After József returned to the Polish front, Matild settled down
to her millinery business “and pretty soon I was doing real good
in it, and trying to save some money for our future.” Józsi
sent her part of his military pay to add to their nest egg. In
her spare time Matyu worked on her hand-embroidered trousseau,
all cutwork linens, and tried to keep her fiancé’s morale from
flagging. On one occasion she baked “fancy cookies” and sent
them to the front; but their delivery was delayed so long they
arrived moldy, and József was terribly disappointed.
“We wrote quite often, especially me,” Matild would recall. “I
had the time, and he needed encouragement.”
By the spring of 1916 the Central Powers had been blockaded by
the British navy for almost two years. Meat and bread were
inadequately rationed in Hungary, food queues were growing
longer, and inflation had sent real income plummeting to half
its prewar level. Add to this the tremendous losses in dead and
wounded, and Hungary—enthusiastically bellicose at first—was
beginning to succumb to war-weariness.
Events of that summer did nothing to cheer Hungary up. The
Empire had taken the offensive against Italy, who appealed to
Russia for help. The regrouped Russians attacked Galicia,
intending simply to divert the Austro-Hungarians, but caught
them completely by surprise and sent them into full retreat.
Russian General Brusilov continued the onslaught and made a
spectacular advance, taking 200,000 prisoners in the first three
weeks and another 200,000 by summer’s end. Among those captured
were Matild’s brothers Dezső and Márton; while József Ehrlich
was wounded again, this time by a nearly-spent bullet in his
side. Russia’s tremendous breakthrough had been entirely
unexpected—not least by the Russians, who had enjoyed little
success in the war up to now and were unsure how to exploit
their triumph. Germany, though fully occupied with “bleeding
France white” at Verdun and anticipating a major Allied
offensive on the Somme, quickly collected fifteen divisions and
sent them east to reinforce the staggering Austro-Hungarians,
partly by putting their army under the command of German
officers.
Encouraged by the Brusilov offensive, Romania—neutral till
now—took the plunge when the Allies guaranteed Romanian takeover
of long-coveted Transylvania. France was eager for Romania to
begin an offensive immediately, hoping this would be a mortal
blow to Austria-Hungary; but the Romanians delayed making their
move till the end of August, and only made it then because of a
threatening ultimatum from Russia.
Transylvania, defended by no more than a few gendarmes, was
invaded by the Romanian army of half a million “sturdy
peasants.” They proceeded fifty miles, but lack of leadership
and stiffened Hungarian resistance brought them to a standstill
in mid-September. Forced into retreat and driven out of
Transylvania, Romania was itself invaded by the Central Powers
and largely vanquished by December 1916. Its demoralized
government fled from Bucharest and was given shelter by the
Russians—after a fashion: one general sneered that if Tsar
Nicholas ordered him to send fifteen wounded soldiers to
Romania’s aid, he would on no account send a sixteenth.
But Russia itself was nearly burned out. Brusilov’s brilliant
offensive had exhausted its supplies and ammunition by the end
of September, and men were not only fighting without weapons but
having to tear down barbed wire with their bare hands. Over a
million Russians had been lost since June, then another million
(mostly deserters) by wintertime; Hungarian POWs had to be put
to work to keep the Russian economy creaking along.
1916 was a year of hideous slaughter on every front. On the
unquiet western front, huge armies had squandered each other’s
lives fighting for bits of bloody ground at Verdun and the
Somme—fighting and dying in vain, since victory seemed
impossibly far from anyone’s grasp. No one seemed to have a
clue how to bring the war to any kind of conclusion; so they all
kept on losing.
As 1916 ended so did Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria and King of
Hungary, who at the age of 86 died thoroughly disillusioned with
life. At the same time, the power behind the Russian throne—Grigori
Rasputin of notorious legend—was murdered, but that did not save
the Tsar’s throne from toppling: revolution followed in March
1917 and Nicholas was forced to abdicate. Kerensky’s
provisional government pledged to carry on the Russian war
effort and General Brusilov tried to launch another offensive,
but his motley army would not fight; when Germany
counterattacked, they threw down their arms and quit. In
November 1917 the Bolsheviks swept Kerensky aside and
established a Soviet government, suspending hostilities with the
Central Powers. Hungarian POWs were repatriated, including
Dezső and Márton Kun; but fear that the ex-prisoners might
spread Bolshevik propaganda led to their being quarantined for
weeks and “re-educated” by clergy. Most did not return home
even then, but were shipped back to the front.
