In the Darkroom

  He and his now wife had opened a Thai restaurant in the suburbs, and Mel was making ends meet working for the TriMet transit authority. “I see all walks of life driving a city bus. They’re little snapshots of humanity, like a quick line sketch of life, it catches life’s essence. I see myself reflected sometimes. It is enlightening sometimes and sometimes it is kind of scary,” he wrote. “I gave up a lot to be who I am.”

  Back in my father’s motherland, as in the U.S. media, questions of identity were in full flower. The ruling Fidesz Party celebrated 2014 as the rebirth of Hungarian identity. That spring, the rightist party won the national elections again, and handily—with an assist from the newly minted media law, which stifled the independence of state-financed media, and with the manipulation of electoral rules that allowed Fidesz to secure a two-thirds parliamentary majority with only 44.5 percent of the vote. Jobbik, the openly anti-Semitic and anti-Roma party, expanded its base even further, nearly edging out the long-standing Socialist Party in the Hungarian Parliament and becoming the most popular far-right party in the European Union.

  Fidesz also swept the European Parliament election that year (and Jobbik came in second). And in the municipal elections that fall, Fidesz won control of every county assembly and all but one of the largest cities, including Budapest. When the polls closed in October, Fidesz leaders celebrated their party’s electoral trifecta. “Three is the Hungarian truth,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán exulted in a speech that day, invoking the (Latin) maxim that “everything that comes in threes is perfect.” The party’s triple victory, Orbán declared, solidified a national “unity” and would “make Hungary great in the next four years.”

  Four months earlier, the Hungarian Supreme Court had issued a ruling in support of the identity prerogatives of the political right. The court found that a TV news channel had violated the media law’s ban on opinionated press commentary by describing the far-right Jobbik as … far right. Jobbik’s lawyers had argued that “far right” didn’t fit the party’s chosen identity, which was “Christian nationalist.” The judges concurred: “Jobbik doesn’t consider itself an extreme-right party, thus referring to it with the adjective ‘far right’ constitutes an act of expressing an opinion, making it possible for the viewer to associate it with a radical movement and induce a negative impression.” The court’s ruling continued, in words that could have been lifted from the identity-sensitive speech codes of a college campus or the “Preferred Gender Pronoun” directives of the blogosphere: “Even a single word, a single epithet, may exert influence on the viewer.”

  On the world stage, criticism of the Hungarian government was reaching a fever pitch: the European Commission had threatened to take legal action against Hungary for undermining the independence of its judiciary and central bank; fifty U.S. congressmen had signed a letter to Orbán demanding that he condemn Jobbik’s “anti-Semitic and homophobic positions”; and media outlets around the globe were calling the nation an “autocracy,” the “EU’s only dictatorship,” and, in the words of one German newpaper, the new “Führerstaat.” Orbán was eager to turn the page. His administration hired the high-powered New York public relations firm of Burson-Marsteller to reengineer its image. The Hungarian government vowed to prove its critics wrong: it would make 2014 “Holocaust Remembrance Year,” officially commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. “2014 must be the year for facing up to the fact and for apologizing,” János Lázár, Orbán’s state secretary and chief administrator of the initiative, asserted at a press conference to unveil the nation’s makeover. “We must make the apology a part of our national identity.” To that end, Fidesz announced that it would open a new museum about Jewish persecution in Hungary and erect memorials and exhibitions to pay respect to the ordeal of Hungarian Jews.

  But plans for a Jewish-friendly “national identity” year were soon unraveling. To direct the new museum of Jewish persecution—the House of Fates (installed in a defunct train station and devoted exclusively to “child victims”)—the government appointed Mária Schmidt, Orbán’s historical adviser who also directed the House of Terror, the museum that had shrunk the Holocaust to a footnote. After Jewish organizations protested her selection, Schmidt unleashed a full-throated attack on these “left-liberal opinion leaders” who use “intellectual terror” and “prescribe whom we can mourn and whom we can’t, for whom we can shed a tear and for whom we can’t.” By such behavior, “they exclude themselves from our national community.” Meanwhile, the Orbán government inaugurated another establishment, the Veritas Research Institute for History, to produce a history of Hungary’s last century that would “strengthen national identity.” Placed at its helm was right-wing military historian Sándor Szakály, who promptly declared that the 1941 Hungarian government’s deportation of eighteen thousand Jews to the Ukraine (where they were massacred by SS and Ukrainian militia) was just “a police action against aliens.”

