young men were us.
I could see the scene before me more lucidly than if I were studying a photograph. My father had conjured this picture on her daughter’s occupational tool of choice, the “typing machine.” A machine that as a young man he had evidently found essential enough to his aspirations to haul across three countries. At my urging, the translation continued:
We paid the driver with half a kilogram of bacon meat, after which we sat comfortably on our pile of luggage and smoked a Chesterfield. It was pleasant weather, cold and rainy. Next to us in an opened garage there were two cars: a small Opel and a Steyer. We studied them, guessing in which one we will travel. After we smoked a couple of cigarettes, it was light. In the villa, life started, and they discovered us, sitting on our luggage. They immediately invited us in for a cup of tea. In the villa, which was furnished with American luxury, in a dining room partitioned by a heavy curtain, they left us with a ten-course breakfast. The beginning was very promising.
At “half past eight,” a gleaming apple-green sedan “curved into the drive.” A Danish Red Cross nurse, “Froken” (Miss) Lund, who “looked like an English lady,” squeezed into the front seat, next to the chauffeur and the wealthy exporter (a “smoking capitalist”), and my father and Tibor climbed in back, clutching two briefcases “containing Danish dictionaries and language books, a map, twenty packs of American cigarettes, a bottle of real Bolognese liqueur, a package of Czech saccharine, two pairs of shoes, half a kilogram butter, two horse riding sticks, Danish salami, cheese, and a toothbrush in a case.”
Riding sticks? I asked.
“Sure,” my father said. “And jodhpurs. We were gentlemen of the nobility.” Pretending to be, anyway. The driver, whom my father and Tibor dubbed “Mr. Na-Na,” for his crankiness, instantly got lost, and it was nearly dusk by the time they passed through Hitler’s hometown of Linz and, soon thereafter, arrived at the checkpoint between the Russian and American zones. Several hours and many wrong turns later, they passed into Germany.
Falling asleep while crossing a dull landscape, we woke to realize that we were lost in Nuremberg. The city, dumped to the ground, was dead. The old houses with their small windows made the impression of a huge prison.
They had entered the medieval city center, where, in one hour on January 2, 1945, bombing missions by the British Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Forces had obliterated 90 percent of the buildings and killed eighteen hundred civilians. After additional attacks a month later, more than six thousand residents would be dead. “We let Mr. Na-Na wander around the dead city. After which we took out our map and led ourselves out from the vale of tears.”
By nightfall they were in what remained of Hamburg, where, over a few months beginning in late July 1943, Allied bombings code-named Operation Gomorrah unleashed a firestorm that flattened the city (including the blocks of buildings whose sale had yielded the Friedmans such wealth) and killed more than thirty thousand civilians.
Among the huge cranes, tanks, and docks, a spooky road led us to a residential district, where mountains of burned houses, coming down on top of each other, showed us a picture of evil destruction. Kilometer after kilometer, we saw only rubble everywhere. Only a few intact buildings rose above the ruins, like lighthouses in the sea.
By three a.m., they had passed through “the land-of-no-one” and arrived at the Danish border:
The red-and-white striped checkpoint pike lifted slowly in front of us. As we looked around, on the other side of the glass wall everything seemed implausible and dreamlike. We were standing in front of a white building, which resembled a small castle with its many little towers. In between our car and the building there was a traffic island, on which three border guards were walking, all dressed in light blue uniforms, with arms linked together, stepping together, as in an operetta scene.
For the happy ending to be perfect, we opened a good-smelling pack of Chesterfields and we offered this prohibited goods to the operetta army. Then we sat back in the car and, saying good-bye to the men, we started our triumph. After the first kilometer we opened a liqueur. Our co-travelers were sharing our happiness and were greeting us in Danish: Velkome til Danmark! Meanwhile we drove along glamorous, clean roads, surrounded by white beautiful small houses, like in a fairy tale. After the big happiness and the liqueur we fell asleep.
