A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [166]
27
In Budapest
IN 1984 AN ADVERTISEMENT FROM A HUNGARIAN TRAVEL agency led documentary filmmaker Gyula Gazdag to realize at last his childhood dream of making a film about the Holocaust. The advertisement was for a package tour of Auschwitz. Thinking that this was a peculiar idea, Gazdag investigated and discovered that the package was being put together at the request of the official Hungarian Jewish Community for the fortieth anniversary of the liberation. All of the tourists who took the package were Auschwitz survivors. Package Tour is Gazdag's documentary about the trip. He finds watching it almost unbearable and could hardly si and looking at it long enough even to edit it. The film crew moves from barrack to barrack across the shady Auschwitz grounds as the survivors point to the spot where someone was shot, where they were forced to line up for Mengele's experiments. A cheerful, enthusiastic Polish guide insists on telling them at every turn information he has been trained to recite. The survivors get increasingly annoyed with this uncaring Pole and finally take him aside to inform him that the people he is talking to are survivors and don't need to hear all this. But then we find out that the Polish guide, one of the early political prisoners, was also an Auschwitz survivor. He had worked hard at being cheerful because that was his job.
Most Gyula Gazdag films were still being censored by the regime. Although Gazdag never became active in the democratic movement, he and other Hungarian filmmakers provided one of the few vehicles for the expression of discontent. In the 1980s the Democratic Charter movement that Gyorgy Konrad had helped create and other opposition movements were emboldened by the seeming weakening will of the Communists. Groups were forming around underground publications. Gyorgy Gado's apartment was searched eight times by police looking for illegal publications, which they generally found.
As Gyorgy Konrad got more deeply involved in the opposition movement, he became convinced that Central Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—would in time break from the Soviet Union. He even developed a pet theory that it would happen in 1992. This was not a deep political insight but instead was based on the observation that every twelve years something happened. There was 1944, then ‘56, then Prague in ‘68, and Warsaw in 1980, and so surely something big would happen in 1992. But he also saw the entire superpower structure of global politics as destined to break up, and he wrote about it in a prophetic book called Anti-politics.
In 1988, Janos Kadar was replaced as head of the government by Karoly Grosz, who tried to offer economic reform as a substitute for political reform. But as in Poland, events outran even the opposition. By late 1989, the Communist party had voted to dissolve into a different kind of socialist party and to give up its power monopoly. New political parties were formed to fill the vacuum. The two leading ones, the Democratic Forum and the Free Democrats, offered similar programs, although the Free Democrats wanted to move a little faster. The major difference was that the Democratic Forum appealed to nationalism and the Free Democrats avoided it. Nationalism was about to turn neighboring Yugoslavia into a brutal battleground. Hungarian nationalism could get pulled in. Yugoslavia had ethnic Hungarians, as did Romania and the Slovak side of Czechoslovakia. Even before the 1990 election a vocal right wing of the Democratic Forum talked about who was and was not a “true Hungarian.” It was being implied that Hungarians of Romanian, gypsy, or Jewish origin were not “true Hungarians.” This was a code that everyone in Central Europe understood. The same thing was happening in Romania, except there, it was Hungarians, gypsies, and Jews who were being singled out. Hungarian nationalists were saying that Hungarian