Tamás Blum

Itinerary

 

[...]

1944-45, Bergen-Belsen, Switzerland, with Mother

We set off from Rákosrendezô goods yard on 30 June 1944. We arrived back in Budapest more than a year later, at the beginning of August 1945.
Scholarly papers, even a whole book, have been written about that trip, the journey of the so-called Kastner group. But even though this concerns Hungarians, the book was published in Canada, or so I have heard.
Some rich Kolozsvár [Cluj, Romania] Jews, most of them Zionists, bribed Eichmann to get them and their families out of the war. Roughly 600 people were supposed to be transported to the port of Barcelona. Those selected assembled in Budapest, at yellow-star houses (designated for Jews). Our friends, the Kolbs, were among those who paid to be included. Since what was meant by a family was not precisely defined, they managed, at considerable financial sacrifice to themselves, to get Mother and me added to the list. A similar thought occurred to others too, so as a result, instead of 600, 1,609 reported as voluntary deportees at the assembly point on Kolumbusz Street. At Rákosrendezô goods yard we were loaded onto freight wagons and then set off. The first stop was Ács, outside Komárom. Here the rumour spread that we were being taken to Auschwitz rather than Barcelona (we understood the place to be Auspitz; no one had ever heard of an Auschwitz). That turned out to be scaremongering, but what it did mean was that even more had to be paid for the extra people. My information about the financial shenanigans is completely unreliable; they did not tell a seventeen-year-old much.
We travelled for a week, but northwards, not southwards. The whole lot of us were held in pawn, as it were, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was as big as a large town. After six weeks, 600 were picked out at random-the original number, in other words-and taken away to Switzerland-as we learned later. The remaining thousand, ourselves included, followed six months later, first to a barracks at St Gallen, then from there to the Hotel Esplanade at Caux-sur- Montreux, which had a splendid view over Lake Geneva. I was granted a special dispensation to attend the Lausanne Conservatory (formally, here too we were interned). Later on I was moved, along with a violinist by the name of Morpurgo and a cellist by the name of Basevi, both Italian army deserters, to the nearby village of Blonay, and we used to go visiting the homes of various refugees to play piano trios. Of course, life was far from rosy even for refugees in Switzerland until it became clear that the Germans were going to lose the war. But then that too is something about which books have been written.
Mother developed cancer of the pancreas, which she found out when she took the report from my pocket. Zoltán, Mother's younger brother, who was lying low in Buda using forged papers, somehow managed at the height of the Russian siege (27 December 1944) to get a telegram sent to me at Caux-sur-Montreux, because he learned from a BBC broadcast that our group had arrived there. I still have the telegram to this day, and I'm taking it out of the box now so as to get it right: All well, Borcsa in Crimea. Borcsa was the third of them. She had been carried off from Balassagyarmat and was no longer alive by then; she too fetched up in Bergen-Belsen, though not as a member of our privileged group, of course. Anikó (I shall write about her later on), who was with her there and later on became the wife of the proprietor of Switzerland's most exclusive hotel (she still is), told me that they knew about our group. Borcsa suspected that we might be among them and tried to get a message to us by concealing it in the backside of the horse that drew the refuse cart, but we didn't receive it.
So Uncle Zoltán's telegram was not true but it still prompted my dying mother, eight months later, to make the return trip to Budapest. There were six Red Cross motor coaches to take 180 returnees from a devastated Germany via a by-andlarge shattered Austria. (The other members of the group have since become scattered around the world.) [...]
