A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [38]
One glass later, they were again ordering everyone to line up, shouting, “Come on! We're going to the damned river!” But at that moment a shell exploded nearby, and two of the Arrow Cross panicked and ran out of the cellar toward the gate. As they crossed the courtyard, another explosion shook the building, and when the hidden people looked out into the courtyard through the settling cloud of dust and smoke, they saw one of the Arrow Cross lying in a half-inch of blood, with his right leg missing from the midthigh.
The other six Arrow Cross, pale and trembling, returned to the basement and the wine bottles. For hours, the people of the house sat and watched these young men grow drunker and drunker. Finally, when a lookout at the gate reported that the Red Army was only a few blocks away, the Arrow Cross took off their brown shirts and replaced them with red ones, preparing to cheer the Red Army. Their logic was uncomplicated: If Brown Shirts wore brown shirts, surely the Reds liked people in red. But one of them could not bring himself to be a Red. Tm not going to wear that. Never,” he declared. Then they ran chaotically into the street. A burst of gunfire was heard, and the Arrow Cross who had not changed his shirt was dead. One who had changed into civilian clothes went up to the fifth floor and was shooting down at the Soviets. They charged into the house, climbed the stairs, and killed him.
After the Soviets finished off the Arrow Cross at the Falk house, they returned with bread and supplies. It was January 18, and it had been a cold snowy winter, made harsher by the fact that there was hardly an unbroken window left in Pest. The streets were blocked with the carbonized chassis of trucks and tanks and the corpses of soldiers and civilians. In the distance, explosions were heard. The Germans, having retreated to Buda, were blowing up all the bridges on the Danube.
There were two different vantage points from which one could view the arrival of the Red Army—another one of those defining rifts between Jews and non-Jews. Non-Jews were not hiding in basements waiting for a band of adolescent maniacs to march them to the river and shoot them. Nor had they seen their relatives shipped off by train to Polish death camps. Recently the trains had stopped, because someone had mysteriously blown up the tracks. But the Germans, ever resourceful, were working on a new idea. They had wired the ghetto, where seventy thousand Jews were still walled in, and they intended to blow up the entire ten blocks. Had the Red Army not arrived, they certainly would have flipped the switch.
One of the men with the Red Army was Bela Gado, a Hungarian Jew who had been shipped off to forced labor in a Serbian mine. His wife had been deported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. After the Soviets took Serbia in October, Gado used his limited Russian to talk them into taking him with them through Romania and the Hungarian plain and into Pest. Just north of Pest, in the suburb of Ujpest—New Pest—his two sons were being hidden by Catholic priests in a Silesian brothers’ school. The boys thought it was only a matter of time before the Arrow Cross found them. Then suddenly the Red Army was blasting its way through the streets, and their father was there. Gyorgy Gado, Bela's fourteen-year-old son, did not remember the Liberation as festive. “A part of the population feared this change and the Liberation. A part had felt it was an occupation.… As for me, all the Jews felt they were liberated. For if the Russians had not come, all the Jewish population of Budapest would have been exterminated, without any doubt.”
Historian John Lukacs later wrote about what he saw