Goodbye, Csupi
As the final note echoed off the ancient stone walls and the string quartet fell silent, I exhaled and opened my eyes. Maybe it was the surroundings—a tiny candlelit chapel in the heart of Paris—but I felt utterly enveloped, wanting nothing more than for this moment to stretch out just a little bit longer. I couldn’t remember the last time a piece of music—in this case, a hushed and prayerful rendition of Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor”—had so pierced me.
The feeling of grace was short-lived. As we stepped outside into the autumn sunshine, Aunt Csupi broke the silence:
“That was a disappointment,” she said. “That piece is so overplayed!”
That’s my aunt for you. Nothing ever quite good enough for her, no one else’s opinion worth acknowledging. A woman who survived some of the 20th century’s most epochal and heart-rending events—the Great Depression, the Holocaust, the paranoid hell of Stalin-era Hungary—Csupi struggled to project even the most basic compassion. Scornful and stylish, she was the family’s black sheep, clothed not in fleece but in ermine and mink.
That concert in the Parisian chapel was a full twenty-five years ago, when Csupi was already well into her dotage. And while I never expected her to live forever, her passing—last week, at the age of 97—hit me hard. Maybe it’s the smallness of her death, coming after a bout with Covid. Maybe it’s that with her departure, the portal to my family’s ancestral memories has slammed shut. Or maybe it’s that I simply loved her, thorns and all. Despite her legendary cattiness—“I hope your sister is happy, if someone like that can ever be happy,” read one letter—she cared for me, in her way. And once you got past the bile, she could be downright hilarious. For years, she’d engaged in a running feud with the neighbors in her apartment block. (I’m not sure, but it may have started when she called the police on her own party rather than asking the guests to leave.) Now she was torn: If she died first, the neighbors would have the last laugh. On the other hand, she was heartened by the hope that her decomposing corpse might poison their apartment: “Just think of the smell!”
Csupi may have been the holder of ancient memories, but accessing them was another matter. In her last decade, certain themes, like her mother’s saintliness, would spin into discursive loops. Others—the ones I really wanted to hear, like how my family survived the cataclysmic last months of the Second World War—remained stubbornly off limits, tucked inside a lockbox with no key.
But when she could be coaxed from those stubborn grooves, Csupi’s unsentimental recollections—so unlike my father’s carefully curated stories—could shake me. A few years ago, something I said snagged a long-buried tripwire. Without preamble, the story of her escape from Hungary poured forth through the Transatlantic phone line, as sudden and unstoppable as a broken water main.
That was in late 1956. A few months before, the Hungarian Revolution stopped the world in its tracks for a few fleeting and heart-pounding days. That October, young Hungarians with pilfered sub-machineguns faced down the Red Army’s tanks. For a moment, it appeared as though they might win their freedom. Then the Soviets came back in force, crushing the uprising in the span of a day. Perhaps 3,000 Hungarians died, another 13,000 wounded. Roughly 200,000 fled the country, among them my Aunt Csupi.
The thing was, she hadn’t planned to. One evening as she left her state-appointed job at the telephone exchange, a man approached her on the sidewalk. “There was something revolting about him; he looked greasy in his leather jacket,” said Csupi, “but he grabbed my arm and told me that Gyuri”—my father, who’d gotten out just before the Iron Curtain clanged shut—“had paid him to smuggle me out. The man gave me ten minutes to decide if I wanted to go. He said he was keeping the money, whether I came or not.”
Definitely not my aunt. During the Hungarian Revolution, Erika Kornélia Szeles joined the anti-Communist forces, ostensibly as a nurse. When her friend was wounded in a street fight with Soviet troops, she raced forward to save him and was herself shot dead. She was 15 years old.
And so she went, that very night. Stuffed like a piece of baggage into a compartment underneath a train, Csupi bumped and jostled her way in the frigid dark for a few hours. Finally the brakes squealed and the train slowed to a stop. They were near the Austrian border, where the engineer had been bribed to pause. There, underneath a waxy moon, she and the other stowaways clambered out into a nearby field. The wind was frigid, the ground covered by a thick blanket of snow. “Run!” ordered the smuggler, and pointed west. The band of defectors took off towards Austria and freedom, a trip that would take her to the limits of her endurance.
