The Choice

Klara tells another story with a happy ending. With the knowledge
that we’d been evacuated to the brick factory, that we expected any
day to get shipped away, to Kenyérmező or who knows where, she
went to the German consulate in Budapest to demand to be sent to
wherever we were. At the consulate, the doorman told her, “Little girl,
go away. Don’t come in here.” She wasn’t going to be told no. She
tried to sneak back in the building. e doorman saw her and beat her
up, punching her shoulders, her arms, her stomach, her face. “Get out
of here,” he said again.
“He beat me up and saved my life,” she tells us.
Near the end of the war when the Russians surrounded Budapest,
the Nazis became even more determined to rid the city of Jews. “We
had to carry identiĕcation cards with our name, religion, picture. ey
were checking these cards all the time on the streets, and if they saw
you were a Jew they might kill you. I did not want to carry my card,
but I was afraid I would need something to prove who I was aer the
war. So I decided to give mine to a girlfriend to keep for me. She lived
across the harbor, so I had to cross the bridge to get there, and when I
got to the bridge the soldiers were checking identiĕcation. ey said,
‘Please show me who you are.’ I said I had nothing, and somehow, I
don’t know how, they let me go across. My blond hair and blue eyes
must have convinced them. I never went back to my friend’s house to
retrieve the card.”
When you can’t go in through a door, go in through a window, our
mother used to say. ere is no door for survival. Or recovery either.
It’s all windows. Latches you can’t reach easily, panes too small, spaces
where a body shouldn’t ĕt. But you can’t stand where you are. You
must find a way.
Aer the German surrender, while Magda and I were recovering in
Wels, Klara went to a consulate again, this time the Russian consulate,
because Budapest had been liberated from Nazi control by the Red