Unravelled (2 page)

Although the laws came fast and furiously in 1944, many had been in effect since I was a very small girl. My father was lucky enough to have been among the six percent of Jews allowed to keep his job at the university, due to familial connections I have never quite been able to understand. Many Jewish physicians had been dismissed from their jobs without warning or simply had their licenses revoked, but my father was lucky enough to keep his job. And while anti-Semitism was certainly not unheard of in Hungary before 1944, my parents did a wonderful job of shielding us children from such hardships, which mainly included a strong leftist and accepting social circle.

First, we were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on the chest of our clothes. Having just turned eight, we were subject to the new law. Our Mama and nanny spent two sleepless nights before it went into effect, sewing the "emblem of shame" onto each and every piece of our clothing, measuring it so it was just the right height and width.

Wearing the gold star didn't bother me so much at first. All of the children at school knew we were Jewish, but it had never separated us from our classmates in any way. In fact, we had once had our friends Zsolt and Eszter over to help us celebrate Hanukkah when they had asked us about how our winter traditions differed from theirs.

On the first day the decree went into effect, the Jews with their Yellow Stars emerged from their homes and slowly made their ways to the market or to work. Some people wore the star proudly, standing erect as they rummaged through the produce at the market or waiting for the trolley. Others looked ashamed, with their eyes downcast, their bodies hunched over in an effort to hide the emblem.

Hajna and I didn't mind, really. We walked to school, hand-in-hand (the way Mama had instructed us to walk, as if our joining hands would save us from any sort of impending danger), all but forgetting we had the stars on our chests as we went about the morning business of shedding our spring coats and putting our lunch pails away.

By the time we gathered in the school lunchroom to eat the cheese sandwiches our mother and nanny packed for us that morning, the stars had become a part of us as if they had merely been a design on our dresses that were there all along. 

"Ugh, Jews!" I heard an older boy exclaim loudly as Hajna, Zsolt, Eszter and I were in the middle of trying to solve a riddle our teacher had written on the board that morning. Our debate was so furious, with words flying through and over my head so quickly, that I almost thought I had imagined the sigh of disgust.

Before we could finish the thoughts percolating in our childish heads, a boy of about thirteen stood at the end of our table. His blue eyes were piercing, shining with a look I became well acquainted over the next few months, but one up to then I had never experienced. He ran his hands through his sandy blond hair before tugging at his raggedy suspenders. Although I never knew his name, just looking at him and his ratty clothes gave away the fact that he was one of the children from the poorer families in the area.

"Jews," he bellowed, pointing at my sister and me, with words so strong that if they had been the wind they would have knocked us over.

Hajna immediately straightened her back and tossed one of her chestnut braided pigtails over her shoulder, as she did when she wanted to prove to Mama she was more grown up than Mama gave her credit for.

"Yes," Hajna nodded. "But we aren't the only ones. Look around. There are easily twenty of us sitting in this cafeteria right now with the gold star on."

"Right," Zsolt nodded. "We're all schoolmates."

The older boy scoffed, slamming his hand on our table so hard that Eszter's bowl of goulash launched itself into the air before coming back down and splashing her purple dress with its tan contents.

"You Jews," he began, puffing out his chest and snapping his suspenders, "are the reason I have holes in my shoes. That's what my father says, anyway. Especially rich Jews like you, like the Sterns, with their fancy house and nanny and maid."

I looked down at the floor, tracing my feet in a circle. As I did so, I noticed my own shoes, the shiny new black patent leather ones Mama had given me for my birthday. My eyes wandered in a line along the wooden floor of the lunchroom to the boy's shoes, which were caked with mud, stained and coming apart at the seams. For the first time in my life, my heart sank with shame. It wasn't the same shame I felt when Mama caught Hajna and me doing something bad like using the phone without permission or eating sweets before dinner. It was different, a hot feeling that washed over my entire body and made my lips and face tingle with a sensation I couldn't quite identify.

"I'm sorry you have holes in your shoes," I muttered, the words coming out of my mouth like thick pea soup.

