SACRIFICING MARCELLINA
THERE WAS NO HELPING IT, I set off from Paris accompanied by the silent clamor of the dead. To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure where I was headed. I couldn’t find the place, not even on the Net. I set off because, after all those years, it was something I felt I had to do. From what I’d read, I knew that I should head for Toulouse first, from where, by all odds, I could catch the local train to Latour-de-Carol. Even the name sounded intriguing. It must have been the tower of one Charles or another. I must have been around eight when I heard the name of the town for the first time. But before I set off, I headed for the nearby rue Geoffroy l’Asnier, where Serge Klarsfeld’s museum is located, and where the walls are inscribed with the names of the victims. I also wanted to see Klarsfeld’s collection of the portraits of murdered children, seventy-six thousand names in all. The names of those who do not exist.
As the years passed, the mass murders of the twentieth century turned into a professional problem for me, as well as for others. I could never deal with these thousands and millions by resorting to fiction. The first anonymous victim impedes my progress. No matter where I begin or with whom, I can’t get to the end. Given that I am a single individual and given my imagination, I simply can’t imagine this many anonymous individuals, I can’t track their progress, nor can my fictional heroes do so. My hero cannot pretend that he never existed, or that he is not bound to find an explanation for his own survival, on this side of the narrative or beyond. Serge Klarsfeld hurled himself headlong into the thick of the story, and with decades of dogged labor he has retrieved amateur photographs from its depths that took everyone by surprise. But then, why should anyone remember the faces and dead bodies of the murdered children of people they don’t even know.
I am professionally bound to confine myself to people with names. Which is ridiculous, of course, because not a moment passes without an infinite mass of humanity by my side, frozen into a state of anonymity, my familial and anthropological plurals; and yet I must leave out whoever does not have a first name and who does not rise from the tempestuous sea of conflicts or the infinite desert of boredom. Their murderers plunged these individuals into the profoundest impersonality, they deprived them of their human face, and Klarsfeld found this intolerable, he found it unacceptable, and so he brought them back, he writes. On the other hand, the shimmering glance of these dead children cracks open, if fleetingly, the marble slab of theological thinking, something that he could not have counted on, say I. It cracks it open even if for decades Christian theology has pretended to have no knowledge of the absence of these individuals, as if the story of their massacre and the story of their absence had not penetrated the daily lives of European society, whereas if it acknowledged this absence, it could retrieve and salvage their memory from the maw of time and rectify the damage done to the concept of divine mercy and preordination.
But though I bought a first-class ticket in order to be at a safe distance from everything and everyone with their small lunch boxes and their small cooler boxes, my awful petit bourgeois train companions got on my nerves just the same. As soon as the celebrated high-speed train, the train à grande vitesse, wrenched itself from the crowds at Gare de Lyon and took off in all its majesty, they, as if on cue, began eating. The French petit bourgeois must satisfy his hedonism on what you might call a tight budget. I couldn’t abide the sight of them fussing about to no purpose, opening and closing, pulling out and jamming back in, putting things down and picking things up strictly for their own benefit, and to the accompaniment of the relentless rustle of their paper bags and the unremitting crackle of their plastic lunch boxes, as in line with some hedonistic rite they methodically guzzled up their prescribed four courses. But before they were done, they first ate three kinds of cheese and a bit of fruit, then drank a bit of coffee from their thermos bottles. Which went on till their stomachs were fit to burst. No one can be that hungry. No one has an appetite as voracious as that. They didn’t eat because they were hungry, and they didn’t eat because they couldn’t resist the pleasure of eating, they ate because their style of living prescribes the duty to heap pleasure on top of pleasure. Whether it rains or shines, they must eat four courses. Their daily portion of baguette must be fresh and crispy, and it better be crispy enough to cover everything with crumbs within a ten-meter radius. Also, they must drink some wine from their two small travel flasks and some water from their plastic bottles with which they poison the environment. They first put all these things up on the racks, then they took them down, they took them out and put them back in, they bunched them up and discarded them, they uncapped them and recapped them, they unwrapped them and rewrapped them, they uncorked them and recorked them. I beat a quick retreat. I fled their first-class hedonistic sense of duty and their Cartesian rigidity. I fled the devastating spirit of Descartes and Sade. I couldn’t bear watching them any longer, I couldn’t listen to their champing, their indecent chewing, the noisy swallowing of their food, the smacking of their lips in public, their Adam’s apples bobbing up and down from the loud, unrestrained gulping of their drinks, and so I went in search of an unoccupied seat someplace else, except I couldn’t find one anywhere, I don’t know why. There wasn’t a single unoccupied seat on this accursed train, as if on this accursed day all of humanity were heading for Bordeaux and Toulouse, and not just me. In this madly speeding train, the corridors, too, were packed with passengers. Considering the speed, the passengers would have never been allowed to stand like this on a proper German or Swiss train.