All I will say further about the other stops on that long journey is that we halted for a long time at Ács, in the county of Komárom. We were allowed to alight from the wagons to relieve ourselves in the fields. We still had provisions, and I gave the German guard some cherries. We must have been about the same age; he was called Fritz, and I was ashamed of finding him highly likeable.
In Linz we were all made to bathe together, men and women, in a communal shower. There were two dogs pacing between us. There were canisters of Zyklon B lying in front of the facility, but we didn't know what they were for.
The train passed through Göttingen. It was the fifth day that we had been in the cattle wagons. In the morning civilians were sent packing from the station so they would not see the yellow-star bunch-which meant we could go to the station's rest rooms to clean ourselves up. As it was safe to assume that none of us would wish to escape, they didn't bother too much with keeping an eye on us. As a result, I was able to stroll out of the entrance to the station and buy a copy of the Völkischer Beobachter from a newspaper vendor as I still had on me some German coins from Budapest. As well as my shirt I had taken off the star so as not to give the vendor anything to wonder about. July 6, 1944 was a hot day anyway.
It was a similar story on 5 December at Nuremberg, on the way from Bergen- Belsen to Switzerland. The difference then was that the Germans had us travelling in first-class carriages and gave us white bread with butter and tins of ham, and by way of parting charged us to tell the Swiss, for the good of the half million people still left in captivity, that we had been well treated. That struck me as being somewhat irrational when the Swiss medical orderly, just two days later, recorded me as weighing only 42 kilos. The torn summer clothes that I was still wearing in December would also hardly have persuaded anyone that I had been treated particularly well. [...]
In the evening we arrived at Lindau, near the Swiss border. One last session was held there with Eichmann's people. The train stood there for hours, with us not knowing if we were going to be taken back or not. At one point the train, all of a sudden, started rolling backwards. Several people tried to jump off, and some people fainted. But then twenty minutes later we found ourselves in Switzerland after all. (When I went by train once from Munich to Zurich, 35 years later, and we again left Lindau moving backwards, I saw that the line didn't run any further because Lake Constance was in the way, so the train could only set off in reverse.) The trip from Switzerland back to Budapest on the six coaches took 12 days (6-18 August). At Dornbirn we wanted to give a number of begging Austrian children some Swiss biscuits, but a Zouave (this was in the French sector) drove them away by brandishing his rifle. We took a look around Munich but not much was left of the city. In Salzburg the only soup to be had was at the canteens for the Allied soldiers. Mozart's birthplace was open, and one even had to purchase an entrance ticket. I had a one thousand mark note that I was given for a dollar. The entrance was supposed to be only one mark, but the woman at the cash desk gave no change because, as she put it, there was nothing to buy with money in any case. The only quarters that the Red Cross was able to locate in Vienna was an isolation hospital. As Mother was feeling a bit better, we slept for preference on a bench on the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace. There was no border between Austria and Hungary. On the last stage our bus went in front, and I was given a seat next to the Swiss driver so that I could show him the way. We came into Budapest on Vienna Road, so I told him to turn left, because that would take us to the Margaret Bridge. It was gone. In the end, in order to reach our destination, the Gizella girls' boarding school, we crossed over to the Pest side of the river at what had been the Franz Josef Bridge, or perhaps it was called Freedom Bridge by then, on a strange extempore boardwalk. After Switzerland the beds at the school looked filthy. We were therefore surprised when everyone was made to show that they had no lice in their hair.

