‘The feeling of having killed five million enemies of the state gave me so much satisfaction that I would jump laughingly into the grave’ (Adolf Eichmann)
On the murder of my Hungarian family in 1944
There’s a common delusion that certain places where evil has happened remain evil forever. People don’t want to buy houses where murders have occurred. Ghosts are often said to haunt them. Visitors say that they sense the pervasive presence of the past horrors. It’s a very common trope, the stuff of so many frightening stories, but it is a delusion. People who don’t make the association with the evil (because they don’t know about it) don’t feel it – in the real world, the owner of the allegedly haunted Amityville Horror house told a journalist, “Nothing weird ever happened, except for people coming by because of the book and the movie”. For those among us who do feel the connection between a place and its past, it’s a substitution of the external – the place – for the internal – one’s own deep sense of the terrible things that once happened there. However, just because it is a projection, a pushing-out and putting-on, does not mean that the reverberations of hideous acts do not constitute something real. We have imaginations, after all, and we need them in order to embrace the evil acts that once occurred. We go to the sites of evil where we imagine, we are moved, sometimes to tears, sometimes to anger and sometimes merely to bafflement. Our imaginations, by their very nature personal and ungeneralisable, allow us to put a frame around these terrible events. Years ago, I was told this story by an old friend. His wife was murdered by a madman, and he had to give the news to his little daughter. She said, “Was there a lot of blood, Daddy?” and then, putting her hand palm-down by the skirting board, asked, “Did it come up to here?” Without imagining the terrible act that she never saw, she couldn’t have contained the horror at all.
My grandparents, Morris Gross and Pauline Lichtblau, on their wedding day in March 1927
My father used to say that the worst day of his life was when his mother, Pauline Gross (born Paula Lichtblau), learned that nearly all of her immediate family in Hungary had been murdered in Auschwitz. It was several months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, in late 1945 or early 1946, when my father, Mark Grantham (born Marvin Gross), would have been 14. Pauline got a letter from her brother-in-law, Lájos Herman, a survivor of the camp, with the news that her mother, father, three sisters, two brothers, all of their respective husbands and wives except for Lájos and one other, and all of her siblings’ children, had been murdered. Sarolta, Malvine, Rosi, Béla, Géza, and maybe twenty or thirty others whose names I do not have – all gone. Lájos may not have known what happened to more distant members of Pauline’s family, including five cousins who were most likely alive, married and parents of children in those eight dark weeks of spring and early summer 1944, when 437,000 mainly rural Jews of Hungary were deported and mostly killed.
When Pauline told her sister, Sarah (born Szeréna), the news, she let out a scream. Pauline snapped at her, “What did you expect? You heard what was happening there.”[*] But after Sarah left, Pauline fell apart, weeping. She died a small number of years later, aged just 48. She was seriously ill and might have died anyway. But you can’t help wondering if her life force started to ebb away that terrible day in Brooklyn, New York, when Pauline, a working-class Jewish immigrant from rural Hungary, learned that her entire family back home had been murdered. Before the war broke out, she’d talked about taking my father and his elder brother Sidney to Hungary for a visit while they still were young enough to get children’s fares on the boat. By the end of the war, like so many deracinated émigrés scattered around the world, cut off from their families back home, she’d heard “what was happening there”. She knew, but the confirmation still broke her spirit.
Pauline and her husband Morris Gross (born Mórics Grosz) were from Szabolcs, a megye (county) in the far east of Hungary, much closer to the borders of Ukraine, Romania, and Slovakia than to the capital, Budapest. Pauline emigrated to the USA in November 1922, Morris in August 1923. They were born about 35 kilometres apart in Szabolcs, but don’t appear to have known each other until after they emigrated. There seem to have been connections in the USA among Hungarian Jews from Szabolcs and neighbouring counties and, presumably through these connections, they were introduced. They married in 1926 and had three children. My father was the middle child. Morris was one of the last of his immediate family to go to the USA, so he seems not to have known of many dead relatives left behind. On Pauline’s side, apart from two of her mother’s brothers, most remained in Hungary; accordingly, the blow of the murders of 1944 fell most intensely on her part of the family.
