The Role of Chance

What role does chance play in our lives?

In the late summer of 1944, everything looked black for my family. First crammed into one of Budapest’s infamous “yellow star houses,” then my grandfather Muki conscripted into a forced labor battalion. Unbeknownst to them, the date for deportation—to a place very few had even heard of: Auschwitz—had been set for August 27.

Now, a stroke of luck befell them: Sensing that the fate of Budapest’s Jews hung by the merest of threads, the Red Cross began renting dozens of houses and apartments and placing Jews there, with official letters of protection posted outside. They worked, mostly.

My grandmother Csurka’s best friend, a woman named Ella Barrey, worked at the Red Cross. Through her, the family was sent to hide in one of these houses, up in the Buda Hills.

Stop there for a moment: Everything I have been able to do in my life—be it blessed, squanderous, generous or lazy—was made possible by this seemingly random chance. A woman I never met pulled some strings, saving the lives of my grandparents, father, and aunt.

So, what’s the photo about? After the Battle of Budapest—during which some 160,000 humans would lose their lives—the ruined streets would become a sort of vast flea market, starving people selling or bartering anything they could for food.

A young woman named Marianne Pinter—the niece of Ella Barrey, the woman who’d arranged for my family’s shelter—was wandering through a makeshift bookstore and picked up a volume at random: a French biography of Ludwig van Beethoven. Flipping it open, she was struck dumb: The book belonged to my grandfather, Muki (given name “Jenö”).

The bookplate, by the way, reads: “Clarity, love, truth - From the library of Eugene Lorinczi”