I Have Lived a Thousand Years Read Online Free PDF Page B

pacing the sidewalk. It’s five minutes to one. Two Jewish females are still on the loose in otherwise pure “Aryan” Somorja.
    Without a word Mother gets on the cart next to the driver. I climb onto the small seat fixed at the back facing the pile of firewood. The peasant cracks his whip, “Gyutteee!” and the horse and wagon roll onto the open road. A sharp stab of pain slashes my stomach. From the bend in the road I can see the yellow star on our house recede into the distance.
    I cannot see the road ahead. I am facing the past as it slips into oblivion. The steel-spiked cart wheels churn up a cloud of dust sprinkled with tiny pebbles. My birthplace is disappearing rapidly. Will I ever see it again?

T HE G HETTO
    NAGYMAGYAR, APRIL 18-MAY 21, 1944
    Finally the narrow dirt road widens into the main street of Nagymagyar. The cart comes to a halt in front of the synagogue yard, a small enclave for twenty families enclosed by a tall wire fence. This is the ghetto.
    Over five hundred families are crowded into the yard. Every family brought the allocated amount of furniture, food, clothing, and personal effects. There is no room for any of it. Nor is there room for the people herded in here from fifteen communities of the region. People are helplessly standing and milling about—mothers and infants, elderly men and women, small children.
    Father, Aunt Serena, and Bubi, who arrived before us, are there, surrounded by heaps of furniture, bundles of clothes, pots and pans, mattresses, baby carriages, sacks of flour, and metal stoves.
    “That’s the sofa from our salon!” A girl about my age is pointing to a deep scarlet satin corner protruding from the heap. Where are my favorite dining room chairs with the Gobelin seats? They must be somewhere in this mountain of furniture.
    By nightfall the yard clears of people. Every available spot is utilized. People crowd into toolsheds, storage rooms, attics, basements, cellars, stairwells, and into the synagogueitself. Only the mountain of precious belongings remains in the middle of the yard.
    Our family has been assigned to share two tiny rooms and a tiny kitchen in a small house with a family named the Blumenfelds. We manage to fit a cot in the kitchen for my brother to sleep on. Father, Mother, Aunt Serena, and I sleep in one room, the Blumenfelds in the other. Mommy and I share the bed, Aunt Serena sleeps on a narrow sofa, and Father on an even narrower cot.
    We are lucky. In other houses six, seven, or eight families are squeezed in together. To make room, bathtubs, stoves, and washbasins are removed and put out in the yard; kitchens and bathrooms, even toilets serve as living quarters. Beds and cots are everywhere. Simply everywhere. It’s hilarious.
    There are beds even in the synagogue entrance hall. Those who sleep in the synagogue itself have to rise before the morning prayers, and wait until after the evening prayers before they can retire for the night. I think this is rather convenient. You simply have to poke your nose from under the covers, and you are in the synagogue for morning prayers!
    “You should live in the synagogue,” I say to my brother. “Your problems would be solved.”
    My brother has trouble getting up for early morning prayers. You have to jerk his covers off; nothing else works in waking him. Then it’s a long sleepy drag until he makes it to the synagogue, usually late. Here, with one foot off the bed, he can join the prayers on time.
    Most of life’s activities take place in the yard. Here several women are cooking on one stove. There a mother is bathing three children in a tub. A long line forms before thepublic toilet, another one before the public bath. And, alongside the tall wire fence, a row of Hungarian soldiers and military police are watching the spectacle. They are our guards.
    In the beginning I felt self-conscious of their stares. But gradually they have melted into the present scenery, and the awkwardness has waned.
    Our life is