  Then the prime minister’s office unveiled plans for a monument to be erected during Holocaust Remembrance Year in Freedom Square, dedicated to “all the victims of the 19 March 1944 German invasion of Hungary.” What “all” meant became clear when the government issued a drawing of the monument’s design: An imperial eagle representing the Third Reich savagely descends on an innocent and helpless Hungary in the form of the archangel Gabriel. Prime Minister Orbán described the monument as “morally precise and immaculate.”

  Some months after the monument’s erection, I would stop on my way through Freedom Square to inspect the results. The swooping German eagle was even more supersized than the drawing had suggested, and more garish, a cartoon bird of prey with armor-plate feathers. The archangel Gabriel was a supplicant, hands held up in surrender, his delicate and bare-breasted frame a study in feminine vulnerability and innocence. Pity, O God, the Hungarian. A few feet away, a homemade counter-memorial by Holocaust survivors and the families of victims protested that assertion of innocence with a display of cracked eyeglasses, empty suitcases, and photographs of murdered relatives.

  The ruling party responded to such criticism with outrage. János Lázár, the state secretary who had promised that 2014 would be a year of “apologizing” for the Holocaust, accused Jewish leaders of ruining the government’s commemoration and “fomenting discord between Hungarians and Jews who have lived in unity and symbiosis for centuries.” The House of Fates director Mária Schmidt chimed in again with her own tirade: “To let international Jewish organizations have a say without having contributed a single penny to the costs of setting up the institution is contrary to the responsibility of the sovereign Hungarian state for its own past, present, and future.” Those who disagree “fail to understand that this time we are dealing with our very identity.”

  In August 2014, a month before I was due to fly to Budapest, I got an e-mail from my father. It contained a link, which read: www.szimsalom.hu. I called up the Web page, but it was a sea of Hungarian—and a bit of Hebrew.

  “What’s this?” I wrote back. I received no answer. My father, for all her enthusiasm for the Internet, rarely responded to e-mails. She preferred the phone.

  Some days later, she called.

  “What was that link?” I asked.

  “A synagogue. Waaall, Reform. But still.”

  “Still, what?”

  “Where it is.”

  I called up the link again and scanned the impossible words, looking for an address. It was in small print:

  Szim Salom Progresszív Zsidó Hitközség

  1092 Budapest

  Ráday u. 9.

  I was astounded. A Reform synagogue had set up shop in a flat in my father’s childhood home.

  “Vaaary Reform,” my father said. “Did you see? They have a lady rabbi.” Indeed. Katalin Kelemen was the first female rabbi in Hungary.

  “It must be small,” my father ruminated, “to meet in an apartment.”

  “We should go see.”

  When I arrive
d in Budapest and walked into my father’s kitchen, I saw two things laid out on the counter. One was a set of tickets for Szim Salom’s Rosh Hashanah dinner. My visit had coincided with the Jewish New Year. The other item was a palm-sized book with a fraying embossed cover.

  “May I?” I asked. She nodded.

  I picked up the tiny volume and leafed gingerly through frail yellowing pages of Hebrew type. It was the prayer book, gilt-edged and cloth-bound, that my father had pulled out of the box in the cellar to show her cousin Peter Gordon.

  “My mother’s,” my father said. “When my mother died, the relatives in Israel sent this to me. … The relatives who wouldn’t give me the deeds to my father’s property. I had to get—”

  “How old is this?” I interrupted. I turned to the front to look for a date, then remembered I was holding a Hebrew text. A bookplate had been pasted inside the back cover. Its Hebrew lettering and block-print illustration of a rabbi reading the Torah was accompanied by two handwritten inscriptions: first, in Hebrew, “Chaim David Ben Yitzhak Elimelech Sinai,” then, in Hungarian, “Friedman István.”

