Marcus Ferrar - The Budapest House

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

To Jzsef and his mother

PROLOGUE

BROKEN GLASS

Who shall remember my house,

where shall live my childrens 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 first 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, vilified 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 fingers 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 fleeing from some other evil, but what? Shortly after they arrived, she had watched the grown-ups gasp with horror as images of fighting and destruction in the home country flickered 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 filtered 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 difficult 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 conflict 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 first 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 finished. She was charmed. I had won. We decided to explore her past together.

The Frances I knew so far was a confident 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 flee 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-finished block of flats 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.