A Chosen Few (12 page)

Israel had learned diamond cleaving in the 1930s, after he had emigrated to Antwerp from Poland. His wife had come from Poland, too, and had worked slavish garment jobs to earn money to send back to her family. But once Israel started cleaving, he earned enough money for both of them. After the war they returned to Antwerp from Switzerland, confident that he could again bring in a comfortable income from cleaving. At least, it would have been a comfortable income, if it were only three children—or four, since they soon had another daughter—who were supported by it. But Israel Kornfeld was that rare kind of religious man who believed that ultimately what matters to God is how you treat other people. And so in his small house he used his diamond cleaver’s earnings to support anywhere from ten to thirty people at a time. If he saw somebody on the street who looked hungry, he would ask them if they needed a meal or a place to stay.

He had done this before the war too. But after the war, with Antwerp awash in camp survivors—this was his moment. He had his children gather flour sacks and stuff them with straw for beds, then run over to the medieval city center to buy olive drab U.S. Army surplus blankets. Survivors would come and stay for a week or a month or several months. There was always floor space for another stuffed sack. They ate potatoes. The children would peel potatoes for two dozen or more people every day. On special days there might be a piece of meat in the potatoes, but the basic diet was just potatoes.

The gaunt strangers, mostly men, would sit around on their sacks and trade spectacularly horrifying stories about brutality and degradation in places called Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald. Israel Kornfeld understood that they needed to talk about it. They would talk to each other or to his wife, but mainly they talked to him. Not only was he a good listener, but he had the perfect job for it, because he cleaved at home. As he listened, Israel, bent over a small wooden box, would carefully place a knife along grooves in the diamond he was working on, and with experienced fingers he would split off pieces along the grain of the crystal. To an outsider, it looked like whittling. He had done it for years, and it was easy for him to listen to people talk while he worked.

The children listened, too, especially the Kornfelds’ son Pinchas. Pinchas was eight years old and curious about everything—about the hole in the floor of the upstairs
shul
in the big
Orthodox synagogue, and about the blackened ruins of the Van Den Nestlei synagogue. He would stand on the sidewalk at Van Den Nestlei and stare at a surviving red-colored wall where a slogan had been written in Yiddish by angry Jewish leftists before the war: “Down with Passover. Long live May Day!” Pinchas wondered about those May Day Jews. He had never heard Jews talk like that. What really aroused his curiosity was the fact that they had misspelled the word for Passover,
Pesach
. What kind of school had they gone to, misspelling
Pesach
?

This wide-eyed skinny boy was barely noticed in post-Holocaust Antwerp, but he stole glimpses at a world that was so dark and so twisted, it was beyond all imagining. No monster story, no horror fiction, was like this. At night, in his parents’ small house, everyone had their sleeping place. Pinchas’s place was in the big front room on a couch. The room was always full of survivors, and rather than sleep, he lay still and listened to their terrifying stories of how they had lost their parents, their children, their wives. The survivors could not stop talking—and Pinchas could not stop listening. He read books with first-hand accounts of survivors—there was an explosion of such books in Yiddish after the war.

The survivors shared more than their stories. Many of them were ill with contagious diseases, which spread through the little house. All three children developed a skin disease, an itchy rash that plagued them for months. Finally they were taken to the hospital and placed in a sulphurous solution and scrubbed with wire brushes while they screamed in pain. Sometimes the Kornfeld children had to miss a few weeks of school because of these diseases, but they were still ahead of most of the Jewish children because unlike most surviving children, they had gone to school throughout the entire war. Not many Jewish children were left. The first postwar Jewish school had started with only seventeen pupils.

Even with their diseases, it was inconceivable that Israel Kornfeld would close his door to survivors. It was what he believed in doing. Later on, when there were no longer needy survivors, he found other people who needed help. There is always someone who needs help.