The driver dropped my father and Tibor Jablonszky at the western port town of Esbjerg and the two young men boarded a train, heading east, then, at Nyborg, a “supermodern” ferry to Copenhagen.
Copenhagen is so wonderful and there is never enough of it—huge, modern houses with glamorous flats and beautiful shop windows. On its wonderful, wide, never-ending, straight boulevards there are many cars. There are rows of automats on the streets everywhere. From buttered bread to caviar, from candy to cake, and from Gillette to pocket lamps, everything is available day and night, from twenty-five ore to two crowns. We keep our eyes open and we are very active. We hope we succeed. Currently we are negotiating with a couple of big Danish filmmaking factories. We watch movies from morning till the evening. …
We send lot of kisses to everybody,
Pista, Tibi
My father returned the “letter from the past” to its folder.
“This is so well written!” I exclaimed.
“Waaall, we wrote it in the style of P. Howard,” my father said. P. Howard, aka Jenő Rejtő, was a Hungarian pulp-fiction writer whose detective-fiction parodies peopled with tricksters were wildly popular in my father’s youth. My father remained a fan. She had a large selection of P. Howard novels on her bookshelf. “He wrote so it would sound like he was a British writer who’d been translated into Hungarian,” my father explained. A British Christian writer, that is. Rejtő had to hide his religion after the wartime laws banned publication of Jewish authors. In the late fall of 1942, an Arrow Cross–affiliated newspaper revealed the true identity of “P. Howard.” Rejtő was sent to a forced labor camp in the Ukraine. Within weeks, he was dead.
My father’s own tricksterism would lead to a happier outcome. In the weeks after his arrival in Denmark, István and Tibor traveled from Copenhagen to Stockholm and on to London. They hit a dozen film distribution companies and brokered deals for fifteen movies “with nothing bad about Russians.” The haul included Caesar and Cleopatra, Odd Man Out, and, my father’s favorite, Ditte, Child of Man, a Danish melodrama about a girl abandoned by her depraved mother. Then, having enlisted a Copenhagen film lab to make reproductions, my father and Tibor flew home—temporarily, they hoped—to collect their commission from Mafirt. At the Budapest airport, they were stopped by customs officers, who confiscated their passports. “They told us, ‘You are of military age. You have to go into the army.’ ”
My father thought otherwise. He had no intention of serving in a military that, less than two years ago, had enslaved his “race” in forced labor and sent them unarmed to their deaths. The next day, the door of the Mafirt office flew open and in stormed a very indignant young man. “I told them, ‘Oh, this is a vaaary big problem! The people at the film lab in Copenhagen will only turn over the copies to us! The situation is hopeless unless we go back.’ ” He delivered the same mes
sage at the Communist Party headquarters, along with a promise to set up a new Communist Hungarian consulate in Copenhagen—he would be “chairman” and Tibor “cultural attaché.” “I knew what they wanted to hear.” Evidently so, because a few days later the two young men had their passports back and were on a plane to Denmark.
They found a room in a widow’s home in Copenhagen. “It was in the back and had a view of a garden,” my father recalled. “We each had our own bed. Aaand our own duvet.” Untold luxury for two war-deprived Hungarians. And soon, they had two local teenage girls in their beds, a few hours after meeting them on a street corner. “The Danes are very relaxed,” my father recalled appreciatively.
My father sought help to extend their stay, appealing to former Ráday 9 tenant Ferenc Nagy, the Smallholders Party leader who had flirted with Rozi and who had become prime minister in 1946. Nagy pulled some strings to make it happen. Some months later, my father again turned to Nagy—this time to assist his young friend from Ráday 9, fellow film-club member Tamás Somló, in procuring a passport to come to Denmark. Again, Nagy came through. I was beginning to understand why a half century later my father would turn to the rightist Smallholders Party for help reclaiming the family property.
