Stilts
A short story about my father’s childhood friend
Quick backstory to the short story:
About thirty years ago I was living in my home town of Chicago, having been estranged from my father Laszlo since my mother’s suicide several years before. On a whim, my childhood friend Cathy reintroduced me to her father, George, who was my father’s childhood friend from Budapest since before WWII, which they barely survived.
Getting to know George must have triggered a compensatory inclination to hang out with him a couple times a month. Without thinking much about the obvious, I was swapping one bad dad for another, the two linked through Cathy, and a half century of friendship between interwoven families, two emigrations, and the Holocaust.
George was a successful CPA and real estate guy who lived in a swank condo downtown, and I was a struggling artist who lived uptown with a dancer named Lynette. George was like an anti-Laszlo — the two were complementary, diametric opposites in body and personality type, ability and demeanor, and nearly every way imaginable.
What they shared in common was severe childhood trauma, and PTSD that manifested into an eccentric, distinctly Eastern European Jewish style of morose, self-destructive narcissism. In essence, they were assholes and terrible fathers, learning nothing from fascism ravaging all of Europe and the world, both then ravaging their own families.
Despite all that, George could be entertaining company, a born extravert and seasoned bullshit artist who told amazing stories. Since everything was always all about George, my visits consisted of him talking about himself, which thanks to his gift of gab rarely bored me. When in the mood, he even talked about the war, which my father never did.
An obsessive writer, “Stilts” was my literary interpretation of a particularly interesting chapter of George’s survival tale. I listened closely to him tell it, went home and wrote it down from memory, then worked it into the short story posted here. The effort seems like an attempt at the time to learn more about my own father, get closer to him again.
This biographical tale of woe and mischief has come to life as I forage through an archive of my old writing. I recently posted an earlier and different kind of short story pulled from the vault, one rough around the edges, and requiring some editorial massaging to make palatable. Aside from a few typos, “Stilts” is posted here verbatim.
In retrospect this story has withstood the test of time, and my own learning curve as a writer. I worked hard to ensure the prose was clear but descriptive, emotional yet nonsentimental. Success was proven by George saying nothing after I gave it to him. When finally pressed to respond, he said: “Why would anyone want to read this shit?”
Crushed, even my girlfriend Lynette was shocked. I tucked the story away in a three-ring binder, and forgot about it for three decades. Rereading it, I’m glad I didn’t burn it. George shat all over it, the same way he shat all over everything and everyone threatening his frail ego. The quality of the work was directly proportional to the zeal of his wrath.
My rendering of his own story had moved him. One could argue that his implicit vindictiveness and lack of apprecation had more to do with vulnerability than jealousy. If nothing else, his criticism and rejection of my creativity reminded me of Cathy’s many complaints, and then made me think of my father and his legacy of abuse.
Bingo! George’s asshole reaction to my art was what made me closer to my own asshole father. Laszlo was tall, George was short; Laszlo was a master craftsman, George couldn’t screw in a light bulb; Laszlo was taciturn, George couldn’t shut the fuck up — but both tried to destroy those whom they loved, because deep down they hated themselves.
I’ve seen similar patterns in Holocaust-surviving families, victims victimizing their spouses, the sons and daughters of the vanquished. I’ve wondered if survivors like George and Laszlo would have become terrible people had they not endured childhoods horrors. Who knows? Rather than judge them, I prefer to write about them.
Here goes…
STILTS
Based on the life of my father’s childhood friend
Her legs are long and lovely, a carriage of loveliness and life, flowing by me like the lines of the Danube river below. I watch her serve the other tables at this outdoor terrace cafe in Budapest, as efficient as she is beautiful, and am reminded of Sartre’s observation that a waiter embodies the essence of himself entirely through the tasks he performs, a waiter nothing more, and nothing less, than the action of taking orders and serving hosts.
She dips, she sways, she serves the drinks and removes the empties. But to me she is far more than her visible role as waitress, transcending even the stunning view of the graceful bridges that span the river, the gently rising hills of Buda, the Royal Palace of ostentatious gilt and filigree, and the Fisherman’s Bastion with its Neo-Romanesque parapets studded with slim, round turrets: She is love, she is life, she is the regeneration of my spirit, a fluid landmark able to heal the wounds of neglect and disrepair, denial and forgetfulness that blemish the rest of the war-torn buildings not found in the Baedekers.
Yes, I am a tourist, a visiting foreigner in my own land. From the moment I opened the French doors of my stopover suite at the Bristol Hotel in Vienna and stepped out onto the balcony, I realized that I gazed down upon a different Europe from the world of turmoil I had left almost nineteen years to the day.
A teenager then, having been beaten bloody by Russian soldiers and stripped of everything but the clothes I wore for illegally crossing the border from communist Hungary into Austria, I had walked over forty kilometers to the Rothschild Hospital. Debilitated, hungry, the city I found was hardly in better shape: the Second World War had ended, but its survivors lived in its haunting shadow, a civilization and its people brought to the very edge of extinction.
But nearly two decades later, this bustling pedestrian mall of Kaertner Strasse below my balcony told a different story, as workmen, perched high on scaffolds affixed to the ginger-bread facade of the Vienna Opera House, shared my view of the magnificent Sacher Hotel and the luxurious frivolity of Vienna in the fifties. Shiny new cars glided by in endless streams of traffic, as elegant locals, alongside jeans and sports-shirt clad tourists sipped at cappuccinos, lazily turned the pages of their newspapers, or punctuated animated conversations with forceful hand gestures as they cast appraising glances at the motley scene of passerby.
In many ways, I stood there hardly distinguishable from most moderately successful American tourists of the day. I, an advanced degree professional, with a wife and two children, living in an upper-class south suburb of Chicago in my custom built home, resplendent with its obligatory dog and mortgage, having realized what in Europe they still call “The American Dream,” had come to Europe like so many others to gape at history and indulge in the pleasures of leisure and travel.
But as the stubborn layer of soot and grime on the Opera House represented a lingering cultural melancholy, so did my own soul reminisce about my dark days as survivor and refugee. And as I stood there above the throngs, the past apparently forgotten or meaningless to the comfortable faces of those lost to themselves and distraction, I could not bring into harmonious coexistence my own inner and outer worlds. For I felt neither here nor there, more like a being from another world, another era, the elevation and disconnection making me feel more like a visiting ghost than a redeeming angel.
After a few such restless days in Vienna, I settled my bill with the concierge, got into my rented Mercedes convertible, and set out for my home city of Budapest.
Crossing the still heavily armed border into Hungary, past the barbed razor wires, mine fields and watchtowers, driving by the grimacing, machine-gun toting border guards, I tried to shake off the feeling of traveling back in time. I reached into my jacket, and sought reassurance by touching, again and again, my American passport, as if my identity, suddenly sorely in question, could be found amid the multicolored stamps and pale blue paper.
