When the Danube Ran Red

Foreword

xi Foreword David Patterson Zsuzsanna Ozsváth opens her extraordinary remembrance of the Holocaust horror with the memory of a child: a little girl named Hanna (like the mother of the prophet Samuel), a survivor who had fled to Hungary from a mass grave called Poland. Thus from the outset Ozsváth presents us with two designated targets in the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews: memory and the child. Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, independently of each other, have described the Holocaust as a war against memory.1 And wherever there is a war against memory, there is a war against the child, against the one to whom all memory is transmitted and in whom all memory lives. “It was as though the Nazi killers knew precisely what children represent to us,” says Wiesel. “According to our tradition, the entire world subsists thanks to them.”2 But it was not as though: the Nazis knew precisely what they were doing when they systematically murdered more than a million and a half Jewish children: they were destroying not only a people but a world, a memory and a name, what in Hebrew is called yad vashem. 1. See Elie Wiesel, Evil and Exile, trans. Jon Rothschild (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 155; Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 31. 2. Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1978), 178–79. Foreword xii Contained in these pages is the memory of a childhood forever undone and of a world forever lost. And yet in these pages the trace of a childhood and a remnant of a world are recovered, thanks to the courage and the art of Zsuzsanna Ozsváth. Crucial to this recovery is the testimony and the memory of one of the righteous, a girl named Erzsi, who herself was hardly more than a child. She is among those honored along the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and Archive Center in Jerusalem: it was her act of righteousness that made this memory possible. Thanks to Erzsi, we have this memory of a Jewish child from a world in which the very presence of a Jewish child was deemed a crime against humanity. The Jewish child is Zsuzsanna Ozsváth; the world is the world of Hungarian Jewry. The World of Hungarian Jewry: The Memoir’s Context In Ozsváth’s memoir one discovers not only the tale of a Jewish child marked for murder but also the tale of a world marked for obliteration, the world of Hungarian Jewry. With all the acumen of the scholar that she is, Ozsváth has already deftly portrayed that world as it was on the eve of the Holocaust in her book In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti. In that book, which might be viewed as a companion work to her memoir, we see how the life and the poetry of Radnóti embodied the life of Hungarian Jews and their frustrated attempts to fit into a world that would have nothing to do with them as Jews. Indeed, Radnóti’s voice was, in a very important sense, the voice of Hungarian Jewry. What modernity has demonstrated to Hungarian Jewry is that a world that would have nothing to do with them is a world that in the end will exterminate them. How did the story of Hungarian Jewry become a story of extermination? Answering that question is a key to understanding the vast historical context of this very personal memoir. Jews have lived in Hungary for at least a thousand years. When the Crusaders arrived in the region in 1097, King Coloman refused to Foreword xiii cooperate with them in their efforts to murder the Jews as they had in the Rhineland. Subsequent centuries saw a sequence of events familiar to Jews throughout Europe: expulsions, readmissions, forced conversions, persecutions, and more expulsions came one after the other. On August 29, 1526, the Turks defeated the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohács and dispersed some Jews to Turkish lands, where they generally fared better than the Jews who remained under Christian rule. When the Habsburgs recaptured Buda on September 2, 1686, Hungarian Jewry once more came under an ironfisted affliction at the hands of the Christians. On March 15...