In the Darkroom (35 page)

My father returned to her rummage in the box. After a while, she extracted a thin file folder. It was titled, in my father's hand, “Letters from the Past.” There were only two inside, the first a couple of paragraphs long, the other five dense pages of single-spaced Hungarian. She handed me the longer document. “This might be of interest to you.” The paper clip holding the pages together had rusted to the disintegrating onion skin. The dateline read, “Copenhagen 1946, Christmas Eve.”

My father translated the first paragraph:

“I wrote this with Tibor,” my father said. It was their first letter home, a narrative of their exodus across post-Nazi Europe, a chronicle of escape.

I could see the scene before me more lucidly than if I were studying a photograph. My father had conjured this picture on her daughter's occupational tool of choice, the “typing machine.” A machine that as a young man he had evidently found essential enough to his aspirations to haul across three countries. At my urging, the translation continued:

At “half past eight,” a gleaming apple-green sedan “curved into the drive.” A Danish Red Cross nurse, “Froken” (Miss) Lund, who “looked like an English lady,” squeezed into the front seat, next to the chauffeur and the wealthy exporter (a “smoking capitalist”), and my father and Tibor climbed in back, clutching two briefcases “containing Danish dictionaries and language books, a map, twenty packs of American cigarettes, a bottle of real Bolognese liqueur, a package of Czech saccharine, two pairs of shoes, half a kilogram butter, two horse riding sticks, Danish salami, cheese, and a toothbrush in a case.”

Riding sticks? I asked.

“Sure,” my father said. “And jodhpurs. We were gentlemen of the nobility.” Pretending to be, anyway. The driver, whom my father and Tibor dubbed “Mr. Na-Na,” for his crankiness, instantly got lost, and it was nearly dusk by the time they passed through Hitler's hometown of Linz and, soon thereafter, arrived at the checkpoint between the Russian and American zones. Several hours and many wrong turns later, they passed into Germany.

They had entered the medieval city center, where, in one hour on January 2, 1945, bombing missions by the British Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Forces had obliterated 90 percent of the buildings and killed eighteen hundred civilians. After additional attacks a month later, more than six thousand residents would be dead. “We let Mr. Na-Na wander around the dead city. After which we took out our map and led ourselves out from the vale of tears.”

By nightfall they were in what remained of Hamburg, where, over a few months beginning in late July 1943, Allied bombings code-named Operation Gomorrah unleashed a firestorm that flattened the city (including the blocks of buildings whose sale had yielded the Friedmans such wealth) and killed more than thirty thousand civilians.

By three a.m., they had passed through “the land-of-no-one” and arrived at the Danish border:

The driver dropped my father and Tibor Jablonszky at the western port town of Esbjerg and the two young men boarded a train, heading east, then, at Nyborg, a “supermodern” ferry to Copenhagen.

My father returned the “letter from the past” to its folder.

“This is so well written!” I exclaimed.

“Waaall, we wrote it in the style of P. Howard,” my father said. P. Howard, aka Jenő Rejtő, was a Hungarian pulp-fiction writer whose detective-fiction parodies peopled with tricksters were wildly popular in my father's youth. My father remained a fan. She had a large selection of P. Howard novels on her bookshelf. “He wrote so it would sound like he was a British writer who'd been translated into Hungarian,” my father explained. A British
Christian
writer, that is. Rejtő had to hide his religion after the wartime laws banned publication of Jewish authors. In the late fall of 1942, an Arrow Cross–affiliated newspaper revealed the true identity of “P. Howard.” Rejtő was sent to a forced labor camp in the Ukraine. Within weeks, he was dead.

My father's own tricksterism would lead to a happier outcome. In the weeks after his arrival in Denmark, István and Tibor traveled from Copenhagen to Stockholm and on to London. They hit a dozen film distribution companies and brokered deals for fifteen movies “with nothing bad about Russians.” The haul included
Caesar and Cleopatra
,
Odd Man Out
, and, my father's favorite,
Ditte, Child of Man
, a Danish melodrama about a girl abandoned by her depraved mother. Then, having enlisted a Copenhagen film lab to make reproductions, my father and Tibor flew home—temporarily, they hoped—to collect their commission from Mafirt. At the Budapest airport, they were stopped by customs officers, who confiscated their passports. “They told us, ‘You are of military age. You have to go into the army.' ”

My father thought otherwise. He had no intention of serving in a military that, less than two years ago, had enslaved his “race” in forced labor and sent them unarmed to their deaths. The next day, the door of the Mafirt office flew open and in stormed a very indignant young man. “I told them, ‘Oh, this is a vaaary big problem! The people at the film lab in Copenhagen will only turn over the copies to
us
! The situation is hopeless unless we go back.' ” He delivered the same message at the Communist Party headquarters, along with a promise to set up a new Communist Hungarian consulate in Copenhagen—he would be “chairman” and Tibor “cultural attaché.” “I knew what they wanted to hear.” Evidently so, because a few days later the two young men had their passports back and were on a plane to Denmark.

