The Budapest Pianist
by Roxanne de Bastion (Robinson, £22, 288p)
If you visited Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1960s, you may remember a restaurant called Paprika, a souvenir shop called Shakespeare’s Doorstep and a fashion store called Chez Vivienne.
The couple who ran these small businesses, Stephen and Edith de Bastion, were Hungarian Jews who had survived the Holocaust. From their faces, no one would have guessed the horrors they had experienced.
But behind closed doors, Stephen would sometimes explode into sudden rage. He was especially sensitive to cold and the smell of smoke. “Close the window!” he would shout, or “This egg stinks!” These moments were the outlet for his post-traumatic rage.
In their council house on the outskirts of the city, Stephen and Edith kept a treasured item from Stephen’s past: a Bluthner grand piano, which came from his family’s burned-down house in Budapest.
Before World War II, Stephen de Bastion had been a sought-after pianist, dazzling wealthy guests at restaurants and hotels throughout Europe.
Before the war, Stephen had been a sought-after pianist, dazzling wealthy guests in restaurants and hotels across Europe with his brilliant musical showmanship. He loved his brilliant career and was so absorbed in it that he did not see the catastrophe coming. In 1938, some musician friends who did see the danger coming invited him to emigrate with them to America, but he declined.
Reading the powerful and gruelling memoirs of her grandfather written by Roxanne de Bastion, Stephen’s granddaughter, it seems a miracle that he ever made it to Stratford-upon-Avon.
Being of Jewish descent in Hungary during the war was a death sentence for the vast majority. Nearly half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz in a few months in 1944.
The survivors were terrorized, shot or thrown into the Danube by Hungarian fascist thugs from the Arrow Cross group. As so often in the horrific history of Nazism, some of the worst perpetrators were nationals themselves, who were allowed to give free rein to their frenzied anti-Semitic hatred.
While cleaning out her father’s (Stephen’s son) house after his death a few years ago, Roxanne found a stash of cassettes labeled ‘Stephen Tells His War Story’ Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Pressing ‘play’, she heard her grandfather’s voice telling an almost unimaginable tale of horror and survival.
His words are quoted in italics in the book. You can hear his Hungarian accent when he says things like, “I can still smell that unbearable smoke, but it was a question of whether I would freeze or not.” Stephen is concise; Roxanne completes her story by investigating the various horrible events.
But when Hungary joined the World War II effort, he was called up for hard labor on the Russian front.
That ‘unbearable smoke’ came not (in this case) from a crematorium in an extermination camp, but from a small, noxious hut in Russia in 1942, where Stephen and his fellow forced labourers huddled for warmth.
Torn from his world as a pianist, he was one of 1,070 Hungarian men suddenly called up for forced labor on the Russian war front, after Hungary joined the war alongside Germany.
The men, mostly Jews, were loaded onto cattle cars and dumped into a snowy desert 600 kilometres south of Moscow. The “lucky ones” were forced to work 11-hour shifts carrying gruelling sacks of ammunition.
The unfortunate ones were forced to clear the minefields; most of them died quickly. This was an early exercise in active Hungarian anti-Semitism. The aim was to extract Jewish thinkers, professionals, artists and religious leaders from society and work them to death on starvation rations.
The men in charge were Hungarian soldiers, all of them absolutely ruthless. Anyone who slowed down was hit with a stick. Sometimes the soldiers forced the men to pull the carts, to “save the energy of the animals”, whose lives were considered more valuable than their own.
Stephen was “strong as an ox,” so he kept going, even when he had dysentery, knowing his life depended on it. Then one night, on January 13, 1943, the Hungarian soldiers suddenly disappeared into thin air and the men were free, but in the middle of nowhere. They began to walk west. Once again, Stephen’s simple words speak volumes about his longing for his homeland: “I just wanted to go back to Hungary.”
He walked for weeks, in a state of constant hunger, terrified to beg, for fear of being recaptured. He continued to replay his entire dinnertime performance twice in his head each day. When he arrived in Budapest, nine months later, he had lost half his body weight. Of the 1,070 men selected for forced labor, only eight returned.
The book tells how Stephen continued through the torrid times to replay his entire dinnertime performance twice in his head each day.
Her granddaughter Roxanne de Bastion, also a singer-songwriter, is the author of the memoirs
You might think that’s enough suffering for one life. And for a few months, life was almost normal again. “We had a good time, although the darkening clouds were gathering on the horizon,” Stephen says on the tape, with his usual understatement.
When the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944, all Jewish businesses were closed within days and all Jews were forced to wear the Star of David and live in overcrowded ghettos called “yellow star blocks”; “torn from the social fabric”, as Roxanne says. Stephen managed to obtain a Swiss protection certificate thanks to a rescue plan led by the heroic Swedish architect Raoul Wallenberg.
Upon learning that his parents’ entire block of yellow stars would be deported the next day, Stephen forged the certificate, put his parents’ photographs on it, and smuggled it to them just in time, saving their lives and putting the yours in danger.
Then (almost unbearable to read), he was selected again for forced labor, this time in the Sopron camp, from which he escaped to join his non-Jewish girlfriend, a singer named Magda – and it may well have been Magda who later betrayed him to the Nazis.
He was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was once again sentenced to forced and murderous labor, this time in a quarry.
The average life expectancy in Mauthausen was six months; somehow Stephen lasted almost a year, before the camp was evacuated in 1945 and he was sent on a death march to another Belsen-like hellhole called Gunskirchen.
When the Americans liberated the camp, they gave him too much greasy food too soon, which accidentally wreaked havoc on his system, resulting in him later breaking out in a terrible rash all over his body.
It was this man who would take over those shops in Stratford-upon-Avon, along with his future wife Edith, who had also suffered the loss of her Hungarian husband and mother during the Holocaust. Stephen and Edith decided to emigrate from Hungary, after everything that had happened to them.
Roxanne, a singer-songwriter, feels a deep affinity with her grandfather and his beloved Bluthner piano, on which she learned and still plays. And her own father, Stephen and Edith’s son, “poured all his love into us, his family and all the friends who were involved.”
