A trip to Europe nevertheless materialized upon the persuasion of friends. Sophie’s roommate in college, Jessica Lipsky, complained of suffocating in American materialism and soullessness. Her mother, in whose Manhattan townhouse Sophie spent many weekends, similarly deplored the philistinism of the land. Of Europe as the fountain of art and culture, Mrs. Lipsky spoke rhapsodically to both “daughters” (having some time ago adopted Sophie as her spiritual child). “There are no good men in America,” lamented her friend Jessica. “America is hopeless.” Sophie agreed, even if she couldn’t share her friend’s idealism about Europe. Her sense of the matter was that things were generally hopeless and that there was no place for her anywhere: the world in which she would have wanted to live had ended—before Hiroshima, before Auschwitz. Just when the first trumpet blew that sent the four horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping across the sky, she did not know. But a trip to Europe, any long trip, appealed to Sophie. Time was oppressive, superfluous. And time passed more easily when one traveled.
“America is no place for two such young women as Jessica and Sophie,” Mrs. Lipsky pleaded tearfully with Sophie’s father and added, “Rudolf, you’re a boor. I cannot change that but you cannot be so selfish. We cannot deny our children the profound spiritual nourishment of...”
Rudolf Landsmann agreed to finance his daughter’s trip to study at the University of Geneva for a year. At this time Kamilla de Vithezy, his former wife, had been making plans to leave Hungary and emigrate to London where her sister lived. It was finally arranged that Sophie, instead of leaving with her friend in the fall, would go to London in the summer to see her mother. When she arrived in Liverpool at the end of June, Sophie found only her Aunt Rosa at the pier and learned that her mother was not allowed to leave the country. Kamilla, though in possession of a dearly purchased exit permit as well as an English visa, had been detained at the airport. A recent shake-up in government made her exit permit, issued by the ousted party, invalid. New rulings were not yet in effect.
There followed a month of frantic correspondence, tearful long-distance calls, ending in resignation. Sophie would spend the summer in London with her aunt and proceed to Geneva in the fall as planned.
In the third week of August, however, a friend brought to the aunt’s attention an ad in a small Hungarian paper for the Industrial Fair. Representatives of American business firms would be granted a week’s visiting visa to Hungary. Within forty-eight hours Sophie’s passport was stamped with a special visa for the Industrial Fair and her flight was booked to Budapest via Prague. Arriving at the airport in Prague at noon, she found out that her connecting flight to Budapest would be delayed. There was no cause to worry, two cheery, blue-eyed Czechs assured her, driving her into Prague in a dusty light-blue car; the plane was scheduled to depart at six a.m. the following morning. They dropped her at a hotel facing a river. She would have her meals there, they explained, all at the airline’s expense; and promising to return to drive her to the airport at four a.m. the following morning, they drove off. And what if they didn’t, Sophie thought, strolling dreamily through Prague’s old streets and over its delicate bridges. Perhaps she never expected to leave Kafka’s city. She couldn’t believe she would actually arrive in Budapest. And when the two men arrived at four in the morning, all during the ride they joked that they were kidnapping her, of course; she noticed it was a different car—she was wishing it might be true.
•
“They wouldn’t let me out with an English visa and an exit permit, but they let you in. I really have a clever daughter,” her mother exclaimed jokingly.
“Perhaps fraudulent papers worked better. It was a matter of luck,” her daughter shrugged modestly.
A group was taken to the Industrial Fair where her passport was stamped.
Walking through the streets of the city she left in April, 1939, she was most struck by the ruins, a long-familiar sight for her mother who had been in Budapest all the time, all during the German occupation, the siege, the Russian liberation. She laughed about that, the so-called liberation. “You can’t imagine—nobody can imagine,” she was telling her daughter as they hastened toward the shopping district—they had so little time. “We didn’t believe it while it was happening—naked corpses piled along the corso, neatly like sacks of potatoes except they stank. In the winter the bodies froze to the pavement, we had to scrape them off. Corpses everywhere, in doorways and the gutters, corpses floated in the Danube. Nobody believed it of course. Then the American planes—” she shook her head incredulously and shrugged. “I never went to a shelter. Most of the people hid in cellars and we had the hotel all to ourselves. No electricity or water, of course—the top three stories were bombed away—still, we somehow managed. But when the Russians came—” she would tell her about that later, not on the street. “You never know.” And they walked into a shop where Sophie would have some pretty dresses made before she continued to Geneva.
For Sophie, the changed aspect of the city was perceived under the emotions of homecoming, however unappropriate. It was impossible
