Engrave their names on a wall
A Jewish cemetery in Central Europe, early 21st century. More than half of the stones are in disrepair. Some are slanted, others are broken. Many are covered in the undergrowth.
There is a sense of finality in the death of those buried here. They were forgotten because no one was left to remember. Those who could remember didn’t choose to forget. No: almost an entire generation was wiped out in forced labor and in death camps – or on the way. Continue reading
Traveling is an experience of freedom. My favorite one, for that matter. It’s a cliché, really: when I get away from the scenes of everyday life, that opens me up, rejuvenates me. I don’t even have to be alone: in fact, sharing this with family or friends even adds to the excitement.
Cliché or not, I can’t help bearing witness to its truth. And I can’t help sharing this deepest of my experiences: I’m starting a series of travel pieces on this blog called the Third Tower Travels. The travel pieces will be short and made up of photos, highlights and anecdotes rather than facts and figures or accurate and complete travel information. At the same time, I hope they will make some of the readers want to visit the places I’m writing about.
Every day, new tidings arrive from Russia about the slaughter of Jews. Russian Jews flee towards Galicia, and they might be upon the Hungarian border in a day or two. Counties like Nyitra, Szatmár, and Szabolcs are sending memorandum after memorandum to the Parliament, demanding a stop to this immigration […].
(Gyula Krúdy: A tiszaeszlári Solymosi Eszter, IV., 1931, my translation)
January 27 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – and the death of Hungarian writer Antal Szerb. It’s the dark irony of fate that on the same day Allied troops entered the death camp, Szerb was beaten to death by Hungarian Nazis (calling themselves ‘Hungarists’ or those of the ‘Arrow-Cross’) in a forced-labor camp in Balf, Hungary.
Szerb was of Jewish descent, but at the same time he was a Hungarian literary scholar through and through. The blackguards who did the beating were not men of culture – how could they know that the man they killed had done more than anyone else to spread and promote Hungarian literature?
The Third Tower 