Parallel Lines

by Peter Lantos

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"I have read few autobiographies more extraordinary . . . Astonishing" OBSERVER
"A classic. I preferred it to Primo Levi's If This is a Man" EDWARD WILSON
"A child's clear-eyed journey to hell" ANNE SEBBA

This is a story of a young boy's journey from a sleepy provincial town in Hungary during the Second World War to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. After a winter in Bergen-Belsen where his father died, he and his mother were liberated by the Americans outside a small German village, and handed over to the Red Army. They escaped from the Russians, and travelled, hiding on a goods train, through Prague to Budapest.

Unlike other books dealing with this period, this is not a Holocaust story, but a child's recollection of a journey full of surprise, excitement, bereavement and terror. Yet this remains a testimony of survival, overcoming obstacles which to adults may seem insurmountable but to a child were just part of an adventure and, ultimately, recovery.

After having established a career in the West, the author decided to revisit the stages on his earlier journeys, reliving the past through the perspective of the present. Along the way, ghosts from the past are finally laid to rest by the kindness of new friends.

With an introduction by Lisa Appignanesi

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 300

Sample

PRAISE FOR PARALLEL LINES


‘Something of a genius … with the readability of a classic’ Alan Sillitoe

‘A remarkable addition to the literature of the Holocaust’ Sunday Times


‘Lantos follows clues, detecting and retracing the steps of his past. He finds a woman who slept in the bunk next to him and his mother in the barracks in Bergen-Belsen, as well as a British medical student who came to help after liberation, and one of the US soldiers whom he met in 1945. Reminds us that the end of the war was by no means the end of the hardship, entailing further resilience. I defy anyone to read this account without retrospective anger on behalf of those who suffered’ Michelene Wandor, Jewish Chronicle


‘Anyone who thinks they have read all there is to be said about the Holocaust should read one more book, Parallel Lines. A child’s clear-eyed journey to hell paralleled by an adult’s scientific quest to understand that journey’ Anne Sebba, author of The Exiled Collector


‘I have read few autobiographies more extraordinary … astonishing’ Observer


This wonderful memoir … introduces a narrator with rare gifts’ The Tablet


‘Parallel Lines is for readers who are interested in history and the Second World War and for those who want that the evil befallen on the Jews of Hungary is not repeated ever again’ Veronika R. Hahn, Népszabadság, Budapest


‘A movingly narrated memoir’ Clare Colvin, Independent


‘Deeply moving’ The Age, Melbourne


‘A classic. I preferred it to Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. One of the things I found appealing was his restraint and reserve’ Edward Wilson, author of A River in May and The Midnight Swimmer


A remarkable historical account and autobiography [which] chronicles the odyssey of Hungarian Jews in 1944–45, as they were progressively disenfranchised from the national life of Hungary, culminating in the seizure of their homes, property and livelihoods before sending them on trains to places like Auschwitz for extermination, or, in Peter Lantos’s case, to Bergen-Belsen’ Michael N. Hart, Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology


‘We can now celebrate Peter Lantos’s book, which accomplishes something rare: an emotionally moving and, at the same time, clinically precise account’ NU, Vienna


‘A child’s perspective on the Holocaust … a remarkable book. Read it and think about other people elsewhere in the world today who are being persecuted’ Professor Philip Hasleton, Bulletin of The Royal College of Pathologists


‘What sets the book apart, and makes this account so refreshing and, oddly, inspiring, is its simplicity. The horrendous events of the last year of the war are invoked with a child’s idiosyncratic susceptibility to detail (Lantos was only five years old at the time) – the noises, the smells, the human proximity – and lack of sentimentality, even when recalling relatives who perished’ Where, Budapest


‘Gripping … an unembellished account from a child demonstrating youthful resilience. Read this book and be gripped by the drama of Peter Lantos’ early life’ Roy O. Weller, Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology





On 19th March 1944, the German Wehrmacht marched into Hungary. Anti-Jewish legislation had been in place since ’38, radically restricting Jewish participation in the professions and the civil service, and forbidding mixed marriage. Hungary effectively became a Nazi puppet state and, for five-year-old Peter Lantos and his family, things got much worse.