Once again, I was at a loss to understand.
From time to time the train gave me a jolt, and had a man with strong arms not reached out after me, had he not grabbed me, I’d have plunged headlong into the abyss of the train’s stairs. Even so, I managed to hit my head against an iron pole. On the other hand, the gash, the split-open skin, the blood oozing down my forehead made me regain my sanity somewhat.
I looked for the place by the names familiar to me from my reading, but at first I couldn’t find it either under the name of Vernet or Le Vernet, the names by which the town was known to me. I couldn’t find it on any of the maps, not even the most detailed; look as I might, I couldn’t even find it on the Internet. On the other hand, I found an idyllic bathing resort in the Pyrenees by the name of Vernet-les-Bains, which was pleasant to explore. This Vernet-les-Bains is rich in thermal springs, it is profuse with flowers and even has a water park. It must have been a miserable little hole in the wall before the war, with a handful of inhabitants and a handful of goats high up in the mountains, but I needed to find my own place or, as Pierre Nora called it, my place of remembrance, somewhere in the foothills. Ariège. And then, when I looked under the entries for the region and the rushing mountain stream from which it received its name, I found the page I’d been looking for. Le Vernet d’Ariège. I could now identify it from my readings on history and from what I’d heard about my own uncle’s life. But there was nothing else on the page. Also, I’d reached Toulouse by then, and thanks to my hosts, the following day I lost even this one clue.
They said that there’s a place by that name just south of the city, it shouldn’t take me more than twenty minutes by train. We found it on a map of the region in the vicinity of the commune of Venerque. No d’Ariège, they said twice, pas d’Ariège, pas d’Ariège, it’s really simple, as if they were talking to an idiot or someone hard of hearing. Et voilà. It’s Le Vernet, simplement Le Vernet. On the other hand, they had no knowledge of anything happening there sixty or a hundred years ago, or even earlier. In the evening, a couple they were friends with came over for dinner, both doctors like them. They were cheerful and talkative, like them, because they also hailed from the south. By all odds, their lack of knowledge is the fault of bourgeois historiography, which is to be blamed for other deficiencies as well. Again and again, their obvious ignorance appalled me. On the other hand, it suited these decent bourgeois and Spiessbürgers, who’d rather not be confronted with anything that might unsettle their much valued worldview, specifically, the course of their businesses and their expense accounts. In turn, bourgeois historiography is pleased to oblige them. They treat political history and political philosophy without considering the workers’ movements as well, or only as little as possible, and the peasants’ movements even less, as a result of which the continent’s social history can’t be properly understood, and the picture of its human condition remains irrevocably distorted. We can recognize neither our former selves nor our present selves in it. They concern themselves with colonialism, militant missionary work, and the slave trade, in short, the fire-and-brimstone history of a series of genocides only obliquely, in line with their national and religious biases, in line, one might say, with their domestic sense of aesthetics. Given half a chance, they balk at incorporating even the sheer fact of the series of genocides into their national consciousness. It would be far too awkward for them to have to come face-to-face with the history of their religious universalism and superstitious racism as reflected in their institutions, administrative systems, and human sciences.