My parents, Mary McCormack and Mark Grantham, on their wedding day in February 1955
My father moved to Ireland in 1953, when he was 22, met my mother, Mary, and stayed. He was Jewish, through his parents, and the Gross household was fairly observant in a typical way for that time, keeping kosher but only attending synagogue on the major holy days. They were quite poor – according to the 1940 census, Morris only worked half of the time in the preceding year, but they owned separate plates for meat and milk dishes and another two sets for Passover. Before Mark left the USA, he had changed his name by deed poll, like a lot of Jews back then, and had abandoned his religion. But he didn’t deny his Jewish origins – he used to say to me that as long as there were anti-Semites in the world, he would declare himself to be Jewish. He always did, for instance when filling out Irish hospital forms that required religion to be identified. He married a Catholic, which was big news in Ireland in 1955 when the term “mixed marriage” functionally applied to trysts between different stripes of Christians: Catholics and Protestants. My mother, devout, did not feel permitted to take communion again until the day my father called a priest as she lay on her death bed – she felt cast out and ostracised by the Catholic Church. In the religious weirdness of the times, I was sent to a Protestant national school, which in Ireland was where non-Catholics, whether or not Protestant, tended to end up. The Protestant Ascendancy – an eighteenth-century phrase referring to the political, social and economic domination of Catholic Ireland by a fairly small number of English settlers and their descendants – was as alien to me as the temple. So, I was effectively cut off from both my Jewish and Catholic roots. Under Jewish law, I wasn’t recognized because my mother was a shiksa. And, for many, I was only equivocally Irish because I bore the mark, however improbably, of a Black Protestant – something a priest at Maynooth in the 1950s once called my father, although American, because he was a postgraduate student in that cabal of West Brits, Trinity College Dublin, which most Catholics were forbidden to attend by the church. I had some cultural affinities with Jews – I remember laughing out loud at the Beyond The Fringe sketch in which Jonathan Miller ironized, “I’m not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish. Not the whole hog, you know.” But even those associations were more with the New York Jews that my father grew up with, their conversations studded with Yiddish (a language eastern Hungarian Jews did not, in the main, speak, but which was common currency on the streets of Brooklyn). So, as a small boy in Killiney, I knew words like bubeleh, bubkes, chutzpah, goy, kibitz, kishke, kvetch, nudnik, pisher, shmuck, shmendrick, shlemiel, shlep, shlub, tuchas, yenta, and, naturally, shiksa. Of course, I only heard and sometimes used them in the home – where else would I speak to people who understood them? Because I stopped learning Irish after we moved to England when I was 10, I think that I probably know as many Yiddish words as Irish ones. But my connections to Jews were still attenuated, and to Judaism, even more so. At most, I always felt Jew-ish.
The wedding cake architecture of mitteleuropa
I decided to investigate the traces of the 1944 murders in 2021, when I was 64. I framed it in my mind as a two-week holiday with a couple of nightmarish side trips. I flew from Dublin to Vienna, then took trains to Bratislava, Budapest, Nyíregyháza (the main city in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg [SSB], the merged county that succeeded Szabolcs administratively), back to Budapest, Kraków and Prague, before taking the plane back home. I’ve always liked train journeys, and have taken them when I could, across Europe and in the USA. When I was young, I used to buy Thomas Cook European and international train timetables and imagine long journeys. I knew the main stations on the Trans-Siberian Railway – Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok … I also knew about the discontents of the railway, about how they changed the world, not always in a good way. I remember A.J.P. Taylor’s television lecture on how railway timetables drove military mobilisation before the outbreak of the First World War. And I often thought about the railways during the Holocaust, how, across Europe, railway workers, signalmen, drivers, stokers and others were co-opted by the military to load trains with human cargo and deliver them to the killing camps. There’s an empty freight car from Hungary in a siding at Auschwitz. How many were involved in getting it from its home to that dreadful place? What did they think about what they were doing?
I expected to spend much of the trip as a tourist, enjoying the wedding-cake architecture of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the castles, the cafés, the Danube – the whole panoply of mitteleuropäische pleasures. During the Indian summer of late October, you could still sit outside, have a melange or a kleiner brauner, and imagine what Vienna must have been like in the days of Freud or Trotsky, Klimt or Schiele, Schnitzler or Josef Roth, Schönberg or Strauss (to help get you in the mood, they play Schöne Blaue Donau over the public address system when you arrive at the Vienna Flughafen). The weather was so good that I spent most of the trip outdoors, walking all over these cities and largely avoiding the insides of museums and galleries. I did spend an evening at the Wiener Staatsoper, where my father told me he saw an extraordinary production of Fidelio in the 1970s, but generally, I walked around these lovely places, the embodiment, for me, of a certain type of Europe, one which I’d pined for during the 21 years in which I’d lived in the USA.
But the dark shadows of the past were everywhere. In Vienna, there was an installation commemorating the persecution of the city’s Jews after the Anschluss of 1938, and their deportation from 1942 onwards. In Bratislava, there was an outdoor exhibition of the city’s synagogue, demolished in the 1960s, when there were few surviving Jews to speak of. In Budapest, the city’s rather grand synagogue still stands on Dohány utca. In 1944, its surrounding area was transformed into a ghetto for, at its fullest extent, some 70,000 Jews under the supervision of Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann, in charge of Referat IV B4 of Heinrich Himmler’s Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office), whose quarters were a 15-minute walk away in the Majestic Hotel. IV B4 was responsible for Jewish affairs, including what were termed “evacuations”. There’s a museum in the synagogue complex, telling the history of the Budapest ghetto. While relatively few Budapest Jews were deported – “relatively few”, albeit many tens of thousands, in contrast to the vast numbers plucked from the countryside – very many among those herded into the ghetto died there of disease, starvation and the other myriad effects of determined persecution. Others died in slave labour battalions, in random executions, and on forced marches, particularly once the ultra-right-wing nationalist Nyilaskeresztes Párt (Arrow Cross Party) was installed by the Nazis as a puppet regime in October 1944.
