Scattered Ghosts

www.nickbarlay.com.

‘Between fact and fiction, archival research and genealogy, Nick Barlay re-enacts the torments of Hungarian Jewish history from the Holocaust to 1956 and to exile in London, where he was born to refugee parents. He takes us to the margins and the cracks, the streets, the houses and the cellars. His tale is an astonishing tour de force, it is a memorial to the unsung heroes through the prism of his family: compelling and informative, deeply moving and scrupulously understated.’

Irène Heidelberger-Leonard, author of The Philosopher of Auschwitz ‘… an intriguing and moving narrative… his account of the fortunes of his large family – embedded in the fortunes of Hungarian Jewry in the most disastrous period of its history – comes across powerfully and convincingly.’

Ladislaus Löb, Emeritus Professor of German, University of Sussex and author of Dealing with Satan: Rezs Kasztner’s Daring Rescue Mission

‘Is it family history? It is. Is it poetry? It is that, too – charming poetry. But clouds soon darken the scene. There’s the smell of blood and the tumult of Arrow Cross pogroms. What binds these family fates together is fine writing – and Hungarian cherry strudel.’

Peter Fraenkel

Praise for Nick Barlay

‘brilliantly literary’ Guardian ‘insanely inventive’ The Sunday Times ‘superbly bitter-sweet’ Telegraph

Cover image: A view of Jewish children walking through the streets of their ghetto (photo by William Vandivert//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images).

Cover design: www.ashapearsedesign.com

Irène Heidelberger-Leonard, author of The Philosopher of Auschwitz

S

cattered Ghosts

One family’s survival through war, holocaust and revolution

NICK BARLAY

‘brutal poetry’ Time Out

‘An Astonishxing tour de force.’

Scattered Ghosts

Nick Barlay is the author of four acclaimed novels and was named as one of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists in 2003, until it was discovered he was too old to be young.

Born in London to Hungarian Jewish refugee parents, he has also written award-winning radio plays, short stories and wide-ranging journalism.

www.ibtauris.com

NICK BARLAY

When two Hungarian Jewish refugees landed by accident in Britain in the winter of 1956, they had little idea what the future would hold. But they carried with them the traces of their turbulent past, just enough to provide the clues to their past. Scattered Ghosts combines memoir, investigation and travel to resurrect 200 years of wars and revolutions, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire via two totalitarianisms to contemporary Britain. It is the story of an all but disappeared world told through the eyes of a single family ruptured by great forces, and occasionally brought together by cherry strudel.

Through haphazard and fragmented possessions – a blunt-pencilled letter; a final photograph; a hastily typed certificate; a protecting document; a farewell postcard from a distant place; a recipe – Nick Barlay retraces the footsteps of the vanished. There is the death march of a grandfather, the military manoeuvres of a great uncle, the final weeks and moments of a great grandmother deported to Auschwitz, two boys’ survival of an untold massacre, and codenamed spies operating in Cold War Britain. The ordinary mysteries and emotional legacies still resonate today in the parallel lives of far-flung family members.

Diaspora, division and cultural identity form the backdrop to the story of ancestors who walked barefoot from Eastern Europe to experience Communism and Nazism, and to outlive them both.

Scattered Ghosts is a family history that explores the events, great and small, on which a family’s existence hinges. How did one person survive and another die? How did a Soviet tank shell cause a revolution between sisters? How did two refugees escape an invading army? Where did successive generations end up? And, ultimately, where did the recipe for cherry strudel come from?

Nick Barlay is the author of four acclaimed novels and was named as one of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists in 2003, until it was discovered he was too old to be young. Born in London to Hungarian Jewish refugee parents, he has also written award-winning radio plays, short stories and wide-ranging journalism. www.nickbarlay.com.

Praise for Nick Barlay’s Fiction ‘Nick Barlay is a fine chronicler of London’s grittier sub-cultures.’

Time Out

‘Rarely does one read writing so inventive, yet so tensed against habituation… brilliantly literary.’

Alex Clark, The Guardian ‘Funny and melancholy… ultimately thought-provoking… This writer has thought about the country we live in and how it got to be the way it is.’

Hilary Mantel ‘Barlay’s controlled and energetic demotic fixes you to the page… superbly bittersweet… a fine literary novel.’

Daily Telegraph

Praise for Scattered Ghosts ‘Between fact and fiction, archival research and genealogy, Nick Barlay re-enacts the torments of Hungarian Jewish history from the Holocaust to 1956 and to exile in London, where he was born to refugee parents. He takes us to the margins and the cracks, the streets, the houses and the cellars. His tale is an astonishing tour de force, it is a memorial to the unsung heroes through the prism of his family: compelling and informative, deeply moving and scrupulously understated.’

Irène Heidelberger-Leonard, author of The Philosopher of Auschwitz ‘An intriguing and moving narrative. Barlay writes calmly, but with feeling. The fortunes of a Jewish family during the Holocaust and the Communist rule in Hungary come across powerfully and ultimately with a dash of optimism.’