"You're not sorry!" he screamed, banging his fist on our table so loudly that the children two tables away jumped, startled by the noise. "But you will be."

"What does that mean?" Our dear friend Zsolt, asked. He was a diminutive boy of eight, with the height of someone a few years his junior. The poor child wore glasses so thick that it made his green eyes behind them seem far away and blurry. His ears stuck out just so that it prompted jeers of "Hey Dumbo ears!" from Tamas, our class bully.

"They'll see. They'll be gone soon. Don't worry," he scoffed, turning on his heel, making a squeaking noise as he did so. I noticed his big toe had all but wriggled out of the top of his shoe.

"It's his father's fault he has holes in his shoes," Eszter whispered when she was sure the boy had made his way out of earshot. "My Mama sees him all the time at our family's restaurant. He's a drunk. He doesn't work. Just because your Papa works hard and buys you nice things, it isn't your fault."

"Thank you," I nodded, my face still flushed with shame.

The rest of the day, I spent with my legs itching to run out the door. By the time the last school bell rang, I shot up from my desk like a firecracker and packed up my things in record time.

"Mama!" I yelled, the moment Hajna and I passed through our doorframe. We weren't supposed to yell when we got home because Mama sometimes had headaches and fevers--part of the reason why our father hired a nanny and a maid. Sometimes our mother would become so tired that she would have to nap after a simple board game or washing the dishes. Our neighbors sometimes would whisper that she was a lazy, pampered rich woman. But knowing my mother, I could see in her face that she wasn't exaggerating her pain or discomfort.

"Shhhhhh!" our nanny, Emilia whispered. "Don't be so loud."

But Mama emerged from her bedroom anyway, standing elegantly at the top of the stairs in a pink Japanese silk kimono my father had bought for her in a fabled time, a time before the war. She smiled down on us, like a beloved queen, and gracefully made her way down our staircase, her red painted toes touching each stair with little effort. She reminded me of a movie star with her perfectly painted nails and coiffed hair. Even when she didn't feel well, she still managed to look radiant.

"My darlings," she smiled, hugging us close to her. I could smell her rose scented perfume as she pulled me close. The smell alone made me feel safe, protected, as if it could erase all of the evil words the boy had said to us at lunch.

"Did the Jews make everyone poor?" I blurted out before I even engaged in our afternoon ritual of changing from our street shoes to our slippers and waiting for either the nanny or the maid to bring us an afternoon snack.

The corners of mother's red lips curled downward to the floor. She closed her deep green eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.

"Who told you that?"

"This boy at school," Hajna shrugged, peeling herself away from our mother's embrace and unbuckling her shoes, as if his words hadn't stung or embarrassed her at all, as if the boy had just stated that the earth was round. Hajna, the weak but resilient one. Me, the strong but sensitive one.

But I didn't move from my mother's embrace. My snow-white arms moved around her middle as I held her closer to me, protecting me from the boy's words.

"Well," she began, stroking the top of my head and looking from Emilia to the floor and back at Emilia again. "No. But some people think that because they don't like the Jews. In fact, a lot of people don't like the Jews."

"Why?" Hajna countered, unfazed, as she shoved her feet in her slippers and threw her school shoes on the floor haphazardly, with one shoe turned inward and one turned outward, in a position no feet could naturally attain.

"Be careful, Miss Hajna!" Emilia exclaimed. "Your father worked hard to buy you nice shoes. Put them down gently."

Hajna gave a labored sigh as she bent over the shoes and lined them up neatly next to mine.

"So, Mama. Why?" she asked, folding her arms over her chest, the way she did when our teacher called her to the front of the room for whispering during lessons. "She has a bit of an attitude," our form teacher would tell our parents over her wire framed glasses on the more than one occasion when they had been called in to discuss her behavior. "But Aliz, she is an angel." Or at least I remembered it that way.

"Well, I know your father and I didn't send you to Hebrew school like maybe we should have, but you know all of the stories where people tried to expel the Jews or hated them."

"Yeah," I nodded. "But what did we
do
?"