I took the train from Budapest to Nyíregyháza, a trip of about three-and-a-half hours across the country. It’s the capital city of SSB, but quite small, with a population of less than 120,000, and in 1941, it was much smaller, around 54,000. In 1944, Eichmann’s bureaucrats efficiently divided the country outside Budapest into five zones, including ethnically-Hungarian parts of other countries absorbed, with German approval, as a result of opportunistically-pursued irredentist political claims. Szabolcs and Bereg were in Zone I, from which, combined with Zone II (which included Szatmár) some 289,357 Jews – the Nazis were determined record-keepers and counters of heads – were deported between 14 May and 7 June 1944, just 24 days. The Nazi zones were based on zones already created for Hungary’s paramilitary (and fascist) gendarmerie, who became enthusiastic partners in what they officially termed zsidólanitó (dejewification).
Hungary was the last country in the German orbit to participate in the systematic murder of its Jews, and its hesitant government of respectable anti-Semites – they’d identified, registered and persecuted Jews since 1938, but were too high-minded to follow the logic of their acts to the end – had to be overthrown to get the job done. The government of Hungary before the Germans intervened was Ruritanian. It was theoretically a kingdom, but after 1919, when it was separated from Austria, the victorious Allies would not allow it to name a king. So, rather than opting for a modern democracy, they appointed a kormányzó, or regent, who exercised many, but not all, of the powers of a king. The regent was named Miklós Horthy, who had the rank of Vice Admiral, but no actual navy, since Hungary became a landlocked country at the end of the First World War. He was a member of the minor aristocracy, and typical of ultra-conservative nationalists that dominated political leadership across Europe between the world wars. Horthy, like so many others, had contempt for the déclassé radical fascists that proliferated across the continent in those years, but succeeded only in enabling the greater excesses to which the fascists were inclined. Horthy did not have the regal power to create nobles, so he came up with his own thing, an order of knighthood called the Vitézi Rend. Members of the order, who were allowed to call themselves Vitez (Knight), included the mayor of Nyíregyháza from 1933 to 1944, Pál Sozhor. The present Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has been active in the rehabilitation of Horthy, whose antisemitism is overlooked in favour of his patriotism and love of Hungarians (or, at least, some Hungarians). Orbán’s political party, Fidesz, controlled 18 of the 25 seats in the SSB county assembly in 2019.
By 1944, Germany knew it would lose the war as the armies of the Soviet Union swept across eastern Europe. But impending defeat only increased the determination of Nazi zealots to kill every Jew they could manage, while they could. The previous year, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had addressed senior SS officers in Posen (now Poznan), Poland, and congratulated them on their work. “[I]t’s in our programme – elimination of the Jews, and we’re doing it, exterminating them.” And in the spirit of sticking to this undertaking, the Hungarian operation of 1944 was a model of Nazi logistics, thanks in large part to Eichmann’s meticulous preparation. In the countryside, peasants and smallholders, like the members of my grandmother’s family, were easily swept up by the Gestapo. Across hundreds of communities around the country, the wealthier Jews were first arrested, then ransomed. Because they were initially released, other Jews were convinced that the Nazis’ goals were not lethal. The Reform rabbi Hugo Gryn, an ethnic Hungarian deported in 1944 from Carpathia, explained the system: “When, in the weeks after the ransomings, the Gestapo said, ‘All Jews are to leave their homes, and assemble in brick factories and timber yards and no harm will come to you,’ it could be believed. Then all they had to say was, ‘And now you will be sent by train to help with the harvest’ …”
About 35 years earlier, I’d visited the original Nazi Konzentrationslager at Dachau. I took the train from Munich and walked four kilometres through pleasant suburbs to get to the camp, past nice men washing the family car or on ladders fixing the roofs of their homes. Dachau was not a killing centre, although more than 30,000 inmates died there, mainly of disease. Its easy proximity to the civilised world had always stayed with me, and I thought of this again in the sunny, pleasant city of Nyíregyháza, which housed no camp but which in 1944 herded its Jews into a ghetto before they were deported to Auschwitz. I stayed out of town in a resort hotel owned by the city’s zoo, surrounded by an oak forest. I could take a bus outside and be in the city in a few minutes.
I arrived in the afternoon on a bright Saturday, 23 October 2022, took the bus to town and wandered a little around the city. I took a photo of SBB’s grand administrative centre, the megyeháza (county hall), an impressive building completed in 1892 overlooking a pleasant public park, Hösök tere (Heroes’ Square), with a nice old empty tram parked decoratively nearby, nothing at all like the empty Hungarian freight car I would see displayed at Auschwitz in a few days’ time. I found the Orthodox synagogue, took some more pictures, and went back to eat at my hotel and sleep.