As the populous, prosperous Austrian countryside of neat, red-roofed brick homes and open vistas instantly transformed into gray, unpaved, dirty Hungarian villages and their poverty-stricken inhabitants, my feeling of dread and unease increased. I reached into my jacket yet again, but the blue booklet could no longer help me. I was on my own, a being with either too much history or not enough, a citizen of the world who found lasting comfort in none of its countries. And of all the places I could have visited, I was entering a threatening, dark and humorless environment, a world I knew all-too well, a world I once considered my home.
Arriving in Budapest, I checked into the new Duna Intercontinental Hotel, built by an Austrian and American consortium to western standards of comfort and service. The Hotel was an import, like myself, and the relative luxury and separation were soothing.
The road journey and even my several days in Vienna had been tiring, and I looked forward to rest and the start of a new day. Traveling across oceans, continents, and countries is tiring enough, let alone traveling across the boundaries of time, back to re-experience firsthand one’s own past. The somber and sometimes austere buildings, the people and their interlaced cultures, all held a sense of fascination and dread, foreboding and expectation. I stood by the hotel room’s window, this time gazing down upon the city of my birth: I felt disoriented, and in that disorientation, began to question my reason for returning.
What could be found here? What value in returning to a land that held so much contradiction, so many painful memories? Vacations are meant to relax the working man, I thought, settle the nerves. Instead, I paced, had difficulty collecting and focusing my thoughts. I no longer reached for my passport; the photograph of the middle-aged American businessman I found there began to alarm me. I had become someone else, and that someone else had even less to do with this forgotten city of the dead.
To calm myself, I stowed the luggage, sat down with a newspaper, and concluded that tomorrow would be a new day, would provide that chance to start afresh. Sleep was welcome and much needed, a chance to dream, dream the dreams of a nineteen year sleep. But I could not remember them as I awoke the following morning.
“What can I serve you, Sir?”
She jars me from my reverie, and offers an ambiguous smile to start, catching me doubly off guard. Tall, serving tray in hand, she towers above me, a gentle giant who awaits my order. Stunned by her youth, her pale delicate beauty, as stunning when standing beside my table as only moments ago while shifting gracefully across the cafe, I hesitate, not having yet considered the options on the menu. I look to the other tables for direction, a shift of attention, but the early morning crowd is lost to the papers, the view, the fresh summer breeze.
“What have you got?” is all I can get out as I turn to her, my eyes fascinated, my heart warming. I feel like a shy, girl-scared teenager.
“Most anything you may wish,” she says, her ambiguous smile strangely inviting with its eerie, enticing sense of recognition and invitation.
“I will have one of your wonderful chestnut pastries and a Drambouie, please,” I say, trying to contain myself, unable to stop staring at her, the attraction subliminal in a way that I do not understand.
She walks away, carried off by those long legs, and I appraise and appreciate her beauty as I would a cubist Picasso: the totality of her natural charm, the sight of her long flowing brown hair, her oval face, her fair skin and enormous Sophia Lauren eyes, her sculpted body and those timeless legs from afar, from near, and now far again, all juxtaposed in my mind and my heart. These images combine, recombine, cancel and enhance each other, all to create a montage of mood, memory, and feeling.
Love is basically a simple emotion, immediate, compelled to flourish among the complexities of life and its great distances and many separations, Some have said that these trials and obstacles even heighten the emotion, that romance and erotica are driven by what you can’t see, what you can’t have, the many spaces between the lines. My first love, when I was fifteen, crossed these boundaries with an intensity and strangeness characteristic of those times of war and dissemination: she, along with her parents, actually moved into my family’s apartment. What we lost in formality, we perhaps made up in convenience, youthful naivete, and the urgency of circumstance.
For years we had “heard” about the War, the sweeping military conquests of Germany; we had heard “rumors” about the vast suffering, the various atrocities perpetrated against civilian populations of the conquered countries.
In Hungary, technically allied with the Axis, pragmatically enjoying a peaceful neutrality, we simply read the newspapers and went on with our lives. For nearly four years the world was indeed at war, but when the fighting and suffering continued in distant lands, we could feign a benign, albeit slightly concerned, indifference. Like all those who luckily manage to escape the horrors of a war that surrounds them but somehow spares them, we considered the whole mess someone else’s problem, their problem, so long as the troops weren’t marching in formation down our own streets.
A balmy, peaceful spring day in March of 1944 brought with the cool western breeze swastika emblazoned, silver formations of bombers, swarms of Messerschmidt fighter planes in escort ripping across clear, crystalline blue skies. On the ground, tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbled across the cobblestone streets of Budapest, deploying thousands of Wermacht soldiers and their entourage.
Our luck, along with our lives, instantly changed, as our indifference turned suddenly to an active, fretful concern. Our greatest fear was realized: the shadowy paranoia materialized into actuality, the fighter planes indeed screamed outside our own windows, the march of jackboots clack-clack-clacked on our own narrow streets, as armed German sentries stood in shocking detail outside our doors. As their silver breast plates reflected the bright sun, the shining, stylized double lightning bolt on the collars of the S.S. uniforms sent an ominous message of the times to come.
The tigers were released in a new part of the jungle, and they quickly sharpened their claws: in swift succession came edicts, ideology transformed into legislation that directly reordered our lives.
To more effectively hunt their prey, the prey had to be clearly identified — Jews were commanded to wear yellow six-pointed stars clearly visible at all times, failure to do so resulting in immediate deportation to a concentration camp.
To make the hunt more efficient, the prey had to be weakened — the Jews were prohibited to practice any of the professions, own businesses, attend schools, use public transportation, or be in the streets but for two designated hours a day.
And to finalize the hunt, the prey had to be isolated — Jews were commanded to relocate into specified areas and buildings of the city. Entire square blocks of residents were forced to move within twenty-four hours, and were only allowed to take with them what they could carry. German officers, S.S. men, imported bureaucrats and advisers expropriated the homes and possessions of these once proud citizens of Budapest. Within the allocated Jewish sections of the city, several families were compelled to occupy single apartments, often a dozen people to a room.
For me, a brash, smart-assed fifteen-year-old, all was not too bad. My first love, living with her family in a forbidden area of the city, was conveniently enough forced to move directly into our apartment. Having her constantly near me, without any of the unnecessary and distracting interruptions such as work and school, was all very much to my liking. And since I had always been somewhat of a rebellious, reckless daredevil, the class clown who distinguished himself more for his outlandish risk taking than foolish buffoonery, I succeeded in distinguishing myself further by refusing to wear the mandatory yellow star, roaming the streets during any hour that suited me, running errands for family and friends, and even going to the movies well past the evening’s curfew.
