Just Me Page 8
I went back to the hotel and tried to shower away my horror. Then I took a walk by the Danube. I was puzzled by three more sculptures. First, a row of shabby shoes cast in iron, fixed to the esplanade. Worn high heels, crumpled boots, the laces left undone as though just taken off and abandoned. Mysterious and disturbing. There was an inscription – in Hungarian. Puzzled, I went towards the parliament building, and here was the sculpture of a man, sitting staring at the river, obviously depressed, and what looked like a verse written out in front of him. Close by, was a strange little bridge over nothing, with a solitary man standing on it, looking into space. My guidebooks were no help at all, and we were departing the next day. I was tantalised that I was going to leave with so many questions unanswered.
That night, our last, I was having a farewell drink with some of my new friends when my bluff northerner started making derisive remarks about 'pakis'. I was stunned because it was so unexpected. He was a good, funny, kindly man, no ranting BNP maniac.
I considered keeping my mouth shut but with the visions of what hatred of people who differ from you in race or belief can lead to still fresh in my mind after the House of Terror, I turned on him more angrily than I should have done. He was upset. Then he explained that he had never had his ideas questioned before, because all his friends felt the same. He described how Halifax, where he had lived all his life, had been transformed by immigration, and how difficult it was for him to accept.
The next day, as we parted, he graciously thanked me for making him think. The truth was he had made me think even more. Was I doing the same thing? Just reciting the liberal hogwash that all my friends concurred with? Had I really thought it through for myself?
On the day of our departure I got into conversation with a young woman in a café. She told me she was a tour guide so I asked her about the Terror Museum.
'I would rather not discuss it,' she said. 'My grandfather was imprisoned there for three months.'
She was a university student, intelligent and knowledgeable, and I thought perhaps she could help me understand Budapest better. So when she told me she was about to lead a group on a tour focusing on classical music I wangled myself on to it and stayed another week. I had unfinished business in Budapest, and I reckoned a few concerts would feed my soul.
For the time being, I decided not to scrabble in the filth of 60 Andrássy út, but to explore Budapest's revival of the good things of life. We went to a concert in the Congress Centre, opened in 1975, where Lang Lang was playing Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3. The last concert John and I ever went to together was this Chinese pianist's English debut at the Albert Hall. John had been recently diagnosed with cancer, but we forgot it all, swept away by this star shining so brightly.
Equally uplifting was the glamorous but shabby home of Liszt, hopefully due for restoration. Kodály's, near by, reflects his devotion to Hungarian folk art in the ornaments and books. He worked out a system to make it easier to learn to read music, with the result that at present 60 per cent of Hungarian children sing in a choir. I wish it were the same in our schools. Imagining how barren my life would be without music, it infuriates me that children are not given the chance to appreciate it as I was, a working-class girl, by my teachers. The same with Shakespeare. One of the best performances of a Shakespeare sonnet I have ever witnessed was spoken by a tearaway black girl, backed up by a rap chant. She thought Shakespeare was rubbish, until my daughter Ellie Jane opened her ears to the music of the language in one of the drama workshops she leads.
In a conversation about Kodály with one of the group, a professional who had spent a lifetime working in the service of others, I rather flippantly suggested that perhaps rap was our modern British folk music. I was shocked by the polite but deeply felt diatribe my remark unleashed: 'They are not British. Anyone can come to our country and claim to be British. I find that unacceptable,' and more in the same vein. It transpired that several of the group abhorred the idea of a uniform euro, despite our trouble with the forints. They had a profound love of German, French, and Italian composers but didn't want any part of the European Union. Keep ourselves to ourselves was the theme. Keep out people who abuse our hospitality. In fact keep them out even if they don't.
These were cultured, well-read people so their attitude startled me. What resentment is lurking deep in our psyche. The places they lived in had, unlike my friend from the north, been unaltered by immigration. Yet they were really angry. It all added to the angst I was feeling. Something about this city generally and in particular the Terror Museum had affected me deeply. Everyone must find the museum upsetting but I was disproportionately shaken. I couldn't get it out of my mind. Was it because of my synchronous wartime childhood? Or the awareness that blind hatred is still bubbling beneath polite surfaces?
I have always believed that if you are frightened of something inside or outside of yourself it is best to confront it. Plunge right in and find out all about it and the fear will dissipate. But in this case, why probe old wounds? Perhaps it is best just to hide them beneath a bandage and hope they won't fester. I had discovered ugly blemishes in this city. Would it not be best, like my fellow travellers, to forget about them and enjoy the lovely things? But it seems to me that if you go to a country and don't look at its past, it's like not taking into account your own. It's blinkered and superficial.
I plucked up the courage to tackle the young guide again about her grandfather being imprisoned in 60 Andrássy út. She told me he would never talk about it and she (unlike me) had the decency to leave well alone. She reasoned, 'At a time of fear and intimidation, even best friends and families betray one another.' Many of the people who had persecuted their neighbours were now in public office, and successful in all walks of life, recanting their previous beliefs. She quoted Péter Esterházy, 'In 1989 it was suddenly rush hour on the road to Damascus.'
