A Chosen Few (13 page)

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 Thüringer 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.

A
LTHOUGH THE
G
ERMANS
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.

Erzsébet 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, Géza Seifert, the lawyer in charge of the project, took her by the hand and said, “I would like to thank you for the beautiful work that you have done.” Ilona looked back with her soft eyes and elegantly featured face. She could see the effect she was having on him. As Géza Seifert took her hand, she had only one thought: “Is he married?” He was not, and soon after their meeting, he married Ilona.

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 Üjpest, 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.

G
YÖRGY
K
ONRÁD’S
parents both survived, and once they were reunited, the family returned to their town, Berettyó Ujfalu, near the Romanian border, only to discover that they were virtually the only intact Jewish family left. Almost all of György’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 Berettyó was Jewish—a total of about a thousand Jews. The Konrád 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, György’s father had changed it to Konrád to sound more Hungarian. It hadn’t spared either of them.

The Konrád family had kept a fairly traditional Jewish life in Berettyó. György 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 György 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?” György was certain that that was their thought. It was his too. “Why were we the lucky ones?” György wondered.

Berettyó 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. György 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 György 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 were arrested and jailed
in the headquarters. Sometimes an extremely fat and good-natured colonel, who drove a Mercedes too big and shiny for the town, would personally kick a soldier down stairs into a cellar, which made a good impression on the townspeople. Soldiers bought things in the Konráds’ hardware store and became acquainted with the family. Sometimes they would come over to the Konráds’ house. On those occasions György’s parents would always get his sister out of sight—these Russians could be unpredictable. They drank vodka and ate raw onions, taking crunching bites off them as though they were apples, and slurped tremendous amounts of raw eggs, sucking them noisily out of the top of the shells. György thought these Russians were a funny people.

J
ust north of Berlin, in the town of Oranienburg, not hidden in the woods but in the town, was the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. For twelve years, people living in gray Prussian houses with high-pitched roofs, neat little gardens, and painted metal gates watched emaciated prisoners march by. Then in 1945 the Germans marched forty thousand prisoners away to nowhere. They did not have the capacity to kill them all and they did not want them to fall into Allied hands, so they marched them. Hundreds dropped dead. Hundreds more were shot. But three hundred were left behind in the hospital, a long, one-story barrack on the edge of the camp.

When the Germans gave the order for the march out of the camp, there was disagreement among the prisoners in the hospital. Should they drag themselves out, or should they claim to be too weak to stand up? Their survival had turned on such decisions for years. Some of the hospital inmates expected that the people who went on the march would be shot. Then, too, they might really be too weak to survive it. How far would they be marched? Others thought that anyone who said he was too weak to march would be shot. Some thought the hospital had been wired and that the Germans would blow it up with them in it.

The three hundred hospital inmates watched the SS march the last survivors off. Some waited for the explosion. There was none.
They waited longer—nothing happened. There was no point in leaving, nowhere to go, and no use in turning to the people who lived in the neat gray houses along the road from the main gate. The hospital had shelter and a little food, and so they stayed there.

The Sachsenhausen concentration camp was liberated one week later by three heavily armed Red Army soldiers who burst into the hospital. They had mongolian features and said something quickly in Russian. Then they left, and the group was alone again. Karol Wassermann, a Slovak Jew, understood enough Russian to know that what they had said was, “You are free.”

O
NCE THE THREE HUNDRED
Sachsenhausen inmates were pronounced free, they were alone—free at last, free to eat and die. And that was what they did. First they looked around the camp for food. Then they slipped out, nervously avoiding the town, going out to the woods, where they caught rabbits and birds and found plants and fruits. Returning to the camp, they cooked rich stews and roasted meats. And they died. These people had been living—some of them for years—on a slice of bread and thin soup that was little more than flour and water. You could never get enough. “I could have eaten—or rather drunk—ten liters of that soup. There was nothing in it,” said Karol Wassermann.

Now they had real food, and they died from it. In all the liberated camps of Europe in the spring of 1945, some survivors dropped over from exhaustion, some succumbed to epidemics—tuberculosis and typhoid—and thousands died from overeating. Survivors hoarded sausages, meat, bread, clothing, blankets—the things that had made the difference between life and death in the camps. Who knew how long this “liberation” phase would last? When the Holocaust started again, they would be ready. Or they would be ready for the next one. Even in the early 1950s orphanages for camp survivors found that some of the children were still hoarding food from the dining hall.

Karol Wassermann, a pharmacist who knew something about medicine, was not going to eat himself to death. The first few days, he barely allowed himself to eat at all. He tried to warn the others as well. But Wassermann was a difficult man; he always went against the grain and was not well liked. When he had first been admitted to the hospital in a fever-driven delirium, he had repeatedly talked about death and—worse—the smell of death. By then, a small crematorium had been built on the edge of the camp, and
the smell from it drifted throughout the triangular-shaped Sachsenhausen compound and into the little town of Oranienburg. But in the camp, as in the town, you didn’t talk about the smell. The inmates did not like people who talked about these things. After the Liberation, when Wassermann tried to tell people that they would die from eating, it was just Wassermann talking about death again. For now, there was food. They should try to get a few pounds back on their bodies before the Germans returned.

They spent their first week completely on their own. Then the Soviets, not the Germans, came back and tried to help them. By then, half of them were dead or dying from overeating.

Two days after the war ended, Wassermann was able to get a bus to Prague. When he arrived, he saw that the city’s stone bridges, spires, and dark passageways were still undamaged. Moritz Mebel remembered the Prague Liberation very differently from the one in Budapest. “Oh, Prague! It was a huge party. I have never again seen anything like that. We were hosted by people. You felt that Liberation was really celebrated with their hearts!”

Once Wassermann was in Prague, he looked for his aunt, who he hoped would not have been deported because she was married to a Christian. He recognized a few other survivors wandering the cobblestone streets. They looked like him, like most people he had known in recent years. The stare, the body that looked as if it were held together by strings. They too were looking for a relative or friend who was still alive. After days, Wassermann did find his aunt alive. She had a place where he could stay and begin to reorganize his life.

He was a Slovak and did not plan to stay in Prague. Czechoslovakia, which had been put together at the end of World War I, had been separated by Hitler. He had kept the western part—Bohemia and Moravia, including Prague—because he considered it to be German. The eastern Slovak region had been handed over to the pro-Nazi Slovak nationalist Father Jozef Tiso. Now that the Slovak nationalists had been defeated and disgraced, Czechoslovakia was a single country again. For a few weeks, Wassermann and his aunt waited in Prague in the hope that his brother Tybor would turn up on one of the trains of returning survivors, just as he had. But after some weeks of vainly checking the arriving trains, Karol and his aunt returned to their native central Slovak mining town of Banska Stiavrica.