The Soul of Things by Éva Fahidi

Author:Éva Fahidi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fahidi, Éva, Jews, Hungarian – Biography, Jews – Hungary – Biography, Holocaust, Jewish(1939–1945) – Personal narratives, Birkenau (Concentration camp), Allendorf (Concentration camp), Autobiographies, Personal narratives
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Group picture of my high-school graduation.

Well, we got back the Russians my mother was so keen on. But first, we got the Germans.

As a result of our self-imposed deafness, not only did we not hear, we did not even see what was happening around us. Put another way, we refused to take notice. Anything might happen in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland – anywhere in the world – we said, but one thing is certain, it is not about to happen in Hungary. Miklós Horthy 5 will protect us. Besides, he has Jewish friends. He even has Jewish relatives. Also, our family is full of heroes who received high military awards for their participation in the Great War. We were always faithful Hungarians and gave our blood, if that’s what was needed, and our money, too, not like the Hungarian gentlemen of old who’d give their blood to Empress Maria Theresa, but not their oats.6

My father did not take seriously the fact that one anti-Jewish law followed hard upon the next (1938, 1939, 1941), that they pulled the rug from under our feet and took our factories, companies, and shops away, because he found and continued to direct those Aryans who bought our enterprises on paper. He thought he could trust them. Anyone with brains left everything behind and fled the country. Material goods can be lost, but they are replaceable. Not so lost lives. How come my father didn’t think about this?

It took many years for me to understand my father.

He was born into nothing, his father was a tailor who had a small workshop in Fehérgyarmat and ten children, and yet he made something of himself. He learned everything on his own, how to eat with a knife and fork, how to behave in polite society, how to conduct a business transaction, how to develop a reliable taste in literature, how to play tennis, how to start not one but several businesses, how to establish plants and manage them. This was too much compared to the nothing from which he had started out. He could not leave his life’s work behind.

After graduation from high school, I wanted to attend the Academy of Music in Budapest. Playing the piano was part of family tradition. Everyone in my mother’s family played the piano, some better, some worse, while Boci, my older cousin from Father’s branch of the family who was eight years my senior, and whom I loved and admired, had already graduated. Everything could be had for money, even back then, and though both sets of my grandparents were Jewish, I was admitted to the Academy as a private student.7 Corruption is not a modern invention.

As if I were living on the last island of happiness instead of Eastern Europe, which would soon turn into the inferno that was raging around us, I played the piano day and night and read books and more books – and, of course, engaged in sports and gymnastics. I, too, wore the family blinders.

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