Swimming Across: A Memoir Read online

  He didn't react at all. He dragged the sled toward his apartment, waved good-bye, and went inside.

  I stayed in the courtyard to finish building my snowman. Half an hour or so later, Jozsi's father appeared in his doorway and called out to me, “Andris, come in here.” I went. I didn't know what to expect. He had not been unfriendly to me, but other than at Christmas, he had never invited me in before.

  When I came into their kitchen, the father told me to sit down on a stool by the kitchen table. He pulled out another stool for himself and brought out a sheet of paper and a pencil. “What did you say your name was?” he asked.

  I could feel the heat rising in my face. Andris, I told him, Andris Grof. I sat there looking at him. He went on, “And where did you live?” My face got hotter. But I told him. “And where is your father? What did he do before the war?”

  And so it went, question after question. Slowly, carefully, he wrote down each answer I gave him on the sheet of paper. Then he looked at me and without a word folded the paper and got up and went to a cupboard filled with shirts and slid the folded paper below the stack of shirts. He thanked me without a smile. I told him he was welcome—also without a smile.

  I got up and left. Once outside, I began trembling with fear and from the hatred welling up inside me.

  I found my mother in our apartment and burst out with what had just happened. I was panting so hard, I could barely speak. When I was finished, we stared silently at each other for a long moment. I was still breathing heavily; she didn't seem to breathe at all. Then she said, “It won't do him any good. The Nazis are gone. Gone.” I nodded. I couldn't say a word. I was choking with hatred.

  A couple of days after Haie told my mother that the Germans were chased out of the Pest side, my mother decided it was time to go home to Kiraly Street. The trams, of course, were not running, so going home meant walking ten miles through the snow-covered streets.

  The night before, we carefully made our preparations. My mother borrowed a backpack and put all of our clothing and some food into it. Early the next morning, after saying goodbye to the neighbors and hugging Jozsef bacsi 's parents, we set off.

  The streets were empty and covered with snow. Tanks and troop carriers had chewed up the snow, and the tire tracks had frozen into hard, icy ruts. At first, there was not much sign of the war, other than occasional Russian patrols. But as we kept walking, the street scene started to change.

  We saw streetcars standing abandoned in the streets. The overhead power lines were broken, and the wires lay twisted on the ground next to the trams. Burned-out military vehicles, both German and Russian, were scattered around. As we got closer to the center of town, the houses started to show signs of fighting. Some buildings had big round holes in them, through which we could see destroyed apartments. Broken bricks and pieces of mortar were strewn over the street. Everywhere, the plaster on the outside walls showed bullet marks. And all the windows were blown out, with broken glass everywhere crunching under our feet.

  There was an eerie quiet in the streets and no traffic. The few people out moved furtively, trying to make themselves inconspicuous. They were mainly women, who were bundled up, their kerchief-covered heads bent down so you could hardly see their faces.

  We kept walking. At one intersection, I saw a man lying in the street facedown, his legs and arms sprawled out. It was the first time I had ever seen a dead body. I kept turning my head to look at him. My mother yanked on my hand and growled, “Look where you're going.”

  We kept walking. Down one street, I could see a strange shape. As we got nearer, I realized it was a dead horse sprawled by the side of the street. An old man crouched next to it, sawing away at the horse's frozen leg with a kitchen knife, cutting off slivers of meat and dropping them into a bucket that was next to him. He didn't look at us as we walked past.

  The closer we got to the center of the city, the worse was the devastation left behind from the fighting. I kept looking around with a sense of wonder. I felt as if I were in a dream. The city didn't look like the Budapest I'd left behind just a few weeks before. In barely two months, it had become a different world.

  The sensation of being in a dream kept me from feeling fatigue and also kept me from wondering what would await us at the end of our journey. I just kept walking, numb. After a while, I was neither particularly surprised nor unsurprised by anything we encountered.