I was too short for my age, and that always bothered me. It bothered me most because it seemed to bother others. The subject of ridicule, I always acted in such a way as to win over those who shunned or insulted me over my height. And if the Napoleon Complex is characterized by overcompensation, then let it be said that at certain times in life, overcompensation can come in handy.
In retrospect, many of my antics were indeed life-threatening and often unnecessarily foolhardy, but the innocence and naivete of youth can, in a time of crisis, be quite an asset. To my true love, the carelessness and merrymaking in the face of such danger were unparalleled acts of bravery, heroism, and manhood, and her enthusiasm for me and my boldness brought me rewards well-beyond black-market chocolate and late evenings at the Bijou with Humphrey Bogart.
Needless to say, our pleasures were wonderfully enhanced by the ever present danger and fear of discovery. Of course, my romantic and financial success enticed many of my closest pals from school to follow my lead: We fantasized ourselves renegades, American cowboys or their Indian savages, English detectives and the equally brilliant criminals they would pursue; we were international spies, merciless hooded assassins, brave lambs and weak predators, and most of all, coolheaded, hot-blooded adolescent romantics. We loved life because the chance of it being taken away was so great: we cherished everything we could get our grubby little hand on, because we could get our hands on so little.
Of course, the frivolity and enthusiasm of youth tells one story, the raw statistics of war and genocide tell another — of the thirty-six boys in our class, eleven would be able to tell tall tales of the good old days. For even during those harrowing opening days of the German presence, the time when fifteen-year-olds were forced to enter their forties, we had yet to realize even remotely what was to be in store for us.
Meanwhile, life went on, for it could not do otherwise. We figured that if smarts couldn’t save you, then perhaps luck would; if luck failed you, then one could always pray; and if God forgot about you, well, perhaps by that time the war would be over or the Messiah would come, a revelation that, to us, amounted to essentially the same thing. For the time being, we were alive, we had our fun. Surrounded by enemies, we learned how to particularly value our friends.
Being out of school in those days of the German occupation, however, had one drawback: I could no longer impress my good friend Karl. Very tall and slight of build, Karl’s straw colored hair fell straight over watery blue eyes, set in an oval, colorless face. He walked as if he feared that with each step he was going to crush something fragile and delicate underfoot. His demeanor was a brew of timidity and apology, his speech stuttered, his locomotion awkward, such that his long, lanky shadow seemed of more substance than himself.
Karl was the janitor’s son in the building where my parents rented our third floor apartment. Karl lived in a dingy, one room and kitchen basement apartment with his parents, his younger sister Lily, and his Uncle Fred. The children slept on a grungy mattress shoved into the corner of the kitchen. His father, strangely enough, slept by himself on the ragged living room sofa, an oddity eventually explained by the then rather amusing discovery that Uncle Fred was no uncle, but shared Karl’s mother’s bed at the other corner of the room.
Looking at Karl’s father, one could instantly and effortlessly understand his tolerance of such a situation: I can remember him sitting at a makeshift, stained wooden table in the kitchen, greasy suspenders holding his unbuttoned trousers over his rotund belly, his curled pipe permanently stuck in his mouth, as he stared forever silently into empty space through an impenetrable alcoholic haze. Karl’s mother was a diminutive, quiet, and always melancholic woman with lush black hair worn in a long, single braid, while her lover Fred was an enormous, strong-willed man, red in the face and short in his temper. Uncle Fred ruled his ersatz family with an iron hand, slow of praise but swift with his fists, a man of violent, uncontrolled temper who beat all offenders of his rules including Karl’s helpless, silent father.
Karl and I grew up together in that apartment building, our age and proximity sustaining the friendship that we carried with us into our teens. Karl was quiet, extremely reserved, and always treated me with the deference due to my exalted social standing as a tenant’s son. I was rather loud, brash, and highly energetic, so our complementary personalities also reinforced our bond.
We attended the same school until we were ten, when I went to a college prep school, and Karl became apprenticed to a carpenter. Uncle Fred soon made him quit his apprenticeship to remain home and assist with the janitorial chores, but our friendship continued unaffected. In fact, our suddenly increased cultural distance ironically brought us even closer together. Every day when I came home from school, Karl would wait for me at the building’s entrance, eager to hear of the exotic, new and wonderful things I was learning. As I spoke to him of the Ottoman conquest of Hungary, of the writings of Plato and Aristotle, the poetry of Villon and the ethics of Lin Yu Tang, I made sure to throw in lots of Latin and other foreign phrases, most of which I did not understand myself. His eyes wide with wonder, his body rigid with concentration, he listened with tremendous awe and enthusiasm to everything I had to say. These forays into pseudo-intellectualism with the janitor’s son felt good. Small of stature as I was, I felt myself a giant in the eyes of this tall, thin Hungarian lad.
But one aspect of our relationship caused me great alarm: Karl was a superb athlete. He could run, he could catch, he could out-pace and out-distance all the neighborhood’s children. Unfortunately for the equilibrium of a relationship based on inequality, I was, and remain to this day, woefully uncoordinated. The laughing stock on the playing field, I spent more time with the girls on the sidelines than proving my non-existent prowess between the white lines. Only Karl, my devoted, highly adroit friend, could, using his athletic clout by threatening to resign from the team, get me into a soccer game. But these were acts of a loyalty I considered my due: after all, I was the truly aggressive one, I was the one who convinced him that I read Schopenhauer, knew Euclid’s axioms, could recite by heart Hungarian translations of Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Byron.
And so, our status quo, however fragile before the merciless judgment of soccer ball and tennis racket, remained in a delicate balance — if not for the stilts.
“Your Drambouie, Sir.”
Much like most of the women I find particularly desirable, she blends into Woman, a universal pool of fascination, triggering feelings so intense and all-consuming that she seems oddly familiar to me, a Lady in every lady, every woman back to Eve. In this case, perhaps only another lusty hallucination. But those eyes, that shape of her face, its pale skin, her shyness — I accept the drink, and offer a toast.
“To memories of Budapest,” I announce and raise my glass, perhaps a little too formally.
“To many more such memories,” she bows, her legs again taking her away, this time seemingly against her will.
I do not know how those stilts came into Karl’s possession, but from the moment I saw, to my infinite distress, the already tall lad elevated more than a meter higher than usual, I knew that all the badly recited Victorian poetry in the world could not save me. To make matters even worse, when on his stilts a strange, some would say magical transformation would take place: the shy, unsure, taciturn and subservient janitor’s son became a tower of strength, self-assurance, and decision. His bent posture straightened, his drooping chin suddenly held high, his whole demeanor became utterly transformed, as even the color of his eyes seemed to darken, turn from a watery blue to a crystalline opal glaze, his gaze fixed fantastically on the distant, otherwise invisible horizon.
