Gemma Tiptonmeets Holocaust survivor Vera Hajnal, whose redemptive story was written, in part, in a cafe at Heathrow Airport.
History is like Chinese whispers - there are versions of events, truths, and then different truths. But as living memory passes, we lose the reality of history, of how individual people faced what happened, how it changed them, and what happened next. Vera Hajnal has led a life more eventful than many, and her new book, The Exemption, is her way of telling her truth, both for her grandchildren and, as she movingly says, "for my husband Feri to see, had I not been so slow."
Hajnal, 78, is the same age as Anne Frank would have been, had she survived the war; and her own survival is down both to the exemption her Hungarian Jewish father gained through his first World War record, and to what she calls quirks of grace that saved her life on several occasions. It's always a strange moment to meet a person whose book you have read. You have heard their voice in your head as you read their words, and conjured a picture in your mind. Sometimes the real thing is a disappointment, sometimes all the expression seems to have gone on to the printed page. Not so with Vera Hajnal; she is a beautiful woman, full of exceptional energy and spirit, and if souls have aesthetics, hers must be a beautiful soul.
We meet in her daughter Julia Tomkin's house in Mt Merrion, Dublin, where Hungarian touches are everywhere. They are in the tulips painted by Vera Hajnal on every available surface, in the exquisite furniture carved by her late husband, in the cake she made that morning in Budapest before flying over especially for this interview, in the massive Hungarian stove she transported across Europe to keep her newly-married daughter warm in Dublin, and they are there in the porcelain from which we drink our tea. The set is from Herend, the oldest pieces dated 1939. Hajnal's parents bought it, paying in instalments just as war broke out to ravage Europe. During the war, the tea set was hidden, submerged in a crate in the flooded basement of the family home on the Hungarian Plain. During the war, 220 people were deported to camps from Hajnal's village. Just 10 returned.
"I remember everything," says Hajnal. "Everything I survived, it's always in me." And the survival - of the war, and the subsequent repressions of Communism ("the ideas were good, but not all the people were," she says), has made her stronger. She notices this in little things; small irritations, such as running out of soap, just don't matter. "My father used to say, 'we mightn't be able to wash our hands, but we will survive'," she tells me. It's there in larger things, too, such as the ability she has to read people's characters, to see whether she can trust them through a glance, a sparkle in the eye, a sense of the person behind the façade. And it's also there in her steely determination to do things her own way.
This determination took her, on the death of her beloved husband, "a strong and good man," to London, where she worked to rebuild an independent life. Part of this project involved living at Heathrow Airport for a while, not at an airport hotel, but sleeping in a space behind filing cabinets, and spending her days in the cafe, writing this book. While that initially may sound odd, talking to Hajnal, it seems to make perfect sense. "There were no direct flights [between Dublin and Budapest], so Heathrow was midway between the two," she explains, and I nod and agree. Live at the airport, it's obvious . . . Did that worry her daughter? I ask Julia, who pulls a face. "My friends call and say, 'what's the news about your mother?', as if they're asking for the latest instalment of Charles Dickens."
"You learn very quickly what's important," Hajnal says, "and you learn that in every place, even in a dictatorship, there are nice, normal people, too. Life," she says, "is like a bunch of flowers." The Oprah Winfrey generation of emotional confession may have cheapened such observations, turning their truths into trite mouthings. But coming from Hajnal, who faced down 15-year-old boys with machine guns, and who walked across the icy Hungarian Plain with her father, with only a bottle of egg liqueur for sustenance, to see if her mother and brother had survived the war (they had), and who now divides her time between Budapest and Dublin, nothing comes across as trite. Instead, I find I could listen to this amazing woman for hours.
When she received a small amount of money in war compensation, she spent it on three Herend tea sets, with the same pattern of roses and butterflies as the one she had hidden away during the war. She mixed the new with the old, and gave one to each of her grandchildren, so that they could have a sense of continuity and of the past.
That, to Hajnal, is what is real, what is important and, most importantly, what is true. u