The Budapest House

By Marcus Ferrar

About the Author

Marcus Ferrar is a former Reuters correspondent who covered Eastern Europe for 18 years and during the Cold War living in East Berlin and Prague. He conducted extensive interviews in Hungary for this book. He has worked as a media consultant in the Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. He lives in Oxford, U.K. He specialises in histories of people who faced moral dilemmas. His previous books are A Foot in Both Camps: A German Past for Better and for Worse and Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival after World War II. For more info on the author, please visit www.marcusferrar.org

About the Author Prologue 1. A Grandfathers Dream 2. The Cauldron 3. Humiliated 4. Putting the Pieces Together 5. America 6. Uprising 7. Authors and Publishers 8. A New World, A New Identity 9. Opening up Knowledge 10. Mindsets 11. Lost track 12. A Question of Jewishness? 13. Greater Hungary, Orban and Europe 14. Leaving Home Epilogue Sources and Acknowledgements Selected reading

To Jzsef and his mother

PROLOGUE

BROKEN GLASS
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's children when the time of sorrow is come?
T.S. Eliot

Frances is British and feels at home in Britain. She loves London, with its cosmopolitan bustle. She is at ease in the village atmosphere of Belsize Park, where intellectuals and artists cluster. She adores her apartment from which she watches the Household Cavalry rest their horses beneath plane trees after exercising on Hampstead Heath. But like others in this part of London, she is no ordinary Briton. In fact, she is not entirely British at all. She has a past, elsewhere. Her rst memories are growing up in America and Switzerland, with little inkling of being different from anybody else around her. But she is. She has a hinterland, which intruded on her one day in 1962 when she was 13. A family friend visiting her in her Swiss boarding school casually let drop that Frances was a Jew. A Jew? She, a Jew? She knew her parents were Hungarian but had no idea the family was Jewish. As she sat in her room that evening after classes ended, one thought after another crowded in. Her family was small and scattered all over the world. Why? Maybe there had once been more. Where had they gone? Eventually the answer dawned on her: Auschwitz! She was struck with horror, followed immediately by stigma. She was part of a persecuted, vilied race struck down by catastrophe. She felt touched by evil, distanced from the straightforward, normal schoolmates she wanted to associate with. Moreover the school was Catholic, and Catholics had long been insidiously blaming the Jews for the death of Christ. Would people now point ngers at her? She felt damned and humiliated. She no longer knew who she really was. Her adolescent sense of identity crumbled. Worse still, she felt betrayed. Her parents had been hiding from her that they were all Jews. She was angry with them, and felt guilty about being angry. As this personal

history of which she knew nothing fell upon her, the strain became intolerable. In the fading light she seized a framed photograph of her parents and stamped it into a pile of glass splinters. The sense of evil that these revelations brought went beyond the fate of the Jews. She thought back to 1955 when her grandparents came to live with Frances family in America. They came from Budapest, the same city where her parents had grown up. The city had become too threatening to be home. The grandparents had been eeing from some other evil, but what? Shortly after they arrived, she had watched the grownups gasp with horror as images of ghting and destruction in the home country ickered across their American television screen. It was all vague and incomprehensible, and to the little girl at the time it was unsettling, but never explained. She had seen her grandfather fall into ruin. Every day he put on a suit and tie, and she could see he had once been someone. But now he spent his days lying listlessly on his bed, fully dressed, listening to Hungarian music played by an American radio station. He did nothing. What had broken him? Little ltered through. Her parents spoke of the good old days in Budapest before the war, but otherwise spent most of the time quarrelling over nothing, as Frances later observed. It was a difcult personal history, and nobody wanted to explain it much. Like millions of others brought up after World War II, Frances had no roots, no homeland, no proud historical heritage and precious little family. She came from nowhere. I was dislocated, psychologically stranded. I feel as if I never really grew up. Whenever I met somebody, I realised they were not like me and it came as a shock, she said, years later. For many, such a baleful background causes only fear and anxiety. History presses down upon them, and they feel helpless under its weight. To make the present tolerable, they turn their faces away from the past. Only like that can they move on into the future. Or so it may seem. But not necessarily so. Frances was not one to mope helplessly about the past. Her mother did that. She was not going to take life easily. That is what her father did. She was not going to blank out her past. It niggled her. She was going to deal with it head-on, even if it took her 20 years or more. Frances pricked up her ears when her grandfather spoke of the Budapest House. It was his. He had bought it before the war and the penthouse apartment still belonged to

him. This dwelling had something sinister about it too, as Frances would later discover. It beckoned to her. Years later she moved into the Budapest House, and as she turned the key in the door she started unlocking the meaning of her life.

CHAPTER 1

A GRANDFATHERS DREAM
I dont know where my attention strayed. I let go of the world, and it broke into pieces
Ern! Szp, 1884-1953, Hungarian Jewish writer

I met Frances a few years ago after she returned from living in Budapest. I had worked with her husband David for some time, and as we sat together in their house in southwest France, Frances began telling stories of her past. They intrigued me, as I have known Eastern Europe for 40 years, and my German mother, a refugee from the Nazis, brought me up on stories of the Holocaust. I was moved because I picked up her dilemma over personal identity. I am not Jewish myself, but I grew up uncomfortably after World War II as the son of a British father and German mother. For much of my life, I have had a nagging doubt where I stood between these two old foes. I have also lived and worked for years in Eastern Europe, and Francess stories about conict and trauma resonated with me. I felt they concerned me too. But would she see it like that? I probed her with questions, and at rst she demurred. It went too deep. My window of opportunity was small. I sat down there and then and wrote a short story about the part of her life she had just recounted. By lunchtime I had nished. She was charmed. I had won. We decided to explore her past together. The Frances I knew so far was a condent groundbreaker in business and philanthropy. Now I also heard the small voice of a child anxious that the world was about to fall in upon her and unsure where she belonged but determined not to let matters rest. Why did the property her Jewish grandfather hung on to through one calamity after another mean so much to her? What chance saved him and her grandmother from the genocide which decimated Hungarian Jews? Why did he still have to ee his home 10 years after the war ended? She took me back to 1937, and told me of her grandfather, Imre Hirschenhauser. He was riding high as an entrepreneur and had just bought a part-nished block of ats

in Budapest from a developer who had gone bankrupt. As emerged years later, his wife Lili was not amused when he broke the news. She had married at 18, was 10 years younger than him, and they worked together in his growing business. By the time she was 38 she had developed a mind of her own that told her this was crazy. After all, Lili and Imre lived in a ne old block above the Berlin restaurant on the Ring boulevard encircling central Budapest. That much Frances knew. But what was going on when this family decision was in the balance? She was not too sure, so I started to read up, drawing on what I already knew about that part of Europe, and visited Budapest to discover what I had missed on my previous visits going back to 1973. Walking around the Ring, I could see that the old Hirschenhauser residence was indeed something a classical dwelling of the late nineteenth century, which Hungarians look back on as a Golden Age the period when Hungary enjoyed autonomy within the Hapsburg Empire. In the 50 years of peace up to 1914, Budapest had become one of the most dynamic capitals of Europe. Only Berlin grew faster. Budapest had Europes rst metro, electric tramways, 600 cafs, 20 newspapers and the worlds largest parliament building. This was the style in which people such as Imre and Lili had become accustomed to living in. Besides its inner core, Hungary then encompassed Croatia, Serbia down to Belgrade, Transylvania (now in Romania), todays Slovakia, and parts of Poland and the Ukraine. It dominated the Danube region. Unfortunately, Golden Age or not, Hungarians were seduced by the siren songs of competitive nationalism which pervaded Europe towards the end of the century. Nations were led to believe they must be pitted against each other in a perpetual struggle for survival. Leaders invoked pseudo-scientic law derived from Darwins theory of evolution through the natural selection of species. Conict was presumed to be inevitable; there were bound to be winners and losers. Behind the classical faades, tensions were thus building which boded ill for Jews such as Imre and Lili but more immediately for the large number of Slavs who lived within Hungarys frontiers. Hungarians felt superior to the Slavs, but also threatened. To make sure they kept on top, they ruled that everybody in the state bureaucracy, down to railwaymen and postmen, as well as schools, the press and cultural institutions, had to speak the Hungarian Magyar language. That effectively excluded Slavs.

In this language discrimination, the Hungarians at rst saw Jews such as the Hirschenhauser family as their allies, because they were ready to drop their Yiddish tongue for Magyar. As the proportion of Magyar speakers in Greater Hungary had never been much more than 50 per cent, the Jews were welcome. By 1910, the number of Jews living in Hungary had risen to 911,000 and accounted for one fth of the population of Budapest. They assimilated eagerly, supported the government nancially and excelled in patriotism. A fair number converted to Christianity; one even became a Catholic bishop. Twenty-ve were made barons, and hundreds belonged to the lesser Hungarian nobility. Jews rose to high posts in nance, commerce, the media, academia, science and the arts. Imre and Lili Hirschenhauser were so thoroughly integrated that their ethnicity scarcely mattered. Imre could make a solid livelihood as an entrepreneur, and others became very wealthy. A photograph at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest shows two little boys detraining in Auschwitz wearing embroidered coats with fur collars. By 1910, every second Hungarian lawyer or physician was a Jew. Jews won admittance to universities in much greater numbers than Gentiles. The Hirschenhausers daughter Agnes, who later gave birth to Frances, gained a chemistry degree.1 The Jews sense of self-value grew. Frances showed me books by Hungarian Jewish writers published in English by a Budapest press she once managed. One of these, Ern! Szp, wrote a memoir about persecution in World War II, in which he halfjokingly referred to fellow-Jews in his forced labour gang as the gentlemen, contrasting their renement with the uncouthness of the Aryan Hungarians guarding them. Unlike Polish Jews, who lived mainly in self-contained settlements and married only amongst each other, Hungarian Jews did not necessarily look typically Jewish only two out of ten, according to Szp.2 Some of them took assimilation so far that they voiced anti-Semitic opinions in order to distance themselves from Jewish stereotyping. Almost every Jew, even those who stayed in their denomination, was an antiSemite, revolted by the other Jews, wrote Szp.3 Another wartime writer recommended to me by Frances, Bla Zsolt, said a Jew who found him too superior in a labour camp in the Ukraine, told him: Remember, youre a shitty Jew like me.4 The Jewish hero of Imre Kertszs Nobel Prize-winning novel Fatelessness says of

the Polish Jews he met in Auschwitz: Their faces did not exactly inspire condence: jug ears, prominent noses, sunken, beady eyes with a crafty gleam. Quite like Jews in every respect. I found them suspect, altogether foreign-looking.5 The Hungarians participation in Europes cut-throat nationalism brought disaster. After losing WWI alongside the Austrians and Germans, the Hungarian state collapsed and the peoples they had kept down took revenge. Romania, Serbia and newly-formed Czecho-Slovakia occupied the parts of Greater Hungary where their own ethnic groups lived, with the support of the United States, France and Britain. At the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, the victorious powers deprived the Hungarian state of over two-thirds of its territory and 60 per cent of its population. Hungarians found the breathtaking scale of the humiliation unfair, all the more so since 30 per cent of ethnic Hungarians were thenceforth located outside the rump Hungarian state. Instead of a Slav minority problem arose a Hungarian minority problem. The new frontiers cut arbitrarily across natural boundaries and communication routes. Nobody consulted the populations concerned it was decided over their heads. Flags were own at half-mast in Hungary because of this until 1938, and a raging sense of injustice dominated the nation for the next 60 years. After6 Trianon, Hungary lled with embittered refugees from the lost territories. They stirred up passions aggravated by the phenomenal losses Hungary suffered in the war: over half their soldiers were killed, wounded or captured.7 The Communist revolution started by Bla Kun in 1919 made things worse. It was the rst Communist dictatorship outside Russia, and lled a void left by the collapse of the landed gentry. The new regime set up revolutionary soviets, occupied factories and nationalised most of the economy, including large tracts of land. A Committee of Public Safety travelled the country in a death train, administering summary justice to political opponents, while a Red Guard and a group of leatherjacketed Lenin Boys conducted a campaign of ad hoc murder.8 Kuns Communists shocked nearly everyone with their disorder and violence, and antagonised the peasants by requisitioning food supplies. For the nationalists who had been pushed aside, Kuns Bolshevism was anathema because it was atheist, internationalist and inspired by Russia. It was all too tempting to focus on the fact that more than half the Hungarian Communist commissars were Jews.

With the Slavs now outside Hungarys shrunken boundaries, Hungarians looked for new scapegoats. The success of the Jews attracted jealousy and resentment. They were accused of betraying, spying and proteering to the detriment of honest Hungarian citizens that is, the majority who were Aryan, Christian, nationalist and humiliated as losers in the Darwinian struggle. The revolutionaries were driven from power within months by an army led by Admiral Mikls Horthy, who entered the capital on a white horse. Addressing assembled citizens, he accused misguided Budapest of degrading the whole Hungarian nation: This city has disowned her thousand years of tradition, she has dragged the Holy Crown and the national colours in the dust, she has clothed herself in red rags she has laid ruin to our property and wasted our wealth. As retribution duly followed Horthy called it his iron broom the currents of anti-Semitism began to swirl through open sluices.9 All of this was not yet much of a threat to Imre Hirschenhauser who, as a youthful businessman, was no doubt pleased that the Communists were quickly swept away. Horthys return to rule by the gentry in 1919, selsh and anachronistic though it may have been, at least restored order and property rights. While others lost everything in the catastrophe of World War I, Imre was poised to make the most of new opportunities. Horthy established himself as Regent, with quasi-presidential powers. While he resided in the Buda castle, he settled his family in a at in Balzac Street. As it happened, this was just around the corner from the block which Imre Hirschenhauser set his eye on in 1937. Lili did not see the point of moving from their comfortable home to a new building that was scarcely complete. Imre brushed aside her doubts. He was an entrepreneur. Invest one third in property, one third in gold and one third in bonds, was his credo. Granddaughter Frances now has his worthless Hungarian state bonds adorning the walls of her study, but Imre could not have known then that another world war and a Communist dictatorship would intervene. His instinct for real estate proved more sound. He told Frances as a young girl, If you own property, hold on to it. If Imre ever felt bitter about Trianon, he did not allow it to weigh him down. With the Budapest House, he was investing in a better future. He nished off the six-storey

block located on the corner of an intersection on Holln Ern! Street. It had curved balconies in the Bauhaus style. In the front hall, black-and-white Art Deco oor tiles embodied the sharp-cut new fashion. Geometric wrought iron balustrades zigzagged up the staircase, and the walls were clad in grey-and-white veined marble. Imre had the outside painted bright yellow and settled his family in the penthouse apartment at the top. A lift took them directly to their apartment. They had a key to open the lift door on that oor. The rooftop terrace outside the penthouse was enormous. The sort of home you see in lms with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is how Frances saw it later. It was a home for people looking ahead. The Ujliptvros district where it was located was an up-and-coming neighbourhood. Intellectuals and Jews such as Imre and Lili were gathering there, as they do still today. Its quiet streets lie just north of the city centre close to the Danube. Across the river is Margaret Island, where citizens go to stroll among its trees and meadows. However the area was still a bit doubtful at the time. Tibor Gold, born into another Jewish family on the other side of the street in 1942, remembers his mother was concerned that it was only just becoming gentried.10 Further north, the streets were mean and derelict, lined by wooden huts with no sanitation and little electricity. Elderly residents remember it as a wasteland. Lili Hirschenhausers hesitation was not unfounded. As she grew up, Frances heard how seriously Imre had taken his duties as a family man. He was a stern but caring parent to Agnes, their only child, later to become Francess mother. He ensured that she had a good education at a Jewish Gymnasium. She did well, and led a happy teenagers life. Her parents were proud of her. For Imre and Lili, focused on the challenges of everyday life, the upsurge of antiSemitism must have seemed like a blip. Over long years, the Jewish community had learned to ignore the barbs, treating them as exceptions rather than the rule. They trusted that things would eventually calm down, as they always had. To believe that catastrophe was imminent was in any case too painful. Jewish author Ern! Szp wrote: The brain rejects and refuses to acknowledge all the horrors accosting us. There is a beautiful wisdom in this built-in defence.11 Calamity may never happen, so why abandon work, homes, friends and a familiar environment? How could they guess that their Hungarian compatriots would soon

deliver them up to genocide? Hindsight was not available to them. It started in 1920, when a numerus clausus reduced the proportion of Jewish students in universities from 24 to six per cent. The Jews were being punished for their historic devotion to learning. It was the rst anti-Semitic law in post-WWI Europe, and spelled an end to the Hungarian Jews equal rights enshrined by law since 1867. Some of them took advantage of a loophole: if they converted to Christianity, they were exempt. Many of these cared little for religion, but it was a denial of self and a demeaning concession to prejudice, the rst of many. In the end, bending the knee served no purpose. When they were led away to be exterminated, it mattered nothing whether they were patriotic, Christian, conservative and upright. Just their race counted. For Imre, a self-made man, and Lili, trained as a seamstress and schooled only until 14, the university decree was of little consequence. But further decrees limited the number of Jews in public employment, and Jewish intellectuals such as composer Bla Bartk, Marxist philosopher Gy!rgy Lukcs and writer Arthur Koestler began slipping away into exile abroad. Economic collapse caused riots and the downfall of Prime Minister Istvn Bethlen in 1931. Financiers were blamed that is, the Jews. Gyula Gmbs took power with an anti-Semitic programme and courted Hitler and Mussolini, but after a few years he had to give way to a more moderate Prime Minister, Klmn Darnyi. For Jews such as the Hirschenhausers, it was sometimes worse, sometimes better, but no real threat. The landowners wanted to preserve the status quo, not agitate. If Frances later felt ambivalent about her background, so too no doubt did her grandparents. However events were running away from them. After the British and French appeased Hitler over Czechoslovakia in Munich in 1938, the Germans could easily push Hungarian opinion their way. The Nazis arranged an agreement returning to Hungary two million inhabitants and 12,000 square kilometres of the Slovak territory which it had lost at Trianon. In a second award two years later, the Germans forced Romania to give Hungary back a further 2.5 million inhabitants and 43,000 square kilometres in Transylvania. The die was cast. When World War II broke out, there was no doubt that Hungary would side with the Axis powers. It joined the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan in 1941. That year Hungary annexed a further 1.1 million people and

11,000 square kilometres as it shared the spoils of the German invasion of Yugoslavia. Overwhelmed by the squalid bargaining (and shocked that the Germans crossed Hungary without asking permission), Prime Minister Pl Teleki shot himself. Further anti-Jewish legislation accompanied the slide towards the Fascist camp. Jews were banned from working as doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, actors and lm-makers. In 1941 marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews were made illegal. Around this time, another family of Budapest Jews decided to change their name from Schwartz to Soros. It sounded less Jewish. Their younger son, aged six, was called George.12 In the last two decades of the century he was to play an important role in his countrys destiny and would give Frances a chance to change her life. Jews were banned from service as soldiers, but were sent unarmed in labour battalions to the Ukrainian front, where they were brutalised by Aryan guards and suffered enormous casualties from enemy action, starvation, disease, exhaustion and exposure. Fewer than 7,000 out of 50,000 returned alive. One of the victims was Antal Szerb, author of a novel I unearthed and read, Journey by Moonlight, published to great acclaim in 1937. He was a lifelong Anglophile, an authority on German, Italian, French and English traditions and author of a monumental History of Literature. A colleague wrote of him that he knew everything. Born a Catholic, educated in a seminary, he was deemed a Jew by blood. In 1944, he died wretchedly at the age of 43 in a labour camp.13 In 1942, the government conscated and redistributed agricultural land owned by Jews. By 1944, they could not use taxis, trains, buses or boats only trams. Hoping to put off the worst, they dutifully queued outside government ofces to hand in radios, which they were no longer allowed to own. All of this did not yet spell disaster for Frances grandparents. For those like Imre who escaped mobilisation to the front, the Jews in Hungary were until 1944 in less danger than elsewhere. George Soros remembers his main problem as a boy was that he could no longer obtain English tennis balls.14 As anti-Semitic persecution worsened elsewhere, 100,000 Jews sought refuge in Hungary from neighbouring Slovakia, Romania and Croatia. * * *

I like the history, remarked Frances after reading what I pulled together about the times her grandparents lived in. I wondered why she had not discovered it herself, but I realised it was not so easy. In America, the grandparents and parents had told her precious little. Events were too recent, too painful and too difcult to fathom themselves. What she had read in history books seemed remote from her own personal story. As is often the case with children of parents numbed by tragedy, it made all the difference if an outsider could help lter what had happened. We were setting out on a search for understanding together. But I was not going to let her off the hook. She also had to nd out things for herself. I sent Frances off to investigate, and soon she pulled a rabbit out the hat. Rummaging through her family les, she found a memoir written by an aunt Agi Jambor.15 This cousin of Francess mother was a concert pianist, who had performed as a child prodigy all over Europe before the war. Agi played duets with Albert Einstein in Berlin, and as she cockily remarked later, she yelled at him for counting the beat wrongly. Agi left Hungary for Holland in 1938 when her husband, a radio cathode inventor, was hired by Philips. In her memoir, she recalls that she was playing a Chopin scherzo in 1940 on Radio Hilversum when a man stepped on to the stage and warned: German planes are overhead. The audience ran out, and the concert came to a halt. Her husband listened aghast by his radio in Eindhoven as the music stopped and there was silence. When Agi was playing in Holland at a camp for German children who were refugees from concentration camps, she asked if anybody would like to play with her. A young man of 18 said he was a concert violinist, but had not played since camp guards broke his ngers and dislocated his shoulders. He borrowed a violin from the superintendent. There was no sheet music available, so he improvised. He played wonderfully, said Agi. When air raid sirens interrupted another concert she was giving for the children, she asked them if they wanted her to stop. They answered: We would rather continue. If we must die, we would rather die with music. The Germans later killed all the children.

Despite the fact that both were partly Jewish, Agi and her husband returned to Hungary in 1942. This was not as astonishing as it may seem. The Germans occupying Holland treated them correctly. Hungary was an Axis ally and not then under German occupation. There were no bombing raids. Prospects back at home seemed reasonable. The Soros family were briey in Switzerland then but did not consider seeking asylum. Writer Bla Zsolt likewise acceded to his wifes entreaties that they return home from Paris. The outbreak of war terried her, and she felt they would be safer in Hungary than in a foreign country. They could not have got it more wrong. * * *

By 1937 the daughter of Imre and Lili Hirschenhauser, Agnes, was already abroad too. With possibilities for Jews to study being closed down at home, she had been sent to study science in Switzerland at the ETH technical high school in Zurich. There she met another Hungarian Jew, Gy!rgy (George) Pinter, who had been sent for the same reason. However persecution and anti-Semitism were far from their thoughts. Their professional futures were bright, and the Alps offered skiing, fresh air and beautiful landscapes. They were in love and about to get married. When they did, he was 24 and she 21. Frances would be their rst child. They look so stylish in those photos taken in Zrich. They were on a budget and lived simply. But they were elegant, without trying. It was just in the blood, said their younger daughter Susanne 60 years later. George Pinter nearly died of polio early in his life and often stood shyly in the shadow of his older brother. But he ourished in his Hungarian high school, became a champion sprinter, and with his dark hair and fair skin was a handsome young man. He wrote tender letters to my little one when his ance was absent.16 I received your angelic letter and you simply cant imagine how happy you made me. I miss you tremendously, dearest Agnes. At every ski-lift I remember that Saturday afternoon. Im counting the days until you come. Come as soon as possible, my little one. I miss you very much. Embracing you That last letter was sent on 3rd August 1939. World War II was one month away.

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CHAPTER 2

THE CAULDRON
Laws are silent in times of war
Cicero17

By the time Agi Jambor, Frances pianist aunt, fell pregnant in 1942, Hungary had been at war for a year. It was to cost about 600,000 Hungarian lives, or six per cent of the population. Hundreds of thousands of others went into captivity, and many never returned. The country lost 40 per cent of its national wealth. By comparison Britain, which fought the war from beginning to end, lost less than one per cent of its population. The Jambor couple soon felt the consequences of their unwise decision to return from Holland to Hungary. Both were only partly Jewish, but anyone with one Jewish grandparent ofcially counted as a Jew. Exemptions could be made by ofcial at. Agi was designated an Olympicon because she won a Chopin Prize in Warsaw in 1937. That enabled her to give concerts despite the ban on Jews performing. But the exemptions too were liable to be evaded. Gendarmes, militia and freelance Fascist gangs frequently ignored them with impunity. One evening, the Counsellor of the United States Embassy in Budapest sat in the front row when Agi was giving a concert. As they chatted afterwards, he asked if she knew why the people shovelling snow on the streets looked like intellectuals and wore yellow arm bands. Agi explained they were Jews working in a forced labour squad. He looked at me and his eyes were full of tears and he said, Promise me one thing, if you too have to wear a yellow star, you will be proud of it. And remember that you have a friend in America who is proud that you are not crushed by this. He returned home shortly afterwards when Hungary declared war on the United States, but Agi discovered later that his pledge of friendship was not idle. Lured into the war by the prospect of reversing the losses of Trianon, the Hungarians found themselves ghting against the one country where they had no claims, the Soviet Union. The Hungarian Army was annihilated by the Red Army deep inside Russia. It lost two-thirds of its ghting strength in dead, wounded and captured.

From early 1943 on, the only question was: could Hungary extricate itself? It could not. The day Agis child was born, one of the young doctors in the hospital came to say goodbye. He left for a labour camp and never returned. Her baby died three days later, and the day after the funeral a friend telephoned to say she should come home because her husband was in danger. She found the at ransacked and her husband suffering a heart attack. Secret police had roughed him up. Instead of a newborn baby, she found herself nursing a gravely sick husband. Sensing the Hungarians wavering loyalty, Hitler summoned Horthy to Austria to legalise a German military occupation of Hungary. The Hungarian Regent protested but Hitler threatened to send in Romanian and Slovak troops instead. Horthy gave in. When German troops occupied Hungary on 19th March 1944, Jews such as Agi and Francess grandparents nally came into deadly danger. Adolf Eichmann arrived at the head of an SS unit and set about plundering their wealth, which unlike elsewhere in Europe had remained largely intact. By this time, the SS had built up lucrative streams of revenue from Jews. They lured their victims into believing that handing over possessions would save their lives. The Jews were grasping at straws. Eichmanns plan was to exterminate all 750,000 of them. His German staff of 150 prepared the round-up plan. 300,000 Hungarian government ofcials, notaries, lawyers, police, paramilitary gendarmes and railwaymen executed it for him. No Hungarian in a position of authority offered any signicant resistance to carrying out the operation on behalf of the occupying Germans.18 The arrival of the Hungarian Jews represented an awful nale for Auschwitz, which the Nazis upgraded to deal with them. By early 1944, they had massively expanded their capacity to gas and cremate victims. They even used human fat to make the bodies burn faster.19 With the arrival of the Jews from the Hungarian countryside, the killing reached a pace which Auschwitz had never achieved before. 320,000 were murdered in eight weeks. After that, the numbers fell off as the advancing Soviet Army rolled up its access routes. In the same way as they deceived Jews into thinking they would be safe by giving up belongings, the Nazis used psychological tricks to make their victims go tamely to the slaughter when they arrived. The exhausted, fearful Jews descending from the crowded cattle trucks in Auschwitz were met with blows and shouting but sometimes also with kind words and assistance. Unbeknown to them, the gas chambers and

crematoria lay just a hundred yards away from the unloading ramp. The SS exchanged jokes and polite inquiries about children as they herded the disorientated victims towards buildings which were supposed to be shower rooms.20 Photos which Frances and I saw at the Holocaust Documentation Center in Budapest show Jews queuing peacefully, apparently relieved that perhaps the worst was over, outside a gas chamber as if at a bus stop. Some were sent to the labour camp on the same site, but within hours all the rest had been gassed to death. Hungarians accounted for one third of all those who died in Auschwitz. Blint Magyar, a Hungarian Education Minister who is half-Jewish and lost many of his family there, wrote in 2006: Although there are no graves in Auschwitz-Birkenau, this is the largest Hungarian cemetery in history.21 The Hungarians wanted to share with the Germans in the despoliation of the Jews. The Hungarian authorities began seizing Jewish dwellings and property as the deportations gathered pace. They justied it as a contribution to the war effort the Germans forced them to pay the costs of the occupying German army22 and at rst organised the operation meticulously, labelling belongings as if they would later be returned. It soon became a free-for-all. When a new decree obliged all Jews to move to safe houses reserved for Jews, Aunt Agi Jambor moved out of their family home with a few belongings, wearing a yellow star badge. The Hungarian janitor came up and said, Youd better give me your belongings, otherwise Ill take them anyway. Youll not need them; youll be killed sooner or later. Without waiting for an answer, he began helping himself, beginning with her dead babys clothes. In 1944, Frances grandfather Imre tried to buy exit permits for himself and his wife, but a middleman absconded with the jewelry they gave him in payment. They had no choice but to stay on in their home, the Budapest House. When they had moved in seven years earlier, they liked to gaze out over the rooftops on to the city. Now it was a place to cower and hide. As the Allies pushed the Axis forces back, they began bombing Budapest and other Hungarian towns. While Agis husband nursed his heart attack in hospital, a nearby building received a direct hit, and the head of a nurse and the leg of a doctor ew in through his second-oor window. As it gradually became clear they would lose the war, the Germans began to see

the Hungarian Jews not just as targets for plunder and extermination, but also as bargaining chips. The Swiss, Swedish and Portuguese legations were allowed to set up safe houses sheltering Jews under diplomatic protection. The Swiss alone established 76 of them. These protective dwellings clustered in the Ujliptvros district, where the Hirschenhausers penthouse apartment in the Budapest House was located. The foreign missions could also issue passports for selected Jews. The Swede Raoul Wallenberg issued thousands of Swedish safe conducts and risked his life gathering Jews together and arranging supplies. Swiss consul Carl Lutz helped save many thousands more. The two diplomats were dismally rewarded: Wallenberg died in the Soviet Gulag, and Lutz was recalled by the Swiss government and reprimanded for overstepping his bounds in his role as a diplomat. The International Red Cross established a protected hospital, where hundreds of Jews and political refugees cowered. The ofce of Regent Horthy issued Governors passes in his name to certain distinguished Jews. Journalist Rezs! Kastzner negotiated an escape for 1,670 Jews, who were allowed to take a train to Switzerland at $1,000 per head. Among them were writer Bla Zsolt and his wife; but Zsolts mother, brothers and sisters, his wifes parents and his step-daughter all perished in Auschwitz. Prodded by President Roosevelt, the Pope and the King of Sweden, Horthy ordered a halt to the round-ups of the Jews in July 1944, and Eichmann had to stop the deportations. By that time practically all the Jews in the countryside were on their way to Auschwitz, where 90 per cent of them died. However the few months respite eventually helped over 200,000 other Hungarian Jews to survive.23 Power in Hungary was passing to the Germans and the lawless Arrow Cross. Horthys memoirs reveal him as a narrow-minded man often several steps behind the game. He and his gentry class had been ready to use the hotheads of the extreme right to put down the Communist revolution. Now they reaped the storm they had sown, helplessly witnessing the rampages of the Arrow Cross fanatical right-wing nationalists no less revolutionary than the Communists. The rebrands rode roughshod over the diplomatic protections, slaughtering at will. The occupying Germans were occasionally taken aback by their barbarity, but most did not care. They too sensed they were moving towards a desperate end. The Jambor couple watched the Arrow Cross drive Jews out of a protected Swedish house to shoot them on the banks of the Danube. Blint Magyars Jewish mother was

led with a group to the Danube, but a diplomat materialised and escorted them to safety. The Arrow Cross recaptured her and were about to execute her at the riverside again when a Russian aircraft attacked and they scattered. The Jambors obtained Swedish papers on several occasions, and switched to faked identities. There was a ourishing trafc in forged papers. Agis husband was one of the counterfeiters. He produced papers turning himself into Nagy, profession: electrician. His wife became Mrs. Kocsmros, occupation: laundress, later cook. Teenager George Soros turned into Sndor Kiss. His father told him: All normal rules are suspended. This is an emergency. If we remain law-abiding citizens and continue our present existence, we are going to perish.24 Gaston Vadasz, who became Francess friend in the 1990s, was given a French name when he was born in 1944. He found out he was partly Jewish only half a century later. His parents no doubt gave him the foreign name to protect him. Tibor Gold, who was brought up across the road from the Budapest House, was given a typical Hungarian rst name in 1942. He was baptised a Lutheran and not circumcised. Like thousands of other Jews, Agi and her husband passed from one dwelling to another, seeking out sympathetic Hungarians who would offer a hiding place for a few days. It was a life of boredom and obsessive fear of betrayal. Although Hungarians enabled the genocide of the Jews, survivors also tell of brave individuals taking considerable risks to help them. Some Hungarians sheltered Jews to score a minor victory over oppressive ofcialdom. Others were moved by human decency or family ties resulting from intermarriage. It was an arbitrary mixture of cruelty and kindness. A woman denounced Agis husband for supposedly drawing rings in the snow as targets for Russian bombers. He managed to argue his way out of that, but then the Gestapo headed for their apartment block to try and arrest Agi. This time, an anonymous telephone caller tipped her off. As Agi rushed downstairs, she saw three of them going up in the lift. She ran into a lower oor surgery of a woman doctor, who gave her a white coat and said, Now you are my assistant. The Gestapo left empty-handed. Bla Zsolt tells of Jews lying with crushed testicles, bleeding mouths and smashed teeth after a savage beating by Hungarian gendarmes. But on another occasion, a gendarme told a Jewish labour party he was guarding: If you want to disappear, you should go. Nobodys counted you. Its only ve kilometres to the Romanian frontier.25

On his forced march to a labour camp, Ern! Szp saw Arrow Cross youths insulting, beating and killing elderly Jews, but also an army lieutenant who served them mugs of water from a nearby tavern and when the guards were out of hearing said: Every decent Hungarian is ashamed at whats being done to the Jews here. Its because of this that Hungary will be wiped off the face of the earth.26 In another act of kindness, the head waiter of the Central caf loaned an apartment to the Jewish family of Egon Ronay (later a renowned gastronomy writer in England). Egons father owned the caf, and the waiters loyalty enabled the whole family to hide for much of the war.27 Hungarians bear a large responsibility that over 500,000 of their Jewish compatriots were slaughtered, but also deserve some credit that 200,000 survived. Amongst the Jews crowded into ghettos, solidarity sometimes gave way to desperate selshness. When one Jew detained with Zsolt was freed because of an exemption, the others nearly died of helpless envy and hatred. In their eyes, he saw icy determination to do anything for one-thousandth of a chance of saving their own lives mentally everybody had already sacriced his neighbour and perhaps even his close relatives.28 Szp wrote that his fellow Jews in the camp cursed, elbowed and kicked their neighbours, and stole from each others knapsacks.29 When militia knocked at the door to search the apartment, Francess aunt Agi pretended to be a whore who had been raped by Russian soldiers. She kept up a ow of vulgar talk long enough for her husband to ush forged documents down the lavatory. I think I played my role of a former prostitute most satisfactorily. I bawled them out unmercifully for using their guns against us peaceful citizens instead of ghting the Russians. I even threatened them that I would go back to the Russians. They doubtless felt that this would be a calamitous blow to the Nazi cause, for they listened to me with open mouths, unable to put a word in edgewise. On October 14th 1944, the Jambors heard Regent Horthy announce on national radio that he was seeking an armistice with the Allies. People stopped them on the street to tear off their yellow stars. That evening fellow Jews broke open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the day of the armistice, the day when we were able to remove the yellow star, the hour of our freedom. Agis husband warned: Lets wait a little longer. This is the time to go into hiding. The Arrow Cross will stage a putsch, with

German backing. By midnight, he was proved right. The Arrow Cross led by Ferenc Szlasi seized power. German troops surrounded Horthys palace and took his son hostage. Horthy resigned and was taken into German custody. A few hours later, his captors allowed him to return to the palace to pick up personal effects. Looters had already broken open cupboards and pillaged his wifes jewels and money. As he entered his bathroom to take his toiletries, a man emerged wearing his dressing gown, having just taken a bath.30 Overwhelmed by impotence and humiliation, Horthy melted away into German exile and oblivion. He was 76. Jews all over Budapest had to sew their yellow stars back on again. Those living in the capital had been reprieved by Horthys intervention in July, but now Eichmann returned and herded 70,000 of them into ghettos. Teenage gangs roamed the streets indulging in the largest orgy of public killings anywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. Father Kun, an Arrow Cross Catholic priest, admitted after the war to killing 500 people personally. He ordered execution squads: In the name of Christ re! For Szlasi and his gang, making Hungary Jew-free seemed to be more important than anything perhaps even than winning the war. There can be no other explanation for their totally irrational behaviour, the sole purpose of which was to humiliate, eliminate and annihilate the Jews, wrote Hungarian historian Kristin Ungvry in 2003. Noting that Hungarian military, police and gendarmes idly watched the atrocities, he observed: This could not have happened without a deep and farreaching moral crisis among the population.31 As for Blint Magyar, when he was a government minister 60 years later, he commented: It is difcult to comprehend how Hungary could have turned its back on hundreds of thousands of its citizens, how it could have humiliated them, robbed them of their possessions and sent them to their death. Although thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of courageous people risked their lives to save those who were being persecuted, it is still difcult to grasp the fact that most Hungarians passively watched the suffering of the Jews and that many of them even joyously seized control of their possessions. What happened was not the private operation of a small band of criminals, but rather the climax of a lengthy process, and the responsibility for what happened must be borne by Hungarys political leaders, its intellectuals and a signicant segment of its society.32

Nobel prize-winner Imre Kertsz judged their behaviour more savagely as the ethics of despair, the mad rantings of self-haters, the vitality of the moribund the corrupt, suffocating, murderous and murder-inducing suicidal system of exclusions and discriminations.33 As the Red Army laid siege to Budapest, Agi and her husband risked their lives with every move from one hiding place to another. As chance would have it, Frances found herself living just next to one of those hideaways when she herself came to live in Budapest 50 years later. When crossing the Danube, the Jambor couple crawled under the links of the Chain Bridge to evade a circling Soviet ghter waiting to strafe anybody spotted moving across. Together with Agis mother, sister, brother-in-law and nephew, the Jambors alias Nagy and Kocsmros crammed into the at of a cousin on the Aryan side of their family. On 3rd January 1945, we had our wedding anniversary, and the friends in the house gave a little dinner party in our honour, recalled Agi. My cousin pulled out a jar of honey that was hidden somewhere, and everybody got one tablespoonful for his bread. Another had a can of American salmon which we divided among fteen persons. A third one brought a candle, so we had some light, and Denes [a musician] again performed. That night we could hardly sleep at all. It was terribly cold and we had no blankets. The gunre was unusually heavy and loud. It was a strange anniversary. Then at six oclock in the morning the police came. This time they had papers permitting them to move to the Swedish Legation. There they found that a senior Swedish diplomat had just committed suicide. Sitting there was a Hungarian mother who had dodged an execution bullet on the shore of the Danube and swum to safety with her baby: The baby was hungry and cried continually and she had nothing to give her. Then the mother began to sing to her child. She sang beautifully and she kept on singing until the child fell asleep. It was the most heart-rending musical experience of my life, said Agi. There was nothing to eat in the Legation, so they set out once more through driving snow in streets deserted by all but Arrow Cross gangs. As bombing and ghting rose to a crescendo, they could dwell only underground. In the last days, they hid with a group of others in a tiny cell hidden below a cellar, with water up to their knees. Once a day, two of them crawled cautiously to the surface

with buckets, one to empty their excrement and the other to pile with snow for drinking water. After two weeks, in the rst days of February 1945, the door opened and a voice said the war was over. They crawled out, half-blind, and glimpsed two Russians with long dark beards in white winter uniforms. A new era was starting.

