16-5-2005

Nine Suitcases, by Bela Zsolt

THE SCOTSMAN

SCOTLAND'S NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ONLINE

Sat 27 Dec 2003

At the gates of hell

BOOK REVIEW

Roger Hutchinson

Nine Suitcases
by Bela Zsolt
Jonathan Cape, £17.99

Between the two catastrophic 20th century wars in Europe, Bela Zsolt was a celebrated liberal Hungarian novelist, playwright, journalist and editor.

He was also a Jew. Two-thirds of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews were massacred between 1939 and 1945. Zsolt and his wife escaped death by the narrowest of margins, riding a hellish roller-coaster between forced labour, detention, urban imprisonment and rural extermination camp before their eventual liberation.

Nine Suitcases is his novelised account of a short part of that infernal journey. It was serialised in a Budapest magazine in 1946 and 1947. Zsolt’s wife Agnes committed suicide in 1948, and a year later Zsolt himself died in a sanatorium at the age of 54. Nine Suitcases was not published in book form in Hungary until 1980, and this is its first English-language edition.

If the continental Nazi Terror did not, as was once suggested, render artistic interpretation redundant, we must thank the artists who survived. Criticism of the work of people such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel may be ventured only with respect and humility, but it would be a final denial of the writers’ own humanity to refuse their literature the same examination as any other.

Following such examination we rightly conclude that Levi and Wiesel were and are men whose genius would have redeemed almost any other horror. In the face of the fact that what happened in occupied Europe cannot expect redemption, they devoted themselves to making language comprehend what had formerly been inconceivable, to finding words for the inexpressible. We are now, fortunately, able to place Bela Zsolt on the platform beside those guiding lights, where unknown to us poor Anglophones he has belonged for 60 years.

Nine Suitcases is a brilliant and beautiful book. It was written, at most, two years after the episodes in 1944 which it relates. Zsolt’s tremendous journalistic powers were deployed to recall the detail; his virtuosity as a novelist provides the irresistible narrative flow.

It takes place mainly in the provincial synagogue where Bela and Agnes Zsolt, along with several hundred other Jews, were brutally detained while the German overlords and their indigenous accomplices from the Hungarian gendarmerie and fascist Arrow Cross prepare the rail wagons for transport to a place called Auschwitz. From here, as in a delirium, Zsolt looks back to his months spent digging mass graves in Ukraine, to his lost last days of freedom in Paris, to the central Europe which he had known, loved, criticised and enriched, but which fascism had destroyed.

Bela Zsolt shares more with Primo Levi than their compulsive readability. His work reminds us of what was destroyed by that tyranny. The urbane sophistication of Bohemian café life, the mordant humour, proud scholarship and challenging insight of the European intellectual owed its soul to Jewry. Zsolt and Levi survived to rebuke us with their hint of what magnificence was buried when that civilisation collapsed.

The shock of the collapse was immense. Hungary had been bad enough in the early years of the war, but when Hitler lost patience with its proxy government in March 1944 and the Wehrmacht marched in to complete the Final Solution, it became literally unimaginable. Zsolt’s fellow Jews, he perceives, "failed to realise to the very end that they were no longer living in a state whose laws had to be obeyed ... even when the filth was rising mouth-high and they were inhaling the stench of the decomposing bodies of their own parents, their own brothers and sisters, and their own children. They were unable to realise that this state had become a rabid dog . . ."

The unreality that enveloped Europe echoes through these pages. Their inability to grasp the dissolution of every standard, every moral precept upon which western civilisation had previously stood, caused persecuted Jews to behave in an otherwise inexplicable manner.

In a book full of haunting vignettes, none is more poignant than the tale of the reluctant escapees. A gravedigging unit is taken to within five kilometres of the Romanian border and freedom. Their Hungarian armed escort, informed partly by sympathy and partly by the proximity of the liberating Red Army, advises them to flee. Only one of them can raise the will to do so.

While the others are making the return journey to their familiar ghetto, silently cursing their own timidity, the escapee reappears. Panting and dishevelled, he had reached the border unmolested before panic set in and he turned back to rejoin, with guilty gratitude, his countrymen, his friends, his family, his fate aboard the wagons bound for Auschwitz.

They boarded those wagons - whose destination was, by 1944, well known to them - in a condition of chronic disassociation. The enormity was too much for a single brain to compass. "People are not only unable to believe that what is happening is happening to them, but are even unable to believe in their own identity … Dimly, they just observe these strangers disguised as themselves going through impossible experiences … How can it be that now, in a place at the edge of town where his wife and child have probably never been before, they are trudging towards the wagons with their bundles on their backs? "Thus it was that those who dug their own graves under the gaze of the gendarme and the Luger, dug on without much protest - because this must end as all nightmares do, perhaps between one shovelful and the next.

Nobody has described those scenes more vividly than Bela Zsolt. He captures even the sound of the death carriages in their sidings - "The engine gave the 30 wagons a shove and under the unoiled wartime wheels the worn-out rusty rails resounded like vibrating strings. This sound effect was as characteristic of the whole event as the shrieks of vultures are of a battlefield or the howl of jackals are of the desert."

We need such writing. The obscene bankruptcy of Holocaust denial is best exposed by witnesses. Far from too much having been made of the details of the Nazi Terror, there is still too much that we do not know - too much that we will never know. Six million biographies remain to be told. Bela Zsolt’s transcendent story is a rare blessing.

Survival strategy

Tibor Fischer says Hungary's finest contribution to Holocaust writing, Nine Suitcases by Béla Zsolt, is not a book for the squeamish

Tibor Fischer
Saturday January 10, 2004

Nine Suitcases
by Béla Zsolt, translated by Ladislaus Löb
288pp, Cape, £17.99

There can't be many Hungarian Jews who survived the second world war who haven't borne witness to what they went through (some even filing posthumously, such as the poet Miklós Radnóti). Béla Zsolt's Nine Suitcases is the latest testimony to make it into English (following the usual transit for Hungarian literature, via German), although it was one of the first "Holocaust" writings, serialised in a magazine in 1946-47, and is one of the best.

Perhaps because Zsolt died before he could edit his material into volume form, Nine Suitcases has some weaknesses: the first half is meandering and repetitive, and Zsolt is fond of reminding us how important he was as a journalist and political pundit. But the shortcomings are more than offset by the book's force.

In his preface, the translator Ladislaus Löb points out that "some narrative details... may have been deliberately arranged in such a way as to underline their symbolic significance". Symbolism aside, there are many suspiciously polished episodes which suggest that Zsolt the novelist was in cahoots with Zsolt the journalist. The final fugitive train journey back to Budapest that closes the book, for example, is so rivetingly dramatic, so Hollywood, that it's hard to believe it wasn't topped up by Zsolt's imagination. But if it's not entirely accurate, it's all true.

