Train to Budapest (26 page)

They stand in silence watching the people pass. There’s still a lot of poverty around. Many people are wrapped in heavy patched coats, either too long or too short, with sweaters in dark colours so as not to show the dirt. Anyway, who has access to hot water? And soap is too expensive. Tired early-morning faces, resentful from having slept badly and too briefly, and knowing they must now face an exhausting and humiliating day. The young run; they have cheap clothes and second-hand army boots. The old move slowly in long handmade scarves and synthetic cloth caps.

‘How can this man and his gazelles make a living just by leading young brides to the altar as if they were his daughters, playing at being their father?’ asks Amara, pointing at the herd of gazelles running in orderly procession towards the future.

Hans turns his suntanned face towards her. The light-brown lock of hair slips over his brow. He screws up his ash-grey eyes with the patient gesture of one who must explain the inexplicable.

‘The house I live in is my own, my grandfather left it to me. I give music lessons, like my father. To his pupils. I inherited them with the house’ – when he smiles he takes on the malicious look of a child embarrassed by having to talk to others and planning to distract their attention with cunning little stratagems – ‘with that and the weddings I get by.’

‘I’m lucky too. I write for a provincial paper. It doesn’t have masses of readers but the few it does have think about what they read. They pay me on the nail. And I can write what I like.’

‘Do you keep a diary?’

‘No.’

‘I do.’

‘Will you let me read it one day?’

‘Maybe.’

Looking up Amara sees an elderly man advancing on them: he is extremely thin with long legs. His violet-coloured jacket hangs from his shoulders, his black trousers are covered with stains and he has two folders under his arm. He climbs the steps slowly. His trousers are too short. They ride up at each step exposing thin ankles lined with thick blue veins that stand out in relief, his two long broad feet confined in rubber sandals. His fine, modest face is surrounded by white hair, balding yet also thick, that forms a halo round his skeletal head. He is like a tired, perplexed Old Testament prophet laboriously climbing the steps to paradise, but not worried about getting there quickly.

Amara and the man with the gazelles get up and follow him up the steps. Finding his keys, he pushes open the great dark wooden door; they follow him in.

The spacious entrance hall smells of mould.

‘Sir and madam would like?’

‘Can we visit the library?’

‘It opens at ten.’

‘It says nine outside.’

‘I arrive at ten. The secretary comes when she feels like it. She’s supposed to be here at nine but at the moment she’s off work.’

‘Well, it’s nearly ten. Can we come in?’

‘Write your names here. Show me your papers. Leave your umbrellas and bags, if you have any.’

The old man sits down exhausted after pushing towards them a large exercise book with scuffed pages.

It’s a venerable local library with tall windows, long worm-eaten tables and uniform wooden chairs, though some have broken backs and stuffing coming out of their seats in tufts.

Amara and Hans go to the catalogue. Not much on the concentration camps, as if there could be nothing to say about facts so
near in time and so inexplicable. On the other hand, not even the library’s readers seem anxious to know more. The books standing upright side by side seem never to have been touched, opened or consulted. They are chilly to the touch and their pages uncut. Undoubtedly there are more documents to be found in the libraries of the camps.

Amara reads their titles, pulls out a volume or two, puts them back in their places. More than anything, they are historical explanations. Few accounts by witnesses. Few novels or stories of the camps.

She sees Hans crouched on the floor, deep in what looks like a new volume.

‘What are you reading?’

‘Witness accounts of the siege of Stalingrad.’

Amara too crouches down and tries to read by pushing her head over his shoulder. It is clear the book was printed quite recently on wartime paper, coarse and fragile, and it is shabby.

‘Dear Magda, Miraculously I’m still alive, I can’t think how,’ translates Hans aloud into refined and precise Italian. ‘All my mates are dead. The Russians surrounded us and began firing from all sides. I lost my shoes, but I took a pair from a soldier who died at my side. Out of the five hundred Hungarians with me, only three are still alive. I never saw such fierce crossfire. I was hit too. I fell and lost consciousness. I thought I was dead but then, with the coming of night and silence, I found I was still alive, still breathing. But I couldn’t move. I must be completely shattered, I thought, even if I couldn’t feel any pain. Then I realised that though still alive I was crushed under two dead bodies. I didn’t even know where my companions had gone. Then I found them by chance, behind a group of Finns and Romanians pulling a cart full of wounded. I don’t know if you’ll ever get this letter. It’ll be best if I bring it to you myself in my pocket if I manage to get home, if we manage to overcome the Russians who are wearing us down. Or it may reach you with my corpse, though that’s not likely since no one collects the dead here. There’s no time to bury them. The wounded are barely rescued, and even then often die in the field hospitals because there are no more dressings or medicines, or even doctors: they are dead too. Goodbye darling sister, I really hope to see you again not in paradise but in our own lovely Budapest, your brother Oskar Horvath.’