  My father looked over my shoulder. I heard a sudden drawn-in breath.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “This is not my mother’s.”

  The book belonged to her son. My father ran a finger over the letters at the bottom of the page. “This says that it was presented to me on the occasion of my bar mitzvah at the Jewish Gymnasium.” Presented at the bar mitzvah that István’s parents had failed to attend.

  A few mornings later, my father and I climbed the wide steps of the Hungarian National Museum, which was participating in the Holocaust Rembrance Year. For two hours we navigated the vast maze of the museum’s second floor, where the official history of Hungary unfolded in twenty marbled rooms. Eventually we arrived in the World War II room, a gallery devoted to the principle that wartime Hungary had no agency. The country was “practically defenseless,” exhibit signage attested. Hungarians had to join the Axis because “there was no other power from which a revision of the Trianon treaty could be expected.” In other words, they had to collaborate with the Nazis to get their property back. I cast a glance at my Fidesz father. The memorabilia relating to Jewish annihilation pointed largely to German culpability: a photo of Eichmann striking a Jewish man, SS regalia, a dummy of a Gestapo officer on a very real BMW motorbike. Two small plaques addressed the Hungarian deportations and the home-brewed brutality of the Arrow Cross with obscure indirection. (“Following the Nazi takeover on October 15, 1944, even those under protection were defenceless against the Nazi authorities and the different armed groups.”) The signs were hung low; I had to crouch to read them.

  My father insisted we skip the next round of rooms, devoted to the Communist period. “The Communists ruined Hungary. Why should I look at them?” We descended three flights to the basement level, where ancient history and the Roman ruins resided. In the corridor leading to the Bronze Age, a placard in a doorway caught my father’s eye. It read, “Survivors.” We stepped in and found a small windowless room, housing a temporary exhibit. On the walls were a series of portraits by Israeli photographer Aliza Auerbach. The subjects were Holocaust survivors and their descendants. This was the exhibit the museum had mounted for Holocaust Remembrance Year.

  My father gazed around the room in confusion, Alice fallen down the rabbit hole. She walked over to the first portrait and, without my prompting, began to translate the accompanying text into English. It was an account from a Hungarian Jewish survivor born a year later than my father. Her birth name was Dina Friedman. No relation, my father said. “As far as we know.”

  Dina and her family had been deported to Auschwitz at the end of May 1944, along with the five thousand Jews who lived in the northeastern county capital town of Nyíregyháza. “There we lost our parents and our humanity was stolen from us,” my father read, and her voice echoed through the nearly empty room. “It never occurred to us to return to Hungary.” It was a long testimony. After a few minutes, a museum guard came over and suggested that my father buy the text in the gift shop instead of reading it out loud here. My father gave her a cutting look and carried on with the translation. My mind was reeling back to our visit to the Jewish Museum in 2004, ten years earlier, when the Holocaust Room exhibition had only aroused her dismissal—“This is of no interest!”—and her irritation at a “braying” Israeli tour guide. Now her eyes were burning.

  We made a slow circuit of the room. My father came to a halt in front of a color photograph of the descendants of Dina Friedman Kol in Israel. Sixteen grandchildren and six great-grandchildren were gathered around the aged couple in a clearing in the Jerusalem Forest.

  “Let the people in Hungary look at them!” my father burst out. “They turned their back. They said, ‘Waaall, it’s none of our business.’ They never looked at who was taken. These people were just like them. They spoke the same language. They were your neighbors. They were your friends. And you let them die! These were the ones you allowed to die! Let them look, so they can go home and not sleep in peace.”

  She said she’d seen enough.

  I followed her up to the lobby and down the ceremonial steps. By the time we reached the street, she was already second-guessing her reaction, retreating from the most heartfelt passion for her people’s fate—and her own—that I’d ever heard her express.