My Parisian friends had not heard the story of the internment camp at Le Vernet either, whereas they were well-informed Frenchmen otherwise, men and women for whom Drancy and Les Milles say something. And yet Le Vernet is not simply a camp in the universe of French camps, it was the largest camp, and it was a penal camp or, according to the official terminology of the time, a camp spécial. On the basis of Anne Grynberg’s investigative work, Les Camps de la honte, I counted eighty-eight camps. In his La France des camps: L’internement 1938–1946, Denis Peschanski identifies an even greater number and speaks of approximately 600,000 internees in two hundred camps. Of course, at this point I might ask where I might find a Hungarian compatriot of mine with knowledge of the internment camps at Ricse, Csörgő, and Garany in former Zemplény County, or whether he can show us where his fellow Hungarians had suffered in these towns.
But that day, I willingly accepted the version offered by my hosts and their loud southern guests, just as I had willingly accepted the ignorance of my Parisian friends. I was a guest. I couldn’t very well start shouting at the dinner table while we were stuffing ourselves with foie gras, strewing the kilim rug with crumbs of their wretched baguettes, and drinking Henri Bourgeois’s Sancerre from Chavignol. I accepted their proposition without a word, to wit, that this Le Vernet, this simplement that shares a station with Venerque, il faut prêter attention, s’il vous plaît ne pas échanger les deux, one must pay attention in order not to confuse the two; in short, I did not doubt them; after all, these two that I must not confuse also lie along the Toulouse-Barcelona line, and so even when I bought my ticket, I thought great, I’m on track, I’m going in the direction of Latour-de-Carol, and that happens to be the station on the French border where, after the collapse of the Catalonian front in February 1939, the defeated Republicans sneaked across, individually and in groups, about twelve thousand of them, practically the entire 26th Division, Spanish anarchists, Spanish Communists, members of the International Brigade, including Hungarians, my father’s envied friends and comrades.
My father had wanted to fight on the side of the Republicans, he had wanted to show his solidarity. No pasarán. It may have been the greatest political ambition of his youthful years. Except, the illegal Communist doctors at the illegal recruitment center weeded him out, they did not consider him physically fit. He was thus prevented from going and killing people and dying a hero of his own free will whereas, had he fallen at the Battle of the Ebro, it would have been an entirely different story as far as I’m concerned because I would not have been conceived. When my father objected to something, it always turned out to be too loudly and far too unsympathetically, and when he next tried to reason with the recruitment board, he gave the impression of a hysterical child.
Not only did he want justice, not only did he want to right erroneous thinking, he wanted unequivocal truth, and he wanted it pronto. He was a quiet man, gentle like his brothers, attentive and courteous to a fault, a person who, quite unexpectedly for the outside world, was nevertheless given to bursts of hysteria.
They explain to him that he has chronic scoliosis and whether he knows it or not, his condition is serious. Perhaps nobody told him, but he should be wearing a back brace. Yet I see from his surviving medical records that he must have known about his illness when he went for the secret recruitment. On October 4, 1934, about three years before he was turned away, he’d been X-rayed by Dr. Dezső Markó at the Charité X-ray Institute, and, on the basis of the lateral X-rays of the vertebrae of the lower back and the upper lumbar vertebrae, the doctor concluded that the spine showed a pronounced kyphosis, a discontinuity in the alignment of the spine. His condition may have been due to the wounds he’d suffered at the Hadik Barracks. The corpus vertebrae are flattened and widened in the area of the curvature. The spaces between the vertebrae are healthy, of medium width. The contours of the vertebrae are sharp. The doctor gave the summary professional opinion that he had kyphoscoliosis caused by rickets.
