There were no shtetls in Hungary, not really.
Previously, I’ve referred to my grandmother’s village, and the villages I visited in Eastern Hungary, near the Ukrainian border, as shtetls because they exude that Fiddler on the Roof feel. The population in the villages runs from a few hundred to a few thousand. They are filled with single storey homes made from adobe bricks and thatched reef roofs. Horses and cows dot their outskirts, as well as countless hay bales. They appear locked in time.
But they were never exclusively Jewish. For hundreds of years, they were inhabited by Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Calvinists and some Jews. In my grandmother’s village of Beregdaroc, Jews numbered about 10 percent; in my grandfather’s village of Napkor, which was slightly larger, maybe 20 percent. Jews and non-Jews lived next door to each other. Shopped at each other’s stores. Worked together. Went to the same school. Often there was no police presence in these villages — everyone knew everyone. And somehow that knowledge makes what happened 80 years ago all the more painful.
I had no real plans to return to Napkor.
I visited it last year, with my boyfriend and son, but found it unsettling. Maybe it was the endless number of relatives — brothers and sisters, parents, cousins with their own children — whose names were inscribed in careful calligraphy in the leather-bound books maintained by the town’s administrators. One was listed as a tailor. Another was born deaf and mute. Their lives remain a mystery to me. Like my grandfather, his family and their life before the war in this village of Napkor continues to be a closed book.
My grandfather, Herman Kohn, was an intensively devout man. As long as I knew him, he was the holder of the keys at our synagogue. He opened the door for the early morning prayers as long as his body would let him. I remember my uncle pushing him in his wheelchair in the dark hours before dawn in the winter, before anyone had a chance to clean the snow.
While he never spoke about his life in Hungary, I knew he was one of many Jewish men and other political “undesirables” taken as slave labour by the German-allied, Hungarian forces.** For months, I’ve struggled to find any documentation of his time there but it was known to be marked with intense cruelty. Men were often sent to the front lines without weapons. Badly fed and poorly clothed, they were worked to death by the Arrow Cross party members.** One report said 20 percent of these slave labourers survived; another said less than five percent. My grandfather was somehow one of them.
The only proof of his slavery is a single notice in a newspaper, marking his return, on July 4, 1947. In it, his name is among one of 16 that arrived in Debrecen. (You can download the document below.) I suspect he was taken in 1942. That’s five years of torture he never spoke about, at least not to me.
In the village of Napkor, there are no Jews (as far as I can tell) or even signs that Jews ever lived there. Not one of the many monuments makes even a passing reference and so far, no one I’ve met claims to remember a single one. There is no sign of a synagogue, although at three times the size of Beregdaroc, I imagine there must have been a local place of prayer.
But there is a cemetery, way out in the forest. Last year, we followed two government officials down muddy dirt roads, tree branches smacking the side windows as we slowly manoeuvred the car to a small clearing surrounded by tall metal fencing.
The door was broken. Inside, not a single tombstone was visible underneath the overgrown bush. All were stolen or destroyed. Devastating, yes, but rather than the more recent destruction, I couldn’t get over the indignity endured by generations of my family being forced to walk this far from the village, on unsteady terrain, to bury their dead.
It was my photographer Laszlo’s idea to return to the cemetery. I described it to him over our days together. I regretted not spending more time there last year, to walk around and take in the spirits, to see if I could find something under the overgrown bushes. The place felt holy. I wanted to take that in. The lack of knowledge about my grandfather’s life came with a certain amount of shame and I wanted to do my best to bring his family to life.
I didn’t admit to myself how much I wanted to return to the cemetery but when Laszlo suggested it, I jumped. The administrative building was already closed when we decided to look for the cemetery on our own. Karesz, my translator and researcher, had the location’s GPS. We followed it on my phone, twisting back and forth between muddy roads and the gravel-lined village ones.
“I don’t trust your phone,” Laszlo said, in his gruff manner as Google Maps kept switching directions. One minute we were 900 metres away, the next 1.2 km.
“It says we are only 850 metres away,” I insisted. Then 800 metres. Almost there, I worried about the road.
“Maybe we should park and walk.”
“We can make it,” Laszlo replied.
“700 metres now.” I eyed the ditches in the road nervously.
We hit 600 metres when the car stopped, its wheels spinning mud. Trees in all directions. Laszlo pressed hard on the gas but nothing.
“I guess we should go out and push,” I said.
Even with Karesz and I pushing, the car’s wheels kept spinning in the mud.
Karesz suggested we try to find branches to stick under the wheels. I picked up a group of skinny ones and immediately was pierced with a large sliver. Not five minutes out in the woods and already a tiny injury. I couldn’t survive out here in wartime, I thought to myself, at least not for very long.
“That one won’t work,” Karesz yelled over at my bunch. I dropped them on the road and stared at my white jeans. It dawned on me how little I was prepared for the unexpected.
We were stuck and took a moment to get our bearings. I stared around the forest, known for boars and brocket deers, and heard nothing. But the pull of the cemetery seemed to call me.
