The First American

Shot down over Budapest and tortured by the Gestapo

Sitting in the Dark

Like most survivors of extreme trauma, my father Laszlo never talked about what he had endured during and after WWII. Such avoidance is understandable — why bring back pain so mercifully repressed with the help of time, distractions, and forgetfulness? Why relive reminders of suffering and death, when the guilt of survival is already too much to bear?

Laszlo never spoke much, anyway, facilitating his evasion while exacerbating my curiosity. Weekday nights he’d come home from work at 5pm, demanding dinner on the table. We ate with my mother in awkward silence, or cowering from his wrath. From there he sat in his big chair in front of the TV, reading the paper until 10pm. Off to bed, rinse and repeat.

One random night the power went out, no television and no light to read his newspaper. As we lit candles and sat in the flickering shadows, I asked him again about the war. The few times I tried were failures, Laszlo wondering why I would care, why would anyone care, since he and his family suffered to the indifference of their neighbors, and the world.

He made a good point, but that night I gave it another whirl, and — surprise surprise — he started to speak slowly in his native Hungarian, buried words arduously clawing to the surface. He had a deep, Bela Lugosi voice, and I felt as though The Grinch Who Stole Christmas were narrating The Bombing of Budapest. We journeyed to Hungary in 1944, only thirty years before…

That summer an average of ten thousand people were murdered per day in the camps. Meanwhile, sixteen-year-old Laszlo lived large at a refurbished Jewish Community Center taken over by the Gestapo and SD. He was part of the expendable local help that had been rounded up by the Germans soon after the Tiger tanks clanked through the cobbled Budapest streets.

Jewish talent was recruited by the Germans across various trades: tailors, seamstresses, carpenters, electricians. Laszlo was chosen by his high school principal as designated draftsman, price paid for being the most talented in shop class. The Nazis gave him his own secretary and office — he decorated it with mounted animal heads ripped from a taxidermist’s shop.

Laszlo was a tall, dashing, Errol Flynn-looking kid with a deeply cynical sense of humor, and the Übermensch thought he was cool. Laszlo thought the tall, dashing, blond-haired blue-eyed Aryans were cool, too, creating an odd Ashkenazi-Nazi dynamic. Entertaining them as class clown and mascot, they printed official documents making him an officer in the SD.

Laszlo felt invincible as most teens do, and had no idea what was soon in store, including a brush with Adolf Eichmann, being caught playing cards on the job, nearly beaten to death and thrown into solitary confinement, released with no shoes into the wintry Siege of Budapest, hidden in a neighbor’s cellar, and nearly deported to Siberia by the Russians.

A some point between sharing air with Eichmann and being tortured, Laszlo sat in his office one summer evening, drawing Wehrmacht uniform insignia and various armaments. The air raid siren went off, staffers panicked. Above them the B-24 Liberators from the Fifteenth Expeditionary Air Force were in formation, attacking the city.

The heavy aircraft dropped mines into the Danube River, and bombs onto Hungarian factories, refineries, and oil tanks. They also released leaflets throughout Budapest that boldly threatened the enemy with retribution for deporting thousands of Jews to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. The world was watching, they said — too bad the Allies didn’t actually try to stop it.

Seeing the Light

“We must go downstairs to the shelter!” the secretary shrieked, rushing into his office. Weighing whether to follow her and use the fog of war to try and get some nookie, or see what was going on, he opted for the latter. “A direct hit kills us all, anyway,” he said. “So I’m going up to the roof. Want to join me?” Despite his resemblance to Errol Flynn, she fled into the bunker.

He went up, not down, made himself comfortable on the rooftop, and watched the show. Search lights darted across the sky, as anti-aircraft flak burst around the illuminated bomber formations and escorting fighter squadrons. Laszlo watched streams of incendiaries pour out of the big planes, saw the distant explosions as factories and depots erupted.

An unlucky Liberator took a direct hit, left wing breaking off as the bomber dipped and plummeted. Spiraling downward, several parachutes became visible, bobbing dreamily as they floated serenely over the roiling city. Laszlo wondered what being an allied serviceman flying in those planes and now shot down must be like, descending into a strange city at war.

As a kid, Laszlo loved watching American movies, and like most Europeans romanticized the States based on Hollywood films. His emulation of Errol Flynn was no accident, the actor smoothly embodying the epitome of a swashbuckling lady’s man. Laszlo loved him in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Bored in class, he dreamt of some day becoming a Yankee Doodle.

As a teen, Laszlo watched the real life show of swiveling beams reflect off the flak bursts and vapor trails, as the surviving heavy bombers released their loads and flew back to safety, the anti-aircraft fire dying down and search lights thinning. Still alive, he trundled back downstairs and returned to his office. “You are crazy!” his secretary said, duly impressed.

Everything went back to “normal” until about an hour later, when Laszlo heard commotion and loud, guttural German voices outside his office. He went to his door, opened it, and saw his Nazi buddies standing nearby chatting, pointing, and calling out. One of the parachuting bombardiers had been caught, and was now put on display for his merciless captors.

Three decades later in flickering candle light, Laszlo shared his wonder at making direct eye contact with his first American: A young man only a few years older, red haired and freckled, wearing a US airman’s uniform and boots. Beaten, his face was covered in gashes and welts — too weak to walk, he was dragged down the hallway, his crimson blood trailing behind.

Laszlo knew nothing about the Geneva Conventions, and neither did the Gestapo, who tortured Laszlo’s First American to death a few doors down the hall. As I watched my father speak, I imagined young Laszlo at his desk beneath the mounted animal heads, trying to concentrate as the young US flyer cried out. American dream turned to nightmare, an ominous sign?

Only a few months earlier, Laszlo was hanging out with his friends, complaining about his parents, ignoring his younger brother, trying to get laid, and wondering about his future when the most brutal war in human history literally came knocking at his door. Of the hundred or so students in his high school class, only sixteen survived. He was one of them.

The price usually paid for survival is guilt: “Why was I spared, and not the others?” Another cost is the jealousy, defeatism, and victimization that guilt-ridden survivors hurl at their own families. A few decades after that fateful evening, Laszlo stared into the face of another American — his first and only son. I likely filled him with equal curiosity, wonder, and terror.