Up there on his stilts Karl entered some fantastic and deeply personal realm, his mind transported beyond the stained brick walls, the silent flowing river, the careless suffering of this world. And when Karl fell into motion, I could do nothing but retreat before this monster, this wingless bird, this oddly majestic abomination, this matchless threat to my adolescent authority. Karl would sway expertly to the left, raise the jutting maple prosthetic limb, arch it forward and down, shift his weight onto the newly conquered territory, repeat the procedure to the right, propelling himself forward faster than I could run. He could walk around sewers and step onto sidewalks; he could stilt through his errands, walk up and down stairs. And with the lumbering determination of a tyrannosaurus, with the agility of a lanky monkey, this alcoholic janitor’s son utterly destroyed my congenitally low-altitude sovereignty.
“Go on, t-t-try them on,” Karl said one day, holding the blond coffin posts out for me. Having disembarked, his two feet once again squarely on the ground, Karl’s old and much welcomed self returned almost instantly after he removed those stilts. Our roles relearned, he thereby became sympathetic to my distress. He again paid attention to me.
“Go on, it’s fun — you can do it.”
My dread was complete. Fully aware of the attempt’s furious impossibility, my tattered pride compelled me to try them on anyway. Of course, I could not even stand in them, let alone walk. I would fall, and my anger would merely increase, pressing me to try yet again. I would fall again, my fury rising to a fever pitch, upsetting my concentration further, making it all the more impossible. Karl, super humanly patient, with the decency of his person, his social position, and his earthbound altitude, did not laugh.
Shockingly enough, he coaxed, encouraged, made suggestions, tried to make me feel better. Furious not only by my failure on the stilts but further by Karl’s kindness, I exploded: “This is nothing! You are nothing! I hate your damn gloating! I am better than you, simple as that, and you can’t change anything by walking around on these goddamned stilts!”
But Karl said nothing, standing there with his eyes lowered to the ground until I exhausted myself yelling. Then he looked slowly, apologetically into my eyes, and said, his stuttering at its worst: “You must n-n-n-not give up. Someday, the t-t-t-time will come when you must g-g-gget up on those stilts.”
“Dumb — dumb dumb dumb — ” I observed, “as dumb as you. What’s that supposed to mean? That means nothing.”
Karl, embarrassed, shuffled away, his stilts dragged dejectedly behind him. “I am sorry. We can try again s-s-ssome other t-time.”
The deportation of the Jews who lived outside of Budapest commenced early in the summer of 1944. Although eye-witness accounts of survivors and various “rumors” slowly circulating from town-to-town warned of the mass exterminations in Russia and Poland, Hungarian Jewry, up to the opening of their cattle cars in Auschwitz, lived in a steady and stubborn state of denial.
By the eleventh year of the Nazis rise to power, the killing machine had reached its highest pitch of efficiency, a level of organization and effectiveness for which the Germans were always so well regarded. By the hundreds of thousands, the Jews of the Hungarian countryside were disappearing, while much like the previous several years of war, the Budapesters were enjoying a relative state of solace. The edicts remained in place and were tenaciously enforced, but an illusion of safety and the hope of an early end to the war reinforced the feeling that we would get out of the nightmare relatively unscathed.
The rumors continued, the Nazi presence everywhere from the banks of the Danube to the outer provinces of Budapest were experienced daily, the drafting of males into Labor Services were a routine occurrence, but we were alive, my own group of friends and our immediate families were relatively unaffected, so our illusion of safety continued.
But history proved infinitely more restless and unpredictable than an unknown fifteen-year-old’s dreams and fears. Germany’s Russian campaign had encountered a bad winter and unexpectedly tenacious troops with sophisticated armor, and by the following winter of ’44, the German army was in high retreat well beyond the borders of the Soviet empire.
Weakened by a vigorous two front war, having already lost on the desert sands of Africa, the Wermacht swayed and relented at D-Day as the Allies successfully established bridgeheads on the northern beaches of France and were well on their way to the Rhine. With the Thousand Year Reich considered a rum bet even throughout the Axis Powers, allegiances were falling apart and regrouping, as Europe was already beginning to prepare itself for a post-War environment where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would figure somewhat more prominently than Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito.
For Hungary’s regent Admiral Miklos Horthy, the deal with the National Socialists was never quite to his liking. Historically, Hungary had always been the gateway to the Balkans, a strategic crossover point between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East for everyone from Attila to the Crusaders to the Turkish Muslims. Swept late into the Second World War, Horthy quickly found himself playing a delicate balancing act between appeasing the seemingly invincible Nazi military machine with its horde of Hungarian irredentist ultra-right radicals, and maintaining at least the semblance of Hungarian autonomy.
As that aura of Nazi invincibility began to crumble in the autumn of 1944, Horthy saw his chance to break with the Axis, declare Hungary’s withdrawal from the futile conflict, and perhaps expand his own sovereignty in the wake of the German retreat. Politically careless, tactically bumbling, and strategically inept, Horthy’s plan for a coupe on the morning of October 15 failed completely.
Considered Hungary’s darkest hour, not only did Horthy fail to establish his new pact with the Allies, but he was extradited to Germany, and his co-conspirators were assassinated. In less than twenty-four hours the Hungarian fascist party known as the Arrow-Cross swept into power, ensuring not only Hungary’s continued participation in the war, but a most untimely fate for the hitherto unscathed Jews of Budapest.
Fostered by a culture accustomed to persecution and fear, we accepted our situation as merely another chapter in the long and arduous fight of our race. To that point, we had been passed over. But as the fears of German occupation materialized into physical reality, so, too, did our fears of systematic extermination.
On the day following the thwarted coupe, all Jewish males between the ages of sixteen and sixty, and all women from eighteen to fifty-five were ordered to gather in the courtyards of their buildings to be marched off to labor camps. Forcibly separated from my love earlier that morning for what would be the very last time, I stood with my father out in the bitterly cold winter morning, waiting to be led away from our homes and into the throws of the final phases of what became known as the Final Solution.
I desperately looked for Karl. Perhaps he could help me, hide me. I found him, for I could not miss him, but he did not meet my searching eyes. He stood motionless, on his stilts, high above the crowd.
We labeled our problem “antisemitism,” much as those in power labeled it “Jew” — but when ideology and politics were reduced to their bare realization, the result translated to little more than neighbor hating neighbor, one conspiring to remove another if only to vent a capacity for hate and perhaps benefit financially. Our own neighbors were taking our homes and our belongings away, for we were already dead. Karl, consumed in his world beyond the horizon, seemed behind a veil more impenetrable than even the hatred or indifference of his kind. He was more removed than the Jews being taken away. He could do nothing for me then.
I took one final look back, back into the world of the living, as the Jackal headed god in the guise of an Aryan face and S.S. uniform ushered me and everything I knew into the depths of the underworld.