CHAPTER 3

HUMILIATED
I saw the victims standing on the track of the number 2 tram line in a long row, completely resigned to their fate
Hungarian lieutenant34

Frances rst knew Agi Jambor not as a Holocaust survivor but as a bohemian aunt to whom she could unburden her young heart. Agi and her husband moved after the war to the United States, where the diplomat they had met in Budapest, Mr. Bombright, helped them settle. Agi re-launched herself as a concert pianist and played before President Harry Truman. It was a triumph, marred only by the discovery afterwards that her black dress actually a nightgown worn inside out had its Woolworths price tag displayed. Her husband died soon afterwards, hallucinating that he was in a Gestapo prison back in Budapest. On his deathbed in his new homeland, he said: Agi, promise me that you will always love this country as your own at least I brought you to America. She was later briey married to Hollywood actor Claude Rains (who played French police chief Louis in Casablanca). He wooed her with his eloquence. When she understood English better, she realised that every sentence of his courting was a quotation from Shakespeare. Agi composed a piano sonata for the victims of Auschwitz, but by the time Frances got to know her in Pennsylvania she had put her past of hunger, terror, bombs, bullets and snowstorms behind her. Frances, then a teenager growing up on Long Island, immersed herself in her aunts zany world. Agi had emerged from the war practically penniless, but Frances found her living in wealth beyond her own familys simple suburban standards, with a job as Professor of Piano at an exclusive girls college, Bryn Mawr. She had a house full of musical instruments, books and artefacts. It seemed chaotic but it was coherent. It formed a rich, cultural whole. The house was full of cats and young protgs from the music school where she taught. It was a wonderful mnage. She was good for a young girl like me, who couldnt talk to her mother about

sex or anything else that mattered. Agi was extremely liberal and encouraged me to be so as well, recalled Frances. Agis past as a persecuted Jew remained unknown to Frances. After so much trauma, nobody wanted to tell, not even that she Frances was herself a Jew. She should be protected. Wartime memories were painful, so why share them? Her younger sister Susanne remembers: The family always talked of the good old days before the war, not about the war itself. Agi Jambor is one of two aunts who inuenced Frances as she sought a direction to her life. The second emerged much later, in Budapest. This was Erzsi. Frances did not know until 1991 that Erzsi existed. After what this Hungarian Jewish family went through, it may be imagined that they held together after the war, comforting each other in solidarity. Not so. The surviving family members went their different ways, not wishing to be linked by their terrible background. By this time, Frances was set on nding out about her past. She was in her early forties, and increasingly discontented about her rootlessness. As she prepared for a visit to Budapest, Frances called her father in America and said: Dad, we must still have some relatives in Hungary! Because I cant believe we really didnt have anybody. There must be some distant relation somewhere. Her father responded that there was probably nobody, and if anybody it would be his cousin Erzsi, but he doubted she was still alive. She had had a hard time during the war. OK, whats her name? Erzebet Nagy. How will I nd her? The best I can give you is her address of 1946. She was living at St Istvn Park No. 2. That is exactly where Frances found Erzebet Nagy, a few blocks away from the grandfathers Budapest House on Holln Ern! Street. Frances telephoned in trepidation, wondering in what tottery state she would nd an old Jewish woman who had gone through the Holocaust and forty years of Communism. Of course you can come and see me, said a chirpy voice down the telephone. But not today, because I have a friend visiting me from Los Angeles. Erzsi too had made her new life, and trips to California were part of it.

Frances thus found that her Hungarian Jewish family was not quite as small as she thought. When she later tackled a demanding job in Budapest, she had a sympathetic aunt in whose home she could relax and conde. Frances had been alienated from her mother, who in any case died early of cancer. She was troubled by her familys Holocaust background. She knew next to nothing about her roots. Attaching herself to Erszi helped her dealing with her vulnerability. Erszi became an ersatz mother, more down-to-earth and resolute than her real mother. She was family, still alive and right there. Not until I sat down with Frances to prepare this book did Frances ask Erszi what she went through in the war. Ask her, before its too late, I prompted, wondering why she had not done so already. Frances did not dare. She sensed it would go close to the bone. When she did pluck up her courage, Erszi said it was not the right moment. Then one day, at the age of 89, Erszi sat Frances down in front of her, and said: All right, Ill tell you, but just this once. Not again. Born in 1916, Erzsi had basic education. One day when she was 13, she came home from school to nd her father sitting on a swing looking devastated. At the age of 50, he had been pensioned off because a new law forbade Jews to work in state jobs. Later Erzsi met her rst husband at a dance where he was waiting to meet another girl. He danced with her instead, and lost interest in the other girl. A few months later they married and made their home in Budapests Ujliptvros district. She went to work as a bookkeeper in his small book-binding business. At the beginning of the 1940s, her husband was taken away several times to work in Jewish labour camps. One day, a customer turned up at their workshop and presented them with a refrigerator. He too was a Jew and was emigrating to America. We were too nave to understand what was happening, that these people were parcelling out their worldly goods and taking only what they could carry with them to the New World, away from war-torn Europe and Hungary, where they could see the dark future, said Erzsi. She herself took a number of objects belonging to Francess paternal grandfather into safekeeping, and was annoyed that he asked her to sign a detailed receipt. Out of pique, she kept a Meissen plate he had forgotten to put on the list, and gave it to Frances on her ftieth birthday, more than half a century later.

The book-binding business struggled on. It had 20 employees, mostly Aryans. Her husband was let out of the labour camps and kept it going with his brother and father. But when the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944, Hungarian police turned up and arrested the husband and the brother. Erzsi never saw either of them again. She was left with her father-in-law, spared because he was too old, but weakening as he could no longer get the insulin he needed as a diabetic. Jewish bank accounts were all but blocked. By the summer the rm was collapsing, with no clients and no business. Eichmann devised a plan based on concentric circles to round up the Jews. Hungarian police and gendarmes acting at his behest rst cleared out the regions near Hungarys borders. Then they moved the noose inwards, gradually tightening it. They herded the Jews into makeshift ghettos before dispatching them in trains to Auschwitz. The ring was nearing Budapest when Horthy called a halt in July. This is what historians established afterwards. But nobody told the Jews at the time how their deaths were being organised. Erzsi heard rumours that Jews were being taken away, but there was no means of verifying them. Jews were forbidden to own radios or use telephones and they could go outside for only two hours a day. They knew nothing except what they experienced directly, and then it was usually too late. Erzsis mother, in her last letter in July 1944, urged her daughter to leave Budapest and take refuge with her in the countryside. It seemed reasonable that a quiet corner on the land would be safer. Erzsi decided not to, and it saved her life. Unbeknown to either of them, the countryside was by then a death trap. Erzsis mother and father disappeared. Erzsi never heard anything more of her husband, her brother-in-law or either of her parents. No news, no death certicate, no tombstone. Only a horrible supposition that they had been deported in cattle wagons and perished in Auschwitz, like all the rest. Erzsi was left with a big void where once there was a family. They had vanished. Ashes. Somewhere. By the time the Arrow Cross supplanted Horthy in autumn 1944, Erzsis block in the Ujliptvros district was designated as a safe house for Jews. But she had to cross the Danube to Buda to work as a labourer in a brickyard. In November 1944, the Hungarian military seized her there and sent her off into the countryside in a long column of other Jewish women. In a last act of cruel folly, Eichmann had ordered that 80,000 Jews be force-marched to Vienna, 120 miles away. As they left Budapest, they passed groups of Jewish men, some of them aged over 80,

forced to dig anti-tank ditches, slithering around in town shoes, hacking feebly into the muddy ground under threat of shooting. Every day, Erzsis column of women was forced 15 miles onwards through rain and snow, cursed by guards who shot stragglers. They slept in sheds or on market squares at night, and considered themselves lucky when they were given vegetable soup. At one stop, village women sold them bread at black market prices. Asked what was worst in this dreadful, senseless march, Erzsi said it was the humiliation. Hungarian children jeered and threw stones at us women as we walked. That was the most painful, thats what I remember most, she said 60 years later. Eva Hoffmann, a Polish-Jewish emigrant author, noticed the same phenomenon among other Holocaust survivors. In a psycho-analytical study she wrote: The most painful element poured so venomously into the victims soul is precisely the sense of humiliation not for having done anything but for having submitted to degrading treatment.35 The marches served no purpose except sadistic indulgence. Eventually, after protests from neutral countries, SS commander Heinrich Himmler ordered Eichmann to call them off. By that time, most of the survivors of Erzsis column were in Mauthausen or Dachau concentration camps. But not she. As she trudged along, she caught sight of a Jewish woman riding a donkey going the other way. Why not try to escape, she thought? She ran and hid in a eld, but local children betrayed her and guards put her back into another column. When rain came, she escaped again into a corn eld, and made her way to a station. The stationmaster offered help in exchange for sex, but Erzsi declined and slipped off again. Another Hungarian child denounced her to military police. She was gasping for water and thought her end was near. Herded together in a group of fty women, she heard the guard suddenly turn and say: Go. If you get out of my sight, you can go wherever you want. The Russians were close at hand, but the women promptly fell into the hands of German troops who took them off to a forced labour camp manufacturing warplane parts near Vienna. A few months later, the war was over and an Austrian mayor arranged transport to the Hungarian border. They hitched a lift with a truck-full of Serbs back to Budapest. Erzsi stumbled into her empty apartment, and found a large, unexploded bomb lying in the middle of the oor.

Frances later discovered that Erzsis upstairs neighbour was another old Jewish woman called Lili Mauskopf. Petite, with dishevelled white hair, she dresses these days in a turquoise track suit, but in the last six months of the war, she wore the striped pyjamas of an Auschwitz inmate. While Erzsi was reluctantly working to keep the disintegrating Luftwaffe in the air, her upstairs neighbour was making bombs at Auschwitz. She was one of the few Hungarian Jews set to work as slaves rather than die in the gas chambers. When Frances called on her, Lili Mauskopf vividly recalled details such as the absence of paper in the latrines, her sister stealing a few potatoes to supplement their meagre diet, or the guard dogs accompanying them from sleeping quarters to work place. She remembered how the women guards shaved their heads and stole their shoes on arrival. For any infringement, guards sprayed them with cold water, which froze in the winter chill. One SS soldier however gave them lemon tea.36 Those back in Budapest faced if anything a greater hell. By Christmas 1944, the Soviet Red Army had laid siege to the capital. The attackers got stuck, and the siege lasted 102 days, developing into one of the longest and bloodiest city battles of World War II. Life sank to depths of misery and degradation which are hard to conceive of today. Hungarian historian Kristin Ungvry wrote of bodies littering the streets, endless bombing and shelling, people cowering for weeks underground in imsy, stinking shelters. Of starvation, collapse of water and electricity supplies, wrecked bridges, hospitals full of disgured human wrecks, dying amid their excrement, ridden with lice, and with no medicines. Shot Jews oating in the Danube or sprawled in red blood splashed on the ice. Old men, pregnant women and young girls committing suicide. Arrow Cross thugs standing in lines to torture their victims with cudgels and whips. Of terrible massacres among the soldiers, as each street was fought over tooth and nail, to and fro, until exhaustion set in. Of desertions, betrayals and cowardice and acts of seless heroism.37 Civilians were caught up in a battle as frightful as those for Stalingrad, Warsaw and Berlin, except that it lasted longer. The maelstrom sucked in 800,000 noncombatants, and by the time it was over, Budapests population had declined from 1,200,000 to 830,000. Some 38,000 civilians died, and the rest could hardly call their city home any more.

The Hungarian soldiers defending the shrinking perimeters faced possible death and certain defeat. Even if they survived, they were aware that they were again ending up on the losing side of a war. The inevitable Soviet victory would be no liberation. Hungarians could expect only reprisals, revenge and subjugation. The German troops had been ordered by Hitler to ght to the end, and they knew they had no hope of winning or escaping through Soviet lines to the West. Their anguish was sharpened by the dim realisation that Germany had brought this calamity on itself. Some 48,000 German and Hungarian soldiers died in the Budapest siege. It was a wretched grind for the Soviet armed forces too. Stalin was annoyed that they had failed quickly to capture Budapest, put Hungary out of the war and open up the way towards Vienna. For them, there was to be none of the triumph enjoyed by their compatriots capturing Berlin. Their own casualties in this thankless task were even more appalling: 80,000 dead.38 Francess grandparents, Lili and Imre Hirschenhauser, having failed to buy their way out, had no choice but to live through the chaos as best they could. As the war drew to an end, they were no longer in their penthouse apartment amid the Jewish safe houses of the 13th District. The round-ups of Jews continued to the bitter end, and with the siege continuing, they were dragged off to prison. Anti-Semite to the end, the Hungarian jailers put the Jews on the top oor of the building, where they were the most exposed to air attacks. Common criminals were given the relative safety of lower oors. Word spread that all the Jews in the prison were to be executed. First they killed the single ones. Lili and Imre heard that couples would be next. They thought they were living their last moments, but suddenly it was all over. On the morning of the 12th of February 1945, when it was still dark, Russian patrols came from house to house saying, Go home the siege is over.39 The Hirschenhausers could go free too. They joined the wretched trudge back through the snow, and climbed up into their apartment at Holln Ern!. It was no longer a bright new abode for an up-and-coming couple, but a chipped survivor of a wrecked city, as indeed were they. Surrounded by the protected Jewish houses of the Ujliptvros district, this dwelling however was secure. It was their safe house. The Budapest House.

;$<2(

CHAPTER 4

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

The acid-etched traces of what they endured
Eva Hoffmann40

As the conict neared its close, George and Agnes Pinter had anything but war on their minds. On 20th February 1944, George wrote: I acknowledge what I have to acknowledge. I reconcile myself to the currently unchangeable I will not kiss you or lay a nger on you. However, I ask the same of you in return. After three years of marriage in Switzerland, they had split up. Agnes had gone off with Georges best friend. The couple had no children yet. George added: Once I asked you to give me a child. Now I ask that of you only if you come back. Otherwise the masterpiece will be spoilt. Nobody knows what Agnes thought of this declaration at the time. Frances depends for her existence on the mothers eventual decision however. As one reads the letters which George wrote to his wife over the eighteen months they were separated, two things stand out. He expresses himself in a rened way, but he is complicated: There is no truth in our little lives. Neither on your nor on my side. The only thing that we take for granted, although we have no idea if it is true, is that our life is small. Small as a measurement, brief, a breath only in that strange busy mess that comprises life, the past, the present and the future You will feel and understand that there are feelings that one acknowledges, and if these are immensely important one follows them as emerging from ones character to be followed, he wrote to Agnes on Christmas Day 1944. If we switch to Imre Kertsz, the Hungarian Jew who won the Nobel Literature Prize, we nd him writing in the concluding passage of his book Kaddish: In those years I recognised my life for what it was: as a fact on the one hand and as a spiritual form on the other, or, more precisely, the spiritual form of the survival instinct that no longer can survive, doesnt want to survive, and probably is no longer capable of survival, but one that still and because of it all demands its own, that is to say, its own

formation like a rounded glass-hard object so that it could continue to exist, no matter why, no matter for whom for everyone and no one; for him who is and him who isnt, it doesnt really matter, for those who are ashamed because of us and (perhaps) for us; but which fact as the pure fact of survival I eliminate and put an end to even if and especially if that fact happens to be me. This sentence runs to 147 words, and the reader may be excused if its point seems obscure. George Pinter wooed his lost wife with the same Central European eloquence complex like Imre Kertsz, rened like Joseph Roth, delicate like Karel "apek and melancholic like Franz Kafka. It was not without effect. His straying wife was of intellectual bent too. Judging by the correspondence, she was not put off by the complexity of his blandishments. The last words of Georges letters actually conveyed simple messages: I only want to say I love you immensely. (30th November 1944) I kiss your hand thinking of your lips. (25th December 1944) I love you too, with the same four letters, unshatterably, simply, like your signature. (8th February 1945) Sleep and live well, my dear Agica, take care of yourself. Your friend embraces you. (11th May 1945) A million kisses and hugs from your husband, who doesnt believe he is guilty if he doesnt let you go. (11th January 1946) I am thinking about you all the time. I dont get any work done in the ofce. I am sending you a million kisses and embraces with the big old love. (21st January 1946) I miss you, love you, worry about you and it is sad to wake up in the morning and realise that I have been clutching the pillow so hopelessly. (31st January 1946) Sweetheart, I love you unspeakably I am waiting for you as much as if I had just fallen in love with you yesterday. (10th March 1946) Agnes succumbed to this tender onslaught. She came back to him. With difculty. Europe lay in ruins. Agnes had returned to her parents in the Budapest House, and it was no easy matter to resume married life. Letters arrived irregularly and late, or went missing. Telephoning was impossible. Telegrams were uncertain and very expensive. Travel permits could be obtained only after tortuous procedures, and Switzerland was keen to rid itself of foreigners who had sought asylum. Georges letters in the last few months were full of lengthy discussions whether her entry visa could be issued in

Bregenz (Austria), Prague (Czechoslovakia) or Geneva (Switzerland). It was a long time before she stepped off the train again in Zrich. Georges letters are full of anxious concern lest she be unable to cope. All the time she was living with his once-best friend, her husband worried about her health, her strength, her nerves, her mood. He even sent her ration coupons. Later, as a father, he was equally solicitous towards their offspring. When Frances was a young adult travelling in Europe, she received long letters from him about train connections and the various levels of parental panic which would be triggered if she failed to report back on time. He never took Frances or her younger sister into his condence about family problems. When new marital troubles brewed, he and his wife shipped the children off to boarding schools in Switzerland. To be safe and untroubled by painful knowledge. Switzerland had sheltered George from the horrors of war, but he could not escape the underlying insecurities of a Jew who had survived the Holocaust. Countless other accounts by survivors and their children tell of the lingering worry that disaster might yet strike again, that they are alive only by a stroke of luck, and that an inexplicable curse hangs over their race. As such, George Pinter was a child of his time. He worried. With Hungary in ruins and falling into the hands of the Communists, the couple set their sights on America. In 1949, while waiting for their U.S. entry permits in Venezuela, Agnes gave birth to Frances, their rst child. As in time immemorial, they were a family of wandering Jews, looking for a home. * * *

Back in Budapest, in the days after its capture in February 1945, it was some time before citizens could put back the pieces of their lives. In the last redoubt of Buda, some 40 per cent of the population was killed, wounded or missing. In the central area, four out of ten buildings were damaged. All the bridges across the Danube, including the Chain Bridge, symbol of Budapest, had been destroyed by the retreating Germans. The Royal Palace was burnt out and the main hotels were in ruins. The Soviet occupiers told diplomats the damage in some parts was worse than Stalingrad.41 Civilians such as Francess aunt Agi Jambor and her husband emerged out of their cellars, half starved, covered in lice and shivering from cold in the last few damp

clothes they could clutch around them. She wore mens long johns and he a ladies blouse. Setting off back to their home on the other side of Budapest, they found the entire road two miles long was covered with dead soldiers mostly Germans. We had to climb over hills of dead bodies some corpses were attened out like pancakes from the tanks that had passed over them. The old grey slacks I wore were bloody up to my knees As we passed a cellar, with its door blown wide open from a bomb hit, I saw inside a mother sitting there with her child in her arms both dead they were simply sitting there. Millions of shards of broken glass turned the snowy streets into glittering deserts. Snipers, and mines hidden under the snow, continued to claim lives. The survivors often found their homes shattered and soaked with blood. Agis family was astonished to see them alive, as friends claimed to have seen their dead bodies. Agis aunt had starved to death and their own apartment was gutted by re. The Hungarians were a defeated people at the mercy of their enemies. The Soviet commander, General Rodion Malinovsky, gave his soldiers three days to pillage to their hearts content as a reward for their ordeal. They took advantage with gusto. And they raped. As in Germany, they set about this with brutal thoroughness. Victims ranged from less than 10 years old to over 90. It was almost impossible for women to hide. The Russian soldiers ferreted the women out with expertise gained from long practice. Some were violated over 20 times.42 The mother of George Soros, who was to be a great benefactor to his country when Communism collapsed, was raped by two Russian soldiers next to a haystack. She did not tell her son about it until many years later.43 The mother and grandmother of Hungarian emigrant Susan Varga, who had taken refuge in a country village, were raped by Russian soldiers who came day after day, smelling of vodka. The grandmother declared: Well, we survived that one too. This all goes with it, my dears. Never mind. The mother drove off Russian soldiers who tried to evict them from their house: Im Jewish. Youre liberating me. I am not going anywhere. While her mother was being violated, the infant Susan came close to deaths door through malnutrition. The mother caught syphilis, became pregnant, had an abortion, fell in love with the Hungarian doctor who performed it, and several months later had an affair with a Russian ofcer she found gentle and romantic. Susan survived,

emigrated to Australia and became a writer.44 Esther Ronay, another of the friends Frances made in Budapest in the 1990s, remembers her attractive mother hiding for long weeks after the Soviet liberation, but as a child she had no such fears herself. The Soviets had a soft spot for small children, and she has a photo of herself sitting on the knee of a jovial Russian soldier playing a harmonica in the front hall of their apartment block. They had come looking for watches to pilfer. The Soviet decision to allow rape and pillage on a massive scale reected the brutally primitive lesson they drew from their victory: that it gave them licence to unleash their worst instincts. This was understandable after their immense sacrices, but it was both ignoble and a major strategic error. It put paid to any prospects of winning the hearts and minds of the nations they occupied.45 Stalin told the Yugoslav Partisan leader Milovan Djilas that the suffering of the Soviet soldiers had been so great, he saw no objection to Ivan having a little fun with a wench. Djilas, a hardbitten Montenegrin who had cut the throats of a good few surrendered Germans, was appalled at the scope of the ravaging. Many Communists and left-wing sympathizers in Hungary felt the same.46 The Soviet Army picked up men on the streets to work on gangs repairing wartime damage, starting with the Chain Bridge. Short of male labour because of their tremendous wartime losses, they also began shipping Hungarians off to the Gulag in the Soviet Union. George Soross brother Paul slipped away from a group when he saw they were being marched to the station, which he guessed meant deportation.47 Esther Ronays father Egon had another narrow escape. In February 1945, he ventured out of hiding in sub-zero temperatures to re-open his fathers Belvrosi caf in Central Budapest, which Russian soldiers had ransacked after driving a tank through its plate-glass window. As he heated acorn coffee on a parafn stove, a few curious inhabitants crawled up to huddle round the stove, and in walked two Russian soldiers. He served them coffee and when they offered to pay in roubles, he declined: Forget it. Its free. The next day, a patrol picked him up and took him to a central depot for deportation to the Soviet Union. He spotted the two soldiers he had treated in his caf, caught their eye, and they had him released on the grounds that hes a waiter, he was good to us yesterday. Other services were restored more slowly. Steam trains running over patched-up

tram lines distributed food. Rations until March were 500 calories per head almost starvation level and 1,000 calories thereafter. Only 50 per cent of houses were receiving gas by November 1945, and the sewage system scarcely functioned until the end of the year.48 The Soviets removed a large part of Hungarys industrial infrastructure to the Soviet Union as reparations. Because of the unexploded bomb, the authorities declared Erzsis at uninhabitable. She had nowhere else to go, so she and her sister-in-law gingerly rolled the bomb out on to the landing of the block, which was common property. She called the authorities to remove it, which they did, charging a fee for the service. A step-sister and her daughter came to live with her, and a brother-in-law arranged food from the country. At least she could reoccupy her at. Many Jewish survivors straggling back from Auschwitz found that the Hungarians who had moved into their dwellings refused to hand them back. Erzsi felt lonely, and went back to the book-binding workshop she once ran with her missing husband. One day, one of her husbands former business partners, De!o Ngy, looked in. They struck up a friendship and began to live together. De!os wife was missing too, but with spouses unaccounted for they could not marry. Erzsi asked returning Jewish survivors about her husband. Some had spotted him on a train. Others said he died trying to escape, but none of this could be veried. Eventually, a friend agreed to testify formally to the deaths of both spouses in exchange for a meal. Now ofcially bereaved, they sought a few sparse means to celebrate their marriage. Erzsi had two kilograms of our which had gone bitter. Her sister-in-law laced this with potatoes and produced some passable loaves of bread in the oven of a local baker. Somebody gave Erzsi a ham in exchange for a coat, and they invited their Jewish friends. Some of the guests would not eat the ham out of religious principle, but her new husband tucked into it with relish. Erzsi remembers it as a happy wedding. As a Jew she was lucky to be alive at all. But nobody among the non-Jewish Hungarian population expressed remorse to her. Guilty they may have felt about conniving in the Holocaust, but the feeling caused so much pain that they repressed it and even resented it. It was easier to blame the Germans and dwell on their own sufferings the menfolk who died in uniform, and the women who were raped by the Russians. As an attitude it was understandable, but morally inadequate. Hungarians were abandoning responsibility for their own history: what they had done was the fault

of others. All over Europe, other wartime protagonists were doing the same. For decades, nobody wanted to talk with me about the terrible experiences I went through or the murder of my relatives. In my workplace, I got a tacit nod of the head, but nobody wanted to discuss it, recalled Erzsi. She had nished her story, and Frances felt deeply touched, having nally dared to tread on the fraught terrain of her aunts ordeal. It was a rst step in breaking the trauma of silence in her personal Holocaust history. Erzsi at rst struck me as the ugliest person I had seen, but later she came across as the most beautiful woman I have ever met, Frances told me afterwards. Imre Hirschenhauser, back in the Budapest House, encountered outright hostility as he struggled to restore his business activities. He would later tell Frances he felt more anti-Semitism after the war than before. Some Hungarians assumed the Jews must be preparing acts of revenge. Others resented attempts by Jews returning from concentration camps to reclaim their property. Rioting and demonstrations against Jews broke out in two Hungarian towns.49 The surviving 200,000 Jews had no community left. Their social structures and family units were torn apart. Aware of the negative feelings, many Jews lived in fear and alienation in the rst post-war years. Blint Magyars mother drew her own conclusions: she changed her name from Klein to the Hungarian-sounding Siklos, converted to Christianity despite protests by the Jewish community, and when Blint was born in 1950, she had him baptised as a Christian. She never talked to him about the war or anything Jewish. As for Esther Ronay, her father told her he was Jewish only when she was a teenager living in London. She was brought up as a Catholic. * * *

Some Jews however thrived in the post-war years. Orphaned and traumatised, they were enticed by the opportunities offered by the Communists, who numbered about 200 in Hungary at the end of WWII but were in rapid ascendancy thanks to the presence of Soviet troops.50 The Communists offered a new order with anti-Fascist ideals and an opportunity to seize the upper hand. Hungarian writer Sndor Mrai observed a whole restaurant fall fearfully silent when a Jewish political police chief stalked in with a leather coat, riding whip and gloves, ordered a banquet with ne

wines and leisurely smoked a cigar, relishing his lonely power.51 The Communists were interested in class distinctions, not racial ones. As an entrepreneur, Imre Hirschenhauser was a class enemy rather than a victim of antiSemitism. When they came to power in 1948, the Communists did nothing to encourage Hungarians to acknowledge responsibility for taking part in the Holocaust. In their class-oriented reading of history, Fascism was brought on by the old bourgeois society, and that had been swept away. They refused to acknowledge the racist and genocidal elements. The Communists asserted that while some Hungarians sympathised with the Fascists, most had their hearts in the right place and welcomed the Communists and their Soviet allies. It was a line convenient for troubled consciences. Painful Jewish memories were swept under the carpet. For the Communists, being a Jew was a reactionary thing, as bad as any religion, said Istvn Bart, a publisher who became one of Francess closest friends in Budapest. But many people consciously put the fact that they were Jewish behind them. Remembering was not welcome. Remembering was spoiling the lives of your children. As a schoolboy, he was taken to see the Auschwitz number tattooed on the arm of a school-friends Jewish grandmother. She laughed when she showed it, as if it were a curiosity. Several boys in my class were Jewish, but it was not something important for us. For them neither. They couldnt care less. For many Hungarians in 1945, Communism offered a new start. Workers looked forward to political power and an end to exploitation. Land redistribution enabled peasants to emerge from serf-like conditions. Going along with Communism was also a quid pro quo accept the new regime if you wished to escape revenge for making war against the Soviet Union. Erzsi too proted. Although non-political, she belonged to a lowly class which the Communists wanted to favour. She was already grown up, but the state gave her a university education, qualifying her for a job in the National Statistics Ofce involving travel to other Communist countries. Socialism caught the popular imagination in the immediate post-war years in the West too. People were impressed by the wartime achievements of the Soviet Union. In Britain, a freely elected Labour government nationalised as thoroughly as Communists in the East. Another friend of Frances, Peter Inkei, later commercial director of the Central

European University Press, was the son of a society photographer. The Communists closed down the fathers business and forced him into a cooperative. But the son remembers a happy childhood. Imre Kertsz too speaks of the 1946-1956 period as a time of fun and adventures, according to a friend. He remembers nding the prettiest girls among the Communists. For the Hirschenhausers and many others however, the Stalinist regime was an unmitigated disaster. It was led by Mtys Rkosi, hardened by 15 years in prison and a spell in Moscow at the height of Stalins terror. He forcibly transformed society through conscations, diversion of investment from consumer goods to heavy industry, requisition of crops, repression of the Catholic Church and isolation from the West. A vast secret police apparatus imprisoned nearly one Hungarian in ten, tortured and executed thousands, and kept les on one million citizens. Rkosi emulated Stalins personality cult, staged show trials and whipped up hatred of Jews when Stalin did likewise. By the perverted irony of the time, he was a Jew himself, which the Soviets did not hesitate to hold against him when he fell out of favour. Esther Ronay, daughter of Egon, remembers her grandparents being forced out of their apartment with some 13,000 other class enemies and sent to live for two years in the countryside in a small cottage with a mud oor. This ruthless exercise in social engineering was intended to push the upper and middle classes down to the bottom of the social ladder and free up comfortable residences for the Soviet occupiers and local Communists. When the Ronays were allowed to return two years later, they could not reclaim their at but had to rent a maids room elsewhere. Her fathers family had been wealthy before the war and Esther has fond memories of her nanny taking her to play as a four-year-old in a park; elevenses of bread with goose dripping and green pepper strips; oodles of ice cream when she had her tonsils out; and her grandfather taking her down into the kitchens of his caf so she could point to the food she wanted to eat risotto was her favourite. As for Imre and Lili Hirschenhauser, they struggled on, trying to make the best out of a situation that was dire at the end of the war in 1945 and scarcely improved. Every company with more than 10 employees had been nationalised by 1949, and the private sector was reduced largely to providing repair services. For Imre as an entrepreneur, the post-war state was a hindrance, never a help.52 The couple was alienated from their homeland, but not quite destitute. Like many

Jews, they had buried jewels in the countryside during the war. When they went to retrieve the treasure, they found to their horror that the Soviet military had built a bunker next to the burial place. They had to wait for several hours for the Russian soldiers to leave. They dug the jewels up and stashed them into hidden pockets they had sewn into their clothing. It was a reex from the war, when possessing valuables meant death for a Jew. On the way back, a policeman stopped them and asked them where they were going. Were on our Sunday afternoon walk, they replied. He had no reason to search them, and they continued home. Today, Frances wears a gold ring with a diamond inherited from this treasure trove. By 1955 Imre and Lili Hirschenhauser had had enough. They decided to leave their home in the Budapest House where they had lived for the past 18 years. Their only daughters family was abroad, and they saw no prospect of a worthwhile life in Hungary. After lengthy formalities, they were able to emigrate, abandoning their business, but remaining owners of the apartment in the Budapest House. At the age of six, Frances found herself having to converse in Magyar with two grandparents squeezed into the family home in New Jersey. It was the same for the Soros family. Young George, beginning his career as a nancial trader, had to take his father and mother into his New York home after they too ed. By the time they left, their Budapest House was dirty, falling into disrepair and inhabited by increasingly dispirited residents with little hope of bettering their material existence. Revolution reached as far as street names. The Budapest House was no longer in a street named after Holln Ern!, a hero of Hungarys 1848 revolution. It was now in Frst Sndor Street, recalling a Communist militant killed in WWII. This lasted until 1992 when, along with a host of other Communist names, the Frst Sndor plates were pulled down and Holln Ern! made a comeback. Ideologies changed but the houses remained the same. When the Hirschenhausers emigrated to America, the Hungarian authorities obliged them to rent out their Budapest apartment. With a severe shortage of housing, leaving it empty was not an option. Their tenant was Andrs Berkesi. Unbeknown to them, he was a Communist apparatchik and a secret policeman. His photograph is today on the Wall of Perpetrators in the House of Terror museum in Budapest. His job, according to the caption, was to hunt down terrorists, saboteurs, ex-gendarmes,

western spies, migr agents and counter-revolutionaries meaning anyone deemed an opponent by the Communist regime. Berkesi had survived wartime penal labour battalions and was drawn into the post-war Communist movement. As a secret policeman, he ruthlessly helped establish the power of the Communists, but like many others fell foul of the system he had helped build up. In 1950, he was sentenced in a show trial to 10 years in jail. This followed the decision of Yugoslav Communist leader Tito to break away from the Soviet camp in 1948. To deter others from doing likewise, Stalin ordered Communist parties all over the rest of Eastern Europe to put thousands of their leading ofcials on trial on trumped-up charges of treason. [In this book, Eastern Europe refers to the part of Europe which used to be Communist.] In Hungarys case, the chief victim of this campaign of terror was Interior Minister Lszl Rajk, executed after being brainwashed into falsely confessing on Budapest Radio that he was a Tito spy. He was suspect because he had not spent WWII in Moscow. Two thousand other Hungarian Communist cadres were executed and 150,000 imprisoned.53 Berkesi was convicted for abuse of power, forgery and using a police at for sexual adventures the rst two charges being made up (but not the last). In prison, Berkesi began research which would eventually launch him as an author. In 1948, he and a secret police colleague had staged a phoney trial of alleged counter-revolutionaries said to be operating under the name of Kopjs. On the basis of fabricated evidence, three of the defendants were executed. In prison, the authorities enlisted Berkesis help in spying on his fellow-prisoners to discover more about the largely mythical Kopjs. He cooperated in order to win back favour.54 In 1955, Berkesi was freed and rehabilitated. After returning to his old job with the military secret police (KATPOL), he and his colleague ctionalised the story as a spythriller called The Kopjs: the Culture of Counter-revolution. It was an immediate success, and in 1958 he made an even bigger name for himself with a sensational novel, October Storm, about the 1956 Uprising. The heroes of course were the Communists, not the insurgents. It was a racy read, but also a masterpiece of distortion. His thrillers were translated and published all over the East bloc. In his heyday, his books sold over 100,000 copies each in Hungary alone and he was a top royaltyearner. That did not represent much in Hungarys cash-strapped economy, but each year the income was equivalent to the price of two or three new Russian-made cars.

He belonged to the cultural elite, but readers knew little about him, not even what he looked like. Authors were not celebrities and their pictures were not published on dust jackets. He did not appear in public and gave no interviews. However a few people noticed the recurring secret agent themes in his books, and guessed what his background was.55 A Communist secret agent would hardly have been the Hirschenhausers rst choice as a tenant, but they were in no position to know who he was. As a Jewish writer, Berkesi tted into the neighbourhood. His protector, Communist Cultural Secretary Gyrgy Aczl, also a Jew, lived around the corner. In the former home of Imre and Lili Hirschenhauser, Berkesi ourished as a member of the Communist circle of power, ignorant that granddaughter Frances would eventually be his nemesis. A canny arrangement made by Imre would give her the chance. * * *

As for Tibor Gold, the one-time neighbour of Francess grandparents, he was growing up in another bourgeois Jewish family trying to keep its head above water. Frances had never met him until she and I started work on this book. Once she and I began digging in earnest, people seemed to appear from nowhere to ll out her history. Frances met Tibor by chance after sitting next to his wife on a plane. Tibors mother and father lived in a block on the same Holln Ern! Street as the Hirschenhausers. The father met the mother when she asked him to carry her luggage up the stairs to her at. A budding actress of 21, her family had brought her back to Hungary from Italy, on the grounds that she was too involved with an Italian Count. After tea and cakes with the actress and her mother in the St. Istvn Park coffee house, the suitor was deemed a suitable match and they married. Everybody living in the building then was Jewish. Some left during the war, some spent the last months in hiding, while others such as Tibors paternal grandparents perished in Auschwitz. Tibor, born in 1942, was brought up in an atmosphere of old-world renement. The adults played bridge in the evenings. A glass panel door smashed in 1945 remained unrepaired, but they ate from an elegant blue-and-white chequered dinner

service. Every now and then the grown-ups invited him to take drinks with them he got a very weak spritzer. His mother sent him to a French lyce, but the Communists closed it when he was seven on the grounds that it was bourgeois and foreign. To her chagrin, he had to go to the local school frequented by poorer children from the rougher parts of the 13th District. Classes started at six a.m. She retaliated by sending him to private French lessons with a Swiss lady living on the other side of Budapest in the grand old Gellrt Hotel. That meant an hours journey each way, with three changes of trams, often hanging on to the steps. After 1948 when the Communists came to power, I cant remember my parents buying anything signicant at all any more, since things disappeared from the shops. People concentrated on keeping things in good condition, but gradually our clothes and shoes became shabbier, he said. As they sat around the dining table, the grandfather would observe: I wish we could afford to live the way we do. They kept food fresh with slabs of ice purchased from a vendor passing by with a horse and cart. Tibors father, a highly-paid engineer before the war, had to trade one of his best silk suits for a chicken. He was too scared to kill it afterwards. The janitor had to do it, says Tibor. One day, his father was in a butcher shop buying bacon. He complained that the tiny piece of paper the butcher gave him was too small to wrap it up and put in his briefcase. The butcher shrugged his shoulders: there were paper shortages. Tibors father then asked for the complaints book, which every shop was obliged to keep. He ripped ve pages out of it and left declaring: There, now I can wrap my bacon properly! Tibor was struck by the contrasts inside and outside his home. On the trams, in shops and at football matches, people pushed, shoved and swore at each other. They seemed irrationally irritable, he told Frances 60 years later. His familys rst-oor at was cosy and well looked after, but the common parts were dirty and unkempt. Hot water was piped communally through a system laid alongside the central drains. The quality of the water was poor and it corroded the conduits in their at. The lift was a creaky death-trap. The janitor was drunk and tyrannised his seven children. The roads outside were potholed and dust swirled high when the wind got up. Not that Tibor cared much. He was football-mad, and the neighbourhood was ne for that. He and his friends could play on the cobbled street, little disturbed by trafc.

Horses and carriages passed by from time to time, and once a day on average, a car. As he kicked the ball endlessly against the opposite wall, he had only one concern: every now and then the ball stuck in a heap of horse dung.

CHAPTER 5

AMERICA
My mother didnt want to integrate herself nor lose my father to integration
Frances

Switzerland was withdrawing its welcome, so the re-united Pinter couple set out for a new life in the United States. While waiting in Venezuela for entry permits, Frances was born prematurely in 1949. The day before, George had killed a scorpion in the living room, and Agnes decided this was no place for a new-born baby. It was time to move somewhere else, and now they set their minds on Australia. It was a vast distance away, even by the shortest route. But they did not take the short way. I have no idea where we got the money for this, but we went east not west. We stayed at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, sailed through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, stopped off in Ceylon and eventually made it to Melbourne. At the age of one, I was apparently the Captains favourite, said Frances with a grin. In Australia, her parents huddled together with other displaced Hungarian Jews struggling to put their lives together again. They helped each other out with sponsorships nancial guarantees demanded by Australian immigration. At one time, nine people were living in their two-bedroom apartment. Her father gave free maths lessons to one of the children. But Agnes could not nd proper work and looked after her own small child. With a PhD in chemical engineering, she had piecework sent in requiring her to break out buttons from a mould. She disliked Australia, too. Finally in 1954, the family sailed up the Pacic and through the Panama Canal to New York. Frances thus completed her rst circumnavigation of the globe before she was ve. A wandering Jew indeed. They found a cheap at near Columbia University, and bought some beds and an ironing board. On the board, the mother ironed her husbands shirts for job interviews, and the family of three ate from it at mealtimes. Across America, thousands of uprooted human beings from war-torn Europe were making the same austere beginnings. Frances never did much like her mother, who died of cancer when Frances was 26. She was a beautiful and supremely intelligent human being, with a tall, slim gure,

dark hair and well-chiselled features. She was also complicated, demanding and deeply miserable, convinced that life had dealt her a poor hand. This was, from my point of view, largely self-inicted because, from where I stood, she could hardly complain. But she did, incessantly, during the period I knew her, said Frances many years later. Her mother had lived in a whirl of balls and operas as a young woman in Budapest, consorting with a retinue of young men. She mixed with a racy Hungarian set when studying in Zurich. She had all the makings of a high-yer, but in the end never realised herself, either in her career or socially. She got everything too easily. She had many boyfriends, she was a prima donna, at the centre of attention. When it got hard as an immigrant, she wasnt equipped, she didnt have the toughness and she became ill, said Frances in one of her less charitable moments. Frances was Daddys girl, and therefore something of a rival to her mother. Frances and Father that was the unit in our family, recalled younger sister Susanne. The two went skiing together, driving up from Sacramento with the breeze blowing through open windows and the radio blaring. He enjoyed the whoosh of skiing; mother withdrew from the whoosh, said Frances. Father made her a scratching stick for measles, commiserated over an ailing goldsh and took her on ying lessons. Mother lectured her on posture, vetoed a pet frog and warned of black widow spiders in the garage or so Frances remembered. For the dislocated girl, the bond with the father was a source of stability. One day the young Frances rushed to climb a statue on a day out in Saratoga Springs. Her mother caught sight of a wire in the long grass and shouted to beware. Frances had skipped over it, but on hearing her mothers call, ran back, tripped over it and broke her leg. Guess whose fault that was. Mother and daughter were both Hungarian Jews, but their spirits were in conict. There were also resemblances. Like her mother, Frances felt angst about her place in the world. Her mother hated being pitched up in anonymous parts of America, alienated from her home country, not wanted in Switzerland, unable to pursue a meaningful career, and cut off from the good life which she had known. Frances shared the restlessness and intellectual ambitions of her mother, more than the easy-going ways of her father.

