MemoirAll the horrors, all the betrayals, all the nasty little cruelties of war are chronicled in this sharp, unsentimental, at times disturbingly neutral memoir.
From the opening sentence, "So, here I am, lying on my mattress in the middle of the synagogue at the foot of the Ark of the Covenant", Béla Zsolt makes clear he intends to shed no tears in the course of telling his story. Initially his sardonic tone, a tone sustained throughout the account, makes the reader uncomfortable. Nine Suitcases possesses a strange defiance: "We aren't afraid of air raids; or any other kinds of death".
Holocaust memoirs have created their own literature. It goes beyond the personal, and almost defies history itself. Because the facts so known have long since become overshadowed by the appallingly unnecessary evil of it all. Zsolt (1895-1949) comes to it all as a hardened observer. His Holocaust experiences did not make him a writer, he already was one and had written novels and plays as well as producing a vast body of opinionated literary and political journalism. In his native Hungary, he had his admirers and he also had enemies, who disliked him for his views, not that Zsolt, a Jew and an anti-communist, cared all that much who he irritated.
Having served as a youth at the Russian front in the first World War, during which he endured desperate suffering in the Ukraine and was seriously wounded, Zsolt had lost his innocence and all notions of hope before the second World War came along to tear the life of Europe's Jews asunder. Aside from the Hungarian ghetto, Zsolt's second taste of war, this time as an outcast, was in an Hungarian-Jewish labour unit, back in Russia.
This is an astonishing and tough book, direct and efficiently written. Initially, it overwhelms through its wry edge. Once you adjust to the cynicism and recognise it as the voice of an individual who has had his very heart squeezed away to nothing, the book becomes as compelling as a conversation. Zsolt is no campaigner, he had no interest in answers. There were none. Only incidents and, of course, opinions. His prose lacks the lyric grace of Joseph Roth, but it matches its candour.
Originally published in weekly instalments between May 1946 and February 1947, Nine Suitcases was first published in book form in Hungary in 1980 and the version under review here is the first English language translation. It offers only the first part of Nine Suitcases, and brings Zsolt's story only up to his return, by train, to Budapest and exhaustion.
The proposed second part, aside from a couple of fragments, was never written, although it was widely known that he then travelled on to Switzerland, where he remained until returning to Hungary in 1945. Two years later he entered Parliament as an anti-communist politician. As is evident from Nine Suitcases, by his mid-40s, Zsolt was an old man; two wars and his lifestyle combined to ruin his health. He died in 1949, aged 54, a year after his wife had committed suicide on publishing her dead daughter's diary.
Those few biographical facts reveal a great deal about the man, and the realities that shaped him. His wife's daughter had been born in her first marriage and Zsolt, not the most sentimental of men, who prefers observation to confession, makes it clear that he allowed the child sufficient emotional distance to enable her to sustain feelings for her natural father.
Equally in the many references to his distraught young wife, who had to endure the agony of having her mother, father and daughter die in Auschwitz, Zsolt reveals more detached concern than passion for his wife, whom he sees battling a post-operative wound at the same time as her family is earmarked for death. Throughout Nine Suitcases, Zsolt never loses sight of himself as the writer carrying a 20-year career - and reputation - on his shoulders. Zsolt the novelist, who notes a young Russian peasant reading Flaubert, is as alert to what he sees as his reporter's eye. The Hungary he observes in war is no tragic paradise, it's a sinister hell. There are no heroes, only the odd kindness. Aside from what he reveals to the reader about the realities of Hungarian fascism, his central concern is recording the utter inhumanity of all around him.
It could be said, and is with some irony, by him, that it was his wife's determination to hold on to their nine suitcases that brought them back to a country they had fled:
I blame the nine suitcases for bringing me back from Paris, where I was living in a small hotel in the Rue Linne with my wife and friends, trying to prepare the renewal of Hungary from abroad, and to save our homeland from outside. My wife clung to the nine suitcases tooth and nail, and because there was no room for all nine together on the overcrowded train to the Riviera we didn't go to Cagnes.
But there is far more to it than that.
Zsolt's wife wanted to return to Hungary to see her daughter, who lived with her parents. As for his solidarity with his fellow Jews, Zsolt makes no secret of his distance from all that. As a European-looking Jew himself, born into a family with a love of the secular Christmas, he regards orthodox, traditional Jews as aliens: "They are as alien to me as Filippinos."
He is reporting what he sees, at times, what he feels. There is a rare outburst, however, when he asks: "What was the big idea in allowing the Jews to make Christianity, which turned out to be the greatest and most calculating power in the world, and then excluding the Jews, of all people, from Christianity and from that power?"
At one stage, he actively recalls deciding to fight for life. But the real truth and terror of Zsolt's story, during which he mentions the incredible coldness, the agony of lice infestation and all the dead rotting bodies, is his gradual detachment from it all. His account articulates the sad, lonely moment when nothing really matters any more.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Nine Suitcases By Béla Zsolt, translated by Ladislaus Löb Cape, 324pp. £17.99