Zsolt describes his survival as a "miracle", and no other word can rightfully report for duty. In Paris at the outbreak of the war, he and his wife were drawn back to Hungary because of the eponymous suitcases. Zsolt, then well into his 40s, served in a labour battalion on the Russian front, service which exterminated a hefty chunk of Hungary's intelligentsia. He also had a brief stay in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before a deal between the Budapest Rescue Committee and the Germans took him and 1,367 other Jews to Switzerland. After the war, Zsolt became an MP, but died in 1949, probably of despair: his leftwing ideals had produced a Hungary far more ghastly than the prewar Ruritanian authoritarianism of Horthy, and his wife had committed suicide.

The narrative starts in 1944 in the ghetto in Nagyvarad, now Oradea, just across the Hungarian border in Romania. Zsolt works backwards and forwards in time to depict the tribulations of Hungarian Jewry. While a knowledge of Hungarian history is helpful, the story is so sickening that failure to appreciate a few details makes little difference. Löb does, nevertheless, provide an introduction and footnotes, with which I have only one quibble. Referring to the prime minister Béla Imrédy, Löb states that there were "pogroms" in 1938-39. True, Imrédy was an anti-semite (purportedly, when shown a document that proved his great-grandmother was Jewish, he fainted) and there was violence against Jews (a grenade attack on the Dóhany Street Synagogue killed several worshippers), but organised cossack-style massacres there weren't.

Nine Suitcases is not a book for the squeamish. Most of it makes for grim reading, but if many people were unaverage in their cruelty, many were unaverage in their generosity and courage. Zsolt's bouts of apathy and cunning kept him alive, but he was finally saved by others. There are also many moments of black humour: the Jews whose name was Hitler, for instance, or the guard who is furious with his Jewish prisoners when they persistently refuse to take up his offer of escape. Zsolt is a cool, urbane guide to the horrors. At times his stoicism verges on the distasteful, and there is a complete absence of special pleading. "I also remember the bazaar at the Trinité in Paris where, as late as 1925, it was possible to buy fancy goods made of the skin of Congolese natives for a few francs."

Perhaps it's because of Zsolt's background as a café raconteur and journalist and because Nine Suitcases appeared in serial form that the reader is treated to regular servings of shrewd observation of humanity and inhumanity. This is by far the best book I've come across on the subject of the extermination of Hungary's Jews. Zsolt is and will be classified by literary historians as a minor novelist, whose tragedy was that his greatest story happened to himself.

Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room is published by Chatto.

A tale without heroes
(Filed: 09/02/2004)

Anne Applebaum reviews Nine Suitcases by Béla Zsolt

Judging from his style and habits, his likes and dislikes, his black humour and his irony, Béla Zsolt, a Hungarian-Jewish writer who produced 10 novels, four plays and copious quantities of journalism between 1925 and 1943, would have been thoroughly at home in the contemporary world.

He loved Budapest, the Hungarian capital, and openly loathed the provincials, "strident types sporting sweaty hats, toothbrush-moustaches and plus-fours", who crowded its streets on summer weekends.

His family was assimilated – "my parents had inherited Christmas from their parents as a folk custom" – and he found the Orthodox Jews from eastern Hungarian villages, with their sidelocks and shaggy beards, "as alien to me as Filipinos". He made fun of himself, his wife, his countrymen, his government – and was, at times, no less flippant about Hungary's fate than any member of Fleet Street might be when writing about parliamentary scandals today. But Zsolt is not, of course, our contemporary, and this book, written in 1946 and 1947, does not describe a familiar world.

In his short lifetime, Zsolt lived through the assorted horrors of Hungarian fascism, Nazi occupation, deportation, a concentration camp and, eventually, the communist regime that followed the war. In another era, he might well have spent his life as a kind of court jester, a writer of clever fiction and witty drama. Instead, he will probably be best remembered for this book, which he was working on when he died and which is only now being published in English: it is an unfinished, uneven, yet weirdly compelling account of his experiences in a forced labour camp, and in the Hungarian Jewish ghetto towards the end of the war.

The book begins with a scene of what can only be described as black humour. In the early days of the war, Zsolt and his wife managed to make their way to Paris, from where they might easily have escaped further. Yet after the Nazi invasion, Zsolt's wife – who later killed herself – refused, point blank, to travel on any train that refused to take their luggage, the "nine suitcases" of the book's title. Since all the trains out of

Paris at that particular moment were crammed full – "passengers were sitting on the roofs and hanging from the steps, robbing each other" – this proved nearly impossible. Only one train was empty enough to allow for the baggage: the train that was heading back to Budapest. So they returned. As a result, wrote Zsolt, he ultimately found himself in the ghetto, "hungrily nibbling a leftover biscuit" and unable to sleep because he was being bitten by fleas.

Like all of the most profound Holocaust memoirists, Zsolt does not romanticise any of his experiences, or invent heroes where there were none. His portrayals of the Hungarian policemen, or of his idiotic Hungarian intellectual colleagues, ooze with sarcasm. But so, too, do his portraits of some of the Jews he met in the ghetto and the camps, among them a "devious, obsequious" religious teacher – "a constant burden to the community" – and a Catholic convert who "prayed all day in a loud voice for a German victory". Only once in a while does a flash of something like admiration for his fellow sufferers come through, as when he writes about the Orthodox Jews from whom he had always felt so alienated: "I'm nevertheless drawn to them, because they are resisting through their obstinacy, because they are defending themselves through their patient, resourceful passivity, and because they have fled a hundred times as far as I have and are still not tired. I am drawn to them like the weak to the strong."

It isn't an easy book to read, not least because, written in the aftermath of the war, at the time of the Soviet military occupation of Hungary, it also portrays Zsolt's sense of failure, his disgust with his old liberal ideas. In his life as a writer, he had, he thinks to himself, "acted as a self-appointed champion of the people". Yet his experiences during the war taught him that the "people" had never been terribly grateful: "In the Ukraine it had been some penniless peasant who beat me half dead, and another who ruined my left eye. In Komarom it had been the same poor people, in civvies or uniforms, who deported my mother, my brothers and sisters, and my younger sister's four-year-old son. And I still had no other goal than trying to fight underground for this homeland, in which neither the masters nor the poor people wanted me."

The book ends on a decidedly futile note. Having been rescued from the ghetto, Zsolt and his wife are planning their next steps. "After lunch we continued deliberating for hours, but didn't come up with any firm plan," he writes. "Frankly, I wasn't very interested."

