asked me why I wanted to know Bernie's story at all. For one thing, because the German crime of the Holocaust never lets me go. But wanting to know about Bernie's “first life” was only part of what motivated me. I also wanted to link it to my own story. To do both, to tell his story and mine—the Hungarian Jewish boy and the young German villager trapped on opposite sides of a mortal divide, who come to America where their paths cross and they can work and play together—this new undertaking came to form the crux of what was important to me: bridge building. I simply refused to accept the fact that the deadly barbed wire erected by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen half a century ago would forever mark us off from one another in a fundamental way, that Hitler would have the last word in how we could relate to each other. The murderous events had been too horrendous to ignore in our emerging friendship, but I didn't want to grant the Nazis the power to perpetuate that divide indefinitely into our present lives.
It was Bernie's desire to have his story told in the third person, thus making it accessible to my narrative voice. I approached this role with apprehension. My narrative voice would be that of an outsider to the Holocaust, a German one at that. Would this constitute a sacrilege? Should I have maintained a discrete distance from one who had “returned from a descent into hell”? Should I have urged Bernie to tell his story in his own voice? He did not want it that way. He wanted us to look at our pasts together, because he believes that reverence for the extraordinary trauma he experienced can sometimes have an exclusionary effect; it can bar entry, define outsiders and keep them at a distance. It can create an inner circle of empowered narratives that renders the past less accessible to others. Toward the end of our work, I asked Bernie what had persuaded him to undertake this perilous journey with me. He said it was our common European cultural heritage, with its Utopian longing for a civil society and the shared experiences of great art, and as for the rest, we agreed with Peter Ustinov's dismissal of ethnic and religious identity: one should have one's roots in civilized behavior and leave it at that.
TWO
Two European Villages
In this dream, summer was all year round, our land a map of child-like colors But if you held this map up to the light, you could see other lines, not roads or streams, but tiny cracks suddenly opening under shaky towns
LEONARD NATHAN
Tab, the village of Bernat Rosner's birth and childhood, is located in the open countryside south of the Danube River and Lake Balaton, about 120 kilometers southwest of Budapest and 90 kilometers north of what is now Croatia. To the west, about 130 kilometers away, lies German-speaking Austria. The parameters of this rural world were broken by Germany's designs on Europe.
Despite the presence of a few radios in Tab, one of which belonged to a neighbor of the Rosners, the village was far removed from the outside world before World War II. News as we know it, broadcast first by radio and later by television, did not yet exist. To be sure, the people of Tab learned about Hitler's invasion of nearby Czechoslovakia in 1938 on the radio and in the local press. And Bernie remembers the occasion when half the village crowded around a neighbor's radio to listen to the announcer's jubilant description of Hungary's Regent Horthy, astride a white horse, as he led his troops into Kassa (Košice, in Czech), the capital of the province returned to Hungary after Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. But such an exciting event receded into the background, drowned out by the predominant sounds of everyday village life with its domestic rituals. Like so many other European villages at that time, Tab was encircled by a wide geographic band of near-perfect silence, a silence that provided illusory protection from the catastrophe unfolding around it.
Only two villagers owned cars, the doctor and the count, who was the largest landowner in the area. But there were trains — two trains, to be exact—one in the morning from Siofok, the nearby lake resort, on its way to Kaposvar in the south and another in the afternoon that followed the same route in the opposite direction. These trains captivated the young Bernie's imagination as far back as he can remember. They gave him the sense of a horizon with wondrous things beyond it. As a small child, whenever he got lost his parents always found him at the train station. At home he loved to construct trains out of wooden blocks that were later chopped into kindling for the stove.
I believe that something more than curiosity made trains so central to Bernie's early life. His body and mind were always on the move, never at rest. Still true to the nickname, “Zizi kukac” (wiggly worm), he earned as a child, the perpetual motion that enlivens his memory is evident now as he gesticulates while telling his story.
But there is something else Bernie wants to communicate to me about trains and that railroad station, and he continues rapidly and with obvious urgency. During his early childhood, the station was a thrilling place where he could watch the trains depart to what he imagined were the distant and enchanting destinations that made up many of his daydreams. The Tab railroad station was also the starting point for the most exciting events of his childhood—the annual visits to his grandparents in Kiskunhalas. But in contrast to those early exciting adventures, at a later stage in his life the station came to connote something sinister, as when, shortly after the Nazi takeover of Hungary in spring 1944, he witnessed an elderly, bearded Orthodox Jew being beaten senseless there with the butt of a guard's rifle, for no other reason than that his distinct appearance annoyed the oppressor.
I wait for him to elaborate on what must be his most dreadful memories of this train station in Tab —the place, after all, from which he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. But he doesn't. More time had to pass before these particular memories emerged. Instead, he relates another nightmarish incident that occurred at a much later time in his life.
In 1971, when he was well established in his American life, Bernie, with his late wife, Betsy, revisited the village of his birth for the first time since he left it twenty-seven years before. After an emotionally wrenching daylong pilgrimage through Tab, they had come to wait on the station platform for the late afternoon train—the same train that played a major role in his youthful fantasies—that would take them back to Siofok and Budapest. A number of local inhabitants were also waiting at the station. Suddenly and without warning a grubby and obviously drunken old man approached Bernie and his wife and began a loud diatribe. Because of both the man's slurred speech and Bernie's by then poor grasp of Hungarian, he couldn't fully understand what the man was saying or the cause of the unprovoked outburst. He did, however, understand enough to realize that the harangue was filled with obscenities and anti-Semitic insults. The crowd waiting at the station immediately distanced itself from the ugly scene, leaving the two hapless foreigners to cope with the confrontation alone until the train arrived to take them away. For Bernie, it was a dreadful moment in which he recognized the same townspeople who had watched in silence as their Jewish neighbors were taken away so long ago. At the time, this episode also seemed to him still another variation on a theme —reminiscent of the same image in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina — in which the Tab railroad station served as a haunting landmark punctuating the turns and twists in his life.
Every year Bernie's mother took him and his younger brother, Alexander, born in 1934, to visit their maternal grandparents at Kiskunhalas. Although it was less than 200 kilometers, due to the many local stops and an hour's wait at Kaposvar before the transfer to their final destination, the train trip lasted from 7:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Sometimes they took an alternate route via Budapest, the home of Bernie's aunt Rebecca, the sister closest to Bernie's mother in age and friendship, where they would spend a day or two before continuing. These visits to Kiskunhalas were the high points of Bernie's year.
Beyond the train rides, Bernie loved the time spent with his grandfather. But on each occasion he first had to get past his fierce maiden aunt, Libby, the dragon of