The Holocaust memorial at the site of the 1944 ghetto in Nyíregyháza
The next day, my guide, Nándor Csiky, picked me up from the hotel and we set out eastwards, towards the villages that my grandmother’s family lived in. When my father had visited Hungary in 1998, he hired a Hungarian-speaking guide to help him, and that gave me the idea. The local tourist office connected me to Nándor, who turned out to be the perfect choice. He was young and smart, a university teacher, researcher and former journalist with a taste for obscure English rock bands like Uriah Heep (which I had seen in London when I was 15). His English was excellent, although it was his third language, after Hungarian and German. He also knew the region intimately. Everything I achieved on this part of the trip was down to him.
The roads we took out of Nyíregyháza towards lead to Ukraine, about 70 kilometres away as the crow flies. (By contrast, the capital, Budapest, is about 240 km from the town.) In 1998, when my father visited, he saw prostitutes plying for business along the main road from Debrecen, 50 km to the south. In 2021, the main roads that I saw were new and modern, typical of the benefits of joining the European Union, to which Hungary acceded in 2004. Infrastructural development is a big deal in the EU and among national politicians. People like roads, and they like the jobs that are created building them. Contractors get the benefit of the work. And goods speed along the roads to other places. The same thing happened previously in Ireland. The landscape is flat, uneventful and agricultural, reminiscent (to me) of the Irish midlands. Small villages are specks on the map. They generally had small populations in 1944, and they are, if anything, smaller today. People who spoke to us said that the young people had all gone to the cities, or abroad. We stopped in a village bar to use the toilets, and I noticed that a half-litre of draught beer cost about a tenth of what you’d pay for a pint in the Irish countryside – it was sold for what the local market could bear. We bought a couple of drinks to pay for our stop.
Remnants of the Jewish graveyard in Levelek
My father visited Levelek in 1998. His mother may have come from there, or from the nearby village of Magy, where her parents apparently had their home. The available records are inconsistent; possibly, Magy was an administrative subsidiary of Levelek. We went to both places. In Levelek, I saw the sparse remnants of the village’s Jewish cemetery, hidden by brush and bracken on the land owned in 1998 by a farmer, Miklós Vargas. It was still overgrown, but people in the adjacent Christian cemetery, being tended by relatives on a Sunday, knew where it was and directed us to it. I took some photographs of the graves, but the Hebrew inscriptions were difficult to make out.
One thing to know about villages like Levelek is that, even before the 1944 murders, there were very few Jews there. In April 1944, a month before the deportations began, there were just 91 Jews out of a population of about 2,100. How do we know how many Jews lived in this tiny, unimportant village, and why did it matter to anyone? Because the German and Hungarian authorities ordered the Jewish congregation to self-identify and they duly complied, forwarding the names to Eichmann’s data crunchers and their Hungarian collaborators.
I don’t know how religious my grandmother’s family was, but given that my grandparents were conventionally observant, I’d imagine her family was as well. So, for instance, on the night before Pesach (Passover), they’d have cleansed their homes of most foodstuffs containing chametz, natural leavening agents such as yeast. (They were allowed to keep wine, which is required in the Passover Seder (dinner)). On the nights of Passover, the family would follow the traditional form of Seder service, taken from the Haggadah, and eat prescribed foods, including lamb, matzo (unleavened bread), wine and maror (bitter herbs), marking the bitterness of the enslavement of the Jewish people in Egypt, which, if it happened at all, took place several hundred years before the Christian Era. In 1944, Pesach ended on 15 April. The next day, all the Jews of the village, except for one decorated war veteran and his family, were rounded up. Six men survived slave labour brigades and three women and one man returned from killing centres. By 1960, just one Jew lived in Levelek.
Their ultimate destination – the Auschwitz camp – is clear. How they came to go there is a little less so. I have two sources giving different outcomes, each written by or edited by the great Hungarian historian of the Holocaust, Randolph Braham, In one place, he says that the Jews of Levelek were first taken to Kisvárda, the third-biggest town in Szabolcs. In another place, Braham writes that they were taken to Nyíregyháza. Both towns created ghettos for Jews in the spring of 1944, from which they were quite swiftly deported, so in one sense it doesn’t much matter where they were first sent. It’s also possible that some Jews were sent to Kisvárda and others to Nyíregyháza. Braham also says that the Jews of nearby Magy, of which there were 31 in 1941, were sent to Kisvárda at the same time. Wherever they went, it was the beginning of the end for most of them. My father recorded that three of his mother’s sisters, and two brothers, together with spouses and children, all died following the round-up. Two survived.
