My parents, Árpad Grünwald and Olga Schönfeld, got married in 1937, and they rented a comfortable two-bedroom apartment in Budapest’s fifth district, also known as Belváros (inner city). The apartment building was built in 1898, and the architecture is reminiscent of the buildings along the famous boulevards of Paris. Our building looked like one of those famous apartments on Boulevard Haussman. The main entrance had a very ornate, carved oak door, it was four stories high, and the apartments had 15-foot ceilings. The ground floor was occupied by retail stores. The location was perfect for my mom’s business, and it was also within walking distance of my father’s office. This was the apartment where I was born and lived with one interruption until I got married in 1969.
The one interruption was World War II and the Holocaust, when in April 1944, we had to move to a government-mandated house for Jews (a Yellow Star House), later to an apartment under the protection of the Swiss embassy, and finally into the Budapest ghetto. We returned to our own apartment after the ghetto was liberated in January 1945.
Our apartment had two entry doors, one opened to the kitchen and the other to the hallway. The kitchen was connected to the living room by a long hallway, at least 28–30 feet long, from which all the other rooms opened. The first room on the right was the kisszoba (“small room,” pronounced as “kishsoba”), which was also called cselédszoba (“maid’s room”). This was designated for a live-in housekeeper/maid/nanny. The Hungarian word cseléd is closer to “servant,” but the young girl who occupied it during the war was rather a combination of nanny and housekeeper. Her name was Piri, which is short for Piroska. According to my mom, I loved her, and I was inconsolable when my mom was forced to let her go. According to one of the many antisemitic laws, young gentile girls under a certain age could not serve in Jewish households.
The kisszoba was an approximately 10-by-10-foot room and overlooked the back of the neighboring house, not a pretty vista. The apartment is on the third floor (second by European counting) in a five-story building. This room never saw the sunlight.
The second room down the hallway was the pantry, the third was the toilet room (WC), and the next one was the bathroom. Opposite the kitchen, on the far end of the hallway, was the living room, from which the bedroom opened. The apartment had 15-foot ceilings, so keeping it warm during the winter was almost impossible. It did not have central heating; each room had its own ceramic furnace or cast-iron stove. The kitchen was heated by an old-fashioned wood-burning kitchen stove that was used for cooking and baking, too.
My first memory of the apartment is from when I was four years old, and we returned from the ghetto. The ethnic German couple who occupied the apartment while we were away reluctantly allowed us to move into the kisszoba. Interestingly, at that time, they only occupied the kitchen, where they set up their bed, too. The reason for this was that the winter of 1944–45 was extremely cold, and fuel (coal, wood) was hardly available. They could only afford to keep the kitchen warm.
We settled in the kisszoba, which was sparsely furnished. It had a mattress that stood against the wall during the day, so we had a little room for two chairs and a table for daily activities. There was a small cast-iron stove that kept us warm and served also as the heat source for warming up meals and water. The room smelled smoky. I assume it was either because of the leaking stove pipe or just the way the stove worked. My mom opened the window every morning to air out the bedding, but only for a short time, so the heat did not escape. Neither did the smoky smell.
A few weeks later, the couple moved out, although not voluntarily. The Hungarian government expelled a great number of ethnic Germans after the war for allegedly cooperating with the Nazis. Some of them did, but collective retribution is wrong regardless of who does it. Finally, we retook the whole apartment, although we still stayed mostly in the kisszoba because that was the only room we were able to heat. The mattress was gone, and we got an armchair, which made it a comfy nook in the otherwise cold apartment.
We stayed all day in the kisszoba. It also became the scene of our evening ritual, which I would call the “heating of the brick.” In order to make the bedroom livable during the cold nights, my mom came up with a brilliant idea. She brought in a brick—there were plenty on the streets of the bombed-out Budapest—and put it on the stove every evening. The brick was from an era when they made them big and heavy, so it kept the heat for a long time. My mom wrapped it in a towel and put it in my bed. The bedroom was ice cold, but the bed was warm and cozy. To get to it was another story. I had to sprint from the warm kisszoba through the very long and cold hallway, long for a four-year-old, and jump onto the warm bed. I loved it.
My other lovely memory of the kisszoba is that while we had the stove, we used it for roasting chestnuts when they were in season. My mom slit the skin of the chestnut and soaked it overnight in sweetened milk. The next day, I would put the chestnuts on the top of the stove and wait until the skin got lightly burned, open it up, and then the chestnut was easily removable. Recently, I tried to repeat this childhood memory in our kitchen on an electric stove. Neither the smell nor the taste was the same. My mom’s magic touch was missing.
About a year later, my mom rented out the kisszoba to a survivor of Auschwitz whose family was wiped out and whose son was protected and cared for by nuns until 1949. My mom married our renter a few years later, and my stepbrother moved to kisszoba. We all lived for many years to come. We still have that bed-warming brick in the pantry.
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