Garami Erika et al.: Budapest–Bergen-Belsen–Svájc. A Kasztner-vonat fővárosi utasai (Budapest, 2020)
Annie Szamosi: Utazásom a múltba
Annie Szamosi A PERSONAL JOURNEY INTO THE PAST In 2002, as a student at York University in Toronto, Canada, I wrote my Master’s Thesis on one of the central figures of the Holocaust, Rudolph (Rezső) Kasztner. This work, like many such investigations, started out as a personal search whose beginnings stretch several years back. It was initiated by a trip to Budapest in 1999, my second visit “back” to a country I had left in 1956. I was born in Budapest. My father and mother — he a physicist, she along with being a mother and wife also an artist — were part of that city’s assimilated Jewish intelligentsia. Although completely secular, they were both originally from an Orthodox background. They had met in a Zionist youth camp before the war, managed to survive the war together, and had decided to stay in Budapest after the war. In 1956, disenchanted by the realities of life under Communism, and the increasing levels of anti-Semitism which the system could only mask for so long, they abandoned their flourishing careers, and taking my older brother and myself, escaped the country. After a number of years spent in Israel and Italy, they settled in Canada in 1965. Subsequently, as an adult, I lived in a number of countries, worked as an actor at first, then a director of theatre and film, as well as a screenwriter and university professor. I settled in Toronto and raised a family. On this trip to Budapest in 1999, despite a very thorough knowledge of Hungarian Jewish customs and culture — both of the assimilated and religious kind — I was a virtual ignoramus when it came to their recent history. Although I had known superficially about the destruction of Hungarian Jewry — in the general manner that most people know about the Holocaust — I did not know any of the details. Even though I am a child of survivors I had grown up in a family that had deliberately put the past behind them and assiduously focused on the present and the future. As a child, apart from snippets of overheard conversations between older relatives, and the occasional out-ofcontext dinner-table reminiscence, I was given no information about my parents’ experiences during the war. To some extent, I believe this was a deliberate choice on their part. They wanted to protect my brother and me from knowledge that would be altogether inexplicable and potentially terrifying to a young child. As we grew up, that reason probably lost its relevance but by that time they assumed that we knew, or that we at least had a general idea of the sequence of events. In any case maybe too much time had passed for the subject to be brought up casually, and of course if we really didn’t know very much, there would never be enough time to tell the entire story, so it would be pointless to begin. It is true that one evening when my brother and I were in our late twenties, and we were on holiday and had all the time in the world, my parents finally gave in to our requests and told us in a rambling, disjointed fashion what had happened to them during the war. One telling was not enough however, for lacking any real historical knowledge or background, their stories of that evening seemed merely a series of random, disconnected events and I soon afterwards forgot them. This all changed one day in 1999, when I was helping a friend from Toronto research her own Hungarian Holocaust-related background. It had started when a friend and neighbour by the name of Julia, asked me to translate her late mother’s adolescent diaries from Hungarian to English. The only thing she had known about her mother’s origins was that she was originally from Székesfehérvár, and that her family had long ago converted to Christianity. Julia did not consider herself Jewish and was not interested in finding out more about her family’s possible Jewish past. In looking at her mother’s diaries it seemed that if we could travel to Hungary 11