She was perplexed about how you deal with the past. It is all the vogue now to say sorry for historic crimes committed by our ancestors – slavery, colonisation, Catholic orphanages. The list is endless. What does it achieve? Closure? That is a favourite word nowadays. If only. I had accepted that John was no longer going to come back, but was the subject closed? Forgotten? No way. She protested, 'My generation has done nothing wrong. We want to move on.' So I understood when, as we passed the ghetto area, her only comment was that more Jews survived in Budapest than in any other city. No mention of the 600,000 I knew to have been murdered in Hungary, plus half a million gypsies and numerous political prisoners and gays. I did not demur and spoil the lovely holiday of music and beautiful churches by unwelcome dispute. I dutifully joined the group at the baroque splendour of St Stephen's Basilica. It boasts a very important relic – the mummified forearm of King Stephen. There is actually a Chapel of the Holy Right Hand, which is taken very seriously by the devout. As these things are. But I had had enough. I was baroqued out.
I signed up for a walk to explore Art Nouveau and Bauhaus in Budapest. As a girl who left school at fifteen and had no further conventional education, apart from two wasted years at the, then, toffs' finishing school, RADA, I have an excuse for my ignorance of many subjects. So, it is with only slight shame that I confess I did not know how to pronounce Bauhaus, let alone know what it was.
The first building our guide showed us was in a run-down area on the Buda side, that had me agape. Maybe it was the surfeit of grandeur that made the austere simplicity of Városmajori Jézus Szíve Plébániatemplom so moving. This church, designed by one Árkay Bertalan in 1933, the year of my birth, is made seemingly of rectangular and square stone boxes, straight lines and flat surfaces, apart from some perfectly proportioned arches in the porch. Its walls shone pinkish-white in the sun. Inside was an oasis of calm. Beautifully lit by sunlight from angled plain windows, all was wood and stone and simplicity apart from a stunning modern stained-glass window behind the rudimentary altar. The atmosphere was the most holy of any of the numerous churches I had visited. In a side chapel was
one small blaze of light – a dazzling window designed by, of all people, Le Corbusier. He, I had heard of. I knew his influence had been blamed for the monstrous estates thrown up after the war and for the dirty concrete of the National Theatre. This glorious window made me think there must be more to him than his reputation suggested.
We visited an area where some neglected but elegant modernist houses took me back to my childhood. When I lived in Bexleyheath, I regularly passed two, or was it three, strange, obviously grand, houses that made me want to be rich when I grew up so that I too could have a balcony (a luxury unknown in Bexleyheath) in a house that looked like a ship. White, with angled walls and curved windows, they seemed other-worldly, but I now saw they were modernist in design. In Bexleyheath. How on earth did they land there amongst the pebble-dash?
Johannes Schuler, the young architect who took us round, had a convert in me. I suspect he was a bit taken aback by my childish enthusiasm and whooping around but he actually liked answering questions. He was disparaging about the restoration of the city, which in some cases is a matter of painting over the dirt and scars, and scornful of new buildings that were being thrown up. However, he recommended a visit to one that he admired: the Holocaust Memorial Centre, which opened in 2004. No one wanted to come with me – 'too depressing'. But I needed to go. Having suppressed thoughts of the war for most of my life, something about this city made it imperative that I should not allow myself to forget what happened.
The Holocaust Memorial Centre was the only place in Budapest where there was heavy security, and I was searched before going in. When it opened, on 16 April 2004 on the sixtieth anniversary of the ghettoisation of the Jews, there was a bomb threat, and sharpshooters stationed on the roofs. It is nice to think that the police were protecting the Jews, which is a change from their wartime history.
It is indeed a splendid building. The modern part is all strange angles and jarring shapes, to depict the twisted horror of the Holocaust, but the contrast of grass and pinkish shades of pastel stone and marble makes it extraordinarily peaceful. The new construction incorporates a synagogue that was used as an internment camp to herd Jews before disbursing them to the camps in 1944. It was left derelict and empty during the Communist era, but is now returned to its past glory.
There were two exhibitions taking place. The main one using film and sound, started with a touching reminder of Jewish life before the war: Jewish men and women working with their neighbours, singing and dancing, celebrating weddings. Then we traced the yellow stars, the exclusion laws, the imprisonment under the Arrow Cross Hungarian Nazis. With the arrival of the Germans in 1944, and in particular Eichmann, occurred one of the quickest exterminations of Jews in any country. In fifty-six days, 437,402 Jews in Hungary were rounded up by Hungarian army and police, and deported to camps, mainly Auschwitz, and most of them murdered.
I knew the stories of people crowded and locked into cattle trucks for days on end with no food, water or lavatories, but here was an exhibition of graphic photos of these events from an album discovered by Lily Jacob, a prisoner at Auschwitz. When she heard the sounds of the US troops liberating the camp, Jacob dragged herself, suffering from typhoid and weighing only forty kilos, to the SS barracks, in search of something to keep her warm. There, she found an album, which presumably the owner had forgotten to destroy before he fled the approaching liberators. In it were 200 photos, some of them of the family and friends she had lost.
