Train to Budapest (8 page)

Łódź. April ’42

Dear Amara. I’ve started working at the carpenter’s again. Every day more lorries arrive and pull up panting in the middle of the street. The SS grab whoever they see and make them queue up with others. Then they make a selection. They push the old, the ill and the infirm into the lorry and take them away. They let the others go, the young ones, especially if they’re in work. It’s said those in the lorries are taken to a camp and killed by a blow to the head after being forced to dig a ditch for their own grave. No one knows for sure because no one has ever come back from these expeditions. The story came from a Jewish cook who heard the SS talking about it while they were having a meal after an ‘action’.

Yesterday I saw an old man refuse to get into a lorry with the others, so they tied his hands and feet and attached him with a hook to the lorry which set off at high speed with his body bumping and rolling behind. It made a strange noise like the rattling of an empty box. You know, I can’t dream any more. What d’you think it means when you can’t dream any more? I wake in the morning with my tongue burning in my mouth. I’m hungry, that’s all I can think about. The bricklayer my father worked for has been taken away too. His hands were covered with sores. He kept them wrapped in two filthy rags. He was about thirty years old, so he told me, but he looked fifty. He had grown old suddenly, his neck wrinkled and his hands covered with ulcers. The Nazis grabbed him and pulled him towards a lorry. He shouted that he could still work, that his hands were only bleeding temporarily, that in a couple of days he’d be able to start working with bricks again, but they took no notice and lifted him bodily onto the lorry. I was watching from the window. I couldn’t feel the compassion I would have expected to feel. In fact, I felt nothing at all. Perhaps this is the beginning of the great change. I am in the process of being transformed into a human being made of stone. Stone eyes, a stone brain, a stone tongue and even a stone heart. Even my love for you is becoming cold and mineral. Another stone in the little cemetery of memory. I must say a prayer.

How can that stone child have survived in that ghetto? Would he have had the strength to survive? Was turning to stone a way of holding on? And what if, after all, he had made it? A boy has his life before him. And it isn’t easy to break a stone.

Łódź

Dear Amara, one day the ghetto fills with people and the next it’s empty again. They arrive in their thousands, some in good shape, from towns and cities newly conquered by the Führer. Many, already tried and tested, thin and with their stomachs full of parasites, come from other ghettoes. But they soon disappear. The SS bring their lorries every day, collect two or three hundred people and take them away. No more is heard of them. So when people hear the engines of the lorries making their way along the streets, they start running away. But the SS push their way into the houses and grab the children and the old. A monster who specially loves children. Do you remember when we used to read
Tom Thumb
? This is the great ogre, greedy for little people. In order to keep in condition he needs to swallow at least a hundred a day. And to make sure they’ll be good about being eaten, and not shout or wriggle too much, he strokes their heads and gives them big friendly smiles and talks to them in a reassuring voice: now take off your little hats, no need for shelter, it’s warm here even though there’s snow outside; it’s nice and warm in here. No, take off your little coats, you don’t need them. There, that’s right. Take off your shoes too and come to me. And the moment they get close, whoomph! he crams them into his mouth five at a time. And if at this point they start kicking what does he do? He crushes their bones with his teeth and swallows them at a single gulp. Little children are so tender!