The father found a job with General Electric. The mother put her training as a chemical engineer to use in creating chocolate for M&Ms (Frances was unofcial taster) and a new cooking process for Uncle Bens rice. As money began coming in, they bought a large brown wooden house with a big porch in a leafy street of Caldwell, New Jersey. Frances loved cycling to school with her best friend next door, Kathy Smith. Asked by her parents what she would like as a present, Frances answered: a dog, a cat, a brother or a sister, in that order. The parents passed on the dog, cat and brother, but did produce Susanne, eight years Frances junior. Then catastrophe struck: My parents decided to move to California. Both were offered enticing jobs by Aerojet and were to work on space-related projects. Leaving Kathy, my school, and everything that was familiar seemed like the end of the world I started saving my allowance for the airfare back to New Jersey. Although the work was interesting, my mother didnt like California either. Too crass, too supercial. And she got ak at work. Her male colleagues found out she was paid more than they were and this rankled. She couldnt cope. A lucky break followed. Francess father was headhunted by Grumman on Long Island, New York, to help build the Lunar Module which carried astronauts down to the surface of the moon. The work was commissioned by NASA. It was a once-in-a-lifetime project. He negotiated a job for the mother too. They got ready to pack their bags. Frances would soon be back close to her beloved friend Kathy. But I ended up spending the next year in Switzerland. On the pretext that the world was about to enter into World War III due to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that it would be good for my education anyway, I was sent to a Swiss school along with my little sister, who was only ve. Only much later did we nd out that our parents were again having marital problems. For the parents, Switzerland represented security and the good life they recalled from their studies and courting. The remote area of Switzerland where the two little girls went to boarding school, was however hardly a mind-broadening environment. In her Catholic school in the little town of Zug, Frances picked up hints about the supposed guilt of the Jews in Jesus death. It meant nothing in particular to her, except that Jews were somehow unpleasant. She began developing an adolescent enthusiasm for Catholicism. That is when a friend of her mothers casually revealed to her that she, Frances,

was a Jew herself. As she wept uncontrollably, the school directors were shocked at the violence of her reaction and asked what the matter was. I hate my parents. I am a Jew, and I was not told, she sobbed. The school wrote to her parents, but that made it worse. My mother accused me of betraying her by saying I hated them. I felt guilty, and I lied to her: No, I was just shocked and surprised. I didnt say I hated you. Of course, that wasnt true. That was the problem. Everything became confrontational with my mother. In the end, the issue of my being a Jew was just another quarrel with my mother, said Frances. I never broached the subject further with my parents, but I wanted to ask, What do you think you were doing shielding me when the whole world knew? My parents must have thought, Its best for you. We dont want you to be hurt. We wont tell people youre Jewish. We dont want this to be relevant. Later she discovered that half a dozen members of her family had perished in the Holocaust. Bla Zsolt recounts similar denial and conict in his wartime experiences in a ghetto. He observed a 12-year-old Catholic-educated girl scream at her parents: Why are you Jews? Why? And if you are Jews, how did you dare to make me? The parents looked cornered and desperate.56 Like many other Jewish refugees, the Pinter parents persisted in their reluctance to talk of their Jewish origins. When Francess grandfather died, her mother forbade her to go to the funeral on the grounds a 16-year-old would be too upset. Her grandmother said the real reason was the Jewish symbols Frances would have seen at the funeral. After the mother died, her father had a relationship with another woman who was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP). He never told her he was a Jew. When Frances asked him why not, he replied: I thought she might have a heart attack. I didnt want that on my conscience. Typically for immigrants from Eastern Europe, the parents were politically proAmerican, conservative and anti-Communist. It was the McCarthy era when they arrived in America. There was a neurotic climate of paranoia and suspicion. There was no advantage in demonstrating their Jewishness. In those years, awareness of the Holocaust was much less acute. It was never mentioned in the family, said Frances. As Jews, the family ranked lower socially than WASPs. So the parents voted Democrat, the party of the underdogs.

Growing up, Frances wanted to identify with the American way of life, and observed the conict between her parents over integration. My mother didnt want to integrate herself and she didnt want to lose my father to integration. She made difculties when he went to a class to improve his English pronunciation. She had no friends, and only complained about life in America. Sometimes I wondered if shed have been happier in a Hungarian ghetto. I myself wanted to dress like American girls, and have straight hair like them not naturally curly as mine was. I wanted to move like them, striding condently around with their heads up. But Frances felt insecure about her Jewish antecedents, and cut off from her origins. Holding her head up did not come naturally. She was always running for class president and failing, since she was not the naturally popular girl. She empathised with blacks as another disadvantaged stratum. Jews and Catholics mixed in the school, but not outside it. The family home did not help her t in. My parents created a little Budapest at home. In New York, they took us down to the Paprikas Weiss delicatessen, and a Hungarian coffee shop where they played Hungarian music from the 1930s. In the 50s and 60s! It was dreadful, said Frances. Her thwarted mother brought the children up to think their family was special. Frances was upset at the pretence: I thought we were upper class, and it came as a rude shock to realise we were ordinary middle class. Eva Hoffmann saw this generational dissonance as a consequence of the Holocaust. In her study, she wrote: There was probably no gulf wider than that between the ethos of postwar youth culture in America and the mental world of most survivors. The tensions between what were in effect two human cultures often boomeranged right back into survivors households, increasing frictions between the generations, the mutual incomprehension, reproaches and remorse.57 Frances ranked 243 out of 1,000 in her academic achievement. But her best friends were all in the top 25, and she found herself gravitating to intellectuals. It was a taste which never left her and a pointer to her future career. She did not excel enough academically to be in the same classes as them, but after school they were all together, writing poetry and the school journal. In order to be able to talk with them, she read the same books as they were set in their literature classes. Intellectual stimulation has always turned me on. Its as good as sex. I love to make a really good meal of juicy ideas, tugging at my brain, Frances says. You could

say this intellectual striving is typically Jewish. It doesnt make you rich or happy, and I never consciously decided to be an intellectual, but I was drawn to it. For once, she is ready to acknowledge her mothers inuence: She was very well read. She tried to ensure I read the classics and we had more books in our house than my school friends. In my later publishing life, she would have been proud of the company I kept. But when her mother brought up maths, French or the humanities as talking subjects, Frances longed to get stuck into history or politics the really important things in the world. When her mother eventually died of cancer, the rst thought of 26 -year-old Frances was: Oh dear, if there is an afterlife, she will be able to see into my head and see how much I hate her. Shell invade my privacy. I tried to hide to myself how much I hated her, because my heart told me this was wrong. Frances was less directly affected by Communism than her parents, so in her political attitudes she identied with progressive, anti-establishment ideals. Her parents newly-acquired American patriotism left her cold. I saw this as just a formal allegiance to abstract principles nothing of substance. Every day at primary school, we had to swear a pledge to the American ag and one nation, under God, indivisible. We were told we should never let the ag touch the ground. I didnt like it much. Nor did I take my parents attitude seriously, Frances said. When she became politically aware, she joined the anti-Vietnam war movement. America gave Frances a can-do attitude, but she did not wholly identify with the American way of life. She graduated from New York University which she remembers as full of Jewish princesses, with whom she felt little afnity since American Jews had no Holocaust background. America left her dissatised. She nally moved to Europe, where she was attracted by a subtlety of life which contrasted with the polarisations of America. Her younger sister Susanne also grew up unaware that her family was Jewish: I had a feeling they were not proud of their background. I was terried of my parents. I felt they considered me a dimwit, and when I went away with Frances to boarding school in Switzerland, I thought they wanted to get rid of me. In America, my mother lost her elegance. She was thin. She stood out among more homely, cuddly American women, who made cookies and were on valium. I didnt know she was ill with cancer and Im really upset they never told us. She seemed to nd me a bit of a nuisance,

except when we went travelling together in Europe. We made wonderful train trips on the TransEurop express, always travelling rst class. She was right to travel in style! We had good times then together. Susanne has been living in England for the past 35 years, but she still has a U.S. passport, as do her two children. For many years she put off acquiring a British one. Switching to a British passport would cost 280, and its either that or the dentist. Besides, she adds, Im the only one of the family born on American soil. Im proud of that. My parents would never have wanted me to give up my U.S. passport. Each member of Frances family reacted differently to being pitched up in America as refugee Jews. For her mother, it meant the end to ambitions and a plunge into frustration. Her father did his best to provide for his family by developing his working career. But as he admitted to Frances near the end of his life, he had an easy ride and didnt push the envelope too far. America was a safe haven, a symbol of healthy principles and a none-too-stressful destiny. The one who really struck a chord with the growing Frances was grandmother Lili, who at 55 tackled American life with relish. She went out to work in a factory making woven materials, and came home with gifts of headscarves designed for old ladies, which the children found ghastly. Grandmother was a strong character. She looked severe, but she was warm and loving and became my role model I also inherited her boxlike shape, smiles Frances, sitting with me alongside her young sister who, in her early fties, has a slender gure and a ne-boned greyhound face. Grandfather Imre, too old to start a new business, isolated in a foreign country with a language he did not grasp, devoted himself to his property in the Budapest House, which he had taken such pains to preserve. Evening after evening, Frances watched him spread the papers out on the kitchen table. Communist bureaucracy plagued him with procedures and form-lling. Although loath to seize the property outright, the regime had no interest in facilitating ownership by an anti-Communist emigrant in America. Shortly after arriving, the Hungarian authorities ordered him to sell off part of the apartment. Hungarians were ocking to the capital from the land as the government forced through industrialisation. Post-war reconstruction was lagging, and the resulting housing crisis had become the number one social problem. A law was brought in

limiting the maximum size of a dwelling.58 There was no question of Imre returning to Budapest to arrange the sale. All through the rst half of 1956, he toiled to comply with the order by mail at a distance of 4,000 miles. The premises were split, he sold the smaller part to a new owner, and the sinister Berkesi stayed in the rest. As Communism changed society, the Budapest House metamorphosed too. Many of the other apartments in the block were carved up for increasing numbers of needy persons to share. Take care of the paperwork. One day the property will be worth something and then you wont regret putting in the time, Lili told her granddaughter Frances as they watched Imre doggedly persist over the documents. Her faith in the potential for change seemed absurd at the time. We were in the middle of the Cold War. In my American school, we were preparing for nuclear war with air raid drills. Nobody believed Communism would go away, commented Frances years later. Grandmother however was right. Both grandparents became American citizens and the West German government paid them compensation for their wartime mistreatment as Jews (not however the Hungarian government). When grandfather Imre lay dying nine years after landing in the United States, 16-year-old Frances was sent to give him a pep talk in hospital. I suppose my parents thought my youth would keep him alive. I did my bit. I said what I was supposed to. But I could see in his grey face that he wanted to go. It was his time. Imres time really came in October 1956, when the family watched pictures of the Hungarian Uprising icker across their American sitting room. The sight of Soviet tanks, ghting, wreckage and bodies lying on the familiar streets came as a terrible shock. There was this huge black-and-white television in the corner, and we were glued to it. My grandparents would gasp and hold their hands in front of their mouths, aghast at what they were seeing because it was so close to them. My parents found it dreadful too of course, but they had left in the 1930s, while my grandparents had got out by a whisker. For many emigrants, a fantasy about going back lingers long after they have left the home country. The Uprising spelled the end. In a ash, the grown-ups realised they could never resume their lives in Hungary. That nished my grandfather off. In the U.S. he couldnt speak the language or do anything. With this, all hopes of ever going back, however fanciful they might have

seemed before 1956, were now absolutely out of the question, said Frances. Imre could lead a meaningful life neither in Hungary nor his country of emigration. He had done his bit in constructing a new future after the cataclysms of the past, but history had caught up with him. It was time to pass the ame.

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CHAPTER 6

UPRISING
If we let things take their course, the West would say we are either stupid or weak
Khrushchev

Indeed a bitter pill for us to swallow but what can we do?

Eisenhower

Frances was too young to remember the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 as anything more than images on American TV. I myself was 12 years old, and despite living in a distant corner of England immediately sensed this was a momentous event of history. I was fascinated by the grainy news photos of wrecked faades, cobblestone barricades, tanks on boulevards, and resistance ghters in belted raincoats and homburg hats running over tramlines with sub-machine guns. It created an electrifying image of Eastern Europe that endured. Compared with my peaceful, ordered existence in England, I learned that life in the East was desperate, tragic and intensely exciting and it was not so far away. When many years later I asked Hungarians about it, 1956 was clearly a dening moment for them all. But whereas outsiders such as I see it as as an admirable milestone in the Hungarian heritage, for Hungarians it is an open wound. It caused antagonisms which persist today. Hungarians disagree vehemently over its signicance. The 50th anniversary commemorations in 2006 ended in bloody rioting on the streets of Budapest in front of visiting foreign dignitaries. This made it harder for Frances when she came to live in Budapest in the nal years of the last century. The discord Hungarians felt about an epic event in their recent history hindered her from nding the roots she sought. Yet her grandparents had lived through the years when discontent was building up, and she had seen them despair as they watched their home city torn apart on television. If she was going to discover her true identity, she should come to terms with this upheaval herself. Through her family, it was her history too. I too had my reasons to concern myself a good part of my life has been involved with Eastern Europe.

In 1956, nobody knew how the Soviet leadership took its decisions in coping with this challenge to its authority over Eastern Europe. Gradually it became clear from memoirs of former Soviet leaders and the opening of archives. In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin turned up in Budapest with notes of the Soviet Presidiums crucial meetings. He handed them to the new Hungarian government. The picture has been lled out by eyewitnesses seeking to make retrospective sense of an event they only partially perceived at the time. Some of them Frances sought out when we were preparing this book together. Gaston Vadasz, one of her Budapest friends of the 1990s, said it changed his life forever. He was 12 years old at the time. Tibor Gold, Francess new-found friend from an airport encounter, also had childhood memories which were still fresh. When she asked him about 1956, Tibor said he could feel a gradual build-up of tensions for some years beforehand. He was living as a boy across the road from the Budapest House, and despite his mothers attempts to raise him with decorum, he had grown up absorbing Communist propaganda uncritically. He did well and became the schools head boy but then things ran awry. The authorities got to know that his father had been a high-ranking professional. This did not t with their doctrine that the working class should be in the vanguard. So Tibor was demoted. On 6th March 1953, Tibor rushed home weeping because the death of Stalin had been announced at school. The teachers presented the passing as a tragic loss. When he told his grandmother, she blurted out an obscenity, which his parents hastily warned him not to mention outside the family. He noticed that grown-ups in his family took to conducting hushed conversations in German. He did not understand, and he was not supposed to. With secret police everywhere, careless talk could lead to prison, deportation to Siberia or worse. Tibor sensed right. Although he had no way of knowing, Stalins death triggered far-reaching changes in the Soviet Union. The ofcial mourning for the dead dictator did not last long. His reign of terror eased overnight as his successors relaxed with relief. They too had feared for their lives. However Soviet Communism was founded on the Leninist principle of dictatorship of the proletariat. So, if the dictator died and people no longer felt threatened, how was Communist rule to be maintained? On the other hand, if the new leaders tried to maintain the same iron discipline, how could they be freely accepted by the peoples they ruled? Stalins successors never did nd

answers to these questions. Hungary in particular was to suffer as a consequence. The death of the tyrant triggered a power struggle in Moscow. Interior Minister Lavrentii Beria was so feared that his rivals had him murdered. After a period of collective leadership, Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev emerged as leader. Gradually a new course became discernible accommodation with the West, less military expenditure, more money to spend on living standards, and hopefully greater popularity for the Communist Party. The rst repercussions for Hungary were that Communist chief Matys Rkosi was summoned to Moscow and reprimanded for practising terror, a personality cult, excessive industrialisation, forced collectivisation of agriculture and painful austerity all of course foisted on Hungary by Stalin. I am very sorry that I did not receive this kind of lesson before, and I was not given a mirror to face myself, said Rkosi in the cringing style of self-criticism expected of Communist cadres. A stubbornness is evident from the Hungarian comrades attitude primarily from that of Comrade Rkosi, was the unforgiving reply from Beria, then still alive.59 Rkosi had to yield his place as Prime Minister in July 1953 to Imre Nagy, who introduced a New Course to liberalise the economy. However, Rkosi continued to head the Communist Party, giving him scope to meddle, block and bide his time. Nagy halted several major industrialisation projects, diverted resources to consumer goods, reduced prices, raised wages, abandoned collectivisation of agriculture, released political prisoners, brought home Hungarians deported to the Soviet Union and curbed the secret police. Political meetings began addressing real issues rather than chanting leaders names and pledges of loyalty. Press and cultural activity became freer. Victims of show trials such as Lszl Rajk were rehabilitated as was the future tenant of the Hirschenhausers apartment in the Budapest House, Andrs Berkesi. It hardly transformed Hungarian society, but it raised expectations. After six years during which one Hungarian family in three had suffered arrest, prosecution, imprisonment or deportation, the yearning for relief was immense.60 Francess grandparents had little faith that anything would change lastingly however. After years of struggle against hostile destiny, they had given up and were preparing to emigrate to their family in America.

Rkosi did his best to put spanners in Nagys works ... and waited. Sure enough, following another power struggle in the Kremlin, Khrushchev summoned Nagy to Moscow, upbraided him for the radicalism of his reforms and ordered him to correct his mistakes. Rkosi weighed in with his own accusations of right-wing deviation and nationalist tendencies, and by 1955 Nagy was expelled from the government and the Communist Party though he refused to recant. Rkosi was back in the saddle, and the pendulum swung back towards repression and economic hardship.61 Unfortunately for Rkosi, Khrushchev did not have a return to Stalinism in mind. The Soviet leader held peace talks with Western leaders in Geneva in 1955. He travelled to Belgrade to heal the split with Tito, and insisted reluctant Hungarian leaders did the same. Stalin had expelled Tito from the international Communist movement for creating a national version of Communism free to act independently of Moscow. What were the Hungarians supposed to make of Khrushchevs volte-face? Could they too expect greater freedom of action? Some thought perhaps; others were sceptical. In hindsight, we know how it turned out. But Hungarians at the time could be excused for guessing wrongly. In February 1956, Khrushchev dropped a bombshell. He told a secret session of the XXth Congress of the Soviet Communist party that Stalin was a tyrant responsible for the deaths of millions of party members and for a disastrous deviation from the path of socialism. This was all too evidently true, but Stalin was the victor of WWII and the direct successor of Lenin. Nobody had dared to speak of him like that. His audience emerged in shock. It was courageous, but also risky, and it raised enormous questions. Khrushchev and other co-leaders had been deeply involved in Stalins terror, and everybody knew it. So who was he to speak in condemnation? And if Stalins past repression was now bad, logically people should be allowed more freedom but how much? The speech had immediate consequences in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. Polish Party meetings where it was read turned into anti-Soviet demonstrations. In June, workers in the Polish city of Poznan launched a strike for Bread and Freedom, suppressed at the cost of 53 lives. Reformist W"adsys"aw Gomu"ka took over the Party leadership in early October 1956, professing a Polish road to socialism. A furious but dithering Khrushchev came

within hours of ordering an invasion, put off only by Gomu"kas assurances that the new line would not jeopardise Communist rule or friendship with the Soviet Union. Scarcely noticed by the West, even greater trouble was brewing up in Hungary. The Soviets dumped Rkosi again and sent him to cool his heels in Russia. He was succeeded as Communist Party leader by the scarcely less hardline Ern! Ger!, who disappeared on holiday for much of September and October that year. Frances took me to hear what her old friend Gaston Vadasz saw with his own eyes. He is happy to bear witness as he does frequently with groups of Hungarian students not born at the time. Frances sat entranced as he recounted the history of her familys homeland. He remembers Budapest suddenly exploding in demonstrations after a student rally in solidarity with the Poles. The demonstrators streamed towards Parliament shouting Nagy into the government, Rkosi into the Danube and Death to the Russians. Nagy urged the demonstrators to go home and trust the Party to reform. They booed him and refused to disperse. Other protesters went to the Radio to have their demands broadcast. A student gathering at the Budapest Technical University approved a Sixteen Points political programme at breakneck speed. According to one of the participants, student Mtys G!dr!s, At nine oclock we demanded a reduction in teaching of Russian, at half past nine that courses in Marxism-Leninism should be made optional. At eleven we demanded that the Russians leave our country. We demanded the introduction of democracy and a multi-party system.62 By midnight on 23rd October, Nagy had been re-instated as Prime Minister. Vast numbers emerged on to the streets, exhilarated by the unprecedented outburst of free spirits. Many can remember exactly what they were doing that day much as people recall where they were when they heard news of Kennedys assassination. It was the most spontaneous revolution I could ever imagine, Gaston Vadasz recalled. Only afterwards did I realise there was a student movement behind it, stencilling pamphlets. The students lit the rst spark, but from then onwards it was completely spontaneous. Gaston was doing his homework at school when a pupil rushed in just after lunchtime and told them there were demonstrations on the streets. I scooted out. The streets were alive with people rushing along. Others looked out of windows to see what was going on. It was unheard of for there to be any rally not

organised by the Communists. I heard there was something going on at the statue of Sndor Pet! [the poet hero of the 1848 Hungarian revolution for freedom from Austria]. An actor was standing on the rst step of the monument declaiming one of Pet!s patriotic poems: Rise up, Magyar, the country calls! Its now or never what fate befalls ... Shall we live as slaves or free men? Thats the question choose your Amen! God of Hungarians, we swear unto Thee, We swear unto Thee that slaves we shall no longer be!63 I cry even now when I recall it. There was something in the air I had never experienced before. Political opinion had been something which was whispered in my family. Now this was an open call to arms, as in 1848. As I started walking past the Chain Bridge, I heard crowd noise, people noise. As I neared the Parliament building at four or four-thirty p.m. and dusk was falling, I could see people from a distance, lling almost the whole place in front of it. As we emerged from a side street, other crowds were emerging from other side streets. It was brazen. There was power in the shouts of Out with the Ruskies and Freedom for Hungary. It was incredibly exciting. Then the mood became more hostile. The crowd wanted to tear down Russian ags, and someone came out on a balcony and cut the Communist insignia from the Hungarian ag. Someone grabbed some placards, rolled them up and lit them as torches. Then we heard there was something going on by the Stalin statue. As we made our way there, people were tearing red stars from roofs and throwing them down. Men were sawing away at the legs of Stalin between the boots and the knees. It was built like 18 tanks. They brought acetylene torches, ropes, trucks which lifted buses and eventually steel cable from the Danube shipyard. At nine p.m. it started going over forwards, tugged by half a dozen trucks. People swarmed over it like ants on the ground, spitting and urinating on it and trying to break pieces off. Then guards on military ambulances transporting wounded soldiers told me there was shooting at the Radio station, and I thought Wow, I gotta be there! As I

zigzagged down the streets, I heard single shots, then rat-a-tat-tats echoing around the buildings. A man grabbed me and said This is shooting, you dont belong here, get home! I realised I could get hurt and jogged home. My brother, eight years older, had been sent to nd me, but came racing back after he stumbled on soldiers setting up a machine gun. My father was wringing his hands, but he didnt hit me. He was pretty cool. Demonstrators tried to enter the Radio building and shots were red from inside. Mtys G!dr!s, who had taken part in drafting the students Sixteen Points, was there: All at once I saw the ashes of a volley of gunre in front of me. Two people were hit beside me. I threw myself down. Suddenly it was war. Another witness was Eszter Berger-Bone, 13 years old.64 Her mother told her: Dont go to school. Come down to the Kossuth Square. Theyre going to take the Red Star away. Youll never forget this all your life. Today is revolution. Eszter went to the Radio, but as soon as shots toppled people around her, she ran back home and hid in her cellar. Hungarian Party leader Ger! asked the Soviets for help, and by four a.m. they were in Budapest. The Russians came with tanks and shot into the buildings. I was terribly afraid, said Eszter. The Soviet leadership was almost unanimous in sending in the troops. Only Anastas Mikoyan urged otherwise, arguing that Hungarians should be left to restore order, and if our troops intervene, we will only make things worse for ourselves. Khrushchev hedged his bets by ordering that Nagy be involved in efforts to settle the conict. He sent Mikoyan and fellow-Presidium member Mikhail Suslov to Budapest.65 Youths threw Molotov cocktails at the Soviet tanks, and surrounded Russian soldiers and harangued them, then slipped away into impenetrable alleyways. The Soviet troops, who had been occupying Hungary since WWII without trouble, felt confused and did not know whom to trust. The insurgents obtained arms from factories and barracks. Hungarian police and soldiers began siding with the rebels. Factory workers, who were supposed to be the backbone of the Communist regime, began forming their own revolutionary councils. The Hungarian Communist Party appointed a new leader: Jnos Kdr, son of an unmarried mother, escapee from a 1944 transport to a Nazi death camp, trained as a typewriter repairman, last employed delivering umbrellas and, more importantly, a leading cadre who had served two and a half years in a Stalinist prison. That tted the

prole now sought by Moscow working class, a good Communist record, but not a Stalinist, and possibly credible to the dissatised Hungarian populace. The Soviets were initially set on pacication, but passions ared when they opened re outside Parliament, killing some 75 people. The streets became lethal. Shell splinters came ashing past at supersonic speed, glowing red from small slivers that could take your eye out to great chunks that would cut you in two, one onlooker recalled.66 The insurgents took control of several boulevards, and the authority of the regime disintegrated further. Mtys G!dr!s said later: It lasted just ve or six days, and then the Uprising had won. It was unimaginable. The Russian troops and their tanks, the secret police, a whole system of suppression planned down to the last detail all of this fell apart. At the age of 19, he was treated as a hero. People queuing for bread drew aside to let him be served rst because they saw he was a resistance ghter. Eszter Berger-Bones political prisoner father was released. At 13 she had never seen him before: How thin he was! He had run from his prison in his striped clothing. Suddenly, he stood outside. Great freedom was there. But he didnt know what he should do with it or where he should go. One of my old Reuters colleagues, Ronald Farquhar, arrived on 28th October after an all-night drive through fog and rain from Warsaw. As soon as the Uprising started, the borders with the West were sealed and no journalists could enter from nearby Vienna. Farquhar found the frontier with Communist Poland was open and realised it was not over yet: Soviet tanks and troop carriers guarded each corner of the Margaret Bridge ... Shell-pocked buildings, uprooted tram rails and lamp standards, burned out tanks and lorries, dangling overhead cables and lime-covered bodies of Soviet soldiers lying in streets strewn with rubble and splintered glass, all testied to the ferocity of the combat, he recalled 45 years later. Open lorries, their sides covered by white sheets with improvised Red Cross markings, rushed with Hungarian doctors and nurses in white coats past Soviet soldiers, many very young, standing, ries at the ready, at street corners and in doorways.67 Gaston Vadasz went out with his father and caught sight of a dead man hanging upside down from a lamp-post. Then another and another. They were plainclothes secret policemen whom crowds had caught and lynched. They were identied by the

personal documents they carried with them. Several were caught stufng the papers into their mouths or trying to burn them. A number were shot in cold blood after surrendering, then strung up and set on re. I wasnt shocked by seeing the dead bodies because my whole world as I knew it had changed. I saw a dead man with the top of his head blown off not far from our home. He was grey, with no brain, wearing a uniform. I saw crowds burning Communist and Russian books. I loved books as a child and was so proud of my collection. But I felt no qualms at watching them being burned like this, said Gaston. Andrs Berkesi, the secret agent who had just become the Hirschenhausers tenant in the Budapest House, observed and collected information. The Uprising offered perfect material for a new thriller. He set to work in the apartment on the book that would make him famous. Francess aunt Erzsi felt uneasy. The mayhem boded no well. The Soviet leadership thought likewise. Vladimir Molotov grumbled: Things are going badly. The situation has deteriorated and it is gradually moving towards capitulation. The elderly Marshal Kliment Voroshilov complained: Comrades Mikoyan and Suslov are poorly informed ... The American secret services are more active there than Comrades Mikoyan and Suslov are.68 Nagy dug his heels in and threatened to resign if he was not supported. Kdr persuaded the Kremlin that the insurrection was not against Communist rule as such, and that they could restore order by making concessions. They would recognise the Uprising as a democratic popular movement, call a ceasere, have Soviet troops withdraw, and disband the Hungarian secret police. Moscow bought this line, and then went further. On the 30th of October a meeting of the Soviet leadership decided to relax its hold over all its East European satellites to an extent nobody could have imagined before. Khrushchev opened by declaring: We should adopt a declaration today on the withdrawal of troops from countries of the peoples democracy. Dmitrii Shepilov remarked: The course of events reveals the crisis in our relations with the countries of peoples democracy. Anti-Soviet sentiments are widespread. The underlying reasons must be revealed ... Eliminate the elements of diktat. Ekaterina Furtseva said: We must search for other modes of relations with the countries of the peoples democracy. Maxim Saburov added: It is impossible to lead

against the will of the people ... we might end up lagging behind events. We are unanimous, announced Khrushchev, and on the same day the Soviet armed forces pulled out of Budapest. The Soviet government issued a statement admitting mistakes in the mutual relations among the socialist countries violations and errors which demeaned the principle of equality in relations among the socialist states. It pledged to observe full sovereignty of each socialist state. Its troops would be stationed on their territory only by consent.69 Having pored for years over the doctrinaire declarations of Soviet bloc leaders, I nd it hard to believe even today that they brought themselves to acknowledge such a damaging truth and act upon it. Lenin and Stalin had taught them to impose Soviet will with an iron st. In the awkwardly-worded notes, I can sense their unease. Even in professing liberal views, they parade in lockstep. Nobody says anything out of line. It was an astonishing turnaround as Hungarian historian Jnos Rainer later put it, one of the rare moments when the Empire sent signals to the outside world that it might be opening up.70 It lasted no more than a day. The revolution was careering out of control. The workers stayed on strike. The insurgents refused to lay down their arms, and demanded withdrawal of Soviet armed forces from the rest of Hungary, as well as a declaration of Hungarys neutrality. The Kremlins olive branch had come too late. With his pince-nez and twirled moustaches, the portly Nagy looked more like a Central European professor than the Communist functionary he was, let alone the leader of a revolution. He nevertheless mutated with the tumultuous course of events. Nagy ended the one-party system, formed a coalition of four parties, began incorporating the insurgents into a national guard and dismantling the secret police, and let revolutionary councils take control of ministries and local government. He called upon Hungary to leave the Soviets Warsaw Pact military alliance. The Kremlin now faced a strategically-placed satellite country set on abandoning Communism, with all its systemic restraints, and breaking clean free. That was not what they had in mind in their conciliatory declaration of the 30th. The ugly images of mobs lynching security police sent shock waves all over the Communist world. The authority of the Hungarian Communist Party, for so long absolute, seemed on the point of collapse. Chinas Mao Tse-Tung urged the Kremlin to crack down.71

The Czechoslovak Communist leadership was alarmed by dissent among the Hungarian minority in Slovakia and ordered police to suppress it.72 The Romanian Politburo closed the border with Hungary, made arrests among Hungarians living in Romania, and strengthened guards on Party and government buildings. The Bulgarian Party expressed alarm that Bulgarian journalists, writers, actors, painters, lawyers and even some Communists were sympathising with the Hungarian rebels.73 Even Tito was having doubts. Tito had broken away from the Soviet Union, imprisoned his own Stalinist diehards, and championed a national path to socialism. He had got away with it, and now the Hungarian rebels looked to Yugoslavia for inspiration and support. But an uprising which seemed on the verge of doing away with Communism raised too many questions about Titos own hold on power. He had always forcibly imposed exclusive rule by his own Communist party. As Tito wrote to the Soviet leaders later, certain elements in our country enemies of the present order in Yugoslavia used this occasion to provoke disobedience against the authorities and the party leadership. He was not willing to go out on a limb to save the Hungarians. Not that Tito could have done anything to prevent what the Soviets were now set on. Khrushchev and Georgy Malenkov ew to brief him on the 3rd of November at his retreat on the Adriatic island of Brioni. Violent thunderstorms tossed their small plane around over the mountains Khrushchev found the ight worse than any he had made in WWII. Then followed a rough sea crossing in a launch to the island, where the Yugoslav ambassador observed them arriving much the worse for wear, in particular the chubby Malenkov, who could scarcely stand up.74 From seven p.m. until dawn, Khrushchev told the Yugoslavs of the Soviet decision to re-invade Hungary and crush the Uprising. The decision was taken on 31st October, reversing the course the Kremlin leadership had agreed unanimously only 24 hours before. Long afterwards, Khrushchev reminisced how he vacillated sleeplessly in his bed on the night of the 30th to the 31st.75 By the morning he had changed his mind. He told his Presidium colleagues that Soviet troops must, after all, restore order in Hungary. If we depart from Hungary, it will give a great boost to the Americans, English and French the imperialists. They will perceive it as weakness on our part and will go on to the offensive. Notes on the meeting indicate little discussion. Everybody agreed at once. It was back to normal, and one can feel the sense of relief. Only Saburov

embarrassingly pointed out that it was the opposite of what they had decided the day before. He was ignored.76 I could feel the exasperation of Khrushchevs colleagues beginning to mount at his mercurial style of leadership. They went along with him this time, but eight years later they would oust him after he unwittingly brought the world close to nuclear annihilation because of his adventure into Cuba. On Brioni three days later, Khrushchev told Tito: What is there left for us to do? If we let things take their course the West would say we are either stupid or weak, and thats one and the same thing. We cannot possibly permit it, either as Communists and internationalists or as the Soviet Union. We would have capitalists on the frontiers of the Soviet Union. He added, as recorded by the Yugoslav ambassador, that there were people in the Soviet Union who would say that as long as Stalin was in command everybody obeyed and there were no big shocks, but that now, ever since they had come to power (and here Khrushchev used a coarse word to describe the present Soviet leaders), Russia had suffered the defeat and loss of Hungary.77 So in the end, it came down not to the rights or wrongs of socialism or any Hungarian interests. What the Hungarians were to undergo was prompted by Khrushchevs fear of appearing weak against the West and losing power at home. Tito did not object, and the two exhausted Russians rode back across the waves to launch their onslaught. The Kremlin intended to remove Nagy. Tito urged them to give full authority to Jnos Kdr, who he felt was closer to his own more independent line. Unbeknown to the rest of the Hungarian government, Kdr and his comrade Ferenc Mnnich had gone to the Soviet embassy and had been spirited out to Moscow. At ve a.m. on 4th November, the capital awoke to a thunder of guns, as the Red Army attacked on three sides. I saw gun ashes silhouette the hills and red tracer stab the darkness. By dawn Soviet tanks were in the city. They surrounded Parliament and public buildings, and straddled the Danube bridges, wrote my Reuters colleague Ronnie Farquhar. The ground shook under the Budapest House, and heavy explosions tossed Gaston Vadasz out of bed in the city centre. I peeped out into the night across the Danube towards the Palace and saw a ring of re around Budapest. The whole horizon

was lit with brilliant orange as the shells left the muzzles of the Russian guns. Everybody in the building rushed to the basement. In our part of Europe, we all knew what we had to take with us on such occasions: our, yeast and bedding, he told me. At 5.19 a.m., Nagy went on the radio: This is Imre Nagy speaking, the President of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian Peoples Republic. Today at daybreak Soviet forces started an attack against our capital, obviously with the intention to overthrow the legal Hungarian democratic government. Our troops are ghting. The Government is in its place. I notify the world, the people of our country and the entire world of this fact. In fact, hardly any Hungarian soldiers were ghting. They received no order to do so. Defence Minister Pl Malter and fellow commanders had been lured to the Soviet military headquarters south of Budapest on the pretext of negotiating withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Russians arrested them during the night. Nagy scarcely knew what was going on, and made no attempt to order troops into action himself. Within a few hours, he, his family and three dozen colleagues had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. At dawn, Mnnich came on the air from a Soviet military radio in the countryside. He announced that he and Kdr were forming a new Hungarian Worker-Peasant Government. So that was what the two had been doing since disappearing on 1st November. They had made themselves available to the Soviet leadership. The Russians then hand-picked all the members of the new government Kdr would head. The Red Army imposed a curfew and threatened to shoot anyone on the streets. Tanks shot randomly at buildings to deter resistance.78 Farquhar, a tank soldier in WWII, took refuge in the British Legation, where bullets whistled through the windows when a Hungarian sniper shot at a Russian tank column. He saw Soviet artillery ring from a hilltop and bombers roaring low overhead. On 6th November, he wrote in his notebook: Firing died down after dark occasional crumps of mortar bombs, ares, sporadic crackle of machine-gun and rie re tanks patrolling the streets in steady rain ... looks like the end.79 Gaston Vadasz saw hundreds of Soviet armoured vehicles rumbling past, and over the next few days he played cowboys and Indians in the dark recesses of the cellars. Mongolian-looking soldiers in weird outts came looking for insurgents. A Russianspeaking maid asked what was happening outside, and they replied: Capitalist soldier:

bum, bum, bum. Ruskie soldier goes BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. They pointed to the Danube and said Suez. Apparently, that was where they had been told they were. Just when Khrushchev was trying to make up his mind at the end of October, the Suez crisis broke out. Britain and France invaded Egypt in an attempt to topple President Gamal Nasser, who had nationalised the Suez Canal. The Americans objected to what they saw as old-fashioned imperialism by the two European states. For the Soviets it was a godsend, since it diverted attention from their own crackdown in Hungary, which moreover looked no more reprehensible than what the Western powers were up to. Many Hungarians saw the implications immediately. Jubilation turned to disbelief, dismay and anger, correspondent Farquhar remarked. A steelworker spoke sarcastically to him about the British Prime Minister: My compliments to Sir Anthony Eden. He stabbed the Hungarian revolution in the back!80 When Eisenhower was elected Americas President in 1953, he ratcheted the existing policy of containment up to roll-back a commitment to liberate the captive nations of Europe. How this was to be done was not thought through. Eisenhower never spoke of using force, and U.S. ofcials worried about encouraging local populations to rise up on the mistaken assumption the West would intervene.81 When the Hungarian Uprising broke out, the U.S. government-run Radio Free Europe (RFE) did just that. Manned mainly by East European migrs, it broadcast military advice for resisting the Russians, and spoke of Western help being only days away. Peter Inkei, another friend of Frances, remembers people coming out from Budapest to his village claiming the Americans were coming, or had even already arrived, and that they would not let the Hungarians down.82 It was a fantasy. Faced by a massive Soviet force in Hungary, the Americans only means of forcing them out would have been nuclear war and that was out of the question. Eisenhowers talk of roll back was empty rhetoric. In reality, there was nothing much the West could do to help the Hungarians bid for freedom. But the deceit about true American intentions was cruel. As he contemplated his impotence, Eisenhower could only bewail that this was indeed a bitter pill to swallow. We say we are at the end of our patience, but what can we do that is really constructive? Should we break off relations with the USSR? What would be gained by this action? The Soviets dont care. The whole business was

shocking to the point of being unbelievable. The British government, absorbed by Suez, decided that we should say as little as possible.83 Kdr and his small band of companions, arriving in Budapest in a Soviet armoured car, faced a daunting task with practically the whole of Hungary against them. His administration was little more than an announcement at this stage, a puppet regime totally dependent on the Soviets 300,000 soldiers and 2,500 tanks. Until December, he had no government apparatus or Hungarian armed forces he could use. Soviets, Hungarians and Yugoslavs negotiated what to do with Nagy and his fellow refugees in the Yugoslav embassy. Tito urged they should be allowed to go to Yugoslavia, but Kdr and the Soviets did not want Nagy there as a focus of opposition. He gave a promise of safe conduct, but when the refugees emerged, the Russians arrested them and whisked them off to detention in Romania. Tito was furious at the double-cross. That broke the back of last resistance. 200,000 Hungarians ed to the West, representing two per cent of the nation. Some 3,000 Hungarians perished and 27,000 were wounded. In 1958, Imre Nagy and four associates, Pl Malter, Mikls Gimes, Jzsef Szilgyi and Gza Lozonczy, were executed in Hungary after secret trials. Those who ed had to decide fast, take risks and leave their homeland perhaps forever. Eszter Berger-Bone [who now lives in Switzerland] and her mother walked for three days to the frontier and slipped over into Austria with the help of a Hungarian guard. Before crossing, Eszter scraped up a handful of Hungarian soil to take with her. In Austria, a countess friend of her mother put them up in a Schloss. Waiters wearing gloves served them at table and addressed the 13-year-old as gndiges Frulein honourable young lady. Gaston Vadasz was summoned by his mother, who told him: What do you think of going to the West? Dont answer yet. If you say yes, we go, if not, nobody will ever reproach you. I dont know where we will go. I cant promise we will come back. I am not sure where we go will be home. But if we go, here will never be home again. Sleep on it. Twelve-year-old Gaston slept on it for a quarter of an hour, considered his maths test coming up, decided it would be an adventure, and gave his assent. Within a week they were off, having sold their apartment. Gaston received a used Omega wristwatch

the purchasers gave in part payment. He wears it today and it works. It was made in 1944, the year of his birth. Clad in a Tyrolean hat and a sheepskin coat donated by his grandmother, its pockets bulging with forints, Gaston and his mother headed for Austria. Crossing the frontier was strictly forbidden, so they took a fake letter from a headmaster claiming the boy had to attend courses in the border town of Sopron. When they stepped down from the train at a country halt in pitch dark, they waited until they heard a horse snort and then picked up a mufed codeword, to which they replied. After being paid, the farmer who was to be their guide took them by cart to a house stinking of sheep, from where they set out on foot across furrowed elds, stumbling and sweating from the weight of their bags and the huge amount of clothes they put on. When light rockets went up, the guides told us to hit the ground, since the border guards would be able to see our shadows. After several hours, we reached a spot where the ground was raked. The guides pointed to lights in a distant village and told us to cross in single le, stepping in the footprints of the person ahead. After 10 minutes, a soldier with a machine gun emerged from the shadows and asked: Are you Hungarians? Welcome to Austria. We crossed on 21st December, the shortest day of the year and Stalins birthday. It was the turning point of my life, said Gaston. He grew up in the United States, and met Frances when he returned to live in Budapest in 1994. For Charles Gati, departure was a family trauma. He remembers his parents watching all night in silence as their only child prepared a few belongings and wrote farewell notes to friends. At dawn his father could hold back his tears no longer. They embraced, and Charles walked backwards down the Budapest street for as long as he could see them waving from their balcony. I did not fully appreciate until much later when I had my own children in America how unselsh my parents were to let go of me, he wrote later.84 Egon Ronays parents begged him not to go. But he could see the writing on the wall. He had a family in Hungary but saw no future for his class here. If hed stayed, Id never have been able to go to university, said his daughter, whom he took with him. In London, Esther Ronay grew up happily and was able to go to an English university, but ponders whether her home country could have offered her more: In