Nine Suitcases by Béla Zsolt, trans Ladislaus Löb
The Phoenix Land by Miklós Bánffy, trans Patrick Thursfield & Katalin Bánffy-Jelen

Hungarian rhapsodies

By Clive Sinclair

09 January 2004

You have to understand that all memoirs, however reliable, have a dash of artifice at their core; the creation of the author's alter ego, the person to whom history will happen. If Miklos Bánffy (1873-1950) had not created himself, Chekhov could have done it for him: aristocrat, bon viveur, portrait painter, novelist, Hungarian foreign secretary. Béla Zsolt was also a novelist, but there the similarity ends. Not a landowner, but a deracinated Jew; never conservative, always radical. And more boulevardier than bon viveur. Take a look at one of Brassai's self-portraits, and you'll get the idea: battered felt hat at a rakish angle, an unsupported cigarette eternally drooping from his lips. Their memoirs cover the period from the crowning of the last Habsburg monarch in 1916 to the final destruction of old Hungary in 1945.

It is a curious fact that there may have been Zsolts in Hungary before there were Bánffys. The first (of many) Jewish tombstones dates back to the third century. Compared to the Jews, the Magyars were parvenus. For centuries thereafter Jews and Magyars lived in harmony. Hungarian coins from the reign of Andrew II (c1220) bear Hebrew inscriptions (Jews being his mint-masters). Relations deteriorated after the Black Death. And for the next 200 years, Jews were expelled and recalled like so many yo-yos. The Turkish victory at Mohacs in 1526 improved matters for the Jews, though obviously not for their Christian co-nationals. "The story of Hungary's troubles really began at Mohacs," observes Bánffy in The Phoenix Land.

Neither Bánffy not Zsolt mentions the other by name, but Zsolt delivers a page of delicious invective against Bánffy's cousin, Istvan Bethlen, prime minister of Hungary through the 1920s. Bánffy, for his part, has little time for "coffee-house prophets who... passed their days in playfully solving all the world's most complex problems."

Zsolt, our "coffee-house prophet", hates Bethlen "with a personal passion", because his "determination, ruthlessness, and stubbornness... was gradually destroying all hope of the return of revolution". For Bánffy, Bethlen was not only kin but kindred spirit and (while foreign secretary) his boss.

Bethlen was appointed PM by Admiral Horthy (like his French equivalent Pétain, a First World War hero) after the fall of Bela Kun's communist regime in 1920, and the subsequent White Terror. Kun happened to be Jewish. Guess who suffered most at the hands of the pale riders? Bánffy thought Bethlen best suited to modernise Hungary, to align it to the liberal democracies and monarchies of the west, and thereby preserve it from Bolshevism. So who was right? Well, AJP Taylor characterised Bethlen as a man who tried to pull the wool over Western eyes with apparent reforms, while working to consolidate the holdings of the great landowners.

Either way, Bánffy began to revise his opinion of Bethlen when he observed that his all-powerful cousin was turning a blind eye to the growing influence of patriotic parties inspired by the Nazis. After suffering a nervous breakdown, he quit the government, and retired to his castle at Kolozsvar, where he began a new life as a writer, producing fiction (most famously the Transylvanian Trilogy) and the reminiscences that fill The Phoenix Land.

It opens hopefully enough, with the 1916 coronation in Budapest of King Karl (the last of the Habsburgs, as it turned out). As the son of a bigwig, and director of the state opera, it fell to Bánffy to stage-manage the crowning. Since the Hungarian nobility is half-centaur, the new monarch was expected to exit the church and leap straight on to a waiting mount.

Doubting his ability, Karl requested steps. Aware of the impression this would make, Bánffy commissioned a wall with no other purpose than to conceal the offending prop. As may be expected, Karl proved as much a disappointment as the first exclusively Hungarian king (post-Mohacs) of whom Bánffy writes, "he was too weak in every respect to achieve what was expected of him". Bánffy came to despise Karl, who foolishly fronted two attempted putsches. As far as he was concerned, these were the sort of hopeless gestures that had ruined Hungary; made it a nation of maso-chists, half in love with tragic failure.

The king's rashness also nearly scuppered Bánffy's achievements as foreign secretary (he was, by his own account, a modest success at postwar conferences). Although Bánffy writes knowingly of politics, he seems happier when describing women or the arts, food or his family estate. He is heartbroken when a ham acquired abroad is spoiled before he can get it home.

Happiness, alas, seems an eternal stranger to Béla Zsolt. His memoir details the human cost of the failures and criminal follies of Karl, Bethlen, Horthy et al. In 1944, after Nazi hegemony over Hungary became absolute, it was decreed that the ghetto of Nagyvarad should be cleared, and its inhabitants transported to Auschwitz.

Among these was Zsolt, his wife, his stepdaughter and his in-laws. A crafty doctor (described by Zsolt as a con-artist) proposes a crazy idea that might just work. Rumour has it that a similar deportation at Kolozsvar (the location, you'll recall, of Bánffy's castle) was aborted on account of typhus. Hadn't Zsolt contracted the disease while a forced labourer in the Ukraine? So why not use his contaminated blood to fake an epidemic?

It works well enough to save the blood donor and his wife, but the latter's daughter and parents are taken and gassed. After the war Zsolt's wife is handed her daughter's diary by a well-wisher. She prepares it for publication, then writes finis to her own life. Zsolt outlives her by a year, dying in 1949, aged 54 (before Nine Suitcases - which had appeared in serial form - can be published as a book).

The title refers to the luggage his wife removed from their inhospitable homeland. Their sheer weight drags them back, as do Mrs Zsolt's ties to daughter and parents. Soon they are all trapped in Nagyvarad, awaiting death. Hard-boiled Zsolt wishes he had the courage to jettison material possessions and family alike, but knows, "like a bad actor in a bad play", he would refuse to abandon anyone if given the chance. He is, he claims, too much of a coward to be a coward.

Somehow this coward manages to survive Ukraine, Nagyvarad, and Bergen-Belsen. The last sentence of his memoir, "Frankly, I wasn't very interested", cannot help but recall the coup de grâce that concludes a famous blockbuster. It fits this world-weary persona, and the times, but ignores the fact that in the brief space before his premature death, Zsolt founded a political party, was elected to parliament, ran a journal, and fell foul of the communists. He also wrote this remarkable and unflinching memoir. Meanwhile, in the ruins of his castle at Kolozsvar, Bánffy was penning the second part of The Phoenix Land (co-translated by his only daughter).

It was in Belsen that Zsolt entranced a boy (a couple of years younger than his stepdaughter), who saw a "sallow-faced, emaciated" man, "desperate for cigarettes", but one who "gathered groups of followers". The lad was Ladislaus Löb, translator of Nine Suitcases. As I read this little anecdote, I think (strangely) of TH White's The Once and Future King: of how Arthur, facing death, commissions his page ("nearly thirteen") to tell the story of the Round Table, so that others unborn may know of it. Zsolt has been as fortunate in his surrogate son as Bánffy was with his daughter.

