An Uncommon Friendship - Bernat Rosner

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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 the family, whom he compares 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

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