Free Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman Page B

Jewish Property Office got it from the Hungarian banks. But how did the banks get it?” He regretted the question as he uttered it. He could never decide if beneath Ilona’s apparent fragility lay a fundamental strength or if the opposite was true. Maybe she only appeared strong but would shatter with the wrong word.
    “They took it. Everything we had, they made us turn in to the bank.First was telephones. I even remember the day. March twenty-seventh, 1944. I know because it was Etelka’s birthday. As a present to her, the government passed a law saying Jews were not to own or use telephones. How do you think we found out about the law?”
    “How?”
    She gave a bitter laugh. “On the telephone, of course. My uncle Oskar rang us with the news.”
    She said that her father had not wanted to spoil Etelka’s birthday celebration, so he had waited until the following day to go to the bank and turn in the telephone.
    “He waited in the queue all day. Who knew there were so many Jewish telephones in the city of Nagyvárad?”
    Within a couple of weeks the Jews of Hungary were ordered to purchase an official form on which they were to declare all possessions whose worth was in excess of 10,000 pengő, and then turn all of it over to the banks that had collected their telephones.
    “One day it was bicycles. Then radios. Then gold. Even my parents’ wedding rings. My father was a grain dealer. All around Nagyvárad there are farms. Wheat, everywhere wheat. My father would buy wheat from the farmers, sell it all over Europe. His warehouse was far too big for him to carry down to the local branch of the Royal Hungarian Postal Savings Bank. So they were kind enough to come one day and collect his keys. You know, before they confiscated his business, he sold wheat to the army, even to the Germans, right up until 1944. The SS who killed my father, maybe after they went back to the barracks and for dinner, they ate bread made from his wheat. How funny it all is, Jack, isn’t it?”
    “Ilona—”
    “Every day they took something different, and every day we waited in queues. All of us waiting so patiently to give up our possessions to the bank.”
    Ilona walked down one of the aisles that Jack had created out of the pallets and crates. She knelt down beside a small stack of empty suitcases on which the owners’ names were chalked in large clear letters.
    “They told us, put everything in packages and envelopes, write your name on everything. They gave us receipts with lists of what we turned in. My father kept these receipts in his billfold. He was terrified that if he lost the receipts, when the war was over he would not be able to put in a claim. He carried those papers all the way to Auschwitz, to the gas.”
    Jack caught himself just before he could tell her how sorry he was.
    “What will your army do with all these things?” she asked.
    “They’ll return them, eventually.”
    “Return them,” she said, and now the mocking tone was back again. “I wish them luck.”
    In fact Jack had often wondered how the owner of any specific item in the vast store would ever be identified. His soldiers brought him anything they found with writing on it that might indicate to whom the objects belonged, but aside from the documents initially handed over by László Avar, there was little to connect most of the items with the people from whom they had been taken. More often Jack and his men found references to cities, a stack of empty silver picture frames stamped with the name and address of the silversmith, or labels in the collars of fur coats embroidered with the names of shops or dealers. Even if there were survivors who came looking for their belongings, Jack worried about how anyone would ever find, for example, a specific set of silver Shabbos candlesticks among the tens of thousands that had filled the train. Which of the thousands of gold watches belonged to a father, which lynx coat from among the thousands belonged to a