Zsuzsanna Ozsvath From Country to Country: My Search for Home

I was 22 when I left Budapest on a cold, windy morning in March 1957. I

had lain in bed wide-awake throughout the night before, and even when I

dozed off for a minute or two, I was stabbed by a sharp pain that

compelled me to cry constantly. The separation from my parents, a

threat with which I had lived ever since my early childhood, would now

become real. But this reality had a grotesque twist: it was not the Germans

who would separate us from one another. It was I of all people who would

depart, leaving behind forever my father, my mother, my past, my

friends, and whatever remained of the rest of my family after the

Holocaust.

Early in the morning, I heard my mother preparing breakfast in the

kitchen. We ate very little, and none of us could talk. Afterwards, I picked

up the two books I had set aside the night before: Thomas Mann’s Doctor

Faustus and Radnóti’s volume of poems, Foamy Sky. I stuck both into

the pocket of my winter coat: “I’ll keep you for a hundred years,” I

whispered. It was time to leave. I hugged my mother with unbearable

pain, kissed the forehead of Renny, our huge, funny, and beautiful, black-

brown German shepherd-dog, and left the apartment with my father. We

took the streetcar to the East-Station. Arriving in 15 minutes, we went to

the platform. I sobbed in his arms for a while, then boarded the train. One

last touch of his hand, one last smile of his anguished face. I waved

farewell. Tears rolled from his eyes. The wheels of the train started to

move.

Opposite me sat Gustaf, the orchestra conductor, who was

helping me escape. I wanted to tell him about our life during the

Holocaust, about my father, the greatest and best of all men I knew, about

his repeated resolutions to leave Hungary but also about his frequent last

minute changes-of-mind in doing so, and, then, about my sudden

desperate decision to break the pattern and run away. But I couldn’t.

Gustaf was smiling and seemed quite happy. Obviously, he wouldn’t know

what I was talking about. An acquaintance of my parents, he had visited us

just a few weeks ago, explaining that he had heard from common friends

about my wish to leave the country. Then, he assured my father that for

$400.00, he could bribe someone he knows at the Ministry of the

Interior, who would be able to get a passport for me. In this way, I and he

could leave the country together, claiming that I was to play piano solo

with his orchestra in Austria. There was nothing “strange” about this

offer. At this point of Hungarian history, many people were involved in

smuggling others out of the country. The problem lay in the sum he had

asked for. To raise $400.00 at this particular time seemed impossible.

With the chaos the revolution created, with hundreds of thousands of

people fleeing, things left behind lost all value. Still, my parents tried to

scrape together whatever they could, selling my Steinway, our remaining

silver, in addition to the Persian rugs, all of which miraculously survived

the Holocaust in our old apartment. Borrowing more money from their

friends and acquaintances, they paid Gustaf the sum he wanted. In this

way, the heretofore unthinkable became reality: I got a passport. The day

after, my father bought my train tickets. I was free to follow István, my

husband, who was waiting for me in Hamburg. Registering as a Ph. D.

student in Astronomy at Hamburg University, he also had a small job at

the Observatory in Bergedorf. Suddenly, I was free to be free for the first

time in my life, free to leave behind Hungary, the Holocaust, the Russians,

the mass arrests, the hellish world my family and I had lived in ever since

I was born.

The wheels of the train were moving faster: it was heading for the border

town, Hegyeshalom. But upon arriving there, it stopped for 12 hours.

Troops of police and an army division virtually took apart all the railway

cars. They looked for “insurgents,” “spies,” weapons, “evil-doers,” for the

so-called enemies of the Soviet-supported Hungarian Communist Regime.

Dismantling the toilets and the seats of the train, they searched the

passengers as well, questioning them one by one, going through their

suitcases, investigating all their belongings. The search went on until

midnight; then, it petered out. The guards withdrew. We were on our way.

I knew I could never return to Hungary; and I also knew I might never see

my parents again.

*

That my fate took such a sudden, unexpected turn, and that I could tear

myself away from my parents and everything that had been my life up till

now, was directly intertwined with the tumultuous political events

shaking Hungary over the previous several decades. From my early

childhood, I was aware of the terrible danger threatening us. This

knowledge had eaten itself into my consciousness, becoming part of my

very being. I believe, it started to take hold of my mind after the

Anschluss and the escape of some of my mother’s Austrian friends and

relatives from their country to Hungary. Their horror stories, which I

overheard, told of atrocities committed by the Germans against the

Jews. I held my father’s hand tightly at night when I asked him questions

about our friends and relatives who remained in Austria. Listening to his

answers, I had yet another question for him that kept on terrifying me:

what would happen to us and other Jews if the Germans occupied

Hungary? He assured me again and again that the Germans would never

invade our country, and even if they would, even if it came to a war, in the

end, we probably would survive. He assured me over and over that he

and my mother would always take care of us. And to make me feel better,

he proposed that I come to him and press his hand whenever I was

frightened. I did just that during the weeks, months, and years that

followed, during the German occupation, during the fire-bombing of

Budapest, even after the war, when a new wave of deportations was

initiated by the Communist government to eradicate “the enemy within.”

Yet despite my father’s reassurances, I ran away when meeting people

who talked about the humiliation and torture to which the Germans

subjected the Jews. There were times, however, when I had to pay

attention. In August 1941, we heard about the arrival of my father’s

childhood friend, Robert, and his family, in Budapest: the four of them fled

from the German-occupied Netherlands. Soon, they came to visit us. And

they spoke of nothing else but the horror they had experienced: the

threats, cruelty, and humiliation the Germans had meted out to the Jews.

“They will kill us in the end,” Robert said, and I could tell he was terribly

frightened. He was right; they did just that in the spring of 1944. But for

the moment, the family felt lucky, as they had managed to obtain false

papers and leave the Netherlands. Since Hungary was still relatively

independent, Robert, his wife, and children hoped to be able to hide and

survive the war in Budapest. Still, I couldn’t avoid noticing that they were

different from other people I knew. I observed that when invited over,

they were anxious to leave before darkness fell on the streets. They

always looked out the window, wondering whether or not they were

followed by the police, and they constantly discussed possible ways of

hiding, in case the Germans invaded Hungary.

We also knew others who had fled from German-occupied Europe. And

they, too, spoke with horror about the Germans’ brutality they had

observed or heard about. To me, however, the most frightening of all was

the story a little Polish girl my own age told me. She recounted what

happened when the Germans arrived in the town where she lived with her

family. One day, she said, all the Jews were herded into the marketplace.

Then, separated from their families, a group of men, including her father

and grandfather, were driven on to a bridge, to undertake some repair

work. Laboring all day, they were taken to the synagogue at night, where

the SS shot them. In the meantime, the Germans marched Hanna and her

mother to the ghetto, with the rest of the town’s women and children.

Some months later, the two of them were smuggled out of the ghetto by

her cousins, who helped the pair to escape from Poland to Hungary. Now,

she went to my school. “But I don’t wnt to live without Daddy,” she said,

her face distorted by crying. “To die by suicide would be better: I would

suffer less.” I have never forgotten this discussion. Afterwards, I had

recurring nightmares that would not leave me, seeing my father, mother,

and brother shot, while I was running down the streets, homeless, alone.

By now, I was obsessed with the fear of separation from my parents.

And I was terrified of the Germans. But soon, I started to be fearful of

the Hungarians as well. With the country joining in the war, tens of

thousands of young Jewish men were drafted into the labor service.

Transported to the Russian front, they were subjected to the torture of

the officers and guards of the Hungarian Army. Most people my parents

knew had family members who were deployed as slave-labor

servicemen on the front. A small fraction of them came home after a while

and gave account of what happened with their comrades in the Ukraine.