  “Waaall, there were a few who were righteous,” she said. Christian Hungarians, she meant. “Like the doctor who gave my father his apartment,” the Ráday 9 apartment where Jenő and István hid in the late spring and early summer of ’44, while the physician and his family were vacationing at Lake Balaton. “And I could tell it from the other side,” my father continued.

  “What other side?”

  “The point of view of the people in this country. From their point of view, the Germans did it. And the Jews brought it on themselves. Our family bought real estate in Hamburg when there was the economic crisis, and sold it when it got better, and that’s how my father founded his wealth.”

  “So what?”

  “So, I’m just giving their point of view.”

  We walked half a block before she spoke again.

  “But to have that exhibit in the National Museum! Fantastic. It’s very praiseworthy.” After a few more paces, as if in response to another voice in her head, “Waaall, but it’s in the cellar.” My father gave a rueful snort. “If they had a visitors’ book, I would write in it, ‘Thank you! Thank you for putting the Jews in the cellar!’ ”

  On the afternoon of September 24, my father and I took the bus into Pest. My father wore a tweed skirt and a dark pullover sweater that covered her arms; I wore a shawl over a long-sleeved dress and black tights. We both had on low pumps. We were on our way to ring in the Jewish New Year of 5775.

  It was with an uneasy sense of déjà vu that I stood before the heavy double doors of Ráday 9 with my father and searched the address roster for the right bell to ring. When I hit the buzzer for the synagogue, it rang and rang.

  “No one’s there,” my father said. “Let’s go. I know a place we can get coffee, and their cakes are …” Here we go again, I thought. Another abortive trip to the natal home.

  Just then, and as if in replay of our last visit, the door flew open and a resident breezed past. This time my father grabbed the handle. We slipped inside. The creaking and still patched elevator took us up a level. We turned left and followed the balcony that rings the inner courtyard to apartment #2.

  “My God,” my father said. She was staring in disbelief at the door. “This is the same apartment.”

  “Same as?”

  “The doctor’s.” It was the apartment where my father and grandfather took cover in the late spring and early summer of 1944.

  I heard footsteps and, to my great relief, the door opened. A cheerful and slightly frayed middle-aged woman stood on the other side. Edit Kovács introduced herself—she was the synagogue’s shammes, as well as its cook, bookkeeper, l
ibrarian, and housekeeper. She apologized; she had been mopping the floor in the back of the apartment and hadn’t heard the buzzer.

  My father explained, in a rush of Hungarian, that her father used to own this building, that she’d grown up here, that she’d spent two months in hiding during the war in this very apartment. Edit spoke no English, but her moist eyes transcended language. She took my father’s arm and drew us inside. My father and I gazed around. Two interior walls had been knocked down to make space for the main sanctuary. A lectern was set up at one end, a painting of the tree of life behind it. A wardrobe doubled as an ark. A cabinet held menorahs and seder plates. The back wall displayed photos of the old Jewish quarter in Budapest, taken by Szim Salom’s youth group. At the other end of the apartment, a small room had been set up as a library, devoted to religious books and guides to Jewish sites in Hungary. The passage between the two had been converted to a social hall, with a folding table in the middle, walls adorned with children’s drawings. An easel showcased Hebrew letters, drawn in finger paint.

  That’s what I saw. My father saw something else.

  “This was the dining room,” she said, poking her head into the library. “There was a grandfather clock right here. It had to be wound every night.”

  In the sanctuary, my father paced up and down the old parquet floor. “This is where I slept,” she said, stopping by a row of folding chairs, “in the middle bedroom.” Whose dividing walls had since been removed.

  “How many people come to services?” I asked Edit.

  “For the bigger holidays,” she said, my father translating, “it can be forty or fifty. But usually it’s no more than twenty-five. Sometimes only ten.”

  My father went to inspect the back corner. “This is where the radio was,” she said. “This is where we’d listen to the BBC. With the sound turned down very low.” This is where my father and grandfather heard that the Friedman family of Kassa had been deported.