Being in America at this time didn’t make the terrible things happening in Europe less terrible. One heard about deportations already in Budapest; in Pittsburgh one continued hearing about death trains, mass exterminations, conditions in the camps. What was happening far away was closer than the streets in Pittsburgh; the death camps were closer and more real than the drugstores she passed which mocked her with the colored pictures of giant candy bars and ice cream sodas; perhaps she herself was on a death train; perhaps a machine-gun bullet just pierced her throat; the streets she roamed between her block and East Liberty became an unmapped limbo while she rejoined her real or phantom self that remained on the other side. Week after week on her way to East Liberty she made her journey to the camps, unable to obtain her death from the thin-lipped, white-smocked Nazi doctors of her fantasies and unable to think herself anywhere else. Herself, walking along the street in Pittsburgh, had no reality at all.
Then there were the hours she spent writing; after everyone went to sleep, the words came to life, absorbed with their shapes and hues she was in an enchanted forest, hunting treasures far from the world where words were ugly sounds coming out of people’s mouths. It was only words from a dictionary; this happiness had nothing to do with her, she realized; moreover she stood in its way. Sophie Landsman was an obstruction that wanted to be expunged.
In the summer of 1942 getting out of a car in New York before the Hotel Park Plaza where her father lived, the nightmare ended. The three years in Pittsburgh were just a bad dream that had nothing to do with her as they walked down toward Central Park West in the evening breeze and the city felt alive and festive. Elegantly dressed people getting in and out of cabs, and poor people on Columbus Avenue had a liveliness she had forgotten.
“Is it true that you flunked all your classes?” her father asked, laughing; “Olga wrote that you did it just to spite her.”
They had dinner with friends, a seven-course feast in a little Hungarian restaurant, all for seventy-five cents; afterward her father read to her from her last letter, “...I’ll live on bread and water, just let me come.”
Life was beautiful in New York. While her father worked she went to the Museum of Natural History across the street or walked up and down Amsterdam Avenue looking into antique shops and hardware stores. At night they opened the folding cot where she slept and put a screen before it. Free all day, she could write anytime she wished in the hotel lounge, which even provided paper. It was as nice as living on a ship. When people asked how she liked America, she told them that she loved New York.
From the Pittsburgh slums to New York—a brief six weeks’ holiday till her father passed his medical examinations and once more they got on a train. Garfield, New York, where her father set up his office and she went to high school; small towns in New England where she played in summer theater, Bryn Mawr College; in that eerie, shallow present, her personal past discarded, she began her journey to past and imaginary worlds. While she tried to escape from America in books, the stage, dreams or sheer blankness, not really living in Garfield or the many New England towns she passed through playing in summer stock, whose names she forgot or never knew, while she fled or simply ignored America, America changed her.
SOPHIE Landsmann, arriving in Budapest in August, 1947, saw no corpses floating in the Danube nor any traces of blood on the cobbles. Two years had elapsed since the last Nazis had fled Budapest, blowing up the bridges and leaving some three thousand corpses strewn in the streets. No one was safe; but, their time being short, the Nazis concentrated on Jews already assembled in large numbers at orphanages and in nursing homes, as well as in the central ghetto. Those who actually lived and survived these times of terror walked along the corso with a nonchalance that awed the American visitor. Business was lively in the shopping section even though the upper stories of the houses had been bombed away. A covered scaffold had been raised over the sidewalks to protect the populace from falling rubble. A thin drizzle of plaster rained on pedestrians, nevertheless. A nuisance...
Fashionably dressed women sporting fancy hairdos, emerging out of scarred passageways, picked their way through rubble and broken pavement on elegant thin heels. Their laughter and fragrance mixed with reflections in the river on this bright summer day. To one who was not present at the scene of the disaster, who left too soon, arrived too late, these incongruities had a special harmoniousness.
Sophie had not planned this visit to Budapest. In the summer of 1947 Hungary was closed to American tourists. Having left Europe on one of the last westbound crossings of the S.S. Aquitania in 1939, it seemed appropriate that she return on one of the first boats making the eastbound trip—a still unconverted military troop ship with hammocks—from New York to Liverpool.
But the object of a trip to Europe had not been entirely clear to Sophie. What could she go back for? Or back to? Growing up in America during the war years, she wished at times that she had never left Europe, or dreamed of returning to live in Europe as though she had never left it. But she didn’t seriously believe in this. Europe was only a lost dream. In any event, her father wouldn’t hear of a trip. More of his daughter’s craziness, like becoming an actress and studying philosophy. Go to Europe in 1946? Go to Europe after Auschwitz? Europe was rotten, centuries of rottenness behind a facade of impressive architecture, outward graces. Nothing but lies and rottenness. “Culture!” her father said scornfully. He didn’t want
