Swimming Across: A Memoir Read online

  Before that summer, listening to the radio was an occasional thing. Now friends came over almost every evening to listen. People started paying a lot more attention to the radio than they had before, but at the same time my mother didn't want anyone outside our apartment to see or hear us listening to it. She would pull down the blinds and draw the curtains, then turn the radio on at a very low volume. She and her friends would huddle around it with very serious expressions. I think they were listening to Hungarian programs transmitted from England. The programs always started with four rhythmic thuds: dit-dit-dit-dah. I couldn't hear anything else, but the adults must have heard something they liked because occasionally they would cheer silently.

  I was confused by all these goings-on and annoyed that I was kept away from the radio. The radio used to be my toy; I used to have access to it any time I wanted. Now the adults had taken over my radio and it was no longer available for me to play with.

  Later in the summer, the radio disappeared. Jews were no longer permitted to own a radio. Now I missed the listening ceremony that used to symbolize the end of each day.

  Certain elements stayed the same. Jani and Romacz still visited frequently. Gizi was still living with us, and meals continued in a regular fashion. Nighttime air raids occurred periodically. But life was getting more tense all the time.

  Government posters appeared on the walls of buildings, describing the latest regulations applying to Jews. Jews were not supposed to mix with other people. Some stores started to carry signs: “We don't serve Jews.” When we took the tram, we could board only at the back and we had to stay standing even if there were empty seats. We could have tried to cheat, but everyone seemed to know who was and wasn't Jewish, so it didn't seem like a good idea. We stayed close to home. I wasn't in touch with any of my school friends. No one seemed to know anything about anyone else.

  Then something even stranger happened. There was a man who ran one of the shops on the ground floor of our apartment building. We knew him only to say hello to, but near the end of the summer, he became much friendlier toward us than ever before. He would frequently show up at our door with flowers for my mother. I didn't think much of it. My mother was a beautiful woman: She had very fine features, big blue eyes, soft brown hair. I thought giving flowers to beautiful women was what people did.

  One day, this man rang our doorbell and I answered it. He had a box of chocolates and he said it was for me. I loved chocolates and I hadn't seen any for a long, long time. I took the box, thanked the man, and danced back to the Big Room, calling for my mother: “Mama, Mama, look what I got.” My mother took one look at the chocolates in my hand and asked me where I had gotten them. When I told her, her eyes flashed, and in one swift, firm motion, she slapped me across my face. She grabbed the box of chocolates and ran out of the apartment after the man who had brought them. When she returned a few minutes later, I was crying in the corner of our room. I didn't know why she had slapped me. She bent over me and said, “Andris, you don't understand what is happening.” Then she explained that the man had offered to take her and me away to his hometown as if my mother were his wife and I were his child.

  “But he's already married,” I said. I knew this because I had met his wife.

  My mother just stared at me. Then she told me, “Do not, under any circumstances, ever take anything from him or talk to him again.”

  Shortly after that, at the end of the summer, our lives changed in a major way. Jews had to move out of their apartments by a certain date and into special buildings that were designated as houses for Jews. People called them “Star Houses” because a big yellow Star of David was painted above the entrance of each of these houses. The Star House that we moved to was just a block and a half away on Eotvos Street.

  We moved into a very small apartment that had one room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It had been Jani's bachelor flat for many years before he moved to a larger apartment. Jani still owned it, and he made it available to us when the building was designated a Star House. Gizi had to return to her home in the country because Jews were not allowed to have domestic help. We shared the apartment with two other women. One was an acquaintance, the other one was a stranger. The acquaintance was the wife of one of my father's former business partners. The wife was Jewish; the husband was not, so he continued to help run the dairy and live in their old apartment, while she moved into the Star House.

  Some furniture was already there. We had no room to take any of our belongings with us, which was just as well, since we weren't allowed to anyway. We just took some suitcases filled with clothes. I took my school knapsack with some books and a few stuffed animals.

  The new apartment was on the ground floor, looking out onto a narrow side street. It was small and a lot darker than our old apartment. We slept on sofa beds and cots, which were folded up during the day. Cooking was very clumsy because of the lack of room. Instead of a stove, there were only two hot plates, so the women took turns.

  Nobody complained or commented much. We made do, because there wasn't much else we could do. Things were happening to us one after another. Just when we got used to one thing, another thing happened.

  The next thing that happened was that we were all required to wear a yellow Star of David on our jackets over our heart. I remember my mother stitching the cloth stars on some of my clothes. We were forbidden to step outside the Jewish house without wearing one. It was just one more of those things to accept numbly and silently.

  One day, a friend of mine, also Jewish and about my age, showed up at our doorstep wanting to play with me. He wasn't wearing his yellow star. I was frightened—frightened for him and somehow for us, too. When we started playing, I forgot about it, but after a few hours, he set off to go home. His home was in another Jewish house some blocks away. My fear returned. My friend just laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and ran off into the street. I was afraid for him, but I was also impressed by his cocky courage.