The round-ups were conducted by regional police and gendarmerie (Hungarians), supervised by the German Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi intelligence agency. On 10 April in Kisvárda, the town’s chief notary instructed the president of the Jewish congregation to provide four copies of a list of all Jews. The list, provided on 15 April, the last day of Pesach, comprised 3,494 names and formed the basis of the round-up which started the next day, the 16th. You can find the names of the streets that formed the improvised ghetto on a map of the town – Deák Ferenc, Petöfi, Horthy Miklós, Bessenyey, Mátyás Király, Szent László … On 24 April, the zealous chief notary requested “sufficient Jewish asset declaration forms” for 1,750 heads of family and independent wage earners from the national directorate of finance’s office in Nyíregyháza. The ghetto grew as the round-ups continued; by 11 May, it was officially reported that 6,932 Jews were interned. Previously exempt Jews were rounded up and placed in the ghetto. Conditions were deplorable, with inadequate food and sanitation. Hungarian gendarmes would torture people they suspected of concealing valuables. On 27 May, the inmates were subjected to an SS attack with dogs. And on 29 May, just over six weeks after the ghetto was created, Jews were forcibly marched from the makeshift camp to a timber yard that had its own railway line. A freight train was already waiting there. Some 40 armed Hungarian gendarmes loaded about 3,500 Jews into freight carriages and the train departed. More Jews were brought to the yard from the ghetto to “clean up”. They had originally been told that the train would be sent to Hortobágy, about 120 km to the southwest. But they discovered instead it was going to Csap (Chop), 30 km in the opposite direction. This was part of Hungary, although questionably so, as it had been seized as part of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 (it’s now in Ukraine). For the Jews of the Kisvárda ghetto, it was on the way out of the country. Some who heard of the destination killed themselves. On May 30, another 3,475 Jews were sent northeast towards Kassa (now Košice in Slovakia), where a railway signalman logged the carriages as they went through, and three days later, another 3,421 arrived. At Kassa, the obliging Hungarian gendarmes departed, and the trains continued another 250 km northwest to Auschwitz. Although some survivors returned after the war to Kisvárda, by 2001, there were just 11 Jews in the town.
There was a similar story in Nyíregyháza. On 5 April, the mayor, Pál Szohor, described by Braham as “fiercely antisemitic” and ennobled as a Vitez by Admiral Horthy, ordered all Jews to wear the yellow star. On 11 April, the mayor ordered the city’s Jewish leadership to compile a list of all Jews. On 15 April, the two congregations came up with incomplete and inaccurate lists that nevertheless had 4,753 names on them. The Jews in the surrounding villages were rounded up the next day at 5:00 am and given 15 minutes to pack some food and clothing. By the end of the first day, there were 3,010 Jews in the new Nyíregyháza ghetto. The Jews of the city proper were rounded up by mayoral decree on 28 April. The police chief asked the mayor for “female investigators, preferably midwives” to be used in intimate searches of women and girls for so-called hidden valuables. Torture and beatings were routinely used by gendarmes and others in the search for these “valuables”. The ghetto became so crowded that from 5 May on, some inmates were moved to nearby “entrainment” centres at Simapuszta, 10 km to the southwest of the city, and Nyírjes, 8 km to the southeast. Conditions were even worse than in the ghetto, although 2,826 Jews were kindly deloused at Simapuszta, according to the chief medical officer. Later, more Jews were taken to Harangod, about 14 km to the southeast of the city.
On 14 May the deportations began, first from Nyírjes, then, on 20 May from Harangod and Simapuszta. Jews were abused physically by and with insults from the Hungarian gendarmerie. Their water buckets were not refilled until they reached Kosice, and the gendarmes would not allow them to throw their dead from the train. The slow trip to death at Auschwitz took three days. More deportations took place on 22, 24 and 26 May and 4 June.
At the end of the war, the mayor, Pál Szohor, escaped to the west and ended up in Canada under the name Pál Nyíregyházy. He was convicted of various crimes in his absence but did not have to face justice himself. He died in Toronto in 1973.
The barge across the River Szamos to Olcsvaapáti
If my grandfather left family behind in Hungary, we don’t know very much about them. Many of his surviving siblings had already emigrated to the USA before he arrived in New York in 1923. He was born in Olcsvaapáti, which is only about 60 km from Nyíregyháza but which to this day is largely cut off from its surrounding communities because the easiest way of reaching it involves using a ferry that my father described as “a crude barge drawn by a motorised pulley.” It is possible to reach Olcsvaapáti by road alone, but it’s the long way around, adding 30 km to the trip. Even in 1941, there were very few Jews in Olcsvaapáti, just nine out of a population of 923. Móricz Grósz / Morris Gross was a tailor as was his uncle Dávid and several relatives. But Morris’ father was less successful - a small farmer - something that my grandmother, a blacksmith’s daughter, would use against him when they argued, according to my father. He was sent away to learn his trade in Dickensian conditions, leaving home at the age of nine and sleeping on straw under the bench. He was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War and was told that he would be eaten by the Russians if taken prisoner. He was wounded and taken prisoner, but not eaten. When the Russian Revolution broke out, the prisoner of war camp was unlocked and he was told to walk home, which he did, to Olcsvaapáti.
