In 1964, the Cold War was alive and well, and travel from Hungary to Western Europe was still the privilege of world-famous performing artists—musicians, singers, and ballet dancers—as well as world-class athletes. However, travel restrictions from Hungary to other Communist countries had eased a little bit. One could apply for a one-time exit permit, and if the local chapter of the Young Communist Organization and the Trade Union gave a glowing endorsement, one could visit such coveted travel destinations as Romania, Bulgaria, or Poland.
My friends and I were neither famous performing artists nor world-class athletes, just plain college students finishing our junior year at the Budapest University of Technology. After the spring semester was over, our plan was to spend a month in Poland, hitchhiking from the southernmost border of Poland to the Baltic seaport of Gdansk and the resort town of Sopot.
In the ’60s, hitchhiking in Poland was very common and very safe and was the cheapest way to travel, especially if you used a Hungarian flag to flag down passing cars (pun intended). The love for Hungarians in Poland has deep historical roots, although I am not sure if this is still the case today. Anyway, in 1964, the Poles even had a saying: Polak, Węgier, dwa bratanki, i do szabli, i do szklanki, which means that Poles and Hungarians are two friends, they fight together and drink together.
We had a great time visiting the historical city of Krakow and hiking in the beautiful mountains around Zakopane before we got to the capital of Poland, Warsaw. I hope I do not hurt the feelings of my Polish friends when I say that Warsaw in the ’60s was not a beautiful city.
After the ravages of World War II, there was not much left of the old city, and the Communist government that tried to rebuild the city had neither the money nor the taste to design and rebuildit. There wasn’t much to see in Warsaw unless you count the monstrosity called the “Palace of Culture and Science”—built in the dominant style of the era called socialist realism, which was borrowed from the Soviet Union.
From the very beginning of our trip, I had a secret mission in mind. More than anything else I wanted to see a monument in Warsaw that had captured my imagination the moment I had seen a picture of it: a monument erected to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This was a major Jewish resistance event during the Holocaust in 1943. The uprising was doomed from the very beginning because the badly armed Jews of the Warsaw ghetto—weakened by starvation and disease—had no chance against the well-armed and well-fed German troops.
The monument stands at the site where the ghetto had been during the war. On one side of the monument is a beautiful rendering of the insurgents, of the men, women, and children, armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. The central figure is the leader of the uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz. The other side is a bas-relief sculpture that shows the persecuted Jews and their tormentors, the Nazis.
On our way from Krakow to Warsaw, we befriended two Polish brothers who shared the bed of a truck with us. They invited us to stay in their parents’ apartment in Warsaw and we gladly accepted, saving us a lot of money not spent on a hotel. Fortunately the parents were out of town, so the seven of us had plenty of space to sleep on the floor of the two-bedroom apartment.
My plan was to sneak out one early morning before anyone woke up and visit the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument. Why was my plan secret? With hindsight, the only explanation I have is that I was afraid that my friends would not understand my motive, and I was not prepared to explain it. The word “Holocaust” was not in use at the time of our trip, and we knew hardly anything about the mass annihilation of the Jews during World War II. It was not taught in schools, at least not in Hungary, and we Jews only knew about our personal losses, but not about the six million. Our surviving parents and relatives were reluctant to talk about the fate of our perished relatives, and I did not learn my father’s story until many years later, when my mother opened up gradually.
Why the reluctance to explain my motive? I saw the visiting of this monument as paying tribute to my father who perished in a forced labor battalion somewhere in Ukraine, and who had no marked grave anywhere. Although this memorial commemorates an event that had nothing to do with my father, in my mind it was a gravestone for those who had none. This was very personal, and I wanted to be alone.
Alone I was. I got there just as the sun was rising. I marveled at the very expressive sculptures, and I said an improvised prayer in Hungarian. My mission would have been perfect if I could have recited kaddish, the traditional Jewish mourning prayer. But this was not an option because I had no Jewish upbringing, so I improvised. Although I did not believe in G-d at that time, as part of the “enlightened intelligentsia,” I am convinced that my prayer was heard. How do I know? Because by the time I left I felt the peace of the closing verse of the mourner’s kaddish:
He who creates peace in His celestial heights, May He create peace for us and for all Israel; And say, Amen.
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