How a Jewish grandfather survived the Nazis and four labour camps by playing piano in his head

The Piano Player Of Budapest

by Roxanne de Bastion (Robinson, £22, 288p) 

If you visited Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1960s, you might remember a restaurant called Paprika, a souvenir shop called Shakespeare’s Doorstep, and a fashion shop called Chez Vivienne.

The couple who ran those small businesses, Stephen and Edith de Bastion, were Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivors. You wouldn’t have guessed from their faces what horrors they’d been through. 

But behind closed doors, Stephen would sometimes erupt in sudden fury. He was particularly sensitive to the cold and the smell of smoke. ‘Close the window!’ he would shout; or ‘This egg stinks!’ Those moments were outlets for his post-traumatic rage.

In their council house on the outskirts of the town, Stephen and Edith kept a treasured item from Stephen’s past: a Bluthner baby grand piano, which had come from his family’s burnt-out house in Budapest. 

Before the Second World War, Stephen de Bastion had been a sought-after pianist, dazzling wealthy restaurant and hotel guests across Europe

Before the war, Stephen had been a sought-after pianist, dazzling wealthy restaurant and hotel guests across Europe with his brilliant musical showmanship. He loved his glittering career, and was so wrapped up in it that he didn’t see the catastrophe coming. In 1938, some musician friends who did see the danger coming invited him to emigrate with them to America, but he refused.

Reading Stephen’s granddaughter Roxanne de Bastion’s powerful and gruelling memoir of her grandfather, it seems a miracle that he ever reached Stratford-upon-Avon. 

To be of Jewish descent in Hungary during the war was a death sentence for the vast majority. Almost half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz in a few months in 1944. 

The surviving remnants were terrorised, shot or thrown into the Danube by Hungarian fascist thugs from the Arrow Cross group. As so often in the appalling story of Nazism, some of the worst perpetrators were people of one’s own nationality, permitted to give vent to their frenzied anti-Semitic hatred.

Clearing out her father’s (Stephen’s son’s) house after his death a few years ago, Roxanne came across a stash of cassettes labelled ‘Stephen tells his war story’ Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Pressing ‘play’, she heard her grandfather’s voice recounting an almost unimaginable story of horror and survival. 

His words are quoted in italics in the book. You can hear his Hungarian accent, as he says things like, ‘I can still smell that unbearable smoke, but it was a question to freeze or not.’ Stephen is concise; Roxanne fills out his story by researching the various horrific events.

But when Hungary joined the Second World War effort he was called up to provide forced labour on the Russian front

That ‘unbearable smoke’ came not (in this case) from an extermination-camp crematorium, but from a tiny, noxious hut in Russia in 1942, in which Stephen and his fellow forced labourers cowered for warmth. 

Plucked from his world of piano-playing, he was one of 1,070 Hungarian men suddenly called up to provide forced labour on the Russian war front, after Hungary joined the war alongside Germany.

The predominantly Jewish men were loaded in cattle wagons and dumped in a snowy wasteland, 600km (370 miles) south of Moscow. The ‘lucky’ ones were forced to do 11-hour shifts carrying back-breaking sacks of munitions. 

The unlucky ones were forced to clear minefields; most of those quickly died. This was an early exercise in active Hungarian anti-Semitism. The aim was to extract Jewish thinkers, professionals, artists and religious leaders from society and work them to death on starvation rations. 

The men in charge were Hungarian soldiers, all of them utterly ruthless. Anyone who slowed down was beaten with a stick. Sometimes the soldiers forced the men to pull the wagons, to ‘save the energy of the animals’, whose lives were deemed more valuable than theirs.

Stephen was ‘as strong as an ox’, so he kept going, even when he got dysentery, knowing his life depended on it. Then, one night, on January 13, 1943, the Hungarian soldiers suddenly vanished into thin air, and the men were free – but in the middle of nowhere. They started walking westwards. Again, Stephen’s simple words say so much about the yearning for his homeland: ‘I just wanted to get back to Hungary.’

He walked for weeks, in a state of constant gnawing hunger, terrified of begging, for fear of recapture. He kept going by playing his whole dinnertime performance twice in his head each day. When he reached Budapest, nine months later, he’d lost half his body weight. Of those 1,070 men selected for forced labour, only eight returned.

The book tell show Stephen kept going during the torrid times by playing his whole dinnertime performance twice in his head each day 

His granddaughter Roxanne de Bastion, herself a singer-songwriter, is author of the memoir

That’s enough suffering for one life, you’d think. And for a few months, life did return to nearly normal. ‘We had a nice time, although the darker, darker clouds were on the horizon,’ Stephen says on the tape, with his customary understatement.

When the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944, all Jewish businesses were closed within days, and all Jews were forced to wear the Star of David and to live in cramped ghettos called ‘yellow-star blocks’ – ‘torn out of society’s fabric’, as Roxanne puts it. Stephen managed to get a Swiss certificate of protection, thanks to a life-saving scheme run by the heroic Swedish architect Raoul Wallenberg.

On hearing that his parents’ entire yellow-star block would be deported the next day, Stephen forged the certificate, putting his parents’ photographs on it and smuggling it to them just in time, which saved their lives and put his own in jeopardy.

Then (almost unbearable to read), he was selected for forced labour again, this time at the Sopron camp, from which he escaped to be reunited with his non-Jewish girlfriend, a singer called Magda – and it may well have been Magda who then betrayed him to the Nazis.

He was deported to Mauthausen concentration camp, where once again he was consigned to murderous hard labour, this time in a quarry. 

The average life expectancy at Mauthausen was six months; somehow, Stephen lasted almost a year, before the camp was evacuated in 1945 and he was sent on a death march to another Belsen-like hell-hole called Gunskirchen.

When the Americans liberated the camp, they gave him too much fatty food too soon, accidentally wreaking havoc with his system, so he would later erupt in a terrible rash all over his body.

It was this man who would go on to run those shops in Stratford-upon-Avon, with his future wife Edith, who herself had suffered the loss of her Hungarian husband and her mother during the Holocaust. Stephen and Edith set their hearts on emigrating from Hungary, after all it had done to them.

Roxanne, herself a singer-songwriter, feels a deep affinity with her grandfather, and with his beloved Bluthner piano, which she learned on, and still plays. And her own father, Stephen and Edith’s son, ‘poured all of his love into us, his family, and all the many friends who played on it’.