Why nobody should sympathize with Nazis or their ilk

Three little kids hiding in a small village.

There's this bulkhead on the Danube River, a big concrete staging area in the center of Budapest. It sits maybe a dozen feet below street level. My father took my sister and I to it when we were teenagers. He sat down. 

 

We had been walking most of the day so initially it made sense. But he remained when he would normally have moved along. "Right here," he said finally. Then he described a scene that he didn't see but was told later after the war. That bulkhead, pier or whatever it was served as the spot where a small contingent of Nazi soldiers lined up a bunch of Jews. Snow covered the ground, but the Jews often weren't wearing coats. 

 

They didn't need them where they were going. The soldiers tied three people together tightly. One group after another. Then the officer put a pistol to the head of the person in the center of this tightly bound cluster and shot. The soldiers with him pushed the trio into the churning waters below. The dead weight sucked them underwater immediately. "They didn't want to waste bullets," my father said.

I don't recall how long we sat there. Most of the afternoon, waiting for him to say we could return to his mom's apartment. When we returned, my grandmother asked where we were. I remember her just nodding her head. She didn't speak the rest of the night. Just prepared dinner as always, cleaned up and sat down in front of the television set poking away at some embroidery she later gave to one of us. Here's a piece about a sculpture to those murdered people called Shoes on the Danube.

 

I didn't really figure out the importance of that story until later. My father of course shared stories with me of his early years. But it wasn't until he suffered from an odd form of dementia, distinctive because of its hallucinations, that he finally revealed why that afternoon was so important. My father, who everybody called Red, in his final years was accompanied by three main hallucinations — an SS officer I called Victor, two twins and a small Soviet bear who crouched on his shoulder and whispered in his ear. I never did understand the bear or its significance. 

 

But Victor was apparently a fleeing Nazi soldier who turned up in his tiny village where he had been hidden with his grandparents and two younger first cousins for the duration of the war. Victor sought refuge but got none. He faced certain death if tracked down by Stalin's angry commandos. The twins proved more a revelation. As my father's mind deteriorated, some of the walls he had established in his mind started to fall. His secrets came out. The twins never spoke as they haunted him. 

 

My father, Imre Antal, with his parents before the war.

"Can't you see them!" he would yell. "They're right there." After awhile I just took it for granted that they never left. Just like Victor. They all three stood in silent watch. I can't say the same for the bear. It apparently kept telling my dad that I was his brother. But the twins were kind of creepy. Then I found out why. 

 

They were close friends of my father's, hidden in the same village. But they left, maybe to see a parent. They were tied to an adult, maybe that parent, as he was shot. My father never lost the image he conjured in his head of his two childhood friends going underwater as chunks of ice floated past. The night he died, he told me they were still there. By his bedside, hair still dripping wet. So was Victor. Apu is what I called my dad, for the Hungarian version of father. His real name was Imre Antal Nėmeth. I believe he had a survivor's guilt. It easily could have been him and his two little cousins tied together and shot. About half the village was Jewish, including his grandparents, including, according to the occupying army, him and his cousins. They were raised as brave little Catholics. They didn't see their parents until after the war. And I think of this because there is no reason anybody should sympathize with the Nazis or their ilk.

 

I didn't add this initially because it's not all that important. My grandmother was Jewish. She gave me a yarmulke when I was a kid. She converted to Catholicism when she married my grandfather in 1936. Even after World War I, it wasn't great to be Jewish in many European countries. My great grandfather, dėd nagypapa, who fought alongside the Germans in WWI, was unable to get work because of his heritage. My father remembers him as an angry old man. 

 

The cousins and my grandmother, still best friends.

One of my dad's two little cousins is still alive. My father called Lizzie, "csöpike," for littlest. Mariska, or Marta, died soon after he did. Lizzie is in her late 70s. I've been communicating on Facebook with her granddaughter, Zsuzsanna. I told her to extract all the stories from her nagymama, or grandmother. 

 

They didn't tell anybody of their heritage. As a result, I didn't mention it to Zsuzsanna. The fear was buried that deeply. I never knew until about six years ago that had I lived in any of the occupied areas during the war that I too would be marked for death. And my kids and my hot young wife for consorting with my tainted blood. But I sure wouldn't go down without a fight.

 

 And my grandfather — the first Imre, I'm the third — was gone for the duration of the war. He fought alongside the Germans, supporting a Panzer division. He didn't return until some years after the war, hiding from the unforgiving and fast-advancing Soviets as the husband of some young Croatian widow. That's another story altogether. 

 

My grandmother, Julianna Roszner, survived all the purges, working diligently as a tailor. She was a strong woman. An amazing woman. When my grandfather returned some years after the war, saying lamely that he had gotten "lost," she would not talk to him for a year.

 

And as I get ready to post this, I wonder if the entire town of Paks will remember history differently. That there were no Jews. That other branches of the family have purged this history from their databanks. All I can say is this is my story. I researched it the best I could given the deathbed confessions I extracted. Actually, my brother in law, Stu Wesolik, got my dad to admit to being Jewish one late afternoon in Hermosa Beach, Calif. That started this whole thing. Apu would die about two years later. I was at his bedside telling him a really stupid story about his best friend, some beers and a couple of not-so-attractive women in heaven waiting for him. Over and over. He laughed. And laughed.

 

Stu's dad worked for the CIA helping refugees in the camp near Vienna where my dad, an identified freedom fighter, had fled the Russians after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. They didn't meet until many years later at my sister Julianna's wedding. Weird how all this fits together.