Berta Kun had never given up the search for Náthán, her
firstborn, and József tried to help: “He used to ask around
wherever he was, looking for someone who might know him or
something about him, but never found anybody.” And it was not
long before the months of worry and grief took their toll on
Berta.
“Mother became very ill, and her heart gave up. At the age of
52 she diedof a massive stroke, leaving our two-year-old baby sister Ily
behind, not to mention all of us, and my poor Dad. It was
terrible, even now it makes me cry to think of that, and the war
was still going on.”
József’s mother Sarolta came to Kolozsvár for the funeral. By
this time she had lost a leg in a streetcar accident; but she
cooked and cared for the Kuns during their shivah, the
seven days following the funeral when mourners were to remain at
home, doing no work. “Our house was sad,” Matild would say.
“Our dear Mother was gone, and our Dad tried his best to keep
the family together.”
Starting in November 1917, all available German divisions were
shifted from east to west for what was planned as the decisive
offensive, one that would overwhelm the French and British
before their new American allies could arrive in strength. As
the spring of 1918 approached, the Germans outnumbered the
Entente on the front line; but they had next to nothing in
reserves, and little to hope for in the way of reinforcements.
Franz Josef’s successor as Emperor-King of the Dual Monarchy was
his great-nephew Karl, no friend to Germany. He refused to send
any Austro-Hungarians to the spring offensive, other than a few
divisions (not of the most sparkling morale) and some heavy
batteries (which he requested that the Germans pay for).
Which is where, in a minor yet fateful way, József Ehrlich came
in.
Since he could speak German, he was made a liaison officer
aiding the transport of Hungarian troops to France. The
Hungarians, accustomed to wider-open spaces, were confronted by
a densely bewildering mass of trenches on the western front; and
many would panic at their first sight of those metallic
behemoths known as “tanks.”
While in France, József acquired a cherished possession: an
embroidered lithograph of what appears to be a winged woman and
her bubble-blowing child.
“Time went by and he started to get more impatient with each
month,” Matild would say. “The war was fierce and he was in the
thick of it all.”
Beginning in March, three massive German attacks pushed the
front line west through Picardy and Flanders; by the end of May
the Germans had reached the Marne and were less than forty miles
from Paris. They had also reached the limit of their impetus,
and opposing them now were the Americans—“ice cream soldiers” as
the Hungarians called them, but unlike friend and foe they were
fresh, confident, and eager to make their mark. They prevented
the Germans from crossing the Marne; and the Yanks kept coming.
During the spring of 1918 there was a mild worldwide epidemic of
influenza—“mild” in comparison with the dreadful pandemic later
that same year. But it afflicted more than a few on the western
front, and among them was József Ehrlich.
“I was notified that he was very ill with the very first
influenza we’d ever heard of,” Matild was to recall. “He was in
a hospital where I couldn’t go, near the fighting, and the
orderly who was assigned to him and was looking after him kept
me posted. It took several weeks before he himself could write
to tell me about it. He’d been left with a bad cough, and was
sent from hospital to hospital until he was sent back to
Kolozsvár to get well.”
This was a lucky break for József. Many wounded Hungarian
soldiers, even invalids, were being recycled straight from the
hospital. Getting leave home was a precious thing, not least
because “it seemed the war would last forever.”
At this time Matild’s sister Margit married her childhood
sweetheart Imre Ladner, whom József had met on the eastern
front. József “kept saying, soon as he feels well, he doesn’t
want to wait any longer either. So we decided to get married,
and set the date.”
On July 21, 1918, József Ehrlich and Matild Kun were married in
Kolozsvár “in the lovely large back yard of the Temple,” under
the traditional canopy. “Mine was a real fairytale wedding. I
had six bridesmaids, three of my sisters dressed in pale blue
dresses, and three girlfriends in pink. After the ceremony and
dinner for a large company and friends, [József] and I took the
train to Budapest for our honeymoon and to visit his mother who
couldn’t come to our wedding. Only one older brother of his was
there, his name was Sándor. But he traveled with us back to
Budapest on the same train. [József] and I had a room reserved
in Budapest at the Royal Hotel, an elegant new place,
and very nice.”
In their wedding picture Matild wears her white gown and gloves
and veil, her bouquet displayed on a stand nearby. József is in
dress uniform, complete with flower in his buttonhole and sabre
by his side; he would later take the gold tassel from Matild’s
bridal outfit and sport it on the handle of his sabre.
József also sported a new moustache on his upper lip. “He
raised that moustache while he was in the service,” Matild would
sniff, as though referring to a pet ferret. “But I didn’t like
it,
so then he shaved it off.”
