Hollywood Animal (10 page)

By the summer of 1944, the war was ending. Russian troops were invading Hungary. Hungarians were terrified. The Red Army was on its way. It was the figurative
return
of the now reviled Béla Kun. The Russians, Hungarians told each other, were barbarians. They were filled with venereal disease. They were raping their way through Hungary. Even old grandmothers weren’t safe from the priapic savagery. They were such animals, Hungarians told each other, that they filled their arms with stolen wristwatches—twenty, thirty, on each arm. They drank from the toilets. They urinated in holy water fountains. They ate cats and dogs. They raped anally.

When my mother was five months pregnant with me, my father got her a maid and arranged that they move to a city near the Austrian border, to Szombathely, as far away from the advance of the Red Army as possible. He stayed temporarily in Budapest, in his capacity as an adviser to the prime minister, but would join us when I was born.

He made it through the chaos of the combat lines two weeks after I was born. His father and mother and his two sisters joined us. The Red Army was sweeping through Hungary. American bombs fell hourly from the sky. We all lived in an apartment house in Szombathely. Air raid sirens wailed all the time.

During one bombing, as my mother raced down the stairs with me in her arms, my father next to her, the roof collapsed onto the stairway. I was knocked from her arms as she and my father were propelled down the stairs. When it was over, desperate, they searched for me and couldn’t find me. They thought I had been covered by the rubble.

They finally found me. An old woman had picked me up. She had taken her babushka and covered my mouth with it. She had saved my life. The apartment house had taken a direct hit.

My parents lost everything but one suitcase. The suitcase was filled with cartons of cigarettes, not for my mother to smoke, but to be used as currency in this ravaged new world.

We moved to a different apartment house, which took a direct hit the following week. We hid in the basement from the bombs. When we crawled out, my parents heard the screams coming from the basement of the neighboring apartment house, which had caved in and was burning. The people in that basement had sought shelter in a huge furnace. They couldn’t get out. No one could get them out. The building atop the furnace burned. The people inside the furnace roasted to death. Slowly.

My father decided after that bombing that we had to leave Hungary, but my grandfather, Jozsef Kreisz, said he wasn’t coming. He wasn’t afraid of the Russians, my grandfather said, no matter what stories the Hungarians were scaring each other with.

He had met many Russians he had liked in his captivity. He spoke Russian fluently and he knew the Russians couldn’t be as bad as the Romanians who had occupied Hungary briefly after his return from captivity. Those bastard Romanians
had
worn pancake makeup—
pancake makeup on men!
—and say what you want about all the watches the Russians were wearing, they certainly weren’t wearing
pancake makeup!

My father begged him to come with us but Jozsef Kreisz hugged and kissed us, then walked away to the nearest hotel. When the Russians arrived in Szombathely, it was Jozsef Kreisz who, sleepy-eyed and in his shirtsleeves, served as the translator between the Hungarian mayor and the four-star Red Army general.

My father drove us in his small Steir car from Szombathely toward the Austrian border. We were jammed in there—me, my mother, my father, my grandmother, my two aunts, driving through lush green countryside and shadowy black forests. Refugees and retreating Nazis and Hungarian soldiers were everywhere. American fighter pilots buzzed the treetops and machine-gunned the cars (like ours) below. They machine-gunned us, but my father roared the Steir over a ditch and into the trees. We crossed the Austrian border and were incarcerated by the Nazis.

The Nazis took us to a camp called Mauthausen. It was a Zsido extermination camp, filled with Jews from all over Europe. The Nazis put us on the same diet as the Jews: nothing but pine needle soup. A German soldier gave my mother a sliced-in-half gasoline can so she could bathe me. We were at Mauthausen for two months.

One morning the Germans were gone. The war was over. We were free. Some of the Jews went into the countryside and exacted a horrible revenge upon the neighboring Austrian farmers who had abused them as slave laborers.

It was chaos! It was anarchy! It was hell! That’s what my father told me and I, of course, believed him.