Hungary, people learn about the world and have a world view. An English education teaches you to think for yourself. That was idle speculation then. She had no other option. But she could make a choice later on. In 1998 she returned to live in Budapest. She missed the city where she had grown up. It called her back, and she obeyed the summons, never regretting it since. She and Gaston were not the only ones to come back after prolonged absences. Those who stayed on were told little of what happened. For 40 years, the peoples of the Soviet bloc were kept in the dark about most of the issues affecting their lives. Communist parties acted like secret societies. No outsiders were admitted to their deliberations and they rarely appeared in public, preferring to move around in large black cars with curtained windows. The media fed the populace only those bits of news which demonstrated the correctness of the Communist path. But as the remaining inhabitants emerged from hiding in 1956, they could see with their own eyes the scale of the disaster which had struck their capital. Gaston Vadasz spoke of phenomenal destruction, like World War II in parts. To this day bullet holes scar windows and doorways. The Ujliptvros area of the city where the Budapest House of Francess grandparents was located survived little scathed, though there too a few bullet marks remain visible. Francess aunt Erzsi saw Soviet tanks parked outside her home on the grass of St. Istvn Park. Insurgent snipers once commandeered the balcony of her upstairs neighbour to re at the occupiers. This was highly risky for the inhabitants, since the Russians had no scruples about blasting buildings from which they came under re. The inhabitants of the Vadaszs building mounted a 24-hour vigilante guard to prevent resistance ghters entering. Ujliptvros was a bourgeois neighbourhood however, and in such areas families tried to keep out of trouble and carry on as usual. Tibor Gold was kept indoors by his parents, and saw little of the Uprising except when he went out to buy bread. The young resistance ghter Mtys G!dr!s took a dim view of this: Its not true that the whole city fought. Only the proletariat, the workers from the factories, really fought courageously... I felt ashamed of my class. When I came home during the battles, I hung my machine pistol up in the wardrobe and looked at my family eating chicken soup from porcelain dishes. I cried out aloud: the Hungarian proletariat is bleeding and here the bourgeois are feeding!85

That was understandable. The factory workers had suffered most from the harsh living standards imposed by the Stalinists, and they felt angrier since this was done in their name. They had been trained by the Communists as factory militias and had access to weapons. All those executed afterwards came from the working class. Erzsi, Francess rediscovered aunt, expressed no enthusiasm for the 1956 Uprising. She was no great friend of the Communists, but under their rule she had been able to go to university and make a career. Life was much better than under the anti-Semitic Fascists in World War II. She had reason to welcome the Red Army as liberators in 1945. Like others who had adapted more or less willingly to Communist life, she was not convinced that the disorder and destruction were worth it. As a growing boy in 1956, I experienced the Uprising from afar as an electric shock. Since then, I have lived through revolution as a journalist myself (in Portugal), and know only too well how it can tear a society apart. In retrospect, the Hungarian Uprising tragically exceeded the capacity of its protagonists. The Soviets did not think through de-Stalinisation. Khrushchev mixed indecision with the brutality of the Ukrainian-Russian factory worker he originally was. Eisenhower spoke unwisely of roll-back, and was shown to have neither the will nor the means to enforce it. Imre Nagy was unable to rally people around common goals. Many disagreed with his claim that freedom and reforms could be achieved within the Communist system. They saw free multi-party elections, a free press and an end to police repression as denying everything Communism represented. His Communism with a human face proved contradictory, and his resolve faltered once he came into conict with the Communist fellowship to which he belonged. The resistance ghters did not necessarily envisage a return to capitalism. Certainly not the workers who formed revolutionary councils. A number of leaders insisted that they were not challenging socialism or friendship with the Soviet Union. They were united by their readiness to ght, but the revolution offered no blueprint for Hungarys political, social or economic system. Time was too short in those few chaotic days. Events ran away from everybody involved. In some respects, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 resembles that of 1848 against the Austrians: a brave struggle doomed to fail. That was the lesson drawn by opponents of Communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It was the Wests failure to support the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 that really

broke morale. People realised the white ships were not coming, said a postCommunist Estonian Prime Minister, Mart Laar.86 There were no more Uprisings. When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring in 1968, Czechs offered scarcely any forceful resistance. Polands Solidarity movement used strikes and sit-ins to undermine the regime. When Communists all over Eastern Europe were losing their grip at the end of the 1980s, their opponents refrained from provocations which could spark a backlash. In the Velvet Revolution of Pragues Wenceslas Square in 1989, crowds chanted no violence. For all its shortcomings, the Hungarian Uprising ranks as one of Europes most important events of the twentieth century. It dened the Soviet Union as an evil power in the eyes of millions, resulting in mass desertions from Communist parties and a huge loss of sympathy in the West. The Third World took its distance. From my point of view, living in Eastern Europe as a journalist in the early 1970s, the Hungarian Uprising already in 1956 showed that people would never accept Communism. In the long run, it was doomed. I warmed to the East Europeans amongst whom I lived for showing that the human spirit was stronger. Hungary 1956 turned out to be the Kremlins last major act of bloodshed in Europe. In Hungary, it thereafter tolerated a more easy-going regime than anywhere else. That represented a small but signicant recognition of Hungarian aspirations. Kdrs goulash Communism is probably what Khrushchev would have liked for the Soviet Union tough enough to keep the masses in hand, but providing limited freedoms and bearable living standards. When the Soviet leader sailed to the U.N. in New York in 1960, he took Kdr along as his shipboard drinking companion.87 1956 earned Hungarians worldwide admiration. The bravery of their resistance against impossible odds pushed memories of their wartime alignment with the Nazis and participation in the Holocaust to the recesses of Western minds. The Uprising gave a new meaning to Hungarian national life. For a few days, as one historian put it, Hungary came back into history.88 In Switzerland, crowds lined railway stations to cheer Hungarian refugees, children queued to give them presents, and sympathisers marched in torch-lit parades. Many were put up in hotels overlooking mountains and lakes, and given scholarships to pursue studies. In my home town of Worcester, Hungarian immigrants set up the rst delicatessen shop and began spicing up English eating habits. The pattern was repeated

all over Western Europe and America. On the 50th anniversary, Western newspapers carried letters from Hungarian refugees thanking their host peoples for the ease with which they could settle, assimilate and succeed in their lives. Frances thus could look back on this momentous event not just with the horror felt by her family in the United States viewing it on television, but with a certain pride too. It was a brave revolt against the cruel regime which her Hungarian grandparents had had to live through. As part of her heritage, it was certainly better than the genocide of the Hungarian Jews. It was a building block in the edice of her shaky identity. Hungarians in Hungary however have found no common account of this momentous national event. Since the Uprising had no common goals, it remains a source of animosity and division rather than pride and unity. The Right claims the revolution as its own because it challenged Communist rule and foreign interference. The Left proclaims it as a struggle for a humane and democratic form of socialism. The two sides boycott memorial events staged by the other, and refuse to shake hands. They invoke 1956 to ght each other rather than celebrate a shared triumph. The Uprising is a prime example of failure to digest traumatic history. Hungarians are victims rather than masters of this part of their history. When she came to live in Budapest, Frances hoped to feel afnity with the compatriots of her ancestors. What she found was a nation unsure what the most important event of its recent history really meant. Back in 1956, to the Pinters and Hirschenhausers in New Jersey, watching their home city being wrecked and trodden underfoot, the Uprising seemed an unmitigated disaster. In fact they had a card in their hands: the family apartment in the Budapest House. It could only tenuously be considered still a home. But it remained solid, unharmed and theirs.

@#A("*&+0)B2&()&-./01"2*&C:3=D

CHAPTER 7

AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS

I sensed there was something really evil about this place and this person
Frances

Berkesi was paying a modest, state-controlled rent for the Hirschenhausers apartment, but over in New Jersey the grandparents received nothing. The money was paid into a bank in Budapest and could not be sent out of the country. This was one of the many challenges emigrants faced in administering property behind the Iron Curtain from America, but Francess mother and grandmother soon cracked it. They would return whenever they could and spend the money there on cafs, seamstresses, thermal baths, masseurs, manicurists, and hairdressers. Frances was allowed to accompany them. The rst time, in 1970, she and her mother stayed at the Hotel Astoria, from where Count Mihly Krolyi proclaimed Hungary an independent republic in 1918 after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The creature comforts they had come to enjoy however did not impress Frances as a youngster brought up in the West: The hairdressers smelled of peroxide and I was struck by the assembly line mentality. The customers sat in a queue and progressed through various stages under the direction of a buxom middle-aged matron. Each person charged individually for their particular services. They wore dingy white smocks and old slippers, and used burning hot iron tongs for curling. This was Communism in its blowsy maturity. The worst of the terror and austerity was over, but the economic growth of the post-war years had stagnated, and the statecontrolled economy was proving pitifully inadequate in providing for the needs of the people. The difference in living standards compared with the West was becoming ever more obvious. There were few incentives to invest, renovate, produce or serve. People had jobs, but in the gift of the state. It could be comfy, and you could nd satisfaction through companionship and mutual support in the workplace. There were plenty of rewards for toeing the line, but few for showing initiative. Like the other states in the Soviet empire,

Hungary was gradually slipping into a state of debilitating semi-poverty. Not too bad if you were of poor origins, had limited ambitions, or wanted a trouble-free life, but stiing and depressing if you knew how it was in the West. Laying hands on the Hungarian forints was no joke either. I remember how it was to queue up at the bank to get the money that was sitting in the account. One had to take it out as cash in those days. It was a seedy operation in a seedy place. There was no place to sit down and you had to wait in line. It was awful and demeaning. They treated you badly. It took my grandmother a long time to get out what she needed each time she came, Frances recalled. It was the same throughout Communist Europe. Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakuli# described using a post ofce in Zagreb at the time. Just when she was nally approaching the counter after a long wait, the ofcial behind the window put up a Break notice and sat down for half an hours coffee while the queues built up further. Even worse than the waiting was the callous lack of privacy. In Communist society, which dealt with people in classes rather than as individuals, there was no private space. Everybody pushed and crowded around each other at the window, so they all saw each others bills, and could deduce large parts of their private lives.89 While in Budapest on this rst visit, Frances mother fell ill with heart trouble and was taken to hospital. Foreigners were rare, so she was put on her own into a room for six. It was a small luxury, but had a price. The medical staff expected to be tipped for their services. Frances and her grandmother had to work out the etiquette for doing this. The doctors told Frances her mother might die, so Frances telephoned her father in the United States. Working in the space industry, he was forbidden to travel to Communist countries. He told me to tell her he was heartbroken. I dutifully conveyed this message and wondered what kind of world I lived in where a man had to say good-bye to his dying wife like that. Mother however recovered, and while she was convalescing Frances began picking up the ways of a peoples democracy. She was warned against reading certain books on the tram. She was taken aback by the jealous fury of people towards an absent person who owned a superior table cloth. Such venomous envy over something so trivial seemed distasteful to me. The Hungarians were not so much keeping up with the Joneses. Instead they would do anything to bring the Joneses down a peg or two. I

would see plenty of that later when I came to live in Hungary. On their next visit in 1971, grandmother Lili and Frances set out on a tram to see Berkesi. Frances had never set eyes on the apartment in the Budapest House, but she had a colourful picture in her mind, gleaned from nostalgic accounts by its owners stranded across the Atlantic. Brought up in America, she was used to living in plenty of space. As her grandparents had spoken so glowingly of the Art Deco chandeliers and the tted bookshelves lovingly crafted out of ne wood, she was expecting to be impressed. But the Budapest House was now down on its uppers, and when Frances walked into the dingy entrance hall, her heart sank. Was this it? The creaking lift no longer went as far as the penthouse. They had to get out on the fth oor and walk up the last ight of stairs. The door opened. She gulped with disappointment. It was small! A fair size for Europe but cramped by American standards. The three rooms overowed with drab, 1950s-style furniture, covered in dark green and red velvet drapes, laden with books, papers and a myriad of belongings accumulated over years. Heavy curtains and shutters kept out the light, and the air was suffocating. The bookcases were nothing special. As she set eyes on Berkesi and his wife, she tensed with foreboding. This was not the happy home her grandparents had depicted. I sensed there was something really evil about this place and this person, she remembered. They were offered tea. Her grandmother sat down in the apartment which was hers but now in other hands. Did ownership have much practical signicance anymore? It must have been just devastating. She was such a formidable character, such a stoic stiff-upper-lip type that she would never show that this was hurting her. And yet it must have hurt to the quick It was her dignity as she sat down that I remember. The table was high, so it hid quite a lot of the body. You were shielded a bit, and didnt have to give much away. Frances, then 21, dgeted behind it, nibbled a few dry biscuits, said nothing and observed. I remember Berkesis wife. She was so elegant. She was younger than him. And she had her straight blonde hair put up in a bun, wrapped around in the back. She did look very Germanic. She had this Grace Kelly look about her, which made her impenetrable and probably quite the right sort of partner for this horrid-looking old man, who had this other life as a secret policeman that nobody knew about then.

They exchanged terse pleasantries about life in America and Hungary. Francess attention wandered. Then Berkesi came to the point: We want to buy the apartment. Its not for sale. My grandchildren will inherit it, grandmother Lili retorted, her voice turning brittle. That was it. Berkesis wife persisted, while her husband tried to pretend he did not care much. The conversation stiffened and petered out. Frances imagined Berkesi thinking: How can these Jewish wrecks thwart my plans? He was well connected in the Budapest establishment. He could afford the apartment, he occupied it and he wanted it now. As outsiders from the other side of the Iron Curtain in the middle of the Cold War, the visitors had reason to feel intimidated. Frances sensed battle lines being drawn. My grandmother must have really felt that at some time the tide of history would turn, and the apartment would have some value, maybe not in her lifetime, but certainly for us. Thats why she refused to sell. By 1984, both Hirschenhauser grandparents were dead, as was their daughter, Francess mother. As often happens, a grandchild stepped up to take over a family duty. Frances kept up the paperwork for the apartment. The task came naturally to her and she had a premonition that the Budapest House was her personal challenge: I didnt know my mother would die early, but I somehow sensed even in the 1960s that the responsibility would skip one generation. * * *

Frances inherited her grandparents feel for business. In 1973, at the age of 23, she became the rst woman to set up her own publishing company in the U.K. That was no easy undertaking, not least because she was not British then and had no work permit. It was by no means clear anybody would take her seriously, since she had no experience of publishing. She contrived a meeting with Andr Deutsch, a Hungarian Jewish publisher who had been a friend of her mother. He didnt really have time, but told me to meet him when he was picking up tickets at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse theatre in north London. He arrived in an opentop Mercedes. I can offer you a job as a secretary, said Deutsch. But I couldnt pay

you much, so your parents would have to support you. Frances thought little of this and in any case could scarcely type, so she turned it down. A few weeks later, she met Mahmood Mamdani, later a professor at Columbia University and then an Asian refugee just arrived from Uganda. Her rst idea was that he write a Penguin special on his experiences as a refugee. Her second idea was: Why dont I set up my own publishing company and publish it? She gave him 200 as an advance out of the 1,000 she had scratched together to start up. Within three months a quarter of the usual publishing lead time at that time she brought out From Citizen to Refugee: Ugandan Asians come to Britain. A friend Peter Hennessey, now Lord Hennessey wrote a review in the Sunday Times and she was away. Shortly afterwards, she went to a party at the London home of Hungarian writer George Mikes and met Deutsch there. She told him she was now a publisher, and he patted her on the head and said: Wonderful! Creation of her company brought her a U.K. work permit, but not yet a steady income. So she took a job interviewing murderers and rapists for a research project on men serving life imprisonment. She was attached to the Department of Law of Oxford University with academic qualications in international relations but none in law or criminology. She bought a small house in Oxford, lled it with tenants, and ran the publishing house out of the dining room. The tenants had to ease their way along corridors and staircases stacked with books. Plenty of older male publishers were ready to take her out to long lunches and help her with good business advice: I was young, and had long curly hair. No, I didnt sleep with them, but I did utter my eyelashes. In those pioneering days, one of her early authors was Megnad Desai, a radical young Indian economics lecturer at the London School of Economics. They sat on the oor of his spartan at and shared a Christmas meal he had cooked for them. Pinter Publishers brought out his treatise Testing Monetarism a decade later and today he sits in the House of Lords. Andr Deutsch, Frances Pinter they were not the only Jews of Continental origin active in English culture. Writers Arthur Koestler and Martin Esslin, poet Michael Hamburger, publisher George Weidenfeld, lm-maker Alex Korda, philosopher Karl Popper, social scientist and music patron Claus Moser, conductor Georg Solti, opera impresario Rudolf Bing and art historian Ernst Gombrich all left indelible marks on

the English cultural scene, drawing it out of its pre-war insularity. They had landed in England after eeing Hitlers genocide and destruction of centuries of culture in Central Europe.90 Frances tted in naturally with this emigrant Jewish intellectual set. Francess path led her frequently to Hungary. When he retired, her father could come too: We ew to Budapest for my fathers high school class ftieth reunion. We piled into a taxi at the airport and he sat in the front and struck up a conversation with the driver. It was as if he had only been away a fortnight rather than fty years. We went to Gundels restaurant and sat at the very table Dad had sat with his parents on his last night in Budapest back in 1934... I became more curious about this previously forbidding country that had decimated my family and left the survivors impoverished and frightened, scattering around the world to pick up their lives. There was a dark quality to Eastern Europe, full of blackened buildings with bullet holes still visible, dim alleyways and courtyards full of memories of unspeakable cruelties. Id lived in two of the freest countries of the world, the United States and Britain. There was order there that offered a coat of protection. Life was relatively light and easy. Hungary represented the dark side of my soul. She was there in spring 1990 when Hungarys rst free, parliamentary election closed the Communist era. She called her father in the United States: Dad, it really is free. People are talking to me on the streets about everything. She felt the euphoria of people convinced that life was taking a decisive turn for the better, sensing the opportunity to take a hold on their lives, looking forward to emerging from the poverty and renewing ties with the West. As she strolled across the Danube with Hungarian publisher friend Istvn Bart, he stopped on the bridge and said: Frances, take in this moment. This is unique. It will never be as good again later. Well never be as free again. Opportunities were opening up rapidly. Frances got together with Andr Deutsch and four others to found a bookshop in Budapest specializing in textbooks for learning English, correctly foreseeing a surge in demand from Hungarians force-fed on Russian. Each invested 1,250. Another legacy from grandfather Hirschenhauser helped them on their way. Besides the apartment in the Budapest House, Imre had held on to the ground oor of a commercial space in central Budapest, rented out to the Gutenberg theatre next door.

Having inherited it Imagine me as a publisher with a tenant called Gutenberg! Frances persuaded the ailing theatre to return the premises to house the bookshop. She angled for a grant from U.K. government funds set aside for knowledge transfers. A haughty British civil servant advised her that this would be impossible without a Hungarian sponsor at the highest level. I organised an approach to Hungarian President rpd Gncz, a playwright who had done time in a Communist prison for his resistance in 1956. The President wrote a letter and sent it directly to the British ofcial, breaking diplomatic protocol. I waited a couple of days and then telephoned to ask whether that was senior enough. It was. I got the grant. On the day of the launch of Libra Books in 1991, queues stretched around the block waiting for the opening. The British Ambassador came to open the shop, which is now a chain of three shops with an annual turnover exceeding 1 million. Through Pinter Publishers, Frances built herself a reputation as an academic publisher of the social sciences. Before, government actions were just decided by the great and the good. I realised social sciences could lead to better evidence-based decision-making, and thats what my publishing company rode on. It was the free-wheeling career of an independent young woman, making her way through her own ideas and chutzpah. She nevertheless wrote once a week to her parents about books, theses, lectures, conferences, degrees, money and dinner companions. Both wrote back separately to her. Now, she is surprised how much she involved them in her life, all the more since she did not identify entirely with either of them. She began to realize that her own personal history was driving her more than she thought: Early in my life, when my parents moved me against my will to California and I started saving my pocket money to go back to New Jersey to see my friends, I decided that wealth meant being able to see whoever you want, whenever you want. Publishing gave me that freedom. Nobody ever refuses to speak to a publisher. I found that more valuable than money. Publishing meant opening up channels, pushing them open wider and wider. Lurking in the back of her mind were the inherited insecurities of an emigrant Jew: I am driven by a fear of failure. I dont want to be humiliated. I cant take it. I am too proud. But I do feel humiliated and I cant explain why. I can feel what people like my

aunt Erzsi went through. Its that idea of the humiliation of the Jewish tribe. Even for a secular person like me, its a powerful sensation. I should have gotten over it by now. But I havent. My non-Jewish husband helps me through but he doesnt understand it. Even some of the students she met left her with a haunting suspicion of failure. While an undergraduate at the London School of Economics, she befriended a goodlooking American Rhodes scholar in Oxford. They got on well, and when it was time for him to go back to America, he asked if she planned to go back too. A little reluctantly, she said no. Abandoning plans to become an American politician, Frances decided she felt more at home in London. He drawled: Well kid, ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I said: One day, Bill, youll run for American President. And so he did, and was elected. In 1992, when I caught sight of him on television, I realised I had forgotten him almost completely. I couldnt even remember his name. I just recollected a hunk from Arkansas with a saxophone. I put two and two together and realised Thats my friend Bill! It hurt then because she could not help comparing herself to the high-yer. I wondered if I had tried harder, been less frightened of the world, were cleverer, tougher, knew more, done more what if, what if? Could I have risen higher up the ladder? Could I ever feel that I did what ya gotta do? * * *

Publishing meanwhile brought her to the notice of another emigrant Hungarian Jew, nancier George Soros. He became famous for making $1 billion in one day in 1992 speculating correctly that Britain would pull out of the European Monetary System. Now he was running a vast philanthropic operation supporting democracy and civil rights, mostly in countries once behind the Iron Curtain. At its height, his annual spending, world-wide, reached nearly a billion dollars. In 1984, he set up a foundation in his native Hungary nancing imports of books from the West for learning institutions. Some of them were unavailable or banned, but the authorities were losing their grip and let it ride. Next he began importing copying machines, which may seem nothing much today but he identied as powerful promoters of an open society. For the regime, copying was a threat to its control of information. One of his Hungarian assistants described the archaic process still

imposed less than 30 years ago on the daring souls who ventured to copy: At the Institute of Literature, if I needed to have something copied I would have to ll out an application listing the specic material, from a particular line on a specic page to another line on another page. Then it went to some ofce where the material was inspected. It might be approved or it might be rejected. Each application might take weeks. The Xerox copiers Soros brought in got round all that. First came a batch of 200, then 200 more, all installed in easily accessible places. The break-through galvanised the academic community. Alongside the documents they needed for their studies, there was nothing stopping them also copying writings banned by the censors.91 It was a decisive blow against Communist control of knowledge. Soross biographer described him as a globally engaged billionaire and revolutionary plutocrat, who acted on a world-changing impulse. Another admirer ranked him among the greatest American philanthropists, considering him the only man in the U.S. who had his own foreign policy and could implement it.92 It was this man who telephoned Frances in London in 1991. Actually he approached Oxford University Press rst. He wanted to set up a press for the Central European University he had established in Budapest. Oxford University Press shrugged him off politely with the remark that after 500 years they could no longer remember how to start a new press. They recommended Frances. George Soros invited her to his house in South Kensington. We talked for two hours and disagreed entirely on just about every detail concerning publishing. I left not expecting to hear from him, says Frances. But he phoned a few months later and asked for a business plan. It was approved and the Central European University Press started in 1993, with Frances at rst running it by remote control from London, popping in and out of Budapest. Around that time, Frances was sitting in her London ofce, waiting for the exchange of contracts on a big publishing deal. It was a moment of quiet reection. The phone rang and a voice spoke in broken English. Could she speak Magyar? Yes, she could He was calling from Budapest, and owned the small part of her grandparents apartment they had to sell off in the 1950s. Grandfather Imre, he said, had put a clause of rst refusal for his family into the agreement. Did she want to buy it? Frances sat for a moment in shocked silence. She had no idea Imre had craftily

inserted such a clause. Just in time, she curbed her urge to say: Yes, of course. Her grandfathers business instinct asserted itself, and she replied she would think about it. The Budapest bookshop was bringing in enough money to fund the purchase, so it did not take her long to make her move. Within a few weeks she owned the little studio that was once her grandparents bedroom. Thereafter she used it as a pied--terre on increasingly frequent visits to Budapest. She was now Berkesis neighbour and landlady. He was not pleased, as she soon heard through the grapevine. By that time, Frances was not alone in her life. Earlier, in the 1980s, she had met lm director David Percy. They both lived in Londons Belsize Park, his childhood neighbourhood. After a time, she let out that she was a Jew. David was not. Indeed, his distant ancestors are one of the great English families of Northumberland, with a seat at Alnwick castle since 1309. Percys came over with William the Conqueror and gure in three Shakespeare plays. I never made the conscious choice to gravitate towards Jews, he said. But I resonate with the Jewish way of thinking. I didnt go looking for Frances for that reason. The moment I saw her, I knew we would get on with each other. I function well with her, because I bring a different dimension. They married in 1985. Soros called Frances again in 1994, on a wet February evening when she and David were on the point of going out to dinner. This is George Soros. I hope Im not calling too late in the evening, he said in his unmistakably Hungarian accent. No, she replied, taking her coat off with one hand while holding the phone with the other. Ive had an idea, he said, getting straight on to business. Wouldnt it be good if we made all the classics of the social sciences and humanities of the West available in all the languages of Eastern Europe? They could be published as a series, like Penguin Books in each of the languages. Could this be done by the Central European University Press? Again, Frances contradicted the master of philanthropy. It would be folly to expect the small Central European University Press to do this successfully on such a scale, all the more since it published only in English. But she knew how it should be done. Each title would have to nd a home with a local publisher who would become a partner in the venture. This would allow exibility and would be demand-driven, not a top-down give-away. She did not say all this immediately to Soros, replying coolly: No George, the

Central European University Press cant and shouldnt do this. But its well worthwhile, and if you like I can design a project. Yes please, he responded, and hung up. She already knew halfway through the conversation that this was a turning point in her life. If carried through as she envisaged, it could contribute immeasurably to the emergence of an independent private publishing sector in a territory covering 12 time zones and 360 million people. Hitherto all these ex-Communist countries had been served solely by state-owned publishers. If she succeeded, she would liberate access to knowledge and transform higher education. Destiny beckoned. The old world of Eastern Europe which had been so inhospitable to her family was opening up to her. The Soros offer was irresistible. She accompanied David down to their local restaurant, sat him down, and informed him that she would soon be leaving London, would sell her publishing company, and they would embark on a commuter marriage. I could only run this project if I lived in the part of the world I would be affecting. Soross foundation had two headquarters, one in New York, the other in Budapest. I knew which one I would be heading for. The home of the families of both my parents. This new home was to be the little studio separated out of her grandparents apartment at the top of the Budapest House. Within four months, she sold her idea to George Soros, negotiated a contract, disposed of her publishing business and moved to Budapest. David meanwhile stayed in London. The Budapest House had not been painted or repaired since before WWII. Chunks of rendering had fallen off. The glass panes in its front door were cracked. The ill-tting door creaked stify. Fumes and dust of the brown coal used to heat stoves hung acridly in the air. For decades, nobody had invested in the building, since the Communist system offered no incentives to do so. In any case, there was no money. Partitioning had proliferated as the state obliged more and more people to share less and less. New doors had appeared on landings, creating a higgledy-piggledy disorder. Fittings were cheap, improvised and dirty. Rather than a home which inspired, it had become a basic necessity allotted by a socialist bureaucracy. Even in the late 1980s however, she had noticed something was stirring. Sensing the approaching collapse of Communism, the occupants had started to clean it up a bit, taking just a little more care. The Budapest House evolved, as if anticipating what

was to come. Frances wandered around the neighbourhood where her grandparents lived. As she sat in St Istvn Park, she realised they must have walked along its gravel paths amid the trees and lawns. Her mother no doubt gazed over the green grass in the summer, dreaming of the future. The houses, trees and grass were the same or were they? Frances asked herself: what was she herself doing in this city? Was it her true home? How Hungarian was she? What feelings did the inanimate matter making up the houses and the streets arouse in her? Could she, like Proust, summon memory of the past to grasp some ultimate reality? In a nearby shop, Frances came across a seamstress who had been there since the late 1940s. She pointed out bullet holes from 1956 in nearby walls. Frances imagined her seeing the Hirschenhausers pass by, but at 84 the woman had no recollection. Demand for makers-and-menders was declining. The old woman closed down her shop and disappeared. Memory was hard to seize. Even if Frances could bring it all back, would this help her settle more comfortably into her life and banish the latent traumas of the Holocaust? Would her engagement with the Budapest House bring together the diverse strands of her identity? For several decades, Frances pursued this quest. On a broader level, the people of Eastern Europe also try to come to terms with the difcult home of their past century of history. They too seek to know what they have become, and they nd the task no easier than Frances did.

@*&42*AE)&'0$B

CHAPTER 8

A NEW WORLD, A NEW IDENTITY

He who is not with us is against us
Mtys Rkosi

He who is not against us is with us

Jnos Kdr

Now, for the rst time, Berkesi had a landlady on the spot the granddaughter of Imre Hirschenhauser, entrepreneur, one-time owner of the building, anti-Communist and involuntary emigrant. The two scarcely met, but Frances was thinking of him, and he no doubt of her. Berkesis heyday was past. His Cold War spy thrillers fell out of fashion. His readership dwindled, his circle of friends abandoned him, and he stopped going out. Ination ate into his pension. He was growing old and time was leaving him behind. His past however was catching up. Scarcely anybody had known of his career as a secret policeman, but nobody was holding anything back any more. As tongues were freed, one country after another in Eastern Europe went through the fraught experience of exposing those who had betrayed their fellow-citizens in return for perks and power. Friends showed Frances newspaper clippings with Berkesis exposure. Not only was he a secret policeman, but he had been one of the Communist regimes torturers. A Hungarian who later emigrated to the U.S. described his interrogation for 53 days at the Military Police station on Bla Brtok street in Buda: They were particularly cruel under the bloody Andrs Berkesi and his deputies. They knocked out eight of my teeth, broke several of my ribs, kicked and destroyed my right kidney, broke my nose, pummelled my genitals, and beat my palms and the soles of my feet to shreds. They tried to extract a confession from me at any cost.93 The loathing that Berkesi had inspired in her, long ago when she had taken tea in the apartment with her grandmother, grew more visceral. The large rooftop terrace outside the split penthouse apartments was ideal for sunbathing. It could be accessed only through a single corridor and door. Frances was

stretched out there one ne day when Berkesi emerged from the darkness of the corridor. The ageing, cold-faced, balding gure stood in the doorframe there before her, his legs spread, clad only in the skimpiest of bathing trunks. Frances inwardly cringed. What for others may have been a pathetic old creature was for her a threatening male invading her feminine privacy. As he confronted Frances lying on her own, his deep tan contrasted with her feeble paleness. The demons of her imagination revived. Without any greeting, he said: Theres a problem with the plumbing in my at. Please x it. It was a banal request by a tenant to a landlady, but Frances could not recall any other such demand in the 35 years he had lived there. He had xed everything himself before. Suddenly I was here, in Budapest, using the other apartment next to his, and thus fair game. All I could think of was how much I wanted to pass his decaying body and cross the threshold into the safety of my apartment. How was it that I could feel so threatened by a man who no longer had any power and stood virtually naked before me? she wondered. In a moment he was gone, and she was alone again on the terrace, under a sun which now had a hard glare. As she lay in bed at night, she imagined she could hear Berkesi snoring on the other side of the wall except she could not. There was nothing. She plagued her mind with the rights and wrongs of her using her lavatory ush at nights. To her, it seemed extremely loud, and he must hear it. She engaged her friends in this moral debate. Flush in the morning. The generous view. Flush and keep on ushing. The other end of the spectrum. The more devilishly inclined volunteered to install an automatic ushing device which would go off every half an hour. She never settled that particular issue, but she did raise Berkesis rent. As moves got under way to introduce a market economy, rent controls were eased. The increases permitted for sitting tenants were small, but Frances applied them methodically. Each year her lawyer sent a hunchbacked, one-eyed messenger to deliver the rent increase to Berkesi. The messenger, Frances learned, had a particular reason to relish performing this duty. How did he lose his eye? Frances one day asked her lawyer. Didnt you know? He was one of Berkesis victims. He had his eye gouged out. Frances remembered the responsibility she had taken on over twenty years ago for

the family apartment. Then it was just a question of keeping up the paperwork. Now she had the whole penthouse in her sights. However Berkesi, who was still paying the equivalent of only $11 per month, stayed put and she had no means of moving him out. Not yet. The Budapest House was working deeper into her psyche: Until the Berlin Wall fell, I would have just gone on renting it out. I would have continued as a London publisher. London was ne as a location, half way between America where I grew up and Hungary where my parents came from. Now I felt it all more heavily. I needed to be in Budapest and deal with the apartment. I was facing the same challenges the Hungarians did nding their identity anew, redening their values and reinterpreting what the past meant. As she settled into her new life, her studio in the Budapest House became too small. She took a larger apartment on the Buda side, a few yards away from the cellar where her aunt Agi Jambor had eked out the last weeks of the war. Just around the corner stood a statue of the Swede who rescued thousands of wartime Jews, Raoul Wallenberg. She rented the studio alongside Berkesi to a student who brought a new whiff of war with her. Jadranka was Croatian, and in the year that she stayed in the studio Serb artillery was lobbing shells into the capital of Zagreb where her family lived. Just when Eastern Europe was emerging from the misery of Communism, the prospect arose that the transition would turn into catastrophe. Jadranka was short, dark-haired, and delicate. At the age of thirty she seemed mature beyond her years. She looked as if she would have been happier in medieval times. She had a porcelain quality, said Frances. Frances gave her a budget to buy new furniture, and she created a light, charming white environment, with linen and just a bed, desk, eating table and personal items. It was so pure and clean, and a total contrast with Berkesi next door. I was so pleased that Jadranka was in my grandparents former bedroom. She was always concerned about her family, always phoning. She didnt want to go back, and her parents didnt want her to return home, but she felt bad about not being with them. It was a constant worry, and in the end she did go back. For a long time, Frances could not bring herself to set foot in Berkesis quarters. Eventually, she went on the pretext of measuring it for new legal documentation. She

took with her a friend, who noticed how Frances normal perky condence crumpled in the presence of her tenant: You went all pale. You were a completely different person. A few months later, her chance came. As property prices rose, the problem of sitting tenants was becoming chronic. The government set up a scheme proposing them subsidised housing. Frances offered Berkesi a nancial incentive to take it up and he accepted. In 1997, he moved out, taking with him all the kitchen ttings, including the sink, and also the bookcases which had been pride of her grandparents. Two weeks later he died of a heart attack. Frances rst thought was: I murdered Berkesi. A dramatic idea, but scarcely borne out by the facts. She thought further: I felt curiously numb. Obviously I had no intent to murder. I knew moving to a new home at 80 would inconvenience him. But I had no qualms. Once he was dead, there was nothing more to be done. I had no feeling of good or bad. Just closure. Only later did she realise what Berkesi symbolised for her. After I knew what he did, I was drawn to him because he personied evil. Through him, I became close to all the evil people that Erszi and my grandparents had to deal with. I tried to imagine what it was like to be one of his victims. Thats what fascinated me about the apartment in the Budapest House. I wanted to explore the empty space where this really evil person had been. I got under his skin and came close to the evil of the Holocaust. I sensed my identity as a Jew. Today, Berkesis books are out of print. The only publicity he still has is on the group photo of Communist Political Police chiefs-of-staff in Budapests House of Terror. The museums documentation describes what they did: Its agents killed without hesitation, they committed burglaries, ruses and torture to send their victims, based on false testimonies and confessions, to the gallows, to prison, or to labour camps. A legion of informers, a shadow army, monitored and recorded the thinking of people at factory assembly lines, editorial ofces, company ofces, universities, churches, theatres. No areas of life were shielded from them. They were the tool by which the Communists seized power, implemented and sustained their system of terror that deported, crippled or mistreated people, and which affected one in every three families.