I am a little stone man now, watching petrified from my window. My mother fusses behind me, but she doesn’t bother me. Except now and then when I beg her not to move so much because she’s causing a cold draught. She says Uncle Eduard was right, they’re going to kill us all. Or we’ll starve to death, like our neighbour Chaim Bobrowski who knew how to play the violin like a king. His feet and face swelled up till he could hardly walk. But he dragged himself to work just the same, his shoes full of holes, so as not to miss his soup ration. Then one morning he fell to the ground. No one stopped. No one picked him up. When someone dies, they die. We know the gravediggers will come in the evening and take the body to the cemetery. Every day my father risks his life trying to get a pass. He runs this way and that with the forged passports in his underclothes trying to find a way out. A mouse in a cage. I know we’ll never reach America as he hopes. He paid so much for those passports but they’ll end up like the eggs, empty and useless, fit only to throw away. But he’s obstinate. Now all he has left is a single valuable earring of my mother’s, hidden inside a pillowcase. An earring with precious stones with which he hopes to bribe someone to let us through, maybe at night, to make our way to the station. Two mornings ago they took Uncle Eduard away. He went out to look for a piece of coal. It was early in the morning and nobody seemed to be about. He had often done this. He thought he was safe because no lorries could be heard anywhere near. But there was one round the corner with its engine switched off and as soon as they saw him they told him to get in. He tried to run away but two bursts of gunfire landed at his feet. He wasn’t hit but he stopped and climbed into the lorry with a heavy heart. Since then we’ve heard nothing. Stefan who lives in the corner house told us about it.

10

Kraków. Returning absent-mindedly to the Hotel Wawel, Amara doesn’t see the partly rolled carpet, trips and crashes to the floor. A young porter with red hair runs to her rescue. ‘Are you all right? Sorry about the carpet, we were just moving it out of the way.’ Then she hears him shouting at a boy in trousers that are too big for him bargaining over other rolled-up carpets piled on a hoist.

‘There’s a letter for you,’ says the porter after checking that she hasn’t broken anything or needs medical attention. He hands her a buff envelope with the key to her room.

My dear Saviour
… Amara reads and rereads again but nothing makes any sense. Saviour from what? The letter is indeed addressed to her, but she doesn’t recognise the sender’s name: who’s Hans Wilkowsky? She reads on:
I have such a vivid memory of your ears
.
Why particularly your ears, who knows. They seemed to me like two unbelievably graceful pink shells. Perhaps I remember them because I was trying so hard to make sure the profound and sincere sound of my voice would reach you through them.

Now she remembers: the train to Prague. They had stopped at the frontier. The man with gazelles on his jumper. The guarantee she signed in such a hurry. The sound of the locomotive in the night. And next to him the other man with fur armbands, the mother with the young baby, and the smell of smoked herrings and birchbark.

I trusted you and you trusted me. You saved me from two days of bureaucratic torture. I reached Poznan´ safe and sound. I found my daughter Agnes had just given birth to a beautiful boy who will be called Hans like me. The child looks like my mother. I told you in the train my mother Hanna was Hungarian and Jewish, and died in the Treblinka concentration camp. My father is half Austrian and half Polish. I’m not sure the two young people did the right thing in coming together as a couple but, I assure you, they were really beautiful: a girl with honey-coloured hair, very long legs and a crystal-clear soprano voice, and a tall dark young man with shining eyes and a playful and well-formed mind. Tadeusz and Hanna. I have here a photograph of my parents at Graz. She is wearing a long light-coloured skirt and a pair of lace-up sandals; he has a jacket with wide sleeves and a pair of shoes with spats. They met in the first years of the twentieth century. My father was studying music at the famous conservatory at Vác. He wanted to be an orchestral conductor. My mother had studied singing in Budapest and had won a scholarship to Vác to follow a course at the conservatory which was reputed to have produced great singers. One evening they met and walked beside the Danube under a huge moon that made their eyes shine and silhouetted them against the long white riverbank. You may ask how I know these details. I answer that my father never stopped talking about it. It was a little piece of family mythology that made him intensely proud.

They spent all that night chattering. And in the morning, when the sun had warmed them, they decided to take a dip in the river naked. They never even kissed. Just lay close together in the sun without their clothes, then left each other, each going home. But they began writing to each other and after two years of lively correspondence they decided to get married.

They went to live in Graz, in a little apartment without water or lighting, because he had not yet found work as a conductor and she was singing in the theatre for next to nothing, just to get known. They were so deeply in love they could not bring themselves to separate for a moment. ‘I was afraid of meeting you again after so long apart. We had grown used to that and I was afraid our separated bodies would not understand each other. But they understood each other perfectly and we have never felt any need to be unfaithful.’ This was what my mother used to tell me when I was a child and too young to understand. It is only now I understand what their love was.

