First Things

“To the memory of the victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944-45.” (Text as it appears on the memorial)

Can Togay & Gyula Pauer, Shoes on the Danube Bank, 2005, © Can Togay & Gyula Pauer, 60 pairs of cast iron shoes, cement.

Photograph taken by Jennifer Walker

November 2017

                                                                   

In the late 1990s I went to a party in Budapest and met a Canadian girl who may have been from Toronto or Ottawa, but at the time came across to me as pure prairie: big-boned, wide-eyed, fresh-faced. She’d come to Hungary to teach English and live cheap, while her boyfriend wrote that novel he’d been dreaming of for years but had never gotten ‘round to writing... In the building where they were renting an old lady had died and the neighbours had picked her place clean as soon as the ambulance took off. She said she didn’t know if she could keep on living in a place where such things happened. I then rather condescendingly explained to her that Hungarian history was full of such stories, that life was difficult here and always had been, that she couldn’t expect people here to behave the way they did back home. The Magyars were shaped by forces of history so brutal that it was hard for someone from such a lucky country as Canada to fully grasp. In the 20th century alone the Magyars had lived through the loss of two thirds of their land and people in the fallout from WWI (the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, widely viewed even today as grossly unjust), the dizzying swing from far right to far left dictatorships, and now an eastern European version of democracy, where the former opposition parties were systematically plundering the state coffers. To her credit, my Canadian prairie girl seemed unconvinced by my voluble “forces of history” argument.

When I think back to that party I have to ask myself, did I really say all that shit?! I did and I can’t ever forget it because the story she told me catalysed a novel over a decade later. But even back then I’m not sure I believed a word of it myself. The truth is her story had always made me think of Shoah. Of how across Europe Christian neighbours had so zealously and gleefully looted the homes of their Jewish neighbours, even as they were being deported to their horrifying deaths. I always thought that prairie girl’s story would be the opening chapter of my novel, but planning a novel and writing a novel are of course very different beasts. That story was just a point of departure, the galvanizing MacGuffin, the stones in the soup. But maybe we can’t know the real significance of first things until we reach the end. The building I always imagined my characters lived in is the same, and in that building there is still an old lady who dies alone, picked clean of her rings and silk scarves by her neighbours. The setting of the novel is the same too. It’s Pest, the 13th district, Újlipótváros. It was, and still is, a place where many Jewish people live. It’s where my father lived during the war as a teenager. It’s where in the winter of 1944-45 Jewish men, women and children were daily shot into the Danube.

When I first began to visit Budapest, the past overwhelmed the present. I never walked by the river without seeing the dead bodies. Being there was traumatic and yet I felt compelled to stay. I didn’t understand why. This place was so familiar to me and yet utterly removed from my own life experience. There was the language itself, a language I seem to have always known. Then there was the familiarity of the faces, the invisible workings of genetics. I kept seeing my father in strangers’ faces, my mother too, even my sisters. Why did I have to go back to this place? To write, of course, but what else? Was it to bear witness? And if so, why must we bear witness? What is this most human of needs?  Is it so that we don’t forget, or so that we can forget? Is it so that we can learn to accept, or do some things always remain unacceptable? 55 years after the Soviet liberation of Budapest I fell in love in this place, deeply in love, four babies in love. I needed to return so that I could be healed. ◊

P.S. The image is of "The Shoes on the Danube Promenade", a memorial conceived and created by the film director Can Togay (whose name came up in my first blog – https://www.nicolewaldner.com/blog-2/2017/10/15/my-muse-the-avenging-angel) and the sculptor Gyula Pauer. It was installed on the Pest bank of the Danube in 2005. 60 pairs of old shoes cast in iron sit scattered along the embankment where in the winter of 1944-45 thousands of Jewish men, women and children were shot into the Danube River. For a factual history of the Holocaust in Hungary see: Randolph L. Braham, Yad Vashem or the USHMM.

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