By 1948, the three young men were getting threatening letters for overstaying their visas. The Communist Party had forced Nagy out of office a half year earlier, and he’d fled to the United States. The ex–Smallholders leader wrote one more letter, from Virginia, at István’s request. My father kept a copy of the certified Danish translation of Nagy’s missive in her lockbox, preserved in a ziplock bag:
I, former Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Nagy, now living in Herndon, Va., USA, certify that I know well the movie operator István Faludi. He has, in the time I was prime minister, received his traveling pass at my request so that he and his companions Tibor Jablonszky and Tamás Somló should realize travel abroad. Because of this fact, the above persons cannot return to Hungary, which is under complete Communist rule, since in that case it would expose them to the Communist regime’s persecution. I ask the corresponding competent authorities to show understanding and goodwill for István Faludi and his comrades’ case.
—Ferenc Nagy, Herndon, Va., April 14, 1948
By then, Tamás Somló had moved on to Stockholm with a Swedish girlfriend. The Hungarian Communist government no longer wanted Western films. The boys’ days in Denmark were numbered.
One evening in Copenhagen, Tibor and my father attended a lecture sponsored by a Brazilian tourist agency. “They showed this little filmstrip, with these beautiful shots of Copacabana Beach.” The very next day my father stopped in at the Brazilian consulate and asked how he could visit the country. The man behind the counter inspected his passport and told him it wasn’t valid for South America. “And so I said to myself, Okay, I’ll make it so it will be valid.” He drew what seemed like an official-looking insignia and submitted it to a printer. “I said, ‘We have this little company and we need this for our office stamp. And we need it tomorrow morning.’ ” The printer wanted to know what the words said in the drawing. “I told him, ‘Oh, it’s just Hungarian.’ Then he wasn’t too interested.” What it said was, “This visa is valid for North and South America.”
My father flipped through the passport until she got to the page with the stamp. “You see here, where I scribbled some French on it?” she said. “And I crossed out North America—to make it look more legitimate. Waaall, by then I had a lot of practice.”
“Practice?”
“Faking things.”
A few weeks later, my father and Tibor took the train to the west coast of Sweden and, after a customs official studied their passports and found them “legitimate,” boarded the Carina. They were on their way to the white beaches of Copacabana. The ocean crossing took two and a half weeks.
“I remember when I first saw Rio,” my father said. Her eyes had a dreamy cast. “It was late afternoon. It was like the mountains and the sky touched. And then the ship radio started blaring ads.” She rattled off a Portuguese jingle.
“What’s that?”
“ ‘Jump out of bed with the will to live, because your stomach is cleared!’ ”
“You still remember it.”
“Back then there weren’t so many commercials.”
The two young men spent their first days wandering the beach and investigating a favela. “Not only that, we took a camera,” my father recalled. “People said to us, ‘Oh, you’ll be in danger!’ But we didn’t care.” For the survivors of a world war, danger was a relative concept.
Whatever the virtues of Brazilian race-blindness, my father and Tibor needed a job—and they would turn to Hungarian expatriates to find one. “We went to see this guy named Glausius, who was vaaary Hungarian,” my father said, “and not Jewish.” Glausius introduced them to two brothers, “who were hairdressers for ladies in Copacabana.” They were, likewise, very Hungarian. “The older brother, he ate bacon in the Hungarian style—bread, bacon, paprika, and onion in one hand, and a knife in the other, and he’d cut a big slab and eat it off the knife. A real Magyar peasant!”
The chain of happenstance continued. The peasant happened to do the hair of the wife of a U.S. Air Force colonel from Texas—he invited the two hungry young men over for dinner (“Big steaks on the grill!”)—and the colonel happened to be advising the Brazilian government’s Institute of Geography and Statistics, which had been trying, unsuccessfully, to convert U.S. Air Force aerial surveillance photographs of Brazil so they could be used to design maps. My father met with the institute’s cartographer and proposed a way to reconfigure the images without losing any detail. His method worked, and my father and Tibor were hired into the institute’s photographic unit.
“Actually, we were the photographic unit,” my father said. “And then, when Tamás came, we were three.”
