A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [40]
As the Third Reich collapsed, the men who had been deported to labor camps started to return to Budapest. But often they found that their women and children were gone, murdered in Polish death camps. Gyula Lippner was one of them. He made it back to the family china shop in Ujpest, but he came back alone. His mother, his three sisters, his wife, and his daughter were all killed at Auschwitz. He reopened the shop that his father had inherited from his grandfather, who had first opened it in 1908. A friend who had survived the labor camp with him had two sisters who had survived Auschwitz. In 1946 Gyula Lippner married one of his friend's sisters. A year later, they had their first son, George.
Now with a child to support, Lippner had to supplement his small income from the china shop. Fortunately, he had experience in one of the most useful trades of 1945 —installing windows. Anyone in Pest who could install windows had work.
GYORGY KONRAD'S parents both survived, and once they were reunited, the family returned to their town, Berettyo Ujfalu, near the Romanian border, only to discover that they were virtually the only intact Jewish family left. Almost all of Gyorgy's schoolmates were dead. While Budapest still had a sizable Jewish population, there were few left in the rest of Hungary. Jews who did return to towns and villages found it difficult to get their property back. In Miskolc hostility became so violent that it turned into a small pogrom.
Before the war, about one in every ten people in Berettyo was Jewish—a total of about a thousand Jews. The Konrad name was originally Kahn, one of the many names borne by Kohenim, the descendants of Aaron. For more than three thousand years, the male descendants of Moses's brother Aaron have been recognized for a priestly role in Judaism. Names such as Cohen, Kahn, Cowen, Kahane often indicate this line. Just as Georges Caen's father had slightly changed the name to sound more French, Gyorgy's father had changed it to Konrad to sound more Hungarian. It hadn't spared either of them.
The Konrad family had kept a fairly traditional Jewish life in Berettyo. Gyorgy hated having to wear the religious vest under his clothes. The only way anyone could tell that he was wearing it, though, was by its four fringes that appear on the outside. Finally, he took to carrying four strings around. When he saw the rabbi coming, he would stand with his mop of curly black hair and his mischievous off-center grin, and arrange his hand with the strings unfurled at his hip so that it looked as if he were wearing the undergarment.
Under Horthy, Jewish men in provincial Hungary had been sent off to forced labor camps. Later, the Jews who had been left behind, women and children, had been sent to death camps. Now most of the survivors were men. Every time Gyorgy caught a glimpse of one of them looking at his own family, he imagined seeing in their sad, sunken eyes what they were thinking: “Why did you survive and not my wife and children?” Gyorgy was certain that that was their thought. It was his too. “Why were we the lucky ones?” Gyorgy wondered.
Berettyo was an interesting place for an inquisitive twelve-year-old to live. Soviet troops were stationed there, and a corporal served as translator for the officers. Gyorgy had to speak to these Russians because he had to speak to everyone, and this corporal was the only one who spoke his language. They would make trades, striking bargains that always tremendously satisfied Gyorgy but on occasion greatly displeased his mother, such as when he traded her watch for a bayonet.
The soldiers tried to maintain good relations with the townspeople. Occasionally, soldiers would rob someone's home. When the locals complained, the guilty soldiers