[...]

1956, Poland, with Józsa

A package tour within the scope of a so-called exchange drive for artists. As the Music Director of the Csokonai Theatre in Debrecen I was able to ask to be allowed to take my wife along. Even though it was stated on her confidential personal file (they also told her this) that she had got mixed up with a frivolous Bohemian circle of acquaintances (i.e. mine), she would be free to join me. Since it was the first time in her life that she had been abroad, she cried when the train passed the Czech border and she heard a foreign dog barking. We were held up for a long time, for no obvious reason, at Szob on the Hungarian-Slovak border and again at Zebrzidowice on the Czech-Polish border. In Warsaw we were guests at the artists' club. There was no interpreter, only a woman called Alicia, who translated everything into French. After dinner, though, a Hungarian student came along who showed us the sights of Warsaw, which consisted, before all else, the Palace of Culture built by the Soviet Union.
I had left my toothbrush behind in Budapest, and the student promised to obtain a new one for me. He was unable to, but then Alicia procured one, because she tagged along with us to the seaside so as to do the translating into French.
Two of my friends were in the group. There was Gábor Földes, chief director at the Gyôr Theatre, who shrewdly explained that Mátyás Rákosi's dismissal as the Party's First Secretary, which had happened shortly before (on 2 July 1956), would stand the Party in good stead, and that Ernô Gerô too would only be a temporary leader. Then it would be the turn of the outstanding youngsters. Földes would later on be hanged by those selfsame Kádárists. When I eventually left Hungary sixteen years later to settle in Switzerland and I cast around for my reasons for leaving, it was perhaps Földes's murder that was uppermost. The other friend was Mensáros¹; he had been permitted to bring his young son along. Three months later I was talking politics with him in Debrecen. No one was more tolerant, more forthcoming or straighter than him. He got away with a prison term and banishment: much luckier than Földes, but then he wasn't a Communist in the first place.
It was at Mie˛dzyzdroje on the Baltic that I saw the sea for the first time. Only the hardier spirits went for a dip in the cold water, and they would speedily dive under blankets afterwards. There was a place called the Press Club where one could read Western newspapers. That was inconceivable in Hungary at that time. It was there that I met the music critic Dankowski, who that October telephoned to me in Debrecen to ask what was up, whether there was any shooting, and should he send any food or soap. As it happened there was nothing happening in Debrecen, no shooting, and there was more than enough to eat. Soap matters were no cause for concern either; even the barrels of the guns on the tanks that were first heading east for Záhony, at the Hungarian-USSR border, and then again west for Budapest, were shining clean. [...]
To backtrack again, we spent a few hours in Warsaw. Mensáros sent his son out to the toy section of a department store with one hundred zlotys to spend, but Péter came back to say he had found nothing there. We concurred that it was worth travelling to Poland if only because it felt good to go home from there. [...]

June 1957, Vienna

I was a Party member from 1948 until 1956, from the age of twenty-one to the age of twenty-nine. I joined because the principle was, in principle, to my liking, but I found it easy to keep myself out of active politics because my Uncle Zoltán was locked up for being a spy for the Yugoslavs (later amended to the British), doing a stretch of seven years. As I was quite sure that he was not, I lost confidence in the regime soon enough. My impatience anyway made me unfit to stick out the meetings and tutorial sessions to the bitter end, whereas I never got bored playing ulti.² My status, as summed up by the theatre's Party secretary, as being a wellmeaning, overly intellectual, not entirely reliable artistic type, suited me down to the ground. On October 24th, 1956 I wanted to travel up from Debrecen to Budapest, but as things turned out I didn't make the trip until December 3rd. By then the old Party had ceased to exist and I didn't apply to join the new one. When I noticed that the liberalization I had been hoping for was not coming about, it was too late to defect. I wanted to find out how much my position had been damaged by my not having rejoined the Party, so as a trial shot I applied for permission for an exit visa at the Ministry of Culture to travel to Vienna for five days. I said that I wanted to look around for new scores for the Debrecen operatic society, though in reality I had nothing at all in mind. I was granted the permission complete with the visa and $30 spending money with astonishing speed, and then I was immediately informed-even though it was meant to be a secret-that I would be travelling to the Avignon Festival three weeks from then. Up to that point, all I had heard about Avignon was that this was where the French antipopes had been in residence in the fourteenth century.
There is nothing to be said about the trip to Vienna, except perhaps that I was thirty years old to the day, and in my excitement at crossing the Iron Curtain I was unable to sleep at all the night before.
[...]