The museum quotes former prisoners as saying they were tortured with electric current, burning cigarettes and pliers, and beaten with truncheons and rie butts. Often they were not allowed to use lavatories or wash, and they had to lie on wet planks, shivering from cold and deprived of sleep. Some were chained by their feet to iron balls weighing 18 kg. The food ration provided 490 calories a day scarcely above starvation level. An acid bath dissolved the corpses of deceased prisoners for ushing down into the sewers. * * *

Six months later Frances sold both her studio and the Berkesi apartment to a young couple. They tore down the separating walls, opened up the windows and allowed in light where for decades there had only been darkness. He was a corporate lawyer, uent in English and accustomed to working with Western companies; she was in marketing; their four year-old child was computer-literate. They represented a generation which had shed the shackles of Communism. They were straightforward and unencumbered by Francess background of Jewishness, family extermination, emigration, harassment and a need to restore right and punish wrong. In handing over the apartment to this fresh young couple, she felt she was exorcising the evil spirits. Frances had kept up the paperwork and the mission she had taken over from her grandparents was complete or so it should have been. Frances sold at a time when she was questioning her ability to integrate. There she was in Budapest, the daughter of two Hungarian parents, able to converse adequately in Magyar, and with her aunt Erzsi located conveniently around the corner but she still could not a t into Hungarian society. She had a successful career in the West under her belt, and was now employed by an international organisation with headquarters in New York. She had a different history from the Hungarians around her and it marked her out. For a start, she earned much more than all of them. When speaking with other guests at dinner parties, she found them obsessed and depressed by the drastic changes imposed on their lives by the transition to a market economy. Ination was running away, salaries were not keeping pace, workloads were increasing, businesses were collapsing, people were losing their jobs, industrial output was collapsing, and public

services were tottering as subsidies were wound down. People were free politically, but subjected to economic chaos which forced living standards down, and levels of stress sharply higher. Karl Marx had warned of the danger of economic slavery which he saw inherent in capitalism, but the experiment of public ownership of the means of production and central planning had proved ruinous. Which way now? To make things worse, a new breed of immensely rich capitalists emerged and aunted their advantage over classes left behind. Maosi criminality began to undermine the stable if impoverished society of the last 40 years. Western Europe took a different path as it pulled itself out of the trough at the end of WWII. Populations then beneted from the pump-priming largesse of the U.S. Marshall Plan, and voters elected governments which spent on social benets rather than imposing the austerity blamed for the 1930s Depression. Most of Western Europe had kept these policies in place. For the ex-Communist countries however, the European Union insisted that nancial orthodoxy should be established and market forces given free rein before allowing them into its ranks.94 The people had no choice. These tough policies eventually stabilised ination, and gradually stimulated economic output and employment. But it took a long time. In the four years to 1994, Hungary received $8 billion in foreign investment but spent more than twice as much on repaying its external debt. Gross Domestic Product regained the level of 1990 only in 2004.95 The baby boom of the rst euphoric years after the end of Communism went into reverse in the mid-1990s. Suicides, which at rst dropped, rose again. A joke went around that Communism was gone, but so too was the goulash. When Frances took up her post in Budapest in 1994, her friends were sweating it out, their early exhilaration doused, with little indication that their lot would ever improve. When I arrived to live in Budapest, it felt like stumbling on a group of people hung over from a very good party the night before, she told me later. Those who had taken enormous risks during the Communist period now sought recognition, but instead they were derided and only those who took their futures into their own hands had a chance of escaping the humiliation of becoming has-beens. Some became leading lights in their new societies, such as Vclav Havel in the Czech Republic, rpd Gncz in Hungary and Adam Michnik in Poland. Some excellent scholars formed consultancy rms, and others quickly learned the art of fund-raising and

secured large EU grants. But these were in a minority and many embittered middleaged people were left behind. For them the transition was too fast, too radical and too unpredictable. They were simply unable to formulate what the risks were of standing still, and incapable of designing a strategy for themselves that went beyond day-to-day survival. The human capital they invested in their professions suddenly became redundant. They felt useless. Her publisher friend Istvn Bart sought to comfort her after she had spent another evening listening in embarrassment to a psychologist, a doctor, a law professor and a senior civil servant telling of their exhausting struggle for survival. My dear Frances, dont worry! This doesnt concern you. These are our problems, not yours, and we all know how much you feel for us. She had been stammering apologies afterwards to Istvn but for what? For being rich compared to her Hungarian hosts and friends? I hardly dared open my mouth. I didnt want to say There, there, it will be all right, because they were suffering and I wasnt. I just wanted to be invisible. Afterwards all my insecurities came out. I thought that maybe I wasnt as bright as these people, and that if I had been born and raised here and had been living here, I wouldnt have been accepted into their circles. Were they being nice to me just because of the money I could bring into the country through grants? I felt impotent in their presence. I felt guilty that I had not been put through what they had been put through, and I had been spared all that, because my parents made a decision to leave all this behind and make a new life in America. I was even envious of these people, that they were experiencing life more fully than me. Envy that they could sit there amongst themselves and reveal themselves to each other because they had such good strong friendships, born out of enduring hardships together, whereas I came from a world where you dont show your vulnerability. They had something I could never have this intense sense of community and friendship, this immensely more intricate, richer bonding of human being to human being. Frances took to stumbling home from evenings out on foot over the ice, rather than be seen taking a taxi. But to no avail. She was annoyed at herself. She so much wanted to be Hungarian. But she was uncomfortably aware that she was not, and never would be. Not American, not English, and now not Hungarian either.

In explaining her decision to sell her grandparents apartment in the Budapest House, she told me years later: I wanted to bring closure to the dark, sinister mess I associated with Berkesis occupation of the place. But I was also recognising that I couldnt make the kind of life I wanted there that community of family, building and location. I came from a family of emigrants on the other side of the planet. I couldnt recreate their old life. However she was not nished with the Budapest House. Selling was not the closure she sought. That had yet to come. * * *

The Hungarians amongst whom she lived had much to digest in their history. Besides taking part in two world wars on the losing side and helping the Germans in the genocide of the Jews, they had just emerged from 40 years of Communism. The latter was the most recent inuence on Hungarian identity; willingly or reluctantly, they had made their lives under this regime. As the years passed, Hungarians had settled into their pragmatic form of Communism, discreetly proud that they had contrived to live in the jolliest barracks in the socialist camp. But it was an existence of light and shadows. For years they had been ruled by a man who ingeniously combined repression with a measure of humanity Jnos Kdr. He had presided as Interior Minister over the execution of his friend and comrade, Lszl Rajk, in 1949 after a show trial. Both were Communists who had stayed in Hungary during the war and were now suspect in the eyes of comrades who had been in Moscow. He promised his friend that he would be spared the scaffold. The Party leaders had no intention of honouring such a pledge, and Kdrs job was to preside over the execution. With his last words, Rajk upbraided him for his duplicity. Kdr had no qualms however at putting obedience to the Party line ahead of personal honesty. The Party came rst. That was the rule. Then, in true Stalinist fashion, the purger was purged himself. Kdr was imprisoned in a further show trial. This ambivalence made him the man of the moment in 1956. Khrushchev appreciated his exibility, which enabled him to swing with the Soviet leaders own vacillations. Kdr had supported Imre Nagys reforms, but when the chips were down,

he was ready to take over his country at the Soviet behest and keep a grip on it for the next three decades. He imposed his authority through imprisonments and executions, including Imre Nagy, who bravely defended himself at his trial. Kdr then settled down to keep his people in line by offering a somewhat better standard of living than elsewhere in the Soviet bloc and a gradual relaxation of political restraints. By this time, the concept of Marx that societies would mutate to perfect Communism under the leadership of the proletariat was moribund. East-West tensions passed their peak, and in the Communist heartlands of Europe, the regimes concentrated on preserving power, seeking economic viability and eking out a modicum of popular acceptance. It was a policy full of contradictions and instabilities, but well suited to the peculiarity of Jnos Kdr. In the 1960s, he was even popular to a certain extent. Disposable income doubled between 1957 and 1978. State controls on business were gradually eased, cultural life could develop a little more freely than elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, and people began to realise that if they did not directly challenge the regime, the regime would not trouble them too much. Everybody could have a job and wages were egalitarian. On her rst visit to Budapest in 1971, Frances met a relative who was one of the winners of the Kdr era. Literally so, since he had won a car in a lottery. Lszl Ferencz was in the electrical import-export business and could travel to West Germany. A bon vivant, he picked up Frances and her grandmother in his car, for which he had a chauffeur, since he did not know how to drive himself. He took them on tours around the city, bemoaning the greyness of the 1970s and pointing out where the lively night clubs had once been. For some other Hungarians, Kdrs rule was an unmitigated disaster. Suicides and alcoholism went up steadily from the 1950s and male life expectancy declined. By 1988, a survey showed 15 per cent of the population was suffering from social maladaptation syndrome a euphemism for neurotic illness.96 One young woman told me how her father, an entrepreneur, was exiled to the Gulag in Siberia after 1956. When he returned many years later, he was a broken man, dependent on alcohol and a torment to his wife and children. Thanks to Kdr and the Soviets, this woman never had a real father.97

The underlying weaknesses of the state-controlled economic system eventually caught up with Kdr. Despite over-burdening the country with foreign debt, he could no longer keep his implicit promise to maintain rising living standards. Real wages fell seven per cent between 1978 and 1984.98 Hungarians knew the gap with the West was widening. Neighbouring Austria had become steadily more prosperous since the Soviets withdrew in 1955. The last straw was the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose liberalisation called the whole Soviet system into question. If the Russians no longer had the strength or the will to preserve Communism, the rationale for Kdr remaining in power dissipated. Ageing and ill, his memory began failing. Like Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, Honecker in East Germany, Husak in Czechoslovakia and Ceau$escu in Romania, he just clung to ofce. In April 1989, he made a nal rambling speech the Communist Partys Central Committee regretting his involvement in the deaths of Rajk and Nagy. Three months later, he was dead. Some in the Communist Party tried to limit the damage and reform, but they did too little too late. The breach in the dam holding back individual aspirations was too great. Hungary began dismantling the Iron Curtain in summer 1989 by removing the barbed wire along its border with Austria. Thousands of East Germans streamed through, and a few months later the Berlin Wall fell. From then on, the populations of all the former Soviet satellites headed into uncharted waters. That the challenge of determining their own destinies democratically turned out to be deeply unsettling should be no surprise. Although there had been ourishings of free thinking in 1848 and 1956, this was Hungarians rst attempt at establishing a fully edged, sustainable democracy. Not only did they lack experience but they were not even sure they wanted it. As psychoanalyst Erich Fromm observed in his book Escape from Freedom, people often prefer the certitudes of authoritarian discipline to the frightening responsibility of deciding for themselves.99 It was the same in all the other countries which had been ruled by Communists. Everybody in Eastern Europe brought political track records with them, having been beneciaries, fellow-travellers, bystanders, survivors or mitigators of the system and in some cases all of these. Now they could no longer blame repressive regimes for their fates. The people whom Frances came to know were like children who had been kept at home by parents long after they should have matured into independent adulthood.

They were forced out into a world of freedom and personal responsibility and had to dene themselves anew. * * *

Peter Inkei, who worked with Frances after she set up the Central European University Press, is urbane, cultivated and laid-back. Frances and I have asked him to tell us his story, 15 years after the fall of Communism. Where else to meet than in one of Budapests stately cafs, known for their nely-tuned gossip and intellectual stimulation? He epitomises the tradition perfectly. His story rolls out smoothly as he charms us with well-turned sentences and self-deprecating smiles. Inkei says his enemies call him the last chief censor of the political police. His job in the twilight years of the Communist regime was General Director of Publishing at the Ministry of Culture. As such, he decided what was published ... and what not. He hardly had censorship on his mind, but the state had a monopoly of publishing and the Communists saw culture as a tool for maintaining political power. So selecting books for publication, and weeding out the ones which would not be, could be seen as a form of censorship. These restraints had plenty of teeth in earlier years. A series of writers now seen as representing the best of twentieth-century Hungarian literature remained unpublished during the years of Communism. Sndor Mrai brought out eight books in the three years after WWII, but left in 1949 when the Communist authorities came to power and refused to allocate him paper to publish any more. On his departure into exile, he left thousands of unsold books in stock. The Hungarian regime sold them to Hungarian bookshops in the West and pocketed the proceeds. Mrai never published again in Hungary. When censorship eased in the 1980s, he received overtures from publishers in Hungary but rejected them with unforgiving bitterness. In his novel Embers, he wrote gloomily: My homeland no longer exists Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everythings coming apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded Everyone has died or gone away, or abandoned the things we swore to uphold. There was a world for which it was worth living and dying. That world is dead.100 Mrai committed suicide in San Diego in 1989. Shortly before, as his family died

off, he wrote: I am a weary stray, I tarry as a straggler with the strength to take a few steps, I hobble after them in single le.101 It was a sad fate for a Hungarian writer now acknowledged as one of Europes greats. Imre Kertsz took 13 years to write the novel which eventually won him a Nobel Prize and worldwide acclaim, but when he completed it in 1973 no state-owned Hungarian publisher would touch it, nor any reviewer mention it. Istvn Ersi had to wait for a West Berlin theatre to give his rst play a premire in 1984 before he became internationally known. He wrote later that being banned from the stage in Hungary hurt more than being imprisoned for four years after 1956.102 This was in a cultural regime considered relaxed by East bloc standards. As one of the last of the so-called censors, Peter Inkei is certainly relaxed, even bland. He comes from a cultivated middle-class family, his father a photographer, his uncle a lm-maker and his grandfather a civil servant. In a rambling family of about 50, only two joined the Communist Party and they were considered abnormal by the others. When the Communists forced his father out of his successful business, it was no great tragedy for young Peter: I had every reason to be sad, but I was not. I had a balanced, almost happy childhood. We were not deported. We scarcely travelled. We had a bucolic, classical family life. Paradoxically, it was a relaxed period. In the evening, there was no television at home, but we did listen guardedly to Radio Free Europe.103 When he was older, his father told him of being blackmailed by the secret police. When the father travelled to Kecskemt to renew his identity card, the secret police picked him up, took him into a building and made him stand in a corridor all day. In the evening he could sit down and they told him: You could help us. They wanted him to become an informer. My father admitted he was not brave, and fell ill with heart trouble afterwards, but he said that was how the matter ended. Inkei pauses, allowing one to wonder whether there might be more to it. He remembers how author Peter Esterhzy, when writing a best-selling novel about his family of Hungarian aristocrats, Harmonia Caelestis,104 looked in the newlyopened secret police les to see if they had information on his father. To his shock, he found the father had been regularly informing on other people. Film-maker Istvn Szbo was also asked by the police to give information, mainly character descriptions, on people he knew at the Academy of Theatre and Film. When

this became known 50 years later, it caused a stir but he was unrepentant. He declared he saved the life of a classmate involved in 1956 and was proud of what he did. Retired Cardinal Lszlo Paskai, former head of the Catholic Church in Hungary, wrote reports about other clergy to the secret police, who codenamed him Tanr (Teacher). Historian Kristin Ungvry, who read the les, says Paskai mostly wrote positive things, but also reported a parish priest for complaining at the bureaucratic chore of writing to the State Church Affairs Ofce.105 Faced with the alternative of a lifetime of conict with the authorities, it was a modus vivendi chosen by many. If you were questioned by the secret police, you might be a victim, a betrayer, a harmless purveyor of anodyne information or, as Szbo would have it, a hero. It was hard to tell. As a child, I felt this cruelty in the air, but otherwise I led a balanced life, said Inkei. The main question was whether to spend holidays on Lake Balaton, or not on the Balaton. There was a limited choice. In a closed world, satisfaction was easily attainable. It was mainly survival, and that gave as much pleasure as a major achievement today. One felt like being in a laager, and like Kertsz in his concentration camp, I quite liked it. When the 1956 Uprising was put down, his was one of the many families facing an agonising choice. We discussed whether to stay. Should we go? What about Venezuela? In 1957, two of my uncles left, one of them to Canada. My family nearly left then too. But they did not, and Inkei remained to make his way in goulash Communism. He gives the impression it did not matter to him too much one way or the other. No supporter of Party doctrine, but not one for heroics either. Like many Hungarians of his generation he was born in 1945 he exudes quiet pride in his capacity to swing imperturbably with tides of a fortune he could not control. When I entered secondary school in 1959, Kdr was still a curse, a cruel oppressor, the suppressor of the revolution. Four years later, when I nished gymnasium, we were all proud and condent of how things were going in Hungary. I could see we were better off when I travelled to Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s. They still had stupid slogans about being with the USSR forever, and fullling the FiveYear-Plan. In Hungary, wed already got rid of that. There were no more white stones spelling out slogans on hillsides. The look of the country was different. It was already

more pragmatic and permissive. We still had red stars, but there was more freedom of speech, and we knew we were freer than people in Romania or Czechoslovakia. When an uncle returned to visit from his new home in Vienna, his relatives told him: If Kdr is the boss, well be OK. Here, things are getting better. For Hungarians who left after 1956 such views were heresy. How can you say that? How many people did that man Kdr torture and execute? the uncle exclaimed indignantly. Those who sought asylum in the West considered they had taken a principled decision to change their lives for ever. Moving easily with the stream of things no longer tted into their values. By temperament, Inkei saw the cup of freedom as half full. For others, it was half empty. Publisher Istvn Bart remembers going as a boy to England, and being invited by Belgians he met there to stay a while in Brussels. He realised he could not accept the invitation, and that the authorities would ask questions if he did. He was humiliated that he could not choose himself. Another Hungarian publisher friend of Frances wrote to a pen pal in Holland when he was 15. He was excited at corresponding with somebody abroad and the two boys wrote about football and school. The authorities intercepted the letters, dragged him in, boxed his ears and told him never to write to anyone outside Hungary. He too felt humiliated. Mtys Vince, a former President of the Hungarian news agency MTI, recalls the niggling controls by janitors reporting to the police. All Budapest buildings were closed after ten p.m. and you didnt have a key to the front door. Only the janitor had the key, and he decided to let you in or not. If you had to go somewhere early in the morning at four a.m., you had to push the button and wake him up and of course you had to pay extra money for this. In this way there was a total control who are the earlyand latecomers, who is coming with whom. I myself remembered how it was much the same in the 1960s in Francos Spain. In Eastern Europe however, such suspicious restrictions lingered on much longer. Until 1990, Frances had to buy a visa every time she visited Hungary. She was prohibited from importing publications, objects or images which could provoke hatred against the Peoples Republic of Hungary. She was not allowed to give money or travellers cheques to private persons. If she converted too much hard currency into forints, she could change no more than 50 per cent back. She could not take more than 100 forints out of the country, and she was forbidden to export any objects made of precious

metals. Foreigners were welcome only if they conformed with all these constraints. A guide book listing them was still on sale on Budapest in 1993.106 The Party distrusted innovations from the West in principle. Inkei rst saw blue jeans in the 1960s. At rst they were sent in parcels by relatives abroad, and soon a small Hungarian rm began making them. However he was forbidden to wear them at school or summer camp. In school breaks, they listened clandestinely to beat music on a portable radio smuggled in by a rich kid. On a good day, they could pick up a Vienna radio station broadcasting Austrian trafc news. As a young man, Inkei was called up in the 1960s to do military service in the Hungarian armed forces, which were supposed to help the Soviet Red Army confront NATO. He and his comrades-in-arms contributed little to the cause. It was a mockery, a camouage. Nobody took it seriously. We were not taught to shoot. The commander was drunk. We did have a lecture on the American Pershing rocket. But when we had to do a 20-mile forced march in a triangle, we did the rst leg as far as a pub, drank beer and then walked back the same way. Inkei was assigned to the parachutists, who in most armies are a tough, elite force. But we were all lazy. I only did 30 per cent of the training programme. At the end, I got a paper testifying I had made the regulation twelve jumps. In fact I only jumped once. Inkei gradually became integrated into the power system and close to the decision-makers. But not too close. He cherished his image as free-thinker. He developed elaborate strategies for avoiding joining the Communist party. In fact he was never asked. I was like a woman who is afraid of being sexually assaulted, but when she gets older, she realises it will never happen. The secret police came after him however. They invited him to a caf, and said it would be good if he made reports to them. He replied that he was too young and immature. Hardly the most convincing of excuses, but they seemed to drop the matter. Some time later, they brought him in for further questioning, this time more aggressively. I sweated and said nothing about it to my family afterwards. I never heard any more from them. Maybe it would not be attering to me if I knew why they stopped. Today he thinks much of the secret police activity was make-believe. However he has refrained from looking up his police les now that they are accessible.

In 1987, he was summoned to the Ministry of Culture and offered the job of General Director of Publishing. He stammered that he was not a Party member, but the senior academic sounding him out replied: Why do you bring this up? We dont want to force you into the Party. Although his job implied control, by this time censorship was running out of energy. Publishing was in the hands of a selected ock of 20 directors of publishing houses, all state-owned. They practised self-censorship, since they knew the rules by heart. The Communist Partys cultural section kept an eye on the dozen or so nonconformists among the writers, who were known to all and not taken as serious threats. Eventually, the Party censors did little more than change the word Russian to Soviet. A number of absurd controls lingered on: playing the theme tune from the lm Dr Zhivago remained banned in public until 1990. But nobody was really interested any more in enforcing Communist cultural doctrine. This was a signicant change, since Communist regimes had always considered a monopoly over public opinon was essential to their authority. A few publishers began pushing at doors and found them swinging open. In 1987, one of them brought out George Orwells 1984, a famous satire on the evils of invasive government. It was an open provocation, the beginning of the end, said Inkei. Nobody tried to stop it. Inkei was chosen for his job because he was seen as Western-oriented. He was set to work on what he called the nth round of liberalisation of the socialist economy This time, the Party had the idea of setting up 200 publishing houses around the country. Inkei knew that this lacked any market rationale. Culture was and still is centred on the capital. Before this got under way, the Communist regime collapsed and Inkeis job turned into privatisation. He helped convert publishing from a state monopoly to a series of independently-owned businesses. That is what brought him in contact with Frances, who was promoting the same process through her Soros programmes. However privatisation soon got a dirty name as in other ex-Communist countries since state rms often passed into the hands of former Communist managers for a pittance. Rightwingers in the new government were soon after Inkeis skin. I rst heard I was due to be sacked when a colleague phoned me and said: Dont think, dont talk to anybody, just go straight to your doctor now and ask for a sick note. By law, he could not be dismissed while on sick leave. That saved him until

he was summoned a few weeks later by the new Minister of Culture, who began the conversation with the words Now lets talk as one gentleman to another Peter Inkei is a natural t with Frances, whose history as an American Jewish immigrant has forged her as a liberal. Inkei is the sort of Hungarian she feels akin to: open-minded, Western-oriented and well read, much like the cultural elite she used to hang out with at university and in her publishing circles. Inkei turns up his nose at Francess former tenant: I was always a snob and never touched a Berkesi book. He was just a hack writer. He has also never been to the House of Terror, which depicts Communist persecutions but was created under the auspices of the centre-right Fidesz party, which Hungarian liberals detest. As he comes towards the end of his working career, he remains a creature of the easy-going, limited-ambitions era of Kdr, disapproving of repression and senseless dogma, but accepting the restraints with equanimity. I never decided what to do in my life. Things happened to me, he said.

CHAPTER 9

OPENING UP KNOWLEDGE
What was I doing on a crisp autumn night sharing a yurt with six men in the middle of the Mongolian steppe?
Frances

Pinter packs her bags for Eastern Europe, said the headline in the publishing trade paper The Bookseller. The decision she took in 1994 to go and live in Budapest condemned her to live out of a suitcase for the next ve and a half years, travelling from her Budapest base on average twice a week. That decision came long before she evicted Berkesi and thought about selling the Budapest House apartment. What concentrated her mind in 1994 was the enormous challenge she had let herself in for. Appointed Director of International Publishing at George Soross Open Society Institute, with a remit to x publishing in Eastern Europe, she was pitched into a maelstrom of opportunity, change, ambition, distrust and organisational chaos. The dead hand of Communism had withered away; the horse cure of liberal capitalism had ravaged economies; populations were reeling in shock; and she had one of the worlds boldest philanthropists breathing down her neck. George Soros had built his reputation as a nancier by backing his hunches with vast sums of money, guessing right often enough to amass tremendous wealth. His attitude to philanthropy was the same: think big, act now and change the world. Frances responded with cool alacrity. This was not the Frances who worried endlessly like her Hungarian Jewish parents, but the can-do entrepreneur who set up as a publisher in London at 23 when everybody told her it was preposterous. With George Soros, she did not need to worry whether she tted. He did not either. These were Jews in the role of non-conformists, doing things other people believed impossible. You dont mind travelling, do you? Soros inquired as he dispatched her to Moscow within a few days of taking up her post in Budapest. She had never been to Russia before, but after Moscow came Romania, and a seven-hour drive to a seaside convention, through a ruined landscape littered with abandoned factories and mangy

farm beasts, followed by dinner with anguished intellectuals under umbrella pines on the Black Sea. Then on to Albania, where the world is made of dust, not the friendly dust of attics and basements storing family memorabilia, but the more insidious kind that is a side product of factories designed to achieve output targets, and featureless housing set among open sewers and unpaved roads. By the time she took a break in the U.K. a few weeks later, she was suffering from dyspepsia and culture shock. As she dressed for a dinner in the English countryside, she felt she had returned from another planet. Soros was set on opening up knowledge to the peoples of the former Soviet empire. That was one of the ambitions of the Open Society Institute (OSI), the operational heart of his Foundations network. By the late 1990s he was devoting $125 million a year to educational projects. As far as he was concerned, textbooks were of key importance, and it was Francess job to do something about it, fast. The publishing industry in the East was in chaos. Freedom had spawned thousands of independent new companies, set up by anybody with knowledge and energy, whether a professor in Prague, a poet in Bishkek or a politician in Tashkent. Two thousand new publishers appeared in Poland, 700 in Czechoslovakia and 400 in Hungary. The economic shake-out was now sending thousands of businesses into bankruptcy. Governments could offer no subsidies anymore, money ran out, production and distribution systems broke down, nobody knew who was supposed to pay for what, and the slanted content was out of date. The result was that many of the former Communist states could no longer provide textbooks in anything like enough numbers. A whole generations schooling was at stake. Francess initial project soon made an impact. Within a couple of years, translating Western classics of social sciences and the humanities was under way in a dozen countries, and by the end of the century, the OSI had commissioned 3,000 translations in nearly 30 countries. Soros funds drove the enterprise forward, but she made sure local publishers invested their own funds as well. Otherwise she knew the books would remain in their warehouses for lack of incentive to sell. She created a Centre for Publishing Development which in Hungary helped nonction publishers to obtain loans. The Centre vetted projects to be nanced by a bank

at low interest rates. The publishers looked askance at the long application forms, but the scheme caught on. Together with two Hungarian publishers, Istvn Bart and Jnos Gyurgyak, Frances set out to lift publishing in Mongolia, a former Soviet satellite the size of Europe. They introduced desktop publishing, ran training courses, formed a Mongolian Publishers Association, and set up an ISBN agency enabling Mongolian books to be registered on global databases. Within a year output of books had trebled from 270 a year. They struck a distribution deal with the owner of a cashmere export company. They delivered school textbooks to the depots where herders brought their cashmere wool from all over the country. Instead of returning to their villages with empty bags, the herders took back textbooks. That is how Frances came to spend a night with six men in a yurt on the steppes of Mongolia. They called it the Cashmere Road. In Russia, Frances saw that the provision of school textbooks had all but collapsed. In Communist days, everything was centralised. The Soviet education minister knew exactly which textbook was used in each class: there was one text, per subject, per level, with no choice allowed to teachers. The post-Communist government did exactly the opposite. It decreed that teachers could use whatever books they wanted, and the Russian Federations 89 provinces must take over responsibility for their purchase and distribution. The result was an acute shortage of books. Back in Budapest, she bumped into George Soros in his hotel. How did your trip go? he enquired. Fine but frustrating. There is a shortage of 100 million textbooks in the Russian school system, she responded. Well, youd better go back tomorrow and x that, he replied. Um, tomorrow is Saturday, but if youd like, Ill go back Monday and see what I can do. She was stunned by her foolhardiness. In a weeks time she was due to take her rst vacation in four years. She was overdue for a haircut and new clothes. I needed to stop and take stock, but instead I was hurtling into top gear, or rather a gear I didnt even realize I had in my gearbox. Over the next week in Moscow, she worked out a plan to loan $10 million of Soros funds to produce new textbooks, using teachers as authors, and get them moving again through the educational system. She called George Soros and his secretary patched the call through to his home.

So, have you solved the textbook problem? Not quite. I dont think we should give them money. That will simply postpone the problem until it gets even bigger. Id rather lend the working capital required, and get the books produced and sold to the regional authorities. In this way we will kickstart a process rather than just give away a lot of books. All right, he said, with a slight lift at the end of the word that she would become accustomed to over the years. Go ahead. And that was that. She put the phone down with a $10 million budget. It was Friday afternoon and she headed to catch a plane to London. As she sat in the Irish pub at Moscow airport, she wondered what she had taken on and the next day went on a weeks holiday to Greece. At the end of the holiday, she took a ve a.m. Sunday ight to Budapest, where her driver brought her ofce mail to the airport and took her holiday clothes back to her home. During this time, she was also dealing with Berkesi and the grandparents apartment in the Budapest House. But on this day she could not even set foot in it, let alone ponder its signicance as home. It was straight on to Moscow again. After much discussion by dozens of committees, 20 titles were printed and sold to local authorities, with the Soros funds put up as bridging nance. Immediately a storm blew up in the Russian Duma. Parliamentarians demanded to know how the government could allow textbooks provided by foreigners to appear in Russian schools. The minister stood his ground, took the books into the Duma, and told the parliamentarians to take a look at the new, lively, well-produced publications every one by a Russian author. In the end, the deputies from the whole political spectrum, from Communist to Fascist and back, agreed theyd never had such nice books in the school system before. My most moving moments were when young adults in their twenties turned the pages, marvelling at the attractive layout, abundance of colour and generally inviting nature of the books they held in their hands. For an instant, there was a rare moment of Russian consensus: these were better books than those from the past, said Frances. Soros, who at this time was spending more on aid to Russia than the U.S. government, came up with a new idea one evening at 11.15 p.m. Frances heard her deputy calling her name outside the window of her apartment in the dark. George Soros is looking for you. Can you call him back? Her telephone was out of order, so she went to the ofce to call. Could she not do something about the dearth

of new books in Russian lending libraries? If they were to set up a programme for buying new Russian books on the basis of matching funds with Russian libraries, would that not also help Russian publishers? Frances thought fast. Yes, I replied. My mind raced ahead. If we did this, we could also develop a books in print database, one of the foundations of an efcient book business. How much would it cost? he asked. As much as youd like to invest, I replied. Well, I cant take it with me. How about starting with $50 million over a threeyear-period? OK? I said that would be just ne and put the phone down. Off he went to catch a plane to Hong Kong, and my deputy and I set about designing a seven-point plan. A few weeks later, I was touring Russia with George Soros. At a stopover in the town of Pushkin, Soros gave a TV press conference at which he announced the Pushkin Library Project. We were up and running. It was to be a cost-sharing deal. Libraries were asked to contribute. Most people were sceptical whether the libraries would nd enough funds to pay their share. The invoices went out at the end of July 1998 and we held our breath. Others were on tenterhooks too, but no one was prepared for August 17th when the Russian nancial crisis hit and the rouble crashed. The cynics rubbed their hands, proclaiming death to the project. And then nothing short of a miracle happened. In a country with banks crashing everywhere, trains brought to a halt and even the Post Ofce ling for bankruptcy, librarians were making the journey to our ofces in Moscow with cash in their pockets. The payment rate was 100%.107## Later the Pushkin Library Project extended to all the countries of the former Soviet Union. It was eventually spun off as a library supply company run by its staff and now delivers several million books each year. I watched a total transformation in the way librarians thought of themselves. Middle-aged ladies became hard-bitten entrepreneurs! observed Frances. In 1996, with the digital revolution at hand, Frances set up an Electronic

Publishing Division. It funded digitisation of archives, scholarly materials and CDROMs of indigenous cultures, and trained thousands of workers in web design. Then she created the EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) for academic journals. The high cost of printing and distribution held back their spread in Eastern Europe, but in the new digitised world, new users could be added at no cost. EIFL aggregated demand, with each country having one license and one fee, regardless of the number of library users. By 1999 over 30 countries had online access to 3,500 journals, 150 daily newspapers, and a database of 11 million items of health information. The Soros Foundation contributed rst-year funding, subsequently passing responsibility to consortia of libraries. The Library Journal hailed EIFL as one of the world's most innovative library projects. The pace of helter-skelter change was amazing in a region which only a few years earlier scarcely knew photocopiers. Working with George Soros enthralled her. She shared his love of risk-taking and venturing into elds where others had not trod. George would go into overdrive. He wanted results fast, he was hiring, ring and deciding at high speed. The key was knowing how to present projects to him. I learned I had to prepare presentations lasting two minutes, ve minutes and twenty minutes, as you never knew when he would want to break off and go and make a few more billions or play tennis. I was lucky. I never had a project turned down, Frances said later. I had to race to keep up with all the good ideas. It was a heady environment, which produced a great sense of achievement. I focused on developing skills and creating solid business structures, always with a driving desire to bring the broadest access to the written word. She remains intensely loyal towards George Soros. His over-riding purpose was to help people in the East create a tolerant society, to grow up and move on with their development. They were both Hungarian Jews by origin, and she says: When I close my eyes, I can hear my family in his accent. * * *

By the early summer of 1999, Francess mission to help develop a free, market-oriented

publishing industry had reached its objectives nearly everywhere. Copyright legislation had improved, networks of smaller distribution companies were replacing old centralised systems, trade associations had formed, publishers were engaging with the international book industry, and new ISBN agencies linked countries to the global book numbering system. Frances was preparing to hand over and return to London, when she received an emergency call from the branch of Soross Open Society Institute (OSI) in Kosovo. A NATO bombing campaign had just ended Serbias attempts to curb Kosovar autonomy with a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Schools were bombed out, textbooks had been burnt, could she come down and design a project to get books into the hands of Kosovar children by the time the new school term began in September?

I packed my bag again now something I was quite skilled at. On landing in Skopje, capital of neighbouring Macedonia, our Macedonian foundation driver collected me from the airport and drove me to the border. When we could go no further on the winding mountainous road, I hopped out, waved goodbye and started my trek, walking past the long queue of jeeps, vans, cars, carts, etc. People were on the move in every direction. Wheeling my small suitcase behind me, I proceeded through the dust and dirt to the border control. I stopped at a caf there. Sitting outside on a gravel road facing a bombed-out cement factory, I asked for hot water for the fennel teabags I brought with me. When I nished, I asked to pay. Hot water is free, the man replied. In London it would have been a pound. In this miserable corner of South-East Europe, hot water was hospitality. Amongst the spanking new, white, four-wheel drives and greenish/brown tanks, I found the OSI's modest car. The driver looked relieved to nd me. We then crawled along, making our way to Pri$tina, a forty-minute drive which took three hours. We passed burnt-out villages and makeshift cemeteries, and children selling Coca Cola on the roadside. In Pri$tina I stayed in a hilly, exclusive suburb, in a rented house. It was forty degrees centigrade, and there was no water and no electricity. But the house was

safe. The head of the KLA [Kosovar Liberation Army] lived opposite. That rst night I walked around Pri$tina choked with emotion as I watched people hug one another in the streets. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were pouring back into the city and each chance encounter with a friend or loved one afrmed the survival of another human being.

The next day, she began working out how to produce and deliver three million schoolbooks in Albanian, Serbian and Turkish languages. International donors were prepared to pool $2 million to fund an emergency programme. Frances was to design the project and prepare the international team to manage it.# They had to act fast if the children were to have textbooks when they went back to school in the autumn. It was vital to win this race. For many children, schooling was their only hope for a decent future. Most of the book printers in Kosovo were functioning, so she gave the printing job to them. Despite summer holiday closures, she located mills which could supply paper in Turkey, Germany and Slovenia. Sourcing in three countries was supposed to spread the risks. But Turkey suffered its worst earthquake on the day dispatches were due to begin. The Slovenian paper had to come through Montenegro, where Serb forces driven out of Kosovo could have bombed or seized the trucks. No one was willing to insure the goods. Frances held her breath until the paper got through.#I had acted against the advice of lawyers and the Foundations accounting department. I had broken rules. # Leaving#the local team to hold the fort, Frances returned to Budapest. Although she still wondered whether the Hungarian capital was really her home, it felt like that when she came back tired and dusty from the downtrodden places where her work had taken her. She could get from the airport to her at, shower and walk to the Opera in time for a performance beginning one hour after she landed. The plush red seats, the extravagant gilt dcor and the sumptuous spectacle on the stage were far removed from the ruins of the expired empires where she operated. For a couple of hours or so, she could live as the cream of Hungarian society did in the heyday of Franz Josef. When she returned to Kosovo in September, she found the project oundering. The banking system had fallen apart. The printers were dejected, as payments were slow. Distribution was faltering because roads were blocked, and trucks were diverted

to transport equipment and materials rather than books. In November 1999 however, on her third trip, still crossing the border on foot, she saw the fruits of their labour. Books were reaching the schools. Local communities were spontaneously rebuilding the damaged schoolhouses rather than wait for aid through ofcial channels. Her last gamble of the twentieth century had succeeded. Hungary had joined NATO twelve days before the alliance launched its military operations in Kosovo. The Hungarian government made a military base available to NATO to help out. For Francess Budapest friends, conscious of their nations predilection for ghting on the wrong side of wars, this was a novelty. We dont know how we are going to cope with being on the right side for once, they told her solemnly. Hungarian minorities in northern Serbia experienced the effect of the change more dramatically. When Budapest publisher Istvn Bart was speaking on the telephone with a Hungarian fellow-publisher in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, his friend interrupted him: Wait. A NATO Exocet missile has just own down the main street. I think it will hit the police station. It did.

