Hollywood Animal (78 page)

A book burning!

How could a
writer
be involved in a book burning?

How had he published all those novels in Hungary? By stopping other writers from being published? By banning and burning their books as an official in the Propaganda Ministry?

Almost as an aside at the end of that first day, I learned that my mother—
my shy, pious, religious mother!
—had been
a registered member
of Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party, Hungarian Nazis openly dedicated to the extermination of Jews.

I felt too tired to talk at the end of that day, said a quick goodbye to Gerry Messerman, ignored my father, waiting to talk to me, and went back to the hotel.

There was no doubt about any of it now.
Even my mother
had joined the only party in Hungary openly espousing the extermination of Jews.

The Arrow Cross Party was the same heinous, sadistic, bestial party which Armin belongs to in
Music Box
.

How could my mother have done it?

What kind of guilt did she feel after the war—in the refugee camps and in Cleveland?

What did her guilt have to do with her mental illness?

I remembered the moment when I was a child and she had shrieked at my father, “I
know the man you are!
”

What had she really meant?

What had she really been saying?

I knew what her Arrow Cross Party card meant to me: she knew everything my father had done and approved of it.

Fervently so.

· · ·

I was bombarded with a buzzsaw of childhood memories as I sat in the darkened living room of my hotel suite that night, slugging my Tanqueray … staring out the window across the river at the West Side where I had grown up.

I remembered my father screaming at that bitch, Margie, who ran that Hungarian diner in New York, screaming the words into her face: “
I am not a Nazi!
” and her response: “You’re all Nazis, all you dirty DPs.”

I remembered my mother telling me that the Zsidos had killed Jesus and my father telling her to “stop filling the boy with nonsense … Jesus was a Jew.”

I remembered the Franciscans who wanted to run anti-Semitic articles in their newspaper and my father’s shouted words to them: “Stop this madness! You can’t say these things here! Didn’t you learn your lesson?”

And I thought about the words which had shaped my whole life, words my father had said to me: “Remember this, Jozsi. Jews are people like any other people, some good, some not so good. Just like Hungarians. Some good, some not so good.
Never judge a man by his nationality or his color or his religion. Judge him by his character. Whether he is a good man or a not so good man
.”

I saw a hundred quick flashes, too, inside my head as I stared across the blackness of that river at the streets where I had grown up:

My father at that Indians game in his beret and trench coat, reading
Crime and Punishment …
Walking down Lorain Avenue with a bag of popcorn under his coat so it would stay warm for me … Telling me the world wasn’t ending as my mother knelt on the floor and prayed … Playing his cheap, half-busted violin in the cabin in Cook Forest, tears in his eyes … Buying the red-and-white Ford convertible (for me) that he looked so ridiculous in … Urging me to read, to “
sitzfleisch
,” to make something of myself … Sitting on the bench at the library, telling me masturbating wouldn’t make me blind … Paying a fortune for the neon sign at Papp’s Bar that I had destroyed with my BB gun … Telling the priest off at Cathedral Latin after I had written the essay called “Jesus Was a Bum” … Being booed by his Hungarian friends because his son had written a movie called
Music Box
.

· · ·

Eli Rosenbaum was the principal deputy director of the Office of Special Investigations.

He questioned my father under oath:

Q—Mr. Eszterhás, you have repeatedly characterized
Nemzet Politika
to us in this hearing as a bad book that you regret having written. Could you explain?

A—That’s because the whole book is bad. The anti-Semitic attack in the book is not only ugly in the description but it’s stupid and in the conclusion it’s
bad
. It’s bad, it’s anti-Semitic, and I hate it today.

Q—When did you come to the conclusion that
Nemzet Politika
was a bad book?

A—When I got a copy of the book now. Because I did not know—I completely forgot what was in the book. And now that I read it I was shocked and ashamed, too, I have to say.

Q—I just want to ask you whether you agree that there is a great deal of inflammatory language about Jews in this book?

