Mészáros Tibor (szerk.): Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai. Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life (Budapest, 2004)
Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai
"With my last breath I will thank fate for making me a person, and for the fact that a thin shard of reason lit my shadowy soul as well. I saw the ground, the sky, the seasons. I knew love, fragments of truth, desires and disappointments. I lived on the earth and l slowly brightened. One day I shall die: and how right, how simple is this1 Could anything better, more wonderful have happened to me? No. 1 lived the most and the greatest, human life. Nothing different or better could have happened to me." The war, slowly winding down, drove the writer to ever greater withdrawal. He felt that the masses were swallowing the world, and for him the person of the masses stood in opposition to the person who created. He found the masses dangerous because they demanded the same rights as those true individuals who created. He took a difficult decision when on 19 March 1944 the German troops arrived. He left Budapest with his wife and moved to the provinces. He was not inclined to work during the German occupation, but neither did he write under Soviet occupation. Indeed because of them he would leave not just Budapest, but the country, for ever. He awaited the end of the war alongside his wife in the village of leányfalu, near Budapest. Opposing the dictatorship was not without dangers. This we know because (according to a memoire), the writer packed up all his possessions: he wanted to return to Buda, but was stopped by an enormous rainstorm. He was lucky, because the Arrow Cross (Hungarian servants of the occupying Germans) was searching for him in his house. In an interview he told of how plainclothes secret policeman wanted to save him. "I could not accept the offer, because at the time I had to share the fate of several other people. If l left, these people would be defenseless and powerless. At the same time, there was no question of taking them with me. That was why I rejected the officer." It was later revealed that they would have taken the writer to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. His house on Mikó utca was hit by a bomb and wholly destroyed. 7 just found a few remnants of my house. During the siege it was struck three times by bombs and hit by more than thirty grenades," he writes in A Memoir of Hungary. He and his family moved to Zárda utca in another district of Budapest, living there from the end of 1945 until August 1948. One of Márai's most important and remarkable works was published in 1945: the first volume of the Diaries. He continues his confessions, his reflections in this book, which is an almost inexhaustible trove of pithy observations about life, literature and the human condition. It is from here that we learn most about the enigmatic writer. "My soul and the Hungarian language are joined. Joined to a few books, landscapes and poems in Hungarian. Everything else is indifferent and hopeless." This is the subject of all his diaries, both in Hungary and abroad he could only live and 15