“A
utumn and Buda were born of the same mother,” wrote Gyula Krúdy, a turn-of-the-century Hungarian novelist. On one bank are the hills of Buda, the last foothills of the lower Carpathian range. On the other side is the cramped urban flatland of Pest, the beginning of the Great Hungarian Plains that were once Europe’s wheat fields. For a few weeks in the fall, when the horse chestnuts start dropping from the trees, and the hills turn amber and coral, and a sweet smell of rot rises, people succumb to the beauty of Buda with a kind of drunken emotionalism. A porous light, the color of raspberry cream, appears on the horizon and filters the view of the curvaceous green steeples over in Pest. Between Buda and Pest flows the wide Danube. If rivers had voices, in the fall of 1944 the Danube would have screamed.

In March of that year the Germans, no longer trusting their ally, Miklós Horthy, had invaded. Jews were herded into a small neighborhood around the huge synagogue on Dohány Street. The streets were walled off, and guarded gates installed. About 130,000 Jews were trapped inside this ghetto. A few months later, on October 14, Horthy was overthrown by Hungarian fascists. Goon squads called Arrow Cross, after their emblem, a Hungarian version of the swastika, took over Budapest. Vicious, uneducated young men, some only teenagers, ruled the streets by force of arms. If they felt like
shooting someone, they shot. But their favored activity was rounding up Jews in Pest, marching them to the banks of the Danube, standing behind them, opening fire, and simply letting the bodies crumple into the river, to be swept south by the current.

Zsuzsa, a nurse, went to visit her mother in the ghetto at the end of her hospital shift and found her walking down a street toward the river with a group of Jews, carrying their belongings in bundles as though they were leaving on a trip. Teenagers wearing armbands pointed the way with machine guns and pistols. Zsuzsa was able to grab her mother, pull her away, and hide her in the hospital until the Liberation.

György Konrád was one of eighteen people living in a house in Pest that was under the protection of the Swiss government. One of the others was an eighteen-year-old girl, with whom eleven-year-old György had fallen into the throes of quivery young love. When she ventured out onto the street one day, the Arrow Cross found her, threw her in with a group they had already gathered, and marched them to the Danube. The group stood on the riverbank in a line, with the Arrow Cross behind them. She was at one end and could hear the gunshots and the splash of falling bodies as they worked down the line. And then—nothing. They had used their last bullet on the man next to her. Out of ammunition, they let her go.

In another house near the ghetto Erzsébet Falk, a non-Jewish woman with a Jewish husband had given shelter to eighty-seven people, including sixty-four Jews. In January 1945 the artillery at night was getting closer. On the night of the seventeenth, the refugees in the Falk house hid in the basement, listening to the bursts and explosions as the world’s largest army blasted the world’s second-largest army off the streets of Pest one block at a time.

As they huddled in the basement speculating on where each ever-closer explosion had landed, they heard a young voice shout, “All right, line up!” Seven young men in brown and green with Arrow Cross armbands, machine guns, and pistols had broken into the basement, looking wild with panic and fury.

“Come on!” they shouted. “Everybody has to go! You are all Jews. We are going to the Danube. Now!”

Erzsébet Falk went over to them, and in a soft, gracious voice said, “Please. There is plenty of time to line everyone up. But first, we have a very nice dinner here. What I suggest is that you have a little dinner. It is past seven. We have some good wine. Whatever we do, we should do after dinner. Let’s have some wine now.”

The seven teenagers had some wine, and as they gulped it by the glassful over the course of an hour, their speech grew sloppy, their voices louder. Soon they rolled up their jacket sleeves, exposing arms that were covered with watches and bracelets, from wrist to elbow, like displays in a pawnshop. “Know where we got these?” one of them called out. “Jews! We got them from Jews like you! Two hours ago at the river.” One of them mimed machine-gunning. All seven burst into laughter.

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. “I’m 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 Béla Gadó, a Hungarian Jew who had been shipped off to forced labor in a Serbian mine. His wife had been deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After the Soviets took Serbia in October, Gadó 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 Üjpest—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. György Gadó, Béla’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 of the Red Army on that day: “Immediately behind the fighting patrols appeared a flood of soldiers in the street, some of them caracoling on horseback.” He described them robbing and raping their way through Pest.

Ilona, Erzsébet 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.”

György Konrád, 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.