The Diary Keepers Read online

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my grandfather, Emerich, my grandmother, Alzbeta, my mother, Marta, and all the Safar and Roth family members we lost in the war.

  And it is also dedicated to the next generation of our family, my nephews, Joseph and Cameron, and my daughter, Sonia.

  Epigraph

  * * *

  Everyone wrote. Journalists and writers, of course, but also teachers, public men, young people—even children. Most of them kept diaries where the tragic events of the day were reflected through the prism of personal experience. A tremendous amount was written, but the vast majority of the writings was destroyed.

  —Emanuel Ringelblum, creator of the Oyneg Shabes underground archive in the Warsaw Ghetto

  Nobody will ever tell the story—a story of five million personal tragedies every one of which would fill a volume.

  —Richard Lichtheim, from the Jewish Agency in Geneva, July 9, 1942

  * * *

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Searching for Emerich

  Introduction: “Vast quantities of this simple, everyday material”

  The Diarists (in alphabetical order)

  Part I: Occupation, May 1940–May 1941

  * * *

  1. “Paratroopers came down everywhere,” 1940

  2. “One should make the best of it”

  3. “Anger blazed in young hearts,” February 1941–March 1941

  4. “No graves, no gravestones”

  5. “Now the games can begin”

  Part II: Persecution and Deportation, April 1942–February 1944

  * * *

  6. “It’s so hard to know what to do,” April 1942–December 1942

  7. “Like a good gardener”

  8. “Was this forced labor or slaughter?”

  9. “A kind of gathering place”

  10. “Until at last the truck was full,” July 1942–December 1942

  11. “If only there were more places for these poor people”

  12. “The time had come to go into hiding”

  13. “The worst year for all Jewry,” January 1943–June 1943

  14. “The man who goes about with his notebook”

  15. “Like Job on the dungheap,” May 1943–August 1943

  16. “She just had a very large heart”

  17. “The tension is sometimes too much to bear,” September 1943–December 1943

  18. “The diary becomes a world”

  19. “The last of the Mohicans,” January 1944–August 1944

  20. “A journalist in heart and soul”

  Part III: Toward Liberation, May 1944–May 1945

  * * *

  21. “I really shouldn’t miss the view,” May 1944–July 1944

  22. “All the trivial things”

  23. “The silence is almost murderous,” September 1944–December 1944

  24. “What do you have to know to know?”

  25. “The Empire of the Krauts is over,” November 1944–May 1945

  Part IV: The War in Memory, May 1945–May 2022

  * * *

  26. “An archaeology of silence”

  27. “Suffering and struggle, loyalty and betrayal, humanity and barbarism, good and evil”

  28. “A gradual lifting of the collective repression”

  Conclusion: “There were more”

  A Note on Translations

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Also by Nina Siegal

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Searching for Emerich

  Emerich and Marta Safar (later Marta Siegal, the author’s mother) in Hungary in 1942

  Courtesy of the author

  When I was a girl, my grandfather Emerich would drive his silver Pacer over to our house in Long Island from Sunnyside, Queens, to take my brother, David, and me out to lunch. David’s favorite spot was McDonald’s on Northern Boulevard and mine was Friendly’s on our town’s main street, a kind of all-purpose American diner with bouncy leather seats. We’d alternate. Even weeks, McDonald’s and odd weeks, Friendly’s.

  As with all good rituals, there was a catchphrase. Before we would step out of the Pacer and into the parking lot, Grandpa Emerich would turn to the back seat, narrowing his eyes. “Now, you can order whatever you’d like,” he’d say with a mischievous glint in his clear blue eyes, “but if you don’t finish it, I’m going to shove it down your throat with a rolling pin.”

  Even as we laughed nervously, we knew that this joke had a solid, indestructible core. Wasting food wasn’t an option for Siegal kids, no matter where we ended up dining in junk-food America. A form of explanation would often arrive later, while we were seated at a sticky table fishing out the last greasy crisps of our fries.

  “When I was in the camps,” grandpa would start . . . What followed might be a story about coveting a hunk of bread in his pocket for days, and rationing it to himself over time to stave off hunger. Or how one could sip a watery soup slowly to make it more filling.

  These narratives perplexed me, as a ten-year-old girl growing up on Long Island, because the word “camp” only conjured images of joyful canoe rides and marshmallows melting the Hershey’s on s’mores. I remember the look of surprise on my grandfather’s face when I finally mustered up the courage to ask, “Grandpa, if you didn’t like the camp, why didn’t you just go home?” There was a moment of silence, as his blue eyes scanned my young face and grasped that I’d missed a crucial point. Then he enjoyed a hearty laugh.

  If he shared these anecdotal experiences with us quite freely, I don’t recall him explicitly defining what “the camps” were, or how he’d come to be there. Although he’d sometimes begin a story with, “After I was arrested,” I can’t remember a time he’d indicated the reason. Somehow, I understood implicitly that he had not committed a crime, but the stories were never about that; they were usually about a cunning way he’d managed to outwit a guard or escape a perilous situation, using his smarts alone.

