The Wind Carries Me/Le Vent me porte

The Wind Carries Me

The German Invasion

The Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, almost two weeks after my eighth birthday. I remember seeing trains passing by with German soldiers sitting in the carriages. My friends and I ran along the tracks and waved at them.

The bombing started soon after that in early April. We lived quite close to the Rákosrendező railway yard, the telephone factory and the Danuvia armament factory, so our neighbourhood was targeted by a lot of bombs.

On April 5 there was a decree forcing all Jews to identify themselves by wearing a yellow star. My mother stitched one onto my coat. When I asked her why we had to wear it, she said it was because we were Jews. I was mighty proud of my yellow star and immediately ran into the street to show it off to my friends.

The bomb attacks were preceded by an air-raid siren, and we would be sent home from school when it went off. I sometimes just rushed into a building, but most often I ran all the way home because that is where I felt safe. I thought that nothing could go wrong when I was with my parents in the air-raid shelter, when I was next to my mother and surrounded by her love. During the raids, everybody went down to the shelter in the basement. My mother would carry a tiny suitcase that contained her prayer book, lump sugar, rubbing alcohol and other necessities, and my sister and I carried little stools. The shelter had a gurney and a first-aid kit attached to one wall, and an iron door to let people through from neighbouring buildings in the event that one of them was hit.

Even though he was Jewish, my father was chosen to be the deputy air-raid defence warden because he was popular and did his job well. By law, all lights in the building needed to be off, and my father diligently complied with these blackouts — with help from my sister and me — to make sure the building was dark when the bombers came. It was almost always my job to ring out the alarm, which was a fifty-centimetre-long piece of metal in the corridor that I gladly banged against the banister. This would make such a loud noise that everyone in the building would hear it and know to go to the shelter.