=$0)8"2&*$0A"77()%&()&*,"&;02*

CHAPTER 10

MINDSETS
Money quite simply is unimportant the things really worth living for can never be had for money
Antal Szerb108

Frances had gone way beyond her original purpose of returning to Budapest to deal with the family apartment. She had made giant steps in reforming the publishing industry across Eastern Europe. But if she was going to tackle her dilemma over her identity, that meant thinking deeply about what made East Europeans tick. Which in turn meant acknowledging that there were limits to her success. She realised that concepts and methods which had proved their worth in the West could not always be transposed to the East. In Kosovo, Frances had imported her organisational capabilities and experience in publishing. The textbooks got to their destinations, but she was aware her success could be transient. Some books were rabidly anti-Serb and needed urgent revision, which she knew would not happen. Once she left, she wondered whether Kosovars, kind though they could be, had the will, vision or discipline to carry the venture forward. Wartime destruction and lack of money were factors, but other obstacles were ingrained habits of resignation, suspicion and obstruction. Western ways of doing things could founder in the quicksands of East European minds. A venture in Romania had already met that fate. Distribution of books there was primitive and needed to be improved. Frances made clear she was ready to help with funds and expertise, and a local publisher and a printer drafted a plan for nationwide distribution. The scheme never got off the ground. Rival publishers sought to wrest away control, but refused to invest themselves. They allowed long-standing habits of jealousy, suspicion and back-stabbing to get the better of them. Chronic lack of trust torpedoed the initiative. Kosovo and Romania showed how even well-conceived philanthropic undertakings could run up against the buffers. When a decisive shift of history occurred, as it did with the collapse of Communism, some people were unable to

abandon their old, harmful ways. In these cases, money and goodwill from outside could do little to help. Russia was the place where this phenomenon was most evident: We achieved a tremendous amount there, but often it was like pulling teeth from an elephant, said Frances. The concept of nance was itself a big problem. The projects which Frances supported had to be underpinned by nancial projections and cash ow forecasts. The East Europeans she worked with were largely ignorant of such practices. Under Communism, targets were imposed from above. Managers were not expected to take decisions themselves. Their only original thinking went into assessing whether targets needed to be taken seriously or could be quietly shelved. Experience had taught them that money did not necessarily have much value. Already in the 1930s, Hungarian writer Antal Szerb wrote: Everything that depends on money is immaterial. You can acquire nothing of importance with money The things really worth living for can never be had for money. Scholarship, the fact that your mind can take in the thousand-fold splendour of things, doesnt cost a penny If a woman likes you and gives herself to you, it doesnt cost a penny. Feeling happy from time to time, that doesnt cost a penny. The only things that do cost money are peripheral, the external trimmings of happiness, the stupid and boring accessories. Forty years of Communism reinforced such attitudes. Education and health care were free, food was subsidised, and there was not much to buy with any money which came to hand. In a market economy, money expresses the value of goods or services as determined by supply and demand. In Communist economies, this was not so. A suit cost more or less the same everywhere for the people. But the party elite had access to special shops where, for the same money, they could buy better, imported suits. Access to consumer goods depended on position in the political hierarchy rather than money earned from producing something useful. So the Western practice of using money as a yardstick measuring the value of human endeavour was and often still is alien. The high-ranking ofcials Frances dealt with were not used to prioritising investments according to nancial return. In the transition years, they frittered money away on unprotable projects, and were taken by surprise when the market penalised them for mistakes. They had wasted money with relative impunity under the Communist system, but such indulgence now led to bankruptcies and job losses. When Frances asked a business friend from Slovakia what

was the biggest surprise of the transition, he replied: The importance of money. I never realised before what it really meant. The people of ex-Communist Eastern Europe also have a shaky grasp of concept of property. Westerners consider property as a cornerstone of a free market economy and expect rights to be clearly dened. But in Eastern Europe, people are used to vaguer denitions of who owns what. That was one reason why Frances and her grandparents found dealing with the Budapest House such a fraught affair. I have been able to observe this myself elsewhere in Eastern Europe. An apartment which had changed hands several times turned out still to belong legally to the state, because property registers had not yet been drawn up. Loopholes may still allow owners fraudulently to sell the same property to several buyers. Property is frequently owned by whole families. If a feud develops, quarrels over inheritance can last for generations. The lingering Communist concepts of class struggle and class enemies encourage the idea of conict. Old habits die hard. Frances found a reluctance to take personal responsibility. In the West, society is oriented to individuals, but in Eastern Europe the group takes precedence. Goals, achievements, identity and values are seen in terms of the group.109 Whereas a Western business executive is driven by competition, individual achievement and personal prot, East Europeans may be more interested in cooperation, interdependence and good relationships. Family concerns may take priority over work deadlines. She realised hierarchies were more important than in the West, with power concentrated among a few, and little delegation of authority. Old age was seen as a plus, and employees were deferential to superiors, rarely questioning their decisions. In the West, a boss is expected to share information with teams of empowered colleagues working towards dened goals. In Eastern Europe, Frances observed that a senior position was above all an opportunity to exercise power, and information was an instrument to enhance it. So bosses were not generous in sharing information, and underlings hoarded it with the intention of sabotaging their bosses. In Russia, Frances initiated a project which she left three Russians to carry through after she left. They were intelligent and hard-working. But they concentrated on establishing who would wield power. They took little personal responsibility for the success of the funds being invested. And when a smart young American woman speaking good Russian was seconded to help, they cold-shouldered the outsider and

she left. To Frances however, they were always civil, perceiving her as high in the Soros hierarchy and therefore to be treated with deference. Her counterparts in Eastern Europe were not used to sticking their necks out. Long years of regimes demanding subservience had undermined their capability to take initiatives and manage risk. They feared failure, resisted change, were anxious about the future and avoided conict. Many hesitated and delayed redundancies until they were too late to save a company from collapse. Trained in the West, Frances expected job appointments to be decided according to transparent and factual assessments of abilities. Her Eastern partners however recoiled at using techniques such as head-hunting, advertising and character-testing, which may have resulted in the appointment of someone they did not know. A local manager in Slovakia explained: No one advertises. We know everyone who is any good. You certainly cant hire anyone you dont know. What if you make a mistake, what then? This was how it was under the Communists, who made appointments on the basis of patronage. They rewarded people whom they knew to be politically loyal, and this took precedence over merit or ability. The Slovak manager had been brought up to trust only the people he knew. Frances understood, but was exasperated when this inner circle approach to recruitment landed her with staff who had no other credentials. The exclusiveness offended her principles: It was a power system based on patronage. It was a waste of power. They feared the outsider. There was a lack of trust. No trust in open recruitment, competitive tendering, no trust in anybody not in the inner circle. In this society based on relationships, criticism was taken personally. When I had to criticise staff head-on, the rest ganged up on me. Even if I was criticising someone whom other people didnt like, the fact that a Westerner was doing it meant they all rallied around in defence of the person. No lessons from criticism were learned. People were deeply offended how could I possibly behave in this way? As someone brought up in America and Britain, Frances had other ideas: The West has formulated ways of handling criticism. In the work place, legislation and conventional practices require you to have appraisals, evaluations, bonus schemes, verbal warnings, written warnings, arbitration and appeals. The process of depersonalising and objectifying criticism has been highly developed, but it just hasnt in the East. Hopefully it will, because it is all part of the rule of law and protection of the

citizen. She nevertheless understood why she attracted hostility: The transition was a huge redundancy programme that left people vulnerable, frightened and kicking and screaming. And who could they kick? Well-off foreigners who came in trying to help them. What do you do with the hand that feeds you? You bite it. Authority was enforced and feared, but not respected, so cheating carried little blame. Creating cribs for exams was developed to a ne art all over Eastern Europe. Students felt little responsibility. The system was authoritarian, to be dealt with by fair means or foul. These habits bred a cynicism towards work, civic responsibilities and rules. What struck Frances (and me) most sadly was the humiliation the populations still suffered because of the economic straits the Communist regimes let them slip into. For years, they had been deprived of basic needs of life such as fresh food, lavatory paper, sanitary pads for women, decent housing and a host of other things Westerners took for granted. When I lived in Prague during the Communist period, I remember spotting orange peel in a gutter, questioning passers-by where it came from, and then joining the queue two blocks further on where a few kilos of Cuban oranges were on sale. If I saw a line on the street, I joined it. This not only represented hardship, but the fact that the regimes silenced protest obliged people to live a lie that all was well. In the nal years, Communist governments ran out of money, mounting up debts abroad and depressing hopes that life could ever improve. In the same way as Jews felt a stigma, so did millions of people in Eastern Europe, sensing that Westerners looked down on them as second-class citizens. They developed parasitical attitudes of which they were ashamed. They have found it hard to change this underdog mentality, and the West with its aversion to immigrants has given them little encouragement. Croatian author Slavenka Drakuli# wrote that when her grandmother died, she found drawers stuffed with solidied detergent, bottles of rancid oil, sugar, coffee, tea, biscuits, pasta, tomato paste, beans, salt, rolls of white tulle, wool, repaired tights and stockings, hair dye, shampoos, soaps, hand creams, toilet paper, outdated antibiotics, aspirins, insulin, pills without labels, cotton wool and sanitary napkins. Drakuli# wrote this in 1991, but 20 years later, many people in Eastern Europe continue to squirrel things away in case there should one day be a shortage. It makes

no difference that shortages have long since vanished, nor that the objects kept may be obsolete. My wife, who grew up in Titos Yugoslavia, insists that any new cooker should have both gas and electric rings in case they turn the supplies off. In her ofce, she keeps scraps of old bread. Her daughter says never throw anything away, since she has an array of East European friends waiting for cast-out computers, furniture, household appliances and overcoats to be recycled down the line. Drakuli# wrote: Those drawers of my grandmas show not only how we survived Communism, but why Communism failed: it failed because of distrust, because of a fear for the future Collecting was a necessity, because deep down nobody believed in a system that was continuously unable to provide for its citizens basic needs for years or more.110 I myself sensed the continuing despair when I worked as a consultant in Bulgaria and Romania just before they joined the European Union. When I spoke of entering new markets, I could read in my listeners eyes that they were certain the corrupt power-brokers would stop them. When I talked of increasing revenues, I looked out of the windows at jobless neighbours trying to sell yoghurt and coffee out of garages, and I knew there was no money in the economy. When I preached upgrading processes to European Union standards, the streets outside cratered with axle-breaking potholes told me: here standards are rock bottom. Nearly one-fth of the population has left Bulgaria in the last 20 years, on average six every hour.111 How do you do it in Europe? my Bulgarian learners asked. When I replied, You are Europe, they did not believe me. A slogan in Soa says: I love my fatherland but I hate my country. Adam Michnik, the Polish intellectual, found this negativity corrosive. He complained of his compatriots strange national nihilism and asked Why are Poles unable to take pride in what was magnicent and brave? Can Poles only worship the defeated, the fallen and the murdered?112 It may be supposed that new generations espouse the free market economy more than their elders who lived through Communism. But as Frances and I both found, mindsets do not necessarily change so quickly, since the free market has also resulted in considerable hardship. In the rst decade after Communism, most East European countries suffered substantial declines in their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In Hungary, there were

17,000 bankruptcies between 1990 and 1993 and the proportion of people economically active fell from 50 per cent to 35 per cent.113 Even if economies continue to grow well, it has been estimated that East Europeans may need up to 80 years to catch up with West European incomes.114 As it was, many countries in this region suffered further sharp falls of GDP in the long nancial crisis starting in 2008. In Slovenia, the most advanced of the ex-Communist countries to join the EU, salaries for manual workers can be as low as 300 euros per month. Yet cars, petrol, tyres, computers, books, razor blades and many other consumer goods cost as much as in the West. In Romania, an average monthly salary is little more than 200 euros. All this explains why a number of ex-Communist countries, after their rst exposure to the cold douche of liberal capitalism, subsequently voted democratically for leftish governments bent on softening the impact. They suspended privatisations and reinforced social safety nets, offering relief from the hard dictates of money, competition and change. It allowed them to maintain some of the social adhesion which had been the cornerstone of their value system. One result was that by 2009, 30 per cent of Hungarians were living on state pensions. It also reected a lack of ambition. The head of one East European broadcaster told me he could not persuade young journalists to take up positions in the West as foreign correspondents. I was amazed, since a foreign posting was the goal of nearly all of us who worked at Reuters. However in societies not used to money as a source of value, ambitions may be directed more towards home life, friends, sports and leisure. Those who should be creating wealth in these new societies do not have the hundreds of years of experience with money that their Western counterparts have. Their pasts taught them plenty about belonging to the right cliques and exploiting networks, but nothing about entrepreneurship. The nancial crisis which broke out in 2008 only exacerbated their frustration. The risk is that their backward habits will hinder the competitiveness of the ex-Communist states in the globalised economy indenitely. Some people however have been able to make the most of the difcult transition. Hungarians already in the last fteen years of Communism developed a sizeable private economic sector, which by the mid-1980s accounted for one-third of national income.115 One dynamic spark who competed successively in the global economy is Hungarian Sndor Kurti, winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2004.

With a computer and a $1,500 bank loan, he set up a company in the early 1990s. His partners were jobless engineers who knew how to repair broken machines. Within a few years, they had carved a lucrative business niche retrieving lost and damaged data on computer disc drives. Subsequently, his Kurt company opened branches in Austria and Germany and began operating in Californian style with its own swimming pool and rock band, while Sndor accompanied the Hungarian President on overseas visits. When his wife Zsuzsa (a friend of Erzsi) told her mother 30 years ago she planned to marry him, the mother said: Well, I guess hell do for the rst one. Zsuzsa was still married to Sndor at the time of writing. She had taken to going out salsa dancing with him. Some women too knew how to seize the opportunities. When Frances took a break in Kyrgyzstan from a conference in 2000, she went hiking in the mountains with a Kyrgyz woman. Alma was born in a yurt and grew up in a family of ten children. She went to school, got a job in government, married and had four children of her own. When the changes came in 1991, she scarcely dreamed that any of her children could study abroad. Before century was out, her oldest child was taking an MA at the University of Colorado. Alma was balanced and charming. Even in her mountains, she had the condent stroll of a Westerner. She was a lovely person. I felt the joy of this mother. We bonded because we shared essential values: a commitment to opportunity and being open to those who want to take it. It didnt go to her head. She was inspiring, said Frances. Above all it was the humanity of the Easterners that Frances appreciated. When word reached her in Tashkent that her father was gravely ill, she and her sister Susanne ew to New York to spend the last ten days of his life with him. The doctors told them they should amputate his leg. Frances asked how long he would live if they did so. Six months at the most. I said no, and I told my father as he slipped in and out of consciousness. The nurses said he spent his rst peaceful night afterwards. I never doubted it was what he wanted. It was the best thing. He died a few days later, 22 years after Francess mother died of cancer. She had lost the father with whom she had shared the whoosh of life. Frances ew back to Budapest and went straight from the airport into a conference she was supposed to be running. I sneaked into the back of the room and sat quietly. I thought I would just listen to

what was going on, but the speaker noticed I had come in and he stopped and said to everybody I had just arrived and he wanted to welcome me back. They all knew why I had been detained. They were publishers and Soros people from 30 countries and a lot of Hungarians. They all stood up and clapped and then just came and hugged me. My sister went back to her workplace in London. They all knew where shed been but no one mentioned it. The contrast was extraordinary. That taught her to try and build friendships before she did business: Once, at a dinner with publishers who were rivals with each other, I ordered just a spoon for dessert. When they realised I was intending to dip into each of their plates, they melted. By coffee, we had a project. I had integrated with them and created intimacy. It helped that I was a woman. In the East, being a woman can work more to your advantage than in the West. Frances grasped that outright attacks on old habits could be counter-productive. Sometimes it was just not worth the trouble imposing change which threatened vested local interests. She also decided to allow the people she worked with to make mistakes. I saw people needed space to prove themselves. In Mongolia, a woman wanted to produce a book on how to use computers in Mongolian, in full colour with a proper binding. I warned her she wouldnt cover her costs, but she persisted. She lost a lot of money, because the cover price had to be too low. She had to go through that. Now shes a protable publisher. In Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, they insisted on producing academic books in their own languages, even though people with higher education all spoke Russian. If wed produced them in Russian, theyd have been half the price. They had to learn the cost of their cultural nationalism themselves. Frances listened, looked and tried to understand during countless dinners, drinks, ofce meetings and seminars. I loved organising conferences, and tried to make them people-friendly. I aimed to understand where people were coming from, and to adjust programmes to what they could cope with at that stage of their development. I made them jump through hoops, but tried to make sure the hoops were worth going through, she said. Frances, with the heart of a left-liberal and a track record in business, came away from her ve-year engagement with strong friendships, as well as professional recognition and a wealth of experience. She achieved much in opening up the free

ow of knowledge in the post-Communist world. As such, she helped millions of people free themselves of the shackles of their past. A friend of mine who knew her described her as a weapon steeled in re for Soros to use helping people who knew great suffering. In tackling this challenge, Frances adopted a tactic which she had developed to deal with her own unsettling past in the shadow of the Holocaust. I never naturally had a real home, so I created a safe space for my collaborators to work in. I told them, Stay bolshie. I may be wrong. Argue your case. I created a safe space to be bolshie. People used to say, You made it safe to fail. If it was safe for them, then I also felt safe. In every environment, I tried to create this safe space. She nevertheless paid a personal price. It was only natural that jealousy of the West, abhorrence of the outsider and old practices of power manipulation should eventually also be directed against her. In Budapest, it rankled with some that she was the daughter of Hungarians who had left for a better life in the West. She did her best to adapt to the sensitivities: I developed an inner sense, which I didnt even know I had, until I watched how people responded to me, as opposed to watching how they responded to other people. But I didnt do it perfectly either. I made mistakes and this was part of the reason why I was so exhausted at the end. This constantly being careful of what you say is very tiring. There was very little spontaneity in my behaviour because I had to avoid hurting feelings. Jealousy nally hit where it hurt. At the end of her assignment, a local colleague accused her of nancial impropriety. The Soros Foundation quickly made clear they did not believe the allegations and after a time the person withdrew them. George Soros asked Frances to stay on as an advisor after her ve-year contract ended. This was a timely expression of condence, but she was scarred by what she experienced as a betrayal. In my dreams I started to see gures staggering along with bleeding faces, she recalled later ruefully. The roller coaster was taking its toll. I kept on wondering about my tolerance of everything I was going through. Was it because I admired the peoples strength, and wanted to live life in a fast-forward lane, in their world that was changing so rapidly? As they redened who they were, I shared the stresses this put on to their everyday relationships amongst themselves. People ducked and dived, either avoiding

confrontations at all costs or butting into one another head on. After her nale in the aftermath of the Kosovo war, Frances told Soros that it was time for her to go. She walked past the Budapest House to take leave. The grandparents penthouse apartment was no longer hers, but she still could not rid it from her psyche. She was locked in her existential dilemma: I wanted so much to be at home in Budapest, but I met so many people with whom I had nothing in common. Still she could not tear herself away emotionally. If I had to go to a desert island and I could take a dozen people, I would choose some people from the East of Europe, for emotional warmth, and others from the West, to maintain my balance, she ruminated. The warm contacts with the Easterners still attracted her, but her past and the practices of the Western organisation she worked for kept pushing her back into the role of a Westerner. She had struggled hard to bring Eastern and Western Europe together in a synthesis, but now her intuition told her she must remove her back from the reach of jealous knives and take care of her marriage to a Westerner again.

CHAPTER 11

LOST TRACK
Being born in Hungary is like a wound you carry with you from birth to death These are the words of Gbor Heller, a television consultant who emigrated to New York from Hungary in 1980 and came back after the fall of Communism. If they sound fatalistic, they are surely meant to. Talk today to a Hungarian, and doom and gloom soon come to the fore. Twas ever thus! Hungarians are by nature pessimistic, suicidal and cynical or so they would have us believe. The hero of Sndor Mrais Embers says: Theres no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deciencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not nd any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty.116 Perhaps Hellers pessimism is intended to be taken with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless his remark reects a tendency of Hungarians to see themselves in tragic terms. Poor Hungary is a frequent refrain. UngaryHun. Heller is a friend of Frances, and is sitting talking to the two of us in Budapest as we take the pulse of modern Hungary. He tells us how he grew up in Hungary and defected to New York at the age of 20. Defected sounds a bit too Cold War for 1980, but that is what the Hungarian authorities of the time told him he was doing. He became an art director for a Madison Avenue advertising rm, and returned to Hungary in 2000 to write screenplays. He married a Hungarian woman, bought an apartment in Budapest and they had twins in 2005. Five years after his return, Hungarians shot a feature lm with a screenplay he co-wrote. So how does the wound of being born in Hungary feel now? I have 50 per cent re-acquired it, that is to say that very gloomy outlook on life which I completely shook off in New York. There you have stress, but youre responsible for your life, they tell you that you can do anything. But here I see

peoples mentality is very slow to change. The mood tends to depression and hopelessness. Hungarians are small-minded. We dont believe we can become big. The optimism over joining the European Union has evaporated, there is no vision for the future, no belief we could become like France. Its a malaise. One is disadvantaged by being born into this region. Nobody ever emigrated to the East, only to the West. People didnt go to Russia from here unless they were taken. I try not to dwell on it, because were talking about a lot of enterprising people who are creative and imaginative, but deep down there is very little belief in success. I dont subscribe to it, but I am also affected by it, because I am surrounded by people who say: no, forget it, here in this country forget it. When you hear that a hundred times a day, then somehow you pick it up also. Of course, the ip side of that is that anything thats Western somehow is cast in a light that has to be more positive than Hungary. Of course, they do it better. Of course, they are more successful. Because they are Austrians, Germans, Italians He grumbles that politics is about ideologies and personalities rather than issues, as in the U.S. Since his wife has just given birth, he has experienced local hospitals and is appalled: You have to bring your own toilet paper, cutlery and medication. The toilet has no door, no light, no chain, no seat. At eight p.m. they turn out the light and you cant read. He is unimpressed by Hungarys long-standing claim to excellence in mathematics, physics and biology. He believes academic standards have slipped and sees only an exodus of Hungarian doctors, dentists, gynaecologists, biologists and biochemists to the West. Then he perks up. Enough of the Hungarian gloom. American optimism clicks in again. Some things have fundamentally changed for the better. Fifteen years ago, you couldnt go into a restaurants restroom without feeling disgusted. Thats changed. Then people have completely opened up to foreign cuisine. They now eat Chinese food, Italian pizza, all that kind of thing. Its natural to them. Thats different from my Hungarian mother, whom I took to a Chinese restaurant when she visited New York in 1981. I ordered the most expensive dish, which was a shrimp dish, and

she said: I dont like worms. That was her approach: shrimps were worms. Another time, I served her Caesars salad, and she said: Im not a rabbit. I dont eat lettuce. She was a meat and potatoes person. Also people on the street they may not look like Parisians but they look much better dressed than just ve years ago. One more thing: before, you couldnt take the bus or the subway or the streetcar without really smelling peoples perspiration. Now its much better. These are major things. Plus, if you go into a store in Budapest, and you speak English, theyll be able to serve you. Even a middle-aged woman selling bus tickets, who never learned English at school, would be able to give you what you want and give directions. Shes been forced to pick up fty words of English. Thats a sea change. Its very heartening. Is he tempted to return to New York? Yes, tomorrow. Im a New Yorker. I will remain so. Its something I cant shake. Then he recalls that he has two small children and this is unrealistic. He marvels at the vibrant culture of todays Hungary, with more magazines than ever, more cultural institutions than ever, and the largest annual youth event in Europe. He cannot quite make up his mind which way to swing. He could only ever live in New York or Budapest. Im not pessimistic. Im just unhappy, he concludes. * * *

Linda and Gaston Vadasz are likewise friends that Frances made during her time in Budapest. Like Heller, they came to Hungary from the United States. Gaston personally witnessed the 1956 Uprising and ed to safety in the West, while Linda is an American Jew he married in the United States. From them we hear owery tales of the intricacies of Hungarian bureaucracy, of complicated medical exams required to renew a residence permit, of queuing at a shop which sells ofcial forms, and then queuing again at the ofce which processes the forms. But as far as they are concerned, these are just dinner table stories. Gaston is Hungarian, but does not experience it as a wound. Linda is not Hungarian at all. They came to Budapest for its six orchestras, two opera houses, fty

live theatres and splendid architecture. They like its central location in Europe, within two hours ying time of nearly everywhere else, and because they can afford to live in a spacious apartment in a good neighbourhood better to be a big sh in a small pond, says Gaston. He owns a vineyard overlooking Lake Balaton, and if you are a friend, he may invite you down to do the grape harvest. Picking starts at seven a.m. They are a gregarious couple who make the most of the advantages they perceive in Hungary. Not for them the doubting, the impotence, the disappointment with what has followed Communism, let alone Trianon. The American way of life has given them a more optimistic, can-do attitude. Linda has picked up rudimentary Magyar, and forces herself to put a few sentences together when with Hungarians, out of solidarity. She is helping museums develop Friends of the Museum schemes, which in America yield large sums in fund-raising. Gaston initially acted as marketing director for a Hungarian commercial radio station. For some time he wondered why a man came with a suitcase once a week, until he realised this was the wages, in cash. He now teaches students conict resolution. Despite the nature of the subject, he notices that when it comes to discussion, the students divide into opposing groups, ghting each other rather than getting together to solve the issue. Frances sees Gaston and Linda as the sort of outsiders who can do good in an exCommunist country: They represent the best of expatriates inuence. They have integrated themselves into the community, found their own way of living and behaving, and have demonstrated certain standards. You cant achieve a transformation of attitudes by coming in and writing a consultancy report. Things change only if people see there is another way of doing things, with the example being set by nice and unthreatening people like the Vadasz couple. Like Gaston, Esther Ronay chose to come back to Hungary from the West. She too sees the positives rather than the negatives. She and her restaurant critic father Egon emigrated from Hungary after the 1956 Uprising and she grew up in England and made a career in lms. She returned in 1998 when she was already middle-aged. At our meeting in the Wallenberg caf around the corner from the Budapest House, she says: One of my ambitions was to live in a European city. Id been visiting Budapest a lot, but I never spent enough time here. I love London too, but I thought Id be

adventurous and give Budapest a try. I had nothing here. I just came, not looking left or right. It was hard to get a decent job as a lmmaker, but it turned out a good decision. I can sit in cafs, walk anywhere in ten minutes and there are no parking problems. It suits me. I feel good about being here, even though Im not completely integrated in Hungarian society. Im quite reserved. Some social lives here revolve entirely round the family. Single women dont go out and about as much as I do. I mix mainly with people of my age. Hungarians are very negative about life here. I know, its Balkan, corrupt and dirty, but I think: what about the positive aspects? I didnt come to Hungary to complain about life in Hungary. I can afford not to concentrate on the bad aspects. Esther has made the crossover. Her upbringing in England gave her stability and a sense of responsibility for her own destiny, but now that she is back in Budapest she feels her old roots: There is a certain magic in crossing the Margaret Bridge, looking up at the castle and seeing that its still there, she says. * * *

Frances and I move to the caf of the elegant Hotel Gellrt. The spring sunshine pours in. Outside, yellow trams squeal and rumble along the embankment of the Danube. It is a stylish place to meet a television executive. Mihly Hardy, news editor at a commercial television station, is another Hungarian who left his country and came back. Not for him the hard contrasts of New York however. What marked him were the six years of liberalisation and upheaval he experienced as a correspondent in Gorbachevs Soviet Union. His world is diffuse, complicated and uncertain. He is a child of the Kdr era, born after 1956, and the equivocations of that era lead him to take into account all sides of a question ad innitum. He remembers growing up in a relatively open-minded society: Even in Communist times, Hungarians were open to foreign inuence. This was not East Germany or Czechoslovakia, where it was blocked. Our borders were

open, and a lot of foreign people came here. I used to listen to the BBC World Service in English. All generations were open to what was happening outside. We considered ourselves part of the Western way of thinking. Culturally, Hungarian society was quite different then. They no doubt stopped some rubbishy books at the border, but everything of value was quickly translated and published here. Nowadays you have to hunt for high literature. If somebody wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, youll nd one or two of their books, but otherwise bookstores are full of the same rubbish you experience in the West. As for lms, I remember in the 1970s we could see Fellini and Antonioni here. In those days Hungarians probably knew more about the outside world than the average young American. Now what you get is the bullshit on the screen made in Hollywood. This is globalisation. You hear the same Top Twenty pop songs in Hong Kong, Singapore, Nairobi, Baghdad and Prague, and see the same ten movies on the screen. You cant get away. Its all the same. Asked how he looks back on the 1956 Uprising, he acknowledges his picture is confused. He speaks of it as a volcano of discontent, an ill-prepared popular uprising, chaos, revenge, lynchings, the wrong people punished and so on: People nowadays dont like to talk about the shady and controversial sides, because the present political elite still likes to look for legitimacy roots in 1956. However very few of them did anything, except perhaps former President rpd Gncz. Less than 20 out of 386 Members of Parliament did anything at any time against the Communist regime. I am quite old enough to remember that the same happened under the Communists. Then there were quite a lot of so-called WWII resistance heroes, but the history books show that shamefully few Hungarians did anything against the Germans Then when it came to 1989, we didnt win our freedom. It was the side effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hungary has never had a long period of tranquil parliamentary democracy. Society still tolerates authoritarianism. The everyday practice of democracy after 1989 has disappointed the majority of Hungarians. There were expectations, but

we simply couldnt live up to them. Hungary before was under Austrian, German or Russian domination, and we could always say our ill fate was due to foreign repression. Now there are only Hungarians to blame. Its quite an ugly exercise to look into the historical mirror. In democracy you have to take everything step by step. You have to go through all those childrens ailments. We dont have immunity yet. The Hungarian political elite doesnt have a clearcut vision of what we will do in year 2020, where we want to go in economic development, in IT, how Hungarian society should look, or what our aims are for decades ahead. Politically we live a day-to-day life. When I lmed political representatives in Beijing, they were working on a medium-term development plan for the next fty years. This is the Chinese way of thinking. They have wonderful economic results, and still they are planning for fty years. Its a 4,000 year-old empire. That type of long-term thinking is missing all over Eastern Europe. So what is his own vision? Much less state, much less bureaucracy. This is worthwhile as far as it goes, but hardly a whole vision. Mihly is knowledgeable, open-minded and perceptive. But pessimism comes easily to him too. Like many of the elite, he seems a bit lost, with little condence that his homelands future may one day be better than its tumultuous past. He looks as if he is wondering whether these two foreigners, sitting with him on a sunny morning on the terrace of the Gellrt, might have a better idea. His beeper sounds. The police are on the track of something, and his camera team is off to capture it. Hungarys history is inching forward again. His eyes light up as he remembers one more thing: Tomorrow is the Holocaust Memorial Day. Go to the Holocaust Memorial Center and see the ceremony. Its impressive. You mustnt miss it. * * *

Opened in 2004, the jagged, slanting architecture of the Holocaust Memorial Center incorporating an old synagogue aptly depicts the tearing apart of the Hungarian Jews.

Its Museum shows little, because little is left to show. In the rst room, a lm loop repeats a scene of young Jewish men and women, dancing a traditional Jewish dance, their boots tapping out the rhythms of an ancient culture exterminated in Auschwitzs ovens. In the next rooms, there are a handful of photos taken by an SS man. A surviving Hungarian Jew who lost all 20 members of her family in the Holocaust found the pictures in a German locker after liberation. They show a few tense faces of rabbis, and groups waiting blankly before buildings they did not know were gas chambers. That is all. In the courtyard, loudspeakers relay an adagio by Gustav Mahler, another Central European Jew. Todays survivors are reading the names of those who died 30,000 new names they have catalogued and inscribed on the surrounding wall since a year ago. They do this every year. Old men and women and teenagers wait in line to relieve each other. They carefully rehearse the names they will read out when it is their turn telling that a Hungarian with a name once lived, that the person was Jewish, and was put to death. There are no other sounds. Nothing else moves. There are many more names to come. It will take them years to complete the work. When I nally slip out, it seems the naming will never cease, continuing forever like the lm reel of joyful tapping feet. * * *

When Judit Schweitzer left Hungary in 1988, still under Communism, she did not intend to return. Her husband, Mtys Vince, had a job at the World Bank, and their future seemed to lie in America. She became a paralegal in a law rm and felt at home there. By 1990 however, the opportunities in the new Hungary looked too good to miss. Mtys decided to go back, she followed and now they have to make do with what they found. Mtys is a news agency man like me, so we talk about Hungarian journalism when Frances and I visit them. He tells how he became President of the Hungarian News Agency MTI in 2002: The Advisory Board ltered applications through a lengthy selection process. There were 13 applicants, and in the second round it came down to six. The Advisory Board chose two names from a short list of three and submitted them

to the Prime Minister. He selected mine and it was submitted to the President, who sent me congratulations. Mtys has written a book about the practices of twentieth-century Hungarian journalism: When I looked at newspapers of 1944, I noticed that when the German Army occupied Hungary on 21st March, the newspapers reported closures of cinemas and the location of shelters. But for two days there was not a word in the Hungarian newspapers that Germany had occupied the country. A tradition of Hungarian journalists has been to refrain from trying to write straightforwardly about an event which is uncomfortable politically. The censor was there to keep such news out of the newspaper and would cut it out if you wrote about it immediately. So the journalists slipped a few references into articles a few days later, and that usually got through. Readers developed a ne instinct for picking up the real news between the lines, and continued doing this through the Kdr years. The Hungarian media are now freer, but Mtys considers the taboos persist, in a more subtle form: Hungarian journalists wholly support an idea, against other ideas and ideologies. Only very few papers try to be balanced, aiming for a wider readership. Most are always directed towards their own people be it the right, the left or the centre. The real losers after 1989 were the working class. Under the old regime they were declared to be the ruling elite. They had privileges and relatively good salaries in comparison with intellectuals. Since the transition, millions of jobs have been lost and skills are no longer needed. There is a much better selection of goods in the shops, but in your pocket there is much less and your job security is gone forever. Its a psychological shock. This whole thing was never frankly discussed in the Hungarian media. It was a kind of taboo. The reason is that the intelligentsia is ashamed that the system change in itself did not bring paradise, and they are proting from it, while the working class are losers. The sun streams in through the windows of their apartment overlooking the Danube near St Istvn Park, just around the corner from the Budapest House of Francess

grandparents. It is a natural habitat for Jews and intellectuals such as Mtys and Judit. It is no surprise that Frances should have gravitated to them as friends. Stories about the wartime Jewish ghettos, many located in this area, are passed down through the generations. Mtys remembers his parents saying the saddest day of their lives was when Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. They witnessed how the unique international ghetto was established. International because foreign diplomats such as Wallenberg were trying to protect the victims. Unique because it was not in one place; the ghetto consisted of dozens of separate buildings designated for Jews. The authorities decided to spread the ghetto around the city because the British and American air forces started to bomb Budapest, and they hoped that if they scattered these Jewish houses around, the Allies would stop bombing because they would want to save the lives of the Jews, says Mtys. It was a vain fantasy. His wife Judit is unhappy at the divisions that have reopened in society: We had lots of dreams around 1990; we thought everybody would be relieved and happy, but it didnt happen like this. Frustration grew in many layers of society, bringing up sentiments we dont like to talk about. When we commemorate our revolutions the 1848 one and the 1956 one the parties celebrate separately. There is no national gathering, even holidays and anniversaries are divided among the nation, and I dont know how this whole situation can be cured. People dont buy the big notion that democracy is important, that freedom is important. Another friend (whom Frances thought it wiser not to name) put it more bluntly: The Jewish issue has come up again and for a lot of people the Jews are again the scapegoats. The problem is that the Fidesz party, just to gain voters, strengthened the feeling of the good Hungarian, the great Hungarian versus the shallow Hungarian. Viktor Orbn divided the country and said there are two Hungaries. He is the king of one Hungary, whereas the other Hungary is liberal leftist cosmopolitan, trash

Viktor Orbn burst upon the Hungarian political scene as Communism was tottering. He belongs to a tradition of ery Hungarian politicians who act bravely, risk all and go over the top. Nobody forgets his speech to a quarter of million people in Budapest in 1989 at the re-burial of the executed Prime Minister, Imre Nagy. At the age of 26, he demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops and free elections. Recalling the executions after the 1956 Uprising, he said: In less than two years, the HSWP [Communist Party] sent to the gallows hundreds of innocents, among them its own comradeswe must see to it that the ruling party can never again use force against us.117 Nobody had spoken in public like that since 1956 and got away with it. The speeches were being broadcast live to the nation. People held their breath to see if the broadcasters would cut him off. They did not. For many, that was the moment the Communist Party forfeited its last authority. The Fidesz party that he co-founded in 1988 appealed to the younger generation who wanted to break with the past, modernise the Hungarian economy and rekindle national pride. Its supporters resented that ex-Communists seized many assets during privatisation. Many had relatives who had been imprisoned by the old regime. With its outspoken standpoints, it seemed a refreshing change from decades of weaving and ducking under Kdr. By 1998 Fidesz had established itself as the main centre-right party and came to power with Orbn as its 35-year-old Prime Minister. He set about removing exCommunists from positions of inuence, and presided over Hungarys entry into NATO. He lost the next election in 2002 and again in 2006, ceding government to a socialistliberal coalition, but returned to power in 2010. This could all be seen as the healthy to-ing and fro-ing of parliamentary democracy. More disquieting to people like Frances and me however, brought up in the more peaceable give-and-take of Western politics, is the readiness of both Fidesz and its opponents to take politics to an extreme. The Right proclaims the Left is economically incompetent, unpatriotic, inuenced by Jews and riddled with effete Budapesters. The Left abhors the Right as populist, dominated by narrow-minded

country folk and too ready to pander to extremists. Battle lines are drawn over every issue along traces which are depressingly historical. Everything is personalised, points of disagreement are predictable and compromise is rare. In the case of Fidesz, its anti-Semitism gently plays on irrational feelings to rally votes from the extremist fringes. Fidesz politicians snipe at the Soros Foundation Soros is a Hungarian Jew by origin even though the Foundation funded a scholarship for Orbn to study at Oxford University. It is scarcely believable that anti-Semitism could return as a dominant ideology. In the light of history, it is playing with re. Rashness however is in the tradition of Hungarian politics. In his relations with the outside world, Orbn positioned himself as the champion of national independence after centuries of foreign domination. Before Hungary joined the EU, he remarked in Brussels that Hungary was ready for Europe, but questioned whether Europe was ready for Hungary. Western statesmen were taken aback by this provocation and by his revival of old disputes with his Slovak and Romanian neighbours in the run-up to EU accession. For Orbn, this represented a readiness to tackle issues head-on, just as he did when the Communists were clinging to power. He saw no reason to be embarrassed Liberals such as Frances and her Hungarian friends shun Fidesz. However Frances is trying to be even-handed in the Western tradition, so she takes me to see Gbor Borokai, who is in his 40s and was spokesman of the 1998-2002 Fidesz government. It is an easy contact: we are both former journalists. He grew up in a family of mixed political origins. The father was a nonCommunist Protestant teacher, while the mother came from a poor family which genuinely believed in socialism: They didnt ght over this in my family, but my father couldnt be himself. He had to suppress lots of things inside himself. He was angry at my history books. My father sheltered me and my brother from political life. For him, Fidesz represents the modern Hungary: When Fidesz came on the scene, it represented a new sound, a new style which was opposite to the old regime. In government, it tried to give opportunities to the middle classes, to strengthen them as entrepreneurs, because that would also benet the lower classes. Fidesz lost in 2002 for reasons of style and because the

media was against it, but above all because the socialists could mobilise the lower classes to turn out to vote. Previously they never voted, never took part in public life, never had an opinion and were always against whoever was in power. The older people in Hungary dont like the conservative values which Fidesz represents. The younger people like it. Twenty-ve per cent of the readers of the newspaper I now write for are in their twenties. They dont see any bad connotations in such values. We need to redene conservatism in Hungary in the 21st century. The socialists represent the past, which is living with us here and now. 800,000 Hungarians were once members of the Communist Party, but the socialists dont like to talk about who were the informers. We in Fidesz do. Our newspapers published a list of names recently, and circulation rose immediately. By 2010, Fidesz and Orbn were back in power with a sizeable parliamentary majority. The ruling Socialists were swept away, rejected as the party of ex-Communist cronyism and held responsible for an economic collapse which followed the world banking crisis of 2008-2009. * * *

Gbor Borokai urges us to visit the House of Terror at 60 Andrssy Street, opened as a museum in 2002 during the time of the rst Fidesz government. Many of Francess leftliberal friends have not been to it, because they see it as a Fidesz project. Its existence is yet another source for conict between the two main political groupings. I try to ignore the political ramications and walk in with a fresh mind. The building is one of the most sinister places in Budapest. It was used as a detention and torture centre by both the Fascist Arrow Cross movement in 1944-45 and by the Communists until 1989. A huge rooftop sign outside dominates the street. In the entrance hall stands a Soviet tank covered in mud. Inside it uses multi-media to create powerful effects and brings history to life through individual accounts of survivors. The Arrow Cross used it as headquarters for the ve months they held power,

torturing Jews and other political enemies in its cellars before hauling them off to be shot on the banks of the Danube. From spring 1945 the Communists started using it as a base for their new secret police. For the next four decades they operated with methods that were not so different. The 40 years of Communist terror take up more space than the shorter period of Fascism. That is what irks Hungarians of the left-liberal side, who nd it unbalanced. They also resent the implication that the two totalitarian systems were equivalent. The visitors ock in however. In the rst three years, the museum attracted over a million visitors, old and young, in a country of 10 million people. In the House of Terror, you nd the dark side of the Kdr era. This is not the story of people who kept their heads down and swung with the wind. This is about people who got in the way, and felt the full brunt of repression. It tells of arrests in the night, interrogations, torture, show trials, executions, deportations to the Gulag, professional exclusion, denunciations and class struggle against enemies, real or supposed. Renata Velencei, who handles the museums public relations, says: You never get accustomed to working here. Im in my thirties and I nished my education at a time when they didnt teach history after 1945. It is amazing how the individual stories recorded in the museum bring to life the psychology of the prisoners, how they kept a sense of humour and communicated with each other by chanting Hungarian prayers. Tmas Madcsy, one of the museums young historians, says: This was the saddest part of Hungarian history. This house has a big impact on everyone whos working here. The more you know, the worse you feel yourself, coming here every day and nding out more about the horrible things that happened here and these persons who did these things to others. It was very frightening for a while. One of those who do not like the House of Terror is historian Krisztin Ungvry, author of the WWII history, Battle for Budapest. In a 3,000-word newspaper article a year after it opened, he tore the exhibition to pieces, nding not one positive word to say. He accused the organisers of falsifying history in order to satisfy Fidesz ideologues wrongly equating the Arrow Cross fanaticism with the softer Kdr years, wrongly insinuating that most of the rst Communist secret policemen were recycled Arrow Cross, and failing to mention the Hungarians role in the genocide of the Jews. He condemned the museum as biased, undifferentiated and incomplete.118 For an institution which has been a hit in terms of visitors, this was quite a

broadside. Whatever its origins, Budapests House of Terror has cast light on a crucial part of the countrys history which had been repressed. By contrast, Slovenia, the most Westernised of the ex-Communist states, remained stuck in its old biased view of history long after the collapse of its Communist government. Until 2006, the Museum of Recent History in Ljubljana consisted of ageing artefacts glorifying the Communistled Partisans, and in 2011 Slovenia still brought out a two-euro coin featuring a Partisan war leader and a Communist star. With the House of Terror, Hungarians have moved faster to look realistically at the uncomfortable legacy of their Communist past. In Eastern Europe, such historical undertakings are bound to run into trouble. Everybody assumes their purpose is to promote one political interest against another. In this case, the Fidesz association damned it in the eyes of many from the start. Ungvry is cynical about the success of his own book about the siege of Budapest. It won critical acclaim abroad, but in Hungary he believes each faction reads only the parts which suit its prejudices, ignoring the rest. In a country such as Britain, the main worry of historians is apathy rather than political manipulation. Few British schools convey a broad overview of their countrys long history any more. The Imperial War Museum in London therefore resorts to artices such as recreations of trench warfare to re-arouse agging interest in Britains momentous achievements in two World Wars. It chooses to interest and entertain, even at the risk of over-simplication, targeting the mass public rather than academics. Like museums in the West, the Budapest House of Terror presents history as part of a peoples cultural patrimony, accessible to all. The million people who passed through its doors in the rst three years voted with their feet in favour of this Western approach. The visitors claimed ownership of their history. If Fidesz wished to inuence the masses through its patronage, the masses took little notice. They voted Fidesz out of government in 2002 and repeated their verdict in 2006. * * *