  As I grew older, I accepted more easily that there were certain questions you didn’t ask; or if you did, you couldn’t expect an answer. Although I adored my grandfather, I saw that there was an ocean that divided us. His life had been back there in the “Old Country,” across the Atlantic, a place that seemed to me to contain innumerable, unimaginable horrors. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Germany, to my mind, were nightmare places of forced labor, prison, random arrest, the Jewish camp guards known as Kapos, and the SS. I didn’t know what all of these words meant, but they inspired fear. Nevertheless, I was assured that all of that was over.

  What was important was to be vigilant, in various ways, so that we would simply be prepared if it would ever happen again. We should eat today in case we couldn’t tomorrow. Our cupboards were stacked with canned goods; the “good silver” was hidden in the basement’s dropped ceiling. I was made aware of certain portable valuables in particular closet drawers, just in case. In case of what? In case we had to flee suddenly?

  When I looked around me, I saw only a quiet, lush, charming Long Island, with its views of the city across the Sound. Suburban ranch houses and mowed lawns with rhythmically hissing sprinklers. Purple and white hydrangeas like bursting bouquets across the fence of our sparkling backyard pool. Neighbors waved and called out friendly greetings when I walked my dog down the block. We were safe here, weren’t we?

  I CAME TO understand that my grandfather was what people called a Survivor, and that made him a rare and singular individual. He had fading blue ink numbers tattooed on his left forearm, testifying to his Jewish superhero status. People saw, and understood immediately, signifiers I was only beginning to grasp.

  Grandpa Emerich, born on Valentine’s Day, had at least two other names: Imre Sàfàr was his official name and his nickname was Sanyi. He spoke about seven languages, English with us, Hungarian and Czech at home. At least a little Yiddish, and enough Hebrew to lead our Passover Seders. I knew that he also spoke German, but he wouldn’t use it.

  Before the war, he had been a scholar, my mother told us, who’d been politically involved in the social-democracy movement in Czechoslovakia. She explained that his family owned a business, so they were relatively well off, but anti-Semitic laws made it difficult for him to find outside employment. They didn’t live far from Prague, I understood, both before the war and after it. But I never heard the name of the town.

  Grandpa was a handsome man with deep-set eyes, a sculptured jaw, and an expression of generous intensity. Years later, when I saw a picture of Franz Kafka, I thought I recognized my grandfather’s face in his. I conjured a romantic image of a Czech intellectual, seated with men in gray caps at a smoky café table in Prague, slamming his fist down while making a trenchant point, to toasts and cheers.

  After the war, once they’d left Europe for Australia, he’d become an auto mechanic to support his family. That skill seemed to translate across disciplines: he could fix pretty much anything around the house, and he was always coming by to help my dad with plumbing or electrical projects, like a skinny, white haired, Jewish MacGyver.

  I was told that Emerich had thirteen brothers and sisters, who were all grown, and mostly married with children before the war began; or maybe he was one of thirteen brothers and sisters. I’m not sure. I only ever met two
, Uncle Bumi, who had gone to work in Western Europe before the war broke out and emigrated to Queens, where he’d married another Hungarian, and had two children, my mom’s cousins Fran and Stevie. In Hungary still were my aunt Blanca, who’d survived with her daughter, also named Marta. There was also a “cousin Mary” who I may have met but can’t remember.

  My mother told me that before my grandfather was arrested, he managed to arrange false papers for my mother and grandmother. They went into hiding with Blanca and Marta, in an apartment in central Budapest, which my brother thought may have actually been Blanca’s home. My mother couldn’t recall much from that period, but I remember a story she told about the women going out at night to procure food, and coming home with horse meat.

  Once, when I described my mother as a Survivor, she quickly objected. That word, she explained in a hushed voice, was strictly reserved for those who’d endured the camps. She and her mother had only gone into hiding.

  I took this response to be a rule of lexicography in a language that had a delicate precision. There were ways of articulating such matters, and if you didn’t do it correctly, you might inadvertently detonate hidden emotional land mines. When periodically I wondered aloud about what had happened to this aunt or that cousin, for example, the answer I often received was that he or she had “perished in the war.”

  A lot of people seemed to have “perished.” In my young mind, the word conjured a geographical or climatological event, maybe some kind of massive sandstorm that had ravished a continent. “Perishing” didn’t imply violence or perpetrators. It suggested death in a natural disaster. In fact, World War II itself seemed to have been a cataclysmic force majeure, rather than a war of men, conjured entirely through the evil magic of Adolf Hitler.

  The survivors I knew—and to me they were all survivors—never once sat me down to explain the broad strokes of history. The war was ever-present, and yet not discussed. Occasionally my mother would trot out certain stories, usually in questionable settings, like cocktail parties. She had certain go-to narratives I’d overhear in company, and that typically ended with a punch line. These were crafted, polished, palatable tales that might elicit laughter, but that had an unmistakable subtext of terror.

  Yet, when I asked my mother, in private, quieter moments, to tell me about her childhood, she would swat the air, and say, “Oh, it’s all too horrible. You don’t want to hear about that.”

