TAKING STOCK
It is of interest to follow the fortunes of certain people and certain things that are mentioned in my story. First the people and then the belongings:
Peter Agocs and his wife lived in their small house on the outskirts of Budapest. Peter had a spinal problem and spent his last years in a wheelchair. My parents visited them after 1963.
Julius Baskay was persecuted almost immediately after the war. Having been a large land owner and a member of the Upper House, he was a marked man. On the first occasion that he was summonsed to the infamous Political Police HQ at 60 Andrássy Street, he was accompanied by both Father and myself and we insisted in making a statement in his favour. He was released after spending some two or three days in a cell. They returned to their home in the country and lost their land, which was distributed to the peasants. Eventually they returned to live in Budapest and died there. Their daughter married a University Lecturer, visited us in England and was assisted by Mother until they did not need help. Their son, a professional Army officer lives in South America and used to correspond with Father.
General Gábor Gerloczy became Father's employee. He and his wife, a Baroness, translated business letters into English and German for Father. He stayed employed by the business even after Father left for the West. Eventually, he and the Baroness were collected by the police in the middle of the night and deported from Budapest into a small village, where the General worked as a labourer pushing a wheel barrow on some earth moving project. Father and Mother kept sending them parcels until about 1960 when they were allowed to return to Budapest. Around that time they lost contact and Father could not locate them on his subsequent visits to Hungary. They probably left Hungary.
Zsuzska and Karolina (Csöpi) Reszeli live in Budapest in the same circumstances as ever. They are still happy and content with the little they have. Csöpi keeps up her correspondence with Mother and advises her of the problems they have with Zsuzska's health. Mother helps them financially and with hand-me-downs since 1945.
Some time after the war Csöpi became an actress and together with other midgets, gave enormous pleasure to thousands and thousands of children in a production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarf, until a newspaper wanted to show its socialistic conscience and protested at midgets exhibiting themselves in such demeaning fashion. The theatre company was then disbanded and all the midgets lost their livelihood. There is no unemployment benefit in Hungary and Csöpi and her mother had a very difficult time until finally they received work in the form of putting on the gum on to envelopes on a piece rate that allowed them almost no income for 14 hours of work.
When I visited them in 1966 Csöpi was the only person in Hungary who recognised me as she watched from the landing John, his wife Clare and me walking up the staircase. Their little flat was absolutely spotless and consisted of a kitchen, which was Csöpi's bedroom and their bathroom also, and a bedsitter, in which Zsuzska lived with her boyfriend. He was a very sick man who died within a few weeks of my visit.
According to Clare, meeting Csöpi and her mother in 1966 was the highlight of her visit to Hungary. On leaving them, Clare broke down and cried and a similar effect was experienced by my daughter and her husband also.
Vilmos Thiringer escaped to Germany and came to visit us in London and eventually emigrated to America, where he became a male nurse. I met him in London and again in America where I spent an evening with him in San Francisco. He insisted that he cannot remember giving me hay, but if he did, so what? He was a gentleman in both the Olde World-Hungarian and real sense of the word.
George Kelemen I never heard of again, - being a great survivor I am sure he left Hungary and is alive and well.
George Schusztek the third George from my Army days is a well to do businessman in Vienna. He married Bársony Rózsi, who was a star of Budapest, Vienna and Berlin and a Jewess too. She was the only actress I know who on her first return engagement after 20 years has sold out every seat in a sport stadium with 100,000 seats and came back to two repeat performances in the same venue, all sold out. I met both of them in Vienna in 1966. She died around 1976, but I believe George is well.
Thomas Lorand the officers' cook who made a fish dish for his sick comrade has a restaurant in London and became a good friend of mine, Joy and my family. He is married to Enid, an English lady and they have no children. I meet them whenever I visit London.
Uncle Imre Balázs survived the War with his wife. He was hidden in a house in the country and after his experiences in the Arrow Cross occupied school, had the good sense of keeping off the streets until he was liberated. Soon after the end of the war, he saw one of the Arrow Cross guards passing the house he lived in. He followed him along Andrássy Street and when the Arrow Cross man was passing in front of No. 60, housing the Political Police, Uncle started to shout and had the man arrested. He confessed to all sorts of crimes and it was him who told about the killing of 15 years old Susan Kádár.
Subsequently, Uncle Imre became interested in politics and tried to convert all his capitalist relations, including his nephews to socialism. He died at the age of 73 and his wife Lili, a charming gentle lady, followed him some years later. They had no child, in fact Lili had a miscarriage on the day the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944.
Frau Eidam and our family - in spite of our being very grateful and all that, did not keep up the friendship after Liberation. However, one day in 1946 or 1947 she traced Father and arrived in his office and asked for financial help. She did it without demanding it and with such charm, that my parents were pleased to help her.
The three ladies living next door to the brothel were ecstatic at being liberated. Within a month two of them were dead. The Jewish woman, who was hiding there continued to live there after liberation and some two weeks later drunk Russians attacked her. To get away she jumped from the first floor window into the snow, broke her neck and died instantly. A few days later the owner of the flat, the gentile lady, who had an acute heart ailment had a heart attack and died.
My mate from Kecskemét, George Kennedy got back to Budapest riding my bicycle all the way. His father, who was not Jewish, hid him in a day & night bed from October until liberation in January. Within an hour after being liberated he was taken to work for the Russians and after he loaded the truck he was made a POW by the green capped NKDV and sent to Russia. He returned from POW camp in mid 1946 after spending some year and a half in Siberia.
