In the small hours of December 7 in 1944 a German train stopped at the Swiss border station of St Margrethen near Lake Constance. It contained 1,368 Hungarian Jewish men, women and children, who had just spent five months in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as captives of the Nazis. One of them was the famous writer Béla Zsolt. I, aged 11, was another. As I gazed at the lights of Switzerland set against blacked-out Germany, I could not have dreamt that more than half a century later I would become the English translator of Zsolt’s
Nine Suitcases, one of the earliest and greatest Holocaust memoirs, to be published for the first time in English this month.
I doubt that Zsolt ever noticed me in Bergen-Belsen, but I still remember him holding forth outside the huts, with his sallow face, his black hair parted in the middle and his air of distinction that even a child could sense. I remember him whispering across the barbed wire to the Wehrmacht sentry who slipped him pages of the Völkischer Beobachter, from which, despite the Nazi lies, he was able to keep us informed of the Allies’ progress since the invasion of Normandy. I remember my father saying that if we ever got back to Hungary, Zsolt would be prime minister — which was less far-fetched than it might have seemed. And I remember Zsolt smoking. Cigarettes, perhaps sent by the Red Cross, were the most wanted currency — three bought a medium-sized onion, twenty a loaf of bread. Zsolt sold practically all his food for cigarettes, although he couldn’t have obtained anything like the sixty a day he used to smoke at home.
We were a privileged group in the camp. Our families remained together. We wore our own clothes and were not forced to work. We had to stand in the open every day for hours, with machineguns pointing at us from the watchtowers, while SS bullies counted us like cattle, but we were rarely physically abused. People were endlessly talking politics, praying, quarrelling or coming to blows out of nervous tension. There were performances of topical satires by the writers, actors and singers among us.
Occasionally British or American bombers passed on their way to German cities, and I liked watching the distant flashes at night or collecting the anti-radar foil raining down by day. I remember being hungry and cold, having bouts of anxiety or boredom, and longing to be somewhere else, but I didn’t understand enough to be constantly terrified. As the utmost horrors of Bergen-Belsen did not begin till after our departure, life was relatively bearable — at least for us. The reason was that we were a valuable commodity.
The Germans had occupied their ally Hungary on March 19, 1944, and immediately started deporting the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann. Eventually 465,000 out of a total Jewish population of 725,000 died. Soon after the occupation a Jewish committee led by the journalist Rezso Kasztner initiated negotiations with Eichmann, who demanded 10,000 Western trucks in exchange for the lives of a million Jews still surviving in Europe. Neither party could have regarded this as realistic, but Eichmann and his SS colleagues — possibly with Heinrich Himmler’s approval — may have been hoping to open a door to a separate peace with Britain and America, while Kasztner’s committee was playing for time to keep as many Jews alive as possible until the collapse of the Third Reich.
The deal failed, but Kasztner managed to rescue the 1,368 of us and 318 others, before returning to Budapest to save more. He paid a ransom of $1,000 per head, supplied mainly by American and Swiss Jewish organisations.
After the war Kasztner settled in Israel. In 1955 he brought a libel suit after being accused of collaborating with the Nazis, but the judgment went largely against him. In 1957 he was shot dead by a Jewish gang in Tel Aviv. Ten months later he was posthumously rehabilitated by the Jerusalem Supreme Court.
Béla Zsolt was born in Komárom in 1895, on January 8. From 1914 he served on the Russian front in the Austro-Hungarian army, till he was gravely wounded in 1918. From 1920 he lived in Budapest as one of Hungary’s best known men of letters. By 1943 he had produced 11 novels, four plays and a large amount of political and literary journalism. He spent much of his time in coffee houses, writing, arguing, smoking, drinking brandy and ruining his health.
Politically, he had little sympathy for the far Left, but even less for the conservative establishment that had ruled Hungary since the defeat of the 1918 and 1919 revolutions. He also detested the rising movement of folksy populists who loathed urban civilisation and extolled the supposed strength and purity of the Magyar race rooted in the Hungarian countryside. These followers of a Hungarian equivalent of the Nazi cult of “blood and soil” vilified him as a decadent, bourgeois and — above all — Jewish enemy of the Hungarian nation. Ironically, his own social criticism was often aimed at the Hungarian bourgeoisie, and in particular the Jews among them.
In 1942 he became a forced labourer in the Hungarian army attacking the Ukraine, and thanks to his fame received exceptionally brutal treatment from the Hungarian guards. In late 1943 his friends succeeded in bringing him back to Budapest, but he was promptly imprisoned for “incitement” and “scare-mongering”. In May 1944 he was “ghettoised” in Nagyvárad (today Oradea, Romania), where he had been recovering at the home of his parents-in-law.
Together with his wife he escaped to Budapest and joined the “Kasztner group” — in much the same way as my father escaped with me from the ghetto of Kolozsvár (today Cluj).
After Bergen-Belsen and a brief spell in Switzerland, Zsolt returned to Budapest in June 1945. He took a leading part in the creation of the Hungarian Radical Party and founded the weekly Haladás (Progress), with himself as editor-in-chief and main contributor. His prime target was the continuing influence of former fascists and the persistence of anti-Semitism in communist Hungary. In 1947 he was elected to parliament, but after a few months’ illness died on February 6, 1949. His wife had committed suicide in 1948, having published the diary of her daughter from her first marriage, who had been killed in Auschwitz.
Nine Suitcases was originally serialised in Haladás in 1946-47. Publication in book form was announced for autumn 1947 but did not materialise. With the regime still frowning on any public discussion of the fate of the Jews, it was not until 1980 that the volume finally appeared in Hungarian. The first edition in any other language came out in Germany in 1999.
I stayed in Switzerland until 1963, when I moved to the University of Sussex to teach German. My father often mentioned Nine Suitcases, but I had not thought much about it until reviews of the German edition reawakened my memories of Zsolt. With some difficulty, I obtained the out-of-print Hungarian volume and located Zsolt’s surviving relatives in Budapest. The result is the English translation.
When Zsolt first published Nine Suitcases there was hardly any “Holocaust literature”. Today we are inundated by books, films, articles and debates on the subject but Zsolt’s book remains unique. It offers rare insights into Hungarian fascism and more generally into the very depths of depravity of which people — the victims no less than the perpetrators — are capable in extreme, man-made, circumstances. It is a nightmare, punctuated by grotesque farce, ironic observations and precious glimpses of human kindness.
It contains some minor inaccuracies, some dialogues that Zsolt could hardly have memorised in those exact words, and some episodes that he may have deliberately structured so as to underline their symbolic significance. But for all the brilliantly imaginative writing, the crucial facts are authentic. Zsolt was spared Auschwitz itself, but he witnessed, or suffered, some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust, and he was only too aware of its wider social and psychological origins.
His account is both the work of a remarkable artist and an extraordinary historical document.
Zsolt tells us chiefly about his experiences in the forced-labour unit in the Ukraine and in the ghetto of Nagyvárad, but not about Bergen-Belsen. I hope my own childhood memories will at least have given a faint impression of what happened to him after the events he evokes so powerfully in Nine Suitcases.
Nine Suitcases by Béla Zsolt, translated by Ladislaus Löb (Jonathan Cape, £17.99; offer, £14.39, p&p £2.25)
