A Chosen Few (50 page)

I
n 1984 an advertisement from a Hungarian travel agency led documentary filmmaker Gyula Gazdag to realize at last his childhood dream of making a film about the Holocaust. The advertisement was for a package tour of Auschwitz. Thinking that this was a peculiar idea, Gazdag investigated and discovered that the package was being put together at the request of the official Hungarian Jewish Community for the fortieth anniversary of the liberation. All of the tourists who took the package were Auschwitz survivors.
Package Tour
is Gazdag’s documentary about the trip. He finds watching it almost unbearable and could hardly stand looking at it long enough even to edit it. The film crew moves from barrack to barrack across the shady Auschwitz grounds as the survivors point to the spot where someone was shot, where they were forced to line up for Mengele’s experiments. A cheerful, enthusiastic Polish guide insists on telling them at every turn information he has been trained to recite. The survivors get increasingly annoyed with this uncaring Pole and finally take him aside to inform him that the people he is talking to are survivors and don’t need to hear all this. But then we find out that the Polish guide, one of the early political prisoners, was also an Auschwitz survivor. He had worked hard at being cheerful because that was his job.

Most Gyula Gazdag films were still being censored by the regime. Although Gazdag never became active in the democratic
movement, he and other Hungarian filmmakers provided one of the few vehicles for the expression of discontent. In the 1980s the Democratic Charter movement that György Konrád had helped create and other opposition movements were emboldened by the seeming weakening will of the Communists. Groups were forming around underground publications. György Gadó’s apartment was searched eight times by police looking for illegal publications, which they generally found.

As György Konrád got more deeply involved in the opposition movement, he became convinced that Central Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—would in time break from the Soviet Union. He even developed a pet theory that it would happen in 1992. This was not a deep political insight but instead was based on the observation that every twelve years something happened. There was 1944, then ’56, then Prague in ’68, and Warsaw in 1980, and so surely something big would happen in 1992. But he also saw the entire superpower structure of global politics as destined to break up, and he wrote about it in a prophetic book called
Anti-politics
.

In 1988, János Kádár was replaced as head of the government by Karoly Grosz, who tried to offer economic reform as a substitute for political reform. But as in Poland, events outran even the opposition. By late 1989, the Communist party had voted to dissolve into a different kind of socialist party and to give up its power monopoly. New political parties were formed to fill the vacuum. The two leading ones, the Democratic Forum and the Free Democrats, offered similar programs, although the Free Democrats wanted to move a little faster. The major difference was that the Democratic Forum appealed to nationalism and the Free Democrats avoided it. Nationalism was about to turn neighboring Yugoslavia into a brutal battleground. Hungarian nationalism could get pulled in. Yugoslavia had ethnic Hungarians, as did Romania and the Slovak side of Czechoslovakia. Even before the 1990 election a vocal right wing of the Democratic Forum talked about who was and was not a “true Hungarian.” It was being implied that Hungarians of Romanian, gypsy, or Jewish origin were not “true Hungarians.” This was a code that everyone in Central Europe understood. The same thing was happening in Romania, except there, it was Hungarians, gypsies, and Jews who were being singled out. Hungarian nationalists were saying that Hungarian Jews were not “true Hungarians,” but they also claimed that Hungarian-speaking Slovaks were. But
many Slovak Jews are Hungarian-speaking—would they be “true Hungarians”?

The Democratic Forum was saying that the Free Democrats were not “true Hungarians,” which was their way of reminding voters that some of the Free Democrats, including parliamentary candidate György Gadó, were Jews.

This was free speech. No one had been allowed to talk like this for forty years. It all may have been predictable, but that did not stop it from being a shock. The activists of both parties had worked together against the Communist regime. An angry György Gadó said, “I hoped, like many other people in my field, that a liberal democratic change had come. We knew, of course, that there were other forces in the society that did not hope for such a liberal change but for a Christian change or a change that had another ideology. But for many months we thought that our first enemy was the former system, the former government, the Communist party, the Communist movement. In this historic change our first enemy is not the former regime. It is people with whom we previously sat together and participated in the so-called opposition round table.”