Two photographers had been given permission by the SS to photograph the arrival and selection process of some of the Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz. These two men clambered on wagons, and moved in and out between hordes of bewildered men, women, and children, to take their dreadful photographs. What can have possessed them to record such shameful events so proudly and meticulously? The rows, five abreast, awaiting selection, women and children one side, men the other. Babies struggling in their mothers' arms, small frightened children gazing with big eyes at the man with the camera. Indolent soldiers, sloping around watching, whilst their superiors waved their hands, making life and death selections of who would be worked and starved to death, and who sent straight to the gas chambers. One shot is carefully composed to include a lorry, which is parked alongside the queue, loaded with canisters of zyclone gas that will soon choke to death most of the people that they are photographing. A perfectly framed wide shot shows women massed in regimental lines, with recently shaved heads, their dirty frocks covering their shaven pubic hair, trying desperately to retain some dignity in front of a camera. In one photo, an older woman in glasses is standing tall, looking defiantly into the lens, surrounded by younger frightened women clutching children, and one suspects that she knows the building behind them is the crematorium. God knows what our gallant photographers hoped to achieve by that compositon, but not, one suspects, the study of a noble woman. There is an eerie calm in most of the pictures. The prisoners surely cannot have known what was happening; although, in one shot, an old lady is struggling violently, with three men trying to quieten her.
The other exhibition in the museum was the story of the fate of the Roma. One of the most shocking photos, which will be engraved on my soul for ever, is of a group of young naked Roma women, arms folded over their bare breasts, or holding on to one another, as they stumble down a heap of earth, with a row of SS men, uniformed in greatcoats, helmets and boots, in the background waiting to fire their bullets into the soft womanly bodies.
During that week I read a book called Fateless by Imre Kertész. It tells the story of a young Jewish boy from Budapest. It brings to bitter life the squalor of that time. It proves how impossible, even if you were not one of the people who herded the prisoners to the depots, it would have been not to see it happening. Or, indeed, watch, while some were marched to the banks of the Danube, murdered and pitched into the river. That was what the row of shoes I had seen was commemorating. I could not fathom what they were, for who could readily imagine such an event, on that very place that I was walking, on that sunny day? Not in some bygone primitive age but when I was ten years old.
Kertész, and Primo Levi, write of how the human spark could survive in the camps. Not always nobly, but merely to survive was noble. Trying to create order out of chaos. Organising yourself. Dividing your ration of one lump of bread to last for two meals. On the marches, and endless standing out in the freezing cold as punishment or torture, placing yourself in the middle, so other bodies helped to keep you upright. Resting on work parties, when the guard looked the other way, if only for a minute, to conserve some of your skeletal energy. When the transports arrived, the prisoners on duty, forced to unload the half-dead arrivals, whispered warnings to the youngsters that they must say they were over sixteen and healthy so as not to be gassed straightaway. And never to say if they were a twin, lest Mengele should use them for his vile experiments. When you are dying, as even the living were, there is no great selfless friendship. If your friend died on the bunk beside you, despite the stench and the lice, you kept it quiet for as long as possible, and ate his paltry ration as well as your own.
I left the Holocaust Memorial Centre depressed by the depths of depravity to which man can descend. The fact is that there are always amongst us people who will use warped idealism to excuse bestial behaviour. Devotion to a group, a cause – the perfect Aryan society, unified Germany, or Hungary, jihad. To obey orders, no matter what. And there are others who are prepared to turn the other way.
The question in my mind is would I be either of these? I was once a Young Communist; I too wanted to impose my version of a better world. I have also kept quiet when it would have been better to 'speak truth to power'. Or would I, please God, if really tested, be like the local people in the testimonies, who smuggled food into the Jewish and Roma ghettos for their neighbours? Who hid people in their lofts and cellars?
Honourable, too, were the people like Bartók and Solti, who left their homeland in protest or Prime Minister Teleki, who, when he could n
ot persuade his country not to join Germany in attacking Yugoslavia, committed suicide. Surely as a public protest, not as a way out. The evocative statue I had seen of the sad man staring at the Danube was Attila József, a poet who wrote inspirationally about his homeland, and also killed himself in 1937, when he was just thirty-two years old. The shame and despair about the way their country was going was unbearable to them all.
More recently in a speech on Holocaust memorial day Ferenc Gyurcsány, their less than perfect prime minister said, 'We let their hands go. We were not courageous enough, and we were not strong enough to keep them, to keep them with us. We let the evil be stronger than ourselves. We let this happen as Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs; we let this happen as Europeans.'
The last statue that had puzzled me, the lone man on the bridge over nothing, turned out to be Imre Nagy, the man I had seen in the mock-trial film in the House of Terror. He was a committed Communist, who was horrified to see the excesses to which Communism led his country. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Hungarian students and factory workers rallied, leading to a full-scale uprising. Imre Nagy joined them, which led to his trial as shown in the House of Terror, and two years later, his execution. The revolution was quelled by the arrival of Russian tanks. The students on the radio appealed for the world to help them. But we didn't: 2500 died, 20,000 were severely wounded and 200,000 fled their native land, to become exiled in countries hopefully more welcoming to them than we sometimes are towards our asylum seekers.