Six days before the Ehrlichs’s wedding, Germany made a supreme
effort to win the war. For a couple of weeks beforehand this
had been the subject of extravagant gossip—so extravagant that
the Allies had gotten word of it, and made certain it stalled
after three days. Then the Allied counteroffensive was
launched, led by hundreds of tanks. By August the Central
Powers were ready to seek peace—mostly at each other’s
expense—but their feelers were ignored as the Allies kept
pushing onward, throwing the Germans back, breaking through the
Hindenburg line in late September.
Order and discipline vanished. The Hungarian army began
deserting en masse, every man for himself; most wanted only to
make it home as quickly as possible, crowding the roads and
packing the trains. “Soldiers were coming back one by one or in
groups,” Matild would recall, “bringing their guns and thousands
of ammunition with them. A complete chaos. But no one knew
what to do or where they should go. It was unbelievable what
was going on.”
József, still in Kolozsvár, felt it his duty to return to the
front. Matild said no, and he agreed when the Hungarian
soldiers began to mutiny and shoot their officers, killing
anyone they held responsible for the war. So József bade
farewell to arms, removing his lieutenant’s insignia and hiding
his sabre in the cellar.
The Empire began to disintegrate as its defiant ethnic
minorities seceded: the Czechs and Slovaks declaring united
independence, the Croats and Slovenes joining Serbia in a new
nation of southern Slavs. Romania plunged back into the war so
as to get its crack at Imperial spoils. “The whole country was
in a torment,” Matild would say. “Every small national started
to grab some part of the country that used to be one great place
under King Ferenc József. Now there started to be Yugoslavia,
or Czechoslovakia, or whatever.”
A virtually bloodless revolution swept Budapest, with the
jubilant city cheering as idealistic Count Károlyi and his
“bourgeois radicals” proclaimed the Republic of Hungary. To
show off their new sovereignty, they insisted (despite Károlyi’s
misgivings) on a separate armistice with the Allies.
All of a sudden, the war was over.
Or so it seemed.
November 11, 1918 saw Matild being photographed out in the
garden, with her brother Dezső—in civilian life a bon vivant
singer-dancer-actor á la Maurice Chevalier—crouched
behind her, peeking out from behind flower pots.
Around the same time, Romanian troops began reentering
Transylvania. They were authorized to go only so far as the
River Maros, but by the end of the month they had crossed that
river and come to Kolozsvár—or, as they called it, Cluj.
“The loveliest part of all Transylvania became [part of]
Romania,” Matild was to say, “and we all hated that. Seeing
those raggedy Romanian soldiers walking or marching into our
lovely city, guns in hand, and we the people just looked and
couldn’t do or say a word. The next day they went from house to
house confiscating all firearms our soldiers brought back with
them from the war, even for keepsakes like a sword.” (Thus the
sabre-with-the-gold-tassel was lost.) “Well, they managed to
make our life miserable at all times.”
The Allies informed Hungary that, despite its protests and
pending the final border settlement, they had decided to
authorize Romanian occupation of Transylvania. Romania had
already occupied Bukovina and Russian Bessarabia, and was faced
with uniting these annexed provinces into the dreamed-of Greater
Romania. In attempting this, the government (now back in
Bucharest) was hardly inclined to accommodate
non-Romanians—particularly such “resident aliens” as the Jews.
Not even Tsarist Russia had matched Romania in virulent
anti-Semitism. For forty years the issue of Jewish emancipation
and citizenship had been haggled over, and in December 1918 the
Jews were holding out (despite government threats) for
naturalization en bloc where everyone would declare that
he or she had been born in Romania and held no foreign
citizenship.
Under no circumstances would this have included the Győr-born
József Ehrlich; but he at any rate had no plans to live in
Transylvania. József’s intention was to take Matild back to
Budapest and there resume his teaching career—after things
settled down a bit, and it seemed safe to travel. Until then
the Ehrlichs remained in Kolozsvár and stayed with the Fruchters,
Fáni and Jani. “Paychecks still came, but we didn’t know where
from, so we took and cashed them to live on.”
The world had fought a war intended to end all war, but in early
1919 the question of establishing peace with Germany was hardly
discussed at the Paris Peace Conference. Instead, the Great
Powers had to deal with the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and all its resulting problems and quarrels. Among these
was a possible new war over Transylvania.
In March Count Károlyi was handed an Allied ultimatum: his
troops were to be withdrawn west of a neutral zone entirely in
Magyar territory, intended to separate Hungarian and Romanian
forces and so keep order. Károlyi’s government opposed this
ultimatum but lacked the power to defy it; so they took another
way out by resigning. Power was handed over to the Communists.