Then came the laws against the Jews. Tadeusz and Hanna had returned to Vienna where at long last he had found work with a youth orchestra. Until one day the city authorities discovered that my Austrian father had married a Hungarian Jewess. The guilty pair were summoned to the police and told that despite the long years they had lived together, and despite the fact that they had two grown-up children, their marriage was not valid under the new laws of the Reich.

Two weeks later an SS patrol came and took them to Heldenplatz to join other couples like themselves. They were forced to wear placards round their necks. On hers was written I’M A JEWISH WHORE AND I CORRUPT CHRISTIANS. On his I’M AN AUSTRIAN PIG AND I LUST FOR JEWISH MONEY. The SS photographed them in right profile and left profile, and made them stand in the square all day with passers-by staring at them. Some, encouraged by the guards, spat on them, particularly on the ‘Jewish whore’. Others showed sympathy, but didn’t dare to stop. I still have a photograph published in a Nazi paper. She is in a light-coloured dress, her curly blonde hair now touched with grey, wearing her hat at a jaunty angle, her head poised with a certain defiance despite the humiliating situation. Her face is serious, not exactly resigned, more ironic I think: it’s easy to see how contemptible all this is, she seems to be saying; I’m here and you are there, you’re free to spit on me, but you can’t avoid seeing me and understanding the horror of my situation. My father seems much angrier, even disheartened. He is holding his placard by one corner; its chain is probably hurting his neck. With his other hand he is holding his hat against his leg; he has a white shirt and bow tie and his eyes are sad. Behind him are standing four SS guards in brown shirts, their collars tightly buttoned to the chin, bandoliers across their chests, swastikas prominent on their shirt sleeves, more swastikas stamped on their caps. They are standing stiffly, pleased with themselves. One is smiling; another sports a Hitler moustache though his manner is unconvincing. A nice souvenir photo …

I was in Denmark at the time and so missed the whole wretched scene. It was nearly evening before the police let them go home. But after that nothing was the same as before. A few days later my father lost his job. My mother had to wear the yellow star on her chest. My sister died soon after of tuberculosis. When their friends saw them approaching, they would cross to the other side of the road and look away. They no longer had any right to go into shops, sit in trams, or go into a cinema or restaurant. I wanted to come home, I wanted to be near them, but they begged me to stay where I was. That saved my life because my mother was deported to Treblinka, where she died of privation a few months later. My father managed to hide until almost the very end of the war, when they found him and took him to Auschwitz. I did not know about this till later. For years I heard nothing. I went on writing to them thinking they must still be alive somewhere. But I never had any answers.

It was only after the end of the war that I found my father, who had miraculously survived not because he was an Aryan but because at the very moment when the Germans decided to burn the camp and exterminate all the survivors as embarrassing witnesses, Soviet tanks arrived and set them free.

When I met him again in ’46 he weighed only thirty-eight kilos and had lost all his teeth. I took him in my arms like Aeneas with his father Anchises after the terrible sack of Troy. It was like embracing a little child. You can’t imagine, my dear Saviour, what it was like for me to take home the featherless sparrow my father had turned into. He couldn’t even speak and only chirped, just like a little bird. I had the joy of seeing him get back his health. A little at a time, stuffed with eggs, meat and apples, he recovered. I also bought him a set of dentures. We were happy together for two years. Then he fell in love with a Frenchwoman called Odette who had settled in Hungary and set up house in the centre of Budapest with her and his friend Ferenc Bruman, first violin in the city orchestra.

Please forgive me if I have bored you with my family history but you are the first person I have felt to be sympathetic and understanding, even though you are so much younger than I am. I know you are not only working as a journalist, but also trying to track down someone you love. I put myself at your disposal: Hans Wilkowsky, man of many occupations, resident in Vienna but temperamentally a vagrant, proposes to help you find the child who was deported so many years ago. Will you accept me as a companion in research?