"We Remember Only the Atrocities" and Other Signs of Amnesia (Part II)
During my visit to my grandmother's village in Hungary, the locals claimed to know nothing about the Jewish community before the war. I wonder how much of that is true.
(Pictured above: Leah Eichler with the two octogenarian women in Beregdaroc who can still recall the day of the deportation in 1944.)
Read Part One Here:
Lately, I am suffering from a fear of forgetting. It’s not that I’m losing my memory — quite the opposite: the more I write about my family’s history, the more I remember.
It’s others, and what they are forgetting, or rather, what they choose to forget, that keeps me up at night. This fear of communal forgetfulness has me so afraid that on a recent night I woke up at 3 a.m. and found myself googling the fear of amnesia.
It’s called “Athazagoraphobia” in case you were curious — the intense fear of being forgotten or forgetting something. It may also include the fear of being ignored or replaced (cue my piece on The Replacements).
I spiralled down an internet worm hole trying to understand the etymology of the word, but there doesn’t appear to be one. Athazagoraphobia may just be made up, a ghost of a root word that lends itself to forgetfulness.
Last week, I introduced you to the two octogenarian women who still live in Beregdaroc, the village in Hungary where my grandmother and generations of her family lived before the Holocaust.
My boyfriend Isac took the picture above. He said, “you look like you are from here, like you could be their granddaughter.” And I must admit, part of me felt like I was from here and I was their granddaughter and I know they thought it, too.
Our conversation went through our guide and translator, Karesz, but at one point one of the women said something sweet to me directly in Hungarian, about my son, Azriel. It took me by surprise that I understood, having heard so little of the language in recent years. There is an intimacy in speaking someone’s native tongue and a mixture of warmth and fear spread through my chest as I did my best to answer. Then I remembered: my son looks just like me, and I look like these people. We look like we come from here. Except almost 80 years ago, this village decided vehemently that we no longer belong.
I met these women after asking the town’s mayor, who acted as our chaperone for the day, if there was a town historian – someone, anyone, who could tell me more about the Jewish families who lived there before the war.
But there were none. Not one. As I mentioned last week, the two octogenarian women told me what they remembered of the deportation but not much else.
“Two Jewish women came back once,” one of them added before we left, as if it were an afterthought. “About 10 years after the war. She knocked on a door in a house, went into her old kitchen and pulled something out of the wall. Then they left.”
So many questions: Who were these women and why does no one know their names? Whose house? Did the current owners know them? Did they ask what happened to them and others? What did she pull out of the kitchen wall?
These women, if they knew, they didn’t say.
I tried to discern if her tone was wistful as she recounted this story. Was she sad? Curious? Greedy? It’s hard to tell, working through a translator. All I could deduce is that, according to the locals, we have a habit, it seems, of hiding valuables. Perhaps she half-expected me to do the same.
Upon my return to Toronto, my cousin Eva, who lives in Budapest, told me that my trip reminded her of a Hungarian film called 1945, by director Ferenc Torok. So, I took her advice and watched it. (Here’s the trailer below. Watch it! You will not be disappointed.)
It was uncanny: the film, released in 2017 and shot in black and white, takes place in a village that could very well have been my grandmother’s. Like Beregdaroc, there was only one store. Like Beregdaroc, that store was owned by a Jewish family before the war. Like Beregdaroc, the village was Judenrein –ethnically cleansed— by 1945.
The film follows the arrival of two Jewish men who return to the village right at the end of the war. A wedding is about to take place between a wealthy villager’s son and a peasant girl, and most in town are invited. But the festivities are turned upside down by these Jewish visitors, who barely speak for the entirety of the film. Their mere presence begins to unhinge the villagers, and slowly their secrets begin to spill out.
Some of the villagers, most notably the village drunk, believe the arrival of these Jewish men offers the locals the opportunity to right a wrong. Or, at the very least, to return what was stolen. Meanwhile, other villagers are ready to defend their spoils of war at all costs. You learn about how close the families were, Jews and non-Jews, for generations, something my grandmother alluded to when she spoke of her village. Something that the villagers I met in Beregdaroc now seem to have forgotten.
What hit home for me as I watched the film was the air of civility among the villagers to these Jewish visitors when we, the audience, know of their dark secrets. They acted welcoming, but the threat of violence loomed ominously in the background. What happens when you want to forget but the ghosts come back? How far do you go to get rid of those ghosts?
It’s a feeling I couldn’t shake during my visit to my grandmother’s village, nestled in a remote part of the country, near the Ukrainian border. Everyone smiled, but I found the smiles unsettling. The mayor watched me with concern when I cried over my family’s tombstones. “I light candles every year on All Souls’ Day and place them at the Jewish gravesites,” he told me, as if to reassure me that even before my arrival, he assumed the role of caretaker of my family’s graves.
Was he telling me the truth? I don’t know, but the condition of the stones led me to believe otherwise.
In the film, the abandoned Jewish homes were reassigned to savvy political players. I can’t help but recall our visit to the “Jewish House” in Beregdaroc, a lovely corner-lot home, currently owned by the police chief and his wife. They have a little daughter. The wife mentioned to me two or three times how much she loves the house. It only occurred to me as I was stepping out that perhaps, like in the film, she feared I would somehow take it away.
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This was a post that went straight to my soul and through my bones. I am not Jewish so I don't want to pretend I understand. But I'm from Finland and my Dad was born in the East of Finland in a town called Viborg, built by Torgil Knutsson in the 1400 century when Finland was part of Sweden.
During the WWII Soviet attacked Finland and my Dad and his family along with the rest of the inhabitants had just a few hours to flee their hometown as Finland lost Viborg to Soviet. Long story short, we gained it back at lost it again.
You can imagine that those Russian people who were transported from other parts did not learn even a fraction of the real history of Viborg or the Carelian area.
So in a way I understand some of your loss and the heartbreaking feeling when meeting those Hungarians that simply prefer to not remember or know. I am 100 % certain of that.
have no doubt this film may complement visually what you excavate of this journey so evocative and the nod to amnesia its seduction and fear of betrayal deserves its own story thanks