When the Danube Ran Red

12 Measures Taken

68 12 Me a sures Taken The rest of the afternoon of March 19 passed as if in a haze. Erzsi arrived in the evening. She had just heard what had happened from her Russian friend Marina, who had fled from the Reds with her parents in 1917 and lived now with her mother in Buda, in the same apartment house as Erzsi. They wanted to go to the movies, but when Erzsi arrived at Marina ’s apartment, she was confronted with the news of the occupation. In fact, Marina told her that she had decided to marry her German boyfriend as quickly as possible because, otherwise, as a Russian refugee, she might suffer terribly. Confused and frightened, Erzsi could think of nothing other than coming to see us. She rang the bell. I opened the door. Her hands were trembling, and she was crying. The only sentence she could utter was framed as a declaration: “I will never leave you!” Stepping into the entrance hall, she told my parents she would do everything to save our family. And if she could not do so, she sobbed, she would come with us wherever we were taken. My father agreed that for the night, she could stay in our apartment, but he insisted she find a place to move to tomorrow because, in the long run, she would not be able to stay with us. In fact, he convinced her to rent a room nearby that might, in case of an emergency, help her and us a great deal. She did so the next day. Moving in, she came back to us and helped my mother all day. Telling the caretaker that she was moving her own things from our apartment, she packed parcel after parcel, containing bedclothes, blankets , warm coats, and pullovers, carrying them one after the other out of the house. Hurrying to the post office, she mailed them to Békéscsaba, Measures Taken 69 to her parents. My mother and father hoped that, in this way, some of our warm clothing could be saved. They could not foresee, however, that less than a year later, after the siege and occupation of Budapest by the Soviet forces, we would flee from the capital to Békéscsaba. Emaciated , freezing, with our clothes torn and worn down, we then found our warm coats, pullovers, and blankets waiting for us in the house of Erzsi’s parents. And we found not only our winter clothes! Erzsi sent home some of my dolls, board games, even my favorite books, so that I could read and play with the neighbors’ children after the war. Hence, we not only had clean and warm clothing during the day and warm bedding at night, but I found also a connection to my previous life with my old toys and games. Having mailed the packages, Erzsi started to visit her friends and relatives. She even went out of town to places where people she knew lived, trying to convince them of the need to help us or help her identify others who could do so. She also went to various addresses my father gave her and tried to make lists of everyone she could visit. My father, too, left the house every day between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., the time period allotted to the Jews for the purchase of food. During these hours, he too tried to meet and visit with friends and find contacts with people who, he hoped, would help us. He wanted to work out a plan for us to hide somewhere and avoid the roundups that were, he believed, inevitably coming. In this way, he thought, we could escape the concentration and entrainment of the Jewish community of Budapest. He visited old friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, begging them for help. But for the moment, he did not have much success. Coming home more tired every day, he did not have anything to tell us. I saw on his face that he was not being successful. In fact, I could clearly see despair and anguish changing his looks and bearing. He just wanted to find somebody to rely on, he told me. Of course, he already knew two people on earth on whom he could rely: Erzsi and Gyuri Faragó. And he was, of course, enormously grateful for their dedication to us. Yet he still felt helpless. He did not quite see how, in the long [3.136...