July 1958, Toulouse

Being a young father, I thought it would be better not to extend my five-year contract at Debrecen, so I returned to my family in Budapest and to the State Opera House. A few days after I had resettled I took a phone call telling me that I was to supply the piano accompaniment for five Hungarian competitors who were taking part in the Toulouse Song Contest, given my knowledge of French (pretty weak actually); they pressed into my hands the group's funds, which meant the money for the hotel rooms and the living expenses for ten days. And six air tickets for Budapest-Brussels-Paris, six rail tickets for Paris-Toulouse-Marseilles-Genoa- Milan-Vienna-Budapest-so tortuous was the route that it seemed almost that they had booked it with me specially in mind, whereas in truth it was merely out of rank stupidity. I was warned that they had failed to obtain transit visas to cross Italy because (I swear I'm not making this up) the Italian ambassador in Budapest had gone off on a fishing trip (unauthorised) to Lake Balaton, and since he had no money on him the police had detained him at the police station while they checked his credentials. The Italian ambassador had taken umbrage (honestly, I'm not making this up) and was refusing to issue any visas for three days. I was given the task of getting the Italian consulate at Toulouse to stamp the visas in the passports, because the three days would be up by then. The Italians in Budapest promised that it would all be in order: it was not worth mentioning. A chap at the consulate in Toulouse said fine, I should go by the next day to see him, and would I mind obtaining for him two tickets to the closing concert. There were no tickets to be had, so there were no visas either. He produced from under his belly a cyclostyled sheet headed "confidente" and showed that he was unable to issue any visas because of the fishing incident. I told him that it had only been for three days, and that was long ago anyway. That may well be, he said, but he was still not going to issue them. A phone call to Budapest. Budapest sent the six train tickets to cover a return journey to Paris and six plane tickets from there to Budapest. By then, though, there were only three people who made use of the plane tickets.
One didn't because she had hopped it even before I picked up the return tickets at the Air France office: Judit (I don't recollect her family name) announced that I shouldn't bother bringing back a ticket for her as she was going to stay in France and get married. She shook hands and then went off with a smile. Two of the party, Alfonz Bartha³ and I, didn't go because the next day the Hungarian ambassador was holding a birthday party and Bartha had been engaged to sing, me to accompany him. This unexpected offer meant that we were obliged to stay around for ten days in Paris, living at the Hungarian Institute and on a decent daily allowance, with the embassy picking up the bill. This made for a very pleasant ending for a trip which had not started off too well. [...]
The Hungarian group was rather successful at Toulouse, winning third and fourth place, which meant that the prize winners had their hotel bills paid for retrospectively, while I had my entire travel expenses refunded because I agreed to accompany the Argentinean singers as well when their pianist was taken ill. We didn't even have to spend money on food because all meals came with the compliments of some master butcher who was an ardent opera fan. As a result we were rolling in money on our return to Paris, and out of his prize money Bartha purchased a fur coat for his sister and had this sewn as a (duty-free) lining into an ordinary raincoat. He felt rather hapless in the strange world of France until he came across a market where he could purchase the makings for a proper lecsó, which he would cook for himself in the Institute's tiny kitchen. I explored the region around Paris, including Chartres, the Grand Château in Chantilly and also the magnificent abbey church at St Benoît-sur-Loire, to which I have since paid two return visits.
Having spent all the money that I was legally allowed to spend, I was still left with a wad of francs, refunded living allowances and hotel expenses-more than it was permissible to take out of France in those days. I stuffed it all into a back pocket of my trousers and so broke French law for the benefit of the Hungarian state. Back in Budapest I informed the Institute for Cultural Relations that Judit had not come back with us. I was rebuked for not, as leader of the group, having reported it sooner, to which I said that I was not a group leader in any sense; I had merely been entrusted with the money and then slapped down on the table the wad of French francs along with receipts. That made them scratch their heads, because they had already written it off in the books, so what were they to do. I asked if it would have been better if I had stolen it. Umm well, they said, there was indeed something in that from an administrative point of view.
[...]

¹ László Mensáros (1926-93) Hungarian actor, one of the best of his generation. He was imprisoned in 1958-61 for his involvement in the 1956 Revolution and only allowed to play in a Budapest theatre again after 1964.

² A card game of the skat family.

³ Alfonz Bartha (1929-), Hungarian tenor, after 1959 member of the Hungarian State Opera House.

Tamás Blum (1927-1992)
conductor, translator of libretti. 1945-53 répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera House, Budapest; 1953-59 music director at the Csokonai Theatre, Debrecen; 1959-72 conductor at the Hungarian State Opera House, Budapest; 1972-77 conductor at the Zurich Opera House; 1977-92 music director at the International Opera Studio, Zurich.