Ladislaus Löb, Emeritus Professor of German, University of Sussex, and author of Dealing with Satan: Rezső Kasztner’s Daring Rescue Mission ‘Is it family history? It is. Is it poetry? It is that, too – charming poetry. But clouds soon darken the scene. There’s the smell of blood and the tumult of Arrow Cross pogroms.

What binds these family fates together is fine writing – and Hungarian cherry strudel.’

Peter Fraenkel, translator, broadcaster and author of No Fixed Abode: A Jewish Odyssey to Africa

Scattered Ghosts

One Family’s Survival through War, Holocaus t and Revolution

Nick Barlay

Published in 2013 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively

by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright Š 2013 Nick Barlay The right of Nick Barlay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78076 662 1 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London Printed and bound in Sweden by ScandBook AB

To my father, Stephen Barlay 1930–2010 and to my family, past and present

Contents

Ghosts The Knock The Night The Road Men The Disappearance of a Father The Coming of Uncle J贸zsi The Anatomy of a Massacre Women The Memory of Paper The Slipping of a Wig Barefoot from the Wilderness 1956 A Revolution in a Family An Accidental Country A Change of Identities

1 3 7 11 17 19 35 52 81 83 103 117 137 139 154 163

Parallel Lives A Tale of Two Doors A Knock from History A Postcard from a Fascist A Disappearing World

179 181 203 213 218

Acknowledgements

223

Glossary

227

Illustrations

231

Select Bibliography

233

Index

237

A Revolution in a Family

D

ramatis personae: Is tván, father Ági, mother Lili, my father’s mother Bözsi, my mother’s mother Ernő, my mother’s father Zsuzsi, my mother’s sister Tomi, Zsuzsi’s husband Panci, Tomi’s mother and Lili’s best friend Bandi, my mother’s cousin Jancsi, family friend *

‘What’s all that noise?’ Bandi asked.

‘Shooting,’ my father replied.

‘Why is there shooting?’ Bandi asked.

‘There’s a revolution,’ my father replied. *

139

scattered ghosts It was the evening of Tuesday 23 October, the evening the shooting started. My father, who had been freelancing for Hungarian Radio since 1948, was trapped like the rest of the journalists in the Radio building. Since the communist takeover, the Radio had been an organ of the state run by Stalinist executives. Outside there were protestors demanding that their grievances be broadcast. Guarding the building were agents of the hated AVH, the Hungarian secret service. Nobody knows who exactly fired the first shot. With the political and social situation changing hourly, the phones at the Radio had been ringing all day. My father just happened to answer a call. The caller just happened to be Endre Gömöri, a friend, senior colleague and his wife’s cousin.

As a child, Bandi, the diminutive of Endre, had been the one who had sneakily rewrapped the silver-papered chocolates belonging to his grandfather, Bernát, having eaten the contents. During the war, he’d survived on his wits, often with a false name and false papers, and once or twice disguised in an Arrow Cross uniform. In October 1956, Bandi, some eight years older than my father, was an established foreign political correspondent. He was calling from Poland, where he’d been sent to cover the rebellion that had begun in the summer and which had ended with a new government, rather than being crushed by the Soviet military.

As they spoke, neither knew that one would end up staying in Hungary, and one would escape.

The question of who started the shooting at the Radio building on Bródy Sándor Street is disputed to this day. What is beyond dispute is that, as a result of the next few days and weeks, there were those who stayed, and there were those who went. Half a century on there is still a pair of verbs that defines the nation: menni, ‘to go’, versus maradni, ‘to stay’. The verbs define the nation, and its families, including mine.

Since I can remember, the other side of the family was always the one that chose the other verb.

In Hungary, in the autumn of 1956, everyone was given the same choice. The revolution, in that sense, was egalitarian. Each choice was accompanied by a story, and stories of the revolution were sprayed like bullet holes across the country. There were a lot of bullet holes. Some, 140

a revolution in a family especially in the capital, are still there. You can see them on random buildings, around window frames, above doors, on fifth-floor balconies, at street level, at head level, from any angle, as if the whole city were pockmarked or porous, as if the whole city were a giant sponge.

Sure, Budapest, where my family was, looks better than it did.

Redevelopment, renovation and renewal made a difference, especially after the new millennium. It made a cosmetic difference to some of the buildings, but not to the people who lived in them. The revolution gave everyone a choice and it forced everyone to choose. This means that there was a revolution in everyone, ten million of them.

