One day I went to visit a friend in the apartment house in which we had first lived when we fled to Budapest. While I was there, a troop of Hungarian soldiers came in to the centre courtyard of the building and were lining up all the Jews to take them away. I started walking toward the exit gate. A soldier stopped me.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving. I don’t live here.”
He scowled at me, “But you’re a Jew!”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“So what are you doing here?”
I knew that telling him that I was visiting a Jewish friend would not help my cause. Just in time I remembered that air-raid sirens had sounded right before the soldiers arrived. “I came in when the air-raid sirens started.”
An officer came by, and the soldier told him my story. “Aw, don’t bother. Let him go,” he said.
As the soldier escorted me to the exit, he said, “I still think you’re a Jew.”
And I replied cockily, “To err is human,” and walked out to freedom.
I was so proud of my cleverness that this story later became my first piece of published writing, in my high school yearbook. It is only in the last few years that I allowed myself to realize how close I was to being taken away by the Hungarian soldiers; my family would never have found out what had happened to me. There were many close calls, and I think it took quick thinking and miraculous escapes to survive those times, as well as a strong will to live. But I was not aware of these things at the time. We all just did what we had to.
Leslie Mezei, garçon de 12 ans enjoué et curieux, ne prend pas la mesure de la menace qui pèse sur sa vie en tant que Juif durant l’occupation allemande de la Hongrie en 1944. Si Magda, sa sœur aînée, consciente du danger que représentent les nazis et les fascistes, décide courageusement de prendre en charge la survie de sa famille, sa sœur Klari, tenace et déterminée, doit faire face à une rude épreuve. Confrontés à la déportation et aux camps de concentration, vivant dans la peur constante d’être capturés, les enfants Mezei doivent braver les réalités éprouvantes de la Hongrie en période de guerre. Au terme du conflit, les membres de la famille se réunissent brièvement, avant d’emprunter des chemin différents pour refaire leurs vies. C’est à Montréal que Leslie rencontre sa femme, Annie, elle aussi rescapée de l’Holocauste. Dans A Tapestry of Survival, les voix de Leslie, Magda, Klari et Annie, s’enchevêtrent pour former le tissu d’une mémoire collective faite de courage, de résilience, et du désir de se reconstruire.
Préface de Borbala Klacsmann
Leslie Mezei est né en 1931 à Gödöllő (Hongrie). Arrivé au Canada en 1948, il est devenu professeur à l’Université de Toronto. Considéré comme un pionnier de l’art numérique, Leslie a également mis au point deux nouveaux langages de programmation graphique. Il réside aujourd’hui à Toronto, où il s’est engagé au sein d’un mouvement interconfessionnel et interspirituel.