Before I went with Frances to see Ungvry, a friend warned that he was a talented historian but we might nd him prickly. The interview is indeed quite a struggle, even though he gives us a friendly welcome and is generous with his time. He wishes to keep the conversation at an academic level, steering clear of questions how

Hungarians are digesting their history or national characteristics. As far as he is concerned, this is idle talk. We talk in German his a little old-fashioned, mine a little less cultivated. You ask me one difcult question after another. I thought you would ask me as a historian where you could nd references for one theme or another Am I pessimistic? No, I am not at all pessimistic. I dont think this country has any chance in the future. Of course, small people have inferiority complexes, and expectations of the European Union were set too high. Eventually he does give insights into his personal background. He is the descendant of a long line of military ofcers of the old school. When Frances says that her grandparents often talked about political repression, Ungvry remarks that this was the only subject his own family spoke of as he was growing up. After the war, the Communists sentenced his cavalry ofcer grandfather to eight years in prison. What did he do wrong? Nothing! It was a show trial in which he was convicted as an alleged war criminal. There was an ulterior purpose: they wanted to get the ofcers to testify against the generals... My grandfather was never afraid. He had been in the Hungarian Olympic horse riding team and for this reason did not have to be worried. Somewhat, but not much. There was much room for manoeuvre in the Kdr period. I knew all the army comrades of my grandfather. Every year, they held an illegal meeting, went to Holy Mass and honoured the dead, and afterwards had a supper, and I was there as a 14-year-old. There was a culture of remembering in those days. I heard about the Budapest siege of 1944-45 already more than 20 years ago on the tramway. I overheard two old dears talking about it. I was 14 or 15 years old then, and I was already making interviews for my book. Even then, before the changes, one could nd people who talked about it. There were also people who said nothing. As nowadays. His father, also an army ofcer, was sent to prison in a political trial after 1956. The

grandfather was released in 1955 after serving six years and was told he no longer had a criminal record. Grandfather and father were fully rehabilitated only after 1989. Our host shows us politely down the garden path of the Buda family villa. At the wicker gate, he ashes a charming smile to his mother who is entering, and greets her with Servus Mama, very much the well-mannered son of an old family. * * *

When Frances talks of her friends in Budapest, she often mentions publisher Istvn Bart. At a time when she was professionally stressed and nding it difcult to assimilate, he befriended her and acted as her guide. Bart succeeded in making a link between Eastern and Western Europe. Besides being able to empathise with Frances, he worked constructively with her in adapting Hungarian publishing to free market conditions. As chairman of the Hungarian Publishers Association, he continued this modernising role after she left. Publishing in Hungary is now a well-funded independent business, increasing the number of titles it brings out by 500 each year. He nevertheless remains an intellectual of the old school and comes into his element when he dwells on his countrys cultural past. He disapproves of innovations such as the euro, or the Bologna Accord establishing a common model for European higher education: Western universities now teach ridiculous subjects, which are being brought into Hungarian universities under the slogan of serving the market place. I dont think that higher education should serve the needs of the market place. Higher education is higher education. You have to train universally capable people. At university, you learn to be an intellectual. Before WWI very few people went to university. If you got a secondary education at a Gymnasium, you could be running a bank, or in the Army you automatically became an ofcer. The number of students his wife, a university lecturer, tutors has grown from a handful to over a hundred. In his apartment, an Aladdins cave of precious objects and rugs collected from travelling the world, he serves guests with wine from a barrel sent up from a vineyard in the countryside. He is a gourmet: the most enlightening entries in his book Hungary and the Hungarians: the Keywords: a Concise Dictionary of Facts and Beliefs, Customs,

Usage and Myths concern food, viz: Trprty%: the brown pieces of solidied fat formed when the fat is rendered from the thick, fatty bacon under the pigs skin; liberally salted, it is consumed with bread and onions; ground up and added to fatty and salted dough, it is made into crackling scones, often the size of ones st, to the indispensable accompaniment of beer. Gulys: a simple beef stew for foot soldiers; can be cooked on the move on a mobile stove, the goulash cannon; it symbolised always the same food for the wretched foot soldiers but also you should not push the wretched Hungarian people too far.119 Budapest is full of bathing establishments with health-giving mineral waters. Istvn Bart has chosen his carefully for the quality of its social contacts. One elderly member, while still alive, put up a commemorative plaque denoting himself as the last soldier serving a King of Hungary. The best gossip is over the top of the changing cabins, Bart observes. Under the showers it has already been censored a bit. * * *

Frances and I prowled around the Budapest House to get the feel of the neighbourhood. We wanted to hear also from the working men and women, not just the intelligentsia. At the local newspaper, they directed us to an old peoples day centre in a poorer street a few blocks away from the grandparents home.120 For the rst time, we hold the conversation in Magyar, because the people we meet there do not speak English. I depend on Frances, who speaks their language. I can see that she reassures them by acting as an intermediary with the foreigner. Their views of the past are robust and pragmatic. Not for them the theorising over abstract concepts such as freedom, reform and transition. They took the cards that life dealt them, and tried to make the most of whatever came into their hands. Ferenc L. Csete, who used to be purchasing manager for a large state-owned

machinery plant, would have preferred that the Uprising of 1956 never took place. Rather than a heroic revolt against oppression, he remembers it as disruptive and damaging. While others recall Communism eroding their lives, for Csete that period was his heyday. He enjoyed his work, which enabled him to travel to the West, and his rms dynamic growth in exports gave him a sense of achievement. He saw no reason to do away with a regime that allowed him to ourish: In the Uprising, the rebels had an unrealistic view what life could be. Afterwards it was a question of restoring the control of the Party. Those who left in 1956 were not the best people. They were out of work. Without the consolidation of the Kdr regime, we would never have been able to develop things as we did. It took six to seven years to move on, but then things settled down and functions such as security, universities and schooling worked properly again. Csete does acknowledge that there was never enough money in the Communist system. As a successful professional however, now retired, he has little time for traditional Hungarian pessimism: This 13th District of Budapest has exploded in development since 1989. Its the fastest changing part of the city. Its becoming a very peaceful area. The mayor understands its potential, and is committed to cleaning up the District and putting memories behind us. Its time to put 1956 behind us and stop polarising and reopening wounds. We cant forget it, but we should be at peace with it and bring it to resolution. We should use the example of the 13th District for the whole country. Lunching with Csete at the day centre is Marika Saguly Istvnn, whose memories focus on survival and scratching a living. She worked as a doctors assistant, getting up at 4.30 a.m. to take her children to a crche, crowding into trams where her sandwiches were crushed against her clothes, and starting work at 7 a.m. As a mother and worker, she sees history in terms of scarcity, food and money: In World War II, I remember civilians going from Budapest with money or gold to

the countryside to buy food. They perched on the top of troop trains. The soldiers ignored them unless they made too much noise, in which case they dumped them in the middle of the puzsta [Hungarys big empty plain]. In 1956 I was living with my children aged two and four on the Rbert Krolyi ring road. The Russians had a tank park there and the resistance was shooting at the tanks. We were so frightened I took the children to the basement and we sat among heaps of coal. The little ones started crying because they were used to having fruit and all stores were closed. There was a warehouse nearby and I heard that produce was being given out. I went out to get two apples. Not a soul was on the street. Then I heard shots in the distance. I thought: a couple of apples are not worth going for in this. I told the children: If I go for apples, I probably wont come back. They understood that. Afterwards the police came along the landings of our block of ats, searching from home to home for looted goods. They claimed they were taking them back to the stores. I didnt get concerned with politics. The real questions were about how to survive, whether to save a bit of money. We wanted to get consumer goods, but our wages were too low. We always wanted to buy a little something a plot of land or a car. My husband had to save a whole year to give me a wedding present, a washing machine. Lajos Szendrei drove vans all his working life. Already in 1945 he was delivering food supplies around the wrecked city. When there was trouble on the streets, he could not get around and his life was at risk. He remembers 5.15 p.m. on 23rd October 1956, when the streets emptied at a time when they were usually bustling. He could not take the cash taken at his warehouse back to the head ofce, so he took it home. He put on a white coat so people assumed he was an ambulance-man and let him through road-blocks. In the following days, he opened up a store in the middle of the ghting to sell scarce milk powder. Then he cadged a van from two security ofcers in exchange for a consignment of bread. Throughout his life, he has been using his wits to muddle through. He measures the varying levels of development in the 13th District in terms of salami. In the more

genteel areas he could sell it from door to door, but in the working class streets he got nowhere. Of course in 1945 under the Russians he was running a black market, remarks Saguly Istvnn with a laugh. Szendrei grins back and does not protest. History weighs lightly on him. They take leave of Frances in Magyar. I do not understand what they say to each other, but she does, as if she were one of them. Almost. * * *

Kristof Varga is a politician in his forties and a 13th District citizen through and through. When we spoke to him, he had just been re-elected to the Budapest City Council. Frances has tracked him down to sense the pulse of her grandparents neighbourhood. The moment he comes through the door of the caf, two corners away from the Budapest House, Frances exclaims how good-looking he is. Kristof is indeed a live spark, and charming. In his demeanour, he embodies the Hungary of tomorrow. He has felt little of the ravages of his countrys recent past. The son of a child psychologist, he has spent a cultivated, middle-class life in the Ujliptvros part of the 13th District, just a few streets away, and has no wish to live anywhere else. He was brought up at a private nursery school by Hungarian and Austrian ladies, who taught him in Magyar and German and took him for boat trips to the Margaret Island in the Danube. Like many in this area, he is partly Jewish, actually only one quarter. He found this out belatedly, just before he stood for re-election. His father said he thought he should tell him before Kristof found out from someone else. The son feels a little squeamish at this late revelation. In Hungarian politics, this is a loaded provenance: When I was small, I was fascinated by World War II, the Nazis and the Holocaust. I found it exotic and read all about it in books. Then at 18, I lost interest. When I entered politics however, I started hearing people say I was a Jew. I thought: sometimes they say youre gay, sometimes that youre a Jew and sometimes that you stole something. I thought that was just usual. In politics, people say a lot of bad things about you. My father told me in 2002, even though I was rst elected in 1998. Why then? I never asked him. Its not an issue for me, but it has been made an issue by

others. When I was studying in the U.S., I had a Jewish girl friend and there that was a plus not a minus. Kristof is just old enough to have done military service for the Warsaw Pact. Like Peter Inkei, his experiences testify how little energy was left in the Cold War by the end of the 1980s. The Army mixed university students with older boys from the countryside in the east. There was no love lost between the two groups, since the army was in the west of the country, where the danger from NATO was supposed to be. The peasant boys homes at the other end of the country were too far away to reach in a weekend. The students from Budapest however had their parents waiting in cars outside the barracks to whisk them home in less than two hours. The Hungarian military was at that time totally incapable of doing any sort of harm to anybody except itself. It was truly dangerous for its own soldiers. When our tank unit had an exercise, there was this alarm in the middle of the night, and we had to take up a combat position in one hour and 42 minutes. We ran to the Russian-made tanks and one guy opened the engine compartment, stood on top of the engine with a re extinguisher and the driver started the engine, which didnt start for a long time and sometimes burst into ames. Thats why the guy with the re extinguisher was standing there. That was standard procedure. On top of every tank there was somebody with a re extinguisher. Once, on a big exercise area near the Balaton Lake, we had to do a manoeuvre with the Soviet Army. We got there by train with our trucks and armoured vehicles and started unloading. The train was very narrow and the vehicles wide, so there were people walking in front, come this way, go that way and it took almost a day for us to do this. Then the Russians arrived, same train, with 20 tanks on it. To unload, one guy got into each tank, started the engine, and then another guy at the end of the train yelled something and waved a red ag. The tanks all jumped over the sides of the railcars, severely damaging the train, but they were ready to ght within three minutes. Very professional. Kristof has seen the industrial part of the 13th District, once a stronghold of the Communists, change into a neighbourhood of banks, consultancies, supermarkets, car

dealerships and residential multiplexes. One building up the road from the old Hirschenhauser apartment is a luxury fortress housing Hungarian Jews returned from Israel. It has a 24-hour guard, an underground garage, a swimming pool, a tness centre, and a garden located at rst-oor level for security. People change too. At a recent pop concert, Kristof heard the old dissident music he was a fan of in the 1980s. The songs were all about belonging to Europe and goddamn the Communists. We kids who went to that music used to get drunk at clubs and sleep out on the streets. Now many are executives in banks. One of those kids, Gbor Demszky, recently met Aryeh Neier, whom he knew in the 1980s as a human rights lawyer, and asked him what he did now. Im President of the Soros Foundation. And what do you do? replied Neier. Im Mayor of Budapest, answered Demszky. Both gaped. With a psychology degree from Budapest and a Masters in public administration from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Kristof has the credentials to participate in building Hungarys future in a multinational community. His work involves him in European Union affairs. He welcomes Hungarys accession without reservations: When we joined the EU, people were more realistic or more fatigued than in the times of great expectations after 1989, or cynical about the whole thing. The EU legislation happened over a number of years, so there was no sudden change, and the economy basically what the EU wants, every economist wants, so there is nothing special about that. For people like myself however, there is a symbolism, and I really enjoyed when I crossed the EU citizens gate at Munich airport with my Hungarian passport for the rst time. I found that was something that we deserved. It does matter. Now big changes are coming in terms of the EU, because money is starting to ow in, big time. A good part of the money that we spend on capital projects now is matched by EU funds, which is a huge amount of capital investment, and thats money you can see. Things will be built roads, infrastructure, sewage, modernised schools, transportation. Is Hungary different or better than other countries? Kristof is not sure: This region has

always had a lot of common things, a lot of exchange, a lot of similarities. If you walk into a modern coffee shop in Budapest, it could be anywhere, in Prague, in Warsaw, even in New York. We like to say we are different from other East European countries because we were the ones who took up arms and actually fought in 1956. But then we went to Prague in 1968 [as part of the Soviet-led invasion] to ght against the Czechs, who wanted to ght for their freedom. So its not a very clearcut picture that we are the freedom-ghters. * * *

I feel this is not much helping Frances to nd her ancestral bearings and I too am frustrated. When I was a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe in the 1970s, things were clearer: people wanted to be free to make better lives. Now, their aspirations are confused. Like the others we interviewed, Kristof Varga offers no rounded vision of his countrys destiny. Young enough to have escaped the worst of Hungarys recent history, he is relatively optimistic about the future, whatever it will be. Cultivated and cosmopolitan, he takes easily to the concept of Europeans growing together, but he hesitates to dene the way forward. Publisher Istvn Bart, although he has navigated the shoals of transition and proved his ability to innovate, prefers to project conservative attitudes. Historian Kristian Ungvry is condent that he can direct his life constructively, but is cynical about the capacity of the Hungarian people to cope equably with their history. It is hardly inspiring. That many should be inclined to pessimism is no surprise, if one considers what everybody in Eastern Europe went through in the last 80 years. War, oppression and economic decay do not encourage a belief that the future will hold anything but the same old mistakes, hatreds, divisions and hardship. Westerners have grown up with more peace, prosperity, travel and opportunities for professional development than previous generations ever enjoyed. They are conditioned to nd the pessimism of the Easterners overdone. For the latter however, it is normal. It represents a sober assessment of probabilities. Surprisingly, the person who had the clearest and most positive view of the future was the working-class pensioner Ferenc Csete, who had done well in the Communist

times. Much less sure were the professionals in the prime of their lives. In the West they would likely be exerting constructive, middle-of-the-road inuences. In ex-Communist countries, people who should naturally be in the centre of the political spectrum hesitate to impose their inuence. Like children from difcult homes, they still struggle as adults to seize their responsibilities and nd their place in the world. History is a handicap not a heritage.

CHAPTER 12

A QUESTION OF JEWISHNESS?
I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory
Elie Wiesel

When Frances settled into Budapest, she set aside a space in her living quarters for her husband David to join her and work with his laptop. But David did not come. During that period, he was working intensively on lm projects in Britain and they left him little possibility of slipping off to Budapest to work remotely. No doubt it was a fantasy on Francess part to think that he would forego his own professional life. She had taken the decision to go on her own, on the spur of the moment, without asking his consent. But he had not made clear beforehand that he would not avail himself of the workplace she offered. When I asked him later why he did not tell her this at the outset, he paused and replied: I knew that if I was to continue running my video production company, I would have to be based in London. But I had a sneaky feeling that she wouldnt take up the Soros offer of the Budapest assignment if I made clear I wouldnt come. I went along with it because I wished to give her every encouragement. It was not a separation, but I had no idea how long it would last. I didnt know she would actually come back. I thought working with George Soros was so important for her, she should maintain this connection for as long as possible. What she was doing was so important more so than that she should be with me. David had sensed what the Budapest House meant to Frances when he accompanied her on an earlier visit: When I rst saw it, I was disappointed and thought: Is this it? It was peeling and neglected. Nobody cared. But I had tears in my eyes when I went in, because I knew how much it meant to Frances. I wondered what it was like when it was built. It was like opening up a skull and looking into somebodys mind. The House is a metaphor. It represents who she is. I said to her: How wonderful it would be to put your grandfathers apartment back together again,

to wipe out what had intervened. If anybody has thought long and deeply about the signicance of being Jewish, it is David. For him, the unique history of the Jews marks each one of them, resulting in an extraordinary approach to lifes challenges. When he was a small boy just after WWII, he heard mentions of Jews on the radio, and asked his mother: What are Jews? She was embarrassed and, wanting to fob him off, replied, theyre sweets gell-gells. He then discovered his fathers partner in his timber business was a Jew. When he went to grammar school at the age of 12, his best friend was also a Jew he wore hand-tailored blazers because his father owned a chain of menswear shops. From then on, I felt an honorary Jew and nearly everybody in my life was a Jew, he observes. David subsequently worked for a Jewish-owned hi- shop in north London, made lms for Israels emergency medical service and the League of Jewish Women, and of course ended up marrying Frances. He sees Jews as an exceptional mixture of high achievement and insecurity. He admires their sharp uptake of new ideas, their talent in business and the brilliance of high-yers such as George Soros. He attributes their insecurity to the envy of others and a lack of physical roots: The story of the Jews is amazingly bitter-sweet. Is their blood richer? Do they have an extra spark in their brains? They are so successful, yet so denigrated. He remembered how Francess Hungarian Jewish father feared making a mistake in lling in ofcial forms in America. He was afraid they would come and get him. It was the fear of a guest in a foreign country. He couldnt afford to upset anyone. He felt he had to toe the line. Frances worries because shes not anchored anywhere. She lacks a place where she feels she truly belongs. I was born down the road here in Belsize Park in London, and I continue to live here now. Im anchored. I work hard but I have no worries, no anxieties. David also nds grounding in esoteric philosophies which, through meditation and focusing on the inner self, help him banish fear and self-doubt. David never worries how he will earn enough. Something will turn up. Not Frances. Despite her proven capacity to earn well, for many years she lived in fear that her nancial and emotional world would collapse. She continually speculated what she would do if David were run over by a bus.

Ive been discussing esoteric ideas with Frances for nearly thirty years, but shes reluctant to incorporate alternative ways of thinking about life and the beyond into her lifestyle. I nd Jews prefer logical thinking to spiritual philosophy. This denial of spiritual creativity adds to their sense of disconnection. The seriousness of mind feeds the melancholy and makes them feel they alone carry the weight of the world upon their shoulders. With their over-sceptical reasoning and material point of view, they weigh down on the mental side of the scales and get out of balance, says David. He considers their different tendencies are perfect in combination: I am sure we have met once in another life. For a Jew and an Anglo-Saxon to work together is a wonderful combination. I work well with Frances. She responds when I throw out a yer, and we make something of the challenge together. I continually reassure her that everything will be OK, while I have to go along with her desire to take care of the future. I cant say it doesnt matter. Frances smiles benignly as she soaks up the loving concern of her husband and does not pay much attention. Watching them, one can feel the warm mutual support they give each other. Yet on the philosophical issues, they talk past each other. Davids thirty years of drip-feeding spiritual thinking has done little to lift the burden of Francess personal history from her shoulders. I can never escape from what happened to the Jews in Europe, because a handful of those six million were my family, Frances says. I cant escape from what my family is. I have always felt a sadness, a pain in my heart that I carry with me. David says lighten up, dont be so intense, but its hard, its not in me. Nearly 70 years after it happened, the Holocaust retains a central place in the Western consciousness as a unique crime against humanity. Of course, the Jews were not the only people to suffer fearful atrocities in the twentieth century. In Poland alone, three million of the human beings the Germans slaughtered were Slavs not Jews. More people died in Soviet Gulags than in the Holocaust, and Mao Tse-Tung has been held responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese.121 Tragedies that break people are also not always collective. For some, it is an individual catastrophe the death of a child, a violent crime, a fatal accident or an incurable disease. All these can burden a persons spirit in much the same way as Frances describes above. The extermination of six million Jews nevertheless continues to evoke a particular

horror. The arbitrary injustice of racial genocide shocks us, as does the fact that it was perpetrated by a people who had previously participated in the enlightenment of Europe. In the West, we feel directly touched because Judaism contributed to Christianity and shares ethical standards such as righteousness and personal responsibility. Many of the victims were at the hearts of our own societies, living much as everybody else did. Some older people know that they too collaborated in the German murder. Further back in the collective European memory is a lingering guilt that our predecessors inicted pogroms and deportations on Jews for hundreds of years. All of this has given the event an apocalyptic character touching not just Jews. Imre Kertsz, the Hungarian Jew who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2002, said the Holocaust was the determining event in all European cultural history. Speaking as a survivor, he said in his acceptance speech: What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveller arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history One does not have to choose the Holocaust as ones subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades It is as if, after a night of terrible dreams, one looked around the world, defeated, helpless.122 Small wonder therefore that Frances should be xated on Holocaust memory. This ts into a well-documented tradition of second-generation survivors. Eva Hoffmann analysed it as a collective ritual mourning, and observed that the children took over the attitudes of their parents: Over and over again, in second-generation literature, testimony is given to a helpless automotive identication with parental feelings and their burden of intense despondency ... [with a need to] rescue the parents and keep undoing the past ... The two generations face each other, all too often, across the barriers of painful misunderstandings. The children reproach the parents for their silence, their secrecy, for enfolding them too closely in the family embrace, or for being excessively aloof and severe. The parents are often ummoxed by such revelations, and sometimes deeply hurt. If they stayed silent, they thought, it was precisely to protect their children; if they were enfolding that was because they loved the children so much. If they were distant, it was because they didnt want

to infect their offspring with their sadness.123 Sorrow, obsession, silence these have been the classical reactions. But with some survivors who wrote about their experience afterwards, other feelings came to the fore. Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, was deported to Auschwitz from Hungarian-ruled Transylvania, and experienced his fate above all on a religious level: Never shall I forget those ames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.124 Primo Levi, for his part, expressed his agonised revulsion for the moral depravity into which the slaves of the labour camps were forced by the tooth-and-claw struggle to say alive, with little choice but to compete with each other for survival. Despite the radical assertions of his Nobel address, Imre Kertsz refrained from dramatising the horror of his experience in his autobiographical novel Fatelessness. On arriving in Auschwitz, the hero remarks on the tidy gardens, the green football pitch and the immaculate white road. The German guards are smart and trim, the sole anchors of solidity and calm. The125 heros concern on return from the camp after the war is to avoid manipulation by politicians. The tone of his historical masterpiece is low-key, distanced and ironical. Ern! Szp wrote in a similar sardonic vein of the humiliating banality of life on a Jewish labour gang in 1944 their obsessions about pieces of bread, petty squabbles among the victims, and the painful boredom of digging ditches that ugly, dumb clatter of tools.126 In both books, the heroes strive to preserve their values and culture rather than indulge in Jewish sorrow. Some Jews have reacted much more militantly to the Holocaust. The Yishuv, the Jews who settled in Palestine before the Israeli state was founded, were appalled that their fellow-Jews in Europe went meekly to the slaughter. Not for them the impotent wailing when it was too late. Prevailing instead was a burning anger, and a determination at all costs to resist future threats, real or imagined. This attitude has taken root in todays Israel and among many of its Jewish supporters in America. These Jews ignore those who point out they were not there, and that hindsight is all too easy,

or doubt whether effective resistance was ever possible. Memory of the Holocaust teaches these Jews belligerence and an overriding need to establish a secure homeland. This was not for Frances as a left-liberal. After she published a critical book entitled To be an Arab in Israel in the 1970s, the Israeli side of her family never spoke to her again. The divisions within the Jewish people over the signicance of the Holocaust remain deep.olocaust remain Is David right to believe Francess insecurity results primarily from her Jewish ancestry? Not necessarily. Worrying, heaviness and insecurity are not exclusive to the Jewish race. Japanese worry, Germans can be heavy and many other small nations surrounded by larger neighbours are insecure. Some Jews moreover react with neither pain, indignation, self-protective irony or pugnacity. Take Francess younger sister Susanne for example. She too was brought up ignorant of her Jewish ancestry and was afraid of her parents. She remembers long, arid years, when nobody in the family had much to do with each other. When I met her in London in 2006, she was separating from her husband, was concerned how her children would cope, and like many people in such a situation was feeling the pinch nancially. According to the post-Holocaust theory which Frances embodies, this should make her insecure. Susanne however may have worries, but she does not show them. She copes with a dash of insouciance. Outwardly she takes it all lightly, mixing selfdeprecation with a devil-may-care charm. She felt that her well-educated parents considered her a dunce. But does it weigh on her mind? Not much. Living in England, she has picked up that the English distrust intellectuals as too clever by half. If anybody worries about Susannes life, it is Frances. All her life she has hovered over her younger sister, convinced that Susanne would sooner or later come to grief. When Susanne was suffering from an earache at boarding school, Frances put a chocolate on her pillow to cure it. It is an amiable relationship, with neither however taking the others attitude to life entirely seriously. Susanne appreciates Frances concern, but worrying about the world is not her cup of tea. While Frances is not tall and has to watch her waistline, Susanne, eight years the younger, is slim and sleek, with a rakish elegance. While Frances moves with the great and the good, Susannes world is fashion and style. Ask her about her family and she will tell you what they were wearing. She remembers the velvet trim on the sleeves of

her grandmother on a photograph taken back in Hungary, and the red linings on the navy blue suits her mother made on visits to Hungary (once the red lining material was out of stock because there had been a Communist holiday). She can still see the shawls her grandmother made in a factory after emigrating to America. When she grew up, she bought herself a sewing machine and trained as a seamstress. She laughs at her navet in turning up for an interview at Vogues art department wearing a home-made dress, but she landed the job. Switzerland continues to glow in Susannes memories, as it did for her parents. She dreams of her boarding school days there, with little serious education but plenty of boys and skiing. It was as far from Hicksville as you can imagine a world of glamour in which she moved with ease. She does not share Francess yearning to feel Hungarian. I feel I have only a little Hungarian blood, though I do nd the joke amusing about the Hungarians being the only people who can follow a person into revolving doors and come out the other side in front. Nor does the Budapest House hold any magic for her. When I visited the apartment at the age of 12, I had been told it was great, but I found it dingy. I wanted to believe in the fairy stories, but to be honest, I didnt nd it anything special. It didnt touch me. England is the closest to where I feel at home, she says, and like a true Briton she is put out by the numbers of foreigners she encounters in her north London neighbourhood. Nobody speaks English where I live. I dont like it. I now understand how people feel when there is an inux of newcomers. Before I felt one of them, but now Ive changed from an alien to a local. I see gangs of Polish workers on street corners being ripped off, Russian maosi exploiting them, and Somali gangs with knives and drugs. Theyre pushy. Its not the English way. Susannes Hungarian looks and lingering loyalty to American citizenship make her not entirely British however. Like Frances, she is a mixture. Her personal history has impacted on her, but she has decided herself what to make of it. And, as she sits back and talks about it with Frances, she is shedding the discomfort of family memories: I feel more relaxed about it now. I dont keep secrets from Frances any more. There is no point in keeping secrets from ones sister. Im breaking the family tradition! Francess great aunt Erzsi did not let her post-Holocaust history sit heavy on her shoulders either. When Frances rst contacted her in 1991, she was just upgrading

from a blue Russian Lada car to a red Japanese Suzuki, with a red shopping trolley to go with it. Later on at 90, she retained her trim gure and sense of fashion, moved youthfully around her tidy apartment, and greeted visitors with a charming Jewish smile. It turned out that this Holocaust survivor, who emerged from WWII destitute, with no family, had been befriended by the computer entrepreneur Sndor Kurti and his wife Zsuzsa. Erzsi had worked in the National Statistics Bureau with Zsuzsas mother. So Erzsis computer was always up to date and she exchanged emails around the world. For Erzsi, the most exciting day of her life was Hungarys accession to the European Union in 2004. This was the opinion of a person born under the AustroHungarian monarchy, voiced at an age when most people consider lifes exceptional moments are past. When Frances takes me to visit, Erzsi is host to Aurelia Schwartz from West Palm Beach, Florida a native of the Transylvania that once belonged to Greater Hungary. Aurelia too is a happy spirit. As they sit together in Erzsis parlour, Aurelia pours out her love for her friend, who introduced her to her rst husband. I love her like my own sister. I made her Kalbsleber [calf liver] in Vienna after the war. I dont want any of my acquaintances. I only want Erzebet, says Aurelia, 82. Erzebet, or Erzsi, is repaying Aurelias Viennese hospitality with a steaming Hungarian Rakotkrumpli layered potatoes, eggs and sausage baked in sour cream. Aurelia revels in her Holocaust heritage despite the fact that she lost her father in a German camp. All her life, she has been tempting fate and getting away with it. The harder lifes trials, the more she bubbles with happiness at having toughed her way through them. Aurelia left Transylvania for Budapest in 1943 to chase after the love of her life, a Romanian Jew aged 19. Her mother thought she was crazy. Her beloved Artur was deported to Dachau and, afraid for her life, Aurelia married a Christian Hungarian. Her husband obtained forged papers as a Christian and hid her in the countryside with his mother for 10 months. The mother, the only other person who knew she was a Jew, took her every day dressed in black to the church and the cemetery. In life, Ive been very lucky. In the war it was OK. When others could hardly nd any milk to drink, I had fresh cream for breakfast. My mother-in-law looked after me

like her own daughter. I never saw a German, never heard a bullet red, she said 60 years later. Her Romanian sweetheart returned from Dachau, emigrated to the United States and married another woman. When the war ended, Aurelia and her Christian husband retrieved their Budapest apartment and his tailoring machines, and set up business again. He treated me like a queen, I didnt have to work, we went dancing on ships on the Danube, and I still have two of the evening gowns he gave me, set with rhinestones. I appreciated my rst husband enormously, but I truly loved Artur. I was spending my whole life thinking of someone else besides the husband I had. We were together like twins in a mothers belly.127 During the 1956 Uprising, Aurelia ed to Vienna, and in 1972, when her rst husband died and Artur divorced, they nally married. Artur told her: No more marriages. Now we stay together. Artur died in 2005, and Aurelia says: The wound is fresh. I miss him terribly. He was my best friend. We did everything together. We had a beautiful life. This happiness I have. She has been 14 times to Israel to visit her sisters family, and she adores her life in her senior citizens compound in Florida. We have ballroom dancing, a clubhouse and Hollywood movies. No doubt she was luckier than some others in the Holocaust (her mother and sister returned safely from the camps), but the war must have been very frightening. Aurelia is anything but the complicated, worrying Jew. She is light and sparkling and you cannot put her down. She is the wandering Jew, able to make a home where fate takes her, taking disaster and good fortune with equal aplomb. Asked whether she was safe from hurricanes on the Florida coast, she grins and replies: Its not secure at all. There were two really bad hurricanes in the past thirty years that wrecked everything. But I love it there. Im not leaving. So Jews with similar histories react diversely to them. Frances returned to her past to discover her lifes meaning. Some ed the scene of their suffering and prospered or foundered in their new environments. Her mother never could accept that history had landed with a humdrum life in the U.S. rather than social esteem in Budapest. Her father never stopped worrying, but grew to love his new American homeland and made his mark there. Berkesi embraced Communism, which promised a better society. Wiesel and Levi

told their terrible concentration camp stories to arouse the conscience of the world, while Kertsz jealously guarded his personal story against manipulation. Francess other aunt, Agi Jambor, tackled wartime horrors and later opportunities with cheeky boldness. Aurelia relied on her blithe spirit to get her through thick and thin. Erzsi was discreet about her Holocaust past but moved on with equanimity. Alone and destitute, she nearly perished in the death march of 1944. But when she passed away in her ninety-rst year in April 2007, sixty mourners came to her funeral. The sun shone warmly in memory of this tiny woman who decided to make no fuss about her unfortunate history. The Jews have a dreadful history of banishment, pogroms, forced conversions and genocide. But they do not necessarily nd the past any more burdensome than others do. Some Jews have emerged from their traumatic historical home, while others have not. The way they responded has differed according to personality, education, family and the choices they made. Frances was stuck in her obsessive xation, but no Jewish destiny determined that this must be forever. Her own choice would decide.

CHAPTER 13

GREATER HUNGRY, ORBAN AND EUROPE

It was as if a curse had fallen on Hungary

Count Mikls Bnffy128

Viktor Orbn represents a Hungary which had abandoned the corset of Communist planning and was establishing a modern market economy. As such, he is doing much the same as Frances did in transforming state publishing throughout Eastern Europe. He began taking Hungary back to the economic system under which her grandfather Imre Hirschenhauser had ourished. Frances and Orbn had that in common, but he was not the man to make her feel at home in the country of her parents. The new leader was inspired by other ideas, which evoked old demons. For Orbn, going back to the old ways was not just about the economy. It meant a return to the old nationalist idea of a Hungary that was exceptional and superior, a concept that had proved lethal for Francess HungarianJewish family. For Orbn this was a glorious past when Hungarians were western in spirit. This is evoked with great panache in an epic Hungarian novel Count Mikls Bnffys 1,400page trilogy, The Writing on the Wall. The hero grows up in pre-World War I Transylvania, goes to school in a Gymnasium in Vienna, and sweeps Frenchwomen off their feet as a diplomat in Paris. Bnffy himself was a Hungarian noble from Transylvania, the land beyond the forests, cherished by his compatriots as the heartland of Greater Hungary. His lordly characters of 100 years ago farm, hunt, rear animals, tend forests and travel in stylish carriages. They visit each others country houses for balls lasting till dawn. They feast on haunches of venison, home-cured hams, guinea-fowl pts, pike from which every bone has been removed, and mountainous cakes with whipped cream, washed down with French champagne and burgundy, tended by servants who wipe up wax dripping from their candelabra on to the parquet as they move around. Hotheads duel over far-fetched points of honour, blackball each other at the hint

of nancial impropriety, and commit adultery with abandon. A man may serenade a married woman at all hours of the night outside her boudoir. A hired gypsy orchestra plays her favourite tunes, then those of her waiting suitor. If she likes them, she puts a candle in her window. Police attend to move on passers-by who gawp. The English author Patrick Leigh Fermor, who rode by horseback from one Translyvanian noble house to another in 1934, found his cosmopolitan Hungarian hosts used English Purdeys for their shooting and discussed Monet, dAnnunzio and Rilke until dawn129. Not all foreigners found the old-style Hungarians so charming. British diplomat and man of letters Harold Nicolson wrote at the end of WWII: When I learned that the Russian armies were within cannon-range of Budapest, I was conscious of delight, which I felt to be neither virtuous nor sane The fact is that since the day more than a thousand years ago when rpd rst entered Hungary, the Magyars have done much harm and little good to Europe.130 Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, grumbled in 1905 that the so-called decent Hungarian does not exist every Hungarian, be he a minister, a prince, a cardinal, a tradesman, a peasant, a hussar, or a stable-boy is a revolutionary and a . English historian Edward Crankshaw went further: It is hard to discover in the history of modern Europe any nation which has exhibited such sustained and unmitigated egocentricity as the Hungarian nation, any nation which at no time in a century of rapid change ever showed the faintest, the most embryonic, icker of interest in anything at all but its own immediately selsh interests They ruled over half the Empire, in which they occupied a position of extraordinary and indeed disastrous privilege, under a King to whom they professed romantic loyalty while doing their best to stab him in the back. They paid less than their share of everything; they had enjoyed more than their share of inuence when it came to policy-making They contributed nothing but some dashing regiments of cavalry, a large number of surpassingly beautiful women, and an innity of woe.131 Bnffy too had mixed feelings about the Hungarian aristocrats to whom he belonged. His characters swear, gossip, quarrel, gamble, drink themselves under the table and cheat Romanian peasants. He laments that the politicians in Budapest are obsessed with obstructing Austria and blocking budgets to modernise the Imperial

Army unless Hungarian ofcers could wear national tassels on their swords. It was as if a curse had fallen on Hungary, he wrote. It was to this world that Orbn harked back, and that was not a part of the Hungarian background that Frances wanted to embrace. Although Orbns steps to sweep away Communist constraints suited her, resurgent nationalism did not. On her ve-year mission in Eastern Europe, she was set on spreading new ways of doing business, which could benet all nations. Reverting to an old concept of national superiority did not t with that. All the more so, since Orbns Fidesz party toys with anti-Semitism. Many of those who want to blow on these smouldering embers gravitate to Fidesz and are not turned away. In 2010, with the country deep in the debt crisis aficting most of Europe, one parliamentary seat in eight went to the even further-right Jobbik party, which stages paramilitary parades with insignia similar to the Fascist Arrow Cross. Hungarians are choosing to be exceptional once again, and for Frances this is anathema. The European Union was founded to put an end to wars between nations, and create a community based on democracy, the rule of law, freedom of movement and open markets. Conforming with EU norms was not high on Orbns priorities however. He was more interested in reviving the Greater Hungary of before WWI. This was no idle dream. Go into the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, and most of the maps you see show Transylvania as an integral part of Hungary. The fact that the Museum is called National rather than State is indicative. Here we are dealing with the Hungarian people, not just the population within todays Hungarian state. That means Hungarians in Transylvania too and in Slovakia, Croatia and parts of Serbia, the Ukraine and Poland the territories Hungary lost at the end of World War I. The Museum concerns a further ve million Hungarians in addition to the 10 million living within todays Hungarian borders (2.5 million in neighbouring countries and 2.5 million elsewhere). This can only rankle with the countries surrounding Hungary, and annoying neighbours over old ethnic issues offends the European Unions core principles. So do hints at territorial claims and stirring up minorities. Orbn shows little sign of caring. When he rst came to power in 1998, he outed EU sensibilities by declaring that the border of the nation extends as far as the Hungarian language is understood, asserting, in case anybody missed the point, that the future of Hungary lies not in the Hungary of