He didn’t understand why his mother was sewing ill-fitting yellow stars on everyone’s clothes. It made no sense that they had to leave their comfortable home to crowd into a dirty and inhospitable part of their small town. Why was there never enough food now and less pleasure? His commanding grandmother and aunts had shrunk from their former elegance to sorry states. When the news came that they were soon to get onto a train and leave, he was thrilled.

But the train was not as he imagined, and their first stop in the larger town of Szeged, an operational centre for the collection and deportation of Jews, marked a further point on a descent into the abyss. That abyss came – via Strasshof and five months in an Austrian work camp near Vienna, where the allied bombs fell with deafening regularity – in Bergen-Belsen, the Nazi holding, then concentration camp in northwest Germany, where Anne Frank met her death.

The cold, the stench, the fear, the lice, the epidemic deaths – all these form part of Peter Lantos’s extraordinary memoir. Here, a child’s singular and vivid recollections are amplified by an ageing man’s search for the missing links of his past.

Peter Lantos begins his story with a recurring dream. In it, he is looking for the house in which he was born. He cannot find it. He searches amidst familiar streets, goes back to the station, tries another direction, and gets lost – again and again. Defeated, he gives up. Only then does he discover that he is in the right place. It is the house that has disappeared.


Lantos is one of the lucky ones. His home may have gone, but, unlike several in his family who ended up in Auschwitz, he lived to tell the tale. He and his mother, though not his father, made it through Belsen. Having returned to post-war Hungary, he also made it through ‘the dark age of Stalinism’, where being a Jew was hardly a social advantage. The family timber yard, first expropriated by the Fascists in 1944, was then expropriated once more by the Communists.

By the time of the 1956 uprising, Lantos was in his penultimate year at senior school. His entry into medical school was at first prevented by the fact that he had been labelled a ‘class alien’. But his fearless mother saved the day. Ten years later, he won a research fellowship in London. He didn’t return to Hungary for many years, one reason being that he had been tried in absentia and sentenced to 16 months imprisonment. Home was now once more lost.


In London, Lantos rose in the medical ranks of neurological research, attaining the prestigious Chair of Neuropathology at the Maudsley Hospital in 1979. His outstanding work contributed to the understanding of Alzheimer’s and other neuro-degenerative diseases. Though he had revisited Belsen before during an earlier academic visit to Germany, it was only after 1989 and the end of the Soviet era, that his Parallel Lines begin to take shape. Its journey is a riveting one.


When I wrote my novel The Memory Man, I had no idea that Peter Lantos existed. Perhaps I dreamt him, since my Austrian hero, like him, is a neuroscientist who works on memory, only to return in older age to those war-time experiences he has long put aside, to confront their dark matter. The novel arose because the story I told in Losing the Dead – of my parent’s war and its haunting aftermath – held an emotional residue that wouldn’t leave me alone.


I read Peter Lantos’s Parallel Lines some years later. I was struck by the spare quality of a narrative that holds so much remarkable life. I couldn’t put it down. We sometimes think there can be nothing left to say about the deadliest moments in the twentieth century’s history, but Lantos’s story is unique. Each memoir of the holocaust adds the particularity of a lived experience, arresting in its detail and in the ways in which its author metabolises the past.


It is good that Arcadia has brought back this fine book for our attention.

Lisa Appignanesi, OBE

Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning novelist and writer. The former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London, she is a Visiting Professor in Literature and the Medical Humanities at King’s College London. Her novels include The Memory Man (winner of Canada’s Holocaust Literature Prize) and Paris Requiem. Her non-fiction includes the acclaimed Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors (Virago), Losing the Dead and Trials of Passion: In the Name of Love and Madness.








