Becoming My Mother's Daughter:. A Story of Survival and Renewal, and: A Hero's Many Faces: Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments (review)

Both of these books begin in Budapest with the terrible events that the city's Jews experienced during World War II's last year. For Erika Gottlieb, the months spent sheltering with her mother and sister in the winter of 1944-45 form the core of a memoir that ranges from the intimacy of familial relationship in wartime Budapest and post-war Canada to childhood recollections of ghettoization and hiding. By contrast, Tanya Schult focuses on the ways 31 monuments in 12 countries have commemorated the "civil hero" (63-4) of Budapest in 1944: Raoul Wallenberg. For both authors, the events of Budapest 1944-45 leave a chronologically and geographically extended trace that is explored in works of life writing and art history, respectively.

Gottlieb's story is one typical of many middle class Jewish families living in the Hungarian capital. Her great-grandfather Sigmund Feher, with his Magyarized surname, sported a "big moustache" and looked "deceptively like his Hungarian gentry neighbors." He sought to distance himself from Jewishness and the "city's sizeable Jewish working class" (34). However, despite all attempts at Hungarian patriotism, Gottlieb's family was subjected to the raft of wartime anti-Jewish measures. Her father, like other Hungarian Jewish men, was forcibly conscripted into a labor battalion. She, along with her mother, sister and female relatives, were confined to their apartment,, one of close to 2000 buildings marked with a yellow star in the summer of 1944. Unlike their relatives in the countryside who were deported to Auschwitz, Jews in Budapest were spared mass deportations. In October 1944, however, the Hungarian fascist party--the Arrow Cross--assumed power. It is the next few chaotic and murderous months that Gottlieb recalls so carefully. She--along with her mother and sister--were constantly on the move from one hiding place to another. They ended up in a convent on the city's outskirts, where they resisted the expectation that they convert to Catholicism in gratitude to their rescuers. Forced to leave this hiding place, they returned to their former neighborhood, where the Arrow Cross rounded them up and delivered them to the closed Pest ghetto, set up in the winter of 1944 (rather than to the Danube shore, the scene of mass shootings). Here they survived the war's final weeks in a crowded cellar.

The details Gottlieb remembers of day-to-day life within the ghetto are one value of this moving account. She recalls a clear hierarchy in the crowded cellar. "The arm chair royalty" (102), as Gottlieb dubs them--previous occupants of the apartment building who had managed to hang on to at least some of their possessions--looked down on newcomers such as Gottlieb's mother, who carried what she could in an old handbag. These tensions between "original tenants" and "more recent arrivals" (89) are ones that Gottlieb experienced elsewhere. But earlier on, in the summer of 1944, when a more dispersed form of ghetto was created in Budapest, she experienced a new form of excitement. Her cousins whom they had previously only seen occasionally, moved into their apartment, which became "like an endless children's party" (60). What comes through strongly in Gottlieb's memoirs is that experiences of ghettoization in Budapest differed from person to person and across both time and space.

After the Soviets liberated the city, Gottlieb, her sister and mother were reunited with their father, who discovered that his immediate family members were still alive when he left his hiding place on the other side of the city. Gottlieb's mother became pregnant "as a way to thank God for our survival.." (116) However, alongside giving birth to a third daughter as a post-war...