Love’s Orphan
Chapter
Picture from second grade in 1954.
Love’s Orphan
Chapter
Chapter 4
The Orphanage
In September 1953 my father moved me into the orphanage, and it was to be my home for most of the next ten years. It was on Delibab Street, just on the outskirts of the famous City Park. It was a big yellow building with a tall wrought-iron fence surrounding it. The view from the courtyard was very nice, overlooking the statues of Hungarian kings, which stood in a half-circle on what is appropriately called Heroes Square. On one side of the square was the world-famous Hungarian National Art Museum, and on the other was the Museum of Modern Art. I spent many hours in those museums on school field trips.
To my surprise, Mom did come to see me the day I moved into my new home. For a moment I thought maybe my parents were feeling sorry for me and had decided I didn’t really belong in an orphanage after all. Instead, they began to argue again about everything, and it escalated as usual. They said a lot of hurtful things to each other, and it was embarrassing and uncomfortable. Mom kept screaming at my father that there was no reason for me to be in the orphanage, and Dad kept saying that she was not fit to be my mother. I felt that my heart was going to break. They were arguing in front of me as if I didn’t exist. I still remember having the same thoughts I had before: Have they ever really loved each other? Do they really love me? It seemed to me that I was always the problem.
I was sobbing uncontrollably and begged Dad not to leave me, but he kept assuring me that this was the right place for me to be for now, that this was a better situation for me than being on the street waiting for Mom to come home, or sitting in a classroom late into the night waiting for him to finish teaching. He explained to me that I needed stability and structure in my life and that, more than anything, I needed to be in a place where I was safe. I was only six years old, and I was trying really hard to understand and accept my new life. In my heart all I felt was complete rejection. And then it was time to say good-bye. My mother promised she would get me out of this place soon, but she never did. In fact, she hardly ever came to see me.
The Jewish Orphanage was supported by Holocaust survivors in Budapest as well as people who had emigrated from Hungary to Israel or the United States before the German occupation. This was an Orthodox Jewish institution. The headmistress was named Aunt Olga. Her office was on the first floor. She seemed stern and cold to me (and I thought at the time that she was probably the most unattractive-looking woman I have ever seen). Throughout my time at the orphanage I was scared to death of her.
Aunt Olga knew my father and spoke of him with great respect. Everyone seemed to know Dad, who by this time was making a name for himself as a noteworthy cello teacher. He made arrangements with Aunt Olga to see me on Wednesdays and Sundays to give me cello lessons, and this was when he surprised me with my first cello. I started dreaming about becoming a great cellist. I thought if I worked hard the way he did I could fulfill the dream of my father. I could bring back to him something so valuable that he had lost, and also make him proud of me.
For a long time I was terribly lonely in the orphanage; I just could not make friends with anyone. I remember looking around the courtyard and seeing many girls of all ages running around playing games, but no one seemed to pay any attention to me. Looking back, I think I know why that happened. I wasn’t an orphan like nearly all the other children. Also, though my hair had grown darker by then, I noticed that I was the only blond-haired, blue-eyed kid out of eighty-five girls. Everyone else had dark brown or black curly hair, so I just stuck out. They used to tease me nonstop about my looks. The first couple of years I cried myself to sleep almost every night.
Then, when I was in third grade, Bea Frank came to the orphanage. She soon became my very best friend. Our friendship helped both of us to get through those tough times. We had a lot in common: like me, she wasn’t an orphan, either. Her mom was not in good health, and her dad just disappeared one day, leaving home to pick up a pack of cigarettes and never coming back. During the early fifties it was not unusual for people simply to vanish for no apparent reason. The KGB controlled everything, and you never knew who was listening in to your conversations.
Bea and I were complete opposites in looks. She was skinny and sick all the time with asthma. She had very thick brown hair, light olive skin, and big brown almond-shaped eyes. I was lily-white with rosy cheeks, plump and healthy-looking. But Bea and I loved all the same things. We would make up stories about what we would do when we left the orphanage. We had big dreams for our futures.
We were lucky because Bea sat next to me in the study room in the orphanage and her bed was also assigned next to mine. We studied together and loved reading, theater, and movies. We started a scrapbook about all of our favorite actors and actresses. We were definitely star-struck! We were completely infatuated with the same actors and imagined what we would say if we ever met them. We created our own fantasy world and had a lot of innocent fun.
We also started writing a daily diary. I think we got our inspiration from the book The Diary of Anne Frank. We both instinctively knew that we lived in unusual times that should be recorded. We would often compare our entries and share our most secret thoughts and dreams. And we shed many tears talking about our lives, yet we could also make each other laugh and forget about our often difficult daily reality.
We used to save every penny to buy tickets to the movies or theater. We talked a lot about going to America, where it seemed everybody wanted to go. In school, however, we were taught that America was evil and that it was about rich people taking advantage of poor people. We were brainwashed with daily dogma from The Communist Manifesto that the only way to succeed was to support the Communist Party, where everybody was equal and had the same rights.
We were always told that we had to give everything to the Soviet Union because they “liberated” us from the Nazis and we owed them our freedom. We studied the lives of Stalin, Lenin, and Marx in school, and their statues were displayed everywhere. We had red stars on every building and all the children were required to become Pioneers, members of a youth Communist organization. All of us had to wear a red kerchief around our necks showing our solidarity with the Soviet Union. Our streets were renamed after “Soviet heroes.”
Under Communist rule there was no freedom of religion, though at the Jewish orphanage we had religious instruction weekly. In public school classes, however, the story was completely different. Both Bea and I believed deeply in God, but in school God was never mentioned, as if He didn’t exist. In books and poems the word God was never capitalized, and when we asked the teacher why God’s name wasn’t written with a capital G she answered, without blinking an eye, “Because there is no God.” Then we saw that very same teacher in the Jewish temple the following Friday at the evening services. We were so indoctrinated with the Communist ideology that we just accepted these double standards as a way of life.
There was one thing we never understood, though. If America was so bad, then why did people want to go there? If the Soviet occupation was so great, then why were people always talking about leaving Hungary to go west for a better life? Bea and I would try to see every American movie, and we would dream about this other world. Even though we knew nothing about it, we both knew we wanted to go there!
The schedule at the orphanage was like being in the military. We wore uniforms to the public school, but underneath we had to wear dresses made by the in-house seamstress at the orphanage. Everybody had a number that was sewn into our towels and our clothes. I was number 11. At school we were always so embarrassed about our clothing because everyone knew that we were the girls from the Jewish orphanage. I remember how humiliated I felt because