The nationalist line of the Democratic Forum paid off, when shortly before the 1990 election ethnic Hungarians were attacked by Romanian nationalists in Romania, killing four Hungarians and further infusing the political atmosphere in Hungary with paranoid nationalism. After the Democratic Forum came to power, the tone worsened. The man of the moment became István Csurka, a popular comic playwright who had risen to be vice president of the ruling Democratic Forum. Csurka talked a lot about “legitimacy.” In repeated statements he expressed the idea that only “true Hungarians” should have a voice in Hungarian affairs. To expound on this message, in September 1992 Csurka staged a rally that was attended by a reported seventy thousand people. Shortly thereafter, thugs murdered a gypsy in a rural town. Konrád and his Democratic Charter organized a counterdemonstration of equal size, filling the large square by the many-spired parliament building with candle-bearing protesters. He was not surprised that it was difficult at first to line up speakers. “I am accustomed to this fact that people generally are afraid in this country. I wouldn’t say that this government is aggressive or violent, but there are aggressive forces. A teacher is now afraid of what he has to say in history lessons to the students. Journalists are afraid, and writers are afraid.”

Hungarians, especially Hungarian Jews, had to deal with things
that had not been seen in a generation. There was an extreme right-wing group called Jobboldali Blokk, and neo-Nazi literature was appearing on the streets. In September 1993 an elaborate ceremony marked the transfer of Hitler’s ally Admiral Miklós Horthy’s body from where he died in Portuguese exile to his hometown in Hungary. It was an unofficial ceremony sponsored by navy elements who called him “a great seaman”—dim praise in a country with no coastline and no fleet. The government said they had had nothing to do with the transfer, but several ministers attended the ceremony and a commemorative coin was issued. Prime Minister Józef Antall, who usually distanced himself from the more nationalist elements, referred to Horthy as “a great patriot” because he had gained back lost Hungarian territory. The fact that he had done this by allying Hungary with the Third Reich was not discussed. Nor were the deportations under his rule mentioned.

Jews were becoming uneasy but also angry. Konrád had a ninety-two-year-old uncle, a veteran of the Hungarian independence struggle, who was furious. “I fought with Kossuth, I survived Auschwitz. Why do I want to be told now I’m not Hungarian?” his uncle would shout. It had become a common scene in Jewish households in post-Communist Hungary. A Jewish businessman who had emigrated to Switzerland and then returned after the change was discussing events with his family over a Rosh Hashanah dinner. He still had his house in Geneva and his Swiss papers. “If things go badly, I can move the whole family there,” he said. But his family had not gone abroad with him before, and they were not interested in moving now. They had survived a lot in Hungary, and they were determined to survive Csurka. A cousin, a meticulously dressed older woman across the table, began talking with a rage that grew like a swell at sea. “This Csurka, he talks about who is a Hungarian and who is not a Hungarian. The Romanians aren’t Hungarians, the gypsies aren’t Hungarians. The Jews. Nobody can tell me I’m not a Hungarian. I have paid to be here,” she said, at which point she shoved up her sweater sleeve and showed the bluish Auschwitz numbers tattooed on the pale inside of her forearm.

A
FTER THE WAR
the Budapest Jewish Community leadership, the MIOK, had estimated that there were 240,000 Jews left in Hungary. About 150,000 fled following the 1956 uprising. For years the estimate of the Jewish population ran between 80,000 and 100,000.
But this had always been a guess. Only about 10,000 Jews were registered members of the Jewish Community. After the change in regimes, in spite of nationalists and neo-Nazis, the number of acknowledged Jews steadily increased. By 1993, the common figure was 120,000 Jews. Budapest had three Jewish schools, and the Community was growing more active and more diverse.