And so he couldn’t show his solidarity, he couldn’t go to his death voluntarily. He argued with the illegal Communist doctors that he was as perfectly fit for expeditions into the Tatra and the Alps, for climbing rocks, rowing on the Danube and the Tisza for weeks on end, skiing in the Tatra and the Alps, as anyone else, but his reasoning fell on deaf ears. Also, he was short of stature. According to his military records from the same period, he was just 165 centimeters, or five feet six inches. On the other hand, in the surviving summer pictures and as I remember him, he was sporty and well built, handsome, hardy, healthy; his bones may have been at risk, but you couldn’t tell by just looking at him. Only before our mother’s death, when he buckled under the strain and walked with hunched shoulders, did he give the impression that he was slightly hunchbacked. Later, he envied even the prisoners, the executed, and the fallen for their participation in the glorious struggle that ended in defeat. At most, his features became distorted, the scar he received as a child turned white, and he trembled under the weight of his lifelong self-restraint when, for the benefit of the family, my Uncle Pali and Aunt Magda gave an impassioned account of the cleansing actions of the anti-Trotskyite firing squads that were acting on orders from Moscow. There was something unfamiliar in their manner, a striving for superiority I had not detected before, as if each was trying to outdo the other, as if each could say something even graver, even more horrible. They were bursting with the amount of knowledge that, to be sure, they should have shared with the others at a much earlier date. Granted that in a dictatorship being in possession of confidential information confers special privileges, the members of my own family were never among the most privileged. It’s not that they gradually found themselves at a remove from the mighty, dictatorial power of the Party; they were never part of it. They would have been ill-suited to the task to begin with, except they didn’t have what it takes to admit it, and their ostentatious display of knowledge was meant to hide this fact, whereas what they were displaying was something they should have been ashamed of to begin with. In this instance, it meant that in spite of their personal views, they had to acknowledge that the attempt to do away with the anarchist and the Trotskyite movements can’t be blamed on Franco’s fascists, not even in retrospect. Even back then, they should have written it off to the account of the Muscovite faction of Communists, what’s more, they should have done so publicly, when they were editing leftist newspapers for their party. And if they knew back then but did not publish what they knew, neither in Femmes, nor in the Paris-based Hungarian Worker, nor in Regards, because they felt that in the interest of the unity of the European antifascist movement they must keep quiet about this series of murders, then they, too, must share the blame. They pretended they’d heard about the postwar show trials and the series of Stalinist purges only from brief, confidentially whispered accounts of speeches delivered at secret meetings, whereas many of their closest friends had fallen victim to the purges of the thirties.
To a child’s mind, the most interesting aspect of their silence was their denial. All the while they were speaking about things they’d never spoken about earlier, they even denied that they might have been keeping quiet about anything at all. For instance, they kept quiet about the cheating during the free elections of 1947, about the so-called blue slips, whereas they printed them and transported them on their trucks, and bragged about it to one another in my presence. Too many of them had been involved for it to be kept secret. On that summer afternoon, under the open sky, they cut one another short, vying to outdo one another to see who could come up with more lies or who knew about more secrets and murders of which for a long time, a very long time, not only was it not right for them to speak, it was expressly forbidden, and had anyone so much as whispered about them, they would have been bound to consider such confidentially relayed information scaremongering, the disruptive machinations of reactionaries, and would have had to report it.
It was summer and very hot, the conversation took place at our home, first inside, but they were restless, they said that there was not enough air, and besides, in those days they had every reason to suspect that the walls had ears. It was their job to make sure that the walls everywhere had ears. Thanks to his telecommunications experience, my father, whose code name had been Jupi in the illegal Communist movement, made sure of it, as did my uncle Endre Nádas, whose code name had been Vadas. And so they continued their conversation out on the big terrace, then moved out to the big lawn under the giant copper beech. Probably, this family gathering took place during the hot summer of 1954. But only the Communist members of the family had gathered for the occasion. Even my grandfather the inveterate Garamist, the social democrat, could not be present, and as for my Uncle Pista, he came alone, without his quick-tempered, outspoken wife, Teréz, a descendant of the composer Karl Goldmark, who was educated by Wallachian nuns and who, with her finely chiseled but extremely pushy manners, stood out from the rest of the family like a sore thumb and got on everyone’s nerves.
It was the last summer that our mother was still with us, if barely. Ruffled by so many obviously criminal acts, the men and women were standing in groups under the shade of the greenish-purple branches of the tree, holding the pink-edged, flower-patterned pink teacups from Erzsébet Mezei’s pink salon in their hands, and they were shouting and making sweeping gestures as they stood on the green lawn, each bent on outdoing the other with their murders, each bent on outdoing themselves. It had been a long afternoon and by then the sky was overcast, but they were bent on reviewing their lives in the movement as the summer storm was brewing, but then did not erupt. No wonder I wanted to make sense of it; no wonder I paid very close attention.