A—Yes, there is. I hate the book. I hate the book and everything that you say about the anti-Semitism in the book is true.

As the hearings continued, I felt like I was being buried by an avalanche of filth.

My father had lied on his immigration application, never mentioning his novels or his writings. He’d listed his occupation as “printer.” It was obvious why: if he had said he was a writer, he ran the risk of someone finding what he had written.

The Nazi camp our family had gone to when we left Hungary, Perg, wasn’t “a part” of Mauthausen, as my father had told me. It was
near
Mauthausen, but it wasn’t a camp … it was a place of safe haven granted by the Germans to friendly government officials at a time when the Russians were invading Hungary.

I understood now the real import of a story I had been told as a child … my father had gone from refugee camp to refugee camp fleeing the Communists. But I knew now that he hadn’t been fleeing Communists; he
had been fleeing Hungarian war criminal charges
.

I kept playing my nightmarish mental game with myself: matching stories I had been told as a child to what I was learning now.

I had been told that my mother, very pregnant with me, had left Budapest and gone to the town of Szombathely because of invading Russians. But that, I learned now, wasn’t the whole truth. Szombathely had been designated by the Arrow Cross government as the place to which all dependents of government officials were to be evacuated.

The Arrow Cross!
A foaming-at-the-mouth, murderous regime … and my father had been a part of its government!

There was even some evidence, not completely corroborated, that my father had either been a part of or in charge of the Arrow Cross’s efforts to burn government documents as the Russians approached.

And there was the affidavit of a man who had worked with my father in the Propaganda Ministry who referred to him as “a rabid anti-Semitic ideologue.”

· · ·

I heard the names of his friends I remembered hearing about or meeting in my childhood … the subjects, I now learned, of other OSI war crimes investigations.

I remembered all those stories I’d heard as a child about my father’s trip to London as the guest of “Lord Razmeer” and Ward Price of the
London Daily Mail
.

I remembered because I heard now that Lord Rothermere and Ward Price, both English Nazis, had invited Europe’s most fervent young Nazis to England—among them my father. Ward Price, I heard now, had even been charged with war crimes at Nuremberg.

And I remembered this scene from my childhood.

“Did you get a copy of
Nemzet Politika
yet?” I asked him
.

“Why do you ask me about
Nemzet Politika.
” My father smiled. “You don’t read my books anyway.”

“You said it will be the most difficult to find.”

“No, I don’t have a copy yet,” my father said
.

“When I grow up,” I said, “I will find it for you.”

“Thank you.” He smiled. “Will you read it, too?”

“All right,” I said. “I promise that if I find
Nemzet Politika
I will read it.”

“Thank you,” he said, his arm around me. “That means very much to me. I will hold you to your promise.”

And I remembered the moment when I was a teenager in Youngstown and he found me reading a book about Auschwitz.

“Did you know that the Jews were taken down to the Danube in Budapest and murdered?” I asked my father
.

“We all heard rumors,” he said. “But that’s all they were. We didn’t see anything firsthand. We didn’t know.”

“What would you have done?” I asked my father, “if you would have seen it yourself. Would you have tried to stop it?”

My father looked at me a long moment
.

“I could tell you that I would have,” he said. “It would be easy for me to say that to you. I could look like a big hero in my boy’s eyes. But it was a feverish and insane time. The Nyilas [the Arrow Cross] were terrorizing everyone. I don’t know what I would have done if I would have seen it myself. But I hope I would have done the right thing.”

I knew now, though, that he was lying to me in Youngstown when he had said, “We all heard rumors. But that’s all they were.
We didn’t see anything firsthand
.
We
didn’t know.”

In his testimony at this hearing, he admitted that he
had
seen it firsthand when he said to Neal Sher: “
I have seen a march of old women they take to the station, railway station
.”

Sher: “And deported?”

My father: “Yes.”

And what had he done?

Had he, as I had so naively asked him when I was a teenager, “tried to stop it”?

No, he had worked for the government … for the Arrow Cross government, for the Nyilas … until the last moment before the Communists took control of Budapest.