Clive Sinclair's latest book is 'Meet the Wife' (Picador)

The Observer

The pull of possessions

ROB ROZETT, THE JERUSALEM POST

Nov. 14, 2004

Nine Suitcases
By Bela Zsolt
Translated from the Hungarian by Ladislaus Lob
Schocken
336pp., $25

On the eve of the Second World War, Bela Zsolt and his wife left Budapest for Paris with nine suitcases.

The tug of home, however, pulled strongly at his wife, so in October 1939, a month after the invasion of Poland, the couple returned to her parents and daughter by a first marriage, who were living Oradea Mare, Romania.

The following autumn, Oradea Mare was awarded to the Hungarians by their German partners, and assumed its Hungarian name, Nagyvarad. The daughter was 13-year-old Eva Heyman, whose poignant diary, which often mentions Zsolt, was published by Yad Vashem in 1974. Zsolt is remembered as a well-known writer and advocate of workers' rights in Hungary between the world wars. Throughout his memoir, he blames the nine suitcases - which to him represent the power of possessions and familial relationships - for causing his travails.

Nine Suitcases was first published in weekly installments in 1946 in Hungary, but was suppressed by the Communist regime for 34 years and is only now being translated into English.

Almost the entire memoir is set in the Nagyvarad ghetto, which was established on May 3, 1944, just six weeks after the Germans occupied Hungary. From his vantage point in a makeshift hospital, Zsolt observes life in the ghetto, ponders the two dreadful years he spent as a forced laborer in the Hungarian Labor Service, and witnesses the deportation of almost all the ghetto inhabitants, including Eva and his in-laws.

After the fourth deportation train heads for Auschwitz, a typhus epidemic is staged in the hospital with the collusion of a Jewish doctor and a local Hungarian doctor. Blood taken from Zsolt and another inmate, who had both contracted typhus in the Ukraine, is used to obtain an order of quarantine for the inmates and their families. Many eventually flee the hospital, including Zsolt and his wife, who are spirited to Budapest by gentile friends.

The memoir ends with their arrival in Budapest, but the translator's introduction tells us that the Zsolts later managed to obtain a place on the Kasztner Train, which took them to Switzerland at the end of 1944, by way of Bergen Belsen.

WITH ALL the facility that made him a well-known writer, Zsolt sketches penetrating vignettes that reveal the foibles of both the victims and their persecutors. In one, he writes about a Jewish nurse with a squint who agonizes whether or not to have sex with a young gendarme in the hope of sparing her father a beating intended to make him reveal information regarding their hidden money and valuables.

Zsolt refuses to advise her, but it soon becomes clear that she has sacrificed her honor for the sake of her father. At first, swayed by the sex, the gendarme offers his aid, but later reneges and the father is beaten to death.

Zsolt writes: "Now [that] he had killed for the first time... he discovered what a magnificent feeling it is for a man to kill another man. That was what had driven him wild, and the fact that he had tasted the intoxication of violence, the lust of cruelty, and in the pride of his sudden rupture he wanted to shake off the dimly nagging memories of his manly tenderness and his small humanity, and to make amends to himself for caressing the girl... [and for] thinking of saving people, when it was also possible to kill people."

Zsolt sometimes links events in the ghetto to his experiences as a forced laborer. He writes of an incident in which about 50 Jews were taken from the Nagyvarad ghetto to the local cemetery to bury those who had died. The gendarme in charge tells them that no list had been made, so they would be able to escape if they chose to do so; after all, the Romanian border is nearby.

Only one Jew, a former labor serviceman named Grosz, attempts the escape. But although he encounters no resistance on his way to the border, he gets cold feet and returns to the ghetto. Ruminating over this, Zsolt recounts an incident that occurred near Unieca, in the Ukraine. While some laborers were working with a sapper unit, the partisans attacked one day. They led the Jews to their base 50 kilometers away, and suggested they become partisans too. The laborers demurred, saying they knew nothing about fighting. Suddenly the Germans opened fire and the partisans fled, leaving the Jews alone.

The laborers were free to go anywhere, but chose to return to their labor battalion. Zsolt was not there, but heard about it at the time and writes: "Of course, some of them would have liked to fight, but in the mood created by the majority, any independent action was impossible. And really, what could they have done? What could I have done if I had been there? As I say, I was no better. I had also been reduced to a hysterical skeleton in a year and half, and it's certain that I too would have shrunk..."

Somewhat later, at Galukhov in the Ukraine, Zsolt recalls a local teacher who admired writers and agreed to hide them in her home. After a close call in which Germans actually entered the teacher's house, the men decided it would be best to try to return to the Hungarian lines.

Leaving the village, Zsolt felt despair. He expresses his feelings and provides a trenchant description of his suffering: "There's nothing heroic about such a longing for death to release one from physical pain. One is seized by a final impatience... I'm no longer prepared to let the lice chew my cold body till it's on fire... the only way to get rid of them would be to burn the whole heap of rags with me inside... If the nine suitcases hadn't arrived at the Gare Pajol in Paris at the last moment, I might now be in Lisbon."

Zsolt's experiences bring him to the realization that his life's work may well have been for naught, and his ideology bankrupt. He writes: "Now I was traveling to Budapest on this train with complete failure in my heart. And I still had no other goal than trying to fight underground for this homeland, in which neither the masters nor the poor people wanted me. Fighting against whom? Against my homeland - for my homeland?"

Written with great style, Zsolt's memoir is a powerful testament to the suffering of Hungarian Jewish forced laborers on the Eastern Front, the ordeal of the Jews of Nagyvarad, the heroism of the few who tried to help, and the callousness of the many who did Jews harm.

Zsolt evokes the deep sense of betrayal the Holocaust sowed in the hearts of those assimilated Jewish intellectuals who somehow managed to survive. His aching confusion over the meaning of the horrific events drives home one more aspect of the tremendous rupture we call the Holocaust.

The writer is director of the library at Yad Vashem.

THE

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JERUSALEM POST

Nov. 14, 2004 9:00 | Updated Nov. 14, 2004 11:09
The pull of possessions
By ROB ROZETT

Nine Suitcases
By Bela Zsolt
Translated from the Hungarian by Ladislaus Lob
Schocken
336pp., $25

On the eve of the Second World War, Bela Zsolt and his wife left Budapest for Paris with nine suitcases.

Nine Suitcases was first published in weekly installments in 1946 in Hungary, but was suppressed by the Communist regime for 34 years and is only now being translated into English.

