A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [39]
Ilona, Erzsebet Falk's niece who was hiding in the Falk house, recalled it differently: “They came by horses, and they brought colored telephone wire. And I was so happy to see the young soldiers with the red star here.” She pointed to her forehead. “And the people came out with yellow stars. And the young soldiers went down from the tanks, and there was very great happiness.”
Gyorgy Konrad, who had been living in the Swiss house, was a little less euphoric. “There was some stealing and not too many rapes,” he recalled. But with his parents being held in some unknown place abroad, he had been waiting in his “safe” house wondering how long the Swiss protection would be respected. He had already worked out a desperate plan of action for running from the Arrow Cross when they tried to drag him to the river. For him, the Soviets could not have come too soon. What he most remembered about those first days was Soviet soldiers going to pharmacies and searching for bottles of a brand of eau de cologne called Chat Noir, which they would drink in hearty gulpfuls.
One infantryman, Moritz Mebel, remembered Budapest as giving a notably cool reception to the liberators. Mebel was not a Soviet. He had been born in Erfurt in the Thuringer region of central Germany, in a kosher Jewish household. When he was seven years old, his religious grandmother died and the household's dietary laws were dropped, although the family still occasionally went to synagogue. Other children would shout “dirty Jew” at him as he walked down the street. When he was ten years old, Hitler came to power, and his parents fled with him to Moscow. His cousins and their family stayed behind and were killed by the Nazis, while Moritz was safely studying, attending a German-language international school for leftist refugee families. When the war came, he joined the Red Army and stood with thousands of other infantrymen at a line that in 1941 was virtually the gateway to the city, although it is now within the Moscow city limits and marked with a monument that people pass on their way into town from the airport. It was there that Mebel's infantry unit began their journey. They drove the Germans back across Russia, Romania, and the Ukraine. But Budapest stood out in Mebel's memory as a particularly tough fight. The unit had to liberate Pest house by house, fighting not Germans but Hungarians, while the Germans in Buda held the high ground and shot down on them at will.
In Mebel's mind, there were two kinds of people in Budapest. “A part of the population was glad we were liberating them—but of course, not the ones who were fighting us.” After Pest fell, some welcomed them, but others hoped—the great fear of Pest's Jews— that the Germans who were just across the river in Buda with its commanding heights, would come back.
ALTHOUGH THE GERMANS did not come back, ghetto survivors were still dying from hunger and disease at a rate of hundreds every week. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, an amalgam of American Jewish organizations, cooked for 3,500 people each day. Synagogues, which had been used as stables, and other community buildings were in ruins. It would take several years to restore them.
Erzsebet Falk's niece Ilona, born in 1921 to an old middle-class Jewish Budapest family, had not been able to finish her high school education because in the late 1930s the Hungarian government, as a good faith gesture to its German friends, passed laws restricting Jews from schools. After Liberation, Ilona's father rebuilt his soda water factory, where she had had to spend her teens instead of in school. Now she realized that the extra chairs and tables in the factory could be used to furnish a new Jewish kindergarten that the Joint was funding. When the kindergarten was opened, Geza Seifert, the lawyer in charge of the project, took her by the hand