I wish to thank, in alphabetical order, friends and relatives who shared with me the memory of the events described in this book: Dr Zsuzsa Ágai (Szeged), Mrs Magda Hajdu (Budapest), Mrs Magda Iritz (Nahariya, Israel), Mrs Mária Kiss (Budapest), Mr András Szemere (Budapest) and Mrs Vera Tőzsér (Budapest). The help and encouragement of Judge Jeremy Connor during the preparation of the manuscript is gratefully acknowledged.


I am particularly grateful to Dr Beatrix Bastl of the Institut für Geschichte, Vienna University and Stadtarchiv, Wiener Neustadt; Dr Elisabeth Klamper of the Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Wiederstandes, Vienna; Dr Elenore Lappin, Institut für Geschichte der Juden in Österreich, St Pölten; Dr Thomas Rahe and Mr Bernd Horstmann, both of Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen; Dr Ilona G. Tóth, Director of the County Archives, Szeged Hungary and Dr Stephen Walton of the Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum, London. My thanks are due not only for allowing me access to the libraries or archives under their care but also for stimulating discussions and for practical advice.


The help of the Staff of the Wiener Library, London and of the Town Archives in Makó, as well as Herr M. Schiller of the Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, in Magdeburg, Dr Eva Drašarová, Director of the National Archives, Prague and Dr Ferenc Tóth of the József Attila Museum in Makó, Hungary is gratefully acknowledged. Two school friends, Dr Ildikó Bencze (Budapest) and Mr János Gábor Farkas (Vác, Hungary) have given me much assistance to rekindle memories of old times. I have greatly appreciated the essay of Mr Attila Stenszky’s on the fate of Jews in Makó.


I also wish to thank Dr Szabolcs Szita (Budapest); Professor Karl Flanner (Wiener Neustadt), Dr Werner Eichbauer (St Gallen), and Herbert Schatz (Strasshof an der Nordbahn) for their help in obtaining information about our fate in Austria. Mr Joachim Falta of Wedringen, Germany, was the perfect guide to events in Hillersleben, past and present. I am indebted to Mr László Kovács (Nyiregyháza, Hungary) and to Professor John Hankinson (Newcastle) for the invaluable information they have so generously provided.


The search for family documents led me to a young local historian in Makó, Mr Zsolt Urbancsok, who with strong motivation and enthusiasm embarked on a project to fill a gap single-handedly in the recent history of his town: the fate of the large and prosperous Jewish community during the Holocaust. He has been an enormous help and unfailing source of information during the preparation of this manuscript.


I feel a profound gratitude to Professor George Gross of San Diego, USA who by saving our lives made this book possible. I was also moved by the response of American veterans and their families who replied to my enquiry about our train journey from Belsen.


Gerald Jacobs read the chapter on Bergen-Belsen and gave constructive suggestions.


Finally, I wish to thank Ian Paten (London) who edited the first version of the manuscript, Elspeth Sinclair (London) who made many useful suggestions to the subsequent text, and Richard Bates (Discript Ltd, London) who effectively commissioned the book for Arcadia and gave the book its final shape.


If one is not familiar with the detailed geography of central Europe, finding Makó on the map can be a problem: not surprisingly, since it is only a small provincial town. Searching the Internet for ‘Makó’ yields a surprising result: 108,204 hits spread over 10,821 pages, depending, of course, on the search engine. But before one can get carried away with chauvinistic pride over the extraordinary popularity of one’s home town in the limitless thesaurus of human knowledge, the truth soon hits one: the name is not the sole property of a small town in Hungary. Other contestants vying for attention are not even towns with the same name in different countries. Rather, they are the short-finned shark, Mako (Isurus oxyrinchus); full and semi-rigid inflatable boats and rubber ducks, bearing the trade name Mako, produced in Cape Town, South Africa; and CompAir Mako, a manufacturer of breathing equipment in Texas. Narrowing the search to Makó+Hungary still yields nearly a thousand hits; many are devoted to the town’s most famous son, Joseph Pulitzer of Pulitzer Prize fame, who was born there on 10 April 1847.