The writer is director of the library at Yad Vashem.

BOOK REVIEW

Wit and immediacy enrich riveting Holocaust memoir

By Scott Helman, Globe Staff | December 27, 2004

From the first page of his Holocaust memoir, "Nine Suitcases," Bla Zsolt conveys a prevailing sense of disbelief about what is enfolding before his rheumy eyes.

A prominent Hungarian writer in the first half of the 20th century, Zsolt saw his homeland turn swiftly against him. His wife saw her town become her captor. Hungarian Jews saw former friends and neighbors condoning their death sentences.

This numbing disbelief extends to the reader: Despite the glut of Holocaust work, one cannot help but be taken aback at the scale of betrayal and inhumanity that Zsolt recounts here.

"Nine Suitcases" was originally published 60 years ago and banned in Hungary until 1980. (Zsolt died in 1949.) But the book, translated into English for the first time, by Ladislaus Lb, has an immediacy because of Zsolt's riveting personal experiences, his clinical journalism, and his dry wit.

The memoir opens on a dingy mattress. Zsolt is in a ghetto in the Hungarian town of Nagyvrad, following the German invasion on March 19, 1944. Bodies are piled up. Disease flourishes. The Jews are confined in quarters not fit for animals.

But this isn't where Zsolt's story begins, nor where it ends. He had already spent part of 1942 and 1943 in a forced-labor unit in Ukraine. It's a miracle, he writes, that he survived the mines and the typhus while he was "starving, stinking, and crawling with lice."

He was released from the work camps only to be sent to a military prison. A few months after he was let out, the Germans arrived, and it was back into cruel captivity.

It is that unimaginable fate that allows Zsolt to harbor some optimism in the Nagyvrad ghetto, even as his mother, in-laws, and wife's teenage daughter are sent to their deaths at Auschwitz. "Believe me," he tells a fellow ghetto dweller, "I can even imagine surviving this hell." And yet later, he is convinced this is it: "It'll be goodbye to this disgraceful town, this rotten homeland, this crazy age, this life."

Much of "Nine Suitcases" takes place in moments of terrifying limbo like this: Jews awaiting word on whether they'll be sent to concentration camps; whether a faked typhus epidemic could delay their deaths; whether the Allied liberators will arrive in time.

"Death in this place is a good 'assignment,' " he writes. "The dead aren't driven out at daybreak to work for the SS, they aren't beaten till they hand over their jewellery, and they won't have to set out in the cattle wagons."

Zsolt, revered as one of the sages of the ghetto, tells of the horror of having to help people make wrenching decisions: If they could save themselves, should they sacrifice their families? And, conversely, if they could save their families, should they sacrifice themselves?

Some of Zsolt's most trenchant observations come in his reflections on how a civilized society could devolve into such barbarism. Yesterday, he remarks, this was a land where ambulances responded methodically to accidents, where engineers installed road signs about dangerous bends, where nature had been domesticated. And yet tomorrow, he writes, his countrymen in European clothing will be taken by cattle cars to be gassed.

Zsolt and his wife later escape with the help of a friend, eventually reaching Switzerland as members of a group of about 1,700 Jews saved in a unique ransom deal with the Nazis. He spent the last few years of his life back in Hungary, as a journalist and politician.

The arc of Zsolt's life was particularly cruel for a man who had so committed himself to making his country better -- someone who couldn't even make love without thinking he should be doing something political instead. "Above all else, I have lost my homeland," he writes.

Like other Holocaust stories, "Nine Suitcases" offers glimpses of non-Jews who act heroically in their own way, notably a tailor's apprentice in Nagyvrad who throws provisions over the ghetto walls and helps Jews escape. But those good deeds are not meant to, and do not, whitewash Zsolt's account, which is by and large a disquieting portrayal of man at his worst.

11. Februar 2000

Die Matratze vor der Bundeslade

KARL-MARKUS GAUSS

Béla Zsolt: "Neun Koffer". Mit einem Nachwort von Ferenc Köszeg. Aus demUngarischen übersetzt von Angelika Mate. Verlag Neue Kritik, Frankfurt 1999. 392S., geb., 48,- DM.

Auch in Ungarn wollte es nachher niemand gewesen sein. Über vierzig Jahrelang bestätigten einander die Kommunisten und die patriotischen Historiker, dassder Faschismus in ihrem Land eine Domäne der Feudalaristokratie war. Das Volkhingegen, ob Bauernschaft oder Arbeiterklasse, das "wahre Ungarn" habeunterdessen im Widerstand gekämpft und gelitten. Mit dieser schon vomstalinistischen Diktator Matyas Rakosi verordneten Lüge wurde nach 1945 dasBündnis der Kommunisten mit der antisemitischen Bauernpartei, die Einheit vonneuer Staatsmacht und alten gesellschaftlichen Kräften besiegelt. So wurde ausUngarn ein wundersames Land, in dem der Faschismus fast ohne Faschistengeherrscht hatte. Und in dem als Opfer nicht etwa die Zehntausenden ermordeterJuden, sondern die Klassen der Arbeiter und Bauern galten, von denen sichZehntausende an Plünderung, Vertreibung, Mord beteiligt hatten.

Béla Zsolt, ein Gezeichneter, der durch Gefängnis und Getto gegangen war, wollte1945 gerade diese staatstragende Lüge, deren Folgen Ungarn noch heutebeschäftigen, kenntlich machen. Zu diesem Zweck gründete er die Zeitschrift"Haladas" (Fortschritt), schrieb Artikelserien - und vor allem den grandiosen,erschütternden, so lange totgeschwiegenen Bericht, der jetzt endlich auch aufDeutsch zu lesen ist: "Neun Koffer". In der Zwischenkriegszeit einer derbekanntesten ungarischen Publizisten, hatte sich Zsolt viele Feinde geschaffen.Ihnen war er als Asphaltliterat verhasst, dessen Produktivität und Sprachgewaltbeängstigend waren und dessen schneidender Witz eine Gesellschaft bloßstellte,die sich mit Mythen aus Blut und Erz wappnete.

Als Ungarn an die Seite des Nationalsozialismus trat, bot sich für manchen dieGelegenheit, Rache an dem unbotmäßigen, dem gefürchteten Publizisten zu nehmen.Zsolt zeigt in "Neun Koffer", dass die faschistische Verfolgung keineswegs alsselbsttätige Maschine funktionierte, sondern von Individuen, von zahllosenUngarn betrieben wurde, die gerne auch eine Extraschicht im Foltern einlegten.Etliche seiner Folterer hat er gekannt, andere haben diesen berühmtenPublizisten schon lange aus der Ferne gehasst und sich gesehnt, ihn einmal inihre Gewalt zu bekommen. Der Faschismus, wie er ihn erlitt, war auch ein Exzessan privat motivierter Gewalt, eine Gelegenheit für Biedermänner, sich einmal mitgutem Gewissen dem Blutrausch hingeben zu können.