Karesz called out excitedly back at the road and I feared the unknown.
“I can’t believe it.” He stared into the woods. “Parasol mushrooms. I can never find them when I’m looking for them but they are everywhere here.”
It turns out Karesz is an expert forager. This is my second trip with Karesz and I’ve quickly learned he is an expert in everything.
“Well, we won’t starve, that’s for sure,” Karesz said.
I couldn’t tell if he was joking. But I know he was itching to pick them and mulled out loud how long they would last once plucked. Meanwhile, Laszlo smoked cigarette after cigarette by his car. He purchased a carton earlier in the day. Maybe we would be okay for the night.
“We have toilet paper in the car,” Laszlo said, as if to offer reassurance. “And we all ate a big lunch.”
“And we have mushrooms,” Karesz added.
I stared at the sky, getting slightly darker, wondering if it will rain soon. I thought fondly of my hotel room, a no-frills suite in Nyíregyháza that smelled faintly of chlorine.
“Camping, next to a cemetery where my family is buried?” I asked no one in disbelief. Perhaps Karesz spotted my panic.
“I’ll walk to the road and see if I can find anyone.”
We watched Karesz walk away and waited.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t stop thinking that we were only 600 meters away from the cemetery. You couldn’t see anything through the trees but I knew it was there. I could imagine the steel walls. I wanted to be there, alone, to walk among the dead.
“I’m going to start walking to the cemetery, to see if I can see anything,” I told Laszlo
“By yourself?” He asked, exhaling smoke.
I nodded; he shrugged.
I began walking about 100 metres. There was a bump in the clearing. If I walked over, I’d lose sight of the car. I cranked my neck through the trees, hoping to catch sight of the metal perimeter wall. I could feel it close. I checked my phone’s battery life. Still a quarter full.
Then something told me to turn back. Logical, yes. I tend to push things too far. It’s getting dark. Our car is already stuck. My phone battery is low. But also I sensed a warning. Don’t come close. This as far as you get now. This story will take time. Be patient.
I returned to Laszlo, who was smoking another cigarette. We waited in silence, walking around, taking photos.
“We’ll be fine here, even if we spend the night,” he said.
“I know.”
It was less than an hour before Karesz called. He found a man working a tractor in a nearby field and explained our predicament. The man said he could help but would need to finish his work first, then drive home in the tractor, get his car and come back. Tractors, I learned, don't drive very fast.
“Call me if you find another solution,” the tractor driver told Karesz.
“What other solution could we possibly find?” he replied, relating the story to me when he returned.
Karesz appeared happy, showing me the endless supply of mushrooms he discovered. He grew up not that far from here and was comfortable in the villages and backwood.
“Are you sure he’s going to come?” I asked Karesz.
“Of course, he said he would.”
“Do you want to call him?”
“He told me to call him only if we found another way to get the car out.”
“What if he thinks we found another way?”
“He doesn’t. Why wouldn’t he come if he said he would?”
I tried to distract myself. Karesz passed the time by talking about foraging and I watched him eye the mushrooms again, musing about how obvious it is to find something you have been looking for only when you have stopped trying.
I wondered if I wasn’t wasting my chance to find the cemetery on my own. But if the tractor man didn’t show up, and it got dark before I could find my way back, then what? It’s bad enough to sleep in a forest near my family’s cemetery. But sleeping in the cemetery alone? That would be too much.
Down the road, I could hear the sound of tires on gravel. The man on the tractor kept his word.
“I told you he’d come back,” Karesz said. I nodded and waited by the road as they tied a rope from one car to the other and pulled. I acted like I never had a doubt.
“Do you have anything we can give him, for his grandkids. Chocolates? A nice pen? Karesz asked.
“I have money,” I mentally counted the Forint equivalent of 300 Euros in my wallet.
“He won’t take your money.”
“I have a pretty notepad with a few pages scribbled in. I can rip those pages out.”
“No, never mind,” he said.
The man stopped next to me in his car on his way out. I thanked him profusely in my limited Hungarian and begged him, through Karesz, to take my money. But he just uttered a few words and waved.
“We are all human,” Karesz told me, “that’s what he said. We all need help sometimes.” I watched him drive away.
“Did he know we were going to the Jewish cemetery?”
“Yes, he said it’s just a short while up the road. We were on the right track.”
Karesz, Laszlo and I got back into the car. It was dark already and light rain hit the windshield.
“I told you he’d come back,” Karesz told me. “Country people are different. They don’t say a lot but mean what they say.”
I think of my grandmother’s village, about the people I interviewed over the last few days. They all appear so helpful and kind. Good people, most of them. And I can’t help but think of her neighbours, and my grandfather’s neighbours, before the war. Good people, too. Until they weren’t.
**The Arrow Cross Party only came into power in Hungary on October 15, 1944. While they committed terrible atrocities, the story of Jewish slave labour is really a homegrown Hungarian one.
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