We don’t know the early part. We never know the early part. Our parents tell us and we love them. So we take their word for it
.

My father did not tell me that the Hungarians, when the war was clearly over, when they were out of ammunition, marched Hungarian Zsidos to the Danube each day and garroted them with wire or choked them with their bare hands, killing so many that the Blue Danube wasn’t blue … it was red
.

I learned this as an American man, reading history books
.

The Nazis were gone and the British and the Americans came. We stayed in one refugee camp for a while and then we moved to another—from Hayd to Kellerberg to Spital, all in Austria.

We lived in barracks, separated from each other by cardboard or hanging blankets. There wasn’t any food for months—except polenta, which we called
puliszka
.

One day someone shot a horse and after months without meat, everyone ate it. We got very sick. The smell of shit and vomit was everywhere.

My life was saved by an American soldier who brought me a Hershey bar every day. It was all I had to eat. He had a child my age. He showed us his picture.

I cried all the time. I cried when I had to eat puliszka. And when I saw them shoot the horse. I cried whenever I saw a soldier. Any soldier. Of whatever uniform. I started crying the instant I saw a uniform. I cried whenever I heard a siren, and I heard sirens often in the camps because fires in the barracks were common.

One night the sirens sounded and people were screaming, running out of the barracks. They ran to the outhouse. I ran outside, too, holding on to my mother. They pulled a body out of the outhouse, the body of a little boy. He smelled. He was covered in shit and was dead. He had fallen through the hole into the shit and drowned there.

It is my first memory. I see his body and it smells and my mother is holding me and I’m crying.

I remember my grandmother holding me as she was crying. I wasn’t crying, but everybody else was. My grandmother and my aunts were leaving the camp and going back to Hungary. They were rejoining my grandfather. My father was begging them not to go.

I heard the words
Kommunista
and
Komchi
for the first time. My grandmother and my aunts walked away from us and got into the back of a truck. They waved as the truck pulled away until I couldn’t see them. My mother picked me up and held me. Her cheeks were wet. My father put his arm around me and held both of us.

I said, “Papa, what are Komchis?”

Komchis are Communists. They were bad guys. They were the worst bad guys. They took kids away from their parents. They killed and executed people. They didn’t let people pray. They were the enemy. They were trying to take over the world. They were trying to take good people back to Hungary. Right here in this camp. The Komchis had spies and agents.

I was scared. “Are they worse than the
Krampusz
?” I asked my father.

He said they were.

The Krampusz came to the camp the week before Christmas, dressed as a devil. The Krampusz asked if you’d been a good little boy or girl. He laughed like a witch and howled like a demon.

If you were a good little boy or girl the Krampusz promised St. Nicholas would come for Christmas. But if you were bad, the Krampusz said you’d burn in hell. If you didn’t eat your puliszka, if you cried all the time …

I was afraid of the Krampusz, the Komchis, the uniforms, the sirens, the outhouse, and of the thing they called TB.

All the children had to line up and stand in front of a machine which would tell you if you had TB. I didn’t really know what TB was, but I was afraid of it anyway and I cried. I was already crying when I stepped in front of the machine. But I didn’t have TB—I was the only child in the camp who didn’t have it.

To try to protect me from getting it, my father took me for long walks every day so we would be away from the camp. We walked the roads outside. There were hills of snow everywhere. It was so cold I felt ice on my eyelids.

My feet froze. We couldn’t walk anymore. I couldn’t even get my feet off the bed. Now I was crying because my feet hurt.

But I didn’t have TB!

Because of the scarlet fever in his hip, my father couldn’t do the physical labor most of the men did. He traded some of the cigarette packs we had for a violin, which he had played as a child. He found other violins and other Hungarians who could play them and formed the camp’s own Gypsy band. They hired themselves out on weekends to play at nearby Austrian taverns.

My parents were overjoyed. With the few schillings my father made playing the violin, they could buy food in the camp’s prospering black market.

Then my father fell on the ice and he broke his wrist. No more Gypsy music. No more violin. No more money.