Zsolt musste durch alle Stationen der Verfolgung gehen: 1941 wird er zurZwangsarbeit in die Ukraine verschickt, später von dort ins berüchtigteGefängnis am Margaretenring in Budapest verlegt. Als er freikommt, geht er insostungarische Großwardein, um sich im Haus der Schwiegereltern von derEntkräftung zu erholen. Doch drei Tage nach seiner Ankunft wird die Stadt vondeutschen Truppen besetzt, die die 20 000 Juden ins Getto pferchen. Dieabenteuerliche Aktion des Journalisten Reszö Kasztner, der der SS gezählte 1648Juden abkaufte, bringt Zsolt und seine Frau Ende 1944 in die Schweiz.

"Neun Koffer", im Jahre 1946 verfasst und in Ungarn erst 1980 in Buchformerschienen, geht diese Stationen nach und ist als Leidensbericht einesÜberlebenden auch im Rahmen dessen, was mittlerweile "Holocaust-Literatur"genannt wird, ein einzigartiges Werk. "Da liege ich nun auf der Matratze, mittenin der Synagoge vor der Bundeslade." So beginnt das Buch, das die Angst und dieAgonie in der als Spital, Leichenhaus und Wartesaal verwendeten Synagoge vonGroßwardein heraufbeschwört. Dicht aneinander gedrängt, liegen dort dieSterbenden, die bereits Toten und die auf ihre Deportation Wartendennebeneinander, und Zsolt registriert mit ungläubigem Staunen, was hier ausMenschen wird. Keiner von ihnen ist "als Märtyrer irgendeiner Idee"hierhergekommen, was sie eint, ist schlicht der rassistische Hass derer, diejetzt das Sagen haben. Sonst verbindet die Getto-Bewohner, die Gefangenen derSynagoge nichts. Schaudernd wird Zsolt bewusst, dass es jenen, die gleichermaßenzum Opfer auserkoren sind, an jedweder Solidarität mangelt. In unvergesslichenEpisoden beschreibt er minuziös, wie die Kranken auf den Tod des Schwerkrankenwarten, damit sie wieder etwas mehr Platz bekommen; wie die Gesunden, selbst imWartesaal des Todes noch voller Illusionen und Vorurteile, ihre Standesdünkelpflegen; wie die Angehörigen der jüdischen Oberschicht, die Bankiers,Rechtsanwälte, Geschäftsleute, vereinbaren, nicht in die gleichen Waggons wieder Plebs zu steigen - als gelte es, "eine Gesellschaftsreise in die Gaskammern"anzutreten. Und er erzählt in bizarren Geschichten von der lähmenden Angst, dieselbst die Geflüchteten nach ein paar hundert Metern wieder umdrehen und in dasGetto wie in ein behütetes Versteck zurückkehren lässt.

Die Grausamkeit, von der er lakonisch, bisweilen mit auflachender Bitterkeitkündet, macht die Lektüre passagenweise geradezu unerträglich. Mitten imSchrecken entdeckt Zsolt immer wieder die abstrusen, nichtigen Zufälle, die seineigenes Schicksal mitentschieden haben. Das Getto lehrt nicht die Moral, sondernden "Abschied von Ideen, Lehren, Zielen". Von neun Koffern hatte seine Frau ausreichem Hause sich nie zu trennen vermocht, stets wollte sie, deren Besitzdenkenin schlechten Zeiten zu einem bloßen "Kult des Gegenstandes" erstarrte, nochdieses oder jenes pretiöse Stück aus dem Hausrat bergen. Die neun randvollgepackten Koffer verhindern auf groteske Weise, dass das Ehepaar sich rettenkann - selbst dann, als die Rettung schon fast gelungen ist und jedem klar seinmusste, dass es um mehr als Koffer ging.

Am Ende sind die neun so sorgsam durch den ganzen Krieg gehüteten und einmal bisParis und von dort wieder zurück nach Ungarn gebrachten Koffer in einem Berg von35 000 Koffern begraben, mit denen die Großwardeiner Juden zu ihrem Abtransportins Konzentrationslager erschienen. Zsolt benennt das mit jener Hellsicht, dienach der Verzweiflung kommt und weiß, dass aus Verbrechen nichts zu lernen,weder Erkenntnis noch Moral zu gewinnen ist. Béla Zsolt starb 1949 anAuszehrung, da hatte er den Kampf gegen die allgemeine und gleicheGedächtnislosigkeit, die die Kommunisten dem ungarischen Volk versprachen, schonverloren.

5/2000

Abfall der Stadt

Die "Neun Koffer" des Béla Zsolt: Ein Buch der Erinnerung aus Ungarn. Und eines, das man lesen muss

Klaus Harpprecht

Béla Zsolt: Neun Koffer Aus dem Ungarischen von Angelika Máté; Verlag Neue Kritik, Frankfurt a. M. 1999; 393 S., 48,- DM

Dies ist kein Buch, das man gern liest (um mit unserem Bundeskanzler zu sprechen): aber eines, das man lesen muss. Eines, dem man nicht ausweichen, von dem man sich nicht à la Paulskirche abwenden kann, weil wir es nicht länger ertragen wollen, mit dem Grauen und mit der Scham jener Jahre konfrontiert zu werden. Es ist so: Das Entsetzen verfolgt uns über die Schwelle des Jahrhunderts hinweg. Wir werden ihm ins Auge sehen müssen, solange wir über diese Erde wandern: wir, die späten Zeugen dieser düstersten Epoche in der Geschichte der Menschheit - wir und die Generationen, die nach uns kommen. Auch sie werden nicht abschütteln können, was sich die Menschheit in jenen Jahren durch den rationalisierten Wahnsinn der deutschen "Endlösung" angetan hat.

Nein, der Bericht des Ungarn Béla Zsolt ist keine Lektüre, die sich für die halbe Stunde vor dem Einschlafen eignet, weiß Gott nicht. Sie könnte für böse Träume sorgen. Die Worte und die Bilder legen sich mit würgender Schwere auf die Seele, auch (und gerade dann) wenn sich der Autor mit einem höhnischen Lachen vor der Übermacht der Erinnerung zu retten versucht.