Potential visitors to Makó should not be discouraged by some of the less helpful Internet sites. One lists three hotels, but none in the town: one is 16 miles to the west, another 37 miles to the north-west, and the third in a different country altogether – in Romania, some 52 miles to the east. However, despite this misinformation there are acceptable local hostelries.


In fact it is not difficult to find Makó: it lies at 46° 13’N, 20° 30’E, in the south-eastern corner of Hungary, close to the border with Serbia and Romania, on the northern bank of the River Maros. At the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the town boasted a substantial hinterland of arable land and busy connections with other towns both to the east and the south, but the Trianon peace treaty of 1920 ended all that. Historical Hungary was truncated, losing two-thirds of its territory: all of Transylvania was engulfed by Romania, while the extensive, fertile agricultural land to the south was incorporated into the newly created Yugoslavia. Makó, once the busy commercial centre of a flourishing agricultural county, was thus severed from its surroundings and exposed to two countries with which relations between the two world wars, mainly as a result of Hungary’s avowed aim (reinforced by fierce propaganda) of regaining its lost territories, were less than amicable. Although geographically it was not strictly a border town, the sudden loss of all the surrounding land to the south and east weakened its economy and gradual decline followed.


The town has been famous for its production of high-quality onions; although cultivation dates back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, only the improved methods introduced from the second half of the nineteenth century, and successful marketing which Jewish merchants were instrumental in initiating, began to provide wealth for the town. As a result, Makó was swiftly urbanized: it was among the first provincial towns in Hungary to build proper roads and to introduce electricity. The debt the town owes to this humble bulb is acknowledged by nothing less than a statue (surely there cannot be many places in the world which have paid such a tribute to the onion) and by an arts centre, which all the locals endearingly call the House of Onion instead of the more appropriate House of Culture.


With the encouragement of an enlightened bishop, the first Jews arrived in Makó around 1740 and settled in an area not far from the town centre, inhabiting two streets which, although named after Hungarian statesmen, were referred to popularly as Little Jewish Street and Great Jewish Street, the distinguishing epithets relating to the length of the streets rather than to the densities of the Jews living there. Despite this religious segregation, the various denominations lived peacefully together until the 1930s. The first synagogue, a simple unadorned building, was founded towards the end of the eighteenth century and demolished in 1919, but by then the town had two other, more distinguished temples.


Emancipated in 1867, the Jewish community played an increasingly influential role in the mercantile and intellectual life of the town. Their numbers gradually increased, reaching a peak in 1920, when there were some 2,380 Jews in Makó, constituting 6.4 per cent of a population in excess of 37,000. Reflecting this secular advance, two synagogues were erected within twenty years; and the fate of these two places of worship could not have been more different. The Orthodox Jews built their synagogue in the Romantic style in 1895. The synagogue for the Reformed Jews (or Neologues) was altogether a different, grander affair, reflecting the increasing prosperity and confidence of the local community. It opened its gate on 2 September 1914, rather inauspiciously, shortly after the First World War began.


As the elegantly clad worshippers, including my grandparents, were gathering for the inaugural service, no one could foresee that the synagogue would be demolished some fifty years later: the seeds of destruction were sown on that late summer day when Europe bade farewell to peace.


The modest Orthodox synagogue, having fallen into disrepair after years of neglect, has recently been restored, while the fate of the much grander Reform synagogue has been far less fortunate: it was demolished in the spring of 1965. Lack of proper maintenance weakened the fabric of the building to such an extent that demolition became unavoidable to prevent spontaneous collapse. After protracted negotiations between the town’s council and the Jewish community, the decision was finally reached to abandon the building to its fate. Whether the synagogue could have been saved has been disputed ever since, but the fact remains that one of the most attractive and distinguished architectural landmarks of the town was destroyed, first to make way for the headquarters of a local co-operative, bearing the name of Lenin, and later to house the committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party.