They found a room in a widow's home in Copenhagen. “It was in the back and had a view of a garden,” my father recalled. “We each had our own bed. Aaand our own duvet.” Untold luxury for two war-deprived Hungarians. And soon, they had two local teenage girls in their beds, a few hours after meeting them on a street corner. “The Danes are very relaxed,” my father recalled appreciatively.

My father sought help to extend their stay, appealing to former Ráday 9 tenant Ferenc Nagy, the Smallholders Party leader who had flirted with Rozi and who had become prime minister in 1946. Nagy pulled some strings to make it happen. Some months later, my father again turned to Nagy—this time to assist his young friend from Ráday 9, fellow film-club member Tamás Somló, in procuring a passport to come to Denmark. Again, Nagy came through. I was beginning to understand why a half century later my father would turn to the rightist Smallholders Party for help reclaiming the family property.

By 1948, the three young men were getting threatening letters for overstaying their visas. The Communist Party had forced Nagy out of office a half year earlier, and he'd fled to the United States. The ex–Smallholders leader wrote one more letter, from Virginia, at István's request. My father kept a copy of the certified Danish translation of Nagy's missive in her lockbox, preserved in a ziplock bag:

By then, Tamás Somló had moved on to Stockholm with a Swedish girlfriend. The Hungarian Communist government no longer wanted Western films. The boys' days in Denmark were numbered.

One evening in Copenhagen, Tibor and my father attended a lecture sponsored by a Brazilian tourist agency. “They showed this little filmstrip, with these beautiful shots of Copacabana Beach.” The very next day my father stopped in at the Brazilian consulate and asked how he could visit the country. The man behind the counter inspected his passport and told him it wasn't valid for South America. “And so I said to myself, Okay, I'll make it so it will be valid.” He drew what seemed like an official-looking insignia and submitted it to a printer. “I said, ‘We have this little company and we need this for our office stamp. And we need it tomorrow morning.' ” The printer wanted to know what the words said in the drawing. “I told him, ‘Oh, it's just Hungarian.' Then he wasn't too interested.” What it said was, “This visa is valid for North and South America.”

My father flipped through the passport until she got to the page with the stamp. “You see here, where I scribbled some French on it?” she said. “And I crossed out North America—to make it look more legitimate. Waaall, by then I had a lot of practice.”

“Practice?”

“Faking things.”

A few weeks later, my father and Tibor took the train to the west coast of Sweden and, after a customs official studied their passports and found them “legitimate,” boarded the
Carina.
They were on their way to the white beaches of Copacabana. The ocean crossing took two and a half weeks.

“I remember when I first saw Rio,” my father said. Her eyes had a dreamy cast. “It was late afternoon. It was like the mountains and the sky touched. And then the ship radio started blaring ads.” She rattled off a Portuguese jingle.

“What's that?”

“ ‘Jump out of bed with the will to live, because your stomach is cleared!' ”

“You still remember it.”

“Back then there weren't so many commercials.”

The two young men spent their first days wandering the beach and investigating a favela. “Not only that, we took a camera,” my father recalled. “People said to us, ‘Oh, you'll be in
danger
!' But we didn't care.” For the survivors of a world war, danger was a relative concept.

Whatever the virtues of Brazilian race-blindness, my father and Tibor needed a job—and they would turn to Hungarian expatriates to find one. “We went to see this guy named Glausius, who was
vaaary
Hungarian,” my father said, “and not Jewish.” Glausius introduced them to two brothers, “who were hairdressers for ladies in Copacabana.” They were, likewise,
very
Hungarian. “The older brother, he ate bacon in the Hungarian style—bread, bacon, paprika, and onion in one hand, and a knife in the other, and he'd cut a big slab and eat it off the knife. A real Magyar peasant!”