And I was there at the Russian breakthrough at Uriv, says someone in the corner in a dispassionate tone of voice. I got a shrapnel wound in my leg.
From the Russians?
Listen, the dispassionate tone continues, I fought up to the Don Bend, and I saw the shtetls being burned down, how every crappy little shack was looted, and that was sweet FA compared with what we’re getting now.
Stop stirring it, will you? Just be thankful the residents put up with you lot, someone shouts.
I find it impossible to tell which voice is which.
I was with a Jewish labour-service brigade. Are you a Jew? A sergeant, I was, deputy commander of a squadron. Have you any idea of the order I had to issue? No leave for anyone in the crew while a single Jew lives. The Jews did mine clearance. At least that was one useful thing they could do.
The man with his head wrapped in a rag who has been walking beside me is boring his way through the crowd, trying to get near me. You keep your trap shut it and push your way in, I hear from one of the earlier voices. Why the shush now? Got some secret to hide? And who are you anyway?
Pocket torches are switched on. A hand grabs the rag from off his head. I suppose he is around Father’s age, but he is already grey-haired. He has prominent features. Why shouldn’t I keep quiet? His voice is firm. That’s it, says the man next to him. He’s keeping very quiet, trying hard not to say anything. Who are you? What do you do for a living? I’m a physicist. What sort of physicist? A professor of physics at the university, sir, if it’s all the same to you. That’s no reason not to speak up. There isn’t anything I have to say, sir. You and your kind talk as if this was all one country; you talk as if the country had been destroyed by others, the bridges, the city; you don’t even notice that this has not been one country for ages. What, then? There you are, sir. That is why I keep quiet, or shut it, as you so quaintly term it, because I have no wish to say certain things out loud.
By now Gizi is standing next to me and tells me it is time to move on.
Again there are lots of people around us, all carrying something. One elderly woman is clasping a dachshund.
The physics professor is again pressing his way forward among us in the snow.
There is a long line standing in front of a bakery. We have no bread, so it would be a good idea to join the queue, but we have to keep going or we shall lose sight of Gizi. A woman rushes out of a house, her face bleeding. Someone shouts, and Gizi stops. Her expression is as it was when I entered her room at the Red Cross home on Mihály Munkácsy Street. She was looking similarly confused then. Father steps over to her and wants to take cover, takes the Red Cross armband off her then walks on without her. You’ve got to go, son, says the physicist.
The carcass of a horse amid the ruins, one side stripped down to the bones. A man in an army jacket, hat on head, is carrying a watering can in one hand and an axe in the other.
On the 1943 map much of the area on the Pest side of Margit Island, down as far as Ipoly Street, is not built up, with the Transport Museum on the other corner. Possibly the house where we went into the cellar may today be situated a block further north, on Gogol Street. To the best of Mother’s knowledge Gogol Street in those days was called Garam Street. She says it was in the cellar of number 38 that we took shelter. How does she remember that? Well, a classmate of hers lived at number 36; she had paid visits there. That’s what I said to Gizi when the siren went off, that we should go to the house in which Tessa lived, but number 36 had been bombed out, and everyone was running to the house next door.
Number 38 Gogol Street is a newly repainted old building. The acid-green paint is awful. Beside it is a shop selling gold and silver jewellery and next to it a sign for a ‘Wine-Beer-Restaurant’. On the 1943 map the nearby plots of undeveloped land are designated by pale-yellow areas.
The word in the column is that the weaving mills should be avoided. Artillery emplacements have been set up near by, and these are targets for the bombers; the carpet bombing is down to them. And also because of the Western Railway Terminus and Rákosrendező Railway Station just to the north, says another man.
When the encirclement of Budapest was complete Hitler ordered the IVth SS Panzerkorps and the 96th and 711th Infantry Divisions, a total of two hundred tanks and sixty thousand men, to redeploy to Hungary. SS Gruppenführer Herbert Otto Gille was appointed commander. Himmler telegraphed Gille as follows:
The Führer has appointed you, along with your corps to lead the relief forces for Budapest since you have experience of being encircled on several occasions and thus bear the greatest sympathy for the fate of the besieged formations, and your corps was the quickest to prove itself on the Eastern Front.
The daily bread ration for Budapest’s inhabitants was 15 decagrams, and for Christmas 1944 12 decagrams of meat was allowed. The water supply was at best fitful and in many places had ceased altogether. The command of the Hungarian 1st Army ordered that a special defensive campaign badge be made for those taking part in the fighting. From Sopron, on the western border of Hungary, Ferenc Szálasi rejected the assistance offered to Budapesters by the International Committee of the Red Cross because one condition was that food would have to be delivered to the ghetto.
Gizi pulls on the ICRC armband again, puts an arm round Father’s waist and supports him; she must have said something, because Father then starts to limp.
There are five in the Arrow Cross group. They jostle a few men to a house wall and carry out an identification check on them. One of them cannot be much older than me; from the middle of the road he lets off two short bursts into the air from a submachine gun. Mother takes cover in a gateway and calls out to us. There is a store next to the entrance. The physicist is waiting on the lowest step. The Arrow Crosser who just fired two bursts at the sky hoicks him on to the pavement and levels his gun at him. I cannot hear what he says. The physicist bursts out laughing and looks at the boy in disgust. He unbuttons his winter coat. A gob of saliva appears on his lower lip; he does not spit but laughs and undoes his trouser fly. He glances at me. It is as if he were trying to warn me. That may be why he is still laughing. He reaches into the fly to show the submachine gunner what he is curious to see.
The Arrow Crossers select three men and direct them off towards Pozsonyi Road on the southern edge of the XIIIth District.
All five of us proceed side by side. Gizi does not go ahead; I do not drop back. We have been joined by the physicist.
Gizi later related, Mother says, that she had been given three addresses, but the protected houses were so crowded that she did not know which of them would accept us.
Avoid factories, a man shouts, that’s where they’re dropping the bombs. Even the Riegler boys do not head in that direction.
Gizi turns into Ipoly Street. We’re going towards the factories, she says. Even the patrols give that part a miss. You heard it yourselves.
By now the physicist is in conversation with Father. Two anti-aircraft batteries in Gyapjúmosó Yard. The big market hall has been destroyed by bombs; the iron railings are now leaning out on to the pave ment. The man in command is a German sergeant, but I can see Hungarian artillerymen in the gun crew, two of them carrying crates of ammunition, the rest scanning the skies. Gizi says that she and Mother will flank Father and the physicist, while we should walk on in such a way that the soldiers can only see women and us, the children, Vera asks her how far we still have to go. Not much further, says Gizi. When we get to the guns Father begins limping again.