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By Root 496 0

they liked the way the Hungarians were standing up to them. Then, for the first time since the Red Army had entered in 1945, they started hearing the phrase “true Hungarians.” In Geza's legal circles a distinction was being made about “true Hungarian” lawyers being the only ones who should be allowed to practice once the Soviets had been driven out. Anyone who had lived through the Horthy era knew that this was code for the exclusion of Jews from the practice of law. Now that the uprising was crushed and the Soviets were back in control, the Seiferts were ready to take their chances. “I am sure,” said Ilona Seifert, “that lots of people were killed who did nothing. And they are also martyrs. But it was not the same, ‘56 and the Holocaust.… I have to say that there were a lot of martyrs from that time, but not one child, not a ninety-nine-year-old man or woman. I am sure they did terrible things and people suffered, for example, people who were in the prisons in ‘56… but it was not the same.”

To the Seiferts, Budapest was home. The Communists, even the Soviets, were people they could work with. They allowed an official Jewish Community, and by being active in the official community you could negotiate things, accomplish things, maintain a Jewish life. It was a question of negotiating skills.

But many Jews did not agree. So many families from the Jewish neighborhoods left that Andras Kovacs's school went from four classes to only two. On November 11, Gyorgy Konrad's cousin and one of his best friends came to him and told him people were being arrested. It would be years before Hungarians learned how many people had been arrested and eliminated. Even Imre Nagy was quietly executed without an announcement. But Konrad's friends understood what was happening because some of their circle, including the brother of Gyorgy's closest friend, had been among those rounded up. Gyorgy's friend and his cousin had decided to leave the country. They wanted Konrad to come too. “Don't stay here and be arrested,” they argued.

But there were forces holding Gyorgy Konrad to Hungary. His wife and her three-year-old daughter could come with him, but could he leave his parents alone? In truth, he was more afraid of leaving than staying. He was determined to be a writer. If he was arrested, he could write about that. “I believe prison would be a good school. As long as I survive, nothing that happens to me here can be bad for me as a writer.” But if he left, he would cut himself off from the Hungarian language, his language. He wasn't sure he could ever write in anything but Hungarian, and Hungarian is a language that has no cousins. Only in Hungary can you be a Hungarian writer.

14

From Moscow to Berlin

MEDICINE HAD BEEN ONE OF THE GREAT SUCCESS FIELDS of Soviet Jewry. At the time Stalin exposed the “doctors’ plot,” Moritz Mebel was among the more than 15 percent of doctors in the Soviet Union who were Jewish. He could not understand what had gone wrong. After his family fled Nazi Germany, he had never experienced anti-Semitism while he was growing up in Moscow. To him, anti-Semitism was a German sickness that he had escaped by moving to the Soviet Union, a nation that had welcomed him and his family. Then he went off to war, and after fighting in the Ukraine, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, he was even shipped east to fight the Japanese. But when he returned to Moscow, the Soviet Union seemed different. He didn't feel welcome anymore.

After the years of frontline combat, he was now hearing that Jews were cowards and couldn't fight, that they all hid far from the front lines. Two hundred thousand Jews had died fighting in the Red Army, an army that—though certainly nobody wanted to mention this while Stalin was in power—was founded by a Jew, Trotsky. Yet it was a popular insult to ask a Jew with a combat medal where he bought it.

As Mebel the veteran was finishing his education, he started feeling that opportunities for advancement were closed to him. He certainly would have no future in the foreign service. But medicine