When the Danube Ran Red

13 The New World

75 13 The New World I remember, it was after the first few weeks of the German occupation that I noticed something strange: people around me, including our friends, acquaintances, even members of my own family, stopped speaking about (perhaps even ceased to consider) the threat we were facing. In fact, recalling my observations during those few weeks, I remember that I noticed people’s desire to forget about the danger. Almost all the adults I knew seemed to discuss nothing else but their concern for the long-term availability of tea and coffee supplies or their involvement in games of bridge and chess. It is possible, of course, that they simply did not know how to react in this state of entrapment by deadly danger, but they appeared to be shocked into silence during the first two or three weeks of the occupation. I remember, even my father seemed to be paralyzed . I, on the other hand, could think of nothing else but the atrocities I had heard about for years. In fact, all I saw before my eyes was Hanna ’s marketplace, with corpses dripping with blood piled on top of one another. Yet nobody wanted to talk with me about this. I trembled when I thought that we might be separated from one another and shot into different piles. When I turned to my mother, she became distraught, her tear-ravaged face even more anguished, as soon as I started to talk about Hanna. She simply called either Iván or my father, hoping they would distract me. But after a while, she seemed to me more worried about her sewing machine than about the future, complaining about how terrible it would be if she could not sew when we would need her to mend our clothing. Nor was my father talking about the horrors facing us. When the Danube R an Red 76 He claimed that we would be saved by the Allies’ war against Germany. And Iván did not even come when called upon to talk or to play with me; he just wanted to assemble a radio, using the pieces of some old wires and electrical equipment my parents kept in the basement. He wanted to do this because we had had to surrender the radio we owned, and he thought we must have one if we wanted to follow the events of the war. After a while, even Erzsi, who was at first very frightened of the Germans, acted like a great optimist. “I am sure,” she said, “in fact, I can foretell that we’ll see the end of the war, and that we’ll live happily ever after.” I was glad to hear this, but I could not help wondering: What would happen if the Germans would not let us do so? And I did not understand any of this. Was my father less afraid now or did he just want to keep the danger away from me? It did not take long for him to stop pretending. “The Allies have landed in Normandy,” screamed Iván on June 6, running out of the apartment, banging the doors and ringing the doorbells of our neighbors, telling them what had happened. In a few minutes our apartment was crowded with people. Looking at the globe on our table, we could follow the events on the eastern and western front alike. “How long can it last then?” was my first question. Most of the visitors agreed: “Not for long.” “A few more months, perhaps,” said my father when he tucked me in at night. “But what can happen to us in the next few weeks?” I asked. “We hope the Germans won’t have time for anything other than defending themselves,” he said and smiled. Every morning he left the house, planning to meet with people, searching for friends, trying to find help for us. Driven by a passionate urge to change our lot, he felt, I think, that he could only act, assess, and decide upon the emerging possibilities when he thought through them with people he trusted. This search for ways to defend us against the Germans gave him strength to live from one day to another, even The New World 77 to remain whole till almost the end. Indeed, after a while, his search began to bear fruit. First of all, he came home every day with...