My mother sighed, looking to the eves of the house as if an answer to an unanswerable question would suddenly appear out of thin air.

"Nothing," she shrugged.

"Then it doesn't make sense," Hajna nodded emphatically.

Mother smiled, opening her arms for Hajna as she cradled the two of us in her arms.

"The world doesn't make sense, I'm afraid," she sighed. "You'll figure that out when you're older."

Her words, her advice from mother to daughters, would haunt me for the rest of my life. And they would ring true more and more with each passing month, with each passing year.

3 CHAPTER three



Not even a week later, Jewish children were banned from going to non-Jewish schools. My mother told us very early one morning, about the time we would be going to school. Hardly able to contain her joy at the news, Hajna put her hand to her pink lips and let out a giggle. I, however, loved school, especially my math and Hungarian classes. It gave me time to sit with my friends, learn from someone who knew so much more than I did and begin planning out my future as a nurse. I had already prepared my report on working for my father when I grew up, which I was supposed to present in class that Friday. Papa had even given me pictures of him and helped me paste them on a poster board to show the whole class.

"Be careful with these," he said, smiling down on me. "Mama will want to put them right back in the album when you're done. Don't tear them."

I nodded and crossed my heart and he kissed me on the top of the head. My father, my slightly balding, with wrinkles around his eyes, protector.

"But my report!" I blurted out, my jaw dropping down practically to the hardwood floor, the one that had been around since before the flood. I put my hands on the lemon colored kitchen wall as if to steady myself from the blow of the words. Up until now, this had been the worse news I'd ever heard. Even worse than when my hamster ran away when Hajna and I took him outside to play in the backyard.

"Maybe you can give it when the war is over," my father nodded. "We'll put it upstairs in the safe and you can show everyone then."

I sighed as my mother ushered me to the dining room table by the shoulders. I let my bottom fall on the mauve chair as I cradled my head in my hands. Our maid, a stocky older woman from Poland with graying hairs around her temples named Agata, served us our morning breakfast of toast, jam, cereal and my parents their coffee. Her hands shook as she put the plates in front of each member of the family, her face wrinkled with uncertainty. At the time, in my own childish selfishness, I couldn't see Agata's worry, but looking back it was inherently obvious. My mother even gave her an extra pat on the arm when she put her breakfast in front of her, as if to try to assure her that things would turn out all right.

After about fifteen minutes of chewing without conversation, each of us spending the passing moments with our own thoughts, Papa spoke up. He wiped his graying-brown moustache with a napkin and cleared his throat, the way I had seen him do when he was presented an award at the university for one of his studies. Just as he did then, he ran his finger over his moustache to get out any last minute debris, puffed up his chest to take a deep breath and then let out an exhale. Hajna raised one eyebrow, suspicious of his next move.

"Girls, how do you feel about moving?"

Moving? First, I couldn't give my report at school and now we were moving?

"This is shaping up to be the most horrible day ever," I sighed, stabbing my spoon into my half-eaten bowl of cereal. It made a terrible squeak as it scraped the bottom of my bowl, the one mother had always told us to be very careful with as the bowls had been given to my great-grandmother on her wedding day. 

"Aliz, behave," Mama chastised. "Don't ruin the bowl."

I scrunched my face as hard as I could to make sure she new how displeased I was with the idea. Hajna matched my expression and looked definitely at my father, her pink lips all the way up to her nose.

"Hajna, Aliz, stop." Lujza shook her head. "Your faces will freeze like that."

"Our teacher said they won't," Hajna answered, taking a momentary respite from her expression and then returning to it as soon as the words came out of her mouth. I couldn't believe Lujza was fine with moving, either. I would have expected her to pout and scream at Papa and Mama, to protest with as much force as the two of us were.

"Well, unfortunately we don't have a choice," Papa nodded. It was then I noticed that several bundles had already been prepared behind him, containing a few mattress pads, sheets and several of their favorite pictures. Next to the bundle stood the gold-framed painting of my grandfather and father dressed in their uniforms from WWI. My father was so young in that painting, his brown eyes so stoic and focused, his eyes unwrinkled. He even had a full head of hair in that painting, something he hadn't possessed as long as I had known him.