Up in the mountains, two thousand meters above sea level, the French police grabbed the fighters as they crossed the Spanish border. About five thousand were taken to Mazères, where there was an abandoned kiln once used to make bricks, the rest were taken to Le Vernet d’Ariège.
As for me, I already had my suspicions the previous day, because in the memoirs and in what I read about its history, there was no mention of the closeness of Toulouse, but there was plenty of mention of the closeness of the Spanish border and the mountains, in which case I was on the wrong track. The defeated troops had to cross the frontier up high, above the vegetation, over impassable, secret paths. My uncle, who was not conducted down to Le Vernet d’Ariège from the mountains but was arrested in 1939 in Paris one morning in early fall, also writes in detail about the nearby mountains. At the time of his arrest, he was no longer secretary of the editorial committee, or secrétaire du comité de rédaction, which for all intents and purposes meant editor-in-chief of Regards, the illustrated weekly of the antifascist People’s Front which he had launched, and whose masthead declared that it was Le grand hebdomadaire illustré du Front Populaire but, because in the wake of the events produced by the war and on orders from the Party in Moscow or, to be precise, in answer to the courteous summons from the journalist and Communist politician Gyula Alpári, he had taken over the management of the Rundschau, the paper of the illegal International Information Bureau of the Party. In one of the two notebooks that have survived, he even mentions that according to a superstitious camp belief, all calamity comes from the nearby Pyrenees. Which is a pretty hair-raising statement. Probably, it’s the furious take on ex montibus salus, salvation comes from the mountains.
When out of simple courtesy, my uncle took over editorship of the illegal Rundschau from Alpári, meaning that in line with Party discipline he gave up a professionally significant job for a professionally worthless one, they had just come back to Paris from the daisy-covered hills and deep green forests of Asnières, they’d just returned from vacation, my Aunt Magda writes in her memoirs, but by then she’d been haunted by some sort of vague fear for many months. Dread. This was one of my Aunt Magda’s favorite words, but she didn’t use it in her memoirs. On the other hand, she mentions that her husband had undergone a profound change. They should leave Paris immediately, this was what her instincts told her. Disappear, make themselves scarce, get away. In the twenty years following the Commune, this was the sixth place they’d lived, and with so much turmoil behind them, my Aunt Magda’s instincts dictated that they must now leave their beloved Paris as well. At the time she was senior editor of the women’s magazine Femmes, the illustrated journal of an international antiwar and antifascist women’s group with a wide political base. She had no way of knowing that another world war had broken out, but she knew that the German Luftwaffe was dropping bombs on Polish cities, that the German army was on the march with intent to occupy Poland, and that it was only a matter of days, possibly hours, before Britain and France would declare war on Germany. The German occupation was nowhere yet when, as a political preamble, the left-wing liberal Daladier government had already caused a rift in the antifascist united front, and had begun its obsessive pursuit of Communists and foreigners in order to appease its own fascists, hoping to take the wind out of their sails, and also to send a message to the Nazis as well. At least, this is how my Aunt Magda characterized Daladier’s politics in word and in writing. We are good negotiating partners because we love neither the Bolsheviks nor the Jews. Even thirty years on, Daladier would still get her fuming mad. Probably, he reminded her of her own hated and despised liberal-bourgeois scum, her own liberal-conservative ancestors. Clearly, Daladier would have liked to forestall the eventuality of the French having to go to war because of the Poles, and so he began persecuting those who could have been his allies in defending the nation, something that would soon be painfully evident, indeed.
I am not convinced that my Aunt Magda did not have a good reason for her rage. With their pragmatic political speculations, the conservative liberals and the leftist liberals generally end up kicking themselves in the ass. My own experience tells me the same.
On the other hand, the eventuality of policing aliens was part of French domestic tradition. They had gathered up aliens as soon as the First World War broke out, they locked them in internment camps, and for the four years that the war lasted, they kept them under tight surveillance, as if they’d been hardened criminals.
Copyright © 2017 by Péter Nádas
English translation copyright © 2023 by Judith E. Sollosy