  To break our trip, we stopped at the apartment of a friend of my parents. This friend was a Jew who had been a highly decorated officer in the Hungarian army. Because of that, he did not have to move into the Jewish houses or a ghetto, and he and his family were exempt from the regulations that governed the rest of the Jews. My mother was confident that he would still be in his apartment. We were looking forward to a break in our journey.

  We went up to the third floor of the building where he lived and knocked on his door, but neither he nor his family were in that apartment anymore. Some neighbors heard our knocking and came out to tell us what happened. The Arrow Cross had taken him and his wife and his children, who were younger than I, out to an empty lot nearby and shot the entire family, decorations notwithstanding. After a moment of silence, my mother turned around and left, pulling me by my hand.

  We headed to the last place we had stayed, in the Jewish house on Eotvos Street. The house was largely untouched by the fighting. Somebody else was already in our apartment when we arrived. We put down our backpack and immediately went over to our real apartment on Kiraly Street. There was no glass in any of the windows, but the apartment house was still standing.

  We knocked on the superintendent's door, and his wife answered it. After a startled pause, she hugged both of us. She was genuinely glad to see us. She said, “People didn't expect you to come back.”

  My mother looked at her for a moment, then said quietly, “We are back.”

  The super's wife told my mother that somebody had moved into our apartment and that most of our furniture was taken away. Then she said, “Let me have some time to take care of things.” We went back to the Jewish house and spent the night with the strangers who had moved into the apartment where we had stayed.

  The next day, we returned to Kiraly Street. Our apartment was vacant. The windows had been covered with thick tan packing paper. It kept the cold air out, but it also kept out the light, so the apartment looked as gloomy as if it were dusk. Some of our furniture was missing. Other pieces were in the wrong place, so our apartment didn't look like home. And it was filthy, with everything covered with dust and dirt and grit. One of the beds was outside in the corridor. The bed had a huge gash in the middle of the mattress. My mother pressed her lips together but didn't say anything.

  Bit by bit, our belongings surfaced. I didn't think we got everything back, but it started to look like our old apartment.

  Right: Me, at age 10, standing on the walkway in front of our apartment.

  Below: I graduated from the fourth grade (I am the third one from the left in the third row). The girl I had a secret crush on is the second from the left. Margit neni and the school principal are in the middle.

  Chapter Six

  AFTER THE WAR

  THE FIGHTING was over, but Budapest was still occupied, this time by the Russian army. No sooner had we settled back into our apartment than the super passed the word that the Russian authorities wanted us all to go out into the streets and shovel the snow. Even though I was only eight, I had to go, too. They couldn't find a shovel small enough for me, so I was given a sharp hoe with which to chip off bits of ice and frozen snow from the pavement.

  We were called out for similar snow-shoveling exercises frequently during the rest of that winter. No one ever worked too hard. People shoveled because they were ordered to, not because they were enthusiastic about it. However, it was a good opportunity to talk and exchange news. That's how we heard that Jani had been picked up by the Russians and taken away to a prison camp.

  My mother buttonholed everyone
she ran into to ask if they had heard anything about my father. The answer was always, “No.” But that didn't stop her. She asked about my father all the time. She would interrupt ordinary conversations to question people she had already asked the day before. I found her insistent inquiries as annoying as a fly buzzing around my head and, it seemed to me, about as productive. We never got any news.

  Normal life returned in fits and starts. Soon after we returned home, Gizi and her husband, Sinko, returned and settled back in their room next to the kitchen. Reassured that there was someone to take care of me, my mother took a trip to Bascalmas to visit what used to be the main branch of the dairy. She packed her bag full of extra clothing, silverware, and china to barter for food. She returned a day or so later with fresh cottage cheese, sour cream, salami, and other things that I hadn't seen for months. I jumped up and down with joy when I saw them.

  My mother told a harrowing story of her trip. Train service had started back up, but it was sporadic and the trains were crowded beyond belief. My mother traveled both directions on the top of a train along with a lot of other people, all of them hanging on to the roof and to each other to keep from falling off.

