When the Danube Ran Red

15 The Ghetto House

92 15 The Ghet to House From June 17 through June 24, about 200,000 Jews in Budapest were on the streets: moving. Getting up early the day after the decree on ghettoization was posted, my father stayed home, and we watched the hurrying masses of people from the window. Some carried their belongings in horse-drawn wagons, others in wheelbarrows, on their backs, in their hands. Marching in endless, chaotic lines, they looked harried, lonely, desperate, and, I even thought, insane. Iván and I left the house at 11:30 a.m. through a basement window. Looking back again and again, we were worried that somebody had noticed us. With a bright yellow Star of David fastened to our clothing, we stood on the corner of Abonyi Street and Aréna Street for a while, only to be followed by our parents, who had seen us leaving the house and came to usher us back to the apartment. The streets were overcrowded with police. Our parents ordered us to go back, petrified of the provocation our presence might cause in the men in uniform standing around. But then they, too, were overwhelmed by the sight they became part of on the street. Seeing old people going through the torture of pulling their carts crowded with boxes and hand-carrying their furniture , mothers with children in a breathless march, the crippled and the maimed crawling between the sidewalk and the street, my parents started to help but pulled back when they saw that a few policemen began to demand identification papers from some of the bystanders. They recoiled and shooed us away. Arriving home, I stared at the blank walls. Were we going to survive? The Ghetto House 93 The measures of June 17 decreed the relocation and concentration of the Jews in the capital. Despite the fact that in our house about 70 percent of the tenants were Jews, we were not really sure whether the building would indeed become a yellow-star dwelling. I was, of course, terrified at the thought of moving. The bookshelves, our library, my piano! The work of my parents and grandparents’ lives filled our apartment , and I knew it; our family often spoke of this. Later, during the afternoon, my father said “OK,” and he tried to smile, rocking me in his arms. “Objects must never be more important than life. What matters is that they don’t separate us!” “Yes,” I whispered, “anything is OK, just let’s stay together.” But secretly, I shivered at the thought of becoming homeless. “Homeless, homeless, homeless,” I could think of nothing else. If we do not belong anywhere, we can be easily separated, I thought. Iván shrugged his shoulders and went away to work on another radio. He certainly was unwilling to discuss the threat. But my mother sobbed all night. Erzsi held me fast. She did not want to go home. My father, however , convinced her she must. Next morning he went again to the Jewish Council. They were at work, he told us later, preparing the list of Jewish houses in Budapest. But the day after, he came home with enormously good news: our house, 10 Abonyi Street, was being designated as a yellow-star house. We were deeply relieved. We did not have to leave behind our belongings, we did not have to move. We will not be homeless, I thought, like Hanna! But, of course, other people had to move in with us. Amid the chaos suddenly developing in the Jewish community of Budapest, by mere chance my father met somewhere a fellow pharmacist, Sanyi (Alex) Beer, whom he had known for quite a while. The Beers were looking for a place to move to, and my father was looking for people who could move into our apartment. But before any decision could be made, a question arose that needed to be answered: How many people would have to move into our apartment? Studying the case, my father found the answer. Although we had four rooms, according to police regulations in When the Danube R an Red 94 1941, one of them did not count as a room because it just had small windows . And another room, which was very small, counted only as “half a room.” As a result, our apartment was registered as a two-and-a-halfroom apartment. Under the new law, there was...