As I watched my father deny everything or claim not to remember, I thought suddenly of his childhood friend, Puskás Öcsi, the internationally famous soccer star, and what he had said: “Your father was one of the toughest kids I’ve ever met.”

“Your father couldn’t run because of his limp,” Puskás Öcsi had said. “So he constructed a wooden shield for himself that he put on his back like armor. All the beer bottles bounced off his back.”

Whenever a new charge was made, my father either denied it or said he couldn’t remember. And when the evidence was presented, he stared and blinked at the newspaper or affidavit or the internal memo with his signature on it and shrugged or shook his head.

At the end of a day of the hearings, the first Gulf War broke out and Saddam Hussein fired his rockets at Israel. As Gerry Messerman and my father and I were leaving the building, there were erroneous news reports that Tel Aviv had been hit with chemical weapons. We hurried to the car and put the radio on. My father asked me in Hungarian what was going on and I told him that Tel Aviv had been hit with chemical weapons.

And in English he said to Gerry, “Horrible. Why somebody do something so horrible to Israel?”

We dropped Gerry off and I went inside my father’s house.

“You hate me,” he said.

I said, “No, you’re my father. I love you but I will hate what you did to the day I die.”

“No,” he said. “You hate me. I feel it.”

I said, “Why did Nana join the Arrow Cross?”

“Everybody joined it.”

“Not everybody,” I said.

“Her friends were all joining it.”

“Did she hate Jews?”

“How can you ask me such a thing?” He was offended. “You know how your mother was. She couldn’t hate anybody.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know how my mother was. I thought I knew how
you
were, but I don’t. I don’t know how you could have done all these things.”

“I did it for you and your mother,” he said.

I said, “Stop. Don’t try to blackmail me with your love. You wrote that book ten years before I was born!”

“Why did this have to happen to me?” he cried suddenly. “I don’t care about these hearings! I don’t care if they deport me! I’m eighty-three years old! All I care about is you. All I’ve ever cared—”

I said, “Please don’t, Pop.”

“Is
this
my punishment? That you hate me? My son hates me? Every damn thing in my life I lost. I lost my career, I lost my country, I lost my money, I lost my house, I lost my books, I lost my wife to her madness. Now I lose you? Is this what my fate is? To lose everything, finally and even—you?”

He was crying. “My God,” he said. “I wish I wouldn’t have lived this long for you to learn about all this shit.”

I went over to Gerry Messerman’s house and fell asleep on his couch while I waited for him to come back from dinner. He saw the shape I was in when he returned, saw how much I needed to talk.

“My dad sold used cars,” Gerry said, “and one day I discovered he was playing with the odometers.”

He let it hang there and he said, “Well, it ain’t exactly the same thing!” and we both started to laugh.

It was classic Messerman. I knew that he was almost as broken up that night as I was, but he always managed to find a kernel of humanity or humor, even if by necessity the humor was dark.

“I wish I could say something to you to really make you feel better,” he told me. “The things we heard today were awful. Neither of us will ever get over the things we heard in that room today and I suspect you’ll spend a lifetime trying. But I do ask you as your friend to remember that your father was always
your
friend, he was always there when you needed him. His love for you wasn’t and isn’t fake. No matter how you feel now about his motivations, remember that.”

On one of those hearing days during the Gulf War, Eli Rosenbaum told Gerry
that
his parents lived in Israel now.

It was obvious to us that Eli was concerned about his parents’ safety and the dire hourly developments in Israel.

Gerry didn’t have a television in his office, so I went out and bought one and set it up so Eli could catch up on the news during breaks in the hearings.

I watched Eli as he anxiously scanned the news … on the TV set bought by the son of an alleged war criminal … so he wouldn’t worry about the fate of his Jewish parents in Israel.

On one of those days when my father was testifying, his voice had weakened and the microphone in front of him wasn’t picking him up well. One of the court reporters propped the mike up so it was angled closer to him.