Hence, it was through these eyewitnesses that we started to hear about the

atrocities and torture the unfortunate servicemen had to endure. Their

accounts shook my father to the core: his brother, our beloved uncle, Pali,

was among those unfortunate servicemen. A highly gifted young lawyer,

Pali loved to read poems and play chamber music. And he could invent

the world’s most interesting fantasy games. We adored him. He left behind

his pregnant wife and a two-year-old baby girl. Forced-marched in rain

and snow, across fields and towns, tortured, ill-clothed, hungry, deprived

of food, sleep, and water, he was shot into a mass grave in January 1943.

We heard the details of his murder from one of his comrades who stayed

alive and returned a few months later. But my father didn’t want to accept

these rumors. He wouldn’t give up hope, he said, repeating again and

again his belief, that despite everything, Pali has survived. He just tries to

hide now in some Russian village. But he would return when the war ends,

my father said, and we would continue to have him around and play with

him for many years to come. After awhile, however, as the story of Pali’s

murder and its circumstances kept re-emerging from several sources, and

he did not return after the war, my father lost hope and turned

despondent for the rest of his life.

Living with bad news and the constant threat of atrocities, I was terrified

when the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944. I feared their

brutality which, I knew quite clearly, would soon be unleashed against us.

But I was most afraid of separation from my parents. In comparison,

hunger, humiliation, pain, even death seemed significantly less frightening

to me. I lived through the next ten months, then, with this fear on my

mind and the foreboding vision of our murder. But I was wrong; we were

spared. While in the countryside, more than 437,000 Jews were dumped

into the ghettos and sent to Auschwitz during the spring of 1944, with

most of them gassed and cremated during that summer, the Jews of

Budapest were ghettoized but not deported. The reason for this lay in the

state of the war; that is, in the combination of the American invasion of

Normandy and the rapidly moving Russian offensive from the East,

auguring the impending victory of the Allies. Fearing Russian occupation

and the Allies’ retribution, the regent, Horthy, cancelled the entrainment

of the Budapest Jews. While the threat of deportation didn’t disappear, it

didn’t come to fruition either. Still, our fate hung on a fragile thread. We

wore the yellow star and avoided the streets, except during the hours

allotted to the Jews. Also, four people were forced to move into our

apartment, because the house in which we had lived for years had now

been turned into a “ghetto house.” But we were enormously lucky: we

didn’t have to give up our home and move elsewhere. Staying in our

apartment where we had always lived, our family was neither separated

nor deported throughout the summer. In fact, after a while, the children

of our ghetto house started to meet regularly, developing deep friendships

with one another and forming a “children’s group” that played games,

rehearsed and performed theatre pieces from morning till midnight.

Although we had less and less to eat and ghetto-living was not only deeply

humiliating but also unbearably difficult and threatening for most adults,

we played throughout the whole summer and, by the early fall, we even

started to believe that surviving the war with all of us staying together in

Budapest was perhaps possible.

But then, on October 15, 1944, with German help and support, the

Hungarian Arrow Cross Party assumed power in Hungary. Things

changed. Our lives were now threatened. We didn’t die, however, because

Erzsi (Elizabeth), our former playmate and baby sitter, who lived nearby,

took care of us from the beginning of the German occupation until our

liberation by the Russians, risking her own life for our sake a thousand

times over. Rather than going back to the countryside where she came

from, and where her parents lived, she stayed in Budapest, helping us

survive. First, she tried to line up places for each of us to hide, in case we

needed to move out of the ghetto; but she also shopped for food and other

necessities for us and helped my parents in every way she could. After the

Arrow Cross coup in the fall of 1944, she saved us from immediate death,

again and again risking her own life in a variety of rescue operations. She

took each of us to different places, finding people who were willing to take

in Jews for money, at least, for a while; and she came to pick us up when

we had to leave. As she had stood in line for food for us throughout the

summer, she now stood in line at times for genuine, at others, for falsified

protective passes. She even found some exemption certificates for my

father so that he didn’t have to report for slave labor. To find such papers

and certificates, she had to cross the streets during the shelling and

bombing of Budapest. Finding places in protected houses, she visited us

wherever we hid, even when the city was under a deadly siege, and often

she had to stop her movement on the streets, and run for protection from

house to house, from shelter to shelter.

Indeed, by November 1944, the Arrow Cross caught up with the

remaining Jews of Budapest. At this point, Erzsi got “Vatican passes” for

us; and we spent two weeks in a protected “Vatican house.” But at the

beginning of December, the Arrow Cross started to eliminate the

“protected houses,” among them those that stood under the protection of

the Vatican, marching Ivan and me to the ghetto. Erzsi was not to be

defeated, however. She came a few days later, found us, and smuggled us

out from there before the Arrow Cross sealed off the area. In the course of

the next six weeks, she took my parents, Ivan, and me to a variety of

places to hide, roving the streets even during the city’s carpet bombing.

She took me first to a Red Cross home to hide from the Arrow Cross, then,

after a few days, to a “Swedish house,” and then, to a convent I had to

leave after I told a playmate that I was Jewish. From there, we went to a

woman Erzsi knew for some time. Staying with her for only one night, I

was on the street the next morning. Undeterred by all the difficulties, Erzsi

found a new place for me. But by then, the siege of Budapest had grown

into a full-fledged, bloody battle, the likes of which only Warsaw and

Berlin suffered during World War II. Erzsi gave my new host my

mother’s last gold bracelet, promising her she would return and pick me

up in a few days. Accepting both the bracelet and me, the lady

disappeared by next morning, however. When I woke up, I was alone in

the apartment; and all I could find to eat there was a small box of cookies.

I lived off them for the next two days. In the meantime, from the suburbs,

the Russians started to shell the house where I was staying. This was on

the Pest side, facing the Danube; so that the tenants, here and in every

other house on the street, moved down to the shelters. But I knew that I

must not do so, because, as Erzsi had told me before she left, the concierge

as well as the standing committees responsible for the people living in the

house and moving to the shelter would immediately call the police, when

seeing me, a new, unaccounted person, and ask them to check me out.

Fearful of being discovered, I stayed in the apartment, which, during the

morning came under increasingly heavy artillery and mortar attack.

Within a few minutes, all was broken: windows, lamps, and most of the

furniture. I ran to the kitchen and saw from there that fire had broken out

in the neighbor’s apartment. I didn’t know what to do. Hearing voices,

however, I ran back inside the place where I stayed. But not only were

parts of the house burning in which I hid, wherever I peaked out the

window, I saw heavy black smoke billowing towards the sky. I prayed and

played and cried all day and all night, crawling into a closet filled with

blankets and pillows, covering myself with them as I heard the bombs

whistling through the air, falling and exploding. By next morning, the

series of explosions stopped; instead, I heard a series of popping sounds.

Thinking the Russians had arrived, I slunk to the window. But what I saw

was worse than anything I had ever seen before, worse than the most

frightening accounts I had ever witnessed. Two Arrow Cross men were

standing on the embankment of the river, aiming and shooting a group of

men, women, and children into the Danube--one after the other, on their

coats the Yellow Star. I looked at the Danube. It was neither blue nor grey

but red. With throbbing heart, I ran back to the room in the middle of the

apartment and sat on the floor, gasping for air. Then, I returned to the

closet, burying my head in the pillows and continued praying, singing

songs, or loudly reciting my favorite poems, so that I wouldn’t hear the

sound of the shootings.

