Budapest is Burning

Suddenly, at the end of June, the world turned dark. Doomsday, it seemed, loomed near, with bad news circling around the ghetto house. At first I noticed that my father and Iván constantly whispered to each other; and, sometimes, they talked in a low voice to my mother as well. Then Erzsi seemed to be busier than ever before, having less time to talk to me, speaking constantly of the urgency of finding a hiding place for us all. At this point, however, I decided to disregard the news as well as Erzsi's plans. I distanced myself from the "real world," or, as we called that senseless brutal place in our children's group, "the realm of the adults," and continued to play make-believe. But I couldn't avoid hearing about the huge concentration of the gendarmerie troops around Budapest nor keep myself away from the whirling rumors regarding the official attention that turned, as we now know, to the immediate entrainment of the Jews in the capital. Of course, as soon as I was brutally confronted with what might come, it was no longer possible to run away from the news. I understood that most people thought we would be deported at the beginning of July. It took some days before I admitted to myself that the moment I had dreaded for years had arrived. And I knew it would destroy our life together.

Soon it became obvious that everybody expected the worst. My father's beautiful, intelligent, warmly glowing dark eyes grew deeper and larger. My mother cried all the time: "My children! My two beautiful children! And we have nowhere to go!"

The Beers, a family we took in as part of the ghettoization, also appeared heavily burdened, silently moving around the house, carefully closing the doors behind themselves. I stopped practicing my piano. I stopped reading as well, and I even stopped, briefly, playing make-believe with my friends. We still met at night, but there was not much we talked about. Nor did the adults argue or spend time with one another. It seemed that everybody lost interest in planning, working, or preparing for something important. And suddenly, out of this paralysis, a state of panic took over. Mrs. Nagy, one of our neighbors who lived on the fourth floor and had two children—a little girl, about six years old, and a boy of fifteen with Down syndrome—came to visit my mother.

"I won't allow them to separate me from my children," she said over and over.

She was terrified of the arrival of the Hungarian gendarmerie, whose murderous treatment of Jews in the ghettos located in the countryside was by the end of June fully known in Budapest. But she had no idea about the purpose of the journey she would be forced to undertake nor about her "freedom of decision" regarding her children. In fact, she didn't know and couldn't foresee what we learned only after the end of the war: that if by some miracle, she and her children had survived the train trip, all of them would have been gassed in Auschwitz upon arrival. For the story of Auschwitz was still a secret kept from the Jews of Budapest in June of 1944.

There was a new sense of danger settling in among the people of the ghetto house. The days passed slowly; we mostly stayed inside our apartments. Then suddenly, amid this sense of dread and terror, amid this tense expectation of a storm, my mother started to speak to me about a threat that was in sight, emphasizing that I was a big girl now and must, therefore, understand the problems we were facing. That is, I must know that perhaps sometime before the end of the war, I would have to hide somewhere without her and my father, without Iván and Erzsi. This meant, she said, that I would have to live alone for a while perhaps, have another name, and act as if I were someone other than Zsuzsi Abonyi, the person I really was. I would have...