Writing about my parents’ escape from Hungary brought our family closer
|
Version 0 of 1. I remember when I made the decision to write a family history. I was in the garden of a stroke rehabilitation unit, holding my father’s hand – the one that had turned into a claw. I was sitting on a bench, my mother crying, and an overwhelming feeling came to me in the form of a question: if not now, then when? The closeness of death seemed to quicken an already ticking clock. Setting down the story of my family suggested a past tense, as if I could write only about the dead and not the living. My mother was immediately affected by the idea. “It’s something your father might have written,” she told me. It was the beginning of a time of tears. I had become a writer like my father, turning to it many years before on his typewriter. The stroke, though, would not allow my father to write any longer. It had damaged his short-term memory. By contrast, as I was to find out, it brought out both the still space of his past, and a child-like innocence from which childhood memories would bubble to the surface. I already knew the broad brushstrokes of my Hungarian Jewish parents’ story: they had fled Hungary in 1956 in the wake of the Soviet invasion, leaving behind possessions and people, not least their mothers and my mother’s sister. Before that, there had been the war, during which Hungarian Jews had suffered badly. I even knew details, such as the massacre my father had survived, aged 14, in a residential block in Budapest in 1944. I also knew Hungary well, having grown up with the language and visited the country many times. Undertaking a family history meant talking to family, asking specific questions again and again. I became partly a repository for information, tales, details and speculations, and partly a totalitarian, deciding who should be in the picture and who shouldn’t. I showed an early section of the book to my brother: “Where am I?” he asked. “I was there too that night. You’ve airbrushed me out.” It was true: one very wintry night, many years before, we had been up on Castle Hill in Buda overlooking Pest on the other side of the Danube. Putting it down on paper, I left him out. The research, which took me from Budapest basements to Slovenian mountain tops, and from Ukrainian border villages to forgotten Romanian cemeteries, led to new questions in the light of fresh facts. I lost count of the times I asked my father to revisit the cellar in which he and my cousins’ father hid, while above them in the courtyard about 20 Jews – very old and very young males – were executed. “What has always stayed with me,” he said after the fifth or sixth such conversation, “is the smell of the blood.” Then there were the times I asked him to recall his own father, who had disappeared on forced labour during the freezing Ukraine winter of 1942. I never saw my father cry, but on one occasion he came close, when he said of his own father: “I think about him getting weaker.” He knew very well that death while on forced labour in the Ukraine meant freezing, starving and being beaten by guards. The most poignant moment was when I asked my father if he would mind applying to the Hungarian state security archives to see what information, if any, they had gathered about him as a “dissident” writer or, as the Americans later referred to him because of his Communist party membership, a “defector”. He simply said: “Should I spend money finding out who I was?” I asked my mother, too, to revisit difficult emotional spaces. One defining moment, shared by many Hungarians, was leaving behind her sister and parents in December 1956. My parents escaped, hidden in an ambulance before walking across fields in the middle of the night to the Austrian border. While going over, again, a half-remembered geographical detail, she said: “It’s a crime to force people out of their country.” I had always known of her sadness about her separation from her sister, the half-century of absence, but not of her underlying anger. “It never leaves you,” she told me, “the ‘what if things had been different?’. Even after 50 years, it never leaves you.” Her sister, like many people, in many ways, had been forced to stay in Hungary. In my conversations with my aunt, it was clear that the consequences of this had been worse than leaving. After all, she continued to live in the same town and on the same streets that had been filled with painful experiences: wartime executions just outside her flat, Jews shot into the Danube, the 100-day siege of Budapest before Soviet liberation, the tank shells of the 1956 revolution. “It’s all here,” she once said to me, gesturing across the river, the city, and its streets. “It doesn’t go away.” If there was a single experience she did not wish to call to mind, it was her husband’s fatal accident. While walking the dog, he was crushed by falling masonry from one of Budapest’s crumbling, poorly maintained balconies that represented the Communist era of “deferred maintenance”. Asking her to talk about what she called “that terrible period”, and to dig up the documents relating to it, which she did not wish to find, was only marginally easier than going to the exact spot where it happened. This I did with my cousin. He, too, resisted but drove me there, staying in the car as I went to look. “I didn’t think I’d be able to come back here,” he told me. And he wouldn’t have, had I not asked him to. Was any of this cathartic? No, neither for me nor any of the family. Emotional sediment, once disturbed, shifts and gradually resettles, but never as it was. If one thing really symbolises the process, it is the barely legible letter left by a great-grandmother. Unread for 65 years, it revealed her final days before deportation to Auschwitz, along with many other family members. Having been forced from her home, separated from family, some of whom had been arrested, and then raided and robbed repeatedly by police and paramilitary gendarmes, she still clung to a few, thin hopes: “We’ll cook together if there is anything to cook,” she wrote. “Maybe fate will allow us to be together again.” Paper has a memory. In disturbing the past, a family’s present is altered for ever. I feel all the closer to my relatives for having shared our story. It brought me closer to my mother. She was the main carer during my father’s illness, and my brother and I became hers. Of course, a family history creaks under the weight of the unwritten stories, the things left unsaid. The absences are the greater part. Perhaps, one day, the next generations will appreciate a decision made in an urgent moment on a bench in a hospital garden. • Scattered Ghosts by Nick Barlay is published by IB Tauris, £15.90 |