  Whenever we went out, we wore our star. But we didn't go out very much. There were few places we could go to, and the hours when we could be on the street were limited. Many stores would not serve people with a yellow star; besides that, it was a very strange feeling to walk on the streets wearing it. People avoided looking at us. Even people whom we knew wouldn't meet our eyes. It was as if a barrier was growing between us and everyone else.

  In addition to the German soldiers on the street, we saw members of the Arrow Cross Party. I didn't know much about the Arrow Cross Party, except for their uniform, which was black and militaristic. They wore armbands with their emblem, two crossed arrows, one vertical, one horizontal, with points on both ends. I had seen Arrow Cross members on the street before, but I never had anything to do with them. Now I didn't want to look at them; they frightened me. I was told that they were the Germans' closest supporters in Hungary and they hated Jews.

  At one point, I got sick. I had a bad case of diarrhea. My mother didn't have the ingredients or the means to cook me a proper chicken soup and mashed potatoes, which was what I craved the most. Fortunately, she ran into the wife of the superintendent of our house on Kiraly Street, who readily offered to make these things for me and bring them over. As a non-Jewish person, she was free to move around.

  I got my chicken soup and my mashed potatoes and enjoyed every bit of it. But the next day there were loud knocks on our door. When my mother opened the door, a strange man stood there with a grim look on his face. He showed my mother something, and words were exchanged between the two of them. My mother came over to me and said, “I have to go away for a while. Stay here and wait for me.”

  There was no one else in the apartment. I didn't know what was going on. All I could do was wait. I played with my toys to pass the time, but I wasn't really interested in them. I was wondering where my mother had gone.

  My mother returned in a couple of hours, shaken up. She told me that the man who came for her was a policeman who arrested her along with the superintendent's wife.
Feeding Jewish people was against the law, and my mother had broken the law by allowing the super's wife to provide us with food.

  My mother said that she was incredibly lucky to be back. As the policeman was taking her in, he told her that she should have bade me a more proper good-bye because she probably would not see me again. They happened to walk by the storefront that housed what used to be my father's dairy, and as luck would have it, one of my father's former partners was sitting in the store and noticed my mother walking by with the policeman. He was the non-Jewish husband of the woman who shared our apartment, and he recognized my mother. The policeman was in plain clothes, but the police station wasn't too far, so the man put two and two together and figured that my mother was under arrest. This man had a friend in the police force, and he instantly telephoned him. The friend pulled some strings, and after being made to cool their heels for a while, my mother and the super's wife were both released with a stiff warning.

  From then on, it was predominantly boiled beans for me.

  Early one evening in October, my mother came to me with a very serious look on her face. “Andris, we have to get out of here,” she said. My father's sister's husband, Sanyi, had come by a few hours earlier. He was not Jewish, so he was able to move around the city and talk to people. He had heard rumors that the Arrow Cross Party was going to overthrow the Hungarian government the next day. After Sanyi gave us the tip-off, he disappeared.

  My mother told me that the Arrow Cross Party thought that the government had been too easy on the Jews. If they took over, things were going to be a lot tougher. I listened without saying a word, as she explained that we both needed to disappear from the Jewish house. Immediately.

  She told me I was to go to Jozsef bacsi, another of my father's former business partners and a Christian. I would stay with him and his wife until she could come and get me. Meanwhile, she had made other arrangements for herself, and as soon as I was packed off, she would disappear, too. But, she assured me, she would visit me as soon as she could.

  We left our apartment within an hour of Sanyi's visit. I put on some extra clothes and gathered up a few of my favorite books in my school knapsack. We dressed in overcoats without our yellow star. Then my mother took me by the hand and we walked the half block or so over to the store. It was dark outside, and I was so confused that it never occurred to me to be scared about being outside without a yellow star. My mother said a quick good-bye, then Jozsef bacsi took my hand and we walked to the tram. We got on at the front entrance this time, which reminded me that I was supposed to act as someone other than who I was. We rode a couple of miles to his house.

  Jozsef bacsi and his wife lived four floors up in a big apartment house that was similar to ours on Kiraly Street but bigger. I was put in a room of my own. There were only the three of us in their spacious apartment, so in one way, it was a pleasant change from my previous surroundings. But I couldn't really enjoy it because my mother wasn't there. I was numb with loneliness.

  My mother had told me while she was getting me ready that if anyone asked, I should say that I was from the country and had escaped from the Russians who were bombarding our town. But I didn't know what the name of the town would be or anything else. There had been no time to come up with a more detailed story in the few minutes she'd had to prepare it. Jozsef bacsi explained to me that the best thing for me was to stay out of sight so that nobody could show an interest in me.

  The weather was gloomy and the curtains were often drawn. Jozsef bacsi 's wife was often around the apartment, but though she wasn't unfriendly, she tended to her own affairs. So I sat in the dim main room, day after day, and read my books over and over. One of them was about a little kitten who goes out to play in the snow and gets very, very ill. I read it a million times, and every single time, my heart would break over the kitten that was going to die. Even though I knew it would get better, I would have to finish the book to get out of my funk.