‘What was a Hungarian doing with the Germans?’

‘It was the famous Operation Barbarossa, haven’t you heard of that?’

Amara admits she knows nothing, and asks Hans to tell her about it. She likes it when he reconstructs history for her. It excites her and her eyes light up.

‘Operation Barbarossa was invented by Hitler. Having swallowed at a single gulp Poland, Denmark and Norway, not to mention the Netherlands, the whole of Belgium and half of France, and after signing a non-aggression pact with Russia, he decided, scoundrel that he was, to attack his Russian ally without warning so as to disarm him and grab his oil and mineral resources.’

‘So the soldier Horvath would have been with Hitler in Russia as an invader even though he didn’t want to be?’

‘Naturally. Horthy’s Hungary had allied itself with Hitler who forced it to join his tripartite alliance with Italy and Japan. The Führer called up the various Horvaths and placed them under the command of his colonels. So they had no alternative but to follow him when he treacherously decided to invade the USSR, forcing his unwilling allies to go with him, as well as the willing ones like Italy, who of course wasn’t doing it for nothing, but was looking forward to her own share of the oil. That was the origin of the Italian Army in Russia or ARMIR, which was sent in with the worst possible equipment and arms. Hitler was desperate to get everything done before the winter, which had been so disastrous for other invaders of Russia; remember Napoleon.’

‘So the soldier Horvath would have followed the Nazis to Russia and written from there to his sister?’

‘On the night of 21 June 1941 Hitler’s troops crossed the border into Russia and after only thirteen days had arrived within twenty-two kilometres of Moscow. They besieged Leningrad and took Kiev and Odessa. Out of 128 Soviet divisions they immediately immobilised twenty-eight, treacherously, without so much as a declaration of war. Hitler cared nothing about pacts and didn’t believe in subtlety, he was a predator and acted accordingly. Among other things, he ordered his soldiers to ignore the rules of war. Prisoners were to be killed with a bullet to the head, even generals. He didn’t give a damn for the Geneva Convention. He just wanted to spread terror and make it clear who was in charge.
The Red Army chiefs who until a few days before had been his allies were all killed, shot without trial. Meanwhile he pushed his remaining divisions towards Stalingrad, the gateway to the Caucasus where the Russian oil was to be found.’

‘But the Russians fought back, both in Leningrad and in Stalingrad, I do know that. But how did the Nazis manage to lose when they were so much better prepared and armed, stronger and utterly unscrupulous?’

‘The Krauts advanced into Soviet territory with a boldness and presumption that took the wind out of the sails of those facing them. Hitler was used to winning by gambling, tricks and violence; he had the mentality of a bandit and cared nothing for his own soldiers who were dying in thousands, or his generals who were advising him to stop and change tactics; all he understood was murderous fury.’

‘So it went badly for him …’

‘It went badly for him, but not immediately. He was able to cause terrible military disasters. He had prepared on the grand scale. Do you know how many men he sent to the Russian front? Three million, I mean three million soldiers, with three thousand tanks and three thousand planes. No small matter.’

‘And how many Italians were there in the ARMIR?’

‘Nearly sixty thousand, commanded by General Messe. At that time it was still known as the CSIR, or “Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia”. But Messe left because he disagreed with Mussolini’s decision to send in six more divisions. And I think he was right. He was replaced by General Italo Gariboldo and the Expeditionary Corps became the ARMIR, or Italian Army in Russia.’

‘“They were three hundred, Young and strong, And they are dead,”’ quoted Amara.

‘Many more than that, sadly. There are also some letters from Italian soldiers in this book. I’ll read you one if you like. Very few were saved. Nothing more was ever heard about most of the men, not even whether they lived or died.’