After three days in the closet, I started to be very hungry. I also became

increasingly weak. It was the morning of the fourth day when Erzsi got

me out of there. How she walked from one end of Pest to the other, I don’t

know. Nor do I know how she had the courage to take me amidst the

bombing, shelling, and the Arrow Cross checkpoints from the house next

to the Danube to Kisfaludy street, where my parents hid in the basement

of a louse-infested makeshift hospital. It took a whole day, but we made it.

A week later, she brought Ivan. The four of us were together now, hiding

with 150 other Jews for three weeks in that basement. And we survived

despite the bloody siege, despite the Arrow Cross’ reign of terror, despite

their murder of tens of thousands of Jews.

The Russians liberated us on January 17th; and we walked home the

same day. In the following weeks, the population of Budapest was further

decimated by typhus, influenza, all kinds of other epidemics, and death by

starvation. I got typhus, but within one week, I recovered. Erzsi included,

all of us survived.

*

Life moved slowly after the war. We went back to our old apartment

which was neither looted after we left and Erzsi moved in nor destroyed

by the bombardment. But lacking coal, we were freezing; lacking food, we

were starving. To escape from Budapest, we set out in a group, walking to

Békéscsaba (about 150 miles), a town near the Romanian border. We knew

the place; we had lived there for some years before moving to the capital.

I don’t remember much of this journey, though, for I was very weak and

unable to walk. My father carried me in his arms most of the time.

Arriving at the house of Erzsi’s parents, we ate for several weeks, day and

night. To eat real food again was truly wonderful; but otherwise, life was

frightening. My parents found none of their friends at home and alive.

Neither did I: nobody among my friends and schoolmates in Csaba had

survived Auschwitz.

Slowly, a few men returned from labor service; and after awhile, a few

survivors as well. But, of course, no children came back from the camps.

Talking with everybody they could reach, my parents sat stunned. It was

the spring of 1945. They began to suspect that all their siblings and most

of their relatives had been murdered. Time proved them right. My father

lost his beloved sister and his brother, and my mother, three sisters and

one brother in the Holocaust. This loss hit my parents hard; they suffered

tremendously. Their only solace was our survival. In addition, besides

the terrible personal tragedies, the general devastation of the Shoah was

almost unbearable to face. The entire Hungarian Jewish community,

except that of Budapest, was destroyed. And even the families of

Budapest’s Jews were significantly torn apart. Most had lost several of

their members.

After a while, however, slowly and clearly, people began to move beyond

death and destruction. Living for the time in Békéscsaba, we found not

only food, but my father regained his strength as well. He started a new

pharmaceutical laboratory, realizing a dream he had had for years but

could never carry out because the country’s anti-Semitic policies

restricted Jewish business activities as far back as the early 1930s. He

worked hard, and soon, his lab, producing serum for animals, employed

three workers. Within the next three years, it developed into a serum

institute of more than one hundred people, filling the instant needs of the

impoverished countryside.

At the end of the summer of 1945, my mother, brother, and I returned to

Budapest. My father, on the other hand, traveled back and forth between

the capital and Békéscsaba, to oversee the operation of his business. In

the meantime, my brother registered in his former school and started to

prepare for his high school diploma, making possible his enrollment in

medical school three years later. I, on the other hand, did not enroll in

public schools anymore. Taking my yearly exams, I continued at the

music academy as a child pianist. By then, the boards replacing the

windows in our apartment house were replaced by glass. Soon we ate

bread instead of beans, and, I remember, by 1947-48, my mother was

baking cakes as often as we wanted her to do so, at least for a while.

Some of our friends and acquaintances, young men and women who had

survived the Holocaust, married and had children after the war; some left

for Israel or for countries willing to accept them. My parents, too, were

considering such a move. In early 1948, they even found two young

Zionists, who volunteered to walk with us across the border to Romania,

and from there, they promised, we would be picked up by others, taking

us on a boat to Israel. But my parents felt uneasy starting a new existence

in another country. They decided to stay and do the best with what we

had.

Two days after their decision, they heard from neighbors that one of my

father’s closest friends, whose wife and son had been killed in the

Holocaust, encouraged his second, remaining son to go to Israel, where

the young man died in the War of Independence. Hearing this news, our

friend committed suicide.

*

As life went on, the question “how did you survive,” which Jews asked of

one another as soon as they met in the months following the Shoah, gave

way to more immediate concerns regarding the present. What took place

then became a topic of discussion only among close friends. The reason

for this silence might have lain partly in the incapability of most Jews to

face the tremendous devastation the Shoah created, partly in the reaction

of the rest of the country to what had happened. For most Hungarians

were unwilling to discuss either Jewish losses or their own participation

and involvement in the Shoah,-- political, economic, intellectual, or

emotional. Aware of this uneven ground, by the end of the 1940s, at a

time when the Communist Rákosi government decided to suppress all

discussions of the Holocaust and concentrate on the “crimes” of the

capitalists and independent business alone, much of the humiliated Jewish

community was terrorized into obeying the official line. Nevertheless, the

events of the Shoah remained deeply engraved in the memory of

Hungarian Jews. Beginning to make a decisive impact on the literature of

the time, elaborations on this calamity grew significantly in volume over

the years. Especially when examined against the background of the ban on

Jewish remembrance, an amazingly large number of memoirs, eyewitness

accounts, and novels appeared in Hungary immediately after the war,

calling attention to the power the Shoah held over the remaining Jewish

population. Even in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, when official policies

intensified the pressure on erasing Jewish memory, almost all Jews

eagerly read whatever was published on this subject.

*

But by 1948, everyday life became hard and political pressure grew ever-

more threatening. Because of unjust demands on the peasants, food

became scarce in the villages. And in the towns, it simply was not

available. Again, we had barely enough to eat, and the general economic

gain achieved immediately after the war declined. Within a few months, a

new exodus started. Once again, we, too, were seriously considering

leaving the country. But it wasn’t easy to do so by then. The number of

places that would accept refugees was even more limited; and, as before,

the sense of uncertainty of a future in foreign lands was more frightening

to my parents than the intensifying tension of politics in Hungary. By the

early 1950s, I recognized, however, that remaining in my “homeland” was

a huge mistake. A Communist terror emerged in Hungary. What I had

read earlier in my father’s library regarding the violence of the

Communists in Russia now became a way of life in Hungary. I had to

realize that the deeply human and moral Hungary of the future, which my

father had so often described to me during and after the German

occupation, including the world’s interest in helping us, would never

materialize. Overnight, Hungary became a center of Stalinist terror. Show-

trials were arranged. People were arrested, tortured, sentenced to

physical labor, and deported from Budapest to distant villages or towns.

Suddenly, my parents wanted to flee, but it was no longer possible.

Hungary had been barricaded; on its borders, guards, fences, and mines

made any escape impossible.

Living under the terror of the state, intellectuals as well as ordinary

people, dreamers as well as realists, searched for theoretical justifications

for the new developments. They became interested in the texts of Marx,

Lenin, and Stalin. Some of these people we knew; some of them were my

parents’ friends. In fact, some intellectuals even believed, or at least tried

to believe, in these texts’ basic assumptions. But I didn’t. In fact, at first, I

couldn’t even explain why anybody would take these ideologues

seriously. To me, they were, just like “Stalin’s best Hungarian disciple,”

Rákosi, the leader of the Hungarian Communist government, who would

lie, cheat, and murder to curry the favor of the Russian dictator. Their aim

involved nothing more than extending their power and gathering people

into groups of a creed, secular in nature, but religious in structure.

