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Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli. (Terentius Maurus)
I am not a mystic, but I cannot rationally explain some events in my
life that could not possibly have happened simply by chance. My
very survival of World War II in the face of persecution is nothing
short of miraculous. Still more mysterious is the fate of a siddur, a book of prayers for all occasions, in Hebrew on the right, in
German on the left.
This siddur was handed to me in 1934 by Dr. Moritz Bauer, my former
high-school religion instructor and the rabbi of our synagogue,
the Neudegger-Tempel, as a bar-mitzvah gift from the
Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, Vienna’s Jewish Community Center. My
name was written inside the light-brown cover, which I found
embarrassing at the time, as I had not written the book. I
almost dropped it while tripping over my first long pants, a symbol of
my passing into manhood at the mature age of 13. Religion was not
my number-one priority. I faked piety for Dad’s sake to whom it
meant a lot. He grew up in a small town’s orthodox community in
which every Jewish boy had to know the Torah by heart, in Hebrew and in
Yiddish translation, including comments by Raschi and other Talmud
scholars through the ages.
Four years after my bar mitzvah, the Neudegger-Tempel went up in flames
during the barbaric Kristallnacht instigated “spontaneously” by
Germany’s propaganda ministry. We (that is, my sister Gerti and
my parents) escaped further Nazi atrocities with a weekend
border-crossing permit for a picnic ride on the Danube to Bratislava.
How smart can you get accidentally? Papa Filip (Fülöp)
had never applied for Austrian citizenship after the breakup of the
Habsburg monarchy. His birth place, Vel'ký Meder in Upper
Slovakia, qualified him (in theory) for Czechoslovak citizenship. My
siddur traveled with me, at the bottom of a backpack that also
contained Hertz salami, rye bread, and my autograph album
(“confiscated” by a customs officer). We wore two sets of
clothes, one above the other “in case it gets cold”. Everything
else we left behind, including Grandma Bertha. She had become a
citizen of the Third Reich, albeit one forced to wear a yellow star,
and was resettled in Theresienstadt near Prague. It was Colonel
Eichmann’s showroom camp with which he duped a Red Cross inspection
team into reporting “civil treatment of Germany’s Jewish minority”.
From the outbreak of World War II in 1939 until mid-1944, my folks hid
out in Dad’s birthplace, aided by relatives and friends. It was
renamed Nagymegyer after Hitler “donated” that part of Slovakia
(Felvidék) to Hungary which then had to join the Wehrmacht in
its march toward world conquest. Three families in particular
helped us far beyond expectations. Dad’s older sister Pepi Lóbl,
whose husband Albert was a shoemaker in Csorna across the Danube, sent
us clothes of their five sons who had been drafted into the Hungarian
forced-labor service (and of whom only one survived).
Józsa Reisz née Braun, Dad’s recently widowed cousin, and
her four children (Árpád, Lipót, Mariska and
Rózsi) shared with us food from their kitchen and from a little
bakery shop which Mariska was allowed to open as the daughter of a
W.W.I. veteran.
Jenö and Rajza Stern, owners of a pub (but not for long), housed us in their
vineyard’s rickety adobe hut which had been used to bottle wine and
which could not be spotted from the road. Their generosity repaid
our hospitality of many years before, when their two infants were
treated in Vienna’s famous children’s hospital. Hungary’s race
laws, increasing in severity as the country’s Nazi party, the Nyilasok,
gained power, deprived them of the pub and forced my family into a
low-rent apartment. In mid-1944 it became part of a Jewish ghetto
from which all village Jews, about 120 families, including my parents
and sister Gerti, were deported to Auschwitz. I never saw them
again. All Jewish property was “nationalized” (a euphemism for
stolen), except items for which the patriotic bureaucrats had no use,
such as Torah scrolls and prayer books. These were “secured but
not inventoried” in the little Hebrew school (Kheder) which had also
served as the community’s temple.
What saved me from the gas chambers? Probably my great love Erzsi
(Elizabeth) who, as soon as I understood enough Hungarian, prompted me
to forego charitable handouts and look for a job. There was none
in the village, not for a Jewish teenager. Jews were no longer
allowed into intellectual positions, and at least 51% of every Jewish
business had to be signed over to Aryan control. Erzsi loaned me a bicycle to pedal to Budapest where some of Dad’s
former business connections helped me to get a job in a textile
factory. Gardénia Csipkefüggönygyár r.t. hired
me as a kifutó, i.e., messenger boy, warehouse sweep, and
general gofer.