‘And then?’

‘In the first months Hitler’s method of aggression and burned earth, of running ahead of everything and everybody, of hitting hard and using surprise, brought success, as it had elsewhere. His orders were strict: keep captured soldiers alive only so long
as they can be used as forced labour, otherwise kill them! Which was against all the rules of war. But Nazi thinking was basic and lethal: the Russian NCOs came from barbarous and inferior races, so they must be instantly eliminated, regardless of whether they fought or surrendered. This was the order. And show no respect for civilians: strip them of everything; feel free to plunder and kill anyone getting in the way, including women, children and the old. That was Hitler’s philosophy of war. And it clearly created panic. The population hid and fled; they were terrified. But with Moscow threatened and Leningrad on the point of collapse, something snapped in the Russian people and they decided to resist to the last drop of blood, regardless of the cost. And they were truly extraordinary. We must give them credit for that. If they’d let the Nazis occupy Moscow and destroy Leningrad and Stalingrad, I don’t believe you and I would be here talking like this in this peaceful library in Vienna.’

Amara watches him attentively. This man with his passion for history astonishes her. What lies behind his prodigious memory? And how does he manage to remember so many languages and read them as if each was his mother tongue?

Meanwhile the Old Testament prophet has come close and is regarding them with an air of disapproval. Why are they sitting on the floor with an open book in their hands? But he doesn’t question them or otherwise disturb them. Perhaps he too has been infected by Hans’s passion and Amara’s curiosity and eagerness to learn. He watches them and listens with increasing attention.

32

‘Well?’

Amara knows more or less how things went, but she loves listening as the excited yet serene voice of Hans explains, remembers and considers, extracting from his extraordinary memory dates, statistics and descriptions.

‘From the Russian point of view, by autumn 1941 the war seemed to have been lost. The Baltic states, Belarus, the northern Crimea and a good part of the Ukraine had been occupied by Hitler. One and a half million members of the Red Army ended up as prisoners in Nazi camps, or working in German factories.’

‘But what could have changed the fortunes of war? How could Hitler’s method of speed and aggression, betrayal and murder, surprise and burned earth, ever fail when it had worked so well till then in Poland and Holland and even in France?’

‘There are probably many reasons. In July 1942 the Nazi Sixth Army attacked on the line of the Don, about a hundred kilometres from Stalingrad. The idea was that once the city had fallen, they would have free hands in the south of the Soviet Union, and from there could join up with the Japanese army which had meanwhile occupied Malaya, the Philippines, Singapore and Burma. The tactic was always the same: surprise, brutality, rapid aggression and the systematic assassination of enemies, particulary military ones, and particularly the most senior of them, without hesitation or pity. On the other hand the Red Army had a fine commander in Marshal Zhukov. And Zhukov decided the tactic of defence and waiting was mistaken, rather it was essential to attack and hit hard.’

‘But how was Zhukov able to pass from defence to attack, I mean, how was he able to convince Stalin who was controlling everything from above?’

‘The first thing was to stop leaving all choices of time and place
to the Nazis. Zhukov knew his only chance of winning was to take the initiative himself, and for him to decide times and places and thus be able to work out manoeuvres of encirclement. It seemed impossible but in the end it worked. Meanwhile Hitler, aware that his troops were not advancing as he expected them to, sent in three more divisions: the Seventeenth and Eleventh Infantry, plus the Fourth Panzer Army. Zhukov, faced with such an array of forces, was forced to retreat. But slowly and methodically he continued the encirclement, preventing the Nazis from advancing more than two kilometres a day. In a month they only managed to gain sixty kilometres.’

‘But winter was approaching, as the history books tell us about Napoleon. Do you think Hitler was aware of that?’

‘He was certainly aware that Russia in autumn would be treacherous. He knew how it had been for Napoleon. So he began to press harder. But he got stuck, unable either to advance or retreat. The people of Stalingrad knew the outcome of the war now depended entirely on them and they fought to the last gasp. Boys, old men, women, everyone, made themselves available to help the soldiers against the Germans, joining the 62nd and 64th armies or helping as porters and postmen. It is said that more than sixty thousand civilians, including men over fifty and boys of thirteen and fourteen years of age, took up arms to defend the city.’