Nine Suitcases

Bela Zsolt, Nine Suitcases, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004, translated from the Hungarian by Ladislaus Lob, ISBN 0224063057, price Ł17.99.
Bela Zsolt was a well-known writer and advocate of workers’ rights in Hungary between the world wars. On the eve of Second World War, Zsolt and his wife left Budapest for Paris, with nine suitcases in tow. The tug of home, however, pulled strongly at his wife. 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. Her poignant diary (The Diary of Eva Heyman) which often mentions Zsolt, was published by Yad Vashem in 1974. Throughout his memoir, Zsolt blames the nine suitcases, representing 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. This is the first translation of the book into English. It is hard to classify Zsolt’s work. Essentially it is a memoir, but the many reconstructed segments of dialogue, imbue it with a novel-like quality.
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 the makeshift ghetto hospital, Zsolt observes life in the ghetto, ponders the two dreadful years he spent as a forced laborer in the Hungarian Labor Service in the Ukraine, and experiences the deportations of almost all of 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 both had contracted typhus in the Ukraine, is used to obtain an order of quarantine for the inmates and their families. Many will eventually flee the hospital, including Zsolt and his wife, who are secreted to Budapest by gentile friends. The memoir ends with their arrival in Budapest, but the translator’s introduction tells us that the Zsolts managed to obtain a place on the Kasztner Train. This will take him to Switzerland at the end of 1944, by way of Bergen Belsen.
With all of 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 vignette, he writes about the Jewish nurse with a squint. She agonizes whether or not to sleep with a young gendarme in the hope of sparing her father a beating, designed to make him reveal information regarding their hidden money and valuables. Zsolt refuses to give her advice, but it soon becomes clear that she has sacrificed her honor for the sake of her father. At first, swayed by the experience of sleeping with the woman, the gendarme offers his aid. But following an incident in which six gentile workers protesting the treatment of the Jews are killed, the gendarme reneges on his offer and the father is beaten to death. It seems the gendarme killed two of the protesters. Zsolt writes: “Now he had killed for the first time and 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 they he had tasted the intoxication of violence, the lust of cruelty, and 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 with the squint on the previous night and thinking of saving people, when it was also possible to kill people.” (P. 42-3)
Zsolt is often very pointed and caustic. This is his tone when he relates how the local madam (Ma) saved two of her Jewish prostitutes from the ghetto. Zsolt contrasts the humanity of the madam to that of local religious figures: “Yes, Ma was a brave women. She had come back for her girls, while the reverend sisters hadn’t come back for the little girls they had brought up as Christians at Notre Dame de Zion and the Premonstratensian priests in their white habits hadn’t come back for their pupils either. Doubtless Ma was above all else a businesswoman, but it wasn’t merely out of greed that she had decided to fetch her girls back. Her salon would have survived without Vilcsi and Sarika (the prostitutes), particularly now, in wartime. After all, a soldier doesn’t care who he goes to bed with, so longs as it’s a woman.” (P. 91)
Zsolt sometimes links events in the ghetto to his experiences in the labor service system. He writes of in 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 may escape if they choose to do so, after all Romanian border is nearby. Only one Jew, a former labor serviceman named Grosz escapes. 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 labor service men 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 of fighting. Suddenly the Germans opened fire and the partisans fled, leaving the Jews behind while the Germans pursued the fighters. The labor service men were free to go anywhere, but they chose to return to their labor battalion. Zsolt was not there, but heard about it at the time and he 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, if not from fighting, at least from the ordeal of a nomadic life in the forest.” (P. 79)
Somewhat later, at Galukhov in the Ukraine, Zsolt recalls, he and some of his companions become separated from their unit during a chaotic retreat. Unlike the men in the previous story, they tried to escape. The local teacher, who admired writers, hid them into her home. After a close call in which Germans actually enter 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: “I wished I had given up the ghost in the teacher’s yard. There’s nothing heroic about such a longing for death to release one from physical pain. One is seized by a final impatience: I’ve had enough, and that’s that. Enough of the cold, of the unsalted cold potatoes, of the pile of dirt that is now my body, of the latrine freezing to my backside. I’m no longer prepared to let the lice chew my cold body till it’s on fire – I can’t scratch myself, I can’t tear all the junk off me, my sweater, my winter shirt, my summer shirt, my vest. Everything’s swarming with lice and the only way to get rid of them would be to burn the whole heap of rags with me inside. I can’t open any buttons with my mittens on, and if I take the mittens off, my frozen fingers will spread out, point toward the sky – ten frozen fingers pointing to the moon. If the nine suitcases hadn’t arrived at the Gare Pajol in Paris at the last moment I might now be in Lisbon….” (P. 161)
Zsolt’s experiences bring him to the realization that his life’s work may well have been for naught and his ideology bankrupt. During the train ride to Budapest and toward freedom, he reflects on how the peasants and workers he had always tried to defend turned on him – on the Jews. He admits that deep down he had always known that they hadn’t really wanted his help. 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?” (p. 275).
Written with great style, Zsolt’s memoir is a powerful testament to the suffering of Hungarian Jewish labor service men on the Eastern Front, the ordeal of the Jews of Nagyvarad, the heroism a 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 assimilated Jewish intellectuals, who somehow managed to survive. His aching confusion over the meaning of the horrific events, he can scarcely believe he has experienced, drives home one more aspect of the tremendous rupture we call the Holocaust.

Dr. Robert Rozett
 

This book review originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post , November 12, 2004
 

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