The march to our destination, an abandoned coal storage yard, took two full days. The weather, as if the otherwise silent God himself mocked us, turned even more bitter, a cold rain washing over us and causing steam to rise from our tattered clothing, ablaze with the hot perspiration of our exhaustion. As we marched further into the countryside, a thin layer of ice began to form on our exposed skin, a layer hardly thick enough to shield us from the fear, shock, and utter strain of our physical and emotional torture. The old and infirm who could not keep the pace were summarily taken to the side of the road and shot, their bodies littering the roadside like milestones between the concentric circles of Hell. Our escorts, S.S. men accompanied by black uniformed Arrow-Cross men and boys no older than myself, beat the laggards and generally relished our mistreatment, as if, waiting months for the dam to break, they could now finally vent the full force of their sadism, justified by a culture of hate deeply ingrained within the lifeblood of a nation forever uncomfortable with itself.
Arriving at the storage yard, we provided slave labor for the forces resisting the Russian advance. Fed a dark brew in the morning, a chunk of stale bread for lunch, a watery soup in the evening, we slept on the ground, exposed to the elements. We dug anti-tank traps, lines of trenches, gun emplacements amid the constant threat of beating, torture, execution. When not forced to bury the dead, the graves were dug by the condemned themselves; swept along by the rush of madness and fear, I can remember burying comrades alive, their bodies twitching as the black earth covered them a shovel full at a time, their few possessions scattered at our feet, later stolen by the guards and gendarmes.
We learned how to dig, and while we dug, we learned how to anesthetize all feeling. For when everything is stripped away, when one’s dignity becomes as meaningless and futile as one’s hope and enthusiasm for living, the raw instinct for survival takes its place, a mechanism that suspends every aspect of oneself that could be considered human, supplanting them instead with an animalistic drive to simply stay alive.
After some weeks, we were told to gather our few remaining belongings, and prepare ourselves for relocation to another camp. Sensing my imminent demise, I escaped. No heroics, no methodical calculation, no conspiracy: I turned left when the column turned right, and made my way to a suburb where my gentile uncle lived with his Jewish wife and their daughter. He hid his wife and child in a hole in the ground underneath their bed. No room for me in such a comfortable crypt, I spent three days wedged in a small alcove between the roof and the attic floor, compelled to lie absolutely still, urinate on my fingers to keep them from being frostbitten. Unable to continue such an existence, I decided to risk it, and set out in search of my family.
Wandering the streets in the rags that were once my clothes, I was quickly picked up by a roving Arrow-Cross patrol and turned over to the S.S. Those who could work were put to work: In their barracks I cleaned toilets, shined boots, and served as a moving target for their sharp-shooting practice by popping in and out between the trees. After all, a war was going on, and the S.S. had to stay sharp.
One night I was detailed to load freight cars with crates containing all manner of goods the Germans were shipping back to the Fatherland. A crate filled with uniforms burst open, I found one that fit me, and with a quick change and an exemplary “Heil Hitler!” walked away with impunity back into the streets of Budapest.
For several days, I wandered about in my German uniform, making official haste in the presence of Germans and their sympathizers, sleeping in doorways and movie houses, scrounging for food wherever it could be found. One late night, near my former home, the street was suddenly blocked on all sides by military police searching among their own ranks for deserters. Terrified of detection, my charade suddenly ineffective, I approached my former apartment building. The building was eerily silent, mysterious, as if a hundred years had elapsed since I had last set eyes on it. The gates were locked after ten in the evening, and anyone who wished to gain admittance was forced to ring the janitor’s bell. The janitor would then come to the front and open the gate for a salutary nickel or two. I prayed for Karl to be on duty that fateful night.
My luck held, he was as surprised as I.
“W-w-w-what are you doing h-here?” he stuttered. “What are you d-d-d-doing in that uniform?”
“Let me in, Karl,” was all that I had time to say as I squeezed past him into the courtyard. “Please, Karl. They are asking everyone for their papers out there, and if they catch me, I am dead. Please, you must hide me. I won’t be around here for long, I promise you.”
He looked at me silently for a few seconds, and them motioned for me to follow him. He stealthily led me through the courtyard, into the building, and into the building’s enclosed elevator. Without a word he reached up, opened the overhead hatch, and pointed. Rather familiar by now with the logistics of such a situation, I instantly complied, and with Karl’s assistance, was hoisted through the hatch and out onto the roof of the elevator.
“You must be v-very quiet,” Karl said, peering up at me in the darkness. For the first time in our relationship, my vantage point was physically above his, but I could hardly relish the wonderment of my superior elevation.
“Uncle Fred is in big with the Arrow-Cross now, and if he finds you he will shoot you instantly.” As he was about to close the hatch, he thought for a moment, reached up and held my hand tightly. “I will b-b-b-bbring you a blanket and some warm food when I can. But in the meantime, remember — please, please b-be very quiet.”
All night long I rode that elevator up and down the five stories of that building. First I sat closer to the corner, away from the greasy mechanism and thick screeching wire, then tried to lie down, only to be jarred by the sound of muffled voices, the grinding of gears, the incessant fear of discovery. I waited for Karl, but Karl did not come.
Woken again by the morning’s traffic, sleep was impossible as throughout the day Hungarian soldiers, Arrow-Cross, and a miscellaneous civilian entourage of those who had taken away our apartments rode that elevator with me, up and down, down and up, an ironic ritual for a teenager so obsessed with his vertical position in life.
Late that evening, I heard the hatch being opened, and with great relief then heard the whispering voice of Karl.
“Here is some hot soup,” he said. “You must leave very soon, as my uncle is already s-suspicious. Do you hear me? You don’t have much t-t-t-time.”
The evening followed much as the last, as did the following day. Around the same time late that night, I again heard the sounds of the hatch, huddled tightly in a corner, and was again given life. But as I gazed down to accept his welcome offering, I noticed that his usually pale face was red and swollen, his lip cracked and bloody. He had a black eye.
“Karl, what happened to you?”
“I got into a fight with some N-n-nazi punks,” was his terse answer. “But you have to go right now, do you understand? You must leave immediately!”
“Is it Fred?” I demanded to know.
Amazingly enough, Karl grew irritated with my question, and spoke with a tone and a degree of self-assertion I had never heard. “Don’t ask any questions! You must leave. Just go. N-n-now!”
“Karl, my friend, listen to me: the streets, I don’t know if they are safe, Karl, please, check them, I don’t know if — ”
“Safe or not you must leave. I can’t be responsible anymore for what happens to you. I can’t risk you being here any longer. Go. Go now, or I will p-p-pull you down and carry you out of here!”
As I climbed down into the elevator, I felt the familiar rage and frustration of again having to look up into Karl’s face. This time, I did not bother.
