The Human Pool (23 page)

And Willi. I grew to see Willi as a projection of my own darkest imaginings. Of all of us, he seemed most suited to those times. Willi fraternised with everyone, a man of many performances, who had stolen something from all our souls. Black marketeer. Emissary, for whom and what, nobody was sure. Leather-company representative. Ladies' man in his slim-waisted double-breasted suits, drinking cocktails. (Willi in Budapest: Magritte's portrait of a young man looking in the mirror, seeing not his face but the back of his head.) Rogue. Spy. Double agent.
Bon viveur
. Jazz fan. A symbol, to me at any rate, of the sophistication of duplicity, my own efforts gauche by comparison. Willi always the better company. Willi's moves more glamorous than mine. Willi had a Hungarian countess for a lover. Willi rising to the challenge. I granted him a sense of purpose lacking in myself. Willi understood the text of which I was only the messenger.

The biggest shock was seeing him one day leaving David's hideaway, hat set back on his head, Dulles style. He didn't see me, or gave no sign if he did. My first thought was that his presence there had something to do with a betrayal of David by Dulles.

David refused to take my warning seriously. He bought Willi absolutely and stifled my objections. He knew Willi was almost certainly a double agent but believed he would not betray him. I was also aware of no good reason why David should trust me any more than Willi. Word was going round that I was Eichmann's spy.

Willi was providing David with ready-stamped residence forms, which bypassed the law of registering any change of address with the police. He was also offering copies of something called the Order of Heroes, which precluded Jewish membership, and therefore granted any holder obvious exemption from the roundups. But these turned out to be poor forgeries, so it was possible that my misgivings had been correct and that Willi was handing them out knowing their holders would be detained. Willi Schmidt was emerging as a bad puzzle with lots of bits that didn't fit.

 

On the morning of 15 October the radio gave out repeated announcements that the Hungarian government would be seeking an armistice with the Allies and the Germans would leave.

The streets were full of people. You could see where the Jews had torn off their yellow stars. It was the most beautiful of days, crystal clear, the likes of which happen only a few times a year. People's faces had a radiance. Everyone remarked on the weather as the quickest way to show the joy they felt. ‘What if it had been raining?' a woman remarked.

I went round to David's place. It was already full, an open house with any pretence of security abandoned. As a man grown too used to false hope, David grinned with caution while all around him others got drunk and kissed and, in the case of one impulsive couple, fucked on the floor. I wondered what Dulles would make of such spontaneous exuberance. Dulles and his shadowy moves, Dulles behind closed doors, working his paper trail; Dulles dry and untactile. Even Willi was there in spirit. Some of his jazz records had found their way to David's apartment. ‘Black Bottom Stomp' on the turntable, played over and over. A young woman danced a crazy Charleston, and I imagined Karl-Heinz packing impeccably laundered shirts, prior to a quiet departure. We celebrated while history made its moves.

•   •   •

Nobody wanted to believe that evening's first broadcasts, not when they were so drunk and disinclined to let anything spoil their fun. Maybe fifty people were crammed into the apartment. Someone came in with a special edition of the paper with the news that there had been a coup d'état. Hungarian fascists had taken over. The Nazis would stay.

Everyone stood around in shock, drunk, hungover, and crying all at once. Five minutes later they were all gone. David said to me, ‘Eichmann will return. Save as many lives as you can.'

Outside, the streets were deserted, in forlorn contrast to that morning. I avoided main thoroughfares except to cross them. Each provided an illustration of the day's brutal change: on one a German convoy of tanks, with trucks of troops massed down side streets; on another two straw-haired teenagers with rifles and bandoliers, representatives of the new order, clubbing passersby. One stopped me, wanting to know where I was going. I could smell the drink on him.

This was how it would end, I thought: some last act of absurdity at the hands of a near-child. I wanted to kill those boys more than anyone. I fired off a stream of German invective at one of them, which knocked the cockiness out of him, and cuffed his ear, a measure of my recklessness. The boy burst into tears while his friend gripped his rifle tighter. Any other day I believe he would have shot me.

