(The following is part of a longer essay, in honor of my mother and her incredible life story, still in the making as of this writing)
My mother's name is Ata. She was named after Attila the Hun, the fierce 5th century warrior, nicknamed 'the Scourge of God', whose descendants founded Hungary. She was born in Budapest in 1913, at a time when the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its capital Vienna were the center of culture and art. Budapest, the Empire's second capital, rivaled Vienna in intellectual and artistic life and my mother was born smack in the middle of it all. Her own parents, both intellectuals, made sure she received a top notch education, which included learning Greek and Latin, Mathematics, Physics and Biology.
Ata looks nothing like Attila the Hun and were it not for her beautiful wrinkled face, framed by a thick mane of silver white hair, her tiny, fragile frame could be that of a small child. She has a hunchback, inherited from my grandfather, which makes it difficult for her to maintain her balance without her cane. She will celebrate her 103rd birthday soon, although she says she would rather be 102 forever.
I sometimes have to pinch myself when I realize that Ata was born before the Russian Revolution, before women could vote and before airplanes could fly across the Atlantic. It is not just her age that makes her unique; she lived her life at a time in history when fate dumped as many catastrophic events on the world as possible.
Ata has always been beautiful, but at her age, her face is radiant. A sweet smile accentuates the roundness of her high cheek bones, and deep furrows have comfortably settled themselves around her eyes and mouth. They are like a roadmap to her long and tumultuous past in which major world events have taken place, which, you and I only know about from reading history books.
Before her first birthday, the First World War broke out. This was the War of all Wars, when the geography of an entire continent was redrawn. By the end of that war, 90 million people had died, Europe was in ruins and Ata's homeland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was destroyed.
Ata's father, Imre was sent to the front before Ata was born. Although he was a Jew, he had to fight for the to Germans, since Hungary was part of the Triple Alliance. Yes, Hungary has often bet on the wrong side and paid a high price for it.
My grandfather was a pacifist, but young men were not asked about their ethical ideals in those days, especially young Jewish men. Imagine a young pacifist Jew forced to fight in the German army!
Family lore has it that while at the front, he always had a large stick at the ready, and when it was time to come out of the trenches, he carefully put his gun down and picked up the stick. How he survived is a miracle, but he did.
He was finally captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia, where he spent six years in a Prisoner of War camp. The Russian army could barely feed its own soldiers, which left the prisoners of war to fend for themselves. Imre, being a learned history professor, taught himself Russian and began a prison career as a teacher, bartering lessons for food.
When he finally returned to Budapest, hoping to return to normal life, he learnt of my grandmother's liaison with a communist agitator. Thinking that Imre was long dead, she had married again and left for Vienna, where she was planning to live a new life with a new husband.
Only Ata remained in Budapest, in the care of an aunt. She was now 5 years old and had never met her father until then. According to family legend, Ata was instrumental in convincing my grandmother to return to Budapest and marry her first husband for the second time. It was a tumultuous relationship; two hot headed, opinionated intellectuals who were always engaged in one battle of the mind or another.
Since my parents moved to Paris after the war, I only knew my grandparents through intermittent correspondence. I loved my grandmother's beautiful curly handwriting, how she signed her letters with her beautiful name ‘Margit’, and the way she used the French language. I could feel the effort that it took to give her Hungarian thoughts French attire, as she wrote these long letters. She spoke and read more languages than I can count on my fingers. She translated from various Scandinavian languages and spoke Russian and German fluently.
She died when I was young, but I wish I could climb up her branch of the family tree and shake her hand, telling her how sorry I am that history didn't allow us to live closer together. I would have liked to ask her what it was like to marry someone twice. How it felt to grow up in an upscale Jewish family in one of the most powerful Empires in the world. I would have sat on that branch and picked her formidable brain, until the cramps in my dangling legs would have forced me to climb down again.
Before Ata's fifth birthday, the Russian Revolution broke out. Lenin established the Soviet Union and Mussolini took power in Italy. Hungarian society was torn between two opposing political forces: the fascists and the socialists. The fascists were longing to get back the old 'Great Hungary' of before 1918, while the socialists wanted a Russian style Revolution.
But life went on for most people, including Ata. She spent the first 10 years of her life as an only child, until her sister Icca was born. Photographs of Icca in our voluminous family albums show a pretty girl with pigtails and a sweet smile. Little does that young, innocent face reveal the terrible fate that was in store for her.
My family and millions of Europeans had barely time to catch their breath, when a new World War broke out. As my family was huddled together in a bomb shelter in Budapest, another heated argument between members of my family caused Icca to leave the shelter and she promptly stepped on a mine. She was sixteen.
Yes, Ata's life could be made into one of those Spielberg movies. Growing up and listening to these incredible war stories, I almost felt envy. Here I was, a post-world war child, comfortably growing up in the suburbs of Paris, albeit in poverty. But everybody was poor to some degree after the war, so I couldn't even boast that being poor made me 'special. Ata met my father in art school when she was eighteen, a handsome, tall man with an aristocratic lineage a mile long and not a penny to his name. They eloped to Spain, and lived like vagabonds, sleeping on the beaches, surviving on olives and almonds from the fields, madly in love with life and each other.
Paris was where artists aspired to live in those inter-war years, and that is where my parents settled. My father painted, and this is when my mother, who had won a rolleiflex camera in a drawing contest, first became interested in photography.**
As Ata progressed along her lifeline, things became more intense. A madman by the name of Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany and five years later all hell broke loose, when he decided to invade Poland.
When the Second World War broke out, my parents were sent back to Hungary, as all foreigners were deported back to their home country. She was 26 and heavily pregnant with my older brother Tom.
To be continued…. leave comment here
** Many years later, after the Second World War, she started to work for Magnum, the newly established prestigious Press agency where she worked as a lowly dark room developer. But Magnum was where many world famous photographers got their assignments, war photographers like Robert Capa and other giants of the trade like Cartier Bresson. She learnt her trade developing their photos and partly contributed to the quality of her later work.