“Of course you can’t be responsible for me, because I was the one always responsible for you: and do you know why? Because you were nothing then, as you are nothing now. You can put your stilts on with your Arrow-Cross friends, you Nazi bastard. I don’t need you, I can take care of myself.”
“Good bye,” Karl whispered, as I walked out by the front gate without another word.
As I scampered away, the anger quickly subsided, and was replaced by nothing, the void of no-feeling offered by the camps, the dead, the savagery that had become such a part of daily existence. This instance was simply another in a string of shocks, as my tolerance had risen to the point of dead calm. Friendship, betrayal, trust, abandonment, these words no longer carried any meaning. The only two commodities were life and death, and when it came to decision, when it came to action, the choice most people made was for life, even if it entailed death for someone else. Karl obviously was no different.
“How is your pastry, Sir?”
I gaze down slowly at the delectable Hungarian specialty, look back at her, and shrug self-consciously. Not having noticed her place it on my table, I have not had a chance to try it.
“Just admiring its beauty.”
‘You have a peculiar taste if you consider chestnut pastries attractive,” she replied.
“I didn’t say attractive, I said beautiful: you, madam, are both beautiful and attractive.”
“Must be the food.”
The fine line between the living and dead was haphazardly and often randomly crossed during the War.
Those who survived could live to remember how they might have come to remain among the living, while the stigma of those chosen to persist is an uncomfortable, open-ended inner conflict, perhaps more difficult to reconcile than the very finality and silence of death. We ask ourselves, in one way or another, every single day: “How did I make it when so many perished?” And much like the mystery of death itself, such questions remain unanswerable, the associated guilt, longing, and forgetfulness merely a host of emotional defense mechanisms, a way we have of being able to address with the heart those problems the mind can never fully comprehend.
With the first few months of 1945 came the time that was, for many years, referred to as the Spring Of Freedom.
The January siege and subsequent liberation of Budapest by Russian troops, the ensuing raping, pillaging, and marauding by our liberators all finally behind us, the first tentative steps of building and rebuilding of life had begun.
With the scents of spring came a new vitality, a rebirthing and rejoicing by those who had escaped the maelstrom. Never before had I been able to recognize one of my fellow Jews while passing them on the street, but after the War a casual nod of the head, an imperceptible glance, or even a slight smile affirmed the common bond shared by a very few. We survived in spite of it all. We won and we lost. We were those chosen from amongst the Chosen. We were and we are, but we will never truly be again…
From the time I first received an allowance from my father, it had been my custom to buy some of the first violets of spring for my mother. Walking along the resuscitated boulevards, resplendent in my fresh, new clothes, my belly full, I stole glances at my reflection in the shop windows. I noted with considerable delight that not only had I indeed survived, but that I had grown a little. Not by much, but the change was there, was visible for the world to see. A cool, pleasant wind kicked up, a faint rustle of budding leaves on trees, the trilling sounds of birds greeting the arrival of the recurring spring, all fused into a musical ode to life and the living. I felt strong and quite grown up. And as is often the case with grown-ups, the flowers in my hand were no longer for my mother, but for my new Love.
Turning the corner into the street where she lived, I bumped into a diminutive woman. Startled by the inadvertent collision we stood silent for a while, staring at each other. Finally I managed to force some words through my choked up throat and trembling lips. “Hello, Mrs. Hagelman. How are you?”
“Thanks to the good Lord I am alright. So good to see you. To see that you have made it. Are your parents and your sister equally fortunate?” She did not look into my eyes. I had the feeling that she wanted to cut the conversation as short as manners would allow.
‘We are all OK.” I, too, wished to be on my way. I could not forget how Karl, once my friend but always her son, had thrown me out into the streets, how when the chips were down, Karl only cared about himself and his own safety. I found it hard to pretend that I cared anything at all about her and her family. “Where are you going?” I continued, changing the subject.
“To visit Karl’s grave.” She stared down at the ground. “Not really his grave — actually, more like the place where he died.” And with the nervous laugh of the distressed, “there was not enough left of him to bury.” She slowly looked at me, her once sad eyes now totally devoid of all expression. “But you, you are a handsome young man now. And that is all for the good. Come and see us sometime.”
For a fleeting moment, I wanted to offer her the violets. But something held me back. I did not want to be a hypocrite. After all, there may not be much justice left in the world, but the ball does bounce right every once in a while: Karl Hagelman was dead, and I was alive.
“I’ll come and visit! Say hello to everyone for me!” I blurted out as I got on my way. Of course, I had absolutely no intention of re-establishing any contact. The book was closed, the judgment decided. That the verdict was in my favor was quite to my liking: I would have been a fool to even for an instant think otherwise.
As I wait for her to return to my table with the bill, I practice various opening gambits, rejecting one after another as juvenile, unimaginative, lascivious or simply stupid. I am an older man, from a different world. But a vacation is a vacation, a chance to vacate one’s problems, the world left behind- vacate oneself. What could be wrong with having a drink, taking in a show? After all, this is my country, my home: What better way for my lingering unease and compulsive sentimentality to find a more enjoyable outlet?
And who better to share such loveliness with than the loveliness before my eyes?
She approaches, her legs carrying her like a flowing white swan over crystalline waters. She smiles her smile, and places the bill on my table.
“Thank you very much, Sir. And you have a good time in Budapest.”
“That would be guaranteed if I could have more of your wonderful smile,” I say, laying it on rather thickly. “Are you doing anything after work?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I have plans for tonight. I will be having dinner with you.”
Now my own smile is rather enigmatic, disconcertion taking command as I reel with disbelief from my sudden good luck. Perhaps returning to Budapest was a good idea after all.
She sits down next to me, and gently holds my hand.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?”
My confusion is now almost paralyzing. “I recognize beauty when I see it,” is my inane try at wit and sophistication, as I make a vain attempt at hiding my confusion.
And with a look that borders on humoring a not too bright child, she succeeds in surprising me yet again. “Our attraction is of a different nature, I would think. I am Lily, Karl’s sister.”
With these softly spoken words a delectable dream collapses, an unwanted, brooding memory taking its place. If I was mocked in this city then, I am hearing those echoes this morning. Of course, I had no choice but to accept our mutual invitation.
Later that evening, I sit next to her in the garden restaurant of the Citadel, the world famous bridges spanning the Danube, the Parliament building, and the promenade on the banks of the river all caressed by soft amber lights, my inner glow heightened by the soft touch of a delicate wine.
I keep wishing that she were not Karl’s sister. We struggle to get past the forced and unnatural conversation of two with common remembrances of a lost childhood who now sit face-to-face after an immense span of time, a spatial distention across an ocean both literal and figurative. I tell her about the days after the War, about my emigration and life in America, aware all the while that I might as well paint a picture of life on Mars for all the meaning I can convey. She, in turn, describes her life under communism, the hardships faced by Hungary and its people in the many turbulent years following the War. But we both know that we are delaying the inevitable moment when the real reason for sharing the evening can no longer be avoided.
