4. WHAT IS LOVE?

The Second World War was over, but food was still hard to come by. My soon-to-be mother Edith Photo8 was picking vegetables for supper in the garden when she saw a man coming in the distance, looking vaguely familiar. But it couldn’t be, could it? He reminded her of Herman, her dead husband…Running into the house, she asked Martin for the first time: “Do you really intend to marry me?”

Herman had started courting her when she was only 18, but her mother Ethel and sister Magda Photo6 disapproved: “He’s only a clerk in a store, you could do much better!” The years passed by with no other offers coming her way in the small Hungarian town where they lived – she was not bad-looking but too shy and quiet to be popular. “Your head is always in a book”, complained her family. After 10 years and with the war about to begin, she gave in and married him, though she didn’t really know about love.

They were together only for a short time, until the Nazis arrived and started taking away the young men, the Jewish ones of course. Just for work, it was said, there’ll be some hardship but they’ll be back…In the meantime, Edith went up to Budapest, where she joined her brother and sister in hiding out with false papers that testified to them being good Christians. She only returned to their town when her father fell ill; as it turned out he had an inoperable tumor and the doctors consulted could only say: “Try to make his last months of life as pleasant as possible.”

But this wasn’t to be, as they soon heard in Budapest – the Nazis had rounded up all the remaining Jews in the little town, woman and children, old people, and taken them away, never to be heard from again. The war drew to a close finally and she had managed to survive, though often going hungry and having to hide – they were the lucky ones. Her sister Magda had even gotten married, by proxy over the phone, to her fiancée Bandi who was on the Russian front, while her brother Gyuri was courting Eva, a young girl who had somehow come back alive from the death camps and was now alone in the world.

They were both busy with their new lives and thus it was up to Edith to go back to their home town to look after family affairs. The few people she knew there who had returned only had bad news to report: her parents had been seen in line for the Crematorium, her husband Herman was dead in a far-away work-camp. The houses of the Jews who hadn’t come back were occupied by other neighbors and the valuables taken – she was shocked to see a woman in the street wearing her mother Ethel’s old fur coat. Where was she to stay while she tried to clear things up? Herman’s sister Johan had also disappeared, along with her 12 year-old daughter Vera Photo4, but Johan’s husband Martin Photo9 had escaped just in time and managed to walk back from the German border. Thus he was living in his own house and offered hospitality to Edith. After all, they were sort of relatives and he was ten years older.

But the stay with Martin soon turned into something else: both bereft, they expressed an affection towards each other that hadn’t even existed before the war. He wanted to feel alive, to start again – and there she was, an attractive young woman, who even resembled his lost wife (and his lost mother) a bit and was also in need of comforting. He wooed her and she gave in after a while, just like before, with Herman. The times were chaotic and who could blame them, but there was no talk of marriage.

Now Herman was back and she had to know: “Should I take him back or stay with Martin? Do I love him more? What if he doesn’t want to get married?” But the answer was yes and poor Herman was in for a sad surprise. The divorce took a long time, so by the time Edith and Martin could marry another surprise Photo10 was underway. I never knew my parents’ wedding anniversary until I was 16 and came upon an old certificate in a hidden box, to find out that it had taken place just a couple of months before my own birthday. And when I asked my mother about love, the reassuring answer was: “A man will come along and fall in love with you, just like it happened to me, twice”. And so it happened to me too, later.