Imagine that you are a young boy
Image: Schoolboy by István Nagy, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest
Imagine that you are a young boy. Your tenth birthday is less than two months away. It is late fall and those few days are gone, when the leaves turned yellow and scarlet and the sun was so hot that the chilly autumn breeze felt refreshing. The rainy cold that precedes winter has arrived, her suitcase filled with grey wet things.
You are late for your music lessons, so you walk, then run until what you see and hear makes you stop. You see a crowd of people along Bajcsyezsilinszky Ut, the east-west thoroughfare that crosses the city of Miskolc. It is also the street that serves as the major artery between Hungary and the northeastern territories of the U.S.S.R. It is not unusual to hear the roar and drone of Soviet trucks as they traveled through the city, certainly not so unusual to form a crowd that is oddly silent. But what you hear does not sound like trucks.
You are not tall enough to see above the shoulders of the grown-ups, so you slip in to the crowd, minnow through the overcoats until you emerge in the first row, face to face with the steel hide of a Soviet tank as it rolls past. The next tank approaches but does not move past you. It groans, then stops. No one speaks, but something akin to a warning moves through the crowd, not unlike the awareness of a predator that is felt instantly throughout a herd. You do not need to look around you to know that the crowd is backing away from the tank. Your eyes remain fixed on the flank of the beast but your feet are moving of their own volition, inching backwards until the first rifle shot cracks the air. Then you run and run and all you want is to get back to your home.
You run up the stairs of the apartment building where you live with your mother and father. You do not know that your mother was watching from the window as you ran back, even though the bullets arrived before you did. You rush into the apartment, calling for her and are too stunned to say anything when she pushes you face down onto the floor of the sitting room. She is on top of you, cradling your head with her arms. From the corner of your eye you see the floor is littered with broken glass and plaster.
When the gunfire subsides, your mother warns you not to move. She crawls past the broken window, to the sofa and pulls a thick down comforter to the floor before the sound of gunfire resumes. She crawls back, wraps you in a cocoon of down and places your body beneath hers. Then, like an insect that has taken its young back into its belly, she crawls beneath the bullets, out of the apartment, through the hallways to the safety of the inner courtyard.
Two nights later you are wrapped in that same comforter, lying between your mother and father in the hayloft of a deserted barn. You fall asleep before your mother finishes tucking the down around you. Two days spent walking , hiding then more walking to escape the fighting in the city.
"Rope! Remember to bring rope!" Years later, when you introduce me to your mother, you tell me about those nights spent in hiding and poke fun at your mother's insistence about the rope: "Apparently my mother thought we might have time for mountain climbing during our extended holiday." Your mother does not laugh at your joke but turns and looks at me across the room. In that moment, when I look into her eyes and see a sadness so deep, I understand why you joke, poke fun, do anything to avoid looking into those depths. For hanging was and is the last resort for the poor, for those without money for a gun or time for poison. For those who lived through one Holocaust, but doubt their chances of surviving a second. And in that moment I realize that I never would have known you if the sounds outside that barn had been footsteps and gunshot instead of rain, wind and the scratching of mice.
More than fifty years have passed from that night when you slept between mother and father, between life and death. You rarely sleep as deeply as you did on that night. Each night sleep eludes you until the moment when you reach for the comforter and burrow into a cocoon of silk-covered down.
Immensely powerful and deeply profound.
[My sincere thanks, Sucre Bebe. -- Kochanie]
Kochanie, this was beautiful and powerful. I'm glad we have your voice back.
[ Thank you for your kind words, P. Burke. I did not expect readers to comment because it is an unsettling memory. Ten years ago I went back to Hungary with my husband and stood in the same place where he saw the Soviet tanks roll through Miskolc. We retraced his steps to the site of the apartment building (which had been demolished). The facades of many buildings in Miskolc and Budapest are marked with bullet holes, memorials from WWII and the Revolution of 1956.
I started working on this piece months ago, but was unsure if I should post it here since it is a memoir and not ostensibly about sex or reproductive rights. But when I read about Lucerno's murder, I realized that if I did not post it here, this memory could be lost. So here it is.
And yes, P. Burke, it is good to be back. :-) Thank you. ~ Kochanie.]
Kochanie, I assume that they fled after the 1956 uprising? What a hard time that must have been. Your words make it painfully vivid. So much of mid-twentieth-century European history was marked by forced migrations, deportations, panicked flights in the middle of the night. That was true too for those on the wrong side of history, many of whom were also ordinary people caught up in Hitler's or Mussolini's or Stalin's armies. (I know a few such stories from my extended family.)
The rope makes me think of Walter Benjamin, who apparently committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis, crossing over the Pyrenees from France to Spain, convinced that he was about to be captured. He had pills, not rope, but he was prepared in much the same way. When I think of that story, I have to think not just of how terrible it was that this amazing intelligence was cut short, but how many others must have met a similar fate, and how horrible it would be to see the world in flames as your life ends. He died in 1940 and so never saw Nazism's ultimate defeat.
What a blessing that his story ended as it did. That doesn't erase the trauma, of course, but it does offer a chance to rebuild a life. I'm so glad he did.
[Sungold, my father was a WWII veteran who, after landing at Normandy, was stationed in Germany for the remainder of the war. He often spoke of the suffering and deprivation suffered by the German civilians and prisoners of war. His squad was bivouacked in the home of German woman and her young children. Since she spoke English, she told my father that she was grateful that the Americans troops reached her village before the Russians arrived with their bitter memories of the siege of Stalingrad.
Both my mother-in-law and father-in-law had married after WWII, which was the second marriage for each. Both had lost their respective spouses and a child during the Holocaust. When the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 began, my in-laws, like many in their community, feared that the insurgence would be blamed on the Jews. That is why they went into hiding when the Soviets launched the counter-revolutionary attack. So I don't think they or Walter Benjamin were unique in having a plan of last resort.
What gave me nightmares for a long time was my father-in-law's description of the "disappearances" that occurred after the Revolution. If a coworker grumbled about the lack of food or criticized the government, that coworker did not show up at the factory the next morning and was not heard from again. If you did not want to share his fate, you did speak about his absence. Makes me realize what an exercise in freedom is the act of publishing a blog post. Thank you, Sungold. ~ Kochanie]
Oooh, bad pronoun use in that last paragraph! I mean the story *you* told, Kochanie, not Walter Benjamin's. Sorry about the oops.