A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [37]
4
Liberated
Budapest
“AUTUMN AND BUDA WERE BORN OF THE SAME mother,” wrote Gyula Krudy, a turn-of-the-century Hungarian novelist. On one bank are the hills of Buda, the last foothills of the lower Carpathian range. On the other side is the cramped urban flatland of Pest, the beginning of the Great Hungarian Plains that were once Europe's wheat fields. For a few weeks in the fall, when the horse chestnuts start dropping from the trees, and the hills turn amber and coral, and a sweet smell of rot rises, people succumb to the beauty of Buda with a kind of drunken emotionalism. A porous light, the color of raspberry cream, appears on the horizon and filters the view of the curvaceous green steeples over in Pest. Between Buda and Pest flows the wide Danube. If rivers had voices, in the fall of 1944 the Danube would have screamed.
In March of that year the Germans, no longer trusting their ally, Miklos Horthy, had invaded. Jews were herded into a small neighborhood around the huge synagogue on Dohany Street. The streets were walled off, and guarded gates installed. About 130,000 Jews were trapped inside this ghetto. A few months later, on October 14, Horthy was overthrown by Hungarian fascists. Goon squads called Arrow Cross, after their emblem, a Hungarian version of the swastika, took over Budapest. Vicious, uneducated young men, some only teenagers, ruled the streets by force of arms. If they felt like shooting someone, they shot. But their favored activity was rounding up Jews in Pest, marching them to the banks of the Danube, standing behind them, opening fire, and simply letting the bodies crumple into the river, to be swept south by the current.
Zsuzsa, a nurse, went to visit her mother in the ghetto at the end of her hospital shift and found her walking down a street toward the river with a group of Jews, carrying their belongings in bundles as though they were leaving on a trip. Teenagers wearing armbands pointed the way with machine guns and pistols. Zsuzsa was able to grab her mother, pull her away, and hide her in the hospital until the Liberation.
Gyorgy Konrad was one of eighteen people living in a house in Pest that was under the protection of the Swiss government. One of the others was an eighteen-year-old girl, with whom eleven-year-old Gyorgy had fallen into the throes of quivery young love. When she ventured out onto the street one day, the Arrow Cross found her, threw her in with a group they had already gathered, and marched them to the Danube. The group stood on the riverbank in a line, with the Arrow Cross behind them. She was at one end and could hear the gunshots and the splash of falling bodies as they worked down the line. And then—nothing. They had used their last bullet on the man next to her. Out of ammunition, they let her go.
In another house near the ghetto Erzsebet Falk, a non-Jewish woman with a Jewish husband had given shelter to eighty-seven people, including sixty-four Jews. In January 1945 the artillery at night was getting closer. On the night of the seventeenth, the refugees in the Falk house hid in the basement, listening to the bursts and explosions as the world's largest army blasted the world's second-largest army off the streets of Pest one block at a time.
As they huddled in the basement speculating on where each ever-closer explosion had landed, they heard a young voice shout, “All right, line up!” Seven young men in brown and green with Arrow Cross armbands, machine guns, and pistols had broken into the basement, looking wild with panic and fury.
“Come on!” they shouted. “Everybody has to go! You are all Jews. We are going to the Danube. Now!”
Erzsebet Falk went over to them, and in a soft, gracious voice said, “Please. There is plenty of time to line everyone up. But first, we have a very nice dinner here. What I suggest is that you have a little dinner. It is past seven. We have some good wine. Whatever we do, we should do after dinner. Let's have some wine now.”
The seven teenagers had some wine, and as they gulped it by the glassful over the course of