It was winter, and the border was not yards away, but miles. “I ran for hours, out of breath,” said Csupi, now nearly breathless herself. I’d never heard her talk like this before, speaking as if from deep inside a trance. “It was so cold, so very cold,” said Csupi. “I fell down many times, in the deep snow. The last time, I gave up. I was so exhausted, I lay down and I couldn’t get up. Then a man I’d never seen before, a complete stranger, stopped and made me get up.
“We kept running. Eventually the sun began to rise, and I realized we were someplace else. There was a little building, a sort of hut with a flagpole next to it. I saw the Austrian flag, and I fell down weeping. I wept and I kissed the ground.”
I was silent for a long moment. I’d never heard any of this, never stopped to ponder what the mechanics of leaving Hungary might have felt like. Later, as I began to dig deeper into the loam of my family’s history I’d find more and more of these stories, less outright lies than quiet excisions, leaving a line of dangling threads in their place.
After her escape, Csupi settled for a time in Vienna. Unlike Budapest, the city had largely escaped destruction during the war. Thirty-two years old and on her own—and, it must be said, kind of a fox—my aunt thrilled to this new Technicolor world, to its optimism and its nightlife. Before long, she had her pick of suitors. She finally settled upon one, but when she went to her roommate with the news, the woman blanched: “Csupi, don’t you know who he is? He’s the son of Vienna’s most prominent Nazis!”
Csupi broke it off.
My aunt told me all this during that single flash flood of memory. But there was one thing she didn’t tell me, one I only pieced together later: That in leaving Hungary, she’d also left behind her only child, my cousin Antal.
Antal was eight at the time. Csupi and his father—a charismatic but unstable neighborhood fixer—had already separated. Tellingly, Antal didn’t even live with his mother. He lived instead with our shared grandparents, Muki and Csurka.
The smuggler was supposed to get Antal on his next run. But there was no next run. I learned this from Antal himself, decades later. As we sipped coffee and nibbled jam-filled kolachy in his Buda apartment, he told me how he went to the train station the following week, his school backpack stuffed with clothing and food. “I waited there all day,” he told me, “but no one ever came. Later, we learned the smuggler had been shot coming back over the border.”
Again, I was silent. Now I understood a little better why Csupi wouldn’t speak of this time, why a black curtain of silence seemed to shroud the story of my family’s former lives in Hungary. What’s strange is that Antal is perhaps the most well-adjusted out of anyone in the family. Whatever hardships the first decades of his life dealt him—and believe me, there were many—they don’t seem to have dented his quiet compassion and essential groundedness.
The same can’t be said of those who left: Csupi and her brother, my father. In his first years in America, he’d enact these strange dodges, like suddenly picking up and moving the family from a predominantly Jewish neighborhood to a more Protestant one. Csupi, too, would move from place to place, country to country. It was only in the conformist haven of Switzerland that she approached something like peace. Of course, they were only reenacting their parents’ earlier acts of reinvention, imagining they could erase their Jewish heritage as easily as changing their address. And so they did it over and over again, never understanding it was themselves they couldn’t leave behind.
The last time I saw Csupi was in a surgically clean nursing facility outside Berne. When she greeted me—trim and stylish as ever in a two-piece wool suit—I was stunned. Though already in her mid-90s, she looked easily two decades younger. My wife and daughter were with me, and we sat together on an upholstered bench on the fourth floor, sunshine pouring through the spotless windows. Maybe her recollections were a little circular, her memories a bit cloudy. But it’s a day I’ll always treasure: past, present, and future all swirling and mingling around us.
Csupi was on her best behavior that day, but she couldn’t quite forgo her old tricks. When we rose to stroll down to the beautifully manicured courtyard below, Csupi lagged behind for a moment. I turned just in time to see her slipping her empty plastic water bottle out the window instead of into the recycling bin at her feet. “Csupi!” I exclaimed. She giggled into her hands and toddled off to join the rest of the group.
Some things, I suppose, never change. Rest in peace, Csupi.