  What I felt without any doubt, was that something profound had occurred to my relatives, something that was in certain ways unspeakable. When it was spoken, it came out in a deranged form, like a demented, ratty doll popping out of the jack-in-the-box.

  Whatever they’d lived through had fundamentally defined their characters. My grandfather, the personification of calm, was deeply, genuinely kind and unflappable. Jarring jokes aside, his company was always a gentle comfort. He always had time. Of course, by then, he was an elderly retired man, but there was something else. I had the feeling that after all he’d been through, he’d learned to live with everything, and nothing could faze him anymore.

  IN SEVENTH GRADE, I got a little bit of clarity on the subject when another Holocaust survivor came to speak to our class. We were reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, and an elderly woman, who’d been a young woman in the war, would tell us her own experience of surviving Auschwitz.

  I recall feeling slightly repelled at first: I already know all about that, I thought. Still, her testimony to our class had a deep impact on me. She spoke to us so clearly, so directly, telling her tale from the outbreak of war to her own liberation, mostly matter-of-factly. She was clear and straightforward, practiced but not in an effort to entertain us or soften the edges. She didn’t get up and move around the room, nervously, distractedly. She sat still, looked us in the eyes, and told us what they had done to her. Sometimes tears came to her wizened green eyes, and I could feel how much courage it took to tell her story. She had tremendous dignity.

  That same year, my grandfather Emerich died. I was thirteen, and David was fifteen. Grandpa had been doing his favorite thing, sitting at a card table at a Hungarian club in Manhattan, playing Gin Rummy, surrounded by friends. He just slumped at the table. I will never forget the plunging wail my mother let out when she got the news the next morning.

  At the funeral, attended by about two hundred people, at least a half dozen weeping Hungarian women pulled me into a fierce hug and each one confessed that she’d been in love with my grandfather. Good for grandpa; even in his late seventies, he still had that charisma.

  After his death, my mother told me more about Emerich’s life. One story took place in the Hungarian countryside, where my mother and Alzbeta were in hiding with a family of farmers, after their hiding place in Budapest had been betrayed. My grandfather suddenly appeared, walking down the country road, seemingly out of nowhere. There were German soldiers standing nearby. My mother was maybe six years old at that time, but she already knew that showing affection for her father would put them all at risk. She managed to stifle the urge to run toward him and throw her arms around her father—an act that remains astonishing to me in its self-restraint.

  I understood that her version of history was a combination of hagiography and mythology. My mother had been a mere child during the war years; what could she really have remembered?

  Later, my mother had multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that can affect memory. Her stories became more hyperbolic, and she amped up their theatricality. Once, my grandfather had been in three concentration camps; now the number had jumped to four. Was this an emergence of new details, or was her memory becoming jumbled? Either way, it was increasingly difficult to parse facts from her embellishments.

  By this time, I was an adult, living in other homes, other cities. I had a life I was supposed to be living in the present, for the future. The past was a horrifying morass. How curious was I supposed to be about the war, the Holocaust? Just because I came from a family of survivors, was I required to deal with that? Hadn’t my family wanted desperately to “leave all that behind us” and “live a normal life.” Normal was good, and for that, it seemed, forgetting was essential.

  I LET IT go for a very long time, for decades. I had other things on my mind, other causes. I became a theater artist and then a journalist. Early on in my career, I wrote mostly about American social struggles: homelessness, incarceration, racism, housing rights, health care, domestic violence. I also wrote about the theater and the arts. Later, when I became a contract writer for The New York Times, my beat was Harlem and the Bronx; then I got a job at Bloomberg News, covering urban art and culture.

  I didn’t tend to identify as Jewish, even if I knew myself to be Jewish. To me, being Jewish meant being religious, and I was a secular atheist. I hadn’t grown up going to synagogue or attending Hebrew school; both my parents were uninterested in religion, my mother avidly so. We did celebrate a few Jewish holidays, but around the table with family, not in the synagogue. When I attended Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, or family weddings and funerals, I felt like an anthropologist visiting an exotic culture: so these are Jewish traditions.

  In 2006, I came to Europe. I was writing a novel about a dead man in a Rembrandt painting, his 1632 group portrait masterpiece, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, and had secured a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research for ten months in Amsterdam. I would work with the world’s leading Rembrandt scholar, Ernst van de Wetering, and spend almost a year living where the events of my novel unfolded in the seventeenth century.

  My first apartment was in the Red Light District, around the corner from Rembrandt’s former home and studio, and where the Rembrandt House Museum stands today. In the Dutch Golden Age, it was home to many Jews, which later gave it the nickname Jodenbuurt, or Jewish neighborhood. Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain had found refuge here since the Inquisition, and Ashkenazi Jews had arrived from Eastern Europe, fleeing pogroms. Jews had been granted citizenship in the Dutch Republic as early as 1616 and could practice Judaism in peace.

  Rembrandt arrived in town from Leiden in 1631. As in many poor urban districts today, cheap rents attracted artists, foreigners, and low-wage workers. Rembrandt liked to sketch and paint his neighbors, right off the bustling local streets, and his subjects included both Africans and local rabbis. He incorporated Jewish faces into his so-called “history paintings,” stories drawn from the Hebrew Bible.