Zippy and Roo are very happy here. It’s a relief for their parents who, amidst all the twangs of their own absolute excitement about this backpacking adventure, were actually a little bit terrified that it would all go a bit – well, very – wrong.
Before we left, I remember telling family, friends and other keepers of small people that we’d be going across Europe by train with a four- and two-year old; and I remember the look in their eyes. Even when their breath carried soothing words of praise, support, wisdom or even a gentle lusting, their eyes couldn’t hide the palpable dread that could only be felt by people who have been in the presence of small humans who have totally lost the plot because of lack of sleep or rice cakes.
But fear we do not. In the countryside – and from the moment they wake up – our children go quite contentedly from damp and muddy trampoline to Chuli the cat; Chuli to the chickens; then back to the trampoline. This ritual can last for hours, and it is has become quite clear that Zippy and Chuli have a real thing going: she spent half an hour sitting with him in his dank, dark outhouse of a home feeding him his breakfast this morning. Nugget by nugget. By hand. Petra tells me he has never had so much attention. The Husband and I wonder how we’re going to break it to The Mother-in-Law that we’ll be getting a cat.
Roo too is having a love affair of his own. With the mop. Whilst his sister is wooing the cat, he dances a tango with a red, plastic-handled, topsy-turvy, rope-haired woman twice his height. The Mother-in-Law will be sympathetic to this relationship, unless of course one of The Brother-in-Laws has an allergy to clean floors.
Late morning, we pile into the car with Franz, Petra and their children, and head 15 minutes east to Sopron. A town today dubbed the ‘dental capital of the world’, Sopron boasts low-cost dentistry and cosmetic surgery for international tourists who may like a glimpse at the bit of medieval architecture that survived wartime bombings, whilst having their bridges built. However, it was only ten years ago that this place was a prominent ghost town of the Iron Curtain and, not long before that, a town once rich in Jewish arts, culture and learning.
Upon arrival, it is obvious that Sopron is literally peeling at the walls with dark history. A history that was not long ago an awake and breathing being, as László Karsai writes:
“Nearly one tenth of the victims [of the Nazis and their Hungarian allies] were Hungarian Jews, which means approximately 550,000 people… Even the definition is strange: a “Hungarian Jew.” A major element constituting the tragedy of the Jews in Hungary was that those people who after their Emancipation (1867) became unreservedly Hungarians regarding their language, customs, clothing, and most importantly, their feelings, were excluded from the community of Hungarian citizens. Horthy Miklós’s regime (1920-1944) carried out their gradual exclusion by a series of Jewish Laws passed after 1938. Those very same Jews, about whom Theodor Herzl stated with resignation at the turn of the century that they became a “dry bough” of Zionism, suddenly realized that their homeland for which they had fought with such devotion during the First World War (more than 10,000 Jews died and thousands upon thousands were wounded and disabled) regarded them as alien enemies. This was the case in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian Jewry, notwithstanding the orthodoxim, regarded themselves as Hungarians following the “faith of Moses.”
For centuries there had been a Jewish community here in Sopron. After its first expulsion in the 16th century, the community returned, and in 1910 nearly 7% of the town’s population was Jewish – there were around 30,000 Jews living here. After the Holocaust just 300 returned, including one single child. In the census of 2001, there were no Jewish Sopronians, so I guess expulsion and genocide had probably gotten a bit tedious for the final 300.
Our first destination in Sopron with our hosts is lunch, and they take us to a restaurant that they recommend for its traditional Hungarian fare. We order Borjúpaprikás (veal paprikash) and gulyás (goulash) with spätzle (ich lieber spätzle!) and lightly pickled cucumbers, and it is good. However, I can’t help but feel uneasy in this place. After the meal, Franz introduces us to the restaurant’s owner and asks if he can take us down to the old wine cellar, which is now another dining area. We climb through the darkness into the cool, bricked, arched room, where Franz stops to tell us that he believed this cellar once belonged to a Jewish wine merchant who traded from the site. He goes on to explain that there were many Jews in viticulture in Sopron before the war, and I later discover myself this area of Hungary played an important role in kosher wine production and trade to the neighbouring Hassidic communities of Poland and Austria.
As a family, this is our first foray into the heartland of the Shoah. Amongst a trip to the supermarket to buy new toothbrushes and a coffee-stop, we visit the former Jewish Street – now tastefully called Uj utca or New Street – the Old Synagogue and mikveh (built around 1300 and rare specimens of medieval Jewish culture), and the New Synagogue, which houses a permanent exhibition of photographs of and artefacts belonging to the Jews of Sopron who were murdered. A tallis here, a yellow fabric star there, these memorials are all the same wherever I have seen them in my life (and I’ve seen many): cold, lifeless, unworthy of the people they represent. It is the street outside the synagogue that silently shouts the loss; the renamed, patched up street in a town crowned with dentists and cosmetic surgeons.
The afternoon is hot and humid, the sky tight with a pressure that makes an uncomfortable place all the more so. The children are weary with the heat, and we head back to the land of trampoline and slumber. On the journey home, Franz looks up at the blushing sky and decides that there will be a harvest tomorrow. The elements are looking out for us – it’s the best possible end to the day.