'Terrible Things Can Happen to Good People'

“The best way to survive the Holocaust was not to be there.”

Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The observation above was made by Moshe Vardi, a mathematician and computer scientist at Rice University whose parents improbably survived the Hungarian Holocaust, a late addendum to the Nazis’ industrialized effort to kill every Jew in Europe. It started in May 1944. By December, thanks to German efficiency, some 565,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered. Moshe’s lecture mingled family history with the abattoir of twentieth-century world history.

Moshe’s father, Rabbi Pinchas Hayim (Abba) Vardi (born in Rumania in 1927, he died in Israel in 2014), lost his grandfather, father, step-mother, six sisters and a brother in the Holocaust; his mother, Ziporah Eva (Imma) Vardi (born in Hungary in 1929, she died in Israel in 2019), her grandmother, mother, a brother and three sisters. Moshe writes:

“Imma survived Auschwitz by sheer will to live, lots of resourcefulness and a few miracles. When they arrived at Auschwitz, they had to jump off the train, helped by other prisoners. The prisoner who helped my mother, held her in the air, looked at her small size (she was then 150cm tall) and asked: ‘How old are you?’ ‘16,’ she answered. ‘Say 18,’ said the prisoner, and put her down. She was utterly confused by this, but when she arrived at the selection line the Nazi officer asked, ‘How old are you?’ ‘18,’ she answered, and was sent to the work camp. Unknown to them, those who were too old or too young to work were sent directly to the gas chambers.”

Here Moshe describes the meeting of his parents in a displaced-persons’ camp in Germany: “On their first ‘date,’ Abba gave her a Talmudic lecture. ‘How did you like the date?’ I asked. ‘I realized that he was very learned,’ she said, ‘I liked it.’ Her brother also approved of Abba. Her brother decided to go to the U.S., hoping there he could rebuild his life. My mother, however, was an ardent Zionist, in spite of her Chasidic upbringing, and she was determined that she and my father should immigrate to Eretz Israel.” In late 1947 she moved to what was then known as Palestine. Moshe’s father joined her a few months later. In 1950 they helped found Nir Etzion, a religious kibbutz near Haifa. Moshe was born in Israel in 1954. Like me he first read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) when he was about twelve years old.

At the end of his lecture, along with the axiom quoted at the top, Moshe gave three others:

“Terrible things can happen to good people.”

“Individual choice and action matter.”

“Human resilience is incredible.”

I remembered Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), the Hungarian poet and Jew. Moshe and I have talked about him before. In May 1944, two months after the Nazis occupied Hungary, Radnóti was pressed into a Jewish labor gang to build roads in Yugoslavia. That fall, as the Germans fled the Balkans, the men in the work crews, already weak from hunger and exhaustion, were ordered to march back to Hungary and into Austria. Of the 3,600 men who left the camp in Yugoslavia, only 800 reached the Hungarian border. When Radnóti collapsed in November, possibly on the 8th, he was shot in the neck by his Hungarian guards and buried with 21 others.

Twenty months later, after the German surrender, the mass grave near a dam in Abda in western Hungary was uncovered and Radnóti’s body exhumed. In the pocket of his raincoat was found a blood-stained address book containing ten poems he had written in the Yugoslav labor camp and on the death march. Their worth is both documentary and poetic. They are great poems as well as emblems of the fierceness of art in the face of unimaginable inhumanity, and are almost impossible to read without tears.

These final poems are fragments titled Razglednicas – Serbian by way of Hungarian for “picture postcards.” The final one, dated Oct. 31, about a week before his murder, has been translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner (Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklos Radnóti, Princeton University Press, 1992):

“I fell beside him and his corpse turned over,

tight already as a snapping string.

Shot in the neck. `And that’s how you’ll end too,’

I whispered to myself; `lie still; no moving.

Now patience flowers in death.’ Then I could hear

`Der springt noch auf,’ above, and very near.

Blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.”

The translators gloss the German phrase this way: “these lines refer to Mikos Lorsi, a violinist comrade of Radnóti’s who was murdered at Cservenka by an SS man on a horse. Having been shot once, Lorsi collapsed; but soon after, he stood up again, staggering. `He is still moving,’ called the SS man, taking aim a second time, this time successfully.” The German phrase can be translated as “That one is still twitching.”

Ozsváth, in her biography of Radnóti, In the Footsteps of Orpheus (Indiana University Press, 2000), describes the scene of the poet’s death like this:

“One of the guards went to a nearby inn to borrow a hoe; another borrowed some tools and equipment from the dam-keeper’s wife. Upon their return, the guards started to dig the grave. They tried to beat the prisoners into helping them, but most of the men couldn’t even move at this point, an inconvenience for the guards, who were in a hurry to return to their column before nightfall. They succeeded in digging a grave, however, and forced a few of the prisoners to jump into it and flatten the ground. These were the first of the men the guards shot in the back of the neck: one guard using a revolver, the rest used rifles. The remaining servicemen were taken to the gravesite and shot in this fashion, one by one.

“After covering the grave. The guards returned both the hoe and the tools to the owners and found their way back to their units at Mosonmagyaróvár, arriving there before nightfall.”  

[Go here for a video of Moshe’s mother remembering her arrival at Auschwitz.]