The encounter was made even more unreal for happening in a busy street. Until then Budapest's terror had been largely invisible and orchestrated to take place offstage. This new reign, administered by conscienceless, misfit children was a sign of things to come. They were representatives of a hitherto unimaginable level of infestation.

 

Embarrassment was the underlying mood of the next few days, each of us privately ashamed for having dared hope. The weather reflected the turn of events by becoming bitterly cold. The new regime dispensed its thuggery. Corpses floated in the Danube outside the Ritz. Any sense of Nazi protocol—of the masked brutality at which they were so adept—was abandoned.

At the Red Cross office Dufy was in charge of organising the Jewish safe houses. He had us working twelve- and fifteen-hour shifts preparing for the worst. Most of the rich young men who had signed on for the petrol ration could still be found in the city's smarter cafés with their cars parked outside. Dufy said, ‘The rats are out from under the floorboards.'

Dufy, bald and sweating and previously mild-mannered to the point of invisibility, lacked Wallenberg's presence. Nonetheless he had been turned by Budapest's tragedy into a tenacious and committed figure. The Red Cross safe houses were full to capacity. David's false passes had seen to that. Dufy knew he would have to beg every favour going, and each dubious contact I had could make all the difference, so he and I formed an uneasy alliance. Once he asked me straight out if I was a Nazi agent. I had a growing sense of how few liked me.

Dufy and Wallenberg held meetings with government appointees who were happy to be seen in their new authority and smart surroundings. Dufy, in his effort to save lives, was shameless in flaunting the possibility of full diplomatic status to the new regime. Karl-Heinz, still lacking a Swiss visa, wanted me to get a message to Dulles, warning him that unless his negotiations with the Americans took a different turn, the Russians would be in Berlin. I told him it was too late for messages to Dulles. I had to stay in Budapest. Karl-Heinz was dismissive: ‘I should have you shot.'

‘Join the queue,' I said, and left thinking,
let him hang.

 

They were like ants scurrying through the streets, it was said afterwards. Less than a week after the coup, the Jews were rounded up in heavy rain. Even those issued protection papers weren't safe. The Hungarian police dug out any fit Jewish male, regardless of permits, to work on the eastern wall ordered by Hitler to hold back the Russians. (‘More madness,' grumbled Karl-Heinz.)

Dufy wanted a movie camera and stock to record some of what was going on and get it back to Switzerland. I spent an evening with my Hungarian film producer, who was reluctant until threatened with counterintelligence, who would be keen to discuss his illegal services to the Third Reich. All he managed to come up with was a little home movie camera and a stack of three-minute spools of film. It was inconspicuous, if nothing else.

Dufy drove me around in a marked Red Cross car, and we filmed the roundups through the window as the gendarmes went about their business with zealous officiousness, under light supervision from the SS. I learned to film in two- to three-second bursts to save stock. Once we were stopped by an SS patrol, and an officer asked what we were doing. Dufy said we were members of the Red Cross, and the officer replied: ‘I can see that. I asked what you were doing.'

‘Filming this street theatre.' Dufy sounded in no mood for nonsense.

When the officer asked for the camera, I thought he was going to confiscate or smash it, but he just inspected it and handed it back, with a shrug, as though to say nothing we did could make any difference.

BUDAPEST, 1944

TO SWITZERLAND
—with a visa at last!—to meet an American representative at the Hotel Baur in Zurich. With hat, overcoat, and briefcase, a civilised man undertaking civilised discussion. Not all the news is good. I have cabled the Reichsführer to stop the marches and heard nothing back. It is possible that he isn't the final authority in the matter, as they are technically a work deportation.

The Arrow Cross is aware of its unpopularity and its probably limited tenure of government makes life unpleasant all around. Apart from Eichmann, everyone treads carefully. On a good day my own back-pedaling high-wire act is the most adroit in the Nazi Budapest circus, with Eichmann's close behind as death's humourless clown.

