War broke out in 1914. The following year Rudolf Landsmann, army doctor in his emperor’s service, received the crushing letter from his fiancée while he was at a military hospital in Serbia: She had decided to marry Franz Gerechter, one of the communist leaders; the revolution was imminent; the cause came first; their engagement was broken. On a week’s leave in Budapest that Christmas, Rudolf, still heartbroken, went back to the Ripper house. Rosa was already married to Franz Gerechter and Rudolf’s return visit to the house, by his own account, was purely sentimental. “It had become a habit,” he said; for ten years the Ripper house had been his second home. He was received by the almond-eyed little sister, now almost sixteen, whom he had often held in his lap and helped with her Latin lessons, and promptly became engaged to her.
A few months later, back at the Serbian front, Rudolf received a letter from his sister Lea in which she mentioned among other gossip items that she saw Kamilla Ripper walking arm in arm with Count Csaba-Csaba in the moonlight on the Fisher’s Bastion. Rudolf wrote Kamilla that their engagement was broken and not to bother to write to him again. He was through with the Ripper girls. In his sister’s next letter he learned of Kamilla’s marriage to the count.
Perhaps it was all for the best. Rudolf distinguished himself as a military doctor: he succeeded in enforcing anti-epidemic measures among backward peasants where others had failed. In particular, Moslem women and nuns resisted delousing, but the young doctor attended to these matters personally and with success. He became a favorite of the Trappist monks, who were eager to recommend him for the chair in psychiatry at the Royal Hungarian Academy in Budapest. He was further promised a post as director of a newly founded psychiatric institute in Sarajevo, assuming that the Dynasty won the war. Both positions required celibacy and conversion to the Catholic faith. Did Rudolf seriously consider?
The Dynasty did not win. The defeated emperor’s troops were caught in the Serbian uprising. Somehow Rudolf Landsmann found his way back to Budapest. There he found chaos. His four years’ army pay which he had sent home to his parents to save was worth the price of a shirt.
A succession of short-lived revolutionary regimes was terminated by a three-year period of counterrevolutionary terror. Rosa Ripper, who had been one of the leading members of the communist Bela Kun regime, escaped execution by fleeing from the capital barefoot in a nightgown and jumping on a moving train. The count and his Jewish wife had survived the communist regime with no greater incident than Rosa’s demanding that sister Kamilla hand over to her all her clothes and linen for the poor. Some years later under the counterrevolutionary regime when the police who knocked on her door one dark night asked why she attended the Galilei Club, Kamilla knew how to lower her eyes and say, “To catch a husband,” with just a trace of a lisp that would convince the gendarme of any party. “And did you?” the gendarme asked. Kamilla stuck her index finger in her mouth and nodded with a silent giggle. Which husband? It wasn’t clear from Kamilla’s account. When this incident took place she was Rudolf Landsmann’s wife. For in the course of these political upheavals Countess Csaba-Csaba and Rudolf Landsmann seemed to have met—one of those incredible chance encounters, as Kamilla told the story later—met in front of a small corner tabac; she was just about to enter the store as he came out. They discovered it was true love after all. Kamilla’s marriage to the count was annulled—a simple procedure, as Rudolf told the story later: The count, a gentleman to the last and moreover a lawyer, produced a false birth certificate for Kamilla which made her a minor at the time she married. Neither Rudolf nor Kamilla remembered the year of their wedding forty years later. A passport issued to Mrs. Rudolf Landsmann for travel to Austria for purposes of health, and bearing Kamilla’s picture, dated the marriage to before March, 1921.
In Budapest the first years of the twenties witnessed, besides the continuation of postwar chaos, the Treaty of Trianon and the setting up of a reactionary state. During the winter of 1921 a series of mass executions took place. Hundreds of politically undesirable citizens—communists, Marxists, socialists, leftists of all varieties—were sent sprawling in the grass, snow, then mud of the famous Bloodmeadow where, not so long before, politically undesirable citizens of another hue had been disposed of similarly. More, it seems, were on the list than were effectively eliminated. Rudolf Landsmann, for one, received an order to appear before government authorities. When he did he noticed some familiar faces among small crowds in the waiting room. The government official informed him that they had records of his former membership in the Galilei Club, the hotbed of revolutionaries. Admitting this, Rudolf Landsmann pleaded that he was never a member of the communist party, or a Marxist for that matter, and that he had faithfully served his country in the war as an officer of the royal Imperial Army. After a brief interrogation as regarded his occupation, marital status, present employment, he was laconically dismissed. Some fifty of the unknown number called to report that morning were shot the same afternoon.
Rudolf Landsmann at the time believed the new government spared his life because they needed doctors. Another explanation came to light some years later when he learned that in fact he had been on another blacklist—that of the communist party, which had slated him to
