When the Danube Ran Red

By Zsuzsanna Ozsvath

Opening with the ominous scene of one young school girl whispering an urgent account of Nazi horror to another over birthday cake, Ozsváth’s extraordinary and chilling memoir tells the story of her childhood in Hun­gary, living under the threat of the Holocaust. The setting is the summer of 1944 in Budapest during the time of the German occupation, when the Jews were confined to ghettos but not transported to Auschwitz in boxcars, as were the Hungarian Jewry living in the countryside. Provided with food and support by their former nanny, Erzsi, Ozsváth’s family stays in a ghetto house where a group of children play theater, tell stories to one another, invent games to pass time, and wait for liberation.

In the fall of that year, however, things take a turn for the worse. Rounded up under horrific circumstances, and shot on the banks of the Danube by the thousands, the Jews of Budapest are threatened with immediate destruction. Ozsváth and her family survive because of Erzsi’s courage and humanity. Cheating the watching eyes of the munderers, she brings them food and runs with them from house to house under heavy bombardment in the streets.

As a scholar, critic, and translator, Ozsváth has written extensively about Holocaust literature and the Holocaust in Hungary. Now, for the first time, she records her own history in this clear-eyed, moving account. When the Danube Ran Red combines an exceptional grounding in Hun­garian history with the pathos of a survivor, and the eloquence of a poet to present a truly singular work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Aug 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9780815651109

Book preview

1

HANNA

It was evening, I remember, and I was in the third grade. Darkness settled outside, and only the streetlights lit up my room. The long, strange shadows of tree branches stretched along the wall. I cowered on my favorite pillow, whose embroidery showed a happy dachshund in a red-blue-green orchard. I held my dolls in my arms and waited for my father. My stomach trembled, my hands shook: I could not forget what Hanna had told me earlier in the afternoon.

It began when we were standing in line for a slice of the chocolate birthday cake, adorned with shiny pearly hearts and red candles, at the party of my best friend, Márta. It was then that Hanna started to speak to me about the Germans. Hanna was not in my class; I met her in the house of my parents’ friends. But I knew that she had arrived here with her mother after escaping from Poland. She spoke Hungarian fluently; she also told stories about the Germans that made me shiver. Of course, Hanna was not the only one who spoke about the Germans and their assaults on the Jews; some of my parents’ closest friends did the same. Yet what Hanna told me that day tore into me more deeply than any of the stories I had heard before.

The afternoon started out with me standing in line, playing with the children waiting for their slice of cake, including Juti (another close friend of mine), Márta, and Hanna. But after a while, I lost track of the others, listening only to what Hanna whispered into my ears. She spoke quickly, almost breathlessly, and soon I could pay attention to nothing but her story.

First, she told me about the morning of her seventh birthday, a year before, in a Polish town, the name of which I have now forgotten, where she had lived with her parents. Her mother woke her up early that day, Hanna said, telling her to hurry because soon they would have to leave their apartment. Receiving an order sent to every Jewish family in town the day before, Hanna’s parents were warned to stay put in their dwelling and wait for further instructions. Everybody knew what this statement meant: the Jews would be driven out of their apartments. Hanna told me that her mother stayed up all night, packing their belongings in boxes, preparing a backpack for each of them for the journey. Then, in the small hours of the morning, she made chocolate milk, mixing real cocoa, sugar, and milk, all of which she bought from a peasant in exchange for her wedding ring. But Hanna had barely tasted her drink, the aroma of which, she told me crying, she still remembered, when their door was kicked in by the Germans, arriving with sticks and rifles, driving them from their apartment to the marketplace, as they did during that morning with the rest of the town’s Jews. It was then in the marketplace that they separated the children from their parents, the old from the young.

At this moment, my heart tightened. I knew what would come. I had heard about such scenes before, and I feared them so much that at night, when I closed my eyes, I saw myself alone amid masses of people, some of them shot, some of them fleeing, with my parents lost in the helter-skelter. I was right: Hanna had described to me such a scene. After a while, the German soldiers marched her father and grandfather, together with a large group of men, into the nearby synagogue. Forcing them to stand for hours, the Germans tore up the place, throwing the Torah, the prayer books, and prayer shawls out of the windows onto the mud and dirt of the street, ordering the prisoners to pick up the garbage. Then they drove the group back to the marketplace, where all the books and shawls were set ablaze. And while all of this was going on, the rest of the Jews in the marketplace, among them Hanna and her mother, had to stand and wait for hours without food and water. In the meantime, the Germans cut off the men’s beards and earlocks, ordering some of them to dance, others to crawl on the ground, soon covered by mud and blood and ashes, before they shot them. The shooting went on all night. Among those killed were Hanna’s father and grandfather, both of whom, Hanna swore, she recognized in the moonlight among the corpses, when she was moved after a while some rows down. They were lying in pools of blood. After executing all the men on the square, the Germans marched the women and children behind a wall, where the streets of the ghetto curved

Reviews for When the Danube Ran Red

[meggyweg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This memoir is a bit different, since the author was never deported, never in a camp or ghetto, and only went into hiding for a relatively short period after the Arrow Cross Party took over Hungary. Nevertheless, she definitely suffered. At the age of twelve, when she and her parents learned what was happening to Jews and would probably happen to them, she suggested they all commit suicide together. Separation from her parents, even for a short time, caused her more anguish than anything the Nazis could have come up with.