Willi Schmidt, a surprise visitor to Zurich, quite the rich man these days, is booked into a suite in the Baur. He tells me how a whole gang of Arrow Cross men barged into the Red Cross offices after discovering the secret presses that had been producing forged protection papers.

We made ironic discussion, our earlier differences, whatever they were, quite forgotten. Former friends, enemies for a while, now friends again, it would seem. Our peace broker was Magda, who had fetched up with Willi. ‘She still pines for you,' he told me, with a trace of smugness.

‘The Arrow Cross are not delegators,' said Willi, ruminative over a good wine. ‘Unlike you Germans. They want to see the effects of their work, close-up. They made Dufy inspect all the papers and decide which were false. There was a quota he had to meet, otherwise everyone got taken off.' Willi grew speculative. ‘How do you select? It would be possible to overlook some false papers, but not many. The more attractive would stand a better chance, I suppose. A displacement must take over, a willed concentration on the irrelevant detail that makes it possible to get through the job—angles of light, the cautious negotiation between bodies, the double knots in a child's shoelaces. What do you think?'

It was, I remarked, almost as though Willi had been there.

‘Not at all,' he said. ‘I am interested in the psychological pressure involved in these decisions. How did you select?' he asked, mischievously. ‘Or did you just, um, not select and mow them all down?'

Willi laughed. I left it at a smile. Willi said he had heard the raid had been carried out because the Arrow Cross was annoyed that Dufy had managed to set up a Red Cross office in the Jewish ghetto. The ghetto, right to the centre, would be sealed off ‘Warsaw-style,' according to Eichmann, Willi said.

What he didn't know was that it was Eichmann who had ordered those with false papers to be pulled from Dufy's protection. Eichmann was finally displaying the fruits of his labour: no sealed trucks to obscure destinations but a forced march down the country's main road, four abreast, two thousand a go because his precious train set was fucked. Eichmann's grand gesture towards nihilism.

Eichmann, who has invested all of himself for his masters, realises that the one job at which he excels will soon be taken away. Eichmann is running out of future. Eichmann, insofar as he is able, is in spiritual crisis.

These are not days to be proud of. I am told that many of those left in the safe houses were grateful for Dufy's expulsion of the false-paper holders as they believed it bettered their own chances. Even before the raid, a delegation from the safe houses had protested about the number of inmates with forged papers. What is the point when the imperative to survive undermines all chance of collective action? Eichmann and his stooges, myself included, have succeeded in reducing crowds to numbers, individuals to ciphers. The process of dehumanisation is complete long before the technicality of death.

Everyone survives on Benzedrine and tobacco, with little pause to eat or sleep. Willi sells me American varieties of both, brought in from Istanbul.

BUDAPEST, 1944

MY NARROW-GAUGE CAMERA
recorded what it could as everyone set off into the grey dawn, followed by a small convoy of relief trucks. Many valid exemption papers had been torn up by the Arrow Cross. People had turned up lugging suitcases too heavy to carry. Everyone was expected to keep up, women in high heels, children as well as the old. The hardest thing to reconcile was that many of the marchers would have once driven along that road on business or family outings. They still wore their own clothes. Their anguish was witnessed. We marched through villages and towns where shops and bars were open and people went about their business, stopping only to point and stare. (One mother, to frighten a disobedient child, threatened to have him put on the march.)

Dufy said little. He smoked. We kept spare packets in the car because the cigarettes we carried were soon handed out.

Some marchers tried to establish good relations with the older guards. ‘They can't shoot us all,' one woman said, though it was clear that she herself couldn't last much longer, having abandoned her shoes. All but the most stubborn discarded their luggage. Any cases still being carried were seized by guards looking for valuables. Ransacked cases lay disembowelled by the road. A good coat turned into the price of death. One Arrow Cross boy took to wearing a stuffed pink silk brassiere over his jacket.

