A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [84]
The Lippners were not practicing Jews, but they told their two sons that the family was Jewish and they repeatedly explained that they should be careful with this information because “it is a very dangerous thing to be a Jew in Hungary.” In general they tried to be good Communists and raise their sons to be good Communists and join the young Communists, and they did all the other things good Communist families did to get ahead.
Even the Konrads’ hardware store in Berettyo was nationalized. Many of the surviving Jewish men had started new families with Jewish women from elsewhere or non-Jewish women from town, and they had opened small shops in their traditional trades. In 1949, once they realized that even these little shops were to be taken, signs appeared on the doors of little ateliers all over Berettyo saying that the owner was away and would be back shortly. The shop owners and their families loaded themselves into trucks and drove to Czechoslovakia, from where they could still travel easily to “the new Soviet ally,” Israel. They settled in a small town on the Mediterranean coast, where they reopened their shops, and continued to speak Hungarian. For two decades Berettyo Jewish life was preserved in this Israeli village.
In Berettyo itself, Jewish life had ended. The more affluent and better-educated families did not get on the trucks to Israel but instead drifted, a few at a time, to Budapest. Gyorgy Konrad, now 16, went to Budapest in search of something to do after the family hardware business was nationalized. Having struggled to learn Russian ever since those first curious troops had appeared in Berettyo in 1945, he had now learned it well enough to work translating articles from Pravda and other party organs into Hungarian. These were wordy, tedious thousand-word items that tortured language to assure political conformity. Each of Gyorgy's translations was carefully filed in an archive, where in all probability it was never again seen.
THE GAZDAG FAMILY lived in Ferencvaros, in southern Pest, where a small tributary forks off the Danube, only to rejoin it south of the capital. Both parents were party members who enjoyed the opportunities of the new system: Ervin was a chemical engineer, and Zsuzsa, no longer a nurse, was a film editor. A successful Communist family, they believed in the future of this new egalitarian society. Their son Gyula, born in 1947, was six years old walking home from first grade with several other children. Suddenly his friends started pushing one boy because he was fat. Gyula decided to defend the fat boy—he was being raised with this kind of idealism. For the rest of the walk home, the boys shouted, pushed, and scuffled until, one by one, they broke away at their homes. When they got: to the street where the Gazdags lived, only Gyula, the fat boy, and one of the other boys were left. They were neighbors. Each boy went to the gate of his building, but they continued to shout at each other. The fat boy shouted at the other boy, “You dirty Jew!” That seemed to put the other boy in his place, so Gyula also started shouting “Dirty Jew!” He went right over to the gateway and shouted it in the boy's face. At that moment an elderly woman who lived in Gyula's