Zsolt galt, wie wir aus dem Nachwort von Ferenc Köszeg erfahren, als einer der bedeutendsten ungarischen Journalisten und Schriftsteller der Jahrzehnte zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen: ein linksliberaler Intellektueller jüdischer Herkunft, dessen Karriere nach dem Frontdienst und dem Zusammenbruch des Habsburgerreiches in Großwardein angefangen hat, dem ungarischen Nagyvárad, das unter rumänischer Herrschaft Oredea genannt wurde: einem Städtchen, in dem sich die Kulturen, die den Balkan prägten, so selbstverständlich und, wie es schien, untrennbar mischten - die ungarische, die rumänische, die jüdische (zu deren Kindern fast ein Viertel der Einwohnerschaft zählte) und wohl auch die deutsche.

Die biografische Skizze weist darauf hin, dass Zsolt vom Jahre 1920 an, nach Budapest übersiedelt, durch seine polemisch-glanzvolle Feder rasch Freunde, Feinde und Ruhm gewann, dass er Romane schrieb und Theaterstücke (mit einem Gedichtband fing er an), dass er im Hotel gelebt, nächtens im Caféhaus gehockt, dass er Tag für Tag an die 80 Zigaretten geraucht und eine kräftige Portion Cognac zu sich genommen hat, vom Mokka nicht zu reden: ein bohemisierender Literat, wie er in den großen Städten der untergegangenen k. u. k. Welt so exemplarisch gedieh, ein beharrlicher Aufklärer, der sich dem aufbrennenden Nationalismus jener Epoche mit gespannter Energie entgegenwarf.

Er wurde bewundert, und er wurde gehasst, nicht immer ohne eigenes Verschulden - so deutet es Köszegs knapper Essay am Ende des Buches an -, da er nicht zu zögern schien, seine Gegner durch harsche und manchmal maßlose Angriffe herauszufordern. Die Widersacher fanden Gelegenheit, sich an ihm zu rächen. Ein Patriot war er dennoch (oder gerade darum), obschon er bekannte, in ihm steckten "nun wirklich keinerlei Illusionen, keinerlei Pathos" mehr. Er sage das wie jemand, "der außer seinem Hab und Gut auch noch etwas sehr Wesentliches, Lebenswichtiges verloren" habe: "das Vaterland". Dieses Vaterland sei ihm immer wichtiger gewesen als den meisten Menschen seiner Umgebung: "fieberhaft befasste ich mich mit ihm in Wort, Schrift und in meinen Träumen ..." Er vermochte sich nicht vorzustellen, dass "diese Heimat eine Heimat war, die man hassen konnte", dass "die Staatsmacht ein räudiger Hund und die Heimat freie Wildbahn der Strauchdiebe" werden würde.

Da seine Frau in ebenjene fragwürdige Heimat zurückdrängte, schlug er sich mit ihr im September 1939 von Paris, wo die beiden der Kriegsausbruch überrascht hatte, auf schwierigen Umwegen nach Ungarn durch: samt den neun Koffern, die mit dem letzten Zug durch Deutschland über die Grenze nach Frankreich gelangt waren (und von denen der romanhafte Bericht seinen Namen bezog). Aber das war schon ferne Erinnerung, als er im Lazarett des Ghettos von Großwardein, das in einer chassidischen Synagoge untergebracht wurde, auf einer schmutzigen Matratze lag und auf den Abtransport ins Gas wartete: im Sommer 1944. Im Frühjahr hatten die deutschen Streitkräfte Ungarn besetzt, um seine Flucht aus dem Bündnis zu verhindern.

Drei Jahre zuvor hatte der Staat des "Reichsverwesers" Admiral Horty im Schatten des mächtigen Alliierten einige Divisionen in die Schlachten gegen die Sowjetunion geschickt, um an der russischen Beute teilzuhaben. Die Juden, die nicht als Soldaten dienen durften, wurden zum Arbeitseinsatz in die Ukraine verschickt: mehr als 40 000 Menschen, die man vor allem aus dem gehobenen Bürgertum rekrutierte, unter ihnen Béla Zsolt, trotz seiner Prominenz, trotz der 47 Jahre, die er damals zählte, trotz des Offiziersranges, der ihm während des Ersten Weltkrieges verliehen worden war.

Die Deutschen konnten sich auf den Antisemitismus des konservativen ungarischen Bürger- und Kleinbürgertums verlassen. Die Gendarmen versahen ihre Bütteldienste mit stoischer Grausamkeit - es sei denn, sie konnten durch Bestechung humaner gestimmt werden. Und die Nachbarn, mit denen man so friedlich zusammengelebt hatte? "... die Stimme der niederträchtigen Schmähungen, des Hohns, des Gelächters, als wir ins Gettho einzogen. Da standen die feinen Herrschaften am Straßenrand, spielten akrobatisch mit ihren Spazierstöcken ... Sie grinsten uns an oder sahen naserümpfend über uns hinweg, als wären die Müllwagen angerückt, um den Abfall der Stadt wegzubringen. Auf der Terrasse der Konditorei schlürften Journalisten, Schauspieler, Prostituierte und ihre Betrachter mit Strohhalmen ihre Erfrischungsgetränke oder tranken Bier und stießen klirrend miteinander an. Ein sanftgesichtiger, blondgelockter katholischer Priester mit dem Aussehen eines Päderasten - so eine Art Pfadfinder, der auch außerhalb der Schule stets mit kleinen Jungen herumspaziert - stand mit fünf kurz geschorenen Knaben in sauberen Hemden und Kniehosen an der Ecke, wies mit dem Stock auf den neunundsiebzigjährigen Schneider Grünzweig und höhnte: ,Seht mal den Juden, der sieht aus wie ein Ohrenmaki.' An der Ecke rief der luetische Zeitungsjunge mit heiserer Stimme die headline des offiziellen Blattes des Katholischen Bischofs von Großwardein aus: ,Die Juden erhalten ihre gerechte Strafe! Ein christliches Großwardein bleibt nicht länger nur ein Traum.'"

Unter der Aufsicht des "Dritten Reiches" hatten die faschistischen Pfeilkreuzler die Macht (aus zweiter Hand) an sich gerissen: willige Helfer des Großorganisators Eichmann, der nach Ungarn geeilt war, um vor dem drohenden Durchbruch der Roten Armee mit einem "Sondereinsatzkommando" in routinierter Geschwindgkeit für den Abtransport der ungarischen Juden in die Vernichtungslager zu sorgen: täglich wurden zwischen 10 000 und 14 000 Menschen nach Auschwitz gekarrt, 437 000 insgesamt.

Die Viehwaggons - von denen Zsolt bemerkte, sie seien das "maßgeschneiderte Verkehrsmittel" seiner Generation - standen am Rande des Ghettos bereit: das Kreischen der Räder auf den rostigen Gleisen und die Signale der rangierenden Lokomotiven ließen die Elenden, die sich in dem engen Quartier zusammendrängten, Tag und Nacht wissen, dass der Augenblick der Abreise in den Tod unerbittlich näher rücke.