Depicting the world as based on two conflicting ideological camps, they

maintained that the first one followed the “working class” and was

therefore redemptive, while the second, wasn’t. These leaders as well as

their followers were in my eyes either lying, deliberately falsifying both

reality and the future, or truly naive. But I couldn’t speak about this with

strangers. Whoever questioned the doctrine of the Party was arrested,

even school children. And the rest? Most acted as if suddenly they had

found “the true and rational” explanation for everything, including the

present and future development of the world.

As for the Holocaust, several of our best friends, some of whom were

Jewish and lost their family in the Shoah, claimed that mass murder could

only happen in a capitalist world, where the rich exploit the poor, and

everybody is the enemy of the other. I knew that this was nonsense. Anti-

Semitism had nothing to do with capitalism. I knew from my parents that

the “believers’” charge of deicide, the Crusaders’ denunciations of the

Jews, and the ritual myth of “blood libel” were accusations that played

themselves out over nearly two millennia in the Western world.

Historically, these accusations resulted in the incitement of people to

murder Jews and, when that took place, the masses regarded the killing as

the “Christ-killers’” divine punishment. I knew that these accusations were

still alive, accepted by many, even in nineteenth-century “enlightened”

Hungary –as the trial at Tiszaeszlár had demonstrated. I also read about

the Russian pogroms and the Dreyfus-affair in France; and after the end of

World War II, I knew what happened in Auschwitz. In addition, I was well-

acquainted with the details of the mass murder of 6,000 Jews in 1919 by

the Hungarian counterrevolutionary army, and aware of the atrocities

against Jewish students at Hungarian universities in 1920. Growing up

on these “lessons of Jewish history,” by the 1950s, I knew that the

problem was larger than the suddenly surfacing, ideologically shaped

Holocaust analyses imported from the Soviet Union. In fact, I knew that

these statements were lies. But there was almost nobody with whom I

could discuss these matters. Several of our friends and acquaintances

were caught up in the process of becoming good Communists and were

overjoyed by this “new vision of the world” towards which the “legendary

leadership” of the Soviet government would lead them. With such

mindless adaptation of the new political system and, of course, direct

military and political pressure from the Soviet Union, it’s no coincidence

that within a few years after the war, Communist Hungary became a

partner to everything Stalin proposed, including an anti-Zionist, anti-

Semitic campaign to discredit the State of Israel, denigrate the Holocaust,

and launch a war against the Jews. At this point, the system had highly

discouraged, and after awhile forbidden, any kind of discussion of the

Shoah.

Thus, what had become important at the beginning of the 1950s, in the

Hungarian media as well as in the educational institutions, among

intellectuals, students, and professionals alike, involved a description of

the world as being torn between the forces of the “future” and those of the

“past”: the forces of Communism and those of Capitalism. Suddenly, some

people started to believe in the centrality of the “dictatorship of the

proletariat,” and became preoccupied with questions and statements of

ideology that took the place of everything else. These questions surfaced

in virtually every discussion in every school or university, including the

Music Academy. We started to have classes in Marxism-Leninism, where

most students were expected to demonstrate their beliefs in the

importance of analyzing these “new” ideas, because without doing so, the

world could again be overtaken by the “enemies of humanity.” At this

point, I separated myself psychologically from most of my colleagues and

from most people I knew in any kind of position of power. I remember

myself starting to refer to the lines of a verse I first read at the age of 14,

in a new volume of poetry by Miklós Radnóti, who was killed in the

Holocaust: “. . ./ such things one must forget, but I / have never yet been

able to forget.” “I have never yet been able to forget,” I repeated again

and again, “And neither would I want to do so.”

*

Reading through these pages, one might think that I felt isolated as a

young girl in Budapest, after the world started to be twisted more and

more towards the Left. But I wasn’t. The gap between me and others

emerged only in my relationship to the larger, more impersonal

Hungarian community. In my personal life, I was surrounded by friends

and continued to live after the Holocaust as I had before. I still saw life as

divided into two groups of people: those who save and those who don’t.

While I know today that this recognition is not a realistic tool for judging

the larger world, for judging mine, at that time of history, it worked well.

That is, I understood and believed that saving us from the Germans, Erzsi

had demonstrated a level of heroic love without which life was unworthy

to be lived. This criterion then became the measure of all my

relationships. Seeing the world from the perspective of my experience of

the German occupation, I was deliberately searching for friends who

would, if need be, save my life, knowing that I would always do the same

for them. I will never forget that in 1951, when I heard about the

impending deportation of the parents of my friend, Vera, I went to their

apartment to help. To my greatest astonishment, I met there Istvan, my

future husband. He rushed there to help the elderly couple pack and move

their belongings. Marked for deportation from Budapest, they were to

report to the police station the next morning. One couldn’t know whether

or not the house was observed. But had the police found István there, he

would have had to face accusations or worse. Yet he didn’t stay away ; he

came and offered his help.

Besides the importance of saving people’s lives, I felt, there was yet

another, albeit very different, quality I hoped to find in a person who

would become my friend: “would he or she like to play?” I used to ask

myself. For many years, I didn’t know why I had such a need for “the

game.” But now I know that it was my desire for reliving the past. What

that past meant involved my experience in 1944, in the ghetto-house,

where our so-called “children’s group” was left to its own devices by the

adults, who were sick of fear and humiliation, preoccupied with questions

such as: “when will we be picked up?” “what will happen to my children?”

and “how will we survive”? Hence, living virtually without parental

supervision, I and my friends in the “children’s group” passionately wrote

and rehearsed theatre pieces, played games and make-believe for days,

weeks, and months on end, inventing a magical private world, separate

from the realm of the adults, a world that was understood only by us, the

self-chosen participants, creating our own “stage.”

As soon as we returned from Csaba to Budapest, I felt compelled to find

new friends and continue to play our old games. This was not hard. During

those years, the youth of Budapest, perhaps more than that of other cities

in Europe, had a history of magical games invented in the settings of

private worlds projected by children’s fantasy. Among students at the

Music Academy and others who were very close to me, I had no difficulty

in finding partners with whom I continued to listen to, re-live, and re-call

these fairy-tale games, with everybody playing along make-believe.

Today, I know that what we did then as adolescents was nothing other

than the repetition of our childhood experience, which helped us escape

the real world of atrocity and the threat of death. Caught first by the

Holocaust and then by the post-World War II Communist world in

Hungary, we continued to live in a hostile environment, from which only

theatre, games, inspired by make-believe, fairy tale, and a magical

imagination, could shield us. We constantly spoke through poems to one

another, sometimes using the same author, sometimes picking up lines

from a variety of poets to express a thought or challenge one another or

invent new combinations. We perhaps would have played all these games

till we died hadn’t the revolution broken out in 1956 and split up our

group forever.

*

Although my life was highly active on the personal, intellectual,

emotional, and professional level, I recognized under the pressure of

change that the public world had deteriorated catastrophically. By the

beginning of the 1950s, the conflict between East and West had intensified.

Stalin was bent on spreading his stamp of power over all of Eastern-and

Central-Europe’s occupied territories. His Hungarian puppet-government

helped him to create the Communist terror. The unbearable “class war”

continued; enemies were identified, and in 1951, mass deportations

started from Budapest into the countryside. By 1952-53, the

destruction of Zionist organizations became the aim of the Soviets and

their followers. Everybody understood that this was an attack not only on

the new Jewish state in Israel but also on Jews everywhere. Indeed,

culminating in the “doctors’ plot,” the new purges were openly directed

against them. In Hungary too, many Jews were arrested, jailed, or sent to

slave labor camps. In fact, one of our friends and neighbors was

imprisoned and tortured for years. I was kicked out of the Music

Academy, probably not because I was Jewish but because my father

appeared as a “capitalist” according to their record. It was the Secretary

of the Communist Party at the Music Academy who told me that I could

not remain there as a student : “you belong to the camp of the enemy,” she

said. “How come?” I asked desperately. “Well, we know that your father

was an industrialist.”