There was no trace of the Grósz family in Olcsvaapáti when I visited. But a kind woman in the local village office directed us to Kérsemjén, a village about 8 km to the southeast, along the River Szamos. There, in another immaculately-tended Christian graveyard, we found an equally well-kept Jewish corner with half a dozen stones carved with Hebrew inscriptions and one in Hungarian, to Frank Jenq, Helen Berger and their infant granddaughter Judit Grósz, who was described as having been “murdered by the Germans” in 1942. The stone must have been erected after the war, and the fact that it was in Hungarian suggests that Frank and Helen may not themselves have been Jewish. But their daughter must have married a man named Grósz, who was probably Jewish, given that the stone is in the Jewish section of the cemetery. It’s a quite common surname in Hungary and he may not have been related at all to Móricz. It’s also odd that the little girl is said to be “murdered by the Germans” in 1942, two years before the Holocaust. But crimes against Jews were essentially unsanctioned, so it’s possible. The pro-German Hungarian militia, intensely fascist and given to excessive violence, might also have been responsible and simply lumped in with the Nazis. For now, it’s a mystery, to me at least. Perhaps it’ll be solved one day.
The grave of Judit Grósz in Kérsemjén
The next day, I took the train back to Budapest and on Tuesday made the nine-hour journey by train to Kraków in Poland. There were three sisters in my compartment, looking forward to their city break, which was going to include the famous Wieliczka salt mine, the Old Town … and Auschwitz. The camp is a big tourist destination, attracting more than two million visitors a year. And it’s where more than one million people died, including many members of my family. It is a monument to a kind of bureaucratic insanity, whereby all the elements of the modern state, whether administrative, political or industrial, were harnessed to its evil goal. The murders of the Holocaust were plainly illegal, even under the tainted laws of war and of the Third Reich, but its architects regarded themselves as law-abiding. In December 1942, two meetings were held as part of the planning of the killing centre at Auschwitz. They were attended by nine senior representatives of various agencies, including the Finance Ministry, Interior Ministry, the Main Office Administration and Economy, and the Main Trusteeship Office, East, responsible for confiscating and liquidating Polish and Jewish businesses. In order to build the extermination camp, they needed to make sure that all property involved was legally transferred to the Reich, including private Polish property, property belonging to the former Polish state, municipal property, ecclesiastical property and property belonging to Germans. This turned out to be a complicated business, even after these multiple agencies transferred their competence to a unitary Land Office of the Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom (supervised by Himmler himself). Six months later, the work had not been completed, so in the end the niceties were overridden and an administrative decree issued to complete the work.
There are two principal sections at the Auschwitz camp – the original, which was a former Polish army barracks, and Birkenau, 3 km away, constructed when Auschwitz was unable to handle the volume of people to kill. (Other parts of the camp included slave labour facilities.) We arrived first at Auschwitz. The car park, not part of the official museum, had a cheery gift shop selling fridge magnets and “Souvenirs of Poland”. Fortunately, inside the gates, there was seriousness and solemnity. You pass under the leering sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” – a replica apparently, following the theft of the original by Swedish and Polish neo-Nazis – and into the heart of darkness. There were no surprises here, given years of exposure to the dreadful fixtures of the museum, but the relics of infamy overwhelmed me. Room-long glass cabinets of hair, of suitcases, of pots and pans, of shoes. You wondered about the prudent deportees who thought they’d need to be able to cook when they arrived. Or the women who wanted to look nice in their high heels. Or the optimistic painting of addresses onto bags so they wouldn’t be separated for long from their owners. And of the shearing of heads like sheep before the hair was stuffed into mattresses to be sent to Germany. The Russians found seven tonnes of unused hair when they liberated the camp in 1945.
The Hungarian freight car at Auschwitz
I stood in a gas chamber. Quite a small one compared with the ones at Birkenau in which my relatives perished, but effective for its purpose. I went next door to the crematorium with its ovens. I was able to walk there, unlike the heaped corpses scooped up by enslaved Jewish members of the Sonderkommando (Special Command Unit) and dragged in for incineration. In the bigger, newer camp at Birkenau, each gas chamber was known as a Leichenkeller (a mortuary or, more literally, a corpse cellar), which could hold up to 2,000 bodies of people who began their industrialised murders, stripped naked, in an adjacent room, the Badeanstalt (bath house). Zyklon B gas, the commercial name for hydrogen cyanide, an industrial fumigant and pest control chemical, was used – pellets from cans liquefied on contact with the air. They were poured down chutes into the gas chambers to do their work. (“Zyklon” means “cyclone”, with its connotations of a natural, cleansing wind; the letter “B” refers to the strength, which could go up to “F”. You didn’t need the hard stuff to murder people. Cockroaches needed Zyklon E.)
Our tour guide from the Auschwitz Museum was an impressive woman, Polish I think, who led us through the horrors dispassionately but with due seriousness. We were told when not to take photos – of the hair, for instance – out of consideration for the dead victims. She guided us through the various categories of the fallen, with their different-coloured insignias – Jews, of course, but also gays, Roma, Poles, other political prisoners. And she would not stand for any bad conduct. At one point she stopped our group and stalked over to a place where a young man with a baby in a papoose was clowning behind barbed wire for his wife’s camera. “Stop that this instant!” she shouted. “Show some respect!” She told me that she led the tour two or three times a week. I said that I’d have to drink a lot of whiskey to manage that.