"Did you get a new job?" Hajna asked. "Are we going to move to Cluj or Debrecen with the family? I haaaaate Cluj."

"No," my father shook his head. "We're staying right here in Szeged."

As soon as he finished his sentence a weight lifted off of my heart. I could still see my friends, still meet Zsolt and Eszter by the Tisza for picnics this summer. I could still go over to Eszter's house and have the delicious fish soup her mom cooked after her father went fishing in the setting summer sun.

"The Germans are forcing all of the Jews to move into a special part of town, near the synagogue."

"Are Emilia and Agata coming with us?"

"I'm afraid not," he shook his head. "They'll stay behind and take care of Kiraly."

"WHAT?!" Hajna and I interjected in unison. We jumped in our chairs like jack-in-the-boxes, our pink jaws falling at the same time and at the same angle. I didn't even have to look at her to know our expressions mirrored one another's perfectly.

"Why can't we take Kiraly?" we spat out at the same time, a salty lump rising in my throat. I kept trying to swallow it, to make it disappear, but it only made hot tears brim in the corners of my eyes. I didn't want to be a baby, I didn't want my sisters and parents to see how upset I was, but we had wanted a dog so badly. We had begged our parents since our fifth birthday for a dog and finally they told us they believed us to be responsible enough to take care of one. And now, only a few months later, he was being cruelly ripped away from us, just when he was beginning to feel like a very best friend. 

"The Germans won't allow pets," Mama answered quietly, speaking the words into her napkin as though if she kept the words contained, they wouldn't be true.

"The GERMANS?" Hajna and I spat out once more, in tandem once again.

"Yes," my father nodded. "The Germans are moving all Jewish families to a special part of the city, down near the temple. But don't worry, girls, it's just until the end of the war. I heard on the radio that the Americans and Russians were closing in. It's not going to be long. Maybe a few months at most."

Papa spoke calmly, waving his fork in the air every third or fourth word, like a conductor leading a symphony.

Lujza seemed composed, as if she had already been told the news before. As Papa explained what was going to happen, trying in vain to console us from a painful reality, Lujza began craning her neck. She began straining so hard that a bead of sweat appeared right at her red hairline. It trickled down the side of her face before disappearing into her milky-white neck.

"The radio?" she asked, nibbling on her pink lips. "Where is your radio, Papa?"

Hajna and I shot up like firecrackers, running to the living room to see for ourselves. Our radio, the beautiful wooden machine had been part of our evening ritual for as long as I could remember. We would gather around it, Hajna and I usually curling up on the Oriental rug, as Mama brushed our hair and we would listen to the whirl of the wires as Papa found the station. First, we'd listen to children's stories. Then, as our eyelids began to grow heavy, Papa would light his cigar and change to a classical station or the news. The strum of the violins or the monotone voices of the newscasters would lull us into a trance, and most nights we fell asleep to the comforting sounds and sweet smell of our parents' milk and tea and the murky smell of Papa's cigar. And on the rare occasion when I was sick, Mama would make a bed for me on the pink Victorian couch and let me listen to the radio programs meant to keep housewives company as they did the cooking and cleaning.

"I gave it away," he nodded, smoothing the collar of his blue silk pajamas.

"You gave it away?" Lujza's eyes grew wide, her hand to her heart, the way our grandmother lifted her wrinkled, browning hand to her chest when she heard shocking news. "Why?"

"Because he had to," Mama nodded, running a freshly painted fingernail over her already made-up face. "The Germans have ordered all Jews to give up their radios. We can't have them in the new place."

"What are we supposed to do at night?" Hajna asked, her little eyebrows knitted so closely together I worried she would give herself a headache.

"Well," my father laughed, "We'll actually talk to each other. We'll make up stories. And you girls are going to have to go to school. There probably won't be one there, but I'll give you lessons. You want to be promoted into the next grade when the war's over, don't you?"