This was a frightening statement. For it was back in 1949 that my father’s

serum laboratory had been confiscated (he found, then, a job in a similar

institute, owned by the state, in Budapest). This remark, made two years

later, was a major threat. To be singled out was dangerous because it

could have had political consequences; but even if it didn’t, it made my

career as a pianist in Hungary impossible. At this point, several of our

friends were thrown out of their jobs, and more and more among them

imprisoned. “Why did we stay?” I asked my parents desperately, suddenly

understanding the horrible consequences of our decision, “it’s only a

matter of time until they’ll get us! Why did we not move a long time ago to

a country where people had never worn the yellow star? Where they had

never been gassed? Where they had not been shot into mass graves or into

the Danube? Where they were not bombed? Where they were not

threatened with exile if their fathers became involved in business? Where

people always had bread to eat?” I had come to understand the past: the

catastrophic history of Hungary, Jewish fate in Hungary, Jewish fate in

Europe, abandonment by the world, danger, vulnerability, and the

hopelessness of escape.

Stalin died in March 1953. After that, life changed somewhat in Hungary.

Antagonism against the Jews ceased to be on the government’s most

pressing agenda, although silence about the Shoah still characterized

national policies. What shifted to the foreground, however, involved the

ideological differences of various factions of the Party. In October 1956, a

planned demonstration developed into an all-encompassing revolution

against the Soviet system. The revolution won; and we believed ourselves

to be liberated and free. But it was not the right time truly to believe this,

not the right time to trust the world. The West was unwilling to face up to a

political conflict with the Soviets. Hungary was left to its fate. Fearing

American involvement for a short while, but soon understanding they had

nothing to fear, the Soviets quickly reclaimed Hungary. In addition to

their large army units surrounding Budapest, new Soviet military

divisions entered Hungary to put down the uprising. Woken up during the

small hours of November 4, 1956, I couldn’t believe what happened: the

house we lived in shook from the shelling. Again. Within the next few

weeks, 250,000 Hungarians fled. My father, too, started to search anew

for possible, secure ways of running away, but he didn’t seem to find one.

Before I knew it, most of my friends left. I suddenly understood that there

was no secure way to leave; no secure future to run towards. Nonetheless,

I understood that we must run away because if not, we would continue to

live in Hungary, continue to live in misery, continue to be persecuted,

continue to be oppressed, and, thus allow the murderers to kill us. I finally

understood that we must leave Hungary. In addition, I understood that

talking to my parents wouldn’t help because they would agree; but then,

they would step back, as they had always done; and in the end, we

wouldn’t leave. I started to beg my husband, István, to pack his bag and

go, telling him that as long as we were waiting for one another, nothing

would happen. But as soon as he would depart, I could follow. And as soon

as the two of us left, my parents would leave as well. I preached to the

choir. He, too, was shaken by the bloodshed, disgusted by the

Communists and the life they forced upon us, disgusted by the Russians,

disgusted by the siege. And he, too, was outraged at the murder of the

Jews, which nobody wanted to discuss and nobody was allowed to talk

about. He, too, wanted to leave. And finally, he did. I was to follow him to

Hamburg.

*

Pondering the past throughout my train trip and even after bidding

farewell to Gustaf, I stayed for five days in Vienna, where I received my

new German “refugee passport,” which István sent me from Hamburg. I

then boarded another train that took me to Germany. I was delirious

from a new sense of freedom, at the same time, also overwhelmed by

pain for those I left behind. I arrived at my new destination with great

expectations and a strange sense of heaviness and uncertainty alike.

There was one thing, however, I was sure of: there wouldn’t be any

difficulties arising from the “cultural difference” between me and the

Germans. For, I felt, there was none. Despite what had happened, I was, in

many ways, like them; I felt part of German culture, part of Bach and

Goethe, Schiller and Thomas Mann.

István waited for me at the train station and took me to the observatory,

where we would live for the next six years. The same night, I met a

number of his colleagues, astronomers, students and scholars alike, all of

whom seemed to be kind and pleased about admitting yet another

“Hungarian” into their circle. In fact, all of them looked upon us with

friendly admiration, as if we were representatives of the Hungarian

Revolution; for they regarded the latter as the first major “galvanizing

attempt” in Eastern Europe to try and resist, even defeat, the all-powerful

Soviet army. Although the revolution of the Hungarians didn’t prevail

then, most Germans were tensely waiting for the next one. Confronted

with the Russian occupation of East-Germany, they were deeply

concerned with the enormous tensions divided Europe posed as well as

the dangers the Cold War created. Despite the fact that neither of us

belonged to the ranks of the Hungarian freedom fighters who forced the

Soviets to surrender, we, too, were overjoyed about the defeat of the

Russians, who perpetuated murder and atrocity in Europe, and about the

collapse of the Hungarian government that terrorized, threatened,

frightened, and forced us to lie for years: a government responsible for

the murder of thousands of innocent people.

As for the Germans I met on the day of my arrival at the Bergedorf

Observatory, many of them were still preoccupied with the horrors World

War II had bought upon them. But I immediately noticed a problem: we

spoke about different horrors. This experience was similar to that in

Hungary, where, in discussing the losses of the Jews, people compared

them to the losses of Hungarians, identifying both groups as having

suffered from the “evil of the war.” To me, however, the Holocaust had not

much to do with the evil of the war; rather it was the deliberate, brutal

murder of the Jews, of all Jews, of men, women, children, the sick and the

aged, their communities as well as their culture. To me, what happened to

others, including the Germans (or the Hungarians) during World War II,

however terrible, was of another nature. While these countries obviously

lost large numbers of innocent people, not all Germans and not all

Hungarians were sentenced to death. I thought about this issue back in

Hungary as well and saw much of my alienation from Hungarian society in

general and the Communist rule in particular rooted in these revised

versions of Holocaust memory. During that night of our first meeting with

people in the observatory, I spoke with several men and women about

their experiences during the war. Some of them brought up rational

explanations for the atrocities, others condemned them; yet others spoke

about the tremendous suffering the Germans went through during the

years they lived under the pressure of merciless Allied bombing. These

were the reactions to the past I encountered in Hamburg on the first night

of my arrival; they were also emblematic of my discussions with most

people throughout our sojourn in Germany.

At the end of March 1957, I applied for admittance to the Hamburg

Academy of Music. I was accepted, and I found some truly wonderful

teachers there: first, Robert Henry, later, Mme. Zur. I also located an

elementary school in Bergedorf that had an old and kind care-taker, Mr.

Schreiber, a Social Democrat before the rise of Hitler. He and his wife

allowed me to practice 8-10 hours a day there. Small wonder that István

and I recognized that the path to achieve our goal was open. Working

hard, we would be able to get our degrees in Germany: he his Ph. D. and I

my Concert Diploma.

Yes, but what else? Weeks, months, and years passed by. We lived in

Hamburg-Bergedorf, but my life remained overshadowed by the world of

Budapest. In fact, time didn’t close the gap between my present and past.

Hurting from the separation from my parents, I wrote them a letter every

day; and my father wrote back daily, too. The Hungarian mail was

unreliable, however, so that our letters were often delayed or even

discarded, confusing our communication, creating constant irritation,

concern, and worries in all of us. This tension was intensified by the lack of

communication via the telephone. We didn’t have one and couldn’t afford

one. Thus, István and I went every Saturday afternoon to the “Inn of

Frieda,” a tavern near the observatory in Bergedorf, where we were

allowed to sit down and place a call to Budapest. Sometimes we could

speak with my parents within an hour or so; other times, it took two to five

or more hours before we were connected; sometimes we understood one

another clearly, sometimes, not at all. It was sheer torture.