My little camera recorded a body jolted sideways by the force of a bullet, its impact doubled by the surprise of the image being in colour. The film producer had given me the new Agfa colour stock: the Arrow Cross boy parading up and down in the flesh-coloured brassiere, the bright shock of such intimate pink. I shot, 4,000 metres of narrow-gauge stock.

At first the human crocodile looked like nothing more than a bizarre outing. The camera generalised and depersonalised. It couldn't cope with detail, and those that it did record looked like inserts from something else—gutted suitcases; a close-up of a dead man's face, swollen from beating; a hand floating in the river. Then the line again, its more or less orderly fashion in stark contrast to the previous images. Sometimes it was possible to prevent violence by letting a guard see he was being filmed; not always. One gendarme looked straight at the camera before clubbing a weak old man and driving him into the river. He laughed about it afterwards as I continued to film him.

Then Willi Schmidt turned up.

When I asked why he was there, he had no answer. But Willi always had a reason. He could have been spying for the Germans even as he handed out charity, or just come to sniff death and add to his wartime scrapbook.

Deprive a person of basic human requirements, multiply that by two thousand, and you have a sobering lesson on the thinness of civilisation. Shit in your pants, the marchers were told. At some of the nightly stopovers, elaborate loudspeaker systems were set up so warnings could be broadcast that the guards would machine-gun the crowd if anyone tried to escape.

While the marchers starved, their guards ate: an Arrow Cross man obscenely waggling a wiener at a woman, offering her a place on a truck back to Budapest if she ‘sucked his sausage' in front of everyone. Another, his mouth so full of bread and beer he could hardly speak, being made to laugh by another guard, and spitting out a half-chewed wodge which people later fought over.

Where Dufy and Wallenberg used a mixture of cajoling and threat in their dealings with the gendarmes and Arrow Cross, Willi became inspired by a newfound relish for confrontation. He took to pulling guards aside and telling them it was his duty to report cases of brutality to the SS, who would make sure that offenders joined the marchers on arrival at Hegyeshalom. Willi also put word around that the guards wouldn't be making the trip back and were going to be set to work alongside the rest.

At Göynu everyone was crammed into barges for the night. The guards forced marchers to run along rickety gangplanks slippery with ice. Fog and freezing drizzle made conditions all the more treacherous. Those who fell in the river froze and drowned. Two guards in particular were making the most of their sport, a big sadist and his protégé, who looked about twelve. The boy laughed as he smoked and watched, contemptuously flicking his butt at a drowning man.

Willi waited until they took a break on a jetty, then begged a light off the older guard, leaning in to catch the cupped flame. The guard gave a high-pitched squeal of surprise as he realised that Willi had shot him in the groin.

The report made no difference in a night full of gunfire. The guard stared in disbelief at the blood staining his overcoat while Willi studied the man's face, teetering on the edge of eternity, and registered the terror of his last mortal moments, which ended as Willi delicately prodded his chest enough for the man to lose balance and topple back into the river. All the while the man's cigarette remained stuck to his lower lip, even as he screamed: a comic detail, a memory for life. Willi's honed curiosity left me in no doubt that he had wanted to do this for some time.

Meanwhile, I had told the boy not to move. He started snivelling. Willi to him: ‘The shoe's on the other foot now, son.'

The boy's fear liquefied. He tried calling Willi ‘mister'. He took on a shrunken appearance. His fingernails were chewed. Under normal circumstances he would have been whey-faced and pretty in a diluted sort of way. He tried to barter with his age. The whiff of shit was strong on the freezing air. Willi shot him in the jelly of the eye. The other popped in surprise. The spray of blood from the exit wound looked black in the dark. Willi was breathing hard as though after running a long race. Where the boy had been, a void between us. Willi bloodied.

After that Willi became tireless in his efforts to pull people from the march. He seemed to have acquired an immunity through contamination. Willi ambiguous to the last, operating in the thinnest of margins on both sides of the fence.