If I were superstitious I could claim that I witnessed an omen of the fate of the synagogue. I was still living in Makó when, during one of the special services to commemorate the anniversary of the deportation of the Jews from the town on 16 June 1944, the large chandelier in the central nave gave way and came crashing down in the middle of a prayer. The sound was as terrifying as it was unexpected. Being at some distance from the site of impact, I remained frozen in place and watched as the chandelier smashed against the wooden pews below, showering splinters of wood and fragments of glass all around. No one in the small congregation was injured, since by then so few Jews remained in the town that large areas of the nave were almost empty, and by good fortune no one was sitting at the epicentre of the impact. In the ensuing panic, I heard one of the women shouting out:


‘It is starting all over again.’




The centre of the town has evolved around the confluence of several main roads, and for a long time has been devoid of signs of far-sighted town planning. The central square, defying all rules of Euclidean geometry, has grown to become not a square at all, but an oddly shaped triangular space. It bore the name of Széchenyi, the great Hungarian reformer statesman of the nineteenth century, until the Communists changed its name to Lenin Square. After the demise of the Communist regime, of course, it reverted to its original name. But all these changes were in vain, since the local population persistently, and irrespective of the prevailing political system, called it what it has always been known as: the Main Square. The naming game also affected the town’s two cinemas: for a long time known as the Park and the Corso, they were officially renamed but hardly ever referred to as the Red Star and Liberty.


At the eastern end of the triangle is the grandest building: the Town Hall, built in 1839 in neo-classical style to replace a much smaller edifice. At the western end of the Main Square, another confluence of roads has created a (yet again somewhat irregular) satellite space, also approximating a triangle. This square boasts another remarkable building: the most amazing edifice in the whole town, arrogantly out of character with everything else around it – a large apartment block of metropolitan pretensions, built in the heady days of 1920s on borrowed money. Undoubtedly at the time it was the smartest address in town, with an elegant pharmacy and a popular patisserie on the ground floor: the former is still there; the latter has, alas, disappeared. The family of one of my cousins lived in this building, and it was from their flat that we witnessed the Russian tanks rolling into Makó after the end of the revolution in November 1956, one gun turret rather menacingly aiming, but fortunately not firing, at the window of the living-room.


In the adjacent square is the imposing local high school, or gymnasium: it was the school in which several of my uncles, my brother and (much later) I were all educated. Built in 1895, it maintained an excellent reputation, even in difficult times. In front of the school was the Russian monument, a white granite column topped with the compulsory red star, here cast in bronze; an obligatory architectural addition to the central squares of every Hungarian town after the Communists’ ascension to power.


From the gymnasium a wide street led to a small, rectangular park, a peaceful place until an open-air theatre was built in it. Some of my older friends claimed to have been initiated into the more superficial pleasures of sex among the larger bushes here: there was a sad, mentally handicapped girl who was a willing tutor in exchange for a couple of boiled sweets.


Perhaps it is understandable that in my dreams I searched in vain for the house in which I was born. This was a modest building: architectural merit had no place in its conception, only convenience. It was the sort of place children sketch when they first try their hand at drawing: a sloping red roof with chimneys, a monotony of unadorned windows and an equally unembellished door – that was all there was to it. Inside, there was a living-room, a dining-room and two bedrooms: one for my parents, and one for my brother and me. There was a big age difference between us; he was fourteen when I was born, and until then he had sole use of the bedroom. It must have been annoying for a teenager to share a bedroom with a much younger brother, but if my presence, often quite noisy, upset him, he never betrayed it. There was also a small garden with a couple of fruit trees and flower-beds, tended by one of the handymen from the adjoining timber yard, which belonged to my grandfather. This industrial enterprise was the reason for our house being there: on either side of the timber yard a villa was erected for each of the two uncles who ran the family business after my grandfather’s death. Our house was a more humble addition at the back.


From the garden we could enter the timber yard through a small wooden gate. This led into a mysterious world of endless surprises waiting to be discovered. The timber y. . .