“There was a shooting uprising and Communism started already,”
Matild would say. “The revolution started in Budapest and we
couldn’t go back, and wouldn’t have wanted to even if we could
go there, and we didn’t know what to do. But we were happy when
I found we were going to have a baby, and a few weeks later my
sister Margit and her husband Imre had the same news to tell to
our family.”
Now that a child was expected, it seemed the wisest thing for
the Ehrlichs to simply stay put, sit tight, and see what would
happen. Here at least they had family and friends and a means
of supporting themselves. Matild taught József millinery work:
“We had no choice but for me to teach him how to use the
machines, and to sew straw hats, and how to press and block
them. He was a good student, and learned quickly, but the damp
steam and fumes of the hat pressing made his coughing worse, and
it was pretty bad for him for awhile.”
The Ehrlichs got a place of their own in the Belváros district
downtown. “Our new ladies’s hat shop [was] right next to the
very ancient birthplace and museum of an early king, Mátyás who
made history for us interesting through the years.” The hat
shop’s address was Number 5 King Matthias Lane, and Number 3
next door
was indeed the house where Matthias Corvinus had been born. It
was now a “charming little museum” featuring Hungarian pottery,
embroidery, and woodcarving.
Behind their store József and Matild had an apartment. On its
walls they hung an enlarged and tinted reproduction of their
engagement picture, and József’s French lithograph of the winged
woman with her bubble-blowing baby.
The leader of Soviet Hungary was named Béla Kun. Any connection
with Matild’s family was unlikely, and certainly would not have
been acknowledged by Matild. But Béla Kun was also
Transylvanian-born and of Jewish background; he had even
attended the University of Kolozsvár for a semester in 1904.
During the Brusilov offensive he had been taken prisoner, and in
Russia he became acquainted with Lenin. After Kun took over
Hungary, he established secret telegraph communications direct
to Moscow—often asking Lenin for money but seldom listening to
his advice.
When Kun demanded that the Romanians withdraw back to the Maros,
boasting he could get the Russian Red Army to come to Hungary’s
aid, Lenin was alarmed and warned the overconfident Kun not to
indulge in “leftist deviation.” Kun replied that Hungary was
already so far to the left it couldn’t deviate further.
In May 1919 a scraped-together Hungarian Red Army went on the
offensive—not against Romania, but the weaker Czechs to the
north—and by June it invaded Slovakia. The exasperated Great
Powers ordered Kun to cease and withdraw to the new Hungarian
borders, promising that Romania would then withdraw from
occupied Magyar territory. The Hungarians reluctantly
retreated, but the Romanians refused to budge; they were
determined to keep hold of Transylvania.
Soviet Hungary’s position was now desperate. Béla Kun, always
rigidly doctrinaire, launched a Red Terror campaign to
“suffocate counterrevolution in blood.” He only further
alienated his people, including the peasants and even the
industrial workers. Kun decided he could only restore his
regime with military victory, and ordered the Red Army to force
Romanian withdrawal.
The Great Powers sat on their hands. No one was proud of this,
but they lacked the mobilized manpower to do more than urge the
Hungarian people to overthrow their repressive government. The
Romanians, for their part, were only too eager to march further
into Hungary. Béla Kun made a last-ditch appeal to Lenin, who
replied that no help could be expected from Russia; a day later,
Soviet Hungary collapsed. Three days after that, on August 4th,
the Romanians occupied Budapest.
Then a Hungarian counterrevolution began. Some of the old
Imperial officers, led by Admiral Miklós Horthy, had formed a
White Army to oppose the Red; and “officers’s detachments”
started persecuting those they accused of being Communists—the
peasants, the industrial workers, and especially the Jews. Kun
and his comrades had escaped, so the White Terror targeted the
Jews who remained behind. These were mostly middle-class and
had overwhelmingly opposed Kun. “All around us sprang up
Communism and we did not like it,” Matild was to say. “Boys
were drafted or put in prison for no reason at all.”
Vainly did the Jews of Hungary point to their long record of
fervent patriotism, the many times they had sided uncritically
and even chauvinistically with the Magyars. Now they were
considered alien and disloyal, accused of war profiteering and
revolutionary agitation. The prewar Interessengemeinschaft
had evaporated. The Great Powers were told that the White
Terror was “restoring order,” and since Horthy’s officers were
Christians determined to purge Hungary of Communism, the Allies
bought their explanation.
In Kolozsvár, amidst all the rumors and counter-rumors and
fearful speculation, never too sure what was actually going on
around them, József and Matild stayed put—sat tight—and awaited
the birth of their child.
Notes