I took the bus over to Birkenau, where there was no tour, just the chance to roam freely. Auschwitz had been a barracks originally, so there was some military order to it separate from the use to which it had been put. Birkenau’s principal purpose was as a killing centre, although it had a secondary function: compelling the labour of the small number of people not selected for death, as slave labourers, members of the Sonderkommando, subjects of medical experiments, and the like. The first thing you see is the long railway line to what once were gas chambers. You’ve seen it in every film and television account of Auschwitz, but the fact that you know what it is doesn’t make it any better. The reason the railway line is long was to accommodate long trains with many freight cars. At other camps, the existing railway tracks couldn’t fit long trains, so they had to be stopped, carriages decoupled and moved onto sidings – very inefficient. At Birkenau they eliminated that problem The trains arrived, the occupants of the cars spewed onto an adjacent ramp – apart from the already-dead, who were dealt with by the Sonderkommando. The freight cars were then fumigated. Back on the ramp, the selection took place. Guards on the platform with sticks and guns. Some people were selected for death immediately – old people, children, mothers of the children … The remainder were placed in a line, at the head of which uniformed officers, would make instant decisions – turn left for the gas chambers, right for another assignment. Sometimes, the officers included the evil vivisectionist Dr. Josef Mengele, seeking subjects for his medical research. By 1944, when my relatives arrived, it had been learned by Nazi administrators that a measure of politeness helped to oil the machinery of murder. Those who had been selected for death were told to come this way for a shower. They undressed and were asked to put their clothes on hooks with numbers, so they could find them afterwards. They were then given soap and a towel and led into the Badeanstalt.
Birkenau
I don’t know how long it took them to work out what was happening. They certainly worked it out, because people started to scream, panicked and clamoured desperately for the unpoisoned air near the ceiling of the gas chamber. Naked people climbed over other, weaker naked people for a few extra seconds of clean air to breathe. When the doors of the gas chamber were eventually opened, apart from the predictable vomit, urine and excrement, there was usually a pyramid of human flesh, a vile parody of a monument. I wonder what those who made it to the top felt in those final seconds? What those trampled at the bottom felt? It took about two minutes for the screaming to die down, although they needed another 15 minutes to be sure that everybody was properly dead. The corpses were pink, with green spots. To be on the safe side, the bodies were searched for valuables and from 1943 in at least one of the crematoria, gold from teeth was cleaned with hydrochloric acid to be turned into ingots in the main camp. The hair was cut off and washed in ammonium chloride before being packed for its end users. Disposing of the bodies was a challenge because it took longer to burn the victims than to kill them. A zealous NCO named Otto Moll (later executed) came up with the answer. He got inmates to dig several deep pits six metres long, two deep and two-and-a-half wide. Bodies were thrown into the pits and, once the proper level of decomposition had been achieved, slaves with buckets scooped out the human fat, which was poured into the incinerators to make them burn hotter. Even then, Moll’s solution was sometimes inadequate to the requirements of the system and the pits burst open, as in August 1944 when the rate of disposal reached 20,000 a day.
Maybe one million people died at Auschwitz. Of course, we don’t know at all how the members of my family died. Some of them might have succumbed to dysentery, typhus or malnutrition, or been beaten to death, or shot. A tiny number survived all of this, through the good fortune of dodging the selection and then surviving the vicious conditions of the camp. One relative, Alice Kornreich (married to a cousin), was in a gas chamber that malfunctioned; she was taken out and never returned to it. According to Raul Hilberg, Crematorium III at Birkenau was subject to “repeated malfunctions”, so she may just have had the dumbest of luck. She lived to a good age. Estimates of the numbers of Jews killed in the camps and by other methods of extermination (shooting, gas truck, etc.) are usually pegged at six million. Raul Hilberg calculated the number at 5.1 million, which chillingly matches Eichmann’s boastful estimation: he said in testimony at his trial (as translated by Hilberg) that the feeling of having killed five million enemies of the state had given him so much satisfaction that he would jump laughingly into the grave.