10 million people but in the Hungarian nation of 15 million.132 This was ghting talk which revived old animosities, in particular in Transylvania. Before World War I, Romanians in Transylvania felt underprivileged. After Trianon, the Hungarians there found themselves isolated and powerless, often forbidden to use their language. When Hungary regained the northern part of Transylvania in the early 1940s, they unleashed avenging atrocities against the Romanians, who in 1945 replied in kind. Populations were persecuted, dislocated and slaughtered en masse. In the 1970s and 1980s, Nicolae Ceau$escu set about reinforcing Romanian supremacy even further. He colonized Transylvania with thousands of Romanian settlers, and put new restrictions on the Hungarians language, culture and economic development. Many Transylvanian Hungarians ed to Hungary, including the janitor in Francess Budapest House. Another signicant minority, the Saxon Germans who had inhabited Transylvania since the Middle Ages, emigrated to West Germany. When Communism collapsed in both countries in 1989, Hungary under European pressure signed Basic Treaties with the Ukraine, Slovakia and Romania, recognising the inviolability of frontiers. But Orbn was not prepared to give up old aspirations. He created Hungarian Certicates entitling Hungarians in neighbouring states to an array of benets. They looked much like identity cards and Orbn made no bones about it: We have been waiting for eighty years for a bond, in a legal sense as well, to be formed between the parts of the Hungarian nation torn from each other, so that links may emerge that go beyond the existing spiritual ties.133 The European Union insisted that the law creating the Certicates suppress mention of a unitary Hungarian nation. After 18 months, about one-third of eligible Hungarians abroad were drawing the benets, but the Fidesz government, far from reaping benets, was defeated in the 2002 elections. In 2004, a referendum to offer Hungarians in neighbouring countries full Hungarian citizenship failed because less than 50 per cent of the electorate voted. When Orbn returned to power in 2010, he went ahead with it anyway, prompting protests in Slovakia, but only a few spats with Romania. By then, dual citizenship was becoming commonplace in the European Union, and Romania was handing out Romanian passports to citizens of neighbouring Moldova. With the right to vote in Hungarian elections, Hungarians in Romania felt reconnected with their ethnic homeland, but the steam had gone out of the issue. The ghosts of Trianon were being

laid to rest. Within Transylvania, old enmities were also fading. Back in 1996, a British academic was astonished to nd that Hungarians in a town in southern Transylvania relied solely on Budapest TV for news, even though they were 600 miles away.134 Ten years later however, a visiting American professor, Robert A. Saunders, found that Transylvanian Hungarians were nurturing their Transylvanianness, not just solidarity with Hungary. This bodes well for the region, as Hungarians are increasingly seeing the local ethnic Romanian population as allies rather than competitors in building a new European future for Transylvania, wrote the professor.135 He found both communities joined in a vision of Transylvania as part of an economic corridor stretching from England to southeast Europe. The lure of the European Union is the reason. The EU insists on peaceful coexistence among nationalities and protection of minorities as conditions of membership. So when Hungary and Romania joined the EU, a framework was created for peaceful cooperation which is starting to yield results. Cross-border trade can increase and people can migrate across frontiers to nd jobs. The countries which joined the EU in 2004 are bound by their accession treaties eventually to join the euro and Schengen. That means people living in Hungary, Slovakia, Transylvania and the rest of Romania will use the same currency, and frontier controls will largely disappear. Travellers will drive straight through, as nowadays between France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy and 20 other countries. With such openness and common practices, a return to the grim past looks unlikely as is doubtless the EUs intention. The disarray in the eurozone has since raised the question whether Europe can continue to wield this benecial inuence. Orbn has crossed swords with the European Union over his moves to undermine the independence of the Hungarian Central Bank, restrict the media and overrule the constitutional court. At Uprising celebrations in 2012, he railed against Brussels for trying to make Hungarians bear the cost of Europe-wide recession. Orbn claimed he governed ten million freedom ghters. In 2013, Romania expelled the Hungarian ambassador, accusing him of fomenting secessionist demonstrations by the Hungarian minority in Romania. The Hungarian government retaliated by raising the old ag of the Hungarian minority over

Parliament in Budapest. Orbn raised alarm bells across the region. Vclav Havel condemned him in 2011 and Adam Michnik, a leader of the Polish Solidarity movement, accused him of wanting to create a one-party state around Fidesz. Veteran journalist Paul Lendvai wrote that Hungary has re-established authoritarian rule under a paper-thin veneer in the heart of Europe.136 But rhetoric is one thing and reality another. For all his fomenting of ill-will against neighbours with Hungarian minorities, it is inconceivable that Hungary could ever launch a war against them. With the Holocaust still imprinted forcefully on public consciousnesses around the world, any really damaging action by Hungarian nationalists against their Jewish compatriots also seems out of the question. When a Jobbik parliamentarian called for a national list of Hungarian Jews to be drawn up on the grounds they represented a security risk, he was condemned by all other parties, and by Orbn himself. A Jewish Summer Festival in Budapest, which began with 3,000 participants in 1998, in 2012 attracted 120,000. Nor is there any realistic alternative to the European Union and its rules and principles. Outside is merely the impoverishment, exclusion and endemic corruption of countries such as the Ukraine, where youngsters struggle even to learn a modicum of English for lack of visas and money. More likely is that the ery polemics will remain idle words, all the more so since in 2013 Hungary was still depending for nancial survival on the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, and both threatened to withhold further funds. The EU also opened legal proceedings against Hungary for breaching its treaty undertakings. The principles and nancial muscle of the two supranational organisations can scarcely be ignored if they choose to exercise them. Frances used similar methods to push through new principles in publishing. In this respect, she was on the same wavelength as the EU and the IMF. For the mass of Transylvanians, poverty is the greater concern. As I saw for myself when I travelled there in 2004, life in many parts continues as it did hundreds of years ago. Its forests abound with bears and wolves. Horses draw ploughs and carts of rewood. People live on subsistence farming and barter trade; if they are ill they consult a witch before a doctor. When lm-maker Tony Gatlif shot his Transylvania two years later, he

commented: In spring the country is splendid, green and generous. As soon as the bad season comes, everything sticks in mud, snow and ice. Transylvania then becomes very harsh and is not easily tamed ... there is a grinding poverty.137 Ceau$escu forced Transylvanian peasants into jobs in articially-sustained industries, which collapsed in the free market economy. The post-Communist government gave the jobless workers their old plots of land back, and they returned to scratching a living from the soil. In the middle of the countryside, the abandoned factories crumble away and the shoddy blocks once housing the departed workers stand desolate. Anything that promises relief from this chronic penury is bound to attract support. Membership of the European Union, for all its faults as perceived from island Britain, offers a prospect of decent living standards that this part of Eastern Europe never knew before. Economic activity in Transylvania ourished after accession in 2004, not so much because EU money began owing in, but because both communities believe that burying the hatchet will make them better off. Even Count Bnffy was rehabilitated posthumously, having drunk the bitter cup to the dregs. As Hungarys Foreign Minister, he forlornly struggled to bring his defeated country back into the community of nations after WWI. At the end of World War II, German soldiers burned his family castle. The contents were evacuated but destroyed en route by Allied bombing. The Soviet military ransacked his residence in Budapest in 1945 and ve years later he died at 77, the values for which he stood lost in the gutter. Bnffy completed the trilogy in 1940. It was not published in Hungary until the end of the Communist era, but when translations appeared at the end of the 1990s, English reviewers compared him to Anthony Trollope, French to Marcel Proust, and Germans to Joseph Roth, chronicler of the twilight years of the Habsburg monarchy. Bnffy took his place in Hungarys literary history after 60 years of enforced oblivion, and his Transylvanian castle was rebuilt in 2006. Bnffys literary resurrection occurred during the time Frances spent in Budapest prompting state-run publishers of exCommunist Europe to open up and adapt to the rest of the world. It was a sign that her normalisation was bearing fruit. Whilst we are in Budapest, Frances and I go to visit a Transylvanian who normalised many years ago. Lszl Vass, descendant of a long line of Transylvanian cobblers, owns a shop in central Budapest selling hand-made shoes to cognoscenti

from Europe, Russia and America. The prices are for the well-heeled. The rst pair I bought there lasted 15 years. I take a gulp and buy another pair, relishing a masterpiece from the land beyond the forests. Francess friend Esther Ronay has no truck with the old malign memories of Transylvania. She belongs to a Transylvanian folk dance club in Budapest. Brtok and Kodly made these dances famous early in the twentieth century. During the Ceau$escu repression, there was an upsurge in enthusiasm for traditional Transylvanian music among Hungarians, to show solidarity with their brethren across the border. Transylvanian dance clubs became semi-clandestine fronts for channelling aid and political support into Transylvania. Esther likes the custom that a man formally invites a woman to dance and she does not wait in vain. She has brought her own whiff of Western equanimity to the Transylvanian question. Asked whether the clubs perpetuate Hungarian nationalism, as is sometimes alleged, she snorts: Certainly not! The musicians discourage anything like that. All this Trianon talk is cloud-cuckoo-land. Weve moved beyond that.

CHAPTER 14

LEAVING HOME
Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence
Friedrich Nietzsche

During her ve and a half years in Budapest, Frances worked hard to tie up the ends of her personal history. On her fathers eightieth birthday, she wrote him a letter recounting how she experienced growing up. She remembered how he never went to concerts because he could play a Beethoven symphony in his head. She felt he was more intelligent than her, but appreciated that he never suggested men were cleverer than women. She abjured his excessive respect for authority: I decided quite early on I wanted to be fearless. She signed off: Thank you Dad for the good traits, thanks for only passing on some of your allergies, and thank you for loving me. A year later he was dead. When Frances looked for family mementoes, Erzsi came to the rescue. She had a rug which belonged to Georges mother. A wartime bomb had ripped a hole in the middle when crashing unexploded to the bottom of a building. Frances asked if she could have it as a souvenir and Erzsi told her to come back in a week. She then solemnly handed Frances the rug, with the hole carefully patched together. It was not what Frances intended the tell-tale hole was now missing but Erzsis practical instinct said: better make and mend than wallow in history. Then Frances set about putting her grandparents mortal remains properly to rest. She collected their urns from the United States and ew them over in her baggage to Budapest. An undertaker mixed the ashes together, and she and Erzsi scattered them in a quiet grove of the Buda hills. In death, they thus returned to the homeland which had given them such a rough ride. Grandfather Imre could scarcely have imagined that he would come to rest so close to the Budapest House which caught his fancy in 1937. By repatriating his remains to his home city, Frances enabled him to win a small posthumous victory over the history which seemed to have so comprehensively defeated him.

When the Budapest assignment was over, Frances and David set about restating themselves as a couple. One midwinter day, they piled their belongings into a removal van and, with a cat perched on Francess lap, migrated to a large old house in southwest France. To all and sundry, they declared they would spend the rest of the lives on a property which used to be a cognac distillery. In retrospect, it proved to be the convalescence Frances needed to recover from the bruising she suffered trying to reconcile the different mindsets of East and West. French country life proved a cul-de-sac. She broke a leg, tripping over in the dark. David wrote off his beloved Jaguar on an icy country road. Within ve years, they were back in Belsize Park, London. Frances became less concerned about her tendency to worry. She saw it more positively as contingency planning of the kind done by her father, who was on duty in Houston in 1970 when Apollo 13 was crippled by an explosion. He was there because he helped design the Lunar Module in which the astronauts were to land on the Moon from their orbiting spacecraft. When the main craft was damaged, they had to use the Lunar Module as a lifeboat to get them back to Earth. It was not designed to do this, but her father and his colleagues had done their contingency planning. They had insisted the astronauts practise the emergency operation on a simulator. In short, they had worried. Feeling with you, as always, Frances cabled her father as he sat for four days and nights in the Houston command centre, worrying whether he had worried enough. He had. The astronauts returned safely. She was reminded of her father again at a celebration in Londons St. Jamess Park of the sixtieth anniversary of Britains WWII victory. She found herself in front of a small man who looked very much like him. He was Polish, had come to England before the war, had served in the Army and was wearing his medals. I asked him to take my place so he could see better, saying you deserve it, but he refused. He was a true Central European gentleman. Francess father had been glad to accept Americas welcome as an emigrant. Now she felt the same about England: Like me, this Polish man felt lucky to be living in a civilised country such as England. I was so happy to be there standing next to him, watching the Queen and being showered with poppies. I felt a wonderful innocence about London.

Frances also began trusting people more readily, something she had found hard with her Central European and Holocaust background: One evening I went to dinner with an old American boyfriend I had known since I was 18 and who had become very well off. I suddenly asked him if he would take care of me if everything fell apart around me, and he answered: Of course. It was all light in tone, but it felt so nice to know it was conceivable that I could turn to another person if my life collapsed. She spoke less of dening herself by success, and more of communicating openly. It was liberating. I felt lighter as I walked down the street, she said. Then came her mothers turn: Walking down Piccadilly a few days later, I realised I no longer had animosity towards my mother. The friend with whom I dined had been fond of her. I suddenly could think of her without raging hate. Now I can feel a gradual sense of forgiveness I feel so sad now that I cannot talk to mother. She died before I could get over hating her. I have so many unanswered questions. Nowadays she would have been diagnosed with clinical depression, and she could have taken medication for it. I am so sorry she had no options. She could have made people happier. As for digesting the Budapest House, that came harder. Despite having sold it, it remained in her psyche. She no longer had to deal with the paperwork or a tenant, but she was constantly drawn to it, as if the answers to her lifes questions still lay hidden within its walls. This house came to be because of my grandfather and will always be mine in a way. I feel the density of its history, located in this area of Jews and intellectuals. I walk into the apartment as if it were mine and try to be a little mouse. I could stay there for days, just feeling and breathing it, imagining it empty of all its furniture. If anybody knew how I felt, they would nd it outrageous. Id be locked up, mused Frances, nine years after she sold it. It was a bit excessive, all the more since the wife of the new owner hospitably admitted us to prowl around her home. I found the apartment ordinary. Not Frances however. She moved expertly around it, pointing out the spaces where her grandparents slept, ate and kept their books, long since remodelled to suit new needs. In between, she elded business calls from London on her mobile telephone, pacing proprietorially up and down while I observed, somewhat embarrassed. Frances went knocking on doors to nd out what sort of people lived in her Budapest House. After 70 years, its inhabitants were still intellectuals and professionals.

Nearly all had lived abroad for part of their lives or had relatives abroad. Some were Jews who had been forced to leave and had returned. A few Westerners had moved in. Some people were running IT businesses from their apartments. With its Transylvanian janitor tucked away in a cramped lodge, the Budapest House was typical of the neighbourhood. But when one of the inhabitants opened the door, Frances thought she was in New York. The owner was wearing a tight, modern tee-shirt and her hair was stylishly cropped to chin length. She was t and agile, resembling a Jewish New Yorker more than a Hungarian. She looked 60 but she was 80. The at was light, airy and individual. A few pieces of elegant furniture were strategically placed around the white walls. Its renement contrasted with the dowdy, unkempt state of the common parts of the building. This pensioner had family living all around the St Istvn Park neighbourhood and knew Erzsi. Her husband had fenced for Hungary in the Olympic Games. She had little time for Hungarys new market economy: People still cheat and lie, and there is more disorder than under the Communists. One of the oldest tenants lived in a sadder apartment dark and shabby, with heavy furniture. She was one of the few to be still renting from the state. She had worked for a ministry and liked the early Communist idealism. She did not understand what parties were ghting about in Parliament nowadays and found it distasteful. The European Union seemed quite a good idea, but she knew nothing about it. Life had moved on beyond her some time ago. History was a distant relic to which she morosely clung. Frances picked up that the Budapest House was divided over an issue. The difference of opinion had turned ugly and the two sides were not speaking to each other. The question was: did the residents have a right to go up on to the terrace outside the penthouse apartment which had once belonged to Francess grandparents? The owner to whom Frances had sold it claimed there had never been any rights for others to use the terrace. He had built an extension out on to part of it. That was the modern view: property is for the owner. His opponents clung to an old socialist concept, invoking ancient custom when the inhabitants of the block had gone together to the roof to watch reworks on national day. So that was it. The Budapest House was a microcosm of society touches of

kindness, a dash of renement, some poverty, plenty of grumbling and cynicism, and tempers aring over a petty dispute. Frances looked at the building afresh, put aside the fond memories of her grandparents, and perceived it was not the most friendly of structures. The individual apartments were mostly well kept up but the common parts remained dishevelled, reecting a lack of social solidarity. She remembered older Budapest dwellings built around inner courtyards with outside landings on each oor. Inhabitants wiled the days away gossiping outside. It was a sloppy, interfering habit, but she relished the spirit of mutual concern. Her Budapest House had no such courtyard. There was nowhere for people to gather. Built in the 1930s, it broke with that tradition. It was a modern building for people leading lives with separate interests. It offered little opportunity for casual communication and conviviality. Frances began to feel distaste for the Budapest House. It was not just a family memento. It symbolised her personal discomfort about the Holocaust: The House was never in the eye of the storm. It was not damaged in the war or in 1956. It was in the area of Jewish safe houses in the war, but was not a safe house itself. It was on the periphery, and my parents and I felt the same. We didnt suffer the Holocaust ourselves. That makes me feel guilty and impotent. Im not like the hero of Kertszs Fatelessness, whose experience in the concentration camp fortied him to nd happiness again in Budapest.138 The rest of us are weaker through not having had this experience. Frances sided with the penthouse owner on the issue of access rights to the terrace. But as she walked down the street, she spotted a Hungarian ag ying from that same terrace. She stopped dead and stared. Could this be true? There was only one logical supposition: that the present occupant was a nationalist. She found this upsetting in a neighbourhood linked so closely with Jews a caf dedicated to Wallenberg was just around the corner. Then she acknowledged, a little late in the day, that she had gone far enough. People in the Budapest House were beginning to wonder why she took such interest. Any moment now she would be sucked into their quarrel over the terrace. Such a long time after selling out with the purpose of bringing closure, her refusal to let go was becoming absurd. The whole business frankly had nothing to do with her.

Her quandary bore down upon her. She longed to free herself of the historical burden but could not do so without abandoning her quest for roots and personal identity. History continued to disorient her. She wondered what she would do if David died: live in Budapest, London, New York, or where? As Frances, David and I sat in nearby St Istvn Park one spring time, watching parents play with children and old people rest on benches, she nally began loosening up. She settled back in the sunshine, stretched out her feet and smiled. The existential anxiety about not belonging, having no rm anchor, of imminent disaster, was seeping away. David after all was alive and kicking: Ive resolved to stop worrying about David. Im beginning to feel more detached now. I can distance myself from my attachment to the house. I suppose it is through collaborating on this book. I just have to get a grip, be rational. The book is closure. Years had passed since she moved away from Budapest. Now Frances recognised that despite her kinship she was never going to be a Hungarian, nor an East European. She realised how much she disliked the excesses, quarrels, jealousies and cynicism she encountered during her time in the region. As she shed her frustrations about not integrating, several people came up to talk. An old woman with a limp sat down to grumble about poor health care, the falling value of pensions and the lack of community services. Others told her stories about their children and the neighbourhood. Frances basked in the human warmth of this little patch of Europe on the banks of the Danube, just around the corner from the Budapest House. Across the street, an old man spoke in Magyar to David as he paused, camera in hand. David explained he did not understand, and the old man said to him in perfect English: Would you be so kind as to help me across the road? Im blind. David obliged. Frances and he were, after all, part of the community, if only eetingly. I sensed that Frances was gradually letting the Budapest House drift away. She had retrieved her past from the House and integrated it into her present life. The House had stimulated her to discover her true identity, but it offered no rosy illusions. It did not allow her to insert herself into a life of yesteryear. It did not even inspire love. It opened its doors to her until she had fully understood. At which point, she could let go of a world that was no longer hers. She could nally leave the family home. Frances had one last chance to hold on to the past. She inherited Erzsis apartment

on her aunts death. Could this be a new foothold in the red-blooded Eastern Europe of her ancestors? A replacement for the Budapest House? No, it could not. She had made up her mind. She would make her home elsewhere. She sold Erzsis apartment without ado. By the time this book was completed, history weighed little on Francess soul. She worked out with a personal trainer, shed 12 kilos and rarely spoke of worries at all. I dont even worry about money anymore, she cheerfully afrmed at the height of the nancial crisis in 2009. She landed a job with Bloomsbury, publisher of Harry Potter, to set up an academic publishing division with her own radical business model. She made all titles available free of charge online for non-commercial purposes immediately upon publication. The works were also sold as books, as other publishers did. This greatly enlarged the range of students whom her authors reached. The question was: would it prove protable? It did. She also snatched a contract to digitise the archives of Winston Churchill from under the noses of more established academic publishers. This was not the Frances worrying about dislocation, uncertain roots and the weight of a Jewish history. She belonged nowhere, but turned it to her advantage. She did not feel part of the establishment, so she created something entirely new. Not belonging helped her think out of the box. I am always going off to new things. Like George Soros, the man from whom I learned so much, I am constantly scanning. Ive been able to spot things which are just over the horizon. At Bloomsbury, I moved into a new space which was not safe. Many people had misgivings, and one person asked me accusingly, Are you a copyright terrorist? I was out of my comfort zone, but I could put it to good use. After four years, she left Bloomsbury and launched another new idea persuading university libraries to get together in consortia to purchase selected academic books jointly. She worked out that the scheme could signicantly reduce the price per academic institution. Publishers could cover their upfront costs, and would be able to sell the books separately to non-library customers. In raw format, texts would be available for free on the internet. Her determination to investigate her past with agonising frankness was a key to her success. Not for her the facile judgments, the self-justications, the taking of sides or the easy nostalgic road. Frances travelled far and wide to understand the mindsets of

the peoples of Eastern Europe. She took care to see all sides of the story, and was realistic in her judgments. She assumed the pain of setbacks, exorcised Berkesis evil spirit and went through the ritual mourning of Jewish tradition. As a result, she was able to resume her life in full awareness of what her personal history meant. Although she never fully integrated into the East, she understood enough to operate with one foot in the East and one in the West. She was able to bring together the old socialist ideals of mutual support with the wealth-creation of Western market economies. That is the person she had become, having left the home of her past. In 2011 Frances returned to Budapest to visit the English-language bookshop she still partly owns. On her return she said: For the rst time I didnt go to see the Budapest House. * * *

Francess example can inspire others to grapple with a difcult past. It certainly helped me deal with my own lingering unease at growing up both British and German. While accompanying Frances, I too confronted my past and nally resolved my divided allegiance in the restored Church of Our Lady of Dresden. I wrote a book about it entitled A Foot in Both Camps: a German Past for Better and for Worse.139 The societies of Eastern Europe amongst whom she moved have generally not found the resolution she did. They have a century of appalling violence behind them which still conditions their attitudes, and that applies to all of them, not just Hungary. As Polish poet Czes"aw Mi"osz remarked, the appalling brutality of World War II far worse than in the West destroyed both the idea of common humanity and any sense of natural justice. Murder, kidnapping, lying, theft and the sights and sounds of killing and agonised suffering came to be seen as ordinary and inevitable.140 The following 40 years of Communism, based on dictatorship, class struggle and confrontation with the West, did little to promote a change towards peace and harmony. This conictual legacy persists. At the opening of Budapests Holocaust Memorial Center in 2004, socialist Prime Minister Pter Medgyessy declared there was no excuse and no explanation for the heinous and unforgivable crimes committed by Hungarians against Hungarians. But the right ignores people from the left. They prefer to remember that many Communist leaders were Jews, allowing bitterness over former

Communists to drift into anti-Semitism. In 2007, vandals dug up the skull and bones of the last Communist ruler of Hungary, Jnos Kdr, and left a note declaring that a murderer and traitor may not rest on holy ground. Moral compromise is another burden. Shameful memories of WWII collaboration with the Nazis cannot easily be wished away. The Communists undermined peoples sense of responsibility by maintaining that collaboration was the fault of the bourgeoisie, not the ordinary people. This gave those who participated in the Nazis misdeeds a loophole.141 In the Hungarian National Museum, prime repository of Hungarys historical memory, the genocide of Hungarys 500,000 Jews, surely one of the most signicant events of the nations history, scarcely features at all. Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics have similar uneasy memories. Middle-aged and older people are also evasive about their involvement with Communism. The authorities had a hold over them by threatening to withhold jobs or university education, or by pressuring them into cooperating with secret police. Some feel ashamed at having been compromised. Others consider they lived in a private world beyond the reach of the regime and were not really involved. Successful operators such as Ferenc Csete believed the system worked well enough anyway, while others lapse into dissatised nostalgia. A survey in 2008 showed 62 per cent of Hungarians felt they were happier before 1990 than now.142 Mostly, people in Eastern Europe do not want to think about the recent past at all. It is too awkward and embittered. Looking the other way has been a tradition in this part of Europe. Few people over the past 100 years can consider they held their destinies in their own hands. The Hungarians in leading positions who were interviewed for this book grew up when their country was subservient and the meaning of history was dictated to them. They do not identify with it, nor do they feel any personal responsibility to answer difcult questions, as Frances did. Most of the nations of Eastern Europe went through similar experiences. Yet the embarrassment over the past prevents them from feeling commonality with their neighbours. They look back to the 19th century and beyond, when they trod separate paths developing different characteristics. They ignore the past century which bound them together in shared trauma. In this part of the world, the legacy of history does little to nurture ideals of

national reconciliation, civic solidarity and rule by consensus. There is little echo of the founding post-war principles of the European Union. Like Frances, I am disappointed. Back in the 1970s, when I lived as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe, I longed for the day when the suffering people would be liberated to make their own lives. When Frances crossed the Danube with Hungarian publisher Istvn Bart in 1990 and rejoiced at the moment of freedom, I felt the same euphoria of a newly-energised people as I criss-crossed Eastern Europe opening up a new market for Reuters news services. Now they seem to be making little of this freedom, except when they leave their home countries and go to live in the West. I begin to wonder not only how long these countries will take to catch up with the West in standards of governance and economic efciency, but whether they ever will. Even Slovenia, once the model pupil of exYugoslavia, stagnates in economic crisis, political paralysis and corruption engendered by the states continuing ownership of 50 per cent of the economy. My Slovenian wife says she does not even notice much improvement in repression and intolerance. People still gain and lose jobs according to which side of the political divide they are. You are in or you are out, just as in the past. It is doubtless unrealistic to expect too much after little more than 20 years. In Oxford, where I live, a Martyrs Memorial recalls how a repressive Catholic regime burned three Protestant bishops to death at the stake. Today scarcely anybody glances up as they pass, since the atrocity took place over 400 years ago. In Eastern Europe, the traumas are more recent and directly felt. Dealing with such a past is tough. However one nation at the centre of Europe did nd a way to move on. Faced with unforgiving enemies after 1945, German intellectuals and political leaders after initial hesitation acknowledged responsibility for the devastation their people had visited upon Europe. Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before the monument in the former Jewish ghetto of Warsaw to assume guilt. No German leader since then has tried to make excuses. By frankly admitting its wrongs, Germany has been accepted back into the community of democratic nations. South Africa too offers an example. After the end of white rule in 1994, Nelson Mandela set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, demanding that all who committed apartheid crimes testify truthfully in return for immunity from prosecution. The vengeful bloodbath which many feared did not take place. Mandela ensured that

memory of past evils served reconciliation. Even in Britain, not used to dealing with uncomfortable parts of its history, Queen Elizabeth travelled at the age of 85 to Ireland to pay tribute at a memorial to slain resistance ghters against British rule. She declared: I extend my sincere thoughts and deepest sympathy. With the benet of historical hindsight, we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently, or not at all. It went down well with her touchy Irish hosts. In these cases, the process was helped by the moral stature of the leaders. Nobility of character, as Nietzsche put it. In 2011 Frances asked George Soros whether they were perhaps wrong to go into Eastern Europe in the late 1990s, since democracy in Russia and some other countries has meanwhile moved backwards. Given that in some ways they failed, were they right to launch their venture? Its because of the failure that we were right to do what we did, he replied. That was paradoxical, but Frances concurred: If something is a good thing, one should do it. It was still a good use of time, energy, money and emotion, even if the result was partly failure. Like Frances herself, the people of Eastern Europe are not destined to remain in this state forever. The younger generations who work in the West already start to think differently. A Pole working on a Western building site is generally straightforward and uncomplicated. The annual dinner of the British-Slovene Society in London brings together not just old migrs, but also condent young Slovenes graduating through Britains best universities or exercising important professional responsibilities in multinationals. They keep in touch with their East European roots, but their careers are as performance-orientated and globalised as any comparable Westerner. Outside the connes of their own countries, they bear no trace of the old burdens from the past. They have come in from the cold. * * *

The Budapest House still stands unassumingly on a street much the same as many others. It is hard now to imagine that it held such deep emotional signicance for those who came in touch with it.

When Imre Hirschenhauser took it over in 1937, its new-fashioned look testied to his belief in the future. When war nearly killed him and his wife, it offered shelter amidst the wreckage. After Communists destroyed his livelihood, the family cherished it as a last possession. When his granddaughter set eyes on it, she had to deal with Communist decadence and the evil of a secret policeman. Now the building is typical of New Europe ageing but evolving; inhabited by the fast rich, the cosmopolitan, the learned, the warm hearts, the ailing left-behinds and the inveterate quarrellers; surviving the horrors of the past more or less intact; in need of a coat of paint but budding with renewed promise. Pushing open the heavy front door, I feel the same metal that grandfather Imre touched as he went in and out. I run my hands over the same veined grey marble and zig-zag stair rails inside. But Imre is gone now and Frances has left it forever too. As I step outside, I know I too will never set eyes on it again. None of us need to any more. Many people have Budapest Houses in their lives. They offer the opportunity to connect and draw lessons. Some people will ignore the chance and stay in their old nefarious ways. Others will learn, move on and do better. They will leave their difcult homes and grow up.

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EPILOGUE

JZSEF
We orphans we lament to the world World, why have you taken our soft mothers from us? Nelly Sachs, Jewish poet143 Erzsi had not told everything about her Holocaust experience. Francess father said he believed the aunt suffered a miscarriage on her forced march at the end of 1944. Erzsi made no mention of this when she told Frances her wartime story. Frances wondered whether the subject was too painful, or perhaps her father had got it wrong. She dared not ask. Shortly before she died in 2007, Erzsi told the missing part of the story to the 16year-old son of her friend Zsuzsa. Erzsi did not have a miscarriage, but in the winter of 1942-43 gave birth to a son, Jzsef. Just before she was rounded up, she gave the infant for safekeeping to a non-Jewish Hungarian family. As the war came to its terrible climax, the family ran out of money and placed the litte boy in an orphanage. When Erzsi returned in spring 1945, she searched for her son and eventually found him. He was starving and died in her arms. For the rest of her life, Erzsi kept this secret locked in her heart. She did not tell Frances, nor Zsuzsa. As she felt her life ebbing away, Erzsi conded in Zsuzsas son, Jerri a boy like the one she could never bring up. Tucked away discreetly in a corner of her apartment, she kept a tiny photograph of the two-year-old who died in her arms. Visitors never noticed, let alone asked who it was. Frances realised that when Erzsi was telling her wartime story, it was almost 60 years to the day since the son died. Unbeknown to her, Frances was sitting in an apartment with the portrait of a cousin she never knew existed. Now, a month after the death of her aunt, she felt the breath of the Holocaust more keenly then ever. Having struggled to nd a foothold in the Budapest of her ancestors, she was again confronted with a ghost. As a Hungarian Jew, she lacked the family and friends who might have helped her constitute an identity based on past

memories. They were simply not there. Her voice was trembling when she telephoned me the news late one night: As soon as I heard this, I knew the story of The Budapest House was for her and for him. Similar tragedies happened to many others, but I knew Erzsi and loved her. She was my aunt. On the broad patchwork of history, Jzsef was a tiny speck of life whose very existence was scarcely known. He came into this story late, but in time to allow a teenage boy to share an intimate secret with an elderly woman on the verge of death. And to touch the heart of a distant cousin seeking roots in the land of her forefathers. For this reason, this book is dedicated to ... Jzsef and his mother.

IJ<2"G

SOURCES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am above all indebted to Frances Pinter, the main character. Few people are prepared, as she was, to allow an outsider to delve into intimate aspects of her life which had been concerning her. She helped gather family records, took me around Budapest to interview people, and when necessary also interpreted awlessly in the Magyar language. I had no intention of writing a hagiography, and she did not shy away from difcult questions. What she offered was the challenging story of a person trying to nd her roots, understand the inuences of a disturbing history and chart a path forward in her life. Many other people also gave time, trust and thoughtful insights in interviews: I thank them all warmly. I am also grateful to: My agent Lorella Belli, www.lorellabelliagency.com, in London, who gave invaluable guidance and encouragement in developing the book; Susan Tiberghien, President of the Geneva Writers Group, www.genevawritersgroup.org, whose critiquing resulted in numerous improvements; Anne Joshua, layout and type-setting professional, who has produced an attractive, well-made book; Charlotte Darwin, copy-editor, for her painstaking revision of the manuscript. The photo credited to AHF is from the American-Hungarian Federation. All other photos are from Frances Pinters private collection or by her husband, David Percy. Marcus Ferrar, Oxford, 2013

SELECTED READING
Ambrose, Stephen, Eisenhower: Soldier and President, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1990 Applebaum, Anne, Iron Curtain, The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, Allen Lane, London 2012 Bnffy, Mikls, The Writing on the Wall (Erdlyi T!rtnet), The Transylvanian Trilogy: They were Counted; They were Found Wanting: They were Divided, in Magyar 1934-1940. English (translated by Patrick Thurseld & Katalin Bnffy-Jelen): Arcadia Books, London, 2001 Barber, Noel, Seven Days of Freedom, Macmillan, London, 1973 Bks, Csaba / Byrne, Malcom / Rainer, Jnos M. (eds.), The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: a History in Documents, CEU Press, Budapest, 2002 Berenger, Jean, Histoire de lEmpire des Habsbourgs, Fayard, Paris, 1990 Bogdan, Henry, Histoire des Habsburgs, Perrin, Paris, 2002 Carr, E.H., What is History? Macmillan, London, 1961 Cartledge, Bryan, The Will to Survive: a History of Hungary, Timewell Press, London, 2006 Chang, Jung/ Halliday, Jon, Mao: the Unknown Story, Jonathan Cape, London, 2005 Conquest, Robert, Reections on a Ravaged Century, W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 2000 Corsellis, John/Ferrar, Marcus, Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival after World War II, I.B. Tauris, London, 2005 Crankshaw, Edward, The Fall of the House of Habsburg, Papermac, London, 1963 Davies, Norman, Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory, Macmillan, London, 2006

Drakuli#, Slavenka, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1992 Esterhzy, Peter, Harmonia Caelestis, Magveto, Budapest, 2000 Ferrar, Marcus, A Foot in Both Camps: a German Past for Better and for Worse, LBLA Digital, London, 2012 Ferraro, Gary, The Cultural Dimensions of International Business, Prentice Hall, US, 1990 Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, Holt, Rineheart & Winston, New York, 1941 Fukuyama, Francis, Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, Free Press Paperbacks, New York, 1995 Gati, Charles, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the1956 Revolt, Stanford University Press, 2006 Gildea, Robert, Marianne in Chains, Pan Books, 2003 Glover, Jonathan, Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Pimlico, London, 2001 Gough, Roger, A Good Comrade: Jnos Kdr,Communism and Hungary, I.B. Tauris, London, 2006 Ha$ek, Jaroslav, The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk (Osudy dobrho vojka !vejka), Prague, 1920-23 Hastings, Max, Armageddon": the Battle for Germany 1944-45, Macmillan, London 2004 Hegeds B., Andrs, ed., Manual of the 1956 Revolution, Vol. III. Reprisal and Commemoration [Az 1956-os forradalom kziknyve, III. Ktet.Megtorls s emlkezs], The Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Budapest. 1996. Hoffmann, Eva, After Such Knowledge: a Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust, Vintage, London, 2005

Horthy, Mikls, Memoirs, Simon Publications, US,1957 Kaufman, Michael T., Soros: the Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002 Kertsz, Imre, Fatelessness, in Magyar 1975. English: The Harvill Press, London 2005 Kertsz, Imre, Kaddish for a Child not Born, in Magyar 1990. English: Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1997 Kis, Jnos, The Hungarian Status Law": Nation Building and/or Minority Protection, Chapter 6":The Status Law: Hungary at the Crossroads, 2004 Kiszely, Gbor, VH, Egy Terrorzervest T!rtnete, Korona Kiad, Budapest, 2000 Kluckhohn& Strodtbeck, Variations in Value Orientations, Harper & Row, US, 1961 Kontler, Lszl, Millennium in Central Europe: a History of Hungary, Atlantisz, Budapest, 1999 Lendvai, Paul, Mein Verspieltes Land, [My Squandered Country], Ecowin Verlag, Vienna, 2010 Lendvai, Paul [trans.: Keith Chester], Hungary: Between Democracy and Authoritarianism, Hurst & Co, London, 2012. Litvn, Gy!rgy (ed), The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Longman, London, 1996 Lb, Ladislaus,Dealing with Satan: Rezs! Kasztners Daring Rescue Mission: a Survivors Tale, Jonathan Cape, London, 2008 Mrai, Sndor, Embers, rst published in Budapest as A gyertyk csonkig gnek 1942, reprinted Budapest 1990. English (translation by Carol Brown Janeway): Vintage, New York, 2002 Mrai, Sndor, Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948, in Magyar as Fld. Fld, Toronto, Canada, 1972. English: Corvina, Budapest, 1996 Mazower, Mark, The Dark Continent: Europes Twentieth Century, Penguin, London, 1998

Michnik, Adam, In Search of Lost Meaning: the New Eastern Europe, University of California Press, 2011 Mi&univo#, Veljko, Moscow Diary Mink, Andrs, The Kopjs: the Culture of Counter-revolution, Dissertation presented to Central European University, Budapest, 2003 Molnr, Mikls, A Concise History of Hungary, Cambridge University Press, 2001 Porter, Monica, Deadly Carousel, Quartet Books, London 1990 Rainer, Jnos, The Road to Budapest, 1956: New Documentation on the Kremlins Decision to Intervene, The Hungarian Quarterly, Volume XXXVII, No 142, Summer 1996 Rees, Laurence, Auschwitz, BBC Books, London, 2005 Roberts, J.M., The Triumph of the West, BBC, 1985 Romsics, Igncs, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, Corvina Osiris,Budapest, 1999 Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, London, 1991 (rst published 1946) Saunders, Robert A., Transylvania Rising, Transitions Online, www.tol.cz/look/TOL, 6 July 2006 Sebestyen, Victor, Twelve Days Revolution 1956, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2006 Smyser, W.R., From Yalta to Berlin, Macmillan, London, 1999 Snowman, Daniel, The Hitler Emigrs": the Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism, Pimlico, London, 2002 Stewart, Michael, The Hungarian Status Law: Nation Building and/or Minority Protection, Chapter 5": A New European Form of Transnational Policies?, 21st Century COE Program Slavic Eurasian Studies, edited by Zoltn Kntor, Balzs Majtnyi, Osamu Ieda, Balzs Vizi, Ivn Halsz, 2004 Swatridge, Colin, A Country Full of Aliens, Corvina, Budapest, 2005

Szeckas-Weisz, Judit/Ward, Ivan (eds), Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile, Imago East West, The Freud Museum, London, 2004 Szerb, Antal, Utas s Holdivg (Journey by Moonlight), Budapest, 1937, English: Pushkin Press, London, 2001, Afterword by translator Len Rix Szp, Ern!, The Smell of Humans: a Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary, Keresztes, Budapest, 1945, English:CEU Press, Budapest, 1994 Szodfridt, Maria, The Story of My Husband: the Terrible Years before the Revolution, www.freedomghters56.com, 6 January 2007 Taubman, William, Khrushchev: the Man and his Era, W.W. Norton & Co, New York 2003 T!ks, Rudolf L., Hungarys Negotiated Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Tutu, Desmond, No Future without Forgiveness, Rider, London, 1999 Ungvry, Kristin, (translator Lb, Ladislaus), Battle for Budapest, I.B. Tauris, London, 2003 Valuch, Tibor, A Cultural and Social History of Hungary1948-1990, www.rev.hu/html/ en/studies/1945_56/valuch/html, 6 January 2007 Varga, Susan, Heddy and Me, Penguin, London, 1994 Vinen, Richard, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, Little, Brown / Co, London, 2000 Weinstein, Michael A., Hungarys Referendum on Dual Citizenship: a Small Victory for Europeanism, The Power and Interest News Report, reproduced on www.threemonkeyonline.com, December 2004 Wiesel, Elie, Twilight, Summit Books, New York, 1987 Zsolt, Bla, Nine Suitcases, rst published in Hungarian in 1980, English: Pimlico, 2005 Zweig, Ronald, The Gold Train, Penguin, London, 2003

Also available from Crux Publishing

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book does not aim to come up with groundbreaking new theories on why things occurred, but rather gives a broad overview of the generally accepted version of events so that non-historians will feel less ignorant when discussing the past. To help readers put events, places and empires into context, the book includes 32 original maps to accompany the text. The result is a book that is reassuringly epic in scope but refreshingly short in length. An excellent place to start to bring your historical knowledge up to scratch!

The Budapest House

ISBN: 978-0-9575245-4-5 Marcus Ferrar All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Crux Publishing Ltd. Although all reasonable care has been taken in the preparation of this book, neither the publisher, editors nor the author can accept any liability for any consequences arising from the use thereof, or the information contained therein.

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