to the Wicked Witch in the “Wizard of Oz.” Because the grandparents were elderly, Aunt Libby met the boys and their mother at the Kiskunhalas station. From the moment of their arrival, she monitored their behavior relentlessly and sternly corrected each transgression, no matter how minor. Bernie would say his prayers in Hebrew, and in one prayer— according to Aunt Libby—he mispronounced a word. However, this was the pronunciation he had learned from his mother, and he stuck to it whenever Aunt Libby was out of earshot. Not only his prayers but also his eating habits fell under her scrutiny. Knowing that Bernie hated sweet noodles, Aunt Libby made sure that he finished every bit of this dreaded concoction that was placed on his plate every Tuesday.
On one occasion, Bernie's spinster aunt even went so far as to turn Bernie into an unwilling accomplice in a scheme to postpone the marital bliss of one of his uncles. The day after his wedding, this uncle Schimi had brought his bride to Kiskunhalas to present her to Bernie's grandfather. Bernie usually slept in a particular cubbyhole near the pantry when he visited his grandfather's house. But on this occasion, Aunt Libby ordered him to sleep in the same bedroom with the newlyweds, frustrating any passionate hopes they might have harbored for the night.
Bernie's relationship to his grandfather, the assistant rabbi of Kiskunhalas, left a deep mark on him. The old gentleman lived a dignified existence in a world of books and reflection. Bernie remembers his grandfather's long flowing beard and the two to three hours devoted to the study of mathematics and the Talmud that he spent with him every morning during vacation. He idolized this learned mentor.
As Bernie recalls his early years of calm and tradition, he conjures up a sensual link to these fleeting weeks in his grandparents' house, with its scents of furniture polish and dried flower petals. Hoping that this elderly scholar had died a natural death before deportation, thus being spared the horrors of Auschwitz, I ask Bernie about his fate. But he does not know.
Religion determined the rhythm of daily life in the Rosner family. Tab had two synagogues, a large one for the moderately religious Jewish community and a small one for the few ultra-Orthodox. Bernie's family were members of the latter, and rituals were strictly observed. There was a prayer for everything, as Bernie recalls, one for eating and one for drinking, one before meals and one afterward, even one for full meals and one for snacks. At the age of three, Bernie's hair was shorn in Orthodox custom, and he began to learn the Hebrew alphabet. The letters of the alphabet were described by Hungarian words to serve as a bridge between the visual signs and the pronunciation of the letters. By the age of four, Bernie was able to read both Hungarian and Hebrew. When I ask him how he learned the German he still knows today, I am surprised at his answer. I had assumed he learned it in the concentration camps. In fact, German was the foreign language required in schools that he attended as a boy. Eager to read everything he could, he even tackled at an early age the German translation of Ibsen's dramas that his literate mother had purchased for their home. The family also owned a Yiddish translation of the Book of Leviticus. But Yiddish, a language for daily communication, was not used by the Rosners.
Each day began at 7:00 with a half hour of prayer at the synagogue. From 8:30 to noon Bernie attended the secular school that was run by the local Jewish community. He returned home for lunch but then went back to Hebrew school, or Heder, for religious instruction. These sessions began at 2:00.
The half-hour break at 4:00 Bernie remembers even now with a sigh, as if after all these years he still feels the need to pause for a brief respite before continuing. The midafternoon break was followed by more excruciating religious instruction that lasted from 4:30 to 6:30, five days a week. During these interminable two hours, Bernie rode his imagination out of the confines of the classroom to places beyond Tab, to Kaposvar and Kiskunhalas, and beyond the reach of the train journey he knew. And when the longing for escape became particularly intense, he imagined himself following the sun on its path to more distant places.
By 7:30 during the summer, everyone was back in the synagogue for the evening prayers before the appearance of the first star. In winter nightfall came earlier, and so did the evening prayers. In summer supper was eaten between school and the evening prayers; in winter it was eaten after the evening prayers. An hour of homework assigned by the teacher of the secular school finished the day's duties. The only free time during the busy week was on Friday afternoons. Even this interval was filled with chores left undone during the week or with preparations for the Sabbath, which commenced at sunset on Friday. Nevertheless, the absence of school on Friday afternoons and the relief that the drudgery of the week had been left behind lent those few hours a magical sense of exhilaration.
Bernie associates the beginning of this short period of respite with the Friday lunch that his mother prepared for the family: potatoes spiced with paprika and crispy fried chitterlings. Friday afternoons were also punctuated by the weekly bath and sunset attendance at the synagogue to celebrate the arrival of the Sabbath. At the end of prayers and after their return home, the Rosners' religious rituals continued with a blessing by Bernie's father and a sumptuous meal of fish and chicken and the traditional Sabbath eve soup prepared by his mother. This meal was followed by the recital and singing of traditional prayers. Young men from the Yeshiva —upper-level students whose homes were not in the area—were invited to the meal, to pray with the family, tell stories of their lives, and accompany the Rosners in song. These young men also joined the family for several other meals during the rest of the week and became part of the ritual life of Bernie's Orthodox family.
The Sabbath day started at 9 o'clock with an extended service at the synagogue that lasted until almost noon. On the way home from the synagogue the Rosner brothers stopped at the baker. There they picked up the casserole made of beans and a goose neck filled with a delicious spicy stuffing that their mother had prepared on Friday afternoon and that the baker had baked on Saturday morning in his large oven.
Saturday afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00 was examination time, when children were tested on what they had learned the preceding week. These examinations were conducted by learned men of the Orthodox community. Bernie's father was not a learned man and was chagrined that he was not qualified to examine his own sons. Following the Sabbath exam, the Rosners often took a walk up the “hill of a hundred stairs.” The stairs were made of railroad ties, and Bernie recalls that on one of these traditional walks the adults talked about how the Germans had just invaded Poland.
This austere schedule might suggest that Bernie's childhood was a time of unremitting tedium. But that is not the way he perceives it now. The little bits of free time—the Friday afternoons, the several half-day holidays at Passover and Succoth, and the visits to his grandparents —were, because of their scarcity, all the more enjoyable and precious. And an intelligent boy could infuse even the most disciplined days with his own imaginative escapes. On the 2-kilometer round-trip he made several times a day between his home and the village center where the school and the synagogue were located, he would run at full tilt and shout, “I'm the train on the way to Siofok.” On snowy winter days, a farmer would permit Bernie to ride to school on the runner of his horse-drawn sled, the only means of transportation during the Tab winters. These winters were enveloped by an aura of pristine innocence when he trudged home through the deserted, snow-covered streets with a candle enclosed in a glass lantern. At times he would take imaginary excursions to Andocs, the village where the Rosners' housemaid lived.
Bernie did not feel close to his father, Louis Rosner, who was born in 1892. But the son enjoyed the stories the father loved to tell and remembers that one of them was called “The King of Claws.” It had something to do with a cat, tiger, or lion, but the plot has faded in Bernie's memory. As Bernie and Alexander grew, their father became less involved with them and more absorbed in the changing fortunes of his business growing, processing, and wholesaling walnuts and other produce.
The Rosner ancestors had been wealthy. On walks through the village, Bernie's father would show his boys the property once owned by the family and drop hints about some disaster that had radically reduced the Rosner wealth and about the paternal grandfather who deserted his family to go to America. As young boys, Bernie and Alexander
