The InvisibleBridge

Andras and Tibor rushed to the side of the car and called to their parents in hushed voices: Anyu, Apu. The diminutive forms not used since childhood. Andras and Tibor made young again in their extremity, by the impossible closeness and untouchability of their mother, Flóra; their father, Béla. Inside the boxcar, men pushed aside to give them room, a measure of privacy in that packed enclosure.

“Andi! Tibi!” Their mother’s voice, desperate with pain and relief.

“But how did you get here?” Tibor asked.

“Your father bribed a policeman,” their mother said. “We had an official escort.”

“Are you all right, boys?” Their father’s voice again, asking a question whose answer was already known, and to which Andras and Tibor could only respond with a lie. “Do you know where they’re sending you?”

They did not.

There was little time to talk. Little time for Béla and Flóra to do what they had come to do. A package appeared at the bars of the single high window, looped to a metal hook with a length of brown twine. The package, too large to fit through the window bars, had to be lowered again and broken down into its components. Two woolen sweaters. Two scarves. Tight-wrapped packages of food. A packet of money: two thousand pengő. How had they saved it? How had they kept it hidden? And two pairs of sturdy boots, which had to be left behind; no way to pass them through the window.

Then their father’s voice again, saying the prayer for travel.

Flóra and Béla hurried through the darkened streets toward home, each carrying a pair of sturdy boots. Behind them, with a hand on their shoulders as though they were under arrest, was the bribed policeman, a former member of Béla’s chess club, who had arranged for them to slip out through a cellar that joined two buildings, one inside the ghetto, one out. Others had slipped out in the same ma

At last the policeman delivered them to the courtyard that led to the cellar. With an antiquated and incongruous politeness, he held the door as they entered that tu

For another few weeks they would share this bed while the Jews of Hajdú County were massed in Debrecen. Then, on a late June morning, as the nasturtium vine opened its trumpets on the veranda and the white goats bleated in the courtyard, they would descend the stairs, each with a single suitcase, and walk with their neighbors through the ghetto gates, down the familiar city streets, all the way to the Serly Brickyards west of town, where they would be loaded onto a train almost identical to the one that had carried their sons to no one knew where. The train would roll west, through the stations with the window boxes full of geraniums; it would roll west through Budapest. Then it would roll north, and north, and farther north, until its doors opened at Auschwitz.

The train carrying Andras and Tibor and József rolled east to the edge of the country. There, in a Carpatho-Ruthenian town whose name would change twice as it became part of Czechoslovakia again and then part of the Soviet Union, they were escorted by armed guards to a camp three kilometers from the Tisza River. Their task would be to load timber onto barges for transport through Hungary and on toward Austria. They were assigned to a windowless bunkhouse with five rows of three-tiered bunks; outside, along the edge of the building, was a line of open sinks where they could wash. That evening at di