market when she saw a group of SS soldiers. She panicked. She ran up
to them and shouted a confession. “I am Jewish!” she said. ey
shipped her off to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chamber. e
rest of the family, exposed by Béla’s mother’s confession, managed to
flee to the mountains.
Béla’s brother George has lived in America since before the war.
Before he immigrated, he was walking down the street in Bratislava,
the capital of Slovakia, when he was attacked by gentiles, his glasses
broken. He le the brewing anti-Semitism in Europe to live with their
great-uncle in Chicago. eir cousin Marianna escaped to England.
Béla, though he had studied in England as a boy and spoke English
Ęuently, refused to leave Slovakia. He wanted to protect everyone in
his family. at was not to be. His grandfather died of stomach cancer.
And his aunt and uncle, coaxed out of the mountains by Germans
who promised that all Jews who returned would be treated kindly,
were lined up in the street and shot.
Béla escaped the Nazis by hiding in the mountains. He could barely
hold a screwdriver, he writes, he was afraid of weapons, he didn’t
want to ĕght, he was clumsy, but he became a partisan. He took up a
gun and joined ranks with the Russians who were ĕghting the Nazis.
While with the partisans, he contracted TB. He hadn’t had to survive
the camps. Instead he had survived the mountain forests. For this I am
grateful. I will never see the imprint of the smokestacks mirrored in his
eyes.
* * *Prešov is only an hour’s drive from Košice. One weekend Béla visits
me, pulling Swiss cheese and salami from a bag. Food. is is what I
fall in love with ĕrst. If I can keep him interested in me, he will feed
me and my sisters—this is what I think. I don’t pine for him the way I
did for Eric. I don’t fantasize about kissing him or long to have him