After our empty espresso demitasses are cleared away and the gypsy musicians move on to another table, she turns and looks at me with an intense, pensive, sad look. “Do you ever think about Karl?”
“I try not to.”
“Why?” she prods.
“Because it doesn’t matter.”
“Did it matter, ever?”
“No, not really.” I wish to close the subject before we begin it. But her urgency demands a more polite close than silence. “What he did to me then, he did at a time and under circumstances when life did not have the same meaning as it does now. Particularly not someone else’s life. He looked out for himself as did most everyone.” My breath comes in short, uneven gasps, and I am surprised to feel her sadness diffuse into my own soul. “In a way, though, I owe him something. He, more than anyone else, taught me a valuable lesson: that when the going gets rough, you should count only on yourself. Life is too short to worry about the many options available to us — what we should and shouldn’t do — we all simply do, and hope for the best. Things are hard enough as they are.”
“You are so hardened,” she says, staring down at the table. “You lived, yet what have you learned from your experiences?”
“I am sorry, Lily,” I sputter. Perhaps returning to this torrid city was indeed a bad idea. Women are always harbingers of trouble for me. I should know better by now, but I never learn. “Whatever he was, he was your brother and he is dead. I apologize. I had no right to carry on like this. Could we, please, talk about something else? “
Visibly shaken, she fights to regain her composure.
She lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, her voice now calm, her expression benign. “Deep down inside, you are a nice man. I knew it then, I know it now. But you are, obviously, bitter and cynical. Hurt will do that to you. What I am going to tell you is not for Karl’s sake. My brother does not need defense nor forgiveness. But you, you need to hear what I must say.” She stares somberly into my eyes. “I owe it to Karl to say it and you owe it to yourself to hear it.”
The second night after Karl hid me in the elevator he was caught by Uncle Fred. Late that evening, Fred had woken up and noticed Karl had made warm soup, methodically spooning it into a pot. “What’s up, Jew Lover?” Fred growled at him. The epithet was attached several weeks before then when Karl tried to protect a sixty-year-old man from being beaten to death by Fred. The man had returned to his apartment to fetch some of his books, taken along with his home and other possessions.
“Nothing. Just hungry.”
Karl ate the soup in silence, only to make another pot hours later and carry it into the night. But the following evening, Fred caught him again, and instantly sensed what he was trying to do.
“You stinking Jew-loving bastard, I know you are up to something. Are you hiding one of your Jews?” With that he repeatedly and ruthlessly hit Karl in the face with his fists.
Karl said nothing. He just stood there, not even trying to escape the blows. His nose broken, his lips bleeding badly, his mother tried to shield him and was badly beaten in turn.
When the beating stopped Fred went to the closet and put on his black fascist uniform. “I am going to get my men. When I come back we are going to search this goddamn house from the cellar to the roof. Don’t worry, Jew-Lover, I will find the vermin you are hiding. And you see this gun? You can justify your hunger for late-night snacks by shooting the pig yourself.”
The call was no bluff: Uncle Fred went out into the streets for his men. Karl and I had little time left.
For what seems an eternity Lily and I sit silently, hurled back into another time, a history that has retold itself.
As the import of her words hit home, I feel that I have been retold, recast not with knowledge and memories, but with ignorance and forgetfulness. I tell her about my times after last seeing Karl, forced into revisiting the labor camp, fleeing from the Russians, the many months spent in Displaced Person camps set up by the Red Cross in Germany following the War, and my early years in the States. She listens attentively, but waits for something.
“How did Karl die?” I ask finally.
The Old Major sat on the damp cellar floor, leaned against the wall, and laid his rifle across his outstretched legs. He looked at the four boys left from the twelve with which he started his platoon. He wondered if any of them would make it much longer. The mortar attacks and house-to-house fighting was taking its toll. And hedged in by the Soviet forces, their backs to the river, the end could not be far.
The boys were young, not one of them over seventeen. He worried about their fate and grieved for the others who already met theirs. But mostly the Old Major worried about Karl. Not that Karl did not do as he was told, it was just that he seemed so different from the others. He was a loner. He did not join in the camaraderie of the conflict, did not share the nationalistic, antisemitic zeal of his compatriots. Come to think of it, the Old Major mused, he could not remember seeing Karl ever fire a shot. What good was a soldier who didn’t shoot? What good was a fight that could not be won?
The Old Major was growing weary, his experiences in the trenches of Belgium and France from the First World War were reminders not of tactics and persistence, but futility and loss. Still, they all had their mission, and deserters had less of a chance than the men on the front.
As the Old Major began to doze off, his thoughts drifted to his civilian life. He dreamed of the many horses he tended, the cozy corner of the stable he made his home. He could almost smell the comforting scent of hay, the aroma of the leather tacks, the familiar, comfortable smells of the farm, ever different with the changing seasons. Occasionally he regretted not having a wife, settling down with a family of his own. But then there were plenty of girls who were willing and ready for him, girls who, for a ride in one of the landlord’s fancy carriages and a bottle of wine, could satisfy him at least for that evening.
But he missed not having children the most. He absolutely adored children, their innocence, their sincere smiles and laughter. He never failed to carry some candy, some fruits or cookies to hand out to the children of the other farm workers. He could not spend enough time with the children, except for the master’s own young boy and girl. As he felt warm and invigorated with the other children, he felt humiliated and confused doffing his hat and bowing to the spoiled pair as they rode past him on their fancy rigged ponies, dressed in their brightly colored, ostentatious and indulgent riding clothes. With one of the house servants in attendance, the master’s little girl would point, the little boy would laugh, and the Old Major would return to stables and hay that suddenly smelled more of shit than summer. These two were different in dress, in speech and manner from all the other children around. They looked at him with scorn and ridicule when all the other children treated him with fatherly love and respect. He knew that this was so because they were Jews.
The Old Major didn’t know or care much about politics. He fought in the First World War out of love for his country, fueled by a fierce spirit of Nationalism his old age had not lessened. He was proud to be a Hungarian and a Catholic, and he knew that when he would again be called to serve, that he would do so out of personal devotion and a sense of loyalty to his homeland and its people. As the New Order settled over occupied Europe, an evening in a tavern became an experience of ideology and indoctrination.