  The days moved slowly, interrupted only by an occasional air raid. The air raids were becoming more frequent, often occurring during the day. I took my books to the air raid shelter. I read them with a great deal of attention, not because they were so interesting—after all, I'd read them a lot of times already— but because that way I could avoid catching the eye of anyone who might be looking at me.

  My mother did come to visit. One of the workmen from the dairy had taken her in. They pretended that she was a refugee from the countryside. The workman's wife was the superintendent of an apartment house, and my mother worked alongside her, lugging garbage, dumping ashes, and sweeping the stairways. She wore a kerchief over her head, like our super's wife in the apartment on Kiraly Street. I had never seen her wear a kerchief before. It made her look plain, but it didn't matter to me. The only thing that mattered was that she was there.

  But no sooner did she arrive than the air raid sirens went off and we had to go to the shelter, all four of us. I wasn't supposed to recognize her, and it took all the effort I could muster for me to avoid talking to her or even looking at her. Then, when the air raid was over, my mother had to go. She gave me a quick hug, and kissed me, and told me she would be back. Then she left.

  When I got bored or lonesome, I looked out the window, which overlooked a square. One day, I was alone in the room and was staring out the window when I noticed a commotion at the entrance to the apartment building across the street. German army trucks were lined up, covered with dark green tarps. German soldiers were standing in two lines, forming a passage between the first truck and the entrance to the apartment house, and people were filing out of the apartment house and onto the trucks.

  This was a Jewish house; I could see the yellow star over the entrance. The people filing out were all wearing yellow stars. They all had their hands up in the air, even the little kids who were being carried by their parents. They came in an unending flow, filling up one truck after another. I watched from the unlit apartment window on the fourth floor. I was too high up to see their expressions or hear any noise through the closed windows, but I could see that the German soldiers weren't shouting. It all seemed very orderly. Tears started to stream down my cheeks.

  All of a sudden, the door to my room opened. I turned around and there was my mother in an overcoat with the kerchief covering her head. I ran to her and grabbed her around the waist and buried my head in her overcoat. As I recognized her scent, I buried my nose even deeper. She didn't say anything, just held me very, very tight. Then, after a little while, she said good-bye and left again. When I looked out the window, the trucks were gone. There was no sign that anything had ever happened.

  The third time my mother came, she came to take me away. Nobody else was around. She sat down with me on a sofa and explained that she now had official papers for us. According to those papers, her name was Maria Malesevics—the papers kept her real first name—and I was her son, Andras Malesevics. I was to forget that my name was ever Grof, and I had to absolutely, positively learn this new name, Andras Malesevics, and the story to go with it.

  We were going to pretend that we were from the town of Bacsalmas—the papers said so—and we were escaping from the Russians. If anybody asked about my father, I was to say I didn't know who my father was. Men were always coming and going, visiting my mother. I didn't know which of them might have been my father. We were going—together!—to a suburb of Budapest called Kobanya, where Jozsef bacsi 's parents would take us in as refugee relatives from the country.

  I didn't care where we were going. I cared only about two things: I was with my mother, and I had to learn a new name. I understood that I had to memorize it to the point where it was a part of me; I couldn't make a mistake. The name was hard— Malesevics is a Slavic name that I had never encountered before, and I was afraid that I would forget it. So all along the interminable tram ride to Kobanya, through the winter evening, I looked out the window, watching my reflection in the glass appearing and disappearing with each streetlight we passed and mutterin
g inaudibly, “Andras Malesevics, Andras Malesevics, Andras Malesevics.”

  We took the tram to the last stop, and after walking some distance, we arrived at our destination. This whole neighborhood consisted of small one-story apartment houses. They looked shabby compared to our old neighborhood. The building we went to had perhaps a dozen units surrounding a courtyard. Jozsef bacsi 's parents lived in one of these units. Their apartment had one room and a kitchen. My mother and I were to sleep in a folding bed that was stashed in a corner of the kitchen.

  Jozsef bacsi 's parents greeted us warmly enough. His mother toasted slices of bread on a pan on the gas stove, spread some lard on top, and gave them to me. I ate them with gusto while she and my mother went about setting up the cot we would share in the kitchen.

  Before I went to sleep, I had to use the toilet. There was no bathroom in this apartment. You had to go outside to the courtyard, where there was a communal toilet with stalls shared by men and women. My mother warned me, never, absolutely never, to pee in front of anybody or to wash myself in front of anybody. I had been circumcised, as Jewish boys in Hungary typically were, but Christian Hungarian boys were not. If anybody saw my penis, it would have given me away instantly. I took this to heart and became extremely private.

  The next morning, my mother heated a pan of water on the stove and I washed myself. Then I got dressed and ventured out to the courtyard. Another boy my age was playing there. His name was Jozsi. We started playing together. There were a few other kids in the apartment building, some younger, some older than we were, but the two of us became inseparable buddies.

  Romacz visited us a few days later. He was wearing a backpack, from which he took a couple of loaves of bread, some lard, and some other food, which he gave to us. My mother took it with profuse thanks and made it our contribution to the household food supply. Romacz kidded around with me a little. It was a welcome change in an otherwise quiet and serious environment.