When we’d had nothing to eat but puliszka for a long time, my father opened the suitcase and brought out a pack of cigarettes to trade for meat. The pack felt light to him. He opened it. It was empty. He opened others. They were empty, too.

My mother had smoked all the cigarettes and had carefully resealed all the packs. My father yelled at my mother, who yelled back at him. I, naturally, started to cry.

Every day from then on, my mother took me for a walk in the countryside. We hunted dry tree leaves together. She rolled the leaves up in a newspaper and sat down on the grass with me and she smoked them. She was happy. Me too.

The Komchis were coming to the camp and my father had to leave. That happened several times. The Komchis had a list with people’s names on it and they’d find the people in the camp, drag them to a truck, and take them back to Hungary. My father’s name was on the list. So he left.

Somehow he always found out when they were coming. He’d go to one of the other nearby camps and blend in with those refugees until the Komchis were gone from our camp.

Once the Komchis came to our barrack and demanded to see István Eszterhás
but
my mother said he had left her and she didn’t know where he was. The Komchis were very angry and when they got back into their trucks all the Hungarians in the barrack cheered.

Sometimes I heard one of the Hungarians, but never my mother, say
“Büdös Zsidok”
when the Komchis left … which means “Stinking Jews.”

I asked my father if the Zsidos were bad like the Komchis and the Krampusz. I could tell he didn’t like me asking that.

He said, “No, Zsidos are people like other people.”

“How do they look?” I asked.

“Like everybody else,” he said.

“Are there any here in the camp?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “there aren’t.”

I asked him why not. There were Hungarians, Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Romanians, and Greeks here. Why no
Zsidos?

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Are the
Zsidos
Komchis?” I asked.

“There are some who are and some who aren’t,” he said. “Just like there are some Hungarians who aren’t Komchis and some who are.”

“Do they stink?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “who told you that?”

I told him some of the Hungarians in the barrack had said it.

“They’re crazy,” my father said.

“Why do they say they stink?” I asked.

He sighed. “Because they eat a lot of garlic,” he said. “It’s good for you.”

“What’s garlic?” I asked.

He laughed and held me in his arms and said, “One day you’ll know. One day you’ll taste garlic.”

As I grew older in the camps, the older Hungarian boys taught me things. Watching a Hungarian woman walk out of a barrack, a small group of us followed her as she walked along a fence and ducked into the back of a garage filled with jeeps. There were American soldiers waiting for her, laughing. There was a mattress on the floor and she got down on it as the soldiers laughed. She took her clothes off. We crept from jeep to jeep, trying to get closer.

After her clothes were off, she twirled around on the mattress, smiling, licking her lips. One after another, the Americans approached her, naked now, their
pimplis
bigger than any I’d ever seen. They moved around individually on top of her.

When each soldier was done, he dropped something on the mattress that one of the older boys said later was a nylon stocking. Then she got dressed
quickly
and ducked back out. The soldiers laughed some more, got dressed, and left.

A few days later, as we were playing with a soccer ball, the same woman walked by us on the way to the milk line. The older boys started laughing and yelling “
Kurva néni! Kurva néni!
”—“Whore lady, whore lady!”

She put her head down, covered her ears, and ran away.

I asked my mother what a
kurva
was and she slapped me.

I played outside with the other Hungarian kids. I liked the soccer ball that we were always kicking over the barbed wire fence—but the soldiers never minded getting it for us.

One American soldier showed us a strange ball one day we had never seen before. It wasn’t round, it was odd-shaped and hard to throw. The soldier kept calling it a football, but we knew it wasn’t a football since our soccer ball was the football.

I heard the phrase “
Lofasz A Seggedbe!
” all the time from the Hungarians around me, but never from my father or mother.

It seemed to be the Hungarian way of expressing anger or displeasure or even mild disagreement. It was used casually, almost as casually as “
Hogy Vagy?
”—How are you?—and “
Isten Hozott!
”—God has brought you.