Most of my paycheck (25 pengö a week) I
sent home, except for rent on a sublet room (with mattress and hot
water) which I shared with four similar refugees. As I was not a
Hungarian citizen and would have been crazy to register as an alien, I
had no ration cards. With a lunch box I stood in line at a
Hadassah welfare kitchen. And I found extra income by tutoring a
couple of high-school students who didn’t need tutoring. Besides
occasional supper, this also afforded me temporary safety from random
police razzias. But weekends were a problem. Budapest
during the war was under curfew and teeming with German secret police
and undercover agents. Most public places, such as libraries,
museums, soccer stadiums, hotel lobbies, and beaches, required I.D.
cards or numbered admission tickets.
I hit upon the idea of posing as a foreign music student. With
sheet music under one arm and gesticulating with the other like
Toscanini, I commuted between practice rooms and rehearsal halls in the
Conservatory of Music and the Royal Opera House. I also memorized
a few Italian phrases, in case a real student asked for directions, and
gargled half a scale before faking “Che gelida manina ...”
with a grip-on-throat gesture of being indisposed.
Once I ran into a genuine Italian but, quick-witted, switched my alias
to a Swiss exchange student. Had my Switzerdütsch been
questioned, I was ready to claim ancestors around French-leaning Lake
Geneva.
This commedia dell’arte worked from about 1940 to mid-1942, when a
pleasant Sunday induced me to attend a free open-air concert.
Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio” was perforned in Károly
Kert (Charles Garden). During the intermission–they couldn’t
even wait for Osmin’s aria–two plainclothesmen asked me
to identify myself. I didn’t know to what I owed the honor of
being singled out, except that I was suspiciously single.
Elizabeth, who had joined me for a few months, had been called
home when her sister was about to give birth.
What the police was looking for were not so much spies as draft
dodgers, and I looked just about the right age. They hit the nail
on the head, as I had recently turned 21 and, as suspected, had not
bothered to register for military service. Not even for Levente,
its paramilitary prequel. What’s more, I spoke Hungarian very
badly. Another bull’s eye – an unregistered foreigner,
a Wehrmacht deserter maybe?
Luckily my boss at the factory supported my contention that I was the
son of a Magyar war veteran. I was interned at a transition camp
(Garany) for as long as it took to obtain an official paper certifying
that I did indeed “belong to” Dad’s little village. Whereupon I
was allotted one week to report to boot camp. Not as a soldier in
uniform with a gun, but with a yellow armband around my personal
wardrobe that marked me as a Jew.
I’ll skip the ensuing nightmare and subsequent odyssey, and
fast-forward to 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came tumbling
down. People behind the Iron Curtain could now be contacted by an
American “capitalist”, such as I had become, without fear of
endangering their lives.
It was two years after my retirement from an academic job in Wisconsin
that I ventured onto the Internet. In Euronet I looked for a
certain poem that had once come from Erzsi’s lips, and chanced upon the
web site of the Arany János cserkész csapat, a boy scout
troop named for a Hungarian poet. The troop held a jamboree in
Vel'ký Meder, my Dad’s hometown. It was now without Dad and
without Jews. The handful of young people who returned from
Auschwitz had taken leave again at first chance and emigrated.
Some left forwarding addresses in a guest book, kept by a senior
scoutmaster who looked after the town’s Jewish cemetery as a labor of
love. He kindly photocopied and mailed me pages with comments by
recent visitors from abroad who had paid their respects to ancestral
graves. One signature stung my eyes: Rózsi Palotai
(née Reisz), domiciled in Tata (some 20 miles from Budapest).
By hunt-and-peck and with beginner’s luck, I chanced upon the web site
of another unsung Samaritan, Veronika Szabó, a language teacher
in Budapest who had recently finished her Ph.D. thesis at Columbia
University in New York (it dealt with Yiddish proverbs in Magyar
Zsidó Szemle, a former Hungarian Jewish review). She
helped me to obtain Rózsi’s exact address, and hours later I
spoke with her son by telephone.
Rózsi, alas, was very sick and has died since, but she let
me know that her sister Mariska had settled in Israel, not far from my
great love Elizabeth. Erzsi was widowed and lived with her
married daughter and three lovely grandchildren – all of whom e-mailed
me in excellent English and seemed thrilled that a romantic “past” had
caught up with their Mom and Granny.
Rózsi also reported the death of her brothers,
Árpád and Lipót Reisz, who had emigrated with
Mariska to Israel, but not before rummaging through the “secured
but not inventoried” Jewish remains in Nagymegyer’s little temple alias
Hebrew school. Guess what? They found my bar-mitzvah siddur
with my name inside the brown cover and took it with them. A week
later, the prayer book was back in my hands, perhaps the last thing my
Dad, Mom, or sister held in their hands before deportation.
Mariska had kept it all these decades without knowing anything about my
fate.
Would it have survived if I had carried it with me into the
camps? A dried four-leaf clover fell out. It opened (Hebrew
on the right, German on the left) to the prayer for the dead.
Yisgadal v’yiskadash..., Praised be His Name who ... I am
saying Kaddish again. Does this make me a mystic?
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