In the Darkroom (28 page)

“Pretty stylish,” I said, wearily pushing the crumbs around on my plate and wishing she'd move on.

“Waaall,” she laughed, “of course, my father didn't know what to do when the car broke down!”

“Not a grease monkey, huh?”

“No, but he did take a course on auto repair once. Aaand”—the finger aloft, her digital exclamation point—“he bought overalls to wear when he would go for his class at the garage. Gray, with a matching gray cap. I was a similar size. So I wore it.”

“You fixed the car?”

“No!”

“For what then?”

“Vadász Street.”

“What?”

“You're not listening!”

I was. I just wasn't getting it, though I should have. In 2004, when my father was leading the guided tour of her feminine wardrobe on my first visit to the Buda house, she had pointed out the one outfit from her former life that hadn't been exiled to the armoire of male castoffs. Hanging in her bedroom closet was a pair of white overalls, carefully pressed and preserved in a dry-cleaning bag. It was the uniform my father had worn as a volunteer for the Yorktown Heights Ambulance Corps. I remembered the nights he was on call; he'd wear the uniform around the house, starched and ironed. I was startled that he'd held on to it, and perplexed by its significance. What was this conflation of clothing and saving, regalia and rescue?

“Vadász Street,” my father repeated. She was referring to the “Glass House,” a former glass factory turned Swiss protected building at Vadász utca 29, where clandestine Zionist youth organizations had set up shop in the fall of 1944. The youth groups printed and distributed tens of thousands of false identity papers, helped smuggle Jews to the Romanian border, and tried to collect useful information to aid the Allied effort. After the Arrow Cross takeover, the young Zionists also began collecting fascist party uniforms and armbands to wear while gathering intelligence and distributing forged documents. Their numbers were small—maybe a few hundred, one of the smallest such movements in Central Europe—and many were refugees from Slovakia and Poland.

My father joined Betar, a Zionist youth organization, at the behest of his seventeen-year-old cousin, Frigyes “Friczi” Schwarcz, who had come to the city in 1944 intent on instigating an armed resistance. The two young men shared an abandoned apartment briefly, before Friczi decamped to a “bunker” on the outskirts of Pest to organize an uprising. Soon thereafter, neighbors denounced him and his handful of young bunker-mates, and they were all killed. “They were going to ‘fight the Nazis!' ” my father scoffed. “They didn't even know how to use a gun. Friczi wanted to be a hero. And he didn't survive.”

My father continued to work sporadically with Betar. “I had this one contact. He'd get in touch and give me a task—like, go spy on some building where the Nazis were. I'd wear my father's overalls and cap.”

“Why?”

My father gave me one of her you-idiot looks. “Because,
as I told you
, they were gray. The Luftwaffe color. I acted like I was a Luftwaffe mechanic, working for the Nazis.”

“That worked?” I doubted it.

“It worked quite well.” And it led, she said, to “an even more absurd happening.” One day, the Betar contact asked my father to spy on an elementary school that had been commandeered by the SS and was now occupied by the Gestapo and the Arrow Cross. “They would take people in there to question them and beat them up,” my father said. His job was to try to find out who was being held.

“It turned out it was
my
elementary school.” The school housed in the Rabbinical Seminary of Hungary, which my father had attended until he was ten. “I put on my ‘uniform' and went over there with my false papers, and I volunteered to be one of the guards on night duty. Waaall, these Arrow Cross guys were not too bright! They were happy someone came to help them.”

“What did you find out?”

“Nothing significant. It wasn't that long. Maybe a week. … But no one suspected me of being Jewish. I didn't act like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like doing stupid things.” Her voice was rising. “Like taking ‘protection' papers from some diplomats who couldn't really do anything.” She meant her parents. “Like moving into a ‘protected' house and saying, ‘Oh, now we're protected!' ” She affected a fey tone as she spoke these last words. “Waaall, okay,” she conceded, “maybe they were for a little time. … But then I had to get them out of there.”

I reached for my notebook. “How?”

“I've told you all that.”

“Not the details.”

She studied her empty plate for a while. “What do you want to know?”

“That day … were you wearing the overalls?” It was a dumb question, but a safe one; she liked to talk about clothes.

“No, I just wore the armband. And an Arrow Cross hat.” She wanted to pass that day as a Hungarian Nazi, not a German officer. “And I had a gun.”

“A gun?”

“Just an old army rifle. I probably got that from someone at Vadász. I do know it didn't have any bullets!” Not that it would have mattered, my father noted. Like Friczi, young István didn't know how to shoot.

“And they let you in?”

“I was armed, so it was all correct.” He told the guard at the front door that he had orders to take away the Friedmans. “I acted mean, but not
too
mean. I didn't overdo it.”

“They weren't suspicious?” I had trouble imagining this.

“I told you, I know how to fake things.” She rose to her feet and began swinging her arms. “I marched upstairs, hup two, hup two, and I pushed open the door and yelled, ‘Is there a Jenő Friedman in here? And his wife? Send those goddam Jews out here! And they can't bring anything!' ” She waved a fist in the air, brandishing an invisible rifle.

“And they were in there?”

“There were as many people as could fit,” she recalled of the room, “all crammed up” against one another, “old people, sick people, little children.” He remembered their stares. “They all felt sorry for my parents,” she said. “They thought, ‘Oh, this Naaazi is going to kill the poor Friedmans!' ” My father said he ordered his parents toward the door. As they were heading down the corridor, an elderly Jewish man sidled up. “He wanted to know if I could get him false papers.” That is, he recognized the young man in the fascist armband as a fellow Jew. “I yelled at him, ‘Get out of here or I'll take you, too!' ” The man backed away, and my father marched his parents down the stairs at gunpoint.