  After a while, Sinko and my mother started making these trips regularly, and eventually my mother reopened the storefront that used to be the dairy distribution outlet. (Like other stores in Budapest, it had closed as a result of the fighting. Luckily, unlike many, it was not damaged.) My mother started to sell the dairy products she and Sinko brought back from the country. This way, in a very modest fashion, the dairy business started back up again.

  When Sinko wasn't busy with the dairy or getting the apartment back in order, he occasionally took me to City Park. He had an old, beat-up bicycle, and he let me ride on the crossbar as he pedaled down Kiraly Street. Sinko liked to go fast. The streets were rutted and full of potholes from the fighting, and on every bump the crossbar bit into my bottom. But I didn't care. These outings were always very special.

  We didn't do much when we got to City Park. I had no friends my age and Sinko didn't qualify as a playmate, so we just rode around, bumping along on the unpaved paths. I desperately wanted to learn how to ride a bike. Once in a while, Sinko let me sit on the seat while he walked the bicycle, but my feet didn't even reach the pedals.

  By the time spring came around, my mother was very busy with her trips to Bacsalmas and the business. School had reopened. Even though some kids went back to class, my mother figured that I might as well skip the entire year and make it up later.

  My mother and I had decided that I would have the Little Room as my own, but soon the novelty of having my own room wore off. I was pretty much left alone, and I was bored and a little lonely just hanging around. However, hanging around became much more fun when I hooked up with Gabi.

  Gabi Fleiner was not related to me, but he might as well have been. His mother was one of the daughters of the owner of a neighborhood tobacco shop. The shop had been around forever. It supplied my mother with cigarettes, postcards, and stamps, and me with occasional candy. The smoke shop owner's family and my mother had a cordial relationship that went back a long way. Our families had something else in common: Like my father, Gabi's father had been taken away to a forced labor battalion and had not returned. Gabi and I had known each other before the war, but we had not been close friends. Now we became inseparable.

  Gabi and I were the same age and about the same height. I was a little pudgy, while he was quite skinny. He had light brown, straight hair, and I had curly dark hair. Gabi was the more enterprising one of us, and he became the leader in our adventures.

  Our first mission was to explore the neighborhood. The streets were a big playground of rubble and bombed-out buildings. We poked around the piles of rubble and gawked at the damaged buildings, returning to our apartments only to grab a bite to eat. It was like being on permanent vacation. Meanwhile, all of the adults were preoccupied with getting their lives back to normal, so they didn't pay much attention to us.

  One day, Gabi took me to a little general store that had sprung up in a bombed-out storefront a few blocks from home. The glass had been blown out from all the windows and hadn't been replaced yet. The goods were displayed in the window opening, protected by a chicken-wire screen. There were potatoes, cabbage, and onions and other staples, and there was also some candy.

  Gabi and I looked in through the chicken wire. Then, while the store owner was busy with a customer, Gabi nudged me with his elbow, quickly reached in through the chicken wire, and grabbed a handful of candy. I did likewise. Nobody saw us, but we pounded off down the street as if we were being chased. When we ran out of breath, we stopped and ate some of the candy; the rest we stashed away in our pockets. It wasn't very good candy, not as good as I remembered from before the war, but being stolen gave it extra flavor. Then we sauntered home.

  My mother was home when we arrived. She had an uncanny ability to know when I was up to something or when I was telling less than the truth, and this case was no different. She eyeballed us sternly and with a few pointed questions quickly found out what we had done. She erupted. Then, still breathing fire, she ordered us to take back the candy we had left and apologize to the storekeeper. She gave us some money to pay for what we had eaten.

  We went back to the store, much more slowly than we had come. My mother followed at a distance, close enough to ensure that we did as we were supposed to but far enough away to let the storekeeper speak her mind to us freely. It didn't take a lot of explanation for the shopkeeper to get the picture. She knew the whole story as soon as we opened our grubby hands and handed her the candy and the change. She accepted them and our apology, and we left. That was the end of my life as a criminal, but not the end of my adventures.