And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, I started to recognize that I was

homeless and would remain homeless for the rest of my life. While there

were people who were kind and good to us, I began to understand that I

could never be free of my past and, in turn, that I could never live in a

world where my past amounts to nothing, where it could never be

translated or explained. These recognitions were new. However estranged

I was from the larger world in Hungary, there had been many people

around me who loved Radnoti, who expressed their thoughts and

feelingsthrough the “vortex of voices” of Hungarian, German, English, or

French poems; who were children, like me, during the German

occupation, who played, acted out, and recited poetry to forget or not to

forget “that which had happened.” I started to see that no matter how

well I knew Faust or the poems of Hofmannsthal and Rilke, I was a

stranger in the German world of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I could

never tell anyone who I was -- although I tried to do so, never failing to

mention that I am Jewish. This fact alone didn’t create a relationship with

people, however. How could it? Why should another person be

responsible for that? And what could my Jewishness tell about me

anyhow? And how could I say more? How could I speak about the pain

and the fear that had been etched into me so many years ago, the pain and

the fear that are part of me forever? How could I speak about the place I

came from? About our life? About the poetry that expresses it? About

Radnóti, whose verse affirms my being? About the Hungarian Jews? About

my father? About Jewish religious questions; about the world of the Jews,

and about what happened to them?

I felt estranged in Germany perhaps because I didn’t know anybody else

who had experienced life as I had. The major concerns of our closest

friends, mostly young artists, young students, or young faculty, revolved

around contemporary German-American policies. To them, wars were

responsible for the deaths of millions of people; in fact, wars caused all

the grief of the world. It was not as if these people ignored the past. But

their outrage was essentially different from mine. They spoke about the

extent to which the Nazis disregarded people’s constitutional rights

during the Hitler era, the extent to which they neglected people’s

individual needs, the ease with which they turned racial discrimination

into national policy, viewing “Gleichschaltung” as a process that

interconnected with people’s desire for fitting in, no matter what was

expected of them. While I, too, regarded these concerns to be of great

theoretical importance, other issues, more direct ones, more personal

ones, hurt me more. I mourned the murdered Jews, the destruction of

our family, and the injustice that separated me from my father and

mother. Nor could István help me at this point. He, too, had been rather

uncertain of himself during this period; he, too, left his elderly parents

behind; he, too, was looking for support. While I was more and more

swept off my feet by the forces of the past, he, too, worried about the

future, which he didn’t see yet as settled. I missed my old friends in

Budapest with whom I used to play all those games, and who would save

me no matter what, and I missed my parents, terribly. I was devastated.

It was amidst these concerns that I obtained my concert diploma at the

Hamburg Music Academy in 1961. Shortly afterwards, one of István’s

colleagues, our closest friend, decided to accept a job at the University of

Texas at Austin and thought that it would be excellent if Istvan would do

the same. We came to Austin in November 1962. Deciding to give up my

career in music, perhaps because I yearned for a new homeland in the

realm of language, I enrolled in the German Department’s Ph. D. program.

I read day and night. A year later, we moved to Dallas, with István getting

a job at the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, which later became

the University of Texas at Dallas. Gradually, I started to feel better. I

found friends here. These people knew what had happened in Auschwitz;

these people were interested in our past; these people knew about the

Jews. I even met some who were interested in Hungarian poetry. I could

speak with them; and I could translate for them what happened to us. I

started to have great friendships. No, I didn’t play games of metaphors

with them, but I found myself closer to home.

*

While my lot improved tremendously in America, my parents’ plight had

not changed. The suffering my father had endured never ceased. He, the

most loving human being of all the people I have ever known, had lived in

a never-ending state of anguish ever since his youth. The more I thought

about it, the more I believed that the pattern could still be changed, that I

and István and our daughter, little Kathleen, born in Dallas, and all of our

friends here could, if not take back what had happened to him, at least

make it good. I wanted to believe in the chance of my parents’ visit, even

in the possibility of their move to America. After all, we lived in America;

and my father loved America; this was the place, he told me, where he had

always wanted to go. Also, by now, my parents were older. I thought they

might appreciate that we had been so well off. With our future secured, I

hoped they would come, and we could lay to rest the events of the past.

But leaving Hungary at that time was still hard. Throughout our sojourn in

Hamburg, my father tried to apply, and re-apply, for a passport; his

applications, however, were mercilessly turned down by the Hungarian

government. Finally, in 1959, he received one for East Berlin. István and I

flew to West Berlin, not yet walled-off from the East, and we spent five

heartbreaking days together. Unwilling to stay and leave my mother and

brother behind, my father returned to Hungary. But he continued to apply

every six weeks for a passport. After three years, in the summer of 1962,

he received one with permission to stay one week with us in Hamburg. A

year or two later, the officials in the Hungarian Passport Office convinced him to retire from his job in the serum institute, so that he and my mother

could receive passports valid for one year in the United States. He did so.

My parents arrived on September 1, 1964 in Dallas, Texas; my father died

of a heart-attack 21 days later. A year later, my mother went back to

Budapest, where she died in 1971.

Our son, Peter, was born in 1967. By then, my love for life returned with

an enormous intensity. However hurtful the past, the world with our

children turned out to be a wonderful and profound experience. Raising

them with constant, enormous joy, we felt tremendously happy and

satisfied. And while we wanted them to be at home in America, more so

than we ever were in Hungary, both of us felt that they would gain much

from retaining part of our Hungarian heritage, which we would carry

within ourselves for as long as we lived. And because the language I spoke

at home with István was Hungarian and the poetry written in Hungarian

has been so important to us, we decided to speak in this language with

both children, teaching them all the games we had been playing

throughout our life, all the folk songs I learned from my parents, and later

from Kodály and Sugár, all the most beautiful fairy tales, and poems, and

stories, and novels, and Jewish jokes we had grown up on. And we did.

Being with them in every free minute of our life, we spent together a

beautiful, love-filled, miraculously free, enchanted time that continues

into these days no matter that they grew up, no matter that they live now

elsewhere. And we have been at home in Dallas, more at home than ever,

anywhere, in my life.

There can be no doubt, however, that besides István and our children, my

desire for studying the Holocaust and translating poetry have been the

staple of my long search for finding home. First of all, my professional life

started to go quite well. Obtaining my Ph. D. in German Literature in 1968,

I began teaching in September of the same year. After a while, I began to

publish as well. And I read --endlessly. Throughout my life, I have been

preoccupied with the Holocaust. But now, I read about it systematically:

studying its history, its literature, its social, political, and ideological

background, with an emphasis on the history of the French, German,

Russian-Polish, Hungarian, and Austrian Jews and their intellectual

contribution in the course of the past two-three centuries. In 1976, I

started to publish and teach courses on the Shoah, and some years later,

with the help of interested individuals, the community, and the

administration, the Holocaust Studies program at the University of Texas

at Dallas started to take shape.

