Dossier K: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

bank would have gone belly-up even without Romanian help. I’m more inclined to think that Hungary’s loss of the war hit my grandfather a bit too close. He may well have viewed it as a personal failure; he identified with the collapse and lost his footing in the panic of defeat. Of course, that was an unconscious process, but it happened to a lot of people. At such times one bad decision follows another; people give way to mass psychosis and either slip into deep depression or join the crowd in baying for revenge. It’s curious that no one in Hungary has properly analyzed this phenomenon, although the interwar period in Hungary in particular—along withGermany, of course—produced by the barrel-load the sort of psychoses that prepared people to accept the most dreadful dictatorships and the catastrophe of the Second World War.
    You say that people in Hungary haven’t properly analyzed the phenomenon, but have you read about it anywhere else?
    I seem to remember that Sebastian Haffner, a superb German writer and journalist who fled to London from Hitler, deals with the subject in his books.
    But I don’t suppose your grandfather was among those who bayed for revenge
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    All the less so as he was Jewish, and the sharply anti-Semitic line that dominated Hungarian public life between 1919 and 1924 must have been very trying for him, since he had fled from the Romanian occupation of Transylvania to what was referred to as the “mother country.”
    Did he speak about that?
    Never. And anyway, even if he did, he would not have done so to his grandson, who was just a child. To be quite frank, no relation of confidence ever developed between us, nor could it have done, as we saw each other only seldom. It could be, therefore, that everything I have said about him is purely speculative, but I cannot explain the aristocratic restraint from behind which the lethargyof defeat was perceptible. When I was a young boy I regarded that as an extraordinarily moving trait, though I wouldn’t have been able to give it a name at the time, of course. At all events, he was not a great intellect; when he went into retirement, out of his own resources and with help from the family he purchased a modest two-room house in Rákosszentmihály, 2 where he lived with his wife, who I only found out later was not my “real” grandma. Every now and again, my mother’s side of the family would get together in that small Rákosszentmihály house on a Sunday evening. By then the Second World War was already in progress. My grandfather would gather the menfolk and usher them into the second room and, brows furrowed by concern, his voice almost a whisper, he would ask, “Now then, what’s new? What have you learned? What’s going to happen?”
    I daren’t ask “what did happen?”
    Both of them were murdered in Auschwitz. From the window of the cattle truck they were able to throw a letter card addressed to my mother: “We’ve been stuck on a train, we’re being carried off somewhere, we don’t know where”—that, roughly, is what it said.
    Does the letter card still exist?
    My mother had it for a long time. I still remember today the downward-sloping two lines scribbled in pencil on the grey-coloured paper.
    And how did the letter card reach the addressee?
    Some kind-hearted soul must have found it, put a stamp on it, and posted it. My mother was still at her own address, but during the forced “clustering” of the Jewish population she moved into a “Yellow Star” house in Gyöngyhaz Street. 3 As you no doubt know, before a ghetto was set up in Budapest, there was an ordinance that decreed that several Jewish families were to move in together into single properties. The resulting houses of mass lodgings were then referred to as “Jewish houses” and a yellow star was nailed up over the entrances. I myself was living in a house like that before … how should I put it: before I was “arrested,” specifically with my stepmother at 24/B