I bent my wrist and rested my head on top of it, letting my loose hair fall over my face. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that mean kids like the boy at school who said we had made him poor, or The Bully who dipped Hajna's pigtails in ink and called Zsolt "Dumbo" would be allowed to live in their own homes until the end of the war and we weren't. I reasoned that Papa was a good man. He treated sick people and tried to make them feel better. My mother was good, too. She even made pies for the 80-year-old woman next door on Sundays. And I hadn't gotten into any trouble so far this year at school and I'd been fairly good at home, only acting out when Hajna talked me into it. We were a nice family, so why did we have to move?

"Curse the Germans," I exclaimed from under my hair, tears falling harder and faster.

"That's not polite," Mama told me, putting a delicate hand on my shoulder and then rubbing my back, making small goose bumps form on my arms. "Like your Papa said, it'll just be for a few months. Then we can come back here and go on vacation to Vienna or Paris or Rome. Or maybe we can swim in Lake Balaton. How would you like that?"

I sighed and wiped my face with the back of my hand, catching stray jam.

"Fine!"

Not even two days later, our family moved into what would come to be known as the Szeged Ghetto. It was like a somber parade, watching all of the city's thousands of Jews move slowly and mechanically through the streets with their possessions. Rich Jews with their furs and expensive purses clutched their material items close to their hearts as they gingerly trod through the streets, their expensive shoes making small clicking noises on the pavement. Poorer Jews from villages outside Szeged walked sullenly, as if apologizing for their existence, their tattered clothes hanging off of them, their faces smudged with dirt, their fingernails ragged and dirty. It was a stark contrast to the wealthier Jewish women of Szeged and their perfectly applied make-up and manicured nails.

"Be good," Agata told Hajna and me as she helped hoist the last suitcase onto the wagon Papa had bought to aid us in pulling our items into The Ghetto. We weren't allowed our cars, he had said, forcing him to leave behind his pride and joy. Pity, even to this day, I can't remember the brand of the car, only that it was a beautiful black one that Papa shined every other day as religiously as some men davened or went to confession. On Sundays, he'd take us for a drive into the country, where we'd have a picnic if the weather was nice enough. We children would wave from our backseat perch at all of the Christians filing out of church in their Sunday best. Sometimes he would pull the top down and Mama would giggle, putting on her sunglasses and scarf over her head to keep her hair in place. But Hajna and I loved the feel of the wind in our hair as if it wanted to take us away with it.

"Don't get on your Mama's nerves," Emilia told Hajna, buttoning up her tan spring jacket with the care and love she had given us since we were babies. "You know she needs her rest."

"I don't want to wear this coat," Hajna protested, as if she hadn't heard Emilia's words of wisdom. She shrugged her shoulders and moved about, in an effort to free herself from its constraints.

"Hajna!" Papa scolded through his teeth. He was busy concentrating on tying up the belongings we were taking with us. His brow was knitted and beads of sweat were forming in the frown lines across his forehead. He grunted as he tried again to secure two impossible strings together. 

"It's too hot," she complained again, rubbing her hands over her tiny face.

"We'll take it off when we get there," Lujza attempted to solace her, adjusting her own pink spring coat and combing back her red hair with her hands. Papa had bought that coat for her on a trip to Budapest at one of the fancy stores on Andrassy ut for her last birthday. Papa had picked it out for her and admired her as she stood in front of three mirrors, her reflection flickering back at her. Although I had to swallow a jealous knot in my throat, I admitted it did truthfully look nice on her. 

"Let's go," Papa bellowed, shooting Hajna his signature 'We'll talk about this later' stare.

Slowly, mechanically, we said our final goodbyes to our beloved maid and nanny, kissing them on their cool and plump cheeks as we made our way into the street, toward the temple and our uncertain future.

Before we had even passed our yard, I felt something wet and slimy through my sheer black tights, nipping at my ankles. I looked down to find Kiraly sniffing at my feet, his chocolate brown eyes begging us to take him wherever we were going.

"We can't take you, boy," Papa quietly spoke. "We'll see you soon."