George Shillinger went to the US and became a mathematician. When I last saw him in 1963, he was Senior Lecturer at one of the New York Universities.
Of the others who left Hungary with me: Peter Kardos returned to Hungary after 3 months in Germany. He took a letter from me to my ex girl friend and nearly married her. He became an engineer and escaped Hungary again in 1956.
Robert Tábori who shared a flat with me in Munich married there and went to live in Paris with his wife and daughter. I visited them there in 1951.
27 Mandula utca, our house on Rose Hill is still there, although in very bad repair. I visited it in 1966, when 2 families lived upstairs and 5 separate families lived in the downstairs area. The basement, where (I am ashamed to recall) lived the janitor, his wife and their daughter, housed in 1966, a women, (who turned out to be the aforementioned little girl) her husband and child and the old lady, who was once our janitor's wife and now his widow. Socialism has not improved their life. The house was taken from Father and Mother and although we could now claim it back from the State, provided we can show that we intend to live in it, the occupiers of the house may live there in undisturbed peace.
Third Floor, 17 Szemere utca, our flat in Town was a home unit and was rebuilt at our expense after the war. I always thought that it was our property, but in fact it was not. Nevertheless, the State took it, lock, stock, barrell and contents and no compensation was paid either for this or the one sixth share of the building which Father and I saw being damaged by cannon fire.
The business was left in charge of my Uncle Imre and Márton Farkas, who was employed by Father for twenty years or more and who returned from the death camps of Germany. However, soon after my parents left Hungary the second time, Farkas and Uncle Imre were summonsed to the Police and interrogated about Father and the business confiscated. Farkas died of a heart attack soon afterwards, his wife blaming the shock of being questioned by the police. The interesting side line to all this is that Father's best known product is still being sold with its original name given to it by Father in about 1937 and also the fact that when Father first visited Budapest in 1962, after an absence of 15 years, the sign outside the old business still proudly displayed the name "KÁLMÁN JÓZSEF". It is worth mentioning here that business was in Kálmán Street, which has connection only with a long gone king of Hungary called Kálmán and not with my Father.
Finally, what happened to the gold? Around 1942 my Uncle Bandi, Eva's father and I carried a big round tin containing 1002 "Napoleon's" i.e. 20 Francs, the equivalents to Sovereigns, together with another round tin containing various gold jewellery with a total weight of over 4 kilograms to Szölösgyörök, a village where his home was, with a view of burying it there for safe keeping.
In the middle of the night Uncle Bandi got up and dug his hole and next night we buried the gold in his back yard, amongst the vegetables. So that the place where it was buried could be described, the spot was at the closest coordinate of the corn silo and the water well. Indeed it was so easy to describe where the gold was, that some weeks later Father unerringly pointed out the spot to Uncle Bandi.
Somehow, we sent message to John that there is a fortune buried at Uncle Bandi's home and of course we and also Eva's family knew where the gold is. Somebody was sure to survive from the six of us.
While we in Pest were liberated in mid-January 1945, the whole of Budapest was not occupied by the Russians until February and the areas west of Budapest not until March. Thus it was some time before we could consider how to get to Szölösgyörök and how to bring back the loot. There was no transport and there were marauding Russians and even Hungarians who were armed and helped themselves to whatever they fancied. Travelling with gold was positively unwise those days.
It was not until about July or August that we could rent a car with an armed guard and off we went with Father and Uncle Imre. He came to see what could be done about his brother-in-law's property, in case Eva or her parents survived and return from where ever they were. We left very early in the morning, not because we wanted to spend a lot of time there, but because Father thought it might be nice to have a swim in Lake Balaton on the way.
My Uncle's house was deserted. All the windows were still boarded up as they were in May 1944 over a year ago. We realised that the building and its many outhouses must have been used as the ghetto where the few Jews of the neighbourhood were rounded up prior to deportation.
We brought our shovels along from Budapest and having located the spot set to dig for the gold. We dug down deep and still there was no metallic noise to suggest that we found it. We dug a little towards the right, then a little towards the left. Nothing. Before long we had a 2 meter square hole dug deep down.
It was then that a police officer approached us. He turned out to be the son of the other Jewish family of the village, who used to be a tennis coach and what used to be termed a gigolo, because of his wealthy girl friends. He suggested that we will find nothing because all the men and women in the Ghetto were systematically tortured by the gendarmes to give up their existing or non-existing fortunes. To him it was obvious that Uncle Bandi confessed to the gold. Just the same he organised some labourers, who were digging away all that afternoon and half the night until the hole was at least 10 by 10 meters large and so deep that we struck water. We took turns to sleep in the car and it was next morning that the little old man, Uncle Geleta, who used to be looking after the horses and the carriage arrived. He told us that the last time he saw him, Uncle Bandi had a face blue and black from a beating he must have received from the gendarmes.
I only hope they stopped beating him when they found the gold.
I visited Szölösgyörök in 1966. The house was not lived in, but the Communist Party used part of the house.
In 1989 Joy and I revisited the place. The house was rebuilt and became the one and only General Store of the village. As usual it was not open for business in spite of us having visited it during the hours when according to the sign it should have been open.
Seeing that house upset me more than any other sight during my visit to Hungary. To realise that my relations' house is unrecognisable, even if it did not disappear and thus their only remaining memento and memorial to their existence disappeared, brought back all the wretched memories of what "my country" has done to me and the likes of me.
We left Szölösgyörök depressed, after being watched by silent suspicious locals, who were old enough to guess why we photographed an unattractive village shop. We must have been regarded as ghosts, who came back to haunt the place on behalf of some people whom they could forget and don't like to remember.