* * *

There was yet another realm of great importance in my life, a realm that

confirms my identity, recalls my childhood, and promises continuity. This

is the realm of literary translations. Growing up speaking Hungarian,

German, and French, I read much from these countries’ literature in the

original, especially, poetry. At the same time, I read the bulk of the

nineteenth-century European novel in Hungarian. In this way, I have

always been aware of the wide-ranging, creative significance of the act of

translation, changing languages, learning to understand oneself and the

world in different ways, discovering the sound and color of other voices,

melting them into one’s own being. Now that I was living in Dallas, I felt

compelled to translate poems and stories from the German and Hungarian

into English. While starting with some works from German, I soon came to

believe that rendering Hungarian poetry into English would be essential

for future communities, as there are just a few people in the world who

know about the beauty, riches, and depth of the Magyars’ literary

tradition. With a chain of voices stretching back eight hundred years, a

major cultural achievement has been realized in Hungarian poetry, which

ranks among the greatest achievements in the Western literary tradition.

While I dreamed about translating much of this huge and diverse material,

in my thoughts, I always returned to the work of the poet who had had the

most significant influence on my life, whose poems I constantly recited

with my friends in Budapest, whose tragic, never-waning presence had

opened to me new and essential vistas on the Hungarian Holocaust:

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944). Radnóti was a brilliant poet with a

heightened sense of beauty and an enchanting musical voice. But he lived

amid a terrible conflict. Hoping to become a major force in the great

Hungarian poetic tradition, he saw himself as being overlooked by

Hungarian official, anti-Semitic political and intellectual leadership.

Humiliated first by the free-floating popular and intellectual anti-Semitism

of the 1920s and 1930s, he was later directly attacked and, ultimately,

dehumanized by the racist, anti-Jewish measures that were decreed

between 1938-41. Drafted three times during the early 1940s as a Jewish

labor serviceman, Radnóti was taken the last time to Yugoslavia. And

when the German and Hungarian armies evacuated the Balkans in the late

summer of 1944, Radnóti was force-marched back to Hungary. Ill-

clothed, malnourished, mistreated, tortured, and driven for months

through rain and mud and snow, he became exhausted and could walk no

longer. Then he was selected and murdered by members of the Hungarian

Army, who shot him with twenty-one of his comrades into a mass grave,

where his body was found and exhumed almost twenty-months later. In

the pocket of his raincoat, those who did an autopsy on him located a

notebook containing ten poems that Radnóti composed during his labor

service in Yugoslavia and on the death march. These poems as well as

much of his earlier lyrics have been, as Levi says about the verses of

Celan, “grafted into me” ever since I first heard them in Budapest. I

dreamed about translating them into English, thereby communicating

Radnóti’s belief in the redemptive power of poetry, his melancholic,

deeply humane words, his heartbreakingly beautiful verbal metaphors,

capturing Jewish life and Jewish death in the twentieth-century. I felt that

he must be introduced and internationally recognized as one of the great

poets of our time and as the chronicler of the tremendum that ruled

Europe and killed millions in heretofore unimaginable ways. I started to

yearn for rendering the dramatic force of his imagination and the beauty

of his words, musical-metrical patterns into English.

One day I met a new colleague, the poet Fred Turner, at The University of

Texas-Dallas, and we began to discuss the tasks, hopes, and potentials of

translations. At this point, I already knew of Turner’s lyrical output, and I

found the music of his verse extraordinarily beautiful: graceful and lithe in

its metrics, movements, and expressions, but also mystical, highly

emotional, and visionary. He felt, as he said in our discussion, that

besides finding equivalences between the source and the target language,

a good translation must capture and recreate the rhymes, resonances, and

the metrical patterns which usually include the cultural memory of the

original. He spoke of the hope for hearing and resounding the “Ur-

language,” a notion close to what Walter Benjamin calls a “pure language,”

a language which doesn’t really exist, but always reverberates in the

music of the original.

We had our first translation session three days later. Our work

started with Radnóti’s lyrics, “Similes,” one of the poet’s tenderly-smiling

love poems I adore. This piece also interplays with one of the games my

friends and I played in Budapest a long time ago, describing a person in

terms of color and sound, a game, which at one point in his life, Radnót

must have played as well. And then, I couldn’t believe what happened:

Fred saw the images of the poem, and he heard its music:

. . .

And then you’re indigo, and I’m scared, don’t leave me,

like twined smoke wandering,

and sometimes I’m afraid of you

hued like the lightening.

And like the sunlit tempest

--darkgold!--

when you lose your temper

you are the sounds of “ah” and “oh”--

resonant, contralto, darkling.

But now I’ll scribble

around you glittering

smiles, ringlet within ring. (FS, 123-24)

There can be no doubt that what Fred calls “the Ur-language” resonates

here somewhere in the depth of the words. And whatever echoes in the

“Hungarian translation” of the poem echoes now in the English version as

well. The reader hears the speaker’s song and sees him scribbling

“glittering ringlets” of smiles around his beloved.

Also the folk song beat of “In Your Arms” resounds in English as if it were

Hungarian:

In your arms I am rocking, rocking
hushaby.

In my arms you are rocking, rocking

lullaby. (FS, 105)

With the rhythm set, the words find their place and so does the voice. But

even the poem’s happiest moments take place on the edge of darkness.

The ending of this “rocking poem” reveals the speaker’s vision of death.

Just as in Hungarian, exhaling again and again the h-sound, the speaker’s

last breath (“huge hushaby”), and reinforcing the hard beat of the d-

sound, the voice moves between “death” and “dreaming,” exhaling with

the last word: “dreamingly.”

when you’re holding me, not even

death’s huge hushaby

can frighten me.

In your arms through death as dreaming

I will fall so

dreamingly. (FS, 104-105)

Translating these lyrics, we went back to render a selection of Radnóti’s

work, one poem after the other. The metrically determined metaphorical

language of the Magyars resounds now in English, recreating the music,

the colors, and the meaning of the Hungarian. Witness “Foamy Sky,”

which projects turbulent foam-like clouds, gushing towards the moon and

contrasting the green streaks in the firmament. The images are as ominous

in English as they are in Hungarian; at the same time, they interconnect in

both languages in the same uncanny ways with the persona’s thoughtful,

existential recognition of being:

. . .

Foam gushes forth upon the moon.

A dark green venom streaks the sky.

I roll myself a cigarette,

am slowly, carefully, a living I. (FS, 99-100)

And we started to work on the eclogues. On the one hand, a given here is

the beat of the hexameter, pulsing in the ancient tradition of both

Hungarian and European poetry; on the other, however, this is a

structure with layers of echoes demanding to be heard and recalled. I was

moved to the core: Fred recreated in English the metrics and the melodic

line of the original composition. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of

Radnóti, his “brother-poet,” who scanned the measure of his poems,

taking their cry to the sky, paying great care and attention to the beat,

even when in the camps, even when surrounded by his tortured

comrades, even in the proximity of death, as in “The Seventh Eclogue”:

Snoring they fly, the poor captives, ragged and bald,

From the blind crest of Serbia to the hidden heartland of home!

The hidden heartland. –O home, O can it still be?

with the bombing? And is it as then when they marched us away?

And shall those who moan on my left and my right return?

Say, is there a country where someone still knows the hexameter?

(FS, 189-91)

Indeed, we wanted to follow Radnóti with utmost care, moving with him

wherever he was forced to go, even on the death-march. We imagined

seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt, observing what he observed as he

noted carefully and conscientiously, like mediaeval chroniclers, the

suffering, destruction, and executions of the Jews. Witnessing his guards’

shooting of hundreds of innocent people, he foresaw and captured in his

last poem his own death, the Jewish death of the twentieth-century:

I fell beside him and his corpse turned over,

tight already as a snapping string.

Shot in the neck. “And that’s how you end too,”

I whispered to myself: “Lie still; no moving.

Now patience flowers in death.” Then I could hear

“Der springt noch auf,” above and very near.

Blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear. (FS, 212-13).