  In the absence of school, organized activities, or much in the way of toys, we had to be inventive to entertain ourselves. Sometimes it didn't take much. The main staircase in our building spiraled all the way from the ground floor to the top. One rainy day, Gabi and I went up the main staircase to the top floor, and we peed down the stairwell, marveling at the shape of the falling streams and the way the drops hit the stone floor two stories below.

  When my mother came home that night, I knew I was in big trouble. Someone must have spotted us and told her what we had done. She called me into the bathroom and yelled at me, and before I knew what she was doing, she started beating my bottom with the handle of a wooden spoon. Although I'd had an occasional slap, I had never been beaten before. It hurt. It hurt a lot. I started bawling and tried to make myself as small a target as possible by clinging to the towel rod and plastering myself against the wall. But my mother kept yelling and the wooden spoon continued to find me.

  Finally she stopped. No one said anything. After her yelling and my bawling, the silence throbbed as painfully as my bottom. I went to my room and lay down on the bed, trying to find a position in which my bottom didn't hurt. I didn't succeed. I tried to read. I read the same paragraph over and over many times before I gave up. I put my head down on the pillow, feeling very sorry for myself. Finally, I went to sleep.

  The next day, I had black-and-red-striped welts all over the backs of my thighs. Some of them showed beneath the hem of my shorts. When I went to visit my mother in the store, her co-workers noticed them and gave my mother a hard time. This consoled me some. Meanwhile, I learned my lesson. I never peed in the stairwell again.

  As the weather became warmer, Gabi and I would go to City Park to play. One time, I found a cartridge of rifle shells. There were six bullets, all shiny and clearly live. It was a real treasure.

  I took the cartridge home and studied our apartment with a purposeful eye. The windows from the bathroom and Gizi's room both opened onto an airshaft, which allowed light to come in from above. Since the building next to us had been demolished, light also came in from the side. The bottom of the airshaft was on the level of our floor. I could climb out through the bathroom window and pretend that I had a private little cou
rtyard. But I had to be very careful that I didn't fall out of it. This area was maybe six feet square, with concrete on the bottom and bricks on three sides. It was the perfect hiding place.

  I climbed out of the bathroom window, clutching my cartridge of bullets, and looked around. I noticed that some of the mortar under the bathroom window was loose. I picked at it with my finger and was able to dislodge a chunk, exposing a hole under the window. The cartridge fit perfectly. I slid it in, then replaced the mortar to hide it. After that, I snuck out of the bathroom window periodically to examine my treasure. I was always very careful. There were all kinds of rumors about kids playing with unexploded munitions and blowing their hands off. I didn't want that to happen to me.

  The war was effectively over in early April of 1945. By the middle of April, the last of the Germans and the Arrow Cross retreated from Hungary. Budapest was gradually returning to the life of a functioning city and becoming recognizable again. Little by little, the paper in the shattered windows was replaced by real glass and the piles of rubble in the streets were cleared away. Some of the streetcars began running again. Stores started to open for business, in a rudimentary fashion. Food was rationed, but peasants from the countryside brought produce to the city to sell, so there was a growing variety of food available. The Russian soldiers were still there, marching around and standing guard, much as the Germans had done a year earlier. I could barely remember a time when soldiers hadn't been a backdrop to my everyday life.

  One of the first signs that life was returning to normal was the reappearance of newspapers. They were sold by boys my age, who ran up and down the streets shouting out the headlines in order to promote sales. One day in August, the kids were madly waving the papers and shouting, “Auto bomb dropped on Japan! Auto bomb dropped on Japan!” I didn't know what an auto bomb was. When I asked, I was told it was a very big bomb, so big that the war might be over. And in a few days the newsboys were shouting that it was.