Some people, caught up in grand events, cannot help claiming, especially after it’s all over, that they were somewhere special or that they did something special. They talk themselves or write themselves into history. One of my distant relatives, Ádám Bíró, writer, editor, collector and teller of jokes, whiskery and twinkling, whom I met once in his poetically weedy and broken-down holiday home in the village of Leányfalu on the Danube, and who escaped from Hungary as a boy in 1956, told me that many of the people he knows of that generation claim to have been somewhere special at a special moment: ‘They all say they were there. It seems everyone was a revolutionary and that the whole of Budapest was right there in the square when Stalin’s statue was torn down. And you took photographs? I ask them. “Of course,” they reply. And you still have them? I ask. “Now? Oh, no. It was so long ago,” they reply. “They’re gone… Lost…”’

The revolution in my family, and therefore in so many others, involved more words than bullets. Between them they did not throw a petrol bomb or shoot a Soviet soldier. None has ever claimed to have been in the square when Stalin’s statue was torn down. There are no ‘lost’ photographs from the events of October and November because none were taken.

But it just so happens that there is a bullet hole in a ‘lost’ painting.

And that there was a tank shell on a ‘lost’ date. And that my father was in one of the most famous locations of the revolution on its opening day.

And then there are the words. These words, the words that were exchanged between family members, the final words, and the final final words that led to irreversible decisions, are just as important and 141

scattered ghosts difficult to pin down as anything else. Everyone had a revolution. It’s just that not everyone had the same revolution.

According to the ‘souvenir’ version, the T-shirt version, the version packaged for Western tourists, the revolution was a freedom fight against tyranny, a spontaneous people’s struggle for liberation fought against a superpower. There are two famous images of the struggle. One is Time magazine’s January 1957 cover. It’s a romanticized drawing, not a photograph, of a shock-haired freedom fighter with a bandaged hand clutching a weapon. Time’s ‘Man of the Year 1956’ stares bravely at you, eyes challenging you. The other image is that of the Pesti Srác, ‘the boy from Pest’. His statue stands outside the Corvin Cinema, which saw some of the most intense street fighting.

The boy is improbably young and carries a rifle. He symbolizes the innocence that fought against overwhelming odds, and died. There is truth in both images. Estimates vary but around 2,500 people were killed and up to 20,000 wounded by an army that brought tanks onto civilian streets and shot civilians at point-blank range. Who could call this anything other than an outrage?

But this is a family story, and the revolution in a family is not necessarily about grand statements, nor about multi-point declarations made by students, nor about which communist leader announced what and when, nor about how workers’ councils were formed, nor about a prime minister declaring withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, nor about whether there should or should not have been outside intervention by the Americans or the British, nor about the essential character of the revolution. The Russians of course claimed it was a fascist counter-­revolution, but, as one old Hungarian, leaning out of his Budapest window, put it to me: ‘How can the people have carried out a counter-revolution against themselves?’ To unravel that logic would be to solve all manner of puzzle. It’s easier to say that it’s true, a people can’t. But perhaps a family can. It’s not that families wanted to. They were forced to.

This is one of the enduring differences between the sisters. One went; one stayed. Neither knew until the last minute what each would do. One of them, post-1956, never had to look out of her window at the exact places where things had happened, where things had been done, at places cast in remembered pain. The other has always lived in these places. It’s what happens when a family revolts against itself, 142

a revolution in a family when it counters its natural instinct to stay together. The outcome in my family, as in so many others, is that it split.

How did this split happen? How was one verb chosen over the other? Who was standing where? And when? And who said what to whom in this family revolution?

After the war, given all that had happened at the address, Lili had been desperate to leave Népszínház Street. People didn’t buy or sell flats. Rather, they put an advertisement in a newspaper and exchanged them. Lili had managed to exchange hers for one on Baross Street, somewhere she had aspired to live for a long time. A second-floor flat with a street view in the huge, green–grey, four-storey, turn-of-thecentury corner block that is number 109 became home to my mother and father after they got married, and of course Lili.

Bözsi and Ernő had moved a few hundred feet from 77 Baross Street to nearby Mária Terézia Square, but Zsuzsi and Tomi lived further up the street at number 81. Their flat was divided into two, with Tomi’s mother Panci and her parents Aladár and Berta living next door. This was the way people lived, with mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, with the family the war had left, and with the ever-present possibility of dramatic entrances and exits on a claustrophobic family stage.

The first family move was an exit, actually a belated holiday. Zsuzsi had been almost too ill to attend her sister’s wedding back in September.

Because of an operation, she and Tomi had delayed a short trip to Prague. My father, with an ear closer to the ground, warned them that something might be about to happen. The events in Poland since June, the student activism in various Hungarian towns, the literary Petőfi Circle’s criticisms of the Communist Party, all pointed to greater expectations and an increasing national temperature. On 18 October Zsuzsi and Tomi went anyway.

Within days, a mass demonstration was being organized by students in combination with writers’ groups. The Petőfi Circle meetings had ‘built up without government reaction’, according to Jancsi, a friend of the Semlers’ and colleague of my father’s whose life was to become inextricably bound to the family. ‘Initially, there were only a few people at the meetings, and everyone waited for speech-makers to 143