One such evening, a fascist leader spoke of how the Jews sucked out the life-blood of the Hungarian people, how with chicanery and cunning the Jews sought to destroy all that was precious to a true Hungarian. These words did not really mean very much to him: the Old Major was indeed a true Hungarian, and he felt that no Jew could ever take that away from him. But when the Leader spoke of how the Jews looked down on all true Hungarians, how they ridiculed them and insulted them, how they considered themselves to be so high above them, he knew that this politician in black told the truth. And that truth was proved each time the little Jew brats rode by on the horses he tended with such care, never a word of thanks, any attention or token of their appreciation or acknowledgment. He would then almost cry sensing what would happen to his beloved country and to all that he loved if these Jews continued to flourish, if something wasn’t done to stop this snobbery, presumptuousness, racial poisoning.
A blast of icy wind shook him awake from his light slumber. He instinctively reached for his rifle, and pointed it at the small, backlit figure standing at the top of the stairs leading into the dark cellar.
The six- or seven-year-old boy was shaking from the cold. He pulled his thin frayed coat, emblazoned with a yellow felt Star of David, tighter around his chest. He hesitated a moment, frightened by the sight of soldiers, but lifted up his courage and spoke: “Excuse me, but have you sirs seen my Momma? We used to live here, you know. But now I am lost, and I cannot find her.” Getting no reply he started to cry softly. “Please, please, sirs, help me find my Momma.” The Old Major’s expression did not change. The bullet he fired into the boy’s chest was his only response.
Instantly collapsing from the impact, the boy tumbled violently down the cellar stairs. Blood oozing from his mouth, he stared with glassy eyes at the ceiling.
A couple of the young soldiers laughed, one remained silent, while Karl rolled up his overcoat, walked to the boy’s body, and placed the make-shift pillow under the boy’s head.
He kneeled down, gently touched the boy’s face, and with sudden determination, stood. To the wonderment of his platoon, Karl then picked up some discarded two-by-fours, a hammer and some bent nails, sat next to the boy and began to make stilts. His voice barely a whisper, he stopped his work for a moment and said to dead boy: “Just hang on little fellow. You see? I will find your Momma. I just have to make these stilts. When I stand on them, I can see very far and I have magic powers. Then, I will take you to your Momma.”
Karl finished the stilts, and the amazed platoon continued to watch him, following him up the steps and out of the cellar. Karl placed the ersatz stilts into the snow, and expertly stood up on them. At the sound of the whistling of the incoming mortars, the rest of the platoon suddenly scattered and dove for cover. Karl, on his stilts, was already transported to his magical world. Whether he ever heard or even sensed the mortar that blew him apart we will never know.
The first rays of the dawn cast yellow-orange beams over the hills of Buda by the time I say good-bye to Lily. The Citadel restaurant long abandoned, the Danube stirring majestically, calmly below, her story has wound like the silent river through the night, the waters and the light ushering in another summer day in Budapest.
She stands, and a touch of our hands conveys a sense of thankfulness and eternal farewell. Although I have been to Hungary many times since then, I have never looked her up.
I am growing old now, and remain a tourist, a fancier of the intimate coffeehouses and fine wines along the Danube.
People say you get shorter in old age, but I have yet to try on those stilts. Perhaps some day, I will feel that I no longer need them.
Postscript
I shared this Medium post with Cathy, George’s daughter, and her reactions were interesting and also worth sharing here, I think.
She had bittersweet feelings learning more about what happened to her father during the war. On the plus side, she was moved by these arduous, often near-death experiences. “In some ways these details make me feel a bit more caring for him,” she said, “maybe even forgive him a little, but not much.” On the negative side, these unknown revelations reminded her how telling them would have required him to actually speak to her while she grew up, which was sadly “not something he felt compelled to do…”
My choice of using the first person also threw her off. Not only did the narrator’s voice not sound like her father, but the disconnect between the person telling the story and the story about whom it was told made her question the accuracy of the events and people described. Specifically, Cathy asked if the concurrent narrative of meeting Karl’s sister was true, or if born of literary license.
I responded, first expressing the hope that I didn’t offend her in any way by sharing the story, especially since I did so through the lens of an introduction that wasn’t exactly flattering to either of our fathers. I was quickly relieved that she had no problem with bringing this story back to light, and making it public in the manner I chose. Cathy also didn’t mind my references to her in the set up, which now makes me comfortable sharing her overall reactions here.
Getting any possible upset or misunderstanding out the way, I appreciated her feedback that the narrator didn’t sound at all like her father, and her observation that reading a biography as if it were an autobiography was odd and sometimes confusing. I explained my reasons for telling the tale of her father in the first person included trying to heighten its emotional intensity, and tell the story in what I thought at the time would be the most compelling and “literary” way possible. She interpreted the story as being about her father; I created her father as an archetype, and tried to universalize his travails as expressions of the broader Human Condition.
I also undertood how such an apparent disconnect between her father as third party source material and me in the guise of a first person narrator would make Cathy question the truth of the story itself, and then conveyed my own recollection that every biographical detail shared throughout the tale was told to me in person by George. I couldn’t vouch for their objective truth, of course, I was never there, he was his own sole unsubstantiated witness. But far as I recalled, the story in its entirety, along with the parts about Karl’s sister, were all exactly as I heard them, in factual essence if not in style.
That all said, her thoughtful feedback today got me thinking again about her father’s feedback, thirty years ago. As the introduction mentions, I interpreted George ignoring ever having received the tale, and then when pressed telling me it sucked, as another expression of his narcissistic and abusive behavior. As Cathy said to me: “My father had to be superior in all things. He likely didn’t like that you did it, and he didn’t, simple as that.”
I never thought the way the story was written might have alienated or offended him, and Cathy’s point about the delta between her father’s voice and that of the narrator brought this possibility to light. Did George feel I had stolen his agonizing youth, only to repackage it as a vanity writing project? Did he feel that he was reading someone else’s interpretation of his own life, the characters and events on point, but the experiences described — however accurate — disingenous and self-serving? Was he dismissive and contemptuous not because the good writing made him jelly and gave him another opportunity to shut down someone who threatened him, but because I had offended and taken advantage of him?
George long gone, I’ll never know for sure. But that uncertainty belies any lingering doubt I have that either him or my father would have been “better people” had they not endured the horrors of the Holocaust. Some people learn from history, their own and the world’s, and strive to do whatever it takes not to repeat it. Others double-down, instead making others suffer because they have suffered. seeking solace in knowing that they weren’t the only ones who had to go through hell. Cather thinks similarly: “Other people went through terrible things, and they weren’t assholes. Despite all that, my father still chose to be one, so that’s on him.”
That Cathy’s father and my own chose to be assholes is simply how the dice rolled. Children can’t select their parents, nor can parents select their children. All any one of us can do is live the best life we can, live the life we love. For me, reminiscing and writing brings joy. The wonderful irony is that the harsher the memories, the better the writing.
Thanks for your friendship and feedback, Cathy — and thanks for your many stories, George. You’re next, Laszlo — I have many more where these came from…
Mookie