“When we went past the guard at the front door, I gave the salute, and I shouted, ‘Long live Szálasi!' ” My father dusted crumbs off her doily placemat. “And that's how I brought the family together.”

Afterward, father, mother, and son set up housekeeping in the winter of 1944 in an abandoned flat on the outskirts of Pest. They were now, according to the false papers my father had obtained from the Zionist youth resistance, the “Fabians,” Catholic refugees from the Romanian town of Brașov. When the long Siege of Budapest began, a few days after Christmas, a bomb fell directly across the street, shattering every window in the unit. The Fabians retreated to the cellar, where they spent the rest of the war. “When we came up from the basement,” my father recalled, “a man was upstairs and he started shouting, ‘I am the rightful owner of this house!' We told him, ‘Calm down, calm down! We're not staying.' Then he introduced himself, and you know what his name turned out to be? Friedman.”

My father studied my hand flying across the notepad. “When you write about my life story,” she said, “this would be a great story to include. Aaand”—she lifted a finger aloft—“it's aaalso true.”

Was any of it? Or was this another one of my father's fairy tales? Had the trick photographer tricked the Arrow Cross—or was she tricking me? How could I begin to assess the truth of a story whose very point was to confirm the storyteller as an extremely effective liar?

On several of my earlier trips to Budapest, I'd wasted a good deal of time trying to research the larger family history, to ferret out the written annals to go along with the pitifully few photographs I had found of the Friedman-Grünberger tribe. There weren't many repositories to ferret in. The Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest had opened only in 2004, and when I visited, its tiny research staff had little to offer. They told me to write each of my relatives' names, along with their places and dates of birth, on forms that they would “file in our system.”

For what purpose? I asked.

“So then we have their names on file.”

They suggested I try the Hungarian Jewish Archives. “But I don't know if you'll find anything,” one of the researchers said. “It's a little disorganized.”

The archives, an annex of the Hungarian Jewish Museum, was in the old Jewish quarter, attached to the Dohány Street Synagogue. Entering from the museum's exhibit hall required negotiating an elaborate series of twists and turns through spottily lit corridors and staircases. The labyrinth dead-ended in an imposing set of double doors. I gave a timid rap, and a woman in a white lab coat let me in. She was Zsuzsanna Toronyi, the archives' director.

The cramped interior was made more so by the old tomes and stacks of moldering periodicals piled to perilous heights around the room. Sagging shelves looked like they could give way at any moment under a riot of cardboard boxes with handwritten labels. I eyed the out-of-order sign on the copy machine with dismay. Toronyi advised me that there was little the archives could offer in the way of family records, but when I said my father had attended the elementary school at the Rabbinical Seminary, she led me through the maze of boxes and, as if by internal divining rod, plucked a book in an instant from the chaos.
The Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest, 1877–1977:
A Centennial Volume
began with a proud recounting of its inauguration “in the presence of the members of the Hungarian parliament and government.” Its instructors were “not only to teach Judaism but also to foster Hungarian patriotism among their co-religionists by disseminating the language and culture of Hungary.” I skimmed through the account of its “modern” curriculum and the lists of its many internationally known graduates. Eventually, the book got around to the Holocaust.

“In spite of World War II,” the text intoned, the seminary's educators “continued their work, hoping that the horror of the European war would not touch them.” A vain wish. Less than twenty-four hours after the Germans occupied Hungary, the building “was confiscated by the SS, to serve as a transit prison for thousands of Jews on their tragic way to the extermination camps.” As I read further into this chilling chapter—the plundering of the seminary's 300,000-volume library, the destruction of the rector's lifework of research, the Arrow Cross's artillery position on the roof, and, ultimately, the bombardment of the building itself—Toronyi appeared at my side to offer another text. It was decrepit and much thumbed, its pages loose in the bindings. “You might find your family members in here,” she said.

The volume's title was
Counted Remnant: Register of the Jewish Survivors in Budapest
, published a year after the end of the war. The register had been assembled by the Hungarian Section of the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which had deployed 402 people to search 35,082 houses in Budapest in the summer of 1945, looking for living Jews. The resulting book listed survivors in alphabetical order, along with their birthplace, birth date, mother's maiden name, and the address where they had been located. The data had been gathered in a hurry and rushed into print in hopes of aiding the search for missing relatives, and was not the most accurate or complete of records. Dates and spellings were often approximate. Still, I knew when I found it. As my finger landed on the fading tiny print, and despite the stifling summer heat, I shivered:

“Friedmann István, Bpest, 1932, Grünbaum Rózsi, VIII, Víg u. 15.”

I tried to place my young father at 15 Víg Street, a good twenty-minute walk from Ráday 9 in the once aristocratic Palace District. What was he doing and thinking that day? Had the census taker gotten his birth year wrong, or was he already lying about his age? I pored over the entry for a long time, as if its contents might yield a secret code. But they were just words on a page.

I flipped to the front to read the registry's introduction. It began with an epigraph from Deuteronomy: “
And the Lord shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number
. …” And went on to offer this counsel:

I closed the volume slowly, distressed that my turning the crumbling pages had loosened several more leaves. I thanked the kindly Toronyi and pushed through the double doors.

Minutes into my departure, I realized I was lost. In my befuddlement, I'd forgotten the complicated directions from the archives to the museum. I turned down one corridor, then another, up one set of turreted stairs, then down again. Every route dead-ended in a locked chicken-wire gate. I knew these were security cages to protect the museum's valuables. I knew it was 2008, yet I could not quell the panic. I began running in circles through the maze, rattling doorknobs. Every one was locked. Down a passageway I heard the sound of a radio. I traced it to its source and banged on the door. A stooped elderly man opened it a crack and marveled at the hysterical American woman on the other side. “Out?” I said, pointing. “Out?” He took my arm and led me to the exit.