Keine Auflehnung, keine Verzweiflung richteten gegen das kollektive Vernichtungsurteil, das über diese Menschen verhängt war, das Geringste aus. Der anklagende Schrei der zwölfjährigen Tochter eines Textilfabrikanten, die im Kloster erzogen worden war, die ihren Eltern zurief: "Warum seid ihr Juden? Warum? Und wenn ihr schon Juden seid, wie konntet ihr es wagen, mich zu machen?" - er verhallte in der Angst. Die rumänische Grenze war nur fünf Kilometer entfernt, aber eine Flucht schien sinnlos zu sein: auch drüben warteten die Häscher. Und wer es dennoch wagte, kam wieder: "... sie flohen aus der erschreckenden Freiheit zurück in die zum Tode verurteilte Sklavengemeinschaft. Der Hund, der von seinem Besitzer erbarmungslos verprügelt wird, trottet von zuhause fort, doch selbst, wenn er in den Wald flieht, bleibt er nicht dort, obwohl der doch vom Wolf abstammt. Der Hund schleicht zurück ins Haus und kann es kaum erwarten, endlich seine Prügel zu bekommen, wieder an die Kette gelegt zu werden und seinen Knochen zu bekommen."

Später suchte Zsolt nach einer Erklärung: die Menschen hätten nicht nur nicht geglaubt, dass all das mit ihnen passiert - "sie glaubten nicht einmal, dass sie identisch mit sich selbst waren. Schizophrenie nennt man die Krankheit, bei der sich die Persönlichkeit spaltet - ein paar Minuten lang denke ja auch ich, wohl ebenso wie sie, dass ich, der ich hier zuschaue, nicht ich sein kann, und sie, die sich zu den Waggons schleppen und zulassen werden, dass man sie hineinpfercht, nicht einmal die andere Hälfte ihres Ichs, sondern dritte Personen, Fremde seien."

Nein, Zsolt schonte niemanden, nicht die Opfer, nicht sich selber und nicht die Zurückbleibenden: "die Menschen, die der Gefahr entfernter oder auch näher waren, versuchten - solange sie ihr nicht ins Antlitz sehen mussten -, mit pathologischer Gleichgültigkeit all jene abzuschreiben, die schon für die Vernichtung präpariert waren". Er dachte voller Bitterkeit, dass er Zeuge eines Rückfalls in den "religiösen Seelenzustand vorbiblischer Zeiten" sei: "in den Ritus des Menschenopfers": "Damit ich leben kann, muss ein anderer sterben - und seit 1933 war ganz Westeuropa, die gesamte zivilisierte Welt außerhalb Deutschland Verkünder und Anhänger dieses Ritus. Damit die westliche Zivilisation in der gewohnten Weise weiterleben konnte, sollen die osteuropäischen Juden, Sozialisten, Wissenschaftler und Dichter doch aufgefressen, ins Gas oder auf den Scheiterhaufen geschickt werden." Der Mensch sei "auf dem Gebiet des Bösen zum Höchsten fähig", stellte er mit dem Zynismus des Hoffnungslosen fest. "Die wollen nicht einmal die Juden umbringen, sondern die Zivilisation an sich", sagte er in der Matratzengruft des Ghettolazaretts.

Er selber misstraute allen Chancen einer Rettung. Nur zögernd ließ er sich darauf ein, den Typhuskranken zu spielen, um fürs Erste vor dem Abtransport bewahrt zu bleiben: die Deutschen fürchteten, die Seuche könne die Bewachungsmannschaften anfallen. (Die Schwiegereltern und die Tochter seiner Frau waren längst Richtung Auschwitz verschwunden.) Ohne rechte Hoffnung ließ er sich schließlich darauf ein, mit seiner Frau zu fliehen und in der Hauptstadt, als Kellner getarnt, unterzutauchen. Als die beiden schließlich im Zug von Großwardein nach Budapest saßen, brach er die Erzählung ab.

Den Fortgang des Geschicks teilt uns das Nachwort mit. Zsolt wurde am Ende dennoch in ein Konzentrationslager verschleppt. Er zählte zu den ungarischen Juden, die durch den Handel des Klausenburger Journalisten Rezsö Kasztner mit der Gestapo befreit wurden: zwar scheiterte am Desinteresse der Briten die Rettung von 10 000 Menschen, die gegen eine versprochene Lieferung von Lastwagen und Rohstoffen ausgetauscht werden sollten, doch ließen sich die Schergen am Ende darauf ein, 1000 Juden gegen ein Lösegeld von jeweils 1000 Dollar von Bergen-Belsen in die Schweiz zu schicken. Zu ihnen zählten Zsolt und seine Frau.

Im Juni 1945 kehrten die beiden nach Ungarn zurück. Der Schriftsteller versuchte, ohne Erfolg, den Kommunisten Rákosis eine Partei bürgerlicher Demokraten entgegenzustellen. Immerhin gelangte er 1947 ins Parlament. Und er warf sich gegen den Antisemitismus, der sich in Ungarn, von den Stalinisten geduldet, aufs Neue regte, mit seiner Wochenzeitung Fortschritt energisch ins Zeug.

Vielleicht war sie der Fortführung seines Romans im Wege. Vielleicht beugte sich der Autor aber auch, von seiner Krankheit gezeichnet, der bitteren Einsicht, die ihm in der Ukraine zukam: dass "das Schreiben als Waffe und Mittel zur Veranschaulichung ganz und gar veraltet und unbrauchbar ist".

Béla Zsolt ist, 54 Jahre alt, 1949 gestorben. Das Fragment gelangte erst 1980 in die Buchhandlungen. Noch einmal verstrichen zwei Jahrzehnte, bis es zu uns fand. Es war eines der ersten literarischen Zeugnisse aus der Dunkelheit der Verfolgung, und es ist, kein Zweifel, eines der wichtigsten: beunruhigend wie kaum ein anderes Buch, das zum Ende des 20.Jahrhunderts aufgelegt wurde. Nein, man liest es nicht gern. Man muss es lesen: eine Botschaft aus der Finsternis, der miserablen Epoche des Schreckens.

PS. Der Verlag Neue Kritik, der sich mit dieser Veröffentlichung so große Verdienste erwarb, hätte auf die Genauigkeit der - im Ganzen gut lesbaren - Übersetzung ein wenig sorgsamer achten sollen. Goebbels schrieb sich, das weiß man noch immer, nicht mit Umlaut. Und es gab im Zweiten Weltkrieg keine "Springerstiefel", die bei den Jungnazis in Brandenburg und Umgebung so populär sind, sondern Knobelbecher, Schnür- und Reitstiefel. Dies nebenbei.