Hugo Gryn
Chasing Shadows

Extract

Chapter One

My previous return to Berehovo was in the summer of 1945. It was just a few weeks after the war. I had barely recovered from typhoid and the effects of starvation. After many adventures on the journey from Austria heading east, I found myself on the train from Budapest to my home town. I was travelling alone, but convinced that if anyone else from our family had managed to survive then surely they, too, would return to Berehovo in the hope that there would be a reunion.

A man got on the train at Cop - where you now left Hungary and entered the Soviet Union --who recognised me. He was delighted to tell me that my mother was waiting for the return of my father and me because she had heard that we were both liberated from Gunskirchen, a concentration camp in Austria. The news was wonderful and terrifying at the same time. The fact was that a few days after liberation, my father had died. Suddenly the prospect of the encounter with my mother filled me with great fear. How was I to tell her what had happened? What would be her reaction?

When the train finally pulled into Berehovo's station, I refused to get off. The man I had been speaking to and several other people tried to persuade and cajole me to get off the train. I protested. Let me get to the next station, which was Ujlak. Let me think a little longer, then I shall return and I will find some way in which I can explain everything to her. The train was held up for at least twenty minutes and eventually I did get off and began to walk towards the house, which she lived in at that time.

It was a very sunny and hot afternoon. Every day, around the time when the train from Budapest was due to arrive, my mother would lean out of the window of his house and wait. The sight of my walking alone told her everything. When I came into the house we embraced, held each other for a long time; without a word she took a low stool and sat on it in the way that Jewish people sit shiva* She sat on that stool for a full hour. We hardly spoke. When the hour was up, she got up. We embraced again and she said, 'Well, life has to go on and you and I will have to get on with our lives'

Now forty-four years later I was back in Berehovo again. The return was not my idea at all. It was my daughter Naomi who had wanted to make a film that would pay tribute to a community, which for me has a personal history that is both happy and tragic.

When I last left it, at the end of that summer in 1945, the town was half empty. Its Jewish population was devastated. A small handful of survivors, dispirited, most of them waiting in vain for the return of other members of their families were still there.

There was a sense of being not wanted, even resented by the non-Jewish population. The town had been ceded to the Soviet Union as soon as the war was over and I guessed that the new masters of the town had some scores to settle with the predominantly Hungarian population. During the time that the town was part of fascist Hungary, they had given both sympathy and support to fascism and to the atrocities that were to come a little later. I concluded that to have any kind of creative life, I had to be away from the traumatic reminders.

My mother was then still a young woman of thirty-seven. She was wounded by the loss of her husband, my younger brother Gabi, as well as the loss of her mother, brothers, sisters and their families. She too had some dreadful experiences in Auschwitz in Stutthof, but she did not want to leave. Not yet, She wanted more time. I felt that she wanted to wait just in case anyone else did turn up, she encouraged me to go and to resume my education.

*Seven day period of mourning which follows the funeral. When somebody discovers too late that they have been bereaved, it is customary to sit for only one hour.

From page 44

I could see that Carpathia had somehow remained a stagnant backwater of the Empire, even in those heady days. Its timber and a few salt mines were useful enough, and so were some of the other mineral riches buried in the Carpathian mountains. But its wine and mineral waters were unable to travel too well or far enough. Another pamphlet described how many Jews, as well as Ruthenians, took a realistic look and decided that their future was as bleak as their past. They then joined the long lines at Ellis Island, beyond which was the more or less welcoming and opportunity promising life of America.

Indeed, soon after the turn of the century, two of my grandmother's brothers, Nathan and Bertie Neiman, emigrated to Pennsylvania and around that time too, members of my mother's Neufeld family moved to Ohio.

But the fact is that from my perspective as a child, Berehovo felt safe and secure, as well as prosperous and progressive. Its three big churches, Roman Catholic, Protestant and Russian Orthodox, had gleaming spires and meticulously kept gardens surrounding them. Just past the big Catholic church was Berehovo's one and only hospital, a modern and equally gleaming set of buildings, and said to be one of the finest hospitals in the district. I can still smell the powerful odour of iodine that seemed to envelop it.

Beyond the hospital a series of roads led to one of the town's great industries. A series of wine cellars at the foot of the hills and, further up, the vineyards themselves. By the time I was of school age my father was successful enough and certainly enthusiastic enough to have acquired both our own wine cellar as well as a vineyard on Rose Hill. From our wine cellar it was possible to see the grounds of the Berehovo football and tennis club, BFTC, which had its own semi-professional football team and whose players were both Jewish and Christian. During the football season, our Shabbat afternoon walks took us as far as our wine cellar and from its second-storey balcony, Gabi and I would follow the match in progress as best we could. There was great pride in our local team and we could generally tell whether they were winning or losing from the noise of the crowd, even more than from the distant scene of running figures.

The large entrance hall of the wine cellar housed the various presses, most of them manual, but one was already mechanized. And beyond the presses stretched a five-hundred-metre-long tunnel, painstakingly cut into the rocky hillside, lined on either side with rows of oak barrels filled with an assortment of wines by the end of each autumn, and hopefully more or less empty by the following summer.

During the weeks of fermentation, the wine cellar was out of bounds because the fumes that filled it were lethal, but once that process was over, there came an all-important time of mixing and blending, which was the job of an expert.

Mr Samuel was one of the best wine masters in Berehovo, and my father employed him every year for this task. He was short and very bowlegged and when I was about seven I was allowed to spend a day mixing and blending the wine with him in the cellar. Dutifully I followed him from barrel to barrel and as he tasted the various red and white wines with the aid of a long glass funnel, I did the same with the help of a shorter one. The difference was that while Mr Samuel tasted the wine and then spat it out, I tasted and swallowed. By the time my father's younger brother Hershi joined us in the afternoon to see how we were getting on, he found me literally rolling among the barrels. For the first and one of the few times in my life I was well and truly drunk.

Hershi took one look, picked me up, bundled me into a waiting fiacre and took me home. My mother, whose one great fear was that of drunkenness, had no difficulty in diagnosing my condition, and also for the first time I received a merciless spanking on my bottom. With a bravado that was born of inebriation, I turned my head to her, saying, 'Go ahead, I can't feel a thing anyway!'