I visited Hungary and Auschwitz, both for the first time, in October 2021. I’m writing this July 2022, and only because I took myself away for three days to finish it. When I was a newspaper reporter, I was told that a good journalist could crank out around one thousand words per hour. On that basis, this represents about a day’s work. But this has been very hard to write, and I think it’s because, rather to my surprise, the experience, particularly of Auschwitz, changed me permanently. The day after visiting the camp, I went to the Jewish museum in Kraków, situated in a pleasant, funky-bohemian quarter of the city. I took a set of earphones to hear the commentary on one of the exhibits, an account by a survivor. I couldn’t bear to listen for more than a minute. I returned the earphones, and the nice woman at the desk asked why I hadn’t stayed longer. I managed to say, “I’m sorry, I was at Auschwitz yesterday and I can’t,” before starting to cry. I’ve been crying a lot for the past few months, as if a layer of my soul has been peeled off. The crying is not directly connected to my experiences – for instance, I tear up at manipulative scenes in TV drama, where a child dies, or the doctors lose a patient. A psychiatrist friend says that this response to things is sometimes an index of depression. But I don’t feel depressed (and that’s something I know a little about). I feel instead that my senses of sympathy and empathy have been cranked up. I didn’t know any of these dead people. I only have my father’s second-hand accounts to go by, as well as my own inquiries. I think of a self-deprecating joke about being emotional that my late (Jewish) father-in-law used to make: “I cry at card tricks.” I haven’t reached that stage, yet, but I’ve edged closer to it. And I think of the beautiful cities that I visited on my trip to mitteleuropa –Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Kraków, Prague – the best and the worst of humanity in the same places. I don’t think I’ve found any answers to the monstrosities and cruelties of this world and have certainly not achieved that improbable Nirvana of “closure”. But I do feel that I’ve connected more to my late father, and to his mother who I didn’t know, and to those unknown family members who minded their own business and didn’t bother anybody and who suddenly became a target for violent fanatics who formed movements to give false meanings to themselves by taking away the lives of others, who created monstrous administrative and industrial machines to do it and who, in the end, left precisely nothing behind, except for their progeny, who could do the same thing all over again. Their worthlessness exceeded only by their absurd self-regard. That’s something that I took from these unspeakably evil places.
A note on sources:
My father, Mark Grantham, visited Hungary in 1998, engaged a Hungarian translator/researcher, and did a huge amount of research into the family history. He also interviewed living family members for their recollections and documents. He preserved much essential and elusive material for later generations. When I visited in 2021, I followed Dad’s example and engaged a superb Hungarian researcher and translator, Nándor Csiky, who I discuss in greater detail in the main body of the essay. There is more work that I would like to do in public records, including the Austro-Hungarian military archives, but that lies in the future. In terms of other people’s research, I have relied on the extraordinary, voluminous work of two great Jewish academics, transplanted from the old Austro-Hungarian empire to the United States of America. Raul Hilberg (1926-2007), an Austrian with Polish forebears, wrote The Destruction of the European Jews (revised ed., 3 vols., New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), nearly 1300 pages of meticulously-detailed research into the entire Holocaust. Although Hilberg covers the field with extraordinary thoroughness, Martin Gilbert’s substantial single volume The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1985) was also helpful. Randolph L. Braham (1922-2018) was born in Bucharest and raised in Hungarian-speaking Transylvania. He survived the Second World War having been sent to a slave labour battalion before escaping. His monograph The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (3rd ed., 2 vols., Boulder: Eastern European Monographs, 2016) and edited work The Geographical Dictionary of the Holocaust in Hungary (3 vols., Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), provide an extraordinary amount of detail, even providing information on the little villages from which my family came. David Cesarini (ed.) Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary 1944 (Oxford: Berg, 1997) brings together a number of important researchers in short, summary essays. On Auschwitz, I relied principally on the 120 or so pages in Vol. 3 of Hilberg on the “killing centres”, or extermination camps, but also on Sybille Steinbacher’s brief but excellent survey Auschwitz: A History, translated by Shaun Whiteside (Penguin Books, 2005). I admit to having always shied away from first-hand accounts of the Holocaust, which I usually found too painful to pick up. Thus, I own translated copies of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man, The Truce, and The Periodic Table, but have never read them. The same for Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, although I did see the 1959 film adaptation on television when I was a child. My copy of Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life similarly sits on my shelf, unread. Since returning from my visit to the camp, I have been dipping into Tadeusz Borowski’s Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories, translated by Madeline G. Levine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), which I find very hard going, while admiring its writing. When I lived in France in the 1980s, I read Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews (Oxford, 1981), which was the first work to make me think seriously about the vast, pan-continental machine that constituted the Holocaust. Of many other meditations on those terrible years, I’ve appreciated in particular Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1991), Janina Bauman’s Beyond These Walls (2009), Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (2011) and Philippe Sands’ East West Street (2016). And there are several documentary or quasi-documentary films that I’ve much admired: Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (1956), Marcel Ophuls’ Le chagrin et la pitié (1971), Heinz Schirk’s Die Wannseekonferenz (1984), Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), and Louis Lentin’s Grandpa Speak to Me in Russian (2007). Finally, I’ve appreciated many long conversations with my friend and neighbour Alison Deegan, a shiksa who has written a fine film screenplay about Irish Jews and their unexpected connections to the Holocaust. I finished this in July 2022, during a short stay at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annamaghkerig, Co. Monaghan.
[*] This part of the story comes from my late father’s unpublished memoir of his mother. He did extraordinary work in the early 1990s to find and preserve otherwise-forgotten accounts of his dead Hungarian family.
There is nothing much to say - we go, we look, we cry.
I stand beside you, dear Bill, as a friend.
A very powerful account of your family history.