One of the first things to be done was to remove the old leadership. Ilona Seifert was asked to leave the MIOK. Some Jews, especially younger ones, were bitter about her stewardship of the Community, and this judgment angered her. In her mind she and her husband had done what had to be done to keep the Community operating. “It was written what we had to do, and we were allowed all the elements of Jewish life. It’s not true that you couldn’t do what you wanted. Unless it was Zionist. That was very strict, and sometimes they thought things were Zionist and they weren’t. But that didn’t come from Hungary, it was from Russia. Because they didn’t know what a Zionist movement was. Young people would try to do something and they would think it was Zionist.”

But what those young people remembered was that the Community had not stood up for them, had obstructed rather than helped them in their efforts.

T
HE
L
IPPNERS
, even though they did not want to be party members after 1956, raised their two sons to do the things that would insure them a career. Being Jewish was dangerous. You could know you were Jewish, but you didn’t talk about it. Like the overwhelming majority of Hungarian youth, the Lippner boys belonged to the Federation of Communist Youth. George excelled in mathematics, coming in fourth in the national competition, and went to a technical university and became a mathematician. It really didn’t matter that he was Jewish, as long as he didn’t do anything about it.

George married a Jew of a similar background. Her parents had drawn one conclusion from the Holocaust—either there was no God, or God was not watching. It was inconceivable that God had intended this fate for Jews. Either way, nobody was looking after Jews, and so it was better to be quiet about being Jewish. George and his wife had two children and raised them, like themselves, without Jewish education. After the regime changed in 1989, George took a job in a Florida community college.

He read newspapers, trying to keep up with the changes in their country, but still, when a new Jewish school in Budapest asked him to be principal, the job offer came as a surprise. Lippner didn’t think there would be any interest in a Jewish school in Budapest. There had been one Jewish high school for years, the Anne Frank School, which was not even allowed to teach modern Hebrew because it was considered a Zionist language. No one who wanted to go to university and have a successful career went to the Anne Frank School.

The new school was supported by the Lauder Foundation, but Lippner found it hard to believe it would attract enough good students to survive. Nevertheless, he decided to take the job. It would be an interesting challenge, because the school was trying to be Jewish without being either religious or secular. It did not even keep records of how many of its students were Jews, although they were certainly the majority. In addition to aiming for high general academic standards, the school taught Hebrew, Jewish history, and the Old Testament. Each Jewish holiday was studied as it came up. Anyone between the ages of 3 and 18 who was open to the curriculum was welcome. They were averaging more than four hundred students.

One incentive for a Jewish school was the growing movement to offer some kind of religious program in the Hungarian school system, which inevitably would be Christian. Jews were to be given the right to excuse themselves, thereby stating to bigots that they were not “true Hungarians” and would not fully participate in the “Hungarian” curriculum.

Even a third Jewish school sprang up in Budapest. Sponsored by the Joint and a Canadian financier, it served the Orthodox community. László Herzog, general secretary of the Orthodox community, said, “If anybody told me ten years ago that I would see a Jewish school with five hundred students—” It was particularly surprising since membership in the Orthodox community, adults and children, had hovered for many years at about 1,000 people.

Herzog’s father had been head of the Orthodox community in Újpest. His wife and two children were killed at Auschwitz. After the war the Orthodox rabbinate arranged marriages for those who had lost their families, and since his wife and two children had been killed at Auschwitz, he was matched with a woman who had also lost two children and a husband at Auschwitz.

Their son, László, was one of the few Hungarian Jews of the
postwar generation who stayed in Hungary and grew up in a traditional Jewish life. Orthodox children were given special permission to observe the Sabbath. László went to a small Jewish school in one of the old dark buildings in the Jewish section of Pest, the rundown neighborhood where the ghetto had been. His family managed to eat kosher, although it meant an extremely limited diet since not many kosher products were available. This Jewish life came at a price. Children like László Herzog grew up knowing that they simply had no future in Hungary. All of Herzog’s forty classmates left the country in the 1960s. László also intended to leave, but at the age of 17 his father died, leaving only him to look after his ailing mother. He naively dreamed of becoming a doctor, but coming out of a Jewish school, he was not admitted to a university. Later, he was able to go to London and receive the medical training to become a
mohel
.