Tamás Somló had taken a circuitous route to Brazil. With the help of his Swedish girlfriend’s father (who was eager to put space between his daughter and her refugee beau), Tamás had obtained a temporary visa to Buenos Aires, where he was stuck for nearly a year washing dishes, until my father landed him a visa and a job at the geographic institute. “I told the director,” my father recalled, “Tamás is an indispensable member of the ‘Hungarian photographic team’!”
My father reached for the “Letters from the Past” folder, and the only other piece of correspondence it contained, dated “Rio, 1950”: a letter from Pista Faludi in Rio de Janeiro to Tomi Somló in Buenos Aires. The occasion was Tamás’s imminent arrival in Brazil.
Dear Tomi,
We were very happy to receive your letter, in which you inform us that we cannot escape from your wonderful presence. The entire country of Brazil is mourning with us from the crocodiles of the Amazonas to the pampas of Del and on the second of January they will all pull the black flag and declare siege. Next year they will even elect a new president because Dutra will not take responsibility for the country if you are here.
I suppose this was another attempt at P. Howard/Jenő Rejtő flair. Still, the debonair and wisecracking voice that sprang from the yellowing foolscap startled me. Where had this gregarious young man fled to?
We find it very clever that you arrive at one a.m. In this case no one will notice that you arrive and you can travel the couple-of-hundred-meter-long distance between our home and the airport without getting a heat stroke. Don’t worry if you don’t speak the language yet, because nowadays Rio is inhabited by so many Hungarians, that addressing someone in Portuguese is showing off. Now the most important thing is that you arrive safe, and we can discuss everything else when you are here. … No matter if you arrive to Santos Dumont or Galeao airport, we will figure it out here.
With hot (35°C) love,
Pista
A handwritten addendum at the bottom of the page read: “Bring addresses of blond women—Tibor.”
At first, the three slept for free in the office. Eventually Tamás ren
ted a room in Copacabana, and my father and Tibor shared a small house on Glória Hill in Rio, beneath the Church of Our Lady of the Glory of the Outerio. Usually, though, the young men were out in the outback, traveling one-on-one with a research scientist or a guide or sometimes entirely alone, photographing the immense ecological and human diversity of the fifth-largest nation in the world. “A lot of these places you could only get to by horseback or plane,” my father recalled. He crisscrossed the backcountry of Mato Grosso, the subtropical jungles of Paraná, the plateaus and savannas of Goiás, and the rain forests of the Amazon, which he and a guide navigated in a tiny wooden boat when a promised ship didn’t arrive, all the way to Manaus, where the young István was enraptured to find the Teatro Amazonas, the lavish opera house built with rubber baron money in the late nineteenth century. My father recalled photographing trees “the size of skyscrapers,” rivers that “seemed like oceans.” Other times he would accompany the institute’s researchers on their sociological rounds, making a visual record of rubber tappers and cocoa workers, African shamans performing ancient spirit dances, and nomadic gauchos hunting wild cattle in the Cerrado. The last would linger in my father’s imagination. “The cowboys would ride on these little horses, and they were covered from head to toe with leather, like a suit of armor!” she marveled. “Their horses wore it, too. They had to or they’d get torn to pieces by the caatinga.” Bushes with punishing thorns. “They were like medieval knights. I wanted that uniform.”
“Where are your Brazil photographs?”
She didn’t know. They had disappeared, along with a couple of large film reels marked “Brazil” that I vaguely recalled gathering dust for many years on a bookshelf in Yorktown Heights. When my father arrived in Brazil, he was still entertaining dreams of a moviemaking career—“the famous Hungarian director!” He convinced the geographic institute that it “really needed a photographic and a filmmaking unit,” and he went in search of a movie camera—“a real one, not something for amateurs.” In Rio, he found a former cameraman, an ex-Nazi who had fled to Brazil, with an Askania to sell. My father was delighted. The Askania, then the height of modern technology, was a 35mm camera light enough to carry on your shoulder, and a favorite of one of his moviemaking idols. “The same camera Leni Riefenstahl used to film Hitler in the 1936 Olympics!”