About friendship

It was Malvin Brandler's Yahr-Zeit, the anniversary of her death, last week. Malvin had no family, no relatives left anywhere in the world, so I said Kaddish for her. She was my mother's best friend. In the last years of their lives they rang each other every day to make sure that each of them was still alive. They discussed everything, television programmes, my mother's children, grandchildren, mutual friends. They could be forthright, to the point of rudeness with each other, but this was part of their plain, unvarnished friendship. They didn't mince words, they spoke bluntly. They got to know each other in October 1944, when all Jewish women under 40 had to report to the brickworks in Budapest for slave labour. The Brandlers lived in the same building as us, designated for Jews only, in Bezeredi Street. From the brickworks they were marched off towards the Hungarian-Austrian border to dig ditches to stop the advancing Russian tanks. As ditch diggers these little, unfit Jewish women were not very efficient, but to embitter the lives of Jews this measure served its purpose. Malvin and my mother looked out for each other, shared a blanket, helped each other to survive. They slept together in a pigsty in Kophaza, They survived the the Lichtenwort concentration slave labour camp together. They walked back to Budapest together after the camp was liberated. It was an acquaintance of Malvin whom they met on the way, who told my mother that we, my brother, I, my grandparents and aunt had survived, were still alive, back from the ghetto, living again in Bezeredi Street. Malvin's husband, Miklos, was a prisoner of war in Russia, lucky, because he was spared the fate of being in a Nazi concentration camp. Malvin and Miklos and my parents kept in touch, but they were not close friends. They hadn't had a lot in common. Compared with my parents, who both matriculated form a gimnazium, an academic high school, Malvin and Miklos had little education. You would not meet them at a concert or in the opera. The latest works of great literature that had just appeared in Hungarian translation would not have featured prominently in their lives. They were simple folk, Miklos a skilled tradesman, a hat maker. What they enjoyed was getting on their motorbike, Miklos riding, Malvin in the side-car, and whizzing around the countryside. After some miscarriages, their son, Robert was born, a cherished son, an heir, a future. Adventurous people that they were, they escaped from Hungary after the 1956 uprising. They remembered their friends, my parents, in New Zealand, and they came here. They worked long hours, lived frugally, at first in an almost dilapidated corrugated iron cottage at the foot of Central Park, then once they scraped together enough money for a deposit, in a tidy comfortable house in Karori. Tragically, Robert was killed in a car accident. Miklos couldn't cope with the sorrow. After Robert's death he refused to utter Robert's name. This made the grieving process especially difficult for Malvin. She could not talk about the thing that was most precious in her life. Miklos died three years after Robert was killed. Malvin survived him by nineteen years, alone, with not one relative, anywhere in the world. Yet though alone, she was surrounded by friends. She worked on making and keeping friends. She joined every Jewish women's organization, WIZO WJS, she was active in B'Nai Brith. She was hospitable, invited friends for lavish afternoon teas. Our children were her grandchildren. She was a hard working, down to earth woman full of common sense. She had a hard life, but a good death. She fell asleep with her supper in front of her, watching Gone With The Wind, and never woke up. My mother died two months later.