Having completed the translation of Radnóti’s poems, Fred and I started

to render into English the work of yet another great Hungarian twentieth-

century poet: Attila József (1905-1937). József reveals an essential

connection between the past and present in Hungarian poetry, resonating

the ancient Magyar tonality as well as the voices of generations of

Hungarian poets; but he also recalls the work of the national and

international avant-garde.

I would not have imagined that József ‘s sonorities and incantatory

metrics could ever resound in English. But they do now. So it has become

possible that in his early love poem, “Beads,” for example, both the static

and the glittery moving circles and spheres act within the poem and

assume at once an audible and a visible presence:

Beads around your neck aglow,

Frogheads in the lake below.

Lambkin droppings,

Lambkin droppings in the snow.

Rose within the moon’s halo,

gold belt round your waist to go.

Hampen knottings

knotted round my neck just so.

Skirted legs so subtly swinging,

Bell-tongue in its bell a-ringing,

River-mirror

With two swaying poplars’ winging.

Skirted legs so subtly calling,

Bell-tongue in its bell a-tolling,

river-mirror
With the dumb leaves falling, falling. (IBV, 75)

And to my greatest delight, we could translate (but may cite here only a

few lines from) one of the most beautiful love poems of world literature,

József’s “Ode.” This has been an important experience for me because

there can be no doubt that besides its breathtaking sweep and glow, this

poem has had an extraordinary influence on my life: it has shaped the

ways in which many of my friends and I have learned to understand love

in the world:

. . .

I love you as we who marked for death

Love the moment of their living breath.

Every smile, every word, every move you make,

as falling bodies to my earth, I press;

as into metal acids eat and ache

I etch you in my brains with instinct’s stress,

beautiful shapeliness,

your substance fills the essence they partake.

The moments march by, clattering and relentless,

but in my ears your silence lies.

Even the stars blaze up, fall, evanesce,

but you’re a stillness in my eyes.

The taste of you, hushed like a cavern-pool,

floats in my mouth, as cool;

your hand, upon a water-glass,

veined with its glowing lace,

dawns beautiful. (IBV, 105-108).

. . .

But József composed poems not only about love and life and death; he

also warned his people of the danger of nationalism and chauvinism and

the threat these ideologies had created in Europe.

Fred and I hoped we would do justice to the art of József, not only to the

harmonious sound of his words and to the mellifluous tunes of his voice,

but also to the projection of his visual power and the clarity of his

thinking, so that his English-speaking reader would appreciate József’s

poetic presence as well as his penetrating insight into twentieth-century

European culture. For there were not too many writers and poets in the

mid-1930s who could produce such insight, who understood both

“wolfish” ideologies of the time, that created wars and killing centers,

ultimately murdering more than fifty-or sixty -million people. Unlike

most of his internationally well-known colleagues, by 1937, József had

recognized and warned against the murderous aggression inherent in

Nazism and Communism alike.

*

Our collection of Attila József’s poetry came out in 1999, and soon after,

Fred and I started on a new project involving the translation of a selection

of 800 years of Hungarian poetry. Having completed this Hungarian

anthology, Fred and I are now involved in translating a representative

volume of Goethe’s lyrics.

*

Changing countries several times in my life, I arrived with István in

America in the fall of 1962. I was homeless, burdened by pain, guilt, my

parents’ tragic life, and the memory of the Holocaust. Despite this burden

and despite this memory, however, I have found my home here. Of

course, it has been my family, István, Peter, Kathleen, her husband, Gary,

and baby Elizabeth who are mostly responsible for my change of

consciousness over the years; and so are my close friendships with people

whom I love. But there have been other factors shaping my life, my

perception of identity, authenticity, and memory as well. It was my book

on Radnóti and my constant reading, writing, and thinking about the

Holocaust, my ongoing discussions with students, friends, and others,

including the interest many people express for the Shoah, which have

played an important role in my understanding of the past. Furthermore, it

took some time for me to comprehend that my past is not mine alone: I

share it with the lives and deaths of many people, my family, my friends,

and millions of Jews. That I am allowed, even encouraged to ponder their

lives and deaths in freedom and with dignity and to think about the ways

that led to the Shoah and the ways in which this event has affected my

future and the future of the world are some of the major reasons for the

deep gratitude I feel toward this country.

But then, besides my passionate desire for reading and teaching about the

Holocaust, there is one more, deeply personal reason for my sense of

being at home in America. Despite my life-threatening experience in

Hungary, my love for Hungarian literature has not diminished over the

years. In fact, it has been intensified by my experience of living in this

country and listening to all those who speak English around me: my

students, readers, friends, and the world that surrounds us. They urge me

to keep on translating poetry. And despite my outlandish pronunciation, a

constant reminder that I wasn’t born in this country, I feel that I express

myself as comfortably in English as in Hungarian and enjoy moving

between these two worlds. In addition, the poems Fred and I translated

have sharpened my sense of hearing and understanding the huge variety

of both languages’ musical material and visual textures, with both

becoming just as vital in shaping my intellectual-emotional world in

English as in Hungarian. I hope to translate with Fred much more

Hungarian and German poetry; and I hope to study further, and continue

to write about, the major issues of the Holocaust.

Yet there are questions the reader may ask, questions that emerge

despite my sense of “rootedness” in America: have my old nightmares left

me? Have I learned to believe that my house will be here rather than

destroyed when I return? That those whom I bid farewell to will return?

That I will return? That the horrific memories of the past will become part

of a bygone world? The answer to these questions is of course no. In my

nightmares, I am still running down the streets, homeless, alone.

Endnotes

See the analysis, description, and exploration of this major attack on

the Hungarian capital by Krisztián Ungváry, The Siege of Budapest: 100Days in World War II (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005).

Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, “Trauma and Distortion: The Ban on Jewish Memory in Hungary, Congress Monthly 1 (2006): 11-15; and in The Holocaust in Hungary: Sixty Years Later, Eds. Randolph L. Braham and Brewster S. Chamberlin (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), 337-47.

As my poor father could never forget about the brutal attack unleashed against him. This happened after he underwent surgery for a life-threatening head-wound he was afflicted with on the front, in WW I. His recuperation took almost a year. In 1919, he enrolled in the pharmacology department at the university, where he was captured and brutally beaten up by a group of “Awakening Hungarians,” as they called themselves, lying in wait for Jewish students outside the classrooms of Hungarian universities. His sacrifice for the “fatherland” was quite meaningless, apparently.

Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner, trans. Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti (Princeton: UP, 1992), 100. Budapest: Corvina, 2000, 102.

Even before WW II, though, Budapest’s youth had been involved in playing and inventing

magical games. e.g. Antal Szerb, Journey in Moonlight, trans. Len Rix (London: Pushkin Press, 2001).

According to Paul Lendvai, about one third of these deportees were Jewish. Anti-Semitism Without Jews: Communist Eastern Europe (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1971) 309.

Paul Celan, “Ansprache Anlässlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansastadt Bremen,” in Paul Celan Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 186.

John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet. Survivor. J ew ( New Haven – London: Yale: UP, 1995), 331.

Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner, trans. Attila József: The Iron-Blue Vault: Selected Poems (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999).

Zsuzsanna Ozsvath

The Leah and Paul Lewis

Chair of Holocaust Studies, School of Arts and Humanities

The University of Texas at Dallas

Box 830688

Richardson, TX 75083-0688

Published in:

"From Country to Country: My Search for Home," ed. A. Rosenfeld,
in /The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exlie Literature/, Indiana
UP, 2008, pp. 177-214.

The book can be purchased at the following website:

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=76825