Paks 1918: A Pogrom and a Prelude

Howard Lovy | Longreads | November 2018 | 17 minutes (4,186 words)
On the banks of the Danube, there is a place where the great river takes two sharp 45-degree turns, making it difficult for ships to pass unseen. For centuries, this feature made the city, nestled within, a fortification against foreign attack. But from an enemy inside the city’s own boundaries, there was no natural protection. And for a 9-year-old boy, hiding as his neighbors ransacked his grandparents’ home, a wine barrel was the only shelter. There he hid, silent, while around him echoed the muffled, angry, anguished sounds of a pogrom.
The year was 1918 and the place on the Danube was the Hungarian city of Paks, where the local townspeople, having endured defeat in the Great War, were venting their rage on the usual cause of all their woes — their Jewish neighbors. The boy in the barrel was Jóska Lovy. Decades, lifetimes later in America, he will be known as Grandpa Joe and the beloved patriarch of an exponentially expanding family of Lovys — of doctors and engineers, of entrepreneurs and soldiers and writers — scattered across their adopted nation.
But, for now, that future was only as thick as the wood surrounding Jóska and his brother Andor, whose grandparents Jacob and Deborah Grun believed to be safe inside these barrels. They knew the casks would not be destroyed by the mob. The goyim would still need them for the coming grape harvest even if they succeeded in slitting the throat of every Jew in Paks.
Jóska cowered inside the wine barrel, surrounded by near total darkness, yet his senses were assaulted with contradictions. First, was the scent of old oak mixed with the sweet memory of Pesach. The residual smell of wine soaked into the oak barrel in which he hid helped him recall the laughter of family at Passover, the taste of holiday chocolates, the mild intoxication of his grape juice spiked with a touch of the sweet alcohol. Last year was the first seder in which he was allowed to pour a drop of wine into his cup, and he savored the knowledge that, if he drank enough of it, he would grow giddy with drunkenness, the way he heard his adults long after he was supposed to have been asleep.